Luni

Luni || any/all || multi-fandom Expect talk of 80s dark fantasies, sci-fi, psychological horrors, and film all around Been also getting into ballet, theater, and opera lately But mostly miscellanous + (heavy) political posting here More active on side blogs

[teunip]

Deet says free Palestine! 🇵🇸

[burlap-bows]

Silkstone barbies˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

I love the hair of the one on the top right.

[caydencrypted]

the wisdom ive learnt is that becoming part of a friend group 1) takes a long time and 2) involves a lot of feeling awkward and left out at first. there’s nothing terrible about this but if you grew up chronically lonely or have any kind of trauma relating to social isolation this likely feels Really Wrong and activates danger signals. but both fortunately and unfortunately it’s just how becoming close to new people works most of the time

[caydencrypted]

another thing that was not intuitive to me as someone who grew up an autistic loner: basically everyone on the planet is starved for connection all the time and almost everything people do is an attempt to reach out to another. most seemingly illogical interactions and behaviours can be explained by this. you have to take as many of these invitations as you can. even if you're wrong you still attempted to bring more warmth into the world

[sunflorally]

find people you feel safe being a burden to. we all have to lean on people sometimes. the point isn’t to never have a problem, to never want to rant, to never need help. the point is to find the ones you can go to with your troubles and know they don’t see you as less.

[aggressive-positivity-network]

When someone gives the advice of “don’t be afraid to disappoint your parents” they don’t just mean taking music theory in college or starting a YouTube channel.

It also means wearing things they might not approve of. Using accommodations that they might not think you need. Not falling for their guilt trips. Eating when you’re hungry, not when it suits them and their idea of your weight or health. Making your own friends instead of seeking the stamp of approval from them.

Of course, some parents are stricter than others, and some use abuse to keep you from expressing yourself. But do what you can, even if it seems small.

Otherwise, when your parents are no longer in the picture, you’ll try to find it somewhere else to get validation. A strict boss, an abusive partner, a selfish friend.

Going against your parent’s wishes is developmentally healthy. Not doing so stunts your independence and self-regulation. You shouldn’t be living to constantly please others, even the people who love you.

[myfairynuffstuff]

Daniel Arthur (b.1995) - Skibidi Cat. Oil on panel.

[officiallyluni]

I just spent 10 hours straight starring at my computer screen 'cause I'm an idiot who didn't realize that in order to get all my files transferred from one google account to another I'd have to start the process a week in advance but tonight is when my older account was scheduled to be deactivated so I had to go through my docs, emails, etc. one by one in order to determine what was the most important to save and transfer them each individually. When I had months to do this but for some forsaken reason just had to procrastinate till the very last minute like I always do.

[plush-autism]

Vintage BRUIN My First Friend hippo

[unsubconscious]

Francesco Clemente 

[sylvandalism]

To Read:

Aime Cesaire: Notebook of a Return to a Native Land

Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History

Mahmoud Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others and On Photography and Vivre Sa Vie and Aesthetics of Silence 

Hamid Dabashi: Brown Skin, White Masks

Sara Ahmed: Against Students 

Catherine MacKinnon:  Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality 

Darnell L. Moore:  On Love, Empathy, and Pleasure in the Age of Neoliberalism

Tiffany King: In The Clearing: Black Female Bodies, Space, and Settler Colonial Landscape Anita Daulatzai: Humanitarianism is as culpable as war 

Claudia Rankine: The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning 

Hannah Black: K in Love

Edwidge Danticat: We Are Ugly But We Are Here

Simone Weil on Science, Quantum Theory, and Our Spiritual Values 

Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together

How to Make Love in America

Greece’s Debt Crisis Explained: 

What is Neo-Liberalism 

The Story of a Hate Crime 

We Are All Very Anxious

Wayne Koestenbaum: In Defence of Nuance 

Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation 

What Makes Writing Sensual? 

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

[stebens]

If you’re autistic and/or have ADHD like me, I recommend switching to ‘Simple English’ when reading lengthy and complex Wikipedia articles because it makes it so much easier to take in, comprehend, and understand

[stebens]

how to do:

On the sidebar on the left, there’s a list of languages listed in alphabetical order, so you have to scroll down a bit to find ‘Simple English’. But even if you can’t, you can just edit the URL from en.wikipedia.org to simple.wikipedia.org

Here’s an example of the difference between English wiki and Simple English wiki:

English:

Simple English:

[autisticawesomeness-archive-blog]

[Image 1: A lengthy article about Japan in difficult words, with long paragraphs and no pictures.

Image 2: The article about Japan, only now the text has been compressed into a mere two paragraphs and there are pictures visible on the right (the Japanese flag), as well as a table of contents.]

[ace-feminist]

Holy crap this is actually a life saver

[mikkeneko]

This is important and wonderful. Knowledge should be available to everyone. Not just people with the right brainware or educational background.

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

i dont CARE that its your special interest bitch whats your SOURCE !!!!!!

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

"source: me ! hahaha🥰" NO !!!!!!! SOURCE: First Name Middle Initiall. Last Name, Name of Book, (City: Publisher, year) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[fuckyeahfightlock]

No talking about the things that interest you! We no longer trust you to have read books/watched documentaries/learned/comprehended! No sharing interesting things with friends! No giving opinions based on having synthesized information!

I 1000% do not envy young people. It seems even more miserable to be a teenager/young adult now that it was when I was those ages (when it was just, you know, regular miserable. Now it's off-the-charts misery and no fun and be careful all the time and judge each other harshly and be anxious and lonely).

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

Are you lost ? This is about academia and serious topics. If you share information that someone is unable to verify, and they ask you for a source, "well its my special interest" is not a satisfactory answer. You do realise that sometimes people have conversations about serious things where having verifiable information is in fact important, right ? You do realise that some people have special interests wherein not spreading falsehoods is actually of really significant importance ? My special interest is nationalism. I got a degree in the topic. This isnt about someone being wrong about the length of their favourite whale or the year a certain toy was manufactured

Also, I really, really cannot stress this enough, is someone asks you for a source and you cant remember off the top of your head, "I will get back to you on that" is in fact acceptable. You can go double check and then get back to them.

[identitty-dickruption]

also what is this website’s fixation on who did or didn’t get a good grade in english class in high school. I topped my school in english when I was 17 and that’s somehow supposed to mean that (as an adult) all my literary analysis is going to be perfect? bitch I don’t think that’s how anything works

“sounds like someone didn’t pay attention in english class” sounds like someone thinks high school is the end of your knowledge development and that nobody is capable of growing beyond that. sounds like someone assumes that these skills will just stay set in stone regardless of how much or little someone chooses to use them in their adult life. come on

[grison-in-space]

Okay so. So decomposing executive function problems, and the things people grapple with, is a thing that I've been chewing over lately. We talk a lot on Tumblr about executive dysfunction but that's a pretty broad category of brain no worky good, and I'm honestly really curious: for other folks who struggle with executive dysfunction, which specific function causes the most problems for you day to day?

If you have more than one thing you struggle with, pick the one that causes you the most problems day to day.

If you have executive function issues, which function fucks you up the most?

behavioral inhibition/impulse control

attentional inhibition/ability to choose what to focus on

working memory/holding information in your mind while working on it

cognitive flexibility/ability to switch frameworks by situation or change tasks

motor initiation/ability to start new behaviors you want to do

emotional regulation / ability to calm yourself down or control emotions

cognitive inhibition / ability to filter irrelevant stimuli out of your mind

planning out approaches to solve problems and reach goals

something not mentioned here (please elaborate!)

I don't have any known executive dysfunction / see results

Voting ended onFeb 11, 2024

[grison-in-space]

so here's the dirty little secret from when I put this poll out last year:

technically, motor initiation is not a form of executive dysfunction. this is because cognitive psychologists don't think about motor behavior as part of the same continuum as cognitive dysfunction, and the "executive" in "executive function" is all about performing cognitive tasks. Specifically, these are skills that are conceptualized as top-down "cognitive control" abilities that help us obtain our goals without letting those goals get eroded by pesky environmental or internal influences. Executive function is fuzzily defined in the academic literature at the best of times--much less the way we discuss it in popular media and social media!--but that much everyone seems to agree on.

And that means that motor initiation is.... not an executive dysfunction! Because motor initiation isn't cognitive.

For this reason, motor initiation is pretty much the exclusive domain of Parkison's researchers. which is fascinating to me, because a lot of aspects of decisionmaking happen in the striatum, and the striatum moves seamlessly from integrating information in the ventral striatum for decisionmaking right up into the dorsal striatum, which handles--you guessed it!--motor movements and initiations.

that said, there is pretty clearly something going on here for people with broader executive dysfunctions, particularly for people with ADHD and autistic people. the best research I am currently aware of on the topic comes from Amitta Shah's Catatonia, Shutdown and Breakdown in Autism (2019), but that work is relatively focused on people who are deep in the throes of breakdown and have more severe presentations than we usually see folks discussing on the socials.

[jmtorres]

(commented first, but also wanted to reblog)

i wonder if maybe the issue is badly named/categorized. like the issue of wanting to do something but not being able to start doing it doesn't seem like a MOTOR issue to me? it's not about whether i can physically do the motions of the thing it's about whether i can translate desire to do a thing into ...will to do the thing. does that make sense?

[grison-in-space]

I mean, I am not gonna simp for executive function as currently categorized here; I agree that the way it's usually categorized by cognitive neuroscientists as a top-down process really doesn't do a good job of recapitulating the brain as it truly exists. I have been particularly enjoying the critiques levied by Koziol et al (2013) on the topic tonight as I round up definitions and discussions on what exactly executive function is for my evening's reading.

however, I am going to gently push back on the motor thing, because I think that there's something getting missed here: if there isn't a motor dimension, then deciding to do the thing should be immediately followed by physically moving in the direction of the task without requiring a buildup of willpower to move the body at all. I'm being really persnickety here about task initiation / motor initiation because the point of decision--the point at which you go, okay, here's what we're doing next--is the last strictly cognitive point on the continuum from "having a desire to do X" to "physically doing X with my body." Most people do not have to build up a critical mass of willpower to self-initiate movement and transition to a new task. You know who does, though?

Parkinson's patients. In their case this is usually considered as part of a motor pathology! And that's because they aren't able to as easily self-initiate movements upon deciding to perform them: they often have to struggle to build up momentum to perform actions (unless taking advantage of external stimulation to initiate movement). Since these are problems that people who work on dysfunctions of motor systems have identified and work on today, I think it's reasonable to frame them as motor problems even in populations that haven't traditionally been classified as dealing with the same kinds of motor issues. This is especially true because paradoxical kinesis--that is, when impairment in motor actions often goes away when an external stimulus provides an impetus to move--is also a feature of these dysfunctions, just as it often seems to be for folks with autism and/or ADHD.

[star-anise]

THE WILL OF THE BALL!

(Refers to an anecdote about a patient with Parkinson's who couldn't move their hands no matter how hard they tried—but if you tossed a ball at them, they could catch it. Which did a lot to clue researchers in to the idea that we have more than one way to motivate behaviour. It got talked about a lot when the ADHD community was figuring out body doubling as a concept.)

I think splitting off motor initiation might be a deeply useful concept here. I personally have noticed that my own problems with motor initiation can't be solved with cognitive strategies.

Specifically, to get off my ass and moving, I need to stop thinking, especially about the task I'm planning. It takes a minute of very concentrated focus on my body, putting my feet on the ground and going to the place I need to work in.

I've often had the issue of wanting to solve all my issues cognitively, when the truth is that many times only behavioural techniques will work. It's much harder to think yourself out of loneliness than to go get a hug for it. So this seems like a promising approach.

[grison-in-space]

Right, yes! This is why I've been doing all that work with my dog Matilda: essentially, I've been using her to toss balls at me every time I want to pick a ball up and can't. Obviously, that is not useful for everybody, but I do think there's a lot of scope to using pets (especially at home) in order to provide that external focus. When I find myself stuck these days, I can almost always ask Matilda to come and nudge me and then I can do whatever I need to--usually as soon as I get the pressure from Matilda's attention and expectation to move.

A while back I asked folks if just wiggling their hands or their toes helped when they were physically stuck, and it didn't seem to help everyone but it helped a lot of people. I think that's something that should be a more well-known trick: sometimes, just getting motion going can make it more helpful to get your body moving to do the thing you'd like it to. I promised to explain why I thought that was helpful at the time, but then the grant mechanism I was applying for got shitcanned under the new Trump administration and the depression got me.

Here's what I think is happening.

The striatum is an organ in the brain that we usually divide into the dorsal striatum, which is involved in motor functions, and the ventral striatum, which is involved in decisionmaking and motivation. That said... there's no clear cellular difference between these regions, no hard line between the dorsal and ventral striatum. One simply flows into the other. "Decisions" start encoded by dopamine signaling in the ventral striatum, and they might flow upwards via dopamine into movements executing the decision.... or they might not, depending on the "strength" with which the valence in the signal is encoded. Importantly, we know that both the major "types" of dopaminergic neurons in the striatum (D1 and D2) have increased activity during self-initiated motions and both have decreased activity during immobility. We can think of the speed of signaling of dopaminergic neurons as dopamine "tone", which is what meds like L-Dopa and other Parkinsonian drugs aim to increase.

Importantly, what I think is happening is transient slowing of dopamine tone in people who have this kind of motor dysfunction (autistic inertia, etc.). We know that low dopaminergic tone in the striatum can, if it drops too low, interfere with self-initiated movements. Unfortunately, dopaminergic tone is apparently a bitch to study (source: my mentor) and equally hard to manipulate, so I haven't dug too hard into actively trying to test this hypothesis.

That said, we know that vigor is encoded by dopaminergic tone. We also know that we can "build up" to vigorous movements by making smaller movements, so I think the interactions may work both ways: "building up" to more tone can be done by making physical movements, not just by hoping that dopaminergic tone will increase again on its own. So my applied hypothesis is that using smaller self-paced movements to increase vigor and bypass inertia can help increase dopaminergic tone in the striatum and allow people who are stuck to more easily "wake themselves up" and move in the ways they'd like to. You'd have to have enough tone to make those smaller motions, but it should work for a lot of the people struggling with these kinds of activities if I'm right. Based on the anecdata from the previous go-round, it seems to be fairly effective for most folks.

If you're trying this for the first time, let me know how it goes!

[dulcevenganzaa]

been getting into critical theory lately

[dulcevenganzaa]

if you like me enjoy reading complex books and crit theory but find yourself at a loss of what to make of it, i want to recommend this yt channel: Film and Media Studies

big focus on media studies as stated, and a lot of the topics are intro level, but they're great for getting your feet wet and exploring these themes on your own. I'm halfway through Walter Benjamin's Work of Art and liking it so far

[singing-bowl]

thinking about how ursula k leguin said "what goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives" and how everyday i wake up slightly different and i can feel myself shed the skin of who i used to be slowly, slowly, until i look back and can scarcely recognise who i was... but also she is still a part of me, part of the leaf litter and the humus, supporting me as i send new roots down and new leaves stretching up to the sunlight

[ellynneversweet]

Listened to a podcast on historical attitudes towards privacy yesterday that reminded me that the corridor is a relatively recent architectural feature, and it just blows my mind every time to imagine how different the way I navigate the world and imagine built environments as a 21st century westerner is from basically most of the human experience for all of history.

Obviously I’m not alone in this difference, but it is fascinating to look at media made by people who are culturally like me who take as a given things like ‘everyone in this story has a bedroom that is for their exclusive use, and they experience other people entering it uninvited (even family or people they share a home with) as a violation.’ That’s a huge aberration from the norm.

[ellynneversweet]

One point that I hadn’t picked up on before but made perfect sense in light of this setting is that a lot of historical artefacts have locks on them. Cabinets, chests, travelling desks, wardrobes, books — instead of the boundary of ‘all my things I don’t want other people to access go in a locked and closed room’ you had ‘all my things I don’t want other people to access go in their own individual locked boxes in a room everyone in my household can access.’