just saw someone comment under a videoclip of the sylvia rivera interview where she insists on the modern (circa 2001) pride movement being a capitalist smokescreen, a “straight gay” movement that worships the almighty dollar, that:
and this person is likely quite young but this really really really captures the limited imagination of capitalist neoliberal indoctrination around freedom and liberation. radical queerness treated as a paintjob over a prison as opposed to the bulldozer that tears the prison down. we have to dream for so much more and endure the pain of dreaming.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
Blackout poetry exists on a dual axis from "banal" to "insightful" on the input side and "kind of deep" to "incredibly fucking dumb" on the output side, and while taking something banal and producing something kind of deep is well and fine, for my money taking something insightful and rendering it incredibly fucking dumb is where the real art is.
#i stuck the word 'banal' in there twice specifically so that 'anal' would be low hanging fruit#but i genuinely did not anticipate 'banana' --@prokopetz
I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses.
Free Courses from Stanford.
Free Courses from MIT.
Free courses from Yale.
Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx
Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses."
Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
