#shape of reality

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

The shape of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

One of the great things about having more time is the opportunity to read more research papers. This one, which was recently released by the Max Planck Institute is beautiful.

Linguists, or people familiar with language study, might be familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For everyone else, it can be (overly) simplified to:

The language someone speaks can affect the way people think about reality

It was proposed in the 20th century by two very prominent linguists, who didn’t have the experimental neurological evidence but used theories based on behavioural observations. For Edward Saphir, it was the anthropological study of Native American languages which were rapidly disappearing from the continent over the course of the 20th century.

Now, neuroscience is catching up. Max Planck Institute effectively found evidence that the language we speak shapes the connectivity in our brains that may underlie the way we think.

The researchers took MRT scans of people who spoke two different kinds of languages (Indo-European morphosyntactically complex language {ie. German} and a Semitic root-based language {ie. Arabic}) and found that the respective German and Arabic speakers brain's language networks had specifically adapted to each language. 

Now, this isn’t definitive proof of Sapir-Whorf by any means, and the study is limited to only looking at two types of languages (amongst other limitations), but it’s a promising bit of evidence which could shape our understanding of how language informs our view of the world. Press release: https://www.cbs.mpg.de/2113362/20231603?c=2482 Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811923001015

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In the shape of you, something new.

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[pandadrake]

Horses. I really like that other movie that Hobie's voice actor was in.

IDK why I ended up putting so much effort into the rendering this was just supposed to be a shitpost.

Hobie's pose is heavily referenced from a shot from the movie Nope (2022). The background texture is also from the same frame.

Miguel is cast as the stressed-out, half-Latino, tech guy with an angel name who watches camera feeds all day and bitches about his life to people he just met.

[genderqueerpond]

We don't talk enough about the fact that Amelia Pond, s5 Amelia Pond, before the timeline is reset, isn't just a normal orphan. Her parents didn't die, didn't abandon her, and didn't send her away. They never existed in the first place.

And if her parents never existed, then Amelia cannot exist. She is a causal impossibility.

"People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces." A photograph. A face carved into an apple. Yes. Sure.

A child.

Now that's too big, surely.

But that's what she is. She is exactly the same as these things. A trace. An echo of something that could never be, never was, never could have been.

And the universe should never allow it. A whole person, that's just too much. She could not have continued to exist indefinitely, in normal circumstances, after her parents never existed.

In normal circumstances.

Because the Doctor didn't just save her from things coming out of the crack in her wall. He saved her from going into it. And he didn't just save her from the threat of going into it simply because of its vicinity.

No, by arriving when he did, he interrupted a process that was probably already in motion. And then by arriving again only moments later on a cosmic relative timestream (too quickly for the process to complete) and yet in the local relative timestream, years later --- years of a potential future caught midway through the process of rewriting -- he solidified that existence. Amy is a creature from another timeline, caught in amber. The Doctor prevented her from never existing, but only after she could already never exist.

And so, no one around Amelia thinks about it. Neither does she. There's some kind of consciousness block, because if you thought about it, really thought about it, for two seconds you'd realize she cannot exist. And the human mind can't deal with that. So, to protect itself, everyone's brain simply slides off it before ever noticing. They just assume that her existence makes sense, and don't question it, and don't notice what they don't question, that is staring them in the face.

But of course, to some extent they do notice. They can't think it, but they notice subconsciously that there's something they can't think. They notice there's something wrong with her, something uncanny. And they don't like it, and they alienate her even more because of it.

"Does it ever bother you Pond that your life existence doesn't make any sense?"

[deoidesign]

Thinking about vampires, death, life, and the space they occupy in between

[hotrodmccoolgal]

No Promises.

No Demands.

Love is a Battlefield.

[iambecomeyourvillain]

i see andrew minyard and neil josten everywhere i look.

[bonefall]

i just thought of something about frostpaw’s design having a wolf motif and her huge autopsy scar - it reminds me of how in multiple fairy tales (particularly ittle red riding hood, like you mentioned in the design post), the wolves in those stories have their stomachs cut open. i just thought that was cool :3

I hadn't even considered that, but it makes it work even better. The fairytales don't even just have the wolf get their belly cut open-- they also get filled with stones and tossed in the river.

There's a clear image in my mind that when Frostpaw is put under the human tranquilizer, her mind falls backward and plunges her into liquid void. A dream takes hold, bubbles forming in the dark, her body cradled by clear water as far as she can perceive.

The unspoken knowledge of her dream tells her that she's in a raindrop, the river, the lake, and Riverstar Himself. The embodiment of water. And He is endless.

Her problems are washed away by the sheer vastness of his being, and she's just beginning to wrap her head around the marvel of it all when she opens her eyes in a den. Warm, comfortable, surrounded by hay.

The vision sloshes in her mind like dancing waves. She has a boiling desire to understand what it meant-- and the only thing that comes to mind is the Tribe of Rushing Water's philosophy that all things are connected by the river. That living by the Lake, fed by the southern delta, which rushes down from the mountain's waterfall, makes their cultures kin.

She decides to start there, and will go further south if need be. Thus begins Book 3 of BB!ASC, The Source of the River.

[art-is-kayos]

Sight of a Star - Blue-ish Star Ryōshū and Don Quixote

[thatsmybook]

Some of my thoughts since the last episode of Agatha All Along:

The most earnest show of religion in an MCU property is being done through a queer kid. I like that the wider world is learning about the intersectionality of identity. I believe that Billy is as Jewish as William because a) the only family he knows has 'raised' him Jewish and b) his love of witchcraft and ritual and finding ways to explain his world intersect with the rituals and traditions of his faith. Even William was deeply fascinated with magic and witchcraft and journeys of discovery.

Marvel fans are aware that Wiccan is a strong character. The fact that this symbol of masculine strength can be found in a witch boy who is raised to be strong in his sense of self by women in his coven, is awesome. He is drawn to feminine strength as inspiring instead of looking for male heroes. He is attracting feminine forms of protection (Alice), feminine disruptors of the status quo and stereotypes (Lilia), strength in the feminine aesthetic and belief in your innate power (Jen), feminine quest for knowledge and ambition (Agatha). He is being shadowed by death (Rio), but even death gives life in its reincarnation (as we return to earth and feed the earth with our life-force to continue on in new forms).

I believe that Wiccan is/can be as important to the MCU as Spiderman is. Spiderman is a teenager who could be any and everyone. Spiderman looks up to Iron Man, especially but also seeks male role models and approval. (A big part of Iron Man's humanity and softness came from mentoring Peter Parker - I see parallels between Agatha Harkness and Iron Man in this way too).

I believe Wiccan is a version of masculinity to teens that can see that women hold the depth of knowledge and power that he is more interested in unlocking and that their experiences with adversity will be better guides for him as he grows to be the most powerful magic user in the MCU. He is also chosen as a witch and not a sorcerer/wizard/warlock.

Will we be getting little boys and girls and theys aspiring to be wiccans and spidermen equally?

[cookiedough77]

i be forgetting that chat noirs "tail" its just... a belt... like i KNOW that but also its not lifelike usually so like when i draw it it technically should just... dangle... because.. its a belt- BUT I DO WHAT I WANT I HAVE FREE WILL

[mazojo]

I wish the ultimatum had a period where the couples go to therapy

[balkanradfem]

Do you ever think about how sad and messed up it is to grow up in this world as a little girl who likes to read. Because you are a child, and you don't get that there's a difference in who writes the books, you read everything you like, you read the adventures and the fantasy and the mysteries and the traumatic stuff and if you're also very isolated and lonely, these books build your worldview. Because why wouldn't they? They're written by humans, so they have the attitudes, opinions, perceptions, morals and spirits of human beings in them, they're telling you what humans think and feel about things, how they go about situations, what they imagine, what they desire. What your role in all this is, or what it could potentially be.

But, since you are not capable of differentiating the material, and you just read what is available to you, you end up reading a lot of books written by m*n. You also have to go thru the required reading at school - 90% written by m*n. And so slowly, since young age, without even socializing or learning it thru interaction, you find yourself in a world shaped by minds who do not have empathy for women, especially not for little girls. You find yourself relating to the male protagonists, but you also find out that girls only play a passive role in their stories. You find that m*n problems are centered, made important, their suffering and violence critical points in the story, while women are cast aside as helpers, servants, givers, caretakers, and generally just exist in the background, not a thought given to what they are going thru.

You learn thru books written by m*n, that your experience is secondary. Even if you cast yourself as the adventuring, immensely important and struggling protagonist, even then the other women in your mind end up being just background characters, caregivers who do not need a thought spared for their suffering.

Books written by m*n, even for children, will trivialize female suffering to the point where they shape the child's mind into one that looks at the world from a male perspective. Where women either don't matter, or are capable only of giving and aiding, to be cast aside for more important matters, such as male aspirations for their own lives.

Thinking back, I understand why I felt myself unimportant and trivial in any social setting - I understood my role from the written word, and I knew adults found me trivial, secondary, only a background figure to someone else's adventure or mission. As much as I could fight it in my fantasies, and make myself the main character, it felt like a pipe dream, like something that was incredible self-indulged and selfish and would never translate to reality.

I wish it had been different. I wish I had been introduced specifically and only to books written by women, for women. I wish I had found empathy for myself in those books. I wish I had found myself standing on high ground, equal ground, with other women, our desires centered, our lives translated into tales of epic importance - because that's what they are. I wish I had been born into a world where female perspective is available from the start, not after years of growing up and finding feminist literature and having to re-write my own role in my brain, from all of those years of reading male perspective as the default.

I don't think any little girl should be exposed to literature that shape her world as a place where she doesn't matter. I don't think books written by males and shaped by their worldview should be allowed into children's literature, or teenage or for young adults. Girls should not be learning from fiction that their most important value is empathy and understanding for male problems, and their second, to be desired and/or helpful to them, all while being treated as nothing but service and background noise until you're desired for something. We need to open books and find out that we matter too. That our lives can be the center of our existence, rather than being in the service of someone else's life.

[canisalbus]

I say this in the best way, but your characters feel like they're from an obscure but really good piece of media, and you feel like the artist who always draws the two main characters as ghay lovers

.

[prolibytherium]

There's a LOT of things people do wrong when constructing fantasy beliefs in pantheons of gods, but one of the more specific is having only one god related to fertility and it kind of being just a horny sex thing.

Like you'll have one in the entire bunch whose sphere is listed as fertility and it's basically like Yeah this is the sex one. She's always depicted naked (but not TOO naked because censorship and/or the writer's own skittishness). She's going to have the exact body type epitomized in contemporary western beauty standards and there's usually no chance in hell that she's gonna be fat (unless MAYBE they're referencing 'venus' figurines). Her thing is fertility, which means having sex and making babies. Might be a goddess of beauty or love or marriage too, because these are kinda sex things, but that's probably it. And yeah that sort of thing is virtually nonexistent in real life.

Like the concept of fertility is so fundamentally important to the function of most societies in human history in ways that it is just Not in industrialized imperial core countries. Most people are getting food from stores, and not having to worry about harvesting crops or breeding livestock or foraging for food or having enough animals to hunt, so fertility only really comes up as a concern if you're trying to have kids (and there is certainly societal pressure to have children, but your wellbeing and survival is rarely going to Depend on it). And I think writing only from that perspective and not even trying to learn about WHY fertility is so conceptually important is why you see this trend.

There's no absolute universal statement about how people believe in gods but it's broadly accurate that systems with many deities will Usually have more than one deity associated with fertility, and these associations will certainly include human reproduction but also the fertility of livestock/hunted animals, plants, the land itself.

Some fertility deities may also be heavily associated with seasonal changes or environmental factors that agriculture or foraging is dependent on (spring/summer/fall, seasonal rains, seasonal flooding, rain itself, sunlight, good soil, rivers, wetlands, etc). Some certainly might be related to love, marriage, sex, and beauty, but that's VERY RARELY going to be the sole way the concept of fertility is embodied. And they'll often will have other associations not directly about fertility, or related to fertility in culturally specific ways.

[badly-drawn-pigeon]

If your Aizen wants to abolish a faulty system because he sees how its flaws hurt people and is willing to make bloody sacrifices to achieve the change despite acknowledging that they are wrong... That's not Aizen. That's Kaname Tosen.