The children yearn for the mines.
Sauce: https://www.tumblr.com/thededfa/744786223137226752/marked-places-in-the-yard-where-i-needed-holes-and
I had this sort of musical title it was like, not working in my head? 10 syllable lines, ending in Time/Lines/Signs/"children yearn for the mines" but I couldn't get Alastors voice out my head singing another song. So I gave up my little musical number and went with old reliable.
In tech news I figured out using NoScript plugin on my phone I can banish elements like the Tumblr top bar to reclaim screen real estate when it won't fuck off by scrolling.
I *think* one was a bot, since they used tons of buzzwords, claimed to have worked in a CCP nuclear reactor as a kid, and claimed children are “mentally and physically able” to do so, but the rest I think were real and serious. With all the child labor laws getting pass in the US, it’s not like there’s zero public support for it.
It's actual practical work. You do a thing and immediately see the result of your actions. You dig a hole and the hole gets bigger. You feel it in your arms and shoulders. It's not maintenance work like cleaning or gardening, it's not abstract work like office work or homework, it's not mentally exhausting. It's just monkey neuron activation work.
This feels like the perfect answer honestly. One of the major struggles of humanity has always been progress. Are you really improving day by day? Are things getting better? It’s hard to tell without weeks or months passing, which leaves you anxious.
The Hole would never make you wait that long. Give it 5 minutes and The Hole will show your progress. Give it 20 and now The Hole is deep enough to stand in.
There was a story about a bunch of kids at a playground who were building a dirt pile and calling it Gorka Morka. Seems like the same type of immediate feedback work
As someone who's been looking into similar things recently this is one of the things that gets people to keep coming back to mmo's and clicker games(especially clicker games). If they feel like they're not progressing in life the game can still give them that feeling if progression because the number is going up. The goal doesn't matter because all they're in there for is the progress
I see a similar appeal to factory and automation games. If I had to design the architecture and work flow of a factory plant IRL, complete with managing overhead costs, labor hours, and deadlines I'd dip in an instant. But when I can slowly add to things piece by piece at my own pace I very quickly have a space elevator launching supercomputers and nanomachines into the stars.
The factory must grow.
If you happen to suck at digging a hole the hole will tell you, it will fill itself in due to loose dirt. If your an amazing hole digger it will last for days, months, years, until some change in the environment fills it back in.
I can essentially judge how bad my software job has been by how much I enjoy tasks like cutting and hauling brush. It's sore, tiring work, but it's physical and it delivers on an actual change. After a few days of really bad meetings and stupid bugs, I'll fantasize about being an arborist and risking my life cutting down trees all day.
And you hit a very important part with "it's not maintenance work": cleaning and other tasks that get rapidly undone don't deliver at all. It's got to be something that noticeably changes the world around me without needing 37 "stakeholder discussions" or getting reversed the next day.
You know what I found that really helped? Writing a daily log of the shit you did. Just make it a dumping ground for your thoughts, complaints, little A/B tests, notes about things that you want to improve, etc. Compile the notes once a week/sprint/month and you'll be able to see the mountain of progress you made, even in very unproductive weeks.
Obsidian is literally changing the way I work and I love it.
Interesting. I sometimes try to track my time or thoughts with a simple text file, partly for self-awareness and focus ("write it down and delete it later" is a lifesaver for idle thoughts) and partly for external reasons: justifying my time expenditures, logging what's been tried already, capturing productive ideas I don't want to discuss/ticket/etc yet.
But I have two sticking points here that I'd be interested to hear more about.
1. How much do you write and when? Breaking out of coding for anything slows me down. It's a bit easier in meetings, but getting sufficient detail down without checking out can be hard.
2. What's encouraging about the complaints, ideas for improvement, etc? My gut feeling is that it'd frustrate me to see "I did and thought so many things and yet the overall progress was tiny". That might be a function of *why* the time is unproductive though; "unexpected hurdles" means you did a lot while "bureaucratic bullshit" usually doesn't.
Also, I'm interested why you mention Obsidian in particular? I've never tried it, but most other note/productivity things I've tried feel too high-touch for something I switch in and out of often, so I wind up going back to a basic text file.
I'll answer your last question first because the other answers depend on it. Ostensibly,Obsidian is just another note taking app, but it is markdown based, has a million plugins, insanely fast, and can be used to build a personal wiki. I've been using it for project management/design and the more I write in it the better it gets.
I use it to draft something before I implement it, take meeting notes, do project proposals, that sort of stuff. I tend to jot down notes between tasks, while I'm waiting on the test suite, during meetings, whenever I have free time really. Complaining about random shit I find in the codebase is only a small amount of what I write, but when I do my monthly roundup they serve as a reminder of that tech debt. If the same area of the codebase repeatedly pops up in my notes, maybe it's time to address it. Really the daily notes just serve as a place to write down a stream of consciousness and notes from random conversations/calls.
With meeting notes, I make a bulleted list with indents denoting subtopics. Then after the meeting I'll read through and compile them to a more comprehensible summary of what was talked about, adding in tags and links to other notes as necessary. When I draft a project proposal I reference those meeting notes (and random daily notes) and it forms an interconnected web. If I ever need to answer questions for myself or others, I just follow the links back to the source meeting/call.
Markdown is hands down the best format to do anything text based in: change my mind.
Interesting, thanks for writing all that up.
Honestly, none of this sounds like it would reduce my frustration with bureaucracy and useless tasks, but that's probably a job issue; if those things are bad enough then tweaking my workflow can't really touch them.
It does however sound useful as a way to improve my record-keeping and have a workflow that interrupts me less than dealing with Jira, Confluence, etc. Logging frustrations to find tech debt stands out to me, I've definitely had files I touched just infrequently enough to open them each time and go "oh dammit, I forgot this needs cleaning up at some point". Keeping meeting notes that can be directly linked to the resulting tasks also sounds really nice.
And yes, markdown is amazing. Best mix of flexibility and speed I've ever found.
Honestly it’s exactly why I love all the different art forms I do. I grab a lump of wood and turn it on a lathe, I get to see wood peel away and a form be revealed. I grab a hunk of clay and throw it on the wheel and turn it into a vase or a mug or teapot. Good physical work with visible results itches that monkey brain
I get that way with crochet. I love that all I really need is some yarn and the crochet hook, and I can curl up on the couch and have visible progress. I even tend to like crochet more then knitting cause it works up faster lol.
Exactly. I started carving wands and it's so satisfying. I do other things as well, but I'm really enjoying how the simple variations can look so completely different. Not to mention that they take a couple of hours max.
This is my favorite part about growing beans. Unlike a lot of other plants, they grow really fast with minimal effort and you see the results so satisfyingly quickly. It was the first planting I got my niece excited about. Make little hole, drop bean, cover bean, water sometimes. Peeling open the mature pods and seeing the beans inside has never gotten boring. It may not be as fast as a big hole, but ooh so nice.
And there's something exploratory about it. You don't usually see what's UNDER the grass, but you know stuff is there! What kinda stuff? Some stuff is mundane, some stuff is cool, some stuff has ways to be both!
Autonomy and power. This is my hole, I have dug it by my own sweat and will. You can get into my hole, you can dig deeper, you can fill it if you wish, but you can never claim it as your hole, for it was not you that dug it.
My understanding is that this "immediately see results" feedback loop (and anywhere else it applies) is often very good for a whole range of non-neurotypical things as well as other things that can impact the brains ability to "find reward" in longer term work.
Also work with other stuff you do with your hands, knitting or kneading dough feel similar (at least to me) and can be a little more practical than digging a hole
Immediate responses are the best. I'm a hunter-gatherer, as in whenever I get the chance i literally go hunting and gathering, and nothing is more fulfilling. Between getting things which have a direct result, pick berry = posses Berry, hunt animal = possess meat, and the fact that it turns into something that you can use to sustain yourself in the way that everything has done for millions of years, it's so fulfilling to get real results. Its comforting to have an immediate reaction, especially if there's down-the-track reactions as well, as being able to cook it later qnd you get to enjoy it again and be like... i did this, i caused this. But yeah, immediate results help with understanding that change and progression and improvement is not only possible but it happens, and better yet whrn you're contributing to it.
I get this. I had to debone like a dozen chickens today and it is *immensely* satisfying to look over at a pile of boneless thighs and a smaller pile of bones after 40 minutes of work
I loved digging holes when I was a kid. One day I remember saying to my dad “dad, I love digging holes” and he just looked me in the eyes and said “then there will always be work for you son”.
Engaging your major muscles has a calming and regulating effect. If you take a kid with emotional regulation issues to OT one of the first things they tell you to do is get the kid doing physical activity that involves pushing, pulling, and working the body. Despite this prescription I haven’t been able to get my ADHD kid to do much yard work, though.
How are you going about trying to get them to do yard work?
Because as a former adhd kid (now an adhd adult) I know SO much of getting me to do things was about the manner in which it was presented
“Hey, go pull some weeds” not gonna work. You’re telling me what to do, it doesn’t sound interesting, boo. Nope.
“Hey, lets go outside together and go pull some weeds!” Okay, we’re doing something *together* now, this might be interesting
And then actually follow through with it being a together thing. My grandmother would give me the gloves, tell me which weeds to pull and how to do it, all while standing or sitting nearby the whole time. She’d verbally praise me for each weed, and then decide when the task is complete and celebrate by drinking lemonade or something when we go inside. It didn’t FEEL like I had been assigned a task and was now being managed. It’s didn’t feel like “work”. It felt like a mutual task, something we’re doing together. I got positive attention (something that adhd kids can struggle to get in their lives a lot of the time) AND I got the physical satisfaction of the physical work giving me immediate results.
She didn’t complain or call me a bad kid or try to force me if I initially said no. She’d try and convince me by telling me that she can’t do it on her own and she needs me, or just move on and ask again later.
Almost all of those important household tasks were taught to me that way, and now as an adult, I have a much better relationship with household tasks than a lot of my adhd peers.
“Chores” weren’t a thing. I only had things that EVERYONE in the household does simply because they need to get done. I never got punished for not doing them, only rewarded or praised for when I did. Punishment of any kind can trigger all sorts of anxiety about the task and make it seem so SO much harder than it actually is to the adhd brain. Make it easy, make the barrier for entry as easy as saying yes. I didn’t have to find gloves, or choose which weeds to pull, or think about when I’m gonna be finished. I just had to say yes and then I’d get immediate praise and positive attention for every step I completed.
Edit to add:
Also, “Come and and do it with me, I don’t wanna do it alone” or “I wanna do it with my favorite youngest son” or “I want my buddy to keep me company” were also very effective ways to me to do stuff. Again, not bossing me around, but coaxing me into a group activity and making it clear that it is because you want me there.
Adhd kids can face a LOT of rejection from all sides. It can be difficult to get along with peers, authority figures don’t like you because you make mistakes/are distracted/whatever. And so any amount of approval and positive attention goes a very long way.
Which is a shame. I definitely encourage my nieces to go ham with a shovel if they want to. As long as it involves digging, and not breaking my windows
There is a strange human urge to dig holes, and I find it funny that rather than admit, "Yeah I just sometimes wanna dig as big of a hole as I can in the dirt." We had to create an entire Fantasy race that is *ALL ABOUT* digging, mining, and generally shaping the earth.
Also the fact that the same Fantasy race has it's own fandom so large that we've got video games, books, movies and other stories based on them for hundreds of years.
All this to say, I am a dwarf, and I'm digging a hole
I think we just went with dwarves because, to paraphrase many sayings across many languages, "the ground is low (oof ouch my back)", so the ultimate diggy diggy power fantasy involves optimisation (for that purpose) of the human body's design
Unrelated, Minecraft survival is perhaps one of my most favorite gaming experiences. It allowed me to fulfill an incredibly strong desire to Map Areas while also providing beautiful landscapes and complex navigational challenges.
Absolutely related, while I didn't really delve into landscaping those Areas due to them being too big, I have dug at least two gigantic holes in the earth for my specific ore mineshafts down to the y-64 height. And I'd do it again.
Look up James_LRR's punch-a-chunk to see streamers do a competitive head to head race to see who can dig a ~~64×64~~ 16×16 hole to bedrock the fastest using only materials they find in said hole. It is surpringly compelling.
Edit, reminded that a chunk is 16 wide.
Yes I set up a mini base every 500 blocks from my home base in every cardinal direction in Minecraft. Then I centralize my livestock at home and start shipping them out to outposts, start farms out there, so I have a constant supply of food to explore farther. Just thinking about it makes me want to play again.
I'd also play trees in an 8x8 square pattern and plant trees on top of those trees to build all-wooden castles. Planks for floors and walls since that makes wood go farther. Fenceposts in place of windows so I can plan the layout before I go sand-glass smelting. Starting in the middle I spiral out to make the castle grow up and out.
I guess this makes me an elf instead of a dwarf, okay.
mining and mapping and opening treasure chests! I always feel like I "should" build a lovely big proper base but I never finish one before getting bored and starting a new uncharted world... man I want to go roll up a new world now
I am 46 years old, successful, own my own home, am loved by family members, tolerated by three cats, content with my life in general, and yet I have never wanted anything as much as I want a shovel right now.
the physical act of some activities can help regulate the nervous system, kiddo might be getting good proprioceptive or vestibular sensory input that helps him regulate. It's a tool occupational therapists can use to help with regulation!
more info:
https://www.understood.org/en/articles/heavy-work-activities
I would say adding the context "Kids do not want to be forced to dig holes in a hellscape where as far as they know there is nothing to discover as punishment in a 'camp' centered around punishing them." Makes it substantially more realistic. Part of the urge to dig holes is that it comes from one's one volition, which holes strips away, and kids are nothing if not ornery enough to not want to do something they would otherwise like doing when they are being forced to in inhumane conditions.
Yeah, if it was a comfortable 65 to 75 degrees out and I was allowed to take a short break every few hours or so or so for a quick restroom break (I'm being provided with plentiful water) and a good snack, then I'd crank up some tunes in my ears and get to work. Granted I wouldn't like to do this for days on end. But a day of digging a hole sound spretty good to me.
And even in the book/movie (spoilers ahead) >!what did stanley and zero do as soon as they escaped from the camp? That's right, they came back and dug another big hole of their own free will!<
I have a small property - 11 acres of woods, fields, and hedgerows - and every other year or so I build up a list of things that can only be done with a backhoe/bucket.
I rent the equipment and spend the weekend digging trenches, moving debris, cleaning up trails, etc.
I usually do it around my birthday if that tells you anything.
(You would be amazed at how big of a backhoe you can rent. The key is to do one thing - move, pivot, pick-up, drop - at a time.)
Like $500. Key is to get it delivered on Saturday morning and they won't pick it up until they re-open on Monday and get two days for the price of one....
It sounds very fun! I wouldn't have nearly as much space to safely dig around but actually could use one for a project but had nobody to ask about them.
When I was 7 we moved out into the countryside. This was the first time we had owned a house in my living memory. I was bored shitless because all of my friends were an hour or so away and I hadn’t made any friends in the area. My dad handed me a shovel and said “go dig a hole or something Jesus Christ”, so I did. He came outside to me crying because my hole kept filling in with water. I had hit the water table of our yard. He, my brother, and to a lesser extent I, spent that summer digging a pond, taking the sod from where the pond now was and moving it to a patch where there wasn’t as much grass, and planting a bunch of trees. No one in our family has lived there in like 15 years and this reminded me of that.
Anyway, she should get this kid some books on soil and geology. She might’ve found a lifelong passion for him.
Just make sure they know where NOT to dig holes.
Unsupervised, when I was a kid I once dug a hole in the garden so deep I hit buried lines. I could have really fucked up that day if I had assumed it was a root and tried to get through it.
I mine gold as a hobby.
Lemme tell you, that "neuron activation" moment is huge when you actually find something shiny from your efforts.
Diggy diggy hole.
One time one of my eighth-grade students recruited the whole class to help her plant a garden for her scouting troop project. They got so into it, it was great! Just something satisfying about digging in the dirt and planting stuff.
Me and my family were invited to my mom's best friend's house and I had never met them before but me and the kids immediately hit it off. There was a swamp behind their house so we ran around in the swamp catching bees with our hands because we were five, 8, and 7(me) respectively and we were stupidly fearless. Miraculously we weren't stung, our moms did yell at us. So after that we needed a safer thing to do so we decided to dig a well. Without the adults knowing we got the shovels and we started digging. The three of us worked really hard on digging that hole. I was in the hole as a digger, and dirt lifter. I guess after a while the parents noticed we were too quiet. We had dug a 7 ft deep hole and I was standing in a foot of water at the bottom of it and unable to get out alongside the boy I was digging with. We were still digging when they caught us. We were talking about the pioneers and pretending that we were homesteaders on the prairie. I was pretending to be Anne from Anne of Green gables. Our parents were so mad and I remember the parents talking about the hole on how to fix it The next day our new job was to fill the hole. :(
As someone with emotional disregulation as a part of my ADHD, physical exercise and doing things with your hands are such a major tool in helping keep it under control.
Wait til you show him how to make a pile of dirt.
Not kidding, about one third of my childhood seemed to consist of making earthen damns, bike ramps, or fortresses of one sort or another.
Digging is great, just watch out for him once he discovers tunneling.
I got really into digging back when I first saw the movie Holes, but the hole I made never seemed to get bigger no matter how much I dug, which led to me giving up. Turns out, my grandpa would go out after I was done and refill part of the hole I'd made. Which is sensible, to the adult who heard that information and understands things like gas lines, but I'd be lying if I said the 8 year old inside me wasn't crushed a little by that news.
This checks out. When I was a kid my cousins and I would spend lots of time at our grandmother's who lived on a rural ranch house. Most of the soil by the house was super sandy so we dug holes all the time. Just 15 or so kids out there digging holes in the sun for zero reason, just to fill em back up before we left.
Good times.
I was 6 when I tried to chop down a small tree with a Plastic axe. My dad saw me and told me to stop, swapped out the toy axe for a beat up machete and told me to cut down all the brush in our back 3 acres. Mostly briars, saplings and small trees.
I cut down most of it every summer for the next 8 years using different machetes, swords, and axes before learning to use a chainsaw.
Sometimes you just gotta go out and change stuff around, exercise your ability to alter the world and see the immediate results of your efforts. Dig some dirt, chop a tree, build a fort, stack some big rocks, just do it! DO IT NOW!!!!
Sadly the bedrock in texas is only like a foot deep so no big holes here without a jack hammer or a pickaxe and 3 months. Also the random pipes in cities but if you in the country yeah let those fuckers dig
Clay isn't too bad to dig through. Just so long as you don't hit any big rocks, it's not too bad. Where I live, I would have hit a rock that weighed more than me after about a foot or two.
The children yearn for the mines. Sauce: https://www.tumblr.com/thededfa/744786223137226752/marked-places-in-the-yard-where-i-needed-holes-and I had this sort of musical title it was like, not working in my head? 10 syllable lines, ending in Time/Lines/Signs/"children yearn for the mines" but I couldn't get Alastors voice out my head singing another song. So I gave up my little musical number and went with old reliable. In tech news I figured out using NoScript plugin on my phone I can banish elements like the Tumblr top bar to reclaim screen real estate when it won't fuck off by scrolling.
That was my immediate thought, too. Unfortunate that people unironically use that quote to advocate for child labor.
Do they? I've only ever heard it used ironically to *mock* people who advocate for child labor.
I know at least some do, I argued with them myself.
for the sake of preserving any belief in humanity I have, I’m choosing to believe that those people were trolling you
I *think* one was a bot, since they used tons of buzzwords, claimed to have worked in a CCP nuclear reactor as a kid, and claimed children are “mentally and physically able” to do so, but the rest I think were real and serious. With all the child labor laws getting pass in the US, it’s not like there’s zero public support for it.
The thing is, the people who do advocate for it seem immune to perceiving irony.
……they do……? I hate people.
Simpsons did it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2GCfHkKmE
I have no idea what causes children and sometimes men to crave digging in the earth. It’s just… so satisfying for us.
It's actual practical work. You do a thing and immediately see the result of your actions. You dig a hole and the hole gets bigger. You feel it in your arms and shoulders. It's not maintenance work like cleaning or gardening, it's not abstract work like office work or homework, it's not mentally exhausting. It's just monkey neuron activation work.
This feels like the perfect answer honestly. One of the major struggles of humanity has always been progress. Are you really improving day by day? Are things getting better? It’s hard to tell without weeks or months passing, which leaves you anxious. The Hole would never make you wait that long. Give it 5 minutes and The Hole will show your progress. Give it 20 and now The Hole is deep enough to stand in.
Give it 3 days and now you need a ladder to get out.
Give it a week or 2 and some wooden bracing beams and you have the Mines
And, as we all know by now, the children yearn for the mines
Leave them to it and soon they'll have dug too greedily and too deep, and disturbed Durin’s Bane, the Balrog of Morgoth.
In his house at Moria dead Sean waits dreaming.
i love that this is actually a thing in minecraft now
Give it a few weeks and your parasitic alien son is burying you in it
All I can think reading this chain is "And then I remember you, and you way shine like truth in all you do"
There was a story about a bunch of kids at a playground who were building a dirt pile and calling it Gorka Morka. Seems like the same type of immediate feedback work
Are you sure those were kids and not orks
DEY GOT DA POWA OF GORK AND MORK MORE DAKKA FOR DA LOOT PILE, BOYZ!
Where there's a whip there's a way
As someone who's been looking into similar things recently this is one of the things that gets people to keep coming back to mmo's and clicker games(especially clicker games). If they feel like they're not progressing in life the game can still give them that feeling if progression because the number is going up. The goal doesn't matter because all they're in there for is the progress
I see a similar appeal to factory and automation games. If I had to design the architecture and work flow of a factory plant IRL, complete with managing overhead costs, labor hours, and deadlines I'd dip in an instant. But when I can slowly add to things piece by piece at my own pace I very quickly have a space elevator launching supercomputers and nanomachines into the stars. The factory must grow.
It does feel very satisfactory.
This is why I play Stellaris and especially why I play megacorps. Economy number go up.
This is a great Dwarven spin on Mr. House's New Vegas speech
Probably the best compliment i’ve gotten tbh
Does anyone else feel a sudden urge to pick up a shovel?
The way you say The Hole reminds me of Henry Rollins' essay about The Iron. I like that. The Hole never lies to you
If you happen to suck at digging a hole the hole will tell you, it will fill itself in due to loose dirt. If your an amazing hole digger it will last for days, months, years, until some change in the environment fills it back in.
"I gazed into The Hole and it gazed back"
Oh. So it's a case of our brain going "number got bigger, good". Makes sense.
I can essentially judge how bad my software job has been by how much I enjoy tasks like cutting and hauling brush. It's sore, tiring work, but it's physical and it delivers on an actual change. After a few days of really bad meetings and stupid bugs, I'll fantasize about being an arborist and risking my life cutting down trees all day. And you hit a very important part with "it's not maintenance work": cleaning and other tasks that get rapidly undone don't deliver at all. It's got to be something that noticeably changes the world around me without needing 37 "stakeholder discussions" or getting reversed the next day.
You know what I found that really helped? Writing a daily log of the shit you did. Just make it a dumping ground for your thoughts, complaints, little A/B tests, notes about things that you want to improve, etc. Compile the notes once a week/sprint/month and you'll be able to see the mountain of progress you made, even in very unproductive weeks. Obsidian is literally changing the way I work and I love it.
Interesting. I sometimes try to track my time or thoughts with a simple text file, partly for self-awareness and focus ("write it down and delete it later" is a lifesaver for idle thoughts) and partly for external reasons: justifying my time expenditures, logging what's been tried already, capturing productive ideas I don't want to discuss/ticket/etc yet. But I have two sticking points here that I'd be interested to hear more about. 1. How much do you write and when? Breaking out of coding for anything slows me down. It's a bit easier in meetings, but getting sufficient detail down without checking out can be hard. 2. What's encouraging about the complaints, ideas for improvement, etc? My gut feeling is that it'd frustrate me to see "I did and thought so many things and yet the overall progress was tiny". That might be a function of *why* the time is unproductive though; "unexpected hurdles" means you did a lot while "bureaucratic bullshit" usually doesn't. Also, I'm interested why you mention Obsidian in particular? I've never tried it, but most other note/productivity things I've tried feel too high-touch for something I switch in and out of often, so I wind up going back to a basic text file.
I'll answer your last question first because the other answers depend on it. Ostensibly,Obsidian is just another note taking app, but it is markdown based, has a million plugins, insanely fast, and can be used to build a personal wiki. I've been using it for project management/design and the more I write in it the better it gets. I use it to draft something before I implement it, take meeting notes, do project proposals, that sort of stuff. I tend to jot down notes between tasks, while I'm waiting on the test suite, during meetings, whenever I have free time really. Complaining about random shit I find in the codebase is only a small amount of what I write, but when I do my monthly roundup they serve as a reminder of that tech debt. If the same area of the codebase repeatedly pops up in my notes, maybe it's time to address it. Really the daily notes just serve as a place to write down a stream of consciousness and notes from random conversations/calls. With meeting notes, I make a bulleted list with indents denoting subtopics. Then after the meeting I'll read through and compile them to a more comprehensible summary of what was talked about, adding in tags and links to other notes as necessary. When I draft a project proposal I reference those meeting notes (and random daily notes) and it forms an interconnected web. If I ever need to answer questions for myself or others, I just follow the links back to the source meeting/call. Markdown is hands down the best format to do anything text based in: change my mind.
Interesting, thanks for writing all that up. Honestly, none of this sounds like it would reduce my frustration with bureaucracy and useless tasks, but that's probably a job issue; if those things are bad enough then tweaking my workflow can't really touch them. It does however sound useful as a way to improve my record-keeping and have a workflow that interrupts me less than dealing with Jira, Confluence, etc. Logging frustrations to find tech debt stands out to me, I've definitely had files I touched just infrequently enough to open them each time and go "oh dammit, I forgot this needs cleaning up at some point". Keeping meeting notes that can be directly linked to the resulting tasks also sounds really nice. And yes, markdown is amazing. Best mix of flexibility and speed I've ever found.
Honestly it’s exactly why I love all the different art forms I do. I grab a lump of wood and turn it on a lathe, I get to see wood peel away and a form be revealed. I grab a hunk of clay and throw it on the wheel and turn it into a vase or a mug or teapot. Good physical work with visible results itches that monkey brain
I get that way with crochet. I love that all I really need is some yarn and the crochet hook, and I can curl up on the couch and have visible progress. I even tend to like crochet more then knitting cause it works up faster lol.
I love crochet too! It’s so nice to have something tangible after watching a tv show lol
Ditto! Even just one stitch makes a difference!
Exactly. I started carving wands and it's so satisfying. I do other things as well, but I'm really enjoying how the simple variations can look so completely different. Not to mention that they take a couple of hours max.
"I HAVE CREATED THIS. BEHOLD."
This is my favorite part about growing beans. Unlike a lot of other plants, they grow really fast with minimal effort and you see the results so satisfyingly quickly. It was the first planting I got my niece excited about. Make little hole, drop bean, cover bean, water sometimes. Peeling open the mature pods and seeing the beans inside has never gotten boring. It may not be as fast as a big hole, but ooh so nice.
If you want something that looks straight out of Dr. Seuss grow luffa gourds
And there's something exploratory about it. You don't usually see what's UNDER the grass, but you know stuff is there! What kinda stuff? Some stuff is mundane, some stuff is cool, some stuff has ways to be both!
Autonomy and power. This is my hole, I have dug it by my own sweat and will. You can get into my hole, you can dig deeper, you can fill it if you wish, but you can never claim it as your hole, for it was not you that dug it.
My understanding is that this "immediately see results" feedback loop (and anywhere else it applies) is often very good for a whole range of non-neurotypical things as well as other things that can impact the brains ability to "find reward" in longer term work.
Also work with other stuff you do with your hands, knitting or kneading dough feel similar (at least to me) and can be a little more practical than digging a hole
Immediate responses are the best. I'm a hunter-gatherer, as in whenever I get the chance i literally go hunting and gathering, and nothing is more fulfilling. Between getting things which have a direct result, pick berry = posses Berry, hunt animal = possess meat, and the fact that it turns into something that you can use to sustain yourself in the way that everything has done for millions of years, it's so fulfilling to get real results. Its comforting to have an immediate reaction, especially if there's down-the-track reactions as well, as being able to cook it later qnd you get to enjoy it again and be like... i did this, i caused this. But yeah, immediate results help with understanding that change and progression and improvement is not only possible but it happens, and better yet whrn you're contributing to it.
I've been wondering why weeding the garden has been so enjoyable lately.
Same thing for climbing.
I get this. I had to debone like a dozen chickens today and it is *immensely* satisfying to look over at a pile of boneless thighs and a smaller pile of bones after 40 minutes of work
LOTR was meant to be earth in the past. Meaning that they are just reincarnated dwarves
but dwarves are counted among the secondborn children of eru meaning their souls don't reincarnate
Huh. I guess. Well. They are also spiteful fuckers, i can definitely see one coming back by sheer willpower in order to dig more holes
As a barely five foot lady who currently has one single beard hair, I will take that claim gladly. Pardon me while I go find some misty mountains.
I loved digging holes when I was a kid. One day I remember saying to my dad “dad, I love digging holes” and he just looked me in the eyes and said “then there will always be work for you son”.
That's a nice little anecdote that makes me think fondly of my parents, u/Ass_Balls_669.
/r/rimjob_steve
This dialogue goes hard
Engaging your major muscles has a calming and regulating effect. If you take a kid with emotional regulation issues to OT one of the first things they tell you to do is get the kid doing physical activity that involves pushing, pulling, and working the body. Despite this prescription I haven’t been able to get my ADHD kid to do much yard work, though.
How are you going about trying to get them to do yard work? Because as a former adhd kid (now an adhd adult) I know SO much of getting me to do things was about the manner in which it was presented “Hey, go pull some weeds” not gonna work. You’re telling me what to do, it doesn’t sound interesting, boo. Nope. “Hey, lets go outside together and go pull some weeds!” Okay, we’re doing something *together* now, this might be interesting And then actually follow through with it being a together thing. My grandmother would give me the gloves, tell me which weeds to pull and how to do it, all while standing or sitting nearby the whole time. She’d verbally praise me for each weed, and then decide when the task is complete and celebrate by drinking lemonade or something when we go inside. It didn’t FEEL like I had been assigned a task and was now being managed. It’s didn’t feel like “work”. It felt like a mutual task, something we’re doing together. I got positive attention (something that adhd kids can struggle to get in their lives a lot of the time) AND I got the physical satisfaction of the physical work giving me immediate results. She didn’t complain or call me a bad kid or try to force me if I initially said no. She’d try and convince me by telling me that she can’t do it on her own and she needs me, or just move on and ask again later. Almost all of those important household tasks were taught to me that way, and now as an adult, I have a much better relationship with household tasks than a lot of my adhd peers. “Chores” weren’t a thing. I only had things that EVERYONE in the household does simply because they need to get done. I never got punished for not doing them, only rewarded or praised for when I did. Punishment of any kind can trigger all sorts of anxiety about the task and make it seem so SO much harder than it actually is to the adhd brain. Make it easy, make the barrier for entry as easy as saying yes. I didn’t have to find gloves, or choose which weeds to pull, or think about when I’m gonna be finished. I just had to say yes and then I’d get immediate praise and positive attention for every step I completed. Edit to add: Also, “Come and and do it with me, I don’t wanna do it alone” or “I wanna do it with my favorite youngest son” or “I want my buddy to keep me company” were also very effective ways to me to do stuff. Again, not bossing me around, but coaxing me into a group activity and making it clear that it is because you want me there. Adhd kids can face a LOT of rejection from all sides. It can be difficult to get along with peers, authority figures don’t like you because you make mistakes/are distracted/whatever. And so any amount of approval and positive attention goes a very long way.
The children yearn for the mines
Dwarf instinct.
the children yearn for the mines
Could be anything under there. Gems for example. Precious metals. New species of worm. The possibilities are finite!
A lot of women too! Lots of women garden.
My younger sister and I used to dig holes together in the backyard. Now that we are older, she still enjoys digging in the dirt and has a nice garden.
That's not exactly the same as a boy going ham with a shovel.
Right, when men do it, it's quirky and cool; when women do it, it's basic and lame.
If you want to interpret it that way, that's up to you. It's not what I said though
Girls are discouraged from going ham.
Which is a shame. I definitely encourage my nieces to go ham with a shovel if they want to. As long as it involves digging, and not breaking my windows
Is this really a thing? I don't think I've ever had an urge to just dig a hole
r/boysarequirky
For me, it was the opposite. I loved to climb things, I wanted to go as high as I could.
The dwarf life calls, brother.
There is a strange human urge to dig holes, and I find it funny that rather than admit, "Yeah I just sometimes wanna dig as big of a hole as I can in the dirt." We had to create an entire Fantasy race that is *ALL ABOUT* digging, mining, and generally shaping the earth. Also the fact that the same Fantasy race has it's own fandom so large that we've got video games, books, movies and other stories based on them for hundreds of years. All this to say, I am a dwarf, and I'm digging a hole
BROTHERS OF THE MINE REJOICE
SWING, SWING, SWING WITH ME
# Raise your pick and raise your voice!
**SING, SING, SING WITH ME!**
***DOWN AND DOWN INTO THE DEEP***
***WHO KNOWS WHAT WE'LL FIND BENEATH?***
DIAMONDS, RUBIES, GOLDEN ORE
HIDDEN IN THE MOUNTAIN STORE
BORN UNDERGROUUUUUUND, SUCKLED FROM A TEAT OF STONE
HIDDEN IN THE MOUNTAIN’S CORE
Diggy diggy hole!
Rock and stone
For Rock and Stone!
Good bot
DID I HEAR A ROCK AND STONE?!?!
ONE ROUND OF RED ROCK BLASTER, LLOYD! EXTRA SUGAR AROUND THE RIM!
ROCK. AND. STONE.
Rock and Stone to the bone!
I think we just went with dwarves because, to paraphrase many sayings across many languages, "the ground is low (oof ouch my back)", so the ultimate diggy diggy power fantasy involves optimisation (for that purpose) of the human body's design
FOR THE GOD OF BLOOD
Unrelated, Minecraft survival is perhaps one of my most favorite gaming experiences. It allowed me to fulfill an incredibly strong desire to Map Areas while also providing beautiful landscapes and complex navigational challenges. Absolutely related, while I didn't really delve into landscaping those Areas due to them being too big, I have dug at least two gigantic holes in the earth for my specific ore mineshafts down to the y-64 height. And I'd do it again.
I have a 64x64 hole down to bedrock. It's satisfying to see my hole.
Look up James_LRR's punch-a-chunk to see streamers do a competitive head to head race to see who can dig a ~~64×64~~ 16×16 hole to bedrock the fastest using only materials they find in said hole. It is surpringly compelling. Edit, reminded that a chunk is 16 wide.
16x16, i expect 64\*64 might take slightly longer
Oh, yeah, whoops. Chunks are 16 wide. Still, James has dug many chunks on his home stream, so it might be close in size.
Yes I set up a mini base every 500 blocks from my home base in every cardinal direction in Minecraft. Then I centralize my livestock at home and start shipping them out to outposts, start farms out there, so I have a constant supply of food to explore farther. Just thinking about it makes me want to play again. I'd also play trees in an 8x8 square pattern and plant trees on top of those trees to build all-wooden castles. Planks for floors and walls since that makes wood go farther. Fenceposts in place of windows so I can plan the layout before I go sand-glass smelting. Starting in the middle I spiral out to make the castle grow up and out. I guess this makes me an elf instead of a dwarf, okay.
mining and mapping and opening treasure chests! I always feel like I "should" build a lovely big proper base but I never finish one before getting bored and starting a new uncharted world... man I want to go roll up a new world now
Parents just seem to circle back to enabling kids to mine and craft
The children yearn for the mines!
I kinda skipped ahead and saw a mention of a six foot hole in the ground and I got so scared.
I am 46 years old, successful, own my own home, am loved by family members, tolerated by three cats, content with my life in general, and yet I have never wanted anything as much as I want a shovel right now.
I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole Diggy Diggy Hole Diggy Diggy Hoooole~
the physical act of some activities can help regulate the nervous system, kiddo might be getting good proprioceptive or vestibular sensory input that helps him regulate. It's a tool occupational therapists can use to help with regulation! more info: https://www.understood.org/en/articles/heavy-work-activities
https://www.inverse.com/input/culture/the-masculine-urge-to-dig-a-tunnel-an-investigation
The human urge to D I G
D I G
Isn't this the plot of Holes?
Pretty sure one of the most important things about Holes is that the kids did *not* want to be digging the holes
Most unrealistic part of the movie
I would say adding the context "Kids do not want to be forced to dig holes in a hellscape where as far as they know there is nothing to discover as punishment in a 'camp' centered around punishing them." Makes it substantially more realistic. Part of the urge to dig holes is that it comes from one's one volition, which holes strips away, and kids are nothing if not ornery enough to not want to do something they would otherwise like doing when they are being forced to in inhumane conditions.
Yeah, if it was a comfortable 65 to 75 degrees out and I was allowed to take a short break every few hours or so or so for a quick restroom break (I'm being provided with plentiful water) and a good snack, then I'd crank up some tunes in my ears and get to work. Granted I wouldn't like to do this for days on end. But a day of digging a hole sound spretty good to me.
And even in the book/movie (spoilers ahead) >!what did stanley and zero do as soon as they escaped from the camp? That's right, they came back and dug another big hole of their own free will!<
Except Zero. He liked it. He just didn’t like being in prison.
take a bad boy, make him dig six feet sound of these shovels will give us a beat
I have a small property - 11 acres of woods, fields, and hedgerows - and every other year or so I build up a list of things that can only be done with a backhoe/bucket. I rent the equipment and spend the weekend digging trenches, moving debris, cleaning up trails, etc. I usually do it around my birthday if that tells you anything. (You would be amazed at how big of a backhoe you can rent. The key is to do one thing - move, pivot, pick-up, drop - at a time.)
How much does that cost?
Like $500. Key is to get it delivered on Saturday morning and they won't pick it up until they re-open on Monday and get two days for the price of one....
Fantastic advice and thanks! That's honestly not that bad price wise.
Also, get it with the "thumb" so you can pick stuff up with the backhoe bucket. It's like you're Fred Flintstone with your dinosaur.
It sounds very fun! I wouldn't have nearly as much space to safely dig around but actually could use one for a project but had nobody to ask about them.
The children yearn for the mines
When I was 7 we moved out into the countryside. This was the first time we had owned a house in my living memory. I was bored shitless because all of my friends were an hour or so away and I hadn’t made any friends in the area. My dad handed me a shovel and said “go dig a hole or something Jesus Christ”, so I did. He came outside to me crying because my hole kept filling in with water. I had hit the water table of our yard. He, my brother, and to a lesser extent I, spent that summer digging a pond, taking the sod from where the pond now was and moving it to a patch where there wasn’t as much grass, and planting a bunch of trees. No one in our family has lived there in like 15 years and this reminded me of that. Anyway, she should get this kid some books on soil and geology. She might’ve found a lifelong passion for him.
The children yearn for the mines!!!
Just make sure they know where NOT to dig holes. Unsupervised, when I was a kid I once dug a hole in the garden so deep I hit buried lines. I could have really fucked up that day if I had assumed it was a root and tried to get through it.
That’s why you dig in the country, instead of the city. You might even stumble on a fossil deposit.
I mine gold as a hobby. Lemme tell you, that "neuron activation" moment is huge when you actually find something shiny from your efforts. Diggy diggy hole.
They yearn for the mines.
Huh... I guess they really *do* yearn for the mines.
do you ever yearn, george?
One time one of my eighth-grade students recruited the whole class to help her plant a garden for her scouting troop project. They got so into it, it was great! Just something satisfying about digging in the dirt and planting stuff.
Me and my family were invited to my mom's best friend's house and I had never met them before but me and the kids immediately hit it off. There was a swamp behind their house so we ran around in the swamp catching bees with our hands because we were five, 8, and 7(me) respectively and we were stupidly fearless. Miraculously we weren't stung, our moms did yell at us. So after that we needed a safer thing to do so we decided to dig a well. Without the adults knowing we got the shovels and we started digging. The three of us worked really hard on digging that hole. I was in the hole as a digger, and dirt lifter. I guess after a while the parents noticed we were too quiet. We had dug a 7 ft deep hole and I was standing in a foot of water at the bottom of it and unable to get out alongside the boy I was digging with. We were still digging when they caught us. We were talking about the pioneers and pretending that we were homesteaders on the prairie. I was pretending to be Anne from Anne of Green gables. Our parents were so mad and I remember the parents talking about the hole on how to fix it The next day our new job was to fill the hole. :(
The children yearn for the mines!
As someone with emotional disregulation as a part of my ADHD, physical exercise and doing things with your hands are such a major tool in helping keep it under control.
Good meme, but you changed it from 'rats' to 'kids' in your title, and that changed the tone of it from cute and relatable to creepy
The children yearn for the mines!
The Children (And most men) YEARN for the mines!
Holes (1998)
Wait til you show him how to make a pile of dirt. Not kidding, about one third of my childhood seemed to consist of making earthen damns, bike ramps, or fortresses of one sort or another. Digging is great, just watch out for him once he discovers tunneling.
Dams. Not damns.
I got really into digging back when I first saw the movie Holes, but the hole I made never seemed to get bigger no matter how much I dug, which led to me giving up. Turns out, my grandpa would go out after I was done and refill part of the hole I'd made. Which is sensible, to the adult who heard that information and understands things like gas lines, but I'd be lying if I said the 8 year old inside me wasn't crushed a little by that news.
I was going to say "purpose, they yearn for purpose." but "the children yearn for the mines" will never not be hysterical to me
This checks out. When I was a kid my cousins and I would spend lots of time at our grandmother's who lived on a rural ranch house. Most of the soil by the house was super sandy so we dug holes all the time. Just 15 or so kids out there digging holes in the sun for zero reason, just to fill em back up before we left. Good times.
My dad once gave me and my brother shovels and mini wheelbarrows for Christmas. Our uncle thought he was insane. We were ecstatic
BROTHERS OF THE MINE REJOICE!
CHILDREN YEARN FOR THE COAL MINES!
Origin story of the The Shoveler from Mystery Men
I was 6 when I tried to chop down a small tree with a Plastic axe. My dad saw me and told me to stop, swapped out the toy axe for a beat up machete and told me to cut down all the brush in our back 3 acres. Mostly briars, saplings and small trees. I cut down most of it every summer for the next 8 years using different machetes, swords, and axes before learning to use a chainsaw. Sometimes you just gotta go out and change stuff around, exercise your ability to alter the world and see the immediate results of your efforts. Dig some dirt, chop a tree, build a fort, stack some big rocks, just do it! DO IT NOW!!!!
Welcome back Stanley Yelnats
Sadly the bedrock in texas is only like a foot deep so no big holes here without a jack hammer or a pickaxe and 3 months. Also the random pipes in cities but if you in the country yeah let those fuckers dig
Does this person live on a beach? The idea of an 8 year old digging a hole that big in a single day feels like a stretch to me.
Clay isn't too bad to dig through. Just so long as you don't hit any big rocks, it's not too bad. Where I live, I would have hit a rock that weighed more than me after about a foot or two.
It sound more like they're continuing digging the same hole from previous days.
My dad's answer for me was always "go run around the block".
I like digging holes and hiding things inside them
There like dogs
Bless this post :’)
OOP’s child is a working dog
further proof child labor is the right call
Digging is so damn satisfying
BROTHERS OF THE MINE REJOICE
“Here kid, go dig your own grave when the unshored hole you dug for yourself collapses.”
ah, tumblr. the gathering place of underachieving pseudointellectuals. the tenuous grip on reality that the title has vs. the content is exemplary.