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[reportsofagrandfuture]

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[buttonbuckfarm]

SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JULY 1!

launching a zine I’ve been dying to make! Submission link: https://forms.gle/o1ZH7X9KQAyKE2Lx8

I STRONGLY encourage those who are disabled, BIPOC, LGBTQ, or members of other marginalized groups to submit! I hugely want to emphasize diverse backgrounds and the things that work for us as opposed to mainstream farm communities.

the finished zine will be available for free online, and - fingers crossed I can make it happen - physical copies will be available to purchase with all funds being donated to Saving Gray Fox Farm (link to GFM!)

Wanna help further? Have experience formatting zines or other documents? shoot me a message to volunteer to help with reviewing and formatting submissions!

Let me know if you have any questions!

[image text: The New Farm Journal Zine, Looking for Submissions

A modern answer to historical farm periodicals prioritizing community, responsible land stewardship, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism.

Seeking:

-Information articles & how-to’s / DIYs (the main focus!)

-Insightful anecdotes

-Illustrations (or other art)

Potential topic suggestions: Livestock, food crops, native wildlife, hunting / trapping / fishing, foraging, recipes, homesteading skills, urban farming, rural community building, local food systems (and so much more!)

Submissions due June 1.]

[eddiernunson]

The Taste of You | Modern Rockstar!Eddie Munson x Fem Reader | 18 +

Word Count: 8.1k

Summary: after attending a successful and rather sweaty concert from Corroded Coffin, you send the front man a rather thirsty DM on his instagram. You wake up to his response...and an offer to go backstage to follow through.

Warnings: lowkey unrealistic, alcohol, oral (f + m receiving), marking, begging (both), no protection, cream pie, use of aftercare

MINORS DNI

Based on my friend @bebe07011 going to a concert and DM'ing one of the band members (who looks a lot like Eddie) about how much she was enthralled by his performance and him responding back. This one's for you <3

Thank you so much to @forget-you-morelike-fuck-you again for editing, you're my lifesaver.

-

You lean on the counter at work, distracted by your Instagram feed. Well, not distracted, per se. There are several more productive things you could be doing, but with your manager out on an errand and no customers to serve, there isn’t really anything stopping you. A post from Corroded Coffin comes up, a few images from their latest stop on tour. You can hardly prevent an excited squeal from escaping your lips, scrolling through their images, and rereading the end of the post over and over. ‘See you next, Indiana!’

You’ve been looking forward to this since buying tickets at the announcement of their tour nearly four months ago. It’s been a summer of anticipation; each post a countdown to your own concert date.

You discovered Corroded Coffin through suggestions from Spotify, the algorithm having picked up on your tastes in rock music and suggested a more modern band. Their music is good, you discovered. Their first album Freaks in the Streets came out about two years ago, and it’s raw in its talent but their latest album, Hell’s on Fire (And So Are You) shot them into stardom. You had it on repeat for months, and their lead guitarist being hot as he was had nothing to do with your fixation.

Okay, discovering Eddie Munson, (said lead guitarist) the main lyricist on the album, had everything to do with your fixation. Every late-night TV host offered a slot for them to play their music and Eddie’s charisma as he cheekily answers questions about his off-putting lyrics drove you into over-excitement mode. You can still hardly believe you're going to be able to watch his sweaty chest perform live.

Your concert date is tomorrow, and you have everything set up. You booked it off from work, got the perfect outfit, and the tickets are waiting on your apple wallet. You set your phone down, locking it. As always, the phone lights up when it faces up and you catch the image of the glistening sweat on Eddie’s chest during a performance from a tweet that went viral a few weeks ago, a photo you immediately saved for your phone. God, he’s mouthwatering. There were several hundred women in the retweets praising him as well, so, of course, there’s no chance in hell.

But it’s nice to fantasize.

-

You sit comfortably in the level 100 seats, dressed in a somewhat alternative outfit, high waisted black shorts with a fringe hanging off them, a chain on your belt loops, and a ripped crop top with the bands logo you found in an urban clothing store. You hold a beer in one hand and your phone in the other, recording the opening act as they sing to an audience that is only half paying attention.

Luckily, you know some of their songs on their short 8-song setlist, half-heartedly singing along but saving your voice for the main act. Though, you know your heart isn’t in it when you notice the placement of the jewels you glued to your temple is awkward. When you squint your eyes in a certain way they seem to threaten to fall off. Whatever, they were dollar store jewels, anyway.

The band finishes their less than overwhelming act, thanking the audience, and teasing them with the fact that the main act is backstage and apparently excited to put a show on for their home state. Somehow, it keeps escaping you that you happen to live about 60 miles away from where Eddie Munson grew up, Hawkins, Indiana. That place certainly had a reputation for itself.

You make small talk with your best friend, who is as excited as ever, if anything, to see your face when you melt to the floor. Natalie isn’t into their music like you are, but she can admit that their music is objectively good. Free concert and the power to tease you? Natalie is SO in. “What outfit you think he’s gonna wear tonight?” You shrug, sipping some wheat water. You don’t like beer, but the venue’s options when it comes to alcohol are…limited to say the least. Natalie leans in to you. “You think he’s gonna wear a shirt this time?”

You elbow her, your cheeks heating up. Some places he wears a shirt, and it’s a day of tragedy. Some places he comes out with his chest already bare, and it’s pure heaven. Although, he is known to rip a shirt off occasionally, and you have far too many videos of that saved on your phone. “I don’t know. We’ll find out when he comes out.”

You’re in the middle of a conversation about the politics of the latest show you’re watching together and the lights go down. An electric guitar is heard but out of sight. Subconsciously, you grab your friend��s forearm as your eyes widen in anticipation, your ass literally hovering on your chair as you’re at the edge of your seat. You hear her laugh, but you can’t focus as the lights on stage dramatically light up two at a time, and out of nowhere you can see the four band members, Eddie second to the left. Oh god, he’s wearing an open jacket with a metal chain. Holy shit.

You’re on your feet and screaming lyrics before you even know it.

The night goes by in a blur, and none of the videos you’ve seen online do Corroded Coffin any justice. Their online stage presence is unstoppable. And while Eddie was a large part of the crowd draw in, you watch as he interacts with each band member, using their energy to amplify his own. He really couldn’t do this without them, which is why he’s so insistent in every interview he’s given. Halfway through the show, Eddie does a quick run backstage, claiming his jacket was ‘too fucking hot’ and when he comes out in a fishnet shirt, the crowd goes absolutely nuts.

You sit in the back of a cab, buzzed and rewatching the multiple videos you’ve taken repeatedly, smiling giddily to yourself. “That was such a good show.” You mumble to yourself, sipping from the drink you promised to the cab driver you wouldn’t spill from. You’re so drunk you barely even notice the taste of the beer anymore.

The cab driver pulls up to the hotel and you drunkenly climb out, handing him four 20-dollar bills on the way, making sure he’s tipped well for having to put up with your drunk ass. He doesn’t seem to mind too much, but then again, you’re too busy rewatching your thirst caught in 4K to even notice. God damn, the video really doesn’t put his glistening chest any justice. It was even better in person. If you could just lick up his chest, you knew every problem in your life would be solved.

Your best friend laughs behind you, escorting you to the hotel room. As the hotel room door opens you just want to climb into bed and scroll through your phone, but Natalie makes you wipe off your make up and get dressed into some pajamas. You check your Instagram, Corroded Coffin’s post from tonight at the top of the feed. There were some high-quality shots of him in his fishnet shirt that you immediately save, going over to Eddie Munson’s personal Instagram from where he’s tagged in the post.

God, he must get hundreds of DMs in a day. One raindrop doesn’t affect the ocean. I wanna lick the sweat off your chest so fucking bad just gimme a chance. Your thumb hovers over the send button, but you’ve sent several messages to celebrities before, and they never respond. So, you hit send, and you’re asleep within minutes, your lamp still lit next to you as the water from the shower in the bathroom less than ten feet away from you lulls you into a deep sleep.

-

Your 10AM alarm rings, yanking you out of a deep sleep.  If you could, you’d spend the next ten hours sleeping to shake off the hangover, but you've gotta get up to have time to pack up and get changed before check out. You can shower tonight at home. As you sit up on your bed, dismissing the alarm, the headache kicks in, making you groan. Oh, fuck, are you hungover.

You check your phone quickly, and as you scroll down your notifications, you triple check a notification just to make sure you’re reading it right. At first, you’re confused. Why would he be messaging you? Your eyes widen as you promptly yeet your phone to your friend's bed when you remember what the fuck you sent to him last night. You curl in on yourself with your knees up against your chest and your hands over your mouth in disbelief.

Natalie comes out of the bathroom after hearing your phone bounce off the bed and land on the floor. “Whoa,” Natalie breathes, seeing your stunned stature. “Are you okay?”

You shake your head, shellshocked.

“Okay, can you at least tell me what happened? You’re kind of freaking me out here.”

“I sent a really, really thirsty message to Eddie Munson last night and I saw a notification saying he responded.” You admit, no higher than a whisper.

“What?!” Natalie nearly shouts, a bit loud in the quiet morning of the small hotel. “Well then open it and read it! What did he say?”

“I’m scared too look!” You admit, grabbing a pillow and holding it close to your chest.

Natalie grabs your pillow and tosses it to the side, her wet blonde hair shining prettily in the morning sun. “Get up, you big baby! Open the goddamn message!”

Fuck, Natalie’s right. Doesn’t mean you liked it. You bend to pick your phone up, sitting next to her on the bed as you open your Instagram notification. Fuck, he responded only fifteen minutes after your message. “Oh you sent him a very thirsty message.”

“Look what the fuck he wrote back.” You whisper, eyes wide as your heart pounds out of your chest.

apricothamster147: I wanna lick the sweat off your chest so fucking bad just gimme a chance.

eddiemunson: Well, damn baby, are you still in town for tonight’s show? Come backstage and we’ll see about making that happen. (Send me ur email for tix)

“Holy shit.” Natalie mutters out loud, her eyes bugging to his response as well. “Well? Are you gonna accept?”

You chortle, holding your hand out to her comically. “Do you have enough money for another night?”

Natalie shrugs. “I have my dad’s credit card.”

“Are you allowed to use it?”

“Only when I need it.”

“Shit.”

“Honestly, girl, you need it. Go ahead, send him your email, I’ll get us another night.”

Your thumbs move fast, hoping his offer wasn’t due to a lack of sobriety or a glitch in the Matrix. If you’re still accepting my offer, my email is apricothamster417@gmail.com. You add a heart emoji just to be safe and send off a message to him.

Your best friend is in the middle of a phone call with her father to get him to call the front desk. They would only accept the credit card if they could speak to him. “Thank you!” Natalie hangs the phone up, looking at you. “Hotel is taken care of!”

You’re lying on your bed at this point, still in your pajamas with your palms stacked on your forehead. “What the fuck am I even gonna wear?”

“You brought multiple outfits, right?” Natalie asks you, sitting on her bed and laying down now that she no longer has to get ready to leave.

“Yeah, I brought some back-ups.” You sit up quickly, eyes wide. “I need your expertise in styling it, though. I have to look hot.”  

Natalie sits up as well, serious as she can be. “Oh sweetheart, he won’t know what hit him.”

-

An hour into her crusade, styling your hair, your phone lights up in a notification. Your phone is closer to her, so you ask her to check it, Natalie knows your passcode, anyway. You know what it is immediately based on the expression you see on her face in the mirror. “Did he respond?”

“Yes!” Natalie answers, placing the hot tool down and putting the freed hand over her mouth.

“Oh my god, gimme that!” You respond, too impatient to wait for her to calm down.

eddiemunson: See you tonight (with a winky emoji)

“Oh my fucking god.” You let out, and suddenly it occurs to you that you’re seeing him in concert again. There’s even a slight possibility of you meeting him, however slim that he may remember to even do it.

A notification from your gmail rings, and you see ticketmaster. You hit it hard, seeing First Name, ‘Unknown’ Last Name, ‘Stranger’ has gifted you two VIP Floor Tickets with Back Stage passes, apparently just scanning the barcode will get you backstage. No. It wasn’t…no. This isn’t real. You stared off into the distance, eyes up from your phone. This doesn’t happen…

“Babe!”

You’re snapped out of it, realizing you zoned out in disbelief. “I’m just…a little in shock.”

Natalie smirks at you, tilting your chin on her fingertips gracefully. “Well now we know it’s fucking real, so let’s party hard, babe!”

Your eyes roll at her antics, but you love them. “Thanks for asking your dad.”

“Bitch, what’s a rich daddy good for if not for my friends?” Natalie laughs, starting to use the iron on your hair again.

Your makeup is done, rhinestones on the inner corners of your eyes, and you're wearing fishnet tights under a jean skirt and an oversized Corroded Coffin band tee. You usually used it as a sleep shirt, but Natalie insists it would work its magic.

Butterflies invade your stomach as soon as your black boots hit the pavement outside the hotel, the sunset cascading across the sky in a beautiful haze of orange and pink. As your thighs feel uncomfortable against the fabric of the cab, you hope your insides will feel as nice as the outside looks right now.

You pay your cab, all on the card, and get out, your stomach in knots. Well, it's now or never. Hesitantly, you hold your phone out for your ticket scanner on the main floor and she approves, giving you the thumbs up. “Wait.” the ticket scanner holds her hands out when she notices the big red letters, BACKSTAGE PASSES. You think you’re in trouble when you’re both handed the Backstage Pass Lanyards, decorated with the Corroded Coffin logo.

This is where you start to believe that you might’ve died last night with alcohol poisoning because there’s no way in Gods’ Green Earth is this real.

You both thank the attendant and walk to your seats, front and center, third row back. You could see the scratches on the sticker on the speakers from the inspector in the factory. Damn, were you close. “We’re going to go deaf.” Natalie comments, a half smile on your face. “Need a drink?”

“Please.” You answer, eyes wide. Natalie laughs and gets up to walk towards the bar, which is much less crowded around in the VIP section of the floor. Fucking wild.

You hold your phone and sing along to some more of the opening act's songs tonight, now gaining some familiarity with it. They’re great musicians, but they’re just not on Corroded Coffin’s level yet. They definitely have the potential to get there.

Their set list ends, and you notice that the lead singer is close enough for you to see the beads of sweat on his forehead.

Oh god, you’re going to die.

Natalie tries to keep you entertained by chatting about anything she can, but it does so little to prevent time from crawling by at a snail's pace.

Your phone buzzes in your hand, and it’s a message from him. Wish Me Luck! You swear up and down it’s immediately after when the lights go down and the guitar starts playing off stage. Did he really just text you right before he started his show? Did that really just happen?

If there’s one thing about being in the third row with little to no one to block your view, it’s that no amount of high quality photos on twitter will ever amount to the real thing less than ten feet away. The sweat that drips down his leather vest for the night is mouth watering, the dark eyes in his expression as he performs hypnotizes you. You sing the lyrics, and jump and dance and occasionally drink, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t tear your gaze away from him.

And for a few moments, it’s like he holds your eye contact. No, that’s crazy. Nothing is happening. He has a million other girls to choose from, why would he choose you?

The concert happens in a blur, Eddie flings off the vest about halfway through the show, splashing some of his hair with his sweat. Your friend laughs at the sharp inhale that leaves your chest as you watch it. Man, he really had you in his clutches.

Eddie holds his arms out for his band as they close off the last song, all bowing together. “Thank you, Indiana! You’ve been a fucking fantastic crowd, thank you!”

“You ready?” Natalie asks you, holding out her lanyard cheekily.

“Nope.” You admit, taking a large gulp of the beer you barely touched. “After another beer I might be.”

“You really wanna meet him tipsy?” Natalie asks, raising her eyebrows at you.

“I don’t wanna be afraid to say anything!” You shoot back, leading her to the bar. You buy another one, and it’s down your throat within five minutes. You inhale deeply, wiping your face off from the excess beer around your mouth. “Does my mouth smell like beer?” You ask, suddenly worried.

“If you have to ask, I think you already know.” Natalie tells you, patting your back and leading you to the sign that says BACKSTAGE in all caps with an arrow pointing left.

A big security personnel blocks the big black curtain to the backstage area. You hold out your lanyard to him, and he gruffs as he holds his hand out for it. He takes a scanner to check out its legitimacy, and once both lanyards are in the clear, his face breaks into a smile, stepping aside to allow you through. It's almost comical.

The backstage area is busier than you had expected, arrows pointing you to where the visitors go, narrowly avoiding the crew as they bustle around. You both walk into a large area where several band members talk to friends or family, all sporting towels to dab their sweat away.

“Oh my god thank you for sending that DM.” Natalie whispers to you, looking around while starstruck. “I’m sure half these people aren’t even celebrities, but this is so cool! I’m going to go and mingle, you stick around for—”

You grab her by the collar, “Don’t you dare leave me alone here.”

“Ok, how bout we both grab some food? Maybe sober up?”

“Only because I’m hungry and free food tastes the best.”

You’re slowly picking at the fruit tray when you hear someone near you call out, “Eddie! My man!” You turn around to face him, the half-eaten strawberry you drop landing on the plastic tray loudly. You quickly finish the fruit and watch as he hugs his bandmate. “What, no shower, bro? You stink!”

The room echoes in laughter, and you join them. He does stink, and he stinks marvelously. The very scent makes you salivate. His laughter, it’s even better in person. He’s never laughed like this in any interview, all calm and toned down for the camera. This is genuine, heartfelt laughter.

You turn around to lean on the table, Jesus you need to calm yourself. Seeing him up close is sending a heat to your center that you're going to need to resolve quickly.

“Fancy seeing you, here.” His voice sends a shiver down your spine, barely five feet away. You turn and face him, your breath knocking out of your chest. Words cannot describe how little all of the photos in the world do him any justice. He is the most gorgeous man you’ve ever seen.

“Thanks for i-inviting me.” You answer, gulping at the slight shine his sweat still gives him. “You’re a really great performer…” You find yourself distracted by his chest. He’s probably going to get all sticky soon… he smelled even better up close…

“I’m gonna go mingle.” Natalie says, pointing towards a crowd of people talking to the band members. “Text me to let me know if you’re meeting me at the hotel.” Natalie gives a shy smile to Eddie and walks away before you could answer.

“Thank you.” He nods his head, giving you a smirk. Then, the unthinkable happens as he uses his thumb and pointer finger to lift your chin to capture your eyes with his own. How are they so pretty? “Are you going to make do on your promise?”

You gulp, your eyes flickering down to his pink lips. You’ve stared at his lips, how many times now? You nod slowly, peering up at him through your lashes.

“Let’s go somewhere a bit more quiet, then.” He offers, extending his hand for you.

You take it silently, his rough hands feeling warm and rough, but perfect. He leads you about ten steps down the hall, a doorway marked with his name over the words Dressing Room. As the door shuts behind him, he locks it, flinging his towel across the room. “C’mere.” He offers, extending his hand to you. You follow his instructions, sitting next to him on the couch. “You haven’t said a goddamn word, yet your message said fucking everything. Is the pretty girl shy?” He asks, thumb caressing your cheek.

You nod your head, gulping as his touch lights your skin on fire. “I—I was six drinks in when I sent you that message. …I wouldn’t have even remembered unless you replied.” You admit, leaning into his touch.

“C’mon baby, let’s see it.” You raise your eyebrows, inquisitively, wondering what he meant. “Your message! Couldn’t stop thinking about my after-show treat all day, a pretty girl begging to lick up my sweat. Show me.”

You nod to him, your near trembling hands reaching out for his chest. Eddie nods, a wild look in his eyes that nearly has you passing out. A loud exhale leaves your body as your hands reach out and reach contact with his chiseled, tattooed, chest, some sweat beads still lingering. How, you weren’t sure. Your eyes rake across his chest, taking in every tattoo you can, your heartbeat racing faster as you lean in, to finally, finally, rake your tongue up from his stomach to his chest, breathing heavily when the taste of the salt and his pure essence is even better than you imagined.

“Holy shit, she’s a fucking freak.” Eddie mutters, you feel his breath getting shallower under your mouth working on him.

You lean in again, nails digging into his skin as you give another long stripe across his skin, the taste of salt and delicious B.O. on your tongue and you let out a sigh of contentment. You crawl up to his collarbones, having noticed a pool of his sweat there gathered while he was performing.

Your tongue slides into the dip, moaning at the salty taste. Your teeth graze the bone, nibbling a little to leave little tiny bruises. You can’t wait to save the HQ pictures with these marks.

You leave one last long stripe on his treasure trail, having stared at many photos where his pants sit low. You’re nuzzling at it, breathing it in when you can feel him. Holy shit, Eddie Munson’s cock is only inches from your face.

You look up at him, and the back of his palms are connected to his forehead, his cheeks flushed, and his chest heavily breathing. He looks down to meet your gaze, and suddenly he sits up, grabs your face and plants a wet kiss to your lips. Your entire body tenses up, barely able to believe that it's real. Your brain eventually catches up, responding in kind, crawling so your bodies fit closer. Eddie pushes you back lightly before you get too close, having you lie down on his couch.

“Can I, sweetheart?” He asks, moving down to where your cunt has been begging for attention.

“A-are you sure? I don’t mind just sucking you off.”

He chuckles, leaning in for another kiss. “Oh baby, you just earned so much more than that.”

Eddie trails down your body, placing kisses on your exposed neck, lifting your shirt lightly as his hands move to cup your tits. You whimper in kind. “Baby, do you know what it’s like having the most gorgeous woman in the world offer to lick sweat off you? If you just give her a chance? I saw your picture you posted from the concert and fuck, you’re a goddamn smoke show. Those eyes, your gorgeous tits, your thighs, oh my god, baby, your thighs.” He talks through wet kisses trailing down your body until he’s face to face with your jean skirt.

He pulls twice, asking permission. You place your hands on your button to undo it and Eddie playfully swats your hands away. Your skirt is pulled off your body, leaving the fishnet tights and your thoroughly soaked panties. He leans in between your thighs, and your thigh muscles slightly convulse as you feel his hot breath against it. “Shh, haven’t even touched you yet, baby.” He hushes you, his big hands gracing your thighs gently. He leans in and you can’t tell what he’s doing until he starts pulling down, and you notice one of the strings from the tights in his mouth. He can’t seem to pull them off like he wants to, and after a last try he gets frustrated, ripping them off, instead. “There, that’s fucking better.”

You let out a tiny giggle, and then you feel so exposed to him, your lacy panties drenched as he stares between your legs.

If you told yourself this would be happening 24 hours ago you’d call yourself insane…or a silly goose. You were incredibly inebriated.

He flings the fishnets across the room and reaches out to touch your soaked panties, the touch inducing a whimper from you. “You’re soaked, huh, baby?” He murmurs, petting along your panties gingerly. You whimper in response, your hips lifting to meet his delicate touch more firmly. He chuckles, watching your face all scrunched up. “If you want me to touch you, beg for it.”

“Eddie, fucking touch me please, want it so bad.”

“Yeah, you want me to fuck you with my fingers, baby?”

You nod, starting to hopelessly grind your hips up. “So fucking bad, please.”

He smiles, watching the outline of your pussy as you get wetter. Without warning, he hooks his fingers around your waist band and tugs it down, and suddenly you find yourself exposing your pussy to the man who took most of your gallery's storage space on your phone. The way he looks at your pussy is damn divine. His eyes darken with lust, pink lips shine with spit, and his cheeks flush; it makes you want to close your legs in embarrassment.

They stay open, because you’re afraid to move, this must be a dream. This is too fucking good to be real.

“Fuck, I knew your pussy would be pretty, but I didn’t know a pussy could be this fucking gorgeous, look at you.” He rambles, you’re not sure if he’s talking to you or your pussy. He places a thumb gently on your slick, stroking lightly up and down, the sensation sending fire rippling across your skin. He sees your thigh shake the littlest bit. “Feel good?”

It does, but you want so much more from him. “Mmm hmm.” You answer, toes flexing with anticipation.

“Do you need something?” He asks, stroking your lips too lightly, not necessarily getting closer to anything. He just narrowly avoids your clit, watching you squirm as your eyebrows furrow lightly.

“I need more-I need more.” You choke out, your hips desperately rutting against his fingers. “I want you to touch me harder, or move faster, I need more.”

Eddie chuckles, hardly believing how much better you had turned out to be. “You need more? Okay, sure. I can give more.” He leans in to lick a stripe right on your neglected clit, and your hips rut up in surprise, a yelp of pleasure jumping out of your throat. It doesn’t even phase Eddie, now that he's tasted you, he doesn’t want to let go. “How do you taste so fucking good?” He asks, his voice low and husky. “Doesn’t make any fucking sense, this should be a fucking crime.”

You moan, hips grinding up against him, head back in pure ecstasy. “Your sweat shouldn't taste so good. I could bottle it like ketchup and eat it on everything.” You admit, your fingers flexing as a wave of heat runs right through you.

Eddie barely lets up, even as the sentence makes his eyes roll into the back of his head. He pumps one of his digits into you, a ringed finger, no less. Your jaw drops as he fucks into you, the hot pool of pleasure in your stomach starting to form. It's the best this has ever felt by a long shot.

Eddie continues to attack you, adding a second finger as his tongue swirls over your clit repeatedly. “Eddie…fuck…so good.” You can barely talk, your bliss radiating in every extremity. “K…Keep doi’ tha’…”

He stares up at pride at your cocked out expression, panting heavily as you feel yourself on the brink. Out of nowhere Eddie picks up his speed into hyperdrive, and you fucking keel over him, high whines escaping your throat as one hand flies into his hair and the other on the couch’s arm rest to keep you grounded.

The orgasm hits you slowly but leaves your thighs shaking underneath him in its wake. It's the best goddamn orgasm you’ve ever had. Eddie continues to place kisses on your pussy, licking up your cum from your entrance, seemingly quite satisfied with his hard work.

You're breathing heavily, looking up at him desperately through half open eyes. “You have to let me suck your cock, please Ed.”

He gives you a half smirk, you’re barely recovered and you’re begging to suck his dick? Did he win the lottery? “No, I need to feel that perfect pussy wrapped around my cock before I cum from the sounds you’re making, alone.”

You lift your heavy head up in confusion. “Sounds?”

“Have you heard what you sound like when you cum? If I had the patience, I’d be making you cum here, all night, but I fucking don’t. I need to know what the fuck your pussy feels like.” Eddie admits, and his voice sounds desperate.

You let your head fall back down, your legs falling down in unison, spread eagle. You shoot a smirk at him. “What if I told you to beg for it?”

“Hmm?” Eddie asks, and you see a light flicker on in his eyes.

“Beg for my pussy, Eddie. Wanna hear that pretty voice.”

Eddie grins widely, fuck, you just keep getting better. “Please, baby. Please. Let me fuck that tight, perfect pussy of yours. Please let me feel those hot, warm walls fucking pulse around me while I give it to you hard and well, just like she deserves.”

It's more than you could ever hope for, but you find yourself feeling greedy. “Hmm…not desperate enough. You don’t really sound like you want to fuck me all that badly.”

To this Eddie actually whines and groans in frustration. “C’mon, baby, please. Let me fuck you, I will do anything to feel that perfect cunt around my cock.”

Your legs hitch around his hips, pulling him in so his hard on in his jeans meets your bare pussy. You lean into his ear, inhaling his shampoo. “If you let me mark up your neck so I can have all those petty bitches be jealous of me at your next show, then go right ahead.”

“Oh, fuck, deal.” Eddie yanks his belt and his jeans and underwear off in one fell swoop, and the sight of his cock is better than anything you could’ve imagined. He kicks them off smoothly, lining himself up with you again in a matter of minutes. “Shit, you want a condom?” He asks, used to fucking bare back.

“I’m on birth control.” You tell him as he hovers over you.

“Oh that’s a good girl.” He mutters, leaning in to kiss at your neck. “You ready?”

“Fuck me, already, Ed, I’ve been ready since this morning.” Eddie chuckles and he slides himself in, the head of his cock burning only slightly, but feeling fantastic. “Oh, oh my god.”

“Fuck…” He grunts, waiting for your go ahead. “Better than I thought you’d feel. God, is this heaven?”

You giggle in response, your pussy pulsating around him in beat. “Your cock…so fucking full.” Eddie lifts his hips experimentally, and you let out a gasp at the burn and the pure pleasure it sends through you. “More.” You choke out when he doesn’t continue right away.  

Eddie doesn’t hesitate to listen to your request, your arms wrapped around his back as you clutch onto him for dear life. He ruts into you harshly, his hips snapping as it hits your g spot intentionally at every rut.

Your mouth seems like it’s trying to form words, but your head is so foggy by the time you open your mouth, the sentence is nowhere to be found. “Look at this cock drunk little slut.” Eddie laughs, watching your fucked out face.

Your hands tug on him, forcing his chest closer to your mouth. He lets his arms buckle down, slowing his pace down as his face finds refuge in the smell of your hair, while you start sucking lightly on his chest, leaving little bite marks. As you suck on his chest, your pussy sucks him in simultaneously, causing Eddie to moan from both sensations you were giving him.

Eventually, you have purpled your way across his chest, admiring your hard work as he continues moving slowly over you. “Eddie, can you go faster again?”

“Sure, baby. Be a good girl and turn onto your hands and knees.” You listen and turn around, tilting your ass up so it’s easy for him to slide in. “Oh, thank you, baby. Now lift your head up.” You do and he yanks on your hair, pulling a good chunk at the root. “That’s good.” He puts himself back in you, causing a guttural moan to leave your lips.

“Eddie…” You gasp out, the first hit surprisingly harsh against your hips. Not a part of you remotely minds, eyes rolling back in ecstasy as Eddie seemingly fucks you as hard as he can.

“You wanna still blow me, baby? Because I’m about to blow…” Eddie doesn’t have to say another word, you getting up and onto your knees on his animal carpet to wrap your lips around his cock and bob your head. “Use that pretty mouth…”

The feeling of you choking on it, your mouth desperately trying to take his whole length sends him over the edge. Eddie moans loudly, and you do everything you can to memorize this moment for the rest of your life, because nothing will top this.

Your mouth is overloaded with his thick cum, and one last load shoots out of him onto your face as your mouth pops off him, and ok, now nothing will top this.

He’s breathing heavily, staring down at the white shiny substance that made it’s way all over your nose and lips, some dripping down your chin to land on your tits. You start to gather it on your fingers, dipping it onto your tongue like it’s donut frosting. You hum to yourself at the salty taste, looking up at him through your eyelashes for approval.

“Shit, ain’t that a sight.” Eddie mutters, watching as you hopelessly attempt to clean yourself up before his cum goes everywhere. “Here, hold on.” Eddie yanks on a pair of low sweats and grabs something, walking towards the sink in the dressing room. He walks up to you and cleans his mess off your face and your tits, his hands behind the warm cloth gentle. He tosses it to god knows where and grabs one of the waters from his mini fridge.

He hands you the water and watches you as you slowly come back to yourself, the haze in your eyes raising. Your phone buzzes on the table next to the couch, and Eddie picks up the phone to give it to you and you call out to stop him a moment too late.

Eddie raises his eyebrows at your choice of wallpaper, it couldn’t be interpreted as anything other than thirst. The sweat glistening, his hand holding the microphone delicately, his face looking rather passionate about what he was singing about. Damn, that's a good photo, Eddie thinks. “So, did I just check something off your bucket list?” He asks, holding your phone out before tossing it to you.

You get up from your knees on wobbly legs, still needing some water, apparently. “Uh,” you take a sip, wondering how to answer as a wide smile settles on your face. On the one hand, you’re embarrassed. On the other, he had to know how viscerally thirsty you were after him. “No. I just did my bucket list.” You answer, taking another sip of your water as you stand in front of him, still head to toe naked. “Didn’t think I’d get this far.”

Eddie laughs at this, the same genuine laughter you heard from earlier.

You walk around the couch, bending over to locate your skirt.

“Lookin' for something?” Eddie asks, playfully pushing your buttons.

“My skirt…” you answer, peering across the room at this point.

“Can I be honest?” He asks, peering over your shoulder comically as you look around.

“Hmm?”

Eddie’s hands land your bare hips, tugging them backward so his boner hits your ass. “I could go for round 2.”

“Oh, thank fuck.” You whisper, turning around to face him. Eddie guides you, your steps messy as you back up to his vanity, a few brushes and the eyeliner he sports scattered. He lifts you easily onto it, your legs wrapping around his torso, pulling him in. You can’t tell when he removed his sweats, but the head of his cock unexpectedly against your heat already pulls a high whine out of you, sighing in relief. “Put it back in.”

“Fuck, don’t need to ask me twice.” He mumbles, lining himself up.

Your jaw drops as he pushes himself in, watching with a heavy chest as Eddie stares down at the sight of his cock entering your slick, a gulp leaving his mouth. “Holy shit, baby.” He mutters, exhaling as he bottoms out, his eyes closing. “How have I already forgotten how good your pussy is around me?”

Your breathing is shallow, watching with heavy eyelids as Eddie closes his eyes to seemingly gain his composure. “Eddie.” You whimper, your legs around his torso tightening. “You’re the…the hottest person I’ve literally ever seen in my life. Nothing will compare to this.”

You can feel his cock twitch in response, and you flutter around him as if to second it.

“Good.” Eddie grunts out, moving ever so slowly, eliciting a whimper from you. “Nothing better fucking compare, your pussy is too good for that shit.” His tongue sweeps a long lick in the crook of your neck, your eyes rolling into the back of your head as it feels dirty, in the best way. “May I return the favour?”

You’re about to ask when you realize his question is rhetorical, and you feel his teeth start to nibble, bite, and suck hard at your throat. He feels you suck him in as you breathe out little whimpers, the relief of his tongue against your skin followed by more stinging of his teeth working on you was everything, your nails scratching down his back in an involuntary response.

“Eddie…” you moan, head tilted back in ecstasy, nearly colliding with his mirror. “Fuck, you feel so good.”

“Baby, fuck.” He mutters, his breath hot against your neck. “I wanna mark you up everywhere.” You fucking tighten up in response, drawing a nearly cruel laugh from him. “Yeah? You like that?”

“Uh huh…” You admit, the feeling of his hips slowly drawing in and out of you and his hot breath on your chest becoming too much, but perfect at the same time.

His tongue makes its way further down to your tit, one hand rubbing your sternum desperately as his teeth work expertly on your bud. He’s not too harsh with it, knows the exact amount of pressure to make it hurt in the best fucking way. “So fucking pretty, baby.” He mutters, his hips starting at a faster rate. He lets off your tit with a pop after sucking on it gently, admiring the bruising that’s starting to take shape across your sweaty form.

You can do nothing but cling to him, all coherent thoughts gone the moment he started sucking on your collarbone sharply.

“Got any…any summer plans?” Eddie asks, out of breath. He moves a leg over his shoulder to get a better angle, deeper than before.

You let out a gasp of pleasure, the sound nearly feral. “Y-you.”

Eddie laughs, his ringed hand rough as he grabs at your thigh on his chest. “Oh fuck baby, I’m close again, your pussy is so fucking good.”

“Cum in me.” It almost sounds like you're begging. 

Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up to his forehead, his jaw dropping comically as he takes in your request. “Fuck, you sure?”

“Want you to fill me up, Eddie. Please.” You plead, and who is he to deny such a pretty girl?

“Gonna cum with me, pretty girl?” He asks, watching in marvel as you look more and more cocked out. You pull on him, yanking his lips to yours. You kiss him wantonly, deeply, all teeth and tongue as you do your best to express what you cannot with words. You don’t have a big enough vocabulary for the moment, anyhow. Eddie takes the lead and tugs on your bottom lip with his teeth, drawing a high whine out of you. “Gonna answer me?”

The edge is so close, an all encompassing heat invading your lower stomach as a palm of his hand toys with one of your nipples. Suddenly you’re aware this could be the last time you ever get the chance, so you sweep one last lick on his chest, lapping at the fresh coat of sweat like it was your first drink of water after a long week in the desert.

“Oh, fuck, I’m gonna—” He doesn’t even finish his sentence, his hips stuttering as you feel his sticky ropes of cum fill you up so deliciously.

In his haze, his fingers latch to your clit, expertly working on it in small circles to send you over your edge as well, your pussy fluttering perfectly around him.

The smell of sex in his dressing room is evident, the air thick as you both catch your breath. Your leg falls down off his shoulder like a weight is stored in it, your foot landing harshly on the linoleum tiles of the stadium. Your head rests against his chest, eyes closed as you breathe in the stench of his sweat. You need to memorize everything you can, sure you’re about to be escorted back to the main party.

Eddie surprises you, his hands soft as they cup your face, pulling you in for a sweet kiss. His mouth is gentle as he works it against yours, the light taste of pre-show alcohol on his breath. He methodically uses the kiss to distract you as he pulls out, but you still whine desperately into his mouth from the loss. A laugh escapes his lips, and you swallow it, still needing his gentle kiss. He finally separates from you, kissing your forehead as his thumb caresses your cheek.

“So…are you?” He asks, taking in your fucked-out face. Maybe you’ll let him take a post sex selfie if you reject him to remember you by.

If. There’s no way on this earth you would ever reject him, but of course, Eddie doesn’t know you’ve been stalking his Instagram.

“Hmm?” You ask, not a thought in your head for the moment.

“Doing anything this summer?”

You shake your head no, gulping. Eddie saunters around his dressing room, grabbing his sweats and another white cloth. He returns to situate himself between your legs, sporting his sweats, the hot cloth causing you to yelp in surprise.

He laughs quietly, a fond smile on his face as he continues to clean up the mess he left in you. At least, you think it’s fond. “You feel like following a ragtag band of misfits around for the summer?” He asks you, voice soft as he holds your eye contact while his hand moves idly.

“Ragtag?” You ask, remembering their electric energy. They’re rockstars, no doubt about it. There’s not one person who can deny that they earned their spot on the stage.

Eddie breathes another laugh, tossing his cloth to the side. “We are as ragtag as it gets, doll.”

You sigh, searching those gorgeous chocolate brown eyes for any signs he was joking. “I-I will quit my job…are you serious?”

He laughs, caressing your forearm. It occurs to him you’re still naked, so he walks to the couch to gather your shirt and skirt. “Dead serious. I can’t let a face like yours and a pussy like that go very easily.”

“Okay…” you answer, your heartbeat loud in your chest. You were so sure this was just a one-time (two rounds) thing that the idea of him wanting more of you never even occurred to you. It’s just too good to be true, no one is this lucky. “If I quit my job, I can’t afford to pay my own way…”

Eddie smiles, handing you your clothes. “If you don’t want to wear that skirt, I can get you some sweats from the merch table.” He offers, before sitting on the chair a few feet down from you. “Baby, I’m on the cover of Rolling Stone. You’ll be fine.”

Your jaw drops open, staring openly at the man as he watches your facial expression. “I’ll need to go and pack up…”

“Babe.” He stops you, getting up to hold your shoulders with his hands. “I don’t even know your name, yet.”

“Y/N”

He lets out an exhale, fuck, that makes sense. “I didn’t even know your name, and all I know is if I let you go then I will never be able to get you out of my mind. Whatever is stopping you, I can throw some money at it or call someone to get it done. Do you want to stay with me?”

“Yes.” It leaves your body in a sigh of relief, like coming home. Eddie presses a kiss to your forehead; you can feel his lips moving upward into a smile. “Also, sweatpants sound really nice.”

Eddie saunters over to a walkie you hadn’t noticed. In fact, you start to look around his dressing room, noticing a duffle bag by a rack with empty hangers, half opened bottles of water, and his phone sitting faced down at a table nearby. When he asks for your size, you provide it, putting the graphic tee over your head. He plops down on the couch, waving you over to sit right next to him. “Need to text your friend?” He asks, teasing you.

“Actually, can I invite her in? Natalie’s my best friend and she won’t let me live this down if I send her back without bringing her in to introduce you.”

Eddie shrugs, starting to pat his pockets for his phone. You grab it on your way to sit next to him, falling easily into his arm. “Yeah, sure, if you’re ready for her to tease the shit out of you.”

“Are you kidding?” You ask, somewhat giddy. “I’m about to go on twitter after your next show and see dozens of people asking where the hell you got your hickeys. Nothing can bring me down from that right now.”

Eddie chuckles, crossing one leg over the other in an L shape. He plants a kiss on your lips, his tongue sweeping against yours delicately. “Fuck, I’m so glad you fucking DM’ed me.” There’s a knock on the door, your sweatpants from the merch stand are delivered.

“You have no idea how much I keep thinking I’m about to wake up.” You confess, your fingers playing with the light stubble on his chin. “Thank god for cheap stadium beer.” The laugh that escapes him is melodic and gorgeous. “Thank god for cheap stadium beer.”

-

Thank you so much for reading! I love to read comments and replies and tags and as always reblogging is the best way to support fic writers on tumblr

Taglist: @pinkcowracing @yourthebrokengirl @skrzydlak @thirddeadlysin @sammararaven @bebe07011 @prettylovley @josephquinncore @forget-you-morelike-fuck-you @names-were-taken

[probablyasocialecologist]

Scientists have uncovered the Amazon’s earliest and largest example of farm-based city-like settlements high in the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes. The thousands of mounds, plazas, terraces, roads and agricultural fields — revealed for the first time in their fullest extent by airborne laser scans — necessitate a rethinking of just how complex ancient civilizations of the Amazon may have been, researchers report in the Jan. 12 Science. Over the last decade or so, the use of light detection and ranging, or lidar, in archaeology has led to significant discoveries in tropical climates, where ancient settlements often lay obscured beneath dense jungle (SN: 12/4/23). In 2018, researchers released scans of remnants of Mayan settlements in Guatemala, followed by Olmec ruins in Mexico in 2021 and Casarabe sites in the Bolivian Amazon in 2022, all which have been revealed to be metropolitan-like settlements filled with complex infrastructure (SN: 9/27/18; SN: 1/6/23; SN: 5/25/22). “It’s a gold rush scenario, especially for the Americas and the Amazon,” says Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who has scanned sites throughout the Americas but was not involved in the new research. “Scientists are demonstrating conclusively that there were a lot more people in these areas, and that they significantly modified the landscape,” he says. “This is a paradigm shift in our thinking about how extensively people occupied these areas.”

[...]

Beneath the tree canopy was a massive network of roughly 6,000 mounds — once homes and community spaces — clustered into 15 settlements and connected by an intricate road system. The lidar data also revealed that the open spaces between settlements were in fact agricultural fields that had been drained to grow crops such as maize, beans, sweet potatoes and yucca. Within the settlements, the researchers found tiered gardens that would have kept some food closer at hand. Put together, the results show that the valley wasn’t simply a series of small villages linked by roads, but “an entirely human-engineered landscape” built by skilled urban planners, Rostain says. Dating from several sites suggests the area was inhabited for roughly 2,000 years beginning around 500 B.C. by at least five different cultural groups. A next step will be to calculate how many people might have lived there.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - September 22-28

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles on Patreon!

1. The slowest of trailblazers: Better DNA testing means trafficked turtles can go home

““You don't want to just get a turtle and just throw it anywhere,” says Rodrigues, especially because box turtles have a big range, spanning numerous states. So [after they’re confiscated from black market animal traffickers] they wind up stuck in captivity. However, DNA testing has gotten cheap enough and good enough that individual box turtles can finally be traced back to the state where they came from.”

2. New progenitor cell type discovered, may aid in tissue repair and generation

“A team of SAHMRI scientists has discovered a completely new type of cell that […] could be used to boost healing in conditions like diabetes, where the body struggles to repair itself properly. Crucially, these cells don't express typical "self" markers, meaning they could be ideal candidates for stem cell transplantation as they're much less likely to be attacked by the recipient's immune system.”

3. How a Children’s Playground Is Helping With Flood Mitigation

“[This park sits above] a below-ground tank capable of holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater that city officials say would have otherwise spilled onto the streets or streamed into the basements[….] Others increase resilience with newly planted trees that can absorb carbon dioxide and airborne pollutants; once they mature, those trees also provide shade cover that can reduce the heat island effect of urban areas[….]”

4. Transforming agriculture from carbon source to sink

“The study results indicate that by 2050, these agricultural practices [using cover crops, biochar, and agroforestry] could reduce as much greenhouse gas emissions as planting new forests[….] Carbon sequestration on agricultural land is not only important for climate change mitigation efforts but can also enhance agricultural productivity and resilience to climate change[….]”

5. Rewilding success for long-lost bird population

“Conservation charities have successfully completed the second round of rewilding of a long-lost bird breed in Dover [… after working] over 40 years to restore a suitable grassland for the birds. […] Earlier this year, 108 choughs fledged successfully in Cornwall, according to charity Cornwall Birds.”

6. Over 30 celebrities join auction to put LGBTQ+ books in classrooms

“Pride and Less Prejudice is hosting its fourth annual #BannedTogether virtual auction this weekend with the goal of raising $20,000 to send 1,600 free LGBTQ-inclusive books to elementary schools across the United States.”

7. Advancement of Indian Buffalo Management Act Underscores Bipartisan Support for Tribal-led Buffalo Restoration

“The advancement of [this Act] reaffirms bipartisan support of Tribal sovereignty, self-determination and capacity building for bison restoration on Tribal lands. […] The Indian Buffalo Management Act would secure funding for Tribes and Tribal organizations that have an established buffalo herd and management program, as well as provide resources for Tribes to establish new herds.”

8. Anti-inflammatory drug shows promise in boosting motivation for patients with depression

“Growing evidence suggests one potential cause of low motivation may be persistent inflammation, which suppresses activity within key circuits in the brain. […] Patients who received infliximab demonstrated a greater willingness to exert effort in pursuit of rewards compared to those who received the placebo. […] "By targeting inflammation, we're not only addressing the biological underpinnings of these deficits but also offering new hope for more effective treatment options."”

9. Pig transplant research yields a surprise: Bacon safe for some people allergic to red meat

“Some people who develop a weird and terrifying allergy to red meat after a bite from a lone star tick can still eat pork from a surprising source: Genetically modified pigs created for organ transplant research. […] The company that bred these special pigs shares its small supply, for free, with allergy patients.”

10. Brussels tries out a novel rooftop wind turbine suitable for cities

“Just like solar panels, the Renewind mini wind turbine can be installed on the roof of a building[….] Renewind's invention is designed to make the most of wind acceleration at the edge of the roof, a phenomenon that could produce between 1 and 3 MWh per year.”

September 15-21 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[flowerishness]

Typha (bulrush, cattail)

A sunny day in November is definitely 'end of season' for these urban bulrushes at Lost Lagoon in Vancouver's, Stanley Park. Bulrushes spread through underground rhizomes which quickly form dense mats. Many parts of the plant are edible and grinding stone evidence suggests that they were used as a food crop as long as 30,000 years ago in Europe. Likewise, here in British Columbia, pre-contact indigenous groups used bulrushes for food, medicine and a variety of other purposes.

[elbiotipo]

Someone in the notes on your post about food in fantasy mentioned connection between at least early modern production of sugar and colonialism and slavery, and while I 100% agree that it's something that should be known, I think that if you want to have lighthearted fantasy setting there are definitely ways to work around this.

Like sugar is also produced from sugar beet. I don't know could it be done without modern equipment (production started at the very end of 18th century so while industrial equipment was primitive it was), but like you may do something with it, like some wizards developing production technology.

In the same vein, crop exchange in the Old World was mostly peaceful, or at least it wasn't due to slavery. Like rice was already grown in Egypt in 1000 BCE and made its way to Spain by 7th century CE. Bananas were grown in Turkey by 15th century CE. And tons of agricultural goods come from West Asia both ways. What I am trying to say is that if your world has equivalent of Americas your Europeans* could have just acquired potatoes and corn without colonization (because they were more ethical than irl or because they didn't have resources for conquest or because American nations were strong enough to stop them). Like potatoes and such are just crops, sailors could have picked them as a supplies and then someone decided to grow them at home.

This is like a suggestion specifically if you want to have a world for costume drama without dealing with heavy themes. I would suggest describing it specifically to point that out, and I can't say that it's very politically aware but definitely not worse than "they just have it" or "yes there are overseas colonies but pay it no mind".

*Because that's usually the case in examples that are discussed, from what I heard East Asian fantasy set in East Asia also suffers from this for the same reason, but I didn't read enough of it to say

Let me say you make real good points and I broadly agree with you. I do think the history of colonialism and where our foods came from is important (I do research that so no doubt). And I also agree that sometimes, those themes are too difficult to board properly, especially in a lighthearted story.

However, in fiction, it's not so much that I want people to do more "clean" ways of getting those crops. Many people told me "well, what if they get it through trade, or what if they got it through magical portals and such" my point is not that you find a "colonialist free" way to have potatoes in your setting, my point is that every crop in real life has a history behind them, and when you place them in your setting, I think you should consider that. Not only because you will learn about real life and its history, but also because of the storytelling potential.

I mean, I do have "worldbuilding fundamentalist" in my bio, and I think even if you don't sketch the entire world, you should at least know where your heroes are. Much of modern fantasy loves to adopt the "medieval" aesthetic, while in fact presenting a world with widespread trade, urbanization, a growing artisan class, etc. (I've done a longer rant about it here). Those things aren't just aesthetic choices, they are different societies that have different dynamics and they do affect the kind of plots and characters you might make on them.

I don't think fantasy should shy away from exploring themes such as imperialism and colonialism, trade and politics, intercultural contact and social change. One reason why I'm so insistent with the theme of crops and trade is that it's because it's emblematic of those issues. Sure, you don't want to explain the potatoes or chocolate in your setting, whatever. Don't you WANT to, though? Don't you want to explore beyond the pseudo-medieval aesthetic, and explore what an American or African -inspired setting might look like? Of course, you could and should also make your own new settings, but exploring actual history, geography, biology (at the broadest term, natural history) will make you a better worldbuilder and a better writer, AND also let you learn more about the world.

Sorry if this rant is a bit unfocused, just woke up from a nap after some wine, but this is why I'm so insistent with the stories that can arise just by considering the crops in your setting. Imagine what else can you write.

[ghostoffuturespast]

22 March 2024 - Friday Field Notes

Rabbitbrush (top), Spring Mountain Parsley (bottom left), Fringed Sage (bottom right)

The Spring Equinox was earlier this week and while the calendars might say it's spring, some days it doesn't necessarily feel like it. The prairie is beautiful, but it's a harsh place to live sometimes. There is limited water and the climate alternates frequently between extremes. So even though the calendars say spring, the prairie is slow to wake up. The patient sort, the prairie knows to wait.

Most people might think it's too early to start even thinking about gardening, but that depends on the types of plants you're planting. Many domesticated garden varieties of plants and agricultural crops have been selectively breed to reduce seed dormancy for human benefit. The seeds from domesticated plants germinate more readily and more consistently than their wild cousins. Which makes them easier to grow, harvest, and eat, but because of that they require a lot more babying and care. Wild plants are much tougher.

Seeds are living organisms, the offspring of plants, and they contain everything a seedling needs so it can germinate and grow. Wild seeds are incredibly patient, they will wait months, sometimes years, before they will even consider growing. Some have armor so thick that it has to be chipped away at by rocks and ice, freeze and thaw cycles, before water and air can even get to the seed. Others contain acids and hormones that have to be used up between specific temperature ranges before they'll even think about sprouting. While others, not fully developed, are knocked off the fronds and petals of their parents, children that brave the elements and just prefer to wait and see. Wild seeds do not rely on a calendar, because they know and can feel when it is truly spring. When it is safe for them to finally venture out into the world and grow.

I have no idea if this Rocky Mountain Bee Plant that I planted will grow this season. It's suggested to do fall plantings so it'll overwinter. It has a very thick and tough seed coat. I'm hoping the abrading I did and the snow might help it along a little. If not, it'll be a surprise for next year.

A couple of Pronghorn lads enjoying the trail.

CW: dead animal, road kill below cut

This Beaver was hit by a car trying to cross the road. Underneath the road there is a storm drain that connects a retention pond and feeds into the creek at the site that I work at. The storm drain is grated off, to help improve the flow of water and to make sure detritus doesn't get stuck in the channel, which increases the chances of flooding. Because this Beaver was trying to follow the water and because the drain was grated off, they had no choice but to cross the heavily trafficked road. It's unfortunate that urban infrastructure often does not consider the needs of all living things. Grating off that storm drain means no wildlife can use it as safe passage.

I salvaged the tail from this Beaver for educational purposes for work, the rest them was too far gone to keep, so my coworker and I moved them off the road and onto the shoulder a safe distance away from any cars.

Most likely this Beaver will first become food for scavengers, Coyotes and Corvids, before it starts to decompose. Insects will lay their eggs on its rotting flesh so their larvae will have something to eat, perhaps the fur will become a part of someones nest, and then the bones will bleach. Crumble to dust and return to the soil to feed the billions of microorganisms beneath. It will help the plants grow. Maybe some day, it might even help another Beaver live.

It's sad this Beaver died, but in nature nothing is wasted and nothing is forgotten. Life and death are so inextricably linked and one does not exist without the other.

And heck, maybe that Beaver tail I kept might inspire a future engineer. Help them build a better and more compassionate storm drain.

[fatehbaz]

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Italian archaeologist and numismatist Domenico Sestini visited Istanbul and left an invaluable record of the vineyards on the shores of the Bosporus. [...] Sestini’s work is treasure trove for an environmental historian wishing to venture into socio-ecological aspects of viticulture in Ottoman Istanbul because he did not solely document the vineyards in and around the city, but also provided glimpses of the geomorphology, climate and ecology of the Bosporus [...]. Suraiya Faroqhi, through a close reading of Sestini’s account, unearths interesting information with regard to viniculture and viticulture that Ottoman sources do not tell, such as differing opinions on and practices of grape cultivation, individuals involved in planting and harvesting, wine making and wine consumption, as well as wages and profits. Faroqhi concludes that the vineyards on the Bosporus ‘have disappeared [...]’; presumably there existed a number of prosperous [...] consumers in Istanbul who stopped drinking the mediocre wine produced in the environs of the city and opted for ‘better wines from western Anatolia or even southern Thrace’.

As grapes retreated from the shores of the Bosporus, they expanded on the rich alluvial plains of Western Anatolia a couple of decades later and changed the course of the region’s history. [...] Actually, the grape had been cultivated in the region for millennia, but it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that it became a major commercial crop. In this period, the grape in the form of the dried raisin, together with its companion, the fig, was the principal export item of the region, attracting foreign capital investment and technology, promoting trade, [...] in the urban and rural, [...] bringing the countryside and city together.

Every autumn, raisin and fig-laden camels arrived in the warehouses of Izmir. There, they were cleaned, sorted and packed, before being shipped to Western European and North American markets. Onur İnal argues that figs and raisins had a profound impact on economic and social life in Western Anatolia and transformed the region’s human and natural landscape irreversibly. ‘The story of fig and grape’, he suggests, ‘reveals a great deal about social and economic life in a major Ottoman port-city in the nineteenth century, but also illustrates the ways in which city and country interacted’. [...]

---

Text by: Onur İnal and Yavuz Köse. “Introduction: The Ottoman Environments Revisited.” Seeds of Power: Explorations in Ottoman Environmental History. 2019. [Some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[skyboxeye]

Capturing the ambience of Sneak King

This tasty title challenges players with stealthily handing out burgers across crowded rural, suburban, and urban environments.

(Not) Extracting Xbox sounds

The Sneak King ISO runs on both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360. This was achieved by including two sets of files on disc, each targeting a respective version: XBP archives and XEN archives respectively.

I didn't make any progress in extracting the contents of a XBP. EkszBox-ABX claims to recognize them as WMA containers as of v1.6, but ultimately extraction and playback didn't work in v2.10-Beta. I will say that while this program is powerful, I have found it a bit buggy/unintuitive in the past. It's also unclear the XBP format I read about is applied here, or if it's just a coincidental use of the same file extension.

I moved on from EkszBox-ABX, and tried unpackers and Winamp plugins on aluigi's site. Finally I tried DragonUnpacker and Game Extractor to no avail. I also tried the XEN QuickBMS script (see below), suspecting that the archive formats might be identical. but it failed.

I suspected that the XBP archives I was interested in were used to contain either WMA or Xbox ADPCM sound assets. I tried simply renaming to WMA; standard media programs still couldn't play them afterwards. I couldn't importing the WMA into Audacity as the format isn't supported there. Finally, I tried using vgmstream to interpret the file with the XBOX codec, but couldn't get usable output.

There is supposedly a home media center project for the original Xbox which may or may not support these files called XBMC4Xbox. This Wiki page has a bunch of info but I personally only found dead-ends.

Extracting Xbox 360 sounds

It's tempting to look further into the XBPs, since they boast bigger file sizes than the corresponding XENs in some cases. However I was reaching the limits of my skills. And besides, I've found little correlation b/t original Xbox audio file sizes and quality in the past - for example, with Riddick Butcher Bay.

We can use a QuickBMS script to extract King's ambient XEN archives and get the WAV(s) inside. This script was posted on the now-defunct XeNTaX forum, now accessible through the Wayback Machine.

This WAV file is in WMA1 or WMA2 format, decodable with vgmstream:

codec = WMA1 interleave = 0x0 channels = 2 sample_rate = 44100 start_offset = 0x00 num_samples = data_size

If you're interested in the sound effects found in each level's XEN archive, use this:

codec = XMA1 interleave = 0x0 channels = 1 sample_rate = 44100 start_offset = 0x00 num_samples = data_size

Some of these sound effects are seemingly ambient sounds, like birds and dogs in the Cul-de-Sac or distant chainsaws on Saw Mill. That said, I've never actually heard them play in-game.

Capturing footage

The Xbox 360 version offers the best visuals and should be used for capturing footage.

(Not) Hiding the HUD

We can try to hide the HUD (read on) or simply crop it out of our captures.

It should be possible to extract the XEN archives relevant to the HUD, modify or remove any relevant textures, and then repackage the archive using the BMS script above. However I couldn't get this working, due to the implementation details of the script - the QuickBMS error message suggests its something about MEMORY_FILE.

Regardless, I couldn't determine what format the textures are in. I was able to get signal using raw pixel viewers that suggests they are probably mipmapped. They are likely in some 360-specific texture format that requires its own toolchain (i.e. not Photoshop) to edit. Unlike some emulators, Xenia doesn't offer its own texture modding capabilities.

There are apparently developer commands in the Burger King games to hide the HUD, but these are disabled in retail.

Hiding the King

To avoid capturing the player-character you can hide the King somewhere that borders an obstacle or the level's edge, and then swing the camera such that the King isn't rendered. First-person mode unfortunately adds its own UI overlay so we don't want to use that (unless we can figure out replacing textures - see above).

Loading screens

In addition to each area's background tracks, there are short (~5 second) ambient loops that play over loading screens for Saw Mill (logging_am_loop_01) and Cul-de-Sac (suburb_am_loop_01). Loading assets seemingly exist for the other levels (const_amb_loop_01 and urban_am_loop_01) but I never heard them in-game.

Notes and curiosities

The game has four named ambient tracks: sawmill, construction, urban, and suburban. Of these, only urban plays on the expected level (Downtown). Meanwhile construction plays on Saw Mill, sawmill plays on Cul-de-Sac, and suburban plays on Construction Site.

[reportsofagrandfuture]

Let's get to work on these fruit, we've got development directions here

[allhallowsthemepark]

Half-a-ween Special: A Full Calendar of Spookiness!

Friends, today is Half-a-ween—the day of the year on the exact opposite side of the calendar from our beloved Halloween—and I thought, what better time to remind ourselves that All Hallows is a year-round celebration of the dark and spooky side of life! Operating the whole year, of course, means having to contend with other holidays as they arise. I touched on the crossover potential between Halloween and Christmas a while back, but holidays have a habit of cropping up in every season, and it seems only fitting to fill the All Hallows calendar with appropriately spooky twists on them all!

For our first shake-up, we’re starting this calendar not in January, but in November—right after Halloween itself, and just when we might be wondering what else we could do with All Hallows now that it’s raison d’être is past.

Dia de Los Muertos: Let’s be clear—Dia de los Muertos is not just “Mexican Halloween,” and I don’t think it’s right to go around poaching bits of other people’s cultures for entertainment. That said, there are some similar themes between the Day of the Dead and Halloween, and if a special event could be done respectfully and with full permission and consultation by the Mexican-American community, it could be a good way to ease the park down from the full-blown frenzy of Halloween itself. Dia de los Muertos events would be located in Ghoul City, and in the expanded version of the park, Croaker Creek (for the Southwestern aesthetic) and History of Horror (for the educational aspect).

Thanksgiving: Pumpkin Acres is our Thanksgiving hub, what with already exemplifying the harvest aspect of Halloween with its cornstalks, scarecrows, pumpkin and apple pies, and other bits of cozy rural Americana. For Thanksgiving, live turkeys are added to Harry Palmer’s Petting Farm, Country Costumes adds Pilgrim garb and turkey suits to its wares, and the pumpkin patch transforms into a farmer’s market selling actual edible produce (including pumpkins, still...but now they're explicitly for pies). Make a reservation for a genuine turkey dinner at Granny McGillicuddy's Pie Barn...and if slots run out, similar meal events are available in other park restaurants!

Christmas: A couple years ago, I devoted a whole post to Christmas possibilities for All Hallows. I still stand by all of it. Hexmas imagery forms the backbone of the Yuletide festivities, with spooky black evergreens in the Entry Plaza, Trick-or-Treat Village, and Ghoul City. Goblin Woods and County Drakul host folkloric monsters as walkaround characters. Meanwhile, people who prefer a more conventional Christmas can head into Pumpkin Acres, where things are a bit more mainstream. All across the park, you can shop for Christmas-themed costumes, and Grave Goods stocks a few bona-fide Christmas decorations alongside the more typical Hexmas ones.

New Year’s: Interestingly enough, the ancient Celts marked the turning of the year at Samhain and many neopagans still observe it as their religious New Year. That said, raucous New Year celebrations are generally considered an urban phenomenon, so head to Ghoul City for the special events (and Baby New Year/Father Time costumes, if you think you need them). Strange things happen when the clock counts down to midnight...and nothing new can start without something else meeting its end...

Lunar New Year: Lunar New Year, as its name suggests, is tied to the phases of the moon. That alone suggests some interesting crossover ideas, but there's more content to be had in focusing on the East Asian cultural aspect with its deep well of horror lore. Chinese hopping vampires, Japanese youkai, Vietnamese ghosts and monsters...expect to see them all wandering the place, along with the animals of the Eastern zodiac itself.

Valentine’s Day: Not to be crass about it, but “monsterfucking” became the Tumblr equivalent of a household word for a reason. Quite a few people seem to fantasize about romance with one or more creatures of the night. Valentine's Day festivities are more touchy-feely than other occasions at All Hallows...or any theme park, really. In this adults-only special event, roaming characters are fully empowered to flirt with guests and even engage in some low-level physical contact (e.g. hugging, hand-holding). The interactions range from the sultry to the silly and everything in-between (but nothing too intense).

Carnavale/Mardi Gras: This one isn't a big deal where I live, so I don't have any firm ideas for specific events or attractions, but I'll just point out two things. First, this holiday shares with Halloween a tradition of masks and costumes, so expect to see a lot more colorful sequins and feathers on the shelves of the costume stores. Second, the etymology of the word “carnival” apparently comes from the Latin root for “flesh.” There's probably something we can do with that.

Easter: What do Easter and Halloween have in common? CANDY! What else do they have in common? Um...things rising from the dead...no, I'm sorry, I can't. I'm not Christian but I'm not about to make a mockery of their holiest day like that. Better stick with the candy. The Easter celebrations in All Hallows can be found in Trick-or-Treat Village, where the characters sport bunny ears and hand out trick-or-treat prizes inside specially patterned plastic eggs.

May Day/Half-a-ween: On this, the polar opposite day to Samhain, the Seelie and Unseelie faeries are said to do battle with each other for control of the natural world! If you dance the maypole in Goblin Woods, you might catch a glimpse of this conflict (read: battalions of bloodthirsty fae will appear without warning and skirmish without regard for bystanders). Elsewhere in the park, the delightful irony of Half-a-ween, or “Halloween in May,” is reflected in window displays and roaming character dialogue.

Summer: Goblin Woods comes to the fore again with “A Midsummer Night's Nightmare,” a full-scale LARP adventure for teams of 4-6 players (reservations required). In Ghoul City, the Gilman Municipal Beach area becomes the site of a tongue-in-cheek Monster Beach Party event. Pumpkin Acres is all about the Summer Harvest, with delicious summer produce and watermelons carved like jack-o-lanterns. These events run all summer long until Labor Day weekend (we Americans are weird and place it in early September), by which point we're all sick of the heat and ready for Halloween season proper to begin again!

All Year Long: Keep an eye on your calendar and plan visits for evenings marked with a white circle, even if they fall in the middle of the week. The night of the full moon is Werewolf Night in Ghoul City, Goblin Woods, and County Drakul, and each month bears a sub-theme of its own, with photo ops, collectible merch, and more! And if a second full moon hits in one calendar month? That's the fabled Blue Moon, bringing twice the spooky magic!

And that's how you celebrate Halloween the whole year round.

[nullarysources]

Saving moths may be just as important as saving the bees

University of Sheffield news release:

Night-time pollinators such as moths may visit just as many plants as bees, and should also be the focus of conservation and protection efforts, a new study from the University of Sheffield suggests. The study found that moths under pressure from urbanisation may also be less resilient than bees, due to their more complex life cycle and more specific plant requirements. It also revealed that despite this threat, moths play a crucial role in supporting urban plant communities, accounting for a third of all pollination in flowering plants, crops and trees.

Was this written by a moth

[female-malice]

Family farms are central to American political mythology. Smiling, attractive families working the land and tending animals are a staple of campaign commercials and stump speeches. Rural family life enjoys exceptional deference and celebration, fetishization even.

Our collective political mythology portrays the family farm as a form of reproduction that is authentic, healthy, and sustainable — the way we lived before modernity, urbanization, and industrialization corrupted both family life and farmland. Given the inhuman scale of ecological crises like climate change and food insecurity, family farming offers a seductive mythology, anchored in a fantasy of permanence and human scale. But it’s a mythology all the same, and one largely disconnected from the history of rural family life in America.

The truth is that life on farms from the Atlantic Seaboard to California bore little resemblance to the nostalgic ideal suggested by contemporary imaginings of the family farm. Populations were transient, families were chaotic and broken, sexual taboos were flouted, and the romanticism of “Little House on the Prairie” pioneering collapsed on its first contact with the material realities of violence, deprivation, disorder, loneliness, and longing that better characterized the peripheries of America’s agricultural empire.

Agrarianism has an enormous footprint in American history, dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson’s famous celebrations of the yeoman farmer in his “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Jefferson’s agrarian rhetoric was good politics even then. An enormous portion of the population labored in agriculture — freely and in bondage — and flattering smallholders with talk of intrinsic virtue built broad-based support for the policies of agricultural expansion.

The kind of agriculture to be expanded remained a source of vitriolic and politically defining dispute. Cotton monocultures, largely tended by slaves, rapidly depleted soil nutrients. With each passing decade, the epicenter of cotton production moved steadily westward, as slavers abandoned old plantations to start anew on unbroken land further west.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the throne of the cotton kingdom sat in the Mississippi River Delta, but its frontiers extended well into Arkansas and Texas. Similarly, Northern settlers moved westward in waves, with farmers seeking fertile bottomland for bumper crops of corn, a crop they transformed into whiskey and pork for Eastern markets.

By the middle of the 19th century, an emergent grain-livestock complex stretched from Ohio to Colorado. In both North and South, agricultural expansion entailed the violent dispossession of indigenous populations, the managed integration of Western lands into settled agriculture, and the organization and importation of human populations necessary to both objectives.

Agricultural expansion depended not upon the settling of America, but on continuous and fitful cycles of dispossession, settling, unsettling, and resettling. Nineteenth-century populations were highly mobile, and they often carved out ecologies and communities that were precarious, fragile, and intentionally temporary. Many farmers planted on a particular plot of land always with an eye on the exit: the fantasy of cheap, fertile land out West. Others went West, and when they found it, immediately fled back East in shock.

For the millions of slaves laboring in Southern agriculture, the notion of permanent settlement ran afoul of the stark realities implicit in the traffic of souls: Slavers sold their slaves to cover debts, to hedge declining labor productivity as slaves aged, to dispose of difficult or rebellious slaves, and for a thousand other reasons. The movements of individual slaves often demonstrated a complex pattern not of settlement and permanence, but of internal flow, migration, and transience that follows precisely the trajectory of cotton cultivation: southwest and downriver. For indigenous populations, the history of agricultural expansion was the history of repeated dispossession and forced resettlement on increasingly marginal lands.

Such highly mobile populations meant that family structures tended toward flexibility and contingency on the frontiers of agricultural expansion. On Northern farms, the family retained centrality as the unit of labor organization and many people traveled West as families.

But these families bore little resemblance to the farmer-homemaker model we often falsely ascribe to family farms. Rather, such families were sprawling, maximalist, and multigenerational affairs with only rough notions of gendered divisions of labor. Men were responsible for staple and field crops, and women were responsible for dairying, poultry, produce, cooking, and cleaning. Ideally, men’s labor generated a lump sum at harvest that covered the cost of the next year’s planting; women’s labor, by contrast, generated a steady stream of income year round — sometimes called “egg” money — to cover daily expenses. Regardless, flexibility was the watchword of the day. With survival at stake, everyone worked — gendered ideals be damned — even if it meant women contributed field labor during harvest and men mended their own socks. Neighbors pooled labor, and farms took on regular hired hands, and this too created kinship beyond blood relations.

High morbidity rates, particularly during childbirth, meant that remarriage was common, and families might be composed of multiple primary couples or even the reassembled components of those pairs once severed by death or flight. Spouses often split over the decision to relocate. Other couples split and separately relocated as a solution to restrictive 19th-century divorce laws. As a consequence, casual, if quiet bigamists were commonplace in frontier communities.

Regardless, many settlers left families in the East and attempted to create new ones in the West. Constituting new families among the scattered and diverse population of the West often involved cross-class and cross-race marriages that would have been unthinkable in Eastern urban communities. Forced resettlement frequently shattered slave families and forced enslaved people to repeatedly reconstitute their families.

Rural people applied a make-do attitude not just to work and family, but to sexual intimacy as well. Camps, bunkhouses, lodges, taverns, and saloons were spaces rife with intimate and sexual relations that directly contravened dominant middle-class notions of sexual propriety: homosexuality, sexual barter and commerce, public and semi-public sex, and cross-dressing and gender fluidity.

Country folk were eager to pay for sex as well, and a distinctively rural infrastructure of sexual commerce met their desires. Brothels and prostitutes in rented rooms were common enough in frontier towns, but historians Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio also describe euphemistically named “hog farms” — farms that also operated as brothels. Matching the mobility of rural populations, other enterprising sex merchants put their brothels on wheels. Many states worked to criminalize “cat wagons,” as the mobile brothels were known, forbidding prostitution in “any such prairie schooner, covered wagon or vehicle,” as a 1899 South Dakota law put it.

Rural spaces were also hotbeds for sexual diversity. Close quarters and cold nights meant that many men slept together, and in timber camps and other gatherings of migrant laborers, proximity led to sex. Historian Peter Boag surveyed reports about camps in the Pacific Northwest and found that reliable reports estimated incidences of same-sex intimacy among men (and often adolescent boys) ranged from common to pervasive.

Similarly, itinerant laborers were a constant source of sexual anxiety among the better sorts in agricultural communities: A hired man might corrupt the farmer’s daughter . . . or his son. Social reformers also fretted that constant exposure to animal sex on farms produced unnatural desires. The sociologist E. A. Ross memorably quoted a Wisconsinite who reported that farm boys “get together in the barn and while away the long winter evenings talking obscenity, telling filthy stories, recounting sex exploits, encouraging one another in vileness, perhaps indulging in unnatural practices.”

What precisely these “unnatural practices” entailed was left unsaid, but decades later Alfred Kinsey would report that homosexuality was most common “in particular rural communities in some of the more remote sections of the country . . . among ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farming groups in general.” Such men often formed complex sexual communities with visible public components such as all-male “stag,” “bull,” and “cowboy” dances as well as stable intergenerational relationships between older “wolves” and “jockers” and younger “punks” and “lambs.”

Rural social events often scandalized middle-class observers. Rural people took the rare sociality afforded by fairs, festivals, and weddings to let loose. Such events rippled with gambling, drink, dance, and sex. Far from quaint, quiet, or orderly affairs, rural public events could be bawdy and rambunctious. Despairing of the corrupting effects of a “whisky, colored to resemble red lemonade,” an 1876 account from Dearborn, Ind., declared, “Thus did an agricultural fair, a promised event of sobriety and chastity, run to the resemblance of a drunken orgie.” Many fair associations responded to these problems by banning alcohol and gambling, but enough rowdiness persisted that in the 1920s the sociologist Alvin Good still bitterly complained, “Even the public dance in the rural community is usually sponsored by the immoral elements, and alcohol is usually consumed in abundance.”

At the turn of the century, such laments were entirely common. Commentators rarely looked out on rural families and communities as models of propriety, chastity, and virtue. Instead, they saw distressing disorder. The Social Gospel activist Josiah Strong captured the sentiment best in 1893. Observing the chaotic churn of populations in and out of rural communities, Strong announced he could “see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice and degradation should not increase in the country until we have a rural peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties.” He called this endemic “degeneration and demoralization” in rural areas, and he prescribed a hearty reordering of rural family life as a tonic.

This reordering was broad-based, national, and highly invasive in its scope. It enrolled ministers, educators, reformers, and government officials. It produced numerous legal reforms such as the “cat wagon” laws as well as other prostitution, vice, and temperance reforms. Alongside these measures, reformers targeted rural public health and hygiene and decrepit country schoolhouses. But reformers also supported eugenic sterilization and marriage registry laws, justifying the measures by appealing to some rural families.

In addition to taking legal measures, rural civil society cracked down on degeneracy. Local vice and social hygiene committees bolstered clean and sober social opportunities, expelled immoral elements from dances and fairs, and provided moral supervision to impressionable farm youth. Agrarian reformer and journalist Henry Wallace, for example, implored his readers in 1911 to clean up their fairs such that they no longer “offer[ed] temptations to vice and immorality.” Similarly, the country church movement aimed to boost the presence and potency of an effective ministry in rural communities. As historian Colin Johnson notes, other reformers endeavored to reach even the most remote reprobates through mail-order social hygiene and anti-vice education schemes.

The Country Life Movement, helmed by President Theodore Roosevelt, invested federal resources in the effort. Its efforts bore the fruit of a federal educational agency called the Cooperative Extension Service, or CES, in 1914. The CES provided agricultural advice to farmers, but it also circulated moral proscriptions and organized youth clubs, later called 4-H clubs, that emphasized gender-appropriate labor, clean living, and supervised social events. By the 1930s, officials at the Department of Agriculture, the CES’s parent agency, bragged that 4-H clubs were teaching millions of rural youth how to build stable families in the countryside, families that fit the gendered order and social stability we only now impute to family farms. In fact, it was only at this moment in American history that the term “family farm” itself emerged as a celebratory ideal, and it did so primarily in the context of government officials and their allies’ rallying the public to reform rural family life.

In this sense, our contemporary political mythology built on the family farm is actually founded on a backlash to a much more complicated history. Our political mythology insistently suppresses that rich, if imperfect human history. Rural America — its landscapes and communities both — did not spring from a process of peaceful, orderly, or permanent settlement. Those processes were tumultuous, violent, and chaotic. What was settled needed to be resettled and resettled again — wave after wave of individuals and families crashing against a wall of grueling deprivation.

Farmers have always been at the cutting edge of North American territorial and ecological colonization. They have also frequently been among its victims. The story of rural America, then, is not that of the permanence we hope to capture in the family farm. It is a story of profound dislocation and loss, and it is the story of the very human struggle to form family, intimacy, and belonging — in all of their marvelous diversity — in the wake of that monumental violence.

[everbloom-garden]

How to Do Gardening in Simple Way with Better Ideas

The most crucial element to get right for a good garden is the soil. Use actual topsoil-containing soil in your raised garden beds. Numerous essential micronutrients found in real soil are necessary for plants to receive a balanced diet. The majority of bagged soil is fluffy and soft to the touch, but it lacks the vitamins and calcium that healthy plants require.

Because it contains clay, real topsoil is heavier and may not drain as quickly, but that's okay! Clay retains water, which gives your plants' soil a more stable hydration level. Pick salad greens that are leafy to save space. The most abundant vegetable garden bed during the season is kale, collards, and chard. Early in the growing season, spinach, lettuce, and arugula taste fantastic, but in the heat of the summer they bolt.

Both cucumbers and hot peppers yield well. In raised garden beds, stay away from plants like potatoes, mint, sweet corn, and Brussels sprouts. Check out The Urban Farm Company's list of the Most Suggested to Least Suggested Crops to Grow for a great cheat sheet. Mixing the soil in the raised garden beds with the soil already present in the ground may seem like overkill, but it's a terrific idea. The direct layering of two different soils by plant roots is known as an interface. If plant roots encounter a hardpan soil that they are not accustomed to, they will actually bend sideways or upwards. Water behaves similarly.

If it can't pass through a stable soil profile, it will produce a small water table. Till the current ground a little, if you can. Raised bed gardening should be filled with 2′′ of soil. The soil you added to the raised garden beds should be blended with the surrounding soil. On Mother's Day, plant, some people advise. Some advise waiting longer. Before the last frost, you should not put your tomatoes in the garden because it will result in dead plants. However, planting warm vegetables when nightly lows are still in the 30s or 40s would definitely stunt the plants and reduce your garden's overall yield.

[journeydb]

October 10 2023 Loule, Algarve

Today after breakfast we rode out to Loule, stopping for beverages on the way of course, to meet our guide, Jao, whose name is like Joan in Catalan, Juan in Spanish, and John in Enlglish. He is a resident of Loule and very knowledgeable about its history.

Let's start with what Wikipedia has to say, some of which Joa shared with us:

"Loule is a city in the region of Algarve, district of Faro, Portugal.  In 2011, the population of the entire municipality was 70,622 inhabitants.

The growth of the settlement of Loulé likely stemmed from the late Neolithic, when small bands began rotating agricultural crops and herds around numerous subterranean cavities in its proximity. Within the following millennium, the settlements began to grow and intensify with spread of Mediterranean cultures, that progressively penetrated the southwestern part of the peninsula.

This culminated in the arrival of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who founded the first trading posts along the maritime coast, increasing fishing, prospecting for minerals and commercial activities. St. Clemens Church belfry is an original minaret of a former Moor mosque in Loulé.

After the 2nd century Punic War, the Romans provided a new impulse to economic activities, expanding the canning industry, agriculture and exploration of copper and iron.  In the urban area of Loulé, a sculpted altar to the Goddess Diana, the rustic villages of Clareanes and Apra, and necropolises suggested the extent of Roman occupation.

 In the 5th century, the Suevians and Vandals, and later the Visigoths, destroyed many of the vestiges of Roman Empire, adapting and assimilating these earlier models of settlement and the cultural experiences of the native populations.

The arrival of Muslim Moors, in the 8th century, lead to the rise of the historic Al-'Ulya' (Loulé), consisting of a small almedina (fortified city) under the reign of Niebla, under the command of Taifa Ibne Mafom.

The bell tower of Loulé St. Clemens Church (São Clemente) was originally a minaret of a former Muslim mosque. It is one of the few remaining Islamic religious architectural elements from the Moor rule in Portugal. Located across the church is Jardim dos Amuados, which is an old Moor Muslim cemetery."

We stopped at the shop of a coppersmith and watched him making some things in copper, while looking through some of the things he sold in his shop.

He was probably a friend of Jao's and he hoped we'd buy some things from him, but I don't think anyone did. It was an interesting stop on the tour, though. It also broke up my history lesson, which you might have been finding a tad boring, but, if not, there is a LOT more!

"By the end of the 16th century, Portugal had lost its independence following the events of Alcácer Quibir. The region and village of Loulé was, once again, threatened by coastal attacks from pirates along the coast, yet the castle defenses had already become threatened and had fallen into ruin. After 1630, the economic vitality of the Algarve began to fall, its populations stagnating and political instability contributing to Barbary Coast piracy. The region's expansion suffered, even as new buildings were being constructed.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Portugal lived a period of economic prosperity sustained by gold from Brazil. Many of the churches and chapels were enriched by the spoils of conquest; gold, azulejo, rich woods, and artistic treasures were used to beautify the religious structures of the kingdom, by artesans in the region and factories in the north. "

One of my favorite stops was at the basket-makers' guild, where we got to watch women engaged in artesanal crafts, including basket-making.

We walked through the streets and alleyways on our way again to the next stop, the city's market. How about along the way we learn a bit more history:

"Before the establishment of the First Republic, many of the contemporary architectural structures were constructed, including the municipal market, a project of architect Mota Gomes."

After we wandered around the market for a short while Joa led us to our lunch venue.

We walked through a shop and found a plaza with umbrellas and tables upon which the most delicious lunch of the trip so far was spread out and they just kept bringing more fabulous dishes!

While others were still finishing lunch I wandered back into the shop to learn more about it.

We headed back on our bikes to our resort, over a mountain pass, then rested, which for me included a swim in the bigger adult pool, showered and then a bus took us BACK to Loule for dinner!

We climbed a circular staircase of a building near the main square and found ourselves on TOP of the building, where we ate on the terrace. of the restaurant below. The food was exceptionally creative and scrumptious. And the views, even in the dark, were sublime.

Camberley and Tim have been with us on other bike tours, including the Costa Brava of Catalunya, before we lived in Barcelona and, in fact, the first time I ever visited Barcelona. We usually don't agree with them politically but we find other common interests to discuss, which keeps our friendship from becoming mired in dissension.