Redownloaded Instagram And Got Sucked Into Reels And It’s Truly Like An Alternate Reality Happening

I’m so used to everyone across the leftist political spectrum online shitting on veganism constantly that I keep being genuinely shocked when I go to irl leftist gatherings and I am far from the only vegan person there. People incorporating veganism into their anarchist theory, their abolitionist theory, their feminist theory.. It’s like oh yeah, the weird internet poison is not everywhere.

Going on vacation as a vegan with a bunch of non-vegans can be so frustrating bc they all pick the restaurants and I have to make whatever half cooked veggies they have work and then they’re all like man I’m so full and I go back to the hotel room and eat the snacks I brought

The funniest homophobia I ever experienced was a Mormon lady at my work telling me she would accept me being gay because we have to get along as coworkers but I really should consider not being gay because gay people have sex like animals (especially gay men) and she just couldn't stop thinking about it and how gross we are. She started really getting distressed, near tears, and saying 'I can't stop thinking about it. I can't stop." over and over and miming some kind of sex acts with her hands and I was like ?????? What is happening???? One of the other Mormon ladies had to come over and pat her on the back and help her sit down to help her calm down and our boss gave her the afternoon off due to being too upset to work.

I talk frequently about how ignorant most Global North citizens are about the immigration policies of their own and other countries. When my husband and I (Global North citizens of different countries) got married, we had conversation after conversation with people who assumed that by producing our marriage certificate we could simply become residents of each other’s countries— and that we could not be refused residence in each other’s countries, as separating a husband and wife could surely not be allowed. 

More interestingly, a lot of people seem to refuse knowledge about immigration, perhaps because it can’t be integrated into some deep and important picture of the world that they have. My parents can’t make themselves believe that my British husband would get in trouble if he overstayed his visa “just a couple of days” in the US, or that I (an American) would ever get deported from the UK, no matter what the circumstances. This is not only because they believe that British and American citizens, as Global North citizens, are specially exempt from the systems that are “meant” to regulate other kinds of people, but also because fundamentally they believe that government and its processes are rational and just. They must believe that government and its processes are rational and just, because otherwise their whole picture of the world— the means by which they understand it— would collapse.

This is all fairly simple and obvious. What is not so simple and obvious is the way that their privileged ignorance, the hothouse resilience of their fantasy world, is part of a mechanism through which the “work of knowing” in our society is outsourced to the underprivileged. (The privileged do not have to know in a way that disrupts their fantasy, because not-knowing has no consequences for them.) This is an interesting dynamic, because many postcolonial theorists (Sara Ahmed, Dipesh Chakrabarty, etc) have explored how the Global South is typically portrayed as that-which-is-known-by-the-Global-North, and therefore as not capable of knowing. So what does it mean that the tools of regulation remain in the hands of the Global North, but that the knowledge of regulation is a burden borne by the Global South? There is an element here of knowing as knowing-your-place, for sure— learning to be interpellated as the illegal and the undesirable. The knowing that is happening also constitutes the production of the illusive “just and rational” world that sustains the Global North. I’m interested in the way that the dehumanization of the Global South therefore serves to sustain the rational and just Human and humaneness of the Global North. There’s an abjectification that is necessary for this— as anyone who has experienced universal healthcare knows, more just and equitable care/distribution of resources often means that more privileged people get less-nice things than they have been led to expect, so if they want to continue to enjoy the same standard of living allowed them by unjust and non-equitable care, they must rationalize this somehow. And how does one rationalize having been, by chance, born in the right geographic area? One can’t. One must, instead, believe that this is not how privilege is allotted, which required not-knowing that this is how privilege is allotted. 

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide

Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:

"I just want an identical experience to DL"

Busuu (Languages: Spanish, Japanese, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Korean)

"I want a good audio-based app"

Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)

"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"

Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)

Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)

*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.

"I have a pretty neat library card"

Mango (Languages: So many and all endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)

"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"

AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)

"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"

AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone

"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"

lingory

"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"

ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)

"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"

Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)

i’ll literally never get anywhere

i loved one direction with an all-consuming force when i was younger. it hurts deeply to mourn someone you were a massive fan of as teenager, and became a peer of as an adult.

i know people change and grief is unsure or complicated when it’s attached to a fond memory or the feeling a person gave you and not tangibly the person themself. i can see many of you on here are struggling with that right now and i understand.

a few years ago i purchased a home that Liam previously owned. there were rumors the house was haunted. He assured me it was not, and i believed him. because i know the ghosts that haunt us aren’t tethered to buildings. They live in parts of us that are harder to reach and they go wherever we do.

as a parent, a fellow artist, and a fan, i simply cannot fathom this untimely loss. my heart goes out to his family, friends, and the fans. 💔

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

I love my people and it's amazing to see so many of us turn up today, but it's like herding very friendly cats 😂

:(