its silly that we have BLM carrds going around, everyone was reblogging them months ago on the regular & u guys are still asking “what are we supposed to do if voting biden is bad” or whatever. like the answer was in those carrds, several of them provided books & pdfs, most of them were FREE for you to read. & you STILL didn’t do your homework.
stop reblogging headlines without reading the article. actually put in the effort to learn about how to be antiracist and how to organize & make a change within ur community. get in touch with local groups. if you don’t have any near you, take the time to learn, listen, & spread resources. research & criticize yourself. take it easy, but take it.
Master List of Black Revolutionary Readings
by Timmy Chau (free pdfs, some have been taken down but most are still up, you could try googling the ones that have been deleted)
yes this is a lot to take in all at once. make small goals for yourself though, try reading at least two articles a day that interest you, etc. find out what works for you.
I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.
Every time I see companies selling “”“punk”“” jewellery or clothing I become apoplectic with rage. Just saw a £65 padlock necklace advertised to me bitch Fuck you go to your nearest weird little shop that sells everything in the world including fake Rolexes and bongs the size of a toddler. Buy a thing of chain and a padlock. Borrow some bolt cutters someone you know will probably own some and if not get some cheap ones or borrow from a local tool library. Slap em together. Maximum cost £30 and that’s MAXIMUM that’s assuming you bought over a metre of expensive heavy chain AND bought the bolt cutters. You can do it for under a fiver with a wallet chain and pliers. I still wear a necklace I made when I was 15 out of a wallet chain and pliers and a padlock I got in a set of 3 from poundland. If the issue is dexterity or otherwise disability related then find a friend and swap a favour with them it’ll still be cheaper than these scamming poser companies and will help you build community and share resources. Something which is actually punk. Fuckin. Capitalist posers
Important to keep in mind there’s a distinction here between ‘someone who paints and sells patches in their own small business’ (cool, craftsmanship, usually very fairly priced for materials and labour while still affordable for punks who don’t have that skillset to buy, honestly not a category far removed from ‘if you buy me lunch I can paint your jacket’ exchanges) and big companies who charge extortionate prices for something that’s supposed to be counterculture, paying staff minimum wage and making huge profits the workers will never see a penny of (cunts)
I don’t think I ever wanted to be anything more than a storyteller and a writer. Other people can decide where the books get shelved.
@eurphrasie That felt rude. Since when is fantasy not literature?!
You know, It’s kind of fitting that It was Sir Terry Pratchett himself who answered this question in an interview, just going to paste this up real fast:
O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
