i was about to joke about how my political stance is “end lawnmower culture” but then it occurred to me that i actually Am against lawns as suburban status symbols and wastes of land that Could be used to sustain native flora & fauna and grow food for people, but no, instead they are these huge useless swaths of land that need Constant maintenance, the process of which is not only destructive, but Incredibly Loud
You know that actually is the purpose of a lawn? They started as a trend of the French monarchy – the ones revolutionaries beheaded for being self indulgent assholes.
It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”
Lawns offend me.
Why have that stunted golf course in front of your suburban house if you can’t even water it? Get one of these instead.
Unite Against the Lawn
Pro tiny house, anti grass lawn. Prioritize practicality.
HOAs hate this sort of thing. One more indication that they’re horrible institutions.
Which is why, while we’re looking for property, anything with an HOA is discounted.
Also, WTF is this HOA crap? The US is all land of liberty and so on, then you get here and there are rules about what colour you can paint your house and what you can plant in the front yard? *looks hard at the US’s land of liberty credentials*
We spent today touring the local area to look at property. Our indecision on where we’re going to live long term continues, but the area we’re living in at the moment (Olympia) has much to recommend it. So we spent the day meandering and seeing what we could see that fit into our price range and how close we can get to the trifecta of location, price and features. Mind you, our trifecta is somewhat different to other peoples.
Olympia certainly offers us the most that we’ve seen in terms of what we can afford. Amusingly, someone suggested to me that we should look at Steamboat Island (google maps). Which is a place Kathryn visited for semi-work reasons recently. We saw some gorgeous property out there, then ran into a chap who’s selling his own 1.6 acre plot (of which a big chunk you can’t build on for many reasons). An English chap, funnily enough.
We took his card and I got over excited about the potential of this land. It does have quite a few significant challenges, and is sloping in a way that means we have to consider whether it would or could be prone to landslides. Which means much discussion with a civil engineer and, I suspect, super-complex groundworks. Which may price it out of our budget.
There’s another property, though, which we are trying to arrange looking at, that’s near to the over-exciting one and which (assuming it doesn’t consist entirely of marsh, which seems to a common thing around here) would be much easier. It’s more expensive, but offers more of the things we want, but takes away the ocean view we’d actually get from the first one.
It is literally the only time we’ve looked at a lot with ocean view and said ‘hey, we could afford that’. Whether we actually can afford it is another question, because we’d need some kind of mortgage to be able to build on it and it’s not big enough that we could sell off a chunk of the land to finance anything. Nor could we build what’s called an ‘additional dwelling unit’ to rent out, which we’d though about doing. So it’s tricky.
Anyhow, then we went and looked at in-town properties. It’s kind of hard to get deeply excited about a city-lot with a quite nice or flipable house, when what you really want is a nice bit of land away from all the peoples. But there were some possibilities in areas that are not horrendous that fit into our price bracket.
If ONE MORE PERSON says “What if they’d medicated Van Gogh!?” I think I’m permitted to set things on fire. If they’d medicated Van Gogh, he’d either have painted twice as much, or he’d have been happy and unproductive. And you know what? Starry Night wasn’t worth a terrible price in human misery. It’s neat. It wasn’t worth it.
Sometimes I wonder if being an artist makes me jaded to ART. Because it’s not magic and it’s not mystical, it’s just paint or pixels. And it can do amazing things! But you don’t owe humanity to be miserable just so you can move paint around in interesting shapes. Jesus. Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go “oh! Neat!” for 5 minutes.
Ursula Vernon, dropping the mic. [x] (via magdaliny)
“Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go ‘oh! Neat!’ for 5 minutes.”
But you guys don’t understand, the woman who does this makes other robots and they are all fucking awesome and hilarious. She has a youtube channel and she posts regularly on r/shittyrobots and I’m in love
She’s an awesome woman who codes and builds robots and I think we need more women like her in the world.
watch the vlogs too because she’s also really funny
1/14/2016 Today Soup-Nose the goat suddenly forgot How To Exist As A Three Dimensional Object. She was in the same milking stanchion we’ve been using to milk her almost every day for three years, but was somehow shocked and amazed by the fact that her horns would not pass through the metal bar. It took twenty minutes of vigorous and muddy goat wrestling to get her out.
Between this and the time a couple weeks ago when she unlatched the chicken house, ate 40 pounds of chicken food, and was still hungry for dinner – where did the chicken food go? that’s a third her weight – I am starting to wonder if I can sign her up for some sort of remedial course on Your Life As A Three Dimensional Being Inside A Pseudo-Riemmanian Manifold or something.
Or “Mom Knight” which is what I kept calling it for most of the time I worked on this. This was my story for Valor, a fairy tale anthology I was in last year! It’s a really great book, and I’m so glad I got to be a part of it. You can purchase a copy here.
