Videos
Line Goes Up, Folding Ideas
This has been called the best case against crypto. Even though the bubble has popped, crypto scams are still running rampant across the internet and it’s worth being informed about. You will learn a little about the technical aspects of nfts and blockchains, but the main focus of the video is on the tech-bro, hype-capitalist culture that is driving all blockchain products and web3. This is my favourite movie.
I can’t stop watching Contagion, Folding Ideas
Something about this just really resonates with me. The basic premise being that we use fiction as a way to explore ideas in an emotionally safe environment. This idea is then expanded to include the ways we try to use fiction to process emotions we are already having.
Podcast
A.I. and Stochastic Parrots, Factually
Chat GPT is not a ‘stepping stone to AGI’ and labour exploitation is a more pressing concern than a ‘paperclip’ scenario. Anyone trying to convince you to focus on that rather than all of copyright violations is not ‘more aware’ of AI than you, they’re just better at marketing.
J.K. Rowling’s Spiral into madness, Matt Burnstein
Articles
The Second Person Internal Monologue
By Eleanor Stern
I love this. My own thoughts often take the form of speaking towards someone, usually someone I know, and they feel significantly more coherent when I am able to direct them. Part of me feel this is not a good thing, especially because when I am too distressed to form coherent thoughts, or find the subject matter of such thoughts to be distressing, my imagined interlocutor becomes quite cruel.
She gets manipulative, and starts gaslighting me about my own beliefs, values and intentions. I think this might be part of the reason that I have difficulty working through large things alone. Why I tend to seek out company with others, and sometimes cannot help but talk about whatever I am finding upsetting.
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Less Tiktok More Screaming
I found this article because it’s referenced in the essay No Good Alone by internet princess. While that essay focuses more on interpersonal relationships, and expresses how this general culture shift towards isolation as a form of emotional martyrdom, this one spends more time articulating the emotional experience of the individual. That is: isolated, numbed, bored, and easily influenced. It is not about how all of our relationships should be easy, but rather how we as people are encouraged to be unproblematic. No more big emotions, no more crying in public, no more feeling, and definitely no more sharing them.
I have more thoughts that can be found here
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standing on the shoulders of complex female characters
internet princess
link I think my therapist would say this is about “meaning making”. That’s what she’s called it whenever I mention banal details about my life because apparently I do a lot of it. This essay mostly ties it to capitalism, and the ways that society demands that women (specifically, although everyone generally), find ways to package our experience into something consumable.
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On Liking Women
By Andrea Long Chu
link I have too many thoughts on this woman to put here. So you can find them here
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I am a a trans woman. I am in the closet. I am not coming out.
by Jennifer Coats
link,
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It is rare that I find something on the internet that so perfectly captures the alienation of non-passing and closeted trans women. The rareness of such a thing is a product of the same frustration that the writer expresses here; How are we meant to feel safe, or included, when the spaces that are nominally ‘ours’ are often so hostile to ‘maleness’ that we are meant to ignore and discard our lived experience in order to feel welcome?
No Good Alone
By internet princess
The Humiliation of Desire by Clementine Morrigan pairs well.
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The Humiliation of Desire
by Clementine Morrigan
All the thoughts this creates for me are also heavily tied to No Good Alone by internet princess.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Archive
by Charlie Squire
I have a rule to not delete any photos. Since purchasing a google pixel in 2016, I have amass 325 GB of photos and videos. I am terrified of forgetting myself, my life, the people I have loved. For a long time, I had a similar approach to social media, refusing to remove photos of exes, myself, or anything else. This changed after a particularly bad relationship with someone who’s number I will never unblock.
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On Hating Men (And Becoming One Anyway
by Noah Zazanis
Link There is a lot to unpack here, and I do not want to get into it. In the place of my own personal experiences, I will give you a quote from the article
Link to original”For me, claiming that my childhood experiences of misogyny do not influence my current relationship to gendered power relations is as invalidating as saying that me having had a girlhood means I’ll never be a man. To believe that would render my past inexplicable, and leave me with no context for understanding the man I am now, and the ways in which I differ from the cis men I organize with, fuck, and love—as well as the ones who have harmed me.”
Why Trans Kids Have The Right To Change Their Biological Sex
by Andrea Long Chu
God I love this woman.
In this article, Andrea Long Chu articulates the elephant in every legislative building where the rights of trans people are being argued. Mainly, that biological sex is real, and that by justifying the right to transition through anything other that bodily autonomy and the desire to do so has been detrimental for transgender rights. For so long we have placed everything on a nebulous metaphysical idea of Gender, and argued that we have some innate unfalsifiable thing that will cause us to kill ourselves if our dicks don’t get awesome blossomed. It sounds like bullshit, to terfs, liberals, and conservatives, because it is. We want a thing for some reason, we have a desire, we should be allowed to act on it. No matter what.
If you would like to know more how I feel about Andrea Long Chu, I wrote a short primer of her here
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