Forget-me-yet?

After a fall, his condition got so bad he had to be hospitalized. While staying there, he caught covid, the thing he's scared of leaving his house about, and subsequently died. When people say that not having a spring break in 2020 or being able to go to the movies "broke" them during "lockdown", I think about Ken, a beautiful soul who spread so much kindness and creativity on this site, who was already disabled and living such a meager existence before being forgotten and killed by institutional disinterest in disease prevention. Please look at and spread his art. Please remember Ken. Please keep covid in mind and work to prevent it so stories like Ken's stop happening.

The suggestion came in a press release posted on the British government’s website Tuesday after a meeting of its National Drought Group. The release gave an update on the status of the drought, which is bad. The Wye and Ely Ouse rivers are at their lowest ever recorded height and “five areas are officially in drought, with six more experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976,” according to the release. It also listed a few tips to help people save on water. The tips included installing a rain butt to collect rainwater for gardening, fixing leaks the moment they happen, taking shorter showers, and getting rid of old data. “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” the press release suggested.

Farmers Fencing Off Streams Has Restored Over 1000 Miles of Waterway in Oklahoma

Image and text from this article in the New York Times:

Oklahoma has been exemplary in cleaning up its streams, by some measures more than any other state. A big part of the solution was simple: Give cows clean drinking water and keep them out of streams. When one farmer tried it, he quickly saw results. His veterinarian bills went down and wildlife returned to the area. [...] For Mr. Victor, the decision to fence his cattle off from the waterway wasn’t easy. The creek was why his great-grandmother, who was Cherokee, especially prized the land. The parcel was allotted to her in 1891 through the Dawes Act, which allowed the federal government to break up tribal land. The waterway gave the family’s cattle a place where they could drink and cool off. “I’m sure at the coffee shop, they were all laughing at me,” Mr. Victor, 68, said. But even though it’s my land, it’s not really my land. I’m just a person here with it at this time, and I carry that big responsibility. The benefits of a healthier waterway exceeded his hopes. Mr. Victor thought that the land around the creek might regenerate in five years, perhaps 10. But within just a couple of years, the banks were transformed into verdant corridors of grasses and shrubs. Wildlife appeared, including white-tailed deer, bobcats, coyotes and bald eagles that return each year to a sprawling nest to rear their young.

mutual aid means no hierarchy between givers and receivers

a new mutual aid org, Bridge of Solidarity, has been established in the gaza strip by 17 year old poet yazan mohammed in response to the exploitative practices conducted by some charities and encouraged by the existing charity-based model of fundraising for gaza. according to BoS: "the western attention economy and pity economy plays a large role in who lives or dies in gaza." essentially, people need to make themselves marketable in order to receive lifesaving aid; people who are not marketable die. yazan himself wrote about the damage this can do to one's self image, which you can read here.

after trying for a year to respect his own privacy, my friend siraj was also pressured into posting images of his son's emaciated body in order to gain sympathy from westerners.

we cannot keep forcing people to do this anymore.

here's a declaration of their values from bridge of solidarity's most recent post:

Our organization is against the Western gaze. We refuse to humiliate people. We refuse to force people to take photos. We refuse to force people to take photos with our flyer or logo. People will receive aid freely without being forced to pose. We will respect people's privacy completely. Our principles include autonomy, dignity, sovereignty, mutual respect, and mutual aid.

this org will prioritize giving aid to people without phones or social media, who do not speak english, and who do not have outside support or living parents. these are the people who are not palatable to westerners but who deserve to live with as much dignity as everyone else

as of five days ago, BoS are working on a water truck delivery

At some point I took out my phone, and at the time I was using face unlock. This prompted him to tell me all the ways this technology doesn't work on him. How his phone selfie camera doesn't focus right because it's not detecting a face. How he had to update his ID the old fashioned way, because the website kept rejecting his photos. And how it was becoming more and more common, and how it was making his life way harder.

For example, it’s very reasonable to be concerned about the new Twitter data center that’s poisoning Memphis right now, and single out the LLM, grok, as a source of it. However, generating an image using locally run stable diffusion does literally nothing to contribute to this. Conversely, using Twitter without using grok absolutely contributes to the polluting Memphis. If we try to simply boycott AI entirely and nothing else, we still contribute to that data center. However, if we single out Twitter/X as a company, then we can actually have an effective boycott.

If your problem is the environmental cost of all data centers, and you single out AI as the source, but still continue to stream video (ie Netflix, YouTube, TikTok etc), use social media, etc, you are still contributing to the stuff that’s at least 90% of current datacenter output. I know this is news to people but data centers didn’t just. Suddenly become a problem post-AI.

People pointing this out are not being contrarian for no reason. Current anti-AI thinking has done literally zero for actually combatting the issues we need to care about, because a lot of these problems go beyond AI. This is the tech equivalent of banning straws.

The point of this isn’t to go “oh and yet you participate in society…interesting”. The point of this is to show how you need to be thinking systemically about these issues beyond the superficial shit you hear in op-eds and tweets, which by the way, frequently misreport the actual data/info regarding the situation.

me: the weather must have been great, you're looking so tanned!

irish coworker: *stares down at his arms, which are a shade of eggshell white i associate with tasteful wedding table settings* i suppose i am!

welsh coworker: *enters room* wow, youre looking so tanned!

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

please try this on for size:

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

During an educational conference, in late 2020, the topic of teaching classics became the subject of hot debate on twitter under the conference’s hashtag. A Black educator suggested utilizing contemporary companion texts, such as Ibi Ziboi’s Pride in conjunction with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to help students connect to the material better while expanding the reading list beyond predominantly white-authored classics. This sparked a secondary conversation among BIPOC authors venting their frustrations with how their (again, predominantly white) English teachers had glossed over or mishandled racism in the classics, in a way that was unfair to both their BIPOC students and the texts.

Can you remember anything else race-related that was stirring heated and frequently exasperated conversations in 2020?

And you know, I get feeling intensely protective of classics. But the reality is, not every teacher is going to do them justice, and sometimes they’re going to fail in ways that hurt students. I attended one of the best-funded public high schools in my state, well before No Child Left Behind, and my freshman English teacher butchered To Kill A Mockingbird, a book I first experienced lying on the grass on summer nights, my mother reading aloud by the lavender bush. (Same teacher later said to my face I probably knew more about Shakespeare than her. I was a fifteen-year-old weeb, not a virtuoso.)

And she wasn’t the only one—even teachers I liked fell short! Another teacher spent plenty of time on John Proctor’s dedication to preserving his name in The Crucible, on the danger of weaponized false accusations, and not a minute on Proctor preying on his 17-year-old employee. Yet another was utterly flabbergasted when a student pointed out that the subtext of a scene in Brave New World was the conditioning of children against interracial relationships. I fervently support our teachers, but I can absolutely believe that an 80% white cohort is going to drop the ball sometimes.

Please come to the drag show even if youre cishet.

Please come to the bellydance showcase even if youre not Middle Eastern.

Please come to the Asian Festival if youre not Asian.

Please dance at the drum circle if youre not African.

If the event is being publicly advertised, you're invited. We want you to come if you intend to come respectfully. If you are asking 'am I allowed,' youre probably bot gonna be disrespectful. Please fill the seats. Cultural events have trouble with attendance sometimes because people who would be curious to go get shy about it. Please go to things that are curious to you. Your presence is not a burden.

The monetary value of every $1,000 is only $500, and the purchasing power of every $500 is only $50. That means neither work nor money has any real meaning. Everyone is destitute, consumed by war and its oppressive reality. Living day by day, hour by hour, while thinking about these details is hell. It will drive you mad.

That’s why EVERY DONATION HELPS

Consider every dollar will help because almost there’s no donation 🥺💔