randomWalks

We’ve been teaching people for decades, for generations, that King had this harsh criticism of Malcolm X, and it’s just not true.

MLK’s famous Playboy criticism of Malcolm X was a ‘fraud,’ author says - The Washington Post

We’re doing a lot of education about anal sex. Think about that for a second. There’s something that gives you pleasure, but a court changes the law, and now your sex life is a very different thing. That’s crazy, and that sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.

Meet Tami Rose: The Woman Who Sells Mississippians Their Sex Toys discussed on MetaFilter

When I was young I read every comic I (my dad) could afford. Later my interest narrowed chiefly to autobiographical comics and — lucky for me — a lot of people are willing to recreate the epic minutiae of their lives in words and pictures.

I was super cised to learn that Gabrielle Bell has a Patreon where she posts new comics! I subscribed as soon as I found out, right around 8:30 this morning, and I’ve already lost track of how I came across this wonderful fact. If you’re not familiar, you can see some of her work on Instagram and on her blog. If you have three dollars, why not give them to Gabrielle?

The 20-track concept album plays out like a sci-fi stage musical about two young girls named Caroline and Suzi, voiced by Buffalo Daughter’s Yumiko Ohno and frequent Tomita collaborator Suzi Kim. Caroline is a young musical prodigy with a case of chronic sadness. At times, she is too sad to sing, and cries while playing Chopin. “Life’s not only about having a good time, is it?” Caroline asks, to which Suzi responds, “That’s right Caroline, life’s not only about being down and out.”

The production is wildly inventive and sort of a space age combination of cut-and-paste tape loop experiments with ’60s show tunes, exotica, Japanese pop-rock, and Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks’ Americana.

Doopee Time: The healthy, mind clearing “Cute Music” of Yann Tomita | In Sheeps Clothing

‘AMERICAN JASMINE’, ‘STAR GLORY’. Vivid scarlet 3/4" wide trumpets with yellow throats. Annual vine to 10 feet, with heart-shaped 6" leaves. E. U.S. Gives abundant bloom. Nick seed to germinate in 1 - 3 weeks. “A tiny elfin morning glory… a bright cheerful orange. Possible elf, fairy, or troll distribution vector." — D.L., South Carolina

🧝,🧚,🧌 you say?

Seedlist I-K - J. L. Hudson, Seedsman

(via [Landline] Light gliding - LANDLINE by Jay Babcock)

An example of the form can be found at mybluehouse.com/weblog, where a woman named Becky publishes Weblog entries from France, on topics as diverse as knitting and fiction, and with links to news coverage and personal photos. On a recent day, Becky’s Weblog included a link to another Web site showing pictures of Tom Thumb’s boots, followed by a review of coffee recipes.

E-Commerce Report; Internet experts wonder if Weblog technology is a powerful new media species, or just another fad. - The New York Times, 25 Feb 2002

Don’t know how I just heard of this book (thanks nedlog) but now you have too!

Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.

Butts | Book by Heather Radke | Simon & Schuster

Q: How clean does a peanut butter jar need to be for recycling?

A:

The cleaner the better, but items don’t have to be immaculate to be recyclable. If you rinse well, shake out the water, and leave less than a teaspoon of residual goo — roughly a bottle cap full — it’s fine.

What can you recycle? Find your recycling mistakes in this quiz. - Washington Post

Hard to believe I closed my Facebook account over twelve years ago! Feels like only yesterday. It’s even harder to believe I only used it for four short years. Felt like an eternity!

This post brought to you by getting my dates together in order to get my two dollars from Facebook for whatever the hell this class action settlement is about. Get yours too!

”I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations.“ — ”Buck Mulligan“ in Ulysses by James Joyce

The Joyce Project : Ulysses : Telemachus

My favorite thing about Micro.blog so far? Titles not required.

For the last several decades, Hampshire has sought to innovate what’s possible in a liberal arts education. Its student-led focus has been emulated by countless other programs, and Hampshire continues to challenge itself as an institution, particularly as it attempts to center anti-racism as a primary throughline of a student’s experience. This is no easy or simple task. It requires diligence, willpower, commitment, and resources.

…

I think it’s easy to look at an institution that doesn’t submit letter grades or adhere to strict general education requirements and somehow equate that with a lack of seriousness and rigor. But nothing could be further from the truth. Future Hampshire College students should come prepared to engage in important and challenging work, which will necessitate curiosity, introspection, reflection, adaptation, and — probably most significant — unlearning.

Professor of Creative Writing Nathan McClain Embraces the Throughline of Anti-Racism in His Teaching (and Learning) | Hampshire College

Focusing the class on the “formal properties” of a story, Baxter asks students to describe its world: “What techniques have been employed to shape this particular story? I talk about request moments, one-way gates, acute vs. chronic tension, inventories and undoings, dramatic imagery, selective listening in dialogue, sparkplug characters, plot reversals—the whole bag of tools and tricks,” says Baxter. “And then: are these techniques working well, or at cross-purposes, to dramatize the story’s narrative?”

If a writer is having a problem with a story, there is that classic Baxter response: Make it a problem in the story. If a character is talkative and boring, have other characters notice their tediousness. Listen to the problem—it has a message for you.

Feast of Love for Charles Baxter | English | College of Liberal Arts

“I only do what is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it, if I falter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.” — Niklas Luhmann

How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing - Forte Labs

I’m ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality.

Because these combat robots are coming, and many are already here, if we do not prevent their global deployment by the time you and I are old we will see robots on street corners with guns that run software we do not control, implementing policies beamed to them over the airwaves in encrypted communications, accessing databases of faces and retinas, ever watchful for enemies not of the State as we currently understand it, but of the people who own the right to program the machines which watch over us. The State will have become technocratic – fascism by remote control – and the dream of control, coveted by evil men for generations, will have come to fruition. We have a scant few years to arrest the development of these technologies or to rearchitect the social foundations of liberty to survive a situation where combat robots leave the population largely powerless to resist tyranny, whether they have their rifles or not.

Taking human life should always be a very serious thing. There’s something very close up about the Middle Ages. You’re taking a sharp piece of steel and hacking at someone’s head, and you’re getting spattered with his blood, and you’re hearing his screams. In some ways maybe it’s more brutal that we’ve insulated ourselves from that. We’re setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you’re sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us.

It amazes me how the seemingly most paranoid people are all “Software created by anonymous entities? Sign me up! I can’t wait to use it to store my most sensitive files/conduct illegal transactions!”

Where do these systems of obedience come from? Why do we recognize power instead of individual autonomy? These questions are fascinating to me. It’s all this strange illusion, isn’t it?

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The thing to understand is why we’re fighting - understand, the purpose of segregation is to preserve the second-class status of blacks. And the main thing for you to understand is we must continue to fight.

I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. The first time I took ecstasy, all of that lifted away. All the anxiety, which is the baseline of my life in some way, and I had this moment of like, wait a second! Are there people who feel this way all the time? This is like a whole way to be, where you don’t feel anxious? Oh my god! It was so amazing. In the months after that, it was a really helpful thing to have experienced. It remains to this day a feeling that is helpful to know about.