Fall Recycling Wrap-up

Hi all, and a special welcome to everyone who signed up for the newsletter down at the Artisan Market over the last couple of months. I was tidying up some papers on my desk and realized that I hadn't actually gotten you all added to the email list yet. You can catch up on anything you might have missed by reading through our archives.

Events on the Horizon

• Emergency DJ Request: Nate and I aren't going to be at the Weathervane "Dance for Democracy" protest tomorrow because I've got an appointment in Grand Rapids. So if you've got a portable speaker and a playlist you've been wanting to share, now is your time to shine! It's at the Weathervane every Friday from 12-1pm.
• Every Friday, 5-8pm at the Artisan Market: Firewood Fridays! Come enjoy a potluck picnic, good music, and the opportunity to whack a piece of wood with a hammer until you feel better about the world 😂
• November 3rd is Election Day! We are less than a week away from the political ads and texts finally stopping, but that also means we've got less than a week to get our votes in! If you're voting absentee, drop your ballots off in person, because ballots sent through the mail may not arrive in time. You can check out the voter's guide I put together a few weeks ago if you want to know who I'm voting for and why. And if you're a City of Montague resident, please consider writing me in for Montague City Council.
• November 10, 5-7pm at the White Lake Community Library: Common Ground is hosting another of their community forums, this time on "Belonging, Group
  Dynamics, & Conflict". We'll hear from Lisa Cobb, a licensed therapist, on staying grounded during difficult conversations (perfect for the Thanksgiving season.)

Nearly done processing the fall computer harvest

I got the last of the optical drives and cable modems disassembled this week, and started the final sorting and packing stages for this round of computer recycling. We took in about 15 desktops and 20 laptops, and it looks like we'll probably clear about $400 to put towards Montague Commoners programs next year. On a dollars-per-hour basis, it makes me glad that Nate's got a good day job, but it's enough to pay for the materials to build a decent number of storage racks once we get our first Mini-Barn at the new Industrial Park site.

(Fun side-story: that blue foam wrapped around the stacks of boards was saved from a dumpster by one of our members! It was a massive roll of brand new foam, but the business that ordered it turned out not to need it, so they were throwing it away. It sat around in my living room for a couple of months while I tried to figure out what to do with it, but it turned out to be just the thing for shipping circuit boards to the recycler in Ohio. It's a perfect example of what I'm trying to create space for at the new Industrial Park site, and I hope that we can eventually have a shipping materials library there so that stuff like this doesn't go to waste.)

We also took about a hundred pounds of materials down to Padnos in Muskegon. These are things like low-grade circuit boards and aluminum heatsinks that aren't cost-effective to ship to Ohio but still have scrap value. It also includes things like batteries and LCD screens that we don't get paid for, but that Padnos can pass along to specialty recyclers who can handle the specific challenges they pose. We made a whole $39 off this stage in the process, but that should be enough to cover shipping for the circuit boards.

Meanwhile, Nate's gotten several of the laptops back into working order. It was mostly a matter of replacing batteries and finding power adapters. He's been installing various flavors of Linux on them, with the goal of eventually making them available for community distribution. It's going to be a while before they're really ready to demo, but in the meantime, feel free to hit us up if you need a new laptop and you're up for trying something a little different. It comes with as much training and tech support as you need from me and Nate, because we want to figure out how to help people get away from big tech, and it's hard for us as long-time computer nerds to anticipate what non-nerds are going to find easiest to use.

We're still happy to take any electronics that you want to recycle, and we'll still have tech take-apart available as a workshop activity through the end of the season. But the next big round of tech recycling won't be until WLACAC's big electronics recycling event in the spring.

Recommendation Corner

I frequently describe the work we do at Montague Commoners as "solarpunk shenanigans". And one of these weeks, I'm going to finally write the big "what is solarpunk" explainer that's been floating around in my head for years. In the meantime, it's hard to understand solarpunk without first getting a handle on cyberpunk, the genre/movement it grew out of. And if you want to get a sense of cyberpunk, I highly recommend Charles Stross's Glasshouse. It explores a world in which human minds can be uploaded to computers, teleported across interstellar space, and downloaded into bodies of just about any design. How would that change human culture? What problems might it solve? What problems might it cause? What might those people of the future wonder about us? It's a standalone novel, so it gives you a taste of the genre without having to commit to a big series. And if you can get around to reading it before I get around to writing my cyberpunk/solarpunk explainer, you'll have a much better sense of what I'm talking about 😄

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! (For the new folks: I generally do my nails for the week while I'm writing the newsletter, because it gives me little breaks from writing mode when I add the next coat of polish, and typing gives me something to do while I wait for each coat of polish to dry. I post pics here at the bottom of the newsletter as a reward for the folks who read all the way to the end.)

I wanted something bright and resilient this week, and these two work well for that. Doing the half-and-half nails takes a little extra time, because I have to let each half of the nail dry separately, but I do enjoy the effect when I have the opportunity.

Pre-meme-ium Content

Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working, free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.