This time around, I'm going to include some things for reading that are of interest to me that I think you might be into. I have a bit of an Announcement to make, finished a book and starting yet another and it's the first full week of Black August, a month of training, studying and fasting.

Reading

📕 The Struggle Within

This book took me three days to read — I have so many notes. There's movements I have no idea about like AIM or the Puetro Rican liberation fronts. To see how much influence the Black Panthers had in these groups, as well as groups like Weather Undeground makes the nature of COINTELPRO even more insidious — it being a system that works to destroy and criminalize dissent. With Obama's work to make dissent basically unfavorable even amongst Black people with his actions with Ferguson and the PATRIOT act, there's a big need for a cultural revolution that we can only begin to fight for. I really can't recommend this book enough; dream hampton's afterword convinced me to reread Assata Shakur's autobiography.

📖 Prisons Make Us Safer

I picked this up immediately after The Struggle Within; another of the author's, Victoria Law, books is listed as recommended reading. The books opens with a sobering statement: that the use of terms of like "inmate", "prisoner" and the like are all terms meant to dehumanize people. This is something I'm going to have to burn into my psyche as I find myself thinking about this a lot; how language contributes to dehumanization, especially when it's handled by the State.

The Tech Resume

Since I can't lose anything by reading a book on how to improve my resume (I also got it for free), I've begun reading this book after breaking fast. I have to admit, my mobility in tech has been both through my skill and social relations; so a resume wasn't as necessary for me (at least for screening). I wrote about what I learned.

🔗 Around the Web

I'm going to try something a bit new! Here's some things I've read that were informative:

• Labor Notes: New 'Battery Belt' Opens Organizing Front in the South: A great and speedy article from the team that highlights the critical need for workers in the South to take this move to a new landscape to seize more worker power. Green capitalism is a beast that washes liberals' feigned concerns with the climate crisis into something that we can allegedly fix by paying the people who've contributed to it more money.
• Truthout: Bush's Infrastructure Bill Vote Criticized b Opponent and Amplified by AIPAC: As misogynoir is a core component of American life and governing politics, it's not shocking to see this. What raised my eye was that she was working to bring more to the table; in a more honest representation of what a Green New Deal would have encompass (protections for people).
• Futurism: Bumble and Hinge Let Creeps See Your Exact Location: Another example of tech companies making tools that people at risk first and needing the community to remind them that safety's important.
• The Haitian Times: The other side of Cap-Haïtien's clean market: A pile of trash from it: Another day, another example of the over-indexing for the wealthy communities in Haiti contributing to inequality; this time in sanitation. It's escalated to a point where Japan, on behalf of the United Nations, is willing to spend USD $2 million dollars on it. Note that nearly $35 million has been allegedly spent already — with nothing to show.
• The Guardian: Antarctic temperatures rise 10C above average in near record heatwave: Well. This feels like the new normal. The predator class is trying to play chicken with the planet and it's going to be at the cost of everyone else.
• The Washington Post: How the Montgomery Riverfront brawl sparked an unofficial holiday: What a time to be alive, ha.

✏️ Writing

I've been picking up my blogging. I gave my roadmap for commemorating Black August, a personal push to blog more in lieu of a sever outage and a bit of a brain dump about my evolving conflict with social media. I'm always open to thoughts on these things — expect follow ups on them soon! I've also incorporated a tool to help me optimize my writing, vale; mainly to reduce my use of ablest terminology and guiding my writing a bit. I do have a book on prose that I've been meaning to reread; perhaps in September.

🖥️ Coding

Livtet has gotten some improvements. I'm making use of a caching layer to pull in the book covers as well as information from the archive itself, which has helped increase the response times of the application. Eager to share more on this week!

📸 Seeing

I think something that'll help people read is seeing the book. I'm a very big fan of writing and sticking up a book so you'll know if I've made progress and have thoughts that I have yet to follow up on by that alone. Berger has given me a lot of homework.

I also reread all of the volumes of Saga that I've collected over the years — eight to be exact. Such a gripping chronicling of folks who are in love and a galaxy that refuses to acknowledge it. The meta-critique of the series was more relevant than I expected and this panel really stuck out to me.

On top of everything else, this is the song of last week: