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On twitter I’m seeing dozens of threads from Black activists warning people against burnout, giving all sorts of useful tips about preventing and managing it for the sake of a long-term, sustainable effort.

On tumblr I’m seeing a hell of a lot of young white kids yelling at anyone who actually follows those steps, and acting like burnout is a moral falling rather than a well-proven psychological phenomenon.

Be careful who you get your information from. Don’t let guilt lead you to make choices that will harm both you and the movement.

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This is going to fucking suck but I will not do my enemies’ work for them. I will not just roll over and fucking die.

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Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.

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I'm reblogging this today. A prayer.

It's late spring, the breeze is fresh and the sun is warm. Carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere is below 350 ppm. I look over my schedule and see that I'll be meeting up with some community members to help somebody build a new potting shed out of rammed earth later today, so I pull out a jar of homemade black raspberry preserves to share at the potluck lunch- it'll go great with my friend's sourdough.

I load up some tools and the jam on a community owned bicycle, and head down the bike path that takes me to the train station that's close to my house. I leave the bicycle next to the neat row of other bicycles, and step into the well-maintained train when it arrives without pausing to pay; we've successfully entered into a post-scarcity society and there's no need for money.

I admire the lovingly crafted public displays of artwork on the train, and look out the window at people who are doing what they want to do, without worrying about health insurance or the cost of food. Many of the people are doing creative things: making artwork and music. People are playing and talking. Some are working, too, because it's rewarding to contribute to your community even when you don't have to.

I arrive at the community garden stop and see that some friends have gotten here already. They are laughing about something and beckon me over. We work hard together on the potting shed, and some of the children of the people working (including my own) arrive on the train after school to help out. As the shadows begin to lengthen, we share the food and drinks we've all brought. Somebody has brought a guitar; we sing and chat and celebrate a lovely day where we made something.

As the sun sets and everybody goes their separate ways, I get a message from one of my partners- we're going to play some games tonight, want to come over? Of course I do.

I end the night with a smile on my face as I lay snuggled in bed with my partner. I'm tired, I'm satisfied, and I'm so glad that I get to do this again.

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Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry

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reblog if you need a hug

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My webcomic rotation circa 2010 was Sluggy Freelance, Questionable Content, XKCD, Hark! A Vagrant, Girls With Slingshots, Buttercup Festival, Order of the Stick, Johnny Wander, Girl Genius, Darwin Carmichael is Going to Hell.

I'm delighted that several of these are still updating regularly, and that I'm able to check them, even if I no longer check them regularly. I'm also delighted that several of these have since wrapped up, and the artists have moved on to other projects and I can do things like support them on Patreon.

The notion of Scary Go Round being adjacent to Homestuck...I think you shifted my reality.

(In reference to this post / my tags)

Ok not to sound totally old-fashioned but this was not in a thematic way or anything!

Back in the day I used to like Dinosaur Comics. At the time, I would read webcomics by sitting at a computer in the morning and checking the ones I kept up with, like a newspaper. I regularly read Dinosaur Comics (updated daily i think?), XKCD, Gunnerkrigg Court, Scary Go Round, Questionable Content, and that sort of thing. Sometimes there’d be updates to other ones I liked, like Buttercup Festival or Hark! a Vagrant. It would take ten minutes, and that was Morning Computer Time.

At the time webcomic artists all knew each other, and the old-fashioned desktop computer browsing design meant that you were looking at them on a big screen, which meant the sidebars were visible. The sidebars would contain links to all of their friends’ comics or recommended comics. There would only ever be like 20 links max. so every day you would read Dinosaur Comics and could, from there, click the sidebar in the left to get to the creator’s own favorite comics. Dinosaur Comics was a good day’s starting point since it linked directly to pretty much all the webcomics I listed above.

(I’m sorry if I’m over explaining or under explaining this.)

(This was before social-media-ized internet was popular, and this was just how you read stuff.)

There was also something TopatoCo / a guy called Jeff who had his own webcomic that I read sometimes, but more importantly he was a central point that sold merchandise for a bunch of these comics, and I bought a Jonathan Colton t-shirt from him. He sold a line of Problem Sleuth/MS Paint adventures stuff and I remember this coming up suddenly in advertising newsletters I got I think. problem sleuth went from 0 to 60 very quickly, but I never really understood it.

Anyway, MS Paint adventures was linked in the sidebar of a lot of these comics!! The people in these circles really hyped it up. and I did read Problem Sleuth, dutifully, but it bored me. Then the same guy started posting his next work, Homestuck. I read the first few pages as they came out and then stopped clicking it. It just wasn’t for me.

So it isn’t so much about them being adjacent in any way apart from Ryan North, the guy who ran Dinosaur Comics, having a sidebar on his website labelled something like “the girls” with his recommendations for other things you might like, like Scary Go Round - XKCD - MS Paint adventures.

And I was literally there dutifully looking at the first page of homestuck before all the homestucks read it, admittedly going “oh nah this ain’t it”, but, like. I was there. I was standing next to the impact crater.

Like every day I would check on my friend T Rex and look directly at a link that led to the homestuck website and check on my friend Buttercup Festival instead. Then I would turn off the computer and be done with computer for the day.

It’s very weird to realise that this is not how people use the internet any more.

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“There are other forces at work in this world besides the will of evil.”

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sea butterflies, Limacina helicina (Gastropoda: Limacinidae)

source

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Astrally projected for one tenth of a second into a world where cocaine was never discovered and Coke was a beverage flavored with oak leaves instead of coca leaves.

Querca-Cola

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On Friendship.

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Building science pro here. Interesting concept; we love to see people being creative and testing to see what works.

To address a few concerns from the comments:

1) This could be installed on a rainscreen surface without introducing any moisture issues to the stick frame. As the substrate degrades over time, you could replace it, just like you would with any other exterior-facing rainscreen material.

2) Correct, this won't work everywhere. A hot, dry climate would obliterate this moss wall. It's probably best suited to locations where there's significant rainfall and mild winters, like the Pacific Northwest or Gulf Coast in the US, Southern UK, some parts of Europe, etc. Basically anywhere that you would normally see moss growing on buildings...

3) This would probably work better on surfaces that aren't exposed to direct sunlight on the regular

4) Yes, you'll probably have to irrigate it, so probably not a great choice if you live somewhere without significant rain, and you'll probably want to intercept and store rainwater from the roof to do your irrigation. Could result in maintenance challenges, and if you're storing rainwater on ground level you'll have to spend some energy to pump it for irrigation.

5) yes, having a green wall does reduce cooling load a bit by intercepting sunlight and by cooling the surface through evapotranspiration. It probably won't make much of a difference to heating loads; any added R-value for moss is likely cancelled out by evaporative heat loss. In any case, this is a much less cost-effective and emissions-effective way of reducing energy usage than adding more insulation instead.

I have a few other thoughts about this, but maybe my biggest concern would be longevity of the substrate materials, especially if this uses carbon-intensive Portland cement, which is very durable in normal circumstances. The net embodied energy of the assembly over, say, a 50 year period might end up being worse than the baseline material due to needing to be replaced, if significant degradation takes place.

This can be a solution to insulation and weatherproofing challenges

Source: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTF2JYRGH/

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We all have a place in the global fight against fascism and climate disasters. We all have something we're good at and something we can do.

They want you to think that you can't do anything about what's happening because they know what you're capable of. They want to take away your vote, your books, your voice and your hope because they know and are terrified about what we as individuals, and collectives, can do.

Do not give up, do not give in, do not let them win.

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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A Sheep poll perhaps?

As usual, I will treat the results as character creation sliders.