like most people I know, I was a voracious reader in my youth, usually clocking in at 100+ books/year, and today I am unable to read books, except in audiobook format.

I still don't fully understand the causes of this social phenomenon, which has been the subject of many a youtube essay etc. but much to my delighted surprise, I found I could get into books just as easily as in the old days—during my camping trip. sadly some other issues got in the way of really catching up, but it wasn't due to difficulty concentrating or a supposedly "eroded attention span". In a space of four days I finished Killjoy's "We Will Be Gone Tomorrow" (was already half-done), then I read the entirety of Caplan's "Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, And Contemporary Rhyming Culture" ( @Lunatic you might enjoy this one), then I got well into adrienne's "We Will Not Cancel Us" which was in my list forever.

I tried to understand how come I recovered my long-lost ability, and I think it boils down to two things:

- no Internet ("no cellphones" isn't good enough, has to be "no Internet")
- no backlog of responsibilities.

the second point merits description. usually I go through my days in a state of permanent worry: there's so much cruft piled up in the apartment, and what about everyone's next meal, and this and that plant needs repotting, and I gotta fold my clothes; and I have to keep up the pressure on the visa office, plus do that arbeitsamt registration, and the kids' health insurance is not transfereed yet, and did I pay that one bill? and I should find a lawyer, and what about my genital surgery, and there's that redesign at work, and my home NAS is broken….... etc. etc. etc., there's stuff everywhere nagging at my attention, demanding care, there's too many fires burning that only I can put out and if I don't lots of bad things will happen not just to me but lots of people.

so when I sit to read, I start thinking of all the stuff I should be doing instead, and I can't turn it off. obviously I know that I can't be doing things 24/7 and there's no difference between books and, say, social media, or playing games, or any other of the things I do when I'm not being productive. but somehow books seems especially sensitive to this, they make me reflective in a way that I reflect about all my shortcomings.

in the camping trip I had no *means* to order my apartment, or fill forms, or find a lawyer, so I also had no guilt or worry for not being doing these this. that plus the absence of the temptations of the Internet resulted in going through books like a hot knife through margerine.

my conclusion is that there's nothing wrong with my attention span; rather the way society works changed the environment around me, in a way that doesn't work well for my mind. adulting is a fuck and computers were a mistake.

- "he's terrible at his own language"

- "I don't speak a dialect"

- "ruining the language"

- "this word doesn't exist"

- "in this city people have no accent"

- "kanji etymology"

- "so many people are using word X *wrong*! the actual meaning is this!"

- "English is irregular"

- "primitive language"

- "drawl"

- "eliminate the passive voice from your writing"

- "German is logical/aggressive/ugly" etc., "French is romantic/sophisticated" "Japanese is mysterious" etc.

- "phonetic language"

- "L'Académie française"

- "grammar error"

with temps surpassing 40º in the UK and my European friends woefully unprepared to deal with hotter and hotter summers, I thought I'd share how we do it back home.

- Change your wardrobe. Don't wear jeans or thick, tight clothing in summer. Light colours help, but it's less important than the fabric being loose and breathable. Imagine you get a gust of wind; can you feel the wind? Linen fabric and synthetic activewear are great for this.

- Cover all your skin when going out into the sun, either with loose breathable clothing, or sunscreen.

- "But I'm only going to the tram" – if you don't like dying of melanoma, sunscreen yourself before walking under the radiation of the nuclear deathstar in the sky.

- Wear a summer hat and/or sunglasses.

- Always be sipping. Doesn't matter if you feel thirsty or not, carry water bottles everywhere, fill them on taps, sip often. If you don't the symptom isn't necessarily thirst; it's feeling tired, sluggish, brainfog etc., eventually sunstroke.

- Learn how to make hydrating serum (1L water, 20g sugar, 5g salt). In case someone has sunstroke give them serum; it hits faster than pure water. (also good for other forms of dehydration.)

- Tea and coffe hydrate you, even accounting for diuretic effect. Alcohol dehydrates; if drinking alcohol, drink at least the same amount of water with it.

- Give up not sweating. Sweating is good. It's a very efficient evaporative cooling system (that's why you need breathable clothing, and sipping water).

- Cold meals, refrigerated fruit and ice drinks are great. Counter-intuitively, hot drinks cool you down too, by hyping up the sweat system. Same goes for hot-spicy food. (this literally cools you down, look it up.)

- Don't go outside when the sun is high. Don't eat in outside tables when the sun is high. Don't go to parks, pools or beaches when the sun is high. Wait until the deathstar isn't killing you.

- Lower your expectations of productivity. It's the apocalypse, fuck work. Procrastinate in the hot hours. Kill time. Nap. Implement the siesta as an institution.

- The buildings here are more prepared for cold weather than hot. You might want to invest in good fans, or even cold floors. High ceilings are fresher.

- The higher the air humidity %, the less effective is sweating at cooling you. Be extra careful on high-humidity high-temp days.

- summer nights can be surprisingly chilly. don't get caught unprepared in your super-breathable, breezy hot girl look during a temp drop with rain and wind outside 3am.

- You need to find the kind of resistance that you can see yourself doing all the time, then do it all the time. suppose right now we urgently need baddass antifa soldiers, much more than programmers, and you're a programmer. we still need ~some~ programmers. you'll help more as a badass programmer who put up a website to recruit enthusiastic antifa soldiers, than as a reluctant, half-assed antifa soldier.

- Security is a set of tradeoffs; different people have different needs.
- There is a place for the old invisible uncles who never leave a trace, and there is a place for the twitch streamers.
- Sadly, your personal security approach affects your comrades too. I don't know how to navigate this.

- cruelty is the point. the State _will_ do egregious, baffling, illegal, forms of repression. on purpose, to stifle rebellious sentiment through uncertainty, trauma, terror.
- so must have means to deal with trauma and terror.
- look up on counter-insurgency manuals. a lot of that fear will transmute to anger.
- but what you really need is a life outside activism + a healthy support system. this is as important to keep going as raising funds and oiling guns.
- public callouts is a tool of the past. calling out a politician as genocidal doesn't work when they tweet about genociding and get votes. less callouts, more mask ups.

- The Left still has a lot of patriarchy to untangle, and doesn't recognise carework as political work.
- Carework is crucial right now.

- Making nazis afraid again: simple, effective, high-impact, fun. Very recommended praxis, both engaging and rewarding.

- Euro anarchists have dour meetings. Kurdish and Mexican revolutionaries have fun meetings that feel like parties. The latter 2 are mourning war losses, battling fascists, and indefatigably standing up to stiff govt repression. Euro anarchists will be dealing with that kinda stuff too (some already are), and if we don't learn to have meetings that feel good and fun and healing, we will all burn out before it starts.

- Trying to convince libs is not worth it.
- The top 2 liberal myths: non-State societies have only existed / must always be small-scale; indigenous societies are primitive. these are prejudices and so impossible to be argued with.
- Doing things for the general community is always worth it, even if you can't reach them ideologically. Like respond to the call for volunteers to pack food for refugees. Wear an anarchist patch. Don't initiate political discussions, just be nice and shape their views of what anarchists are like.

- just in general, propaganda of the deed does a lot more outreach than words. one of the best things that Euro anarchists do: remembering the affected when no one else does. while the libs are decrying Ella for the dangers of vigilantism, Jewish elders pass along copies of Antifa-Infoblätter while remembering the Shoa, with a lilt in their voices, "look at what the young people are doing". the media has let go of the NSU coverup and has forgotten about Hanau, but when we invite the families of the Hanau victims to speak, year after year, the Muslim immigrants in the streets and shisha bars stop to watch us. They will remember.

- you need meds or drugs off the system, who do you think of? you need to sneak in a relative, you need an emergency place to crash, you need an illegal abortion, you need protection and can't trust the cops, you feel like the State is violating your bodily autonomy, you feel lonely and empty in the rat race and like there's no community for you, you are just done with the system and ready to fuck stuff up, who do you think of? right now for a lot of people the first image that pops to mind is "the fash".

- I've met people who wanted to resist, but felt too disabled or scared and that it would never be for them. in cases like this I reassure them, and I mean it, that not everybody has to be on the streets shouting or dismantling ecocidal machinery, that just by caring and being nice to people they're already doing a lot, and other truths. then, not even thinking of politics, I listen to their personal stories, I cook for them or let them cook for me, I tell them, sincerely, that it must have been terrible to go through that, that I can understand how they feel, I validate their identities and their sense of injustice. then before I know it they're out in demos with me shouting at the face of cops. now look I"m not a cure for mh- or disability and I'm not doing this on purpose to gather soldiers, my point here is only one: That somebody who is broken, alone and hurt needs healing, love and care, not preaching.
- *definitely* not guilt-tripping to burn themselves in activism like a second job.

- Not just global warming but systemic ecological crisis in all spheres, not caused by the Anthropocene, but by the Colonialismocene.