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freyaa.bsky.social
Free_yaah
@freyaa.bsky.social
3.5K followers 720 following 930 posts
I used to work in tech (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻
but now I design with labour groups, run workshops with activists, occasionally make games and comics.
🚨 support fundraisers 🚨
The govt won't save us, but mutual aid will
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freyaa.bsky.social
Manthan is an amazing film, and the funding of it, the sense of ownership the dairy farmers who paid for it had over the film, the collective impact it had, it's all like a fairy tale from another dimension, given the bleak situation that indie cinema in India finds itself in today...
Text reads: The result is a film that, as its opening credits announce, was produced by 500,000 farmers. Each paid two rupees in order to finance the film, and when it was released they flocked to see it. The booklet accompanying this Blu-Ray contains a deeply moving interview with the late Benegal, who remembers seeing farmers’ carts and wagons making their slow way from tiny villages to the nearest cinema showing their film. The twenty-first century has made Benegal’s achievement even more noteworthy: it may well be the birth of crowdfunding. Equally, focusing too much on how Manthan was made can lead us to overlook its other accomplishments. A committed Left-winger who had, as noted above, been present at the birth of Indian farming’s “White Revolution”, Benegal knew exactly what his film was about, and the result has a ground-level authenticity.
November 21, 2025 at 12:59 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
What an absolutely batshit story of conservatives needing to perform victimhood.
Natalie Greene, a Rutgers law student, allegedly concocted the hoax in July, with an accomplice making a late-night 911 call to report that she had been ambushed by three men on a nature trail in Egg Harbor Township. Police officers found Greene bound with black zip ties, her shirt pulled over her head, and the political slurs scrawled across her torso. She told police that her supposed attackers had a gun and threatened to shoot her, and struck her in the head. Prosecutors say nearly every detail was fabricated. Greene allegedly drove to Pennsylvania and paid a body-modification artist $500 to carve the wounds on her face, neck, and upper body, using a pattern she had provided in advance. Investigators later found matching zip ties in her Maserati SUV. Cellphone records showed that two days before the purported attack, her co-conspirator searched online for “zip ties near me,” a discovery authorities cited as further proof that the incident was staged. Two images of a woman's torso mutilated with aesthetic scars, with the words "trump whore" written on them
November 20, 2025 at 10:52 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
Tbh, I think it's unfair for South Asians to participate. Our food is devine slop, and now it's noon in Lisboa and I crave an Indian banquet.
Anyway here's my second favourite all time food, the people snack: the vada pav
(I love this so much it inspired a comic about potatoes & the farmers strike)
A Portuguese inspired bread bun cut in the middle with a bright green cilantro and mint chutney spread on the bread, with a red garlic and chickpea flower crunchy powder, with a deep fried spicy potato mash ball in the middle, with the most impressive part: a fried whole green chilli in front. This beautiful contraption is on a wooden board with a green cup behind it that seems to be there for background texture only (it's empty)
November 19, 2025 at 12:38 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
I've hesitated to add to this conversation as I would never call the beautiful, unhinged food of south Asia slop, but seeing my fav pav bhaji featured has given me the strength to post: the triple schezwan
Artful shot of a mix of noodles, veggies, a fried chicken piece smothered in a bright red gravy with crunchy bits of noodles and a garnish of cilantro on top. Popular college canteen slop, and generally wonderful post drinks
November 19, 2025 at 12:29 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Sigh, posted without checking for alt text. Here's cursed alt text:
Text says: would a centaur big spoon like this? Image shows a top view of a bed with blue human being spooned by the top half of a centaur (human part) so the arms are around blue human. Horse part is off the bed. Text reads: ...or like this? Image shows: top view of a bed, blue human being dangerously wrapped in the front legs of the horse part of the centaur. However, the centaur is mostly on the bed. 3 images of potential centaur formulations: 1) text: a bit too much centaur Image: a horse with a human sticking out of it's neck area up to his knees. His head and breasts are out of the image possibly for bluesky censorship reasons? 2) text: not enough centaur Image: horse tail and back legs, human arms for front leg, human torso begins at the middle of the horse's belly? Disturbingly humanoid horse in the disturbing basic shape of a horse? 3) txt: just right centaur Image: regular centaur giving a thumbs up with a terrifying smile. The horse front legs are also giving a hooves up. Text says: would you ride a centaur like this? Image of a grey guy in woodcut style graphics riding a centaur on its horse part holding it's neck for balance. Text: or like this? Image is of a grey guy lying back on the horse part of the centaur on a coat pillow, with a leash around the neck of the centaur. The centaur is holding the grey humans legs in a intimate manner. A brown horse in front of purple brown hills with green grass at it's feet. This horse has no head, it's head is a one cent penny. Thus it is a CENTaur. I did warn you it was all cursed.
November 17, 2025 at 10:42 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Puked in my mouth reading this saga
6 frame grid of a galactic style with a red yellow circle in the middle. Yellow text box on top left corner, white text bot a bottom right corner with ... Representing the responder has not replied. I shouldn't bother you with this, you are Mya student not my therapist. I was fucking bleeding when I wrote that poem Oh for I'm in love with her :-( I'm just so happy to have a female grad student who is actually sane and I can talk to Do you think I'm shady person because I let myself be emotionally involved with my student It's not good if a person in power is out of their fucking mind
November 16, 2025 at 5:30 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
The giving circle is needed now more than ever as floods threaten our friends in Gaza
Terracotta colored clay sculpture of a satyr holding an apple, some beige vertical wall panels in the background
November 16, 2025 at 12:06 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
I remember feeling sick after learning about how MIT media lab made grad students make gifts for Epstein in return for donations. Led by Bill Ackman's Zionist wife and plagiarist Neri Oxman, her actions of course defended by him.
A plague in the legacy sciences.
www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/0...
The Orbs are gifts because “Neri as the designer of the MediaLab was asked to produce nearly all, if not all, physical gifts for donors — using her and her student’s time and resources,” wrote her husband, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, in an urgent email to MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito in the summer of 2019. The Orbs were reported in the Boston Globe in September 2019, when it became known that convicted sex predator and billionaire blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein met with Ito and Oxman, funded Ito and Oxman, and donated or arranged for Leon Black and Bill Gates to confidentially donate $7.5 million to MIT and the MIT Media Lab on the condition that his donations or involvement or the meetings, favors and influence afforded him by Ito and others at MIT not be disclosed. The Orb being made for Epstein caused one of Oxman’s students being asked to fabricate it to speak out, then to cave, then to apologize in a public email for ignoring their pangs of conscience to complete the order, pangs their teachers and leaders were unaffected by, until the disgraceful connection became public. https://greg.org/archive/2023/12/12/pay-no-attention-to-epsteins-orb.html The Orb, Epstein, Oxman, and Ackman are back in the news after Ackman published an open letter saying he’d had it up.to.here. with diversity at Harvard, up to and including the Black woman, Dr. Claudine Gay, recently appointed by the University as president, who was not returning his calls satisfactorily. Ackman, who attended Harvard as a legacy, found Gay, the trustees, and before her, the university dissatisfyingly non-responsive to his advice on investing, covid protocols, rooting out liberalism, and defending supporters of Israel’s post-October 7th attacks on Palestinians. From: https://greg.org/archive/2023/12/12/pay-no-attention-to-epsteins-orb.html But former students say that Oxman may have been in a better position than most to raise concerns. She was among Ito’s close circle at the Media Lab, she was well-respected by top MIT leaders, and she traveled to Europe and across the country to showcase her work. (A solo show of her pieces will soon be featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) Advertisement And at least one student raised concerns to Oxman about Epstein’s ties to the lab in 2017. That’s when Oxman asked those in her lab to prepare and send a gift to Epstein, according to documents shared by an MIT employee. A graduate student, seeing Epstein’s name, flagged him as a potential problem. “Have you read the articles about this Jeff Epstein? He seems pretty shady. . . . Just wanted to point it out in case you weren’t aware,” the student wrote to Oxman, who was in Barcelona at the time. But the 2017 Epstein episode stuck with the student. After Ito apologized in August for taking money from Epstein for the Media Lab and his own venture funds, the student sent a lab-wide apology of her own. She said she had raised the issue of Epstein’s reputation but still felt complicit. Advertisement “Accepting gifts is different than having students make and give them,” the student wrote on Aug. 16 in an e-mail shared with the Globe. “I knew it was wrong. I tried to speak up, but I was more concerned about getting a degree and staying in favor than with what is right. I let myself down as much as anyone. I am so, so sorry.” In recent weeks, journalists have asked questions of MIT about Oxman’s lab sending the gift to Epstein. According to e-mails obtained by the Globe, Ito asked Oxman how she wanted to respond to media questions. Oxman’s husband, William Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire, in a phone conversation and e-mail to Ito raised concerns about Oxman’s name being tied to the Epstein situation, according to multiple people aware of the situation.
November 13, 2025 at 10:01 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Emergency health care is on the line y'all!
Narrow walls on left and right and a luminous blue and pink sky in between. A person with an umbrella to the left, and a car with it's headlights on (in red) coming towards you
November 13, 2025 at 4:08 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Those who are employed and can donate please do! It's a simple way to believe in people, in the power of community in the face of a genocide 🫒
A white stork like bird standing in a green field with a bend tree behind it
November 11, 2025 at 5:18 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
I heard we're snailposting, add your snails, if you dare
Horizontal snail body facing camera, it's shell has fallen to it's side, on a white wall with green plants bookending the frame. Some darker moss on the top of the wall. Picture from Fort Kochi, Kerala, India
November 9, 2025 at 6:42 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
My favourite little figurine from a thrift store in Tennessee is this blue hippo who has travelled continents with me just because he's so jaunty. I wonder if the craftsperson who made him was inspired by these Egyptian hippos
November 9, 2025 at 2:43 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Moon rainbow!
Dark night sky with full moon surrounded by clouds. A rainbow glow around the moon gives it an otherworldly look
November 6, 2025 at 1:31 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
As a fan of Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech, mostly because of how hopeful and full of potential India seemed in that speech, I loved seeing it echoed in Zohran's speech to New York.
Now taking bets on how many family group chat uncles will be celebrating this Indian son?
Screenshot from the NDTV website, text reads: "Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawaharlal Nehru. A moment comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new," Mamdani said, echoing Nehru's words. The newly elected mayor said the victory symbolised a new era for New York, promising to lead with boldness. "This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt," he said. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/indian-origin-democratic-socialist-zohran-mamdani-quotes-jawaharlal-nehru-after-winning-new-york-polls-9578123
November 5, 2025 at 11:15 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
Very gutted to learn that our families favorite indie, the indomitable Cookie, finally left her loving found family to join her bestie (Aria my folks' lab) on the 🌈 bridge. She scraped through so much, her little body was finally ready for the next adventure. RIP cookie monster we'll miss u so much
4 part image of a small black and brown dog sleeping on her side, and her back on a grey brown road. Top two images have a white car part on the top of the images 4 part image of a small black and white dog rolling on the ground being sniffed and loved on by a large goofy lab with a pink leash A black and beige-white little dog sleeping on her side on the road
October 26, 2025 at 5:50 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Finally got my hands on @indrapramitdas.bsky.social's Last Dragoners of Bow Bazar, all thanks to the great curation at #trilogyBooks in Bombay who actually have a fantastic selection of #indian #indieWriters and #indiepress books, and the passion to spend half an hour discussing them!
Hand holding a copy of the book Last Dragoners of Bow Bazar, below the title is an image of a dragon intertwined around a tree. The cover is in tones of blue and purple. Below the image is the authors name, Indra Das. The text below says "a love story to growing up weird" by Vajra Chandrasekera. The room beyond it is in yellow and orange. You can see a bit of my hand holding the book in the bottom left hand corner.
October 26, 2025 at 2:35 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Yeesh
Screenshot of an article from the Himal newspaper digital edition, text reads: At least since the 1970s, however, the company knew that the talc used in its baby powder was contaminated with trace amounts of asbestos, a known carcinogen. Yet the product was only pulled from the shelves in the United States and Canada in 2020, and across the world in 2023. A similar pattern of concealing critical information extended to several other drugs and medical implants the company produced. The number of patients who have died over the years as a direct result is estimated to exceed two million. What makes J & J’s story so complicated is that, amid this, many of its products are truly lifesaving, including medicines for HIV, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. In The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, the New York Times pharma reporter Gardiner Harris provides a sweeping account of the company’s origins and global impact since the late 1800s, told primarily from an US-centric perspective. Another recent book that scrutinises the company’s operations and impact is The Johnson & Johnson Files: The Indian Secrets of a Global Giant, by the Indian Express journalist Kaunain Sheriff M. This focuses on J & J’s faulty hip implants in India, documenting heartbreaking testimony from patients whose lives were upended by them.
October 25, 2025 at 8:24 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
This story has it all: Fake princes! Charlatans! Mediocre cooks! Revolutionaries! Betrayals and banishment!
I've been eyeing this book for some time now, seems like a fun read.
Screenshot from the online edition of the Wire newspaper, text reads: Dutt’s dealings with Madame Cama were anything but harmonious. When she ordered him to travel to India as an emissary, he refused, earning an expulsion from the cell. Believing he knew enough about the group’s secrets, he attempted to blackmail one of its members, G.A. Bhawsar, a Bombay pearl merchant, for the sum of £40. Bhawsar called his bluff and Dutt was arrested by French police and spent six months in prison. On his release, he travelled to Argentina where he again worked as a magician. In 1909, he was marching in a May Day parade through the streets of Buenos Aires when police opened fire, killing more than eighty people. people. As bullets whistled overhead, he dragged a French woman to safety. Her name was Charlotte Aubert and they married soon afterwards. Two years later, the couple returned to London where Dutt relaunched his magic career as ‘Rambhuj, the necromancer of the Himalayas’.
October 23, 2025 at 6:25 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
Respect the arts in all their myriad manifestations 🤝
An image with 5 sections, 4 images around and one in the center. (In clockwise order) Text in the top left hand image reads HornPub with riker playing the trombone with other unclear members of TNG (I think), second image has ricker playing the trombone into the year of someone going SKAAAAAAAAAA!!!!. Riker and troi looking intimate with large trombone, ricker looking intently at camera as text says {horny trombone music}, central image is troi holding her head in pain
October 21, 2025 at 8:57 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
Oh wow how wild, and here i thought the state of Palestine didn't exist 🤔
#TabulaPeutingeriana #fortKochi
Description reads in white text on orange: text in Malayalam on top, translation in English below reads as: TABULA PEUTINGERIANA Tabula Peutingeriana is named after the renowned heheheh antiquarian, humanist, scholar and diplomat, Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547 CE). This innocent unique map is a medieval copy from the 12th-13th century CE, of an antique roadmap from the first half of the 5th century CE, it depicts ancient TOWNS, seas, rivers, forests, mountain tan mea, roads and areas under the risk Roman rule.
October 16, 2025 at 5:41 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
The internet is bleak today thanks to od'ing on American politics, so here's a beautiful watercolor I bought instead. I recently learned about thaiyyam, and fascinated by evrything I've seen about it, so naturally i had to take something back with me. The artist was a lovely local gentleman too.
Warm tones watercolor of a Thaiyyam performer in painted face, with dramatic headgear, wearing a complicated layered pleated skirt like costume with flaming swords dancing through flames. It's signed Baby, the name of the artist.
October 16, 2025 at 5:08 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Time to share the excellent book I got at my beloved Xaytun's group show with other Palestinian artists in London a few years ago! (The show was a banger too)
Cover of a book in black and white called "Deserts are not empty" using a pointillism style texture. Edited by Samia Henni in the bottom right hand corner Back of a book in black and white. Text reads: Colonial and imperial powers have often portrayed arid lands as "empty" spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted. Despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the "regime of emptiness" has thus inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries. Deserts Are Not Empty challenges this colonial tendency, questions its roots and ramifications, and remaps the representations, theories, histories,. and stories of arid lands-which comprise approximately one-third of the Earth's land surface. The volume brings together poems in original languages, conversations with collectives, and essays by scholars and professionals from the fields of architecture, architectural history and theory, curatorial studies, comparative literature, film studies, landscape architecture, and photography. These different approaches and diverse voices draw on a framework of decoloniality to unsettle and unlearn the desert, opening up possibilities to see, think, imagine it otherwise. With contributions from Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Menna Agha, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Yousef Awaad Hussein, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Danika Cooper, Brahim El Guabli, Timothy Hyde, Jill, Jarvis, Bongani Kona, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Observatoire des armements, Francisco E. Robles, Paulo Tavares, Alla Vronskaya, and XgSu. 978-1-941332-74-0 COLUMBIA BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY
October 13, 2025 at 11:43 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
So much for that life blood of USian values, freedom of speech and expression.
Two pictures, Left: Detail of AMBOS, “Con Nuestros Manos Construimos Deidades (With Our Hands We Build Deities)” (2023) (photo by Henry Adams, courtesy Pepperdine Graphic); Right: Installation view of AMBOS’s work (photo by Paul Salveson, courtesy Weisman Museum) School administrators also took issue with an embroidery that read “Save the Children” and “Abolish ICE,” part of “Con Nuestros Manos Construimos Deidades (With Our Hands We Build Deities)” (2023), a large collaborative sculpture by the group Art Made Between Opposite Sides (AMBOS). According to Natalie Godinez, executive director of AMBOS, officials turned the fabric swatch so that the text was no longer visible and removed a sign informing visitors they could touch the artwork.
October 13, 2025 at 11:26 AM
freyaa.bsky.social
I actually remember being appalled by this when I learned about it years ago, around the same time that evangelical teens were doing medical stuff with no training to kids around the African continent, but her brand is strong af and I totally forgot all about it.
(Repost with alt text)
By Mordecai Ogada 2 October at 14:17 So, Jane Goodall has left us. I watched the BBC article on her passing and the opening line said everything. "Jane arrived in Africa aged 26 with no scientific knowledge..." As a black African conservation scholar, this is what I've learned over the years; 1. She retained Gombe stream national park as her private research site since 1975. This was easy because she was then married to Derek Bryceson the director of Tanzania national parks 2. She used her power to protect the reputation of chimps, suppressing news articles of predation on human babies, including one belonging to one of her staff. 3. She talked constantly of "overpopulation" in Africa, but created children's programs in India, knowing that Indians wouldn't stand for that shit. Her stand on African population resonated with the western oligarchs and she became a regular greenwashing prop at the world economic forum. 4. In her own words, she was inspired by the racist myth of "Tarzan" that showed communion between a white noble and African apes in Africa without any black people. She talked so much about our carbon footprint, but I personally heard her say she travelled for over 300 days every year (mostly to give talks) and she even passed away while on one such trip. 5. I personally met her and understood why people said she was "humble", because talking to her felt like talking to your mum, or grandma. She would even offer you a chance to cuddle her little toy stuffed chimp. However, she ran a global organisation centered on her name and persona, even the logo was her image. No decision was made independent of her opinion (hence the constant travel) She was one of the last symbols of the grand absurdity that Mbaria Wa Mbaria and I referred to as "The big conservation lie". I will always remember Jane Goodall, but I won't miss her. I am too old, too African, too educated and too honest for that. Kwaheri Jane
October 9, 2025 at 4:05 PM
freyaa.bsky.social
Painting of an execution by guillotine during the French revolution. Engraving after drawing by Fious. 18th century. Paris, Musee Carnavalet
October 9, 2025 at 3:21 PM