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Personal - Trying to save Pisgah National Forest

Aug 1 2022 - Starting tomorrow I’m supposed to be at my laptop at the ungodly hour of 8:15 AM and do Extremely Important Environmental Activist Things* with the US Forest Service - and I will! - but damnit I am still sick. It’s been a week now.

Originally I was going to throw myself back into a refresher research binge b/c this is going to be some dense policy stuff which is normally my jam but I might just show up and mute and hide myself the entire time so they don’t have to hear my never-know-when-they’re-going-to-hit coughing fits. I am just not at 100%.. nothing near it. I am so much better at writing than speaking off the cuff in any case.

Really really hoping I’ll be healthy enough by Friday, when I’m actually expected to show up for work again… so terribly sad that I couldn’t use this time off to actually accomplish some projects! There’s so much to do!

At least I finally had the energy to make myself a completely badass salad tonight, with tomatoes and mint from our garden and corn and cucumber from our friend Farmer N. Also managed to throw down a little organic fertilizer and mulch on the plants that needed it in the Deck Beds.

*A small band of us - mostly strangers and a few local nonprofits - are the last line of defense for the forest (through official, legal channels). We are fighting against their shitty 30 year plan — it includes cutting down shitloads of old growth forest for no damn reason! Publicly even the logging industry said they aren’t interested in logging in this much. 

Wish us all luck, welcome all prayers and spells!!

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Mom sent me a facebook link to a PBS news hour post about how the anti-lawn movement is growing. The vast majority of the comments on it were stuff like this:

Most people are on our side here, even the so-called "boomers." We just have to be spreading ecological knowledge and practical means of creating useful habitat in back yards! Educate! Protect! Resist!

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I didn’t even consider that soap could be made out of bacon grease, like when I heard “animal fat” that just never came to mind

I am once again thinking about neighborhood-scale networks of DIY and mutual aid where community wealth could be created literally for free by collecting things that people would otherwise throw away

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tape casette recorders are compatible with literally every. single. thing. im out here living in 2095.

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-core as a suffix serves the exact same function as -esque and yet they throw tomatoes at me when i say something is kafkacore

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I want to be a house un-flipper. I want to buy expensive houses and make them look so shitty it devalues the entire neighbourhood

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New favorite method for growing pumpkins & winter squashes:

1. Build a pile of rich compost 2 feet high.

2. Make a hole in the top, fill with soil.

3. Transplant a pumpkin into the hole and water well. Ideally one you grew yourself that's in a newspaper or other compostable pot to eliminate transplant shock.

4. Apply mulch around the pumpkin. Used coffee grounds work well.

5. Water occasionally for the first few weeks if the rains have already stopped and you happen to notice they need it.

6. Ignore all summer.

7. Harvest from the two plants treated this way this year:

Pretty good, considering the near complete neglect they endured. Much better than the ones that weren't planted in a hill of compost certainly. And people, I literally hadn't done anything to them since July- I was too busy with other things.

I already have thoughts about improvements for next year, aimed towards having them thrive without care once planted, reducing the need to water, and getting bigger harvests.

First off, instead of building a tall hill that water will run off of, I'm going to dig a shallow basin with a berm around it, and fill to the original soil line with compost. Not only will the squash roots be closer to the soil water, if it does rain, the water will be directed towards the squash plants and soak in, instead of running off.

To make up for the extra cold from not being on a hill, the compost will be unfinished, so it'll provide extra heat as it finishes decomposing. This is an old English way of doing things, they called it making a hot bed, and used it for growing cucumbers, and my mom used it for squash. I'm sure other cultures also came up with the idea, but that's the lineage of my knowledge.

But seriously, so many pumpkins, for so little effort. I'm quite pleased.

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Two universal constants of high fantasy living:

If something falls into ruin a necromancer will move in 100% of the time

There is a critical mass of gold that will summon a dragon. If you keep accurate records and stay below it you’ll be fine

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So HYPOTHETICALLY if i wanted to seed bomb a golf course, what kind of plants are hard to get rid of and also not invasive?

Seed bombing is a bad idea and will ultimately make things worse. A golf course owner isn’t going to throw up their hands and go, “Oh, well, you win this round, ecologists!” it go to the effort of removing the plants carefully. They’re just going to dump loads of extra herbicides on them, ultimately leading to more harm than good.

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Little flat-window garden update: short Scottish days are not match for nasturtiums! Look at them go! They are pretty leggy but I hope they'll be ok. My strawberries are taking their time but a few days of sunshine have got them moving. And happy days: brand new leaf on my monstera! And my lovely amaryllis is back for its fifth year!

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I just realized this is totally the place to showcase my sewing adventures!!! I try to use more second hand materials than anything else, which isn’t too hard as I’ve made friends with a woman at a cool antique store who gives me discounts on vintage fabrics from her personal collection. I’ll post some pics soon!

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Pops’s Great Big Mutual Aid Masterpost

So, this isn’t the first post ever made like this, but I’m trying to do something a little different than just posting a bunch of links. I’m only gonna include resources that are international, common, displayed either as a map or as a geographically-sorted list, and easy to participate in, to make this masterpost as accessible as I possibly can. If you’re reading this post you’re probably an English-speaker with an internet connection, and so with that in mind my goal here is that any given link you click will have a decent chance of having something near you, and there will almost certainly be at least one link on this list with something you can plug into

Groups

Mutual Aid Wiki - A map of mutual aid groups of all kinds, largely (but not exclusively) ones started in response to the pandemic

Food Not Bombs - A map of free public meals from rescued food waste. Can be a little outdated

Buy Nothing Project - A list of hyper-local gift economy groups

Trash Nothing - A list of local groups where people give and request things that would otherwise be thrown away

Transition Network - A map of local groups seeking to build sustainable circular economies from the ground up, for people, not profits

Industrial Workers of the World - One big labor union for everybody, with local chapters across much of the world

Locations

Slingshot Collective’s Radical Contact List - An international catch-all list of projects

Intentional Community Directory - A map of communes, housing coops, land trusts, eco-villages, and similar communal living projects

Repair Cafés - A map of spaces where you can show up and have your broken items repaired for free (or volunteer to do so for others)

Sharing Spaces

Little Free Library’s Sharing Box Map - A map of little free libraries that have been converted into sharing spaces for food, personal care, or hygiene items

Freedges - A map of community refrigerators for sharing food

Little Free Pantries - A map of sharing boxes for non-perishable food

Can’t Find Anything?

None of these lists are comprehensive, and these aren’t the only resources available either. Try using a search engine or looking on social media with keywords like “[your location] mutual aid”

If you’ve looked everywhere you can think of but are still coming up short, you can DM me (not on anon) with the rough area where you live and I’ll try to find some stuff for you

Maybe you could start something yourself! Here are some resources: How to Form an Affinity Group, Small Town Organizing for Anarchists, resources for mutual aid groups from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, seven steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group

If you don’t have even a single accomplice to start an affinity group with, there are still actions you can take on your own! Check out my #practical tag for ideas

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i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

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I think everyone should take at least one business class or at least read out of a business textbook if they have the opportunity, not because it’ll be “valuable for your career” or whatever, but because nothing will sharpen your hatred for capitalism to a fine point quite like studying business academically. Other things will make you hate capitalism more, obviously this can’t hold a candle to just opening your eyes to the human suffering it causes, but it will teach you to hate capitalism with precision

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The Chrome browser exists to show you ads and track where you go so that Google can show you more ads. Please stop using Chrome. Firefox is open source, and while Mozilla is not perfect, it isn’t actively fucking evil the way Google is. It has a bazillion plugins, including various (FREE!) ad block plugins (I recommend uBlock Origins, which will even block YouTube ads – you can watch videos without interruptions again!). It will also function very effectively with a lot more tabs open than Chrome. I’ve got around 800 tabs open right now (not loaded, of course, except for maybe 2 dozen; it’s been a heavy browsing day), and my wife has between 2k and 3k at any time.

We are in the New Browser Wars. This time there’s a helluva lot of money up for grabs, because a lot of it is about running those ads. Monopolies are bad for consumers.

Just go download Firefox.

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A year of living with our faces covered and masked has taught us that society can still function even when we can't see each other's faces, and that it doesn't erase our identity, it doesn't significantly threaten security.

We're still people, humans, our eyes meet, we connect with our voices, despite the distance we maintain from each other.

With this realization now clear, it's surprising that the fixation on burqa and niqab bans still isn't going away. Switzerland recently had a vote on the matter, and now Sri Lanka seems to be headed down the same path of prejudice. It seems to be a strange kind of political fixation, an obsession. It's also now clear that these bans are inspired by nothing more than prejudice.

Sending my love and regards to all the niqabi sisters out there. You don't deserve to be subjected to these prejudices just because of your choice of clothing. Stay strong.