Good Finds For Your Ease & Delight
An antidote to inbox tedium
September 2024 Good Finds
Good News
Cool Things That Exist Now
Oh Hey We Found The Helpers
A Goofy Thing Just For You To Enjoy
Helpful Stuff To Keep In Your Pocket For Later
1. Good News For Climate Justice
It’s not always visible, especially because we usually focus on the setbacks. But your hard work is paying off. So keep at it.
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[video: Climate Good News by @GoodGoodGood: a young adult I perceive as feminine presenting with light skin and dark curly hair tells us deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is at its lowest level since 2018. Engineers discovered how to cool buildings without electricity. The DRC has planted almost a billion trees in the last 5 years, renewable energy is growing so fast earth is on track to meet net-zero targets, major cities are suing the plastics industry for clogging waterways]
2. Cool Things That Exist Now
Free Coloring Pages For Book Nerds
Beautiful Pie released a series of free coloring pages to share with your library, book club, or whoever just needs a moment of coloring meditation.
3. Oh Hey We Found The Helpers
Practicing Transformative Justice at Home
My 10-year-old still remembers that day a couple weeks before lock down, when I completely lost my shit with him, ranting and slamming his hamper down on the floor. Despite my attempts to never repeat my parents’ scariest moments, my reaction left him terrified and it has colored his childhood.
That’s a memory he’ll keep with him forever. And I can’t ever erase it.
Luckily families no longer have to do this alone - there’s a growing community of parents breaking these cycles of harm.
Not only that - there are ways to repair after these kinds of rupture, so our families can come back stronger, safer, and more resilient.
Nat V. has been successfully helping parents marginalized by capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as we strive to break cycles of generational trauma. We now have the tools to change our reactionary behavior and truly model the change we want to see.
This autumn, the Come Bak To Care community is opening invitations for new families. Share it with parents in your community interested in practicing transformative justice at home.
4. A Silly Memory For You To Enjoy
You remember when Furbies were revolutionary AI?
The commercials sold them as responsive fyzzy robots that could chat with you. I saved up and got two of them to see what would happen in a robot-to-robot conversation. If left to their own devices - would they achieve sentience and take over the world?
I was disappointed. They mostly just blink at each other and volleyed greetings back and forth. Sadly, I was unable to instigate the Furby singularity in 1998.
HOWEVER - 15 years later I finally got to witness conversational Earthquake sentience
All it took was making two entire humans from scratch using my own organs. It took another couple years for them to really start talking to each other (cue the start of unrelenting sibling arguments).
Video bote: R2 has a… unique way of speaking. It’s worth turning on transcript/captions.
[Video description: 2-minute video, R2 and Q stooping on an early autumn day. Q neurotically peels a carrot to death and apologizes for his rudeness over a year ago. R2 smears a yogurt pop on his belly and assures us that he has/will share his birthday cake and presents.]
5. Helpful Stuff For When You Need It
From book bans to project 2025, are you high-key freaked out about the wave of jerks fighting to dismantle free and accessible public K-12 education?
Whether or not you’ve had to deal with them yet - they are coming. And when that time times, you can be prepared using HEAL Together’s free trainings on how to protect every child’s access to public education.
Unfortunately (ridiculously?), I hadn’t had any training on how to make a public comment 2020, when anti-equity jerks came for our local public schools.
After listening to bigots advocate for dismantling equity initiatives, abolish culturally responsive curriculum, and actively segregate classrooms, I was flapping mad.
So I channeled my fury into openly mocking their arguments.
(I was angry, nervous, and borderline unintelligible, so here’s a written version of my public comment).
Fortunately, the decision-makers in the room got the joke. But because so many people said this stuff for serious - a few audience members thought I, too was seriously advocating to “stop letting weirdos share their experiences” and “If a student chooses to identify as Asian, they can do that at home. They don’t need to bring that perversity to school.”
Which is probably why you should work smart, not hard, and just do it the easy (and more effective) way. So if you need it - get HEAL’s guidance on crafting a clear, direct message that cuts off bigots attacking local public schools.
Free training on how to give a confident public comment: 9/10, 10/23 & 11/6
Coming up next
Next week, I’ll be back with a new Collective Action Toolkit for kiddos.
Have good finds you’d like to share with our community? Tell us about them!
with you,
Ashia
PS. And for the 24 awesome folks who support my work here on substack, you get free early-bird access to our October workshop for parents hiding like scared bunnies on a corner (or FREAKING OUT) about the upcoming election below…
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