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Lubumbashi City Hall, DR Congo, 2007

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don’t abandon joy because it is brief. don’t commit to solitude because happiness is fleeting. it’s okay that good things do not last forever. it’s okay to simply enjoy a thing for as long as you have it.

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“WATER, limitless and immortal, is the beginning and end of all things on earth. The most changeable of the elements, all ebb and flow and constant movement, it has a hypnotic, ineluctable hold on us. We are drawn to its depths because we see in it our own image. “In his inmost recesses,” Bachelard writes, “the human being shares the destiny of the flowing water. Water is truly the transitory element … A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away.” It is the nature of water to dissolve, to wash away, to purify, to regenerate. It lures us into seeing in depth, and seeing beyond.”

— Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume, Mandy Aftel

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why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

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There are so many different types of gluttony. Even now, just as when I was a child and without responsibility, I can lie on my back in the tall grass in autumn and stare at the clouds, an adult with not a thought in my head; and when I stand up, hours later, I will still be ravenous for the sight of those clouds, and for the whispering of that grass, and when I go to bed that night I will still be hungry for the memory of the warmth of that late-season sun, even as, in the moment, I am enjoying the scent and embrace of the darkness, and the cooling night.

– Rick Bass, from “Titan,” The Lives of Rocks: Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

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“We experience the gaze of others as an evil eye not when it wants to penetrate our secrets and make them transparent (such a penetrating gaze is rather flattering and exciting)—but when it denies that we have any secrets, when it reduces us to what it sees and registers.”

— Boris Groys, ‘Art Workers Between Utopia and the Archive’ (via frnchrllo)

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Maya Angelou working on her bed with a Thesaurus, a Dictionary, and the Holy Bible. (1982)

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stay earnest, be crazy, study study study, flirt with philosophy, cry at 2am then ace the test, fall in love with sentences, question everything, romanticize gray weather, seek truth like its art, read freud for fun, argue like you’re defending a dissertation, quote camus in casual texts, fear nothing but mediocrity

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this this this this 

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Anna Akhmatova, from "By the Sea Shore" in Selected Poems

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"Making worlds is very hard and losing them is devastating. In the middle, one has to build confidence or just habits that allow rest and coasting amidst the labor of making. So much of what we do demands inattention (our current emphasis on mindfulness neglects the mind’s need for incoherence, to rest, coast, spread out, incohere)."

Lauren Berlant

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my week long reprieve has come to a close

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decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

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do you think “the chosen people” and “the promised land” narrative has done more harm than good? can’t deny that all of the conflicts are rooted from the people who weaponize it to violence each other and i wish it was different

the narrative of promise and picking emerge from people in exile—they have no promise and are not picked. reading that rhetoric in its proper vulnerability and fear is meaningful. exerting it from a position of power is only ever a mis-reading. the heavenly promise is something you yearn for, so, if you're killing for it, it's not heaven's and it's not the promise

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But no single map of the emotions is available here. Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling (mignumi) and desire melts the limbs (lusimeles, cf. Sappho fr. 130). Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded. The god who melts limbs proceeds to break the lover as would a foe on the epic battlefield.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet