the target looks where you look

Happy full moon eclipse and Happy New Year everyone. :)

I’m writing from the kitchen table with a cloth face mask on and penicillin in my system after an unplanned trip to the urgent care this morning for an ear infection. Woof. A cold had been brewing, making itself cozy with some mucous production and fatigue these past few days, but I guess I fucked around with doing too much yesterday and the bitch decided to take advantage. Really curious how a 35º change in temperature from mid-week to weekend will affect all our bodies.

I want this to be an interesting jam packed newsletter but baby I’m tired. I’m gonna take it slow.

Geez, I just went on Tidal to find some background music, digging around in the new releases, and it’s just… I’ve been so amused and appalled at how white indie rock has shamelessly delved into this 60s & 70s psychedelic aesthetic with their visuals and sound over the past few years. And then the whole thing of the sound being derivative of Black music from decades past. I don’t have the energy to get into it. Did I ever share that article about Jared Leto and hippies and media narrative control and the CIA? Well I can’t link you now anyway cause looks like the site is deleted. 0_0; For that matter, here’s a screencap I saved from a slideshow I can’t find anymore…

If you remember from last time, I was counting down the days till I could stop my full time hours at my job and enter into a beautiful month and a half off, to prioritize getting shit done with my All That’s Left rewrite. Is it any surprise that the first full week in I get sick? I remember near the end of December wondering if something like this would happen, and all week I’ve been pulling the Star and the Hanged Man in my tarot deck. Take it easy. Cool.

I thought about writing some epic 2019 recap thread, but again I’m tired, and you can honestly see what was what on my News page. Speaking of…

news

Just hours earlier I received my reprinted, expanded short story collection, TRANSITIONAL TIMES TRANSITIONAL BODY.

Tales from the crossroads of desire, hope, and despair. A sci-fi survivor memoir that has no princes, cops, or chosen people, that does not promote the colony or romanticize the empire. The short stories in this freshly expanded collection make apt companions for travelers, underworlders, heartbroken hope seekers, and of course fellow cyborgs.

Once a zine, now a book with 6 stories:
• Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance
• About A Woman and A Kid
• Adolescence
• The Romance of the Colony
• Monk's Dream
• Real Work You Deserve

Set in OpenDyslexic typeface.

106 pages.

3rd edition for 2020.
ISBN: 978-0-9981138-3-8
Ships media mail.

It’s 8 bucks, plus $2.50 shipping in the US. Anyone in my area, you’re more than welcome to message me & stop by my place and get a copy, I just don’t have it in my rn to coordinate delivery meetups—in my experience they nearly always drag out and in the end feel pretty inconvenient for me. Thanks for understanding.

floating world podcast

Episode 5: Ghost of Mars just dropped and I’m very excited to listen! Catch me doing a feature on this experimental podcast I love that reminds me of the best of radio/sound shows

As usual check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. In this episode some folks leave for Mars under dubious circumstances. Projecting the insidious logic of colonialism onto our (very hypothetical) spaceward expansion, M Téllez (@cyborgmemoirs) of Metropolarity weaves a tale of subjugation, coercion, and little resistances - amid neighbourhood walks, cyborg rhythms, and a strange goodbye from an old caretaker.

You can find out about M Téllez at their website, www.cyborgmemoirs.com

Submissions from:
John Morrison
Rodnie King
Cybee Bloss
Elissa Fredeen
Rachel MacDonald

compiled, edited and composed by Ada Adhiyatma / madam data
'little feather' composed and performed by Ada Adhiyatma

if you'd like to support and maintain The Floating World, consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/thefloatingworldpodcast

in case you missed it

• Heat Death of Western Human Arrogance is now an audiostory [Mixcloud] [Youtube]

• Venus Saturn Square smut zine is open for submissions, due Feb 29th

• My guest spot on a live speculative fiction panel edition of Weird Kids Wanted social/literary criticism podcast [ep11]

coming up

• Soothsaying with Metropolarity podcast in the works???

but anyway…

I walked up and down the streets downtown the other day in response to this US aggression on Iran shit. I haven’t been in loads of demonstrations or marches or protests, but I was disappointed (and have likewise been disappointed in the past) at how lacking in persuasion the march chants were. No rhythm in the chants or the stepping, and if anything can be appropriated from Mummer’s day parades can we turn the Mummer’s strut into a protest dance? Or liiike, more I’m saying that the Mummer’s Strut is incredibly easy to do, and don’t people just love going to New Orleans and doing that second line dancing? Maybe I’m being ignorant—maybe people don’t want anything to do with Mummers not even taking their moves.

Later that day (since it was a nationwide coordinated demo), I read a twitter thread—a few, and many from people who were out in the streets during the 90s and 2000s over oil wars in the Middle East—but this one in particular was talking about how mass demonstrations do nothing to prevent war. They weren’t being nihilistic, they were recounting their own participation in anti-war anti-imperialism protest movements, and recounting recent world events related to it all. I think it’s good people show out in the streets, and that alllll the people who had their phones out recording us as wide-eyed bystanders, all the cars that drove by honking, they catch that energy. I think in a local way it’s better than say, being absolutely legally barred from demonstration and violently repressed if we try. I want to exercise that right and shit. But in terms of yeah how the fuck does this affect the decisions and resources and choices available to our rapist psychopath president??? (and bet he’s not the first!) How do our street demonstrations affect the major players of geopolitical power??? In the early 90s a hacker said straight into a video camera how he was basically as powerful as the government, and if the banking system or a facist government needed to be taken down, would he do it? If it needed to be done, he answers. Where is he now, I wonder.

World news is distressing. I just want to say to all my Philadelphians and mid-atlantic region peeps that while I don’t think our extreme weather will be as catastrophically massive as Indonesian floods and Australian fires and so on (yet), I do think we’re going to be dealing with bugs, illnesses related to sanitation, water & air quality issues, etc. A transplant asked me with a bit of disbelief, I drank the tap water here? Philly soil is full of lead! And I was like… ::looks down at self and sighs:: and… I’m gonna be drinking this water until I really physically can’t anymore. I have always resented bottled water as a trend and marketing item. For years I would rather get dehydrated than go to a store and spend a dollar or two dollars on a bottle of water. The motherfuckers. If you didn’t have someone in your life growing up making sure you let the tap water run for 10-20 seconds before you poured it in a glass, well, just remember to do that cause I think it’s a good habit.

Now I will admit some personal thoughts regarding abolition. Maybe they’re adjacent thoughts, or thoughts that I contend with when I think about virtue signaling my belief in abolition on socials. I believe in abolition over reform. Abolish the police, abolish the prisons, abolish the president and all nation states. Something else must arise, that is the dream. Black and Indigenous disabled and trans people should lead, and the rest of us should be in service. I believe that, and yet I find myself a coward when it comes to fully refusing participation in the material structures and institutions that keep imperial death cults in power. I find myself unable to totally respond to the needs of those I should be in service to. I am unwilling, when the hourly calls come, to give all the money in my posession or all my time-energy away, and find myself incapable to stretch that thin and stay sane. And while I also believe the reasoning that one should take care of themself in order to take care of others, it becomes so questionable to me under some abolitionist lenses. Given our specific personal circumstances, what's the difference between having resources and hoarding resources? I see more and more people on the streets in Philly and I know I don't ever wanna be in that position again; I'm still burnt out from being the main person holding a whole house together; I have a level of material stability that I know would be foolish to completely abandon (self preservation). In order to face a personal problem, one must admit that they have a problem to begin with, right? One must constantly reckon with having a belief system (aka ideology) that isn't yet powerful enough to overcome the violent demands of our material confines. And there is so much more to say here than words can give meaning to. So many variable contexts to situate and reason within. And this is just a meditation that I'm sharing, from daily interrogations I hold for myself. Make of it what you will.

I just went through my email looking for “abolition” and a Data for Black Lives email came back, with these words from Yeshimabeit Milner in it

"Abolition is about reimagining the social landscape, it is about unlearning, surrendering, and it begins with you, right here and right now."

and this video embedded (shout out to Petra for fwd’ing the email):

till next time

take care of yourself, friends

Monk

@}-}-;———