Market Magnet Madness!
Hey all! I'm typing the newsletter up from inside the Commoner's Workshop cabin this week! It's part of an experiment in holding regular "office hours" during the week that I'll get into later. For now, let's get to the news:
Events on the Horizon
[Note: We're still looking for someone to help collect event info for the calendar! I am deeply terrible at keeping track of these things. Reply to this email if you'd be interested in helping out.]
The Laptoppening
When WLACAC held their electronics recycling event back in May, we stuck to collecting the desktop computer towers, because we wanted to leave some of the good stuff for Goodwill. But nearly a month later, they still hadn't collected the laptops, so Jeff asked us if we wanted some for the recycling program. I picked out 25 or so that seemed most likely to contain useable RAM and hard drives, and brought them over to the Workshop.
Laptops are a bit more work than Desktops, because they have keyboards and screens to deal with, and most manufacturers use a lot of tape and glue to hold them together. But laptop motherboards are generally more valuable by weight than their desktop counterparts, and they often use the same RAM format as the NUC-style minicomputers that we like to use for servers. So while there's a lot more brute force and swearing involved in the average laptop teardown, they tend to be worth it in the end.
(If anyone out there is planning to buy a new laptop, I strongly recommend making it a Framework. They specialize in computers that are easy to upgrade and repair, so they never end up a recycling bin in the first place. We're not sponsored by them or anything, but if I can convince you all to gradually switch over to Framework, I can save myself a lot of swearing at HPs and Dells in the future 🤣. I'm typing this on a Framework laptop right now, and it's absolutely the best laptop I've ever owned.)
Workshop Progress
We had a great time on Saturday at the Market, with four different projects happening at once around the big table. We got our first round of Tshirt yarn done, and we're quite happy with the results. We also got some zines stitched up and ready for distribution, made some plant tags, and took apart some computers.
This week, I've been upping our materials storage and organization game. I'm trying to get as much as possible of the electronics recycling project out of my living room and into the Workshop, and that means having plenty of bins to sort things into.
I also brought down a first aid kit and some sewing supplies, so we're now prepared to deal with minor injuries to both people and clothing. Long term, I'd love to make a couple of batches of portable first aid and sewing kits that we could make available in the shop, but I managed to stop myself from chasing down that particular rabbit trail until we get the laptops done.
Our crafter's display board is now fully operational, with plenty of different pegboard hooks for hanging stuff up. Part of our deal with the City is that crafters who want to display their work for sale while they're hanging out here are welcome to do so. So if you've got some work at home that you'd like to put up for sale, this is a great way to do it. There's no fee for participating, but we do ask that you stick around and offer crafting demos while your work is on display.
The Great Market Magnet Hunt
Our Waste Not, Want Not program has been bringing in quite a bit of magnet sheet scraps from a friend who works at a custom printing shop. The scraps come in a variety of sizes and shapes, but luckily so do our art and meme stickers! We've been using stickers to turn the scraps into fun magnets that can be used to reversibly decorate your fridge, car, filing cabinet, or other flat surface made of steel. We're pricing them at a flat 10 minutes ($5) each for now.
To celebrate the launch of our magnets, I've hidden a dozen or so Montague Commoners magnets around the Farmers and Artisan Market areas. If you find one of these magnets, you can bring it to the shop cabin and trade it for the art magnet of your choice. Or, if you'd rather keep the Montague Commoners magnet, you can! We'll be adding more designs and hiding more magnets all through the summer, so keep your eyes peeled.
Other Shop News
I've been trying to remember to bring some of the emergency food buckets down to the Market since we opened, and I finally did! For those who are new to the newsletter, the emergency food buckets were a project we did back in January. We got a bunch of bulk foods like rice and beans from Whispering Pines, and we packed it into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers to give it a 25+ year shelf life. The idea is that the more of these are stashed away in local homes and community gathering places, the easier it will be to keep the community fed if there's ever a major disruption to the food supply. Because the oxygen absorbers provide such a long shelf life, there's a much lower risk of food waste than with those just-add-water convenience foods that need to be swapped out every 2-5 years. And if we make it to 2050 without having to crack open the buckets, we can throw a weeklong burrito festival to celebrate our good fortune 😂
Buckets are 4 Hours ($120) each, and contain enough basic staples like grains and beans to meet the basic calorie needs of an average adult for about two weeks. (By the end of the two weeks you'd be very sick of beans. They should be heavily supplemented with seasonings and fresh produce, and in a genuine widespread emergency, you're probably better off sharing your bucket with the best cook in your neighborhood than trying to learn high-stakes bean cooking from scratch. But as someone who knows first hand just how hard it is to find bulk calories in the wild, it's a lot easier to figure out how to make rice dish #35 taste interesting than it is to grow or harvest 2000+ calories of food every day.)
This Week in Solidarity
I haven't done a This Week in Solidarity segment in a while, but I'm bringing it back this week because there were a couple of under-reported news stories that are important for people to know about. First, the Prairieland defendants received 30-100 year sentences for basic protest organizing activities. Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines.
Secondly, there was another round of mass arrests of protest organizers, this time in Minnesota. The link at the top of this section goes to their legal defense fund. They're facing similarly trumped-up domestic terrorism charges for organizing bog-standard direct action protests.
The administration is trying to sell a narrative about "Antifa Terrorism Networks", and they're going after everyday protest organizers to make it happen. It's a predictable part of the authoritarian cycle, because it provides an excuse to go after labor organizers, mutual aid groups, and other people working to build solidarity and resilience within communities.
So what do we do about it?
- Follow the cases, and support imprisoned organizers however we can. The more eyes are on the case, the harder it is for political prisoners to "disappear."
- Tell your less politically engaged friends about these cases. Pass along updates when they happen. Mainstream media tends to underplay these sorts of cases, or even openly promote the regime's version of the story. Most of the major corporate social media sites are limiting reach for posts about the cases. It takes direct person-to-person word of mouth to counteract that.
- Support the Michigan chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The NLG works to connect criminalized protesters with lawyers who are experienced in that kind of defense work.
- If I ever get swept up in one of these mass arrests, get noisy and make them give me back 😅 I'm pretty small potatoes, and I think we're still a few years away from them coming after people like me, but I'm on the record as someone who's organized a lot of protests, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't freak me out sometimes. "Small town rallies to demand release of local maple syrup maker" is the sort of story that can break through a media blackout, and the resulting bad PR can be enough to get a flimsy case dropped.
Recommendation Corner
To wrap up our pride month movie marathon, I'm going to recommend The Celluloid Closet, a classic documentary about the way Hollywood has portrayed queer characters over the years. It came out in 1995, and when I was in high school it was the only gay-related DVD in the local public library. It introduced me to concepts like queer-coding of characters, and it opened the door to media theory in general. It pairs well with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which came out a decade later and focuses on the MPAA rating system, as well as asking larger questions about how we decide what is and isn't "appropriate" in a movie.
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 stayed up late to do them this week, because after multiple weeks of computer recycling, my nails were completely wrecked. No real story on the colors this week, I just wanted a contrast from the yellow and green that I've had on for weeks.
I hope all of you between Montague and New Era survive the Electric Forest bass this weekend, and if I don't see you around town I'll see you back here next week.
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.
