My name is Ariel! I'm a disabled Peruvian artist, making art and learning while I work to manage and record my disability while I try to increase my quality of life in any way possible.
This blog is meant to serve as a resource for both myself and others on being engaged in the world while still preserving joy, and working to find actionable ways to improve the world we live in as civilians with limited capacity. Read below for more info, and major tag links!
My Website - My Linktree
Things I like acting on and posting about:
Being engaged in local politics
Being informed about national/global politics
Learning about and utilizing government programs
Learning about and utilizing public transit, and reducing car usage
Cultivating care for your local community
Making and creating art in love
Planting in joy, and engaging in community gardens
Rejecting hate and bigotry; Calling out behavior in local communities, but giving it as little attention as possible online.
This blog covers all of these topics. I appreciate any of y'all that follow along. Below are links to major tags I tend to use, and their descriptors
my wish for you project: Click here for my master post about this project. Includes updates and receipts on days that I do donations from my projects sold, updates about adopted campaigns, and links to donate directly to people in need
learning library: Articles, books, and videos that I'm learning from, and want to share as a resource to expand knowledge
ariel's records: Posts about my personal world, and things I'm up to
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I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore đ
Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the appâŚ. Which requires your login informationâŚ.. and also stores your card information so even if you didnât use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.
I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.
Sure. Thatâs how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:
Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.
No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.
So hereâs what weâre gonna do gang:
Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:
Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.
Express that you didnât actually want it, you just couldnât see on the shelf how much it was.
POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.
When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you donât want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)
If itâs a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If itâs a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.
In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.
Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.
I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.
I worked in retail for years. If this had happened while I was working retail, I would have been delighted and felt great solidarity with anyone who was wasting my employer's time and money and giving me busy work as an act of protest. In point of fact every moment the employee spends carting items back to the shelves is a moment not spent standing at a register.
Had a coworker tell me they hadnât texted once because of the time. âI didnât want to wake you.â
I stared at them through the dawning realization that they lived in a world where that was remotely possible. âMy phone is on do not disturb if Iâm sleeping. Why would I let random texts wake me up? My sleep is important.â
Equally baffled they replied, âWhat if someone at work needs you?â
âI am not a manager. No one at work will ever need me badly enough to interrupt my sleep. If Iâm not working then thereâs no reason to be calling me.â
âNot even if you need to cover?â
I laughed, âI donât need to cover. They could ask me to cover but good luck getting ahold of me if Iâm sleeping.â
They looked distressed at this idea.
To console them I added, âI have important people like my mom and my wife set to override. If they call they get through no matter what.â
There was a small pause before they asked, âYou can do thatâŚ?â
So friendly reminder. Become unreachable. Work does not need you that badly. Sleep.
Ocean and Coastal Futures - Weâre all about connecting people â organising events, creating communications and promoting job opportunities.
From the article:
French Polynesia has become the worldâs largest contributor to the global 30Ă30 ocean protection target, after President Moetai Brotherson announced on 7 June that a further 520,000 km² of the territoryâs waters will be fully protected from extractive industries. The move brings the total share of French Polynesiaâs exclusive economic zone under full protection to around 30%, an area covering roughly 1.4 million km², more than twice the size of continental France.
For those who don't know, 30x30 refers to global efforts to commit to preserving 30% of land and ocean habitat by 2030. French Polynesia has now hit that target.
It's worth noting that the decision to protect these areas was made with the consensus of French Polynesian communities and that traditional sustenance fishing by local communities is still permitted.
Periodic reminder that your library more than likely has books on quilting. Books on knitting, and sewing, and painting, and gardening whatever you're into the library probably has books about it. It probably has ebooks too, and magazines.
Your library has all kinds of resources and they absolutely want you to use them.
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unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem
what common file types are
some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private
how to understand terms of service
(hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)
what a cookie actually is
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)
common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
how to not get a virus while pirating something
what a temporary email is and when to use one
red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)
what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous
a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps
a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)
some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself
âHaha remember when murder-hornets were gonna be a thing? What a nothingburger.â
Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.
âY2K came to nothing amirite?â
Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.
âRemember the hole in the ozone layer?â
You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?
One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those âitâs gonna be an apocalypseâ disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.
The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.
And I still think thatâs going to happen. I donât know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope wonât help bring it about.
And I refuse to let the cynics own a chunk of my heart.
Actually, fuck the myth of the Tower of Babel. The real beautiful utopia where we can all finally truly understand each other doesn't lie in sameness or uniformity, it lies in the giant and digital Rosetta Stone we are going to build and broadcast across the entire world
So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point
The Rosetta Stone was and is real.
This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.
The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.
The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this culture/time and place explained or understood that sort of event."
The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists
Photo credit: By Š Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928
That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.
Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!
And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs
True understanding depends on ethical translation and language preservation, not on unity of language
And this is a very urgent thing for us to remember, because a fluent speaker - and especially a fluent native speaker - of an endangered language is one of the rarest, most concentrated, and most fragile sources of knowledge in the world
Preserving and revitalizing endangered languages is a race against time. For many languages, especially Indigenous languages and languages from an oral tradition, the loss of each individual fluent speaker is a permanent loss of language
Almost half of the world's 7,000 languages are endangered! You can learn more about, and find resources and education on, the Endangered Language Project and similar organizations, especially ones that are Indigenous and respect knowledge sovereignty and traditional ownership
knowledge sovereignty: when it comes to language and traditional knowledge, knowledge sovereignty is the simple but super important principle that the speakers of a language and members of a culture should have full, independent control of their own traditional knowledge and knowledge systems.
For Indigenous languages in particular, sometimes knowledge sovereignty means certain language resources are closed to those outside the tribe, Nation, and/or culture - which is absolutely fair, given what white people have historically done and are still doing when it comes to stealing, and then fucking copyrighting, Indigenous traditional knowledge. (Related: Fuck Monsanto)
But good news - you can learn more about, support, and access community resources on language preservation at The Endangered Language Project here:
I feel like to really get this circulating as it should, we need it superimposed over the picture of the turkey going in the fridge. (I can't do it I'm on my phone.)
Protect yourself and your community from the fascists's celebratory bullshit!
Any meds that you or a loved one might need*, or any other preparations, e.g., earplugs, N-95 masks for smoke, arranging to stay the night with a friend who lives somewhere quieter, etc.
Check in on your loved ones if they might need something like that as well.
*Note: Includes inhalers!!!!
And keep in mind that if you have long COVID or any other new source of lung/immune issues, you will be vulnerable this where where you might not have been in the past!
You can also protect your community by only buying LEGAL fireworks, which are compliant with laws on wildfire protection and heavy metal exposure!
Condemning USA nationalism and protesting the 4th of July can be compatible with protecting the public health of our community - not at odds with it!
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Oh hey, all you Library-Loving Libby users out there. A piece of advice for you. Go to your search engine of choice and type in â[your local library] reciprocal agreementsâ.
Might pull up nothing, but chances are there are somewhere between two and seven other Library systems in your state that you can get a card at perfectly legitimately simply by applying for one with your current address and proof of having an active card at your local library. You can then log into Libby with these and use them even if you never manage to go to a physical building of that library. (Though you should take advantage of the physical library too if you can) Some of them might have significantly larger or at least different ebook/audiobook collections for you.
There's a website (https://reciprocard.com/) that will pull up this info if you put in your hometown library, and gives you a link to apply to the different libraries. Sometimes you don't even need to apply. My library is in a consortium that just uses my card to cover all the other libraries. I use the same card number.
Your results page also lists some libraries that will let you get a non-resident card, usually for a yearly fee. (Frex, I decided it was a way better use of my precious dollars to get a Queens Public Library card for a year than to pay for that streamer I never watch anything on.)
What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?
What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?
What if the rainforest ADVANCES?
What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?
What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?
What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?
What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?
What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?
What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?
What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?
The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.
Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.
It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.
We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.
People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.
Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.
Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.
We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.
In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 â more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.
When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.
When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.
When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!
We fixed it.
We CAN fix it and we ARE fixing it and we DID fix it.
Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.
This is not the narrative media sells us. We have access to more information about suffering now than we used to, but things are getting BETTER overall. Yeah some people are trying to undo this, but we have made SO MUCH PROGRESS. Don't give up.
IF YOU'RE UNEMPLOYED
IT'S NOT BECAUSE
THERE ISN'T ANY WORK
JUST LOOK AROUND: A HOUSING SHORTAGE, CRIME. POLLUTION; WE NEED BETTER SCHOOLS AND PARKS. WHATEVER OUR NEEDS, THEY ALL REQUIRE WORK. AND AS LONG AS WE HAVE UNSATISFIED NEEDS, THERE IS WORK TO BE DONE.
ASK YOURSELF, WHAT KINDS OF A WORLD HAS WORK BUT NO JOBS? IT'S A WORLD WERE WORK IS NOT RELATED TO SATISFYING OUR NEEDS, A WORLD WHERE WORK IS ONLY RELATED TO SAT- ISFYING THE PROFIT NEEDS OF BUSINESS.
THIS COUNTRY WAS NOT BUILT BY THE HUGE CORPORATIONS OR G6OVERNMENT BUREAUCRACIES. WAS BUILT BY PEOPLE WHO WORK. AND, IS WORKING PEOPLE WHO SHOULD CONTROL THE WORK TO BE DONE. YET, AS LONG AS EMPLOYMENT IS TIED TO SOMEBODY ELSE'S PR0FITS, THE WORK WON'T GET DONE.
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As relentless rains pounded LA, the cityâs âspongeâ infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of waterâenough to sustain over 100,000
As relentless rains pounded LA, the cityâs âspongeâ infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of waterâenough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three daysâover half of what the city typically gets in a year. Itâs the kind of extreme rainfall thatâll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The cityâs water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a âsponge city,â replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out âspreading grounds,â where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. âThere's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,â says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. âDams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.â
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isnât working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. âThe problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,â says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. âNo one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.â
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifersâporous subterranean materials that can hold waterâwhich a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water thatâd normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. âAfter the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, youâll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,â says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where itâs exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where itâs banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. Itâs also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also âsweat,â cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effectâthe tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. âThe more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,â says Castro. âSometimes when itâs 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.â
LAâs far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surfaceâsidewalks, parking lots, etc.âtheyâre using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isnât just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intenseâit stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world thereâs a better way.
The infrastructure to make the county more "spongy" is also used in the dry season to remediate contaminated groundwater and to return recycled water to the aquifers.
There have also been some pilot projects to make flood-prone neighborhoods more spongy on a small scale by distributing water barrels (to hold more water out of the storm drain system) and regrading the edges of roads in areas without sidewalks to allow for greater ground infiltration. I've been studying this for a while because we had to deal with a grading problem that caused a lot of water to build up against our foundation (thankfully poured concrete rather than a raised foundation, but it's still not great). There's a lot of small scale ways to reduce runoff that contribute to the overall sponginess while improving quality of life in other ways.
Making the average yard (at least in the Midwest) more capable of holding water is so easy that it's nuts that more people don't do it. Every bit you put back into the soil instead of letting run off mitigates flooding and stores water in the ground for dry periods.
The mantra for rainwater management is slow it down, spread it out, soak it in. Water soaks into the ground more easily when it moves slowly, so plant every bit of soil you can. You can force water to move over stones or other obstacles to slow it down as well. If you can spread the water over a larger area, it will naturally move more slowly, also soaking in more easily.
Rain gardens are just shallow depressions, usually 6" to 12" deep at most, designed to to hold water for 24 or 48 hours until it soaks into the ground. All you need is a shovel and plants native to your area that have deep roots.
I made a rain garden in my front yard that takes the discharge from my sump pump as well as a gutter. Even in a big storm, I have no runoff from that side of the yard. I have been know to take videos of my rain garden in a storm and send them to my gardening friends. Check out the rainscaping page at Missouri Botanical Garden for more methods of managing rainwater.