Persistence Pais

Broadcast TV has come a long way since the days of four channels! I live 20 miles from the nearest TV stations and 50 miles from a major metro area, but I currently get reception on 15 channels, occasionally 21 if weather conditions allow a different city’s six channels to come in. You can check your situation via the FCC’s coverage resource.

Local news helps you stay plugged in with your community. But watch out for Sinclair stations, local affiliates that are owned by the super-conservative Sinclair conglomerate.

Your local PBS station does fascinating local shows! Even after the budget cuts due to the GOP destruction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS stations still have their archives. (And if you want to support them, you can become a Viewer Like You! A $5/month subscription gives me access to PBS Passport, the PBS streaming service, which has a ton of great stuff.)

Ads for local businesses are occasionally hilarious. There’s a lawyer around here whose tagline is “If I had your number, I’d call you!” It’s so transparently desperate (or so desperately transparent?) that it somehow comes back around to charming.

If you’re a sports fan, free sportsball! In limited ways! I’ve been watching World Cup matches over the air on Fox instead of giving Fox money to stream things. It’s harder if you’re a fan of a faraway team, of course. But maybe you can become a fan of something local and thus get connected to your community!

NO TRACKING, NO ALGORITHMS, NO HARVESTING YOUR DATA.

everything you do matters! what you do counts! you won't be the only person doing it and you won't be the only person who cares!

there are things you can do big and small but also advocacy and having the conversation is necessary too. something like 89% of people are at least somewhat worried about climate change and want more to be done about it but since people aren't talking about it regularly, they think they are the only ones who care.

and the world is actually doing a lot. so far, we've avoided the worst projections (although current projections are still pretty catastrophic) due to changes that have been taking place.

the united states is the biggest holdout right now but most of the rest of the world is—to varying degrees—trying to transition away from fossil fuels, which is like the main thing we have to do. and actually, even the u.s. is moving towards renewable energy despite the current administration's backwards bloviating idiocy (for example, texas generated more power last year through solar energy than coal for the first time ever. turns out renewable energy is just economically more stable and worth investing in and these constant energy shocks from pointless wars aren't helping the case to continue burning fossil fuels for energy.)

i just really want to hammer home to everybody that the doomerist message that there is nothing we can do is literally how oil and gas companies want everyone to feel. they want you to feel there is no solution, that you are powerless, that the changes are too hard or will interrupt your comfort and convenience, that the changes are too expensive, that your choices don't matter at all, so that the changes that need to happen don't happen. but they are happening! right now.

(btw, this is an area where it really does matter who you vote for, locally and nationally.)

over the next little while, i'm going to try and post more content about what the world is doing and where we are succeeding in this.

because this content is not reaching the people who need it. the mainstream news sucks. social media algorithms suck. nothing viral or popular on any algorithm-driven social media platform is reaching your eyes organically—and its been that way for close to a decade. the entertainment outlets are filling our brains with disaster movies and stories where things go wrong and too much of the time the only solution is some hero or return to the status quo or whatever. we've destroyed the sense of community that helps people feel like what they do matters and realize that other people care about the same things they do and are willing to work towards similar goals. our myths and media are fucked and they've seriously fucked up our brains.

where we are at now: the climate is already changing. we're too late to stop that from happening at all. it's been happening for some time and we knew about it and we had solutions but the world has been stupid drunk on oil and gas and capitalism incentivizes the worst anti-social behaviour and organizing society around private profit turns out to produce terrible and stupid results.

now we have really good efficient solutions and they are (in many cases, still too slowly) being implemented. it is not too late to stop making the climate worse, to move the direction to a habitable future, and to adapt society to the new world we are coming into.

May I present the best apple:

I also make custom flower crowns! Shipping is fast (usually 1-3 days). I hope your month has been as queer and wonderful as you are!!!

It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.

As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.

I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.

So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.

The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.

I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.

The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.

You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.

When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".

"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?

Only $2.50 each!

Buy assorted 2.25” buttons here!

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As usual, enamel pins, stickers, and other pinback buttons are still in stock! View my whole shop here

I’m working on getting the explosive pride stickers back in stock— you can see what I have left of them at the moment here