Guild Sign-ups Available Now

Silver dollar plants are flowering now! By late summer/early fall, these flowers will have turned into large silvery seed pods.

Hey all! We had a great first weekend at the Market, and we've got updates on several projects, so let's jump right in:

Events on the Horizon

Friday, May 15th, 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, May 16th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Monday, May 18th, 6:30-7:30pm - Whitehall School Board meeting at the Viking Athletic Center. A group of local parents and community members who are concerned about a creepy church targeting kids at school are going to be meeting in the parking lot at 6:15 so they can all go in together.
Wednesday, May 20, 6-7pm Walk @Duck Creek Natural Area - The White Lake Area Climate Action Council will have a brief stand-up meeting. Then, we'll walk part of the Fruitland Trails together. Meet at the Duck Creek Rd parking lot.
Wednesday, May 20, 5-7pm - Come to the White Lake Community Library to hear the Chemours Environmental Impact Committee (CEIC) explain the current cleanup plan being pushed by Chemours (formerly DuPont) and EGLE, and the changes they're pushing for.
Thursday, May 21st, 11am-1pm - Open Studio time at the Nuveen Art Center! Get to know other local artists while you work on whatever you'd like.
Friday, May 22nd, 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, May 23rd, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Friday, May 29th, 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, May 30th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
Saturday, May 30, 2-4pm - Electronics Recycling Drop off at Montague Farmers Market. It's as easy as loading up your car with your old electronics and dropping them off. Recyclable Items: household batteries, light bulbs, printer cartridges, and MOST household/portable electronics. NO large appliances, air conditioners or CRT monitors/TVs. Montague Commoners will be hosting a tech-take-apart table where we harvest magnets from hard drives.

This Week at the Market

Two people sitting around a picnic table. One is turning plastic yard signs into boxes, and the other is turning plastic bags into yarn.

The Crafters' Guild got off to a great start, making several yard sign boxes and almost half a spool of plarn. I've been saving those big cardboard spools for a couple of years now, and I'm thrilled that they finally came in handy.

Instead of having a single project each week the way we did last year, we're mixing it up this year with project bins. The bins live on the bottom shelf of the retail displays, and each bin has all of the materials and tools required for one of our upcycling projects, like origami seed packets or soda can plant tags. Each bin also lists the folks who have learned that project well enough to teach it. Anybody who wants to can grab a bin, find one of the listed teachers, and get to work.

Susan and Leighton standing next to each other in the doorway to our shop. Susan is holding up the pair of boot dryers that she just bought.

In the shop, we made our first sale! Susan bought a pair of boot dryers. I think it took us about a month to make our first sale last year, so hopefully it's a sign that we'll have an easier time making rent this year 😄

I keep forgetting to take pictures of the shop setup, but it's a big upgrade from last year. For now let's pretend it's an exciting mystery available only to folks who come see us in person 😂

This Week in Projects

A token painting station made out of yard signs and duct tape sits on the window-desk at the entrance to City Hall

Hour tokens and token painting kits are now available at Montague City Hall during normal business hours! Take home a blank 30 minute token, invest 30 minutes in decorating it, and you can spend it in our shop to buy a dog toy or an assortment of teas.

So far we've got these little token painting stations at City Hall and at the Nuveen Art Center. We'll be adding more locations as we get more tokens and painting kits made. If you've got a chop saw or a belt sander and you want to help us make tokens, or you've got a sewing machine and you want to help us make token kits, let me know.

After nearly two months of trying to find a self-hosted alternative, I finally caved and set up a guild signup form on Google Forms 😒 I'm hoping this can help us get a sense of which guilds have the most community energy behind them, and make it easier to start connecting people up. So if you'd be interested in putting a couple of hours a month into helping build a guild, sign up today.

In more successful self-hosting news, we now have our own link shortening server! I picked up the domain mcom.lol a few months ago after getting tired of trying to fit giant urls into flyer and brochure designs. This week, I used a piece of open source server software called Shlink to set up our own custom link shortener. This is has several advantages:

We get to shorten links without exposing our community to surveillance from bit.ly and the other corporate link shorteners
As our digital infrastructure evolves, we can update the links to point to new pages or applications. So mcom.lol/guilds will always point to the guild signup page, whatever that guild signup page happens to be.
I don't have to try to fit "newsletter.montaguecommoners.org/give-us-useful-stuff" on trifold brochures anymore 😂

A screenshot from the admin page for the link shortening server, showing visits from botnets looking for vulnerable wordpress sites

One interesting sidequest I stumbled on with the Shlink project was the "orphan visits" log in the admin panel. It turns out these are requests the server gets that don't match a valid url. These are basically all bots, and it's a fascinating peek into what botnets are up to these days. The ones trying to visit the base url are probably a mix of search engine indexers, AI art thieves, and who knows what else. But quite a lot of them are recognizably targeting Wordpress installations. The server gets dozens of hits per hour from bots trying to access its non-existant Wordpress admin interface. They tend to come in clusters, with a dozen different requests supposedly from all over the world showing up within a few seconds of each other and then long gaps before the next swarm. It's a tragic waste of resources that's only going to get worse in the data center age, but it does make for an interested pattern recognition game.

This Week In Nature

White apple blossoms with gentle pink highlights along the edges of the petals

Lots of fruit trees are flowering around town right now! This is the perfect time to snap some pictures of any mystery trees in your neighborhood and post them to iNaturalist for an ID. The flowers are often a lot easier to ID than the leaves or twigs alone. It also means that this is absolutely the WRONG time to spray any sort of pesticides near your fruit trees. Pollinators are going to be out in force doing their jobs, and killing them off with mis-timed insecticides could be devastating for the other neighborhood plants that need to be pollinated this year.

Garlic mustard season is also coming into swing. Garlic mustard is a noxious invasive that forms dense clumps and crowds out native understory plants. Luckily, it makes a tasty salad green. We'll be doing weekly garlic mustard pulls in the area around the Artisan Market each week, so feel free to ask us for an ID lesson.

Recommendation Corner

Another from the "found on Mastodon" files, taken is a great little project that simply takes all the information that your browser makes available to its server and reflects it back to you with explanations about how it can be used. In an age of surveillance pricing and algorithmic manipulation, it's a good idea for everyone to have a sense of how much the websites they visit know about them. If reading through it makes you a little paranoid, Privacy Guides is a great place to learn about hardening your devices against surveillance.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, so that means you get to see this week's nails! Decided to go with green this week in honor of the six types of mint coming up in the garden. It's been fun to grab a leaf of spearmint or lemon balm between batches of token-sanding.

Enjoy the good weather while we can! If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.