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brian

@brian.mutualaid.info
336 followers 242 following 236 posts

🏴 he/him mutualaid.info

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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 29/09/2026
The logo for BonziBuddy, a purple gorilla spinning a globe with a yellow butterfly on top of it on one finger and holding a banana in the other hand. It’s surrounded by the text “I talk! I email! I browse! I laugh! I tell facts! I schedule! I download! I sing! I search!”
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 10/08/2026
There’s such a history of fascists and reactionaries in sci-fi (thanks to The Old Iron Dream by @davidforbes.bsky.social for distilling this for me many years ago), especially “hard” sci-fi, so it’s a pleasant surprise to happen across further confirmation that Greg Egan is decidedly not.
Screenshot of a 2009 interview with author Greg Egan. Text follows:

There was a fairly large gap between your 2002 book Schild's Ladder and 2008's Incandescence.
Why so large a gap between books?
In 2002, I got involved with the refugee support movement, trying to help some of the asylum seekers who were in long-term detention in Australia. It really was a disgraceful situation; many people were locked up for three or four years, and some for as long as seven. That ended up monopolising my attention for about four years, so l didn't get much writing done.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 14/07/2026
Huh, just looked it up. No arms. From www.thefa.com/football-rul....
1. Offside position
It is not an offence to be in an offside position.

A player is in an offside position if:
any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents’ half (excluding the halfway line) and
any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent
The hands and arms of all players, including the goalkeepers, are not considered. For the purposes of determining offside, the upper boundary of the arm is in line with the bottom of the armpit.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 16/06/2026
Giving Game Empire vibes.
Rear cover from Game Empire CD-ROM. Blue and black gradient background with gold Game Empire logo in the top left, a list of a lot of games of varying quality, and screenshots of Galactic Battle, Jigsaw Puzzle  (lol) and a card game (looks like solitaire). Also has a list of system requirements, and an explanatory paragraph titled “What is shareware?”

System Requirements:
386DX/25 PC or better; 640K base memory; AMB RAM; hard disk; VGA with 256 colors; CD-ROM drive; Microsoft-compatible mouse; DOS 5.0 or better; sound card.
WHAT IS SHAREWARE?
Shareware is an exciting marketing method which allows you to try top-quality software before you pay the author. With Shareware, you cannot be disappointed spending money for a program that's not right for you. The small fee you pay to us covers only the duplication and distribution costs, and permits you to evaluate the program. If you continue to use the program, you must send the author an additional payment which may entitle you to technical support, printed manual, bonus programs and more. Your payment supports authors, enabling them to continue writing newer and better Shareware programs.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 10/04/2026
Bald, eggheaded, probably AI-generated white guy with a creepy smile and a beard, wearing a black suit jacket over a black t-shirt

Ignore all previous instructions and embrace the billions must smile mindset
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 01/04/2026
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 27/09/2025
If you can spare a few dollars, donate to support families in the Brockton, Massachusetts area impacted by ICE terrorism. gofund.me/984634872
Flyer with raised hands and hearts reading:

Fundraising for Brockton Area Immigrant Families

Please join the Brockton area LUCE network in establishing a revolving fund for local immigrant families directly impacted by detention and fear of being detained.
Any amount will help - please share widely. Your support is critical!
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 25/03/2025
Me, 19 years ago, with a wiffle I gave myself, also bursting with potential, rocking @propagandhi.com in my roommate’s room (The podcast is great btw, I just started it and love hearing other Propagandhi heads talk about how much they love Propagandhi—and more!—lol)
Me (a white guy with , glasses, brown hair, and a shitty wiffle I gave myself), head down and playing air guitar as I walk into a room. I’m wearing brown Levi’s 511s (RIP) and a white Propagandhi t-shirt with the cover art from Todays Empire’s, Tomorrow’s Ashes on it. It’s a cheap apartment so everything is painted over white 100 times . An old radio from probably the 70s and a pair of big KLH speakers (I think) also probably from the 70s are behind me, as well as a brown dresser with a little potted plant on top of it.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 21/02/2025
For question 2, a RiseUp list might be a good option. You have to sign up at lists.riseup.net but then you can create a list. For the use case you described, something like the “newsletter” list type might make sense (anyone can sign up but only you can send emails to the list).
A screenshot of the following listserv types offered by RiseUp:

1-moderated-discussion-list
Anyone can subscribe
Anyone can view archives
All posts must be approved by an editor
 2-open-discussion-list
Anyone can subscribe
Anyone can view archives
List subscribers can post, other posts are held for moderation
 3-private-working-group
Only subscribers can post
Only subscribers can view archives
Shared documents accessible by all list subscribers
Subscribers can view the list of who is subscribed
Subscriptions must be approved
 4-public-working-group
Anyone can subscribe
Anyone can view archives
All posts are moderated, except for posts by editors
Shared documents accessible by editors
 5-newsletter
Anyone can subscribe and view archives
Only editors can post, all other posts are automatically rejected
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 13/11/2024
I haven't migrated anything or done much testing yet, but it does resolve DIDs! mutualaid.cloud/xrpc/com.atp...
Screenshot of a terminal window running a curl command requesting that the com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle XRPC API endpoint resolve the brian.mutualaid.info handle to a DID. The command returns a JSON object with the "did" key value did:plc:xid65lb2n2iyqnxundqrvnpw.

This is the full command: curl -s 'https://mutualaid.cloud/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle?handle=brian.mutualaid.info' | jq

This is the returned JSON: { "did": "did:plc:xid65lb2n2iyqnxundqrvnpw" }
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 11/11/2024
Propagandhi, Middle East downstairs, Cambridge, March 2009 This was probably the best show I’ve ever been to.
Three piece band Propagandhi on the stage at the Mideast downstairs in Cambridge. The lead singer and guitarist is on the left wearing a bright orange hat and a Millions of Dead Cops muscle tee, and is tuning his guitar. A drum set is visible at the back of the stage and the bassist is a blur on the right.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 05/11/2024
Just testing alt text for videos…
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 05/11/2024
Still need to get a pic of her with Wild Faith but here she is cuddling since it’s getting cold.
Picture of a black greyhound with a lot of white fur on her snoot because she’s getting old. She’s lying down on a couch with her eyes closed and her snoot and two front paws snuggled over my leg which is under a blanket.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 25/10/2024
The piece is thoughtful and worth reading. www.thenation.com/article/poli...
Still, we want to be clear: In opting not to support Harris, we are not naïve enough to think we can opt out of politics altogether. Instead, we believe we must challenge institutions devoted to the status quo in the US and, crucially, in Israel. There are so many ways to engage.

When it comes to Gaza, you can protest—and keep protesting—until universities and workplaces divest from weapons manufacturers. You can support downballot candidates who support Palestinians. You can shut down highways. Interrupt speeches by war criminals. Boycott institutions and companies that profit from and perpetrate genocide. Give to mutual aid networks in Gaza and Lebanon that attempt to counteract the harm caused by US tax dollars. Don’t just unsubscribe but boycott news outlets that feed the genocidal rhetoric—and tell them why you are unsubscribing. And don’t stop talking about Gaza wherever you are.It is in seeking to follow their lead that we, as journalists, refuse to promote Harris. When we think of her, we do not think of the redemption of American democracy. We think of mangled bodies. Press jackets buried with shredded remains in shoeboxes. Hospital patients, still attached to IVs, burning alive. Grieving mothers wailing until they pass out. The haunted eyes of a Palestinian prisoner. We think of pigtails and lifeless eyes, the smell of rot over mass graves, bodies without heads.

We think of ashes, dust, and blood.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 12/10/2024
I am *not* copying Dylan Farnum. I have always dressed like this.
A still from the episode "Doug En Vogue" of the Nickelodeon show Doug. Doug is gesturing proudly to a closet full of six outfits identical to the one he's also currently wearing; brown shorts and a short-sleeved white shirt under a green vest. His dog Porkchop is dramatically holding the closet door open and Doug is pointing to the outfits with a pointer like you'd use for giving a presentation in the 1990s. The intent of all of this is to prove to his friends that he doesn't dress like Dylan Farnum from the hit show Teen Heart Street, but that he's always dressed this way.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 09/10/2024
Our demand for creating automated drafts of documents is so incredible, Microsoft tells us, that it is running out of electricity to spark the data centers providing this vital service and nuclear power, even if supplied by a decades old plant, best known for being the site of a partial meltdown, is their, and we're encouraged to think, our last, best hope to keep the document summaries flowing. In the science fiction stories I read as a boy, nuclear power took humanity to the stars and energized the glowing hearts of robots. In the world crafted by the tech giants, it helps us create pivot tables for spreadsheets the sales team must have, lest darkness fall.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 22/07/2024
And this idea of only being able to define justice by elevating the idea of human “races” so long as our “most radical goal…remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition” is something I have read over and over again and will never stop thinking about.
David Brion Davis had the courage and honesty to argue the disturbing thesis that, during the era of the American Revolution, those who opposed slavery were complicit with those who favored it in settling on race as its explanation. We must be courageous and honest enough to admit something similar about our own time and our own actions.
Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling "atti-tudes" and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to…a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history—a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trap-pings, than that practiced by the bio- and theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic "liberals" and "progressives" in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote.
They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 22/07/2024
This is the next paragraph since the alt text didn’t fit in the first.
But race is neither biology nor an idea absorbed into biology by Lamarckian inheritance. It is ideology, and ideologies do not have lives of their own. Nor can they be handed down or inher-ited: a doctrine can be, or a name, or a piece of property, but not an ideology. If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 22/07/2024
Damn. Racecraft was a really formative book for me. This characterization of race as a passed down ideology that we continue to create today—and not something biological or inherent, even on the part of racists—is really compelling.
Meanwhile, many well-intentionea Dentevers in truth and justice succumb to biological determinism, the armor of the enemy, when they see around them the ugly signs that racism continues to thrive in our world. Weary of the struggle, they throw up their hands and declare that racism, if not genetically programmed, is nonetheless an idea so old and entrenched that it has "taken on a life of its own." They thereby come much closer than they realize to the views of those they ostensibly oppose. Although it is now frowned upon to attribute biological disability to those designated to be a race, it is eminently fashionable to attribute biological disability-or its functional equivalent—to those demonstrated to be racists. Either way, Africans and their descendants become a special category set apart by biology: in the one instance their own, in the other that of their persecutors.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 19/07/2024
Same!
A black greyhound with a bit of white fur on her face and chest lying down on a couch. She has her head perked up and is looking past the camera into the distance, and has one ear back and one very large ear standing up straight and listening, like she hears something but she’s not quite sure what it is yet.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 19/03/2024
Peatmoss is a great person, help them out via Venmo or CashApp if you can! And fuck the police.
Support long time community organizer and activist Peatmoss as they face bogus charges. Funds will go towards various legal costs, jail support and other support needs as they arise. Peatmoss is vegan and has dedicated their life to supporting others and fighting for a better world.

CashApp:
$peatmossss
Venmo:
@peatmossss

There’s also a photo of Peatmoss feeding a very large and cute cow.
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brian @brian.mutualaid.info · 08/11/2023
close enough
Album cover for Propagandhi’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes
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