I recently read that rather than "global south" and "global north," some people opt for "global majority" and "global minority." I like that, it reflects how I've always tried to think of it.
So, obviously, a beginner wants to start with a hardy plant, and I guess a cheap one, and one suited for the conditions the houseplant will be living in, and one they like the look of. But my intention with this hobby is to become more connected with my environment, not to exploit it in the way most convenient for me. I want to understand: what is a good, or minimally harmful, houseplant? Are the ecological footprints very different between different houseplants? I've been told that if you live above a certain floor on an apartment planting natives isn't important since pollinators don't get up to your level anyway--is that accurate? Do people ever uhhh...just like scoop up plants growing around them and just pot them and grow them at home? Are all plants that would thrive as houseplants commercially available or is what's commercially available mostly influenced by other factors like subjective/cultural aesthetic value & hardiness under transport conditions & stuff like that?
We sent a reporter to Rojava. In this preface to a long series, he recounts his trip & his interview with the YPJ’s top commander.
First of all, the publication's website counts every time you view a page as a new article being read, so if you view the original and not the archived version you'll just get locked out after refreshing it three times.
Don't bother with the first half imo, it's a useless faff, but the consciousness portion onwards is worthwhile: worker cooperatives being a marginal addition to a capitalist economy where many people are suffering, lack of participation in lower councils even among the Kurds (non-Kurdish groups apparently participate mostly only in name), asayish not becoming obsolete but ossifying into a police force, a war on the "state mentality" of the people. Nothing groundbreaking but updates are always welcome. The author will post a long series. I have my thoughts, what do you guys think?
he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.
seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you're doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?
What do you use for TTS? I'm interested in both a service that'll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.
Can I ask how you ended up there in the first place? I can scarcely think of a more interesting place on earth.
How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I'm a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners' perceptions.
One thing I do not need is more recommendations of what to read, my list is bottomless. Do you find it encourages you to read more or read differently? Has it given you any insights about your habits?
what benefits do people see from tracking their reading? why do you do it? I couldn't see the appeal years ago & had some hangups about it (like an overjustification effect psychologically from the social aspect of it messing up my motivation to read) but I've since gone through periods of tracking my spending & my food & seen benefits from those.
Jesus, why the downvotes? Someone give this man a dragonfruit. So much for friendly, casual discussion
I disagree. I've only ever had luck with the white ones.
I've done this and still only gotten lucky like 1/20th of the time. Very hard to tell when they're ripe and flavourful
I realise now what I was getting at in the OP is how people massage themselves into a state of inspiration where they can maximise their engagement and what they get out of the book and the beauty of it and open their hearts to it or whatever, and how they interact with the text when they're in that state. I realised this because I had the unusual honour of experiencing a state of inspiration the other night. Life feels pretty much dull and my heart feels pretty much shut to suggestion most of the time. What actually got me there was a completely unrelated life event (whose enchantment has already long since dried out). Seems like a work of art is the seed but the soil is life itself--how you read might be, at best, the water, so my question maybe isn't of much use if we live in a world of concrete. I hope there's more we can do that's under our own control but it doesn't seem that way now to me. (edited to rephrase a few times)
I've always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn't matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn't an option for me, 2) start improving from when you're young enough that you're not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.
Nobody has to take it seriously but I suspect it's more fun if they do. Some writers plot and foreshadow as baroquely as if they were building up a philosophical argument. I just read a review of a novel I'd read and the reviewer quoted some beautiful sentences I have no memory of.
Good for others but doesn't work for me as it's not on mobile sadly. There are several mobile translation extensions but they all rely on Google/Microsoft/DeepL & I don't know how to assess the privacy consequnces of that.
I dunno, I just mean like, in a qualitative way. A painter just puts the paint on the canvas, mechanically speaking, but there's some idiosyncratic internal imagery going on as they make the decisions as to what goes where, right? Some people do things faster than others. I imagine some people read more by theme, maybe including reading several pieces on the same thing in sequence. Others read more by character. Some people see literature as being morally instructive, others as escapism. Some people are very sentimental and loving towards some aspect of a work and not an other. Some people re-read a lot. I actually re-read about half of a novel because I initially came into it with a lot of suspicion but as I became sympathetic to the protagonist and author midway through the book I wanted to go back and suck in what I'd already read with more generosity and love. We all do things a little differently, it's fun to hear about how folks do it.
These past few months I've come back to reading novels for the first time, really, since I was a kid. I just read them an alternative to scrolling, though, so I don't really pay much attention. When I sit down to watch a film, I try to make sure my mind is clear, my environment is undistracting, and I try to watch observantly and engage on multiple levels. Not always easy to maintain that level of attention even for a 1.5-3h movie, to try to do so for a novel seems unreasonable. I've felt mostly indifferent about the novels I've been reading during this streak. I had one moment where I felt moved but I can't really speak eloquently as to why or how. I have too many goals that matter infinitely more to me to make becoming a more refined conscientious fiction reader a goal, but I'm curious by-the-by how other (more experienced?) people approaach their reading.
In terms of fiction I'm 2/3rds of the way through Free Food for Millionaires. It's all right. I found the writing in the beginning so compelling, but now I'm not sure if it's going anywhere. We'll see. I'm an inattentive reader in fiction.
Especially on an android browser like Mull (especially) or DDG.
Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it's the first time I've had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit's exhausting.
My first edit to this post was "maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start" bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.
I'm here seeking advice from those further along in their fitness journey than I am about the mental aspect of fitness as well as about some concrete knowledge. I'm a beginner and in the past I've had a lot of success in staying pretty consistent. 90% of anything is showing up. A golden rule for beginners is find an exercise you love doing and then you'll show up for it.
That's great advice. But there's limits, right? If you want to get strong you'll just...have to do some stuff you don't like. I can't jut play soccer all day, not least because the weather or outside forces don't permit it.
So there's another complementary approach: habit formation, and this is mostly what I rely on. In fact, I see a lot of people talk about how they hate their exercise (running and rowing especially) but they do it anyway--this abilty is inscrutable to me except in light of environmental conditions & habit. The point is that my life and environment are engineered where it's almost the path of least resistance to do my workout plan. I don't love, own, or identify with the workout program I do except by identifying with (1) the successes when I pull it off and (2) the fact that it's incidentally a part of my daily life--I identify with it the same way I identify with any other incidental habit in my life, like my commute, which I don't love or have sentimentality about otherwise. I think there is a subtle emotional cost to ragdolling yourself like this but it's more than worth it because of all of the practical benefits of exercise as well as the feeling of accomplishment.
But, the key word earlier being...almost the path of least resistance. And I think when inevitably Life Happens (TM) and the habit is broken the emotional cost of ragdolling has to be paid. Once the habit is broken and the path of least resistance is simply to not, the identification-by-habit is gone by definition bc the habit no longer exists, and the identification-by-success is gone because there's been a failure. There are a few ways I can respond to this situation, I think:
- Be forced to keep going. Extremely hard, virtually impossible, to force oneself against both the inherent difficulty of an exercise you don't love and the emotional baggage of having failed. To get back on track with the next day of the program is...very hard. Possible with a PT or gym buddy or other support but assume one doesn't have this.
- Summon up self-compassion out of thin air to void the aforementioned emotional baggage. This is basically as inscrutable to me as saying "cast a magic spell to solve the problem." What? How? Everything only works by the logic of effort and reward. God can give grace, I don't think I have that power wthin me.
- Go back a few steps in the program and ease oneself back in. Gentleness and momentum. Very sensible and I think extremely doable when there is an impetus to do anything, anything at all.
- Put a break on the current program and find other ways to move and develop a loving, joyful relationship with one's body and exercise. I think this, too, is a great idea. But because I'm a beginner, the advice I've been given is just "pick a tried-and-tested program and follow it." I don't really want to pick another effective but similarly impersonal program, that doesn't solve the ragdolling problem. But I don't just wanna flail around and do things that have no benefit to me whatsoever and risk backsliding entirely on the gainszsz I do have.
So, two questions: any responses to how I look at working out/programming, does this reflect your own perspectives earlier in your journey or now? And: how do I assess what to pick for joyful, loving, reparative, but still-effective movement? When it comes to food, there are lots of micronutrients and flavours that can guide my decision-making. When it comes to movement, is it the set of muscles I move? Is it the type of movement (squat, row, etc)? Is it the quality of the movement (power, etc)? Where do people learn this stuff?
In which Bateson argues that the efficacy of Alcoholics Anonymous is (in a Western, Cartesian context) comes at least in part from providing a more correct epistemology/ontology that subsumes a reified "self" into a larger system/circuit. The alcoholic is, by "hitting bottom," forced to shift from a destructive symmetrical to a complementary pattern of relation with the system.
I feel like any young person I speak to who is plugged into the English-speaking world will at least have encountered anti-work discourse. I've heard of people lying flat in China and nearby countries. Is there comparable discussion going on in your language? What does it look like?
For better or for worse, while growing up my social life was mostly online: gaia online, livejournal, deviantart, tumblr, and many others. I've heard of social media interaction be described as social junk food & even as I want to defend the many genuine, meaningful online relationships I had, I'm sympathetic: of course it's better to laugh together, to touch each other, to see each other's facial expressions, to do projects together, to tangibly help each other, to be part of each others' physical lives. Of course tech companies prey on our increasing loneliness and need for interaction the way that Coca Cola preys on thirst: claiming to cure it but exacerbating it and making us ill at the same time (and killing workers as they do it). But lots of people are in situations that keep them isolated that they can't easily change: disability, living rurally, working two jobs, living in places where they can't speak the language well, and the internet can provide a solution.
My life circumstances enable me to live the life I've always wanted to live, but it comes at a few sacrifices, the biggest being a social life, particularly a social life with people who share my values and who I feel comfortable speaking intimately with. There are lots of ways I can think of to make friends online, but mostly they involve having conversations on spyware platforms. Now that I'm privacypilled I can't unring that bell. It's as comfortable for me to make a friendship on a facebook group as it would be meeting a stranger for lunch in an extremely crowded public venue and have to scream our entire conversation perpetually. At least if they were willing to switch to Signal or something at some point we could metaphorically go to a quiet cafe and speak freely, but even the dude I talked to who talked about the book he read on techno-feudalism ditched it after trying it for a grand total of five minutes with me.
I fucking hate most tech companies and basically can't tolerate mainstream social media. My IRL prospects are what they are, I could change them only at great cost to myself. But, embracing my milkless cloth monkey mom, I have to admit sociality, love, and understanding are needs: their absence won't kill me as quickly as starvation, but it's probably up there with sedentism. Anybody else in the same pinch? How do you cope?
An art collective that creates immersive multimedia pieces about non-human subjectivity. I'm posting the TED talk bc when I looked, noting they had online seemed to be designed for online consumption, it's all exhibits. I hope one day they make work intended to be consumed at home and not just in a few galleries a world away. Their ideas/approaches seem very powerful.
I'm in a pretty vegan-friendly country with a long tradition of plant-based eating. Most people eat meat, but they are basically sympathetic to every meat-free argument: ethical, environmental, health. They sometimes do an awkward little shuffle & apologise for eating meat in front of me or say they're part-time vegetarians and so on. I think this is all quite nice.
What bothers me is when these same people talk about their pets. Eating meat, especially in contemporary urban settings where the origin is factory farms, indisputably objectively does more harm than keeping a pet, but people basically acknowledge meat-eating is a matter of habit/skill/knowledge. Whomst among us lives totally plastic-free, fuel-free, in the woods, etc? But people fucking rhasphodise about their pets. People will buy an animal from a breeder and keep it locked in the house or a cage completely bereft of any stimulation, they'll make it do stupid tricks to earn its food, they'll hound it or punis it for behaviours the owner finds inconvenient, use it for emotional comfort while having no real curiousity about the non-human animal's internal life or perception or needs beyond food and water and maybe some exercise, and then they'll talk about how it's their best friend. Guess what--I wouldn't "own" my friends! At least eating meat, in principle (though obviously not in practice in the modern world) is part of the natural circle of life and can be part of a respectful predator-prey relationship & sustainable ecology. At least people don't generally defend their meat-eating. But suddenly they're saints and best friends in their own eyes for taking a captive. To me, even though the objective harm is lesser, this is actually much more sadistic on an individual level.
Obviously there's a spectrum, bla bla. Dogs are an especially complicated case as a primeval co-domestication relationship with humans. One can absolutely make the case that because of the danger of our anthropocentric/anthropogenic built environments, it's the humane thing to do to keep a cat in the house instead of destroying wildlife or geting run over by a car or drinking antifreeze somewhere. The attuned, curious, considerate shelter-adopter is not the same as the owner who gives her dogs narcotics so they stop whining and disturbing the neighbours while she's gone 8 hours a day. But while interspecies companionship is not wrong, ownership imo aways is. I think people should at least be very self-critical and ambivalent about it. On the contrary, most people see it as unproblematic and a hobby.
To me, destroying non-human habitats and taking them into our own homes and completely flattening their internal lives & turning them into "good boys" and restricting their freedom (while calling them "friends"--friendship is a fucking voluntary dyadic association with no collars involved!) is a much blunter manifestation & affirmation of speciesist ideology imo. Every time I encounter it I find it very hard to deal with. I just stayed with someone who kept dogs leashed up 24/7 except for two daily walks who talked about how much he loved them and how ethical he was with them (there is no animal protection agency here, all of that is legal). A friend of mine just whined to me about how sad he is that he can't stroke his rodent because it died because another rodent pet of his bit it--well, don't fucking keep animals captive together in unnatural circumstances where they can hardly avoid conflict that was absolutely forseeably fatal?
Again, to me, it is just sadism. This is such a deeply-held position for me and it's so unpopular and impossible to talk about. I can't actually connect with anyone who is a proud or uncritical pet owner. I just smile and nod and think about how much muchness is in every consciousness and how close we are to most animals we keep captive evolutionarily and how much suffering that is both extremely easy to imagine and sympathise with if you bothered to consider it (no mammal or bird likes to be caged up/understimulated/told what to do/eating ultra processed garbage, fucking duh, Vox has a pretty good article critiquing pet ownership that lays it out convincingly & plainly) & difficult to understand bc every being has its own unique perceptions & desires & needs & skills many of which are opaque to humans...is created by pet ownership! And it makes me very very sad. I've distanced myself from relationships bc of it. Death to speciesism, death to anthropocentrism, death to the myth of human superiority.
tributarium @lemmy.world a life well-lived is a life taken seriously with curiousity cultivated about the right things