#Locally

[blythe-dollz]

snowing so I took some pics <3

[sustainabilitytravel]

10 Easy Ways to Make Your Next Trip More Sustainable

Traveling is one of life’s greatest joys, but it often comes with an environmental cost. Luckily, sustainable travel isn’t as hard or complicated as it may seem. By making a few mindful choices, you can enjoy your adventures while reducing your impact on the planet. Here are ten easy ways to make your next trip greener and more responsible.

1. Choose Eco-Friendly Accommodations

Look for hotels and resorts that prioritize sustainability. Many accommodations now have green certifications or practices, such as using renewable energy, reducing waste, or supporting local communities. Websites like Green Key or BookDifferent can help you find these eco-friendly stays.

2. Pack Light

Packing light not only makes your trip more convenient but also reduces your carbon footprint. The heavier the plane or vehicle, the more fuel it consumes. Stick to essentials, and choose reusable items like water bottles, tote bags, and travel utensils to minimize waste.

3. Travel Locally

You don’t always have to go far to have an amazing experience. Explore nearby destinations and support local tourism. This reduces the emissions associated with long-haul flights and helps boost local economies.

4. Use Public Transportation or Walk

Once you’ve arrived at your destination, ditch the rental car and opt for public transport, cycling, or walking. Not only are these options greener, but they also allow you to experience the local culture and environment more intimately.

5. Offset Your Carbon Emissions

If you must fly, consider offsetting your carbon footprint through reputable organizations like Gold Standard or Cool Effect. These initiatives support projects like reforestation and renewable energy, balancing out your travel emissions.

6. Support Local Businesses

Instead of dining at big chains or shopping at international stores, choose local restaurants, markets, and craft shops. This helps sustain the local economy and ensures your money benefits the community you’re visiting.

7. Respect Wildlife and Nature

Avoid tourist attractions that exploit animals or damage natural habitats. Choose ethical wildlife tours and respect local regulations, such as staying on designated trails or keeping a safe distance from animals.

8. Reduce Plastic Use

Plastic waste is a global issue, especially in popular tourist areas. Bring your own reusable water bottle, straws, and containers. Many airports and cities now have refill stations to encourage this practice.

9. Embrace Slow Travel

Instead of cramming as many destinations into one trip as possible, focus on exploring one location deeply. Slow travel reduces transportation emissions and allows you to form a stronger connection with the place and its people.

10. Educate Yourself and Others

Sustainability starts with awareness. Learn about the environmental and social challenges in the places you visit and share your knowledge with fellow travelers. The more people adopt eco-friendly practices, the bigger the collective impact.

Why It Matters

Sustainable travel is more than just a trend; it’s a responsibility we all share to protect the planet and its communities. Every small step counts, from packing smarter to supporting local businesses. By incorporating these tips into your next adventure, you can enjoy the beauty of the world while ensuring it remains vibrant and accessible for future generations.

[maddaddamwasright]

The post is a great joke, but less jokey: another problem of Internet discourse is how separated it is from the actual (material) realities of people's lives. My neighbors and I share the same landlord, we are working under a single legal framework when it comes to employment, our neighborhood is shaped by the same companies. My (queer) partners and I live in the same city and face the same homophobes, and live in a culture where we experience the same gay bashers.

My online experience provides other things, but a huge proportion of online discourse is shaped by US-american discourse - I live on a different continent, but every day I interact with online discourse I am faced with knowing yet another yankee politician/law/absurd state repression/what-have-you. Largely these things are entirely disconnected from the reality outside of my computer, and largely I am entirely powerless to affect these horrors, but I am still faced with knowing them daily.

A pet peeve of mine is then how this yankee discourse gets adapted into settings where the conditions look entirely different: a generation of Swedish online activists were raised on a discourse regarding whiteness that was largely based on US-american conditions. Racism is alive and well in Sweden: we have oppressed Sámi and Roma people for hundreds of years, we had one of the earliest biological race "science" institutes globally, and there has been a ton of racism directed at most immigrant communities, be they Finns, Poles, Chileans, Greeks, Iraqi, Thai or Somali. The Swedish conception of race is very different to a US-american conception of race, and using Whiteness as a concept when discussing the e.g. the oppression of Sámi people has led to confusion and frustration.

Anyway, this is getting long, but what I'm trying to say is:

Please get organized locally - understand the conditions in which you live. Your neighbors/colleagues/local queers/anarchists are going to have a ton of things in common with you that you won't share with people that live on another continent.

More people should abandon Internet discourse and get into observing/engaging with local politics. I say this not because local politics often offers more meaningful opportunities for effective praxis (although it does), but because local politics often offers just as much highly toxic and entertaining petty drama.

I highly recommend city council meetings. You might make yourself an informed voter and active community member or something. You also might get to watch an ongoing soap opera of old men ready to murder one another over trash collection ordinances, and unlike the Internet, none of them can effectually tell one another to kill themselves no matter how hard and how clearly they are thinking it.

[3liza]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

[luulapants]

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

[icedhotcocoa]

okay guys but in all seriousness the trump attempted assassination is going to rally the right like crazy. voter turnout will be going up. it is more crucial than ever that you SHOW UP AND VOTE IN THIS YEARS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

[theblob1958]

people are saying do it scared, but you also gotta do it alone. you'll miss out on so much you want to do if you wait til someone will do it with you. do it scared and do it alone.

[fleuvien]

[thoughtportal]

the things that are reported matters. the language used matters. what is left out of the story matters.

[laughroditee]

"She's so beautiful! I bet she goes to the library."

- my 7 year old daughter

[pinklavenderdoll]

[ghostatservice]

Guys this especimen is so real fr Look at this unblessed trainreck of a teen with religious trauma and repressed self 🙏

[coffinwoodx]

ok so for those of you who don’t know, there’s this twitter account of a japanese local hero mascot named dentman who went viral recently due to this tweet

but yeah he saw the tweet. and his response went viral as well (which is how i found his account)

and he just has like. hourly posts reminding you to brush your teeth

oh and his rival? his name is mr. mutans. whenever dentman posts he makes a post of his own, ofc

but THAT’S NOT ALL. literally while making this post i found a THIRD ACCOUNT that’s all about taking your meds

safe to say i’m losing my mind

anyway the point of all this was that people are ALREADY beginning to draw them ship art 😭

and the reactions are everything

I CANT ADD ANY MORE IMAGES BUT TRUST ME THIS IS SO FUNNY

toxic one-sided dentman yaoi wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card but it DEFINITELY IS NOW!

[shitbl0gger]

[saulwexler]

how to explain to non-americans that the better call saul ads aren’t exaggerated for comedic effect they are super normie