The first episode of my podcast The World on a WIre Show, titled “Beautiful numbers, magic numbers,” is now public! Following the show’s theme of “the social history of computers,” we begin with a half-hour crash course on how computers encode human expression as a series of numbers, and how encoding schemes and even the legality (or illegality) of numbers can impact culture.
My friend Lex got into a car accident on the way to the food bank (in the greater Seattle area) with their mom and could use some help getting the car back from the towing company. Lex’s mom is a cancer patient and that makes any logistical problem like this more complicated.
Now that’s Tumblr is taking apart even more than it already had I just want to remind you all where to find me. Different social media are useful for different things, but I found the essentially unlimited length of Tumblr posts made it difficult to disengage from unhealthy reading habits, so I initially moved to Twitter and then ended up on “the Fediverse” (specifically using a Mastodon server called todon.nl) I find the community approach to moderation and used there, and the amount of control it gives you to curate your own feed has been a lot more effective in allowing me to avoid weird stuff like “The Ace Discourse” and “Is This Ship From a Fandom You Don’t Remotely Understand Pedophilic?” Also I use this lightweight Android app for it called Tusky that’s much less of a battery & data drain than the Tumblr app tended to be.
So find me at https://todon.nl/@lunasspecto, and maybe check out the list of Mastodon servers at joinmastodon.org. There’s servers hosted by and for trans users, socialists, Pokémon fans, sex workers, academics, people who like to write without using the letter e, and furries. The software won’t be everyone’s thing, but it would be nice to see you around.
There’s a lot I miss about this place, & there are some great people here, but I’m also glad I got out when I did, for a few reasons.
xoxo
I might move most of my social media presence to Mastodon, so I’ll put my handle in my header
I keep seeing some weird symbol tagged in various places around my university’s campus and it looks kinda like this. I have no idea what it means so I’m wondering if anyone here does? Thanks.
Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy…We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.
The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors).
One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.”
Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”
Hot-wired to the movement of ’77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms.
It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.
Here’s the cover of my new book of poetry, Dead Monochrome Doggerel available now on Amazon and the Internet Archive at archive.org.
“so here we are / cutting the crap / and i promise you / i mean every word”
In a series of terse, direct poems, Dominique Cyprès guides readers through a meditation on the tensions between the unaddressed injustices of history and the untapped potential of the future, between unresolved conflicts of youth and diminishing possibilities of modern adulthood, between the inescapable fragility of life and the hope of new parenthood. Occupying a space that borders on the personal and the political, Dead Monochrome Doggerel places the poet’s life, and the contemporary social moment, along the long, murky arc of history.
Reading the book on the Internet Archive is free. If you read it, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon. The list price for the print edition is US $6. I’ll reblog this post with links.
Here’s the cover of my new book of poetry, Dead Monochrome Doggerel available now on Amazon and the Internet Archive at archive.org.
“so here we are / cutting the crap / and i promise you / i mean every word”
In a series of terse, direct poems, Dominique Cyprès guides readers through a meditation on the tensions between the unaddressed injustices of history and the untapped potential of the future, between unresolved conflicts of youth and diminishing possibilities of modern adulthood, between the inescapable fragility of life and the hope of new parenthood. Occupying a space that borders on the personal and the political, Dead Monochrome Doggerel places the poet’s life, and the contemporary social moment, along the long, murky arc of history.
Reading the book on the Internet Archive is free. If you read it, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon. The list price for the print edition is US $6. I’ll reblog this post with links.
I know I’ve been really inactive on Tumblr lately but I just self-published another book of poetry so I gotta plug it here.
I think if I put links in my post, it won’t show up in tags, so I’ll have to reblog myself to add links or whatever? I’ll give it a go.
Applying for jobs/internships
Write a résumé and show it to a specialist.
Throw your old résumé in the TRASH where it BELONGS. That template you followed is ABSOLUTE GARBAGE and that’s not how ANYONE writes a résumé anymore. Write an entirely new résumé.
Search the Appropriate Job Sites. All of them. You’ll get, like, 500 listings. Try to narrow that down to the five or so that don’t require a degree you don’t have or involve relocating to a country where your spouse is not allowed to live.
Send your résumé to as many companies as possible.
You didn’t send your résumé to enough companies. No wonder no one’s called you for an interview in the past three weeks!
Our idea of what terrorism is now has been so shaped by 9/11 that it’s really fascinating to look at it both in a more international perspective and to look at it in earlier periods. One topic I have a research interest in is the wave of far-right terrorism in the US in the 1980′s and 1990′s.
The Order assassinated a Jewish radio host and got into a shootout with feds; the Aryan Resistance Army robbed 22 banks to stockpile weapons and had connections with Timothy McVeigh; The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord set fire to a gay church, a Jewish organization, tried to bomb a gas pipeline, and then a member killed a Jewish shopkeeper and a black cop; WAR got into public brawls with protesters, harassed and in one case killed non-white immigrants, and made strings of bomb threats; the Phineas Priesthood bombed abortion clinics and robbed banks;
Eric Robert Rudolph
nail bombed abortion clinics and lesbian bars (which the Army of God took credit for) and injured over 100 people by bombing the 1996 Olympics; and on and on. No one remembers any of this. This is all completely forgotten.
Frustrating things today
My supervisor crushed his hand between some milk racks he was moving. I think the bones were probably okay? But there was some bad bruising and a lot of swelling
Campus shuttle driver was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, in September 2017, please make it go away
Career Center advisor critiqued my résumé and cover letter, but I’m still pretty much on my own in terms of finding internships and contacting the people who run them, and I am Bad at that because of Autism™, but I don’t feel like I can ask for any specialized services because I don’t have any proof that I’m autistic except that some therapists have verbally told me they think I am
“Talk to your friends to explore their industry connections!” I honestly have no idea how to do that
School-specific job board won’t let me send my résumé to companies offering internships until they’ve manually reviewed my résumé for some reason
I bought a “blondie” in a dining hall on campus on my way home and the cashier took that as an opportunity to attempt to commiserate with me about political correctness run amok (“I can’t believe they haven’t made us call them something different by now”) and I didn’t have any idea how to handle that? So I just tried to make small talk about how the word brownie is used as a loan word in Spanish
I missed the part of an email we got last week that says we need to collect Logic Design lab materials from a TA during their office hours, and the next time I can do that without taking time off work is Tuesday. Lab is due 8 days from then, so I’ll probably be okay?
Logic Design exam is happening late in the evening, and I have to either take time off work between classes and exam or accept that I won’t be home at all from 4am to 9pm
Y'all creepy motherfuckers who tracked down the author of My Immortal down had better at least buy her books. Y'all owe her that much after hunting her down as if her life is a game to you.
And please, don’t forget to sign the petition at lakotalaw.org! State-run foster care/adoption agencies kidnap 700+ Native American children from their families every year and let strangers adopt them–all for the money. Almost none of these children are being taken out of legitimately harmful homes. (Read: Removal was warranted in less than 3% of the cases.) Trust me, I only wish I were making this up. Native families have been fighting for the return of their children for years now, but if you add your voice to the outcry, the government can’t ignore us forever.
“Your dad’s Indian. Your mom’s black. Why are you white?”
Skylar St. Clair’s been getting questions like these all his life. Skylar’s home is the Nettlebush Indian Reserve; his family, the hundreds of Plains Shoshone living there. Skylar can’t help it if he better resembles his biological mother, a woman whose untimely death left him with more secrets than memories.
Skylar’s father has been in federal prison for the past fifteen years. The summer of his release coincides with familial matters of a different nature: Skylar and his husband are trying to adopt a daughter.
Piecing together a fragmented family is no small task. All the patience in the world cannot contend with thirty-three years of reticence.
Things Nick North is supposed to be: A space pirate. An awkward teenager on the verge of adulthood, newly navigating the maze of gender and sexuality. Things Nick North is not supposed to be: A psychotherapist. Escort to a pair of alien princesses. Owner of an amusement park. Captain of the entire ship.
The Suddenly Space Pirates have an unwanted stowaway in the form of Raul Ales de Foc, genocidal destroyer of universes. How the crew reacts in his time of need will ultimately test their character–and their Patience. The question remains: Can Nick steal three new pieces of treasure and still find time to hand in his summer homework?
Matteo and his brother Kalid are night walkers, two of thousands of Ugandan children who walk away from their rural homes every night to evade captivity by the Lord’s Resistance Army. The Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian army spanning the width of East and Central Africa, has been kidnapping children to fight its battles for over a decade. Worse still for Matteo and Kalid is that they are Muslims–the very enemy the LRA proposes to wipe off of the face of the planet. When Kalid contracts a debilitating fever, the boys’ parents urge Matteo to make the nightly walk on his own; the LRA wants healthy soldiers, they reason, not sickly children. Reluctantly, Matteo makes the trip to neighboring Luwero without his little brother. The following morning, Matteo returns to his village to find it raided by the LRA, his brother missing, his parents dead. Matteo quickly makes up his mind: He must join the LRA, find his little brother, and smuggle him to safety. What Matteo does not expect to discover on enemy soil are thirty thousand children who want to go home but have forgotten the way. Conflicted by their suffering, Matteo’s quest to find his brother spirals into a journey to unite thirty thousand boys and girls in a rebellion against the world’s largest and cruelest army, all while fighting Someone Else’s War.
Most of her books are under five dollars, and have a lot of non-white and queer representation. Please support this writer as she enters a new chapter in her career.
GREATEST PLOT TWIST OF 2017??!!!
There’s an Evangelion AU for everyone
Evangelion AU where Kaworu is still an angel but he and Rei command the other angels and Kaworu is Shinji’s boyfriend for keeps. Gendo runs some kinda research station on the Moon where no one has to deal with him. Rui is alive and Kaji is Shinji’s new dad. Ritsuki and Misato are dating. Asuka is pretty sure she’s going to teach high school physics and Tōji is trying out for a Paralympic basketball team and Kensuke makes really popular videos where he builds custom models of NERV equipment. NERV itself is disbanded due to an intense public investigation of SEELE, but the Eva pilots and other NERV personnel have little reunions on a monthly basis. Rei’s poetry is a breakthrough success and she’s on a book tour.
