a whole lot of links
Hello hello, today is mostly a gigantic round up of things to read online! But first, a few programming notes and studio process updates.
BOOKLUCK is happening tomorrow, Sunday Sept 15th, 12-3pm, at Gasworks Park in Seattle. Here’s the RSVP form. I made some sourdough to bring!
Add yourself / a printshop / press / community space / event / library / etc to RISO West Coast — the deadline is SEPTEMBER 30, 2024 and here’s the form! It is free to add yourself, and you may submit multiple things!
Adam and I have been working on Spectrolite again as the weather cools. He’s been coding: adding one-ink-color dithering options, as well as TRAPPING (experimental) where you can automatically expand colors by a few pixels, to extend underneath a key color(s), making it easier to register and align inks. A few changes making a few things faster and more consistent visually. I’ve been working on a bunch of new imposition layouts too, for making books of different orientations, shapes and sizes.
New: digital PDF copies of Getting Started with Making Electronic Music.
I just re-read my guide to making a Shelf of Natural Wonders (a throwback to the winter 2013 issue of Open Review Quarterly) and in the process rediscovered Adam’s short climate fiction I’m the king of this sidehill.
I’ve been using the circular bowl from this set of wooden spoons and bowls I carved four years ago to hold my pencil sharpener and catch the shavings while making sketches for my comic about pika. (PIKA!!) Just feeling so much gratitude for the beauty of things I’ve made / things that friends have made. I like when things made by hand that ease into daily life so much you almost forget their origins, while also feeling so connected and appreciative of their materials.
I’m working on Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher, the follow up to Notes on Artist Publishing. Little essays with bits of advice, opinions, ideas, and questions that focus on the physical and mental and emotional labor of producing artist publications, and being kind to yourself as you do it. Covering time, money, when to professionalize, accommodating sensory sensitivities, and also things about occupational noise exposure and common causes of burnout like continuing to make do without proper equipment when you’ve scaled up enough to need it. And taking shipping seriously. I’m really letting myself nerd out with all the combinations of my electrical engineering / math / engineering management / product management / public health and occupational safety background that I accumulated over the course of college, grad school, and work that I have been trying to apply to printmaking and making artist publications.
Now, onto the links, so many links:
Climate Reads
I really enjoyed reading A Note on Hope, an excerpt from Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s new book, What If We Get It Right? I identify so so much with:
The world is full of delights even as it may also be spiraling toward conflagration and deluge. So when people perceive me as hopeful, I think what they are actually seeing is that I am joyful. […] If not hope, then what? Truth, courage, and solutions. Love. Collaboration and community. And all the sweetness along the way. That’s what can get us there. Possibility. That’s a word I can wholeheartedly race toward. I find motivation for action in glimpses of what could be, and in values instilled by my parents that say it is my responsibility to try, without any guarantees of success. The force that propels me is a simple and deep desire to be useful.
and:
“What we need is mega-pragmatic utopianism — utopianism plus a lot of detail. We need to go all-in on that.”
Speaking of detail and possibility, the paper The momentum of the solar energy transition in the journal Nature Communications was really interesting:
We find that, due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies. Uncertainties arise, however, over grid stability in a renewables-dominated power system, the availability of sufficient finance in underdeveloped economies, the capacity of supply chains and political resistance from regions that lose employment. Policies resolving these barriers may be more effective than price instruments to accelerate the transition to clean energy.
I liked looking at their projections of the percent of energy produced over time in the future — look at all that change in the coral color… that’s electricity produced by solar panels. We’re early in the graph, in 2024, on the verge of huge change.
This huge momentum that solar has now, and what’s coming in the very near future is really driving a lot of the right wing dark money / Project 2025 / fossil fuel companies in this presidential election — Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben is great take on it:
[we’re entering the s-curve exponential growth with solar, and it’s…] why the fossil fuel industry is so freaked out about this year’s election. They can read these charts as easily as anyone, and they know what’s coming. If it keeps happening at this pace, it will quickly start reducing demand for their products—they have vast reserves of, say, natural gas in the Permian Basin that will stay there forever simply because there’s no market. They have to lock in customers right now, or else watch their whole business start to slowly, and then quickly, fade. And with that fade will come, inevitably, reduced political power. Right now they can still frighten politicians—hence the fact that Kamala Harris, with Pennsylvania on the line, has to insist she supports fracking. But four years from now, not so much.
I also recommend:
If Trump Wins in November, Life on Earth Is Likely to Get Far, Far Worse – Mother Jones 🫠
Kamala Harris is making climate action patriotic. It just might work. (It’s a side note in the article, but I hadn’t realized that the slogan “Don’t Mess With Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign in the late 80s. The aim was to get young men to stop throwing their beer cans on the side of the road, and it worked, reducing roadside litter 70% in four years.)
Circular battery self-sufficiency (Gravity batteries!)
How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse — Julian Brave NoiseCat
Culture + Reading
There’s something sapphic in the air this summer, and it all started with Chappell Roan
‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine
The Second Life of Books by Abigail Oswald really made me want to read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s work.
I Tried an "Intention Tray" as Mindful Decor, and It Works | Apartment Therapy
[Make an] “intention tray” by filling it with items that serve as a visual reminder of the goals or desires you’re trying to achieve in your home or a given room. “Something physical in our environment reminds us to honor our practice,” she writes. “Something beautiful in the ceremony of that practice invites us to honor ourselves within the ritual.”
“Somewhere on the seafloor of an oceanic canyon near Vancouver Island in 2022, scientists dropped a bundle of video and audio recording gear and a carousel loaded with 24 bottles. Each bottle contained a hefty sardine bathed in vegetable oil, and the carousel was programmed to release one sardine every two weeks to attract the deep-sea fish skulking in the area. The muddy bottom served as stomping grounds for sleek sablefish, noodly eelpouts and hagfish, and flabby snailfish, all of whom roam in nearly absolute darkness, aside from glimmers of bioluminescence.”
Food
Tamar Adler, author of An Everlasting Meal, one of my favorite pieces of food/cooking writing, has an advice column! (!!!) I started with: The Quandary of Quinny Poo + The Suffering of Slow Down in the Kitchen
Politics
I Attended Trump Political Rallies. Here's What I Saw. (“Being outside a Trump rally venue is like being at a giddy but dystopian carnival — like something you would find in a haunted video game.”)
I'm Rural. I Vote Against My Self-Interest + Why Don't They Pay Attention? + Blue Missouri
Noodly eelpouts roaming in nearly absolute darkness,
— Amelia
P.S. — Don’t forget, please add yourself / a printshop / press / community space / event / library / etc to RISO West Coast — the deadline is SEPTEMBER 30, 2024: https://forms.gle/Fnmq4jbo6Pj1Agt4
