Marko Cindric @MarkoCindric@mastodon.green

I’m talking specifically here about this app called Transit that constantly requests access to my fitness data so it can tell me if I need to (no joke) run faster to make it to my bus / streetcar on time.

It’s only once I started disabling permissions on my phone’s apps that I realized how many of them openly complain to you if they’re not granted full, constant access to things like location services, camera, etc. Like, constant tooltips about how “my experience could be improved.” 🙄

Finally sorted this out thanks to the fine folks in this forum thread! https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=193121

#Apple and Broadcom have done an excellent job of preventing me from running #Linux distros on my 2017 MacBook Pro. So much forum trawling this past week and I still can't get Zorin OS to establish a Wi-Fi connection, proprietary drivers or otherwise. 😞

And I thought *I* was having a bad time with this Mercury retrograde. 😂 #FacebookDown

There's something particularly disheartening to me about the fact that academia can't extricate itself from capitalistic grind culture; I feel like that practically guarantees that certain paths of exploration will be overlooked in favour of those of least resistance.

Clearly nobody understands me as well as I thought they did because I hadn't been introduced to Everything But The Girl before this past week. 😂

(Disclaimer: I've been to many nights where my friends would DJ the Todd Terry remix of "Missing" — but that's not even the best one!)

First project for my "Data as Material" course, a 'data self-portrait' where I manually scored a batch of camping trip photographs based on the prominence of each of the four astrological elements (fire, air, earth, water), then used those score values as the dimensions of four 'elemental orbs' in #Blender. A meditation on perception and prioritization in what is chosen to be photographically memorialized. #MastoArt

I'll counter that darker take with this one by Joanna Macy, which serves as the foreword in her 30th anniversary edition of World As Lover, World As Self:

"When we dare to face the cruel social and ecological realities we have been accustomed to, courage is born and powers within us are liberated to reimagine and even, perhaps one day, rebuild a world.

Do not look away. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside."

https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/entering-the-bardo/

On that note, this recent Caitlin Johnstone article has really stuck with me. Many (incl. myself) are quick to dismiss ideas of psychosocial programming as bogus conspiracy theories, but I think the truth is much more nuanced.

"A population that's been psychologically dominated into doing everything the powerful want doesn't notice that it is being tyrannized, because it isn't being forced to do those things at gunpoint; people think they are doing what they want to do."
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/people-dont-understand-how-unfree

Had the pleasure of encountering some paradigm-shifting books this past year that have completely reframed the way I approach our planetary ecological crisis:

Joanna Macy: World As Lover, World As Self (30th Anniversary Edition), 2021

David Abram: Spell of the Sensuous, 1997

Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass, 2015

Bayo Akomolafe: These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, 2017

Changing our minds is a critical part of finding creative solutions that don't perpetuate destructive systems.

I've tried getting into Mastodon a couple of times in the past but I'm feeling like this time might stick. Fingers crossed.

🛸 Hello, world! 👽