Notes

🔖 Deneocolonize Your Syllabus – Nonsite.org –

The brilliance of the American neocolonial turn was the way it was able to divide the European notion of universal “Culture” from the anticolonial need for oppositional local and national “cultures” in order to conquer both, leaving us with little more than toothless ideas about lifestyle, “difference,” and “resistance,” and the seemingly endless distraction of ever-disenfranchising “culture politics.” The legacy of that triumphant division and conquest structures our syllabi as much as it has the direction that world history has headed in since decolonization.

🔖 The Shadow Ring 09-27-1997 O'Brien's –

beacons flashed on the bills of gulls / a single feather dropped into the sea / it dropped silently into the sea / and i swum out into the water and cast out a net

🔖 Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century –

We have all been to a gathering, a ritual, or an adventure that felt unrewarding or downright upsetting to be a part of. Then there are those experiences that we are absolutely over the moon for, experiences that remind us of who we are and why we are. Those experiences feel like magic, but it doesn’t take a spell to make them happen.

Seasoned experience designers, self-identified or not, tend to employ similar strategies, especially when it comes to opening people up to risk in a caring way. They share no common language for what they do, but there are clear patterns to what makes an intimate social experience transformational.

🔖 Using actions in Pa11y

🔖 Fantômes - a zine of ghost stories, haunting images and occult practices –

Fantômes is a collaborative ghost story zine, bringing together story-telling, poetry, folklore, illustration and photography in small cobbled-together publication. It is a place to explore personal and collective ghosts, lend them a voice through summoning rituals, raw poetry or scribbled drawings and get familiar with their haunting presence.

🔖 An Interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer - Believer Magazine –

Mosses are so very permeable. I think about them in contrast to higher plants, which have barriers and boundaries, waxy leaves and so forth, trying to keep the inside in and the outside out. But mosses don’t have that capacity and therefore they’re really intimate with their environment. And that means there is a relinquishment of control. When moss dries out, it dries out. But that’s not the end of the world. You just wait and it’ll be wet again. And, you know, no harm done. It’s that notion of control and having all needs satisfied—or all wants satisfied—at all times that, of course, our society and our economies have really propelled us toward. That notion that we’re entitled to the wealth of the world and to comfort and to convenience is pretty new for humans. And those comforts and conveniences themselves can be barriers to intimacy and connection and relationality because they make us think it’s all about us and our needs, which are not independent of the needs and desires of the millions of other species on the planet.

🔖 Thou Make Us a Hardcore Mixtape | self-titled –

Bryan Funck had a better idea: How about a mixtape of crucial hardcore music instead, complete with liner notes and a two-side ‘tape’ entitled If You Don’t Like This Music, We Can’t Be Friends? We got our start in Buffalo’s sXe scene during the ’90s, so the answer was simple: Well, yeah.

🔖 We’re All Preppers Now | Live Like the World is Dying –

I used to feel the relationship between individual and community preparedness as a tension: I was one of the only people I knew who focused on prepping before Covid, and I wondered what the point of it was. I don’t believe in individualist survival, so what good is it if I, and only I, have a gas mask or a few months of dried food lying around? Then, come Covid, I learned what the point is. The point of being prepared, as an individual, is that you’re better situated to help your community.