And so the work week comes to an end! Going to go stick my head in the wet sand for a while. Have a good one.
The Supreme Court just gutted unions' ability to strike entirely so that's where we're at now.
The case was Glacier Northwest vs. Teamsters Local 174. The vote was 8-1. (So much for those liberal judges 🙄) And striking workers can now be sued for lost product and revenue. Super cool!
cool. cool cool cool cool. normal legal decisions by absolutely normal people who care about ensuring people respect the law's right to have social meaning in any way ... love seeing it.
pretty soon the only way to resist this sort of thing will be murdering the rich and their chosen bootlickers and parading their corpses around as a threat, like they think we won't.
wish it were otherwise, but, like, what else do these judges want the takeaway to be, here?
Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris
(via Mubi)
[Image description: A series of close up profile screenshots of James Baldwin. Captions are printed on each shot.
“Love has never been a popular movement. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you are looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
The whole point of writing fascist characters as human beings is that real fascists are also human beings. If you think of fascists as somehow less than human you are falling into the trap of letting their mentality frame your worldview, thus legitimizing their course of action!
When you start looking at fascists as subhuman the debate becomes 'which group is actually subhuman and which is being unfairly maligned?' And personally I'm not fucking comfortable with that question being on the table ever.
#ADDITIONALLY #it makes recognizing fascist ideology in the people around you so much harder #bc if you know someone as a person #and a fascist isn't a person #then clearly this person can't be a fascist #or have fascist views #they're your colleague or your neighbor or your family member #they are way too human to be fascist
DING DING DING ✅
Without saying too much my dad manages a research-grade supercluster computer for work. According to him, most of what you read about LLM softwares like chatGPT is complete bullshit made up by marketing teams to make AI seem more powerful than it actually is.
It is currently threatening exactly one job: people who synthesize specialized technical information into form letters.
The sharpest blade requires the most practiced hand to wield it... there is no psychological tool more subtle and deadly than the ability to intentionally, selectively not give a shit about things. You need a monastic level of self-discipline to use this power responsibly. Many cannot.
My annual post about Pride month
Dear Other Cisgender Heterosexuals,
Pride month is not ours. Pride month is not a fabulous party for us to whoop it up at. Our entire job during Pride month (and every month!) is to support the folks that we aren’t. Be supportive. Be respectful. Don’t talk over the folks who Pride is for. Don’t out people. BE SUPPORTIVE AND RESPECTFUL.
Help those who need it. Stand up for those who need protection. Use your privilege to push back against discrimination.
To all of you who Pride month IS about, I see you, I support you, and I love you.
The National — First Two Pages of Frankenstein (4AD)
Photo by Josh Goleman
For all of the (kind of understandable) jokes both lovers and haters of The National make about the band’s relentless sadsack whiteguy dadness, you don’t have to scratch the surface much to unearth a pretty profound and consistent engagement with harrowing anxiety. Caught in mid-spiral on “Mr. November,” staring into the mirror on “Baby, We’ll Be Fine,” the constant self-recriminations of Boxer… even actual fatherhood merely gave Matt Berninger material for the fun new dread of “Afraid of Everyone” and “I’ll Still Destroy You.” One thing that gives all the bad vibes an unusual power is, as Berninger freely shares in interviews, its origin as a kind of negative visualization; a way of perversely preserving and strengthening those relationships at risk. That doesn’t magically evaporate the fear and guilt, but it maybe speaks to why so many find those struggles comforting and reassuring rather than just a bummer. The sometimes withdrawn (but trying not to be) First Two Pages of Frankenstein emerges after a period of depression and writer’s block left the band’s existence in actual doubt. As you might expect, it doesn’t find Berninger and co-lyricist/spouse Carin Besser any more settled than before, even as the band spins ever more impressively filagreed scaffolding to support their sentiments.
After kinda missing me with the last album, the National are back baby!!! For me, at least. There’s a lot of good stuff out there on the fraught origins of this one, and I really like old buddy/Stylus compadre Brad Shoup’s more measured take on the record (like all of Brad’s reviews, this one has at least one bit that makes me outright no-qualifiers jealous of his skills; here one that jumps out at me is “it has the effect of filling a canyon with mist”), so this is just me setting out my stall on some of the stuff I feel like I always gotta relitigate with them and explaining why I find it so moving.
a really little animated black cat with giant eyes and no other discernible features
do you get it or do you not know anything
more examples that people keep getting upset with me for not adding
That’s just how black cats be
there is no unlived life or alternative reality where everything went right…. there is only here and now what are you going to do with it
Hello! I have a short story up at The Offing! Give it a read.
But the new tunnels’ patina is wrong: dry and crisp, lacking the centuries-old drip and goo that lends the catacombs their secretive, haunted air. (Lining them fully with bones, as Paris’ tunnels are, strikes the projects’ planners as in bad taste, somehow.) The city gets in touch with a midwestern metropolis that’s modernizing its wastewater system for rising sea levels, and the demolished tunnel walls are shipped down to the southwest. There, they spackle the blackened, pocked surface of the wastewater stone onto the crisp walls of the new tunnels.
DC’s tribute to Rachel Pollack from DC Price #1 (2023)
"helicon 2 (max tundra remix)", kicking a dead pig (v/a, 2001; remixing young team, mogwai, 1997).
"Never focus on on what you can subtract from- but what you can add to your meals."
This video was very fast but... this is what made me reblog.
Very well said.
The reason SPAM has a negative view is quite simple. During WWII, it was the only protein that wasn’t rationed. This meant that most people ate more SPAM than they wanted to.
The culture around it has just remained.
Dust Volume 9, Number 5
Ascended Dead
Hard to believe we’re approaching the halfway point of another year, and yet here we are in May, thinking about the mid-year and how we’re going to fit all the excellent stuff so far into a reasonable length list. There’s always too much music, a wonderful problem, but a problem all the same. And so we turn again to Dust to burn off some of the excess. As usual, the reviews run the gamut, from lucid ambient reveries to blistering industrial mayhem, from joyful death metal (surely a contradiction in terms?) to ragged improvised noise. Contributors this time include Ian Mathers, Andrew Forell, Jonathan Shaw, Tim Clarke, Bill Meyer, Christian Carey Jennifer Kelly, Bryon Hayes and Jim Marks.
I’ve got a little blurb on Aarktica’s gorgeous ambient guitar-and-cello record Paeans in here!
Hi Mr. Gaiman, I've seen a few tweets and posts about not crossing the picket line for the WGA strike but nothing actually explaining what that entails for this strike? Is it not watching streaming services since that's one of the main issues? All tv? TV and movies? only new stuff or reruns too?
No, it's to not cross the picket lines literally. If there's a writers guild picket in place, you don't cross it. (But you can always join it -- especially if you are in LA or NYC.)
The WGA hasn't called for a boycott of streaming services or TV or anything like that, and until and unless they do I wouldn't push for that.
What the WGA would like is for people to make their support for the writers clear and loud -- write to the networks you watch on and tell them to treat their writers fairly, post your support on every social media outlet you can. Let the producers know that public opinion is against them.
It's easy to support strikes at first - to swap memes and say "Go Union!" and tell writers we support them.
It's harder two months in. Four months. Eight.
If this goes like the last few writers' strikes - it means a terrible tv season, a delay in movies, big changes in late-night talk shows (the talk isn't scripted; the monologues and jokes are--and they don't have half a dozen scripts in the can; they have to be written based on recent news), and other areas we won't notice until it's underway.
Strikes are a game of chicken. AMPTP is counting on public backlash to convince the WGA to back down, and that won't happen right away.
The writers are risking a lot for this. They're not getting paid while they wait. (There may be strike funds, but there are no new project deals, no bonuses, no overtime pay, and so on. And the strike fund isn't unlimited.) They're pinning a lot of hope on the skills of their negotiators.
So when they tell you what would help - believe them. That's always "don't cross the picket lines" and "express support publicly" and "if you can get there in person, the picket lines appreciate coffee and snacks." It is always "don't take a scab job doing the work that someone on strike is refusing to do." (Note that in this case, the WGA has the right to block future membership from scabs. You can't get an edge in the industry by taking the jobs that are going to open up.)
Anything other than that, the negotiators try to figure out.
Maybe that's "It'd help if people suspend or cancel their streaming services." Maybe it's "please DON'T suspend or cancel them - that's how they feel the pressure to produce new content. If people cancel, they'll claim there's less demand, less money for the writers."
We're on the outside, and there's a lot of moving parts. Listen to the union when they tell you how you can help.
And be ready to stand by them, even months later when (1) your new shows on TV suck, because the only scripts available are the ones that were initially rejected, and (2) the AMPTP starts announcing how unreasonable the WGA is being, how it's misrepresenting their claims, how they don't understand how the business works, how there's this one case where the WGA demands would make everything worse for the writers involved.
It's all lies. Stand with the union. Trust them to know what's best for their workers.
they’re living the dream
