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Sugarcane is tragic, haunting, and yet also beautiful. The documentary film focuses on an investigation into Saint Joseph’s Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada, but these residential schools weren’t unique to Canada. The U.S. government had similar policies and similar tragedies unfolded at those schools and we’re doing a much worse job as a country in reckoning with that part of our history. Sugarcane provides a better, while imperfect, model for our federal and local governments to follow.
Watch the trailer.
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What triggered this? I dunno, man, I guess I saw some new app being kickstarted by The Iconfactory and I’m sure some people will love it, but I see something built around the concept of “a single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources,” and I just want to put my head in the toilet and scream and scream and scream until I have displaced all of the oxygen in my body with toilet water and I drown in the toilet because my shit gills have yet to evolve.
I’m not at “jump into a vat of acid” level of repulsion with the standard RSS reader, but I find them to be a place where content I ostensibly care about goes to live in quiet purgatory, never to be discovered again.
I will admit that there is something inherently alluring about organizing all of the information you intend to absorb into one place, but I find, in practice, the incessant drip, drip, drip to overwhelm, rather than delight.
I still find myself falling back to RSS readers because I want to stay unplugged from the urgency and hysterics of social media, but I too find the singular, linear nature of these readers to somehow be both overwhelming and guilt-inducing (I will never be able to read it all).
Aside
In the last post I included Jon-Kyle Mohr’s essay on building with AI and off-handedly mentioned Cycle—an app he’s built—analogizing it to an RSS reader. But that comparison isn’t quite fair. Cycle caught my eye precisely because it seems to be recognizing both the overwhelm factor and the purgatory I describe, and trying to solve for both. I’ve only used it briefly, so don’t consider this a full endorsement, but I am excited to see something new in this space.
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“One misconception I hear about the gender liberation movement is that it exclusively impacts the queer community. It can appear that way with such large support from the LGBTQIA+ community, but gender liberation includes everyone and benefits us all, too. Bodily autonomy is a human right. Even those who are predominantly featured as beneficiaries in the current gender structures are being harmed in the long run. Yes, I mean men, and yes, they deserve freedom from gender, too.
‘A system cannot fail those it was never built to protect.’ —Vann Newkirk. I don’t believe our savior to be a white man nor the government system that grants them power. At its simplest, gender liberation begins with you and me. It’s a highly personal and spiritual transformation we all must embody. We must protect our human rights from the current onslaught of legislative attacks on females, trans people, and immigrants. Many reforms are needed, but it can be so overwhelming and distracting to advocate for a system that does not recognize our humanity. This is why the Gender Liberation Movement requires coordination and many intersections of people to be most effective. It’s all hands on deck right now, and we invite you to join us.” —Cole Witter
Emphasis mine.