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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I can corroborate that it gets crazy even in courses expecting high literacy. I had the painful experience of teaching a 3rd year course in communication studies that was part of the media production stream. It required writing preproduction documentation and a script. There were a lot of questionable attempts but there’s always a range of interest and skill, right? One student, and let me remind you this is third year at a university, I called into office hours. I’m a fan of poetry, so I just had to be sure that she wasn’t cleverly lampooning Gertrude Stein in some ironic way. Sadly, no, she just had no fucking clue how to write ANYTHING coherent. Amazing.



  • I’m the one who is awake by the fire when the sabretooth shows up at midnight. I’m the one going around telling everyone to get outside, the house is on fire. I’m the one who is suddenly at the bottom of the small cliff, still steaming and naked from the hot tub, doing first aid assessment on the partier who fell off. I’m the one who burns for 14 hours and gets the team to push that working build out minutes before going live.

    There’s dopamine in there. We’re starved for it daily so we can go hard in some way when it counts.








  • Verified: group cooking is the way.

    I have friends and family who live in a cohousing building. About 50 people in 30 units. Each apartment is complete but the kitchens are slightly smaller than typical.

    Cohousing is mutual ownership of the building. About 20% of the building is common areas, like widened hallways with couches and bookshelves, or a games nook, music room, workshop, laundry, etc. It’s basically a tall village, and they are like roommates with privacy.

    The giant kitchen and dining room is used six nights a week. One person is chef with a small crew, and dinner is for around 30 people. It costs $5 CDN per meal, though if you raid the leftovers later it’s pay what you want, usually $2. The cooking volunteer roster is optional and organized by a Slack channel. Food is usually awesome and everyone wins.

    If you want you hardly ever have to cook dinner for yourself.





  • I worked in the specialty AIDS ward in St. Stephen’s hospital in London (before any meds were available).

    AIDS has a devil’s banquet of particular cruelties as the diseases it kills with are many, some are particularly horrific, and they overlap so that the comorbidity of all this horrible shit happening at once is itself an overriding cruelty.

    Sometimes it goes on forever, and also I watched buff fit vibrant people burst out in painful cancerous lesions and waste away to a stick figure in a month.

    AIDS is a concentration camp not a prison, unless you have the best meds and care.