lovebug5151

[lovebug5151]

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

[lovebug5151]

have you or a loved one been diagnosed with asshole? you may be entitled

[lovebug5151]

this is the gay agenda and i LOVE it

[lovebug5151]

You ever have that "hungry but nauseous" feeling about activities? Like you really really want to do something and you've got plenty of fun hobbies and things you could pick from but all of the options turn your stomach so you're just laying there bored and angry about it.

[lovebug5151]

[lovebug5151]

The problem with playing smash or pass is that there's a lot of characters which I'm not sexually attracted to but I would fuck in a heartbeat out of sheer curiosity and ego, like I don't find Mickey Mouse attractive at all but if he approached me at a bar and went "Hey sexy, want me to show you my mouseketool?" I would say yes because then I get to tell my friends I fucked Mickey Mouse

[lovebug5151]

I thinks folks expressing incredulity at the quality of the writing and composition in Calvin and Hobbes are often missing the context that Bill Watterson is arguably the most influential sequential artist of his generation. Like, this is a guy who once told the editors of nationally syndicated newspapers to go fuck themselves when they wanted to mess with his panel layouts, and not only did he keep his job, he got his way. He could have had literally any gig he wanted, and he chose to be the Sunday funnies guy because that's what made him happy. He's basically the Weird Al of sequential art.

[lovebug5151]

ordered pizza from a small local place and they didnt actually cut it so i've chosen to revert to a wild animal and begin ripping it apart instead of just using a knife to portion slices

[lovebug5151]

[lovebug5151]

calvin and hobbes is my favorite comic strip ever

[lovebug5151]

[lovebug5151]

the human mind is prone to catastrophizing when left unoccupied. And that’s why it’s important to always have a little Blorbo to rotate in your head. It acts as a protective charm of sorts to redirect your imagination away from harmful spirals

thoughts without Blorbo: oh my god I was so cringe in seventh grade why did I do that

thoughts with Blorbo: I haven’t considered the interactions with bleebus; I must rectify this immediately

[lovebug5151]

me, continuing to look at a screen despite having a headache: OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain… OUCH my brain…

[lovebug5151]

men love to make fun of women for overreacting in emergencies when they are, in fact, massively under-reacting

[lovebug5151]

"men don't need to be afraid walking around at night"

Unless they're black

"men make more than women in jobs"

Black men make less than white women on average

"men don't get followed around by people who mean them harm"

Black men are heavily policed and regularly jumped and killed for just walking down the street

"no one tells a man what he can and cannot do with his own body"

Black men are repeatedly assaulted and have their hair forcibly shaved or cut for wearing their hair natural and in culturally important styles. Black men who choose body modifications like tattoos or piercings are branded as thugs. Black men who have children and black men who don't have children are both regarded as players, hounddogs, absent fathers, and baby daddies, as if the logical answer is that no one's first choice of partner and father of their children would ever be a black man.

"no one judges a man's worth based on his clothes"/"a man isn't ever in danger no matter what he wears"

Black men are required to look presentable and professional according to eurocentric standards, push themselves into clothes not made for their bodies, and be highly uncomfortable in their daily lives or else risk 'fitting the profile' or 'matching the description' and getting detained by police AT BEST for the crime of existing in public. Black men wearing comfortable clothes are seen as sloppy, thugs, gangsters, street rats, hood and ghetto.

"no man fears rape"

The rape and sexual assault of black men ties directly to black buck stereotypes and black fetishization to the point where liking a black person or having your dating pool be open to black people is treated like a sexuality much like being gay. People are both threatened by and aroused by our bodies and that leads them to perform extreme acts of violence on us, including rape, SA, coercion, trafficking, and more. Much like how "tranny" and "lesbian" is a porn category, so is Big Black Cock. Sometimes with us featured as the rapist. Sometimes with us featured as the victim. Almost never with us featured as intimate, passionate, loving, tender. Black men are either to be feared and reviled, or to be broken and forced to submit. Direct ties to slavery with white people still getting off to our suffering.

Just say you don't care as much about black people's suffering and go, jesus.

I have privilege because I sometimes pass as a man? Try walking in my shoes for a while. Turns out being a black man vs being a black woman isn't always so different.

[lovebug5151]

Weird when you first start paying attention to animal noises and realize they don't actually sound like the words we use

[lovebug5151]

"this thing is rare and only affects 1% of the population" dude that's 80 million people can you shut up