Two kinds of soup

Did some blogging for my nonprofit, GOAT, to talk about the DIY lights and safety workshop we ran with ILRCSF, and a small conference I gave a talk at, Common Tools. I also did some extra work on my 2 consulting jobs, co-working on video chat with Sumana for companionship.

Before lunch I had a walk to bring soup to yatima since I made a giant pot of chicken posole yesterday. I actually looked up whether it might be possible to rent a miniature pony to bring to her in the garret where she is isolating, because i would like for her to have all the ponies, but maybe isolation and a visiting pony and several flights of stairs don’t QUITE mix.

At lunch (which was escarole soup my mom brought me yesterday!)  I read a kids’ book, Summer of the Swans, that I picked up from a little free library along the Bernal Cut. It’s a Newbery Medal winner from 1970 that I remember looking at and rejecting when I was a kid, basically for gender reasons as the main character bugged me so much I didn’t want to read the rest. I didn’t mind super old fashioned girls’ books when I was younger, like reading Heidi, or Pollyanna, or whatever, but a vaguely modern tween girl freaking the hell out that her feet were too big and hates her nose or whatever, was a big fat no.   However, I read it while eating my soup today.

In Summer of the Swans there are two POV characters, Sara who is about to be 14, and her little brother Charlie, who is non neurotypical in some way because of a severe fever he had when he was a toddler. Their older sister is 19 but acts maybe 15 by my standards even for 1970, maybe especially for 1970. Anyway, the younger brother has mutism and some kind of developmental delay, and his sister Sara has a fairly strong bond with him and defends him against people who bully or tease him. He then wanders off in the night and the extremely thin plot of the book is basically that Sara realizes how much she loves him and finds him in the woods along with the Yukkiest Boy she totally hated who turns out to be quite nice and asks her on a date for that very evening. The end!  Yawn. Did this deserve the Newbery? It is probably notable for having Charlie be a sympathetic character and including his point of view and how he thinks and experiences the world and what he considers important, and the fact that his family respects him maybe is radical for 1970 or even today.

The book goes right back out onto a free shelf though. I pick up a lot of free kids’ books like this, read and release them, and only a few make it to the bookshelf of honor and preservation in my house!

I am also well into, maybe nearly done with, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, which is as fluffy or flufflier than Legends and Lattes, and is basically a knockoff of it where a tough palace guard and the land’s most powerful mage run off together to a small border town where they open a combination tea shop and bookstore/lending library while solving all the local political and magical problems and being adorable lesbians mildly processing their various insecurities and anxieties. Does our city guard “deserve” love or still feel she has to “earn” it? Does our mage take reasonable care of herself or run herself into the ground? Will they get married (duh yes but maybe in book 2). What will happen about the sucky, evil-ish Queen what’s her name? There are also mildly bad “puns” which I have to put in quotes because they hardly even deserve the name.

Obviously, I enjoy this comfort read and will read as many as appear before me magically on my Kindle.

Our contractors started painting today, or maybe just taping in preparation for painting the bathroom. Luis and his son also covered the back of the house in tyvek and started getting ready to do the exterior siding in the corridor alongside the new ramp, and also on the outside of the bathroom which was water damaged and a total teardown and rebuild. They are really great, but I am so ready for this project to be done with!!

Stardew and Voyager Farm await me – I am in mid summer and pushing hard on getting those 5 gold star melons for the Community Center bundle. I will also make myself amazing tacos with the remnants of the chicken posole. The broth is now gone, so it is just shredded chicken, peppers, tomatillos etc and the maiz blanco; I have white corn street taco sized tortillas which I will fry up lightly, maybe some refried beans from a can since didn’t think to cook actual dried beans, celantro, raw red pepper. I can’t remember if I have any salsa or cheese but am not feeling motivated to go out. Plain tacos are fine!

This weekend I am planning to hang out at the Legion of Honor museum festival with my sister and our parents and maybe my friend Mikayla. I will miss Lisa’s podcast for  Aaron Swartz Day this weekend (Saturday from 2-5pm) but planning to be on her podcast early next year to talk more about GOAT.

Books and Stardrops

Well, I read Metal from Heaven and am about to start Can’t Spell Treason without Tea. And I’ve played the new Stardew Valley update on my Switch for the last two days, so much that I’m well into Summer Year 1.

Last night had dinner in Annalee and Jesse’s garden with a bunch of really lovely people. Loudly shrieked with people about Metal from Heaven (psychically damaged hallucinating fantasy motorcycle bandit lesbian train robber revolutionaries! unions! strikes! with a side of  decadent aristocrat prep school girl graduates!).  Other fun messing about with Meshtastic with Jesse and Emma H. and then Jesse told us about AREDN. I still need to go get my ham license!!   Megan told me about being a Master Birder and then Rick and I just kind of gloriously explained to each other all the facts we know about different kinds of rocks, which is like one of my favorite kinds of conversations, and then about family history things.

Today I had lunch with my parents and later had a video chat with yatima, who has covid and has to isolate – I will bring her soup tomorrow, having just made chicken posole after going to the newly opened (today!) El Chavo supermarket, which is great & I highly recommend it.  I went to Stamper and ordered new glasses, the cheapest possible progressives, because I sat on my wonderful glasses that I love. (I did find the same frames used and ordered them from Canada, fingers crossed that works.) Lunch was at the old St. Jorge cafe, which has re-opened with new owners as Tea Rex, and I can report they have a very good quinoa-beet-apple-balsamic salad and excellent coffee. That is it. I am giving myself some space and down time to feel a wide range of things.

Last weekend I had a great time with new friend Tiffany as we wandered around Valencia, had ice cream, dumplings, shopped around in Silver Sprocket, exchanged stickers, and showed each other our tattoos.  Danny is still reading me chapters out loud from book 2 of Dance to the Music of Time, from Bangkok, when our schedules overlap.

Everyone is just so shell shocked.

I try to keep my historical perspective and I do know that I am lucky to be alive in a time where I have any rights at all to anything, and I never expected even so to see queer/trans rights and all the legal changes there and the shift in acceptance that we have seen. We hoped that was a done deal – with a little backlash – But no. We then saw our rights to our bodies taken away and people die from pregnancies, miscarriages, infections, women driven into poverty or in the control of abusers.  The dynamic here I think is less backlash and more the economic precarity that goes with climate change and rampaging billionaires or whatever, that leads so many people into hate, fear, right down the path to fascism. We are not unique in the world, and other countries are struggling with the same stuff. What to do? I don’t know, probably same as ever but twice as hard and with more determination. I did not get to blow my ridiculous celebratory bugle that i blew in 2020 but I will blow it again soon enough.

I recommend reading (and subscribing to) Erin in the Morning – I found her post This was always going to be a generational fight for transgender people to be heartening today.

Skibidi Megalon

I went off to see Megalopolis excitedly knowing that a lot of people think it sucked, because even if it sucked I figured it would have some interesting thing to say about “the Future” and would also be something of a spectacle, part “neo Rome” and part art deco. But mostly, I am one of those people who often think about the Roman Empire! Danny, Mikayla and I escaped from the heat of this week at the Alamo Drafthouse, buckled up and ready for THE FUTURE.

It was ridiculous from the beginning. The signifying lesbians in the club (Girls licking each other performatively = Decadence!) The strange attempts to convey SCIENCE, the power hungry vamp, things that were like, vaguely Roman (?) And then the power to STOP TIME.

I complained to Danny that they did not lean in at all to the time stop power or any of the magic. “It’s because it’s meant to be ART – it’s like the power of ART!” OK fine…. it would be nice if the ART contained more artiness.

Aubrey Plaza leaned in hard to her part of the money and power hungry vamp “Wow Platinum” and I thought Adam Driver also did as good as could be done with his weird caricature of a Tortured Genius. They just played it as hard and cartoony as they could.

Things I liked: the trippy montages were embarrassing and pretty good at the same time. The dumb Megalon substance, never explained, that makes a beautiful 1920s World’s Fair park thing in the razed (and satellite-bombed) former slums. TBH I also liked the decadent performative-for-the-male-gaze lesbian gaggle. (I think it was Mikayla who pointed out that the first time they appeared it was like, oh they’re symbolizing decadent empire – but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th times you start thinking maybe Francis Ford Coppola just likes watching cute girls lick each other.)
The science startup montage in the office in the art deco skyscraper penthouse was so ridiculous it was good, at least at making me laugh, as they did a sort of trust exercise and spinned dramatically in spinny chairs while bouncing a basketball and unrolling scrolls on a drafting table. Maybe… maybe… the city planning aspect (while dumb as hell) kind of connects to how Rome would do very deliberate city planning??!

Every time Adam Driver referred to his Nobel Prize (often holding it up in its little case!) was a riot.

Another good laugh – when Adam Driver is partying because he’s upset (I can’t remember why – because his mom is nuts maybe?) And Julia mutters into her bracelet/smartwatch: “10:17pm. Drunk AND high.” The Caesar/Driver being drunk AND high montage is so silly! I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it’s like to be drunk AND high!!!!

Best, was when we got permission to laugh harder at the vestal virgin in her post-scandal, hellfire joan jett haircut & eyeliner phase. OMFG best scene of the whole movie.

I loved being in a theater with other people who were also bursting into laughter and kind of groaning during the Serious moments. It was irresistible to me during the last half of the movie to attribute everything to Marcus Aurelius. All the quotes made me kind of hit my head and groan. It was all so sophomoric! Even the things I kind of liked I also didn’t like! Or I thought they were badly done in some way.

BUT then I was thinking, well, it is not a “good movie” by what we expect to be happening in a good movie, or in its narrative style fitting what we think is good, but that doesn’t make it invalid artistically! No one is (now) telling Herman Melville to “show don’t tell” so maybe I can kind of treat these plonking philosophical bits and the entire speech from Hamlet as Melville-ish digressions. But did it achieve those digressive glories? No. Not quite enough for me.

Things that made me go hmmmmm:
– The basic horrible elitism and “great man” theory infusing it all.
– The mob scenes are all about “the people” being manipulated and used by a few unscrupulous elites. It chilled me to the bone to have “power to the people” be shown in that way by someone who was around for the civil rights movement. It felt deeply racist and also like a racist dog whistle. We can see it as FFC’s commentary on Rome I guess. But none of the Rome stuff went that deep. “The people” don’t have any agency or politics or thoughts or even art (the whole fucking theme of the movie presumably, “Art”)
– None of our (in the U.S.) actual cultural connection to Rome and the various myths of Rome were really touched on. Coppola’s take on Rome and Caesar and everything felt like it came from having read some very outdated historian’s fusty 1890s perspective on the OG sources.
– The hideous sexism. Does anyone go, hey, does Julia also have this magic time stop power since she sees you do it and sees through it? No. no one asks. She is just there to be a muse and to BELIEVE IN HER MAN, who is a GENIUS.
– The more hideous sexism of the mayor being like “can’t you just be daddy’s little girl?” and trying to cockblock her whole relationship
– His original animosity towards Caesar/Driver very much unexplained. Why did he hide his dead wife’s body etc? What??
– Though I guess Julia does have the power with her one year of medical school to surgically reconstruct an entire eyeball and brain and face with Megalon ™. (But maybe just by girlishly Believing. Unclear.)
– that bit at the end where they are entering the world’s fair ass looking park where apparently inventing shiny escalators has solved all world problems, but the same mob who was grimy and looking through a chain link and barbed wire fence a few moments ago is now dressed in their best holiday party gear. Are they stepping merrily into the world’s fair? no! they are looking UP at the platform of famous pop star/politician elites step onto the shiny escalator in the sparsely populated theme park.
– just a nitpick, but if Adam Driver didn’t know his dead wife was preggers when she died, how?! since she was VERY pregnant including maybe an entire baby growing inside each enormous boob

I also thought, maybe this would have been a better movie if it had been made when he first thought of it! I don’t regret seeing it and I kind of like it better the further I get from being in the actual theater watching it and hitting my head groaning or shrieking with laughter. it did make an impression!

Maybe it wasn’t for ME… maybe it was for that 14 year old who is only starting to think about history and art, and looking for something to hook those thoughts on!

Well, anyway, I still love art deco curvey futurism.

But you don’t get to a place where the future is better and art is healing and the ecological interconnectedness of the Earth is respected, by looking to a Lone Genius Science Man to invent a magical substance that fixes everything and then having a bazillionaire donate a lot of money to fund it! And anyone sensible would know that because they would have thought about something that wasn’t the shallowest possible sophomoric Boomer-assed, Fountainhead-brainrotted, literary canon! They might have READ SOME SCIENCE FICTION which is literally a whole genre of people writing about the Future! Maybe even some feminist science fiction which deliberately writes about collective action, people’s relationships, people actually caring for each other day to day instead of giving an occasional speech about Love while totally forgetting birth control might exist, ETCETERA. The Earth / planet not even mentioned till the very last frame of the movie – I guess there were ecological problems (that weren’t fueled or caused by corporate/elite greed??????????????) that are all solved by MEGALON. Whew!

There is my review!

I definitely enjoyed the movie!

Conversational power

Up till now the voice versions of “AI” have given me the same irritated feeling I get while listening to an automated phone menu. I feel frustrated or impatient listening to the voices of things like Alexa or Siri. I don’t trust them on some fundamental level.

The other night I watched a video clip with Danny, where someone asked ChatGPT to chat wiht it in a Cockney accent. I had watched it earlier and thought, Huh that’s convincing, it sounds very much like Danny’s family. When we watched it together I saw his face go through a very complicated sequence of emotions. It was just wild.

Then the next day I tried asking it for a chat in a Rhode Island accent that was from someone Italian-American. It answered, “Sure,”and with that one word I felt my face do what Danny’s did the day before. I felt surprise, shock, fascination, fear, vulnerability. In the short paragraph it then generated, which was a normal thing for someone to say from where I was born and where the core of my family was from. I got a sort of homily, an offer of coffee milk*, and was told, “Mangia!”. That sounds so stereotypical but the personality and conversational subject felt as correct as the accent (if maybe a little bit of a stereotype). As the hair on the back of my neck stood up I had a strong memory of my grandmother (who I was estranged from for much of my life) singing “A You’re Adorable” and tenderly reading to me while I was in her lap.

The evoker of the Cockney accent, the video maker, appeared in their short chat to bond with the ChatGPT generated personality, at the end saying goodbye with a warm “love to the family”.

It is interesting we both experienced such powerful emotions. I think that even without our particular contexts of alienation or distance, people’s relationship with “AI-ness” is going to change, because it feels very different to talk with an entity that expresses a personality. It feels grounded, rooted, and has at least the warmth level of making small talk with an affable stranger who you might meet in daily life.

The veneer of culture and personality may be thin right now. It’s likely that when I go back and try this exercise in more depth, ChatGPT will cycle through a fairly short list of stereotypical “Rhode Island Italian” things it can insert into the conversation. But that level was enough for casual chat. It is far from the phone tree voice or robocall that you want to throw across the room. Definitely worth a handshake.

—–

*

“What the hell is coffee milk?” Danny asked me. “Um. I have some in our fridge right now is what.” (I special order it from Rhode Island is what. It’s delicious! “A swallow will tell you!”)

“And (looking at the text of our chat) what does m-a-n-g-i-a” mean?” he asked, Britishly.
Me: [!!!!! (laughing uproariously)] Only a thing I was told every single day a million times!

a plastic bottle of coffee syrup made by Autocrat, with a bird logo

Bop Spotter

I love this project, the Bop Spotter! This is my neighborhood and I love its musical landscape.

Sometimes I add to it myself from a bluetooth speaker on my wheelchair, but more often I’m surreptitiously shazaming the music around me from others’ speakers, from cars, from businesses I’m going by on the sidewalk.

This is a cool use of a old/low end phone – hooking it up to a little solar panel on a utility pole. The web page shows the community’s culture to the community. It’s community data collection that’s positive, approachable, and fun. We are also invited to listen along on Apple Music or Spotify!

You could expand this project out in different ways, like log all the music, make it searchable, count the times we hear particular songs or artists, make it possible to, in the future, reconstruct the public musical soundscape of this corner!

It’s beautiful just as it is of course, but I get kind of excited about the archival aspect of communicating with the future!

Oct 8: Zine-making workshop with the SF Disability Cultural Center

I’ll be giving a free workshop on how to make a tiny zine, coming up in a week or so, hosted via Zoom with the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center. It’s happening Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM Pacific time. Please register to get the link and more information!

Mini-zines are easy and fun to make – something about their tiny form is very freeing! Liz Henry, poet, literary translator, small press publisher, hacker, and maker of innumerable zines, will facilitate this hands-on workshop. We’ll look at a few zines for inspiration and construct our tiny zines together. We’ll hang out and chat while we all start – and maybe finish – our own! Zine-making kits are available for folks in the Bay Area.

If you are in the Bay Area, you can also check out some other zine making communities and events!
The DIY Museum is doing neat work and hosts a ton of events!
– SF Public Library’s monthly Zinething: https://sfpl.org/events/2023/10/17/activity-zinething
Tiny Zine Library‘s Zine Club – 2nd Sunday of the month at Szygzy Coop in the Haight
– periodic events at Double Union makerspace in the Mission

I’m sure there are more, but these are the ones I know about!

two zines on a colorful tablecloth

People told me slow my roll

The song stuck in my head when I woke up this morning was Pursuit of Happiness by Kid Cudi. A brilliant song (and album! listen to it all at once in order) and I also love the dreamlike music video where he keeps getting up off a couch and falling through windows and doors. (There is a different “official” music video that is oddly boring and standard.)

People told me slow my roll
I’m screamin’ out, Fuck that!
Imma do just what I want
looking ahead no turning back!

– Brought to you by the couch where I have my feet up and my knee in a stabilizing wrap

I flew to DC for a summit at Gallaudet on disability, tech, and labor rights! Went to the Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Natural History Museum! It was a lovely trip & I met so many great people- and will write that experience up soon.

Back home again, I was not feeling up to even travelling across the bay, but did my talk for Common Tools via Zoom. Another great gathering where I met interesting people and learned some things.

Last night went to Writers with Drinks, the Banned Books edition, which was also great!

I *will* have to slow my roll any moment now but not yet, lord….

Whill battery hack night at General Lithium

This week we held a little powerchair hack night with GOAT, Justin from General Lithium, CriptasticHacker and associates from Spokeland, Morgan from CIL, and more friends, to explore the battery technology of Whill Fi and Ci powerchairs. A Ci battery teardown is in progress along with an investigation into the Fi and its charger.

There was also knitting, and an adorable small support dog on a fluffy cushion. I had a cool moment realizing how many of us knew, or had worked with or learned from, John Benson (aka, Cripple A). I was thinking John, a fabulous human being, should get an award, and Morgan said, what he would really like is a parade. My mind took off with this great idea! What if we had a fabulous parade in his honor, with musical instruments and punk marching bands and a zillion wheelchair users zooming around?! We will also hopefully see him and some other repair and DIY wizards at our upcoming events!

a probably AI generated image of a futuristic looking glowing powerchair on a glowing disco platform

We didn’t do any formal talks or introductions, but CriptasticHacker kicked off by talking about one of his finished projects, the WBSW, Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder!

We have learned some things from cracking apart the Ci battery.
– It has hidden screws under the bottom corner pieces
– You still have to pry it open with a screwdriver and mallet
– The battery is encased in several layers of totally sealed plastic for waterproofing
– And under that it is podded, 5/6ths encased in rubbery gel stuff so you can’t really take it apart and hack it well.
– It has 1/4 kWh

For the Ci, our best option to soup it up (as it has fallen out of warranty and parts don’t seem to be readily available!) may be adding a new battery or batteries, which we could do for about $400 per kWh. We could easily fit 2 of those under my seat in the undercarriage basket. Then those could hook up to a new replacement (V)ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) which we then connect to the motor (managing the voltage etc. so it will be compatible).

For the Fi, we were able to access it a bitbetter and Zach, Henner, mjg, and others had a look with digital microscope, logic analyzer, etc. To figure out what is going on with the power management . Zach will describe all that on his hackaday.io page!

three people gathered around an electronics workbench

It was interesting to see the different approaches in play at the various workbenches. The laborious and intensive work needed for detailed understanding and reverse engineering is in some ways a philosophical stance, of learning, reuse, and conservation, but in other ways, a factor influenced by resource constraints. In other words, necessity is the mother of the meticulous teardown! The people with capital, on the other hand, had less patience with this approach and were ready to throw resources at a problem, and use new (or repurposed) stuff to do complete workarounds, or simply throw it all out and invent something new that would be more rapid to get working, even if unlikely to be elegant or refined in the first prototype.

There was a long discussion on how to make a kit to convert manual chairs to power with Justin and Morgan. To that I added some wild eyed ideas but also a pointer to these interesting, cheap, DIY open source wheelchair designs and to Whirlwind Wheelchair. We see people every day in the Bay Area who are struggling with clunky or broken chairs. It is a good topic for future exploration – what other conversion kits are out there? What were the problems and pitfalls? How feasible is it to to come up with a maintainable, cheap, design for such a thing?

I learned during the event that ESC (pronounce the letters in it) is an electronic speed controller (the thing I normally just call “motor controller” with a vague handwave.) VESC, frequently mentioned by our hardware hackers, is a particular technology – or we could call it a movement – that I think looks amazing – for “flexible, efficient, and reliable power systems for your platform”.

Another cool nexus of ideas that came up: Whill chairs come with Bluetooth and a phone app. You can control the chair from the app, configuring it with one of three pre-set acceleration curves. Could we write a new app to communicate with the chair and program it in different ways?

You can also steer the chair from a phone or tablet screen via Bluetooth. I have never actually used this feature. But we can see that airports are starting to explore using Whill chairs on auto-pilot, to take passengers to their gates. Using programmed routes but also LIDAR, like robot cars! That put a gleam in several people’s eyes. Actually, it put a whole range of different and hilarious facial expressions on everyone’s faces!

And as one more note for future investigation: The chairs also appear to log and send diagnostic information to the manufacturer. I’d certainly like to see that traffic! I wonder if it is encrypted and what the heck it is sending!

I’m really looking forward to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech hosting more electronics and hardware tinkering nights, as well as other DIY gatherings!

Overheard:
(just for fun – it was a lively event!)

“I’m so impressed with the fact that you bypassed the VMS…. Expert move”

“….. and then it would explode!”

“That motorcycle [points to motorcycle in a giant pile of e-bikes] has a battery bigger and more powerful than a tesla powerwall. and it goes 160 miles an hour! [gleeful laughter]”

“You can control it via bluetooth? Woah!! That’s my kink!”

“There are no standards for bike wheels, so there are 4 different kinds of 26 3/4 wheels and none of them work with the others!”

(Justin): “I’m gonna take your 1/4 kWh battery and give you THREE kWh. We can just strap the batteries under your seat.”
(me:) “Oh, great! I’ve always wanted to be launched into fucking SPACE with my ass on fire!”

“Is this illegal?” “No surely not!” “Well, maybe? But we’re just taking things apart, and looking at how it works! How can that be illegal?”

(FYI: This can be a complex question! You may want to read this Coder’s Rights Guide from EFF as a starting point. )

More pics from the event:
Wheelchair battery hack night at General Lithium

Thanks to everyone who showed up, chatted, tinkered, and especially thanks to our congenial hosts, General Lithium – they are a battery tech company, but they also have a nonprofit wing that runs this maker/coworking space in the heart of San Francisco. Have a look at their events page and membership information!

Disabled Ecologies

Experimental liveblogging! I’m in Berkeley at Pegasus Books for Sunaura Taylor‘s book event for Disabled Ecologies. Sunaura is here in conversation with Yomi Young from the Shelterwood Collective.

I have been reading the book on Kindle but like it so well that I want a physical copy too!

yomi and sunaura with microphones at front of a book lined room

You can read more about Yomi and her activist work in a zillion places but check out StoryCorps and maybe this article on the DJCC’s work early in the pandemic.

As Sunaura started her talk it only just now hit me that Sun-aura = Sonora like the Sonoran Desert. Oh! How did I miss that.
sunaura with microphone alongside an ASL interpreter

Crowd instantly on board with Yomi’s joke about doing some comedy performance art where they try to pass each other sheaf of papers in crip time (miming dropping papers and scrambling with hands)

yomi in powerchair, with the microphone

Sunaura reads us a short section from the introduction, Age of Disability. “Environmenal destruction is a story of disablement.” (Of people and of the land). “Mass ecological disablement of the human and non-human world.” Her story and her research are deeply rooted in Tucson’s history.

I lived in Tucson briefly – only for a few months, but I loved it and the desert and its life very much! Good memories of my many visits (with membership) to the Desert Museum, geologizing all over with Halka Chronic’s classic Roadside Geology of Arizona, and sneaking through the weird ruins of Biosphere 2!

A main point of the book is that just as disabled people have adapted and created ways of being, living, healing, doing care work, and finding joy, we can, or must, do the same with our relationship with the land.

Yomi mentions being blown away by the balance of philosophical discussion and personal history in the book. She asks Sunaura, Why now? Sunaura replies, she knew she would write it someday and her whole career has been leading up to it. And it has taken her 9 years to write! Her own life is entangled with the narrative of pollution on the southwest side of Tucson near the air force base and Hughes facilities. Her origin story gives her the roots of thinking about disability and nature. Not just her individual problem but that it is a political issue caused by systems of harm, racism, war, etc. and impact a whole community. Injury to nature is harm to all of us humans.

(It is like 1 million degrees in this bookstore as we are a large crowd sitting on a raised platform (there was a lift). My kingdom for a fan, or the space to leave and find a bathroom to remove the long underwear I unwisely wore so I would not be cold on the way home. I also regret the woolly socks. )

Yomi talks about the way the book is constructed. She loves how obsessed with aquifers Sunaura is. The book itself has an aquifer! Which has this nuanced way of organizing information. The pages of the book have , running along the book, an aquifer with extra explanations!

Aw I love this. Yomi has the soul of a poet. And one that admires huge nerdiness. Yay!

Sunaura says this is her favorite question because she loves aquifers so much! She talks about understanding aquifers as relational and as connected. “Magical holders of ancient time.” Unimaginable amounts of water under there, fossilized water.

She notes that because she doesn’t use her hands to read, she doesn’t like footnotes at the end of the book. So the running footnotes felt better to her and metaphorically became parallel in her mind to the underground running stream of information underlying the book.

Yomi says the book is an important one for disabiliyt studies but also for the environmental movement as it is not often Yomi sees environmentalist advocacy or research that includes disability – She feels it is a gift to our community. Sunaura has blown her mind with the new framing of community, disabled ecology.

Sunaura takes that idea and talks about disabled ecologies and communities. When she returned to Tucson as an adult she was following the trails of disability. The pollution and contamination left a trail of people, of wildlife, who were harmed. Wildlife was drinking from the unlined, uncovered pits. The trees died. And the aquifer was permanently altered. Material injuries didn’t just impact humans. Disabled Ecologies is in some ways a mapping project. (You can map not just where the weapons are made, but where they go off.) Disability not just a personal lived experience. She talked with many people and there were so many narratives of disability and illness, in public health, in community activists, in litigation, and these narratives – and mobilizations were often racialized in various ways.

Another short reading – from the chapter The Ground Beneath My Wheels. “What was I to make of this patch of land…” She felt a sense of solidarity with the injured landscape and was drawn to get to know it just as she was drawn to get to know the human communities. “How was I to write myself back into nature?” She then reads a quote that mentions Yomi and her work! (Audience goes oooooh!) Sunaura then reads a bit that mocks the hell out of Edward Abbey and his misogynist, ableist, colonialist writing. (Quotes about possessing a beautiful woman; and a bit where Abbey exhorts everyone to get up out of their motorized wheelchairs. (Audience laughs and boos; I have double flipped off the air for good measure. Cartoonishly bad!)

Knowing an aquifer wasn’t hindered by (in)accessiblity – it needs research, imagination, and understanding to become intimate with the aquifer. “The injured underground became a sort of companion.” “The desert I desired was bursting with community.” “Knowing the desert was not nearly as important as learning to be responsible to it.”

Yomi talks about her own work about land and disabled embodiement. That disability is incompatible with nature – this is a lie – And that natural spaces must be pristine and untouched – that we (disabled people especially but all humans) damage and corrode it. We who have been harmed should be leading the thinking about how to heal together with the land.

Yomi asks Sunaura about Mexican American communities who fought so hard for the environmental damage to be recognized. They continued naming it over and over and confronting environmental racism in a way that was so effective. Outside of movements, we don’t often hear these stories, it’s all Erin Brokovich where someone comes in to save the people. The skill this community had to use every possible tool at their disposal – including impact litigation – is great.

Sunaura – Talks about Yomi’s work with Shelterwood. She started off this project not knowing about the decades of incredibly environmental justice activism in South Tucscon. They should be given credit for the aquifer protection laws that were passed in Arizona. They were really badass but even in Tucson they are not well honored. Decades of contaminated groundwater. the city officials did nothing. No investigation, etc. But the community knew something was wrong. And then in the 1980s as they mobilized the City blamed it on their “lifestyle” or their diet, racist ableist ways to deny responsibility and making the community feel it was their own fault. This is often something that happens with disability!

Then at some point people were like, cleaning up the environment is one thing but right now we all need health care!

Time check! It is nearly 7, yay read the book! Any questions!

Audience m ember asks What happened then! (We all holler, you have to read the book!) Sunaura and Yomi: The story continues. For a while, they got a health program at a clinic. They won a historic groundwater protection fight and passed strong legislation. But the continued fuckery of the system is still harming people. And they are fighting for things they need to live and thrive as disabled people. There is no end.

Yomi: It never ends. And it’s very important that we don’t leave anyone behind. We don’t stamp out disability. It’s part of the human condition. It’s about, how do we live with disablement. Not leaving bodyminds behind, moving together, at the pace of our most marginalist and most disabled. That’s what is really beautiful about it.

Sunaura: it is a hopeful book and the framing of disability is a hopeful one. i know from the beautiful expansive world of disablity community . how can we make that reality one for the non human world as well?

A really lovely interview and talk, and I look forward to actually finishing the book!

So far, it makes me think about what I was trying to say in my short essay here, “Thoughts on AI, comradeship, ethics, interdependence” which I rewrote and made a bit longer for my zine Tabahtea Triple Junction. There, I started in a different place, with some recent discourse on AI and sentience, and tried to recontextualize it to the relationships we build with non human things including land. Sunaura’s book is crystalizing a lot of that thinking for me in a very useful way!

Coincidentally I also just re-read some of the Haraway she mentions and my friend unixjazz had messaged me a few days ago to say he found an OG copy of Sandra Harding‘s The Science Question in Feminism from 1986 while he was on vacation and snagged it for me (another book mentioned in Disabled Ecologies!) So maybe it is no wonder we are thinking about similar issues as we imagine the underground ebbs and flows! I will be going to unixjazz’s Common Tools event later this month to talk about DIY assistive tech as a liberatory idea with ecological connections, too!

Meshtastic foray

I now have two working Meshtastic devices, one for my pocket and one for the roof. They use LoRa (Long range radio) tech to send text messages. You can type via the Meshtastic phone app and Bluetooth connection, or hook up a little external keyboard.

The R1 is my nice portable pocket device. It’s a bit expensive but has a nice enclosure. It gave me some difficulties on and off, and finally Danny helped me re-flash it from Windows (still not sure if the issue was Mac weirdness or what, but try Windows, and erasing it before re-flashing.)

The roof one is in a decently waterproof solar power enclosure and I got it off some random seller on Etsy. I can see many more connections from the roof device, and can bluetooth to it from inside the house.

map of san francisco bay area with a smattering of mesh node stations stretching out to sacramento

I would like to build a 3rd one from various parts and mount it on a hill somewhere to add an extra long range line of sight hop for myself (and the whole neighborhood) but will have to figure out a bit more about how to properly solder it into its solar-powered floodlight enclosure.

The main default channel 0 (LongFast) is public. There is occasional chatter there as people connect and try to test.

Danny and I set up a second channel which I think is “private” to us, though I have no real idea and don’t well understand if/how it is encrypted, since I haven’t looked this up yet. I have also tried direct messaging people around the neighborhood and have established friendly communications with a few.

There is a Bay Area Meshtastic group with an active Discord server: https://bayme.sh/ .

If I can get some friends and family to have cheap solar mesh devices, we can be prepared to communicate in an emergency (like a big earthquake) that takes out power and cell towers.

If you are a hiker or going to somewhere out of cell range with a group, then pocket Meshtastic devices would be a great way to stay in communication (especially with precise location enabled).

There are lots of sensor options so this device likely has good potential use for weather stations and agriculture.

But aside from that, it is just fun in the way that ham radio is fun!

I also think that the way punkgeek set up the project for open hardware and software development, and kind of handed it off, is a great model for creating vibrant ecosystems and communities!