June 28, 2021

Hum if you agree

Illustration by Shing Ying Khor, I Do Not Want to Write Today: A Comic. Image ID: A girl is putting an elaborate crown on her head. Captions swirling around her — "I want to write what white girls write. I want to write about me. I want to write like I'm not just the centre of my universe, but the centre of yours too: golden and narcisstic and unconcerned."

READING IN MY TABS

• Things you can try to do to so your kid's not a dick about other people's weight.
• The stories we heard after (particularly Malaysian) schools shifting online since the pandemic revolved around the digital gap where children from underprivileged families have to jump hoops (climb trees, study outside where the Internet connection is much better, share devices with the rest of the family members, etc.) in order to attend online classes. I am also intrigued to hear another side of the story where online classes made it easier for other vulnerable groups, particularly from the disabled community, to be able to participate in education better. This story (US-centric though) is one of it. In the end, it all boils down to make education inclusive and accessible for all intersectionalities of life.
• The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech. “It means educating our children about humility and connectedness, rather than vanity and individuality. It means changing our relationship with consumption, breaking the spell of advertising, manufactured needs and status. It means political organising, generating demand for a politics that sees beyond the nation state, and beyond the lifespan of the currently living generations.”
• "When there are hard decisions to be made, Working Group chairs [at the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF)] can call a “hum” to find out how to go forward with a document. To initiate a hum, the Working Group chair presents two or more options, and the participants’ throats do the rest. After the actual humming has taken place, the Working Group chair decides whether there is “rough consensus” based on the hum."
• I have been documenting for a series of social justice advocacy workshops and the recurring theme is that language is often evolving and everything is a working definition – this article is one such of the notion of why some terms are moving and shifting, with some justifications. Related: not 'transphobia, but 'transmisia'.
• Friendship levels in Arabic. Also: the circles of friendship.
• I spend way too much time on Twitter where, like the rest of my fellow Malaysians deprived of effective mediums to air our grievances, we yell at our unelected and inept government. But also occasionally I am there for trivia threads like this.
• Overheard: "Any modern convenience that improves your life is probably ruining someone else’s."
• "Before having any conversation about borders and migration it’s important to recognise the immediate and mortal peril that millions of migrants and refugees across the globe are currently suffering. Merely for being born on one or another side of a fictitious, political line, human beings and their immediate needs of security and dignity are dismissed out of hand. Just in the last fifteen years, an estimated 100,000 people are known to have died while trying to cross borders, and those are only the known cases. As you sit or stand wherever you’re sitting or standing, as I write this in my apartment in Brooklyn, tens of thousands of people are currently adrift in the Mediterranean, trekking across the deserts of Arizona or the Sahel, ducking Turkish or EU border guards, languishing in a global archipelago of brutal immigration detention centers and cramped and squalid refugee camps from Australia to Jordan to Connecticut. It is one of the particular, infamous, and insidious cruelties of our time that we relegate millions to suffering, death, and an apartheid-regime only because of where they were born. [...] Why are we all not up in arms that our own families or neighbors are being ripped from their homes, that people have to run medieval-like gauntlets of border walls to live free, find dignity, reunite with family?"
• "I remember when humanness lived inside me like a community garden, every visitor welcome & nourished in their coming & going, all those bright hues — but my body has become a border."

RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS

• Making your workplace safe for grief.
• The Organiser’s Activity Book offers fun and engaging exercises to help organisers reflect and learn about potential risks and benefits of using personal data.
• A practical guide to inclusive UX research, featuring an all-female team (but I hope their scope would expand beyond US at some point.)
• "Collaboration is essential to your safety, well-being and effectiveness as an investigator, no matter the context. But what does it mean to collaborate and what kind of collaborations are possible? This guide will help you plan, organise and run your collaboration with investigators, sources and others in order to make the most out of your own skills and the expertise of others on your team."
• A checklist for fact-checking tools and techniques, from the ever brilliant Tina Carmillia of The Starting Block newsletter. Also, the basics of fact-checking.
• List of common misconceptions.

STATUS BOARD

• Reading: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, and Affecting Technologies: Machining Intelligences.
• Listening: Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes' album What Kinda Music, a "smooth, intuitive coagulation of sounds spanning acid jazz, hip-hop and electronica, soldered with cosmic touches."
• Watching: Discriminator, an interactive documentary about facial recognition databases, and the second season of Lupin.
• Food & Drink: Made another round of sardine sambal, and although I don't believe in rewarding myself with food after a long week (because I believe food should be indulged at all times in all occasions) I ordered a box of Solero lime sorbet to enjoy after work.