| Oxytocin |
[05 Jan 2010|11:15pm] |
I got the idea to research oxytocin and discovered a whole passel of interesting stuff! Most of it is from the blog "Hug the Monkey".
Oxytocin is a hormone that facilitates pair bonding and mother-infant bonding by stimulating feelings of love and trust. It is secreted during and after sex (in both men and women), during childbirth, during experiences of social intimacy and connection, and from physical touch such as hugs and massage.
Here is some of the interesting stuff I found:
Exposure to cuteness, such as pictures of kittens, can trigger an oxytocin rush.
The presence of oxytocin relieves anxiety, reduces stress, and may be an effective treatment for PTSD. It may also lead to longer life.
Taking care of yourself, by journaling and nesting, can help maintain healthy oxytocin levels.
Oxytocin is not all lovey dovey - it can increase feelings of envy and schadenfreude, as well as the desire to betray others. Creepy.
Oxytocin's effects are more pronounced in women, because testosterone tends to mute its effects, but guys need hugs too.
An "in love" feeling can also be due to dopamine and norepinephrine, not just oxytocin. One psychologist recommends that women date 3 men at a time to avoid becoming accidentally bonded to someone she doesn't know well enough.
Pets may experience genuine feelings of love for their owners - meaning that when they act devoted, they aren't just manipulating their sources of food.
Oxytocin supplementation seems dicey, but it looks like acupuncture may work. (Of course, there are a lot of "natural" ways to stimulate oxytocin, from sex and cuddling to caring for a sick person to practicing generosity and gratitude.)
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| Doodles - Jan.04 |
[05 Jan 2010|08:06am] |
Click for Larger Image
Another installment of my "Babylonian Prostitutes and Superheroines series". Weird (and frustrating) thing is that I can't really draw these ladies when I'm trying, like for a proper illustration - or at least it's a lengthy, erasing-intensive process - but I can sketch them easily enough. Amateur psychologists, start your analyses of how pretty women give me anxiety.
Anyway, enjoy these, some rapid gestural sketches ...
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| Kyubi is part termite. |
[05 Jan 2010|01:42pm] |
December 25th | 
January 5th |
Kyubi is part termite, I'm sure of it. What I'd thought would be a fun Christmas present that would last a long time has turned into an addiction, a ravenous hunger that must be sated. We just bought him two more wooden carrots and are trying to not let him get through them all too quickly, but I'm not sure how long we can hold out.
Watch your fingers.
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| Stories |
[29 Dec 2009|10:55pm] |
It seems that storytelling is fundamental to human communication.
It's probably the oldest form of entertainment - tales around a campfire - and also the most state of the art - moviemaking is a glamorous industry and individual movies can cost enormous amounts to make. Advertising is nothing but storytelling.
Almost every non-basic communication is a story, from "how was your day?" to "why should I vote for so-and-so?" Even hypotheticals can be seen as stories, e.g. "If it keeps raining like this, we'll get some nasty floods." The key is the presence of cause and effect.
The storytelling process is powerful because it creates curiosity about what comes next, which causes the listener to invest energy and attention, creating a bond between the listener and the teller. Also, knowing some of the same stories as other people around you provides a language and a shared background.
Being able to tell short, interesting stories on the fly seems like a crucial skill.
The stories you tell yourself are also important. They influence which events in your past you treat as significant, and they affect what you think you can do, and what you think you should do. If you're not doing something that fits in your story, you feel uncomfortable, like something has gone wrong.
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[29 Dec 2009|07:37am] |
Back in the late 1980s, DC undertook a complete reinvention of the Superman titles from scratch, wiping away almost fifty years of backstory and giving a bare bones cast and setting a whole new coat of paint. Part of the revamping involved addressing that old general complaint about Superman - that he's too powerful1 - and toned him down drastically, making him more of a match for the contemporary threats of terrorist organizations and rogue super-scientists2. Along those lines, they revamped Superman's archenemy3 Lex Luthor by ... ALSO toning down his power level. I didn't get this, because if you make Superman less powerful but also make his greatest enemy less powerful then you sort of have acquired no net value change so why exactly did this happen again?
Anyway, in an effort to make Superman more "street-level", Luthor went from implacably evil super-scientist to corporate douchebag with a good PR machine, supposedly beyond Superman's reach because the city of Metropolis just lo-o-o-o-oved Luthor, like we all just lo-o-o-o-o-ove fatcat industrialists. Shy of his formerly trademark jetpacks and kryptonite death-traps, late-Eighties Luthor's arsenal of evil tricks was comprised of (a) loads of money (b) megalomania and (c) he was an avid womanizer. This was one of the things that made him so evil; he didn't value women as people. You don't need Superman to save you from a bad boyfriend, ladies, Oprah can help you with that shit4.
It's all part of the hyper-juvenile confusion over gender which typifies super-hero comics, that Luthor was such a bad guy because he slept with women but he wasn't nice about it, that the women are once again targets whose only purpose in the story is to get raped or murdered and thereby give the hero something to get mad about. By the end of this period, I literally cannot think of more than two or three core female characters with whom Luthor had not had his way - I was going to say "Perry White's wife Alice," BUT NO, he fathered an illegitimate child with her! It's been strongly suggested that he and Lois Lane were bumping (exceptionally) uglies, and possibly that he'd even raped (or had arranged to be raped) Lana Lang. Dude was combing it out of his hair5.
Anyway, it just got me thinking about Luthor as a predatory sexual opportunist - if the incredibly boring late Eighties Luthor was all about conquering his enemies by sleeping with their ladies, why not also sleep with their friends? Why not seduce Jimmy Olsen? How about Perry White? Why not Pa Kent6? Why not Krypto7? If poorly-conceived late Eighties Lex Luthor insists on using his dong as a weapon of conquest, why not open up the playing field? It'd give him an amped-up advantage against his old enemy and also it would lead to the hilarious scene up above, implied robot-hand fisting not intentional8.
1A complaint most often made by the same group of people who then go read a comic about an "ordinary guy" who is also the world's most brilliant genius of everything and also best athlete of all time and also gets tons of tail and is indescribably rich and also if he gets shot or gets his back broken he just shakes it off, but at least he can't fly I guess.
2 Which is what the Eighties were known for.
3 "Enemies", actually, because a lot of Superman's rogues gallery got trimmed back - Brainiac, for instance, went from interstellar toy train enthusiast to fat magician named Milton. He and Luthor had once been Superman's greatest enemies, now they were mostly tubby targets of a potential visit from the Ghost of Cardiac Events Yet To Be. Also did I mention that Luthor got cancer? A terrifying menace, that sick fat sonofabitch Lex Luthor.
4Like, I'm not even joking, that was basically Luthor's super-power - he made women feel like shit. They wrote whole comics about it. Included in DC's "The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told" is a back-up story wherein Luthor just fucks with the head of some waitress in a greasy spoon out in Buttfuck, South Egypt. THAT WAS IT. The whole conflict of the story, what drove the narrative, was that he made her feel quite bad -- ON PURPOSE! Move over Joker, stand aside Doctor Doom, there's a new number one baddie in town!
5 Sort of.
6Because he's dead.
7Because he's a dog.
8 PS Late Eighties Luthor had a robot hand. He was a fat cancer-ridden middle aged dude with a prosthetic, A FINE OPPONENT FOR THE MAN OF TOMORROW!
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| Who Killed Arnold Stang? |
[28 Dec 2009|07:38am] |
Sad to hear last week about the death of Arnold Stang, voice of Top Cat (among others). His lifestyle of wild sex, drugs and alcohol finally took its toll at 91.
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| ...And for the record, Josie > Archie & His Pals > Josie & The Pussycats |
[23 Dec 2009|10:57am] |
I've recently been reading some of the late Sixties' Archie Publications comics, specifically the early Josie series. I'm not particularly a fan of ... well, just about any teen comic, really, and the Archie family is no real exception. There's a period which begins in fits and starts around 1958, peaks around 1968, and which is gone, gone, gone by 1971 where Archie - if just for the quality of the art - was really notable, and those are what I've been lately perusing.
Dan DeCarlo (and, eventually, the trio of Dan and his twin sons) was the artistic core of these books, the elder DeCarlo specifically being known for his energetic good girl art. Josie's the best of the endless teen comedies DeCarlo and the rest of the Archie Publications crew turned out during this period (for other publishers, even), and the one which received the best flourishes from DeCarlo ...
So, flipping through 1968's Josie #38, I was delighted to come across this charming cameo in a story featuring the (unfortunately typical for the era) stereotypically ditzy blonde bombshell Melody and her anonymous cadre of dumbfounded admirers ...
    
Did I mention that DeCarlo based the character Josie on his longtime wife? Thus I declare that this is adorable...
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[23 Dec 2009|08:22am] |
Hey Jerks1! Still stuck at work with little or nothing to do? Here's some more time-killers from the best of the latter half of the year's worth of my Livejournal!
Hey, you know what I did on the way to work? Picking up breakfast at the supermarket, I also got a wheel of President brand "Wee Brie", tiny wedges of processed brie. I did this because I thought it was funny. Then I ate some. It's not funny anymore.
MURRAY CRISSMUSS!
1I'm sorry, that was rude, I meant to say "Hey Jerk-ASSES"...
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