NOW | 9 Sept 2025
Think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in awhile.
Reading: I wish everyone would read The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins. I usually read fast, but this one I started in May and am only 60% through now. It pairs with my favourite documentary, The Act of Killing. Other than that, still deep diving into both Nathan Rochelle DuFord's Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory and Mohamed Abdou's Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances— these two books have given me an entirely new personality I fear! And I love me more for it.
Listening: As AI playlists flood YouTube I have been really enjoying real human beings doing mixes and song selection in different settings, house parties, labour protests. Obsessed for example with molam (หมอลำ) mix so mental it scares the hell out of government and the homies mixing R&B and burning grilled cheese for an hour.
Making: 🍋🟩🍯🌺 We have popsicle silicone moulds now so I am turning everything into ice, such as the lime honey hibiscus tea I made from flowers in the garden. I made a working glossary. With my hands I am folding and doodling A4 mini zines, mostly based off my existing essays as an exercise to summarise them in a pocket form. I'm also experimenting with creating presentation slides instead of essays to digest ideas from books I've read.
Living: Did you know there's a species of snake that glides 10m in the air from tree to tree? 🐍 We know because one tried to creep into J's office the other day and he admired the danger noodle briefly before escorting it out. The Year of the Snake is coming for all of us here. Two weeks ago we all screamed into a fire and it felt good. The nonstop child sacrifice ritual being carried out by the world's richest abusers continues to fuel our daily rage and actions. If I didn't keep a journal I wouldn't have realised that every August something fundamentally shifts for me in a big way. I fell sick for the first time in years last month and having to stop everything to sleep it off for a week really took me on a psychic journey. Remind me later to tell you how changed I was on the last day of August compared to the first.
Hyperfocusing: Andor is the best TV show I have ever seen. It is so radicalising that the Star Wars empire will fumble trying to get lightning to strike twice. I will be making references to it for years. Since the announcement of tariffs and further imperial violence in West Asia and the Levant, I learned about financial warfare, which led me to self-learning the basics of geopolitics, and I am convinced is context that is both clearer and more important than ever before.
Total notes filed in my system: 1486
- 🔹 613 in reading memory (facts, events, reports)
- 🔸 873 in second memory (concepts, claims, ideas)
Some notes added recently:
- Spirituality is a central pillar of decolonisation
- It's impossible to do religion without race or race without religion
- The year 1492 is year Zero of the modern world, where Muslim power declined and the European settler-colonial project in the Americas began
- The diaspora quest for assimilation and inclusion promotes colonial violence elsewhere
- Identitarian relationships are insufficient for solidarity
- An ethics of disagreement is necessary for collective liberation
- The destruction of social welfare increases the supply of working class for private companies to exploit
- The US Empire's greatest export is the illusion
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.