This Is A Summary Of College Only Using Two Pictures; Expensive As Hell.

We all seem to agree that Tattooed!Sirius would have Canis Major somewhere on his body but I am also of the opinion that on the side of his chest, usually covered by his arm, he’d have Leo as well. When people asked, he’d say it was because Leo is the lion, for Gryffindor, but closest to his heart, the Regulus star stuck out, because for all his talk, he hadn’t quite given up on his little brother yet.

Solarpunk Action Week 2021

It’s that time again, space cadets!

Solarpunk Action Week has been ongoing twice a year since 2019, with every week looking bigger and better than the last. People all over the world are planting gardens, learning new skills, building things, reducing waste, spreading information, taking direct action, and getting their neighborhoods and workplaces organized. We, your humble hosts, have consulted the auguries and scheduled Solarpunk Action Week 2021 for:

April 25th to May 1st!

Mark your calendars, kids

What is Solarpunk?

Solarpunk is  a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and  activism that  seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a  sustainable  civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The  aesthetics of  solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the  well-designed  with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the  earthy and  solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or  concerned with the  struggles en route to a better world — but never  dystopian. As our  world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not  warnings. Solutions  to live comfortably without fossil fuels, to  equitably manage scarcity  and share abundance, to be kinder to each  other and to the planet we  share. At once a vision of the future, a  thoughtful provocation, and an  achievable lifestyle.”

And what is Solarpunk Action Week?

Solarpunk  Action Week is a week dedicated to taking radical environmentalist and anticapitalist action to make the world a better place.  Previous Action Weeks have seen people starting gardens, learning new skills, making and repairing things, reducing waste, spreading information, getting involved in community organizing

All you have to do participate is begin or continue with an environmentalist, anticapitalist project and talk about it in the #SolarpunkActionWeek tag; it’ll get a lot of signal boosts to connect with other people around the world doing the same. &and follow along on Mastodon at @SolarpunkActionWeek@ecosteader.com

- - -

The previous Solarpunk Action Weeks saw a lot of individual actions, and those were incredible to witness, but we’re at our most powerful when we come together, so your homework for the next 6 months between now and the end of April is: Get organized! If we were able to do so much as individuals back in March, just imagine what you could get done rolling into Solarpunk Action Week with a crew ready to go

If you’re new to organizing, here are some great places to get started:

The Industrial Workers of the World (which has that good good Environmental Unionist Caucus and Southern Coordinating Committee)

Food Not Bombs

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Transition Initiative

Buy Nothing Project

Food Not Lawns

Can’t find anything in your area? Start something yourself!

Got 1 or 2 friends? You can start an affinity group

Guide to small-town organizing  

7 steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group

Wet’suwet’en supporter toolkit  

And I’m sure people will link to all sorts of other great projects and resources in the rebagels, so keep an eye on the notes!

If you’re already part of a union or a tenants’ association or what have you, even better! Get them in on it.

What can I do?

So many things! You can check out the #SolarpunkActionWeek tag to see what others have done in the past for inspiration. The two dinguses organizing these events have got resource tags full of just so many things you might could do and how to get started on them, here and here respectively. And here are some other fun ideas:

Everything you need to know about solarpunk

Everything you need to know about gardening

Everything you need to know about agitprop

Everything you need to know about antifascist action

Everything you need to know about making and repairing things

Everything you need to know about organizing in your workplace and your community

Learn how to become a street medic

Learn how to repair clothes

Regrow food plants from kitchen scraps

Recycle scrap fabric into yarn

20 plants to grow indoors

Make your apartment more energy efficient

Build a beautiful and functional vertical garden out of your literal garbage

Get out there and invent the future, space cadets, because we have a world to win. I know y’all are gonna make me proud; y’all always do.

If you want to keep up with/support the mods between Action Weeks, here’s our info:

Pops: Mastodon, tumblr (resources tag), Patreon, ko-fi

Natalie: Mastodon, tumblr (resources tag), Patreon, cashapp $NatalieIronside, buy Natalie’s book

—

“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.“ 

–Buenaventura Durruti

This is officially my favorite piece of art in the whole book. Titled: Behold the Dragon Warrior

Despite their enormous ecological values, new research reveals we don’t understand how most arachnid species are faring right now – or do much to protect them.

Spiders need our help, and we may need to overcome our biases and fears to make that happen.“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. […] A new paper by Isaia and 18 other experts digs into the conservation status of Europe’s 4,154 known spider species and finds that only a few have any protection at the national level. Most have never even been adequately assessed or studied in detail, so we don’t know much about their extinction risk or their ecological needs.

Italy, for example, is home to more than 1,700 spider species, but fewer than 450 have had their conservation status assessed and only two have any legal protection in that country. Greece, meanwhile, has nearly 1,300 spider species within its borders, but scientists have only assessed the conservation needs of 32 of them. None are legally protected. […] “What surprised us most while assembling the data was the extremely poor level of knowledge about the conservation status, extinction risk and factors threatening the survival of European spider species, despite Europe being one of the most studied regions of the world in terms of biodiversity,” says Filippo Milano, the study’s lead author […].

And of course, this is not unique to Europe; other countries and continents fail to protect arachnids, and for similar reasons.

“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.” This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae.

As we see with so many other wide-ranging species, a transnational border is often not a spider’s friend. The paper identifies several examples of species protected in one country but not its neighbor, despite being found in both places. According to the paper only 17 spider species are protected by conservation legislation in two or more European countries.

“Animals aren’t limited by our political lines on a map,” notes Echeverri. […]

And maybe, along the way, their work can help inspire people who fear spiders to look at them in a different light — or even to help look for them, like the Map the Spider project that asks citizen scientists to upload locations of the complex webs woven by elusive purse-web spiders. […]

“Focusing on spiders has been a very important choice […],” Isaia says. “You may study their web, their venom, their bizarre behaviors, the interactions between different species, their role as predators, their amazing taxonomical and functional diversity, their key role in the maintaining ecosystem equilibrium. You may also use them as sources of inspiration in architecture and visual arts. Aren’t these good reasons to find them attractive?”

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Headline and text published by: John R. Platt. “We Need to Talk About Spider Conservation.” As republished by Salon, 23 May 2021. Originally published by Platt at The Revelator, 10 May 2021.

i'm begging you guys to start pirating shit from streaming platforms. there are so many websites where you can stream that shit for free, here's a quick HOW TO:

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)

you can also download the media in question (look for a "download" button built into the video window, or use a browser extension such as Video DownloadHelper.)

damn, your comment about where did the carbon come from has got me wondering why the earth's crust is so... ordered, if you see what I mean. like, you don't have just tiny particles of elements that happened to react with each other, in a random mostly-homogeneous mix--you have large areas of the same type of rock, large veins of iron or whatnot, and so on. like going with like, to an extent.

too lumpy and solid to combine and homogenise? or it combined and then separated due to different densities and varying levels of heat? I have no idea where planets came from, I only live on one.

The peryton is a mythological creature resembling a deer with the wings and overall plumage of a bird. Sometimes perytons can have bird-like hind legs, but are often depicted as being entirely deer aside from the wings. Last image created by the talented Skallan of Deviantart.

incredibly funny to realise the US supports single-family zoning so much on the exact same material basis as the Wehrbauer system

This is an illustration I did for the August 2014 issue of Popular Science Magazine. The assignment was to show a scifi take on human aging in the future. I wanted to do something relatively positive, so I drew a lady whose life has been been prolonged through cybernetic enhancements and augmentation, so she gets to spend time with her great-great-great-great grandchildren. 

Thanks to AD Michelle Mruk!