hirrrioo

[hirrrioo]

i think it's fine to attribute some desire to biology, like wanting to have kids. like yeah I'm sure a lot of it is the living creature need to proliferate. it doesn't bug me. same as acknowledging that love is dopamine or whatever. a cynic saying love is just chemicals in our brains isn't a gotcha. like ok we as humans were so driven and fascinated by our capacity to love that we found the exact juice that produces that feeling and gave it a name. that's awesome, actually, i dig that, i love that. with my chemicals.

[hirrrioo]

75% decrease in insect biomass within my lifetime and I'm supposed to care about cover letters

[hirrrioo]

Everything needs to be glass, if it can’t be glass it needs to be ceramic, if it can’t be ceramic it needs to be wood, if it can’t be wood it needs to be stainless steel, if it can’t be stainless steel it needs to be stone, if it can’t be stone it needs to be glass

[hirrrioo]

[hirrrioo]

NEW EPISODE ALERT!

The seemingly small things we can do as individuals are actually really radical, impactful, and important.  Whether that’s mending our clothes, calling our representatives, boycotting big brands and shopping small and secondhand instead…even just cutting back on our consumption of single use plastics We don’t need huge organizations or big accounts/influencers to make change in the world.  We need each other. We need our communities. And we need more of the small but radical things we do every day to become the norm!

Throughout this year, I’m going to be sharing episodes about different things you can do in your community that seem small, but create positive impact. And I am super excited about this week's guest, Scout of Radical Sew Club! Described as “a safe space to learn how to sew and repair textiles while in community,” Radical Sewing Club is a weekly meetup held in LA.  I’m so excited for you to meet Scout because while mending and sewing is often dismissed as unimportant, unskilled work, we know that is completely untrue! And Scout is going to share what they have learned along the way that can help you start your own mending and sewing club in your community! We will be talking about important things like venue, cost, materials, and even how a typical Radical Sewing Club evening plays out.

Along the way we are going to talk about lots of other important things, including the following questions:

🧵 Has capitalism taken away sources of joy for us (only to try to replace it all with shopping)? How do we get those back?

🧵 Why is the lack of third spaces an issue that impacts people of all ages?

🧵 Why is building community sometimes as simple as knowing your neighbors? And how has capitalism made that more difficult?

🧵 Why is it actually super radical to repair fast fashion?

🧵 And how many people do we really need to push back and make serious change in this world?

My mission this year is get us all motivated to do good things in difficult times.  If you’re doing something in your community that you think would be great for other people to introduce in their area, get in touch!

REDUCE REFUSE RESIST!

[hirrrioo]

world's first marine psychiatrist trying to wrestle a knife out of a suicidal sea sponges hand in serbia

[hirrrioo]

I have readily moved my set up outside, as spring has soon sprung, yay! I hope they do better out here without the artificial lights, i do need some lattice desperately, but i might want to make the lattice myself? I have some cardboard but i fear itll melt in the rain, though the balcony i have does have a cover. I am still looking into getting a larger pot for the strawberries, well, longer truly.

These carrots are having a rough time, they were the first thing i planted and they sure look like it, ill let them do what they want for now but i dont expect anything crazy cool from these guys, hoping maybe for some funny shaped carrots hahaha

Here are more updates on the potatoes, im worried about moving them? Dont know if thatll damage them too bad but they seem hardy enough. Recently found out that a glass tank is a horrible choice for this guy in particular because if a potato is shown to the sun she turns green and poisonous- oops, thinking about putting them into a huge like storage tote? Its dark and large enough- so might do that tonight who knows.

This is what is going down inside now, i decided to start a few more babes that i got recently and some other seeds i already had. This includes some hot peppers, different tomatoes than before, the same type of tomatoes, basil, another batch of chamomile, and peas!

Hoping for the best for my garden, i hope them being outside like this wont shock them too bad and they will adjust to the cooler temperatures. This hobby brings me so much hope and satisfaction, <3

[hirrrioo]

It's beautiful how easy it is to learn new skills compared to 10-15 years ago. I like to say I taught myself a ton of stuff in all kinds of creative fields, but in reality, "self-taught" means a hundred different people made free resources that helped me get here.

This is one of the reasons I vouch so much for open-source projects, free resources, good educational youtube videos etc.

I want to dedicate my life to creating cool, fucked up art, and at the same time, nurture the internet as a public and open library for learning how to make cool, fucked up art.

[hirrrioo]

by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...

The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.

[hirrrioo]

cooking is really important to teaching (food) gardening. it is the final stage of gardening. What use is a garden if it is not accompanied by knowledge of how to prepare delicious meals with the foods grown in it.

gardening is popular in the USA but community gardens will not truly catch on until we plant with recipes in mind--building gardens based around staple foods with ingredients to round out a nourishing meal. grains have a whole Process, but potatoes and dry legumes are easy staples cooking-wise.

why so much neglect of the humble dry legume?

be curious also, look outside of the vegetables easily available in every Walmart.

[hirrrioo]

Gripping people by the shoulders to earnestly tell them how parts of Ireland could be similar to the North American Pacific Northwest with stunning temperate rain forests if we actually committed to re-wilding are you listening to me? The constant rain we have supports beautiful rainforest ecosystems that were destroyed but we can bring them back. It wouldn't even be that hard. The forests will regenerate themselves over time if we just stop planting non-native pine plantations, remove livestock grazing from the land, and control the deer population. We could turn one of the most ecologically degraded countries in the world into one of the most unique ecosystems found on earth. Do you hear me???? Only a handful of other places on the planet support temperate rainforest biomes and we are continuing to destroy our own. Why are you trying to get away???

[hirrrioo]

The back panel of baby's first battle jacket is complete 🍅🏴☀️ Hand painted design plus some storebought iron on letters I eventually had to just sew on individually. @_@

Now to add some patches and spikes...

[hirrrioo]

Lily of the Valley Vases 🪷

[hirrrioo]

I made some little fairies out of pressed flowers 🌷

[hirrrioo]

A little update on the garden, i planted more carrots and the lettuce the first time around didnt go so good, had the lights way too high, so ive lowed lights and everything has spread quite a bit, i also planted potatoes and i fear they are already outgrowing their current living situation, trying to figure out plans for that soon. In about a week or so im going to try and move some stuff outside and transplant the strawberries i have into larger and longer pots. The peas i planted are sprouting through the holes in my shelf, wild little things

She is small and janky, but she is mine

[hirrrioo]

group living is beautiful and it’s about having a compost named marty and making dinner together and late night cups of tea on the couch with good books and sharing thrifted CDs or ones from the library and going to the park together in the morning before work and hugs when you get home and a household zine collection/obsession and sharing soaps and journals and making brownies together and dancing in the kitchen and planning a network of gardens between other people we know in the city and scrabble nights and teaching each other how to mend and cook and building each other nightstands and helping sew quilts and sliding books under bedroom doors and sticky notes with jokes and laughing in the sunshine outside of the laundry mat

[hirrrioo]

spinning your own yarn *is* a holy activity that *can* bring you closer to the gods, in this essay i will