Amorphous Carbon Soup

For when you’re bored, overwhelmed, anxious, or need to otherwise occupy your mind without depleting your spoons!

Warnings are listed in parenthesise after the name of the site.

Painting, Drawing and Building

Your Infinite Painting

Bomomo

Silk

Many Lines

Voxels

Spin Painter

Neon Flames

Interactive Visualisers

Starfield (Motion sickness)

TouchEffects (Motion sickness)

Clouds

Voronoi (Flashing/Phototsensitivity warning)

Imagination

Particle and Force Simulators

GPU Fluid Experiments

Fluid Web GL

StarFluid

Adaptive and Recursive Image Generators 

Mutating Pictures

Grow A Face

Animations and Infinite Zoom

Coca Cola Dominos (Has audio)

Arkadia

Tumbler (Has audio)

Music and Rhythm (All have audio)

Type Drummer

Touch Pianist

Darwin Tunes

Patatap (Flashing/Phototsensitivity warning)

Plink

Tonfall Sequencer

GØY | GØY

Things to Destroy

Google Space

Broken Self (Has audio)

Cold Void

Miscellaneous

Thisissand (Has audio)

Koalas To The Max

Blob

Sphere (Motion Sickness)

bookoftextures:

actuallyadhd:

This post is a variation on the tried-and-true balloon flour stress balls. These fidgets are made from water bomb balloons, which means they’re smaller, and more discreet – hopefully ideal for classes, lectures, or at work The fidgets are also filled with different materials – not just flour! This means that you can have half a dozen or more fidgets of different textures.

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Materials

For this post, I’ve used kinetic sand, quinoa, play dough, and flour (pictured from left to right in the image below), but you can use practically anything. You might like to try legumes, water beads, marbles, silly putty, ordinary sand or clay. Go wild!

You’ll also need some small water balloons or water bombs.

All the materials I’ve used I either purchased at a junk shop, or in a supermarket.

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Method

1.    Place the filling material in a small dish or bowl.

2.    Use your fingers to carefully stretch the neck of the balloon open (demonstrated in the gif below). Depending on what sort of water balloons you have, it can be very easy to pierce the latex with your finger nails.

3a.   Scoop and the filling material into the balloon – I’ve used my free fingers (demonstrated in the gif below), but if dexterity is an issue for you, or you’re worried about making a mess, you might need another person to fill the balloons with a teaspoon.

3b.  To fill the balloons with play dough, roll the dough into small balls that will fit through the neck of the balloon (demonstrated below). I also added a bit of water to mine, to try and prolong the life of the fidget - I’ve noticed that the play dough has a tendency to dry out over time.

4.    When the balloon is full, remove your fingers and squish the air out of the balloon (shown in the gif below). Take care to do this gently, or the contents might squeeze out everywhere (this is especially true for flour). The more you compress the contents of the balloon, the firmer the texture will be.

5.    Make sure all of the filling is in the body of the balloon, by pinching off, stretching the neck of the balloon, and working any material caught in the neck down with your fingers (See the image below).

6.    Tie the neck of the balloon in a tight neat overhand knot, just as you would with any other balloon (as demonstrated below), and cut off the excess neck with a pair of sharp scissor. If your water balloons are especially thin, you might like to put the stuffed balloon inside another balloon, before tying it off.

And you’re done!

Go forth and fidget!

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Notes

It’s worth mentioning that because the balloons are made from latex, they will perish over time. I’ve found that the kinetic sand I used perished the balloons faster than normal, but that might depend on what brand you buy. The balloons also don’t mix well oils – I have kept a vial of essential oil with my first set of finger fidgets, and the latex perished when the vial leaked.

If you’re allergic to latex, you might like to try using nitrile gloves. Nitrile doesn’t stretch as much as latex, but if you cut the fingers off the gloves, you’ll have a wider neck than a balloon, so you shouldn’t need to stretch it open as much anyway. Just fill it and tie it of the same as I’ve described above.

If you have limited mobility, dexterity or strength in your hands and fingers, you might have some success in using tweezers or pliers to hold the balloon open, just be careful not to nick or pierce the balloon. You might have more success getting someone else to hold the neck of the balloon open, while you fill it with your chosen contents.

There is also a method where you put the filling into an empty bottle and blow up the balloon. You then twist the neck of the balloon to keep the air in and stretch it over the neck of the bottle. When you turn the bottle upside down you can shake the filling into the balloon.

This means you can make larger fidgets, and can avoid touching the contents directly. Try looking for instructions for balloon DIY juggling balls. I’ve done them with lentils and flour.

If latex/other materials are a problem because of allergy disposable gloves or condoms can be a good source as they have more information on contents (non lubricated advised!).

Or look at their flour ball instructions, not checked them yet :)

(Prue from ActuallyADHD here)

This is a good point. I did know about the inflate and bottle method (in fact I saw it here, when exploring different ideas for the fidget toy post), and I made a few larger fidgets this way, but it’s almost impossible to find a bottle with an opening small enough for the little water balloons, and it’s really easy to tear them, whilst trying to stretch them over the neck of the bottle (believe me, I tried).

I was initially going to cover larger fidgets in this method, but the post was long enough as it was, and there is lots of information on that out there already.

Condoms are also a really brilliant suggestion, and one that I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years, so thanks.

I don’t know if someone has already done this, but learning AUSLAN is on my list of things to do, so I though I’d compile a list of resources.

Auslan Signbank

The Auslan Signbank provides a dictionary and videos of Auslan signs, as well as links to classes

Sign Planet

Sign Planet has a whole bunch of work sheets, flash cards, games all based around Auslan, although some areas appear to require a subscription. It also has resources for NZSL, BSL and ASL.

RIDBC Auslan Tutor Key Signs

The Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children has an app, which includes   150 of the most common key phrases in Auslan, as well as videos on how to form the signs. It’s available for iOS here and Android here.

The RIDBC also has a more comprehensive Tutor app, which is $20 for Android, and $39.99 for iOS

If anyone wants to reblog and add more Auslan resources, that’s cool.

the-tabularium:

So my Functional Proteins and Genes lecturer dealing with oligosaccharides formats all of his slides like this:

But all I can think of is:

This reminds me of that marketing campaign NIB Insurance ran with a couple of years ago (it was a shocker):

On the topic of retro powerpoint themes, however, I’ll contribute these:

When giving this presentation, the lecturer actually commented “This kinda brings me back to when I was a student, and I thought this was the greatest, prettiest powerpoint theme that was around. Really trendy at the time. At least it’s not comic sans?”

As a side note, an abnormally high proportion of my lecturers seem to prefer dated electric blue gradients over other themes, apparently? I’ve only included the best two here, but I found at least 5 or 6 different examples from 5 or 6 different lecturers! Is it a generational thing? Who the fuck even knows!