The American Hogwarts Houses

damn, your comment about where did the carbon come from has got me wondering why the earth's crust is so... ordered, if you see what I mean. like, you don't have just tiny particles of elements that happened to react with each other, in a random mostly-homogeneous mix--you have large areas of the same type of rock, large veins of iron or whatnot, and so on. like going with like, to an extent.

too lumpy and solid to combine and homogenise? or it combined and then separated due to different densities and varying levels of heat? I have no idea where planets came from, I only live on one.

Ao3 Classics. 

Series inspired by Penguin Classics. (x) 

(for single covers follow the link x)

Links to works under the cut |

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Thousand mile long shadows

Blackness to me is inherently gender nonconforming largely because we will never fit into binary white supremacist notions of manhood and womanhood.

So in What Matters in Jane Austen, the author points out that Lizzie and Jane are constantly going off to have their own side conversations and gossip with each other, moreso than any other set of characters in Austen, and now I’ve decided a necessary feature of any modern au is Lizzie just CONSTANTLY texting Jane. Like the second any conversation ends she’s texting Jane about it. If she’s feeling particularly mean she’ll just text Jane while you’re still talking.

transcript:

[ even as one branch of asian americans goes corporate, another branch follows edward said’s insights and connects east/southeast “orientals” to arab “orientals”.

asian american studies owes so much to edward said, the palestinian author who wrote orientalism, which gave all of asia this specific framework to understand their own oppression, how the west uses orientalism to justify colonization and exploitation of asia.

and this was derived from his own experiences with the brutal colonization of his homeland palestine, which is in west asia.

and so, to all of the people who are posting a lot about #stopasianhate i hope you guys remember that “asian american” was a political identity created in the 60′s to create continental solidarity to fight against western imperialism.

so, there is no asian american politics without “free palestine” ]

end transcript

Māori are trying to save their language from Big Tech

Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

“In March 2018, Peter-Lucas Jones and the ten other staff at Te Hiku Media, a small non-profit radio station nestled just below New Zealand’s most northern tip, were in disbelief. In ten days, thanks to a competition it had started, Māori speakers across New Zealand had recorded over 300 hours of annotated audio in their mother tongue. It was enough data to build language tech for te reo Māori, the Māori language – including automatic speech recognition and speech-to-text.

The small staff of Māori language broadcasters and one engineer were about to become pioneers in Indigenous speech recognition technology. But building the tools was only half the battle. Te Hiku soon found itself fending off corporate entities trying to develop their own indigenous data sets and resisting detrimental western approaches to data sharing. Guarding their data became the priority because the only people truly interested in revitalising the Māori language were the Māori people, themselves.”

A note to all college kids, So Microsoft word has default settings for papers.

If you search MLA, or APA you can get an entire paper template.

REPEAT: Microsoft word will Format your entire paper!

You never have to spend hours lining everything up again.

The #1400challenge - How to turn stimulus checks into collective power | Inhabit

The last year has demonstrated just how razor thin our margin of survival is—from the brutality of the police to the viciousness of the virus, from the absurd ups-and-downs of the economy to the glaring incompetence of the government.

Now that they’ve been forced to send some cash our way, we’d like to propose a little something they maybe didn’t expect. The idea is simple: what if we took our stimulus checks and put them towards collective use?

In recent weeks Inhabit has been collaborating with groups around the country to put together a series of kits called the #1400challenge. The result is a handful of introductory guides for a variety of collective projects—from soundsystems and meshnets to pop-up dwellings and community gyms.

Each project is based on a proven and replicable idea, a working model that has already seen action in the streets and in neighborhoods. And each could be a jumping off point for new designs, new skillsets, new encounters, and newly expanded frontlines in the battle for the future.

No doubt many of us will have to spend our checks on necessities like groceries, rent, medical bills—all the bullshit it takes to stay alive in this bullshit world. But for those who can, and especially for those who want to pool resources, the opportunity is clear: invest in collective infrastructure that increases our shared capabilities, that augments our ability to live and to fight.

Here’s our wager. We have to translate isolated, temporary solutions to individual problems into the material and ethical basis for building collective power. We need autonomous solutions that scale at the level of neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Our power together unlocks more potential than we have alone.

It’ll take more than a stuck container ship to break the hold of the economy over our lives. Design and build new ways of living together, that lessen our dependence on their system at the same time that we cultivate trust in one another. Leverage all the means at our disposal—including their cold hard cash—to bring out the beauty, dignity, and creativity of our shared existence.

Read more…

If you want even more ideas, check out my #practical tag

justaholmesboy did this magnificent Irish Elk fawnlock and I couldn’t resist drawing fanart for it. COOL AUs. HORNS. PRETTY MARKINGS. CENTAURS.