kradeelav | Entries tagged with awareness

"Many parents, in fact, report that the worst-case scenario is not when your whole family is ill but when the adults are miserable and the under-six cohort feels just fine.

Old hands at this situation have plenty of advice for first-timers, all of which boils down to this: lower your standards as far as possible without inviting a visit from Child Protective Services. Lock the doors, unplug the appliances, and leave the children to their own devices—a phrase that didn’t used to have technological overtones, but if there were ever a time to waive your no-screens policy, along with all your other policies, this is it. Your six-year-old wants to watch “Night of the Living Dead”? Go for it. Your four-year-old wants to eat ice cream on a hotdog bun? Sure thing. Together they want to finger-paint the toddler? Have fun. As for you: keep an ear out for genuine screams and excessive silence. Change dirty diapers and intervene in activities that would result in calling 911. Otherwise, divide and conquer with any available grownup and rest as much as you can."

- welcome to the preschool plague years

hilarious, real, and endearing article. i currently work at a place with a disproportionate number of parents to young kids/focus on toddlers, and ohmigod this is so true.

"Along with specialization and delimitation of skills, we would tend to say that the two other practitioners of Bruno's magic, the actual magician and the prophet, have now vanished. More probably, however, they have simply been camouflaged in sober and legal guises, the analyst being one of them and, after all, not the most important. Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic."
- Eros and Magic

(dope thesis even if the book almost requires you to read it in a fever dream haze lol)

It was clear that the Texans’ interpretation of the ceremony differed from my own. My lasting impression was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking. These people might have reached the apex of their professions but emotionally they seemed to be trapped in their college years. I wondered whether the Bohemians shroud themselves in secrecy for reasons no more sinister than that they thought it was cool.
I remembered something that my Bilderberg deep throat had said to me on the telephone one Sunday evening shortly before I set off for the Grove. He said that far from being fed up with hearing wild conspiracy theories about themselves, many of the Bilderbergers actually thoroughly enjoy it.
He also said that, in all honesty, neither Bilderberg nor Bohemian Grove attract the calibre that they used to. The current members are getting older and older, and the prospective newcomers – the world leaders of tomorrow – don’t seem all that interested in getting involved.
“Let’s face it,” my deep throat had said to me, “nobody rules the world any more. The markets rule the world. Maybe that’s why your conspiracy theorists make up all those crazy things. Because the truth is so much more frightening. Nobody rules the world. Nobody controls anything.”
“Maybe,” I said, “that’s why you Bilderbergers love to hear the conspiracy theories. So you can pretend to yourselves that you do still rule the world.”
- Them: Adventures with Extremists

"We may sometimes assume that a translation provides a window onto the original, but just as often, as Derek Walcott says, “to translate is to betray.” An old Italian pun—traduttore, traditore / translator, traitor—reminds us that the translator who connects two people always stands between them."
"Translation, divination, sacrifice, theft, and more: these are the connecting /not-connecting arts, and each is therefore well figured as the artus that is a flexible joint or the boundary that is a permeable membrane. To say this is, in a sense, merely to restate the old idea that tricksters and their actions embody ambivalence, but it restates it in a language that makes it clear why we may call the tricksters who practice these things artists in an ancient sense and their creations works of art."

- Trickster Makes the World

"So now it is urgent to defend love’s subversive, heterogeneous relationship to the law. At the most minimal level, people in love put their trust in difference rather than being suspicious of it. Reactionaries are always suspicious of difference in the name of identity; that’s their general philosophical starting-point. If we, on the contrary, want to open ourselves up to difference and its implications, so the collective can become the whole world, then the defence of love becomes one point individuals have to practise. The identity cult of repetition must be challenged by love of what is different, is unique, is unrepeatable, unstable and foreign."

In Praise of Love

"Of course [technical skills in art] matter. You need appropriate technical skills.That's why I'm saying good enough is good enough. I was explaining this during the break that, you know, I just want to make sure everybody gets a chance to see it. You start out here [at the bottom] right? You struggle through learning, you get here and now you're good enough at - say what I've been talking about today. You're good enough. It doesn't mean there isn't somebody better than you, somebody on- on Instagram you admire, somebody in history that you love, somebody blah blah blah. That's irrelevant.

Good enough is good enough. It doesn't mean you're the best. The best has nothing to do with it. It's a red herring. As soon as you're good enough and good enough by the way, is pretty good - you want to diversify. So you're going to [branch out] from here and you go OK, character design, environmental design, narrative structures, composition, color theory, stylization, etc. What learning how to draw gets you is the chance to do all of that. Well, provided you have the wit to realize you're now good enough. You don't have to be the best, right?

But you do have to try to learn something new."

- Will Weston

copy/pasted from a server. iykyk.

> trying to finish "trickster makes the world" - very good if dense book on trickster mythology across the world and history. this little excerpt feels like it hits at the centre of a lot of my complicated feelings on me drawing (__redacted___) art.... thought of us a bit too.

Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries. They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called “an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.” When the pilgrim Tripitaka insists too forcefully on righteous action, his Monkey guide goes home sulking and the pilgrimage collapses. When Monkey persuades him to leave his unseasoned and abstract sense of shame behind, they cross mountain after mountain.

learned about Benjamin Cardozo (old US supreme court justice) recently while talking with grandma, interesting dude. :o sounded like a rare gem of a being. love this quote:

In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity—please observe, a plodding mediocrity—for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.^[33]

(a/n: interesting internet history interaction....)

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joshdavham 15 minutes ago | next [–]

> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind. Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.

neom 3 minutes ago | parent | next [–]

> This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

x

i've heard about recent issues with gangs forcing trafficking victims to create fake gofundme scams/spam from denise (who's generally extremely reliable and somebody i'd put immense trust in reporting and knowledge even if we don't always agree), but this article was incredibly in-depth and nuanced on the reporting issue, gave a bunch of links to other articles, and put actual faces to names without falling into generalized asia-phobia. sobering read.

In a deeply reported investigation published on January 16 through the WeChat based outlet Positive Connections (正面连接) , journalist Wu Qin (伍勤) provided rare insight into the cyber scam industry along the Myanmar-Thailand border. In recent years, thousands have been trafficked to compounds run by criminal gangs on the Myanmar side and forced to engage in online fraud. The issue was given greater public attention in China and across the region last month as it emerged that a well-known Chinese actor, Wang Xing (王星), had been abducted while in Thailand and held for three days in a compound across the border in Myanmar.

Wu’s story, which required months of on-the-ground reporting in Mae Sot, on the Thailand side of the Moei River, takes an intimate look at the complex infrastructure and mechanics of criminal operations in the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources — including Chinese victims, Thai Chinese brokers, Myanmar Chinese who secure land for operations from ethnic armed groups, immigration and border authorities, and others — Wu’s piece is also noteworthy for how it questions the Chinese public discourse on the scam industry, which has focused blame on Southeast Asian countries despite the fact that Chinese criminal groups are at the heart of operations.

"Perhaps it would be better, then, to say that those who work the edge between what can and can’t be said do not escape from shame but turn toward it and engage with it. They wrestle with it; they try to change its face; they kill it in one form so as to resurrect it in another. Hermes is a shameless speaker in the Hymn, but that poem regularly refers to him as the Slayer of Argus, as if to remind us that he doesn’t simply avoid shame, he faces it and fights it if he has to."

- Trickster Makes the World

"More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes “too much sense”), but in a more capacious mind it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of other people’s noise. Either way, the intelligence that takes accidents seriously is a constant threat to essences, for in the economy of categories, whenever the value of accident changes, so, too, does the value of essence."

- Trickster Makes This World

"I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country…. What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls."

LeGuin, a "Left Hand" Commencement Address
- (via ayjay)

Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin This morning, this evening, so soon

"Many words have been spilled about the inherent humanity evident in artistic merit and talent; far fewer words have been spilled on something even more human: not being very good at something, but wanting to do it anyway, and thus working to get better. To persevere in sucking at something is just as noble as winning the Man Booker. It is self-effacing, humbling, frustrating, but also pleasurable in its own right because, well, you are doing the thing you want to do. You want to make something, you want to be creative, you have a vision and have to try and get to the point where it can be feasibly executed. Sometimes this takes a few years and sometimes it takes an entire lifetime, which should be an exciting rather than a devastating thought because there is a redemptive truth in practice — it only moves in one direction, which is forward. There is no final skill, no true perfection.

Practice is in service not to some abstract arbiter of craft, the insular juries of the world, the little skills bar over a character’s head in The Sims, but to you. Sure, practice is never-ending. Even Yo-Yo Ma practices, probably more than most. That’s also what’s so great about it, that it never ends. You can do it forever in an age where nothing lasts."

the own-work woodshed (via

queenlua )

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none. Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother. Studies show the mother we have in mind isn’t the mother that exists. Mine says: What the fuck are you crying for? Studies show the baby monkey will pick the fake monkey with fake fur over the furless wire monkey with milk, without contest. Studies show to negate something is to think it anyway. I’m not sad. I’m not sad. Studies recommend regular expressions of gratitude and internal check-ins. Enough, the wire mother says. History is a kind of study. History says we forgave the executioner. Before we mopped the blood we asked: Lord Judge, have I executed well? Studies suggest yes. What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz, have you thanked your executioner today?

— Solmaz Sharif, “Social Skills Training,” published in Buzzfeed

I’m nervous at night when I take off my leg. I wait until the last moment before sleep to un-tech because I am a woman who lives alone and has been stalked, so I don’t feel safe in my home on crutches. How would I run? How would I fight back? Instead of taking Klonopin, I read the Economist. The tone is detached. There is war, but always elsewhere.

(...)

When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. The manifesto, published in 1985, promised a cyberfeminist resistance. The resistance would be networked and coded by women and for women to change the course of history and derange sexism beyond recognition. Technology would un-gender us. Instead, it has been so effective at erasing disabled women¹ that even now, in conversation with many feminists, I am no longer surprised that disability does not figure into their notions of bodies and embodiment. Haraway’s manifesto lays claim to cyborgs (‘we are all cyborgs’) and defines the cyborg unilaterally through metaphor. To Haraway, the cyborg is a matter of fiction, a struggle over life and death, a modern war orgy, a map, a condensed image, a creature without gender. The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.

Common Cyborg (via

queenlua )

(whole essay's worth a read)

(this made me lol)

pillow-princeps (via tumblr)
> I'm not downplaying the historical and philosophical value in Marcus Aurelius' writings but I do think it's funny how many people hold up his Meditations as an earth-shattering paradigm-shifting breakthrough in human thought when it was very, very clearly an extremely stressed out and depressed man desperately trying to teach himself any form of coping mechanism he could to put up with more or less being forced to continue to reign as emperor against his will

>> Meditations reads less like a philosophical text or compilation of thought and more like a series of post it notes Marcus had tacked to his bathroom mirror that said stuff like "hang in there kitten!" and "don't kill yourself today!"

"At DEF CON, Laufer begins his talk by explaining that, a few years ago, he had a mystery illness that caused him to lose his hair and shed layers of his skin. Ultimately, he had a tumor removed.

“I don't know who needs to hear this but I'm scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what's wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what's wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can't have it because the infrastructure has failed and it's not available.”

“This is wrong,” he says. “And I hope to show you all some tools so that it doesn’t ever have to happen again … most medications, you can make a better, cheaper version of, yourself, at home.”

Throughout his talk, Laufer explains how Four Thieves was able to make cheaper versions of Daraprim, the epipen, and abortion medication.
( Read more... )

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

krad

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