Finding a good primary care doctor can feel a little bit like dating. It’s awkward. Your expectations are high. You know it’s rough out there, but you’re still secretly hoping to find the one.
So where do you begin? Just like dating, finding a doctor you click with is all about trusting your intuition.
“What you get in a snapshot isn’t that far from the truth,” says Dr. Kimberly Manning, a primary care doctor and associate professor at Emory University. “In terms of interactions, in how someone talks to you — I think those things can be really powerful markers to help you decide if this is a good fit.”
Everybody’s always talking about desperately wanting to run away into the woods and build a hut, start a vegetable garden, collect stones, ignore capitalism, etc. But really, when you think about it, what’s stopping us? Communes and things like that have successfully existed before. Who says that we couldn’t pool resources and get a plot of land and start the solar punk goblin/cottagecore lifestyle we dream about? Like I’m being super optimistic here, but I can’t help but think about it.
Yea o___o
Southern Ohio is rural and dirt cheap, I’m sure there are plenty of other places like that all over.
What if we, like…actually…organized?
Tons of cheap land in Appalachia, Midwest, and all over, really.
For anyone who is interested in this sorts of thing, there’s a few things to look into:
1) learning basic food skills. Learn how to cook from scratch. How to bake from scratch. Try to shop in season and take advantage of deals you may find, and then learn how to preserve or put back what you can’t use in a week.
2) learning gardening skills. Herbs in containers can be a good place to start. Buy seedlings, buy a bag of potting soil, find/scavenge something suitable for a container (stab holes into it if necessary).
3) learn any other relevant skillset that interests you. this might involve volunteering at local farms, animal rescues, and habitat for humanity.
4) Start visiting existing ecovillages and intentional communities (maps pictured above and below). They DO exist, some are even here on tumblr. Take the time when you can to visit such communities. Watch how they organize things and work together - every community is different. Many of these communities will do work/trade so you can visit, do some labor, and learn while you’re there. You will see things you will want to replicate. You will see things you won’t.
If you can actually get a group of people together to learn and practice these skills, and then to actually join together with on-the-ground real-world time spent in some intentional communities, you’re well on your way to actually creating one.
One of the common questions I run across in r/homesteading is how to pick out the best type of land. This is a clear sign that the person/people aren’t ready yet to actually get it. As you learn your skills and figure out exactly what you want to do on your homestead / commune / intentional solarpunk village or whatever, you’ll figure out on your own what kind of land you’ll want to do those things.
People think getting the land is step #1, it’s actually more like step #212.
You may be able to achieve your dreams! But your dreams will take time, time to learn the skills (volunteering + youtube makes this easier than ever), time to earn the money to buy things like the land and the well and the tools, time to organize your group. A five year plan isn’t a bad idea. V and I put ourselves through a 5 year homesteading/repair skills bootcamp before we got our property. We also got in shape.
And you don’t have to learn 100% of information about a skill before trying! I want to bake and garden (and more) but trying to tend to my parent’s garden has been overwhelming. So I “practice”. One year it was seeing if I could grow lettuce and spinach in a window box. I should mention I had killed off a NUMBER of houseplants in years prior, before keeping some of the lettuce and spinach alive. Small, small steps here. The next I tried carrots, cucumber, and some herbs. Only the carrots survived. Last year was my best, I still have a lavender plant, mint, and basil from last summer. Practice.
I can’t own my own property yet. I can’t grow most of my own food, I have no money for fertilizer or fencing, or cans to preserve things. I have some hand me down pots, garage sale trowel, and seeds, and I practice.
Yes! Learning takes time, trial and error. You’re on the right path!
Finding out what resources are in your area / scavenging is very useful.
Fertilizer: If you can set up a composting bin, you can add in rabbit or chicken poop. Fresh will burn plants, but composted it is excellent to add to plants*. You might be able to search on craiglist or nextdoor or facebook groups for owners of pet rabbits and chickens and volunteer to clean out their pens. For non-edible food, and assuming you are healthy, not taking medications, and not squeamish, you can dilute human urine 10 to 12 parts water to 1 part human urine. Human urine does not have the ideal nutrient ratio, it’s pretty high in nitrogen, but better than nothing.
Fencing: you may also be able to scavenge. Untreated wood fences may last you about a season (or more, depending on climate). You can take apart old pallets and rebuild them into fencing (this will take some tools, screwdriver + screws or whatever you prefer). There is also wattle fencing, where you take thin branches off of trees and weave them together… it’s a bit of an art, and takes time to gather and cut the materials, and then time to practice putting them together. There’s lots of DIY videos and websites on how to build wattle fences. You can even build living wattle fences or just plant hedges (like hazelnuts) to act as fencing.
Jars: You can use old glass jars that food comes in to try pickling and fermenting. Sometimes thrift stores will carry them too. I ferment hot sauce by taking ball jars and just not screwing the lid on all the way. I tried fancy air locks and but have had better results from the usual metal rings + lid. You can also experiment with freezing foods as well.
Here’s a link to the full PDF of the Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I recommend downloading it! I was gifted the book and only really found a couple of pages useful, but it’s basically the bible of fermentation. Fermentation was one of the main methods of food preservation, pre-refrigeration / pre-electricity / pre-industrial era, in many cultures.
*In the short to medium term. Long term, get soil tests, as you can end up with excess phosphorus issues.
Teacher loses her job after her boyfriend(a fellow teacher) exposed a private, topless photo she sent him to her young students. He faces no repercussions but she loses her career. The importance of her winning her case for equality and civil rights for women should not be underestimated. The boyfriend should be on trail for exposing porn to minors and using revenge porn but when are men in the US held accountable for anything 🤷♀️
This also perpetuates the idea to children that women are inherently sexual objects. Once our breast’s are exposed they “no longer respect her[us]”. We are more than a pair of tits. Lauren Miranda is renowned in her community for being the best algebra teacher there is but suddenly, once they’ve seen her breasts - she no longer has the intellegence or worth as a woman to teach.
This is what they are teaching to the children of that school. That a man can be shirtless can still hold value but women can not. Women are sexual objects seen by the state and teaching that to young girls is detrimental to their self-worth and understanding of their bodies.
Even more wild is the fact that it’s actually legal(it’s fucked up there’s laws for breasts right?) for women to walk around topless in the state of NY where she teaches. It’s one of seven states in the US.
A case like this is also very important in the context of deepfakes: automatically computer generated images which superimpose an existing person’s face over a different body in a believable way. The technology was most famously used to create videos in which an actor was able to wear a famous person’s face and voice files generated from existing audio, to say and do things which the subject never did.
For regular people, the concern is that they can be weaponized, especially against women. When done manually, it takes a digital retoucher many hours to create a single believable fake still image. Using AI, a large number of fake still images and possibly even short videos can be automatically generated for any number of targeted individuals, in order to disrupt and distract. Most likely, these fakes will be used for blackmail purposes, or to remove that person from a position of authority. This teacher’s case shows that even if it is determined that the victim had nothing to do with the image in question being released, they still suffer a negative effect from the picture being exposed. This is a dangerous precedent, and once again women suffer disproportionately.
Men aren’t immune though, because even a fake image of a male politician engaging in heinous behavior like pedophilia or rape could still work as a disruptive element especially during a political campaign. (Unless that politician is right wing, in which case it could boost their popularity).
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
