Homemaking, gardening, and self-sufficiency resources that won't radicalize you into a hate group

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Gardening

Country/Rural Living:

Sewing/Mending:

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!

HERE’S THE THING THOUGH

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.

This is my new favourite story.

When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring. 

Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.

But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

And then, it got better.

For real.

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

Source:  http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport

No okay THAT is adorable and I’m queueing this for next December.

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

David Tennant as Tenth Doctor Doctor Who | Season 2 (2005-2006)

The Princess Bride (1987) dir. Rob Reiner

The Princess Bride (1987) dir. Rob Reiner

Do you like old timey country music or bluegrass? Do you wanna support Indigenous people making contemporary music in their own languages?

Well if you answered yes to both of these questions, please check out Agalisiga’s album Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi (It Started In the Woods). He’s a Cherokee singer who recently released a whole album IN CHEROKEE. And it’s really good! Available on Bandcamp and other streaming services now!!!!

i view just enough horror and have poor enough visual processing that i legit thought this was a gore-drenched bedroom that i would nope the fuck out of

Yeah, I feel like the floor is going to squelch blood if I step on it, and if I touch one of those dangling red strings, I'm going to get pulled up, enveloped, and digested by the sticky red organic globules hanging from the ceiling.

no it's nice design cause in color theory red is associated with more positive emotions than negative 😁

What is this, a children's hospital?

The balloon strings dangling above open flames would make me turn around and smack the person who put this together upside the head. Some of the balloons are already losing their float.

It feels criminal not to include the third panel

Guy wearing "I ❤️ Arson" Shirt: Let me redecorate your house.

Voters: Okay.

Voters, later: Oh, no, the house is on fire!

Firefighter: I can put it out but you need to kick out the arsonist guy.

Voters: Whatever! Do it!

Voters, later: Ew, the house smells like smoke!

Firefighter: Okay? It was on fire earlier. I'm still dealing with it.

Guy wearing "I ❤️ Arson and Killing Firefighters" Shirt: Let me back in and I'll fix the smoke issue.

Firefighter: Don't! He will literally set your house on fire again. He brought a whole crew with matches and cans of gasoline with him.

Voters: I'm pretty sure those are paint cans.

Firefighter: It says gasoline on the cans!

Voters: Get out, I'm gonna let the previous guy in.

This analogy is almost perfect, but you forgot the part where the guy wearing the "I ❤️ Arson and Killing Firefighters" shirt is also openly bragging to anyone who'll listen about how he's going to burn the house down, and, with any luck, the entire neighborhood.

He's in talks with other arsonists to learn how to build pipe bombs.

The firefighter said he would protect a neighbor I dont like. I can't vote for him, he might save my annoying neighbor. It doesnt matter if my house burns down, the annoying neighbor must be punished.

listen up chucklefucks, i just gotta say. I'm not defending zir, but I'm sad zie deactivated. Like, i get that trauma lasts a long time and the good stuff is maybe easy to forget?? so maybe it's just like that. And my beloved mutual @/pompeyspuppygirl made a post about zir clout chasing behavior, which is pretty shitty behavior if it's true (and if we're canceling someone it had better be pretty severe). anyways now that zie's gone pompeyspuppygirl said it was okay to make this post (again, thanks ppg everyone go follow her --really everyone in this whole drama is worth a follow)

ANYways yeah zie was my mutual and like, reblogged a lot my smaller posts. (that isn't to discredit what my mutual pompeyspuppygirl is saying about zie clout chasing ofc). AND idk zie was always reblogging art from new and undiscovered artists and reblogging donation posts (which if you don't know is really bad if you're trying to clout chase...) (again, though, ppg is my mutual i believe her.) and like, remember on valentines day i tried to blaze zir posts and zie told me to stop because zie didn't want the posts to go viral? (but again ppg is my mutual and has a lot of proof in the Google doc I'm not trying to disprove that I'm just saying what else I know)

Idk, like i feel like a lot of people loved zir's blog a while back, bc like zie DID make some good posts?? So idk why everybody's acting like they aren't even a little bit sad.,. like ngl this feels like maybe all the reasonable people left to Twitter and all the Twitter refugees who love drama came here??? shdfhhdhdhdhdh haha but idk...look idk, i just, julie i do miss you. idk. more thoughts later sorry I'm getting worked up shshs

Here's the original text because honestly this is impressive and I don't think it fully hits unless you know the Shakespeare.

I am losing my mind laughing THANK YOU SO MUCH OP

@rubecso @lyrasoxford

changing of the seasons

hits the bong and immediately becomes aware of the narrative

hits the bong again and looks directly at the camera knowingly

this is how eve got expelled from Eden

I like how bong can mean both penis and that big vertical disk that makes a lot of noise.

that's dong and gong. bong means neither of those things

This edible (fruit from the tree of knowledge) ain’t doing shit.

I’m naked.

it is absolutely BONKERS to me, the number of people in the united states i have talked to who have never even heard of the battle of blair mountain. how the largest labor uprising in our history manages to skirt by so many leftists unknown is just downright astonishing. the largest labor uprising, and the largest armed uprising, period, since the civil war.

did yall even hear me?

THE LARGEST ARMED UPRISING!! besides the civil!!! fucking!! war!!! was fought in 1921 in the name of LABOR RIGHTS AND UNIONS by TEN THOUSAND RIGHTEOUSLY PISSED, STRIKING COAL MINERS

these absolute fucking LEGENDS marching out the hollers of west virginia, wearing their red bandanas and wielding their papaw's shotguns pointed at the lawmen. waging war against the fucking UNITED. STATES. MILITARY!!! for their right to work safely and be paid fairly!!!

and people just like. don't know about that? put some fucking respect on west virginia!!! and fellow appalachians, yall best just own it when ignorant people call you a fucking redneck cause our ancestors did that shit and they did it for us

The mine owners hired planes to drop bombs on the striking workers. Chemical weapons and leftover WWI explosives were also used against the striking workers. All for the “horrific crime” of wanting to join a miner’s union.

That is why we celebrate Labor Day in September. That is why Labor Day is a national holiday.

To the best of my knowledge, the continental United States has only suffered air-to-ground attacks four times in the nation's history.

9/11

One (1) successful fire balloon attack courtesy of the Japanese Empire in WWII

The Battle of Blair Mountain

and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

A full half of these attacks are US citizens bombing other US citizens because the victims of these attacks were willing to do the hard work required to improve their material conditions within the oppressive systems that defined their lives.

I fucking hate game apps. I wanted to play tetris the otherday so I figured there must be a simple tetris app out there its the most basic game. But every app is like heres your daily log in bonus of 10 gold! You get 5 free plays a day. Here's an ad. To replay a level costs 1 diamond. You can eart gold by earning points in levels. 1000 points = 1 gold. You can exchange 550 gold for one diamond but we have a sale right now that they only cost 500 gold. Heres an ad. You can buy a loot crate of diamonds for 5.99$! You leveled up! Heres 1 free diamond. Youve run out of free replays for today, would you like to buy some more diamonds? Heres your daily tasks, make sure to log in every day this month for a free reward chest. its free! Heres an ad. Would you like to sign up for this credit card to recieve 10 free diamonds? Invite a friend and you can earn points! Ding! Youve leveled up. Heres an ad. This is our special bonus play weekend, you get one free replay and a pack of diamonds only costs 4.99$. You can use your gold to purchase new skins for the tetris blocks. This ones shaped like cats! It costs 100 diamonds. You need to collect them all. Free to play, may be some in-app purchases.

I agree with literally everything op is saying and I don't want to detract from their point but this website here, specifically for mobile games (though they intend to eventually branch out to other types) is creating a database that flags those exact types of predatory things. It also flags games as safe, so if you want to look for safe mobile games this is an invaluable resource.

https://www.darkpattern.games/

It also has definitions, explanations, and examples of all the different types of psychological manipulations games pull on the website so if anyone ever tries to give you "just don't spend money, it's easy" you can send them this

Oh thank god, I lost my link to dark pattern some time ago and I thought I would never find it again.