AAAtism hey guys i actually gave my blog a TitleTM

Comics I drew in top surgery recovery, 3/4 (More here, or read in order here.)

the session maps:

Rest in power, Emi Koyama. Emi's activism and writing had a profound impact on the trans movement over the past 30+ years. After coining the term "transfeminism" in the early 1990s, she worked across many different social movements, including spearheading several feminist, trans, disability, decrim, AAPI, and intersex groups.

I was introduced to Emi in 2014 during my first year of college. She hosted a workshop on disability and trans identity, teaching us about intersectionality and effective organizing. She showed me that trans women have the capacity to develop new language about our experiences, and what that means for us to protect one another regardless of how respectable we are in society.

"A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high.

Western civilization has grown remarkably climate conscious over the last 20 years, but not when it comes to building, civic planning, and especially zoning. Perhaps the interiors of buildings are becoming more climate adapted, and in some cases the facades as well, but in a way that’s a little like inventing a freezer designed to keep ice cream frozen while sitting next to a fire.

Wooden or concrete boxes arranged side-by-side across leveled ground with sprawling, largely treeless gardens and concrete sidewalks alongside wide, blacktop roads is simply a culture of construction that has to be abandoned if living in a world of 2°C or higher annual temperatures [or, hopefully, less than that, but nonetheless likely over 1.5°C] is to be tolerable.

Fortunately for Arizonans, change may have finally arrived in the form of a carless, planned community that looks and feels like a Greek island village.

In the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Culdesac has arisen as a 17-acre mixed-use neighborhood from the ground up to stay cool and local, taking the concept of the 15-minute city, where anything a resident might need is only 15 minutes away, and putting a Mediterranean spin on it.

Buildings are tall, thick, and totally white. The residential areas look like they were built atop of the ashes of the Phoenix zoning code burnt in effigy. Crammed together, they create narrow streets and alleys that are almost constantly shaded, through which wind is channeled and accelerated in passing.

Windows open towards each other, allowing wind that enters one building to exit into another, while the total lack of asphalt means that the ground temperatures are a staggering 50-60°F lower than pavements beyond the limits of Culdesac.

No privately-owned cars are allowed to enter the neighborhood, in which electric bikes, robotic mini taxis, and light rail shuttle people around town, to downtown Phoenix, or out to the airport.

The street life is lively—there are no cars to bisect movement between the 21 different businesses and eateries, among which is a James Beard Award-winning Mexican restaurant, DIY ceramic business, and some stores run out of apartments—a big no-no under Phoenix zoning laws.

“Once you pull the cars out,” Architect Daniel Parolek who designed Culdesac, told BBC, “there’s so much more opportunity to make a vibrant, thriving community.”

His inspiration was sun-soaked locales like Italy, Greece, and Croatia, where town centers were designed before the automobile and before air conditioning.

Technically speaking, the entire Culdesac neighborhood is one apartment complex, but the paseos, or little alleyways, open up into plazas of open space exactly liked one would expect in a little village in the Cyclades.

Because no one has to jump in a car to get from place to place, people run into each other, sparking conversations, relations, and breaking through the counterintuitive phenomenon of big city loneliness, which in Phoenix hits particularly hard.

“Culdesac Tempe has shown that people do want to live car-free in the US, even in a metro area like Phoenix that’s often seen as the poster child for car dependency,” says Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s government relations and external affairs lead. “This success has shifted the conversation around what’s possible in American development.”

We can't just decide that the world is going to be safer and more pleasant for queer kids. They don't have genies. Changes have to come in the form of specific laws or other specific things, and there's no "make people stop being homophobic/ableist/mean to weird people" law. There's laws that people can pass related to school bullying, there's specific things that can make things a bit better, but some problems aren't pass one law and you're done problems.

It's good to identify what a better world would look like. And, context matters. "With the world the way it is, x (easily doable) change would make things worse" is not really the best place to go "x wouldn't be necessary if y (change easy to describe, but not a change that can happen within a reasonable time frame by passing a specific set of laws or dedicating a certain amount of money to the problem.)"

ALT

Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.