Bage

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Behold the beautiful timbers:

Now the thing is, that while I was removing the bark, I started trying to see how long a piece I could remove in one go*, as is my habit. I was really impressed by how flexible the bark was, and how easy it was to make long strips:

And then I thought I remembered** reading about how people are able to take the inner bark of ash trees and peel it away from the outer bark, so I decided try on my break, and:

Look at that! So flexible! So smooth! So staying in one piece!

I did some quick googling and found a few examples of people using black locust bark this way, so I'm pretty excited to try it out. The first thing to do apparently is to dry it out, before rehydrating it to work with.

If you've done this or similar and have any tips, I'd love to hear them!

*Yes, I am the kind of person who habitually removes the orange skin in one piece.