#but i think they are valuable and useful to read

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

[uncanny-tranny]

I know this is a very unoriginal observation (much like any other), but I'm finally reading The Great Gatsby, and even I wouldn't describe men the way Nick does.

[galaxseacreature]

the other significant others is a book about how amatonormativity-sorry, compulsory coupledom-sucks for everyone and we can do better if we dare to try. I think it is pretty well done and i know it's sorely needed. it has incredible mainstream accessibility and I genuinely hope people read it and the ideas circulate more broadly. but it drives me a little insane that aromantics get thrown into just one list in the intro and then the book seems reluctant to truly acknowledge that some people genuinely don't even want a romantic relationship and that's ok. anyway, the book tells a series of stories about various platonic life partnerships. it weaves in history about changing friendship and marriage norms and facts about modern relationships and how they might not fit our assumptions. the last chapter even dives into some really exciting legal reforms that could address amatonormativity! sorry. compulsory coupledom. anyway. I recommend this book for like....your allo cishet friend or like, your mom or something

[lo1k-diamonds]

I was doing it for you! The reason was all for you, for us!

It's always interesting for me when authors use words native to me to describe feelings that are not translatable - like saudade. So yes, I had to read what Taehyung was up to, and I was not disappointed!

Reading it, I wasn't sure what type of feeling this story would go for, as even saudade can mean many things, but the story delivers. The scene was set nicely, with the natural ups and downs of a person who notices their relationship changing and can't seem to do anything to stop it. Meanwhile, I wasn't expecting Taehyung to have more than a "work" excuse, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Also, I really like it when stories depict fights in a realistic, not overly dramatic, but also not lackluster way, and I was on the ride the whole time. I'd also want to leave the fight to think and honestly, I was put off by Taehyung's persistence. Some people need to solve it on the spot, and some need to process it. But since OC is okay with it, I'm okay with it, too. It leads to a sweet resolution, and I'm sure the couple learned a valuable lesson, so love wins!

saudade | kth. (m)

saudade ; “a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something/someone that one cares for and/or loves.”

➵ summary : a demanding idol lifestyle was something taehyung and yourself were all too familiar with. it wasn’t so hard when considering your unconditional love for one another, but lately, taehyung wasn’t the same anymore; and you decide it’s time to find out why.

➵ pairing : idol!taehyung x choreographer!reader

➵ genre : angst, smut, fluff (the holy trinity), idol!au, established relationship!au

➵ rating : 18+

➵ word count : 16k

➵ warnings : sexual content, swearing, dom + sub dynamics, dom!tae, fingering, oral (f. receiving), lots of dirty talk, t e a s i n g because let’s face it this is tae, big dick!tae, cock sliding, marking, restraint (with his own hands), unprotected sex (wrap it up peeps), rough sex, mushy i miss you sex, lots of feels, tae undresses reader (it’s hot i promise), praising, name kink, slight body worshipping, slight brat-handling, forced orgasm, creampie, one spank, tiny impreg kink, aftercare

➵ a/n : wow, my first fic on tumblr!! i’m beyond excited to finally be sharing my stories and writing, hopefully i can let you escape into a whole new world and enjoy my works! comments and feedback are always appreciated <3

2:27AM. 

He still wasn’t home. 

Texts on delivered, calls unanswered, radio silence on all social media. 

And it wasn’t just tonight, it was every night. 

Everyday. 

And it’s been a month. A long, grueling month.

Keep reading

[feminetomboy]

My prediction is that Cucurucho is trying to take down the Federation from the inside. And post.

[dodomingo]

Is there like 'become a human being' intensive career therapy or smth like that or is that something Ronald Raegan un-invented

[sincerely-sofie]

I'm not sure how weird of a question it would be to ask, or if it's one i should ask, but if you could choose to hallucinate one of them again without any kind of drawbacks just to talk with them, would you? And who would you talk to?

Not a weird question at all, and it's one I've actually asked myself a lot over the years! If I were able to hallucinate one of my old Brain Roommates™️ again, but without the intense anxiety that is required for me to hallucinate in the first place or the actual damage to my brain that hallucinations do, I'd be very, very interested in it. However, my answer for who I would speak to in this hypothetical scenario has changed throughout the years.

Originally, I wanted to talk to the Black Clock. He was the most consistently distressing hallucination, and was a sort of manifestation of my intense perfectionism and high standards for myself. I wanted to ask him if I was enough. It was a question that haunted me for years, and either answer scared me. If I was enough, then that meant I wasn't living up to my potential and that I was "sinful, irredeemable filth" according to the script I told myself back then. If I wasn't enough, then I didn't deserve anything good and I was an active blight on all that I loved, somehow. Nowadays I don't have anything to say to him. I'm enough for myself and I'm enough for God. The opinion of some misfiring synapses doesn't matter.

After that, I wanted to speak to the Red Woman. She expressed remorse after I found my first set of medications that partially stopped me from hallucinating, and she apologized for what she put me through and told me goodbye. I held her the night I took those medications while she cried and said she was scared to die. I never saw or heard from her again, at least as a hallucination. I wanted to tell her I forgave her and that I hoped she was okay, wherever she was. I don't have that same anxiety over the speculative mortality of the voices in my head anymore, so I wouldn't say I would want to talk to her again. There's not much point to it in my eyes. She hurt me and said she was sorry. That's a full sentence. I don't need to open it up for anything else.

Later on, I wanted to talk to the Lime Hands because, in a very bizarre exchange, he expressed to me he was depressed and didn't want to exist. I wanted to see if he was feeling any better, as strange as it was to ask that of a hallucination. Now, though, I hate that freak and make no apologies for what the dang thing put me through, and the only way I'd want to reunite with him is in some wonderland scenario where I could tangibly interact with him. And that's only because I'm punching that sucker's teeth in and breaking his pinky fingers.

As for the present day answer: If I were to choose any of my hallucinations to speak to without consequence, I think I'd like to speak to Doc Brown, or the Marigold Girl.

Doc Brown was the most cordial of the hallucinations and actually stepped in to advocate for me on occasion when the pain was really bad. I liked him a lot. He was a friend to me when I had very few people to talk to. We joked together and he gave me advice and words of comfort during some of the worst nights of my life. I think it'd be fun, in a very surreal way, to catch up with him— ask him how he's doing, how he's been, if he and the Marigold Girl are still buddies and if the Red Woman and him ever got over the hump of their flirtatious hatred for each other and actually became an item. It'd be a nice little send off to the guy. He was one of the first hallucinations I stopped experiencing, and his disappearance was very abrupt. I'd like to be able to say goodbye properly, thank him for his help, and smile and kindly say I hope I never see him again.

(also, the guy's whole shtick was anxiety over disease / contamination and the possibility of me infecting others with whatever bug I caught at the time. I stopped hallucinating him WAY before 2020 and I think he would lose his mind if I told him about COVID-19. That was his time to shine and he missed it. Poor thing.)

The Marigold Girl was a very difficult figure for me to handle when I was hallucinating. On the one hand, she was a lovely, if somewhat unsettling, little girl. She liked it when I read books and explained the plots to her. She always wanted to be held. She was scared of the dark. She adored my stuffed animals and would whisper to them while I was trying to sleep. I enjoyed being around her for the most part, but she was a very weepy hallucination, and the Black Clock would deal out punishment without fail whenever she cried— it was always my fault somehow, and so I suffered the consequences of her being a bit of a crybaby.

Looking back, I feel bad for her. She was a good kid, or at least as good of a kid as an unhealthy cocktail of neurochemicals in a weary brain can be. She once said she didn't want to cry all the time and wished she knew how to stop because I got in trouble because of it. I think it would be nice to comfort her and tell her it wasn't her fault that I'd be hurt. She couldn't control things anymore than I could back then.

I'd really like to show her the new stuffed animals I've collected over the years and read her one of the short stories I've written. I think she'd like Winter Came and Went if she didn't have to worry about the consequences of crying during the sad parts. She'd definitely enjoy Bibbidy Bee Goes to the Library. If possible, I'd like to ask what her favorite color is. I think she'd have a lot of fun answering, and I'd like being able to get to know this part of my psyche that was scared to let herself show any sadness for fear of hurting others with it.

[chronomally]

drop the paper? 🅱️ls?

If you're talking about the one that discusses using AI to make decisions about which unhoused people get access to housing, it's available for free here

[twinkubus]

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary (alt text under cut)

"The frameworks through which the world can be understood continue to be depleted of complexity, drained of whatever is unplanned or unforeseen. So many long-standing and multivalent forms of social exchange have been remade into habitual sequences of solicitation and response. At the same time, the range of what constitutes response becomes formulaic and, in most instances, is reduced to a small inventory of possible gestures or choices. Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience. At the same time, whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematic participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances."

[datafags]

actual answer: the exp share isn't bad, the level balancing is bad.

one of the most valuable lessons I learned in game design school was when your audience complains about something, you should read between the lines. rarely should you take it at face value and move on. when the audience says "I hate the new exp share", you can infer what they mean is not that they want to switch-train a magikarp for a half hour or be forced to use only their starter, but that they feel they're leveling up too fast.

if you think the exp share is a valuable part of your game for other reasons, such as reducing grind for the average player, then you can think of other ways of addressing what is ultimately the core issue. you could adjust the exp gain of pokemon, or make the levels of the trainers higher. or if you want to keep the difficulty of the main game the same to accommodate younger players, you can add optional more challenging trainers like ScVi did, or add a hard mode like in gen 5. or like the tags said, save the real challenge for the postgame.

I don't think there'll ever be a time where people will stop complaining about things in games that aren't actually problems. but if you look at the common complaints with a critical eye, you might be able to find what they're actually getting at.

It’s so funny how controversial the EXP share is among Pokémon fans as if every RPG ever doesn’t distribute EXP among your whole party. Pokémon fans would know this if they played another RPG.

[spacelesscowboy]

i hate doing the readings for this class they make me so upset

[shoechoe]

I almost forgot to mention. I find it interesting how Diavolo consistently refers to Doppio in the third person and the two of them with the plural "we", but when Doppio is about to take damage, Diavolo says "I can't let my foot get hurt because that is a loss to me"

[bugsongs]

i completely forgot my favorite writing magazine switched to being only digital bc they sent me like one email about it two months ago so now that i'm trying to check it out it's like oh no problem just put in your access code that we emailed you :) except i don't have that and i'm trying to find a support email or something and its like. this is too much effort. i understand paper is expensive but i just want a physical magazine mailed to my house 😭

[realityhop]

“For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, womanlike, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her." — Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

"Glory-seeking heroes have dominated boys’ fictional worlds since humans started telling stories. In the classic narrative, the superheroes, fantasy warriors, and video game avatars tend to be one man, working alone, often with some kind of superhuman power or at the very least hypermasculine strength and abilities, who slays the villain, saves the day in a blaze of glory, and usually "gets the girl" as a result. … At their best, these narratives can provide enticing imaginative worlds and valuable lessons about morality, bravery, and self-sacrifice. Clearly, the vast majority of young boys consume them and go on to live happy, productive lives. But there are invisible harms to this impossible vision of manhood, and boys can easily internalize damaging expectations from them about masculinity and their their own place in the world. Boys are socialized to see themselves as the hero on his journey and the main character in any story, and to see everyone else, and especially women, as minor characters or narrative foils. … this sense of specialness and superiority comes at a price. Taken together, the messages about individual heroism contained in these stories can end up breeding an odd combination in boys of both entitlement and inadequacy. The hero’s story creates impossibly punishing expectations for boys of what a man should be: physically invulnerable, emotionally bulletproof, and ideally, superhuman. Actual boys and men, with human flaws and vulnerabilities, will always fall short. Failure is built into the project. … I think about the friendship and relationship narratives we give to girls, that help them absorb the idea that they are part of a relational system, a community that everyone contributes to and draws from, while boys are socialized to think they need to be unique and special. Christensen writes about the ancient Greek concept of kleos, a kind of fame and glory or "eternal renown" that a hero earned through his great deeds. This was the basic reward system for the classical hero, his motivating drive. And at some level, that hunger for specialness and glory has endured as a kind of baseline expectation in the modern male psyche. “I think it’s about innate ability. You believe that you’re innately better and good," Christensen explains. With all this in the background, it makes sense that men might avoid the boring tasks of adulthood. If you are shooting for eternal renown, doing the laundry or studying for your social studies test might well feel a little beneath you. The model of quiet diligence and cooperation that girls are encouraged to emulate can easily read as emasculating when compared to the glorious feats of the hero. But in most situations that life throws at us, quiet diligence is more important to success than splashy acts or a feeling that you are special. It’s not innate genius or superpowers or once-in-a-lifetime feats of bravery that get you into college or land you a job or force you out of your childhood bedroom. Mostly it’s tedious, incremental drudgery. It’s perhaps not surprising that boys are spending so much time playing video games—they provide the only arenas in which they can play out their hero fantasies and expectations of glory, instead of fulfilling the tedious tasks of the real world. The pressure to be masculine might have helped boys launch into adulthood when it was an economic requirement, when men were the sole breadwinners and had to provide financially for a family. But now, with most women working and less expectation that men will be the main wage earners, masculinity has been stripped of the only part of the story that really promoted adulthood. Without the breadwinning, what’s left are just toxic scraps—a grab bag of childish vanities and impossible pressures." — Ruth Whippman, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (2024)

"It was Machiavelli who broke with the classical and Christian aspiration to temper the tyrannical temptation through an education in virtue, scoring the premodern philosophic tradition as an unbroken series of unrealistic and unreliable fantasies of “imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught how to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself.” Rather than promoting unrealistic standards for behavior—especially self-limitation—that could at best be unreliably achieved, Machiavelli proposed grounding a political philosophy upon readily observable human behaviors of pride, selfishness, greed, and the quest for glory." — Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018)

Harrison Ford - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

[galaxseacreature]

Another day trying to convince my fellow biologists of the value of adding a single, complete English sentence to their list of field measurements and raw observations. To pull everything together. To state their conclusion, even