Well, yeah. They don't really go anywhere and they don't have anything to say.

I just rewatched the prequels. Sure, they can be criticized but they do tell a rather cohesive story about a dying democracy's inability to deal with emergent totalitarianism, while also exploring Anakin Skywalker as a character.

The new trilogy starts with ideas that might be interesting to investigate but then completely fails to do so.

It does.

I've experienced symptoms of depression for as long as I can remember. Over the years I tried a lot of different treatments, medication, therapy, etc. None of it ever worked.

I lost a lot of jobs and friendships because I simply didn't have the energy to do the bare minimum. I divorced the love of my life in part because I could see how much my chronic illness was weighing on them.

I was never suicidal but I've frequently wished I was because that at least would provide me with an option to stop the unending apathy.

There's never going to be a point in my life when I'm not depressed. I'm gonna have to be very disciplined and work hard to maintain a level of functioning that I consider suboptimal. Mistakes made when trying to judge how much energy something will take or those unavoidable times where you simply need to push yourself more than is comfortable will be setback that could take days or weeks to recover from.

But I have reached a point in which I'm content a lot more. I have a partner that loves me and they're great. I'm a more-or-less reliable member of a local anarchist collective and people appreciate me and come to me for advice. They're respectful of my limitations. I've been reading more and trying new hobbies. There's people who love me and I love them.

I can look at a sunset and appreciate its beauty. Yesterday I was singing along with some punk rock while driving and kinda enjoyed it. I baked cookies to share with people and I look forward to handing them out. I found an empty snail shell on the street and it was pretty enough to make me smile.

Is my life amazing? No. Do I have to work very hard and be very disciplined to achieve what most people seem to have naturally? Yes. Have I reached the point where I think that work and discipline is worth it more often than not? Definitely.

The best advice I can give you is to do things anyway. Seek out things that are, at least in theory, fun or enjoyable. If there's something you'd like to try out but it feels scary or not worth doing, try do it anyway. Look for what makes it easier.

Imagine the coolest possible future version of yourself. Try to take small steps to move in that direction. For me that was things like painting my nails, going to Pride, joining a protested, learning to wield a sword... For my partner this was dying their hair, going out to party, learning to make fire... However it looks to you: try to do it.

Living in Europe this is fairly easy te remember. None of the choices are great, but they definitely exist.

As someone who has treatment-resistant depression: keep inviting your friend. Keep asking them for help when it makes sense to do so. Even if they cancel a lot or are quiet when they do show up. That's helping a lot.

People need community.

I don't live in the US so my assessment might be completely off here, but with protests like this you shouldn't hope for the more radical positions. If you're more radical yourself this can be annoying or feel like it serves no purpose and I get that. It still provides opportunities for us.

There's two main reasons I advocate for showing up at things like this:

1. Treat it like a networking event. Go talk to people, hand out flyers, wave your flags, bring funny signs, hand out vegan cookies... As an anarchist I'm very much aware that most people never think about anarchists, and when they it's rarely in a positive way. Protests like are an opportunity to get people to see, however briefly, that anarchists can be nice people with free cookies.

2. If or when things go poorly, like if the police or the far-right decides to escalate, I'd want people with experience there to provide assistance. Whether that's taking up the front to defend others, yelling: "Walk! Don't run!" while people are trying to get out of tear gas, handing out water so people can rinse out pepper spray (and telling people not to use milk), explaining how to handle a kettle, etc.

I don't like that advice. Part of the fun of TTRPGs, to me, is the randomness involved in outcomes.

But if it works for you it works for you.

Best advice I've ever gotten was that the DM isn't responsible for everything. So now I let players handle the scheduling.

My brother rented out a small cinema to watch this with friends and family for a special occasion. I didn't know what to expect but I don't think I've laughed out loud with any other movie as an adult.

It's a really weird, funny movie and I'm glad it exists.

It's probably dangerous to think this is just any one thing. For the vast majority of people it's likely just a form of normalization. If you've been involved with anarchism (or other radical politics) for a while it can be hard to remember just how normalized state repression or even state violence is. Similar to "capitalist realism" people just aren't used to imagining that things could be differently. Addressing that would involve both arguing that certain things (such as police defaulting to violence) shouldn't be considered as normal, while also presenting viable alternatives that we could be doing right now. For that last part I think the concept of prefigurative politics plays a big role.

I'd perhaps cautiously suggest that some sort of "learned helplessness" or a variation thereof could also be at play. When you lack agency and bad outcomes seem to happen regardless of what you do, many people will just passively accept the bad outcomes. Here I think people should be shown that through community and agency you can create positive outcomes. Getting people even tangentially involved in any form of direct action has been (in my experience) a good way to make that happen. It is, however, rather challenging to get people to take that step. Telling them about (successful) forms of direct action will be necessary here. Someone I know recently had the realization that direct action can have a much bigger impact than they thought after watching the documentary "To Kill A War Machine."

Most people also just don't have the necessary handholds to think about all of this. The necessity of a government or the continued existence of capitalism is taken as a given, the same as gravity or magnetism. A lot of effort gets put into making sure this is the case and most people don't have the time, energy, or inclination to look into it much deeper.

I hate nationalism very much and would love to have a more global hub to learn about the important political subjects that dont crop up that much in French (my local one) or US media. Sadly, I never see such a thing. National communities are a bad solution but to a very real problem, which is that global themed communities end up being US ones.

This strikes me as they key point. While I seriously doubt any community based on where I live (Belgium) would be very active, it would be really cool to have conversations about things happening near (or near-ish) me or about region-specific subjects.

The example you give about immigration is a really good one, since the challenges with the EU's border regime are meaningfully different to what the US is facing.

No idea what the best way to approach this.

Country-specific communities chafe ideologically and might just not be active enough to be worthwhile. Language-centric ones make some sense, but run the risk of seeing the same problem as English ones (namely, being mostly centered on discussion about the largest or most culturally dominant nation state using that language). It'd also (potentially) divide countries that aren't linguistically monolithic.

We've had predictive text and automation of boilerplate code for years without needing any generative AI.

Hostility towards what is now colloquially called AI seems very justified to me. The costs to society, especially the environmental ones, can't be justified by the meagre "benefits" it purports to offer.

The biggest boons of generative AI I've see its champions mention (other than making horrifying imagery that makes someone feel like an artist with zero art involved) are cost-reduction and automating the "boring" parts.

The cost-reduction seems unsustainable and mostly exists because these companies are operating at an enormous loss. A lot of the automation already existed and those "boring" tasks where also opportunities for junior coders to learn their trade.

The Revolutionary May Day March is Brussels was pretty chill. After the police heavily escalated things last year, this time they kept their distance and the whole thing was as festive as it should be.

I think they can help in a small way. If you're only ever meeting people online, you'll rarely face consequences for poor behavior or see people facing consequences for their behavior.

That being said, finding allies is probably a bigger aspect here. Where I live there's fairly few of those spaces, especially for non-electoral leftists but that also means the ones we have are always filled with different groups and individuals that might otherwise not have met. This leads to more cooperation and understanding.

If you're an anarchist, I see no point in "pretending" you're not.

Do you think the, by now century-old, propaganda efforts against anarchism couldn't be redirected to a new term?

Sure, some people are put off by the term "anarchism" because of its negative connotations. You don't need new vocabulary to counter that. You can either just correct their misconceptions or show their error by example. The people who aren't willing to listen to you doing so also aren't going to be convinced of your ideas of you package them differently.

I think people generally overestimate the extent to which "anarchism" being a scary term matters. Most people don't even think about anarchism as an active political force.

You would also be distancing yourself from historical and ongoing anarchist struggles and efforts, which I personally think are an important way in which people get to known anarchism in a positive way.

Sure, but that doesn't change my points in any way.

Belgium has five governments. All of them have been silent while the country is literally on fire.

The ruling parties have zero interest in even acknowledging the realities of the Climate Crisis and are more interested in brutally striking down climate activists.

Installing something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu is fairly easy. The hardest part is probably creating the install media and that's not particularly hard ei her.

If you don't rely on specific software (like Adobe), using Linux is a good idea. I'd still advice not to mess with a computer you rely on and wait until you have sufficient time to troubleshoot something. Even if nothing goes wrong a new OS can still take a little getting used to.

Everyone around me always assumed I was a boy (or later: a man). I never really felt like a girl and, growing up, I didn't know there were alternatives. The performative masculinity of my peers never set well with me, I didn't like all of the things boys are supposed to like, and often got along better with girls than most other guys. I just thought I was an open-minded, quiet, and feminist dude who wasn't always great at performing masculinity.

Then I was really depressed for a long time and my gender wasn't something I thought about a lot. I learned what non-binary meant and met a couple of non-binary people, but I didn't hate being a man and figuring out how to live with depression had a higher priority than looking into my gender.

More recently my depression has gotten more manageable and I had more time and energy to look at other aspects of my life. Due to conversations about gender (with both cis and trans folks), I felt I should do some introspection. I didn't hate being a man, but I also never really enjoyed it. There's aspects of masculinity or my (rather traditionally masculine) body I appreciate, but not in a way that's connected to my gender.

This is all fairly new to me, so I'm not good at putting it into words yet. When I see my hands with bright nail polish on, they feel more like my hands. Wearing a skirt gives me energy in a way other clothing doesn't always do. When my girlfriend first referred to me as non-binary, I couldn't stop smiling for an hour. It all just feels more correct.

Since realizing I'm non-binary I've found each much easier to exercise and eat healthily. I've started taking more care of how I dress and of my personal hygiene. I just feel more like myself.

Even just very small and temporary ones would do a lot, in my opinion.

Part of what makes direct action valuable is that it temporarily creates a space for just doing what needs doing, with less regard to the reality of capitalism and the state.

This book can't be recommended enough.

If you're an experienced activist you'll probably know a lot of what it says already, but it'll do so in language that helps you teach it to newer people looking to get involved.

And as an anarchist I disagree with you, but on most struggles we're actually facing we're probably on the same side.

If you're polite and don't force me to operate within a hierarchical structure we can probably work together in a lot of real-world situations.