NOW | 23 July 2024
Think of a Now page as what one would tell a friend they haven't seen in a year.
🦖 In May and June, I lived out of a carry-on bag for about 40 days, moving from a hot and humid work trip to a family trip in the cold and bleak suburbs in Canada. Everyone around me had hockey fever from the Stanley Cup Final. I went to a rodeo. I went to the hot springs. I saw a black bear. I saw a raccoon cross the street and wild snow rabbits skip through suburbia in the morning. I tasted real maple syrup for the first time. I saw the Rockies from the plane window seat and from the highway. I went through my partner's childhood photos and got to give thanks to the place that made him. Whenever I described where I was from to others, it was compared to Mexico. I decided to take up Mexican Spanish. I went a small town known for its excellent dinosaur museum. Amidst everything going on in my first time in the North American region, I found myself sitting in front of this T-rex in person— named 'Black Beauty' because of the minerals around it when it was fossilised— and I got to hit pause on all the strange struggle I was in the middle of, briefly in the belly of the beast.
📻 I haven't listened to much music this year, and if you know me at all you know how significant that is. I depend on music and lyrics heavily for self-expression, for externalising emotional landscapes I don't have words for yet, for building connections to others. When I was younger, I was just as likely to burn CD-Rs and slip them into cases with hand-drawn cover art for someone I was just getting to know as I was for good friends. Maybe I've made you a playlist. Anyway, I needed to rethink my relationship with it and the entertainment industry pretty much ever since the moral turning point of everything that was October 2023. In the years before I had already given up Spotify for supporting AI in the military-industrial complex, and made a commitment to buy more music on Bandcamp. Lately I've only just started putting on music again, this time listening only to those who have called for an end to occupied territories, expressed solidarity with Palestine, Sudan, and/or called for Israel's exclusion in Eurovision and other spaces. It's still a good and growing list— there's Kehlani. Hozier. Chappell Roan. Fever Ray. Mustafa the Poet.
Music video for Kehlani - Next 2 U. People in Gaza held up signs thanking her when it dropped
Along the way, I continued to think about my relationship to music and entertainment. I want music that can connect me outwards, to current and possible new kindred and comrades, instead of something I put on to distract me from their suffering. I thought I would miss removing all Radiohead from my life and karaoke playlists, but instead I have been tickled by how the lyrics of Creep actually make for the perfect Zionist settler anthem; they can keep it.
🧠It took me a year, but I finally completed a values-based integration exercise. Several journal entries and reflections later, I narrowed it down to six values and elaborated on each:
Liy Yusof
🎇 There are almost 1,000 notes in my system in year 5! I am getting signs in different ways and from different people to finally get a simple explainer of the system live here and a session or two walking some friends through how they can find it useful for themselves. I'd like to get all of that running to ring in the 1,000 notes mark— we're just past 950 now.
Total notes filed: 954
as of 6 May 2024 23 July 2024
327388 in reading memory (facts, events, reports)426566 in second memory (concepts, claims, ideas)
89 notes added since last update, including:
- ChatGPT drinks 500ml of fresh water for every 20-50 requests you make
- Understanding domestic abuse can sharpen one's political analysis of authoritarianism in other forms
- All abusers use the same blueprint of basic techniques to establish power and build bonds of coercive control
- All insecure attachment styles use control tactics to avoid intimacy as a response to their understanding of others
- The Zionist settler occupation is funded by the platforming of banks, hedge funds, weapons makers, surveillance and security firms, political elite in mainstream pride celebrations
- There is a futility in celebrating neoliberal constructs while people are occupied, displaced, enduring genocidal violence
- Training large language models increases trauma and digital sweatshop culture in the global South
- Corruption costed Malaysia 277 billion ringgit from 2018-2023
- Before WWII, Malaya was so valuable to the British Empire that it was second only to Canada
- Malaya's land was so rich that colonising it carried the British Empire through both the Great Depression and 2nd Industrial Revolution
- Israel's genocide against Palestinians is accelerating its own economic collapse
- People who take the Covid-19 pandemic seriously have been abandoned by their friends and communities
- In 1995, only 14% of the US Empire had internet access
- Big Tech companies have informal monopolies over electricity access where their data centers are, disrupting local businesses
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.