KU JOURNALISM MAJOR SHREDS “CASE” AGAINST MIKE BROWN

Let's talk for a moment about food prices, inflation, and the nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and steps you can take. We're going to go from food bank to growing your own, so stick around. This is mostly written for people who do not have much, if any, start up money.

To be brief, food prices are high, and inflation is going to mean more people will be struggling. On top of that, there has been a nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and on top of that, China and Russia said they wouldn't be exporting any until June.

I'm not here to discuss how bad it'll be, I'm here to provide some options.

First off, if you have money, donate money to food banks. If you're in a well-off area and your food banks have lots of support, consider donating money to areas that aren't as well off. Food banks can buy in bulk, so they can get way more food for the same dollar, which is why I'm not saying donate food.

Secondly, if you're struggling or even if it would make life a bit easier, use your food bank. If it's coming down to rent or food, go to the food bank and pay your rent. This might be different where you are, but here they get enough support that they really want and encourage people to come get food. If you're not sure, you can always call and ask.

Consider joining a bulk buying club (this is where a lot of food coops started) - people joining together so they can buy in bulk, get the cheaper prices, and then divide it up. If there's not one where you are, consider starting one. Buying in bulk is so much more cost efficient!

Where to grow:

Next comes growing food. If you don't have space, see if there are community gardens that you can join- or start one by asking the owners of vacant land if you can put in a garden. Join your local gardening groups (they're probably on facebook) and see if there's anyone with space willing to let you garden, or make some kind of arrangement.

If none of those options work, look into guerrilla gardening. Two factors for success here are that your plants be located a) close enough to you that you could feasibly walk by them multiple times per week and b) located where they either won't be noticed or won't bother the type of people who would notice. There has been much written about this, read up on it.

Of course, if you're lucky, you have your own yard, and can just grow in the ground there.

What to grow:

We've got a different mind set than many self-sufficiency folks, because we don't have enough time or space to grow all our own food. So, the focus instead is on growing what we can to reduce our grocery bills as much as possible.

What do you eat a lot of? What costs a lot per square foot and unit of time? It's the plants that you eat a lot of AND are costly AND are productive that we're going to want to focus on. Keep in mind that what might be true for my climate might not be true for yours. I'll give you a few examples:

Onions: If you eat a lot of onions, you might be tempted to grow them- but they are usually less than $1/lb and they take the whole growing season to make one harvest.

Kale: relatively expensive to buy, multiple harvests, and super easy to grow while not taking up a lot of space.

Artichokes: super expensive to buy, easy to grow (once established), but takes up a lot of space.

Personally, I grow the kale, and skip the artichokes & onions.

This person actually looked at yield per squarefoot and cost at the store and made a table for it:

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

The most expensive vegetables in your vegetable garden - The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Many vegetables can be expensive to purchase by growing the most expensive vegetables in your garden and buying the least inexpensive vegeta

But keep in mind, again, yields depend a lot on climate. In general, fresh herbs, leafy greens, and things like tomatoes are your most cost efficient plants to grow.

Look at what you actually eat and figure out what will be most cost efficient to grow. Don't grow a bunch of cilantro unless you really like to eat it, no matter how cost efficient it is.

Once you know what you want to grow, check out your local extension office/ master gardener program and learn HOW to grow it in your area!

Next: getting and growing food plants

If you're doing this on the cheap, first look to your local free groups, mutual aid groups, seed libraries, and gardening groups. There will be seed and plant swaps where people just want to share and don't particularly want or need a trade in return.

If you get food stamps, those can be used to buy seeds and vegetable starts in some states.

Other than that, I prefer to grow from seed, but I know that can be scary for new gardeners. Give it a try anyway! You'll be amazed.

How to feed your vegetables for free:

The best time to start composting is 6 months ago, but alas. Start composting now. Get coffee grounds, get lawn clippings, get whatever you can, and compost it. Heavy feeders grow well with a mulch of lawn clippings around them. Someone near you has horses or rabbits or something else and would love to give you some manure.

You can also straight up bury kitchen scraps and plant over them and the decomposers will still do their job if you don't have room for a compost pile.

Do you know what the limiting nutrient in most gardens is? Nitrogen. Do you know what you have an unlimited, free supply of?* Just saying, raspberries love it. Look into it and read up on it so you're not just going out there willy-nilly and burning your plants to a crisp.

Also, if you're municipality has yard waste/Organics pick up, there's a good chance they have a very large pile of free compost/mulch some where. Make use of it.

I'm sure there's more, but I gotta get going. Add your thoughts!

P.S. if you really do want to look into growing more of your calories, look into potatoes, corn for corn flour (not the same as sweet corn!), fava beans, and dry beans. What will work for your climate might be different.

*pee

Author Ken Liu Explains "Silkpunk" to Us

Ken Liu’s new novel The Grace of Kings is a sprawling fantasy set amidst war, rebellion, and border-crossing intrigue. But it also features a truly fresh technological world to explore. Here, Liu explains to us where that technology came from—and just what exactly “silkpunk” means.

Ken Liu talks about silkpunk in his latest novel:

“Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes as its inspiration the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity. My novel is filled with technologies like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales driven by primitive steam engines, and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore, as well as fantasy elements like gods who bicker and manipulate, magical books that tell us what is in our hearts, giant water beasts that bring storms and guide sailors safely to shores, and illusionists who manipulate smoke to peer into opponents’ minds.

The silkpunk technology vocabulary is based on organic materials historically important to East Asia (bamboo, paper, silk) and seafaring cultures of the Pacific (coconut, feathers, coral), and the technology grammar follows biomechanical principles like the inventions in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The overall aesthetic is one of suppleness and flexibility, expressive of the cultures that inhabit the islands.”

Will you say something about the songs you have composed for the film?

Ao3 Classics. 

Series inspired by Penguin Classics. (x) 

(for single covers follow the link x)

Links to works under the cut |

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How To Shop For Fabric Online

RIP Joann's. Now many places in the US no longer have a local fabric store, such as it even was toward the end.

There are some good posts going around about where to shop for fabric and craft supplies online, like this one for example. But if you're a beginner-to-intermediate sewist, and the way you've always shopped for fabric is by going to the store and touching it, it can be a hard, even cruel adjustment to suddenly be looking at a photo online and trying to piece together from the inconsistent descriptions what you're actually looking at.

So I'm going to just try to bang together a little primer on What Things Are Called, and how to educate yourself, so that you don't have to do what I did and just buy a ton of inappropriate stuff you wound up not being able to use for what you'd thought. And I will link to some resources that will help with this. This will be garment-sewing-centric but will, I think, be fairly broadly applicable.

The first thing is to look carefully at your desired project. If it is a commercial pattern, it will usually tell you what kind of fabric you need, but it will describe it in not the same words it's often sold under. If it is NOT a commercial pattern and you're kind of winging it, it's even harder. So here is how to start figuring out what you need.

Number one: Knit or Woven?

Quilting fabric is woven. If you are making a quilt, you want a woven. Most craft projects are made with woven fabric-- tote bags, upholstery, you name it.

Many garments are knits. T-shirts, yoga pants, cardigans. It is easy to know, because knits stretch. They can either stretch both ways (along the length and along the width) or just one way (usually along the width); this is confusingly either called 2-way stretch or 4-way stretch. Yes, stores are inconsistent. Look carefully at the description, and they will usually specify-- "along the grain" or "in all directions". Some garments require stretch only around the body-- maxi skirts, knit dresses etc-- while some absolutely need stretch both ways, like bathing suits.

No, you absolutely cannot clone your favorite knit t-shirt in quilting cotton. It will not fit. Most knit garments have "negative ease", meaning they are smaller than your body and stretch to fit. All woven garments have "positive ease", meaning they are larger than your body, unless very firm shaping undergarments are used.

SMALL EXCEPTION: There exist "stretch wovens", which are woven fabrics made with elastic fibers. These will be labeled as such. They are actually harder to sew with than regular wovens because they almost never have their stretch percentage labeled; they are NOT suitable for knit patterns. Avoid them, until you are more advanced and know how to accomodate them, is my advice!

Number two: WEIGHT.

How heavy is the fabric? How thick? How thin? This is measured in two main ways-- ounces per yard (denim is often 8oz, 10 oz, 12 oz) or grams per square meter. But many fabric retailers do not tell you a weight, they use words like "bottomweight" or "dress-weight", and you have to learn to figure out what they mean by that.

My lifehack for learning these has been go to go to ready-to-wear clothing retailers and see if they give the weights of the fabric their garments are made from. (Yes, I learned how to shop for clothes online instead of in-store years ago, because I am fat; some of us have had to do this a long time.)

If you are making a pair of trousers, you need heavier fabric than if you are making a blouse. Do not buy a floaty translucent chiffon to make your work trousers, it will not work no matter how cute the color is. Learn how the different weights of fabric are described, and you will improve your odds of finding what you need.

Number three: DRAPE.

Is it stiff? Is it fluid? Is it soft? is it firm? There are a lot of very artsy words used for this, and you may find yourself puzzling over things with a fluid hand, or a dry, crisp hand, or "a lot of drape", or maybe the listing doesn't describe it at all. This segues neatly into another technical thing, which is the WEAVE of the fabric. There is a dizzying array of words that tell you what kind of fabric it is-- twill, tabby, challis, chiffon, crepe, organza, georgette. And these will give you insight into the drape, and thus into the texture/usability of this fabric, and how suitable it may or may not be for your project.

I know it's a lot to think about but I am now going to give you resources for where to see all this stuff.

Number one is Mood Fabrics, which I can't believe hasn't been in any of the posts I've seen so far. They are a huge store in NYC's Fashion District and yes you can go there, but when I went there it overwhelmed me so much I left empty-handed. But what they have is AN INCREDIBLE WEBSITE. They have everything on there, and what's most important for you, their listings are INCREDIBLY consistent. They have VIDEOS of many of the fabrics, where a sales associate will hold it, wave it, stretch it, and tell you verbally what it is and what it's for, in about thirty seconds. HUNDREDS of these videos.

Whether you want to buy from them or not, go to Mood Fabrics, click around, find their listings, and read them. They will tell you fabric content, weight (usually gsm), often weave, they have little graphics that show you if it's for pants, dresses, shirts. And they have those videos. Look at the listings, watch the videos, and you will leave knowing a lot more about how to look at an online listing of fabric and know what you're getting.

Another really excellent website for this is Stonemountain & Daughter. I've actually not bought anything from them yet (they came highly recommended, but they're not cheap), but their online listings are, again, very thorough and very detailed. They always have a picture of the fabric with a fold in it held in place by a pin, which does more to help you understand the weight and drape of a fabric than any other static image ever could-- that visual, combined with how informative the listings are, has helped me learn to estimate fabric weights on other sites very effectively.

And here is a page that's ostensibly about how to wash silk, but I found it so useful because it gives such a clear image of what each weave/type of silk fabric looks and drapes like. I've never bought anything from these guys either, but this is a good resource.

Learn a little bit about fabric so you know what you're looking for, and you can begin to replace some of that "i just have to go and feel it in person" problem. There will still be trial and error, but you'll have a better starting place at least.

Ancient lock mechanism

I am Lunē Greybridge, I live in occupied Seminole territory, and I have hit…. a wall.

https://www.gofundme.com/share/s/share-family-friends/lgs-land-back-justicehealingclimate-emergency

!PLEASE watch and share this video.!  I am doing the best I can and working very  hard but your help is absolutely needed right now. Transcript under the cut:

Keep reading

And we’re back to the beginning

Israel attacked worshipers at AlAqsa mosque on Friday prayer with sticks, rubber bullets, and gas bombs. Remember this is what started the entire events on the previous 11 days. They attacked worshippers at AlAqsa mosque.

Note, Friday prayer is the group pray of the week is Islam, that’s why you see a lot of people. I can’t help but think of this a provocatively deliberate choice of day.

And look at them! Do they look like a threat ?!!

P.S : this happened about 14 hours ago and they retreated, but unfortunately I was too ill today to hold the phone. Even though Israeli police retreated. You must know and see this.

You can find more #Israelbreaksthetruce on Twitter.

Very cold take but the reason I think a lot of settler vegans view meat as murder (and therefore immoral) is because they cannot get past their colonial mindset of viewing all interactions as either consumption or domination instead of the reality of a vast web of mutually beneficial and self sustaining relationships with the ecosystem and eachother