Notices by Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)

@evan parliament is prorogued (aka on hold) until late March so not much gets done. There'll be an election called but this gives the Liberals time to choose a new leader. Is that what you're asking about?

@Infoseepage I'll stick with the scientists on this one.

Looks like bird flu is turning up in SF wastewater in increasing concentrations, meaning it's likely human to human transmission (if this is accurate).
https://bsky.app/profile/falconryfinance.bsky.social/post/3le6ol2gink2h

@skinnylatte I think cold climate relationships to food (and obviously available foods) are very different than tropical ones. Very different flavor personalities but deliciousness usually comes down to the quality of ingredients and someone being a good cook because they care about the food they're cooking. @aehdeschaine

@skinnylatte The world is delicious and I have an appetite for its beauty. It's alien to me but I do understand some people just aren't as sensual or as transported by sensation as I am. Though I do always feel a bit sorry for people who just grew up without food culture.

@cwebber We actively worked against doing the right thing in the West, mainly because of right wing and corporate political pressure coming out of the US and UK (and some bad actors at the WHO that managed to shut down the sensible voices). Asia, in general, took it far more seriously and were more prepared (South Korea being the most prepared because of their previous experience with SARS but we also had post-SARS pandemic preparedness we let lapse, despite consistent warnings we were entering an era of pandemics).
Also, COVID being endemic doesn't mean there's less risk. Yes vaccines are helpful for reducing death and overall risk but they virus hasn't gotten milder and continues to mutate and cause Long COVID and immune suppression even in vaccinated people. All in all, the simple act of masking on public transport (including flights) protects us from a lot of different illnesses and from potentially becoming a vector of disease ourselves and harming others.

@cwebber All the better for it to spread rabies to other critters...

Chronic pain is debilitating, whether it's emotional or physical. People who haven't experienced it or don't care for someone experiencing it have no idea how terrible the suffering is. The lack of empathy and compassion some people are proudly displaying over on Bluesky is appalling. Though pretty par for the course.

I'm lucky, I don't have chronic pain. It's just luck, I'm not more virtuous. Sure I do yoga to prevent sciatica's acute pain but I'm also lucky and privileged that I can do this. Blaming victims of bad luck makes you a monster not a superior human being. We're all one fall or accident away from chronic pain.

Chronic pain's a complicated neurobiological condition we still don't understand well. (I grew up around pain research, I know a lot about it and briefly worked in a pain clinic.) Pain's so complicated and subjective, and linked to cognition, that even culture influences how it is experienced and expressed. It's not just mechanical and money isn't magic.

I mean, I'm 60yo and I have a worn down disk in my lower back and a degenerating hip so I'm not entirely pain free (both my mom and my aunt needed hip replacements, we'll see if I get access to that kind of care when I really need it.) But it's usually pretty manageable and my psychological/mood set point tends towards optimism. I'm lucky and I know it (but feeling that way is also luck in many ways).

People really do understimate how much of feeling good and being healthy is outside of their control. Exercise is a common way people damage their body, especially over time, just fyi. Also, supplements are generally bad for your health over the longterm. Our sense of control is largely an illusion/delusion. We're all born this way, we don't get to choose the bodies or circumstances we're born into. Be kinder to other people and also yourself, especially if you're lucky enough to be healthy and currently living pain free.

Remembering the mass murder of 14 women in an act of femicide in Montreal on Dec 6th. Particularly as anti-feminist, women-hating, anti-bodily autonomy and anti-abortion legislation by right wing political parties in North America around the world increases. Pushing women out of schools and jobs, murdering us for existing as humans with agency not objects of male desire and abuse, forcing us into pregnancy and servitude, all these oppressive things are back everywhere in the world, despite how hard we, our mothers and women throughout history have fought. The femmicide needs to end. And that includes the murder of transwomen and femmes of all kind. Femmephobia leads to femmicide.

https://www.cbc.ca/montreal/features/remember-14/

@paninid But also "memory culture" and the fetishization of German (and European guilt). Not to mention PR for Israel. (It took a very long time for the other groups targeted by the Nazis to be recognized by Holocaust museums and it was very begrudgingly at first.) It's more than just documentation. It's not like we don't know about the atrocities of slavery either. It's also not unlike how the US gave refuge to Nazi scientists while pretending that eugenics was only something the Nazis did.

https://opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2021/1/24/declaration-of-gay-survivors-of-the-holocaust-50-years-after-their-liberation

@skinnylatte It's also possibly because you're away working more now too. If she sits on you, you can't leave! 😆 ❤️ 🐈

@MayInToronto I am not a succinct person most of the time so I appreciate the long word count to explore an idea casually!
I 💯 think you're right about accessible third spaces. And while I'm a very online person and I appreciate how online communities can function as a form of third spaces, it's not the same as sharing physical space with other people.

One other thing that came up in discussion was how Saathi meetings were very informal and the events the group organized were open to everyone, it wasn't agenda driven, it was motivated by care and connection. It was place finding/making. It was very touching hearing from some of the younger members of the audience and their desire to feel they belong somewhere (and quite a few of us older people were pretty overwhelmed with emotion too). It's been a very powerful time for me recently reconnecting with both that part of my past and with people I fell out of touch with because illness made my world very small for about 10 years and then the pandemic hit!

@MayInToronto These are all definitely systemic/logistical factors but loneliness is also about lack of connecting and not feeling seen and understood. And we can't really connect and be seen by another person unless we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, that's part of being open enough to connect deeply.

A lot of people shy away from this part, they avoid the real connection because they just want entertainment or fun, or to take without reciprocating, or are transactional about relationships. It's about utility not care. Caring brings joy but it also can bring deep loss and sadness (the death of a loved one is an obvious one but also the other hardships of real life beyond the facade, such as illness, loss, etc). It also requires negotiating boundaries, acknowledging our own and others' limitations, etc. But there's also the shared joys.

A lot of this goes counter to our culture's marketing of entertainment as connection (art CAN connect us, entertainment is more about distracting us but it can also be about sharing experiences). And it also often costs money. If don't have real friends and social solidarity, and 3rd spaces as May points out, you can lose a whole social circle if you run into financial difficulty.

The other thing is that friendships DO require time and attention. Friendships need to be tended like gardens, even if we allow them to go wild or even a bit fallow at times (lifelong friendships often have periods of less closeness but their duration allows for us to know each other very deeply). This can become more difficult as we become older.

I went to a panel discussion that is part of a storytelling series at a local uni last week where some old friends were discussing the history of a queer South Asian group they created back in the 1990s. It was a crucible of a time, of course, because AIDS made everything so much more urgent and life so much more intense.

It was a great discussion about making friends and creating solidarity, as well as the challenges everyone faced. But as we get older, and disperse geographically the threads get stretched but not broken. I've been thinking about these things a lot, especially as an older queer person who isn't married (as many of us aren't).

The other thing about loneliness is that it's also a physical thing. We all (or most of us) need to be hugged and touched, caring is also physical, we can become starved for physical affection. Hugs and gentle caring touch help us regulate our nervous system. Love, care and gentle touch are crucial for all aspects of our health, we need it to know we're included and safe.

It's why kind words or a helping hand given to a stranger can be so powerful for both the person extending the care and the person receiving it. It's why a hug from an old friend can be so powerful. Interdependence is the healthy human relationship to each other and the world. It's also why being exploitative is ultimately damaging even to the exploiter. There's really nothing more powerful than care for each other and solidarity.

@skinnylatte

@skinnylatte We lived there for a year when I was a kid. That was in the early 70s. It was very working class and home to a lot of Algerian immigrants (I was the only White girl in my class at school, an experience that taught me a lot).
Hmm, I may be wrong about which arrondissement it was, going to have to double check that!

@mekkaokereke Lol the main issue I can see with them is you can add people to them without their permission. That seems like a potential vector for abuse. I can see why people like using and creating them, and some people love being included in them.

@evan They should consider all kinds of people, not just design for men by default. Or make something pink, charge more and pretend it's for women.

@oigreslima Exactly. @evan

@rysiek The continual attempts to pass off sociopathy and clinical narcissism as autism are an intensely annoying form of excuse making for terrible men. They do this with school shooters. It's similar to how rich White boys and athletes who are rapists get excused made for them. Plenty of people are on the spectrum without being clinical narcissists or sociopaths (which is also why promoting this idea is also harmful to people on the spectrum, as is the "autistic people are superior" belief....different isn't better or worse, it's just different!) @mekkaokereke

@pluralistic I love this. Deliciously rewarding praxis 😆

@jonny Skibidi is a nonsense word from Russian techno outfit Little Big's song of the same name. It was made up by people not an LLM. Little Big was huge in Russia but left Russia when Putin launched its invasion of Ukraine. The Skibidi toilets thing is a very bad imitation of Little Bigs absurdist Russian aesthetic and may well be a form of war propaganda (one of Russia's more influential propagandists was an artist, crude absurdity is a tactic). Little Big were massive in Russia and the song Skibidi got a fair amount of attention in some circles in the West (their videos are really fun and they really established a certain absurdist aesthetic). Anyway, main point is it's nonsense slang made up by human artists who are famous for an absurd and surrealist aesthetic and not an invention of an LLM. This ends our Ted Talk on the etymology of Skibidi and why it's not indicative of LLMs creating a new language. It's all human inventiveness and about how words sound in a musical context, it's jazz scatting and very human creativity.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trust-the-tale-not-the-teller-art-and-propaganda-in-contemporary-russia/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDFBTdToRmw