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sp0ka.bsky.social
sp0ka
@sp0ka.bsky.social
780 followers 370 following 1K posts
Everything for everyone 🚩 | aprendiendo español | gym tweets | she/her
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sp0ka.bsky.social
Learned to solder today if anyone even cares (adafruit zero player LED game)
November 15, 2025 at 10:28 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Not that anyone cares but I have also been to these baths bc I was lucky enough to be in Budapest the ONE day a month or whatever they allow women
The Structures of Everyday Life ordinary interiors and the ingenuity of its storage space. In spring 1699, Osman Aga passed through Buda (recaptured by the Christians in 1686) on his difficult journey home to freedom (he had been taken prisoner, or rather reduced to slavery by the Germans at the capture of Lipova ten years earlier). There, he was thoroughly happy to be able to make his way to 'the magnificent baths of the town' 6 They were of course the Turkish baths on the bank of the Danube below the fortified town and had admitted everyone, without charge, since the time of the Ottoman domination.
November 15, 2025 at 2:17 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
It seems kind of strange that so many cultures didn’t invent the table. If you’re Russian, you’re writing on your knees on tough paper. Is that not so annoying it causes the table? Apparently not
Traditional civilizations and unchanging interiors Rule number two: traditional civilizations remain faithful to their accustomed décor. A Chinese interior of the fifteenth century could equally well date from the eighteenth, if one ignores certain variations - porcelains, paintings and bronzes. The traditional Japanese house looked in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century much as it does today, except for the coloured prints that came in during the eighteenth century. The same applies to the Indies. And Muslim interiors of the past can be imagined from those of the present. Non-European civilizations, except for the Chinese, were in any case poor in furniture. There were practically no chairs in India and no tables: in Tamil the word for table - mecei - derives from the Portuguese (mesa). There were no chairs in Black Africa where Benin artists were content to imitate European chairs. Neither were there chairs or for that matter high tables in Islam or the countries under its influence. An item in the invective against the Moriscoes in the Antialcorán by the Spanish writer Pérez de Chinchón (I532) is this odd claim to superiority: We Christians sit at a proper height, not on the ground like animals?6 In the Muslim part of Yugoslavia, in Mostar for instance, it was still normal some twenty years ago for guests to sit on cushions around a low table. The custom is still kept up in certain families attached to tradition, and in many villages. 63 In 1699, Dutch merchants were advised to take very strong paper to Muscovy; having few tables, the Russians wrote mostly on their knees and so had to have a tough type of paper.
November 15, 2025 at 1:53 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
I hate these stupid things with my LIFE
An amazing one palm scanner at NYU Langone
November 14, 2025 at 5:07 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Looping them in now to a #bookthread

Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits
by Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo
November 9, 2025 at 2:41 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Everything is so insane all of the time (from Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits by Marek Poliks and Robert Alonso Trillo)
If one is remunerated from labor at the grist-mill not with flour, but with a representation of potential flour, a token for flour whose conversion rate into flour is dynamic both at the point of assignment (wage) and at the point of exchange (at the 'flour-shop'), the mapping of a worker's labor agency between flour-production and compensatory flour-buyback gets weird, nonlinear, random. Things get weirder the higher up the token stack you go, like with the Play to Earn game Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is really, really weird; it's a kind of high-order shell economy in which an nth order token is the direct compensatory return for playing a hacky iOS and Android game that "looks a lot like Pokémon."60 The particularly nubile token at stake, "Smooth Love Potion" (SLP), is earned through in-game activity and leveraged to 'breed' Axies - digital pets that in their one-of-a-kind singularity are also ERC-721 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with their own satellite economy. Because it "can take time to accrue SLP through the game," one often needs to make an initial investment to start breeding: buying "SLP on the open market is a way for gamers to get a headstart."6 The weirdness of Axie Infinity was much-discussed throughout its rollout, specifically the popularity the game enjoyed among underpaid populations in the Philippines looking for an alternative to minimum-wage precarity labor. The burden of that initial investment spun up a new kind of mobile game Satanic Mill: As the price of SLP continued to shoot up last summer, many aspiring players found themselves unable to afford the cost of purchasing their starter monsters. So an employment scheme emerged in which wealthier investors, known as "managers," would buy Axie monsters and then lend them out to "scholars," who would handle the grunt work of leveling up. The owners of the monsters would then pocket anywhere from 30% to 50% of the scholars' profits [...]162 Perhaps predictably, the economy that sprouted out of Axie Infinity was ripe with abuse, labor alienation, and financial insanity - two successive boom-and-bust cycles annihilated the value of the SLP, its respective valuation in the hands of workers who had burned endless nights playing a random digital monster mobile game, and even the 'play to earn' component of the game altogether (the game, somehow, is otherwise still alive).
November 9, 2025 at 1:23 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Living in Bushwick after the Zohran victory
S3 E18 of sex and the city pause screen of big saying sleeping in his red bedroom is like “sleeping in communist china”
November 8, 2025 at 12:44 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
The Bushwick pumpkin gamut
A fresh large pumpkin carved into a winking smiley face with the open eye carved into a heart A decaying pumpkin with mold on it and eyes not fully cut out making a mushed weird smiley face
October 31, 2025 at 10:22 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Gif from the MTA Weekender so cute I downloaded it
October 31, 2025 at 8:02 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
it's such a good bit to make your dimensions chooser a set of sliders. shoutout to rugs dot com
it's a set of slider filters instead of blanks
October 27, 2025 at 12:33 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Like I’m sorry the accommodation for being held without trial or being charged with any crime is you get to wear a blazer?
Abu Zubaydah, whose true name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn, has never been charged with a crime. The first photos of him were taken before he was allowed to wear civilian clothing at the prison, an accommodation in line with the Geneva Conventions that the U.S. military now makes for those not convicted of crimes.
October 24, 2025 at 12:10 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Still unknown in a lot of Europe until the 18th century
226 The Structures of Everyday Life a population of 600,000); in 1846 (and this figure is more reliable) consumption was only 362 kilograms. An estimate for the whole of France in 1788 gives a theoretical average consumption of one kilogram.14 We can be certain that sugar was still a luxury item despite public favour and the relative fall in its Price. The sugar loaf hung over tables in many peasant households in France. Directions for use: hold your glass up to it briefly so that the sugar can melt into it. In tact, if one were to draw a map of sugar consumption, it would be very irregular. In sixteenth-century egypt, tor instance, there was a minor industry in preserves and sweetmeats, and sugar was such a predominant crop that cane-straw was used for melting gold. 147 Two centuries later, there were still great tracts of Europe where sugar was quite unknown.
October 19, 2025 at 2:09 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Putting these in a thread with an image so it’s easier for me to find
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Centure Volume I by Fernand Braudel
October 17, 2025 at 1:21 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Glad I did not wuss out of candito bc the MR10 set / 5x3 cluster sets squat combo is actually pretty fun
A woman stands in front of a mirror in workout clothes and a lifting belt and knee sleeves
October 14, 2025 at 12:09 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
we are like maybe 2 years out from someone realizing you can pair programmatic audience data w/these apps and charge for higher quality dating leads. jesus christ
Chat GPT is a large language model (LMM), and the way LLMs work is by spotting patterns in language – the bot was picking up on keywords and themes in his match’s answers and weaving them into jokes, compliments or echoes of shared interests. Where Jamil might have left an awkward “nice” or “cool”, the bot would spin his match’s love of Bali into a playful, if somewhat unimaginative, line about coconut cocktails. It made him seem, at the very least, attentive. Jamil says he doesn’t feel he tricked anyone, he sees it more as hacking the apps themselves. “Dating apps put everyone at a disadvantage – you’re competing with hundreds of other people for attention, and half the time the chats die after two or three messages. If ChatGPT helps me stand out, why wouldn’t I use it?”
October 12, 2025 at 2:07 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
I remember a time when people would rather kill themselves than say something like this out loud, much less in a paper of record
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
The majority of Chatfishers say they would never dream of letting AI do all of their talking. Most are like 38-year-old Londoner Nick, who sees it as a tool to help foster stronger connections with app matches. He works in tech and lives with his girlfriend; they’re in an open relationship and both date other people casually. He sometimes uses ChatGPT in his conversations on the dating apps Feeld and Bumble. “If I’m using a dating app,” he says, “I want to start a conversation that feels meaningful from the beginning so I can hook the other person in – but also I don’t want to spend too much time on it. Equally, while I want it to be ‘meaningful’, I don’t necessarily want to get super heavy and emotional straight away – it feels like quite a balancing act.” ChatGPT, he says, helps him tread that fine line: offering enough charm to spark a connection, without the investment of time or emotional labour that might otherwise feel wasted if the match fizzles out after a handful of messages.
October 12, 2025 at 1:46 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Passing around a single cup, digging your hands into the serving dishes and getting mad about forks: European nobles in the sixteenth century
Spoon and knife are fairly old customs. However, the use of a spoon did not become widespread until the sixteenth century, and the custom of providing knives dates from the same time - before that the guests brought along their own. Individual glasses for each guest also appeared at about this time. Courtesy formerly dictated that one emptied the glass and passed it on to one's neighbour, who did the same. Or else, when requested, the manservant brought the required drink, wine or water, from the pantry or the dresser near the guest table. When Montaigne crossed southern Germany in 1580, he noted that 'everyone has his goblet or silver cup at his place; the man serving takes care to refill this goblet immediately it is empty, without moving it from its place, pouring wine into it from a distance away out of a pewter or wooden vessel with a long spout'? This elegant solution economized on the effort demanded of the staff, but it required every guest to have a personal goblet in front of him. In Germany in Montaigne's time every guest also had his own plate, either pewter or wooden; sometimes a wooden bowl underneath and a pewter plate on top. We have proof that wooden plates continued to be used in some places in the German countryside, and probably elsewhere, until the nineteenth century. But for a long time before these more or less tardy refinements, guests were satisfied with a wooden board or a 'trencher', a slice of bread on which the meat was placed. The large dish then sufficed for everything and everybody: each guest selected the morsel he wanted and picked it up with his fingers. Montaigne noted that the Swiss 'use as many wooden spoons with silver handles as there are people [note that each guest had his own spoon] and a Swiss is never without a knife, with which he takes everything; and he scarcely ever puts his hand in the dish' 7 Wooden spoons with metal handles (not necessarily silver) are preserved in museums, together with various types of knife.
October 12, 2025 at 1:01 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
It looks like actually it was pretty great to survive the Black Death or otherwise live immediately after. Things deteriorate later in the 1600s.
From 1350 to 1550 Europe probably experienced a favourable period as far as individual living standards were concerned. Following the catastrophes of the Black Death, living conditions for workers were inevitably good as manpower had become scarce. Real salaries have never been as high as they were then. In I388, canons in Normandy complained that they could not find anyone to cultivate their land who did not demand more than six servants would have been paid at the beginning of the century' 33 The paradox must be emphasized since it is often thought that hardship increases the farther back towards the middle ages one goes. In fact the opposite is true of the standard of living of the common people - the majority. Before 1520-40, peasants and craftsmen in Languedoc (still little populated) ate white bread, a tell-tale detail. 3* But with the passage of time, after the 'waning' of the middle ages, the deterioration becomes progressively worse, lasting well into the nineteenth century. In some regions of Eastern Europe, certainly in the Balkans, the downward movement continued for another century, to the middle of the twentieth. The decline in meat consumption after 1550 Things had begun to change in the West by the middle of the sixteenth century. Heinrich Müller wrote in 1550 that in Swabia 'in the past they ate differently at the peasant's house. Then, there was meat and food in profusion every day; tables at village fairs and feasts sank under their load. Today, everything has truly changed. Indeed, for some years now, what a calamitous time, what high prices! And the tood of the most comtortably-oft peasants is almost worse than that of day-labourers and valets in the old days.'3s Historians have been wrong in not taking account of this repeated evidence or in persistently interpretiong as man's morbid need to praise the past. 'How far away is the time, oh comrades, explained an old Breton peasant (I548), 'when it was difficult for an ordinary feast day to pass by without someone from the village inviting all the rest to dinner, to eat his chicken, his gosling, his ham, his first lamb and his pig's heart. '36 'In my father's time,' a Norman gentleman wrote in Is60, 'we ate meat every day, dishes were abundant, we gulped down wine as if it were water. Before the Religious Wars, another witness noted, the 'village people (in France) were so rich and endowed with all possessions, their houses so well furnished,
October 12, 2025 at 1:46 AM
sp0ka.bsky.social
“The peasants value the potato…because it is never exposed to the ravages of war”
Sometimes it was the threat of war, which could destroy the wheat-fields. The peasants value the potato, a document explains apropos of Alsace, 'because it is never exposed... to the ravages of war': an army could camp all summer on a potato field without destroying the autumn crop. 241 Indeed every war seems to have encouraged potato-growing: it happened in Alsace during the second half of the seventeenth century; in Flanders during the war of the Augsburg League (I688-97), then during the War of the Spanish Succession and finally during the War of the Austrian Succession, which coincided with the cereal crisis of 1740; it happened in Germany during the Seven Years War and especially during the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778-9), which was known as 'the potato war' 242 Finally, it had one particular advantage: in some areas the new crop was not subject to tithes and indeed it is through the lawsuits brought by landowners that it is possible for us to trace the early introduction of the potato to the southern Netherlands after about I680, and in the United Provinces from
October 9, 2025 at 12:09 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
OP posing with her boyfriend who she met on twitter
October 8, 2025 at 5:36 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
Hiked a good chunk of the West Highland Way & summited Ben Nevis from the north face (hard mode). Not to sound like a parent, but you learn a lot about yourself when you truly can’t give up bc the only other option is a helicopter evac
A woman in an orange bandana print kerchief and rain layer takes a selfie on the ridge between the summit of Càrn Mòr Dearg & Ben Nevis. You can see her upturned hiking poles sticking out of her bag and she looks exhausted The same woman sits on a rock with a man in a black hat and maroon jacket. At her feet is a blue hiking pack. In the background is a valley that passes between some hills in the Scottish highlands A woman is walking through a door-like opening under a bridge on a stone path between two wooden fences. Lots of greenery is coming through the fence A view from nearly the top of Càrn Mòr Dearg with a cairn in the foreground among all the red rocks. A river stretches out on the horizon under low clouds
October 4, 2025 at 3:46 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
We are learning about the society of the spectacle in order to stay awake and conquer jet lag
A woman in a blue jacket and black glasses sits at a table near a patio door with a tabby kitten in her lap. She’s holding a copy of The Society of the Spectacle
September 22, 2025 at 4:40 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
You guys did not do a good job of explaining that these uncanny photos were the PROMO for the show and not some “paparazzi caught her dehydrated / after a long night usually she looks better” ones
The Netflix promotional image for Emily in Paris featuring an emaciated white woman whose name I don’t know sorry
September 19, 2025 at 12:47 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
It’s wild that he wrote this in 1917 and people still have to rediscover this themselves today.
92 STATE AND REVOLUTION Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we shall see ev-erywhere, in the "petty" — supposedly petty-details of the suffrage (residential qualification, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "beggars"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc.—we shall see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, ex-ceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor, seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine hundredths, of the bourgeois publicists and politicians are of this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from pol-itics, from active participation in democracy. Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when,
September 13, 2025 at 2:11 PM
sp0ka.bsky.social
One hundred years ago canvassing for Julia Salazar
sept 13, 2018 • Today three eight year oldish boys rolled up on me on scooters when I was flyering for Julia at my corner and demanded to know why I wasn't for "the boy candidate." Me: well how do you feel about landlords? Boys: I hate landlords! Fuck em! Me: that's what I'm saying! The boy candidate loves landlords and they're his friends. Them: WHAT *points at negative Dilan flyer I'm holding* THIS GUY?? Ме: yep. He loves landlords. And Julia hates them like we do. So that's why I am out here. Them: *looking around* you could get killed out here for this you know. Me: hm it seems unlikely but l'll keep an eye out. Tell your voting age friends to vote Julia. (Only one said he would but come on eight year olds don't have voting age friends anyway.)
September 13, 2025 at 1:56 PM