Brave In Fixed Amounts

You can get this as a print now:

By day I wove the web, and in the night by torchlight, I unwove it // ἔνθα καὶ ἠματίη μὲν ὑφαίνεσκον μέγαν ἱστόν νύκτας δ᾽ ἀλλύεσκον, ἐπεὶ δαΐδας παραθείμην

*deep breath* If the antifascist (esp. American-centered) art you make or consume refuses to acknowledge the truth that framing this time period as the "sudden rise of fascism" along with its supposed volatility (i.e. "it can't last; that's not how its built") is just a comforting construct to keep white Americans from reckoning with their literal centuries of active and passive participation in this country's fascist, genocidal violence against Indigenous and Black people, your art isn't just wrong...it's worthless. How can you imagine dismantling unjust systems without seeing the blood on your own hands? How do you comprehend the size of the fight for mutual liberation without seeing that the scale of the threat is exponentially larger than your personal experience of the danger of state violence; or is your envisioned win condition only as shallow as the return to your previous sense of safety?

I'm so glad they got Ted Chiang -- a wonderful writer of science fiction and thinker about technology, in my opinion -- to write this essay. My favorite line was this:

I've obviously been playing too much of The Long Dark, because last night I had a dream that I was exploring the Aurora mine on Coastal Highway (which I have never done, because the idea of getting trapped in there scares the bejesus out of me). But I'm in there searching with my little flashlight when my real life dog shows up at the elevator and there are live crackling wires are between me and her and I'm so terrified she's going to try to get to me that I jump over them to get to her, so I get fried and wind up with massive burns all over my legs...