schipelblorp

Is anyone else attracted to internet forums merely because you can be sure at least one person is going to get your reference, no matter how obscure?

And when you are among a smaller group of people in real life, you would just be met with blank stares?

Hi, there. Our server is trying to replace it's home page sidebar image.

If anyone would like to submit their human-created art with some combination of lemmings and technology, we vote on September 11.

Thanks!

tl;dr: I did not understand then, but I understand now how my life is built upon her suffering. She is systematically marginalized to do low-wage, unstable work that affords me the ability to purchase services, products, and a lifestyle because of race/gendered/class/citizenship privilege. The managing of palliative solutions to her problems also created a career for me. What I did not understand was my own investment and implication in her suffering. Most white “saviors” do not see their systematic relationship with those they are “helping.” There is distance: I am privileged here; you are oppressed over there. When in reality, it is dialectical. We aren’t trained to see the relational aspects, where I am privileged because she is oppressed, and she is oppressed because I am privileged.

Excerpt

The Makings of a White Matriarch

I was a case manager for Job Corps in my mid-twenties before I was a teacher. Job Corps is one of the last Great Society programs from the Johnson administration in the 1960s that was supposed to provide residential training in a trade. Students, who were from age 16 to 24, lived in dorms and went to classes for their GED and to learn a trade like plumbing or secretarial skills. My job was to assist students leaving campus once they graduated, hopefully finding them jobs, transportation, housing, childcare, and possibly community college.

The vast majority of my caseload was people of color, primarily Latinx and Native American. To say that nothing qualified me for this position is an understatement. I had a history degree, which carved out no career path that would not require an advanced degree or at least a teaching certificate, options I was not ready to take. I had worked my way through college through various forms of retail, warehouse work, and eventually, I became a courier at a law firm. Once I was out of college, I sold car insurance for a large corporation, I was a barista, a secretary, and worked on commission at a local jewelry store. As someone who worked through high school, I was very flexible and familiar with various forms of low wage work. Aside from insurance sales, this was my first professional opportunity and all they were asking was that I owned a car, could network, and would be able to get along with the students who were not much younger than I was. I was also required to be on call 24 hours a day in case students needed me for something.

It was a confusing concept, the concept of students living in poverty, facing systematic racism, and intergenerational trauma “needing” something. When would they not need something? What was I supposed to give them? I was completely overwhelmed with calls about problems I had no idea how to solve and no guidance about how to find out. I was handed a hundred or so cases, made up of teenagers and young adults I was supposed to track for a year, some leaving the center, some who had already left, and others who had been gone for a few months. The goal of the position was to account for where students went after they left the center.

Job Corps receives a huge government grant that we had to answer to, so we needed to show that our program worked, evidenced by stable employment of graduates. My 24-year-old self had no skepticism about this. My older self knows that they probably put unqualified people like me in this position because I would be kind enough to take the calls, responsible enough to gather the data needed, and compliant enough not to question long-standing beliefs and practices that went on in a center like this.

This was also was my first job as a white matriarch. I believed in my own benevolence and the ability to solve peoples’ problems. I was also acting out the part of white savior. White saviority, prevalent in films like Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers and the Blind Side, always includes the notion of an antiracist white hero or heroine who believes that they are helping people of color overcome obstacles in their lives. White saviors believe they counteract racism by seeing the humanity in all people but really hold racist notions of the people they are tasked with helping (Maurantonio, 2017).

The notion of white saviority works together with colorblindness to mask the significance of race and racism in the supposed benevolent actions of white people. For example, I could believe that I was the same as my students by erasing their specific struggles related to structural inequality, but I could also simultaneously believe that my caseload needed me because the success of people of color was something dependent upon white people.

The problem with white saviority is not that whites are completely useless to people of color. It is that white saviors believe that people of color could not solve their own problems, cannot teach their own children, or manage their own families. It is, of course, part of white matriarchal maintenance. The belief that I would be able to handle these issues at my age is part of how white women gain power over people of color. I was going to be in their homes, their workplaces, and I was going to be surveilling them at best, interfering with their lives at worst. How my lens about their lives was considered competent is deeply rooted in notions of white women’s moral superiority and competence in all things having to do with schools or helping professions (Feimster, 2009; McRae,2018; Spring, 2008).

The second day on the job, a sixteen-year-old 1.5 generation Mexican immigrant, Lucia, came into my office, furious because she was going to have to leave the center without her GED or her training because she was pregnant. The center was not able to house pregnant students in their third trimester. She had nowhere to go except her boyfriend’s family’s house and she was not sure that she wanted to be there. My job was to transition her into schooling or a job at this point, and so I took up the task of trying to figure out where she could go and what she could do. Attempting to help Lucia took me down a path that I had not anticipated and that haunted me afterwards. If I were to name an event that led me to where I am now, it would be getting to know her, her struggle, and failing miserably to find my way with her through a system that does not care about her at all.

I learned about what it meant to try to navigate schools, workplaces, hospitals, and social services for immigrants. I also learned about some of the underground networks for work and money that many immigrants depend on in order to survive. Because my job was nebulous and the goal was to help students stabilize after the Job Corps center, I accompanied her on appointments with doctors, social services, and visited her in the hospital when the baby was born. Many times though, toward the end of her pregnancy, I would just pick her up and take her to Sonic or drive around and talk.

I had a genuine concern and affection for her. She entered my own life at time when I felt rudderless, alone, and distant from family, and I needed company too. Her life had been full of violence, obstacles, and instability, which had landed her at Job Corps like many of her peers. She usually tried to have a lighter mood with me, but some days she shared her deep sadness and fear. One day, we sat at Sonic. She had become quiet, the way women do at the end of pregnancy, and she said, “Miss, why do I have to suffer?”

I did not understand then, but I understand now how my life is built upon her suffering. She is systematically marginalized to do low-wage, unstable work that affords me the ability to purchase services, products, and a lifestyle because of race/gendered/class/citizenship privilege. The managing of palliative solutions to her problems also created a career for me. What I did not understand was my own investment and implication in her suffering. Most white “saviors” do not see their systematic relationship with those they are “helping.” There is distance: I am privileged here; you are oppressed over there. When in reality, it is dialectical. We aren’t trained to see the relational aspects, where I am privileged because she is oppressed, and she is oppressed because I am privileged.

Let's say I need to grab a large EPUB/PDF (60MB+) from a site with multiple mirrors. What often happens is I go the mirror, cut/paste the link, and watch as the file slowly trickles in before ultimately failing.

So I go to the next mirror and the process repeats.

Is there a way I can plug all the separate links into a software manager and download the file concurrently in chunks from the different servers, torrent style? Or at least resume the download at a fresh link?

I downloaded Persepolis on Linux Mint, but it doesn't seem to do anything differently than the browser.

Any tips for finding subtitles TV shows and movies? There´s databases out there, but they don't seem to have what I'm looking for.

Transcription is obviously better than subtitles. AI is a possibility to transcribe; I've experimented with local models and had poor results. Professional AI services are good, but I am extremely broke.

For various reasons, I prefer to d/l my stuff and watch it on jellyfin. I know if I were streaming my life would be easier in some ways.

Current target is Lastman (2016) in French.

[Tag: Loose fit.]

One of my goals has been to improve my ability to hear music, and I've been working on it on-and-off for about a year now.

Yesterday I sat down at the piano and tried a new exercise: I play a note on the piano, hear it in my mind, and I wait for another note to come to mind.

I played a C. I heard it in my mind, a little foggily, as the real sound died away, and I waited for my brain to come up with another note. After several seconds, it gave me a C# an octave higher. And that was it. I was at the piano for about 5 minutes, and my brain, which has been playing guitar and flute and voice and clarinet and violin and piano sporadically over my entire life, provided exactly one note.

When I was younger, an English teacher told me I had a sense of style, a unique way of writing. That was the first time anyone saw anything interesting in me, so I decided I was going to be a writer. Every time I sat down to write, it was like that exercise at the piano: nothing would come.

Oh, sure, I could write words down--I was a furious transcriber of my thoughts; but if I asked my mind to give me a story, or a character, or an image, it was quiet.

When I would do therapy, it felt like chatter that never went anywhere. I remember trying Internal Family Systems and earlier Inner Child work (edit: and jeez, even before that, Gestalt), where you imagine parts of yourself as people and have conversations with them. I'd struggle to placate my therapist by describing a part, but they were almost all mute.

Some people say journalling, especially over their childhood, is extremely helpful. When I try to do that, I am met with more silence; probably more related to neglect than abuse. I've heard it said you can't remember all the times you mother didn't comfort you, or all the times your dad did't see you.

One of the deepest silences come when I ask my brain questions, especially, "What do we want to do today?" If I have a day off, or a week off, a month off, I drift around the house keeping myself occupied until it is time for bed.

Is there a link between this silence in my mind and my lack of intrinsic motivation?

I notice when it comes to motivating myself, I'm largely unable to do it. I have to imagine some kind of reward at the end of it, and it has to be a BIG reward. I meditated for over 3 years, chasing Enlightenment (also see: spiritual bypass). I went hard into music this year, thinking I'd win friends by being a musician, but that was a fool's errand, though I have no regrets about what I've accomplished. I mastered Spanish because I thought it would set me on the path to being employable.

I do sometimes come up with these fucked up compromises, where I say I'll learn a language, so I start memorizing conjugations and going through vocabulary, but that excitement of speaking with others or absorbing media is not there to organize and motivate me, so I spend most of time reviewing flash cards. It's just another dumb way to pass the time.

Yo estaba. J'etais. Eu estava.

If I ask myself, "What would I want to do today, for it's own sake, with no promise of future reward or development?" I never have an answer. So I end up here, on lemmy, posting, commenting, replying, refreshing: subscribed, local, all.

Is there anyone that has struggled with this and found a way out or a way in or a way through?

Hi, since I've started using Lemmy, I've been running into the same people and having something approaching a relationship with them--even if it's mostly imaginary.

It got me to wondering if there's a community or form of community available on the internet that I haven't tried yet that might actually lead to something approaching having friends.

So far Discord has been extremely meh; but I've heard of Mastodon and Peertube and Matrix and all kinds of weird stuff that is outside the mainstream.

Anyone have better success with different protocols?

Who exactly can see a private message on Lemmy? Anyone who runs a server? Or only the sending/receiving server?

And what all is your experience with Matrix? I don't have an account, and imagine I would need one if someone wants to message me there.

Because I'd guess it is--a covered teacup with a misplaced handle, random "generic devices" scattered about, cables that go nowhere....

Any interest is an open call for a replacement image for the server?

I use Anki and the MOST consistent reason a word lands in the leech pile is not because I can't remember what it means, but because I consistently think it means something different than what it means.

So for, instance, I keep thinking French costaud means, "rib or side", probably because I associate it with *costal" from anatomy class or costilla from Spanish.

What I do in this instance is make a Match Pairs card with:

• costaud matching "strong, burly"
  and
• côte matching "rib."

This way I practice differentiating them and simultaneously learn the correct word for rib.

But I do worry that I'm unintentionally strengthening the connection by having them always together like this.

What do you guy do for these situations?

Edit: You may notice that a properly formatted card would include le/la to indicate the gender of the noun, which costaud, as an adjective, would not have but I am inconsistent and also don't like depending on little tricks that only work in index cards, so for the matching card I do not write "la côte" because that way I could guess the card based on part of speech instead of definition.

Situation: Someone makes a post asking a question. I spend time answering it. Then the post is deleted.

I can no longer access the post and therefore can not find the author to block them.

What I do have is a link to an empty page.

How do I find the author?