"there's no such thing as a good or bad thought", "your thoughts do not define your morality", etc = good, helpful, acknowledges the fact that thoughtcrime isn't real

i have so many questions.

A crew of sailors discuss their ship. "her mast is strong but the sails need changin. She's a beaut though."

I see a fancy rock on my hike. I pick it up, turn to my friend and say "Look at him, he's so handsome"

A group of our sparkling Gay gentlemen meet up for a night out. "Girl, Daniel's serving up looks tonight. Queen! She's stunning love. She's killin it."

My neighbor needs a cup of sugar, I take some to them.

My lesbian friend wants to introduce me to her fellow female partner. "There's Star, he's wearing the blue jacket. Let's catch up with him"

like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal

doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY

—the angels are mostly human now and don’t really have much by way of special powers

—they DO have imprints of their original bodies, though, which are sometimes barely noticeable and sometimes VERY noticeable

—said original bodies are much closer to ‘totally incomprehensible do not be afraid’ monstrosities rather than ‘pretty guy with wings’

—Cain’s imprint is bands and loops of color ‘tattooed’ onto his limbs and especially his hands, which are fine as flat designs but would be physically impossible in three dimensions

The year is 2012.  It’s Christmas.  It’s the first year my sister and I are both home from college, and we’re feeling kind of nostalgic, so we take out the old family photo albums to remember everyone from times past.  We’re all on the couch or the floor with hot chocolate and the Dog is curled up under the tree.  It’s all very Norman Rockwell.

We’re going through my Mom’s side of the family, laughing at the pictures of Grandma putting wrapping paper on the dog, and grandpa pulling faces at the camera, when we find an old brown envelope.

“The fuck? says my sister, because she’s been in to Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, and I open the envelope.  Inside are four tickets to the titanic, unused, and Mom tells us the story of how her ancestors ALMOST came over on the Titanic, but Great-Aunt Liz got the measles and forced everyone into quarantine, thus saving their lives.

The OTHER thing in the envelope are seven Photographs, dated 1890.  They are of my Great-Great Grandmother.

They are nudes.

They are NOT tasteful nudes.

Like, these are Violating-Terms-Of-Service-On-Most-Platforms- OBSCENE.

GGG had these taken waaaaay back in ye olden days, in order to convince her wayward husband to move back to England after he ditched her to party it up in Chicago.

I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW FUCKING HARD WE LAUGHED.  Like, I think I passed out I was laughing so hard.

he's a whole adult man with a long "honest" career with an entire child and presumably?? no wife? unless she's Way more chill with Harry dumping his job and moving to New Orleans without warning than a regular person would be

and he just. got critiqued by THE sophie devereaux on his one and only theft attempt, which he did in fact research on youtube, almost got saved by THE parker, and then got an assist from the whole leverage team on his escape (you can count getting knocked out by eliot or not)

I have to mention Naruto’s master Jiraiya, whose design, antics and speech are all based on Kabuki. Jiraiya’s rough, broad and bombastic way of speech and body language is a style used in kabuki for masculine, heroic characters. These type of characters take a lot of space and use flamboyant and exaggerated, even aggressive body language.

I have seen a claim that Naruto is the “opposite of traditionally masculine” because he’s flamboyant while Sasuke is traditionally masculine. Sorry but that’s not what Kishimoto was going for:

He draws Naruto in a similar manner to Jiraiya whenever he wants to bring “Kabuki” into Naruto’s character. Notice the crude facial expressions, the face paint and the same, reoccuring hand move.

Jiraiya and Naruto’s sage mode “makeup” is also a nod to the exaggerated face paint used by these hero characters in Kabuki plays. Which is why it makes perfect sense Naruto is wearing the intimidating “hero makeup” when arriving as a hero to save everyone.

So what about Sasuke? Sasuke’s look is more soft, fluid and not exaggerated (including facial expressions). I don’t bother with too many individual pictures so that this doesn’t become too long but Kishimoto spends time portraying Sasuke as poised and graceful in comparison to Naruto’s brash and exaggerated appearance.

Here as well you can see Naruto’s body language being the same type of brash and exaggerated, taking a lot of space, while Sasuke is calm and beautiful and expressionless. . Sasuke is the yin to Naruto’s yang.

But nowhere is Kishimoto’s intention more evident than in this illustration he drew in 2018.  Here they are complete opposites. Sasuke’s stance is graceful and closed, his back is straighter and his shoulders are down. Naruto’s is more assertive and open (arrogant). Sasuke is delicate looking, feminine (has some makeup), his build is slightly smaller than Naruto’s (look at the wrists). Sasuke uses the back of his hand to hold back the sleeve, unlike Naruto. Sasuke’s face is smaller and more slender than Naruto’s while Naruto’s features are squarer and not polished. Even the patterns and colors of the kimonos follow. Sasuke’s blue and white symbolise calmness and passivity, Naruto’s colors and patterns symbolise aggression and war (notice the lighting and thunder clouds). The sheer attention to detail!

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.

And implies that gestures have grammar. I mean. Holy. Shit.