#[mutuals] - review

[t-hirstreview]

[bleachersgirl]

like he left benson’s jacket in the bathroom at the diner but then he had it at miss beard’s house later so he. sat on the curb for a while and stared at the cops and the body and then he stood up and walked his gay ass back into that diner to get the jacket and took it home. ok.

[apostaterevolutionary]

Oh man, I actually haven’t been this mad at bioware in years lmao (see my last reblog if you’re seeing this without context somehow). It’s oddly refreshing. Almost comforting even. Like ah, yes, of course they did something stupid, that’s just the world working as it always has. Sky blue, water wet, bioware making an absolutely massive fumble that fills me with burning rage. Normalcy

[marciliedonato]

So... Apparently UA s4 is a massive flop.... I'm not saying we need to start bullying* showrunners and writers and networks/streamers (*putting pressure on them to do right by beloved pieces of media with passionate fan bases so much so that they feel they'll get the guillotine if they do anything less than perfect and justice by the story/characters) but.... We need to start bullying showrunners and writers and networks/streamers again. These mfs have gotten too comfortable

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Deb Chachra's "How Infrastructure Works": Mutual aid, the built environment, the climate, and a future of comfort and abundance

This Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Engineering professor and materials scientist Deb Chachra's new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical – even beautiful – hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way – forever:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Chachra structures the book as a kind of travelogue, in which she visits power plants, sewers, water treatment plants and other "charismatic megaprojects," connecting these to science, history, and her own memoir. In so doing, she doesn't merely surface the normally invisible stuff that sustains us all, but also surfaces its normally invisible meaning.

Infrastructure isn't merely a way to deliver life's necessities – mobility, energy, sanitation, water, and so on – it's a shared way of delivering those necessities. It's not just that economies of scale and network effects don't merely make it more efficient and cheaper to provide these necessities to whole populations. It's also that the lack of these network and scale effects make it unimaginable that these necessities could be provided to all of us without being part of a collective, public project.

Think of the automobile versus public transit: if you want to live in a big, built up city, you need public transit. Once a city gets big enough, putting everyone who needs to go everywhere in a car becomes a Red Queen's Race. With that many cars on the road, you need more roads. More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.

Geometry hates cars. You can't bargain with geometry. You can't tunnel your way out of this. You can't solve it with VTOL sky-taxis. You can't fix it with self-driving cars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need transit. There's a reason that every plan to "disrupt" transportation ends up reinventing the bus:

https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/09/when-silicon-valley-accidentally-reinvents-the-city-bus/

Even the cities we think of as motorists' paradises – such as LA – have vast, extensive transit systems. They suck – because they are designed for poor people – but without them, the city would go from traffic-blighted to traffic-destroyed.

The dream of declaring independence from society, of going "off-grid," of rejecting any system of mutual obligation and reliance isn't merely an infantile fantasy – it also doesn't scale, which is ironic, given how scale-obsessed its foremost proponents are in their other passions. Replicating sanitation, water, rubbish disposal, etc to create individual systems is wildly inefficient. Creating per-person communications systems makes no sense – by definition, communications involves at least two people.

So infrastructure, Chachra reminds us, is a form of mutual aid. It's a gift we give to ourselves, to each other, and to the people who come after us. Any rugged individualism is but a thin raft, floating on an ocean of mutual obligation, mutual aid, care and maintenance.

Infrastructure is vital and difficult. Its amortization schedule is so long that in most cases, it won't pay for itself until long after the politicians who shepherded it into being are out of office (or dead). Its duty cycle is so long that it can be easy to forget it even exists – especially since the only time most of us notice infrastructure is when it stops working.

This makes infrastructure precarious even at the best of times – hard to commit to, easy to neglect. But throw in the climate emergency and it all gets pretty gnarly. Whatever operating parameters we've designed into our infra, whatever maintenance regimes we've committed to for it, it's totally inadequate. We're living through a period where abnormal is normal, where hundred year storms come every six months, where the heat and cold and wet and dry are all off the charts.

It's not just that the climate emergency is straining our existing infrastructure – Chachra makes the obvious and important point that any answer to the climate emergency means building a lot of new infrastructure. We're going to need new systems for power, transportation, telecoms, water delivery, sanitation, health delivery, and emergency response. Lots of emergency response.

Chachra points out here that the history of big, transformative infra projects is…complicated. Yes, Bazalgette's London sewers were a breathtaking achievement (though they could have done a better job separating sewage from storm runoff), but the money to build them, and all the other megaprojects of Victorian England, came from looting India. Chachra's family is from India, though she was raised in my hometown of Toronto, and spent a lot of her childhood traveling to see family in Bhopal, and she has a keen appreciation of the way that those old timey Victorian engineers externalized their costs on brown people half a world away.

But if we can figure out how to deliver climate-ready infra, the possibilities are wild – and beautiful. Take energy: we've all heard that Americans use far more energy than most of their foreign cousins (Canadians and Norwegians are even more energy-hungry, thanks to their heating bills).

The idea of providing every person on Earth with the energy abundance of an average Canadian is a horrifying prospect – provided that your energy generation is coupled to your carbon emissions. But there are lots of renewable sources of energy. For every single person on Earth to enjoy the same energy diet as a Canadian, we would have to capture a whopping four tenths of a percent of the solar radiation that reaches the Earth. Four tenths of a percent!

Of course, making solar – and wind, tidal, and geothermal – work will require a lot of stuff. We'll need panels and windmills and turbines to catch the energy, batteries to store it, and wires to transmit it. The material bill for all of this is astounding, and if all that material is to come out of the ground, it'll mean despoiling the environments and destroying the lives of the people who live near those extraction sites. Those are, of course and inevitably, poor and/or brown people.

But all those materials? They're also infra problems. We've spent millennia treating energy as scarce, despite the fact that fresh supplies of it arrive on Earth with every sunrise and every moonrise. Moreover, we've spent that same period treating materials as infinite despite the fact that we've got precisely one Earth's worth of stuff, and fresh supplies arrive sporadically, unpredictably, and in tiny quantities that usually burn up before they reach the ground.

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking. Here, read an essay of hers that prefigures this book:

https://tinyletter.com/metafoundry/letters/metafoundry-75-resilience-abundance-decentralization

How Infrastructure Works is a worthy addition to the popular engineering books that have grappled with the climate emergency. The granddaddy of these is the late David MacKay's open access, brilliant, essential, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, a book that will forever change the way you think about energy:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/04/08/sustainable-energy-without-the-hot-air-the-freakonomics-of-conservation-climate-and-energy/

The whole "Without the Hot Air" series is totally radical, brilliant, and beautiful. Start with the Sustainable Materials companion volume to understand why everything can be explained by studying, thinking about and changing the way we use concrete and aluminum:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/17/sustainable-materials-indispensable-impartial-popular-engineering-book-on-the-future-of-our-built-and-made-world/

And then get much closer to home – your kitchen, to be precise – with the Food and Climate Change volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Reading Chachra's book, I kept thinking about Saul Griffith's amazing Electrify, a shovel-ready book about how we can effect the transition to a fully electrified America:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Chachra's How Infrastructure Works makes a great companion volume to Electrify, a kind of inspirational march to play accompaniment on Griffith's nuts-and-bolts journey. It's a lyrical, visionary book, charting a bold course through the climate emergency, to a world of care, maintenance, comfort and abundance.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

btw tumblr mutual authors if you ever need proofreading done and don't know who to come to, come to me. I'm pedantic, particular and notice the tiny errors that creep into every book. also typesetting. I love typesetting. but yeah, proofreading. come to me and I can at the very least proofread part of your book free of charge, probably more. also my sister Cathy proofreads for people's theses and stuff but you'd probably have to pay her. she does like PhDs as well as fiction. Cathy's cool.

but yes I am apparently reasonably good at picking up on errors. I'd rather spend time proofreading a book than buy it and find out there are errors. (this is no shade to anyone, just an observation, because I like things to be correct.)

[wifegideonnav]

watched saltburn. if i was someone who liked unearned twists that were simultaneously not even a surprise and also i wanted to fuck jacob elordi im sure i would’ve loved it. 4/10 could’ve been worse, overall forgettable

[chandajaan]

Green continues to be the sexiest, coolest and most delicious colour ever, she means everything to me

[m1xieup]

spoilers for 108

So I think it so funny that Will arrived to Prospero/Montresor’s room when he did because that means he either

a) woke up before Mrs Poppet’s alarm or just straight up hadn’t gone to sleep (which aligns with my belief he had trouble sleeping based on how tired he can be shown to be/the fact there is often more line weight/a slight shadow under his eyes [though that could just be showing his eye shape]) and he probably knew of it before the alarm

b) his room is really close to their room

c) he ran as fast as his legs could take him to get there. He SPRINTED down those hallways and stairs to get there. Monty and Prospero had barely gotten up when he got there. He was running so, so, fast

[leechjuice]

looking for an intimate, bloody lesbian horromance to sink your eager teeth into this summer?

e-ARC applications for my debut novel, IN THE END, YOU KILL US BOTH are now OPEN, and will remain open until JULY 19TH.

full synopsis + cws can be found on the application page! due to graphic content, please do not apply to receive an e-ARC if you are under eighteen years old!

click here to apply!

[logray]

GOODBYE (2022) dir. Vikas Bahl

bonus:

[blicketdabest33]

The worst thing about writing smut is that you can't ask someone to peer review it. Like, I'm not gonna ask my friend (who's not even in the mcyt fandom) to read over my Majorwood smut-shot where Scott is in heat I'd honestly rather kill myself than do that

[justice-falls]

i drew a michael as a gift for @fortunechaos :)

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Call for support

Hey friends and followers, we at Solarpunk Presents Podcast (me and Christina, basically...) would really appreciate it if you would lend us your support this holiday season / solstice.

Support can look like subscribing to our Patreon, where we post episode excerpts, bonus chats, dispatches, and reviews from Christina and I. Sometimes, we post videos and photo essays, and we're fostering a little solarpunk community there.

Support can also look like a one-time donation through our PayPal. Every little bit helps us to keep the metaphorical lights on and support solarpunk podcasting.

If you're strapped for cash right now (and to be honest, who isn't? Global finances are pretty abysmal right now, and capitalism's stranglehold is starting to cut off a significant amount of air…), you can still support us very meaningfully by reviewing us on iTunes or Spotify, liking and commenting on our YouTube videos or subscribing to our channel, or even picking a favourite episode of yours and sharing it with a friend, family member, or solarpunk comrade before the end of the year.

Let's start 2024 off on a note of abundance and with a renewed commitment to bringing solarpunk into the present.

(Ariel's note: I've been putting this off cause it feels gross, but it's also kind of necessary for us; watch as I just c+p this across our social media because rewriting shameless calls for support is difficult for me…)

[liftme-up-letme-go]

Concert Recap Rammstein Dresden 15.5/16.5.24

Sooo after I finally had some time to process the last few days I wanted to tell you about my time in Dresden.

It was amazing! Not just the concerts but also the people I met made those two days so special. I was going to the concerts alone but on the first day I met lovely Julia from Reddit and later on awesome @trinitite-princess joined us. We did a Powerwalk to Feuerzone , managed second/third row on Richards side and had an absolute blast! It was so nice meeting you 🫶🏻

The next day I met up with Julia again, it was very windy so by the time we got in we were covered in dust and then they made us run even further than the day before because they changed the entrance. So that was kind of exhausting but also worth it in the end. I ended up standing randomly next to @marimayscarlett (I recognised her beautiful red dress) and @thegothicviking . You guys are just really cool and I loved talking to you! Maria I hope you also saw Richard taking of his arm cover thingies ...I think I died a bit. Also tell your Mum she's awesome!

I am so looking forward to Klagenfurt, meeting my mutuals and enjoying Rammstein together! So glad I joined this fandom 🔥🫶🏻

[churlfriend]

just logged into my letterboxd account for the first time in like four years. good lord there was they/them pronouns in there