I want to ask you all for some reading recommendations on the history of the GDR. This is for a party thing I’m doing, so I’m looking for something credible that’s not just anti-communist propaganda (and also not just apologia, but that’s less of an issue obviously). I’ve heard that the PDS published a whole book series, but I’m having trouble finding it. Can anyone point me at some books or texts? Thanks!

There’s another -17 for protecting LGBTQ rights lmao

Tolkien stopped Stuart Hall from doing his graduate thesis as he planned, either because of racism or because of anti-Marxism. He was a reactionary through and through

No, it hasn’t.

And just to drive it home: The WMF spend only a fraction of their money on IT and lawyers, i.e. the one useful thing they do for Wikipedia. The rest just goes into salaries and ominous ever-increasing funds.

They solved that problem by just making the models a bit boring. In the end, it’s just another batch of space marines

I refuse to accept that 5 years have passed already

What’s with political columnists getting into comics writing? I remember Ta-Nehisi Coates did the same thing. It just seems so weird to spend your whole career on short-form non-fiction pieces and then pivot into an entirely different form of creative writing mostly aimed at teenage boys.

I am once again suffering from technology. So my university has introduced compulsory two-factor-authentication using a Cisco smartphone app in order to access JSTOR and the like, which was already a hassle. I had to hand-write a letter to IT because I couldn’t get to campus to set it up, lol. Now Google has updated their “integrity” standards and my cheap Chinese phone is no longer allowed to use said Cisco app at all, which means I’m forced to buy a new phone and contact IT again to set it up. All this because some IT people got it into their heads that the normal method of JSTOR authentication is nonviable or insecure or something. Frankly, I’m hoping those kickbacks from Cisco are worth it.

Ramses Ii

There’s an article about that: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

Unfortunately, we’re organized in a rather informal and egalitarian way, so there’s nothing to be done except maybe be the first to post the agenda. However, someone with more social capital than me called out that this didn’t follow the procedure we agreed on, so maybe we will talk about the way we do things and how seriously we take our division of tasks.

I’ve got to vent a bit. In my local org, we’ve got a subgroup (just a group chat) to prepare the agenda for the next meeting. I created a text document and put some topics in it, but received no reply of any kind. Now, there’s some current events happening, there was an optional meeting I skipped and people got together and created their own agenda. And it’s perfectly fine; it contains everything I wrote down and other, more important things. It’s just that the work I did was completely useless and nobody even bothered to tell me. These social interactions are very stressful to me and I have to make quite an effort to contain my emotions. This is really just my own problem, but I’m upset that I’m upset for no good reason.

Substack should just be forbidden in general, maybe with some exceptions for news articles that aren’t accessible otherwise. We really don’t need the opinions of “leftist” outrage merchants trying to make a buck on some Nazi website on here, I feel like.

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn’t really add anything to the game but tedium.

Nearly every computer built after 2008 or so is possibly backdoored on a hardware level due to the Intel Management Engine (and its AMD equivalent). But unless you’re committing computer crimes that could arouse interest from the FBI, you’re better off worrying about your password and email security than obscure and unproven methods of exploitation in my opinion.

Genuinely how on earth do you misinterpret the themes of a film so poorly lmao.

I don’t appreciate that tone. Her accepting her sexuality ends in her having sex with what you call the “embodiment of male sexual domination” and then they both die. How does that make sense? It seems like everyone save the men loses out from her accepting her sexuality. And I don’t think it’s very coherent how the movie shows that sexual desire cannot be controlled – except via marriage – because that has murderous consequences, which can, however, also be resolved through sexual desire. I just don’t feel like the metaphors here work together and that is what I meant by “incomprehensible”.

To put it more clearly: In the Eggers films I’ve seen, every woman either ends up dead or part of a childremoved cult and I don’t think women who suffer are automatically a sign of feminist politics.

It’s so bad! You can’t see a thing, there’s a magic exposition man, everyone constantly talks for no reason and the message appears to be that women having sexual desires causes the plague. Like, Werner Herzog did this movie already and Eggers instead decided to crib most of the changes for his version from Francis Ford Coppola (and from The Exorcist, the scariest movie of all time (!)). I should have realized after watching The VVitch that he’s just another middlebrow director with weird gender hang-ups that get lauded for being incomprehensible. Also, what kind of filmmaker is unable to make a movie set in the current day? Seriously now.

Fuchsia Dunlop has a recipe by Buddhist monks in her Hunan cookbook that’s simple and vegan. You cut some celery and smoked tofu into strips, you fry the tofu in a wok, take it out, fry the celery, put the tofu back in and season with soy sauce and chili flakes. Serve the whole thing over rice et voilà.

Some of the saddest characters online have got to be writing influencers. Posting about the nobleness of art all day and how unrewarding and tough the life of a writer is, commiserating with others in the know about how those fools just don’t appreciate the harsh realities of the publishing industry – and never actually posting any writing. I mean I literally never see anyone recommending their stories or their magazines. It’s just self-aggrandizement based on the idea of accomplishment rather than actual accomplishment.

Can you tell I got mad about social media again?