coffeewithkika
coffeewithkika
Let your dreams come true
13K posts
Kika. Beautiful buildings, old books & language enthusiast. 'Veni Vidi Amavi'. A bit of a hopeless romantic. Personal content under #mypost. Tag #coffeewithkika
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coffeewithkika · 2 years ago
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So I have neglected this blog for far too long. But I’m back! And I have some exciting news…
I published a poetry book!!!
If you would like to support your local tumblr starting out poet, please consider buying a copy. Or sharing this post with your followers.
I’ve worked silently on this little project for a few years, but now it’s time to share it with the world.
Anyway, here she is. This is my proof copy and the author’s copy is on the way!! It’s so exciting and I hope some of you will be able to enjoy it!
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This is the link to buy, if you’re interested:
Have a lovely Sunday my darlings!!
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coffeewithkika · 2 years ago
Text
So I have neglected this blog for far too long. But I’m back! And I have some exciting news…
I published a poetry book!!!
If you would like to support your local tumblr starting out poet, please consider buying a copy. Or sharing this post with your followers.
I’ve worked silently on this little project for a few years, but now it’s time to share it with the world.
Anyway, here she is. This is my proof copy and the author’s copy is on the way!! It’s so exciting and I hope some of you will be able to enjoy it!
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This is the link to buy, if you’re interested:
Have a lovely Sunday my darlings!!
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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You can only reblog this today.
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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I am heartbreakingly in awe of the strength of the Ukrainian people.
Some things that really stuck out to me from the coverage I've watched so far:
Ukrainian officials requested that a no fly zone be placed over Ukrainian territory and Russia has not just been bombing military targets, they have been bombing areas in cities filled with civilians - they have shelled multiple Ukrainian nurseries, kindergartens and an orphanage, killing numerous children
Ukraine's UN ambassador told his Russian counterpart that "there's no purgatory for war criminals, they go straight to hell"
A Ukrainian soldier went onto a bridge during battle to detonate a bomb on it knowing he would die in the process
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president has refused offers to evacuate him and is insisting on staying above ground in the capitol (Kyiv) which is currently being bombed and invaded by Russian troops. Russia claims that they are willing to have peace-talks if Ukraine surrenders - Zelenskyy (rightfully, in my opinion) has refused
It is estimated that 100,000 Ukrainians have fled across the border to neighbouring countries so far. Polish citizens have been offering to drive them where they need to go and also offering them places to stay. Women and children have had to leave male loved ones behind at the border as Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been barred from leaving the country in order that they may be conscripted into the Ukrainian army
Russian soldiers on a warship told Ukrainian soldiers stationed on a Ukrainian island (Snake Island) that they were about to invade the island and told the soldiers there to surrender and you could hear the Ukrainian soldiers over the radio saying "so this is it" because they knew they were going to die and then they told the Russian warship to go fuck themselves
There is a video of a Ukrainian woman going up to Russian soldiers and telling them they are cursed and offering them sunflower seeds (the national flower of Ukraine) to put in their pockets so that when they die on Ukrainian soil at least sunflowers will grow
I am so sorry to every Ukrainian for what you are going through. Putin is a despicable man. I am deeply impressed and humbled by the strength your people are showing - I don't know that I could ever be that brave.
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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“they” (1 word) is shorter than “he or she” (3 words)
“they” is more inclusive than “he/she”
“themself” flows more naturally than “him or herself”
“they” is less clunky than “(s)he”
it’s time to replace the awkward “she or he”
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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A little something.
I know most relief/donations are now targeted at Ukraine, and rightfully so, but I wanted to post a link where you can donate to the organization that helps those in Russia who are prosecuted because of participating in the anti-war protest (or any anti-government protest in that matter). We have about 1,5k people arrested as of now. And given how all protests are illegal but it’s not gonna stop people from having their voice heard, we’ll surely see more people arrested.
https://donate.ovdinfo.org/en#page=en
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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Want to learn something new in 2022??
Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)
40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)
Excellent basic crochet video series
Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)
Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)
How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)
Another drawing character faces video
Literally my favorite art pose hack
Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??
Introduction to flying small aircrafts
French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding
Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)
Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)
Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)
Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:
Calculus 1 (full semester class)
Learn basic statistics (free textbook)
Introduction to college physics (free textbook)
Introduction to accounting (free textbook)
Learn a language:
Ancient Greek
Latin
Spanish
German
Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)
French
Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)
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coffeewithkika · 3 years ago
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Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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college is so STUPID why can’t i go 5 times and major in 10 different things for $999 total and then do like, 3 MFAs on the house
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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reblog for good luck this new school year ✨
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn’t need a number, don’t put a fucking number in it.
Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.
I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can’t resist nitpicking a number. For example, “This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it’s plot convenient,” will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there’s no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.
Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don’t know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they’re thinking critically but it’s about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn’t be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they’re supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or… etc etc etc.
Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don’t bring that evil down upon your head.
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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coffeewithkika · 4 years ago
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Morning coffee and reading.
ig: rhiharper
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