“A Thread of Tips” by Shelby

• #16 is missing but to find out more tips, follow her on twitter; be sure to thank her! 😁

The 2017 Miles Morland Writing Scholarships have been awarded to five writers, four for fiction and one for nonfiction. While the scholarships are usually awarded to four writers—three for fiction, one for nonfiction—“the standard was so high and the competition so fierce that the judges couldn’t decide on the best four so we agreed to award five Scholarships this year.” The fiction scholarships went to Nigeria’s two-time Caine Prize and one-time NLNG Prize finalist Elnathan John; Nigeria’s Farafina Workshop alumna Eloghosa Osunde; South Africa’s 2015 Caine Prize finalist Fatima Kola; and Zimbabwe’s Bryony Rheam, who was also shortlisted in 2016. The nonfiction scholarship went to Eritrea’s Alemseged Tesfai, who, at 73, is the award’s oldest recipient…..

Our five scholars fit all of these criteria. ALEMSEGED TESFAI of Eritrea will write a single volume of the history of Eritrea – challenging conventional scholarship on the subject and drawing from rich personal experience.

Congrats!!  A great moment for African literature and Eritrean literature

Thank you Ato Alemseged Tesfai for your contributions to African and Eritrean literature

sources:

https://twitter.com/EmbassyEritrea/status/938820536771272704

https://brittlepaper.com/2017/12/5-winners-2018-miles-morland-writing-scholarships/

http://therapyforblackgirls.com 

reblog to save a life

My cousin Sioban has her own practice now and she’s like, a respectable upstanding citizen and not at all a ball of creative garbage juice like me

Boosting for black women and girls who need therapy

Oh my god! This is a godsend!

capitalism is selling you a human birthright and labeling it a luxury

“billionaires bad” is an objectively good opinion actually

One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.” There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people. The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line. It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.

i scrolled past this post 4 times until it finally hit me

I’m in a coffee shop trying not to scream

Goodness…

i have suspicions

I’m not saying it’s aliens… but it’s probably aliens.

“Hello fellow earth-spawn”

This is like how they called it the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Human Services”

Definitely not an alien trap, then. NICE TRY, GOVERNMENT.

LOL. The caption killed me. Grade A post.

getting into a conversation in a language you don’t actually speak that well

@ablogoflearning my Tigrigna

Lol. My Amarigna

Nielsen report shows that water is wet

How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.

Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).

And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!

The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet. 

We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk. 

Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:

Grow food in 5 gallon buckets

This is so great

@tropicalhomestead @stringornothing @westindianheaux !!!

I'm just going to drop this right here and walk away.

I just learned that some websites use cookies to adjust prices. That is, if you visit a certain website a lot the price will increase.

You can tell if that’s the case by checking the same web page on a different browser if you have a different number of stored cookies for that site. I checked something on Chegg and it was $14.95 on Chrome, $19.95 on Firefox, and $16.95 on Safari.

The fix? Clear your cookies for that website.

Reblog, save a wallet.

Plane tickets almost always do this!

PLANE TICKETS DO THIS ALL THE DAMN TIME 

When you’re looking for plane tickets and waiting for prices to drop, ALWAYS clear your cookies beforehand and switch between browsers. A friend of mine was looking for a flight and getting prices that were the CHEAPEST at $800-1000, I sent her a link for a round trip that was like $495, and it read as $900 on her computer because she had been hounding the airline site. 

alternatively: avoid all this headache by using incognito when shopping for plane tickets, text books, etc

Hotel rooms are notorious for this, as well. Just like, go on incognito mode to look at these sites, saves u a lot of time & hassle.

Bruh I ain’t never know dis thank you man

The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover-era surveillance of so-called dissidents—a motley assembly of Soviet sympathizers, anti-war activists and civil rights leaders—has been well documented since the 1970s. But [Claude] McKay was the first, though hardly the last, of one Hoover-tracked subculture that has received less attention: black writers, including some of the most celebrated names in American letters. In the heart of the 20th century, beginning decades before the FBI’s campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, later, the Black Panthers, dozens of allegedly subversive African-American poets, novelists, essayists and playwrights were distinct targets of the agency, whose surveillance of this group was thorough, far-reaching and sometimes ruthless.

The extensive scope of this surveillance is only now coming into focus, thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Building on the detective work of prior researchers who discovered files on the likes of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright […]

Alarmingly, the disclosed files reveal that the FBI prepared preventive arrests of most of the names dropped above, and altogether more than half of the black authors stalked in its archive. Twenty-seven of 51, accused of communism and related extremisms, were caught in the invisible dragnet of the agency’s “Custodial Detention” index and its successors—hot lists of pre-captives “whose presence at liberty in this country in time of war or national emergency,” Hoover resolved in 1939, “would be dangerous to the public peace and the safety of the United States Government.”

As I was doing my skincare routine, I stopped and stared at myself for a while; I came to the conclusion that I’m so beautiful, so intelligent, so wonderful. I’m all of these things and still, I’m not even close to my final self, I’ve yet to reach the end of my growth.

In the event that this world doesn’t go down in flames before I reach my final form, I’m positive that I will make an incredible mark here. In that moment, all the hurt I carried for the people who are no longer in my life, turned to pity. I mean this in the least arrogant way possible, but I do feel sorry for those unable to experience this greatness.

I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites. 

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ most useful.

I’m already gone

“Beccas were the white women who sat on plantation porches teaching their slaves how to read but still had slaves.”