tanyalokot

[tanyalokot]

I wish I could make every 12-13 year old read The Left Hand of Darkness.

As Mr Gaiman says, her depiction of gender on the world she created, it’s mind-blowing to young brains.  It is a whole new idea.

And then listen to her: She was 85 I think when she got this award.  And she’s still ready to take down capitalism.

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We’re not even in the US, but my Irish university and my department community is joining in the action (Ireland is doing Strike for Repeal on March 8, so it all adds to the overall effort). We’ve had conversations about how some people (permanent staff) are in less precarious positions than others (PhD students, temp staff, part-timers), so we thought it was good to give people options. Our ideas so far have included: teaching, but shifting the topic of your class that day to reflect women’s issues and women’s rights; doing a teach-in on the topic; putting an out-of-office auto-reply on your email explaining that you’re not answering today and here’s why, etc. We realise not everyone can walk out, and many people also feel like they want to do something constructive to engage students and generate conversation and visibility for women’s rights. So I agree that it’s ok to do what you can, and pick other options when striking/walking out is not one you can afford.

The next huge women’s protest has been scheduled for March 8. Mark your calendars and get ready to be loud about it

The organizers of the Women’s March are planning a general strike — A Day Without A Woman — on March 8, which is International Women’s Day. They made the announcement on Twitter and Instagram yesterday, hashtagging it #DayWithoutAWoman and #WomensMarch. Here’s what’s involved.

[tanyalokot]

obligatory festive season reblog

guys my humorless architect parents laughed at a meme for the first time today

damn i feel like the proud parent

[tanyalokot]

We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.

Tom Stoppard

[tanyalokot]

When you don't know anything about linguistics: The plural of "memorandum" is "memoranda", why can't people get it right

When you know a little about linguistics: The plural of "memorandum" should just be "memorandums" because that's how people naturally say it, "memoranda" is just prescriptivism

When you know a lot about linguistics: Oh my god? So certain English words borrowed from Latin and Greek have competing plural forms, with one form using the English plural -s and the other using a borrowed Latin or Greek form? Do you realize how crazy that is - a language borrowing *inflectional morphology* from another language? And here the two competing plural forms have become markers of education, expertise, and social class, isn't that incredible?

When you have a degree in linguistics and dgaf anymore: memorandibles

[tanyalokot]

A cartoon I made for the Guardian a while back.

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A recent cartoon for New Scientist.

p.s. you can now follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tomgauld/

[tanyalokot]

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

deleuze, negotiations, 129, qtd. in porpentine’s “hot allostatic load” (via pussy-strut)

This improves on and falls in line with a brief essay I read recently – I’m not going to link it because I didn’t agree with a lot of it (also it was very Jesus-y) but the upshot of it was that silence can be resistance. Obviously in political/protest terms this is almost never the case, speaking out and being heard and insisting on being heard is important. But as a response in the workplace, to a culture that requires us to be valued on what we produce, refusing to produce sound can be considered resisting toxic social forces. (Though I realise as a white dude this is a lot less complicated for me than for people who are constantly silenced in the workplace anyway.) 

Whenever I go into a meeting at work now I remind myself that silence is resistance, and it’s both helped me not to resent some of the people at work who are unkind to me so much and also created a situation where I feel like I have more power, whether or not that’s really the case. When I’m faced with hostility at work and want a way to subtly resist without fucking myself over and losing my job, silence has become my #1 weapon. It’s been shockingly effective. 

(via copperbadge)

[tanyalokot]

A great read.

This is an exceptional interview piece on academic writing and prose style with transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey. Lots of good recommendations for reading and a very interesting discussion of how age impacts academic writing, plus some sidebar musings on prose and gender.

[tanyalokot]

Men in Burkina Faso cosplay in traditional clothing

Photos by Alexandre Eudier

WΛW | Like : Tweet : Pin : Blog

#WeAreWakanda  

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Midnight Radio. Written by Ehud Lavski. Art by Yael Nathan. If you like it, please share.

Contact: elavski@gmail.com

[tanyalokot]

The OTW is recruiting Support staff and Translation volunteers. Translation really needs volunteers who speak Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Korean, Norwegian, Slovenian, Turkish and Vietnamese—but help with other languages would be much appreciated. Read on if you’re interested; otherwise, please signal-boost!

[tanyalokot]

David Bowie, ★

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Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays by a nice Yule Fire!

[tanyalokot]

OMG so excited this is finally happening

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. 

This is a bad land for g o d s.

[tanyalokot]

Amazing.

SMELLER is a genuine organ, an olfactokinetic art device for composing, producing, interpreting, programming, recording, storing and playing back compositions made up of scents and scent chords.

A scent organ for olfactory storytelling.