[syndicated profile] openculture_feed

Posted by Colin Marshall

To many of us, the concept of solitary confinement may not sound all that bad: finally, a reprieve from the siege of social and professional requests. Finally, a chance to catch up on all the reading we’ve been meaning to do. Finally, an environment conducive to this meditation thing about whose benefits we’ve heard so much. (Perhaps we made those very assurances to ourselves when the COVID-19 pandemic set in.) But according to the animated TED-Ed lesson above, written by psychiatrist and correctional mental health expert Terry Kupers, the negatives of the experience would well outweigh the positives. It all comes by way of answering the question, “What happens to your brain without any social contact?”

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, isolation takes its greatest toll when imposed against the will of the isolated, and even more so when imposed for an indefinite duration. “Early on, stress hormones may spike, and as time passes, that stress can become chronic,” says the video’s narrator.

Without the availability of social interactions as “a sounding board where we can gauge how rational our perceptions are,” one’s “sense of identity and reality becomes threatened.” The stage is therefore set for “depression, obsessions, suicidal ideation, and, for some, delusions and hallucinations.” Sleeping difficulties can manifest on the more strictly physical end, potentially accompanied by “heart palpitations, headaches, dizziness, and hypersensitivity.”

While traveling in the United States, Charles Dickens bore witness to the punishment by solitary confinement already in effect in American prisons, coming away with the impression that it was “worse than any torture of the body.” He wrote that after a visit to a Philadelphia penitentiary, whose very name reflects the theory, held by the Quaker groups who introduced the practice in the late eighteenth century, that it could “bring about reflection and penitence.” After much research on the matter, Kupers has come to the conclusion that, in fact, it “does immense damage that is contrary to rehabilitation, while failing to reduce prison violence.” If you’re reading this, you may not be especially likely to be sentenced to involuntary confinement. But the next time you start feeling out of sorts for reasons you can’t pin down, consider how long it’s been since you’ve spent real time with real people.

Related content:

What Happens When You Spend Weeks, Months, or Years in Solitary Confinement

How Loneliness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Harvard Psychiatrist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

Modern Art Was Used As a Torture Technique in Prison Cells During the Spanish Civil War

What an 85-Year-Long Harvard Study Says Is the Real Key to Happiness

On the Power of Teaching Philosophy in Prisons

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

[syndicated profile] openculture_feed

Posted by OC

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Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogeneous compendium of creatures from ancient folktale, myth, and demonology around the world.

Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of  what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind.

Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.

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“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.

As the Public Domain Review notes:

The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”

The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, now an assistant professor of Islamic history at Columbia University. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.

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“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.

A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).

There’s a playful Boschian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?

See many more of these strange paintings at the Public Domain Review.

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Related Content:

700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

160,000 Pages of Glorious Medieval Manuscripts Digitized: Visit the Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. 

[syndicated profile] jalopnik_feed
If you can run ships on nuclear power, why not cars? In an era of atomic optimism, Ford unveiled its plan for a car that would run on uranium fission.

beanside: (Default)
[personal profile] beanside
It's Friday! They're almost done the project. The dude said he'd be here today, then the painters come Monday. Tues or Wed we should have a washer and dryer! They've been absolute sweethearts. They discovered that Jess recently had surgery, so they have been bringing in heavy packages, and generally being awesome, while getting the work done super fast.

Yesterday was a bit of a cluserfuck. I got ready and hauled all my shit to the coworking office. For four hours, things went great. Enormous monitor, very nice chair, very quiet and private. Then, just after noon, the internet went down. I waited a few minutes, but it didn't come back up. Poked my head out, and it turns out that the power went off on half the building, and it was going to be a couple of hours to get it back up. So, I closed down and went to head back home, only to find that the elevator is in the half of the building that has no power. On the fifth floor.

Knowing that I only have two hours to get back online before I have to start using PTO, I braved the stairs. It was not pleasant. I had my bag with my computer and accouterments, and the dishes from lunch. I would not like to do it again.

I got home, and sat for a while, until the worker went outside to get supplies, then I squeezed into my sister's room and got set up again. Fortunately, it seems like they're done with most of the loud stuff, so it wasn't bad.

I think today I'm going to just stay home and do my job here. I'll have to move my shit tomorrow to my normal desk, since I'm working on Saturday, but that's okay.

Tonight, I have my monthly psych appt. We're going to have to discuss changing my ADHD meds, because the insurance is not going to cover them any more. So, farewell Vyyvanse, hello Azstarys.

Tomorrow, we take Yoda for his interview with Camp Bow Wow. This should be interesting. Hopefully, he does well, and we can start depositing him in day care for a few hours here and there, working up to overnights. I am stressing more about this than I was about the work they're doing.

My sister has been incredibly interactive today, and I need a drink. I shall persevere. At least I had my normal half hour of peace and quiet. Okay, everyone have an excellent Friday!

Load Up

Oct. 3rd, 2025 05:49 am
pshaw_raven: (Autumn Leaves)
[personal profile] pshaw_raven
After the 10k on Saturday I'm taking time off from running for a while. I'm so burnt out, y'all. I don't intend to give it up entirely but I need some other outdoor cardio as a change of literal pace. I still have my plate carrier I bought earlier this year, and this week I splurged and bought myself a fancy GoRuck pack and some weight plates. There are a lot of rucking events that range from rucking around urban areas with a group to tough endurance events in the middle of nowhere. Of course, you know I've got my eye on a something dirty and difficult.

I like having something to train for in my future, and when I started running I thought that one day I'd like to try running a marathon. That helped inform my training from month to month. For rucking, I'm looking at stuff like GoRuck Heavy, or this overnight event in Ocala where you need to go 65 miles, mostly unsupported, in 24 hours. No drop bags or aid stations, but there are five checkpoints where you can refill water, or tap out. I've been interested in military-style physical training for a long time, despite having no actual military ambitions. I've apparently been named a domestic terrorist so there's that. (Not me specifically, just everyone who dislikes the current administration.) My overall fitness philosophy has always been "I'm making myself hard to kill," not that anyone's actually trying to kill me, but you get the idea.

No one's trying to kill me, right?

This will still allow me to get time on my feet, outdoors, and see stuff. I love the little dopamine hit when someone says, "You went HOW far??" I can still do the endurance sports I love without having to grind through another run training cycle. I'm actually really glad I don't have any more races on my calendar right now, especially long ones, because stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Plus I get to buy quasi-military gear. With patches. I love patches. And MOLLE. Lotsa straps. I would say I need attachment points for an admin pouch, first aid kit, etc, but I've got plenty of room IN my pack. I can carry water, a rain slicker, a little blister/first aid kit, snacks, and a towel.

Anyway, this has also caused something of an existential crisis, because I've built so much of my identity around running and road racing. If I'm not running anymore, who am I? Will I get fat again? Will that make me a quitter? Etc. Reasonably I know it's a more or less lateral move, but for some reason it feels like a huge step. I'm probably grossly overthinking it.

I dropped dead yesterday after spending all day doing various food prep tasks. I have about fifteen pounds of pie pumpkins so far and more coming in. I made my first roselle harvest and processed the calyxes and seed pods to make jam, though it didn't quite set so I'll need to reprocess and try adding more pectin. Soy sauce chicken for lunches, a loaf of bread, holy crap I'm tired. AND I made dinner. And cleaned up.

So over the weekend I'll get my gaming and reading posts written up but for now I need to eat a bit and go for a short shakeout run.
mific: (A pen and ink)
[personal profile] mific posting in [community profile] drawesome
Title: Through a Window, and Molten.
Artist: [personal profile] mific
Rating: G
Fandom: original work
Content Notes: I'm sure I won't manage all the Drawtober prompts but here are the first two: "through a window" and "molten". Not a flight I'd want to be on, though! Made in Procreate.

Aeroplane window view of an erupting volcano with red-orange clouds above and lava running down.


full size pic here... )

The Friday Five - Trust Your Senses

Oct. 3rd, 2025 05:32 am
pshaw_raven: (Hiroshi Nagai - palm trees)
[personal profile] pshaw_raven
1. Do you ever wonder if the way you see things visually aren't how other people see them?
I know it isn't - at least for some people. I know that I see a range of color that many people don't, but I'm not sure how "far out" my color sense is. I love color though, and I rarely leave Home Depot without filching a paint chip or two. Yes, I collect them. :D

2. What kind of sounds are the most annoying?
DOGS BARKING. Or anything that's both loud and irregular.

3. When walking through a store, do you shop with your hands by touching/feeling the texture of things?
That depends on what I'm shopping for. It's essential when buying food, especially produce. And I also rely on it for buying clothes. If I don't like the texture when I feel it with my fingers, I won't want it on another part of my body.

4. If you could only smell three scents for the rest of your life, what would they be?
Are we talking about three scents in addition to normal air? I'm a little less sensitive to smell. I guess the smell of coffee brewing, the smell of the woods, and that slightly dusty, warm smell that animals have when their fur is clean.

5. What sorts of things do you savor when eating them?
Meats, some desserts, cheese. Anything with a decently complex flavor profile. Most packaged or restaurant food seems one-note, especially the way places will pile on more and more ingredients until it's just chaos rather than complexity.

Follow Friday 10-3-25

Oct. 3rd, 2025 03:44 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] followfriday
Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

constellation

Oct. 3rd, 2025 08:47 am

Ownership of the Soul + Miami Vice

Oct. 3rd, 2025 01:52 am
mxcatmoon: Miami Vice 04 by me (Miami Vice 04)
[personal profile] mxcatmoon
 
So, I've gone all-in with Miami Vice, and am about to start a re-watch of the episodes. It's been providing a much-needed distraction from the horrible things that are going on in this reality we're living in. It's something I'm enjoying and looking forward to when I get home from work. I really need that to counteract the anxiety and depression I've been dealing with. I think the fact that it's an old show from a better time helps too, because I do have a current fandom that I've been much more involved with, but it hasn't provided me with this kind of diversion. I'm vibing on the nostalgia. The 1980s was a good time for me.

Read more... )

Just One Thing (03 October 2025)

Oct. 3rd, 2025 08:44 am
nanila: me (Default)
[personal profile] nanila posting in [community profile] awesomeers
It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

9/29/25 - 10/3/25

Oct. 3rd, 2025 12:14 am
gwydion: (Default)
[personal profile] gwydion
* In the midst of everything, the Lenovo Lemon Lemoned. More details below. Basically, I can't do the aggegate under these conditions. The refurbished, while excellent hasn't the memory for it, and it's simply to much work to do with all my prep inaccessible. I'm posting the smidgen I had scaffolded now as I've no guarantee it'll be here next reboot and I'm going to try to trick Best Buy into helping free. I have 4 dollars and change in my bank account as of this writing so paying for help is impossible until social security comes.




* "Jane Goodall, famed primatologist and conservationist, dies at 91:" https://abcnews.go.com/amp/International/jane-goodall-famed-primatologist-anthropologist-conservationist-dead-91/story?id=109868347

* I went to the Ostio. We are proceeding with hip physio as expected. Bonus, he did a steroid injection in my right hip joint. I had steroid injections to the hip joints more than 15 years ago. They got rid of the ground glass sensation and rolled back the pain several years. This one is already a noticeable improvement. I'm to go back for the left in a month or two.

In other news, when I tried to log on to Firefox Tuesday night everything was gone. As usual the restore previous session option was greyed out. I absolutely don't have time or energy to try to hand restore it all today or really at any time this month. Still I guess it's now on my Wednesday night's to do list. So much work has been lost, and I won't be able to get much of it back.

Plus someone I care about very much is dying and the grief keeps hitting me in waves. I don't really want to talk about it. I'm talking with him and other people who know him. I'm just explaining that a lot of my energy is going into that right now.

This fucking year.

* Wednesday, I managed to break down the living room airconditioner. It's a whole drama as everything needs to be cleaned, drained, etc.. and the metal piece that goes in the window broke early in HoA Bedroom Attack Crisis. I did my best with the good duct tape. (NOTE to self. Need more Duct tape.) These uses a lot of spoons and also involved a closet reorganization as it gets stored right in front of where the water filter is now. It's short enough to not interfere with filter access at all, but a bunch of things had ended up in the hole the air conditioner fits in so I had to pull them out and deal with the TV trays endlessly falling off their rack and make everything fit back in around the unit. At least the air conditioner has little wheels under it, but I still have to manhandle over even small obstacles and I take it out on the patio to drain.

We mostly talked linguistics over dinner.

All night, everytime I got up, I did small prep things for fish reorganization. At least it's something.

I've started try to deal with the waterfox crash, but it's going to be a slog.

* Lenovo Laptop is broken again.

Just before bed Tursday morning, the connectivity went out just on the problematic Lenovo Lemon. The one I need to do all the aggregate things because it has enough memory to do it. Squirrel's laptop and the second hand refurbished connect just fine.

I can't do the aggregate if I don't find a solution. All the prep is over there.

I tried the usual things: reboots, checking connectivity. Coming back more than twelve hours later in case it is a temporary glitch. The computer claims it's connected, but it isn't. Disconning wifi and reconnecting it. Troubleshooting tool (It has never once worked for me in 30 years). Following a complicated set of directions written for someone else with the same trouble. Running an antivirus scan.

I spent two - three hours deleting things. I'll probably keep picking at that.

I'm out of ideas.

Does anyone know how to connect a Lenovo to the Internet after it breaks like this? Is there a trick to getting the web browser to talk to the part that says the wifi is working?

* "Sunday Sweets: Gothic Elegance:" https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/sunday-sweets-gothic-elegance-2025

* What to help support all of us all here at the Cat Asylum? https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/Gwydion

Critical Role: Campaign 4, Episode 1

Oct. 3rd, 2025 02:40 am
settiai: (Critical Role -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
It's been ages since I've tried to do one of these, but I've typed up some reactions to the newest episode of Critical Role as I watched it. It's a combination of quotes, random thoughts, and some speculation, and it's full of spoilers (albeit vague ones in places).

Spoilers under the cut. )

There was so much to take in, especially with all of the new characters who were introduced and had various interpersonal relationships and interconnected histories. I definitely need to try to rewatch this episode sometime between now and next Thursday, possibly more than once, because I know that I missed somethings.

But for now? I'm going to attempt to convince my body to let me get a few hours of sleep, and then I'll go back to panicking about various things in the morning. It was nice to escape from reality for a few hours at least.
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
You would THINK that the "Found Family" prompt would've been an absolute cakewalk for me, and yet, I couldn't get it to go anywhere, so you get another of the alt prompts today. I also found it pleasing that I managed to get the first three fills spread across all three of the fandoms I'm writing in for this particular Whumptober.

No. 3: “I look in people’s windows, transfixed by rose golden glows.”
Isolation | Candlelight | Found Family


[Alt] Deal with the Devil
Babylon 5, G'Kar, Cartagia arc; all hurt no comfort (500 wds)
Also on Tumblr.

500 wds under the cut )

gibbous

Oct. 3rd, 2025 01:00 am
[syndicated profile] merriamwebster_feed

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 3, 2025 is:

gibbous • \JIB-us\  • adjective

Gibbous is most often used to describe the moon or a planet when it is seen with more than half but not all of the apparent disk illuminated.

// The waxing gibbous moon provided the perfect lighting for a night of spooky storytelling around the campfire.

See the entry >

Examples:

“At 3:30 a.m. the gibbous moon is high in the south and Perseus is nearly overhead. Set up a comfortable lawn chair facing away from any bright lights, ideally looking toward the northeast with the moon to your back. Have insect repellent handy along with hot chocolate, tea or coffee and enjoy the show.” — Tim Hunter, The Arizona Daily Star, 7 Aug. 2025

Did you know?

The adjective gibbous has its origins in the Latin noun gibbus, meaning “hump.” It was adopted into Middle English to describe rounded, convex things. While it has been used to describe the rounded body parts of humans and animals (such as the back of a camel) and to describe the shape of certain flowers (such as snapdragons), the term is most often used to describe the moon: a gibbous moon is one that is between half full and full.



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