For someone who romanticized back pain and math @admagical 

<Moccasin Flowers_Mary Oliver>  <@burials> <@ashstfu> <unknown> <Someone New_Hozier> <unknown>  <Andrew Garfield> <The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac_Mary Oliver> <Spring_Mary Oliver>

the Mountain Goats - “No Children” Live at City Winery 12/04/2015

And I hope when you think of me years down the line You can’t find one good thing to say And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out You’d stay the hell out of my way I am drowning There is no sign of land You are coming down with me Hand in unlovable hand

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.

Tenderhooks by Joan Tierney

i have been scrolling the “looks” on the gucci website. whoever designed these desires only to cause pain. so many of the patterns on these clothes actually appear to be moving when I look at them. these models are all hollow-eyed Victorian children trying to advertise to predators that they are poisonous.

In Bloom Gown // FireflyPath

gender non-conforming king! this man is dating a woman his own age

Honestly it's not that bad as it sounds. It takes the eagles about 2 hours to get to my liver and another 2 to eat it. The whole ordeal is over by one and I've got the afternoon to myself.

Paintings by Salman Toor, one of my favorite artists.

when it comes down to it everything is about ghosts except ghosts, which are about love

the only reason cops are at pride now is to intimidate gay people into not making it a riot again and i will stand by that fact until the day i die

Sometimes Twitter is good

absolutely lost my SHIT while peeling potatoes at “it goes both ways like MEeEeEeE, canonically BiSsExUaAaAaL” 

i love crying in front of a mirror i am both audience and performer i am narrator and narrated this is a self referential tragicomedy and i should start a youtube channel