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if you see me in an all consuming relationship with a body of water, do NOT save me. I'm exactly where I want to be

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While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they'd have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.

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this too shall pass

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Fuck moon’s taking poison damage

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moment of unspeakable beauty today when one of my coworkers called another coworker "judas" for not splitting a can of white monster with her, and i got to watch the guy who sits next to me open a new google tab, type in "jeudis," and say quietly to himself "french thursday...?"

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Let’s scream with mama

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cracking myself up thinking about the movement towards simplified forms in cave paintings

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defying the odds with mama

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she was at the club. it didnt change anything. it didnt save anyone. there were just too many forces against it. but it still matters that she was at the club.

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the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying

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just learned about farming simulator

I mean, I already knew about it, but I just learned about it

Did you know that the target audience for Farming Simulator is actual real-world farmers? Because I didn’t. I just assumed that farmers probably don’t want to go home from a day of farming to do some (presumably highly inaccurate) virtual farming?

Like, imagine if the target audience for Power Washing Simulator was actual professional power washers.

Farming Sim gets sponsored by companies and shit to put ads in their games. But since the game is for farmers, all of the ads target farmers. Advertising products that, realistically, only farmers would be interested in. Aka John Deere tractors and shit.

There’s a fucking farming sim esports league. Where do they play? Agriculture conventions. not gaming conventions. agriculture conventions.

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gideon nav is such A Character. perhaps the most character ever. she's a mama's girl without a mother. she's a loyal knight without anything worth swearing her loyalty to. she's been dreaming of the frontlines since she was nine years old. she plays at being gruff and unconcerned but it's game over the second someone appears even the slightest bit vulnerable. her crush on an evil cougar almost killed her. she has horrible acne. she's the kindest person you'll ever meet and also such a dick. she's a butch lesbian. she's chivalry's stubborn pulse. she's a meatheaded jock filling in last-minute at an international science competition and she could NOT be less concerned about it. the girl who tortured her in a bunker for 17 years asked politely to torture her further one (1) time and she immediately said "yes." that same girl revealed her tragic backstory and gideon's first instinct was to baptize her and give her a little kissy on the forehead. she's the saddest girl in the world. she's a shambling corpse and maybe she has been the whole time. she's an albatross. she's lit up red and gold, a candle in the cold and dark. she's named after her mother's murderer, because everyone simply assumed she was screaming for the baby. she's a walking memento mori. she's never had a salad before. and she is also, i cannot stress this enough, quite literally jesus.

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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.

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In honor of the Ides of March, my favorite Tiktok

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You think THATS a denim jacket?

Surely you

Jest