On May Day 2017, anarchists participated in lively demonstrations all around the United States, from the heartland to the coasts. In the Northwest, Seattle witnessed a successful block party at the site of a juvenile corrections center, while in Olympia anarchists barricaded train tracks to oppose fracking and clashed with police. Support arrestees here. Yet Portland, Oregon may take the cake for the most creative and combative May Day. Demonstrators not only defended themselves from unprovoked attacks from police who declared the march a riot—they also introduced exciting new innovations into the aesthetic of the black bloc street presence. Here, comrades from Portland explain their goals with the giant spiders they created for May Day, and offer a helpful guide for those who wish to make spiders of their own.

In an effort to bridge the gap between art and activism, giant spiders were assembled off-site and pushed up the street to the demonstration, stocked with water bottles, snacks, earplugs, and other party favors. The idea was to narrow the divide between “us” and “them” that often exists at demonstrations, and it was a complete success. We performed community outreach, engaged in cultural development, boosted morale, provided crucial supplies, and created an amazing photo opportunity in the process.

The concept is multi-dimensional: it works on many different levels. The idea began from frustrations around attendance at local demonstrations. In Portland, where the majority of citizens seem to be white, middle-class, and apolitical on account of these privileges, they don’t show up unless a demonstration concerns their interests specifically. However, Portlanders are fascinated by their own love of art and “wacky” stuff as well as the commodification of protest as “funtertainment.” We decided to embrace this love of the “weird” to test whether a hyper-localized approach to engaging people could succeed.

Our tactical art enabled us to fill a supporting role for other participants in the march, helping challenge narratives that the black bloc is an “othered” or “othering” tactic. Whether this separation is intentional or not, the fact remains that the general public is often hesitant to engage with us. Bearing that in mind—as well the tendency of the Portland Police Department to brutally shut down demonstrations—we stocked our Spiders with fliers, water, LAW (liquid, antacid, water, the eyewash with which street medics treat pepper spray), ear plugs, and snacks. We also included a few other party favors, because anarchy needs revelry!

We intentionally engaged with the folks around us. A lot of people walked up to ask what the spiders meant! It was inspiring to see so much dialogue between folks in everyday garb and folks in black bloc. We explained the ideas behind our actions as anarchists and the creations themselves: the three spiders representing Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Direct Action.

A word about symbolism. The idea of using the spider as an icon of resistance is that spiders are always there watching, waiting, and keeping the environment free of pesky insects and other parasites that consume resources without supporting their fellow beings. While we may look scary, we’re here with you and for you. We are the spiders, and the insects are the societal ills that we fight against.

The symbolism of the black widow spider is rich with history that guides our work. We want to contribute to that rich history, adding our own interpretations. Mutual Aid, Solidarity, Direct Action are our black widow’s cruses. (Crux? Curse? Cures?)

In regards to developing our own culture, there are many barriers we face in this process. State repression is the biggest threat, of course. The specter of state repression can complicate organizing, planning, and building trust in our communities. Portland has a history of repression and slander, ruining the lives of activists and anarchists; these horror stories reverberate throughout the underground. We can’t allow ourselves to be publicly disparaged and forced into hiding by our adversaries and their culture war, so we create as a political act. Creating is intuitively human: we plan, we build, we think, we conspire, we imagine. It is also an activity in which everyone can engage to some degree while building new skills. It enables us to get to know each other, build trust, and share time and company.

More globally, seizing the Spectacle is a step towards our goals, because it allows us to dictate our own narratives. With the development of Public Relations and Social Engineering, the visage of capitalism has come to define its delusional reality. To paraphrase Guy Debord, lived experiences are now taken in as a collection of representational images. We can tell our own stories and show the general public what these three principles mean in action. We can create our own mythos, speaking out on our own terms, in our own language, with our own symbols. The state and media dictate too much of what we’re allowed to say and how it’s spun—it’s time to spin our own webs to connect and fortify our relationships.

We are building the bridges we need to move forward. The existing connections between art, activism, and anarchism are fiery and well-storied. The new wave of repression under Trump’s regime is still building steam, but it is already proving dangerous. We need to be more careful than ever. Art allows us to demonstrate and show our fangs, and we can use art to empower those around us.

when I drew this comic 3 years ago I had NO idea how far it would reach. I'm happy to finally share a corrected version with proper abbreviations, and even MORE state names of indigenous origin ♥️

however, the goal of this comic was to inspire people to do your OWN research on indigenous history. To question everything we have been taught, and everything that has been pointedly left out. This erasure, this “forgetting”, of history is not just of the past… it is happening now. - Across so-called Canada, the US, and US-occupied islands, native women are victims of murder at 10-12x the rate of non-native people, and are the most likely to go missing without being searched for by the law. - Native reservations have the highest rates of poverty in the US, with over HALF of tribal homes with no access to clean water (with more joining this list by the year) - Native people are 6-10x more likely to be unhoused than the rest of the population, and native teens suffer suicide rates higher than any other demographic. This list of modern day genocide goes on (thank you for compiling @theindigenousanarchist <3) and yet take a look at those environmental stats!

Native people manage to do SO much for the planet as a whole - thanklessly - and with all this stacked against them. Don't even get me started on kin fighting in south america. Could you imagine if there was help? #landback is resistance to genocide, and it is the key to saving our warming earth.

So look into it and the other hashtags, cuz a cartoon goose ain't a substitute for a proper education. Love to my grandparents who always kept a map of tribal territories of turtle island on their wall, to speaking on our Tsalagi & Saponi heritage. Love & solidarity forever, happy research, and happy #indigenouspeoplesday

LANDBACK.ORG

(Also, if you care to support the artist, I'm publishing a book ! and writing another - a fantastical afroindigenous graphic novel - that I post exclusively about with tons of other art on my patreon.)

I wish that instead of talking about “independent living” as disabled people we talked more about “autonomous living”.

I think when a lot of people see “independent” they assume it means living alone without other people. And some people assume that independent living services aren’t for them because they need 24/7 care. Or non disabled people think it’s pointless because many disabled people can’t live on their own.

But what we call independent living often includes having access to carers/ PAs/ support workers. It’s about having freedom to make all the meaningful choices we can, having the support and equipment we need to live comfortably and safely and to access the community and other activities. And I feel like “autonomous living” describes that better.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but especially with the end of the school year coming up soon, and a bunch of people about to leave high school or about to leave college, I just wanted to say:

Being an adult can be really nice, actually!!!

Like, okay, yeah, life can be fucking stressful sometimes, and there's definitely an annoying amount of paperwork.

But me and just about every single adult I know will agree: I would never choose to go back to being a teenager, even if I somehow could.

Insert obvious disclaimer that nothing is universal. But for people worried about aging or graduating into the next chapter of life, here's some words of reassurance:

When you're a teenager, your brain is extra mean to you. Like, neurologically. All of the changes it's undergoing really, really increase rates of depression/anxiety/etc. A lot of the time, literally just not being a teenager anymore is really good for your mental health

Less than five months out of high school, everyone I knew my age was like "Thank fuck we're no longer in high school." Once you leave high school and adolescence there's really just such a dramatic drop in petty bullshit. Shit that would have been a huge social humiliation or gossip in high school is really often just like, "Hate that for you, man." Boom, done.

When you're a teenager or a brand new adult, you're encountering so many problems for the first time ever. When you're older, you just. Have learned how to handle a lot more things. You know what to do way more often and that builds confidence

When you're an adult, other people generally don't care if you don't do things perfectly, because jobs and life don't work like grades. This was such a trip to learn, honestly? But when you are an adult or have a job the bar for success is usually just "Did you do the thing?" or "Did you do the thing well enough that it works?" or "Did you show up to work for your whole shift and look like you were doing things?"

Similarly, if you're about to graduate college and you're really stressed about it, fyi just about everyone I knew in college ended up very quickly going "wow, 'real life' is way easier." Admittedly I went to a school full of very stressed out perfectionists and the like, so I can't promise this is universal, but there's a very real chance that life will in many ways get easier when you graduate

WAY MORE CONTROL OF YOUR OWN LIFE

Literally I cannot overstate that last point. As an adult, you are (barring certain disabilities or shitty circumstances like abusive family/the criminal justice system/etc.) able to make most of your own decisions. If you want to rearrange your furniture, you can. If you want to eat tater tots at midnight, you can. If you want to get yourself a little treat, you can. You can sign contracts and make your own legal and medical decisions and not need a parent or guardian signature for just about anything ever again

You generally learn how to give fewer fucks

The people around you have also generally learned how to give fewer fucks

Even when things are shitty, being able to choose what kind of shitty a lot of the time can really be worth an awful lot

Spanning nearly two centuries of global history, the basic pattern of trans misogyny is much older than TERFs, or right-wing Christians, and extremely consistent. Trans misogyny is not a mere psychological and irrational hatred of trans women. In fact, trans misogyny as a concept helps explain how individuals, or interpersonal violence, can act on behalf of the state or other abstract political movements. At the interpersonal scale, however, trans misogyny testifies to the uncomfortable thickness of social bonds across hierarchies of gender, class, and race. When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine. And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women’s access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women’s presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity. It is felt as a fear of proximity. Trans femininity is too sociable, too connected to everyone –– too exuberant about stigmatized femininity –– and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality by getting too close. But sociability can never be confined or blamed on one person in a relationship; it's impersonal, and it sticks to everyone.

The defensive fear and projection build into trans misogyny, whether genuine or performed, is an attempt to wish away what it nonetheless recognizes: that trans femininity is an integral part of the social fabric. There will be no emancipation for anyone until we embrace trans femininity's centrality and value.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

sam winchester + autonomy

Laments—Jenny Holzer / "The Leaving Season", Some Are Always Hungry—Jihyun Yun / (excerpt from) Memorial Drive—Natasha Trethewey

Chainsaw Man is about self-destruction. It’s about self-destruction as a means of reclaiming your autonomy in an environment where you are consistently denied it. Chainsaw Man is about denial of autonomy. Chainsaw Man is about how, when you are in an environment where you are denied your own autonomy, you learn to view interpersonal relationships as interactions you have no control over unless you find a means of controlling the other members of that relationship — whether that be through methods of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Chainsaw Man is about how denial of autonomy is framed as love. Chainsaw Man is about how love that denies autonomy is violence.

🤲 more grunge-type affirmations

it's my body, my choice, til the bitter end. nothing can ever make it okay to take away my basic rights. i do not deserve to be marginalized. no one does.

Freedom demands that man maintain his dignity and purity, that he control himself.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Christian Existentialism

"The prospect of freedom?" he said.

"Exactly," said Lord Vetinari. "There is always a choice."

"You mean...I could choose certain death?"

"A choice, nevertheless," said Vetinari.

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Auto Putting Away Groceries

With this mod, Sims can autonomously take market baskets with groceries (e.g. left by a delivery person) and put them away into a fridge, especially when they're hungry. Originally, Sims must be directed by the player to do it.

Update (4 Aug 2023): Removed redundant game version checks in the auto putting away groceries mod.

Choosing the right version

If you have Ultimate Collection, Apartment Life, or Mansion and Garden Stuff installed – choose EP8. If not, go to 2.

If you have Super Collection or at least one of the following packs installed: Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, FreeTime, any stuff pack (except of M&G) – choose EP3. If not, choose base.

Butler groceries restoking fix mod

In a vanilla game, a butler who has ordered groceries can't cook until he restocks the fridge by himself. This is a stand-alone mod which enables a butler to cook after someone else has restocked a fridge with groceries ordered by him. This mod requires Apartment Life as butlers have been introduced in that expansion pack.

I strongly recommend using this mod when you're going to use the auto putting away groceries mod in order to avoid the situation described above.

My unpublished mod simler90-butlerGroceriesRestokingFix is technically the same mod so there's no need to replace it. You may just rename it.

Conflicts

Do not use the butler groceries restoking fix mod with Butler Mod by simler90 – it contains this fix.

Credits

Ciastko jfade (The Compressorizer!) simler90 (Butler Mod – the butler groceries restoking fix has been extracted from that mod) Creators of SimPe

Download

simNopke-autoPuttingAwayGroceries-base – updated 4 Aug 2023 simNopke-autoPuttingAwayGroceries-EP3 – updated 4 Aug 2023 simNopke-autoPuttingAwayGroceries-EP8 – updated 4 Aug 2023 simNopke-butlerGroceriesRestokingFix

On MTS

anxieties over kids on the internet always come down to anxieties about youth autonomy. always. it is never about ‘safety’. it is not about ‘protection.’ it is about control, and parents’/institutions’ realization that young people are forming connections outside the purview of adult surveillance.

!UPDATE ALERT! Sims around the entire map, can now autonomously collect seeds and other items. In addition, they will also be able to put their clothes to wash and hang them on the line independently, making neighborhood behavior more realistic.