dragonlady7 | Jul. 10th, 2018

Jul. 10th, 2018

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unicornduke:

bomberqueen17 replied to your post: omg I love fresh dug potatoes they are the shit…

we were going to dig just a few new potatoes for 4th of july but it was Too Damn Hot

bomberqueen17 replied to your post “omg I love fresh dug potatoes they are the shit and they taste so good”

lol i was going to tell you that we do a big potato harvest session and volunteers come but i feel like maybe the last thing you would be excited about is the chance to harvest potatoes, lol

I would so love to do that!!! Honestly, potatoes are great and I love them

Mine aren’t really ready yet, I dug two plants of each variety to judge if they were ready but most were a little small so I’ve got at least a month until I harvest the first planting, two weeks to size up and two weeks to cure

I just need to figure out how I’m going to store them all lol

Well, if you want to harvest potatoes in company, I’ll keep you posted. Sometimes a bunch of CSA members come. Last year a random lady came with her two very small children, she’d seen it on the Facebook page and didn’t know us from Adam but wanted to go out into the countryside because she’d recently moved to the area and missed her old hometown. She was from somewhere in Europe, though, so it was especially unusual!
I always run up against my stupid too-white-to-live skin issues eventually, but I can usually manage at least a tote before I have to run.

Yeah, storage of storage crops is always tricky. You need a dark corner of a walk-in cooler. We’ve used the basement before but it’s not ideal.

I know ours are still tiny, it’s usually quite a bit later that we harvest them. And sometimes we do a couple small digs for new potatoes first.

Two years ago, in the drought, all of the potatoes were so pathetically tiny. The plants died back, so it was harvest them or let them rot, but we got so many that were like tiny marbles. Sigh. Last year was much better, though.

Farmkid was so enamored of the teeny potatoes. She’d say it, “Teeny potatoes,” in the highest-pitched voice imaginable, which coming from her already-shrill self, was largely audible only to bats. I don’t know if the charm is still in effect, but I think of that every time I eat little potatoes. “teeny potatoes!”
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I want to be writing but I’m so far from any of my WIPs and I have to get immersed in one again and kind of wriggle around until I line back up with the intentions of any of it and I just– it’s effort, you know?

That’s the downside of being so busy in the summers. It’s meaningful work, at the farm, but Christ, it’s so goddamn long since I just– sat and wrote for thousands of words, you know? It’s so goddamn long. And I don’t feel right unless I’ve done that, you know?

Anyway. Been attempting to reread some stuff. Keep not managing to get sucked back in. V. annoying.

Life went on, children grew up. Ula was kind of looking forward to being able to have more abstract conversations with Osana, and to get to know her as a person instead of a small bundle of inarticulate needs.

Osana was narrating the rest of the trip, and they were going much slower now, but they weren’t really in a hurry. They’d just been sent by Ula’s great-aunt to check up on Bixenta, their matriarch, who had been meant to be checking in on the radio collar trackers for the mammoth herd. The herd had been out of range for much of the winter, as expected, and their migration should by now be far enough along for them to have begun to come back into range.

“You remember your Auntie Edurni, don’t you?” Ula said, when there was a pause.

Osana frowned up at her, and shook her head a little.

“Edurni,” Ula said. “She’s big, she’s a mammoth, with her tusks still small enough to be straight, and she picked you up in her trunk, do you remember?”

“Oh,” Osana said, thinking.

“And her mother, Zakiyah,” Ula said. “With the big curving tusks. Do you remember her?”

“Maybe,” Osana said. Then she launched into a fanciful story Ula only understood about every other word of, something about giant birds with tusks, flying. Well, maybe Osana’s memory wasn’t very good yet, but she had a great imagination, that was for sure.

Probably. Ula wasn’t really sure what exactly she was talking about. Her own mother was better at puzzling out Osana’s speech, having a great deal more practice with the speaking habits of the very young.

Gotzon was standing outside the roughly-carved portico of the ancestor shrine and dovecote complex, arms crossed, back leaned against the wall so he could look out over the valley. He smiled as Ula and Osana approached, but Ula had seen that his expression had been grim.

Osana greeted him brightly, and he grinned back at her, his face collapsing into wrinkles. He wasn’t ancient, but he was well over fifty, and sun-beaten. He’d been a herder in his youth, and a message-carrier, and had settled in as the shrine attendant when Ula herself was a teenager. He’d been the one to teach her message shorthand and how to operate the radio.

“How’s it going?” Ula asked. “I just thought I’d bring Osana up to show her the tracker readouts and the radio.”

Gotzon sighed, face going solemn. “There’s nothing to see on the tracker readouts,” he said.

Ula blinked, astonished. “But that’s– they’re not in range?” That was dire to contemplate, that something had so delayed the herd’s migration that they weren’t back within range of the receivers yet.

“Or the interference that’s got our radio down is bad enough to affect the transmitters too,” Gotzon said.

Ula considered that. Osana had freed herself from Ula’s grip and had gone over to Gotzon, who picked her up to listen to what she was telling him. “I didn’t know the transmitters could be affected,” Ula said.

“Oh,” Gotzon said, “they can, absolutely. It’s less noticeable because they’re not so constant as the radios. And they’re a little more robust, but.” He shook his head. “And if the transmitters are down, the translators might be as well.”

“The translators,” Ula said. “I didn’t think they– used any of the same technology.” The transmitters were embedded in the translators, and all of them fastened together onto collars that the mammoths wore.

“They’re all interconnected,” Gotzon said.
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The entire meaning behind the reclamation of the word “queer” rests on its usage as a slur. In fact, the concept of reclaiming it for self-identification doesn’t make sense outside of this context. Also, I am continually confused by people’s assertion that people who dislike queer as an umbrella term have created an environment where individual people feel uncomfortable about reclaiming it for themselves. What specific actions are people doing that make people feel uncomfortable?

Because I do not see people explicitly arguing that nobody should call themselves queer. I see people discussing the negative connotations in a way that only somewhat overlaps with the objections that TERFs make to the word. I see so many people who believe that queer isn’t a slur saying that we all want to censure them for identifying that way, but again, the argument is “this is a slur, therefore a bad umbrella term” not “this is a slur, therefore fuck you if you call yourself that”

And it does frustrate me when people’s response to other people talking about their personal experience of homophobia is “that’s ahistorical and also some terfs have reasons to dislike this word too, which means you support terf rhetoric”, despite having a totally different reason for their critique of it as an umbrella term. Like… That’s blatantly dismissive and uncharitable and 90% of the time responding to an argument they did not actually make (“nobody should call themselves queer”).

There’s a lot of stuff in the tag in my previous post, but I’ll pull it out for you. Re: historical evidence, there is documentation from at least as early as 1910 of it being used as a self-identifier. That’s somewhat close to the first recorded use of the word (as a slur) in 1896. The pejorative and the subversion of the term as such have existed almost parallel to each other until the pejorative meaning prevailed. And it was reclaimed in the late 80s and early 90s, around the AIDS crisis. Yes, queer was a slur. But in this day and age, I don’t think it is anymore. The use of the word “queer” was largely unquestioned as an umbrella term (cf Queer as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) until about… 2014? 15? That’s when I remember seeing it pop up as a thing. So yes, for about 25 years it was largely considered not pejorative.

I agree that the concept of reclaiming it for self-identification is absolutely related to it as a slur. But honestly, what word to describe same-sex attraction has not been used as a slur at one point or another?

Homo(sexual)

Gay

Lesbian

Dyke

Growing up in the 90s, I personally heard “gay” and “lesbian” used as a pejorative much more than “queer”. I was looking for one of the ads from the 90s about not using “gay” as an insult and to my surprise I found a whole bunch of articles from 2017-18 talking about why you shouldn’t do that. Here is a page from an LGBT interest group for an Alabama association of counselors about the use of “gay” as a pejorative from 2012. Ctrl F for “queer”. It shows up once, in a link out to further resources. I don’t want to make generalizations, but if there are places in the country that “queer” is still used as a slur, I think it would be there. (Obviously this is not meant to represent all attitudes in Alabama, but come on.)

Why are we not campaigning against using “gay” or “the gay community”? What about “gay” is more acceptable than “queer”? Nobody has been able to answer that for me.

Re: making people uncomfortable to use the word queer to self-ID. You honestly don’t think that the mere assertion of somebody saying “queer is a slur” doesn’t make people more hesitant to use it? Slurs are bad! Why would you want to associate yourself with one? And the repetition of this lie stigmatizes the use of the word as a self-identifier.

I think queer is a wonderfully useful term because it’s so mushy. It’s a term you can use when you don’t know what you are, but it’s definitely not straight, and also one you can use when things are too complicated to sum up in an elevator speech.

I absolutely acknowledge that some people have bad associations with the word, and if I know that I will endeavor not to use it as an umbrella term around them. (Refer back to “gay is bad but we’re not saying that’s a slur”) I am, however, willing to bet very few of the people advocating this line of rhetoric have actually been called “queer” as a homophobic insult. But I could be wrong! My experiences growing up in a fairly liberal part of the country are not the same as somebody who grew up elsewhere.

I take issue with your assertion that saying this doesn’t mean you don’t support TERF rhetoric. This lie originated with the TERFs. Every time it’s repeated it supports their point of view. It might not be intentional, and I feel like if a lot of people found out where this assertion came from they would be horrified, but you can shore up lies until they seem true, simply through repetition.

Anyways. Those are my thoughts, take them or leave them.
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over on pillowfort, a short meditation on mountains/geography.

We’re totally never going to move our office, we’re just going to be perpetually locked into a cycle of decluttering and reorganizing and it’s just never going to happen until the most inconvenient time possible, somehow. anyway– ugh.

At least I got off my ass and dug out all my old digital camera stuff I don’t use anymore and brought it in to trade in. I could totally use some store credit more than I could use clutter in my house.
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pillowfort-io:

Hey everyone, Wave 4B sign-ups are closing tomorrow at 11am EST! Sign up now if you want to get in on the site before we launch our Kickstarter!
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