Josh "cortex" Millard @joshmillard@mastodon.social

Cathode Ray Jepsen

The Passion of the Christ but it's just a two second clip of Jesus looking into the camera and saying "graphic design"

GUITAR PICK 1: i really wanna fuck that sock
GUITAR PICK 2: it's huge, you'd die
GP1: there's gotta be a way
GP3: its hopeless
GP4: just physically impossible
GP5: ...unless
GP1-4: unless?
GP5: what if a whole bunch of us worked together
GP1: like a voltr--
GP5: like a voltron sock yeah
GP1-99: ...let's work out a blueprint

~ later ~

ME: where's my other fucking sock

ME AGAIN: where are all my fucking guitar picks

like the fact that Prince Philip was hospitalized recently is really undercutting the potential drama of a young Philip insisting on taking up flying

like he ain't gonna go out like a Downton Abbey character now, obviously, so so much for that

decided to watch The Crown because we're between serial dramas and I want to watch the Olivia Coleman seasons, and now I've gone from not learning about the details of the 20th C. British Monarchy out of a profound passive disinterest to not learning about them because I don't want spoilers

Queen Amygdala

Mighty Mighty Autonomous Workers Collective Tones

why do they call them "unborn children" and not "human presources"

Placido Dodongo

This is all a few steps into the weeds, of course; the flipside of criticism of these second-order dynamics is that they in turn can be weaponized by people who refuse to do any work, and use the notions of "virtue signaling" and bad-faith performativeness to short circuit any need to take responsibility or sit with their discomfort in the first place. Cf. the overt culture war defensiveness of right-wing media about Cancel Culture, etc.

So it's a hard problem and a mess all around.

But as part of a public dynamic, grappling internally with your discomfort and the causes of it is not much of a display. And that can lead to a bad situation where the necessary internal work is...unsatisfyingly internal. And so the desire to verify you're doing the work collapses down to wanting to verify your discomfort. Which gets into some bad social territory, a paradox of needing folks to decenter themselves but then pressuring them to center their discomfort for evaluation.

Which isn't a statement about motives: I think the concept that people do need to sit with their discomfort with e.g. their role in systemic oppression is a good and important one, that your responsibility is to grapple with the source of your discomfort instead of deflecting and externalizing it and making your discomfort the center of conversation. And that can be hard and, well, uncomfortable, but it's necessary and internal work to do.

Been thinking a lot lately about the distinction between sitting with your discomfort and wallowing in it, and how unfortunately the distinction between the two when viewed from the outside is that the latter is often more satisfyingly performative than the former even though it's the less healthy or productive of the two.

Distinction between "I want you to not make your discomfort my responsibility" vs "I want to see and verify your discomfort".

none pizza daft punk

isn't it past time we talk about ambient INclusion

...yeah, i've been taking this, uh, I guess it's French? medicine, it's called "le Xapro"

Internet of Things That Make You Go Hmm

La Isla Totinos

Finished up this project from late last year: "STOP permutations", a series of 24 linocut prints of all permutations of the letters S, T, O, and P.

Blog post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/stop-1-24-47305806

Prints for sale on my shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/959320243/stop-permutations