Notices by Red Oak (redoak@social.coop)

while i'm musing on degrowth - i continue to grapple with the question of individual & collective action. to me it's clear that rather than either-or, it needs to be both. lately i've had a thought that i want to offer when folks disparage individual-choice changes: maybe some percentage of potential comrades needs to see the difficulty and smallness of some of these things at the personal scale in order to get on board with more systemic answers.

Certainly i've learned a lot about practicalities and logistics pertaining to, e.g., composting by practicing it myself. Likely nothing could have convinced me of the need for local-scale collaboration on waste management & soil building better than the year i tried to shred and compost every cardboard box shipped to our house.

so, rather than saying "you don't need to change your behavior," consider encouraging people to try the behavior change, and being ready to help them learn the lesson that literally we cannot do what needs to be done on an individual, voluntary basis alone. after all, the fact is that we will *also* need to change a lot of behaviors, so trying to reassure and entice people like that will end up backfiring - i think lots of people understand, even if only subconsciously, that our (US) lifestyle is unsustainable and sooner or later we'll be forced to adapt

Unusual case at work today, the house has a great rooftop solar setup but they're in a pickle with it: the company who installed it went bankrupt, and now there's an issue in their system that nobody is obligated to fix, but they're still paying the loan.

Being mastodon i thought id ask if any of yall might know how to regain control of a SolarEdge inverter/monitoring platform, once controlled by Titan Solar?

ok so twenty minutes ago i was getting in my head about it. like, the level of overly confident white guy, to say "maybe if i just take it out and blow on it it'll work" like it's a fucking NES cartridge rather than a terrifying miracle of science and engineering that makes the NES look like a literal rock

but it's working again now, so, if i'm stupid i was stupid correctly

like, i'm still annoyed with myself on 8 different levels at least

but i can't stop laughing about this

honestly! what the fuck!?

@gemlog mine have the basics of chess but it didn't really grab their interest too tightly. when i was young, that was a special time with my dad because he didn't play a lot of games either. then i went to college, and they moved, and there just wasn't a good place to leave a chess board out and ready. i'm only just now realizing we haven't played since they moved out of that house.

welp, got my ass beat at a board game by an 8 year old again

my younger kid is my board-game buddy, older one isn't as into it

i haven't "let them win" since they were like 5 honestly, but i also don't really play maximum-cutthroat-competitive with them either.

but the 8yo regularly wipes the floor with me in Clank!, among other games.

tonight we tried a new-to-us free roll-and-write called Fantasy Food Truck, it was pretty fun! we'll definitely check out some of the creator's other games.

https://belugablissgames.wordpress.com/fantasy-food-truck/

all i want is for basically our entire society to be organized differently, is that so unreasonable???

what if i learned to communicate effectively

the other day i randomly put on an album i loved ~20 years ago, and it was fun to hear. i think it was the closest i've been to feeling levity or joy in at least a couple months. then the idea that right now, i can only get that feeling from a hit of unexpected nostalgia made me sad again.

get in loser, we're trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

Humbly requesting stories about something you've done / are doing lately to withdraw support from the death cult and/or create alternatives for yourself and others. Nothing is too small, or too imperfect, or too late; i just need a little positive energy of this particular flavor to feel less alone and angry today.

been a while since i reposted this classic, but @afewbugs inspired me to dust it off today. truly fundamental imo.

@nathanlovestrees @derek have y'all met?

"Political violence is never acceptable," say a bunch of guys who use the machinery of state power to enact political violence every day and twice on sunday

wow, i just froze myself up. task is to write a brief description of volunteering with my org for a community directory kinda thing. left to my own devices i'm inclined to either write something stark about climate change, or something lyrical about the common welfare of all life on earth, and i think those could be convincing in their ways, but ~~obviously/implicitly the brief is "sensibly cheery description of the work."

i'm so tired of performative normalcy..

"Embrace AI or get out of this career" haha, way ahead of you, fucker

not watching monsterdon, but i won't let that stop me from posting "30-50 feral bogs"