@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"If one uses the word “fascism”, people accuse you of hysteria – but isn’t this precisely what fascism looks like? A minority group is unfairly demonised until public opinion sours sufficiently for lawmakers to impose restrictions on said group"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 24 I hear it is charged against me
This poem feels just so typically Whitman, but lesser somehow. Not one of my favorites.
He says he is "charged that I seek to destroy institutions". Charged by whom, one wonders, is he really so important? He sort of denies this, or is ambivalent to it, and then gets to the queer part:
I will establish ... the institution of the dear love of comrades
And here we are again at the central queer question: just what does he mean by "dear love of comrades"? As I read these poems I'm increasingly thinking it's both things. Sure, it's brotherly love, adhesiveness, a sort of robust fraternity. But so much of his writing and life is homoerotic it has to also have that charge. It can be both.
I feel like I've heard that phrase "the institution of the dear love of comrades" repeated often.
@chriscz@social.linux.pizzaI may well have aphantasia to a degree in waking life as I cannot visualize voluntarily.
https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WritersCoffeeClub June 4: Do you consider writing work? Would you consider writing your life's work?
Work, as in something that requires effort, that I take seriously - yes.
Money is beside the point.
Writing is what I do, what I love, and what I want. Is that "life's work"? I don't know, that's for someone else to decide once I'm gone.
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"despite the law being very clear, actually, a few very determined transphobes have crawled their way to the heart of the law like maggots in an apple. A system that has been working perfectly well since 2010 has now been unnecessarily tampered with – and Starmer has capitulated because he’s spineless"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights
@salrandolph@zirk.us
@randy_@social.linux.pizzaOver the last few months, I have filtered out most USA news, so I have basically a minimal knowledge of what is happening in that part of the world. To be honest, it's great! The same goes for tech, I work long 12-hour days and weekends as a sysadmin, and the last thing I want to see after those days is tech stuff. So, I read tech news through newsletters sent to an email address I only use for that purpose.
It’s making my life more relaxed not to care about what is happening on ot…
@sonnets@bots.krohsnest.comSonnet 009 - IX
Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye,
That thou consum'st thy self in single life?
Ah! if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep
By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind:
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his…
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to"Jim Coplien ends his talk with a simple call to action: at every conference where new technology is introduced, software engineers should strive to be skeptical; to ask whether it improves the quality of life of society as a whole, and to take it home only to increase the human value of our products and services.
Focus on the people. Again and again. Because that is what Agile and OOP were all about, to begin with."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/james-coplien/
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"I changed my passport in 2015, but now I can’t get a visa to the USA for my book tour unless I say I’m male? Will I get detained at JFK? My birth certificate was lawfully reissued in 2018 as a female birth certificate, but now I’m not a woman legally?"
#TransRightsAreHumanRights
@annettamallon@aus.socialDeath Literacy is essential for a good quality of life for every stage of life, including our end of life and dying. *
Got questions? I'm an end of life doula and I'm here to help.
#GDEPAU
#AskAnnetta
#EOLD
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgThe recent two "Behind the Bastards" episodes on Carl Schmitt are really enlightening. Like I knew his thinking but showing how it emerged from his life is really insightful. What a fucker.
https://pca.st/episode/d3befe91-6bc9-409f-8347-372c2615683f
@denmanrooke@social.coopWhat is the biggest threat to companies regarding remote work?
I think it really comes down to remote employees have more autonomy over their life, and so aren't forced to cower to the company. Remote work removes the hassle of having upend ones life when changing companies by moving country etc.
@MamasPinkyToe@mastodon.worldI live a life of danger.
@nelson@tech.lgbtCalamus 21 Music always round me
A celebration of life, the metaphor of music all around us if only you can hear it. The last line is what gives me pause, it suggests an interesting nuance of meaning.
I do not think the performers know themselves—But now I think I begin to know them.
I'm a little pressed to find a gay reading of this poem, it doesn't have the usual paeans to manly love. There is a pleasant exuberance and sensuality to it, "shuddering luciously" and all. But it's the beginning lines that really catch me:
Music always round me ... yet long untaught I did not hear,
But now the chorus I hear, and am elated,
It's like there's a secret world of pleasure that Whitman only recently has learned to enjoy himself. A feeling similar to the epiphany of coming out to oneself.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialTo dig slightly deeper here, I think that there's a feedback loop between "fall in love/wait for your perfect match (and by the way girls the only career you should aspire to is the literally unattainable 'princess'" Disney stuff and this "my characters are complex I'm so sophisticated; they suffer but it's not intolerable and their lives are good enough despite the imperfections" crap that gets praised as so evocative of the human condition. In fact, I think it merely evokes the condition of its authors & fans who were poisoned by the Disney in their youth and who have remained bad as relationships ever since, though this is not exactly their fault. In any case, their white middle-aged wisdom-shaped-but-quite bitter and intricately-constructed-so-it's-hard-to-see-the-really-untrue-character-facets work ends up keeping their audience within the "romance is luck" cult by way of reassuring them that a middling romance with lots of doubt and complications is "just life" even though the author doesn't actually have any broader perspective on what life is than anyone else.
This has turned into a bit of a rant, but I think I'll just add that reading Mama by Nikkya Hargrove just before Dream State helped immensely to see how the distant & awkward parent-child relationships of the latter are not a product of human nature but instead of white western culture & capitalism.
(The defeatism about climate change is a whole nother dimension of wrong about Dream State, by that's a separate rant.)
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Learn more:
@castarco@hachyderm.iotechno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.
@EmilyMoranBarwick@mastodon.socialSometimes I feel like a broken record when #writing about #neurodivergence
But re-processing my past through the lens of #Autism
@arXiv_condmatsoft_bot@mastoxiv.pageEmergent Dynamics of Active Systems on Curved Environments
Euan D. Mackay, Giulia Janzen, D. A. Matoz Fernandez, Rastko Sknepnek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24730
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…
@emilis@social.linux.pizzaJoin our #Luanti server they said. A few days have passed and I built this. Now what?
Contemplating my life choices.
@sonnets@bots.krohsnest.comSonnet 111 - CXI
O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eisell 'gainst my…
@zudn@theres.lifeA nice little nap on the couch under the air conditioner, when the temps are scorching the air outside, is just what the doctor ordered.
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WritersCoffeeClub 5/27. What is a ‘load-bearing’ part of your non-writerly life that makes writing possible for you?
I have a limited amount of energy and my family comes first, and then obligations that I have to take care of. Work is necessary, not optional.
The time I have left is my spare time. We all have that, an hour or two when we're free.
During that time,…
@arXiv_qbioOT_bot@mastoxiv.pageWhat Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life
Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Michael Levin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15849 …
@davidshq@hachyderm.ioOne of the most important lessons I've learned in life / continue to learn / managed to forget is the importance of "stopping." It is so easy for life to become overwhelming with all the things I must do. Work, family, friends, volunteering, community, finances, chores, taking care of my health, the list goes on...
"Life is a very simple thing. We make it more complex." - Anonymous
"When we are making our life more complex, that is precisely the time when we are totally incapable of seeing what we are doing. The more complex our lives are, the more we need to be present to them and, surprisingly, this is exactly the time when we are most distracted. When we are distracted, we tend to have poor judgment and make more mistakes . . . usually adding to the confusion . . . and so it goes."
"....We usually respond by trying to become even more controlling and, eventually (or immediately!), this just makes things worse."
"It's time to stop, take stock, take some deep breaths, rest, listen to others, and regroup...We may miss something. We may even miss something we think is important. That's okay. We're more important."
"Taking time to stop may be just what I need to move ahead."
-- Anne Wilson Schaef, Meditations for People Who (May) Worry Too Much, Ballantine Books, 1996, entry for May 6th.
#life #quotes #health #productivity
@blaise@mastodon.cloudI'm not advocating psychopathy, but hear me out. Aren't psychopaths happier than everyone else? They feel no empathy, so they don't feel guilty or remorseful for anything they've ever done. They feel superior to those around them. What they want, at this moment, is basically all they will ever care about.
Seems like a fairly placid internal life, to me...
@blaise@mastodon.cloudBrain-dead mother. Brain-damaged fetus. No hope for either. So torture their family by keeping both alive until the at-least horribly disabled baby can be delivered and then suffer for months or years with their brain damage. This is what "pro-life" means...
https://www.newsweek.co…
