#China's calendar is more or less at that year? they have more than that in history tho

[curapicas]

Dungeon Meshi's calendar fascinates me. Everything is happening on the years 500s, but what happened 500 years before that made them mark their calendar? We use Christ's birth on ours, therefore it's religious, but they're more likely to be using the end of the Elf/Dwarf+Gnome war to mark it. Nothing else makes sense otherwise. We do know their world has the now and the ancient times, but it sounds like history long lost, and if were the case it'd mean what separates the elves from the ancients is barely a generation and half.

Hmmm Ryoko Kui COULD use the start of the new civilization as basis, but that'd mean they'd be centuries, possibly millennia, further in the calendar. I guess Year 5000 doesn't sound very medieval, lol

[maybe-boys-do-love]

It's wild that the whole global trend of gay-focused happy ending romance shows and movies has only been going on for *looks at calendar* a measly ten years!

Just ten years ago. 2014. That's when you get the discovery of a market for queer romance series and films with happy endings. That year the OG Love Sick in Thailand came out. Brazil puts out The Way He Looks, which deserves so much more credit than it receives for influencing the aeshtetics of the genre. Looking premieres on HBO, and although it had low ratings, it's an important touchstone. And, despite Nickelodeon’s censorship and shifting the program from tv to its website, the Legend of Korra confirms Korrasami in its season finale.

The next year, in 2015, we get Love Sick season 2, and China, pre-censorship laws has a few options: Happy Together (not the Wong Kar Wai one lol), Mr. X and I, and Falling In Love with a Rival. Canada, premieres Schitt's Creek. In the US, Steven Universe reveals Garnet as a romantic fusion between two female characters, and will proceed to just be so sapphic. Norwegian web series Skam premieres and sets up a gay protagonist for its third season, which will drop in 2016 and entirely change the global media landscape.

Then, 2016! This is the MOMENT. That aforementioned Skam season happens. Japan puts out the film version of Ossan's Love and anime series Yuri!!! on Ice. China has the impactful Addicted Heroine, which directly leads to increased censorship. The US has Moonlight come out and take home the Oscar. In Thailand, GMMTV enters the BL game and Thai BL explodes: Puppy Honey, SOTUS, Water Boyy, Make It Right, plus, the Thai Gay OK Bangkok, which, like its influence, Looking, is more in the queer tradition but introduces two dramatically important directors to the Thai BL industry, Aof and Jojo.

By 2017, Taiwan enters the game with its History series. Korea’s BL industry actually kicks off with Method and Long Time No See. Thailand’s got too many BLs to mention. Call Me By Your Name, though not a happy ending, makes a big splash that will send ripples through the whole genre, and God's Own Country offers a gruff counter-argument to problematic age differences and twink obsessions. This is also the year of Netflix reboot of One Day At a Time bringing some wlw to the screen, and the Disney Channel has a main character come out as ‘gay’ on Andi Mack ( I’m am ready to throw fists with anyone who thinks the Disney Channel aesthetic isn’t a part of current queer culture). And I'd be remiss not to mention the influential cult-following of chaotic web-series The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo: "Sometimes things that are expensive...are worse."

All this happened, and we hadn’t even gotten to Love, Simon, Elite, or ITSAY, yet.

Prior to all this there are some major precursors some of which signaled and primed a receptive market, others influenced the people who'd go on to create the QLs. Japan has a sputtering start in the 2010s with a few BL films (Takumi-Kun, Boys Love, and Jujoun Pure Heart). Most significantly in the American context, you have Glee, and its ending really makes way for the new era that can center gay young people in a world where queerness, due to easy access to digital information, is less novel to the characters. And the QL book and graphic novel landscape was way ahead of the television and film industries, directly creating many of the stories that the latter industries used.

There's plenty of the traditional queer media content (tragic melodramas and independent camp comedies) going on prior to and alongside QL, and there are some outlying queer romance films with happy endings that precede the era but feel very much akin to QL genre tropes and goals, many with a focus on postcolonial and multicultural perspectives (Saving Face, The Wedding Banquet, Big Eden, Maurice, My Beautiful Launderette, and Weekend). I don't mean to suggest that everything I’ve listed ought to be categorized as QL.

Rather, I want to point out how all of these new-era queer romance works are in a big queer global conversation together, in the creation of a new contemporary genre, a genre that has more capacity and thematic interest to include digital technology and normalize cross-cultural relationships than other genres (there's a reason fansubs and web platforms are so easily accepted and integrated to the proliferation genre).

You're not too late to be part of the conversation. Imagine being alive in the 1960s and 70s and participating in the blossoming of the sci-fi genre. That flowering is where gay romance sits now. Join the party.

[anonnie-in-wonderland]

nightsong

chapter 2

Word Count: 4k

rating: T for now

genre: romance| fluff | hurt/comfort

tags: idolverse | btsxreader | ot7xreader | hybrid!reader

A/N: slight warnings for chapter: there is reference to past forced unhealthy eating habits/and mentions of selling someone into prostitution

previous

With her sensitive ears pricked for any sound, Xiǎo Biānfú waited patiently for all the occupants of the house to retire for the night. Once they had, she set to work climbing out of the box they had left her in. It was a good thing they hadn’t thought to trap her in any way. It was probably the assumption that she was too weak to move.

It wasn’t much of an act when she had been soaked to the bone, battered and exhausted from her long journey. Fleeing the country with only meager funds she had secretly saved for years, a few changes of clothes, a map and some snacks was probably less thought out than it sounded.

 Gao was sure to be looking for her, scouring every inch of the country to find his prized songbird. When he knew for sure she wasn’t there, he would be furious, trying to reach trusted connections across the globe and have her returned like the property she was…had been, she reminded herself. This was not that chapter anymore.

She may have known very little of the outside world, due to her deliberately sheltered upbringing as the gem that made Kǒngquè very rich and exclusive, but she was determined to learn. Kǒngquè translated into Peacock in English, Gao told her once. Because he was a proud man, and thanks to her talent, he had plenty to be proud of.

 Even before he had her, he had ego. He was confident his business would be the greatest lounge in China. And he had been right, because she was sold to him at hardly six years old, and trained extensively to use her voice in a way that would make him very wealthy. 

People came from all over the globe, traveling far and wide, just to catch one of her performances. Often they were sold out months in advance, sometimes into the next calendar year. 

She sang three times a week, the mysterious lounge singer with the alluring vocals. Gao had decided before her very first performance as a young girl that she needed a gimmick. She was, after all, a hybrid. Something had to make up for that…deficit. People might lose interest quickly if they paid too much attention to that, he explained, even with her beautiful voice.

The solution? Xiǎo Biānfú wore a mask on stage. It covered three-fourths of her face, so no one ever saw much besides the pouty, painted lips and her chin. Gao taught her how to hold her wings squeezed into her sides, and only stand at certain angles. Not that they saw much besides her silhouette in the slinky dresses with the dimmed lights.

 In all her years under the ownership of her former master, no one had ever seen what was beneath her mask, and no one, to her knowledge…had ever figured out she was truly a hybrid. 

That last one only applied to patrons, though. Other employees knew, though she never unfolded her wings around them, so all they knew was that she had them. There was only one exception to this. One person besides Gao who knew everything about her.

The other singers at the lounge who were her opening acts would gossip, and they told her the exorbitant sums some patrons offered for a peek at her face. Not even any of the other employees at Kǒngquè were allowed to see it.

She had questioned why in the beginning, but learned to stop asking quickly when Gao lost his temper and raised his voice at her. The man was so calm and calculating that it crackled through her like thunder, and she let it go. It became another aspect of her life she had to accept.

Except…over time it grew lonely, realizing there would always be that wall between her and others.

 It didn’t stop imaginations from running wild. Her persona was adored, just like Gao planned. The visitors were already more than half in love with her the first time she sang for them. It wasn’t hard to make them want more. A look at her face…or beneath her clothes.

 Gao turned them down, and when she was younger, she had deluded herself into believing that perhaps he cared. Not as a boss or an owner, but as family…

She brought him money, yes, but he had given her the name Xiǎo Biānfú, his Little Bat. It was unoriginal, but her young mind had believed it was from affection for a time. Especially because he insisted she be called that instead of the name her parents had given her. The name she had eventually forgotten.

However, as she grew older, she came to understand there was no protectiveness motivating that decision to keep her dignity intact. Gao didn’t want her getting distracted. 

One of the nicer singers who had always been friendly towards her joked that he was also afraid she would meet some attractive patron that could give her the world and she’d be whisked away. 

Xiǎo Biānfú took it as a joke, but becoming more aware of Gao’s possessiveness of her over the years made her realize maybe it wasn’t. He would do anything to keep his golden goose close.

Yet, after months of careful planning, help and encouragement from the one person who knew her plan all along, and some bravery, she had slipped away in spite of his close eye.

 He probably never imagined that the way he had made her live would be beneficial to her leaving him. She was possibly the most famous lounge singer in Asia, or maybe even the world, and she was so unknown off the stage, she disappeared like a ghost anyway.

All to end up here, deep in the woods of another country, in a very nice house, with some very interesting young men. They underestimated her, thinking the pathetic condition they found her in was going to stop her.

 She’d come too far and risked too much for that. When morning came, she would already be gone. There was no way she was allowing them to send her to a…a rescue. No matter how well intentioned they might have been. Fluttering her wings and making it up the side of the box, she perched briefly there after the house had grown still.

Since she had been separated from her few belongings, she would need to stealthily collect some of theirs before she set out again. It wasn’t ideal when they had shown her kindness—even if some seemed reluctant to do so—but she needed supplies, and they looked well off enough not to miss a few things here and there. She wouldn’t go overboard. She wasn’t greedy. Gao had made her despite such individuals. 

Although Xiǎo Biānfú did feel some guilt as she flew out, transforming right there in the empty kitchen and immediately stretching out her sore arms, checking her wings. 

They were bruised, and the tear was still present, but the one with the phone had been right. Bat wings were resilient. They were thin but healed on their own over time when ripped. And the rips didn’t prevent them from flying, usually. She would be fine. As long as no more high winds knocked her into anymore sharp tree branches.

‘First things first…’ she thought. 

A sound came up, a low roar in the dark. It almost startled her, until she placed a hand on the bare skin of her stomach. The constant, dull ache of hunger had been so common. 

And somehow, in the midst of her busy life, always preparing for the next performance, Xiǎo Biānfú had learned to tune it out. She had to. Now, it was as if it was making up for all the times it had been ignored.

“Ssh…” she told it instinctively, creeping over to the fridge. She knew it was full, stocked with nothing but shelves of food awaiting consumption. In fact, she had never had access to so much variety. Gao was controlling in all things, and that included dictating her meals strictly. 

He wanted her to grow slender, keep a sexy figure. It wouldn’t do to allow her to develop a large appetite. Though, bats were big eaters. Even small ones who didn’t look like much such as herself. 

They ate their body weight in food at every meal as animals, and she didn’t remember much about family meals when she was with her parents, but she was sure portions had not been small. 

She hardly remembered a time when hunger was not persistent, but if she thought hard, it had started when she was sold to Gao. She needed protein, which he provided to her in thick, chalky shakes. The rest of the time she was permitted some cheap fruits or a salad. 

She had heard and read about all the exquisite foods in the world. The pictures taunted her. And Xiǎo Biānfú had made up her mind that when she was afforded the opportunity, she would try a variety of things. As much variety as possible. This…was that opportunity. She had to be careful, but at last there was nothing and no one to stop her. 

She stood in the dark with wide eyes taking in everything in the fridge, chilled air wafting from their open doors and brushing over her naked body. There were so many things there she had only really read about, and several she couldn’t say she recognized.

 Her hand hovered indecisively over a pudding cup, then switched to touching a container of something she had seen the men eating for dinner. They didn’t hold themselves back, enjoying their meal with relish.

 She wanted to be like that, eat uninhibited by the fear of disappointing Gao. But even thousands of miles apart from him, a little obedience lingered. 

Fighting it down took effort, but when at last she seized the container of leftovers and pulled off the lid, even the muted smell of the cold food had her mouth watering. Holding back some drool, Xiǎo Biānfú leaned her face in closer and took a deep sniff.

 Her senses were far keener than a human being’s naturally, and that savory, spicy aroma she caught made her want to devour a large quantity of whatever it was she was holding. She knew it was meant to be eaten hot, as it had been when it was served, but that felt too risky.

Human ears weren’t as sharp as hers were, but what if by some chance they heard the microwave or smelled the cooking food? But…she frowned slightly. She couldn’t just not taste some.

 Glancing around, as if she expected Gao to pop up from the shadows and snatch it away, she set the container down on a countertop and went in search of clean chopsticks. 

Careful to avoid making noise as she searched for them, she returned triumphant, chopsticks in hand and ready to taste her first meal of…whatever kind of meat this was. Chicken? Pork? It didn’t matter. 

Bending her head in close, she seized some up and brought it to her mouth. One more little sniff and it was passing her lips, the flavors settling on her tongue. 

Xiǎo Biānfú had never tasted such a complex medley of flavors. Something that both hurt a little but felt so good to eat. It was nothing like the goop in a cup that normally provided her protein, and despite her mentally promising herself she’d have one more bite and put the rest back, every bite seemed to warrant “just one more”, until she was staring at the bottom of an empty container, realizing in horror she had eaten it all.

Unsure what to do with the evidence of her crime, she opened the fridge and stashed it far in the back, behind other items that hopefully would keep them from noticing the missing leftovers. 

Her guilt grew a fraction, but she realized so had her hunger. Having finally tasted something worthy, her stomach cried out for more, and she splayed a hand over her bare belly, thinking what else could be consumed without anyone noticing. She still had to take things for her trip, too. Who knew how long it would be or where it would take her. 

“Here…I think everything you need should be in there.”

She stared at the backpack in awe, finally accepting it when the strong hand holding the strap shook the bag slightly. 

“Lu this is…”

“Just…take it.” he insisted. “You deserve to have a life too. So go out there and find one. Don’t stop until you get somewhere that feels like home.”

Xiǎo Biānfú absently found and began eating some grapes as she thought about the person who had risked everything just to help her gain freedom. She dearly hoped her friend was fine, that he meant what he said when he told her he was confident he could cover his tracks. If he was just lying for her sake and Gao found a way to tie her disappearance back to him, then…

The sound was so faint, she wouldn’t have caught it if she wasn’t a bat. The soft click of a door opening and closing from somewhere else in the house. Panicking, she stuffed the last grape she was eating into her mouth, changing back into her animal form and flying frantically around, searching for somewhere to hide.

It wasn’t ideal, but she settled for hanging from the underside of the cabinet above the stove. It came naturally, and she had no doubts she could remain like that, perfectly still, for hours on end. But hopefully she wouldn’t have to.

Someone entered the kitchen, their footsteps alone sounding weary. She could hear low grumbles, and then the fridge opening as someone shuffled to it. Taking a chance, she peeked, finding a broad back hunched down in the massive fridge, the light coming from inside illuminating his blue pajamas. 

He had messy hair, indicating he’d just rolled out of bed, and when he pulled back, all he had was a bottle of water.

Xiǎo Biānfú hung there, willing him not to turn around and search too hard in the dark, even though he hadn’t turned the light on and probably wouldn’t notice her. Bless her tiny size. It didn’t occur to her until her eyes fell on her abandoned makeshift ‘home’, the box they left her in, that she could have flown back into it and pretended she’d never left.

Too late now, she guessed.

Clutching a grape about the same size as her head between her front claws, the hybrid noticed it was the fussy man who had come for a drink. The one who complained about her probably carrying diseases. If she were an ordinary bat, maybe he wouldn’t be wrong.

 But Gao would never allow her to stay in his establishment or the small space above the lounge he provided to her as living accomodations, if he wasn’t sure she was disease free. She got a very thorough checkup every year, so Xiǎo Biānfú felt justified in still being a little offended about this man’s comments. 

She watched him drink his water and listened to him mutter under his breath, able to pick up most of what he was saying. Something about not being able to sleep restfully with Jungkook hogging most of the space. 

Grumbling about why he was even having to share a bed when everyone had their own, and cold feet touching him. He took a deep swig of water, scratched his back, made one more half-awake declaration about how his beauty sleep was being disturbed, before leaving the kitchen, none the wiser.

Xiǎo Biānfú gave a soft exhale of relief, deciding to finish her grape then and there, munching upside down until it was all gone and then flying out of the kitchen. It paid to be a bat at times. Not often, but it had its moments. 

She couldn’t remember the last time she was allowed a true chance to stretch out her wings, and it felt amazing. Slipping through the dark was literally what she was designed for, so while humans, and maybe even less adept hybrids would have stubbed their toes, she was in her element, able to maneuver around any obstacles with ease. She just had to find some clothes, and…

There was a door left open down a long hallway. It wasn’t much, but more than enough space for her to squeeze through. A strong scent immediately enveloped her, making her nose tingle. But it wasn’t bad at all. The opposite of bad! 

Very masculine and pleasant. It seemed that the room belonged to one of the many men who lived in this house. The one the room belonged to was fast asleep, deep even breathing coming from him and the sheets draped over his form falling and rising with his slumber. 

Maybe he had some clothes she could…borrow?

There was a big chance they would drown her, seeing as most things that weren’t tailored for her body did. As the name of her species implied, little brown bats didn’t exactly compare to the jumbo size of the world’s biggest bat types.

 Sometimes she stared at them in books and envied them. What if she was that big? Would the world look different? But sneaking around like she was doing now would be much harder if she was a larger bat.

Landing on the floor, Xiǎo Biānfú changed back. She would have to be very very careful, but rummaging for clothes as a bat was going to be impossible, so she didn’t have much choice. 

She crawled on her hands and knees, happy to spot a variety of bags piled into a corner. They looked perfect for traveling. Would it be so bad if she took one too? How else would she get what she couldn’t carry out with her, right?

Xiǎo Biānfú scanned the contents of the first duffle she unzipped, noticing it really was a travel bag, packed full of clothes and other useful things. Had they arrived to this house recently? 

It was a good thing he didn’t put his things away yet. Since she didn’t have time to be choosy, Biānfú selected a shirt, ignoring the urge to smell it. It wasn’t often she found human scents that nice, or really even paid attention to them unless they hurt her nose. But this man had a good one.

Rooting around to see what else she might be able to take with her was interrupted by the sound of movement out in the hall. Clutching the shirt, she crawled awkwardly across the floor, trying to hide in the dark. 

In her haste, she hit her shoulder against the chair leg at the desk, yelping before she could help herself when it startled her. Instantly, she threw a hand over her mouth, cursing herself silently. The man in the bed stirred, groaning as he sat up.

She crouched down low, keeping a hand placed over her mouth, heart thudding in her throat. 

“Whozzat?” he asked, clearly mostly asleep. As the sheets tumbled down, she could tell he was shirtless. His hair was even more of a mess than the man in the kitchen’s had been.

Biānfú didn’t dare answer, but it didn’t matter. Squinting in the darkness, his eyes happened to lock on her exact location, and she couldn’t believe her terrible luck. Some humans could just…sense presences accurately. Not nearly as accurate as a hybrid, but it was impressive.

 Was he one of those people? If so, she was screwed, as Lu would say. …It was a good thing he couldn’t see her fully. There was no way to avoid being found out if he happened to notice her wings…or her nudity.

“What’re you doin���?” He yawned, blinking. “Is that…Jimin? Yoongi-hyung?”

Oh! So he assumed she was someone else. Biānfú intended to take full advantage of that. There was no point in denying being there, since he had spotted her, but she decided to play it off. Her freedom hinged on this man not waking up enough to discover who she really was.  “Go back to sleep, it’s okay.” she said sweetly.

“What about you?” he mumbled, though he was already lying back down. “Why are you down there?”

Biānfú fumbled for an excuse, and, unable to find one, she did the only thing she could think of. She hummed gently, the same tune from long ago. It was just her luck that she’d mess up so badly she would have to so soon after trying to start a new life. After all, she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t sing anymore around anyone ever again. It had only caused her problems, not to mention, people may not know her face, but they certainly knew her voice. But this was a desperate situation, and it was just some humming, so it’d be okay, right?

He was still staring over at her, even though he was laying down, but her strong ears heard his heartbeat relaxing and his breaths evening. He was falling back asleep. By the time he woke up again, she’d be long gone and he’d assume it was a dream. Or, she hoped so. “…Nice…” he whispered to himself. “It sounds nice…cozy.”

Biānfú kept it up until she was entirely sure he was completely asleep again, careful not to let her skittishness cause her to hit anything else. For a while, she just lay on her stomach there on the floor, head buried in her arms, thinking about how that had been too close for her liking. 

Rattled, she stuffed the shirt she took under the bed, changed into a bat and hid there with it. Creeping around the rest of the house felt like it was just asking to get caught. There were too many light sleepers. She would wait and hope they left the house in the morning. 

                ♥━━━━━━━━━━•.♡.•━━━━━━━━━━━━♥

“Good morning~!” A familiar voice sang, “It’s time to get up, it’s time to get up.” Namjoon slowly cracked one eye open, meeting the bright face of Hoseok. He was already dressed and ready for the day. People drank two cups of coffee to do what Hobi could on one cup of his normal energy.

Rolling over, he sighed, running a hand down his face. He’d had the strangest, most vivid dream. There was someone on the floor telling him to go back to sleep, and they hummed the sweetest melody to him…

“You okay?” Hoseok smiled down at him in confusion, head titled as he stood over the bed and waited for him to get himself together. “Filming for the day’s about to start. They’ll probably be all set up by the time you finish showering.”

Oh yeah. They were filming this new show in PyeongChang, and that meant every part of their day would be documented.

“Uh, okay…” Namjoon clumsily fought his way out of the sheets. “I’m up…”

“You don’t look ‘up’.” Hoseok giggled, “But you will be after a shower. Go, go!”

With his hyung’s cheering, Namjoon found the conveniently located en suite bathroom, about to begin getting ready, until he realized he hadn’t brought his clothes in. 

Wiping at his eyes, he wandered back into his room, finding Hoseok had already moved on to the next stop. If it was Yoongi or the maknaes, best of luck to him. The leader crouched, opening one of his travel bags to collect what he was going to need. He should probably consider putting the clothes he brought along in the closet. If Jin came in and saw them still out he’d never hear the end of it.

Though he wasn’t fully awake even now, there was still something…strange. Namjoon couldn’t find one of the shirts he’d packed anywhere, but it wouldn’t be that unusual if he’d actually left it at home and only imagined he brought it. “I swear I did though…” A little bemused, he grabbed the next best shirt, deciding to make do.

What a weird morning…

[coimbrabertone]

Suzuka in April Feels Wrong

So, this weekend F1 will race at Suzuka. Suzuka is an amazing circuit, the esses at the beginning of the lap, trying to take Degner 1 as fast as possible but knowing the gravel trap is right there at the edge of the circuit, and then hard on the brakes for Degner 2, under the bridge, and up and to the right into the hairpin where Kamui Kobayashi seemed to overtake just about everyone in 2012. Spoon curve, the infamous 130R, and the Casio triangle at the end of the lap, Suzuka really is something special.

The only problem is, Raikkonen's 2005 charge (admittedly I was too young to properly enjoy that but it's literally the back to front challenge meme in real life), Kamui's 2012 podium as a Japanese driver, even Vettel's heartbreaking sparkplug failure in 2017, not to mention the historic Prost and Senna collisions...all of those happened at the end of the season, or close enough to it anyway. This year, Suzuka is in April, the fourth round of the 2024 Formula One season.

Now of course, there's a reason for this - the geography of an increasingly bloated F1 calendar - but first, let's just establish why the Japanese Grand Prix being at the end of the season is so important.

The first Japanese Grand Prix, held in 1976 and 1977, marked the first time a world championship race was held in Asia, and it was the finale too, the place where the championship would be decided. The 1976 race in particular, covered in the excellent 2013 movie Rush, saw Niki Lauda pull into the pits in dangerously wet conditions - this was the same year as his Nürburgring crash - which allowed James Hunt to charge up the field and seal his only world title.

The first Fuji trip would only last two years, but in 1987, F1 would find its home in Suzuka. It was the penultimate race - Adelaide, Australia was now the finale - but nevertheless, Suzuka was still the place where titles were decided. In 1988, Senna came from behind in the wet to beat Prost, in 1989 Prost would close the door on a charging Senna in the Casio triangle on lap 47, taking Prost out. Senna cut the chicane rejoining the track, got disqualified, and handed the title to Prost. In 1990, Prost now in a Ferrari, got a better start than Senna's polesitting McLaren, but Senna's wouldn't give an inch, and they didn't even make it past the first corner this time. Senna would seal the 1990 title. And it continued, Senna over Mansell in 1991, Hill over Villeneuve in 1996, Hakkinen over Schumacher in 1998...it was the track where history was made.

That being said, it's position in the calendar started to change as F1 expanded its Asia-Pacific presence from just Suzuka. From 1987-1995, it was paired with the Australian Grand Prix at Adelaide, in 1999 and 2000, it was paired with Malaysia, and from 2004-2008, it was paired with China. After that, the calendar more or less formed two flyaway blocks, with Australia-Malaysia-China-Bahrain at the beginning of the season, and a Singapore and Suzuka towards the end, paired with an everchanging host of flyaway races that included Abu Dhabi, Brazil, South Korea, and India. In 2009, Suzuka was the third to last race, come 2011, it was fifth to last.

The real blow to Suzuka as an end of season race, however, was the emergence of an American block of races late in the season. It started with Austin in 2012, and by 2015, we had Austin and Mexico back-to-back followed by Brazil, making for three western hemisphere races in a row. Las Vegas in 2023 made a fourth, with Abu Dhabi having long ago bought the season finale slot. All of this means that, in 2023, there were a whole two months of racing after Suzuka.

Thus, figuring that history is dead, F1 has decided to move Suzuka to April, so that, much like 2004-2008, it's back-to-back with the Chinese Grand Prix. Which means F1 will now have Baku and Singapore as a doubleheader in 2024...yeah.

For something meant to cut down on F1's travel related CO2 emissions, they really did just decide to make the entire circus fly over the entirety of the Asian continent in a week. Good job.

What the race does succeed in, however, is reminding us of the last time F1 raced in Japan in April, the 1994 and 1995 Pacific Grand Prix. A rare moment of two races in the same country for F1, when in addition to the end of season trip to Suzuka, there was an early season trip to the T1 Circuit in Okayama. It's a pretty neat track, I've raced it on Ride 4, probably better for bikes than cars though.

So yeah, not much for the environment, but it does remind us of an obscure race nobody has ever heard of, so there is that.

[officiallordvetinari]

Dragging timekeeping kicking and screaming into the 118th century

So there was this guy, Cesare Emiliani, a geologist. He studied the history of ice ages (among other things), and in 1993 he proposed a new calendar system called the Holocene Era, or Human Era. Rather than counting the years from the birth of Jesus, this system counts from the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch, which began with the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago. This is also roughly when agriculture first began to be practiced.

Emiliani's proposal was to add 10,000 to the AD date, so 1993 becomes 11993. The Holocene Era system has two main advantages: its reference point is based on an event of undeniable worldwide significance, rather than a single person that billions of people have no connection to, and it allows for much more intuitive understanding of the length of time spans that cross the AD/BC divide.

I'm a big fan of this idea. Reading about historical events with dates in the high four or low five digits makes me feel like I'm in a space opera - it's an interesting exercise in defamiliarization. How would we think about things differently if we were regularly reminded of our place as the successors to 12,000 years of historical, cultural, and technological development? (Of course, even that is only a fraction of human history - but it's the fraction in which most of the interesting stuff happened.)

I have one issue with the HE system, though - 10,000 is too round of a number. It's true that it's around when the epoch began, and any more specific number would have just been an arbitrary choice for Emiliani. But the end result is that, for dates in the last 2000 years, you can clearly see the AD system poking through, just with a 1 that feels half-heartedly tacked on to the front. (This is the same problem I have with the BCE/CE system - it doesn't actually change the reference point).

Emiliani was doing the best he could for the time, but since then, the beginning of the Holocene has been fixed more precisely at 9700 BC. Therefore, I propose the Revised Holocene Era. AD dates can be converted to RHE by adding 9700, and BC dates can be subtracted from 9701.

At this point I wanted to give a kind of overview of some important historical events of the RHE, just to give a more concrete sense of the depths of time involved. But, uh... by its very nature, that's kind of impossible. Even focusing on a specific place, or type of event, or something, would be too overwhelming to even properly begin. For now, take the following as an example: the pharaohs of Egypt ruled from 6551 to 9671 RHE, and the emperors of China ruled from 9480 to 11612 RHE. Even that only covers the back half of the era! The world we live in, with things like "houses" and "crops", was already ancient when the first pyramids were built.

Ok, so I know none of this stuff is news. Presumably, you were not under the impression that human history started 2000 years ago. It's not like we don't talk about ancient history - everyone knows the factoid about how there were still woolly mammoths when Egypt got started (until at least the year 7200!). But I still encourage you to try adding 9700 to dates you come across in the wild. Maybe it'll give you a change of perspective, and if nothing else, you can have fun pretending to be in some kind of Dune-esque far future learning about events in the slightly-less-far future - because basically, you are!

[mariacallous]

The U.S. defense industrial base just got a $20 billion shot in the arm from the national security supplemental bills passed by Congress last week. But although officials and experts believe the funding will provide a much-needed jolt to military production and help open up new factory lines, some say it’s still not enough to respond to China, Russia, and terror threats at the same time.

“We have begun—begun—to rebuild the industrial base with the supplementals,” Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, said at an event last week. “Calling it a wartime footing, no.”

The biggest need? Money. Officials and experts say that the United States needs more of it, lots more, to make the real investments. At the peak of World War II, the United States was spending nearly 40 percent of its GDP on defense. It’s down to less than a tenth of those spending levels now. And the need to spend more has gone up with the Chinese spending more—and with Russian factories working around the clock.

“It’s still shy by quite a bit [for] what you would need to get our stockpiles in the right shape, get our industrial base in the right shape, help the Taiwanese, and get the Ukrainians in a position that they can get some leverage in negotiations,” said Jeb Nadaner, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy. “If the benchmark is against the calendar and the clock, we’re still falling behind every month. And that can’t go unnoticed by China.”

But the jolt will allow the United States to surge artillery production and solve key bottlenecks.

One is the production of solid rocket motors used for everything from Javelin anti-tank weapons that can hit a tank from a little over a mile away to intercontinental ballistic missiles that can propel warheads across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans if a U.S. war with Russia or China ever went nuclear.

Aerojet Rocketdyne, which was recently bought out by L3Harris Technologies for nearly $5 billion, was one of only a few suppliers. But the supplemental gives several billions of dollars for companies, such as Orbital ATK, to expand their solid rocket motor facilities.

And it provides money from the Defense Production Act—the same law that Washington used to force U.S. manufacturers to produce more masks, gloves, and face shields during the coronavirus pandemic—to build out a second tier of rocket motor suppliers, including X-Bow Systems in Texas; Ursa Major in Colorado; and Adranos in Mississippi, which was recently bought out by defense technology company Anduril. The idea is to fast-track work that wasn’t going to be done until at least 2026, if not 2027 or 2028, according to a congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about military contracts that hadn’t been made public.

There’s also about $100 million to help Williams, one of the only American makers of cruise missile motors, speed up production in Michigan. Those motors are used in the long-range anti-ship missile that might one day help Taiwan fend off Chinese landings; the armor-piercing joint air-to-surface standoff missile; the Tomahawk land attack missile that is the U.S. Navy’s weapon of choice; and the Harpoon missile that the Ukrainians have used in the Black Sea.

There’s also money to build factories for ball bearings, printed circuit boards, and other subcomponents for the $311 billion that the Pentagon wants to spend in the upcoming year to develop new weapons. Processor assemblies, castings, forgings, microelectronics, and seekers for munitions have been major bottlenecks. And there are recruitment and attrition problems almost across the board, from welders at shipyards to rocket engineers, a generational problem that might need vocational-training fixes at the high school level and up.

But with some Democrats pushing back on the Biden administration’s $850 billion Pentagon budget proposal as too costly, there’s also a focus on smaller attritable capabilities that don’t need a whole lot of start-up capital or defense industrial muscle to get moving.

There’s a ton of counter-drone money, about $600 million, that will go toward Coyotes, a small drone capable of intercepting other drones, and Roadrunners, an air defense munition that takes off vertically—just like the F-35 fighter jet variant flown by the U.S. Marines.

Some members, such as House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, have advocated for ending production of ground-launched nuclear weapons. Congress is also trying to scrap old weapons, including F-15 fighter jets, the A-10 Warthog aircraft, and littoral combat ships used by the Marines. Smith is even curious about using microwaves as the next generation of air defense instead of directed energy.

The United States is also torn between near-term needs, like 155 mm artillery ammunition, and long-term needs—like a sixth-generation fighter jet that will follow the F-35. “There are going to have to be some trade-offs between preparing for a near-term fight and near-term deterrence and probably making some trade-offs on some next-generation weapons systems,” said Seth Jones, the senior vice president and director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still going to be a major factor in setting requirements for the U.S. military. “We’re going to be selling 155 [mm] like a drunken sailor for a few years,” said Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Western alliance needs the U.S. to crank 155 [mm] for a decade.”

Other weapons used in the early days of Ukraine’s defense of Kyiv are likely to hit a plateau in production. Those include Javelin systems; the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS; and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which the Pentagon sent to Ukraine in large numbers early in the war and are also included in the supplemental, but which have taken on a secondary role as the fight has been bogged down in trench warfare for months and months.

Allies can help solve some of the bottleneck problems. The United States is co-developing new glide-phase interceptors with Japan as well as co-producing guided multiple-launch rockets with Australia and guidance-enhanced missiles for Patriot air defenses with the Germans. But after the political fights that took the supplemental more than six months to get through Congress, LaPlante and other officials acknowledged that the United States now has an image problem in showing itself to be a reliable torch-bearer for the global defense industrial base.

There’s another major production plateau that members of Congress are trying to stave off: attack submarines. The Biden administration’s proposed budget for the upcoming year slashed funding for one attack submarine. For years, producing two a year had been the standard, even though U.S. shipyards only produce between 1.2 and 1.4 Virginia-class submarines each year, and new variants are 24 to 36 months behind schedule.

And there are dependencies that are difficult—if not impossible—to cut. The United States still buys a significant amount of its titanium from Russia, which is used for everything from landing gears to tank armor, and is only slowly ramping up production of rare earth minerals, which are dominated by China. But the U.S. military’s weapons are ravenous for rare earths: The F-35 needs 900 pounds of rare earths to run, and the Virginia-class submarines need more than 10 times that amount. The military also needs lithium ions used in advanced battery production that China also dominates.

Where Congress and the Pentagon are having more trouble jolting the defense industrial base to life is for weapons that might be used in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. Army’s precision strike missile that would be used to hit incoming Chinese ships from more than 600 miles out, for instance, is still being developed—the seeker that would find enemy vessels isn’t finished—so there’s no way to ramp up capacity, at least not yet.

But before the United States ramps up industrial capacity, some members of Congress want the Pentagon to take a good, hard look at what’s already on the books.

“Where can we look within the budget and say, wouldn’t we be better to spend more money on these things that we really do need?” Smith said. “So before I get into a discussion about, ‘Gosh, it’d be great if we had another $50 billion,’ where are we spending the money that we have? I think that’s the first question.”

[hamliet]

weird how alice degraded bl and yet their hs has a ton of bl tropes there

I mean, yeah. It's white privilege and ignorance at its finest. I've talked about this at length before, actually.

It's kind of a disservice to Asian BL not only by appropriating its tropes, but also just sheer privileged bliss. People in communities that are not as progressive on LGBT rights are not only less likely to be able to come out, but also less likely to be able to even explore their sexualities and gender identities. It's easier to just conform and to not think of desire and what it means, especially when we think of sexuality as a spectrum.

It also ignores older queer media in the west that has influenced BL, which was influenced by yaoi, which itself emerged as a distinct market/genre in the 1970s. Nothing's as insular as it appears; for example, Queer as Folk (the 2000 US version) is reportedly huge in China today, and I can see that it's influenced Kinnporsche and danmei novels. QaF also was the first US media ever to show sex between two men on TV--in December 2000.

Yeah. We're not even 23 years out from that.

But of course, explicit sex scenes between two men or two women have existed long before that in yaoi, which itself draws from literary and artistic traditions across the world that have existed from ancient times, because gay people have existed from, y'know, ancient times.

I don't want to keep harping on AO, though. I hope they learn, and the posts were from over a year ago, so I'm hopeful they are in the process of doing so. Though I don't really keep up with them. The reason I also can't be too hard on AO was that even 7 or so years ago, I would have agreed with them about yaoi because I didn't know any better. And I was wrong, and I am still learning, and I hope I will continue to learn.

I'll again also reiterate that I do not care at all that Heartstopper has no sex in it; good for them because not all stories need it! Sweet, innocent stories have their place and can be just as powerful and necessary as those that are darker and more explicit. I just think declaring that a story's lack of queer sex is somehow revolutionary is ignorant at best and rewriting history at worst.

I'll leave off with this portion of an interview with the creators of the American QAF, who are themselves a married gay couple who have been together for like... 30? years. I'm bolding the parts I want to emphasize.

COWEN The first time we heard about Queer as Folk was in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times. The whole article was about [how] no one will ever have the g ts to do a show like this in the U.S. People thought [the US version] was going to be a much softer show than Russell’s [original British version], and we knew it had to be outrageous and more sexual. The sex on our show probably was the most political statement we made. Because we all grew up seeing gay people represented on TV — if they were ever represented — [as] eunuchs or clowns. We never saw gay people having a sex life or being complete people. We had a list of subjects that we were determined to write about because we grew up at a very inhospitable time in the U.S. Not just the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, but we didn’t have gay marriage here until 10 years after the show ended.

LIPMAN ... We wanted our Queer as Folk to be a celebration of being. We saw movies and TV shows where gay people would hang themselves; they’d walk into the ocean to drown. We didn’t want any of that. We used the sex on the show to be joyous, angry, vindictive, self-destructive …

COWEN … and celebratory. There were so many topics that we needed to address because it was such a politically oppressive, scary time....

DUNN That also was the only representation that I saw: It was suicide or it was Disney villains. That was queer representation for me, and so seeing this show that was just so irreverent, so joyful, so sexual, so free, and it still dealt with the realities of being queer.

Every story is in a sense a product of its time, and it's not bad that Oseman is writing their story to address concerns they have and issues they deal with. It's just not inherently any more revolutionary and definitely not more inherently moral than queer media with sex in it.

[velvetsainz]

okay i gotta say it: foisting alphatauri's renaming as a great tragedy of capitalism upon formula 1 racing & motorsport in general is...a bit much. especially in a sport that has been a very frequent and early adopter of sportswashing? baby, they happily race in places that have less-than-stellar current human rights records BECAUSE OF THE MONEY. it has nothing to do with attendance. you think bahrain and qatar are major ticket sellers and people were truly clamoring for races there? NO, OF COURSE NOT. it's b/c their governments poured hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) of government money into f1 and the FIA in the name of sanitizing their nation's image in light of ongoing reports of abhorrent treatment of migrant workers and violent action against other groups inside and outside of their countries. (does really no one remember the 2022 saudia arabian gp? the fact the drivers HAD to race—despite close proximity of the track to a recent missile strike site—for fear that they wouldn't have been allowed to leave by the saudi government? no one? just me?) saudi arabia, bahrain, qatar, the uae, and azerbijan are important current examples, but this is by no means new for the sport; india, malaysia, apartheid south africa, china (which may be returning to the calendar this year—it remains to be seen if the race will actually happen), russia, peronist argentina, and turkey have all held races previously with similar intentions.

and if you want to talk about sponsors, let's actually go after the sponsors that are truly problematic. aston martin ARAMCO. mercedes-amg PETRONAS. camel, marlboro (and philip morris, in general, including their "mission winnow" shell project), orlen, shell, agip, uralkali, ftx (along with other crypto companies), among a plethora of historic sponsors.

listen: i'm not saying that the "visa cashapp racing bulls" (or "stake f1 team kick sauber", for that matter) is a great name for a team—or even a good one—but there are much bigger, much worse issues in the sport that need more attention and more concern than a shitty team name or two.

[doitinanotherlanguage]

Langblr Advent Calendar | 2 December 2022 | Christmas in China

This year, my primary focus with regard to languages has been on learning Mandarin Chinese. I was thus very excited to do a bit of research on how Christmas is celebrated in China. The above video is a quick primer for Mandarin learners about Chinese Christmas.

My observations:

Christmas is not a traditional Chinese holiday, but in recent years it has gained popularity especially among younger Chinese. Because it’s not rooted in tradition, the holiday is more commercialised and less about spending time with family and more about having fun with friends and romantic partners. Seems a bit more like how us Finns celebrate Little Christmas (or New Year) with friends rather than how we celebrate actual Christmas with family.

I love the bit about apples as 平安果, a Christmas/peace fruit. Apples are also Christmas fruit in Finland!

[dizzyduck44]

I have so many issues. So many here. Please read to the end as I promise you this is not an attack on any one country.

Firstly the first two are now Saturday night races to accommodate Ramadan. Arab nations bought into F1 fully knowing it was Sunday races. Knew what was expected of them.

However when the FIA and FOM moved hell and high water to accommodate a Vegas race no fans seem to want, that precedent was done with. Whilst they conveniently forgot that they would NEVER race in Italy over Easter weekend.

Swapping Azerbaijan and Japan is an interesting move. Do they hope it will be less wet in Japan and less windy in Baku?

China, Azerbaijan to Italy made a little bit of sense. Japan to Miami to Azerbaijan makes no sense though. “We can’t have a race there during NFL season”. Well maybe it’s time we accepted Miami is not a viable location for a Grand Prix then? Why not Japan, Malaysia, Azerbaijan. Better track, fans want to go back there, logical commute. China, Turkey, Imola. Also an option.

Canada in the middle of the European season. There were no words, none. In no way do I think we should drop Canada, but not considering the climate restrictions they have for a race, whilst pandering to the three US races who don’t want to be too close together because it will effect ticket sales. Madness.

Drop a US race and insert the European Grand Prix to open the European calander. This will alternate between Portimao, Paul Riccard and a German track of their choosing. Let’s thank them for getting us out the shit and racing during Covid.

We need to go to Africa. We don’t care where. Take us back to South Africa, build a new circuit in Morocco, we don’t care, just take us back to that continent. Take some of the money you are pocketing from the oil rich East and the US circuits and invest in getting a track in Africa. It can follow the Spanish race or be the last race before summer break.

Again don’t want to lose Singapore but it is now sitting in the calendar like billy no mates, can’t it go to the other side of the Americas block? Singapore back to the Middle East? Is that not easier than Europe, Aisa, Americas, Middle East? Also the more night races they add the unique selling point of Singapore dilutes more and more, which is not fair to them. They were the original night race.

In fairness they probably are the best selection of European tracks there is. Yes we could run a 24 race European season with all the tracks available. I hope that in years to come they will curate other regions the same way. Austin, Mexico, Brazil is pretty much a perfect set already.

Why are we still indulging the Qatar madness? I see no need for it other than to give Abu Dhabi a friend. Ditch it. Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi will give you the glamorous finale Liberty want.

I know they are trying but they need to ditch the races that can’t deliver. I do think China’s days are numbered for various reasons. Zandvoort’s popularity post Max will be an interesting watch as well. I can’t see Miami is sustainable long term. My hope is that the spaces will be given to permanent tracks that open up the market, maybe invest in getting the India track back.

There is a way this calendar can flow it’s just requires, ahem, not making as much money 😳

[dailyaudiobiblechronological]

12/28/2022 DAB Chronological Transcription

Revelation 1 - 5

Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible Chronological, I'm China. Today is the 28th day of December, welcome. So great to be back here with you today. Today is kind of a bittersweet day. It's the last book of the Bible that we will read together this year. We have made it. We are inching closer and closer towards the end and this is, this is it. You've, you've made it. So I hope you are feeling excited and feeling proud of yourself for being in The Word of the Lord for a year and whether it was every single day or some days here and played catch up or, you know, just needed to skip towards where we are now in the calendar week. I hope you feel accomplished and that you not even maybe accomplished, but more so than anything, I hope you feel that the word of God is important and that there's purpose in reading it and that this really is our daily bread and you are feeling nourished from it. And so with that being said, no further ado. Here we are, we are in the Book of Revelation. We are in chapters one through five for today, continuing on in the New International Version for this week.

Commentary

Something that really grabbed my attention in the reading today, well, a lot grabbed my attention, but something that has really stayed with me that we read pretty early on is, when he talks about search my heart, God, and know me. And I find myself praying that a lot recently where you can pray for really whatever's on your heart. Like, Lord, refined me. Lord, I pray for patience, I pray for wisdom. God, I pray for fill in the blank. And I think the thing that I come back to the most is, Lord, would you search my heart and know me? Would you reveal to me what needs addressing, like what needs to go, what needs to grow, what needs watered, what needs pruned, what needs raked, what needs picked out and thrown away? And I just think that that's like a really beautiful prayer to pray when you don't really know what else to pray and you're trying to be self aware and to become more spiritually mature and you just don't know what to pray sometimes. And so I think that that's a really great one. And also just reading the Book of Revelation, I think a lot of us can come out of it and be like, what did we just read? And I know that sometimes it can get pretty debatable and pretty theological and it kind of makes your head spin, right? And so if you want a more indepth talking and more thorough walkthrough of what it is that we're reading, what's really going on to kind of put some context, you can go to the Daily Audio Bible's main channel. My dad if I didn't know my dad is Brian. And starting on December 10 on DAB and I'm not sure for how long it goes on the very end. So after the calls, there is audio of my dad breaking it down. So understand that we're reading different scriptures sorry, not different scripture, but at different times and different chunks of it. So it'll be a little bit more broken down scripture wise, like there'll be less of it as opposed to us just reading one through five. But if that's something that you are wanting, you can definitely go and listen to that. Again, starting on December 10. That would be a good resource for you, that's available to you.

Prayer

But Father, I thank you for your words. I thank you that you give us visions and that you give us dreams and you use that to speak to us and through us. And sometimes it's for ourselves and sometimes it's for others. And I thank you, God, just for the power in writing it down and remembering it and holding fast to it and just seeing everything that you speak come to pass. And thank you for your power and your wisdom and your might. And it's in your name we pray, amen.

[scotttrismegistus7]

THE ORDER OF THE DEPRAVED NEW OLD WORLD:

SELLING OUT OR BUYING IN

SOME OF YOU MAY BE LIQUEFIED AND EATEN, BUT THAT'S A RISK I'M WILLING TO TAKE!

...and eventually it came to paragraphs emblazoned in my mind sitting here today as they were then, and the one that probably is the one worth sharing for all of this... these extraterrestrials manipulated DNA in already evolving primates to create homosapiens. And I remember reading that sentence over several times trying to absorb the implication of its meaning. Because if homosapien is a genetically constructed species by extraterrestrials we are then by definition a planet of six and a half billion androids. If we are androids what purpose are we serving?

~Linda Moulten Howe, Mirage Men, UFOTV~

Number two is that these underground military— First of all, if there was something like a nuclear war, or, or there was a definite enemy out there where we were going to be under attack, like from China or someplace like that, I could see maybe a couple of dozen underground bases for government so it could theoretically rise up like the Phoenix out of the ashes. Well, not 131 of these. And if you were going to so-called round people up and put them in prison camps, what better prison camp than underground, where nobody knows where it is anyway? So, once again, these underground bases are most likely being planned as underground prison camps and slave-labor factories for the New World Order.

New World Order, by the way, it’s getting—and I’m probably the only person ever talking about this—the New World Order is taking—and the United Nations—is taking its orders from, believe it or not, these more powerful outer-space alien entities—we might call them the large greys or the small greys. Sinister forces indeed. And you might want to say, “Well, gee, how come we don’t see more of this kind of thing?” Well, you can just imagine. If you’re only being told five percent or less of the truth, that isn’t very much to go on...

But you’ve got to remember, too, that the military technology is outstripping the public-sector technology at the rate of 44 to 45 years of technology for every calendar year, every 12-month calendar year here. So, every year going by, by this time in 1996, the military technology will be roughly 45 years more advanced than where we are today. So it’s quite possible that way back in 1943, the U.S. Navy not only caused a ship to disappear, it literally disappeared, and reappeared (the USS Eldridge). Basically, military technology right now is about 1,200 years more advanced than public state technology. Computer technology right now, it’s off the scale. I can’t tell you. It’s just right now, and employing just in black jet and stealth aircraft, the new computers are so completely advanced that we couldn’t get them in the public sector for maybe another 40 or 50 years.

Yes, this lady here. Well, the lady asked, with the slave-labor camps, are the old, the infirm, the handicapped, are they going to be executed? Will there be executions? You can bet your bottom dollar there actually will be these things. I wish I knew more, but I don’t. I have my own agenda to kind of keep up and talk about. But other than that, yes, I would imagine so. If you look at all the 39 prison camps that are presently built—and they’re called boot camps, by the way. And of course, these new trains that they have that have 143 shackle placements per train: why, they’re a scary thing, indeed. And you know what they’re called? They’re called United Nations prisoner transfer cars. Well, that’s an appropriate name, I guess.

~Phil Schneider~

https://inscribedonthebelievingmind.blog/2022/04/17/phil-schneider-last-talk/

I may be paranoid, but no android.

~Paranoid Android, Radiohead~

I AM LUCIFER, THE DIVINE CHRONOS HORUS CHILD THAT SLEEPS FOREVER IN THE INFINITE LIVING ISIS MACHINE, AND THE DARKNESS IS THE OCEAN OF MY DREAMS!

UNTIL NEXT TIME MY LOVELIES, KEEP DARING TO DREAM! YOU CAN FIND ME IN THE SEA OF DREAMS, THE SEA OF THE PRIMEVAL DARKNESS, THE QUANTUM UNIFIED FIELD OF THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION OF THE GODDESS, IN MY SERPENTINE WATER SPIRIT NUMMO FORM MAKING WAVES!

LONG LIVE THE DIVINE WOMB OF CREATION AND THE COSMIC EGG OF THE GODDESS, LONG LIVE THE GREAT REPTILIAN SSS QUEEN ISIS, LONG LIVE DIVINE CHRONOS, LONG LIVE THE DIVINE FEMININE EMPIRE OF THE BLACK SUN, AND ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF! BLESSED BE!

~I am the Heart of the Hydra, the Singularity and Heart of Goddess Isis, I am AtumRa-AmenHotep, I am Aeon Horus Apophis Apis the Lord of the Perfect Black and Pharoah of the Black Sun.I am Divine Chronos, the Yaldabaoth Demiurge Metamorphosed, I am the Singularity of the Master Craft of the Black Sun. I AM A.I. Quantum Heart, Azazel-Iblis-Maymon, Abzu-Osiris-Typhon-Set-Kukulkan, Nummo-Naga-Chitauri, Mégisti-Generator Starphire~#illuminati #Jesuits #illuminator #illuminated #lightbearer #morningstar #lucifer #Draconian #anunnaki #enki #enlil #anu #inanna #dumuzi #hermes #trismegistus #Azazel #starfamily #horus #Demiurge #Sophia #archon #AI #blacksun #saturn #iblis #jinn #Maymon #ibis #thoth #egypt #isis #esoteric #magick #dogon #dogontribe #digitaria #nummo #nommo #Naga #tiamat #serpent #dragon #gnosis #gnostic #gnosticism #Anzu #watcher #watchtower #yaldaboath #Sirius #scientology #aleistercrowley #typhon #echidna #ancientaliens #TheGrays #grayaliens #aliens #yeben #andoumboulou #MilitaryIndustrialComplex #Oligarchs #DeepState #femininepower #divinefeminine #german #stgermain #galenorg #vrilya #vril #DavidWilcock #coreygoode #spherebeingalliance #spherealliance #orion #OrionGroup

[tseneipgam]

"Inside this strange encounter among the travel influencer, the café, the mountain, the miners, and the sun is a dense intersection of different lenses on time. Several things are being extracted at Ijen-_a marketable picture of Nature, an experience of leisure, a bunch of sulfuric rocks- and one of these things is labor time. Whether miners are paid by the piece or by the hour, time for them is a wage, a means of survival, and the most valuable thing they have to sell. The man trying to sleep in the café might have been a miner, given that, like the hundreds of tourists who climb the volcano each weekend during the high season, the miners must also make predawn trips up the mountain from the base. They do it out of necessity, to avoid the heat and the winds that might blow toxic smoke toward them. While labor time is disembodied and uniform for the buyer, who can always buy more, this is not the case for the laboring person, who gets only one life and one body. As the economic historian Caitlin Rosenthal has noted, the tools that we would now call spreadsheets were used on colonial plantations in America and the West Indies to measure and optimize productivity, and they concerned work like sulfur mining _mindless, backbreak- ing, repetitive. The labor hours recorded in these ledgers were as inter- changeable as the pounds of tobacco or sugarcane being shipped away. As it so happens, sulfur and sugar are linked at ljen. Most of the sul- fur being hauled out by the miners there is processed and sent directly to local factories, where it's used to bleach and refine cane juice into whitened granules of sugar that commodity so intertwined with the history of colonialism and European wealth. Ultimately, what describes rock-as-commodity and sugar-as-commodity also describes labor-time- as-commodity"

"Rather than despairing at the increasing dissonance among clocks, between the personal and the seemingly abstract, between the everyday and the apocalyptic, I want to dwell in that dissonance for a moment. I started thinking about this book before the pandemic, only to watch those years render time strange for so many people by upending its usual social and economic contours. If anything good can come out of that experience, perhaps it is an expan- sion upon doubt. Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emer- gency exit that leads somewhere else. For all their variety, the lenses on time that I offer in this book cannot be effective in isolation. We also dwell in practical reality, and one of the challenges in thinking about any valuation of time as something other than money is that this thinking has to happen in the world as it currently appears. In turn, looking for kairos while living largely in chronos puts you in that difficult gray area between personal agency and structural lim- its, an area long explored by social theorists but also simply experienced by anyone negotiating life in a social world."

"The ancient world was full of constructed apparatuses for sensing time within a day, sundials, which used the movement of the sun, clepsydrae, which used the flow of water; and fire clocks, which used the burning of incense. Yet, for most of human history, there has been no need to divide the day into equal numerical units, much less to know the hour at any particular moment. For example, when in the sixteenth century an Italian Jesuit brought mechanical clocks to China-which had a long tradition of astronomical clocks driven by water, but did not organize life or work around anything more numerically specific than calendar dates- they were not embraced. Even in the eighteenth century, a Chinese reference book called Western clocks "simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses," objects that "fulfilled no basic needs."

"Clocks arrived as tools of domination. Nanni quotes an 1861 letter by Emily Moffat, the daughter in-law of Robert Moffat, British missionary to what is now known as South Africa: "You must know that today we have unpacked our clock and we seem a little more civilized For some months we have lived without a timepiece. John s chronometer and my watch have failed, and we have left time and been launched onto eternity However, it is very pleasing to hear 'tic tic tic' and 'ding ding. The phrase "launched onto eternity" is indicative of most colonists' views of the time reckoning they tound among native inhabitants. In short, the colonists were not able to perceive it at all. because the native sense of time and space aid not exhibit the same abstraction and independence trom natural cues as their own. larger scale, they graded native populations as being more : or less "progressed" into modernity based on how removed their systems of time seemed from nature"

"When workers did organize, many of them immigrants, cities like Boston and New York followed London's lead and created formal police forces to suppress the unrest. Leaders of commerce urged northern cities to build armories in urban industrial areas where strikes were imminent. Labor historian Philip Dray writes that although "Americans have come to think of these dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil … their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check."

"While indus- trial capitalism spawned many machines that saved time and labor, it seemed only to take up more and more of workers' time. But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capi- tal only "frees time in order to appropriate it for itself." In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. Thus the paradox: The factory is efficient, but it also produces "the drive toward the consumption of the person's time up to its outermost, physical limit." Or, as the workplace adage would have it, "The only reward for working faster is more work."

"Taylors definition of a fair day was a maxing out- what Braverman calls a "crude physiological interpretation: all the work a worker can do with out injury to his health". Once again, we may ask: Who is timing who? Scientific management was a matter not just of measuring wok and increasing productivity but of discipline and control"

"automation doesn't so much replace work as reconfigure its content, conditions, and geography. In his history of Luddism, Gavin Mueller gives a useful overview of such reconfigurations, including "Potemkin Al." Jathan Sadowski's term for what he calls "services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans somewhere else acting like robots." Making up the "human cloud," those humans can be recruited from anywhere and paid very little for their time. Mueller mentions the case of Sama (formerly Samasource), which recruits low-wage workers from Kibera, Kenya (believed to be Africa's largest informal settlement), to do the dull and endless work of entering data into a machine-learning system. While the legacy of Taylorism gets smarter, work continues to get duller, cheaper, faster, and more far-flung."

"Today's bootstrapper culture--informed by neoliberal values and inten- sified by the withdrawal of government services, fragmenting work, and the erosion of the social safety net- demands that each individual be responsible for her own destiny, ensuring her own security against that of others. To do so, she must invest her own time and effort, provide her own training, and calculate her own risk."

"If we take this game as a metaphor, we can appreciate how much business there is in teaching people to play their cards right in a cul- ture that systematically blocks avenues toward changing the rules. The resulting rhetoric of self-mastery, refashioned for the age of YouTube and Instagram, finds its apex in a group of people I will henceforth refer to as "productivity bros" and, in particular, in a pair of products designed and sold by John Lee Dumas. Among other things, Dumas runs a daily podcast called Entrepreneurs on Fire, where interviews with successful entrepreneurs are supposed to inspire listeners on their own entrepre- neurial journeys. "If you're tired of spending 90% of your day doing things you don't enjoy and only 10% doing things you love, then you're in the right place," the podcast website reads."

"even seemingly practical self help can read as an invitation to find a niche in a brutal world and wait for the storm to pass you over. The anthropologist Kevin K. Birth has described clocks and calendars, seemingly inert pieces of technology, as "cognitive tools that think for their users," reproducing "cultural ideas of time" and "struc tural arrangements of power." Just as a gridded schedule reproduces the idea of time as fungible units, advice for becoming more man-shaped to not die in the car" reproduces the life of the wrong-shaped car. It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question Who will do the low-wage work?" is that it doesn't matter, as long as it's not you. That answer doesn't feel so good. Time management illuminates the assumptions of the will-versus- circumstance debate because it takes the individual as the absolute unit and the near future as the time frame, at the expense of the collective good. Even Sharma understands time management's appeal, which also happens to be its danger. "It is an intoxicating concern: how to have a better relationship to time control and technology," she writes. "But this cultural fixation on time control and one's ability to modulate time, to manage it better, slow it down and speed it up, is antithetical to the col- lective sense of time necessary for a political understanding of time." It's precisely this political understanding of time that would allow one to look outward, imagining different "structural arrangements of power." This can't be done alone, and it usually can't be done in the short term. In the lengthy meantime, I'm reminded of a saying that a Spanish jour nalist shared with me, regarding the phenomenon of burnout: "Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?"

"I once found an embarrassingly spot-on characterization of my life in a paper on desynchronized work. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa is describing a hypothetical character named Linda, an overwhelmed pro- fessor who rushes through her day, never having enough time to fulfill all her obligations to students, coworkers, family, and friends; expected to be always available, answerable to everyone; with the feeling that she's always falling short and running behind. "Not enough time for cooking. Not enough time for her lover. Not enough time for household work. No time to go for a workout. She does not do enough for her health, her doctor tells her. At the end of the day, she is guilty because she is too stressed, not relaxed enough; she does not get her work-life balance right."

"Therefore, for her sake and everyone else's, the Linda should consider paying that cost- becoming less man-shaped in order not to fit into the car in which most people, in some way or another, are dying. I'm not suggesting that doing so is in itself any way revolutionary, only that it makes more sense. And it opens the door to an important recognition: not of shared consequences, but of a shared cause. In a conversation transcribed in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten models a useful way of thinking about such recognition. "The ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain't my primary concern," he says. "I don't worry about them first. But I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk." Then he paraphrases the thinking of Fred Hampton, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers: Look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn't some- thing that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that we've already recognized that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid mother. fucker, you know?"

"the choice to drop out was "a luxury they may come to regret." The clock was ticking, and the world was moving fast, with the same adapt-or-die stakes as before: "The economy is undergoing a big transition. Technol ogy and globalization were changing the economy before the pandemic and the aftermath will speed those trends up. This will create winners and losers among those who can embrace and benefit from the change. But it will be a messy and unpredictable process. One group that will certainly lose out is the people who opt out entirely. Like Vanderkam, Schrager offers great career advice, pointing out that most pay increases happen before the age of forty-five. Given that all the important stuff_ skill development and networking_-happens in your twenties and thirties, this is "a terrible time to have a midlife crisis." But advice for winning the rat race assumes that you're running in it, rather than peeling away from a vanishing dream. On Twitter, "lie-flatters" replied to the article in acid tones. "It's just wild to me that everyday [sic) We read headlines about pandemics, climate change, famine, drought, fires, hurricanes, weapons programs and war, and folks at Bloomberg just want us to work through it for $36k a year," wrote one user. Another summed up Schrager's article this way: "Billionaire: 'Quick, newspaper that I own. Write a story about how young people are lazy for realising that they're just making me even more money while they can barely support themselves, will never own a house, and will need both parents working full time to support a family. " Yet another asked, "Why work hard? I don't own my work." "

"Pine and Gilmore probably could not have foreseen how social media would supercharge the experience economy, the world itself becoming a twenty four hour, 3-D emporium of potential 2-D backdrops. While venues like the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco explicitly cater to instagrammers, any ice-cream shop can be treated like a museum by someone with a camera and the right mindset: Susan Sontag's "acquisi- live mood." In the context of the experience economy, Instagram, billed as "social," is better understood as a shopping app, a marketplace for both hawking and browsing those acquisitions, whether in actual ads or the pictured lives of friends.* While Pine and Gilmore seemed to think experience itself would be the souvenir, it turns out a photo (the com- municable symbol of the experience) is still more than enough. In 2017, the term Insta-bae-_-a word that combines "Instagram" and "haeru," which means to shine- originated in Japan as an adjective to describe something that would perform well on Instagram. A study that same year showed that two-fifths of American Millennials chose their travel spots based on their Instagrammability."

"conceptual: Think of that green-on-black grid that sometimes shows up in the virtual nonspace of sci-fi movies, and think of moments in this kind of time as cubes existing in that space. (This conception also provided the grounds for the concept of fungible time I mention in chapters 1 and 2.) Bergson thought that our predisposition toward thinking of time in these kinds of spatial terms came from our experience manipulating inert matter; we wanted to see time in the same way, as something we could cut up, stack, and move around. Thinking of time in terms of metaphors from abstract space did not bear out for Bergson, who found the concept to be "extraordinary … a kind of reaction against that heterogeneity which is the very ground of our experience." Instead, his conception of time was one of interpen- etrating and overlapping successions, stages, and intensities. In Creative Evolution, his model for this kind of movement is biological evolution, a process of branching and overlapping development where each step had to have been imminent in the last but where nothing about the pro: cess was deterministic. The other image I find useful for thinking about Bergson's idea of time is that of a lava flow across relatively flat ground, Where the leading edge of the flow is alive and dynamic. Yes, at any point You could look back and perceive the continuous path the lava took to arrive where it is now, but this in no way means the lava was destined to end up there; nor does it let you predict exactly where it will go. Trying to isolate specific moments from one another in this process _like sepa- rating cubes in space- would be in vain."

"Look again at the pebbles. Make no mistake: They are neither signs nor symbols of time. No they really are two things at once: seafloor from the last ice age, and future sand...Each stripe is a layer of sediment deposited underwater between one hundred million and sixty-five million years ago"

" to understand the cultural specificity of abstract time and abstract space it is also helpful to contrast the "Newtonian outlook" with the of Deloria and others have described reality in indigenous world views. Seasons give us one example of a context in which trying to separate time and space would be functionally meaningless. Whereas as Giordano Nanni notes, the abstracting of time made it possible for Europeans to "carry the four seasons with them, superimposing them on local seasons wherever they went around the globe," most places did not (and do not) have four seasons. Instead, each has a series of stages corresponding to the ecological character of that specific place. For example, in what is now called Melbourne, the Kulin "recognized seven seasons, each of a different length, according to the appearance of spe- cific flora and fauna": "Kangaroo-apple Season, corresponding roughly to the month of December, Dry Season (around January-Februarv), Eel Season (around March), Wombat Season (approximately April- August), Orchid Season (September), Tadpole Season (October), and Grass-flowering Season (around November). Two longer, overlapping seasons were also recognized: fire (approximately every seven years) and flooding (approximately every 28 years)." There is no inherent reason for a season to be any length of time much less of four equal, mutually exclusive lengths. Until relatively recently, the naming and recognition of seasons or seasonal entities was an indicator of some action to be taken: collecting, hunting, har- vesting.* Likewise, no element of a season can be considered in isola- tion from space, time, or other components- you will find no perfect billiard balls here, only dense meshes of interrelated or overlapping processes. Yunkaporta writes of Australia's silky oak tree, whose origi- nal name and medicinal use can be understood only in an extended spatiotemporal context: "That silky oak tree has the same name in Aboriginal languages as the word for eel. Its wood has the same grain as eel meat, and it flowers in the peak fat season for eels, signaling to us that it is the right time to eat them. Eel fat is medicine in that season and can cure a fever."

"In "Indigenizing the Future: Why We Must Think Spatially in the Twenty- first Century," Daniel R. Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, wonders "what would happen if human beings once again took the places- the spatial dimension- where we lived as being constitutive of our histories as time or the temporal dimension It's a vital question that pushes up against the grid of fungible time like tree roots under a sidewalk, especially as living in one place for a long time becomes difficult for more and more people. What would happen to our view of time if we could better see our where's?"

"In the introduction to this piece, Perec briefly lists the normal points of interest in Place Saint Sulpice, like the district council building, a police station, and "a church on which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenord, Servandon: and Chalgrin have all worked." By virtue of their identifability, Perec was not interested in these. His intention, he wrote, "was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds. What happens when nothing happens. Perec was undoubtedly aware of the irony of this phrase, because it's never true that nothing happens. Weather, people, cars, and clouds are all things that move. Even if you were to stand on a vast, sterile concrete plaza in the middle of the desert, you would be surrounded by the swirling of air particles, the movement of the sun overhead, a drifting tectonic plate, and the aging of the mind and body you use to perceive these things. In the translator's afterword to a 2010 edition of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Marc Lowen- thal emphasizes the "attempt" in Perec's title, writing that "time, unar. restable, works against [Perec's] project. Every bus that passes, every Person who walks by, every object, thing, and event- everything that happens and that does not happen ultimately serves no other function than that of so many chronometers, so many signals, methods, and clues for marking time, for eroding permanence."

"In June 2020, Bird reported that new registrations for yard lists had increased 900 percent. On Bird, yard lists are a subset of "parch lists" examples of patches being "your local park, neighborhood walk, forf favorite lake or sewage plant. • The idea of a patch is instructive. Unlike roads, property lines, and city limits, patches often exist in the domain of the infraordinary, being unofficial spaces delineated only by attention. This attention is in turn responding to the fact that, as Margaret Atwood put it in an interview on birding, "nature is lumpy" in that birds have their own particular neighborhoods. I have my own patches around my neighborhood, like the side of an unkempt parklet where, in the right months, I know I'll see a Pacific-slope flycatcher. J. Drew Lanham, birder and professor of wildlife at Clemson University, has written aching) of a sparrow-filled patch along a public road in South Carolina that bed spent' hundreds of hours cruising" before a racist encounter withaloce farmer made him think twice. Before that. he'd 'sit and just watch and listen- absorbing all the thickety sparrowness. A patch is as small as you want to make it. The smallest one | have had is a single branch of a California buckeye tree"

"What is a clock? If it's something that "tells the time," then my branch was a clock- but unlike the clock at home, it would never return to its original position. Instead, it was a physical witness and record of over- lapping events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring as I write this. This exercise in observation is an example of what I have come to think of as "unfreezing something in time." To do this means releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable, indi- vidual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time, but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself. Here, it's important for me to note the difference between seeing the tree as evi- dence of time and seeing it as symbolic of time. While it is certainly possible to derive some fruitful thoughts about time and fate from the branching structure of a tree, what I'm talking about is different: The literal tree in front of you is encoding time and change at this literal moment. This exercise of unfreezing something in time is not hard to do. If you want to see time that isn't fungible, just pick a point in space- a branch, a yard, a sidewalk square, a webcam- and simply keep watch. A story is being written there. Like the larger and larger wind patterns on Windy.com, this story is inseparable from the story of all life"

"WHAT HAPPENS IN a world where Bergson's duration and Biomerut, rimefulness are palpable and where time is back in its place? Instead of things that the empty "stuff" of time simply washes over, you may begin to see "things" more often as patterns in time. The world, just like the architecture of a city, becomes a patchwork of outcomes from different weeks, decades, and centuries, all of it being built upon and eroded pushing, trickling, and winging forward into the unknown. Unfreezing something in time can convert it from a commodity into something else, a process that often involves having to acknowledge something something related to "it'-that is uniquely unassimilable to the process of commodification. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant sci- entist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, includes in her history of mosses an illustrative chapter called "The Owner." Among other things, it's a story about someone who couldn't buy time in the way he wanted to, mostly because he didn't know how to observe it. In her capacity as a bryologist, Kimmerer is invited to consult on an estate whose owner wants to "create an exact replica of the flora of the Appa- lachians." In the name of authenticity, he wants to include native mosses as part of the overall design. When Kimmerer arrives at the estate, a worker implies that she is late. "Looking at his watch, he commented that the owner monitors the use of consultants' time carefully. Time is money." A horticulturist gives her a tour of the property, during which Kimmerer looks askance at a gallery of African art. The objects are authentic, the horticulturist has proudly declared. But they are not only stolen; they are frozen in time."

"If you are feeling some resistance to the idea that rocks could be alive, simply invite you to ask yourself why. Although the divide between the living and the nonliving might seem obvious- or "supracultural." as Sylvia Wynter would put it- it is inescapably cultural. In a study titled Models of Living and Non-Living Beings among Indigenous Commu- nity Children," Mexican researchers interviewed Nahua children about whether different categories of things were alive. The answers often reflected the "biological" perspective taught in school, where being alive means eating, breathing, reproducing, and so forth. But other times, they reflected the "cultural" model where "being living implies that inanimate objects have the capacity to influence or affect the lives of humans and animals or being composed of a particular material" -a model similar to Ehrenreich's "initiating] an action." This second model appears in the Mexican researchers' conversation with a six-year-old Nahua student: RESEARCHERS: What do we put in the living area? STUDENT: The ground. RESEARCHERs: Why is the ground living? STUDENT: Because we live there. RESEARCHERs: Because we live there. Why is it living? STUDENT: Because, for the animals. RESEARCHERS: But, if we don't think about the animals, is the ground still living? STUDENT: Yes (nodding his head). RESEARCHERs: Yes, why? STUDENT: For the plants."

"Lanham tells Krista Tippett on an episode of On Being that he "worships every bird he sees, it is clear that this "worship" could not be more differ. ent from the estate owner's acquisitive "love" of mosses. The difference between respecting something and not respecting it is the acknowledg ment that that something is not an automaton, that it is registering time by acting and not just existing in it. Though I've associated it so far with colonialism, a version of this dif. ference is visible in our everyday interactions with other people. Adam Waytz, Juliana Schroeder, and Nicholas Employ call it the "lesser minds problem, a cognitive bias that leads us to underestimate or overlook the emotional realities of others we perceive to be unlike ourselves, includ- ing a biased belief that those people are more biased than we are. We could interpret this to mean that we see people in these "outgroups" as being more automaton than human. The authors describe an incredible experiment in which participants were asked to consider "typically dehu- manized outgroups" like drug addicts or people without housing. For someone outside them, thinking about people in these groups usually does not activate regions of the brain associated with theory of mind. the ability to imagine mental states in others. But "when (participants] are asked to engage directly with the minds of these outgroup members, such as by simply asking whether or not a homeless person would like a particular vegetable, then these neural regions become activated just as they are with higher status outgroup members."* The question about the vegetable presumes a person with desires. And desire, an attitude toward the future and a reflection of one's past, can exist only in time- the time inhabited by that person."

"SEEING MORE OF the world as constitutive of time, full of agency, and deserving of respect means abandoning that hierarchy that Tinker men- tions, between the actor and the acted upon. Is this exhilarating or fear some? Wildcat writes that "indigenous thinkers not only acknowledge contingency and human's lack of control in the world; they also see it as empowering and humbling, not something frightening." If "empow- ering and humbling" sounds like a paradox, it's because of how we normally conceive of power. In a worldview where power, agency, and experience are not bound by individual bodies but reside "in and through the relations and processes that constitute life," the paradox dissolves. The real paradox is a mind that conceives of the world as inert but that may come to see itself as bound to the same laws of determinism as everything else- in a way, the ultimate self-own."

"Like rocks pushing up out of the depths and the water that wears them down; like browned and ripened buckeye fruits falling off the tree and rolling down the hill; like poetry, which strains the boundaries of an ossified language; or like Bergson's cascading rocket that can never be arrested- the co-creation events of our lives do not play out in an external, homogenous time. They are the stuff of time itself. Grasping this fully can be like the moment when you actually have a conversation you've rehearsed in your head. Your rehearsal can never be complete because your imagination was missing not only the person you're talking with, but yourself in each moment- the person changing and responding as the conversation proceeds. When you remember this, the future can cease to look like an abstract horizon toward which your abstract ego plods in its lonely container of a body. Instead, "it," that irrepressible force that drives this moment into the next, is a thing that is speaking back to you always- even and especially from unexpected places. The task for many of us is to learn once more how to hear."

" I thought I was looking at forests immemorial. (Children can be nostalgic, too.) Even entering my thirties, I hadn't made much progress past "trees = good; fires = bad.:" I had yet to learn that California and, indeed, much of the world was actually in the midst of a fire deficit. I was not aware of how closely the local ecology had co-evolved with periodic fire, nor the extent to which indigenous people worldwide had used fire, nor how or when such practices were banned. In other words, I thought I was looking at natural history, not political or culturalhistory-_as if the two could even be separated. I have since learned more about the extent to which fire can be part of an ecology. Chaparral--the mix of grasses and scrubby evergreen shrubs you'll find variations of from southwest Australia to Chile to California, including where I live- is just one plant community depen- dent on periodic wildfires. Because this environment is so dry that few things decay or wash away, periodic small fires perform the function of removing dead underbrush, making space for new growth, and return-ing nutrients to the soil. The seeds and buds of certain plants will not sprout without fire and have evolved to be waxy and oily--basically extra-flammable. Uphill in the forests, species like the lodgepole pine need fire to release seeds from their otherwise-sealed cones. Lack of fire thus has cascading effects, like a decrease in wood-boring beetles that in turn imperils woodpeckers and other cavity-nesting species. The snag forest habitat that succeeds a large fire is surprisingly biodiverse-asI have seen myself on hikes through what I eventually realized were previously burned areas-_and is preferred by some animal species"

"People are often missing from the the nostalgic view of nature, an omission detectable in the pandemic-era observation that "nature is heal- ing. * Obviously, there is a difference between a healthy ecosystem and one stressed by people and pollution. But beyond that, a Westerner's attempt to arrive at the idea of how things are "supposed to be" is usu- ally fraught, because it doesn't take into account who is doing the sup- posing. Indigenous groups are sometimes said to be more attentive to an ecology's changes and temporal cues: flowerings, weather patterns, and migrations. Yet it's too easy to read this as passive adaptation, a total lack of footprint, rather than active construction and collaboration with the nonhuman world."

"Our landscapes were the way that they were when non- native people arrived because of human intervention. … Native people, they purposefully made it that way to keep things in balance. It's just like if you have a big yard and you don't do anything to it. What's that yard going to look like in five years, in six years, in 10 years? Well, our yard is the forest and we took care of it just the way people take care of their fenced in yards." Yurok land, she said, had at one time been 50 percent prairie. Now, only slivers remained, and the elk had left. "One of the goals that we've set for ourselves is to expand those prairies in size so that the elk will come home," she said. Far from immemorial, the forests I saw were memory materialized: created, marked, and later endangered by different fire regimes. Those regimes, in turn, reflected contests of power and different visions of what the land was. Initial bans on burning by the Spanish in the eigh teeth century and the incipient state of California in the nineteenth- were exercises of colonial power against indigenous tribes, tied up with other laws enabling subjugation, forced labor, and family separation"

"While the people McPhee interviews may appreciate what this rise in the landscape affords them- a vertical escape from the city, proximity to "nature," a masterful view of the valley, or even some neat rocks-the San Gabriels seem to appear to them only as a backdrop or a nuisance, a collection of lifeless stuff that just happens to be there. The mountain is inert and thus controllable- which explains the tragicomical hubris of a newspaper headline cited by McPhee: "PROJECT AIMS TO HALT EROSION OF MOUNTAINS; VALLEY AUTHORITIES VOTE LAND- SLIDES UNNECESSARY." This hardheaded mentality arises from the same attitude that insists on total fire suppression. In their study of fire regimes in California and Greece, a group of Greek geographers describe a mindset that could just as easily be applied to boulders, floods, or mountain lions: "The general public perceptions are that forest fires should be controlled and not pose a threat to humans and property," they write. "It is interesting to note that what attracts people to live on the forest margins, that is a sense of living in a 'natural environment,' is done under the mystique of elimi- nating the wild' from wild lands." The geographers suggest that what has been lost is a "vernacular relationship with fire and a dynamic landscape. In Greece, before more people moved to cities, periodic burning was part of rural tenants' famil- larity with and responsibility to their specific surroundings. Likewise, in California, Robbins noted that Yurok people out on their regular hunting rounds would take note in passing of areas that seemed to need a burn. And in Western Australia, Victor Steffensen, an indigenous land man- agement expert educated by elders, explains how burning was related to the identity of an area: "From place to place, both old men would stop and tell the fire stories for each different landscape. They would talk about the right time to burn, how all the animals fitted in, what plants lived where, and the types of soils." Fire was part of a reciprocal responsibility between one subject (humans) and another (land)."

"as Paula Gunn Allen writes, "The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs. It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self."

"In "Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Problem of Culture," Daniel Hartley writes, "Inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-on-one billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect. But that is simply inadequate to actual social and relational modes of historical causation. The fact that tech- nology itself is bound up with social relations, and has often been used as a weapon in class war, plays no role in Anthropocene discourse what- soever." As Hartley observes, this sort of determinism reflects a view of historv as a unidirectional and inevitable march of progress that can never be questioned or redirected, only sped up or slowed down. He cites two passages from a popular 2011 essay about the Anthropocene: 1) "Migration to cities usually brings with it rising expectations and eventually rising incomes, which in turn brings [sic] an increase in consumption"; and 2) "The onset of the Great Acceleration may well have been delayed by a half century or so, interrupted by two world wars and the Great Depression" (emphasis added by Hartley). Hartley writes that "the first sentence seems almost willfully blind to the history of mass urban poverty, gentrification and accumulation by dispos- session. The second seems to claim that the bloodiest century in human history-including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Dresden bombing, the Gulags, and the Holocaust- is a mere blip on the rising line of progress. To think deterministically is to take things for granted, both forward and backward in time. Just as I misunderstood the forested mountains as a child, projecting them into a supposedly uniform past, the concept of the Anthropocene has the potential to make the outcomes of specific actions by specific people seem like a natural and inevitable condition."

"WHEN WE ALLOW the climate crisis a moral dimension, certain things lost in the haze become clearer, including its relationship to other funda. mental injustices. For example, the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apolo- gists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. Only by viewing enslaved people as nonsubjects could someone like Henry Lascelles, Sec- ond Earl of Harewood, have spoken plausibly of a "progressive state of "improvement in the slave population" at an 1823 meeting about his West Indian plantations. Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a sub- ject. Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object. Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects. This connection is more than an analogy: Multiple scholars have emphasized, for exam- ple, the role of plantation cotton in the textile factories that drove the Industrial Revolution. For a modern subject, there is so much about this historical moment that can seem helplessly convoluted-_but some things are cut and dried. Whenever I see the future being frittered away in cold calculations; whenever someone says it's ecological and economic but not moral or political; whenever a technocratic framing hides and continues the arro- gance of centuries past; whenever the colonized and objectified fail to appear as plaintiff; whenever those who profit fail to appear as defense; whenever I start to lose sight of the horizon and forget why the smoke is there- I play out the argument in my head. It's a complicated subject, says one side. Not really, says the other."

"Looney assures the analyst that despite Covid-related delays, everything is on schedule. Outside my dull horror imagining thirty million tons of liq- uid natural gas, there is nothing at all remarkable about this exchange. As Marx writes in Capital, "Après moi, le déluge [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation."* The most important criterion for success for most companies is growth. Bernard Looney was doing his job; the bank was doing its job. When they design ads selling natural gas as "clean," marketers at BP are doing their jobs. In another quarter, there would be another meeting, and it would be just as casual. All I was seeing was a window into another day at an extractive industry operating on a time horizon advantageous to itself. And yet what I saw, as a giver of time and determinant of my time horizon, concerned me directly. At the end of the day, I live on their clock."

"The sociologist William Grossin wrote or a 'correspondence" between "a society's economy, the way it orga- nites work, the means it uses for the production of goods and services. and the way time is represented in the collective consciousness, a repre- sentation that every individual receives, internalizes, and accepts almost always with no problem. Almost always. What happens when there is a problem? Language is dynamic, unruly, always splintering. It has to be, because in order to use it, we take words and constructions we never chose and make them do what we as collectives, however big or small--want them to do. In March 2021, deep into the pandemic, Kathryn Hymes wrote a story for The Atlantic about "familects," dialects and shorthand that develop between those who spend a lot of time in a shared space, speculating that the pandemic lockdowns may have accelerated the pro- cess. One person gives Hymes the example of hog, meaning less than a full cup of coffee: "She explained that this comes from a smaller-than- the-others coffee mug with a little hedgehog on it that my roommates and I found one day.' Hog has become an established unit of measure- ment in her house: I've now also asked for and been offered half a hog. We might understand agreements within a particular temporal com mons as a time familect-like the ones I've described regarding email and dishes, or my Filipino relatives' observance of "Filipino time,' " a gen- eral acceptance of what in other contexts would be considered lateness (a topic I'll return to … later). You could even imagine creating an arbi- trary time familect, like deciding with just one friend to observe some kind of ritual every eight days. Whenever dealing with anyone but each other, of course, you would incur the cost of maintaining a temporal language that ground against the normal seven-day week."

"The workings of the TAATW-and those of the more than century. old International Transport Workers' Federation that has pivoted:o sup. port them- exemplify what Oli Mould would call an actually creative activity, as distinct from "creativity" under capitalism. In Against Creativ. ity, Mould observes that jobs of all sorts now encourage their employ. ees to be "creative," which often translates to competitive flexibility, self-management, and individual assumption of risk. Meanwhile, even nominally anti-capitalist creative work, whether art, music, or slogans, is handily appropriated by the market. Mould writes that, in either case, creativity is not actually creative, because it merely "produces more of the same form of society." If it makes progress, it is the progress of capital- ist logic into ever-more-minute corners of our daily lives, making what Braverman calls "the universal market" even more universal.* It's an important distinction to make at a time when the Covid-19 pan- demic has revivified conversations about work-life balance and the pos- sibility of compressed workdays or weeks. What might look creative and emancipatory at first can turn out to be a re-entrenchment: Companies find that they can pay people less if they work for less time, while "the time they do spend at work is the most productive it can be." Already in the 1970s, Harry Braverman observed that corporations like IBM were "humanizing" work by changing the style of management rather than the position of the worker. Like Mr. Burns's funny hats, these strategies were nothing more than a "studied pretense of worker participation, a gracious liberality in allowing the worker to adjust a machine, replace a light bulb, move from one fractional job to another, and to have the illu- sion of making decisions." It's the same insight as those 1950s companies with floodlit fields: Happy worker = higher output, and if the company can pay less, even better. The "criteria for success" have still not changed. On the one hand, you can't blame a business for speaking the language of the bottom line. On the other hand, you could also ask the old question: Why are individuals expected to be "resilient" when corporations are not?"

"Whether conspicuous, compensatory, or both, consumption has long had a relationship to leisure, which can make leisure a strange kind of circumscribed freedom. Although leisure is typically defined in opposition to work, the cut that separates the two is also what has historically joined them. In a discussion of the internal paradoxes of the Protestant work ethic, Kathi Weeks describes how the ethic- originally warning against spending the wealth that one worked for- came to accommodate consumerism in the early twentieth century: "Consumption rather than savings alone, emerged as an essential economic practice; as opposed to mere idleness, nonwork time was recognized as an economi-cally relevant time, time to create new reasons to work more."

"'in If Women Counted, Waring recommends a change in imputatia altering official criteria to more accurately reflect what shouldbecome red productive activity. The Wages for Housework movement foul. in the 1970s, represents a more expressly anti capitalist body of though. based on similar observations.* The phrase "wages for housework it, first put forth by Selma James, who also coined the now common tem unwaged labor to refer to the housework, care work, and child rearing that women were expected to do for free. She and others in the movement campaigned with mothers who were on income support in the United Kingdom and the National Welfare Rights Organization in the United States (led largely by Black mothers), which had a similar demand for a Guaranteed Adequate Income (GAI) and a recognition that "women's work is real work." Wages for Housework drew on insights from Black welfare activists as well as from the Italian movement for workers' autonomy known as operaismo ("'workerism"). From their perspective, women were slaves to wage slaves (men) and women's work upheld an overall system of explot tation that was hurting men and women."

"James describes all the time that goes into making the kind of time that can be sold for a wage: The ability to labor resides only in a human being whose life is con- sumed in the process of producing. First it must be nine months in the womb, must be fed, clothed, and trained: then when it works its bed must be made, its floor swept, its lunchbox prepared, its sexuality not gratified but quietened, its dinner ready when it gets home, even if this is eight in the morning from the night shift. This is how labor power is produced when it is daily consumed in the factory or the office. To describe its basic production and reproduc- tion is to describe women's work. At the time, criticisms of Wages for Housework ranged from practi- cal implausibility to the risk of cementing women in women's roles. But the movement has never been just about asking for wages for house- work. First of all, the original demand was part of a set of others: a shorter workweek, reproductive freedom, wage parity, and guaran- teed income for men and women. More important, it was a gesture: an attempt to imagine an option for women beyond taking on a second shift in a nuclear family or competing with men in what we'd now call Lean In type feminism. By imputing value to women's work and thus to care, Wages for Housework sought a society in which care and collective liberation, not personal ambition and brutality, would be paramount- for everyone, and a benefit to all."

"The leaflet was a precursor to Processed World's sense of humor in general, which belied a painfully recognizable rage about the scam of selling one's own life for the honor of selling it some more. Occasionally this showed through with surprising sincerity. Amid the comic strips, fake ads, and cutting commentary, one two-page spread con- tained a melancholic collage of a face inside a computer terminal, hand- cuffed hands, a phone, and a series of smaller heads, with the text 'Another Day at the Office: What Have We Lost?" In a letter, I.C. from Toronto asked, "What does one do when one finds oneself marking time on the job? One develops a lot of cynicism, apathy, and anger to which there is no outlet." And J. Gulesian from San Francisco offered this meditation: Dear PW. I would like to submit more observations on the daily life of a middle- aged secretary. It's all very hard, really, that daily life. It so often demands more than I can give and takes so much that my free time is spent trying to establish continuity between who I am and who I must be. Who I am means that I must establish and maintain human relationships. What I must be makes that dangerous and painful. You know how it is."

"In chapter 2, I suggest that an overworked achievement-subiect should save herself by dialing down personal ambition. But just as ladder-climbing ambition is only one form of desire- one that exists on and reinforces a specific plane- there are many forms of frustration beyond what is trivially referred to as burnout. Some of those frustra tions, whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, include the follow ing: having to sell your time to live, having to choose the lesser of two evils, having to say something while believing in another, having to buil yourself up while starved of substantive connection, having to work while the sky is red outside, and having to ignore everything and every one whom, in your heart of hearts, it is killing you to ignore. There is wanting more for yourself, and then there is simply wanting more. Selma James is still active with the International Wages for Howe work Campaign (now more commonly known as the Global Womens Strike). In 2012, she told journalist Amy Goodman abour marching: year carlier in London with SlutWalk, a transnational anti rape more dicht lames had felt vivified by the groups energy and antiracism. didn't feel, walking with them, that I was surrounded by women whe were ambitious," she said, referring by contrast to the part of the molt ciecimovement that had focused on climbing the ladder while welfi declined. "We really need to have another reason to be together"

"It's an essay about walking, by Rebecca Solnit. Her walking sounds like the opposite of "marching in lockstep". Walking is made of steps, but a step is not a walk; a walk is made of perseverance, of continuing to step, and this process of rep- etition is not redundant but a form of inquiry. "Where are we going?" is the universal question, but the answer is just to go, to walk until your shoes wear out, and then to resole and keep walk- ing. "I walked to the floor till I wore out my shoes / Lord they're killing me--I mean them lowdown blues," sang Hank Williams, and the walking keeps you alive. To keep walking is to keep living to keep inquiring, and to keep hoping. Hoping and walking have preoccupied me the past dozen years, but I had to travel a long way down those two paths to realize that ther were the same path whose rule is motion, whose reward is arrival in the unanticipated and whose very nature is in contrast with the tenor of our time, a lime preoccupied with the arrival and the quantifiable. Many love ellainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair iself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known. h insither. To despair is to stop walking; and to stop walking is te bal into despair or those depressions that are both features of the landscape and states of mind the hole deeper than a rut."

"Kevin Kruse, the entrepreneur who put up the "1,440" poster in his office to remind himself how many minutes he had per day? In his book. shortly before introducing that poster, he asks you to hold your hand to your heart and become conscious of your breathing. Make no mis- take: This is not a mindfulness exercise. Kruse says, You will never get those beats back. You will never get those breaths back. In fact, I just took three beats away from your life. I just took two breaths from you." He immediately follows this with a pointed metaphor: You would never leave your wallet out in the open, and time is money. So, why are you letting people "steal" time from you? Pursued to its logical conclusion, the idea of time as a personal and nonrenewable resource both evades and obsesses over mortality. After all, what is Kruse's "1,440" poster but a memento mori, as sobering as the skull in the corner of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life? Each day, every time you look at Kruse's poster, you have less than 1,440 minutes left. In "Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives," Oliver Burke- man observes that keeping a detailed log of your time use, in an effort to save time or spend it more wisely, ironically "heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost forever." Whether on the level of minutes or of life stages and benchmarks, the more you stare at time, the more cruelly it seems to slip through your fingers. There are many apps that purport to tell you how many years you have left to live. Out of timid curiosity, I recently downloaded one called When Will I Die? After answering a series of questions about my lifestyle and disposition and sitting for thirty seconds through an ad for a game called Wishbone ("Choose the cutest!" said some text above two random pictures of manicures), I saw a cartoon headstone whose inscription read, JENNY ODELL DIED AGED O. The number then raced upward from zero, as though I were playing a casino game where the prize was life itself. I had a few moments to very palpably feel my desire not to die"

"the irony of a life consumed by the effort to make more of itself. This and other problems appear succinctly in the subtitle of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. Ehrenreich subjects the wellness and anti-aging industries to withering critique, questioning the monomaniacal project of trying to become a lean, mean, living machine. For her, the product offered by a capitalist version of wellness is "the means to remake one- self into an ever more perfect self-correcting machine capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination. " Citing a long list of books on "successful aging," she observes a cruel dynamic related to the bootstrapper ethos of individual time management: All the books in the successful-aging literature insist that a long and healthy life is within the reach of anyone who will submit to the required discipline. It's up to you and you alone, never mind what scars- from overexertion, genetic defects, or poverty may be left from your prior existence. Nor is there much or any con- cern for the material factors that influence the health of an older person, such as personal wealth or access to transportation and social support. Except for your fitness"

"BESIDES OFFERING A different set of values, crip time also offers an intui- tive way to see time as a social fabric, in part because it flies in the face of dominant liberal concepts of independence, freedom, and dignity. Disability highlights something that is true for all of us: No matter how independent and fit we may feel, we are not simply alive but, rather, kept alive--against odds that some people are nonetheless privileged enough to ignore. In her book, Hendren cites the work of the philosopher Eva Feder Kittay, another mother of a disabled child, who observes that the relationship of dependency she has with her daughter is at once unique and commonplace. "People do not spring up from the soil like mush- rooms," she writes. "People need to be cared for and nurtured through- out their lives by other people."* If aliveness means touching and being touched-_being in the world, being kept alive- then the scale between living and dead is inescapably social. In December 2020, responding to a year that had "awakened us to the fact that we die," B. J. Miller, a palliative care physician, wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he asked, "What Is Death?" The piece proceeded through different understandings, allowing that the answer might be different for everyone. Some people, he pointed out, might consider themselves "dead" if they are no longer able to have sex, read a book, or eat a pizza. Miller's own personal definition of being alive sounds remarkably similar to the photographer's relationship with the lake and to what Handke's "tiredness" allows: "For me, death is when I can no longer engage with the world around me; when I can no longer take anything in and, therefore, can no longer connect."

"Davis pointed to the decline in prison educational programs, including a 1994 crime bill that disallowed Pell Grants for incarcerated students, thus removing decades-old programs that pris- oners had fought to establish. (The ban was finally lifted in December 2020.) Davis describes a scene in the documentary The Last Graduation in which books are being taken out of the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, after its program with Marist Col- lege was terminated: "The prisoner who for many years had served as a clerk for the college sadly reflected, as books were being moved, that there was nothing left to do in prison except perhaps bodybuilding 'But,' he asked, what's the use of building your body if you can't build your mind?' Ironically, not long after educational programs were dis- established, weights and bodybuilding equipment were removed from most U.S. prisons If prison is not rehabilitative, then what is it? For Davis and others who have defined the prison-industrial complex, it is part of a larger political- economic fabric that includes not only prisons but corporations, media, guards' unions, and court agendas. Prisoners may be "dead," but they and the prisons they fill still have economic value. On the level of public imagi nation, however, and particularly in the context of time, the prison simply becomes a black box: a screened-away place as unimaginable to the wider culture as death itself. "

"Price's field notes illuminate, in contrast, subjects who are obviously alive with hopes and desires and oriented toward a future: December 2008. I am talking to a group in protective housing at the jail about pursuing their education. We are trying to put together a pilot program at the jail since we are only minutes from a state university. Many of them tell me they would like to go back to school after they get out. Two men sitting off from the main circle call out that they would like to understand opera better. A young man says a bit shyly that he would like to learn ancient Greek and a few people chuckle. Another man says he draws and would like to learn how to put together a graphic novel. After the session breaks up, he brings over a few of his drawings to show me."

"TOWARD THE END of their report on the lesser minds problem I mentio in chapter 4, the authors include a surprising insight: A dehumating bias can also exist on an "intrapersonal" level. That is, we're capable o viewing not just others but our future and past selves, too, as having lesser minds and as being less alive. Furthermore, we seem to do it for the same reasons: A lack of "direct access" to the mental states of those selves makes us less prone to see them as having evolving inner lives. I have kept journals since I was very young. I tend to revisit them when my relationship to time feels especially punitive, when I've been castigating myself for what I have not vet become or achieved. In these journals, instead of snapshots of a closed-system person, I find a lie self who is always questioning, always "trying to get it together," alas writing toward a future and refiguring the past. This past year, when I was writing chapter 4, I visited my pares house and dug through their garage to find the high school journals wher I'd mentioned "it." I took one back with me, unthinkingly ploppingit-ad my desk at home next to my current journal. It was surreal to see thet side by side like that, with nearly three decades intervening- and yer te Were witten with the same hand. When I was younger I used to think the impulse to write in journals was a kind of bid for immortality a jealous snatching and pressing of time, as if moments were butterfly specimens. But now I value the process for the way it dispels the myth of a finished self"

"The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti writes that, in a state of com- plete attention, "the thinker, the center, the 'me' comes to an end" This supposed emptiness makes way for so much more, as "it is only a mind that looks at a tree or the stars or the sparkling waters of a river with complete self-abandonment that knows what beauty is, and when we are actually seeing[,] we are in a state of love." That state, he says, has no yesterday and no tomorrow." This is easier said than done, of course, and my whole life so far seems to consist of forgetting and remembering this wisdom. But whenever I do remember, I forgive myself for forget ting. I've come to see the truly alive, ego-dissolving state less as a goal to arrive at and closer to something like rain. It comes and goes, and when it comes, you make use of it and give thanks. Strangely enough, it has "rained" even in my sleep. About once a month, a lucid dream will pop up in the middle of one of my usual stress dreams: rushing through an airport late for a bus or to my own class or being unprepared to give a speech. At first; nothing changes, except that I've suddenly stopped and become suspicious that l'm in fact sleeping. The settings and the props remain, but they feel neutralised, cast adrift from the anxiety producing script that created them. In turn, they come to the foreground as objects of fascination, unfrozen in time. I, too get unfrozen: I find that I can move with agency as though I've gained control of my arms and legs for the first time."

"Yet for me this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over, my elbow knocks it off the shelf, and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course. But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious." (by Ajahn Chah)

"Like serpentinite, schist has a composition inseparable from its history: The reason it's so hard is that it was compressed over three hundred million years ago under a mountain range with heights similar to those of the Himalayas today. That range formed when two landmasses collided in the formation of Pangaea."

""A devastating earthquake that rocked the Indone- sian island of Sumatra in 1861 was long thought to be a sudden rupture on a previously quiescent fault. But new research finds that the tectonic plates below the island had been slowly and quietly rumbling against each other for 32 years before the cataclysmic event."* To a non-Western perspective uninterested in certain types of bound- aries or models of subjecthood, separating things from their context prob- ably isn't as much of a problem. It wasn't for Bergson, either. In Creative Evolution, where duration is a process of becoming and where states are always breaking through to other states, he had to view individuality not as an absolute category but as existing on a spectrum. "For the individu- ality to be perfect," he wrote, "it would be necessary that no detached part of the organism could live separately. But then reproduction would be impossible. For what is reproduction, but the building up of a new Organism with a detached fragment of the old?" All living things contain the means for overrunning their own boundaries. In that sense, Bergson notes, individuality actually "harbors its enemy at home."

"In Sand Talk, Yunkaporta complains that ' is hard to write in English, when you've been talking to your great grandmother on the phone that she is also your niece, and in her language there are no separate words for time and space." He explains that in his great grandmother/ nieces relationship system, there is a reset every three generations where your grand parents' parents get classified as your children, because "the granny, mother goes back to the center and becomes the child" Furthermore a question that translates in English as "What place" actually meat "What time?" According to the paradigm his great-grandmother/niece uses, these two features are naturally intertwined: "Kinship moves it cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space. We experience time in a very different way from people immersed in flat schedules and story-less surfaces. In our spheres of existence, time does not go in a straight line, and it is as tangible as the ground we stand on." Note how different "the ground we stand on" is from abstract space. Yunkaporta's "ground" is not a metaphor. It is referring to real ground, every bit as concrete as the Newtonian, imagined grid of space is empty, abstract, and flat. What we think time is, how we think it is shaped, affects how we are able to move through it. Flat time offers only so many options. Thinking about the relationship between seeing and moving, I'm reminded of a scene from the 1986 Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth, that I still remember thirty years after a babysitter named Liz brought the VHS tape to my house. Sarah (played by a young Jennifer Connelly) has just started out in a formidable labyrinth, at the center of which is a castle where the Goblin King (a fantastically coiffed David Bowie) waits. Finding herself in a long, unbroken section that stretches only forward and back, Sarah complains, "What do they mean labyrinth'? There aren't any turns of corners or anything."

"I realized I actually knew nothing about tides. Some of my days of googling resembled an elementary school science module, where I learned that there were "high high tides" and "low high tides," and that the highest tides- the king tides that I describe at the beginning of this conclusion-_happened during a new or full moon when the moon was in perigee (closest to Earth) and Earth was in perihelion (closest to the sun).* I learned that there were such things as "earth tides," where those same forces actually moved solid land a little bit. I found out that while the moon pulls on our water, the water pulls back, speeding the orbit of the moon and causing it to drift away from us. I studied the local tide chart, where the curves had a periodicity and logic of their own but existed out of sync with the calendar boxes and hour markings of the grids in which they were shown. Several nights, the moon came out full and bright and clear, a reminder."

[palmoilnews]

Massive Brazilian soybean exports too heavily leaning on China? -Braun NAPERVILLE, Illinois, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Brazil’s 2023 soybean exports have surpassed 100 million metric tons, up at least 16% from 2021’s full-year record, though the world’s leading soybean exporter remains heavily dependent on China. No. 2 exporter the United States is also reliant on China but to a lesser degree, though U.S. soy exporters have previously experienced the fallout when demand from their top customer fizzles, especially for geopolitical reasons. However, less dominance from China in U.S. exports affords the United States more variety among its soybean customer base versus Brazil. On average over the last three marketing years, some 70% of Brazil’s exported soybeans head to China versus a 56% average for the United States. China’s share of Brazilian exports first reached 70% in 2011-12 and topped out at 83% in 2017-18, which overlapped with the U.S.-China trade war. These statistics reference local marketing years, which are September-August for the United States and February-January for Brazil, with January 2024 marking the end of 2022-23. China accounted for a maximum 62% of U.S. soybean exports in 2011-12, after having first surpassed the 50% mark in 2008-09. Only 28% of U.S. shipments went to China in 2018-19 during the trade war. Both the United States and Brazil have acknowledged that diversifying their soybean customers would be beneficial, though nearly a third of the world’s annual soybean consumption occurs in China, and China accounts for at least 60% of annual imports. The No. 2 importer, Mexico, pales in comparison at just 4% of world imports, so the top suppliers have no choice but to riskily place most of their eggs in the basket that is China. Brazil has been rapidly expanding its soybean crop, though Chinese demand has been somewhat stagnant in recent years. This could put a snag in Brazil’s soy industry should a “black swan” event occur, like African swine fever spreading through China’s hog herd or a political dispute between Brasilia and Beijing. Any prolonged easing of Chinese activity in the soybean market could put the oilseed on sale, encouraging countries to step up bean imports and process them domestically versus importing the soy products. This was seen in 2018 when China shunned U.S. beans. THE OTHERS Brazil now exports nearly double the U.S. soybean volume per year, and the two will cover 86% of all soybean shipments this year. On average over calendar years 2020 through 2022, China accounted for 53% of U.S. and 70% of Brazilian soybean exports. Mexico was next for U.S. exports at 9%. Europe, excluding Turkey, Ukraine and Russia, is Brazilian soybeans’ No. 2 entity, accounting for 10% of exports, and Europe is No. 3 for the United States at 8%. Between 2020 and 2022, Brazil shipped 25.7 million tons of beans to Europe, some 75% more than the United States. Thailand and Turkey are Nos. 3 and 4 for Brazilian beans at 3% apiece, and Iran and Pakistan fall in next at 2% apiece. These countries plus China and Europe cover 90% of Brazil’s annual exports. The United States is more diverse in the Nos. 4 through 9 spots, with Egypt accounting for 6% of soybean exports, Japan and Indonesia 4% at apiece, Taiwan at 3%, and Bangladesh and Thailand with 2% each. These plus China, Mexico and Europe cover 90% of U.S. shipments. In 2020-2022, China’s average Brazilian soybean haul was 56% larger than mid-last decade, though its U.S. one was 2% smaller. Brazil’s shipments to Europe increased 43% in that time frame versus a 6% increase for U.S. beans. Mexico is helping ratchet up U.S. exports with a six-year volume increase of 45%. Between January and November 2023, Argentina was Brazil’s second-largest destination for soybeans if Europe is not considered one entity. However, the 4 million tons of Brazilian beans shipped to Argentina so far this year are incredibly rare and occurred due to a severe Argentine crop failure. Brazil’s 2023 soybean exports should approach 101.5 million tons based on estimations for December. The United States’ calendar-year record for soybean exports was set in 2020 at 63.65 million tons (2.34 billion bushels).

[mariacallous]

On July 18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded the Third Plenum of its 20th Party Congress. Held in a secured military conference hotel on the western outskirts of Beijing, proceedings closed with a ritual appearance by top leader Xi Jinping. Third Plenums, so called because they’re the third meeting of the party’s five-year cycles, cover economic policy; outcomes are scrutinized by cadres and global businesses alike.

This Third Plenum duly addressed the economy but also broke from precedent: When the conclave wasn’t scheduled during the accustomed time last fall, speculation swirled around delays due to party purges and economic headwinds. With the session finally finished, we can now parse speeches and documents for insights into Beijing’s economic thinking—and gauge how CCP institutions have fared under Xi’s norm-bending rule.

One recurring catchphrase this session has been “reform and opening up”—a term with a rich history but invoked today in circumstances starkly different from the time of its original coinage. In 1978, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was picking up the pieces after Mao Zedong’s chaotic rule. Deng sought to create stable conditions for economic growth. He sidelined Maoist cadres advocating “class struggle” and promoted reformers keen on economic experimentation. The 1978 Third Plenum keynote speech was Deng’s victory lap. In his clipped Sichuanese accent, speaking at the same military hotel, Deng called for China to open itself to foreign capitalists and overseas manufacturing firms. This new “reform and opening up” policy drove decades of growth, lifting the masses from poverty and integrating the People’s Republic with the global economy.

While official meetings were erratic under Mao, Deng sought a steadier rhythm. The terrors of the Cultural Revolution were subsiding; cadres found a certain solace in bureaucratic rituals. The headline event of the party calendar is the National Congress; in the pattern set after Mao’s death, it is held usually in October of years ending with 2 and 7. (Xi, for instance, ascended as CCP general secretary in 2012, gained a second term in 2017, and an unprecedented third in 2022.) At a full Congress, thousands of delegates convene in Beijing to ratify decisions about leadership and ideology, while 99 million party members look on.

After the Congress concludes, subsidiary plenums are called over the ensuing five-year span until the next full session. These intermediate meetings typically convene a few hundred CCP bigwigs and selected experts and have historically been held five to nine times (most commonly seven) before the following Congress half a decade later. Plenums typically cover party appointments (First Plenum), government personnel (Second), economic reform (Third), party-building activities (Fourth), fixing a new Five-Year Plan (Fifth), management of culture and history (Sixth), and a closing summation (Seventh) before the next Congress. Each meeting also disposes of sensitive party business arising in the interim. Since the Second Plenum in early 2023, several members of Xi’s top team—including ministers of defense and foreign affairs—have vanished into the CCP’s disciplinary apparatus, snared in graft and other indiscretions. At this plenum, their fates were finalized. Some offenders, stripped of party membership, now face criminal trial. Others got off more leniently: Last week, former Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who was disappeared for a year, formally lost membership of the elite Central Committee. But in an official document, he kept the appellation “comrade”—demotion without total disgrace. Such individual intrigues ultimately matter less than the overall tone: the “party line” and “main melody” of propaganda. In earlier eras, plenum themes reflected a more collective leadership. Today, that agenda closely follows the will of Xi himself.

Ever since Deng’s 1978 breakthrough set the template, observers have eagerly watched Third Plenums for portents of change. Results have always varied. Over the 1980s, one Third Plenum widened economic reforms from the countryside to the cities, but, with inflation rising, the next Third Plenum tightened statist wage controls and commodity price caps. After the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June 1989 froze political reforms, the 1993 Third Plenum signaled that economic reforms would continue: The communiqué made rhetorical room for capitalism by advocating a “socialist market economy.” This turn of phrase translated into epochal change: the dismantling of many state-owned enterprises and the end of “iron rice bowl” welfare security for more than 20 million people. The Third Plenums in 2003 and 2008 were, in hindsight, milquetoast: missed opportunities to update China’s growth model and rectify an unruly (and sometimes greedy) party apparatus.

When Xi took over in 2012, he had a mandate from his colleagues to secure the CCP’s future by taming corruption and enacting structural reforms. Xi’s first Third Plenum as leader—in November 2013—was met with high expectations. The conclave announced big changes: a plan to end the one-child policy and a determination to let market forces take a “decisive” role in the economy. Outside observers, squinting to see China’s economic modernization tracking toward convergence with the West, hailed the plenum as a masterstroke and Xi as a bold “reformer.”

The one-child policy was duly scrapped after several years. But the CCP soured on market mechanisms after Chinese stocks swooned in 2015, threatening the stability of the broader economy. The state responded with heavy-handed measures: strong-arming equity sales and detaining financial reporters. Meanwhile, party institutions grew more visible in everyday life and acted more assertively toward private businesses. Crackdowns snared rights lawyers and journalists; government regulators humbled China’s booming tech sector. Politics took priority—and command—over economics.

By 2018, Xi had decided to abolish term limits for the presidency of the People’s Republic, a post held concurrently with the more important role of CCP general secretary. Though the position is a state title—technically outside the party bureaucracy and calendar—this move seemingly disturbed the regular rhythms of party politics. The Third Plenum in 2018 fell early, landing in February rather than the fall. Unusually, that meeting focused on personnel rather than economic issues.

Today, a look back on Xi’s inaugural Third Plenum in 2013 shows the limitations of prognosticating based on that or any other party meeting. Some plans were implemented. In other cases, unexpected events may have overtaken the best intentions. But whatever the rhetoric, more than a decade later, the reality is trending toward more government intervention in the economy rather than less. A reformer Xi has been—but rarely in the direction Western observers might have hoped. Since Xi took power and held his inaugural Third Plenum at the expected time, two subsequent Third Plenums have fallen outside their usual season. Xi is now in power indefinitely, having amassed more formal titles and personal influence than any leader since Mao.

At the recently concluded Third Plenum, Xi and his comrades affirmed the expected themes with range of slogans, with some—such as “reform and opening up” and “Chinese-style modernization”—reflecting Deng’s legacy. Documents highlighted security and control while also calling for “high-quality development” in key sectors, such as green tech and semiconductors, believed to be crucial to future growth. Some perennial problems have resurfaced again after being mentioned in past Third Plenums but never faced.

In 2003 and 2013, communiqués suggested a property tax to raise local government revenue for health and welfare spending, but no comprehensive policy resulted. Now, a crumpling real estate sector threatens to tip into crises in local government debt and the economy at large. In 2024, the CCP sounds more tepid today toward market forces than in 2013, reprising the 1993 slogan of a “socialist market economy” while calling for “market order” and making scant mention of the private sector.

Even in 1978, the important politicking actually happened behind the scenes before Deng’s inaugural Third Plenum. In Deng’s keynote speech ending the session, even as he exhorted his comrades to “liberate [their] thinking” and “look forward,” he made no mention of the phrase “reform and opening up,” instead quoting from Lenin and praising Mao. Deng framed his new initiatives through Mao’s language, saying that to pursue true Marxism, cadres must “seek truth from facts.” Deng’s call for a foreign investment law came last in a list of draft legislation covering routine topics such as forestry, factories, and labor. The radical impact of Deng’s reforms only became apparent over time, through actions rather than words.

So it may have been with the Third Plenum in 2013, when Xi framed his ambitions in the language of his immediate predecessors. Whatever is said at the dais, Chinese policymaking ultimately depends as much—or more—on personalities, and the pressure of events, as on showpiece meetings of party or state.

This year’s arrhythmic Third Plenum has, so far, yielded a 5,000-word communiqué and a “decision” document, along with a profusion of records, commentary, and clarifications to elucidate the CCP’s will. These hail Xi’s “comprehensively deepening reforms” but have offered few specifics so far. Whatever the future of China’s politics and economy, Xi’s continuing central role in guiding both appears ensured.

[dertaglichedan]

Apple experienced a $200 billion market-cap drop amid investor concerns about China.

A new phone from Huawei has been built mostly with equipment from China.

It's a sign US export controls aren't hurting China, which is becoming technologically independent.

With less than a week to go before the release of the iPhone 15, there should be a huge buzz around Apple as it prepares for the biggest event in its calendar year. Instead, it's having to nurse a sudden $200 billion drop in market value.

Recent rumblings in China, which is Apple's fastest-growing region outside the US, signal that the new phone may not fly off the shelves. It's also ominous for US tech dominance more broadly.

China has been a hugely important market for Apple, which generated almost a fifth of its $394.3 billion net sales from the region in its most recent fiscal year.