Fun at Pride, plus recycling updates
Hey all, the newsletter is going out a little early this week because I'm heading to Lansing for the Michigan Climate Summit. So let's dive right in:
Events this week:
- Thursday, June 11th, 5:30-7pm - Join Chemours Environmental Impact Committee (CEIC) as they present their plans to Chemours (formerly DuPont) and EGLE on on June 11, 5:30 to 7pm at NBC Middle School in Montague.The more community members are there, the harder we can push for a real cleanup.
- Friday, June 12th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
- Saturday, June 13th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Commoners at Pride!
Muskegon Pride was a huge success! It was held at Hackley Park this year, and I think the park made a great venue. We were on the north side near all the food trucks, close enough to the stage to hear the music, but far enough away that we could (usually) hear each other talk. We had lots of visitors, got lots of email signups, and made nearly 400 seed packets!
We're planning to do it again next year, and we'll probably get a bigger booth so that there's more room for project space. And apparently we should have brought a LOT more zines. We ran out of several of them halfway through the day.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi, and a big welcome to everyone who's newly signed up for the newsletter! It's weird here, but in a good way 🤪
Computer Recycling Update
I've gotten through all of the cases now, so I'm starting to do a second-level sort on all the components we pulled out. Here we have the copper-and-aluminum heatsinks. Heatsinks are designed to draw heat away from computer chips and release it into the air so that fans can get it out of your computer altogether. Most of the heatsinks we encountered were made of pure aluminum, so they went in the same bin as the hard drive enclosures and other aluminum parts. These are the older or higher end heatsinks, which use copper for some of their parts to increase heat transfer. They get recycled in their own special category so that both the copper and the aluminum can be reclaimed.
From left to right, these are SATA hard drive boards (the current standard), IDE hard drive boards, and boards from SATA DVD/CD drives. Boardsort has specialized recycling processes for each of these, so by sorting them out before we send them in, we're able to get the highest possible price for each board, as well as making sure that it'll be recycled as efficiently as possible. I'll be honest, this is the part of the project that has been absolute catnip for me. I have a LOT of weird skills, and they are usually very hard to monetize. Finding out that I can double the value of a piece of scrap just by recognizing it has been a very pleasant change of pace 😂
For those who don't know, I'm extremely face-blind. I can usually work out who someone is based on things like context, haircut, voice, clothing style, etc., but it's like learning to tell golden retrievers apart. Nate once came up to me in a context where I wasn't expecting him, and I introduced myself. We'd been living together for two years.
Most people's brains process faces using a part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is particularly well-suited to complex recognition tasks. They look at the face of a person they know, the visual data gets routed to the fusiform gyrus, and their conscious mind gets the message "that's Joe." My brain runs faces through its general object recognition system, which basically comes back with "that's a person." Then it's up to my conscious mind to race through "(middle aged white guy) + (hardware store) + (deep voice) + (Steelers tshirt) + (recognizes me) = 95% chance that that's Joe." So if you've ever run into me around town and it's taken 30 seconds or so before I've seemed fully engaged in the conversation, it's because I'm playing a quick game of Guess Which Human in my head. 🤣
It has its obvious downsides, but it has a big upside too: it frees up my fusiform gyrus to identify all kinds of other stuff. I can't tell the difference between Alan Rickman and Adam Driver, but I can tell the difference between Silver Dollar Plant and Dame's Rocket. And after 30 years of playing around with computer hardware, I can recognize pretty much every common connector used in PCs from the 90s onward.
We talked a little last week about interoperability, and how it allows a diverse ecosystem of PC components from different manufacturers to work together. These IDE hard drive boards are a good example. They all served the same purpose. They took in requests for data, they gave instructions to the motors and read-heads within the hard drive, and they sent the requested data back to the motherboard. All of these drives would have fit in the same 3.5" drive bay, connected to the same data and power cables, and responded to the same diagnostics. But each one is completely different! Manufacturers had a lot of freedom to experiment within the interoperability standards, and that meant that boards could get smaller and more efficient over time without requiring power supply or motherboard manufacturers to get on board.
One of my favorite examples of interoperability in rural life is the mason jar. If you've got a lid designed for a regular mouth mason jar, you can put it on any regular mouth mason jar, no matter the size or the manufacturer. We use mason jars for drinking glasses, food storage, flower vases, and more. Thanks to interoperability, any mason jar can be a soap dispenser, or a salt shaker, or a teapot. It just needs the right lid. When you don't need a teapot anymore? It goes right back to being a jar.
Zines Ahoy!
We've been running low on a number of zines for a while now, and Pride cleaned us out of most of them. So I spent some time this week with my Printers' Guild hat on, and started getting a big batch underway. One of my most-used organizing tools is my Epson EcoTank printer (not sponsored), which has internal ink reservoirs that you fill from big bottles instead of having to buy a million ink cartridges. Between zines, flyers, brochures, etc., I print more than ten thousand pages a year on that thing, all for barely more than the cost of the paper. When I got my first one in 2019, I expected them to rapidly overtake the printing market, but they've stayed weirdly niche 🤷
Anyway, my little printer's been busy printing out a few dozen copies each of our most popular mutual aid zines, and the next step is going to be stitching them together. I like to use stitching rather than staples because it helps preserve traditional bookbinding techniques, and because using cotton thread makes the whole zine biodegradable. Plus, treating refined metal as disposable makes my inner energy nerd cry.
So if you're interested in learning how to do a basic 5-hole zine stitch, or more about the Printers' Guild in general, stop by our new Commoners' Workshop at the Artisan Market this week.
What, What?
Yep, I really buried the lede there. It's on purpose, because we aren't going to be ready for a grand opening until next week. But those of you who read the newsletter closely get to find out about it before everyone else 🤣. The City is letting us use Cabin #13, the one next to ours that's been empty so far, as a community crafting space! This is going to let us dramatically expand the range of crafting projects we can do down at the Market, and I'm really excited to see where we can take it. We'll be open at a very basic table-and-some-chairs level this week, and we'll be setting up supplies storage and things like that over the next couple of weeks.
Recommendation Corner
Continuing the Pride month movie marathon, this week's recommendation is But I'm a Cheerleader, a classic satire of the "ex-gay" conversion therapy world. It came out in 1999, when Focus on the Family and Exodus Ministries were at the height of their power. Mainstream media was getting slightly more open to the idea of gay and lesbian characters, but they were mostly written and performed by straight people, and finding genuine queer perspectives still took a lot of work. As a queer kid at the time, I was starving for any scrap of representation I could find, and a lot of what I ended up finding was "tragedy porn" for straight people, where the gay characters experienced homophobia so the straight audience could feel good about themselves for recognizing that homophobia was bad. It was better than the Hayes Code era, where movies with gay characters were required to actively send the message that homophobia was good, but it's still not a great set of building blocks when you're a queer kid trying to figure out what that means for your life.
But I'm a Cheerleader was the first movie I ever saw that seemed like it was actually made for gay people. It poked fun at everything straight people get wrong about queerness, and highlighted the joy that has always been a vital part of queer community and queer survival. It showed me that there was more to gay life than violence and discrimination.
Nate and I re-watched it recently, and it was interesting to see how fresh it still felt. The satirically retro aesthetic gives it a sort of timeless quality, and unfortunately the cultural forces its skewering are still very much alive. I have friends half my age who were sent to conversion therapy, and the current administration is trying to bring it back in a big way. We're seeing a big push towards goverment-enforced gender norms that feel straight out of the True Directions playbook. But at least we've still got Megan and Graham to remind us that we can always sneak out to go dancing.
This Week's Nails
You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I picked the colors this week in honor of the MiCAN summit: green for environmentalism, yellow for solar, and blue for water protectors. (This particular yellow goes the extra mile to represent solar, because it glows in the dark!)
Have a good week out there, don't melt in the rain/heat, and if I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.
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