This is actually such a crucial part of healing from neglect and abuse and I have to add to this.
Because indeed, people who like you will not roll their eyes and sigh at the idea of accommodating your needs, they will value your voice and be upset with you about injustice done to you, not at you for "being difficult". They will be happy when you find a way to live a better life, and help you to get there. If you are struggling, someone who loves you wants to see you smile, not tell you to smile because "you have it so good".
What was the exact Dara Horn quote about this? Something about it being hard to learn from Auschwitz relative to say, a university, because you'd mostly just be gassed and dead and it's hard to learn lessons when you're dead.
”American Holocaust educators often ask me what they should be teaching as the “lessons of the Holocaust.” The question itself is absurd. As one of my readers once put it, Auschwitz was not a university, and most Jews who arrived there were immediately gassed and incinerated, making it difficult for them to produce coursework in ethics for the rest of the world to enjoy.”
on the met museum website straight up searching it. and by it i mean. haha. the collections. today's find is a horse's bit that has horses on it. and those horses have more horses standing on their backs. horseception
“To ‘violate Elektra’ would be to stop saying no to evil and filth. Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax. These characters usually express defiance in some heroic action - Antigone buries her brother, Ajax falls on his sword. Elektra has the same kind of raw, stubborn, scandalous soul, but her circumstances are different: Elektra is deprived of action. The play begins with two men centre stage making a plan that will change her life and deciding not to tell her about it, although she is hovering just inside the door (they can hear her weeping). The play ends with two men centre stage marching into the house to complete the revenge plot while Elektra is left outside to follow after them or stand and wait, no one seems to care. The play’s centrepiece is a deception scene in which two men manipulate Elektra with lies to a point of near hysteria. She is an adult but unmarried female in the house of a mother who hates her and she has neither social function nor emotional context. She seems to squat on the doorstep of the house rather than live inside. Her sister calls her a maniac and waves her ideas away. Her brother treats her as superfluous to his plans - he finds her wild, emotional, depressing. She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her.”
— Anne Carson, An Oresteia (via flores-et-dracones)
I'm rereading Treasure Island again (with the excuse that I've been given permission to attend a book discussion about it on Tuesday) and I'm beside myself at the line "I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him"
As plain as PRINT. The only time Flint is actually seen in the whole book and it's a hallucination that figuratively turns him back into text. This man is SO trapped in Story it's unbelievable
I'm at this point in my manuscript and I really wanted to try to do something with like negative space and ink bleedthrough so we see an outline of a man within the words but I couldn't get it to work :(
i cant believe that there's still gamergate STANK on games that women enjoy. NASTY misogyny residue. stardew valley is in fact a video game. animal crossing is also a video game. so are otome games and dating sims and twee little cozy games. sometimes a bitch doesnt wanna play bloodborne that shit's hard
guys who mainly play 2k and fortnite will still be like oh youre not a real gamer for having 1000 hours in stardew. mother fucker you're larping as a basketball player
I genuinely find it interesting as to how often people don't understand why continuity for judaism is important. I don't think it's exclusive to judaism but rather a common trait among persecuted peoples--especially those who, if the decision were left to the majority, would have their entire culture(s) erased because it's "weird" and "too much work" to accommodate for the differences. I want my kids to be jewish and I want to live in a jewish way because I have the privilege and the responsibility to do so. I want them to be proud of their heritage and see it as a source of strength and community, and more and more I'm realizing that for those who come from majority-communities or haven't faced a real threat to their culture simply haven't been made to confront their relationship to their identity.
use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.
use firefox or librewolf (open-source fork of firefox) instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).
use mega instead of google drive
get rid of bloatware
use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite
get free stuff with the help of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/piracy and r/roms
use trakt (for shows and movies), letterboxd (just movies), or TMB instead of IMDB (owned by amazon).
use storygraph instead of goodreads (owned by amazon).
use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions
use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp
make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge
use search for a cause, ecosia, or ocean hero to support the environment instead of google
use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)
use flashpoint to play archived online flash games
find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books
burn your music onto cds
use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe
use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, or tuta instead of gmail
remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X
remove bloatware on samsung X
use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta
use project gutenberg for free public domain books, and librivox for public domain books and audiobooks
use the seal app (android only) to download video and audio
use ellipsus instead of microsoft word or google docs
use mastodon instead of twitter
use peertube to create a network of small video hosting providers (disclaimer: not a 1:1 alternative to youtube)
use threema and signal for encrypted communication, on mobile and desktop
use qwant and startpage for secure internet browsers
use syncthing to securely transfer files between devices
learn how to jailbreak your kindle/ereader if you have one (wiki and video walkthrough)
use riseup’s email and VPN for secure communication (aimed towards activists)
use cryptpad and collabora instead of the microsoft office suite
use google takeout to export the data on your google account
use library extension to look for books on online stores and find them at your library
remove paywalls with removepaywalls
install the open-source adblocker ublock origin
install sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments on youtube videos
use bookfinder to look for the cheapest available listings of books, including textbooks
learn a language through mango (duolingo laid off some of its employees and now relies on AI translations) for free with a library card or through your school
edit photos with photopea
edit pdfs with foxit and sumatrapdf
download music with doubledouble
take notes offline and collaborate securely with obsidian
for android tv, use smarttube and cloudstream (ad-free, open-source)
change your OS to linux
changelog:
removed ground news (uses AI to summarize articles)
removed unroll.me (sells your data)
removed proton mail and drive (AI assistant feature, claims of CEO Andy Yen supporting Trump, please DM if you have proof I can add here)
removed NCH suite (only has very basic free features, puts watermark on anything saved)
notes:
this post blew up while I wasn’t looking (the end of my semester was hellish, and i recently came back from a 3-week family vacation). thanks so much for all the suggestions! <3
i included Ecosia because of their financial transparency. It’s physically impossible that they plant a tree for every search, but their profits still go towards projects including reforestation and solar energy. i view their actions as a net-positive
feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3
"who cares about your lonely soul" is so cunty like enjolras could've stopped at "now there is a higher call" but he thought no. i need to destroy this horny straight man's self-esteem. and it worked
"A student [downloads] hundreds of pages of [PDFs] and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the [PDFs] exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many."
-Umberto Eco (in How to Write a Thesis, originally discussing photocopies)
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
