NOW | 30 Dec 2024

• Celebrating five years of my notes system by finally describing it at its most stable form yet and with its own permalink. I also wrote about some of the principles behind its design.
• I'm on a good end-of-year break and I've been spending it mostly hanging out at home away from social media and sitting with my feelings, following trails of thought in my notes system, and having long conversations with my partner. Time feels spacious outside of work, there's room now for so much that I couldn't hold earlier in the year.
• We're trying to grow an avocado seed. It's starting to split, but we'll have to wait a lot longer to see. The other day we made spring rolls from scratch to freeze in bulk. I could eat a million of them. A shopkeeper in town gave us an acoustic guitar in exchange for something we found while cleaning up. I can't play it, but a guitar is always good to have around; may it delight our future guests.
• Added to the notes garden: How do you know what you know? In what ways do we accept, question, or resist authority? I share a framework for some language to describe the depth and ownership of our knowledge in any topic, plus some of my own commentary at the end. I also archived the ladder of citizen participation from an old ig post so it has its own standalone link.
• While finding spaces outside of the algorithm, I was really delighted to come across are.na and fell deep down the rabbithole. Replacing scrolling time with arranging my digital mess into channels has been so good for me. I love leaving around treasure for other people to find. You may have already seen the are.na 'playlists' I made for each of my values.
• Five of my reads in 2024 that I would recommend to you: 1️⃣ Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba's Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, 2️⃣ Isabella Hammad's Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, 3️⃣ Ruha Benjamin's Imagination: A Manifesto, 4️⃣ George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson's Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, and 5️⃣ The Women's Khutbah Book: Contemporary Sermons on Spirituality and Justice from around the World, edited by Sa'diyya Shaikh and Fatima Seedat.
• Games I explored in 2024 that I recommend you play with as little knowledge beforehand as possible: Slay The Princess, Gibbon, Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Untitled Goose Game, Citizen Sleeper, Wandersong.
• Archived some poems from my 20s: One on how to be a bed, one about the number one, a romantic poem about back pain, things my grandmother doesn't understand (may the Beloved be pleased with my grandparents).
• In my drafts: Highlights from the non-fiction books I read in 2023-2024 🪴 decolonising the imagination 🪴 basics on how to use a corpus when reading the Qur'an 🪴 why the settler project of israel won't win 🪴 on attention, coercion and intimacy 🪴 the only important binary to me right now

Total notes filed: 1140

In my system as of 23 July 2024 30 December 2024

• 🔹 388 461 in reading memory (facts, events, reports)
• 🔸 566 679 in second memory (concepts, claims, ideas)

186 notes added since last update, including:

• The parables of Jesus make more sense when understood through the flexibility of Aramaic
• Boundaries are values you impose on your self and behaviour, not rules you can enforce on other people
• The wave of 2020s media about declining population health often omits that all symptoms map to long Covid
• Whether you are religious or not, you worship
• Conservative and far-right institutions have historically protected predators
• Migrating birds use the Earth's magnetic field lines and celestial cues to find their way
• Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting
• When we respond to each crisis in isolation, we fail to identify the neoliberal false god all our disasters have in common
• Thailand is a major source of agriculture workers for israel
• Women delivery workers in Mexico City have come together to form a union demanding better protection, equal pay, and a change in the algorithm
• The Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion and culture that emerged from slaves in South America practising their beliefs in secret, forming a blended pantheon of orixás
• Torah upends the demands of Empire
• In 2024, scientists are measuring climate change's impact on daily life with a new type of forecast, 'outdoor days'
• The Beloved never forgets

This is a /now page inspired by Al Ibrahim, who was inspired by Derek Sivers, who said to think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in a year.