“i like my body when it is with your” by E. E. Cummings
“New Year's Eve Prayer” by Jeff Buckley
“Rain” by Roberto Bolaño
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
“Spring Torrents” by Sara Teasdale
“Tulips” by Sylvia PlathÂ
“A great Hope fell” by Emily Dickinson
“Poem” by Langston Hughes
“Sometimes I Pretend” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon” by Mary Oliver
“Summer Morning” by Mary Oliver
“You Are Tired (I Think)” by E. E. Cummings
“Sifter” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Emergency Management” by Camille Rankine
“Thanksgiving 2006” by Ocean Vuong
“Litany” by Langston Hughes
“Suicide in the Trenches” by Siegfried Sassoon
“I heard a Fly buzz - when I died” by Emily Dickinson
“Warning” by Jenny Joseph
“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” by E. E. Cummings
“Love Sorrow” by Mary Oliver
“Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” by Warsan Shire
“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken
“Limited but Fertile Possibilities Are Offered by This Brochure” by Marge Piercy
“The Thing Is” by Ellen Bass
“Mad Girl's Love Song” by Sylvia Plath
“The Century’s Decline” by Wislawa Szymborska
“A Primer For The Small Weird Loves” by Richard Siken
“Unpainted Door” by Louise Glück
“Spring has come back again” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Homesickness” by Marina Tsvetaeva
“Don't Hesitate” by Mary Oliver
“There's a certain Slant of light” by Emily Dickinson
“Poem for Haruko” by June Jordan
“To Be Human Is to Sing Your Own Song” by Mary Oliver
“Toward a City That Sings” by June Jordan
“Edward the Confessor” by Eileen Myles (under the cut because I couldn't find it online)
Edward the Confessor
by Eileen Myles
I have a confession to make
I wish there were
some role in society
I could fulfill
I could be a confessor
I have a confession to make
I have this way when I step
into the bakery on 2nd Ave.
of wanting to be the only
really nice person in the store
so the harried sales woman
with several toned hair
will like me. I do this in all
kinds of stores, coffee shops
xerox shops, everywhere I go.
And invariably I leave my keys,
xeroxing, my coffee
from the last place
I am being so nice. I try
so hard to make a great
impression on these neutral
strangers right down to
the perfect warm smile
I get entirely lost and
stagger back out onto
the street, bereft
of something major.
It’s really leaning
too hard on the everyday.
My mother was
the kind of woman who
dragging us into stores
always seemed to charm the pants
off the cashier. She was such
a great person, so human
though at home she was
such a bitch, I mean really
distant. I imitate her and
I don’t do it well. She didn’t
leave her wallet
or us in a store.
I’m just a pale imitation
it is simply not my style
to open the hearts of
strangers to my true
personhood. I hope you accept
this tiny confession of what
I am currently going through.
And if you are experiencing
something of a similar nature
tell someone, not me,
but tell someone. It’s the new
human program to be in. It would
be nice for at least
these final moments if
we could sigh
with the relief
of being in
the same program
with all the
other humans
whispering
in school. I can’t quite locate
the terror, but I am trying
to be my mother
or Edward the Confessor
smiling down on you with up-praying
hands. I am looking down at the
tips of my boots as I step
across the balcony of the
church excited to be allowed
to say these things. Outside my church
is a relationship. On 11th street
this guy and this woman are selling
the woman so they can
get more dope. All their things
are there, rags and loaves of
bread and make-up.
And there was—
this was incredible.
Two men lying by the door
of the church giving
each other blow-jobs.
They were sort of street
guys, one black one white.
I said hey you can’t do
that here. They jumped
up, one spit come
out of his mouth. If you don’t
get out of here I’ll call
the cops. Don’t call the
cops we’ll go, we’ll leave.
That was a shock. That was more
than I expected to see in
a day. Something about
seeing the guy spit
come out of his
mouth. He didn’t
have to do that.
I guess I scared
him. I couldn’t
believe my eyes.
I was scared too.
People who are like “erm why would I take a 6 hour train when I can fly there in 45 minutes” are forgetting the mental toll of Being In An Airport which shortens your lifespan by 2 months each time
And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.Â
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.Â
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
Dear Team,
In lieu of our Zoom meeting this afternoon,
let’s all agree to wander beneath the trees tonight when
the moon is high.
Let’s sink our fingers into the soil and send messages
via fungi and salamander.
If that fails, let’s simply live on,
having lost nothing at all.
also fucked up how AA is like "if you ever drink again its all over for you! one beer and you're instantly an alchy again" its a great way to establish a self-fulfilling prophecy that sends people right back to the meetings and shit. one of my biggest milestones in recovery is the fact i can chill and have a couple beers or a glass of wine and not go out of control. obviously it looks different for everybody, which is exactly the problem with orgs like AA and NA that drill you with the idea you are powerless to your addiction and there's nothing you can ever do about it besides pray or call some guy and you need to feel bad and guilty for being an addict.
Wait, so...that's NOT how addiction works? I thought once you got addicted and quit, one exposure could cause a relapse and get the addiction to come back so you have to try to completely avoid the thing as much as possible?
No so addiction is incredibly individual and what works for one addict will not work for another when it comes to recovery, so obviously a one size fits all "recovery means no substances ever" is foolish, because it assumes everyone is the same. But also a blanket statement that actually can be made is that one glass of wine doesn't constitute a relapse any more than one glass of wine drank by a person who has never been an alcoholic constitutes alcohol abuse. It's entirely possible to apply this to other drugs as well. A person who used to be a heroin addict in their 20s may be entirely capable of taking an oxycodone prescription for a surgery they have in their 40s. People don't like to acknowledge this one but a meth user could even have their addiction solved by an Adderall prescribed if their use of meth was motivated by self medication for an undiagnosed psych disorder(Or heroin/painkillers and undiagnosed chronic pain etc). The difference between using again and a proper relapse is whether or not it effects your daily function, whether or not you can stop after just one, whether or not you can take your pills as prescribed instead of downing the whole bottle over the course of a week. There is of course the issue of chemical dependency early in recovery, but there's no reason why a person 3 or 4 years sober should consider a mimosa at a friend's birthday party to be a failure if they don't black out or keep drinking for days after.
Also most addictions have underlying causes like coping with mental illness or physical illness or other shitty life circumstances and usually if you treat the underlying causes of addiction people don't want to go crazy with drugs like that.
But AA is a cult which follows conservative Christian ideology very closely so it's very convenient for the current power structure if you believe that you can never use again, which is why they spread that propaganda. Which is why you thought that. Garfield meme.
the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.
does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?
At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.
So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.
I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.
This is the updated version. It’s animated now.
But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.
And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.
For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.
And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.
And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.
While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.
So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.
Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?
This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”
It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.
So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.
Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.
It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.
Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.
Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.
See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.
It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately
I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.
The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.
And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.
Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.
Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.
You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.
And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.
There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.
Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.
i know we're all sick of self-care being a marketing tactic now, but i don't think a lot of us have any other concept of self-care beyond what companies have tried to sell us, so i thought i'd share my favorite self-care hand out
brought to you by how mad i just got at a Target ad
Now THAT’S a self care resource! If you’ve gotten distracted by capitalism’s appropriation of “self-care” and watering the meaning down to nothing this is a super helpful guide to cut through the bullshit.
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.Â
