Really mod, pea pod, Buff bod, hot rod

You Look Like A Thing And I Love You by Janelle Shane: A pretty accessible examination of what LLMs are and how they're able to function. Pretty funny and silly at times. Good for trying to understand more about the methodology behind all the new programs being pushed.

Fuzz by Mary Roach: sometimes animals break the law because they don't know about human laws, and if they did they wouldn't really care. Roach talks about some cases of these and what humans have done to navigate them, to varying degrees of success. I would suggest anything written by Mary Roach, she's delightfully warm in the way she can express information.

The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe: this is the book version of Moe's podcast. It's part memoir, part relayed stories from his years of interviews. Moe is incredibly funny without ever losing insight on the depression he's struggled with for most of his life. He really impacted how I try and talk about my own mental illness. I emailed him to praise his book after I finished it, and he emailed me back and was just so so nice.

The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson: a peek into the career of professional obituary writers, and the culture of newspaper obituaries as a whole. A fascinating depiction of a very odd industry. Far more lighthearted at times than you might expect.

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kilph Nesteroff: stories of the lives and efforts of indigenous comics. Depicts the lives of both historical native comics, and modern people making a name for themselves. It is equal parts heartbreaking, relatable, delightful and informative. Even just the sliver of learning about the vaudeville scene was fascinating.

Your 5h coding session did save you 10 minutes of work !

It's okay to forget your semicolons.

The next distro you'll hop to WILL be the right one !

Your O(n!^n) algorithm is good enough.

No, you don't need to multithread everything.

All of the red when you compile is your compiler showing you ❤️Love❤️

The owner of the bookstore was this grand old dame of 76 who had been in the business for 40 years. She'd had three kids with a husband who was extremely gay, and as soon as those were old enough, they split up. She read on an epic scale, was an avid follower of the opera, sang in several choirs, and scheduled arts programming for a private club. She had gentleman callers (so they styled themselves) at the store continuously the entire fifteen years I worked there--yah, into her NINETIES. She never took up seriously with any of them, because they couldn't keep up. She was impeccably dressed and put together every single day of her life, drank regularly, and said they would pry her estrogen supplements out of her cold, dead hands. She had a gang of elderly single lady friends, though, and they went out every night of the week. They knew everything and everyone, collectively. She got her first smart phone in her mid-80s and became extremely Online. I bet she's on Tumblr now. She is 96.

This blew my mind. Life didn't have to be over...ever.

We worship youth in our culture. Only the young have futures, and the aged exist to enable the lives of the young. We act as if by the time you hit forty, you've had your chance. You are now expected to step aside and scede life to others.

FUCK THAT. I have a lot of life ahead of me. I have places to go and books to read and people to fuck and food to eat and music to dance to and emotions to feel and nazis to punch and stories to tell and hearts to break and ventures to capitalize and empires to conquer. I am going to be doing this for the next fifty years, minimum.

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

- Popcorn time. Multi platform, easy to navigate, has tons of shows and movies.

- Library Genesis (libgen). For books, and scientific books and articles.

- Biblioteca Cervantes. For license free books in Spanish. Technically not pirating but still good to have.

- The Pirate Bay. Here is where to find other stuff you couldn't find on, say, Popcorn time. But you can still use Popcorn time to download things from here to your machine.

These are my basic day to day tools. A piece of advice would also be: use online forums to learn more about these. I'm not a big fan of Reddit for some reasons but it is a nice place to start to look for instance "beginner guide Libgen reddit" on your search engine (preferably not Google-based).

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

It's punk to be fat, in a world that wants you to keep getting smaller.

It's punk to ride an old bike, drive an old car, patch your old clothes with different colored thread, cut up old sheets for rags instead of using paper towels, and make stuffed animals out of scrap fabric, in a world that wants you to just "order it off amazon".

It's punk to tend a messy, overgrown, weed-filled garden. Tomatoes grow right next to dandelions.

It's punk to can the veggies from your messy garden and give your neighbors delicious tomato soup in the depths of winter.

It's punk to make a bird feeder and look out the window to take a break from your screen.

It's punk to wear your "Let Trans Kids Play" shirt to a college basketball game where there are no trans players, because a trans kid in the crowd will see it and maybe (this year) decide to join the team.

It's punk to have wrinkles, when the world wants you to stop aging at 23.

It's punk to go to your local library.

It's punk to take your kids to your local library.

It's punk to take your kids to a pride parade, a sit-in, a land-back ceremony, an accessible trunk-or-treat, a soup kitchen.

It's punk to plant trees. It's punk to PROTECT trees.

It's punk save for solar panels, someday.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

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