do you have a source for “fetuses masturbate in the womb”? I don’t doubt your words but I am really curious about how that was found out/methodologies of any studies on it
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.
For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes.
Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.
Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.
He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms
His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.
Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore
And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL
a lot of behaviors that get attributed to “female socialization” can be so much more easily and accurately understood as a person recognizing the power differential surrounding them and behaving sensibly in response to that.
like. does a woman politely listen to a man monologue at her because of some experience she had when she was twelve that magically cursed her to behave that way forever, or does she do it because the man has the power to hurt her and she knows it?
does a woman do all the dishes in her household because she is less capable of breaking out of a long-ago conditioned response than, like, your average trained dog, or is she doing that because she knows that all the men in the house will blame her if she doesnt and will make life worse for her if she speaks up?
maybe a lot of sexist patterns of behavior that are widely observed in society arent caused by women like, lacking willpower or backbone? maybe it is super fucking weird for supposedly feminist movements to imply this is the case when they talk about female socialization as the end all, be all of predicting human behavior?
isnt it both more useful and more respectful toward women to consider that they are perceiving their present circumstances accurately, and recognize when power is already being wielded against them, and take logical measures to deescalate and protect themselves because it works? is it not fucking clear to everybody that trans women in particular have to do this all the fucking time?
it does more harm than good to prop up the myth of the ‘neurotypical’ who completes tasks cheerfully with no issues. this person is a capitalist fantasy. the more you define yourself in comparison to this myth the more you justify social structures staying the same with minor accommodations to the ‘exceptions’ and the continued pathologizing of discomfort under hostile conditions
I love the ambiguity and grief of The Orphanage, and the main character’s emotional journey is absolutely gutting.
The Strangers has some of the most subtle, dread-inducing scares of any horror film of its era; if you liked the hidden ghosts in Mike Flanagan’s Haunting of Hill House, it owes some inspiration to this film, I think. It truly gave me nightmares.
The newer Suspiria has really stayed with me, and I loved Flawed Peacock’s analysis of the film on Youtube as well. I watched both this and the original back-to-back a few months ago, and they’re both great in different ways, but nothing tops the haunting, sickening beauty of the end of this one.
28 Days Later is the only zombie movie for me, and yes part of that is because Cillian Murphy was so fuckable in it. I’ll never forget the quiet, contemplative air of this movie, which is rivaled only by The Last of Us games. The zombie genre is bloated with derivative crap, but this movie rang in a whole new generation, and did it so well you don’t need most of the rest.
The original Saw is a hell of a stage-play-slash-bottle-episode, and it’s far more sophisticated in its writing than any of the rest in the series. It really holds up in my opinion.
The Cell isn’t really that scary, to me, but it’s fucking cunty as hell with incredible costumes and set pieces, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Bonus points for having a minor corruption/hypnosis aspect really tickled my imagination. I just wish that element had lasted for longer.
Speaking of movies that are actually plays – there’s no better Stephen King adaptation than Misery. Kathy Bates absolutely crushes in a nauseating, confining performance here, and the hobbling scene is one you just never forget. To me it’s a perfectly paced film, and it holds up shockingly well in the era of stans and superfandoms.
Ghost Ship is my favorite bad stupid horror movie. The opening scene is enough creative nonsense carnage to justify its existence, but stick around through the end for a very weird trip-hop montage.
Dead Silence is another goofy one that gets really inventive with its gore. I love horror movies that do just downright disrespectful, creepy shit with corpses, and that’s what this one is all about.
The Boy is a fucking laugh riot to me. The entire premise is so transparent from the very beginning and the thrills are so awkward and tame that it’s a great Halloween party movie. If you’re anything like me, you and your friends will walk around the house talking about the Boy for days afterward. Brahms is an age regressor king
Some people find Aronofsky’s movies to be too over-the-top to connect with, but I think he nailed the internal horror of perfectionism, codependency, sexual repression, and eating disorders with Black Swan. Barbara Hershey’s character is so perfectly unsettling that it sets all my people-pleasing, abandonment-fearing issues alight every time. Everything about this movie is confining and distorting, which is exactly how it feels inside when you narrow your entire life to a singular pursuit and are governed by impossible rules.
The Others has exactly what I need for a horror movie to have good replay value: just like The Orphanage, it’s final reveal is more depressing and unsettling than it is pure scary, which makes it cut deeper, and it recontexualizes the whole rest of the film. The interiors and aesthetics are great.
Possession is easily the most disturbing movie on this list. This one cuts deep in a confusing, unmooring way – it makes you feel sick in your soul, hopeless, and put off from relationships. Filming it reportedly ruined Sam Neil & Isabelle Adjani’s lives for a good while, and you can see why. This film is the psychological reality of divorce in its unabashed form. To really leave behind a life you once committed yourself to, you have to become almost unrecognizable to yourself, and do great violence to both your former self, and the ones you love. This film gets that, and it’s painful. It makes you feel disgusting for wanting things or for staying in a place where you’re unhappy.
Wondering if you have experience with anti anxiety and anti depressants and if you can share. I am sensitive to most medications and have been prescribed many through the years but stopped taking them as they made me worse. However this year my constant anxiety became unbearable so I went on escitalopram. After some adjustment it does work. But it comes at the cost of a lot of things. I have no sex drive and even when I do it takes me a long time to cum and it’s just not anywhere near as intense as it was. I also no longer have intense good feelings about anything and am mostly apathetic. So weighing up being an anxious and depressed mess or a frigid repressed mess.
I don’t miss the constant exhausting anxiety. But it would be super cool to also feel good things.
The only medication I’ve taken for anti-depressant purposes is S-adenosyl-L-methionine, or sam-e, if you count that. It’s a compound already present in the body that can be bought over the counter and taken as a supplement, and findings on its use as an anti-depressant is generally positive.
I took sam-e during a period of especially low mood during 2016, and I found that it gave me a dreamy, relaxed sensation all day long and reduced the emotional pain I was in. It also made me incredibly horny, and made me far more prone to drifting into trance states, which lead me to finally seek out erotic hypnosis partners after having a fetish for hypnosis my entire life but being too terrified and repressed until then to act upon it.
On sam-e, I still felt sad about the problems in my life that were very real and needed addressing, but it was a sadness I could nurture in an almost pleasantly meditative way. I felt languid, imaginative, and fully in touch with myself. I had some really meaningful dom-sub relationships during this time that brought a great deal of meaning to my life, and I was emotionally opened up enough to give them my all. I had the brain space to do a lot of important inner work. I read a lot, journaled a lot. I also had a few trippy revelations, while I was on it – during one hypnosis play session, a Dom was asking me to speak in a valley girl voice and I was suddenly struck with certainty that I wasn’t a woman. I came out as trans a few months later.
I stopped taking sam-e after several months, when I could tell that my depression was abating and I was becoming more functional. This interior emotional sensitivity is something that people on anti-depressants often lack, as I understand it. Sam-e didn’t make my emotions go away, it just made everything feel more fluid and observable. It felt like how the quality of music changes when you go underwater. Hell, talking about all this makes me kinda want to try it again for a while!
I’ve avoided taking any kind of psychiatric drug for many of the reasons you have outlined. The evidence of their efficacy is pretty damn dismal, and I don’t have any interest in getting any *more* numb or losing sexual responsiveness. I’d actively prefer to risk suicide ideation and other extreme mood states alongside sexual passion than to be more even-keeled. (Especially since I know I can survive those things, and plenty of interesting, important life developments have come from those extreme emotional moments in my life. I don’t think they’re undesirable, they’re often necessary and enriching).
The withdrawal effects for many psych drugs are downright terrifying to me, as are many of the physical side effects, so that’s also always put me off taking them (when I was 21, a partner of mine was on an anti-psychotic that can cause heart attacks, which left a strong impression on me). I’m also a bit of a control freak and was terrified of modifying my neurochemistry for the longest time – I didn’t smoke weed or do drugs at all for many years either.
Now I’m more open to experimentation, but only with substances that can wear off after a day or less. I don’t take molly because I don’t want the depression crash the next day for instance. I’m even scared to try adderrall because Autistic friends of mine have described it making them less creative and more linear in their thinking, and I don’t really want that. I like taking weed to help me feel more intuitive and appreciative, and I’m always more relaxed and mentally clear the day after dosing, but I’m kind of compulsively sparing about it because I fear building a tolerance or dependence.
Like you, anon, I have a really high level of ambient anxiety, and being able to do away with that is certainly something I have contemplated. But I don’t think any psychiatric drug would be a net benefit to me. I would consider taking a beta-blocker or similar drug that targets the physiological experience of anxiety, rather than the mental part. But for the most part I view my mood states as a signal – if I’m stressed I need to cut back on obligations, if I’m depressed I need something to feel hopeful about or some purpose, if I’m suicidal I feel stuck, and so on. That said, I certainly self-medicate with weed, alcohol, sex, work, writing, delusional relationships, various obsessions, exercise, and so on in various amounts. Those are all quite mood and mind altering things.
![Getting to play Agent Smith really unlocked rage inside of me that I didn’t know was there. That’s helped me so much with “Merrily,” particularly in the first act. Learning the kung fu was, like, months of fight training. They called me the Savage, because I was so into it. We were shooting a big fight sequence with Keanu, and, after the first few takes, I remember Lana [Wachowski] at the monitor, like, “Jonathan, come over here. Who is that?” I was, like, “I don’t know.” And she was, like, “And what is that?” I said, “Gay rage?” I’d never shot a gun before. I shot Keanu and thought I had peed my pants, because I had this hot feeling. You know when you pee yourself and it’s warm? It lasted about ten minutes and then it went away. I sat next to Keanu and said, “Keanu, I just had extreme heat from my groin for, like, ten minutes.” And he was, like, “You opened up your root chakra.”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9cb904d18c40515c629fa49ec66ed85b/432821c8dba21cbc-29/s1280x1920/5685313ce1d430ffb5d5b956ea4c5e1c1e667e6f.jpg)
