In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…
And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…
Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.
He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.
The thing that fucks me up about North American city planning is not just that it's ugly or that it sucks, but the knowledge of what it took to seize the land and seize the money to build it in the first place. The US enslaved millions, committed genocide against an entire continent to take the land from people who had lived there for millennia, committed coups and invaded nations on every other continent, destabilizing governments and fanning the flames of war and destruction worldwide, threatened to engulf the globe and nuclear hellfire and boil the oceans, all in the name of profit. And after all of that, it was for this?
All of that blood spilled for strip malls and cookie cutter suburbs, entire belts of the country of which are now empty and rotting because everybody left? So much unspeakable violence to halt anyone from challenging the shape of society and the hierarchy of domination, and of all things it was done in the name of, it was this? A way of living that people aren't even happy with? So many cultures and languages, thousands of years of history passed from one generation to another, were uprooted and tried to extinguish, for shopping malls that didn't last even a single lifetime? There is nothing that would have been worth what imperialism has done to the world, but it's spaces like these which, to me, are even more emblematic of the structural myopic selfishness of capitalism that spurred on all of that violence than the tacky opulence of any billionaire.
Even at home, that these endless suburbs were built for white Americans fleeing from having to share cities with non-white neighbors. All the billions of tax dollars spent to employ white supremacist cops to surveil, harass, kill, cram into overcrowded prisons and immigrant concentration camps, so many countless people of color, spurred on by racist fear that they might somehow threaten this.
All of that to create and maintain a society of alienated and isolated would-be monarchs living in flimsy little plywood and plaster castles filled with an endless stream of toys that will be shortly forgotten and thrown away, surrounded by miles and miles of empty featureless places which only exist to give them warehouse sized concrete boxes full of collections of shelves from which to select from ten dozen nearly identical types of bland home goods to spend their money on.
Make no mistake, no individual or even large group of individuals in the suburbs caused this on their own. It is not the vague specter of consumerism or personal spending habits that created this. It is the product of the way our whole society was built and shaped by capitalist white supremacy. The same fundamental logic is true of Europe and every other imperialist project, too, even if it hides it better behind a prettier facade or a better set of social welfare options. This is just the naked face of it laid stark and bare.
Hair Pins
Enchanted Creations on Etsy
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
“When the handle has snapped off the basket that held all your eggs…” gone girl tier monologue
just thinkin
New Bivouac Fanton, Auronzo di Cadore, Italy,
DEMOGO Architects,
Photos by Iwan Baan
he makes lil costumes for his birbs and no one can convince me otherwise
hmmm
Donald Trump gets attacked by an eagle.
This eagle truly represents America. What a majestic symbol.