💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › ~shufei › phlog › Shufei-ThisAndThat-Weiphlog.gmi captured on 2021-04-25 at 10:00:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-11-07)
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Tidbits and notions. Stuff and blither. News and snooze. This little gmiphloglet be short and more mirth than matter.
On Niger’s Sahel regreening, accomplished anarchicly by farmers, and why it has worked. (Psst, it’s called permaculture.)
I wanna take you to a gay bar.
I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
Let’s start a war. Start a nuclear war. At the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
https://savingnature.com/flight-emissions-calculator/
Calculate how many boreal trees you need to plant for your plane trip offset. Trust me, there’s plenty of need for it regardless. Climate change means we will need to speed up human aided forestation ahead of climate impacts, especially as old species cannot cope with drier conditions in places like the NorthAm west.
...is one of the only recent adventure films of decent heart to have somehow dribbled out of the fetid cloaca of Hollywood. The story inscribes a humble framing of heroism almost illegible to the era of blockbuster torture porn. The fact that The Finest Hours bombed at the box office tells me all I need to know of the repugnant schadenfreude which fuels our morally decrepit Zeitgeist.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Oh7sQ4hPnyk
The Last Farm - Icelandic short film, on the importance of dignity and connexion with land.
https://www.tristandc.com/newsmessageinabottle2016.php
A message in a bottle sent by a Galician fisherman washed up on a beach on remote Tristan da Cunha island many years later. The fisherman’s community became friends through the link with the people of Tristan. A poignant memorial to solitude and connexion.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o
Short but deeply intimate documentary on the Sewol sinking, its ensuing scandal, and the lives of the students lost beneath the waves. All needlessly due to official incompetence and malicious dereliction. Shameful.
https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/now-we-dont-talk-anymore
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-birthrate-sterilization-genocide
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55794071
https://voxcom.cmail20.com/t/d-l-qadte-jytjceij-s/
Uyghur genocide by the PRC regime, the gruesome nuts and bolts.
https://www.lastwhispers.org/#mission-section
The Last Whispers multimedia site, raising awareness on the mass extinction of human languages occurring now. 2022-2032 will be the international decade of the indigenous language. Good to get prepped for language revitalization!
https://www.seejewsinspace.com
“See! Jews. In. Space...” Discussions of how Jewish ritual culture would adapt to inhabitation on Mars. How to know which sol is Passover?
http://www.filaha.org/author_Ibn_wahshiyah.html
Nabatean Agriculture, an as yet untranslated text preserving the lifeways of rural mediaeval Mesopotamian polytheists circa the year 1000 CE.
An hopeful development in possible coastal permaculture: the potential of seagrasses to become a major new grain food, helping sequester carbon and boost sea ecologies.
https://gettingflak.blogspot.com/2009/07/disappearance-of-enormous-talent.html
https://www.facebook.com/pg/Cheryl-Barnes-Fan-Page-216387785061183/posts/
Only the calibre of Cheryl Barnes could get me to post a Faceborg link. Apparently, she lives in Finland now, as might be expected of a person of quality, living a private life. Kiitos paljon, Ms. Barnes. Heaven bless you.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=FnotzpkYiB8
Cheryl Barnes, in the 80’s, singing on tv. She seldom performed, but when she did she certainly broke hearts with her power and soul.
A rundown on Project 2049 Institute. Unsurprisingly, it’s a think tank fronting the military-industrial complex. Given how Taiwan friendly Biden has been so far, one wonders how hawkish he will indeed be in the event of a conflict. Sadly... I more and more think an invasion is a required wag-the-dog for Xi and pals. And if there is one, mainland can only play it to win.
https://project2049.net/2018/12/06/nightmare-scenario-the-pla-invasion-threat-taiwans-response/
Recent survey of the Taiwan defense situation from a DC think tank. They actually raise the spectre of emphasizing guerilla operations as PRC deterrent. The implication being, the USA is still unprepared and has little appetite for defending Taiwan. One thing is clear: Taiwan is not only the last standing sliver of real China (事實上現代的共匪支那並不是華夏囉）, but the keystone to the current American imperial order. Mutterings about possible PRC attacks on Guam... should be taken very seriously.
No. Stop using Facebook.
https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/noam-chomsky-david-barsamian-mole
Recent interview with FW Chomsky, touching on recent upheavals.
The Rainforest Flying Squad (web)
...packed with heaps of info and news and getting involved on the new logging blockades of Fairy Creek, Vancouver Island. I was shocked by the numbers on how little old growth rainforest is truly left in BC. Please support RFS.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/09/canada-logging-old-growth-trees-vancouver-island
BC’s pose is such a sham. It’s just Alberta, but with more chainsaws, kids.
Speaking of bad bosses... This report may mostly go unnoticed, but is a good barometer for the general totalitarian drift happening in the PRC. These Uighur educators have been given the death penalty for the *state approved* textbooks they produced almost 20 years ago. The winds from Beijing lately are pretty definitive: the old liberalization tack is dead, and with it, any peaceful reunification and democratization hopes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw
I’d heard of the radium girls before, natch. But not fossy jaw. This is why we don’t ever trust bosses, kids.
The Karpatska-Rus Periodical Archive (web)
Through most of the 20th century, the Lemko (Carpathian Ruthenian) immigrant organization in the USA published this newspaper. Later articles are mostly English translations of Lemko stories. Some of them are quite affecting, the pathos of Eastern Europe in turbulent times.
There is a wubixing-pinyin hybrid IME module for Linux Fcitx, and it is Top Drawer. The IME shows the wubi codes when you input pinyin, helping one learn the Wubi tables. (Not to mention being more visual.) Oh, and it has a Proper Chinese (正體中文）setting which so far seems great.
https://lookingglassfactory.com/
While some of us blinked, apparently realistic full motion holographic displays were invented? Definitely not filed under smoltech. But jaw dropping, I daresay.
https://invidiou.site/watch?v=Q9uiNspXon8
Episode 1 of the 1988 CBC teleseries version of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, classics of Cascadian midcentury children’s lit realism.
https://invidiou.site/watch?v=iDyFmJPLmnk
Rebecka Liljeberg, in an interview during her last film, absolutely torpedoed any insinuation she wanted to keep acting. She kept to the decision, and all the better for it.
...today goes to GRUB for making their latest install, update, and configuration process as newbie-hostile as possible.
(GMI) Guardian Mirror - Indigenous Nations Best at Protecting Rainforests
Nothing we haven’t known for, well, centuries. But it’s good to put a final seal on who is to *not* be blamed when we Onceler the last tree in the Amazon, just in time for the region to be too hot for mammal life.
https://jenniverse.com/MultiverseGame.html
I want to play this Commodore 64 Multiverse game so desperately. Just to see the demo run, even. There is only one copy, in the dev’s hands... Is there any game comparable for C64?
(web-invidious) Melanie - Lay Down, Lay Down
Thanks, Wolfman. Aaaaaooooooo...
Astounding discoveries of other late hominin species are overturning the simple “out of Africa” conquest myth. The evidence is mounting that higher order cultural exchange was two way over long periods of time between Homo sapiens and others.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/10/is-this-the-end-of-forests-as-weve-known-them
Smoky the Bear, how we have failed.
Britain dutifully continued bank reparations to pay off slave *owners* until 2015. That... says it all, really. But this essay further puts the grotty of political “possibility” around British abolition in stark perspective.
...people used to say. It seemed easier when there were more survivors around. It’s hard to forget when someone looks you in the eyes with a beam of first hand truth. Yet humans find a way. Want to see what forgetting history looks like, how it’s pulled off? Look around today.
Speaking of the chattering classes, some Harvard Law schmuck decided to yoke his orientalist fanboy fancy to the Japanese fascist gravy train. The case is worthy of note for how little the “MeToo” moment actually changed anything outside of the bourgeois social media “influencer” spheres. “Comfort woman” rape slavery denialism is an “alternative fact” on par with flat-earthism, no matter how it is weaponized by geopolitics. But trust the absent minded ivory tower sorts to keep a finger to the fascist wind and deny there’s a gale.
If the 小粉紅、五毛黨 think these comments are critical, they should see what people say on this side of the waters when the filters are off. Xi has made mainland China fragile like a senile old woman... On the other hand, I’m sick of the chattering, artsy liberal classes making voyeuristic exposes on precariat poverty. Wanna help us neo-okies? Great. Fab. Push for social and economic policies... like a 15 USD minimum wage law -pinned to inflation and productivity-. That would still be ~7 USD lower than the equivalent of what Americans had in 1967, by the way.
http://jenniverse.com/MultiverseGame.html
Jaw-dropping C64 sim game which was never released by Activision, devved by Reitz and Lepisko. This is the kind of thing I’ve longed to see on C64...
A nice refutation of the identarian left’s strategic fecklessness, or rather managerially friendly “liquid capitalism” tacks. The critique could be extended to most contemporary personality cults and status curation (branding).
http://www.dunnington.info/public/startrek/
Compleat history of the STARTREK/Super Star Trek/Spacewar game, originally coded in basic in 1972. Has a link library to numerous versions for sundry machines.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_shareware_fb_GAMES-13
STARTREK.EXE on Archive.org. It’s a rather difficult game, I recall. An interesting bit of Trek from the 80’s.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bonobo-all-us/
Interview on the (oversimplified) relevance of Bonobos as a root of primate ethics and eroticized empathy, in contrast to the aggression and hierarchy by chimpanzees. Wither Homo sapiens?
Rise of Sinophobia in Australia, tied in part to export from USA Trumpism. Funtimes.
Now that so many people are leaving Faceborg, Faceborg is determined to force all social interactions to include us, like it or not. I say, all people who wear “smart glasses�� in public should have their devices stomped under foot.
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