When I was young, I sometimes used to say “I don’t have an accent.” Now I realize that such a statement is tantamount to saying that “I haven’t observed/experienced/fully internalized the breadth and extent of language x.” I somewhat internalized my gringo accent when learning to speak Spanish, but I think it was really took moving to New York City to learn the degree to which I will probably never speak Spanish like someone who grew up in Mexico or Cuba or Colombia....

At the end of the day, there are no rules. The “law” and “justice” in this country are all in support of empire and capital. Buck v. Bell (1927) The court ruled that the state has the “right” to control the “genetic stock”, roughly speaking of a place/people. More accurately, “we will do it; shut up about it or we will kill you too.” We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives....

My first course in complex analysis involved almost no pictures. This is the first post in a series dedicated to distilling a few neat properties of analytic and meromorphic functions by letting pictures and videos do as much heavy lifting as possible. A survey of complex functions We begin with the identity function $f(z) = z$. This form of domain coloring is essentially a kind of polar coordinates where the “base color/shade” is an angular coordinate and the “darkness” is the distance from the origin....

Imperialism Who Is That You All Are Going to Whip, Mr. Legree by Robert Minor This one always makes me laugh. Even when I know it is coming and I try to not laugh. As far as I can tell (and it is somewhat difficult), it was drawn by Robert Minor for the Daily Worker . I don’t know why the main place I can find it is the Marxist library ....

TLDR: The way I determine whether a “text editing tool”/“thing I use to write software” is a text editor or an IDE is as follows: If it requires more than one second to open/fully start, it is an IDE; if it opens in less than one second, it is a text editor. Examples GNU Nano , and out of the box/vanilla (neo )vim are absolutely text editors because they completely start/open in less than one second....

A review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States TLDR: This book was an absolute banger that I don’t think 98% of Americans have the heart to read. To be clear, any literate and educated adult who wants to seriously engage with the history and trajectory of the United States in the scheme of the past 5000 years of history must understand and internalize these lenses. In atleast one lens “Everything in US history is about the land – who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity broken into peices to be bought and sold on the market”1....

Today I was walking through some of the deserts roughly 1 hour south of Dubai. This was my first time in a desert and I wanted to know what it feels like to walk for a while with no water in sight. As I got to the top of a sand hill and felt how powerful the sun really is in a desert, the following hit me: Drinking alcohol frequently leads to dehydration, which can be a death sentence in the desert, or atleast divert limited water from more important uses....

Hikikomari Kyuuketsuki no Monmon is my favorite anime of Fall 2023. The Jujutsu Kaisen Shibuya arc had some good scenes this season, but is kinda settling into not having much of a plot, pushing it further into just some teenage power fantasy. The Tokyo Revengers Tenjiku arc is…fine but I am just getting a bit sick of Takemishi’s main redeeming quality being limited to having unlimited HP. The geniuses at MyAnimeList convinced me to check this out from an email describing this show as “Clumsy Vampires, Pervy Maids, and Politics Galore!...

This is the first of many posts that react to/discuss the History of the Indian People and Culture series. I plan to write roughly one every hundred pages or so, mainly to make sure I understand the claims in the series. The first few chapters of Volume One were rather dull, insofar as we mainly focussed on the scope of the series, dicussed which sources were most valuable and worth considering, and described the geography, flora, and fauna of India....