I've been thinking about my cousin lately. She killed herself in December and she was someone I thought I would get to grow old together with. It feels strange that I have to divide my time from before and after her. I haven't told some of my friends because as little as they know about her there is a version of her still alive in their minds. One day they will ask me how she is and I'll have to tell them the news, but until that day she is alive. She is alive and she is trying to push me off the slide.
We shall trend again #hannibalrise
On the journey to getting better but I am gonna complain about it the whole way through
pioneering something called "gritted teeth optimism" where everything is gonna turn out okay even if i have to bite and claw and gnash my way through it
begging people to start paying attention to prison organizing and listening directly to incarcerated activists who are talking about these things instead of just basing your knowledge of the US prison system off of true crime podcasts or brooklyn 99 or whatever.
Marshall Project, Prison Journalism Project, and Scalawag Magazine all have a lot of really good coverage of US prison news and share a lot of writing from incarcerated journalists. Prison Radio has a bunch of important commentaries from incarcerated journalists.
there are a ton of books to prisoners programs and inside/outside organizing collectives and just so much out there if you look for it.
Israel is now bombing 1.7 million civilians trapped in Rafah, threatening an imminent invasion of the last “safe place” in Gaza.
Israel is committing the worst crimes in modern history, and Western regimes are calling it “self-defense”.
Never forget. Never forgive.
Touch starvation is no longer a problem all I have to do is press my teacup to my face and its almost like the warmth of a hand.
wait and another neat thing about stray: the way it ties humanity to class! where do you see the most pro-human sentiment in the game? its in the slums! theres the ‘rip humans <3′ graffiti, the robot that cares for the plants because the humans liked them, and of course you find b-12 near that area as well. its also where all the outsiders came from; the ones that are still able to both dream of and actively work towards a better life for themselves and their loved ones, and all the robots in general. even the enemies in this section of the game are biological in nature.
then you have midtown, the middle-class police state area. suddenly the main enemies are robotic surveillance cameras, not living creatures. this is also where you start to encounter robots that are not friendly, and that will sell each other out for profit. there are also robots that will try to keep you out of certain areas, unlike in the slums where you could mostly go where you pleased. for the most part the robots still tend to be friendly here; but not all of them are altruistic, and there’s no real sense of an overarching community.
and finally, you get to the upper levels, the area for the elites, where the upper class stayed literally above it all to run the city… and theres no one there. there are no people. the robots are just robots: they have no names, they make no conversation, they merely complete their assigned tasks as if nothing has changed. i almost expected to find real humans here, or at least a corpse or something in the control room, but… nothing. there is no humanity, in any form. its a pretty, pristine, wasteland.
but down in the filthy, zurk-infested slums, humanity lives on.
i'm going to listen to the album of the artist you like even though he's not really my vibe. i'm going to read the book you suggested even though it's not a genre i usually enjoy. i'll watch the show. i will try the recipe. i will play the video game, or at least watch a deep-dive youtube explaining the really-long lore so i have some idea of what's happening. the movie you suggested is too scary for me, but - i mean, the wikipedia page is kind of interesting - look at the length of the section Controversy.
this is not a burden. i think maybe "burden" and "love" might be oppositional, the way sometimes "love" and "hate" are not opposites. a burden is a dragging. i love you because you brought me to the water, and it is the horizon of your heart. i love you because of your nervous pacing around the edges of the rabbit hole.
often you are right. some songs on that album remind me of the spark in your eyes. the book was really thought-provoking.
more i just want to understand enough that you can talk to me. that you can explain, in depth, why it matters that wheat has shallow roots. i love you, even platonically - your love of this thing leaks into me. i watch you, cautious and dancing, the shy desire for you to smear the colors of this thing into my life, too.
they are your colors, though. of course i want them here, in the marginalia of my life. you matter to me. i want them to crowd the little moments of my day. i want your fingerprints scattered throughout the rooms of my heart.
one time i spent about six months reading and researching a particular author, just so i could talk to one of my friends about him. i never got the chance. she betrayed me, broke my trust, and sided with her abusive ex-boyfriend. standing in the sodden floodplain of what she left over, some bitter part of me asked - isn't that tragic? you have all this knowledge and nothing to do with it.
but i did have all that knowledge, though. when i reach for it, i still feel it glow.
I know everyone gets very sad about ao3 going down and not being able to reach their daily fanfic quota but can we just
Like
Appreciate the people who work on Ao3?
They’re running this massive site with millions on millions of entries that each contain about to millions of millions of words and tags and languages and comments and that’s so much information and even then everyone has their own personal accounts and bookmarks and series and and yet even back when I had an itty bitty iPod the only time the site was ever slow or wonky was Wi-Fi issues on my end??? Like??? They’re magical??? Idk ao3 peeps run their site so well and we don’t ever appreciate them, they’re probably sad about their site being down too but instead of keeping it up they turn it off just a little bit for the sake of keeping it as smooth as it always has been and it’s awesome that such a big site only gets little bumps and errors every couple months and only needs a few hours to be perfect again.
Just
The mods??? The admins?? Other computers working people who work so hard to get us our fluff and our angst and our smut???