newthinkerer

[newthinkerer]

[newthinkerer]

[newthinkerer]

just saying i prefer my food-based crimes to be more "heisting $1 million worth of syrup from the Canadian Maple Syrup Reserve" and less "corporations giving toddlers listeria for fun and profit"

[newthinkerer]

Cynicism is bullshit, if you have no hope for change and improvement, it will never come

[newthinkerer]

World Oarfish Day is June 24th!

[newthinkerer]

what is it about lord of the rings that makes internet nazis love it

[newthinkerer]

discord servers replacing forums and similar niche communities primarily sucks for being a black hole of information but a close second is that it discourages lurking. maybe i want to anonymously observe a community to see what people are like and if i would fit in before i start interacting! maybe i don't want to immediately jump in to a spammed chorus of animated greeting stickers on an account tied to several other elements of my online identity! let me lurk!!!

[newthinkerer]

Shel Silverstein predicting ChatGPT in 1981

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Earl Grey Chiffon Cake

[newthinkerer]

Hey man, ahead of this heatwave I'm gonna go ahead and rip the veil off of something for you:

The reason American Southerners have the luxury of saying that 90 ain't that bad and it's not unbearable until it's 100 is 1) prolonged exposure to high temperatures over multiple decades 2) our mindset for these living conditions.

You don't have number 1, and you can't just acquire it, so I need you to adopt number 2 immediately. How do you live like a Southerner in the heat?

Don't be a hero.

Stay inside. Buy a box fan, put it next to a bucket of ice, and wrap your arms around it like a lover. Do not leave the shade under any circumstances. If a dude makes fun of you for getting out of the sun, don't get mad, just think of a funnier insult to call him while you flip him off and go stand under a tree.

Southerners love nothing more than to exaggerate and lie to each other. Like I think we got off on the wrong foot when you walked in on us saying things like "It was only 110, I didn't even take my damn jacket off" when really, last week it was 95 at 10 PM and we were on the bed buck nekkid in front of the fan moaning incoherently and praying to die. So yeah, we can take extreme heat. We also want you to think we can take ludicrous heat. You must learn to talk shit and then be a hypocrite and a coward in your actions, because this will serve you best.

It sounds like I am joking but I cannot express to you how much I am not. Do not fuck with Mother Nature, because that bitch will kill you. Take every opportunity to lower your body temperature and drink water, because that is what all of us in hot climates are doing all the time, and that is why we are not dead, even when it seems like we should be.

(And yeah, we do go through like two and a half ugly weeks in April every year where everyone wants to absolutely just goddamn drop dead because none of us have our heat tolerance back, but we must go to work anyway, which must be a crime. And yes, when it gets below 70 we really all do short circuit and cover ourselves in seven jackets, except for Shorts Guy.)

[newthinkerer]

I hope you heal so much that taking care of yourself is one of your favorite things to do and I hope you can forgive yourself for everything you did before you got there

[newthinkerer]

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

[newthinkerer]

The age of eligibility for an ABLE account, allowing USAmerican disabled people to save up money without losing their government assistance for having “too much,” is going to go up to cover disabilities diagnosed by age 46 (currently it’s age 26), meaning a much larger number of people will be able to access them. As the article notes, many Americans don’t know these accounts exist, let alone whether they or someone they care for could qualify for one, so please share this information around.

It seems to me it would obviously be better if the “no more than $2000 a month” limit were simply removed and disabled people could have whatever savings accounts they chose, but this is heaps better than nothing.

[newthinkerer]

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.

[newthinkerer]

Here’s a video so you can hear the water and the thrushes. I took it for you because you couldn’t be there. <3

[newthinkerer]

ppl who celebrate fictional character birthdays are annoying pass it on

[newthinkerer]

what are yall doing that we need this??