Pisha

What's with political columnists getting into comics writing? I remember Ta-Nehisi Coates did the same thing. It just seems so weird to spend your whole career on short-form non-fiction pieces and then pivot into an entirely different form of creative writing mostly aimed at teenage boys.

I am once again suffering from technology. So my university has introduced compulsory two-factor-authentication using a Cisco smartphone app in order to access JSTOR and the like, which was already a hassle. I had to hand-write a letter to IT because I couldn't get to campus to set it up, lol. Now Google has updated their "integrity" standards and my cheap Chinese phone is no longer allowed to use said Cisco app at all, which means I'm forced to buy a new phone and contact IT again to set it up. All this because some IT people got it into their heads that the normal method of JSTOR authentication is nonviable or insecure or something. Frankly, I'm hoping those kickbacks from Cisco are worth it.

Ramses Ii

There's an article about that: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

Unfortunately, we're organized in a rather informal and egalitarian way, so there's nothing to be done except maybe be the first to post the agenda. However, someone with more social capital than me called out that this didn't follow the procedure we agreed on, so maybe we will talk about the way we do things and how seriously we take our division of tasks.

I've got to vent a bit. In my local org, we've got a subgroup (just a group chat) to prepare the agenda for the next meeting. I created a text document and put some topics in it, but received no reply of any kind. Now, there's some current events happening, there was an optional meeting I skipped and people got together and created their own agenda. And it's perfectly fine; it contains everything I wrote down and other, more important things. It's just that the work I did was completely useless and nobody even bothered to tell me. These social interactions are very stressful to me and I have to make quite an effort to contain my emotions. This is really just my own problem, but I'm upset that I'm upset for no good reason.

Substack should just be forbidden in general, maybe with some exceptions for news articles that aren't accessible otherwise. We really don't need the opinions of "leftist" outrage merchants trying to make a buck on some Nazi website on here, I feel like.

Nearly every computer built after 2008 or so is possibly backdoored on a hardware level due to the Intel Management Engine (and its AMD equivalent). But unless you're committing computer crimes that could arouse interest from the FBI, you're better off worrying about your password and email security than obscure and unproven methods of exploitation in my opinion.

Thanks for the good answer! I do have an advantage in that I'm privately insured – something I'm thankful for every time I get involved with doctors about trans stuff – so a private therapist sounds like an option. Would you happen to know if there any good ones in, like, Berlin or Hamburg or so? I always get quite anxious when contacting therapists so I'd rather not do multiple telephone calls just to get blown off because of the wait list.

I'll get an appointment at one of the places in Munich. Incidentally, I've had a preliminary talk at Uniklinik Essen and the experience was uncomfortable enough that I decided against them – can't actually speak about the quality of the surgeries though.

Need some advice from comrades in Germany: Is there any way to get GCS here without doing multiple months of therapy? I can't see how I could manage to get a slot at a psychotherapist, given how overworked they all seem to be, and I've got everything else done, so to speak, so I'm not even sure there'd be much of a point in therapy right now. Thanks in advance!

Genuinely how on earth do you misinterpret the themes of a film so poorly lmao.

I don't appreciate that tone. Her accepting her sexuality ends in her having sex with what you call the "embodiment of male sexual domination" and then they both die. How does that make sense? It seems like everyone save the men loses out from her accepting her sexuality. And I don't think it's very coherent how the movie shows that sexual desire cannot be controlled – except via marriage – because that has murderous consequences, which can, however, also be resolved through sexual desire. I just don't feel like the metaphors here work together and that is what I meant by "incomprehensible".

To put it more clearly: In the Eggers films I've seen, every woman either ends up dead or part of a childremoved cult and I don't think women who suffer are automatically a sign of feminist politics.

It's so bad! You can't see a thing, there's a magic exposition man, everyone constantly talks for no reason and the message appears to be that women having sexual desires causes the plague. Like, Werner Herzog did this movie already and Eggers instead decided to crib most of the changes for his version from Francis Ford Coppola (and from The Exorcist, the scariest movie of all time (!)). I should have realized after watching The VVitch that he's just another middlebrow director with weird gender hang-ups that get lauded for being incomprehensible. Also, what kind of filmmaker is unable to make a movie set in the current day? Seriously now.