musical quality assurance spectre

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad

I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.

It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.

As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.

Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.

I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.

so the doctor (back then) ordered labs and it turned out my vitamin d level was like 5 or 7 and i've never seen a doctor so elated about lab results in my entire life. she said, 'it's never. vitamin d. but it is this time. we can fix this. you're going to feel better.'

she was literally like

Special issue! All about our lovely man on the chair!

PILOT - ISSUE #2 - ISSUE #4 (on my Ko-Fi!)

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.