polsref

reference blog for politics, science, information and current events. ask to tag.

[nativenews]

[xensilverquill]

You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become? 🌿🌿🌿

patterns available on Etsy and Ravelry!

[warpweight]

Warrior Pose | Mary Turfah

If home is the colony, where does one go to escape? Israelis have two options: Retreat via mind or body. Why choose? Yoga is both/and.

Psychic threats are no match for the world’s most moral army; through yoga, therapy, surfing, self-affirmation (saying “we’re the most moral army” over and over), the threat can be eliminated, and the integrity of the self reconstituted. It starts by acknowledging the breach. Delicately, without losing sight of one’s why, oneself, one’s people: You feel like a bad person because you’re actually a good person who did bad things and the fact that you feel bad about it is an indication of your goodness. Doing the bad things actually helps you realize you’re a good person. The people you killed? They started you along your healing journey.

Notice that, up until this point, there has been no mention of the word Palestinian.

[eroscestlavie]

hi! was wondering if you had any general advice/resources for freelancing (like how contracts work, how to approach freelancing vs. traditional full-time work). i'm a graphic designer who only has experience with in-house work and want to try branching out. no problem if not, thank you!

My advice with freelancing is honestly to keep saying yes to shit you want to do....and to do this, if you're in-house especially, the advice people give that you should never work for free EVER at all is bullshit lol and will limit you in the long run. I think a lot of people don't know how to negotiate rates and value and that everyone should be paid for work but freelance in the creative arts does require just sort of wheeling and dealing a bit. Be discerning and figure out who you want to work with and why.

If you already have a job, chase the shit you love doing. Practice. Post self-done project stuff and promote it. Build affiliations around the stuff you like. To that point am an incredibly insane type A person probably more than I let on here. I do things like make frequent lists of my immediate network and triage them based on what I could do for the people there and how I want to do it.

Here's an anecdote to that effect: Last March when I went to AWP I went and spoke to people at tables, made conscious efforts to follow up, and when I got home I made a shortlist of presses I wanted to work with. When I got laid off last June I immediately reached out to one of the presses and said hey, can we work together, etc. Said I didn't care what the rate was as long as it was moderately compensated and ended up with a 4-month contract to do some freelance, crushed it, and then when that press had a collaborative piece coming out with another publication I offered to do image work for them for free. I pulled out all the stops in my creative and now a year later my first major pre-press job (with a much much fatter paycheck) is with the press I did that work for. It will lead to other lucrative work as well if I play my cards right. Halfway through that I also linked with Night Gallery because I was emboldened by the other shit I'd done especially as a local merch designer (again working for free) and since then I've landed two major artist contracts for merch that all paid over $2k and also have done well selling work with Night Gallery. I would never (and could never) have approached some of those clients without doing free/passion work first but moreover I built a brand by affiliation.

I think the reason I sometimes bristle at the "never ever work for free" piece of advice is that a freelance career really is built by you--you're in charge. If you're doing this on the side you can decide which jobs you take on for experience. Build a network and a personal brand and re-negotiate the rates once you meet people who can and will pay you more. Think carefully about who and what you want to be associated with.

The other thing about this approach: a lot of the most disastrous freelance jobs I've had are the ones where someone is paying me a nominal fee of like $200 to do a lot of work. (I know I said I was "moderately compensated" for that work before--it was more than $200 lol.)

IMO, If you're working for free there's an understanding that 1) you're doing this as a collaboration and it gives you more freedom to make something your own (very important for brand building) 2) you can set reasonable timelines. I genuinely think that in many cases no money > almost no money LOL. Not that way every time but I've found the hell-spot is when someone thinks of you as "a client" but underpays you ESPECIALLY if it's work you do not enjoy doing and that doesn't help your personal brand. Take the cheap work for stuff you'd do for free, take the free work for stuff you'd do for free, take the check once people understand who you are.

Hope this is helpful!!

[drmanahan]

You don’t know me, but I co-sign all of this. But I’d also recommend a constant policy of “under promise, over deliver”, even or especially if you’re doing freelance work for free or cheap.

It’s heartbreaking when you SAID you could do something but didn’t have enough time/energy/flexibility in the end to do what you KNOW you’re capable of. And then the client is disappointed, or they could even be in a bad position because they depended on you.

I only commit to what I know is obviously, easily do-able. I can always offer more later, but if I offer less later, it will make everyone (and perhaps most especially me) sad. If you do things for free badly, it doesn’t make you look professional. Doing things WELL for free is the flex.

[eroscestlavie]

Excellent point, I am still running into moments where I don’t do this and fuck myself over—it’s ALWAYS a lesson freelance will teach you the hard way!! Basically the golden rule of it in some ways. Over delivery and underpromising forever!! Ty for adding.

[animentality]

[dramatic-dolphin]

people are so fucking weird about uncontacted tribes/peoples oh my goddddd you are not making it out of the colonialist mindset

[dramatic-dolphin]

fun fact uncontacted peoples are not ignorant they are fully aware of the "outside world" and are CHOOSING not to have contact because they (rightly) feel it would add no value to their lives and place them in an exploited position. it's voluntary. they are isolated on purpose.

[dramatic-dolphin]

sentinelese people aren't like some ignorant noble savages, or actual savages who are all about warfare and killing (wildly racist take i see very often), they are literally regular ass fucking people who have seen the exploitation of their neighbors (other andamanese people) AND the massive disease outbreaks caused by contact, and decided they want no part in that. they are literally regular people choosing to survive. that's it.

[dramatic-dolphin]

glad that this is getting traction, but if you're saying things like "yeah, and they are right! modern society is a curse! they are living The Right Way and are more enlightened have better lives than us!" you are also the people i'm talking about. sorry. they are regular people living regular lives. please internalize this fact and stop exoticizing.

[shutyourmoustache]

Making exercises more accessible to the disabled? Fuck yeah!

[lmaonade]

i am not joking we need to force teach cooking in schools. like. it is an essential thing for survival. do you know how easy it is to make things if you know even the bare bones shit about how cooking works. we need to teach teenagers how far you can take an onion and some other veggies it''s sad that people grow up not knowing how to prepare literally anything. and i'm not talking about oh this home ed class taught me how to make chicken nuggets at home i'm talking about learning the balancing of sweetness and acidity and saltiness and bitterness and shit like that and techniques and oil temperatures and how meats cook. it needs to be taught because it's literally not even that difficult and it matters so much

[lmaonade]

i truly believe that knowing how to cook is a basic survival concept and the fact that so many people can't even make simple dishes is depressing as hell this is the sorta thing that should be taught at a young age. being able to take the ingredients you have around your home and turn them into a meal is like, essential and will make life so much better. you don't need to be a high end chef you just need to understand some things that can be easily taught... but then again maybe the education system is playing a roll against this and ultimately they want you to grow up to rely on mcdonalds for dinner. i don't know. please learn how to cook for yourself if you're able. i'm not asking you to hunt for specific ingredients to make some expensive youtuber's "best" recipe but if you know the basics of cooking you can do a lot with cheap canned ingredients. cooking can be affordable i promise you just need to learn how to make do with what you can get

[eroticcannibal]

Can anyone point me towards resources that teach those basics cus I would LOVE to teach my child this stuff but i dont know how to cook

[loumandliker]

not comprehensive but heres some:

internet shaquille's basics but especially:

making rice

making scrambled eggs

making oatmeal

levels of cooking meat

using & storing vegetables with recipes in the description (this one has a bit of Sassiness directed at people who dont like vegetables but the content is solid)

food safety + a recipe to demonstrate

how to learn to cook (just a list of subtopics, no actual tips)

cooking techniques playlist

how to cut x

basics with babish s1 & 2, but particularly:

freezer meals,

weeknight meals,

kitchen tools (although the specific suggestions are pretty expensive even with the lower end scale items the basic categories are solid, and you can evaluate what items you will realistcially need - eg. if you dont need to read temp for steaks etc the temp reader will not be relevant) &

kitchen care (mid-high advanced home cooking)

basic knife skills

picking the right pan for each recipe

j. kenji lopez-alt's tips and tricks playlist

egg recipes

a little more complicated, involved, and longer than any of the rest of these but good breakdown of flavor & how and why to use the basic seasoning/flavor profiles

and then recipe channels representing various cuisines:

j. kenji lopez-alt (various)

marion's kitchen (southeast & east asian, western/asian fusion)

maangchi (korean)

future neighbor (mostly korean)

the western supermarket playlist of chinese cooking demystified (more recipes available but these are accessible if you dont have "specialty" ingredients)

family recipes playlist by made with lau (chinese)

not another cooking show (various)

cooking with boris (bear with me here i know he does it exaggeratedly humorously but a lot of them are actually solid and beginner cook friendly. mostly slavic/russian)

you suck at cooking (also falls into the intentionally humorous category but most of the recipes are pretty solid anyway)

how to cook that (baking, also does debunking videos of viral cooking hacks - breaks down the reasons the hacks dont work, pretty important to understand those basics imo)

internet shaquille (various)

babish culinary universe (various)

i REFUSE to recommended joshua weissman because he is fucking insufferable but if you want you can try if you can deal with it, the techniques/recipes seem fine for the most part

again definitely not a comprehensive list but it touches on most of the basics

[theinternetarchive]

a few psychoanalytic sources on the Internet Archive that i personally vouch for

Freud

an outline of psychoanalysis

the origin and development of psychoanalysis

the complete psychological works

the ego and the id

the interpretation of dreams

introductory lectures on psychoanalysis

a collection of critical essays

Lacan

four fundamental concepts (other edition here)

the ethics of psychoanalysis

the limits of love and knowledge

the language of the self

seminar i: freud's papers on technique

Sartre

existential psychoanalysis

being and nothingness

Žižek

the sublime object of ideology

violence

everything you always wanted to know about lacan (but were too afraid to ask hitchcock)

the plague of fantasies

in defense of lost causes

enjoy your symptom! lacan in hollywood and out

others

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists – Joan Copjec

Imagine There's No Woman – Joan Copjec

gaze and voice as love objects – Žižek et al

jacques lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis – Žižek et al

a clinical introduction to lacanian psychoanalysis – bruce fink

lacan: the absolute master – mikkel borch-jacobson

lacan and contemporary film – todd mcgowan et al

[fatmasc]

Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16uhmMb8kE4P_vOSycr6XSa9zpmDijZSd?usp=sharing

[fatmasc]

Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!

[bosstoaster]

OP I owe you my life

[whatchamacallitz]

OP you are the greatest person currently in my life. You beautiful, thoughtful creature.

[diserbillyti]

So because I used to work with a lot of young men, I've seen/read a lot of manosphere shit (genuinely I had to know what a sneako is for work) and read/watched a lot of opinion pieces on the manosphere.

Something I notice is, when men discuss the manosphere, they either centre the reason boys fall down that pipeline on some inner weakness or defectiveness of the boy, ie. "they're just autistic weirdos who want rules for women because they can't get their dick wet," or they centre the reason on women, "feminism had made women too woke, mean and impossible to socialise with."

What I noticed while working is that every single little Tate goblin I had to work with had conservative parents, and I have never once seen that aspect of all this discussed. Boys will reflect the social norms they are raised in within their household. The biggest preventative for manosphere bullshit I saw in the boys I worked with was a dad who isn't a fuckwit and a household that isn't LARPing the 1960s.

Blaming disabled people and women for shit men do instead of the men in the immediate vicinity with an active role in the situation seems to be a trend.

[somejoyinmudville]

Feminists might kill joy simply by not finding the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising. The word feminism is thus saturated with unhappiness. Feminists by declaring themselves as feminists are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not only as being good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy “spoils” the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness.

Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy?

Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?

Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that their failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.

The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed

[estro-boi]

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

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

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.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

[tieflingkisser]

[a-thousand-suns-one-more-light]

If you’re still on windows 10 it’s there as well. Tho it’s under Devices>typing>typing insights.

[bideogaymes]

that Natasha doll shit that’s big in Asia rn (China, Indonesia, Korea, etc.) is emblematic of why we say antiblackness is global. abusing a Black baby doll to relieve stress, in violent and pedophilic ways, & then going out of their way to take pictures of irl Black, African, and half-Black Asian children to brag that they found the “IRL Natasha doll”? and comments under posts on Xiaohongshu saying they want to “punch” it (an irl Black child) up?

and in Spanish speaking circles online they sharing gore pictures of dead African babies in online chats so much it has a label named “BND”? Another Black teen was murdered recently by an Asian American store owner convinced he was stealing despite putting items back. He shot him in the back.

yall dont deserve nothing from Black people in any part of the diaspora, irdc. this shit makes me so angry but the demands for an expectation of actionable organizing and dismantling of the white supremacist project that is the US is laid at our collective feet and no one else’s is so crazy to me. how are Black ppl supposed to generate trust for nonblack ppl that hasn’t been demonstrated in a sustained, recent, manner, without us having to force the rest of the world to see us?

Idpol is divisive until it’s time to self adopt the moniker of the Global South and that often doesn’t include & backseats Black African exploitation/extraction. it’s hella transparent how nonblack leftists only mention Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. as afterthoughts to their awareness and solidarity posts focusing on Palestine but feel entitled to call Black leftists “zog slaves” for not making dedicated media to the issue they feel the most important, regardless if to these Black leftists making Black issues their focus and niche.

fucking crazy so many of yall got the nerve to posture moral superiority.

[bideogaymes]

i didn’t say every East Asian did or does support this, nor did i specify East Asia at all.

[bideogaymes]

the video is even worse. these Chinese and Asian social media users are actually going to remote African villages to film themselves abusing, terrorizing, and humiliating Black children.

One clip shows a Chinese man holding a young Black girl on his lap and having her repeat sentences in Chinese. she doesn’t know what she’s saying but the captions show him having her say, “ I have no value. I’m just a retard.”

im sick to my stomach.

editing to add youtube video link:

[megacarapa]

ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??

[megacarapa]

don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!

[prairiedeath]

Fars Province, Iran. Shooting competition.

source