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anyway, Medea did nothing wrong

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men love to make fun of women for overreacting in emergencies when they are, in fact, massively under-reacting

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MY EX’S BROTHER KILLED HIMSELF THREE WEEKS AGO and saying “my ex’s brother” is kind of shitty of me i think. but i also can’t say “my friend” because we weren’t friends, and i can’t say “my friend’s brother” because now that we’re exes we’re not really friends, and also there’s a difference between “friends” and “grew up in the church together” and that’s a lot to say to someone who doesn’t have the whole picture. but it’s better to include “ex” in there somewhere, because when people hear “ex” they like to assign some bitterness to it, and it’s kind of refreshing to hear “do not meet him for coffee who cares if he’s grieving he’s an ex for a reason” instead of the run-of-the-mill scrambling for something polite and respectful to say. and then when i do meet him for coffee and his hair’s grown out again to where i once told him i like it and he tells me about his next tattoo and that he’s saving up for another motorcycle and apologizes for something he barely did two years ago and tells me that he’s single again, i can joke around with my best friend about how he still wants me if his instagram likes have anything to say about it, and i don’t have to think about how tired he looks or that, like me, he hasn’t said a word about God in six years. i don’t have to sit in the church i haven’t sat in since high school and wonder if this is the funeral—sorry, celebration of life for someone who didn’t even want to be here—my ex’s brother would have wanted. i don’t have to watch the back of my ex’s head and wonder how he can stand any of this because nobody here will shut the fuck up about God. i don’t have to sit in the back of the congregation and selfishly think WHEN I DIE I HOPE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT GOD for three hours. and usually my purse is relatively neat but right now it’s stuffed full with tissues and waterproof mascara and packets of wildflower seeds and i wonder if my ex’s brother really did like planting wildflowers or if they just told us that so we’d spread them.

later that week when i spend the night at my sister’s she tells me the exchange student she brought home for thanksgiving a few years ago was in an accident. i want to apologize because ever since i was a child i’ve felt like death follows me around somehow. his instagram says he was doing what he loved and he’s with God now. i hug my sister while she cries and i think WHEN I DIE I HOPE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT GOD. in a few days i will text her at midnight because i had a dream that i don’t necessarily remember but i do remember wishing she was still alive. and i won’t tell her that but i’ll ask her what she’s wearing to the bridal shower and she’ll say the same thing she wore to the funeral because she doesn’t have anything else, and i’ll do that too since we were asked not to wear black and the blue i wore is much more suited to a happy occasion anyway. the brides will make a toast to loved ones lost while i’m wearing the same dress i wore to celebrate the life of a dead boy and my grandmother will pray to bless the union and i’ll arrange flowers and play little games with the women in my family and all i can think is WHEN I DIE I HOPE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT GOD.

whenever i tell people my cousin drowned they always ask if he’s okay and that always surprises me because i feel like the word drowned has a finality to it; it’s an end result, and if he was okay i would have said almost drowned but i didn’t. and sometimes when i talk about someone in the past tense people will say what do you mean was? is he not your uncle anymore? as if the concept of death is so far-fetched and archaic that it only happens to the elderly and the extremely unlucky and people on tv. these are the same people who keep talking about Heaven and eternal life and how death is just the beginning and nobody’s really gone and i smile politely but i want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and say fuck you. MY EX’S BROTHER KILLED HIMSELF THREE WEEKS AGO and i am drawing pictures and watching a trashy reality show when one of the contestants announces his early departure because his sister has died.

why do you write so much about death? what is everyone else writing about if not death? a few years ago i found out people think i’m obsessed with the idea of dying. i am not. i didn’t know there were people out there who have not experienced tragedy at all. i say tragedy and people think it just means loss. i am not talking about old men passing peacefully in their sleep. i am talking about a drowned fourteen year old and a fiancé whose heart suddenly gave out and a new grandfather t-boned by a drunk driver. these are too unrealistic for fiction. you write too much about death. i am not afraid of death and i’m not sure if that’s leftover from teenage suicidal tendencies or the result of years of exposure but i am afraid that i will die unexpectedly and nobody will know who to tell and so none of the right people will find out. and then the only people at my funeral will be family members who keep talking about God and Heaven and eternal life and give out packets of wildflower seeds, and i will watch from inside my casket even though i wanted to be cremated and i’ll scream EVERYONE SHUT UP ABOUT GOD until i can almost feel my throat but nobody will hear me because i am dead and no longer have a throat. my friends will keep texting me and wonder if i’m angry with them.

my ex’s brother killed himself three weeks ago. after the funeral i take a day off of work to sit in my kitchen and think WHEN I DIE I HOPE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT GOD.

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my ancestors seeing me shrug off a diarrhea session

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Also, many ‘different types’ of people using a resource like a food pantry destigmatises for others.

-deep breath-

A 'no questions asked' food pantry means no questions asked.

When we're stocking our pantry, we are not looking at a person's clothes or their accessories or what kind of car they drove there in. We are HAPPY to see it BEING USED AT ALL.

I don't know anyone's situation. Maybe they got that designer bag at a thrift shop. Maybe its a knockoff. Maybe it was a gift. Maybe they got it when they had money and now they don't have money. Maybe they're getting stuff for a friend.

Maybe they have plenty of money, don't need to be taking stuff from the pantry, but they are anyway because we said-

NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

Do you know what happens when someone takes from our pantry when they don't need it? We're down one item. But maybe they tell someone that the pantry is there. Or maybe they come back to it when they need it. Or maybe they throw a dollar in the donation box. Or maybe they put an item on the shelf. Or maybe they come to our food drive.

WE DONT CARE.

We don't care who used it.

We care that it was used.

Im not a cop. Don't make me do cop stuff, I wont do it.

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Dame Archer kicks McDougal’s Scots ass there in the rain at the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire - August 11, 2018 - Photo by Douglas Herring

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Various webrings— probably on geocities I guess.

Please participate in my research (also, if you say other, please put it in the tags/comments !)

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Embroidered Sculptures Recreate Lifelike Mushrooms, Lichen, and Fungi in Thread

by Grace Ebert - Colossal, February 25, 2022

Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.

Currently, Cobbett is preparing a collection that will head to the Artful Craft exhibition at Make Southwest, which opens on April 2.

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21, 22, 27

21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?

err a ceremonial boomerang with art of the seven sisters tjukurpa (dreaming) on it, and a recipe for Bully Beef stew so aliens know what to cook when they come visit.

22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?

I think there is a lot to be proud about in regards to Aboriginal peoples. Whether it's our astronomy, season mapping, farming practices that bent with the land rather than against it, Inventive tools, traditional stories, ceremonies, dances. etc

Recently, I've been really proud of the fact that we have a communal culture that ensures responsibility for each other. With the rise of social media, I feel like sometimes individualism is really forced down your throat. But like, no matter where you go in the world, you share the stars with every other person on earth. There's not a single part of the sky you see alone.

When you look up at it, no matter what you see, you're sharing that view with millions of other people. Thinking like that keeps me grounded. It's easy to get lost in your own thoughts, but when I realise other people are looking at the same sky as me, I feel better. It's because I come from a communal culture that I know a shared goal is possible and attainable. Anyway. I've just been grateful for that kind of mentality.

What doesn't make me proud is definitely Jacinta Price that dog. (for those who don't know she's an anti-black politician that has voted against her own people on every occasion. Her mother Bess Price, was a very loud political spokesperson for the NT Intervention so I have a personal grudge against her family based on that.)

27. favourite national celebrity?

oooooh it's too difficult to pick one.

Baarka - the artist (music) has spoken out against racism, misogyny and police brutality in her songs. It's not often that an Aboriginal woman is given a platform to be political, but she got very popular with mainstream audiences which gives her voice a lot of weight.

Patty Mills - a NBA Basketball Player who has used his platform to speak out against racism and deaths in custody, he also supplied a community with clean drinking water.

Cathy Freeman - She became a gold medalist for sprinting at 16 years old and was noted for running with the Aboriginal flag (Which a lot of people was mad about) She was one of the very first Aboriginal people I saw on television.

There's more but many of them are deceased activists so I'll leave that for another post.

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“hi, I’m not from the US” ask set

given how Americanised this site is, it’s important to celebrate all our countries and nationalities - with all their quirks and vices and ridiculousness, and all that might seem strange to outsiders.

1. favourite place in your country?

2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad?

3. does your country have access to sea?

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

5. favourite song in your native language?

6. most hated song in your native language?

7. three words from your native language that you like the most?

8. do you get confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom?

9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best?

10. most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

11. favourite native writer/poet?

12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem?

13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?

15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?

16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with?

17. are you interested in your country’s history?

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?

19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?

20. which sport is The Sport in your country?

21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?

22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?

23. which alcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country?

24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country?

25. would you like to come from another place, be born in another country?

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?

27. favourite national celebrity?

28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites?

29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country?

30. do you have people of different nationalities in your family?

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but your honour thats my emotional support word i overuse

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Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

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/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

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i love being a 30+ woman in fandom. reblog if you also love being an old dame in fandom

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I know we talk about how John takes away the personhood of his disciples by renaming them, but - I do wonder if it isn't an inherent part of the resurrrection process. The first time he speaks Ulysses' and Titania's names out loud is also the first time he moves them. Gideon needs her soul to be reattached to her body, and she wakes up as Kiriona.

Names have power. We know this. John has been careful not to spill a single drop of blood in the last myriad. He has also, crucially, changed his last name. Arithmonyms are as unique to their bearers as their first names. The lyctors keep their first anmes private from an anyone but each other, and have all but forgotten their last names. The mere mention of the name Alecto makes John flinch, and Nona shatters her middle thoughts.

Abigail for my mothers. Pent for my people. Step two: analyse the soul. Understand its structure, its shape. Three syllables you did not even understand.

And Isis said unto Ra, "O my divine father, tell me thy name, for he who is able to pronounce his name liveth."

I wonder if Pyrrha remembers John's old name.

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Need you guys to know I am soooo anti generative AI. In case that wasn't clear. It's bad for the environment, unethical, theft, and will never be as freaky as me. It is inferior in every way