hybridzizi

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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Got my SCUBA dry suit certification today. One of the things you need to do to get certified is hover for two minutes without kicking your feet or paddling your hands and without crashing to the sea floor or rocketing to the surface, in order to demonstrate that you have achieved neutral buoyancy.

Dry suits have a tendency to collect air in the feet and pull you upside down. You can compensate for this by kicking or paddling your hands.

But I was not supposed to kick or paddle my hands.

Which is why I spent two minutes of my day today bobbing completely upside down, unmoving about 13 feet underwater.

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I don't think men saying out of pocket shit to me on the internet is because they're men. everyday billions of men wake up and don't say out of pocket shit to me on the internet. this is clearly an active choice

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Spent the whole time she was writing this update arguing about the best way to translate the name into English. We eventually settled on "Mm-pah snip" as it turns out "Mm-pah" is a weirdly satisfying sound to make as you do a rock-paper gesture with your hands.

Rock Paper Scissors was invented in China, supposedly during the Han Dynasty which is 200ish BC to AD 200ish, by which I mean it was probably invented in AD 1600ish [1]. A lot of different sets of three things beating each other were tried, but it eventually settled into Rock, Scissors, Cloth.

(Cloth makes so much more sense than paper. You can imagine a cloth bag sturdy enough to hold a rock.)

Rock, Scissors, Cloth spread throughout all of Asia under that name, but when it got to Japan, Japan decided to rename it to Rock, Scissors, Paper. My best guess was that “paper” was easier to say than “cloth” and everyone knew what you meant, anyway.

Europe and the rest of the world got Rock Paper Scissors from Japan sometime in the 1900s, so that’s why we’re stuck with Paper.

[1] The problem with ancient Chinese history (really, with ancient history in general) is that you have to rely on ancient historians, and ancient historians are not great about separating facts from rumors. [2]

[2] Do you ever write a blog post solely so you can cite it in the footnotes of another post? And then the footnote post explodes because @argumate reblogged it, before you even publish the post that cites it as a footnote? Because that totally happened to me today.

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I was in a chronic pain program for a bit and this was one of the nicest things about it, IMO. Like, the program also did improve the pain some but I mostly couldn't talk about it when it did! Most people kind of figure that you are not dealing with awful migraines about every four days, so when I'd go "I am now only getting a migraine every seven days!" they'd be, like, real concerned and sympathetic -- which was not the correct response!

Meanwhile, you don't really sign up to spend 10 hours a week talking about pain unless you are doing Pretty Bad, so there I would get, like, high fives and congratulations, as is appropriate.

Crazy thing about #healing #recovery Small Victories is when you'll have some shit going on that's like, saying this would involve admitting how you used to be doing. You know? Like hey guys good news I'm gonna change my bedsheets this year

[hybridzizi]

I got to pull a fire alarm yesterday.

There was a fire in the apartment by the garbage chute in my building. No one was answering the door so we couldn't put it out.

My partner and I did badly on our WIS checks and started trying to figure out how to pick the lock. My friend rolled better and called 911. They told us to clear the building.

It turns out when you pull the fire alarm there's like a 5 second delay before anything happens? Which is like just long enough for you to go "oh shit it didn't work now what???"

By the time we made it to the bottom of the stairs, the firetruck was pulling up. I think it was like maybe 3 minutes after my friend called? So impressive speed.

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>forgotten where I've left my keys

>no worries, I'm an intellectual

>simply stop, smug look to camera, and announce that I'm entering my mind palace to remember where I put them

>close my eyes and pinch my temple

>instantly find my consciousness transported to the entrance of my mind palace

>mfw I've forgotten my mind keys

[hybridzizi]

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

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and you're telling me the popular ship in the fandom is gideon/harrow and not gideon/dulcinea. that's what i'm given to understand. no one else is melting at gideon saying very genuinely "i don't want you to die". no one else is really really smitten with dulcinea and practically swoons when she talks

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"Hearthfire" belongs to a larger thing???

I wish I had studied music growing up bc I have always been so enamored by music and musicals, how you can evoke emotions with sound alone, but I thought it was a talent that you were born with, not something you earned.

So when I started playing guitar and I didn’t become fantastic at it overnight, or when I started auditioning for musicals in high school and never got casted as anything but chorus, I simply assumed that I didn’t have the gift, and that music was something that would always remain mystical and unknowable to me.

It’s not too late to start, I know, but still.

It feels like we are entering a golden age of musicals, and I wish I had the history and knowledge to contribute to that somehow.

In some alternate universe, I am writing a musical about Norse mythology, specifically about the friendship and subsequent fallout between Odin and Loki, as though it were a Shakespearean tragedy between feuding families… mainly told through the POV of Odin and Loki’s respective children.

The first act would be like a big family reunion, with Loki recanting stories of things he’s done to help Odin out with this and that, with Odin cheering him on and his children getting increasing exasperated with Loki’s antics. Possibly including a scene where Loki cuts Sif’s hair super short and wears it as a wig in the following scene, because she mentioned wanting a trim, and Loki wanted to know what he’d look like as a blonde. And act 1 would end with Loki’s children with Angrboda being introduced into the mix.

And the second act would incorporate the prophesy that foretells doom, and Odin’s sons attempting to avert tragedy by imprisoning Loki’s children, thereby accidentally fulfilling the prophecy they sought to avoid by invoking Loki’s wrath.

Also Sigyn, Angrboda, and Loki lowkey having throuple energy.

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okay i have to show everyone my favorite tiktok.

you don’t understand. i could recite this from memory.

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Happy Pride everyone, today is the tenth anniversary of the nationwide right to gay Marriage in the United States and the 22nd anniversary of nationwide legalization of Gay Sex. In 2 days is the 56th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

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The Onion dispels the common myths surrounding autism.

MYTH: Autism is caused by vaccines.

FACT: There is no scientific evidence that the microchips inside vaccines are linked to autism.

MYTH: All autistic people are good at math.

FACT: All autistic people are good at Wave Race 64.

MYTH: Bad parenting causes autism.

FACT: Bad parenting causes people to believe that bad parenting causes autism.

MYTH: Only boys can be autistic.

FACT: Girls were given access to the spectrum in 1983.

MYTH: There weren’t autistic people in the past.

FACT: Who do you think categorized all the bugs?

MYTH: All autistic people have a special skill.

FACT: Autistic people are often just as useless as the rest of us.

MYTH: Autistic people will use martial arts to kill my family.

FACT: The Accountant and The Accountant 2 are works of fiction.

MYTH: Some people with autism may never work.

FACT: That’s awesome, good for them.

MYTH: You should have been much, much nicer to your classmates with autism growing up.

FACT: This one checks out, actually

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Idiotic hot take of mine:

Children should be introduced to computers via the command line only.

No smartphones. No iPad babies. We use BASH in this household.

Pros:

- Children have to actually learn how a computer works in order to use it.

- No dark design patterns. No hyperoptimized attention vortex in your pocket.

- Your 7 year old can brag to the other kids on the playground that they use Arch btw.

- Easier to sandbox into a VM to prevent installation of malware.

- Can use FreeDOS to raise them with an understanding of legacy systems.

- By the time they figure out how to connect to the internet they will be ready for it.

Cons:

- sudo rm -rf

[hybridzizi]

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe has a lovely metaphor near the end that goes

Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.

I recently went to an event where people wrote songs inspired by this book and like half of the songs referenced this specific passage because it was just so resonant and beautiful