You Can Judge Things In Multiple Ways At Once. Things Are Rarely Just Good Or Just Bad.

I was talking to my dad about renewable energy and he was like “the only problem with solar farms is they take up so much space.”

And it made me think about a city and how much sun exposure all the rooftops in a city get and…why not just make the city it’s own solar farm by putting solar panels on every rooftop?

Tips for Defying the End of the World.

Printable version here - feel free to print out for yourself or distribute to others for free.

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

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

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

In light of certain fandoms' creators recently using their considerable fortunes to substantively make life worse for trans people, particularly trans women, this week, V and Emily take a look at a pioneering gender-conforming person who, literally, founded modern scifi fandom: Donald Wollheim. We look at Donald's fannish history, including hosting the very first scifi con ever; publishing Lord of the Rings in the US; and founding the Futurians, the early East Coast scifi fan club who definitely won the all-time BNF war. Then, we look at the other side of Donald's life as a landmark figure in the midcentury East Coast trans and GNC community, including penning the first first-person book about being gender-nonconforming and it not being something to shun, but something to celebrate. While certain big-name authors have decided that they want their legacy to be one of division and hate, we look this week at an individual whose legacies in both fandom and the queer community are ones of building. Of hope for the future. And of telling people that they are not alone.

Sources

American Experience: Casa Susannah A Year Among the Girls, Darrell G. Raynor (Donald Wollheim) Wikipedia Wikipedia Wikipedia Fancyclopedia 2 (1959)

This Week In Fandom History is a fandom-centric podcast that tells you… what happened this week in fandom history!

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If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

The Conversation

Explainer: what is citizen science?

Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to researc

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

"Solarpunk will never happen!"

As if it's not already coming, already here and starting to bloom before our eyes.

Neighborhood cooking clubs and libraries lending out more then just books, it's the art club that the community garden started, it's the funky gardens my neighbors have.

It's the DIY projects ppl wear with pride and ones that hide in the back of their dresser drawer. It's in the magazines and podcasts and in passing hope forward.

Like gruella gardening alone is enough for proof of concept for me, but the rise in community events and potlucks and fighting for rent caps and UBI and decentalizing energy and gardening is happening now.

And yea I gotta fight nazis and dickwards daily for it, and I gotta spend the time to educate and build up as I take down, but they can't say this future isn't coming. I'm here with you right now in it.

The flag situation

It's been brought to our attention that the original versions of the quidditism flags hel a lot of resemblance to the flag from a queer facsist group rising to "fame" lately.

At first, we elected to ignore it, but alas, nobody wants to be conflated with these people.

The flag has therefore been changed.

The old designs will stay up on this post and can of course still be used, but the main flag is now the one on the pinned/coining post.

Old flag designs:

New flag design:

I am trying to choose to hope. 

I am choosing to imagine public transportation. 

Grocery stores with attached soup kitchens to decrease food waste. 

Neighborhood meal- and garden-sharing programs.

Green spaces connecting to other green spaces.

The rainforest ADVANCING, churning up dry soil and turning it dark and healthy. 

The sky filled with birds and the sea with fish, their populations increasing. 

The air and water clean. 

Emissions-free vehicles on roadways, with speeds governed, and safe streets for tricycles, bicycles, dogs, deer, and stray soccer balls.

Solar panels on every public building, over every parking lot. 

Beehives and wildflowers on the open berms between roadways. 

The total lack of gunshots around the world, and instead the sound of shovels, digging holes to plant fruit trees by public sidewalks. 

bro n@zism is not "when killing any group of people" 😭🙏

Correct. Nazism is “extreme racist or authoritarian views or behavior.” (Oxford Dictionaries)

The primary goal of Nazis is to create a “Volksgemeinschaft”. Which means the People’s Community, however the word was later turned to mean a cleansing of previous “inferior” races/ideologies/practices and to replace them with the Aryan. The Aryan was not only determined to be the “Master Race” by Adolf Hitler, but the Aryan was also characterizrd to be those who are dedicated to defending the Nazi party and political movement.

So, I did use the term Nazi correctly, if that is what you were trying to get at.

Consistent Progressivism prides itself on eliminating inferior beliefs or practices that they determine to be “Conservative”. And that is step 1 of Fascism (or as I say, Nazism). By them watering down and dehumanizing a group of people into a very wide term and to be used derogatory, is step 1.

Step 2 is to seek and assault, kill, hunt or destroy a large group of people. And for them, Consistent Progressives, this is a large part of their identity. They torture and exterminate people who identify as conservative or use “Conservative Languages/Practices”.

Now, step 2.5 is to change the definition of terminology in order for them to seem the most correct ideology and political class of people. And for Consistent Progressives, they did this by turning the definition of “Conservative” into something that benefits their party.

Their definition: “A political worldview defined by a broad category of ideas either implicitly or explicitly believing that people should be discriminated against because of their race, gender identity, pronouns, sexual identity, or anything else regarding their identity that does not harm others”

The true definition: “a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values.” (Oxford)

Along with step 2.5, they are against any other dictionary and discourage their followers from using dictionaries like Oxford and deem the usage as “Conservative” (see step 2)

I hope this helps you. If you need help getting out of a cult like this, my dms are open and I am never judgemental.