[plantyhamchuk]

Personal - Trying to save Pisgah National Forest

Aug 1 2022 - Starting tomorrow I’m supposed to be at my laptop at the ungodly hour of 8:15 AM and do Extremely Important Environmental Activist Things* with the US Forest Service - and I will! - but damnit I am still sick. It’s been a week now.

Originally I was going to throw myself back into a refresher research binge b/c this is going to be some dense policy stuff which is normally my jam but I might just show up and mute and hide myself the entire time so they don’t have to hear my never-know-when-they’re-going-to-hit coughing fits. I am just not at 100%.. nothing near it. I am so much better at writing than speaking off the cuff in any case.

Really really hoping I’ll be healthy enough by Friday, when I’m actually expected to show up for work again… so terribly sad that I couldn’t use this time off to actually accomplish some projects! There’s so much to do!

At least I finally had the energy to make myself a completely badass salad tonight, with tomatoes and mint from our garden and corn and cucumber from our friend Farmer N. Also managed to throw down a little organic fertilizer and mulch on the plants that needed it in the Deck Beds.

*A small band of us - mostly strangers and a few local nonprofits - are the last line of defense for the forest (through official, legal channels). We are fighting against their shitty 30 year plan — it includes cutting down shitloads of old growth forest for no damn reason! Publicly even the logging industry said they aren’t interested in logging in this much. 

Wish us all luck, welcome all prayers and spells!!

[plantyhamchuk]

Thanks for all the love and support! Day 1 featured: 

this one well dressed guy who politely shredded the Bad Forest Plan up (turns out he’s an environmental lawyer.. he was a total badass) 

learned that apparently there are people who go CAMPING with their HORSES and the single greatest problem in their lives is that sometimes the campsites that allow horses fill up or something.

rock climbers are a bit nuttier than I realized, but also apparently they want to keep climbing in areas that are so ecologically fragile that they really ought not to be.. but they absolutely don’t want to stop and in fact feel betrayed that they might be asked to stop.

a crazy hostile conspiracy fisherman took over the entire thing at one point, and got into a verbal battle with some whitewater enthusiasts AND the forest service simultaneously. Fisherman kept threatening to sue everyone it was pretty wild, but he did eventually make some good points that the streams he’d been fishing in for 30 years had legitimately been ecologically degraded.

lots of ecologists explaining that they’ve found tons of rare species and things that aren’t on maps or official inventories and that the forest service actually has no idea wtf they’re doing, they’re just making lines on maps and then making rash decisions like sure let’s put a road here and just log the crap out of everything.. also we can’t preserve this area because it was logged too recently so it doesn’t fit our arcane definitions we made up - better log it again.

The hunters want to log everything in sight, they hate old growth b/c there’s less deer there but like.. there’s deer fucking everywhere here. Everywhere! Just hang out in your backyard. Also hunting is a dying sport and the forests are already losing trees like crazy due to invasive species/diseases - no need to thin that’s happening right now. Statistically, waaaaay more people hike and camp than hunt.

One guy representing an outlying county with few industries wanted to both log the crap out of the forests but also attract tourists. Most tourists want to hike and camp in endless views of giant trees…

Most Passionate Speech Award: super inspirational speech on how the bits of forest we have left are just a tiny fraction of what used to exist on the east coast, on indigenous land management .. and even went into anticapitalist antilogging territory and then into how one day we’re going to give trees personhood or something he was really in the Feeling Zone on this group videochat. Respect.

He made some great points, but I’m afraid it was lost on most people as soon as the word “anticapitalist” slipped out of his mouth. 

[plantyhamchuk]

Day 2: 

The loggers really showed up! The smug, greedy ass sons of bitches with dead eyes. They’re currently looking to get 5x the logging land that they’ve had access to previously. They continually were like.. ephemeral streams don’t matter. Yeah logging has made some mistakes in the past but we’re all great and super modern now. There’s no way we’d fuck up like they did in the past. They were chomping at the bit. If you let them, they’d clearcut the entire damn national forest. Trees = $$ to them, that’s it. They make most of their income on private lands, no reason for them to fuck up the very few public lands we have! It was beyond infuriating.

New environmental lawyer showed up, and showed pictures from as recently as 2017 logging that was fucking up streams and waterways, creating totally muddy clusterfucks, revealing the complete fucking lie the loggers were trying to push. She wasn’t quite as powerful or convincing as the other lawyer, sadly, but the pictures spoke for themselves. 

I’m still sick and could NOT handle listening to the smug ass greedy ass dead-eyed loggers, so I definitely did not hang around for the full thing. More power to those who could. I figure yielding my time to those who could try to fight via bureaucracy was best. One more day left. 

[headspace-hotel]

Mom sent me a facebook link to a PBS news hour post about how the anti-lawn movement is growing. The vast majority of the comments on it were stuff like this:

Most people are on our side here, even the so-called "boomers." We just have to be spreading ecological knowledge and practical means of creating useful habitat in back yards! Educate! Protect! Resist!

[anarchopuppy]

I didn’t even consider that soap could be made out of bacon grease, like when I heard “animal fat” that just never came to mind

I am once again thinking about neighborhood-scale networks of DIY and mutual aid where community wealth could be created literally for free by collecting things that people would otherwise throw away

[anarchopuppy]

Expecting every single person to make soap and broth and compost and mend all their clothes and repair all their electronics and upcycle all of their trash in useful ways is just never gonna work. No one has time to do everything, especially if they’re forced to have a job too

But if one person learns how to make soap, and everyone in the neighborhood brings them leftover animal fat and gets soap in return, it becomes a lot more manageable. Someone else learns how to spin dryer lint, someone else pulps and recycles paper, someone else grows food, someone else raises chickens, etc, etc, and suddenly you’ve got a whole moneyless circular economy going. Less stuff going to landfills, less money going to corporations, more prosperity for everyone

If the concept of getting free things in exchange for trash interests you, find a Buy Nothing Project or a mutual aid organization in your area and get involved!

[purple-hel]

Also check out trash nothing, what free cycle became! https://trashnothing.com/beta/

[magnetictapedatastorage]

tape casette recorders are compatible with literally every. single. thing. im out here living in 2095.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

things you can record (audio only), simply by lying to your computer, telling it that the tape recorder is actually a set of headphones:

discord call

podcast

documentary

radio and internet radio

music, from any source. without having to download it at all.

music you make on virtual pianos/etc

noteworthy news items (fireside esque, interviews, huge events)

stand-up comedy

rented or borrowed media

any other sound your pc can produce

and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.

Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.

Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.

*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.

[gayspock-deactivated20250217]

-core as a suffix serves the exact same function as -esque and yet they throw tomatoes at me when i say something is kafkacore

[astergenius]

kafkastuck

[gayspock-deactivated20250217]

(the tomatoes stop midair and change direction) (they are now hurtling towards YOU)

[whetstonefires]

#THESE ARE ALL SUBTLY DIFFERENT (via @brawltogethernow)

yeah it’s like—-

-esque means homaging or resembling the style of, or reminiscent of even if unintentionally; you can apply the -esque suffix without making any overt assertions about creative intent or your own interpretive lens

-core is about pursuing motif as theme; it’s designating the [thing] attached to the suffix as a core (lol) unifying conceptual or stylistic element, rather than a mere attribute. it implies lifestyle choices, maybe an attached subculture–to be thing-core an item must either be produced as part of or usable within a pursuit of the theme

-stuck is weirder because it derives from a subculture to begin with, but generally it’s more like [other thing] ‘in the mode of’ [thing]. thingstuck implies the application of a template to another template to create the fusion child thereof; appropriately has its roots in fanfic aus

[roach-works]

holy shit that is all exactly right! i’d like to further suggest:

-punk indicates an ideological counterculture rebellion against current cultural norms in the direction of [thing], such as steampunk and solarpunk. kafkapunk would be something like defiantly embracing the option of turning into a hideous giant bug in lieu of participating in late stage capitalism. which, frankly, is a big mood.

[despazito]

I want to be a house un-flipper. I want to buy expensive houses and make them look so shitty it devalues the entire neighbourhood

[wolverinequeen]

I did this. I wouldnt call it making it shitty, but some people have scoffed and said I “Redneck’ified” the neighborhood. I moved to a suburb in 2009, it’s not HOA thankfully but older people acted like it was. I got cops called on me for my lawn being too tall the week I moved in, like 8 inches and such and they continued to do this often for my grass and my dogs being “too stinky and an eye sore to their view”

I have asthma and can’t use a push mower. I don’t own a riding mower. I can’t mow my lawn timely. I’m also not gonna pay a company to mow here 2x a week. I have a relative mow the front portion of my yard a few times a summer and we call it good. I then rewilded the property so the native plants manage themselves, my backyard is a meadow now. I have lots of trees.

People stopped fussing about the lawn eventually and these old huffy folks eventually moved away. I got chickens, turkeys, quail, rabbits in the meantime. My place is a hobby farm. I planted crops and gardens. My yard isn’t immaculate but it’s okay. I have corn and watermelons growing in my front lawn. 

From then on, a neighbor turned a spare acreage across the street into pasture and got a pair of donkeys. A herd of feral guineas roams the whole neighborhood. I’m the poultry lady here. A guy talked to me about turning his property for pigs recently. Someone on another street turned extra lots they bought into a meadow for their herd of goats right in the middle of the suburb. On the other side of the neighborhood someone has horses in a nice big field. At the road entrance to the neighborhood, the first house you see is another hobby farm of a couple dogs, a 4 wheeler,  some really happy kids and chickens. And their house is really beautiful too.  

All of this because I stopped mowing my lawn regularly when I moved in.  

It’s truly a thing of beauty and the homes are getting more affordable! Because someone in a local fb group complained a few months ago about it “I can’t sell a house here for the highest I want to because of all these places here! This used to be a decent neighborhood!” 

You don’t have to make things downright shitty. You just have to stop mowing your lawn regularly. 

[turtlesandfrogs]

New favorite method for growing pumpkins & winter squashes:

1. Build a pile of rich compost 2 feet high.

2. Make a hole in the top, fill with soil.

3. Transplant a pumpkin into the hole and water well. Ideally one you grew yourself that's in a newspaper or other compostable pot to eliminate transplant shock.

4. Apply mulch around the pumpkin. Used coffee grounds work well.

5. Water occasionally for the first few weeks if the rains have already stopped and you happen to notice they need it.

6. Ignore all summer.

7. Harvest from the two plants treated this way this year:

Pretty good, considering the near complete neglect they endured. Much better than the ones that weren't planted in a hill of compost certainly. And people, I literally hadn't done anything to them since July- I was too busy with other things.

I already have thoughts about improvements for next year, aimed towards having them thrive without care once planted, reducing the need to water, and getting bigger harvests.

First off, instead of building a tall hill that water will run off of, I'm going to dig a shallow basin with a berm around it, and fill to the original soil line with compost. Not only will the squash roots be closer to the soil water, if it does rain, the water will be directed towards the squash plants and soak in, instead of running off.

To make up for the extra cold from not being on a hill, the compost will be unfinished, so it'll provide extra heat as it finishes decomposing. This is an old English way of doing things, they called it making a hot bed, and used it for growing cucumbers, and my mom used it for squash. I'm sure other cultures also came up with the idea, but that's the lineage of my knowledge.

But seriously, so many pumpkins, for so little effort. I'm quite pleased.

[cappurrccino]

Two universal constants of high fantasy living:

If something falls into ruin a necromancer will move in 100% of the time

There is a critical mass of gold that will summon a dragon. If you keep accurate records and stay below it you’ll be fine

[probablyfunrpgideas]

I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t renovate your summer keep and live in it at least one month out of the year, we’ll have to charge you with Negligent Dungeonization of Property. The old cellar laboratory might have belonged to your uncle, but if you aren’t going to use it, something will.

The players are a squad of government investigators, trying to prevent monsters from claiming new habitat. It’s mainly negotiation but sometimes people have an interest in attracting dangerous entities for their own purposes.

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

I love this so much!! GIVE 👏 ME 👏 DUNGEONS 👏 WITH 👏 BACKSTORIES

[katjohnadams]

Heck but I’d play that idea though

[vbartilucci]

Reverse embezzlement.

Evil accountants, hired by people who hate you surreptitiously adding gold to your treasure rooms, increasing your wealth incrementally, until the day the Dragon Event Horizon is passed and you’re ruined.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

The group hired to stop the evil accountants are called Robin Hoods. They’re oftentimes nearly too late and end up having to pull some elaborate heist to distribute the gold over a wide enough geographical area that the dragon looses the scent

[digitaldiscipline]

“Gods damn thee, Hardison!”

[vigilantsycamore]

Let a building fall into ruin, but every year, go back there and add a bunch of gold

If you get it just right, the Dragon Event Horizon will be reached at the same time as the necromancer moves in, and then you get to sit back, eat popcorn, and take notes on what happens so you can write an article and get published in Mad Artificer Weekly

[glumshoe]

So HYPOTHETICALLY if i wanted to seed bomb a golf course, what kind of plants are hard to get rid of and also not invasive?

Seed bombing is a bad idea and will ultimately make things worse. A golf course owner isn’t going to throw up their hands and go, “Oh, well, you win this round, ecologists!” it go to the effort of removing the plants carefully. They’re just going to dump loads of extra herbicides on them, ultimately leading to more harm than good.

[tweedlebean]

You know what'll do more good? Calling the club management and telling them you'd be more interested in a membership if there were more native plants and trees, and if they used sustainable watering practices. Follow up a week later. Hell, if you know any members management will ABSOLUTELY listen to them. I know it's not as fun as vandalism, but there are courses that aren't harmful to the environment. The course I worked for left dandelions and other small flowers on the fairway, was heavily forested between holes, didn't use pesticides (even when wasps moved into one of the tee signs, we just put up a warning) and watered using the rain-fed water hazards. I saw more biodiversity there than in some nature reserves. There's no reason your local course couldn't get better, but they need to know that they're gonna gain, or at the very least not lose, members.

[lalalalalemon]

Little flat-window garden update: short Scottish days are not match for nasturtiums! Look at them go! They are pretty leggy but I hope they'll be ok. My strawberries are taking their time but a few days of sunshine have got them moving. And happy days: brand new leaf on my monstera! And my lovely amaryllis is back for its fifth year!

[solarpunkandstainedglass]

Oops, put this on the wrong blog!

[solarpunk-secondary]

I just realized this is totally the place to showcase my sewing adventures!!! I try to use more second hand materials than anything else, which isn’t too hard as I’ve made friends with a woman at a cool antique store who gives me discounts on vintage fabrics from her personal collection. I’ll post some pics soon!

[artikulator]

[noctumsolis]

I'm all in favour of driving Amazon's physical shops out of business. They should not have, nor be allowed to develop, a monopoly on retail.

[anarchopuppy]

Pops’s Great Big Mutual Aid Masterpost

So, this isn’t the first post ever made like this, but I’m trying to do something a little different than just posting a bunch of links. I’m only gonna include resources that are international, common, displayed either as a map or as a geographically-sorted list, and easy to participate in, to make this masterpost as accessible as I possibly can. If you’re reading this post you’re probably an English-speaker with an internet connection, and so with that in mind my goal here is that any given link you click will have a decent chance of having something near you, and there will almost certainly be at least one link on this list with something you can plug into

Groups

Mutual Aid Wiki - A map of mutual aid groups of all kinds, largely (but not exclusively) ones started in response to the pandemic

Food Not Bombs - A map of free public meals from rescued food waste. Can be a little outdated

Buy Nothing Project - A list of hyper-local gift economy groups

Trash Nothing - A list of local groups where people give and request things that would otherwise be thrown away

Transition Network - A map of local groups seeking to build sustainable circular economies from the ground up, for people, not profits

Industrial Workers of the World - One big labor union for everybody, with local chapters across much of the world

Locations

Slingshot Collective’s Radical Contact List - An international catch-all list of projects

Intentional Community Directory - A map of communes, housing coops, land trusts, eco-villages, and similar communal living projects

Repair Cafés - A map of spaces where you can show up and have your broken items repaired for free (or volunteer to do so for others)

Sharing Spaces

Little Free Library’s Sharing Box Map - A map of little free libraries that have been converted into sharing spaces for food, personal care, or hygiene items

Freedges - A map of community refrigerators for sharing food

Little Free Pantries - A map of sharing boxes for non-perishable food

Can’t Find Anything?

None of these lists are comprehensive, and these aren’t the only resources available either. Try using a search engine or looking on social media with keywords like “[your location] mutual aid”

If you’ve looked everywhere you can think of but are still coming up short, you can DM me (not on anon) with the rough area where you live and I’ll try to find some stuff for you

Maybe you could start something yourself! Here are some resources: How to Form an Affinity Group, Small Town Organizing for Anarchists, resources for mutual aid groups from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, seven steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group

If you don’t have even a single accomplice to start an affinity group with, there are still actions you can take on your own! Check out my #practical tag for ideas

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

i think it's fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

a plant's job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb

[iridescentjaq]

my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE

the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides

also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.

[johnnyjoestarrelatable]

that’s horrifying! thank you

[scarlet-rosepetals]

I think everyone should take at least one business class or at least read out of a business textbook if they have the opportunity, not because it’ll be “valuable for your career” or whatever, but because nothing will sharpen your hatred for capitalism to a fine point quite like studying business academically. Other things will make you hate capitalism more, obviously this can’t hold a candle to just opening your eyes to the human suffering it causes, but it will teach you to hate capitalism with precision

[madgastronomer]

The Chrome browser exists to show you ads and track where you go so that Google can show you more ads. Please stop using Chrome. Firefox is open source, and while Mozilla is not perfect, it isn’t actively fucking evil the way Google is. It has a bazillion plugins, including various (FREE!) ad block plugins (I recommend uBlock Origins, which will even block YouTube ads – you can watch videos without interruptions again!). It will also function very effectively with a lot more tabs open than Chrome. I’ve got around 800 tabs open right now (not loaded, of course, except for maybe 2 dozen; it’s been a heavy browsing day), and my wife has between 2k and 3k at any time.

We are in the New Browser Wars. This time there’s a helluva lot of money up for grabs, because a lot of it is about running those ads. Monopolies are bad for consumers.

Just go download Firefox.

[themusingmuslim]

A year of living with our faces covered and masked has taught us that society can still function even when we can't see each other's faces, and that it doesn't erase our identity, it doesn't significantly threaten security.

We're still people, humans, our eyes meet, we connect with our voices, despite the distance we maintain from each other.

With this realization now clear, it's surprising that the fixation on burqa and niqab bans still isn't going away. Switzerland recently had a vote on the matter, and now Sri Lanka seems to be headed down the same path of prejudice. It seems to be a strange kind of political fixation, an obsession. It's also now clear that these bans are inspired by nothing more than prejudice.

Sending my love and regards to all the niqabi sisters out there. You don't deserve to be subjected to these prejudices just because of your choice of clothing. Stay strong.