How was your January?

Overall, a lot more chaotic than I thought it would be; hoped things would calm down after December.

Do you want to share something that you’ve done this week or month?

The news megathreads and posts therein have taken a backseat to trying to find more literature and decent news sources.

As a sneak peek as to what I’ve been trying to cook over the last few weeks (that the news mega people won’t see unless they’re also here, or scour my profile I suppose), I wanna shift from daily+weekly news posts to daily+monthly news posts, as with nearly two years of experience - good fucking lord it really has almost been that long - I’m coming around to the idea that a week is actually kind of an awkward timeframe. It’s not really long enough to allow most events to play out, and for shorter term events, you want the granularity that daily updates gives you rather than having to wait a week. So, daily posts are staying, but I want to do monthly posts. The actual logistics of this is what I need to work out, and it’s taking me longer than I thought as I only have so much free time in a day.

As I said, I’m also trying to find more literature, and this is to get the geopolitics reading list up from its barebones state to something actually useable. The problem is that most literature of the communist variety tends to be focussed on the big hits - the Russian Revolution, or the Chinese Revolution, or events from the 19th century, etc. The rest of it is very general, like on imperialism in general, or on Marxism/anarchism in general, or on Africa in general. If I want to find a useable, relativelt recent, and definitive text on, say, Gabon, then where do I go? Repeat for 200 countries, of which ~150 are either fairly obscure, or known but are usually oversimpified. Like, geopolitics is kind of my thing now. I want to be the mythical Geopolitics Understander, and I can’t do that unless I actually fucking know what’s going on (and has been going on) in Tanzania, or Mongolia, or Peru. In general I wanna minimize the sense of events overtaking me - as in, I don’t wanna be like “Oh, looks like [country] has popped off into revolution/war/crisis, anybody got any articles or reading about this?”

So that is my current task, and I’m not gonna say it’s going badly, but it’s harder than I thought it would be.

Do you have some plans or goals for February?

Well, continuing this, and finishing it up hopefully. I really hope I can put something together for January, but I can’t promise anything. On top of that, I do wanna get into cycling again.

Solidarity forever, comrades.