Ru

Missives and musings about comics, Bollywood, & queer stuff by an Indian-American. Co-founder of @occupythedisco.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

It would take far more than a month to honor the contributions of queer and transgender New Yorkers.

From the Cercle Hermaphroditos in 1895, the first trans advocacy group in the United States, to the drag balls of the Harlem Renaissance, to the Stonewall uprising, to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, to ACT UP!, founded in 1987 as queer people fought for their lives while the Reagan administration looked away, New York City's history has long been shaped by queer and trans New Yorkers.

To all our queer and trans neighbors: you deserve a City where you can afford to live safely, openly, and joyfully.

Happy Pride, New York City.

[bradley a clayton @knifesystem]

My first Marvel story (Wiccan and Hulkling: Raid of Ultron) is out today!! Featuring, among many other Ultron variants, a new diva. Ultronica is the “daughter” of Ultron. Equal parts Terminator and Cher Horowitz.

I hope you enjoy her and even more I hope you GO BUY THE BOOK

[Kevin Wada @kevinwada]

Cyclops in Savage Land
Commission, 2026 🦖🌺🥵

[New York City Council @NYCCouncil]

New Yorkers shouldn’t have to dodge 🐶 💩 on their own block.

The Council has introduced the SCOOP Act to expand resources to keep our neighborhoods 🐶 💩 free.

But we can’t do this alone. Join the new NYC Scoop Patrol, where you can post yourself helping clean your community and tag @nycscooppatrol.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@Sturgeons_Law Reminds me of the Japanese poster for the Hindi Film, Anjaam.

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@lostinsfictionn so funny to see so many only fans gays on this. Also so clear that you can just buy an international magazine cover with no real impact on the world.

[Rihanna @rihanna]

Namaste Mumbai!! Still daydreaming about one of the most unforgettable and heartwarming experiences! Thank you 🙏🏿 🧡💚

it was so fun getting to debut the @fentybeauty Ki Haveli pop-up with you in person, and it will be open until May 4 🫶🏿 so make sure you check it out before then!

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@MuuMuse Same issue. Canceled as soon as it's placed. seems like others are having this issue too. Hopefully it's sorted.

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@MuuMuse Does it need to be ordered via Grindr?

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@MuuMuse I've used multiple methods (PayPal, shop etc) and keep getting this error. Even changed the address to include a 10 digit zip code lol.

Oh well.

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@MuuMuse every time I order it the order gets canceled. weird?

[Ru @DJRuBot]

Not enough people are talking about it but also the movie should have Kuhoo Verma! @therealkuhoo

[Kate Reinking @katereinking]

The nerdiest people you know are freaking out about niche a cappella musical theatre songs being sung by the most insane assortment of theatre turned tv/movie stars you can think of and I think that’s just beautiful

[billboard @billboard]

Asha Bhosle, One of India’s Most Versatile Bollywood Singers, Dies at 92
https://t.co/M6qGk1wwN4

[Ru @DJRuBot]

@Main_Khamakha This is copying Truth Hurts lol. This remix only got famous because the song was big in America.

https://t.co/TQRCiyU2dV

[🤍ara. 🇵🇰 @choppywriter]

This is beautiful beyond words.
Damn, queens! 👑 (And Atif Aslam)
Electrifying atmosphere on that stage. So intense.

[The Academy @TheAcademy]

What’s your favorite romance film that involves travel?

Featured films: YOU, ME & TUSCANY, THE HOLIDAY, DILWALE DULHANIA LE JAYENGE, EAT PRAY LOVE

[Romeo S (Reloaded) 🇩🇴🥇 @PaIIahAbdul]

This is what gentrification is taking away from us btw.. sexy men who shower

[Classic X-Men @ClassicXMen]

1994 Fleer Ultra X-Men #95 — Moonstar

[chaotic memes @memechaotic]

LMAO