Camping on Halloween Night

...eard water and ran to the stream bed. The day before it had been dry, now it ran with water. I knew it was a temporary flow, but the sight of running water after a long dry summer brought tears to my eyes, and I remembered that Halloween is the Celtic New Year. It’s a time of darkness, and a time of death (the traditional time for slaughtering stock), but in death there is renewal, and I felt that renewal in the moist loam beneath my feet and the...

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A Shadow Manifesto

...ontiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible. A sacred darkness awaits us. We have nothing to lose but our ceiling cans! Thanks to Amy our friend...

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Our Shaky Town

...timated magnitude, I knew it wasn’t going to be huge but we all had enough time to get under the table if we needed to If you haven’t downloaded @myshakeapp now would be a good time! Also the system is improving constantly so even if this one didn’t work I guarantee future you will appreciate the warning ⚠️ https://myshake.berkeley.edu This was probably the best-case scenario for people in LA to get an early warning — big enough to trigger the sys...

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Sorting the Digital Photos of a Digital Pandemic

...ome it was a a world of anxiety, literal blood and guts and for others the time to kick back on the couch and watch every episode of Tiger King. But this is, of course, too much of a dualistic view. Many who were stuck at home also had to deal with the reality of panic over finances and taking care of family members. And most of us, including a lot of Useful People, ended up spending a lot of time looking at screens and this is where the paradox o...

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A Pandemic Anniversary

...s and emotions and that trick has been extraordinarily useful. Most of the time I noticed low level anxiety and fatigue caused by the constant risk management we all had to do. Sometimes I had COVID dreams and outburst of hypochondria. Observing these feelings helped to not get attached to them and kept them from spiraling out of control. I also came to the conclusion that it’s perfectly okay not to be productive all the time and recognize that th...

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