Read the latest posts from dotart.blog.
from Ovro
I am the Final Word Moving through the universe From mouth to mouth Rumour speed Light has nothing on me
I am the Final Word On tips of every tongue Rolling easy Finding all who speak
I am the Final Word Tying all tongues The End of spoken world
I am the Final Word Cleansing the Universe
I am the Final Word
This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.
Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter W Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.
W is for Whale
Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.
Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky
All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!
from RMiddleton
On election eve I'm sharing How 2024 changed me politically A lot & permanently. A major change is that I no longer trust that the career professionals in the Democratic Party know anything. The reason to listen to them & compromise was supposedly to win. They fail their one job. Like many others I feel strong disapproval of the Democratic Party yet I would still vote for them compared to the alternatives. If I lived in NYC I'd vote for Mamdani, in VA Spanberger, & in NJ Sherrill, but of those 3 only Mamdani do I feel enthusiastic about. If I lived in Minneapolis I'd vote Omar Fateh. After decades of paying attention to politics I have concluded that weak, centrist liberals—whether it's the New York Times Ezra Klein or Schumer & Jeffries or the way Barack Obama governed—that's why the Democratic Party loses: not standing for principles that improve people's lives sufficiently. They pass half measures that take too long & aren't universal; & after doing so they lose & Republicans undo what little good they did & much more.
from cobbles
When I was a little girl, like many other little girls I was told the tale of Red Riding Hood. As I got older we learned more about the meta of the tale.
We updated the tale, found sympathy for the wolf. Sometimes we saw it as a dark romance. Sometimes the wolf and the woodman found love together. Tales change. We update them for our needs. Fairytales are encoded folklore, lost memory encoded for a lesson.
We took the metaphor and considered the woods managed. They became forests. But danger still lurked in our forests and the internet is no different.
We still have the dangers. But the villains of the forest like to chop down the trees, drive fast cars and make money.
Within a space we have a habit as humans of descending into archetypes. The masculine man, the very feminine woman. Good obedient kids. That hateful old scold telling you what you shouldn't do. She's an evil witch, kill her.
People who are no better than they should be.
Do you recognise these? Do you see yourself in them?
How do you find your community when you don't see a path for you in the world?
Who will welcome you?
Some of us queers (before some of us knew we were queer) went online. We found family and some of us learned how to function in a community and see ourselves as part of a collective rather than an individual. Some folks had done this before us, had organised before us in meatspace. So they brought their experience online as well.
But what about the straights? What about the baby queers who don't know they are queer yet but know somethings different. They are lost.
I'm choosing to focus on the straight boys here. The mainstream are focusing on the manosphere of Andrew Tate etc. Although these types have always been online. The issue is the sheer scale and availability. Because it's not just about searching, it's about what our addictive websites and apps serve. In service of the algorithm.
So we have a bunch of lost directionless young men, who've been brought up on the idea of the nuclear household. 2.4 Children, go to university, marry, have kids. Be successful.
But our social contract has been broken, with boys and young men feeling very isolated with some very stark prospects of debt. There aren't the youth clubs anymore, furnishing social activities. The church (the other source of local community clubs) is shrinking. The pandemic has also shrunk the social sphere. Although the issue of the manosphere was a concern for a lot longer than that. We've always had toxic abusers on the internet who are good at building up a cult. Which is what this is. A cult with a bunch of devotees. Who started out wanting to improve themselves and looking for community.
'Some of what pulls Men towards the manosphere, is a search for connection and a sense of belonging and meaning,' says David Bartless of Equimundo. A sense of belonging that is lacking elsewhere. [1]
Like I said, looking for community. When I was growing up in my small village we had a community centre with events during the holidays for six up to sixteen. Then the funding got cut. My Father and Uncles had a very rich community centre life even being working class. Their mothers local church had a film club, there were outward bound events. Because of those my Dad and Uncle went hillwalking and across Rannoch Moor. But they learned about how to do that because of the community clubs.
It's not enough to ban apps, or content. The damage is done. What you need to do as a society is invest in community again. Invest in youth. Bring back grants so that further education is affordable. Invest in community sport beyond football. Expand funding out to the charities that already provide activity clubs. Invest in local hacker spaces and repair cafes.
In order to ensure that the kids don't look for community online, you need to give them something offline.
I don't think we can truly lay this at the door of the internet entirely. After all what's on the internet is our physical universe manifested with all of our toxic culture. All the internet does is what our media landscape does. Serve all of this toxicity at scale.
Our ephemeral world, our algorithms serve physical masters who use the data that our digital poppets serve them.
But what are our poppets?
A poppet is a doll made to represent a person. It's purpose is to cast a spell on them, or help them through magic. They are made, then often hidden.
You could make them from anything, but something from the person the poppet needed to affect was needed. So hair clippings, nail trimmings were attached to the poppet.
There's folklore about being very careful about what you did with your hair and nail trimmings. Folks would bury or burn them so that they couldn't be used against them later. [3]
Digital poppets are our digital twins, our advertising profiles on our phones. Our metadata from our browsers with our buying preferences, our Internet addresses we access the web from. It's our browser settings including our accessibility preferences. Our poppets are created from what we put up there, what we send to one another unencrypted. All little pieces of data, which on their own doesn't seem like that much.
Data leaks, data gets sold. What happens when that data is collated together from different sources? When we use google as a login, or various payment providers to pay at different websites.
All that data is our digital clippings and becomes a digital taglock to add to our digital poppets.
With folklore, folks used to be cautious about what to do with hair and nail clippings. As those could give a witch or sorcerer power over you.
We have this now with our electronic clippings, we give our clippings to social networks and that gives a whole heap of power to them and to the buyers of that data who can then analyse it.
There's an analogy for you. – Esther Payne (me) [2]
We know how effective propaganda can be. Humanity is hackable through the meme. It's hackable through our storytelling. We want life to make sense and have a level of control over it. So we are susceptible to propaganda. We have very effective ways to spread this propaganda at scale.
Look at Cambridge Analytica and the Vote Leave campaign. They were able to use targeted ads to Brexit voters as part of a political campaign. Those ads were served everywhere and they weren't always marked as advertisements. They spread through our walled gardens like poison. The poison was also spread and is still being spread across traditional media.
There's nothing particularly special about the internet other than the scale and the personalisation of what can be served to you, thanks to your digital profile. Your digital poppet.
Targeted advertising follows folks around the Internet. It's a harmful part of a complex system. But the harm isn't mythical. Information is leverage, particularly when it's combined with your other information.
Knowledge about a person is power. If knowledge isn't really power, then why are governments threatening E2EE with the Earn IT act. Why do we have to keep fighting against chat control in the EU.
Information applied with targeted analysis is leverage. Your metadata contributes to an organisations' knowledge about you. In various circumstances it can be life threatening to investigative journalists etc. Your digital poppet snitches information about you to all sorts, to hackers, governments and big tech.
That's before we even get to who want's to send you a message and reel you into buying what they sell.
So we can see what lures in young folks. It's a subculture. We've had sub cultures before. The difference is, how much access young folks are getting. The sheer scale of what's being served to them.
They aren't getting adult supervision, and it's like letting your kids onto the motorways on a balance bike. They don't have the initial training. The cognitive and critical thinking training.
Then we allow them to access this information motorway through a smartphone.
But we also need to remember it's not just the internet to blame for our culture. Gen X came of age having internalised some pretty hetero normal stuff. So did the millennials. We shouldn't be surprised at the grifters telling young folks that “feminism and diversity” has gone too far.
We know that's not true. But when you have a system that depends on objectifying people so that the grift can keep happening a narrative needs to be told. A point of view.
So boys much like girls are taught a fairy tale. Except boys aren't taught to be Disney princes. They are told the fairy tale of masculinity. We're taught it in sitcoms, in our media, with the majority of our politicians. We're taught the average, so there's no space for diversity when you're looking for the norm. Which leaves no space for the rest of us.
As a woman, I struggled under the expectation of dating and being expected to marry and have kids one day. Yet I also wanted a career. The women in my family being working class worked. We couldn't afford to not to. Yet the workplace also didn't have accessibility affordances so one parent couldn't work. We didn't fit the mold. So I get why boys feel they must be doing something wrong. Especially with the lack of opportunity available for young folks.
Folks are taught you must find a wife, marry have kids and life will be complete. So when the social contract is broken, who will young men blame?
However as we've seen in this idea with the “Tradwife” women are objectified reduced to a doll, a servant, expected to service a man's needs. A sexbot, a mother for the children. A confident, a cheerleader, a domestic servant to curate the house and keep it clean. A hostess for dinners. Be his validation. His purpose is to take care of you. Like he takes care of all his possessions.
In return women can just settle in and be taken care of. A man will take care of everything
But what happens when a man's earning potential is damaged? What happens when the man dies. Is there a succession plan? Does another man take over the responsibility for the wife and kids?
I don't think a devotee to the manosphere particularly thinks about that or cares. When you treat women as disposable objects and kids as extensions of yourself, how, or if your woman and kids can survive your death doesn't matter. In extreme cases some men try to take us with them, a la the myth of the Pharaoh's in Egypt taking their servants with them via murder.
Historically and socially, the idea of the trad wife at home is a very specific white idea of the family. This idea is very rooted in white supremacy. It's the Patriarchy. It what defines the middle class from the working class. It's aspiration. It's also not realistic. It's another fairy tale.
Both of my Grandparent's working class families had both parents working. The only reason my Grandmother stopped working for a short while was when her local factory closed.
When my Grandfather was killed in a car accident, she had to go back to work. She'd grown up in a family where her father died young at 34. It was the 1930s after all. There was no social safety net.
The dream of the manosphere is a very specific individualistic idea, but it attracts a lot of lonely boys and the addictive nature of app's like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok peddle more of it to make money. That's not to say that what's being peddled to the rest of us is great either.
While the kids are watching their digital poppets get filled in with bits of metadata. So more of these libertarian individualistic ideas get peddled. White supremacy packaged up to be more palatable.
I don't have an answer for what we do about the manosphere, other than advocate for a social safety net offline. Where we aim for Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, Free Education and Free Public Transport. Where we aim for the commons rather than the individual.
It's soulless to chase status for money and a partner. It feels soulless having to work to just survive. It's isolating, but there's a false sense of community. Because you're being told by the cult leader “just do this next thing bro. Just keep going bro. You'll be successful with women, have money like me.”
It's modern folklore with none of the learned wisdom. It's fake.
I'm horrified by the abusive potential of the manosphere and the abuse that's already been done by Tate and his ilk. I'm horrified by the idea of Women's choices being limited, of being negged so much by abusive men that we feel we have no choice.
Which isn't true. Some of us in the past have managed. It's not easy and poverty sucks. There's a reason why the right wing gradually sought to disable the social safety net to help capitalism thrive.
As I've got older, I stopped believing in faeries. But I work in a world that I access through a screen and keyboard. My world is the unseen. Coders create code, a series of incantations to tell the device of zeros and ones what to do. We have words like daemons, so magics always been a part of my vocabulary.
So perhaps in order for folks outside our fields to understand our world with all of it's risks; we need to update folklore to explain what's happening with our technology and our online spaces. To use the idea of the digital poppet and explain how those poppets have helped to shape our democratic choices. How those poppets have helped to peddle the manosphere to our kids. But also how our mass media plays into that.
Our internet peddles fairytales the same way our folklore used to. To tell the tale of a point of view, how to act. So choose your fairytale wisely. In the old days we used to say don't give your real name out. I've broken that old rule. Our world is built that way so we have to break the rule. But it's also why we need to push back against age verification and ID verification that takes our biometric data. [5]
You have to work really hard on youtube to not get peddled right wing videos. You have to work hard to not see AI slop. Youtube doesn't really do moderation. You can't block content creators.
But this has always been the case. Free Speech without Free Association in safety. No techbro ever considers the right of Free Association. Or the other Human Rights listed in the UDHR, if they did, they'd never use github. [6],[7]
It's why the Fediverse is important, although even then, there will be a bastion of the manosphere somewhere on the Fediverse. If not now, give it time. How we build our online communities and how we build our tech is determined by the political ideals of the builders.
At least with the Fediverse we do have other options, with developers who do care about these sorts of things. [8]
The idea that information must be free for everyone to take part in and consumer is the mainstay of the internet. But within our physical community spaces there are rules. So we must consider when we build our online communities what our tools are. We must consider how do we enable boundaries? We must consider consent and what we do with our community members data.
Remember the old ways. It's a dark forest out there.
[2] https://chaos.social/@onepict/107780763058678202
[3] https://magickalspot.com/taglock/
[4] https://dotart.blog/cobbles/defiance
[6] https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
[7] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/9/20906605/github-ice-contract-immigration-ice-dan-friedman
[8] https://freefediverse.org/index.php/Main_Page
This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.
Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter V Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.
V is for Vixens
Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.
Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky
All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!
from RMiddleton
I don't begrudge anyone their entertainments [2]. I don't want a world where everyone likes the same things; I just don't want different tastes to cause offense.
I've accepted an offer on my home. If it goes smoothly the sale will close by the first week of December. My bf is coming back with me to help me organize & process the next several days. I'm overloaded with doing things poorly through the pain. He helps me with perspective.
I have made a decision on how to process my stuff in a diminished state. I don't want to expend the energy it takes to sift through unknown Mystery Boxes of memories. First I want to identify the large items that I know I do not want to keep. These will be sold, given away, donated, trashed, whatever. There are friends, potential buyers, charities, and a nearby dumpster to accept those things. Anything that causes me pause & uncertainty, for now I'm just going to keep. I need to see how large this portion is. Can it fit in an already paid for storage space? Can it fit in my car? Only after that will I see the amount that I have to process. Yeah I hate that again (as always) I'm postponing decisions & putting off processing. I'm prioritizing. I have limitations. There will never be a time when I'm not forced to rank priorities, I don't think. There's more I could say but it is not high priority with my limited energy.
[1] Weekly Rworld News — Princeton University sends me a magazine that they call Princeton Alumni Weekly that does not come out weekly. They just like calling it the PAW! (It used to be weekly.) I don't know if I'll ever commit to issuing weekly news updates, but I enjoyed making this graphic. The source tabloid, The Weekly World News, was a hilarious periodical (that seems a lot less funny now that disinformation is ascendant). In the 90s I had 2 WWN covers as t-shirts. One proclaimed numerous US senators to be “space aliens”; the other I can't remember right now — wasn't bat boy, but they also gave us Bat Boy! Go see the musical if you get the chance.
[2] I don't begrudge anyone their entertainments — Is that true? It's more accurate to say that I struggle to accept and respect the tastes of others. I greatly dislike gambling and real violence as entertainment. (I'm ambivalent about simulated violence. I feel there's so much in entertainment that it may prime some viewers to expect & accept more violence in real life.) My acceptance for the differing tastes of others is expressed in hope that my own peculiar tastes, especially my lack of conformity to the preferences of the majority, might be likewise accepted. I consider this matter an essential component of a functional society. Tolerance.
from untilted dot lol blog (dotart.blog's version)
On October 5, 2025, I deactivated my Bluesky account @untilted.lol as I felt that, simply put, it just wasn't for me in terms of both admin moderation and self-moderation, especially when everyone noticed that its CEO dismissed and evaded concerns about transphobic and other controversial/inflammatory accounts that are still on Bluesky without these accounts being suspended. And, despite the fact that I did initially get more engagement on Bluesky compared to Mastodon in the form of likes, I decided that it wasn't worth my well-being to remain on a platform that's way too relaxed over people flinging vulgar insults at each other yet now has suddenly decided that their moderation, and the platform itself by extension, needs to change. It does feel sometimes like on X/Twitter where every post's thread would descend into a flame war (even way before Elon Musk took it over), but I wasn't very cognizant of that until I further lurked into what the Bluesky controversy was like. Now it just feels like Bluesky has turned into another X/Twitter where it's hard to stay professional and cool and collected while everyone else around you just fights each other.
Furthermore, I'll probably be called a "goody-goody" over this, but I honestly don't believe we need another catchphrase that reclaims a word that was originally intended to be a really harsh offensive insult, and suddenly act like it's the hottest trendy thing to say. These kinds of trends, to me, are how we get people adopting ideas and beliefs that may not even resonate with them in the first place, but are really just to justify whatever biases they have of certain others. It also leads to the proliferation of catchy but low-quality and actually problematic ideas that sacrifice all dignity and integrity to make them appealing to a broader audience. And then we wonder why we have vulnerable audiences repeating and unironically believing these problematic sentiments. What we should all strive to do instead is craft compelling and meaningful statements that are timeless and resonate with us all, even if it sounds "too serious" or "corny" or whatever. I just don't believe in reclaiming words that obviously have an original negative intent in the name of "making it positive and digestible" for a broader audience. To me, it's inauthentic, and, dare I say, trying too hard. And I'm not saying this out of some arbitrary standard or to feel superior. I'm saying it out of respect and care. But, I won't go out of my way to police how other people think and what they say either, unless it directly affects me, or others around me.
For the time being, I will be around on mastodon.art posting updates about my comic strip Untilted, and I will try to personalize all my posts, including self-promos, in a way that doesn't come across as too heavily reliant on copying and pasting scripts. This criticism might sting, but I'm starting to notice how the vast majority of self-promoters just drop a few standard messages, a briefly original statement (sometimes to report on updates), post an image with additional info in its alt text (or worse, post NO alt text), and that's basically it. Since noticing this, I want to aspire to be different and add more of a personal touch to my self-promotional posts while still respecting others that may not want to see these types of posts so frequently. I hope others would too. I'll have to figure this one out myself, and you'll be noticing it sooner or later from me.
Also, after a few years, I still have not been able to pick up new members on either untilted.lol (free and paid plans) or the Buy Me A Coffee version of the paid membership. I admittedly haven't been uploading much exclusive content on my website, and I haven't had the motivation to transfer that to the Buy Me A Coffee version of the paid membership due to a seemingly lack of interest in... well, anything I seem to do. I think the fault lies in the fact that I don't do much marketing beyond making promotional posts and word-of-mouth, and I don't like receiving excessive attention either, but that shouldn't have to mean that people assume that I don't want any attention at all. Another factor is that I've been having some difficulty figuring out what kinds of membership posts I would truly like to do besides just posting high-quality works in progress or behind the scenes stuff. Everybody does that. But I wish to offer more. I might create a poll on that soon. There's so many likes and favorites on my social media posts but I'm always short - and often devoid - of people offering maybe constructive artistic criticism that's understandable to help me improve on my work, or maybe someone willing to work with me in a way that doesn't just promote what they themselves have to offer but also gives me meaningful personalized advice. That's what I value more.
I think the problem lies in that both Bluesky and Mastodon, despite claiming to have no algorithms that push ads or other content on you, paradoxically push people with the most followers with the most popular/relevant perspectives on their respective "Discover" feeds, while a lot of genuine self-promo and mutual aid posts from users with a smaller follower base get buried, or worse falsely reported (depending on how one interprets it). The differences between them are that Bluesky emphasizes algorithmic timelines while allowing users to customize those feeds to not rely on trending posts all the time, along with making follower count signals more uniform by concentrating influential users (this was made more apparent when Bluesky introduced the "Verified" feature for "important and culturally relevant" accounts and made people sign up for that via Google Forms). While Mastodon's "Discover" feed is more instance dependent and sometimes moderated depending on the instance, in addition to localizing certain users with high follower counts to an instance or across instances, which means it depends on how well said instance federates with others.
But that's not the only issue. Bluesky appears to be more friendly towards those who self-promote/market their content to anyone seeing their posts, while views on this user behavior on Mastodon tend to be very mixed and fragmented. I've seen some instances ban any kind of self-promotion by users on their own instance. I've also seen others welcome it, but to the extent that spam waves and other automated behavior become common at worst. A quote from me:
"I've seen people who happen to have small indie businesses get called out for "engagement farming". Conversely, I've seen these same smaller people told they're "not trying hard enough" if nobody still acknowledges their business after 6 months or more. And given a bunch of "suggestions" or "hacks" that only appeal to larger corporate companies.
The truth is, there really seems to be no winning formula for meaningful online interaction, whether it's to promote a business or just hang out with people or even just to ask for mutual aid. When someone attempts to make strategic posts designed to maximize engagement (regardless of whether that someone is running a business or not), that someone is criticized for being inauthentic. Yet, when that same someone attempts to pivot to genuine, sincere interactions, there is nothing but minimal response, or worse, dismissive, vague responses that seem to make fun of that someone."
On both Bluesky and Mastodon, I've only had up to, like, less than 10 people genuinely interact with my work in a meaningful way. The others just clicked the like button. I rarely actually get likes or even a single repost/boost on Mastodon, however, unless it was an opinion on something that everyone seems to agree with.
At the same time, I don't want to act like just because Bluesky and Mastodon share similarities in some flaws, it should have to mean I'll have to see them both negatively, as I like it way much better on Mastodon. I don't want to see myself turn into someone that does things to get likes or stir up controversy to get negative attention. I don't want to have to appeal to what the majority likes. I don't want to have to cater to other people's interests to the detriment of my own genuine ones. And I especially do not want to alienate anyone at all, except maybe some truly harmful people like those who discriminate against the marginalized, but that's all. So I am trying to strike a balance here. And I would like to open myself up to any criticism or accountability if needed.
In other news, I'm still retaining my Pinterest account as I actually want to post more regularly on that even though I'm seeing people say that Pinterest is currently not a good place to be due to the platform's recent random bans on people. However I want to clarify that I have opted out on the AI thing that Pinterest wanted to force on us, and, despite being a business account, I want to mix some personality into my self-promotional posts, I have not faced any disciplinary action and I am still on good standing. If you think I should make some changes like reverting to a personal account or closing Pinterest entirely, I might do so since I don't get much traffic. I watermark all my social media imagery using artshield.io to protect it against AI scraping and stuff like that, but I'm open to other alternatives (since it sometimes fails to watermark certain images despite them not having a white background. ugh). I'm also still on Side 7, but lately it's been ticking me off due to the lack of interaction I get and the fact that no one responds to my inquiries except the moderators and admins (who are helpful sometimes).
I'm also looking forward to new comic platforms (no tapas.io or webtoon please) and I wanted to try ComicFury webcomic hosting but the last time I contacted them they were unresponsive. So I preferably want something like ComicFury or preferably help in coding something that allows serial art to be shown in an accessible manner, as some platforms lack the ability to add alt text (especially Buy Me A Coffee's gallery). I'll also work on making my alt text more descriptive and nicer to read. If anyone has any useful suggestions on this matter, reach out to me if you can.
In the meanwhile one can support me on either Buy Me A Coffee or my website through signing up for any of the plans and creating an account.. To date, the latest issue I've done is #83 and can be viewed here. (I've fixed an error on my last one)
I'm also going to revamp Untilted's lore and character profile a bit, to clarify some things and make more sense.
Any suggestions, criticism, etc. relevant to this post are welcome!
This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.
Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter U Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.
U is for Usagi
Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.
Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky
All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!
Last time, I wrote about the importance of spoons. This time, I was going to share one of my recipes. Then I got sick. Ever since I caught COVID a while back, even the smallest cold knocks me right down. As I type this, I have the smallest cold, & so I am completely exhausted. I don't have even one spoon left. So instead of just one recipe, you're getting every recipe I like to pair with tea. Lucky you!
A very flexible Pantry Cake recipe (vegan) Fougasse & Scallion Pancake Bread (vegan) Super Easy Brownies Lemon Bars on Olive Oil Shortbread Jam Tarts Peanut Butter Bread
Iced tea with a plum simple syrup (vegan)
Are you going to try one of my recipes? Let me know on Mastodon or Ko-Fi. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!
from cobbles
A recent Guardian Article about far right groups in the UK growing on Facebook got me thinking. Reading some of the comments published reminded me of the undercurrent I grew up with in my childhood village. [1]
I grew up reading body language, before I could talk I could mimic. I'd had to learn that language because of my household. Outside that household as I started to walk and talk I'd see folks attitude to my disabled parent and my family.
I grew up watching ableism. I knew some folks didn't think my parent should have been allowed to have me. They also couldn't understand why my non disabled parent loved that disabled parent. There were occasions when my disabled parent would be upset over something someone had said about them, and about me.
Plus being a small child, you'd be amazed at how folks either don't notice you are there, or think that you won't understand what they mean. I could read Arthur Conan Doyle at nine years old and I'd been reading childrens novels from the age of six. I could read silently really well, reading out loud not as well, but I could understand language. I loved reading and devoured books.
When adults think that you must be developmentally backward in someway (because of a disabled parent) you'd be appalled at what's said around you.
I'd ask my non disabled parent, and that parent did their best to explain to the letter and no further. But I grew up knowing some folks didn't think I should exist and they were surprised I wasn't disabled in some way. I knew that some folks felt my family were wrong. Our family was othered.
Before I knew the word Eugenics, the meaning was made clear. My existence was not approved of. Some folks if they'd had their way would have ensured my disabled parent would have been sterilised. So I grew up with a politicised existence. Not as politicised as some, as when I moved away, as I went to a new high school then university, no one knew I had a disabled parent (by that point in time two disabled parents) unless I told them.
I'm cis, white and fairly privileged. Doesn't change the fact I grew up in a small village with folks who were ableist and in some rare cases Eugenicist. Long COVID has shown me, that I'm being very generous, there's more eugenicists in my groups both professional and personal than I thought.
Folks are shocked at MAGA and Reform rising in popularity. I was shocked with Brexit. But I'd been ignoring a very inconvenient truth. Many folks always supported those kind of parties.
They were waiting for permission for their racism and ableism to be spoken about openly. We facilitated that speech while ignoring the right of free association in safety.
Very often privileged folks, particularly in FOSS do not choose to understand why someone's existence may be political.
There's a discomfort when those of us who grew up learning this the hard way, point this out. There's a discomfort when we state our boundaries. Some folks find the sudden discomfort of empathy and guilt is hard. So you lash out.
Privileged folks can't tolerate discomfort. Whereas for the rest of us it's a walk in a shitty, obstacle laden park and we'd like to clean it up. But your comfort just can't tolerate the huge piles of shit that you helped to pile up over our paths. It hits us just as hard. But we've not had the privilege of being able to ignore it, we've not stepped on others so we didn't get shit on our shoes.
Suddenly we aren't presenting our backs for you to step on. We refuse to enable your comfort. So there's backlash against DEI and as Fatma Aydemir points out in the Guardian it's not fatigue it's strategy. [2]
We can see it in DHH and Palmer Luckers salivation over the resignation of most of the Moderation Team in NixOS. We can see it in folks characterisation of empathy for others and making accessibility affordances as “the woke mind virus”. [3]
Folks, these men are rich. If they get disabled, they will still have the comfort of the world around them. They don't care if you get laid off. They won't pay your families medical bills and you are one bad accident or infection away from life ruination and struggle. It's why so many of us poor disabled folk know that the only way forward is to find that empathy. To help others where we can. To spread the idea of mutual aid, and when we can help each other. You'll fundraise for Blue and then wonder why the rest of us won't vote for your status quo.
We knew how shit the world could get. You'd have a better world investing in your local community and community fridges and free libraries. Not expecting the Democrats and Labour to look after you. They've been captured by the corps, it's the nature of a centralised democracy when the population doesn't exercise it's right to protest or actively care about politics. It's what happens when you consistently vote for the least worst option. That's not democracy.
As we've said in our presentation at Fluconf, “Our values demand sacrifices.” My father gave up his career and comfort to ensure my brother and I could heal. He's very proud of what we both try to do within our communities. [4]
Some folks are scared of protesting and losing that livelihood, because they know no one will help them. This is how we become divided. This is how tyranny grows and we become isolated and alone. So how do we counter this?
You need to find your folks. You need to start learning the idea of community and cooperation. It's not always about what concrete work someone can do. Sometimes it's the person who manages to stop a dispute and just does lots of small background stuff. You'll never see them. But they work hard.
You need to reach out to your small groups and see where you can help. Even if it's the local community and helping out by doing a pot luck. Get to know your community. Learn and listen.
Protest movements grow because people band together and are prepared to support those folks who protest. People love to quote the first they came for poem. But the thing that they appear to miss is the community aspect. Fascists are good at dividing people. It's a lot harder to go to gatherings and break bread. To learn about other folks and be open to getting it wrong but being gently corrected. Yes it hurts when you realise you have offended someone, but rather than say they were wrong, you must sit on that discomfort. You will feel discomfort from time to time, because to err is human. Most folks will be forgiving, but not if you take out your pain on them.
That discomfort means your empathy is growing. Much like when muscles tear. It will get stronger if you work on it.
Communities will support one another, will hide people from the authorities. I'm literally only alive because a local community resisted the Nazi's and hid my Grandfather. He in turn helped others out of France, including a vulnerable family.
My other Grandfather was a trade unionist. He went on strike. When you go on strike you rely on the rest of your community to help you out with shelter and food. Folks banded together so that rent got paid. Thatcher didn't just break the unions, she broke the community around them. That's how Capitalism works, it needs for you to focus on the nine to five so you're too scared of falling as no one will catch you. It's why the social safety net has been systematically destroyed.
Mutual aid is so much more than just begging for cash. It's a recognition of community and support. In person in a local community it's literally feeding other folks kids. We were poor growing up, but my father always made sure there was space at our table for visiting friends.
Instead we are isolated in our fear and discomfort. Those of us on the left are used to fear, used to being mistreated. Examine your own discomfort and start listening. We will be suspicious, we can see your discomfort. But you need to do the work.
You will have the heartbreak of realising that your friends and colleagues will never have your back even as they say pretty words of ally-ship. So you cannot compromise, your values demand sacrifices.
If you've read through this, you've started. Sit on the discomfort for a while and then read some more.
We'll be waiting, breaking bread together, supporting each other.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/30/germany-anti-diversity-backlash-trump-afd
[3] https://devinprater.micro.blog/2025/08/13/beyond-parity-the-case-for.html
[4] https://librecast.net/fluconf-2025/
This year we're arting the alphabet from A-Z. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.
Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter T Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract.
T is for Tree
Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.
Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky
All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you next week!
from RMiddleton
This post would be titled My Sins.
I would list the social norms that I am breaking.
I would express ambivalence for some, regret for some, defiance for some.
I would assert that I am choosing to live in a manner that leverages every asset I have in service of long-term goals that might be considered unrealistic. I would explain that I prefer progress that feels slow and natural, that takes root within me.
I would explain my social norm breaking as an effort to resist what feels like a constant siege from outside influences that do not, cannot know what is best for me (and in many cases do not care; or are explicitly unconcerned with my well-being).
I would discuss how social norm breaking causes difficulties that are “added to the list” of goals. In this section I would further elucidate situations about which I feel regret and ambivalence.
At no point would I endorse shame. I would confess that titling this “My Sins” is a form of lazy discourse to dislodge my ambivalence. I would admit the incompleteness of my path. Self acceptance is the necessary goal. Striving towards it, my attitude towards religion has evolved: acceptance, incorporation, rejection, defiance. I am yet to fully find peaceful coexistence with religion; that's a barrier in many relationships. Social norms are not necessarily grounded in religious teachings. Perhaps I would describe the intertwining of norms and morals, and contrast with ethics. These are not my specialties. I center feelings. The feelings part is that breaking norms can lead to ostracization and condemnation. These struggles feel life and death. They are existential.
Breaking norms has not occurred frivolously. It's my choice in an effort to live a life that feels worth living. I will continue doing so and endeavoring to explain.
from Tired Doll
dolls are made to be loved, but dolls aren't made to love. dolls are made to be a comfort and a friend, a companion through the hardest and scariest parts of our lives, but they always hope they'll be outgrown.
and one day you'll move on, packing the doll away. move after move, new start after new start, always carefully placed in its box.
until, time comes, when it ends up in that last box; that last box you'll “get to someday”, that box of things you never consciously miss.
that is the true home of the doll.
from cobbles
There's a freeze that happens when you witness atrocity from a distance. We're watching a real time genocide happening on the Gaza Strip while the IDF makes the argument that the civilians they kill deserved it somehow.
It reminds me of the excuse that Prosecuting Lawyers worried that the defence of my Grandfathers Gestapo torturer might make during the Post war prosecution of war criminals.
From the Affidavit it appears that Private SMITH, when captured, was wearing civilian clothes. This may be put forward as a defence by the accused and as justifying SMITH to be treated as a spy. Whatever the circumstances of the case, treatment such as is set out above can of course never be justified, and there appears to be no defence whatever.
In the historical archives of the UN you can read about the testimony my grandfather made.
My Grandfather was working with the British Underground in France during 1941 helping Airmen, Captured troops and a vulnerable family leave during the six trips he made to Marseilles as a passeur/helper. When he was captured he was then tortured for what he knew and then shipped off to several of the German Arbeitan Penal camps. He met the civilians who helped him in France in the Camps again after they had been betrayed by Harold Cole.
He never knew why he survived and those civilians were executed. But the underground was funded by locals, the British Government and some rich benefactors.
Resistance tends to need help from outside a country as much as inside. Resistance often is transnational.
Fast forward to now, and we see people trapped in Gaza. To help those folks political and economic pressure is needed.
Meanwhile a Labour Government is pushing the courts to lock up protesters who support Palestine action. Let's be clear here. Labour has long been captured by Capitalism, it's stepped away from the roots of socialism decades ago under New Labour.
The trappings of government with the need for negotiation with the entrenched political classes that inhabited Westminster has changed the party. It's the moving target of the “center” which means placating the right. Ignoring Human Rights. We have normalised the Far Right. This didn't happen overnight. The Far Right never went away. They just hid their views under a thin veneer of “civility”. We gave them permission with the idea of “balance.” Our media organisations ignored Karl Popper. So the center gradually moved, because of the fear of the left. Plus the fear of the funding cut, the loss of advertising. Eyes on content mattered.
The trappings of a vampiric empire, made up of an aristocracy where the only membership you ever needed was generational power. Wealth is just a store of that power. But they told us the lie of Thatcherism and New Labour continued it. Yes the working classes moved up, some of us became middle class. But we fell for the shell game. Our wealth isn't generational, so the only power we can have is the power we share. The aristocracy, the billionaires won't share it with us.
There's a reason why authoritarian regimes often have a very close relationship with industrialists, with the Tech Barons. It's all about the money, but the money's just a store for power.
We're complicit in this when we look down on striking. We look down on the folks who point out the hard truth. We are complicit as we look down on those who are less fortunate as somehow lesser. Not deserving of our help or compassion. It's what fuels anti immigration, ableism. It's the desire to not stick out, so you don't give that helping hand.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. – Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind
I see our bonds tightening around us so slowly. I started to see the bonds with the G8 protests in 2003. But the bonds started to tighten much earlier with that, when Thatcher broke the Unions. When the poll tax riots forced a policy rethink.
We became complacent. We allowed the kettling. We allowed a Government to ignore a million people marching against the invasion of Iraq, when we should have joined the marchers.
Between Labour Governments, we allowed the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to use the excuse of Austerity to cut the benefits of disabled people. We are means testing the elderly with arbitrary limits, when they've been frugal. We need Universal Basic Income, but we're kept obedient by rising food and electricity prices. We keep our heads down and hope we don't get laid off. We allowed the social safety net to be taken away from us and turned inward.
We're watching as one of the architects of New Labour is thinking about how to carve up Gaza. Stealing Land, allowing people to be starved to death. Yet again allowing an invasion to serve Capital.
A Labour Government is locking people up for protesting this. These protests will not be the only time. Anytime we wish to protest for human rights there will be a danger of prosecution, of state violence. So anyone with dependents, who's income is precarious will be rightly terrified of taking part in protests.
So any Government can gradually tighten the bonds on us. With no come back, to protest will be criminal. No matter how much state violence is enacted against us. The violence of authoritarianism. Make no mistake, we are captured now. Some of us are just out on day release. Don't make a fuss, otherwise your life will be ruined. We're isolated from each other, so we feel powerless. We have no support structure, no community safety net. No one is coming to save us. So we must find a way to build community support to save each other.
Fear keeps us in line. So at what point do we resist? The longer we leave it, the harder it will be to resist.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. – Victor Frankl
Our values demand sacrifice. How long do we leave off resisting before we must sacrifice everything to defend the human rights of others? Our humanity demands our care, our acknowledgement that authoritarian regimes are humanities enemy. Those regimes are a threat to us because they threaten our human rights by ignoring the human rights of those they deem as “enemies.”
We often flirt with the idea of the heroism of resistance. We romanticise the escape lines. We imagine a long journey sneaking through the forests of France and over the mountains. Which some of it was. But a lot of it was guiding escapees onto trains, hiding in plain sight under the eyes of Nazi's and French officials alike.
The very nature of resistance must be flexible. Sometimes it's loud protest. But sometimes, resistance is giving shelter. Sometimes resistance is hiding the existence of the vulnerable. Sometimes resistance is loudly protecting them. It depends.
But we must always try to resist authoritarianism. We can call it by different names in our history. But the Nazi's, the British Empire, Stalin, and all the others can be reduced down to their real ideals. Authoritarianism. Tyranny.
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. [...]
Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
- Nemicks Manifesto – Andor Season 1 – Tony Gilroy [1]
Authoritarians want us to be so overwhelmed that we just look for the quiet life. They want us cowed, authoritarians want us to be afraid. Willing to just work for a pittance, while they pillage our cultures and our peace of mind.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]
The way to start is to find solidarity with each other. To help others, to hold the hand out when they can't get up. To give mutual aid, to shelter others and ensure they are fed. The politics of the status quo may have failed us. But the past fifty years were never about the people. You need to start by recognising the humanity in the poor, the ignorant. Recognise the Humanity in queer folks, in those who come to our countries because they are displaced by our governments policies of war.
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]
It's not enough to vote only in National Elections. You build solidarity, go to each election, even if it's for a parish council. Gain the experience of organising, learn the joy that comes from being a part of community. Help to build community.
Build those bonds of friendship and respect. Choose to support parties that aren't the status quo of Conservative/Slightly less Conservative. Vote. Join the parties that you vote for and spend time getting to know the people in those parties. If you're in those parties and some folks can't attend meetings because of disability make those meetings accessible. Make remote access to those meetings available. We can't have a true democracy unless everyone can participate.
Freedom is a natural thing. It is also a responsibility. Power is also a responsibility. But what we should take from this is that we should share our Freedoms, share our power. It shares the responsibility and lightens the burden on us.
For our democracies to function, we must actively engage in them. We must make our democracies accessible to everyone. We must extend the social safety net to everyone.
Not distribute power and our largess to people we think are most deserving. Humanity tends to fail at that. We tend to believe in the glamour of the rich and them being good people. As if amassing enough money to be a billionaire is a virtue rather than being a robber baron.
When you go around the world, people surprise you with hospitality. We've been given free cups of coffee in Spain on a wet day on our motorbikes. We've paid that hospitality forward in cafe's for other bikers or giving a hitchhiker a ride. We're been to borders at the edge of Europe. I've been given a large apple bigger than my hand by a kindly old man for free while on a rope ferry in Hungary. People can be generous with each other, but in order to do so, we have to recognise each other's humanity. We have to recognise each other's human rights to exist and be in our places. We need to ensure everyone can live in freedom and safety.
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
The Great Dictator Speech – Charlie Chaplin [2]
People are kind. In that kindness is resistance to Authoritarianism.
Be kind, be responsible, share what you can and don't be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Building a community safety net, starts locally. But gradually it expands. While some people want a solution at scale. Most folks care about local issues. We aren't built to understand the contexts of millions or even billions. But brick by brick we can build our communities, we can share the responsibility of power and understand the contexts of issues that make a local communities life harder.
It's why local communities supporting each other is how we counter the far right. We make our local communities our beacons in the dark.
That as well as protests is how we fight authoritarianism. By not succumbing to it's seduction in the first place. We find our resistance in each other. In our communities that we build by finding solidarity with each other.
[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/The_Trail_of_Political_Consciousness
[2] https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/synopsis/articles/29-The-Great-Dictator-s-Speech
from RMiddleton
When the news event happened I wasn't immediately sure who it was. I'm old & the name resembles some from other contexts to me. And I even consume left political media. As I'm writing this I have a video paused about The Daily Wire's Mr. Birchum being appropriated as queer, even though the animated show is part of Ben Shapiro's attempt to “win the culture war.” I heard that & thought: “Culture War? A strange game, the only winning move is not to play.” I paused the video, came here, & started typing.
“You're in the war whether you want to be or not,” I can imagine someone telling me. And as I say I do consume left media. I'm a frequent viewer of The Majority Report, but I wouldn't be if it was entirely dunks on right wing media. I appreciate the interviews with authors, academics, & labor leaders more than the partisan attacks. Like, I'm happy if Hasan Piker appeals to young people but I can't watch him much—strikes me as maniacally immersed in online politics. I don't think “the battle” (or war) is online. Yeah you can say that's what swung '24; I'll still say that appealing to the oppressed & disengaged is more important. I believe it's a much larger number of people for one thing. And I want a politics of substance more than of rhetorical skill. Both are needed but I choose substance over rhetoric for the long term. “But, Rob, the American voters don't understand substance.” That's the challenge that I care about. I'm not in a culture war because I refuse to enlist. Not on those terms. I believe if we are always fighting on their terms then we are losing. I focus on self improvement, and respecting others. That's the content I want to share. That's my strategy, my battle, or my war. But those bellicose terms do not apply because I see victory by force as defeat. I'm a lover not a fighter. I do what I love. I seek to inspire others not convince.
Liberation is the goal. I don't believe freedom can be imposed. I do understand that tyranny is being imposed & must be opposed. I believe the way to achieve lasting liberation is only by the majority of people choosing it. I think that people must be awakened & inspired. The person I'm most concerned with is myself. I work to liberate my mind & emotions. I have ambition to share my journey with others. My path to freedom has been long, winding, & slow going. While I do not fault others for their methods, I seek to avoid commercial distribution. I watch plenty of YouTube videos but I know I won't feel comfortable with my output until it no longer subjects viewers to the harm of commercial platforms. The only sponsors I seek are individual donations. I never look at detailed metrics on any platform I use. These are my choices in order to keep my values in focus. The “race to success” is less important than my life satisfaction.
I describe the actions that work for me. I am grateful for the many others fighting for me & all of us in the ways that work for them. Respect for diversity is a core value in the better world we are building together.
Thanks for reading.
from RMiddleton
| this blog | th'other blog | |
| AFTER | personal writings | writings on topics |
| dotart.blog/RMiddleton | dotart.blog/humanissome | |
| BEFORE | anytime blog | “weekly” blog |