#The Quintessential Mind

[unofficialchronicle]

On Habits, Rerouting Them, and Using Them to Renew Your Life

Source: https://thequintessentialmind.com/power-of-habit-mastery/

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To begin to combat automatic behaviors or processes, break your habits up into their components.

Cue. A cue is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. This trigger can be anything from a physical location and a person, to a smell, a taste or an emotional state.

Routine. The routine is the activity you are about to perform when you are triggered by a cue. It can be physical, mental or emotional.

Reward. Duhigg refers to the reward as something that helps our brain figure out if a particular loop is worth remembering in the future. The reward is mainly achieved mentally after a connection with something physical like a chocolate or a cigarette.

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The more we encounter this loop, the more automatic the habitual process becomes. However, the real moving force behind the habit loop is what Duhigg refers to as cravings. As we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning. Whenever we crave something, our brain somehow urges us to feel the same feeling we will experience when we actually reach the reward stage of the loop. The stronger the craving, the stronger our desire to perform that particular habit.

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"With the right conditioning, you could automatically do what you normally need willpower for."—Scott Young  

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“What gets measured, gets managed.” –Peter Drucker (Take note of your "wins" and your progress).

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”—Aristotle

[fiftypiercings]

I can't believe I decided to read orv on a whim because I just wanted a good manhwa with no romance subplot and here I am knees deep into the novel questioning my whole life because whatever these mfs have got going on is much more nastier and visceral than any romance.

[towardsmodernism]

saw someone on this website say that speaking in tongues would be a perfect album if it didn’t have the song swamp like…. well first of all speaking in tongues IS a perfect album so jot that down and second of all. if you can’t handle david byrne putting on a horrible little goblin voice to literally speak in tongues and quote Goethe for five minutes and thirteen seconds im not sure thsi is the right place for you. that’s all

[mo-ok]

Absolutely obsessed with how these mecha move tbh

Land Lion - Choujuu Sentai Liveman

God Logan - Ninja Sentai Kakuranger

Won Tiger - Gosei Sentai Dairanger

[phanyu]

i always thought that dan was more stylish than phil because regardless of their personal aesthetics, phil sort of just wore clothes where as dan put together An Outfit. and im being proven right by the fact that phil’s aesthetic hasn’t really changed but he’s Putting Together Outfits now and that iota of effort makes him eat dan up like dan didn’t even know it was a competition

[age-of-moonknight]

“Journey to the Center of the Mind,” Moon Knight (Vol. 9/2021), #27.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Federico Sabbatini; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[manasurge]

1/3 of the way done of this last page, then I can finally post it all o|-<

[thatoneluckybee]

Bee hi

Hello! Why are you on the alt!!

[pondslime]

poacher’s dream

bo sinclair x afab!reader

word count: 2.5k

Everything is HAVE YOU SEEN ME? and yellow police tape and you are the girl on the milk carton and the face on the flier, and there’s nowhere to go unless you’d like to disappear into the fuzz of the television.

Bo’s just trying to watch a little TV and you keep distracting him.

cw’s: dubious consent, stockholm syndrome, explicit sexual content, rough oral sex, female reader, gendered anatomy, second person, alcohol, inanimate object porn, blowjobs, hair-pulling, dirty talk, degradation, slut shaming, pet names, bites and bruises, possessive behavior, obsessive behavior, little bit of a praise kink, canon-typical violence

read it here

[myriad-rainbows]

Love how when I take my hair down after it's been in two braids I get a few hours of looking like a 19th-century painting of a medieval lady who's about to give you a quest

[pearthery]

will there be more chapters for your potpurri au? no pressure, just curious!

hopefully one day!!! i did have a ginzura-themed draft set in the potpourri au (it's still there ahaha i just haven't added to it in a long while) which was titled something like actually the strawberry flavour in your strawberry milk is really just sugar and red dye. i only got so far as ginzura bullying haggard old man hasegawa-san before i lost the plot of it but i aim one day to finish it!!! actually here is a snippet ahaha

After a long day at work ferrying customers back and forth through the endless streams of urban traffic, Taizou slams shut the driver's door to his cab, rolls his shoulders back and his head up, and then nearly bursts into tears. 

"Please stop sitting there," he begs to the demon perched on the wall outside his house. "Please. It gives me a heart attack." 

Yoshida-san's devil child, the one that the man dotes on incessantly, the one that likes to wheedle snacks from Taizou's sweet, innocent wife, the one that has tormented Taizou relentlessly without him even lifting a finger at least three times a week ever since their paths had tragically crossed, stares down dolefully. 

"Hatsu doesn't mind," says Gintoki. "Besides. What's it my fault if pathetic old men die early? An old man who dies from something as lame as a heart attack is like a piece of dog crap stinking things up on the boot of society. An old man who dies from a heart attack is probably dying from something else already anyway, like crappy convenience store cigarettes or the weight of their own failures or their sunglasses leeching out all of their braincells like a cursed object."

"That's Hatsu-san to you," says Taizou, for lack of anything else. 

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, old men like that are already like zombies anyway. Even if they die, they'll still get up and go back home and leech off Hatsu." Gintoki pinches around the outsides of his nostrils thoughtfully, probably in search of stray boogers.

Taizou drags his hands down his face. He heaves a large sigh. His blood pressure has been climbing upwards for years at this point. "Aren't you too old to be doing things like this? Don't you have to get home? Don't you have anything better to do? Don't you have too much homework to be bullying poor, working men just trying to get by? God help me." 

"Pft," says Gintoki, twelve years old and mean as hell. "As if God would listen to dog crap like you." 

ooo

The first thing to ask, obviously, is why Gintoki is here.

"It's because he's run away from home again," explains Katsura-kun, politely letting himself into the kitchen through the back door. He gestures over at Gintoki (rifling through Taizou's refridgerator shelves for sweet treats) and beams at Hatsu (heading out to the garden) when she pats him on the head, even though the kid's almost as tall as she is now. 

"Yeah," says Gintoki. He settles down at the table with a cup of chocolate mousse. 

Taizou gazes wearily at the scene. 

"Don't just come into my house like that. Who even invited you? And you. I was going to eat that. I was going to have that for dessert tonight." 

Gintoki's eyes go wide and he makes a noise of surprise. "Hm? Oh, this l'il thing? Sorry. It just looked so lonely in the back of your fridge. I thought I'd keep it company. Anyway, I'm a growing boy, so I need all the sugar I can get." 

"I put it up at the front so I could take it out for dessert. I was really looking forward to that."

"It's probably better that you don't eat too much sugar anyway, old man," Gintoki adds. "I heard too much sweet stuff is bad for geezers."

"You know what. Fine. Go ahead," says Taizou.

"If you're hungry or peckish," says Katsura-kun, "then I'm not sure Hasegawa-san's pantry is the best place. It would really have been better for you to stay home and let Yoshida-san stuff you with, what's that he's been baking a lot recently? I think they were lemon rosemary cookies." He pauses and looks to his left, where Gintoki nods absently into his chocolate mousse. 

"Yes, that's right. Lemon rosemary shortbread cookies. They were quite good actually. Yoshida-san gave me a container to take home. I stopped by their house after school, that's why," he says to Taizou, whose expression must be showing the confusion bouncing around his brain. "He even sat me down to discuss the symbolism of the ingredients he used. He said: half a cup of sugar for the sweetness of existence, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract, a quarter of a teaspoon of salt for the tears shed in existence, a cup of butter, smooth and slippery, like all the things that slip out of your grasp—"

"Hey, what do you mean my pantry's not the best place?," says Taizou after a moment of realisation. "I work hard to feed myself and my wife, you know that, you brats? This whole day I was driving around rude, shithead city people who smoke in my cab and spill disgusting sticky soft drinks on my seats, and this is what I come home to?" 

"You're the shithead who smokes in your cab," says Gintoki. "If your car smells like smoke, then that's because you're stinking it up in the first place, so it's your own fault."

"Are you really a little kid?" says Taizou. "Why do you have such a crude mouth for a kid? Why is everything you say so mean?"

"Hey, you're the one who said 'shithead' in the first place. I'm just repeating what you said. I'm an impressionable young boy, so you should be watching your mouth, actually. You should be a good role model." 

"Don't your neighbours smoke? I see Tatsugoro-san with his pipe around all the time, are you this mean to him? Are you this mean to Ayano-san? You aren't, are you? You're only this mean to me. I'm the only one you call a pathetic old man, aren't I? I'm the only one you unleash all of your insults on, aren't I? You only call me dog crap on the boot of society." 

"—two cups of all-purpose flour, soft and bright, for all the things that are so delicate that they can be blown away in a single breath, rosemary for fidelity and remembrance, oh Gintoki, what have I done that I don't deserve your fidelity, oh Gintoki, remember me, won't you Gintoki, wherever you have gone to, away from me, preserve the memory of me in your soul, even when you so evidently can no longer stand to look at my face—"

"Shoyo has a dumb face," says Gintoki to Katsura-kun. "And I'm just going to stay at your house for a week or two. I go to your house all the time."

"Well, you forget that Yoshida-san is possessed by a thousand spirits of melodrama," says Katsura-kun. "Also, lastly, lemon for bitterness. That said, I have a container for you as well, Gintoki."

Gintoki wrinkles his nose. "I don't want it, thanks." 

"I'll take it," says Taizou, having been demolished by a middle schooler. "I need a pick-me-up." The container is swiftly slid across to him. "Thanks."

He opens the lid to find resting on top of the pile of warm biscuits a small square note embossed with spiky leaves around the edge. It's covered with pen drawings of hearts and sad faces and reads: FOR MY STINKY LITTLE SWEETPEA WHO IS ALWAYS WELCOME TO COME BACK HOME AT ANYTIME HE DECIDES TO RETURN HOME MOST HOPEFULLY SOON. <3.

"I wonder what Hatsu's doing outside," says Taizou. If he arches his neck, he can glimpse through the window. She's tending to the flowerbeds, it looks like. She pulls out a couple of weeds. Katsura-kun looks as if he knows exactly what is contained in Gintoki's care package (kid probably watched the note be written) and is politely ignoring it. Gintoki's face is very bland.

"Looks like there's some paper in here. With some writing on it. And some little pictures." He takes a bite out of what really is a good biscuit, sweet and buttery and still warm. Yoshida-san seriously is a good baker. "So these are kind of like fortune cookies, yeah?"

"Huh, says Katsura-kun. "I didn't get anything in mine."

"Huh," says Taizou, with maximum discretion. "Weird. Maybe something happened at the fortune cookie factory and they had a mix-up. Welp, since I'm an old geezer and I've had enough of both sorts 'a fortune, good or bad, in my lifetime, I guess you kids can have mine."

Silently, he folds up the note. Gintoki's hand is already open and outreached, though he refuses to look at it. Underneath that note is another one, which is a mournfully calligraphed poem about the temporary nature of happiness and domestic bliss that has additionally been annotated. He passes that one over as well.

"Anyway, Katsura-kun," he continues, "what was that recipe? Can you say it again, or maybe write it down? Hatsu might like it. She's mentioned wanting to try her hand at baking these days." 

[hypnolordx]

Requested by SomeHypnoGuy who wanted to see a Starro pic with all five of the Nakano quintuplets. So I did that, and put them in order too! Enjoy!

P.S. Ichika, Nino, Miku, Yotsuba, and Itsuki Nakano's exports were made by Tfgame-LoueEcchi)

[lemon-wedges]

Just came across a mug that says "World's Best Sacrificial Lamb" - made me think of Ryunosuke

I SAW THAT AND HAD THE EXACT SAME THOUGHT

[writeouswriter]

Searching for very specific book recs again because people on goodreads can't read:

Looking for a book like Contact by Carl Sagan, realistic science fiction about alien contact that's subtle with no big wars or battles or alternate histories or dystopian futures or greys or such, more of a focus on the characters, on people and their reactions, and doesn't stray too far from actual science, set preferably mostly on Earth in an unchanged present day/or within the past 30-50 years/maybe next 10 years at most, more on the scale of wow, this could really actually happen like now or something like that. Preferably NOT YA. 

Alternatively:

Also searching for a sci-fi book (again NOT YA) where I can get overly attached to a funky little scientist man. In the sense that I am currently projecting all my love on Newton Geiszler from Pacific Rim right now when I didn't even have particularly strong feelings for the movie itself.

[age-of-moonknight]

“Darkness at the Edge of Town (Part Two),” Avengers Unlimited (Vol. 1/2022), Infinity Comic, #34.

Writer: Alex Segura; Artist: Jim Towe; Colorist: Andres Mossa; Letterer: Joe Sabino

[thatoneluckybee]

CHARACTER RANKING GO

I'M NOT GOOD AT RANKING THINGS Y'ALL REALIZE I AM UNABLE TO DO TIERLISTS