Beautiful! And I bet it’ll be even more beautiful in bloom!
Do you harvest from this patch and eat them? I’ve never had prickly pear, but everyone I know who has raves about it. Therefor, I am jealous 😄
Beautiful! And I bet it’ll be even more beautiful in bloom!
Do you harvest from this patch and eat them? I’ve never had prickly pear, but everyone I know who has raves about it. Therefor, I am jealous 😄
I would just like to both validate and challenge your view of the UK. I lived in Torquay (Devon, so the southwest) for a good long while, albeit during the height of lockdowns, and community felt nonexistant. There were some punk-type-folks attempting to get stuff started right when I moved away, but only just then iirc.
I moved to Inverness (Scottish Highlands) and it’s night and day. There’s a queer community doing hella shit, there’s a tool library popping off, lots of good local initiatives are being organised and taking off.
My kneejerk response is to say that Inverness beats the hell outta Torquay. But the thing is, about 4-5 years ago NONE OF THE STUFF I mentioned was going on. The queer meetup was organised by one dude who moved up from London and was gobsmacked that there wasn’t an active community. Now it’s consistently a huge, weekly event. There are even offshoots of quieter meetups that had to be created because the main one is So Successful. But all the local queers will tell you that before this started, they thought they were all alone up here.
And the tool library is only about a year old, but keeping on well.
So on one hand, yeah, I think the UK has a very… independent culture. But once someone identifies a need in a community and fills that need, people tend to show up and appreciate it.
Also, i reckon this is a good time to be an organiser. People are tired of being alone during a pandemic, people are tired of seeing what other communities do via the internet and want their communities to do the same.
Tl;dr be the change! There’s an appetite for it.
What an awesome thing. Reminds me of the Trans Couch Network on tumblr back in the day, I always wondered if there was something else to take its place.
(I have the same concerns as I did then of the potential for abuse, like someone else said, but I don’t have any actionable advice/etc yet. But queer housing is a major Thing to me so I might do some research/thinking on the subject of abuse mitigation, if that’s welcome)
I can see the concern, as a trans and nonbinary person, about the phrasing of the headline. Casual readers will totally think the actual guidance says “if you fuck up a person’s pronouns, you go to jail” or whatever.
But not the guidance itself. We need more protections against intentional, malicious misgendering as verbal harassment. Which is usually less “she said— oops, they said—“ and more stuff like “(female coworker) put has pronouns in her signature? I thought she was a REAL WOMAN”
(The second being a real example from a friends work place. Funny thing is, friend is stealth trans and the coworker being misgendered is cis, but i digress)
But yeah all that aside I think the real context is misgendering when someone needs the bathroom, e.g. “you’re in the wrong bathroom” type comments. Where we really need stronger protections.
I like option 2, I thought I would prefer Option 1 before I saw 2 but it’s executed really well in 2! Also, that illustration is gorgeous, and thank you for sharing the illustrator’s details. I want my next novel to be solarpunk, and I am definitely in the market for a new cover artist…
I need to add this and Murder in the Tool Library to my storygraph. And preorder/buy a copy of both tbh.
This looks like the kind of feeder a small bird would build for itself, and I mean that in the best way. I love it
As always, thank you for these updates! I really enjoy reading them and they inspire the fuck out of me.
Part of the issue could be in overlap of identities. I could have identified myself as transmasc on the poll, but I chose nonbinary instead. Both are true most days, anyways.
This makes me so happy because at least half of the things in community sufficiency column are things I see happening in my city. Saw a flier for a fermentation course recently as well as general veg growing, not to mention the community gardening initiative where people plant edible plants in public spaces. I still need to find a day I can help out with that one. Then we have a local mattress store that sells bespoke and/or handmade mattresses for affordable prices, and specifically employs disabled folk so they can be paid a living wage while upskilling. Then there’s the tool library that’s saved many a DIY project of mine…
I live in a chronically underfunded part of Scotland. In the past i lived in an underfunded part of England. Don’t get me wrong, no city should be underfunded to start with, that’s a government crime imo. But the Scottish city took underfunding and went “fuck the government, we have each other” while the English city just kept crumbling.
All of this said not to brag, but because it proves that this shit can work, does work, and is working. And i find that inspiring.
Oh hell yeah, what a great excuse to write more! And the prize money is not freakin shabby. Like I could put a sizeable chunk towards creating the kind of future I want to write about.
Hey, good for you! I wish for all of the success in this project, community centres are so important.
Reading your updates on this project is always the highlight of whatever day’s scrolling it falls on.
Though I have now unlocked a new fear of being abruptly asked if someone can come over for coffee.