#my brain hasn't been the same since the 20th

[oppitfs]

We laughed about Megumi falling in love with Yuji quickly.

When it was YUJI ITADORI who tried to seduce him literally as soon as they met.

Like, dude, I know he's drop-dead gorgeous, but you don't need to imitate Rose from Titanic.

[sodasa-was-taken]

How subtle is the romance of G-Witch really: The language of romance and the bias in interpretation

First of all, I want to express my gratitude for all the feedback I've received. You guys are awesome. When I posted my first analysis, I had no idea how it would be perceived. Throughout my life, I've mostly been met with confusion, if not a bit of curiosity, when I've told people about my fascination with the romance genre. Even people who like the genre don't treat it with the respect I do but rather see it as something they can turn their brains off to. I was scared that people who saw my analysis would think that G-Witch, I dunno, had too much else going on to be considered a romance. I can't tell you all how validating it's been to get this much praise for writing about one of my biggest passions. Thank you so much.

This post is less an analysis of G-Witch as it's an exploration of the hypocrisy in how straight and gay romances are interpreted even by the queer community. I've engaged with a lot of female/male romances, especially when I was younger and thought I was straight, so it's quite surreal seeing similar stories being interpreted vastly differently based only on whether the main characters are queer or not.

There's been a lot of discussion about how explicit same-sex relationships in fiction should be. Many agree that the minimum for the characters to be unambiguously into each other is for them to kiss. That would be an ideal metric if the same applied to a man and a woman being into each other. It does not. For the vast majority of history, since people first started portraying characters in romantic relationships, explicit depictions of physical affection between those characters haven't been a thing. Depicting that sort of thing didn't become commonplace until the 20th century. For example, you would be hard-pressed to find any of the somewhat indecent positions Miorine and Suletta get into in a Jean Austin novel. Like, usually in a platonic hug, you lay your head on someone's shoulder or clavicle, and Miorine's burying her face in the upper part of Suletta's cleavage. How scandalous!

Of course, these views are centuries old, and the expectations of what should be included in a story about people getting together have changed drastically since then. Except in a lot of ways, it hasn't. Especially in manga, light novels, and anime, it can take real-life years for two characters to show affection through physician touch. Still, it’s expected that the characters are or will become attracted to one another and that they’ll end up together before the end of the story. Unless they’re the same gender, where not only is that not an expectation, but due to tropes such as Bury Your Gays, people are more likely to think one of them is going to die. That’s messed up. Being a main character in a romance or something adjacent shouldn’t be a death sentence for any character. Then there’s the fact that same-sex couples-to-be in fiction can be as forward as they want in their physical and verbal affections. Still, a straight couple-to-be that does nothing but bigger or just be the most prominent characters in their respective genders will still be perceived as less ambiguous. A man and a woman who get a bit flustered around each other are hopelessly in love. Yet, two girls sharing an intimate hug after a conversation about how neither wants their engagement to just be a transaction; that’s “totally platonic.”

Better yet, Hollywood has fine-tuned this to the point that the male and female leads only need to look at each other for about five seconds, and it’s enough to infer that they’re attracted to each other. This has become so ubiquitous that people have gotten confused when the leads are implied not to have gotten together despite having shown zero romantic intent. Having the character show romantic intent isn’t generally considered a requirement for them to end up together in a Hollywood film. No, seriously. All this is to say that literary and visual shorthand have always been and continue to be a major part of romances. Yet, the bar is much higher when it comes to the confirmation that two characters of the same gender are into each other. An author can use the exact same narrative tools that have become a staple of female/male romances/romantic subplots, and someone will tell you you're being led on for picking up on them.

The main reason for the high standards placed on same-sex couples is the desire for representation. If straight couples are allowed to or even expected to kiss at some point in the story, the same should be the case for same-sex couples. That said, kissing neither is nor should be the be-all and end-all of good representation. Yeah, straight couples get to kiss and have sexual relationships, but by all accounts, a significant amount of straight representation is absolutely abysmal. Lots of straight romances reek of sexism, outdated gender roles, and stereotyping, are toxic, and straight-up have a reputation for romanticizing abuse. If kissing or an “I love you” is the metric to which good representation is judged, two straight people who have zero chemistry or are downright abusive would be better representation than a same-sex couple whose relationship is built on mutual respect and support but who doesn't get to kiss or say “I love you” and that's ridiculous.

It’s also worth noting how people who tell others they’re crazy for seeing a queer story where according to them, there aren’t any, get characterized as needing to see something explicit to pick up that a story is or even just be interpreted as a queer romance. The thing is, most of these people aren’t dense; they’re willfully ignorant. They can pick up on the signs just as easily as they can in male/female romances; they’re choosing not to, even if it’s likely an unconscious decision. There seems to be a need among queer people to have depictions in media that even bigots can’t deny are queer. Why though? Representation is vital in helping to normalize the existence of various types of people, but for so many queer people, it just doesn’t seem to be enough. So what if some people wouldn’t get it unless the characters kiss? Those people will just start complaining about how they’re having queerness forced down their throats, and that’s their problem. There’s so much more to the queer experience than displays of physical affection, and this representation gatekeeping isn’t helping anyone. Normalizing same-sex couple kissing is important, but normalizing people of the same gender kissing is only going to normalize the kissing itself. If, for example, two people of the same gender get to kiss and then one of them gets killed off, that's the opposite of normalizing same-sex relationships.

Pulling from my own experiences, I've never been told that there was anything wrong with two people of the same gender kissing. Still, I saw same-sex relationships as inferior and believed being in one couldn't give me the life I wanted. I tried so hard to convince myself that I was straight and was only attracted to someone with a different gender presentation than me – because I was also an egg who told myself I was wrong for feeling uncomfortable for being referred to as my assigned gender at birth. Honestly, I thought that I would be happier if I didn’t even entertain the idea of getting together with someone with the same gender presentation as me. So, imagine how much it meant to me to see a show about two girls where one of them didn’t even think that getting engaged to another girl was an option, both of them having young men interested in them but asking each other to spend their life with them, and ending the show being married and being all the happier for being with the other. That's the kind of representation I've been looking for.

On a less serious note, I’d like to share an antidote from when I watched episode one for the first time. When Suletta sees someone floating around in space who appears to be in danger I didn’t initially consider that the person in question might be Miorine. The visuals planted the idea in my mind and the thing that confirmed it was the framing of the two inside Aerial’s cockpit. I couldn’t explain what I was picking up on, but to me, it was a dead giveaway.

[peopleiveknown]

Recordings of Gordon Fitch - RIP 5/28/2025

"The worst thing is having no job. The second worst thing is having a job."

"I conjured you to call. Your ball of green wool is sitting on my desk, staring at me, and here you are."

"New York is going to the dogs."

"The story reminded me of a number of things.  One was the way the mother of some of my poor neighbors was mistreated and allowed to die, almost certainly because of racial, cultural, and class prejudice.  Also of my experience of the Nothing due to anaesthesia a few years ago, which I may have already ranted about.  Sometimes I mention Parmenides during this rant.  Also, of an essay I read in which the writer theorized that consciousness is not located in a particular set of electrical circuits in the brain but is a sort of field surrounding the body.  No material evidence was mentioned, though.  Life remains quite a mystery."

"Well, when we die, we are permanently detached, so in life I prefer to be attached." 

"If the kids are fortunate they will be allowed to have this communistic experience a while before the aforesaid bourgeois institutions crush everything."

"War seems like a tough nut to crack since people love it so much (except if they actually have to fight one)."

"I often vividly remember things that didn't happen."

"Oatmeal cookie recipe in three formats, at least one of which ought to work, maybe."

"I have been drawing.  There is a website with videos of people posing[...] It is true the models are almost all babes, but I suspect that it's a part of their business model.  I don't mind drawing babes but it's a narrow spectrum of appearances.  Also, as they're mostly quite young (of course) they don't have a lot of visible character in their looks. They might have the character, but it hasn't come to the surface yet."

"Allen Ginsberg punched me on the arm. You could say we were friendly acquaintances."

"I am working on making Werner Herzog CDs. Surely one will eventually be playable somewhere..."

"The best thing to do is to put 'Joseph Cornell' in Google and step back."

"I know [David] Graeber -- did I tell you that? He gave me a book called Keep The River On Your Right."

"In regard to energy and laziness, remember, you have a 9-5x5 job and I don't. That makes a tremendous difference.  Corporate and bureaucratic work, hitting the front once a day regardless of how you feel, takes a lot out of a person even if they have a 'good' job that they 'love'.  I always got off the leash whenever I could, which wasn't much."

"I was thinking about making some arrangement to do your portrait."

"A rather unusual person even by my standards, not because he did wild bohemian things but because he didn't."

"The classes are $20 (I think) which is a lot cheaper than most therapists.  I think that's about average for classes in drawing etc.  I think Life Drawing is a really good practice because we are what we depict. We can feel the object from the inside out (sort of)."

"Anyone who does anything in any way original is probably going to run into resistance. So it's probably a good sign."

"It's the first part of the review that interests me; further on it (and, I suppose the book) deteriorates into the usual eternal internecine warfare of the Left.  The initial theme, though, is that there is a greater cultural gap between the Boomers and the Millennials than the famous gap between the Boomers and their parents.  From the Great Depression until about the end of the 20th Century, people coming of age were confronted with a world they could be optimistic about.  Today (and I sense this myself) the present and the future look pretty bleak.  Usually I reject generationism, but in this particular case I think it makes some sense, and I wonder what people who are actually experiencing the phenomenon think."

"We could draw each other at the same time, like poor little hungry art students in a Parisian attic in 1890."

"Luigi Mangione is like a Raskolnikov."

"In regard to the word 'fascism,' people mean a lot of different things by it, so my consideration of it may be overly picky.  There are certainly a lot of military and quasi-military and police-state dictatorships in the world, and a lot of people seem to like them, but they often profess other ideals, like 'democracy', 'socialism', 'law and order', 'free markets', and so on, which are not nominally fascistic.  The European fascists of the 20th century were explicitly fascist and had somewhat coherent theories about it. I think they're worth paying attention to, because anyone who wants to practice authoritarianism is likely to follow a similar path even if they profess otherwise."

"It would not surprise me to find that I speak a dialect a century or two out of date."

"Yesterday I went with my son to show him where the F train was -- that's about a mile, and a mile back. Not sure it was a good idea, given the cold wind. And I'm sure he could have found it without my help. But parental duty calls upon us to annoy our children and ourselves."

"Minerva was in a somewhat pissy mood even though I gave her a book of poems by Patrick Kavanagh which are supposed to activate her Irish muse."

"My secret wasteland is in the North Woods, the lonely, scruffy, silent lakes of the Adirondacks and the Laurentians.  I have an attraction to that sort of thing I had better stay away from.  The ocean, too, is a kind of desert, but these days it's very crowded and we can't be alone together."

"There is a Korean woman improbably named Kimchi who sold a lot of postcard-sized drawings through Minerva's studio, so maybe that's the way to go."

"That is a profoundly interesting essay [on the Marionette Theater by Heinrich von Kleist].  For instance -- and this is only a detail -- the narrator's conception of how the puppets' limbs move is almost a direct transcription of a martial arts theory, in which effective movement begins in the dan tian (spelled many different ways) which is approximately centered just above the hips and is conveyed outward to the other parts of the body.  That's just one thing.  I will have to study it further. Thanks very much for sending it to me."

"I will keep the box as a manifest of your existence and intention to reappear one day."

"I wish I could see you other than just in my mind's eye."

[hecksee]

okay fuck it im adding on to this post because it hasn't left my brain since i posted it.

yes, there's something about historical queer people that just isn't the same as reading about queer people in our day and age. said people can be fictional or not, the reading nonfiction or fic, but reading about them just hits a spot.

my personal theory is that it has something to do with how little easily accessible queer history we have access to from those days (like the mid 20th century and before).

because yes, we did exist. we were there. we have always been here. but almost nothing remains from then, because we were criminalized and shamed and persecuted to the point where people burned their own love letters or spoke in code and did anything and everything possible to hide who they really were from society.

so yes, we have always existed. yet, knowing that, and being able to see that or read that are two very different things.

and a lot of the history, the evidence, the proof, whatever you want to call it, that we've always existed has been somewhat negative. and the parts that aren't have been overshadowed by the negatives.

with every piece of writing and literature we write or discover in this day and age, it almost adds to our understanding of the past, and in a way, adds to the history we do possess from those time periods.

especially the peices that are written today, that show some of the happier sides, some of the more positive sides, of being queer in those times where circumstances were so much worse than they are today in a large portion of the world.

obviously it can't erase the oppression. it can't bring back the gaping holes in queer history, where only fragments and scraps remain. it will never bring back the letters burned or all the history that died with unnamed people, due to only ever being recorded in their mind.

but it helps us get a better idea of what it was like being queer in those times, even if it isn't exactly accurate. it helps make those gaps less gaping. it helps us and our community heal. and we can't erase the past, or anything that happened in it. but maybe we can help make that portion of history somewhat less barren.

and a reminder that circumstances like the ones talked about in this post do still exist right now, despite a majority of the world being a much more accepting place. in places like uganda and iraq. while the rest of the world lives with somewhat better attitudes towards queer people, circumstances that are dire like these ones do still exist and that's something we need to work on fixing.

im learning i have an intense fondness for historical gays. modern gays are good, but theres just Something about historical queers that hit my brain. bonus points if they're from the 17th-19th century.

[sciencespies]

Over 100 years of searching hasn't found key differences between male and female brains

https://sciencespies.com/humans/over-100-years-of-searching-hasnt-found-key-differences-between-male-and-female-brains/

Over 100 years of searching hasn't found key differences between male and female brains

People have searched for sex differences in human brains since at least the 19th century, when scientist Samuel George Morton poured seeds and lead shot into human skulls to measure their volumes.

Gustave Le Bon found men’s brains are usually larger than women’s, which prompted Alexander Bains and George Romanes to argue this size difference makes men smarter. But John Stuart Mill pointed out, by this criterion, elephants and whales should be smarter than people.

So focus shifted to the relative sizes of brain regions. Phrenologists suggested the part of the cerebrum above the eyes, called the frontal lobe, is most important for intelligence and is proportionally larger in men, while the parietal lobe, just behind the frontal lobe, is proportionally larger in women. Later, neuroanatomists argued instead the parietal lobe is more important for intelligence and men’s are actually larger.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, researchers looked for distinctively female or male characteristics in smaller brain subdivisions. As a behavioral neurobiologist and author, I think this search is misguided because human brains are so varied.

Anatomical brain differences

The largest and most consistent brain sex difference has been found in the hypothalamus, a small structure that regulates reproductive physiology and behavior. At least one hypothalamic subdivision is larger in male rodents and humans.

But the goal for many researchers was to identify brain causes of supposed sex differences in thinking – not just reproductive physiology – and so attention turned to the large human cerebrum, which is responsible for intelligence.

Within the cerebrum, no region has received more attention in both race and sex difference research than the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibers that carries signals between the two cerebral hemispheres.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, some researchers found the whole corpus callosum is proportionally larger in women on average while others found only certain parts are bigger. This difference drew popular attention and was suggested to cause cognitive sex differences.

But smaller brains have a proportionally larger corpus callosum regardless of the owner’s sex, and studies of this structure’s size differences have been inconsistent. The story is similar for other cerebral measures, which is why trying to explain supposed cognitive sex differences through brain anatomy has not been very fruitful.

Female and male traits typically overlap

Even when a brain region shows a sex difference on average, there is typically considerable overlap between the male and female distributions. If a trait’s measurement is in the overlapping region, one cannot predict the person’s sex with confidence.

Chart shows how measurements that differ between sexes (f = pink, m = blue) also overlap. (Ari Berkowitz, CC BY)

For example, think about height. I am 5’7″. Does that tell you my sex? And brain regions typically show much smaller average sex differences than height does.

Neuroscientist Daphna Joel and her colleagues examined MRIs of over 1,400 brains, measuring the 10 human brain regions with the largest average sex differences.

They assessed whether each measurement in each person was toward the female end of the spectrum, toward the male end or intermediate. They found that only 3 percent to 6 percent of people were consistently “female” or “male” for all structures. Everyone else was a mosaic.

Prenatal hormones

When brain sex differences do occur, what causes them?

A 1959 study first demonstrated that an injection of testosterone into a pregnant rodent causes her female offspring to display male sexual behaviors as adults.

The authors inferred that prenatal testosterone (normally secreted by the fetal testes) permanently “organizes” the brain. Many later studies showed this to be essentially correct, though oversimplified for nonhumans.

Researchers cannot ethically alter human prenatal hormone levels, so they rely on “accidental experiments” in which prenatal hormone levels or responses to them were unusual, such as with intersex people.

But hormonal and environmental effects are entangled in these studies, and findings of brain sex differences have been inconsistent, leaving scientists without clear conclusions for humans.

Genes cause some brain sex differences

While prenatal hormones probably cause most brain sex differences in nonhumans, there are some cases where the cause is directly genetic.

This was dramatically shown by a zebra finch with a strange anomaly – it was male on its right side and female on its left. A singing-related brain structure was enlarged (as in typical males) only on the right, though the two sides experienced the same hormonal environment.

Thus, its brain asymmetry was not caused by hormones, but by genes directly. Since then, direct effects of genes on brain sex differences have also been found in mice.

Learning changes the brain

Many people assume human brain sex differences are innate, but this assumption is misguided.

Humans learn quickly in childhood and continue learning – alas, more slowly – as adults. From remembering facts or conversations to improving musical or athletic skills, learning alters connections between nerve cells called synapses. These changes are numerous and frequent but typically microscopic – less than one hundredth of the width of a human hair.

Studies of an unusual profession, however, show learning can change adult brains dramatically. London taxi drivers are required to memorize “the Knowledge” – the complex routes, roads and landmarks of their city.

Researchers discovered this learning physically altered a driver’s hippocampus, a brain region critical for navigation. London taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampi were found to be larger than nondrivers by millimeters – more than 1,000 times the size of synapses.

So it’s not realistic to assume any human brain sex differences are innate. They may also result from learning. People live in a fundamentally gendered culture, in which parenting, education, expectations and opportunities differ based on sex, from birth through adulthood, which inevitably changes the brain.

Ultimately, any sex differences in brain structures are most likely due to a complex and interacting combination of genes, hormones and learning.

Ari Berkowitz, Presidential Professor of Biology; Director, Cellular & Behavioral Neurobiology Graduate Program, University of Oklahoma.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#Humans

[imnothinginparticular]

#finishedbooks Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Got this from the library after several recommendations. It is as the subtitle suggests, a brief history of humankind from the big bang to speculation on the future of an a-mortal cyborg human being. He goes about this dividing our history into four parts: The Cognitive, The Agricultural Revolutions, unification of humankind, and The Scientific Revolution. In this he shows how humans have thrived thru mutual cooperation in large groups which was achieved through our collective imagination in believing in things that don't exist through mutual trust such as country borders, economic and political systems, various gods, and human rights all converging toward an interdependence. Pointing out the stumbling blocks on the way such as the ills of the agricultural revolution and later the scientific revolution stemming from European thought suggesting that technology has come to the point of ending the species as we know it. With that and coming in at just over 400 pages it doesn't go deep into specifics rather than an overview that is well written in the connections he makes but doesn't contribute anything new. Really prior to this Visa issue, in Tokyo I pretty much confined my reading to art history/theory, foreign literature, and random 20th century history. But since being back in the US (with a lot of free time) relying on the library and finding a wider availability of books in English at cheaper prices I have been stretching myself so now having read random topics from astrophysics, theology, political science, geology, all sorts of theories, mythology, etc I kind of felt reading this would be redundant and it was. I would have gotten way more out of this prior to my visa issue, but if not up on this (which I wasn't 2 years ago) this is a solid read for one to then go and choose something like game theory to really dive into. I have come to the point instead of reading topical works on say Darwin, I'd rather just read Darwin and cut out other interpertations to distill my own. Also, relates to being back in the US as everyone presses me to listen to Podcasts which I refuse for the same reason. Structurally for the most part the ones I was forced to listen to begin with self promotion, then they start getting into some facts but constantly digress with this weird American mix of cynicism and sarcasm underlying a rather forceful liberal reactionary view (it does have to entertain and I am definitely not conservative but it is easy and narrow), and usually ends with instructions on what social media likes I should give them and what else to check out, etc. For myself and the way I prioritize my time, I skip out on this accessible second-third-fourth hand information and would just rather read the source material myself. With that there is nothing wrong with accessibility and a lot of people truly don't have the time, but I do and maximize it. Because the fun in reading for myself is rattling the ideas around in my brain compared to everything I have read, adapting it to my perspective, etc etc and just seeing what I can come up with. Also I feel it is my responsibility if I am going to call myself an artist, creator, or story teller to take the time and go deeper so I can perhaps show you something you maybe haven't seen or heard of before...otherwise what good is my perspective if I only indulge in Marvel films or Podcasts like everyone else? I can always see in an artist who aesthetically hasn't gone further than basquait, sonically further than 90s hip-hop, and say in film gone no further than 70s American cinema... the results are usually uninteresting but there is more to it than that.

[david-watts]

Name one favorite band from each decade

well!! this should be uh. interesting. forgive me for starting in the 1940s since I'm not exactly well-versed in bands from earlier decades

1940s: glenn miller and his orchestra I kinda grew up listening to them on accident, probably because of dad's army, something my m*ther, dad and grandpa love/loved to watch. I don't tend to listen to them that often, but since I do have a favourite then well I might as well put it down!

1950s: bill haley and his comets again, this is my dad's influence, but several of the songs on the cassettes he made up for me were by them. I also have a copy of the rock around the clock album that I got for free at a record fair a long time ago and I would say it's my oldest but I have a 78rpm disc from the 30s. I guess it's my oldest playable disc since we don't have a working 78rpm player

1960s: the easybeats now this was a tough choice! I nearly put the rolling stones, but also I think I enjoy a more wide selection of the easybeats' music than the stones' (not to say I don't enjoy their 60s body of work, it's more about the level at which my brain vibrates) and honestly how can I not list the band I have spent the most money buying albums of

1970s: the kinks I know. but considering that the glenn miller orchestra were formed in the 30s I can count the kinks for my 70s band, since I think I slightly prefer seventies kinks over 60s kinks musically (otherwise the shit that they got up to in the 60s wins out like dave really invited his mother to his shag pad with porn lying about) and yeah. I listened to 20th century man again today in the car before I unwillingly fell asleep. shit's good

1980s: flash and the pan was tempted to put the kinks again but. did you expect anything else from me. I wish opera singers was on the internet in better quality so y'all can go feral over it too

1990s: pink floyd was tough since I don't actually listen to stuff from that decade too often. just hasn't ever been my thing? but honest to god my choice came down to douglas adams playing with them that one time and probably being that publius guy (ik he denied it but seems like something he'd do. dude was probably doing it to procrastinate)

2000s: my chemical romance again, don't really listen to bands from this decade. like yeah I listened to radio pop at the time but also I was at max eight years old, so like. I kinda did have to list the band I've enjoyed most in casual passing (also kinda influenced by gerard way using a flamethrower I like fire)

2010s: for half the 2010s the only things I listened to were classical music/film music (aka I had been watching the same films over and over again and uh. kinda memorised the soundtracks to listen to in my head. I did not have much internet access which is why I did that but I did also pirate dr who music to my phone during the time I DID have it) so my knowledge of the music of the 2010s is. rusty. or alternatively remembering the shitty songs people blasted in various spaces at school and I so desperately wanted to make them listen to the fuckin salt and pepper diner challenge if we remember that. fuck it the tso is definitely my most consistently listened to 'band' (it's an orchestra) from that decade even if I think I found my old spotify wrapped decade thing and it says I listened to queen the most. yikes

2020s: abba like the fact that they released a new album and it slaps and I have two copies of it made this choice easy lol

anyway thank you for putting up with my long answer!! yes I was very weird in the first half of the 2010s, don't @ me