#Maintenance-Free

[lemon-film]

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[wuntrum]

decided to make all my comics (signals, oh...huh!, and maintenance) free/PWYW to read!!! at least from now until the end of july. of course, if you like them, consider sending a tip my way (or preordering a physical copy or two!), but i wanted to make them free so you can check them out before committing to paying for it. thank you endlessly for the kind words about my work, it really energizes me to keep making weird stuff and putting it out there <3333

[plushri]

edited 22/02/2024 - my mum helped me raise the match goal from £100 to £200

edited again 22/02/2024 - I met and exceeded my goal! Donations are still very welcome because I think it's really impactful to show our collective donations, I will close this on the 27th when I am paid and can make my donation

Idea credit goes to @ibtisams and I was inspired by @stuckinapril and @geekydragon !

I am doing a donation match!

I will match every pound donated, from now until next week, up to £200! I will donate £50 regardless of the outcome.

-

1. Donate any amount you can to one of the places below:

UNRWA | Palestine children's relief fund | esims (link is a how to guide!) | Operation olive branch (any family that resonates with you)

2. Send me proof/receipt showing the date and amount, cross out any other information you wish

(currency does not matter, I will convert it and donate the equivalent in GBP)

3. I will update in the reblogs how much has been donated so far, and will make my matched donation on the 27th of February (when I get paid the money I plan to donate)

I'm currently planning on splitting my donation across the above sources, but I will donate £200 total.

-

If we meet the match goal we will raise £400 for people who desperately need it right now! It's easy to feel a small donation doesn't help, so hopefully this is a way to illustrate how it all does really add up.

Any amount helps, if you have £1 to spare please do, but if you can donate more I urge you to

If you have nothing to spare, please reblog and do your daily click

[fischlich]

fellas is it gay to dig the plants that grew too deep out of your girl best friends back

closeup + extra info and doodles under the cut yippee

any text in the images is in the alt if its hard to read! last one has some ara doodles in general because i love them so much you guys

[dreamgirlvibes]

Once you let a certain woman in, they automatically change your type. They introduce you to something different and something that isn’t just “found”. That’s why usually when things end, ppl always come back around bc there is no THEM. They have something you would look for but can’t just find. They have that “thing”, they leave you with their mark. Certain women just can’t be replaced no matter how better or worse you do after them. Once you meet HER, you will know.

[simoneindiaa]

Gratitude in FULL affect

Forever walking by faith, never by sight.

xoxo, SIS <3 =)

[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!

[fucking-relax]

be purposeful with your wellbeing

this could include:

let yourself move to music however you wish

doing small stretches during periods of waiting

celebrate when you do a task

reflect on the joyful mundane

ask: what is one thing you can do in this moment to make yourself more comfortable?

set aside time in your schedule to do whatever the fuck

[gatorpond]

2024 is trying to kill me and i'm so fucking tired of being beaten into the dirt.

my car won't shift into gear. mechanic appt on the 15th. can't afford it but don't know what else to do. looking into short term loans in case i need a new transmission.

ko-fi link

this is my lifeline. it's my only stability. i know i keep asking for help and i'm sorry.

i'll post a video showing proof of the problem later. right now i'm too tired. i'm just working as much as i can so i can take more comms asap since delivery driving is no longer an option for the time being.

i am physically disabled, traumatized beyond belief at this point, having cptsd/poverty flashbacks daily, can't sleep, can't eat, & i'm the only money-maker in my home right now. my partner had a job "hire" her then not send her any actual work so they're not paying her. i have lost 2 family members since may, i have 3 more likely losing battles with cancer within the next ~6 months, on top of everything else. i haven't had a chance to catch my breath at all. govt assistance denied mult times now.

i don't know. i just don't know what to do. i'll be working, i guess. it's all i can do at this point.

i'm sorry. thank y'all.

[golyadkin]

I'm still alive there's just been so much going on and last week another responsibility arrived screaming at me from the hedges in front of my building

Meet Tatum

[cafe-for-palestine]

🍰 the cafe is closed! ☕️

hey there!! do you have an idea you've always wanted to see written and drawn, but don't have the time to do it? do you want to donate to palestine, but don't know where to start?

welcome to the nico and evo cafe, in which @deliwobbe and @good-vs-evo will collaborate to create one fanart and fanfic combination for any prompt in exchange for a donation to palestine!

we'll be catering to a whole lot of fandoms! including, but not limited to: chainsaw man, heaven official's blessing, haikyuu!!, alien stage, and so much more!

for our first trial run, we will be taking two commission slots! (slots taken, thank you so much for your support!)

check out our carrd for more info and samples!

our dms and askbox are both open to answer any questions you might have about how this event will be running :] thank you for reading this! if you can’t donate, reblogs are appreciated!

[wuntrum]

!!! NEW STUFF !!!

charms for the first time ever!! signals charm w/ mini lanyard, and saints for girls charm with spinning cd inside!

new stickers! computer sticker sheet (!!!), saint sebastian gold sticker, as well as the stickers from my top surgery collection are back

new prints of laura and chell

very limited signed copies of maintenance

[shakingparadigm]

I desperately want to see Ivan with longer hair like in the one child flashback if anything could turn Till gay it would be that

I had a draft on here about Ivan joining the rebellion and growing his hair out long!! ROUND 6 released and absolutely DASHED my hopes of course but it was nice to look back on how blindly optimistic I was haha.... ha....

Anyways. Yes. Ivan with long hair. I think he'd look good with it in a low ponytail maybe... or braided hair.... I've seen AUs where Ivan stayed in the slums and he absolutely rocks a mullet. It's a shame Unsha and Nigeh are so keen on keeping their pets well groomed and proper (Ivan and Sua's hair is so perfectly cut and it stayed that way for basically their whole lives). Ivan with a mullet... Sua with the same hair length she had in the angel/devil art with Mizi.... wah..... they'd look so good.

I think a lot about the fact that Till is so fixated on Mizi's long hair and I wonder if he'd start growing fond of Ivan's hair too if he grew it out (Till braiding flowers into Ivan's hair and insisting it's just practice even though he adjusts the style into something he thinks would fit Ivan specifically... Ivan feeling warm at the touch of Till's hands in his hair.... aauuuuooiighhh)

[miiukkaa]

I was looking at the med bay in your new lair thing, and I was wondering what you think that little room would have inside it? I thought the med bay would be another train car, and I’m not all too familiar with subway layout.

Just general curiosity if you had imagined something for it out not :)

*rubs hands together* yes! i did have some ideas about the medbay area!!

here you have the medbay area, you'd seen in the subway lair layout, highlighted in turquoise. you can immediately see that i have included both the small room and a subway car!! why? what does that mean?

the little room used to function as a maintenance room for the subway back in the day... though now it's repurposed into what i call the operating room! just like the name implies, this space is mainly used for treating both minor and major injuries.

after your injuries have been looked at, i doubt you'd wanna lay down to recover in the small room that smells of chemicals and generally just feels lonely... but fret not! for you have the separate space for recovery: the recovery subway car!

admittedly, i do not have a layout drawn for this specific space but yes, it'd just be a subway car with most of its chairs replaced with beds instead. i do have this older background i'd drawn for animation practice, though! i do think the background does still look pretty close to how i would go about drawing it now! :)

you'd have, again, mikey's little doodles adoring the walls with small "get well soon!" -drawings posted here and there. the doors of the subway cars have been taken out and replaced with drapes instead. you can also treat minor injuries in the subway car as well as change old wrappings to new ones!

(also, as a side note, let it be known that you can find your way back to my posts about the subway lair by clicking on the appropriate tags on my pinned post!)