I hate how two things perpetually make it nearly impossible to do any kind of collective activity where I live.

One of those things is an excess of tourists/tourism-related things. Too many restaurants, too many bars, too many souvenir shops (on one short pedestrian stretch alone, there are EIGHT), too many nonsensical "attractions" (not even museums or galleries, which frequently aren't that great as options, either). Too many of the residences have been turned into AirBnBs, pushing people out.

The other is that the people who remain are all people who refuse to engage with each other in any capacity. There's the obvious class disparity that is so different between the people who live here and own their homes (many of whom are citizens and retired from prestigious jobs—not all but a good chunk of 'em) and then a handful of people renting (many of whom are non-citizens, and citizens always look at us as temporary regardless of how long we've been here). Hell, there's even a huge disparity between the people who rent in this area (because my shithead landlady thankfully has kept the rent fairly low in comparison to flats around us—though, it's still high—we're one of the poorest immigrant families in the area, while others are fucking embassy families who are the temporary bastard expats everyone looks at the rest of us as being).

This isn't to say that I don't want to do those collective things (like building a library of things or whatever), but it makes it so hard because so many of them just don't want to. It's so infuriating, especially because it means doing something super simple within a single apartment building is absurdly difficult (like building management, who the owners of flats in the building pay for, will remove fridges if we try to do "share food so it doesn't spoil" sorts of things... and also tourists love ruining that shit when someone does try it, for fuck's sake).

Okay, if people know a series that is like Amulet by Kazu Kibuishi, I want you to tell me because I am two books away from finishing it with my student, and I don't want to disappoint her by not finding something similar because she really loves this one (edit: I'm doing this because she specifically asked for similar things, not because I made this decision for her).

Preferably, I want something that I can read as a PDF or at least via sharing because we have online lessons. And it'd be cool if it was largely finished or self-contained.

(I've grabbed Nimona, and I'm trying to hunt down The Nameless City. Maybe I should grab the Avatar series, hmm.)

I'm glad to see people being rightfully angry about the news that Dolores Huerta shared along with the news published by the NYT.

Now do the boards of your little institutes. Check some of your fave authors who your media groups and publishing organisations love and support and bring around all the time.

Because I can guarantee a fair few folks are sitting around with the exact kinds of shitheads and their apologists, no qualms about it. And I know, because I've been told by some of them, that it doesn't matter because it's "carceral" for them to face consequences (like deplatforming and decreasing access to potential victims or people they can weaponise against their past victims) or that their work is just too important. I've seen way too many of them latch onto how we should be engaging in restorative justice while they straight up shit on anything that focuses on survivors.

Looking at some specific anarchist spaces, btw.

I know this is me kind of... spiraling on something, but I need to be very clear:

Judith Suissa has literally done precisely zero for anarchist pedagogy (or anarchist learning spaces or anarchist anything). She wrote a book about a niche topic. One. She hasn't worked with anarchists, she isn't an anarchist, and she makes her living by being an academic.

And we know that academics, particularly those who do not engage with the topics they research (but even those...), are engaged in extractive work. Nothing she did benefited any anarchic learning community. Her work also focused primarily on alternative schools that weren't specifically anarchist in any capacity, regardless of whether or not there was an anarchist somewhere inside of it.

She did the academic thing. Niche topic to extract from, conflate things that aren't really that topic (while ignoring the relevant people in that space), and then move on.

And she has spent the last decade being a piece of shit TERF and has appeared in Krauss's most recent piece of shit bigot book, The War on Science (2025). And here's me... in 2023 pointing this out for what feels like the dozenth time.