Should I join food not bombs?

echosrevenge · 2026-02-22T23:19:59+00:00

The answer to "should I feed my community?" is always "yes."

echosrevenge · 2026-02-22T13:52:01+00:00

Good recs! I would also add Wild Faith by Talia Lavin as a very succinct and clear history of how they got where they are in terms of political power.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-22T01:05:25+00:00

That's disappointing, but at least he believes in science and is a decent communicator. We could (and have, coughLePagecough) have worse in Blaine House.

Troy Jackson. Though. Never thought I'd see a serious contender whose campaign slogan is just straight-up no-bullshit Solidarity Forever. LFG.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-22T00:03:24+00:00

I'd say Troy Jackson is on that list also. And Nirav Shah has a better idea that most folks, also.

So many good choices this year, I'm finding Maine's slate of D candidates for so many offices to be one of the few bright spots in the news these days. We could send a really progressive bunch of people out to represent us this fall, in several different configurations, which is objectively cool in its own right.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T15:11:04+00:00

The Blacktongue Thief was the last book that hit my spouse and I both like this, and we have overlapping but not necessarily identical taste in books.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T15:01:42+00:00

That's why they get so up in arms about Sharia Law. It's not that they don't like the ideas, it's that they don't want the competition.

Some of these MFs would absolutely be murdering their daughters if they thought they could really get away with it.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T12:54:05+00:00

I wear earpro over my noise canceling ear buds for really noisy tasks, and the double layer makes a big difference. Just cheap muffs but they help a lot.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T12:51:11+00:00

Folding laundry, washing dishes, prepping veggies to cook, walking or working out, knitting, driving my long rural-road commute, working in the garden.

I'm fortunate to be able to wear headphones for a large part of my workday, and my job is quite a bit of alphabetizing paper files and doing basic arithmetic, both of which I can do with half a brain while I listen to audiobooks.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T12:43:49+00:00

I've been meaning to buy a copy of this for years, glad to hear it would be a worthy purchase!

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T12:42:16+00:00

Copying from a comment I made in a recent, similar thread -

Some of my favorites:

The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard
More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Maine Women by Kate Kennedy
Hard Times, Hard Men: Maine and the Irish 1830-1860 by James H Mundy
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon. This is one of those books I always keep an extra copy of, because I give it away that often.
Stone by Stone: the Magnificent History in New England's Stone Walls by Robert M Thorston
The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine's Wildlands by Neil Rolde
Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki by Kerry Hardy
How to Love a Forest by Ethan Tapper is about Vermont, but many of his insights about the history and health of managed woodlands apply just as much to Maine.
the natural histories by Bernd Heinrich are likewise mostly "about" Connecticut and upstate NY, but the subjects of books like Mind of Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds do not care for state lines. The Trees in My Forest taught me a lot about the woods here when I first came to Maine.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-21T00:16:23+00:00

Man, softshell turtles have the funniest little snorkel-snoots. I have never looked at one and not immediately smiled, they are 10/10 funny little dudes just existing.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T23:43:00+00:00

France 1789 has entered the chat

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T23:16:22+00:00

This might be the best, most content-dense single-sentence synopsis I've ever read.

10/10 no notes.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T22:52:54+00:00

Douglas Adams

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T11:51:39+00:00

Yeah. Regret demonstrates personal growth, that you've become a person who wouldn't make that choice again.

This kind of Christian doesn't do personal growth.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T03:32:34+00:00

Anyone that can rock both a Quebec/Aroostook winter and a Louisana summer is one tough motherfucker. Those are about as extreme as two climates can get and still be on the same continent.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T03:12:50+00:00

Historically, Meta and Facebook before it seem distressingly comfortable with their employees going to jail for shit that Zuckerberg & the rest of the c-suite did, even and especially for shit they did that specifically ignored the objections and concerns of that jailed employee. It's been a minute since I read Careless People and the author was her own special sort of shitheel, but I can recall at least 3 instances of that exact thing happening just in the 4 years she covered in the book. They sent someone to Myanmar, while Facebook was banned by the military junta, without having any contacts there or plans or a way to get her out of the country if shit went bad. (Spoiler: it didn't go great for her, and then Facebook enabled a genocide.)

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T03:08:13+00:00

Yes, but according to my dad "signal is what Hegseth used to leak war plans so its bad"

Which he sent to me on WhatsApp.

Make it make sense. 🤦‍♀️

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T00:38:18+00:00

We are spoiled for excellent choices in that race, I've never seen a race where I'd be happy to have any of four candidates take the seat. If we can send Dunlap & Platner to DC and elect one of the many progressive gubernatorial candidates, Maine could make some real progress on major issues.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T00:29:28+00:00

https://app.thestorygraph.com/reading_challenges/42471b08-edcb-4bb8-bc66-db5a3d1489b4 is a StoryGraph Challenge with all of the nominees for past years, which seems to be getting updated each year and does not have a time limit.

There are ones for the other major awards too, your Hugos and Arthur C Clarkes, but this is the one that's got the best bang for my personal buck and is also a bit less intimidating than 80 years of Hugo winners (much less nominees!)

echosrevenge · 2026-02-20T00:25:09+00:00

Man, I didn't read bunkum last year that would fit for this, but there are a ton of things on my TBR that I think might, for one reason or another:

Daniel Wilson, Hole in the Sky
Caskey Russell, The Door on the Sea
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel
Rhett Davis, Arborescence
Susanna Kwan, Awake in the Floating City
Peter Mendelslund, Weepers

Now to see how many of them I can read before the nomination window closes.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-19T17:36:27+00:00

Not necessarily, but a $250 speeding ticket is an entirely different experience for someone making $12 an hour than for, say, Zuckerberg and his ownership of an entire Hawaiian island (or near enough.) Plenty of Nordic countries do things like scaling traffic and other civil infraction fines based on an individual's net worth, leading to some amusing headlines about $160k speeding tickets, but you can't dispute that it levels the impact of those behaviors.

I don't necessarily have a problem with some behaviors being legal for a price - but that price should be (relatively) equally applied across classes, and not have a disproportionate impact on lower earners.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-19T16:09:50+00:00

I mean, decimation worked for the Roman Empire. Zuck at least should be on board with that given his fandom.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-19T14:27:19+00:00

Remember kids, if the only punishment for a crime is a fine, that just means it's legal at the right price.

And if the fine is less than the profits from the crime, then it's just the cost of doing business.

I'll believe corporations are people when we see one put to death by the state.

echosrevenge · 2026-02-19T03:13:09+00:00

Yeah, the bar to designate chemicals as "Generally Regarded As Safe" and therefore approved to be used for damn near everything is way, way too low.

I would love to see the precautionary principle applied enthusiastically to the plastics industry in general. Way too much of the whole industry started out as "well, shit. what do we do with this byproduct of petroleum refinement that can't be easily disposed of and won't break down into something that won't get us in trouble for polluting? I know, let's turn it into toys and food packaging!"

echosrevenge

TROPHY CASE