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A Call for Empathy or "Slacktivism"?

A Call for Empathy or “Slacktivism”?

The theme of ARS22: living encounters is a call for empathy. It acknowledges that the world is in a crisis in every possible way and the goal is to bring about a diverse set of voices to create empathy in the world. One of the most memorable pieces was Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires which is a film that is shown on two diagonally joined screens. The last…

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The Archipelago Museum and Why You Should Travel to Obscure Places

The Archipelago Museum and Why You Should Travel to Obscure Places

I like the more obscure places to explore more than very well-known sites. The Archipelago Museum is one of those humble locations. Outside of Helsinki, one will have to take a car to get there. The largest town nearby is Porvoo which is also a very cute town to visit, particularly, the picturesque red wooden houses on the river. There is Isnäs but it is very small. So, you will be going far out…

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Mystery! Mondays: The Crooked Man

Summary: A middle age couple was fighting in a room and the husband was found dead and the wife passed out. The wife had two suitors, one of which was the husband and another. They were both in the British military in India. The husband betrayed this other suitor and had him taken to a prison of war. Every bone in his body was broken hence giving him a crooked appearance. The man goes back home…

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Mystery! Mondays: The Solitary Cyclist

Mystery! Mondays: The Solitary Cyclist

This episode is my favorite episode so far! It also has a very relatable yet disturbing story. The episode has a female character, while not as fantastic as Irene Adler, is someone who can hold her own.It’s about a woman, Miss Violet Smith, who is followed by a man every time she bicycles down a lonely path. Already, this is a daily fear by many women. Eventually, it is revealed that there was a…

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Mystery! Mondays: The Naval Treaty

Mystery! Mondays: The Naval Treaty

“The Naval Treaty” is considered one of the first spy thrillers. In this story, Sherlock Holmes’s case is about a stolen treaty that could lead to World War One. I find it interesting how Holmes’s mysteries have a lot of variation and not just murder mysteries. So far, the series has us encounter: a royal scandal, harassment, and assault that led to murder and this political mishap. Sherlock…

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Mystery! Mondays: A Scandal in Bohemia

Mystery! Mondays: A Scandal in Bohemia

 “My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the…

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Masterpiece Mondays: The Yellow Wallpaper (1989)

Masterpiece Mondays: The Yellow Wallpaper (1989)

We enter a darker entry of Masterpiece, The Yellow Wallpaper. I feel really excited about this cause I feel like it’s why I got into doing this series and finding gems like this. It’s a story I heard from other people, but it didn’t feel like something that would capture me till I started to watch this Masterpiece production.It’s a short story. It’s ten pages long exactly. The story is seen as a…

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Masterpiece Mondays: Poldark (2015-2019)

Masterpiece Mondays: Poldark (2015-2019)

Before going into Poldark, I want to address this series’s purpose. It’s meant to be like a journal of my musing on my “journey” through Masterpiece’s series. I do research but not extensively, so that might be the case if I miss things. If you want to address it, by all means, do. This might change in the future, but this series will be like this for now. Overall, the series is research for me…

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Masterpiece Mondays: Pride and Prejudice (1995)

Masterpiece Mondays: Pride and Prejudice (1995)

As someone who grew up watching public broadcasting television, I am well aware of Masterpiece Theater, and all the shows came up after the children’s shows were done. Even though I did not watch it religiously, there were times when I was sick and did not have cable and was forced to find something interesting for me. I wanted to go back and really give these series a chance and perhaps find a…

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Mayerling 1936

I always complained that Netflix had a very little obscure or black and white cinema, but now, it’s changing that beat. Recently, I noticed more obscure films for the average audience being placed in its library, and Mayerling (1936) was one of them. This film was on my to-watch list for a long time, so I thought to review it. Mayerling by Anatole Litvak was the first movie with sound out of…

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Gödöllő Palace

Many students and expats have heard of Szentendre, but some may not know another small town an hour away from Budapest, Gödöllő. One would wonder why one should see Gödöllő? Because of the royal palace once inhabited by the famous Empress of the Austro-Hungarian empire herself, Elisabeth, aka Sisi. If you plan ahead of time as some areas of the grounds need to be seen with a tour, there is…

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Sometimes I look at my boobs and think I would make such a hot milkmaid in medieval Hungary

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“Consider the Vikings. Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga “Vikings” emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.

One of the central characters in “Vikings” is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.

In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days.

King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.”

“...Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.

Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied.

“The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.

Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined.

But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment.

“In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.””

- Virginia Postrel, “Women and Men Are Like the Threads of a Woven Fabric.” in The New York Times

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The Semmelweis Medical Museum is a small, obscure place that I recommend to people who love weird dead things like myself. If your stay isn’t that long in Budapest, I would not necessarily say it’s a must, but you know who you are if you have to see this stuff no matter what. The Semmelweis Medical Museum is named after the Hungarian doctor who realized that washing hands before surgeries…

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Vanesssa Kirby as Princess Margaret in The Crown

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Photography: Elliot Erwitt

Grace Jones and Andy Warhol, New York, 1986. 

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today, 8th of april, is the international rromani day. today the rroma are still subjected to discrimination, marginalisation and segregation. discrimination is widespread in every field of public and personal life, including access to public places, education, employment, health services and housing. the rroma community is still not regarded as an ethnic or national minority group in every member state (in europe) and thus it does not enjoy the rights pertaining to this status in all the countries concerned.

bring awareness of this issue. this is a map with that reflects the size of the rroma population in each european country.

Some sites to donate money to help to better the life of rroma communities:

Secretariado Gitano (Spain)

Roma Edutional Fund (International)

European Roma Grassroots Organisations Network (International)

Roma support group (UK)

@oprerroma has a lot of resources and organisations on her bio where you can donate to.

Feel free to add your paypal, cashapp, etc to this post if you're rroma. Also if you know of local/national organisations that accept donations add them to this post as well.