I went to a party a couple days ago. It’s meant for queer people to meet new people. Had a surprisingly good night and met a few people.

I really wish I knew how hitting on people works because I’m so painfully oblivious to it all. People seem to have a tendency to start kissing and I have no idea what I’m doing. I was just being nice?? Anyway, that night a guy I was talking to started kissing my neck and I had to politely tell him I was just there to meet new people. Fortunately he took it super well. I have plans to invite him to one of the techno parties I go to regularly which should be fun.

Also, as I was leaving, I happened to be talking to a group of people and someone just happened to mention a band that’s playing in Toronto next week. Turns out her and I are seeing the same band play so I think we are gonna go together? We’ve been slowly texting each other so we’ll see but should be fun either way. I’m still pretty excited.

I look forward to hiking the next couple weeks, the leaves are all changing colours, lots of reds, yellow and orange. I absolutely love fall colours.

The second worst part of a new tattoo is the itch. So itchy…

I got a new tattoo yesterday of a couple of mourning doves. The artist working on me was working around some ticklish areas. I kept jumping at all the light touches when she was wiping away excess ink from the area so I asked her to use a bit more pressure when she was working there. She laughed and said no one has ever asked her to be more rough but I was twitching a whole lot less after I asked. Other than that, it was nice to have a quiet mind for a few hours. Getting a tattoo is the closest thing to meditation I’ll ever get.

Also, I’m going to a party this weekend and am both excited and anxious. I think it might be a techno party but the organizers of the party host events for queer people to meet each other. It’s going to be loud which is awful for me when trying to talk to others. I usually go dance by myself because I’m there for the music but this time I’ll have to try and meet some people. I’m hoping since the event is for meeting new people that things will work itself out. We’ll see how the night goes.

I didn’t know this was a thing but I did something like this last year.

Last winter I gathered a bunch of leaves from the tree in the front yard and covered up all the garden bed with leaves. I was hoping the leaf layer would protect the soil surface from the cold and snow during the winter. Since the leaves are so thin, they broke down really quickly in the spring time when it started to warm up.

I plan on doing the same this year as well.

I also have a spot in my garden I just add compost waste. It’s just a pile of food scraps and trimmings from my garden. I’m too lazy for any other composting options. I’ll just spread that area around the rest of the garden next spring.

I’ve noticed personally just how different my mind works when I am constantly presented with data for my actions. Even though these random data points have no real affect on my life, I’m still drawn to having those numbers be bigger than before. From the votes I receive from a social media comment to the reactions from a meme posted in a discord server, all I want is more attention through a click of a button from someone else’s screen.

I hate it. It feels like my value is placed into a number. For me, I prefer my value to come from how I treat other people. I feel a far greater sense of self when I am able to put my time and effort into helping other people. I get to learn the inner workings of someone else and teach them to empower themselves. It feels rewarding when later on those people I helped express their gratitute and trust in me. That is far more rewarding compared to the quick hit from any brain chemistry when looking at a bunch of data points or a bunch of money.

Unfortunately, I can’t make money this way. Not in the way I want to learn, teach and empower other people. I’m terrified of going into a career that will destroy my innate desire to help others. I know it’ll wreck me in the process. Again.

Capitalism destroys everything it touches by sucking all the life, creativity and humanity out of it until there’s a empty shell left behind. An empty shell that looks like every other empty shell. All those empty shells can be counted, given a value and sold. Reducing us and the human experience to yet another data point.

I truly hope more people come to understand that these data points don’t have to put us in a competitions with each other. That our value as people can come from places that don’t have/need to be from a number value.

One day, our planet will die. One day the last historian will die and all that data and preserved knowledge will sit and decay. It’s human knowledge and it’s meaning has more value to humans than any other living creature on our planet.

Personally, I’d rather live a life where my actions are responsible for the wellbeing of myself, my community and the land under my feet. It doesn’t matter to me anymore if my value can’t be reduced to a number.

I’m okay with this, I’m away for the next two weeks so there’s no one to manage my garden except to water it. I’m going to give a few excess cucumbers to my neighbours before I leave though.

I’m also big into collecting seeds and have plans to save a few cucumbers to allow them to age naturally. At least I assume that’s what I can do. This is the first year I’ve managed to grow cucumbers and not just the flowers. I also have a habit of letting plants grow a bit wild the first time as I watch how they grow. This way I have a better understanding for myself of how to manage them next year.

It seems like I could treat the cucumber plant sort of like the tomato plant, trimming excess growth to promote veggie/fruit growth but I haven’t gotten that far with experimenting yet.

It’s actually a trick of the lens, those cucumbers are obscenely huge… I didn’t even plant cucumbers there, they just showed up and took over.

I may have “lost” a cucumber in the grass, sure hope whoever finds it enjoys it :)

I’ve been enjoying the use or weird lately. I’ve had some strong personal opinions on language lately. A lot of it comes with a huge increase of new words that sort of seem abstract from it’s meaning.

I think with how rapid information can spread to large groups of people, it’s just too fast for my mind to keep up. All of a sudden I feel like I’m in a war with words and who knows which landmine of a word will get you in trouble. It causes me even more anxiety when someone comes at you with manipulative intentions in order to control the direction of the discussion.

I think weird works because it’s an almost basic word. It’s simple and descriptive. It’s not a newer, more specific word that requires a deeper understanding of a broader topic. It’s understood by more people. People with varying degrees of language knowledge including people whose native language is not English. It’s easier for more people to understand.

It’s a lot easier to understand someone is weird compared to someone being a fascist.

It’s hard to tell from this angle but it’s an older, much larger bunny. It hopped off behind the house and I was able as close as the hose was to the baby nearby.

I just pretended it wasn’t there as I slowly coiled up the hose as I snuck by. I think I felt physical pain from how cute it was.

This feels like satire? A site called real men, real style with an article about penises?

They look like springtails to me. I use springtails and isopods in my gecko’s terrarium as a clean up crew.

The isopods eat the poop while the springtails eat any mold that would grow in moist conditions. I do have plants in there too so all that bug poop goes right back into the soil to be reused.

They can’t survive outside of a moist environment for long and will simply dry out. I have no idea how harmful they are to plants alone but at least you don’t have to worry about mold.

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I’ve found myself lately a lot more interested in games that don’t focus heavily on graphics but instead allow other parts of the game to speak for itself. This allows for the imagination to fill in the gaps, as you mentioned.

I’ve been playing a lot or Caves of Qud recently. It’s a rogue-like game with tile graphics and colourful text. Somehow this menu simulator game has drawn me into it’s harsh and unforgiving world. The tile based graphics actually allows for an amazing amount of creative freedom both from the developer and player point of views. The developer has created this futuristic planet with mutants and cybernetics roaming the planet trying to survive. The player has the freedom to play as they like and create the most unique characters they can imagine. My current character has two hearts, a scorpion tail, a fanged beak, two dagger wielding claws and a habit for stabbing.

I think the rise of constantly better technology has inadvertently encouraged a focus on better graphics over other aspects of video games. While there are some absolutely beautiful games with higher hardware demand, I think as of late, I’m yearning for games that focus more on story or gameplay. Games where you can feel the developer’s passion. Games with polish and attention to details in the most unexpected ways. Games that attempt to push boundaries within certain limitations (think hardware or graphic styles for example).

I think what I want is a game that feels like I’m reading a fiction book in a way. What I mean is that when you read a work of fiction, your imagination is filling in all that visual information. A game can provide you more than just text, but if it can balance graphics, gameplay and story, it can really transport and immerse your imagination into that world.

I’m glad to see more posts recently with a push towards regenerative farming practices. In the past when I talked about it, I was either largely ignored or got a lot or push back to continue with modern, standard practices dependant on chemicals or fertilisers.

In my opinion, understanding the importance of what lives in the soil, what their roles are in their ecosystem and how to cater to those living organisms is all very important to growing crops.

I’ve had a lot of trouble finding decent or reliable information online about regenerative farming. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from what little I’ve learned from indigenous cultures that I’ve been exposed to in my life and have been fumbling my way around experimenting with my garden over the past couple years.

The article mentions how some people find regenerative farms look messy. I think the wild, natural look makes everything seem more beautiful. With diverse crops and crop cover, it brings more pollinators and more life to my little garden in this suburban wasteland of cut grass lawns and driveways.

As with many travelers in Australia, we both had work/holiday visa’s that allowed us to stay in Australia for 1-2 years. This wonderful comment was thrown at me within the first week of arriving at a hostel in Sydney.

Fortunately they left a month or two later but I still avoided them when they did still live there.

Amazing. Layers of ignorance for an already dumb thing to say.

I’m a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.

My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up “white.” My voice, appearance and behaviour are “white.” I was born and raised Canadian. I’m far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.

I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.

The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I’m not “Indian.”

West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I’ve never visited any West Indian country. Then I’ll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.

Then there are the white people… No matter how white I act, I will never be “white” enough. I’ll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.

In fact, I have a “friend” who is a cop. He’s not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I’ve known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I’d be a perfect “UC.” Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I’m just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.

I’ve never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.

Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means “House Master.” You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.

I love Robins. They are brave little birds who love to hop/fly slightly ahead of you so they can stare you down. They give off a “Keep walking this way and you gon’ get stabbed” vibe. It’s an all bark no bite situation, so you’re not actually in any real danger.

I really like the idea of regenerative land use.

I managed to learn quite a bit about living soil when I created a terrarium. Understanding the role of each part in an enclosed ecosystem really reframed what I thought a garden should look and act like.

I was able to build a garden last year and I’ve kept a focus on trying to build a good home for the life living within the soil.

Keeping a cover crop such as clover really helped keep moisture in the soil. By mid summer, I was able to skip days watering my garden because the soil remained so moist. That constant moisture is great for any bacteria or fungi living in the soil. Also great for worms and isopods since they require high humidity as well.

I also chopped up any waste from trimming back some plants and threw it back in there as food for what’s living in the soil. Chopping the waste up also sped up it’s decomposition so it didn’t sit around for long.

Last Fall I also took some leaves from the trees and made a layer on top of the soil. I thought it would be a good idea to add a protective layer before the snow came. As a bonus, the extra leafy goodness would be broken down in the spring to be added back into the soil. I couldn’t find any information about doing something like that online but I figured trying to recreate forest-like conditions would be beneficial for the soil.

With a focus on what’s in the soil, I’m hoping that above ground becomes the delicious bonus. I am allowing some native plants to grow alongside my crops to attract a variety of pollinators which seemed to work well last year.

This year is only my second year with my garden so I’m still observing, learning and adapting things. I’ve recently noticed some native chickweed growing will be watching to see how it acts this year as ground cover alongside my clover.

A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.

I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.