Backpain Bogus - LINK DUMP
This is Ospare, I am located in France and this is what it looks like :
I had something else planned for this week-end’s newsletter but life got in the way so I’ll need you to wait till next time for these worms.
Anyways, how are you doing ? What are your dreams about lately ? Mine feel more tangible these days.
I still don’t have the habit to note them down as soon as I wake up but I have this recurring feeling that I’ve just lived something real, not just a simulation by an active brain. A disturbing “I have to go somewhere!” feeling some anxious dreams give you that last a few seconds even after waking up. Another problem of the 5-days workweek i guess :P
The Age of Information Disorder By Claire Wardle
Yet another one of these “don’t trust all the shiny images” guides out there.
Can’t hurt to be a bit more cautious these days, especially when Social Media Industry traffic is increasing.
What Nihilism Is Not By Nolen Gertz
I know it’s not the cheeriest way to start with but it moved something in me to have all these neat boundaries and interweavings between different attitudes, times and ways of being.
I don’t know about you but i can recognise parts of my self in each of the [isms] presented here, only each seems linked to a different moment in my lifecycles.
We’re stuck in a paradigm of thinking conservation is this passive, fringe condition. It’s becoming apparent, however, that conservation landscapes and the management and adaptation of those landscapes are critical to survival. When you see forests being burnt at scale in Australia, you understand that these landscapes are interdependent with our cities.
Can’t wait for this shit to drop!
Excellent video on John Berger, a writer-critic whose work sets the exemple for what popular art education can try and do even at the dawn of the most atrocious economic circumstances while using the most popular media-form. I still haven’t read his fiction work though !
KUWASI BALAGOON: ON LINEAGE By Jasmine Gibson
“As a Black queer communist, you are faced with multiple fights, among them: one with white leftists negotiating their own obsolescence and two, fighting with and through history to see yourself. It is like looking at the decaying wall of an Egyptian tomb, trying to make a sentence out of the missing forms present before you. An eroded nose, a sacred figure in stone. As a queer communist, I am reminded “Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone.” “
Sometimes you find out about people who explode a little bubble of opinion you’d kept around in your mind, not necessarily one of resentment or apathy, more like a quiet contentment, acceptance that “this is the way things were”. William Dorsey Swann was one of these explosions, for me. Kuwasi Balagoon is another.
Interesting worker self-organisation story from a vastly overlooked figure, I bought his book PAN-AFRICAN SOCIAL ECOLOGY and am waiting for it to get shipped. Bookchin is cool and all but I really need some social ecology that doesn’t center a universalist figure of the human.
She Who Sees The Unknown By Morehshin Allahyari
“is a long-term research based project which started in October 2016 as part of my residency at Eyebeam in NYC. In She Who Sees The Unknown I use 3D modeling, 3D scanning, 3D printing, and storytelling to re-create monstrous female/queer figures of Middle Eastern origin, using the traditions and myths associated with them to explore the catastrophes of colonialism, patriarchism and environmental degradation in relationship to the Middle East.”
Islamic Futurity beyond daesh futurism (flawed but interesting paper), I’ve been thinking about this lately, after seeing Lynch’s DUNE again and learning that the Fremen population in it is supposed to be partly descendant of a subsection of a Sunni sect. I’ve looked a bit for the presence of islam in (western) sci-fi but I think my best bet would really just be to look up muslim authors, diasporic or not. (I know there’s gulf futurism but I’m looking for weirder directions).
From the excellent LAAB Mag N°4 By Siah Files
I don’t have any last words I haven’t typed out before, sometimes I feel like me repeating “take care of yourself” might be a bit annoying, then I remember that this is not a fucking public service announcement or manager checking up on a wageslave email but a newsletter and I did promise indulgent rants ; it just so happens my rants are about wanting to see a better world be born out of this one. That starts with making sure y’all are alright or on your way to something that could be said to be alright. And if you aren’t I’m just a click away.
That was Ospare tuning out, send books to ospare@substack.com or ospare@protonmail.com