stay curious 💡⭐

24, she her / college senior / this is a sideblog! (est. 2015)

[alwaysbeenjessica]

ray bradbury

[jun-hug]

Hi! I made this calendar sheet for a christmas art fair i'm attending this year at my uni campus! (my first ever art fair!) Aside that, i'll be bringing some prints, bookmarks and stickers, all handmade. :)

I share it also with you as a free printable PDF available on my kofi!

Holidays are coming so consider this a little gift from me! This was such a lovely and aventurous year for my art journey. Thank you so much for your love and support for my silly cat arts <33

[firstfullmoon]

I know it’s not much in the face of everything but I have been finding hope & resilience in palestinian poetry these past few weeks and I created a google drive file of poetry collections by palestinian poets that I will keep updating as I keep on reading. I also recommend checking out @fiercynn’s palestinian poets series for more poets + poetry available online

[glenthemes]

🦛 ✦ What is WordHippo Lite?

A minimal (lite) version of wordhippo.com that offers definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and example sentences of requested words. Uses the unofficial WordHippo API.

🦛 ✦ Why not use the mobile apps?

Purely personal preference! The WordHippo apps on Android & iOS work great, but the desktop site only works with adblockers disabled, and even then, it tends to take up an excessive amount of memory usage (up to 2GB) during its idle state, so I decided to make a minified version of it.

🦛 ✦ Who is this for?

Writers (and readers) who prefer using WordHippo on desktop rather than mobile devices.

🔗 wordhippo-lite.fly.dev

[hoursofreading]

“I feel it in my work as a teacher, where I recognize that we are so close — so, so close — to a world where teaching looks like AI-generating lesson plans and delivering those lesson plans using AI-generated slides, and then assessing the skills of those lessons using AI-generated tests, and then grading those tests using a form of AI. The content of AI producing student work that is then fed back to AI for AI to assess. And for what? And at what cost? It pains me. It pains me deeply. And then I sit down and I read about clams. And it’s not just that I am reading about clams. It’s that I am reading the perspective of someone who thought that it was worth paying attention to clams. There. Remind me again why we read? I think that’s part of it. You pick up a book and someone has you by the arm. There, they are saying, look over there. They are pointing now. They are holding something in their hand. Little clam in the palm, refusing to open. Look at that thing that loves being alive, how it resists the same sun we turn our cheek towards. Crazy world, beautiful place. Down in the deep somewhere, a clam smaller than my hand is withstanding the pressure of a few dozen full-size trains just hanging out on top of its body.”

— Mary Oliver’s “Clam” - by Devin Kelly

[tealornoteal]

Heyo! Opening these on my other socials so thought I’d post about it here too — I’m opening five slots in November / December in time for the holidays! They will all be done in time for the holidays depending on your needs :)

$35USD per portrait or pet / animal, $70USD per full body and +$35USD for detailed background!

Note: I will happily do PnF (and other fandoms) too — I’ll do most characters and ships, if any questions, just DM me!

To commission me, DM me or email me at [email protected]!

For more info + examples, go to https://esmiora.com/commissions

[zzoupz]

I drew these emo cats

[rosalesbeausderholle]

One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!

[lesbiscotti]

It does impact your memory! I saw a study (I forget where, but it was an actual scientific paper, not an opinion article) that students using AI to do coursework have far worse memory retention of what they’ve done compared to students who used digital resources or just their own knowledge. If you’re a student reading this, please don’t use AI in school for your own sake!! The goal of school is to learn, and you won’t be able to learn as much if AI does components of your work for you!!

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[hayaomiyazaki]

i spent the last week refreshing some of the content on my public googledrive ☺️

i kept about 50 films on the drive, and i've added more + a good chunk of my queer film book & bfi film book collections!

quick glance summary of the new stuff:

— FILM

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975) dir. Gene Wilder 🇺🇸

Along Came Love / Le Temps d'aimer (2023) dir. Katell Quillévéré 🇫🇷🏳️‍🌈

Delicatessen (1991) dir. Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet 🇫🇷

Dreams / Drømmer (2024) dir. Dag Johan Haurgerud 🇳🇴🏳️‍🌈

Hamam / Il bagno turco (1997) dir. Ferzan Özpetek 🇮🇹🇹🇷🏳️‍🌈

The Hill Where Lionesses Roar / La Colline où rugissent les lionnes (2021) dir. Luàna Bajrami 🇦🇱🇽🇰🏳️‍🌈

In This Corner of the World / この世界の片隅に (2016) dir. Sunao Katabuchi 🇯🇵

It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley (2025) dir. Amy Berg 🇺🇸

The Killing Fields (1984) dir. Roland Joffé 🇬🇧

Lacombe, Lucien (1974) dir. Louis Malle 🇫🇷

Le Beau Serge (1958) dir. Claude Chabrol 🇫🇷

The Maids (1975) dir. Christopher Miles 🇬🇧

Moolaadé (2003) dir. Ousmane Sembène 🇸🇳

Mystery / 浮城謎事 (2012) dir. Lou Ye 🇨🇳

Once (2007) dir. John Carney 🇮🇪

Perdida (2009) dir. Viviana García-Besné 🇲🇽

Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) dir. John Huston 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈

Safe Conduct / Laissez-passer (2002) dir. Bertrand Tavernier 🇫🇷

See How They Run (2022) dir. Tom George 🇬🇧🇺🇸

Time of Impatience / Sabırsızlık Zamanı (2021) dir. Aydın Orak 🇹🇷

Un varón (2022) dir. Fabián Hernández Alvarado 🇨🇴🏳️‍🌈

Vermiglio (2024) dir. Maura Delpero 🇮🇹

Voyager (1991) dir. Volker Schlöndorff 🇩🇪

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) dir. Ken Loach 🇮🇪

What a Feeling (2024) dir. Katharina Rohrer 🇦🇹🏳️‍🌈

The White Bus (1967) dir. Lindsay Anderson 🇬🇧

Yuki's Sun / ユキの太陽 (1972) dir. Hayao Miyazaki 🇯🇵

— LIT

BFI Film Classics: 8½, Akira, All the President's Men, An American in Paris, Blue Velvet, Caché, Doctor Zhivago, Double Indemnity, Dr. Strangelove, Eraserhead, Heat, High Noon, Jeanne Dielman, Lawrence of Arabia, M, Once Upon a Time in America, Performance, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Queen Christina, Ratcatcher, Rocco and His Brothers, Solaris, The Godafther, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Night of the Hunter, The Shining, The Thin Red Line, The Wizard of Oz, Y tu mámá también

Anne E. Duggan – Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy (2013)

Arnika Fuhrmann – Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (2016)

Axel Madsen – The Sewing Circle: Hollywood's Greatest Secret-Female Stars Who Loved Other Women (1995)

Bernard Schulz-Cruz – The Evolution of Gay Imagery in Mexican Cinema: An Analysis of Thirty-Six Films, 1970–1999 (2010)

Chris Perriam – Spanish Queer Cinema (2013)

Clara Bradbury-Rance – Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory (2019)

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, Feride Çiçekoğlu – The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (2022)

Cybelle H. McFadden – Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras: Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn (2016)

Daniel Humphrey – Archaic Modernism: Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (2020)

Daniel Humphrey – Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (2013)

David Greven – Queering The Terminator: Sexuality and Cyborg Cinema (2017)

Delphine Benezet – The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism (2014)

Derek Jarman – At Your Own Risk (1992)

Dirk Bogarde – For the Time Being: Collected Journalism (1998)

Emma Wilson – Céline Sciamma: Portraits (2021)

Gavin Lambert – Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000)

James Ivory – Solid Ivory: Memoirs (2021)

Joe McElhaney – Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema (2021)

John Izod, Karl Magee, Kathryn Hannan, Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard – Lindsay Anderson: Cinema authorship (2012)

Joyce Rheuban – The Marriage of Maria Braun: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Director (1986)

Julia Leyda – Todd Haynes: Interviews (2014)

Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albill – Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (2008)

Lee Wallace – Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage (2020)

Lindsey B. Green-Simms – Queer African Cinemas (2022)

Lucille Cairns – Sapphism on Screen: Lesbian Desire in French and Francophone Cinema (2006)

Mario Falsetto – Conversations with Gus Van Sant (2015)

Niall Richardson – The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman: Critical and Cultural Readings (2008)

Nick Rees-Roberts – French Queer Cinema (2008)

Noël Burch, Geneviève Sellier – The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956 (2013)

Robert Emmet Long – James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies (2005)

Robin Griffiths – Queer Cinema in Europe (2008)

Shane Brown – Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy (2022)

Song Hwee Lim – Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006)

Stephen Bourne – Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–1971 (2016)

Susan Potter – Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (2019)

Tamsin Wilton – Immortal Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (1995)

Thomas Waugh – The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006)

Vinodh Venkatesh – New Maricón Cinema: Outing Latin American Film (2016)

William J. Mann – Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969 (2002)

Willow Maclay & Caden Gardner – Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema (2024)

[philippinewildlifeart]

Not only must we conserve what remaining forests we have. We must also help nature bring back the forests we have lost. They are our natural flood control and climate control, water sources and purifiers, and yet so much more. And only when using trees native and adapted to the habitats we bring back, managed by people who live in or near these areas, planted and supported by everyone in the country, will this be most effective.

[thepileofclothesonyourdesk]

"We have a new AI feature!" "With the power of AI..." "Our AI..."

I am going to abandon technology and start only inscribing things on clay tablets

[arnaerr]

Fuck genAI. A reminder that if you support genAI in any form, use chatGPT instead of your brain etc - pls unfollow me 🥰

[skribblegurl]

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

[heywriters]

I couldn't remember the word "doorknob" ten minutes ago.

[bumblewyn]

ok but the onelook thesaurus will save your life, i literally could not live without this website

[breelandwalker]

REBLOG TO SAVE A WRITER'S LIFE

[myfairkatiecat]

LIFE SAVED

REBLOGGING TO SAVE ANOTHER WRITERS LIFE

[sirowsky]

I use this every time I sit down to write. It's the best tool in the world and I would be lost without it!

[superlinguo]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science, 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[superlinguo]

Almost a decade later and there’s a fun update to this paper!

Eight years after this original study Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow have a sequel.

The original paper showed that blind and sighted people who speak the same language have similar gestures to represent events. These gestures can’t have been acquired through visual learning, so this was evidence that gesture and speech must be all bound up together in the brain. But there was still a question about how deeply they’re tied together. Perhaps this was something that adults settled into as they got older.

In this new paper, Özçalışkan and team looked at the speech and gesture of blind and sighted Turkish children between the ages of five and ten years old. They used the same methods and targeted the same kind of action verbs and gestures. It’s worth checking out the paper for the frolicking doll dioramas they set up as part of the experiment.

Even the youngest children showed the same kind of gesture patterns as adult Turkish speakers. This means that these kinds of patterns are part of language learning and not something that gets added on top later in life. That is further evidence for the original argument that speech and gesture are a package deal.

It’s so great to see this team continuing to refine and support the original findings.

From the “research highlights” section of the paper:

Gestures, when produced with speech (i.e., co-speech gesture), follow language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Gestures, when produced without speech (i.e., silent gesture), do not follow the language-specific patterns in event representation in both blind and sighted children.

Language-specific patterns in speech and co-speech gestures are observable at the same time in blind and sighted children.

The cross-linguistic similarities in silent gestures begin slightly later in blind children than in sighted children.

Citation

Özçalışkan, Şeyda, Ché Lucero, and Susan Goldin‐Meadow. (2024). Is vision necessary for the timely acquisition of language‐specific patterns in co‐speech gesture and their lack in silent gesture?. Developmental Science, 27(5), e13507. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13507

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[dreamforrest]

With SNAP and WIC programs being paused until further notice, I wanted to share that TooGoodToGo is a great way to get bread, bakery items and even prepared foods for cheap. It was created to reduce food waste. As it’s grown, restaurants and stores continue to be added.

[theinternetarchive]

I just want to let you guys know Cornell's entire library is open access (no permissions required) and there are (shocker) many books...