attention log
[2025-06] ☯️ Because all Things come in pairs, the relationships, symmetry, and asymmetry between those pairs helps us understand reality and the hierarchies of domination and exclusion humans succumb to.
[2025-05] 🇲🇽 A woman runs a hummingbird sanctuary from her bedroom, releasing 300 healed birds every year in Mexico City.
[2025-05] ☠️ Google bought 389 acres of land in Port Dickson, Malaysia, for data center development.
[2025-05] 📖 I'm back to reading fiction— for example my first James Baldwin, which was absolutely devastating and had me shaking fists. A beloved and I were exchanging texts as we were reading it together, which was really fun and now I want to try reading along with others more often.
[2025-05] 🪐 After a few years of exploring TTRPGs and recently reading Ideas To Postpone The End Of The World (a recommendation that reached me from Brazil) I find myself wanting to practice writing speculative fiction, new myths, fairytales for neoliberal times and a burning planet. Ailton Krenak in translation: "My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so that we've always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we'll be forever putting off the world's demise."
[2025-04] 🕋 Reading the al-Mulk chapter reminds me of the obsession with space travel, especially with recent news of the women going to space. Looking at 67:3-6— the mention of an "evil destination" for those who disbelieve as opposed to the fantasy destination of space, the lowest heaven with stars made into missiles for stoning devils (67:5), and how they look again and again, frustrated and weary (67:4) for a neoliberal escapist fantasy that will never come.
[2025-03] 🇺🇸 Declassified JFK files show us how many diplomats around the world were actually CIA agents.
[2025-02] "Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you're operating within a fascist logic," they said. "That means there might be a second one you're willing to sacrifice and a third, a fourth. Then what happens?" — Judith Butler
[2025-02] 🇺🇸 In late January, the world's richest man did two Nazi salutes at the presidential inauguration. A week or so later, the billionaire industrialist gained access to US payments infrastructure. In the same February, the Pentagon buys $8.8 million worth of AI-powered suicide drones to use on Americans.
[2025-01] 🇫🇷 French president Emmanuel Macron called African states “ungrateful” at a conference in Paris, claiming that African states would not be sovereign today without France’s intervention, and that France has not been thanked for the role it played. "We had a relationship based on security. It was in fact of two kinds: on one hand it was our commitment against terrorism since 2013, and we were right. I think they forgot to say thank you. It's okay, it will come with time. Ungratefulness, I know all too well. It is a disease that can't be transmitted to men."
[2024-12] 👀 Egyptian president Sisi got a few Qur'an verses engraved on his new palace but it's a quote from the actual Firaun.
[2024-11] 🥑 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.
[2024-11] 🧁 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. Also: 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.
[2024-11] 📚 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.
[2024-11] 🎮 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.
[2024-07] 🪸 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 here.
[2024-07] 🎹 I want music that connects 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 made it popular and they can keep it.
[2024-06] 🦖 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.
[2023-07] 🎨 I saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in an almost-empty cinema and was delighted by every minute. But it occured to me sometime in the movie (I think it was seeing Hobie's animation) it occurred to me how UNLIKELY it was that Sony would have done right by all these animators and artists (I remember this feeling with Life of Pi too). And welp, a Vulture piece came out last month where artists describe working on the film as 'Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts'.