thought carousel

Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
noise dept.
No title available
tumblr dot com

No title available

JBB: An Artblog!

No title available

blake kathryn
No title available
we're not kids anymore.

titsay

⁂
taylor price
dirt enthusiast
i don't do bad sauce passes
AnasAbdin
seen from Finland

seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye

seen from United States
seen from Estonia
seen from Canada

seen from Germany

seen from Italy

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from South Africa

seen from United States

seen from India

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
@saxpayer
thought carousel
mafia goon in the 1940’s who just started transitioning:
I am being continuously plagued by those perplexing juggling men
be scared. be angry.
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.
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
how i can turn you into a nidorina in one simple step:
it's nido tummy thursday
Potentially hot take but one of the reasons we need art and music in schools is that, taught correctly, they are ideal avenues for teaching kids how to do something, kinda suck at it, keep going anyways and improve over time.
And THAT is one of the most valuable skill sets a human being can have. THAT is the skill set that unlocks soooooo many others.
A LOT of people I see with anxiety and depression do not have this skill set. To suck at something is a threat. Proof that they are doomed to suck at it forever. And then, often, that either THEY suck forever or the task must be stupid/useless/pointless (whence we get AI art fans who have decided actually making art is pointless and degrading the labor and skills of others is fine because these are useless skills).
Or you get the freeze- the inability to try things in case you fail. The sudden lancing shame and humiliation or hopelessness. The sense that anything you haven't learned by now you can't learn. Which is so heartbreaking and so untrue.
I just hate it.
"What if I write it and it's bad" "what if I draw it and it's bad" "what if I play it and it sounds bad" DOING IT BAD IS HOW YOU LEARN TO DO IT GOOD! You can't skip the process of leaning and the process is FUN if you let it be what it needs to be!
Actual roman epitaph for a dog
humans are the same
I’ve seen this one doing the rounds a few times (and it makes me cry every time I see it), but was curious about the original Latin text, so I did some digging: it’s a shortened version of CIL 10, 00659, a tombstone from Salernum (modern Salerno, Italy). (source; CIL is the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum).
Portaui lacrimis madidus te, nostra catella,
Quod feci lustris laetior ante tribus.
Ergo mihi, Patrice, iam non dabis oscula mille
Nec poteris collo grata cubare meo.
Tristis marmorea posui te sede merentem
Et iunxi semper manib(us) ipse meis
Morib(us) argutis hominem simulare paratam,
Perdidimus quales hei mihi delicias.
Tu, dulcis Patrice, nostras attingere mensas
Consueras, gremio poscere blanda cibos,
Lambere tu calicem lingua rapiente solebas,
Quem tibi saepe meae sustinuere manus,
Accipere et lassum cauda gaudente frequenter
And here’s my translation:
Wet with tears I have carried you, our little (female) dog, just as I did in happier times fifteen years earlier (lit. “three periods of five years). For myself, Patrice, now you will not give me a thousand kisses nor will you be able to lie lovingly around/against my neck. I have sorrowfully placed you, merit-worthy, in a marble tomb and I have joined you always to myself in death, as by your cleverness you matched a human. Alas, we lost such pleasures for myself! You, sweet Patrice, were accustomed to join us at our table, to beg charmingly for food (while sitting in our) laps. You were in the habit of greedily licking our cups with your tongue, which my hands often held for you. Frequently and joyfully (you) receive a weary one with your (wagging) tail...
tl;dr: this dog was named Patrice and was very, very loved. (another translation with some glossing of the text.)
It's the fact she's joined to them in death, it's the fact that she sat in her owner's arms and ate their food. That he held the cups down for her to drink from....
Hundreds of years and we still know she was loved. We still know how she liked to sleep. All these years!! Loving dogs is the same!!!!
gonna point out too that 15 years is an INSANELY long lifespan for a dog in ancient Rome. This dog was both well loved and well cared for to have lived so long. Obvs there's going to be some statistical overlap with ancient dogs with loving epitaphs having longer lifespans, but in a world without modern vetrinary science or medicine, no canine vaccines, and no nutritionally formulated dog food, this Roman's beloved pooch exceeded even the average pet dog lifespan today.
@adelinejclose
The fact that animals that care for their young will sometimes adopt others' lost or orphaned young to raise along their own is just funny to me. I know that it's all hormonal and there's no conscious thought involved in it, but the internal logic of it is so funny.
"Baby = success. More baby = more success. I have one baby and I found four other baby. I have five baby. I am being so fucking successful right now."
Girls will be boys
Boys will be girls
Fascists will 💖 be shot💖
The amount of terfs I blocked on this post, that complained about the fascist part is very telling.
Went to take this picture of this insane bigfoot sex sign and only after opening my camera did i notice the entire flock of little chickens chilling in the dirt. life is good again
me looking at the sign then seeing the chickens
that’s so crazy
What’s happening to boys?
Into the Wilderness: Part 37
Is a trend emerging? Nice boys, raised by dedicated mothers, taught to respect women and see the world’s inequality toward women. Boys who made room in the school yard for girls to join ball games. Teens and young men who knew and honored the meaning of “no.” Twenty-something male adults who attended and graduated college, befriending 20-something young women as equals, study partners, friends. Suddenly, are they all losing themselves?
The latest lost boy was a son to me. He needed a place to live so I opened my home- we had an entire unused apartment in the basement. He could stay with us over the summer while he sorted out school and work. He stayed longer.
When he came home from school or work, he’d sit at the kitchen island and talk while I prepped dinner. We’d talk about politics, country music, life mistakes, parenting, sports, cats, food… and hundreds of other subjects. I always invited him to join us for dinner. And he did, shoveling multiple platefuls with gusto that expanded my Greek mama’s heart by two sizes like the Grinch’s. He loved curries and bold flavors, so I expanded my repertoire. I made butter chicken, keema, Gochujang buttered noodles, Korean meatballs. He ate the leftovers for lunch, saving them from the trash (girls don’t eat like boys). He always cleaned up too, rinsing and stacking dishes, scouring the pots.
He became a family member. On the wall, we have a magnetic Scrabble game. Before he’d leave for his early morning run, he’d put a word on the board. When I returned later from teaching Jazzercise class, I’d add mine; my daughter would add hers. We tallied the scores on the side.
We also sent each other Instagram reels. Recipes we wanted to make, silly cat videos, lots of pug and beagle videos. When I got a gas griddle for the deck, we made patty melts and sausage with peppers and onions. One day, he made authentic Asian dumplings. He even made the dough. He made chicken shawarma, and I learned to make it too. He came to Jazzercise and brought his friends with him. And he was really good! I’d get him up on stage to dance with me.
He bought me sourdough bread in the city, macarons, honey from the Middle East. He brought me flowers for International Women’s Day. He gave me a glass that said, “Mama needs some wine.” He called me Mama. He was another “honey,” the universal name for everyone in my house.
I had met him through my daughters who were attending the same college. He was part of their friend group for at least two years. He lived with us for over a year. He celebrated every holiday with us. He was family. He had been estranged from his mother who lived half of the globe away. His “tiger mom” had beaten him into excellence. I, then, would heal him with love.
He was the son I never had.
I’m using past tense. I’m sure by now you’re getting a sense of what’s to come. I wish life gave similar forebodings as writing.
Actually, warnings were there. He stopped coming to dinner. No more words filled the Scrabble board. He left before the sun came up and returned way after dark. I figured he was busy- work, school, sports. He’s an elite runner who trains for hours daily. He had goals. I figured he was working hard to live into them.
But I knew something was wrong. Suddenly, he didn’t call me Mama. He ate McDonalds rather than home-cooked food. His increasing absence nipped at my heels like an angry chihuahua (angry Chihuahua is redundant). He just slowly disappeared- first in closeness, then in relationship and finally in presence. Poof! He was gone!
He was gone, and we were left with charges on credit cards we couldn’t explain, hundreds in EZ Pass fees and a damaged car. How could we have been so stupid?
Or was I stupid? What happened to him? Searching online, lots of people are asking this question. “Nice guys finish last,” the saying goes. But this nice guy wasn’t. He was doing well in school, he had a scholarship for track, he had lots of friends- nice friends! He had a wonderful girlfriend he professed to love. He had us- his new, American family who adored him. I adored him.
On YouTube, videos made by young men tell other young bros to “stop being nice to women.” The Andrew Tate epidemic is strong- and men are listening. Incel culture is flourishing. They are buying the “women are the problem” argument, blaming women for every fault, rejection, blockage they experience. It’s part of the current American belief that men deserve anything they want. Their desires should come to them without effort. It’s their birthright. Sorry, guys, no one gets anything without work. The equation is easy: work on yourself rather than blaming others.
I watched videos of guys saying- “I’m a nice guy and no one wants me.” The guys saying this are often kinda creepy. Women usually see this. Most of the time, women know when “nice” doesn’t mean kind. Perhaps “nice” is a pretense while kindness is real. Perhaps men have glossed niceness over misogynistic beliefs, birthright beliefs that show equality really means to them that they are better than women. Their basis is “men are better.” Being nice with this belief is like wearing an expensive Italian suit over tattered, filthy jockey shorts. Eventually, those unders will be visible.
As far as my near-son, I wonder what lived in his heart. Were his efforts about making us like him rather than have a genuine relationship? Real relationships require honesty, hard conversations, discomfort, straight talk. I see now, he avoided all of this, conforming himself to our vision of who he was rather than his real person. I’m pretty sure I would have liked that person as much. I’m pretty sure the facade couldn’t hold, reminding me of Yeats, “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
In my center, I feel a gash, an oozing unhealed gash. I think, “I wonder what X would like for dinner?” Then I realize he’s not here. I’m struggling more than anyone in my family. They have re-centered, reconstructing life without a family member. I still want him to eat the love I poured into my food. I still want the Scrabble game, the dog walks, the late night movies. I want the son I never had.
Please like and share this blog with others. Subscribe to receive it by email and go directly to the Walk the Moon website to peruse the full collection of articles and updates. You can email me from the Walk the Moon website as well.
Source: What’s happening to boys?
"there should be some kind of test you have to take before having kids" -> wrong, extremely dangerous and highkey eugenicist and racist "the youth should have safe and effective legal pathways at their disposal to make sure their human rights are constantly protected and upheld" -> based, centers the youth, gives minors more power to fight inequality and does not reinforce the idea that parents are immune to scrutiny from their kids