#'15 Uprising

[scotianostra]

23rd February 1716 saw Lady Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale, help her husband William escape from the Tower of London.

This is a great tale of a brave woman putting her own life on the line to help her husband escape.

Winifred Herbert was the daughter of William Herbert, 1st Marquess of Powis. Her parents accompanied James VII into exile in 1688 and her mother became governess of the young James Francis Edward Stuart, later to be known as the "Old Pretender". Winifred herself became a lady-in-waiting at the Jacobite Royal Court. On 2 March 1699, at the age of 27, she married William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, a member of a Scottish Catholic family.

The family returned home to Scotland in 1699 an settled back into life at their home at Terregles Castle near Dumfries. Maxwell worked hard to dispel suspicions of him in Scotland because of his Catholicism and his links with the Jacobites. However, he did come out in support of the Jacobites in the 1715 Uprising, and joined with the Northumbrian Jacobites under General Thomas Forster at Hexham. He was captured with other Jacobites at Preston and sent to the Tower of London. He was subsequently found guilt of treason the sentence was death and was to be carried out on February 24th 1716.

Winifred travelled to London to ask George I for clemency, but none was forthcoming. On the night of 23 February, the eve of the date set for her husband's execution, Winifred her maid, and two friends visited William at the Tower of London. Winifred distributed a generous amount of drinking money to the guards, and the women proceeded to come and go from William's cell, mingling with the wives of the guards and generally raising confusion about who was in the cell and who was not. Meanwhile, Winifred shaved William's beard and dressed him in spare women's clothing brought in for the purpose, including what has since become known as the "Nithsdale Cloak". William was then led from the Tower disguised as a woman by Winifred's maid, Evans, while Winifred herself covered the escape by carrying on a loud conversation with her - now departed - husband in an otherwise empty cell, before making good her own escape.

Winifred and William hid in London until he could be smuggled to France disguised as a servant of the Venetian Ambassador. Winifred herself then rode to Traquair House in Scotland to retrieve a number of family papers and arrange for their property to be cared for. She then, despite a huge search for her and her husband, returned to London, and traveled to the Continent. She eventually rejoined her husband at the exiled court of James Francis Edward Stuart in Rome. Winifred later became governess to Henry Benedict Stuart, the younger brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie

[globin--goblin]

Kid Icarus got Viridi's character absolutely right because ecoterrorism is EXACTLY how an 8-year-old girl would act if she had the powers of a god

[dovahcourts]

Entropy Zero Uprising OCs, I have a couple more but it's just these two for now

No name yet other than the one with the head trauma being named Silver-20 and the other being Condor-15

How did Silver-20 get the head trauma? A loose brick fell onto their head,

[knightofthegarden]

It is friendship and farming time once again!!

Join me and @wildflowersthebunny as we finally journey to the Elven village of Nel'Vari, where MY FAVORITE BOY awaits! I am so excited to be obnoxious about him on stream, with all of you!

Catch my stream here!

Catch Wildflower's stream here!

[pa-pa-plasma]

WHEN was anybody gonna tell me they made an OPPORTUNITY ROVER DOCUMENTARY

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the NYPD defeated bodycams

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.

Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.

Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops' interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers' claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.

Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of "a few bad apples." As the saying goes, "a few bad apples spoil the bushel." If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?

Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership don't want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.

What if?

In "How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras," Propublica's Eric Umansky and Umar Farooq deliver a characteristically thorough, deep, and fascinating account of the failure of NYPD bodycams to create the accountability that New York's political and police leadership promised:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras

Topline: NYPD's bodycam rollout was sabotaged by police leadership and top NYC politicians. Rather than turning over bodycam footage to oversight boards following violent incidents, the NYPD suppresses it. When overseers are allowed to see the footage, they get fragmentary access. When those fragments reveal misconduct, they are forbidden to speak of it. When the revealed misconduct is separate from the main incident, it can't be used to discipline officers. When footage is made available to the public, it is selectively edited to omit evidence of misconduct.

NYPD policy contains loopholes that allow them to withhold footage. Where those loopholes don't apply, the NYPD routinely suppresses footage anyway, violating its own policies. When the NYPD violates its policies, it faces no consequences. When overseers complain, they are fired.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that's exactly what will happen. There is nothing about bodycams that makes them more resistant to capture than dashcams, tasers or pepper spray.

This is a problem across multiple police departments. Minneapolis, for example, has policies from before and after the George Floyd uprisings that require bodycam disclosure, and those policies are routinely flouted. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd's murderer, was a repeat offender and had been caught on bodycam kneeling on other Black peoples' necks. Chauvin once clubbed a 14 year old child into unconsciousness and then knelt on his neck for 15 minutes as his mother begged for her child's life. Chauvin faced no discipline for this and the footage was suppressed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, it took five years of hard wrangling to get access to bodycam footage after an officer sicced his attack dog on an unarmed Black man without warning. The dog severed the man's femoral artery and he died. Montgomery PD suppressed the footage, citing the risk of officers facing "embarrassment."

In Memphis, the notoriously racist police department was able to suppress bodycam disclosures until the murder of Tyre Nichols. The behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death are a testament to their belief in their own impunity. Some officers illegally switched off their cameras; others participated in the beating in full view of the cameras, fearing no consequences.

In South Carolina, the police murder of Walter Scott was captured on a bystander's phone camera. That footage made it clear that Scott's uniformed killers lied, prompting then-governor Nikki Haley to sign a law giving the public access to bodycam footage. But the law contained a glaring loophole: it made bodycam footage "not a public record subject to disclosure." Nothing changed.

Bodycam footage does often reveal that killer cops lie about their actions. When a Cincinnati cop killed a Black man during a 2015 traffic-stop, his bodycam footage revealed that the officer lied about his victim "lunging at him" before he shot. Last summer, a Philadelphia cop was caught lying about the circumstances that led to him murdering a member of the public. Again, the officer claimed the man had "lunged at him." The cop's camera showed the man sitting peacefully in his own car.

Police departments across the country struggle with violent, lying officers, but few can rival the NYPD for corruption, violence, scale and impunity. The NYPD has its own "goon squad," the Strategic Response Group, whose leaked manual reveals how the secret unit spends about $100m/year training and deploying ultraviolent, illegal tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

The NYPD's disciplinary records – published despite a panicked scramble to suppress them – reveal the NYPD's infestation with criminal cops who repeatedly break the law in meting out violence against the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These cops are the proverbial bad apples, and they do indeed spoil the barrel. A 2019 empirical analysis of police disciplinary records show that corruption is contagious: when crooked cops are paired with partners who have clean disciplinary records, those partners become crooked, too, and the effect lasts even after the partnership ends:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119879798

Despite the risk of harboring criminals in police ranks, the NYPD goes to extreme lengths to keep its worst officers on the street. New York City's police "union"'s deal with the city requires NYC to divert millions to a (once) secret slushfund used to pay high-priced lawyers to defend cops whose conduct is so egregious that the city's own attorneys refuse to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

This is a good place for your periodic reminder that police unions are not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity

Indeed, despite rhetoric to the contrary, policing is a relatively safe occupation, with death rates well below the risks to roofers, loggers, or pizza delivery drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

The biggest risk to police officers – the single factor that significantly increased death rates among cops – is police unions themselves. Police unions successfully pressured cities across American to reject covid risk mitigation, from masking to vaccinations, leading to a wave of police deaths. "Suicide by cop" is very rare, but US officers committed "mass suicide by cop union":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html

But the story that policing is much more dangerous than it really is a useful one. It has a business-model. Military contractors who turn local Barney Fifes into Judge Dredd cosplayers with assault rifles, tanks and other "excess" military gear make billions from the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#1033-1022

It's not just beltway bandits who love this story. For cops to be shielded from consequences for murdering the public, they need to tell themselves and the rest of us that they are a "thin blue line," and not mere armed bureaucrats. The myth that cops are in constant danger from the public justifies hair-trigger killings.

Consider the use of "civilian" to describe the public. Police are civilians. The only kind of police officer who isn't a civilian is a military policeman. Places where "civilians" interact with non-civilian law enforcement are, by definition, under military occupation. Calling the public "civilians" is a cheap rhetorical trick that converts a police officer to a patrolling soldier in hostile territory. Calling us "civilians" justifies killing us, because if we're civilians, then they are soldiers and we are at war.

The NYPD clearly conceives of itself as an occupying force and considers its "civilian" oversight to be the enemy. When New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board gained independence in 1993, thousands of off-duty cops joined Rudy Giuliani in a mass protest at City Hall and an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. This mass freakout is a measure of police intolerance for oversight – after all, the CCRB isn't even allowed to discipline officers, only make (routinely ignored) recommendations.

Kerry Sweet was the NYPD lawyer who oversaw the department's bodycam rollout. He once joked that the NYPD missed a chance to "bomb the room" where the NYPD's CCRB was meeting (when Propublica asked him to confirm this, he said he couldn't remember those remarks, but "on reflection, it should have been an airstrike").

Obvious defects in the NYPD's bodycam policy go beyond the ability to suppress disclosure of the footage. The department has no official tracking system for its bodycam files. They aren't geotagged, only marked by officer badge-number and name. So if a member of the public comes forward to complain that an unknown officer committed a crime at a specific place and time, there's no way to retrieve that footage. Even where footage can be found, the NYPD often hides the ball: in 20% of cases where the Department told the CCRB footage didn't exist, they were lying.

Figuring out how to make bodycam footage work better is complex, but there are some obvious first steps. Other cities have no problem geotagging their footage. In Chicago, the CCRB can directly access the servers where bodycam footage is stored (when the NYPD CCRB members proposed this, they were fired).

Meanwhile, the NYPD keeps protecting its killers. The Propublica story opens with the police killing of Miguel Richards. Richards' parents hadn't heard from him in a while, so they asked his Bronx landlord to check on him (the Richards live in Jamaica). The landlord called the cops. The cops killed Richards.

The cops claimed he had a gun and they were acting in self-defense. They released a highly edited reel of bodycam footage to support that claim. When the full video was eventually extracted, it revealed that Richards had a tiny plastic toy guy and a small folding knife. The officers involved believed he was suffering an acute mental health incident and stated that policy demanded that they close his bedroom door and wait for specialists. Instead, they barked orders at him and then fired 16 rounds at him. Seven hit him. One ruptured his aorta. As he lay dying on his bedroom floor, one officer roughly tossed him around and cuffed him. He died.

New York's Police Benevolent Association – the largest police "union" in NYC – awarded the officers involved its "Finest of the Finest" prize for their conduct in the killing.

This isn't an isolated incident. A month after the NYPD decided not to punish the cops who killed Richards, NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx apartment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

The officers lied about it, suppressed release of the bodycam footage that would reveal their lies, and then escaped any justice when the footage and the lies were revealed.

None of this means that bodycams are useless. It just means that bodycams will only help bring accountability to police forces when they are directed by parties who have the will and power to make the police accountable.

When police leaders and city governments support police corruption, adding bodycams won't change that fact.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Tony Webster, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_Police_Officer_Body_Camera_%2848968390892%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[survivingcapitalism]

Reminds me of how the British blamed the Acadians for the Mi'kmaq resistance.

The crackdown on campuses offered a grim continuity: Police and other officials churned out all the same old excuses for quashing resistance. Most notably, their rhetoric relied on the predictable canard of the “outside agitator.” New York Mayor Eric Adams trotted it out as grounds for sending in an army of baton-wielding cops against the city’s students. And Deputy Police Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went even further on MSNBC Wednesday morning, brandishing an unremarkable chain lock — the sort of which I’ve seen on bikes everywhere — as proof that “professionals,” not students themselves, had carried out the takeover of the Columbia building. The bike-lock business quickly came in for rightly deserved mockery, but the “outside agitator” myth is no joking matter. In this current moment, the “outside agitators” conjured are both the perennial anarchist bogeymen or Islamist terror groups sending funds to keep student encampments flush with the cheapest tents available online. The “outside agitator” trope has a long, racist legacy, including use by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama claiming that “paid organizers for the communists are only trying” to get Black people “in trouble.” The allegation does double rhetorical harm by denying the agency and commitment of organizers themselves and suggesting that “outside” support from beyond a given locale or institution is somehow a bad thing. More recently, the canard has been hauled out in defense of movement repression in Atlanta, against Stop Cop City protesters who had made a national call for backup. And it was a common refrain for politicians nationwide during the 2020 uprising, as well as discourse around the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson after police killed Mike Brown. Blaming outside agitators or interests always was a propaganda ploy and remains so now. The idea that Palestinian liberation struggle is a mere proxy for Iranian interests repeats the delegitimizing logic of the past. In fact, the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses are student-organized and led, with Palestinian students at front and center, and a disproportionately large presence of Jewish students too. It is students, over 1,000 of them, who have faced arrest. It also happens that millions of people have called for an end to Israel’s genocidal war, and support for Palestinian liberation is not and must not be limited to the mythic and maligned terrain of campus activism.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Defend the Haitian people's uprising! Stop U.S./U.N. intervention!

Washington Post, 10/15: U.S. backs sending international forces to Haiti, draft proposal says

A draft U.N. resolution, citing instability and violence in Haiti, suggests the Biden administration may be willing to participate in a multinational mission that has a military component

[chaoticace2005]

You guys asked for it…

Why Lilith might have left Lucifer:

1. She lost interest. Simple at that. 10,000 years of the same routine…

2. She found out where Eve was and ran to her long lost love.

3. A deal was made with Alastor and she had to flee for her nefarious plans.

4a. Lucifer was bad in bed.

4b. He wouldn’t let her take off his hat while having sex.

5. Lucifer was good in bed and she was getting addicted, so for her own sake she left.

6. She had to get milk.

7. She took a look at hell after all her years of working, saw how fucked up humans are and said “nah.”

8. Donald Trump became president so she fled the country but forgot to take her family with her.

9. She could no longer deal with Lucifer’s ~autistic swag~

10. She got a coupon for an expense-paid trip to the Bahamas.

11. Lucifer wasn’t doing the DAMN DISHES.

12. Lucifer kept asking her to “quack” in bed.

13. There weren’t any good marriage counselors in hell. So she read drama books to fix her marriage and thought this was the best solution.

14. Lucifer got a sleep apnea machine and she couldn’t handle it anymore.

15. She bonked her head and completely forgot who she was. That’s why she scowls when Lute says “Lilith” at the end- because she has no idea who “Lilith” is.

16. Seven years ago Alastor killed Lilith. To cover his tracks he put on a wig and visibly left the cast as “her.”

17. SOMEBODY wasn’t putting the damn seat down. Do you think they have to deal with this in Heaven?

18. There was a silent uprising and assassination plot. She dealt with it all while Charlie and Lucifer remained oblivious, but is now being hunted.

19. Faked her death. Lucifer is somehow unaware that his wife even “died.”

20. Niffty blackmailed her into leaving.

21. They ran out of blond dye at the Hellmart and she couldn’t handle being the only one in the family without blond hair.

22. She felt the need to leave her family, build a luxurious pirate ship, hire random pirates, and sail the seas until she had a homoerotic relationship with a competing pirate and retired.

23. She too borrowed 50 grand from loan sharks, stole a car, and crashed it into a loan shark’s girlfriend (but that bitch had it coming!)

24. She went down in an airplane.

25. Fried getting suntanned.

26. Fell in a cement mixer full of quicksand.

27. Her feather allergy kept getting worse and she had to leave for her health.

28. Lucifer kept saying he was “magic in bed” and then would do magic tricks despite being a LITERAL ANGEL.

29. Susan.

30. Committed tax fraud and had to flee the country.

31. She was going to get bottom surgery after Lucifer’s top surgery and is still recovering. (Hell doctors SUCK okay??)

32. Lucifer wouldn’t admit that water is wet.

33. Lucifer was putting ketchup on his pancakes.

34. Lucifer wasn’t vibing with her BFF-girlboss-malewife-bestie Alastor. She couldn’t deal with the ~drama~

35. He wouldn’t stop talking about his Fantasy Sports team.

36. Needed to find some artistic inspiration because the whole “I’m in hell” thing is SO overdone.

37. Not a fan of the circus or clowns.

38. Mental health break. She’ll come back when she’s ready. Sometimes it takes a while.

39. She was KIDNAPPED.

40. Lilith is dead. That’s not Lilith. That’s a shadow version of Lilith made by Alastor who works for her killer (Eve?) That’s why she wears sunglasses. So we can’t see her eyes and the empty void behind them.

[scotianostra]

February 24th 1716 saw the execution of two leading Jacobites, William Gordon, 6th Viscount of Kenmure and James Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, but not William Maxwell! 

If you remember yesterdays post William had escaped the day before, with the help of his wife  Lady Winifred.

The 1715 Uprising Jacobites threw themselves upon the mercy of Westminster, and were sentenced to death by the Lord Chancellor William Cowper. Only half managed to wrangle mercy from the crown.

Derwent spent part of his youth in exile as the companion of the young James VIII at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He received permission to return to England in 1709 and quickly established himself as the leader of the Jacobites in Northumberland.

Following his capture at Preston and execution in London he became a tragic hero of songs and ballads. He may have been an Englishman but if the Corries thought him worthy of a song that’s good enough for me.

His partner at the chop, Lord Kenmure, was a Scottish Jacobite. William Gordon was the only son of Alexander Gordon, 5th Viscount of Kenmure of Kenmure Castle and succeeded his father on his death in 1698. He had received a commission from the earl of Mar to raise the Jacobites in the south of Scotland, and first appeared in arms, at the head of 150 horse, on the 11th October, at Moffat, where he proclaimed King James VIII as King. With a Jacobite force he marched into England, and was present at the battle of Preston in Lancashire, on 13th November of the same year.

On the defeat of the rebels and their surrender at discretion, he was conveyed a prisoner to the Tower of London. His trial for high treason took place before the House of Lords on 19th January 1716, when he pleaded guilty, and on 9th February, with the other rebel lords he received sentence of death, and his estates and titles were forfeited to the crown.

On the morning of the 24th February, he was beheaded on Towerhill shortly after Derwent. He expressed his regret for pleading guilty to the charge of high treason, and prayed for “King James.” He presented the executioner with eight guineas, and on laying his head on the block, that “functionary struck it off at two blows.” Not to be outdone by Derwent he also made the folk playlist in O Kenmure’s On And Awa , Willie.

The Corries, tell the story in the song Derwentwater’s Farewell 

Farewell to pleasant Dilston My father's ancient seat A stranger must now call thee his Which gars my heart to greet; Farewell each friendly well known face My heart has held so dear My tenants now must leave their lands Or hold their lives in fear No more along the banks of Tyne I'll rove in autumn grey No more I'll hear at early dawn The lav'rocks wake the day; And who shall deck the hawthorn bower Where my fond children strayed? And who, when spring shall bid it flower Shall sit beneath the shade? And fare thee well, George Collingwood Since fate has put us down If thou and I have lost our lives Our King has lost his crown; But when the head that wears the crown Shall be laid low like mine Some honest hearts may then lament For Radcliffe's fallen line Farewell, farewell, my lady dear Ill, ill, thou councell'dst me I never more may see the babe That smiles at your knee; Then fare ye well brave Widdrington And Foster ever true; Dear Shaftsbury and Errington Receive my last adieu And fare thee well my bonny grey steed That carried me aye so free I wish I'd been asleep in my bed Last time I mounted thee; The warning bell now bids me cease My trouble's nearly oer Yon sun that rises from the sea Shall rise on me no more

And when the head that wears a crown Shall be laid low like mine Some honest hearts may then lament For Radcliffe's fallen line Farewell to pleasant Dilston hall My father's ancient seat A stranger now must call thee his Which gars my heart to greet

[zvaigzdelasas]

Burkina Faso's transitional government decided on Wednesday to elevate former president and father of the Burkinabe revolution Thomas Sankara, killed on 15 October 1987 in a putsch, to the rank of "hero of the nation". "The Council (of Ministers) adopted a decree recognising the late Captain Isidore Thomas Noël Sankara as a hero of the nation", the minutes said, transmitted to AFP. "The consecration of the status of hero of the nation" to Thomas Sankara "aims to perpetuate the cardinal values on which the Republic is founded", the government explained.[...]

The status of "hero of the nation" was created in June 2022 to honour people who have distinguished themselves by their "exceptional bravery in the defence of a national cause", or their "exceptional and honourable prowess for the nation". After Mr Sankara's death, Blaise Compaoré remained in power until a popular uprising led to his downfall in 2014. In April 2022, after a six-month trial, the military court in Ouagadougou sentenced Mr Compaoré, who lives in Côte d'Ivoire, in absentia to life imprisonment for his role in the assassination of Thomas Sankara. [...]

A "national and international ceremony to pay tribute to the victims will be organised on 15 October 2023 to honour their memory", according to the government. The transitional president, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, has regularly paid tribute to Thomas Sankara since coming to power in a coup on 30 September 2022.

5 Oct 23

[dovahcourts]

Condor-15, Vulture-40 and Silver-20

[garadinervi]

Carrie Crawford (Mineral Workshop), Cloud Work, (indigo, acorn, oak gall, logwood, iron, cotton, and linen), 2023 [Uprise Art, New York, NY. © Carrie Crawford]

Exhibition: Contexture. Laura Berman, Carrie Crawford & Gail Tarantino, Uprise Art, New York, NY, January 15 – March 15, 2024

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

Youtube Essays Shill Post

I'm getting close to 1000 subscribers so I'm gonna make a shill post for my channel. I make videos on independent RPGs (no D&D/Pathfinder etc), highlighting narrative moves, the intersection of mechanics and themes, and analyzing them in parallel with books, movies, and game theory. I've had a really great crop of essays this year, and I bet at least one of them will do it for you:

###

Spire RPG & Babel: The Monstrosity of Empire, the Necessity of Violence (52 min)

I read Spire: The City Must Fall in parallel with RF Kuang's Babel: An Arcane History, and try to make the connection between Spire's worldbuilding and the British Empire's historical methods of extracting labor and resources from its colonized subjects. I'm especially proud of how I work through the ways in which Spire's Drow are treated as commodities, emulating how Britain's most valuable resource was human beings, and discuss why there's not an alternative available to the Drow except for violent uprising.

Heart RPG, Annihilation, and Sangfielle: Brainworms all the Way Down (38 min)

I follow the themes of compulsion, infection, and dissemination of a supernatural intelligence that I found both in Heart : The City Beneath and in Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. It's kind of gross, but if you like reading about parasites, strange urges, and transformations that destroy the self, you'll probably be into this. I also make a few references to Friends at the Table's Sangfielle season, if you're a FATT fan.

Apocalypse Keys and Desperation to Belong (15 min)

Apocalypse Keys is a really interesting game, but it's also the most emotional game I read this year? It's all about heartbreak, longing, and trying to hold on to the people you love, even though you know you'll lose them in the end. The essay is also very much tied up in my feelings on diaspora, faith, and what it's like to be excluded, except for the home you make for yourself. It's also like, undeniably queer in a way I think a lot of folks will relate to.

The Endings of Hellwhalers and the Fewness of the Saved (28 min)

Okay I actually talk about being an ex-Catholic a lot, but this is my most explicitly religiously-inspired essay. I compare the text of Hellwhalers and its interpretations of Christian hell to the actual Catholic doctrines of hell, including the sermon that eventually made me break away from the Church altogether. If you like whales and religious trauma, please check this out.

###

Please consider taking a look at my channel! I hate having to beg for viewers, but there's just no other way to build an audience, and I'm really proud of the work I've done this year!

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Last summer, anti-drought actions multiplied. This summer, activists will act with even more fearlessness and creativity: cutting off hoarders’ water supplies, putting golf courses out of action, dismantling megabasins, squatting the swimming pools of the ultra-rich and the air-conditioned offices of their insurers, banging saucepans outside pool manufacturers offices, building beaver dams to revive our rivers and their banks. Our inventiveness must have no limits.” This kind of activist communique follows two years of unseasonable drought across France. As of 30 June, 42 of France’s 96 mainland départements (administrative divisions) contain at least one area with water restrictions. 15 of these 42 are officially in crisis, meaning water usage is restricted to priority functions: health, civil security, drinking water and sanitation. It’s no surprise, then, that French climate groups are escalating their tactics in the fight over water. In August last year during water restrictions in Vosges in eastern France, activists drilled holes in jacuzzis at a holiday resort. Over the winter, others sabotaged artificial snow canons at Clusaz, south-eastern France, while others set up a ZAD (autonomous zone) in the area, citing the winter drought as their motivation.  The most contentious of these groups is Les Soulèvements de La Terre, or ‘Earth Uprising’, which is currently waging 100 days of action against “water hoarders” across the country. In response, the French state is cracking down on so-called eco-terrorism – and hard.

[...]

Earth Uprising doesn’t use the word sabotage to describe its militant action. In French jurisprudence, sabotage denotes an attack on infrastructure that’s vital to the “fundamental interests of the nation”, Basile explains. “A cement production site or a megabasin is the opposite – it’s private infrastructure which puts the possibility of a living future on the earth in peril.” Instead, activists prefer the term “disarmament”. Victor Cachard, author of A History of Sabotage, adds that this term is also a reference to the actions of the ecological movement in the US against the industries building weapons for the Vietnam War and later the Gulf War. “There was the idea among ecological activists to join their environmental struggle with their anti-war struggle, as they recognised that war pollutes,” he says.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 24 June 1973, an arsonist ignited a fire that engulfed the LGBT+ bar called the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans, killing 32 people and injuring 15. The fire was the deadliest attack on a gay bar in American history prior to the 2016 Pulse Nightclub Massacre. In a city where LGBT+ culture was largely hidden, the Up Stairs Lounge was one of the few establishments catering to the gay community and one of the only gay bars that welcomed Black men and lesbians. On the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, patrons assembled at the bar for the weekly beer bust. Sixty-five people remained when Bartender Buddy Rasmussen heard the doorbell ring and asked friend Luther Boggs to answer it. As Luther opened the door, flames rushed into the lounge. Buddy led 20 survivors onto the roof of a nearby building while others unsuccessfully attempted to escape through barred windows. The fire department arrived at 7:58 and extinguished the fire quickly, but the powerful flames had already overpowered many patrons. Among the victims were 12 members of Metropolitan Community Church, the first church serving LGBT+ individuals. They included Rev. William "Bill" Larson, associate pastor Duane "Mitch" Mitchell, and Mitch's boyfriend Horace Broussard. Unlike other tragedies, the Up Stairs fire did not amass community support. Although newspapers reported the fire, journalists enflamed anti-gay sentiment by perpetuating vulgar rhetoric and harmful stereotypes. Articles painted the victims as "thieves, burglars, and queers," while other reports named the tragedy a "fruit fry." Eyewitnesses told author Johnny Townsend that they overheard either police or firefighters saying: "Let the f*****s burn". No formal memorials were planned, and churches refused to provide services. This reaction galvanised the New Orleans' LGBT+ community to organise for gay rights as they mourned those who died in the tragic fire. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=649971757176043&set=a.602588028581083&type=3