Vtubers in the brain

Happy Juneteenth my siblings!! 🖤💚💛❤️

It feels like a uniquely American capitalist take to assume these traditions will make you completely self sufficient. You need a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of knowledge across a lot of subjects, and a lot of luck to provide for everyone's nutritional needs.

So should you even bother trying to be more self sufficient with your food? I argue yes. Foraging and gardening are fun and will teach you so much about many things. They are deeply rewarding activities that can supplement your diet. There are herbs I haven't bought in years because I grow my own. There are dishes I can only make with foraged ingredients because I can't get them in stores.

Buy the cheap stuff - like grains, starchy tubers, and legumes - and grow the expensive stuff, for example:

herbs (mint family always in pots, never in the ground)

garlic, shallots, green onions

ginger (in pots, overwinter indoors)

lettuce, spinach, chard, arugula, kale, and other greens

tomatoes, peppers, eggplant

asparagus

rhubarb

strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries

tree fruit and nuts (if you have room and time for an orchard)

Even living in an apartment and growing in windows/balcony, I saved maybe 25% of my June-November food budget. Now in a house, with mature fruit trees, eight raised beds, bees, and chickens, I save maybe 50% from June-November and 20% the rest of the year. And meals are way tastier and more nutritious!

Don't try to do everything at once. Learning the needs of a lot of plants at the same time is overwhelming. Start with a few simple things and expand from there. Which things are simple depends on your local climate as much as on the plant.

Don't invest money that you can not afford to lose on failed crops. Most people's first years are not that great and even an experienced gardener can lose crops due to unexpectedly extreme weather, a really bad bug infestation, etc.

Trees are investments that take a long time to pay off, nut trees especially but any tree can take a few years. So you don't just need space, you also need to be reasonably confident that you will still live in that place when they start getting good.

Do you like Indigenous horror-drama? Do you like films about recovering from trauma? Do you like just genuinely well-written, well-acted, well shot, all around good filmmaking? If so, please do yourself a favour and check out Sk+te'kmujue'katik (At The Place of Ghosts)!

The film is about Mi'kmaw siblings Mise'l and Antle, forced to confront the trauma they went through as children in a very real way when that trauma takes the form of a malevolent spirit. They must travel through an old forest where time blurs, interacting with different generations of their family - as well as their younger selves - in order to confront the source of the haunting.

You can currently digitally rent or buy the film on the following platforms:

YouTube

Apple TV