We've just spent 3 days on the ZAD filming a documentary and I'm really excited. If you don't know, the ZAD is a French term that means Zone a Defence and means somewhere squatted or occupied to resist the state. In particular we were on the Notre Dame des Landes ZAD, a massive area of biodiverse wetland that was squatted by farmers, ecologists, anarchists and communists for over a decade to stop the French state building a new airport near Nantes. Eventually the state gave up and the squatters won, and now they live there outside of modern capitalism taking care each other in a manner that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call real, actual communism that's happening inside the imperial core right now

We stayed at pa Rolandiere, one of many little communes within the ZAD, and home to Jay and Isa, authors of We Are Nature Defending Itself. Like many of the places we saw, there is a central common living area and lots of little cabins and caravans around for sleeping in, but la Rolandiere also has a couple of pretty unique things. They have a lighthouse, and a visitors welcome centre. Jay told me this is because they see conviviality as a certain kind of revolutionary practice. The state paints the people on the ZAD as terrifying violent criminals, so having a welcome centre for visitors to come and learn about the ZAD is a kind of direct resistance to that.

I learned a hell of a lot being there. I talked to farmers, artists, squatters, a medic, a botanist and of course, lots of communists. I also walked miles through forests and fields and got to forage some interesting mushrooms which was very special for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary develop into a real thing, but sitting on the train back from Nantes to Paris right now I'm reflecting on it all and I really feel like I'm coming down off an incredible high. This morning I was weeding a row of carrots!

I keep thinking about our interview with the botanist Jasmine, who told us that on the ZAD it's really hard to be lonely, because even if you aren't around human beings, you feel the presence of all the plants and animals in a way that you don't do anywhere else, and I really think it's true. I'm going yo be thinking about the ZAD for a long, long time. I may not have been a part of their struggle but I hope that my documentary can be. We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself 🌺🍄🦎

We're in the middle of our return stay to finish the documentary finally 💕 every day here is so peaceful and fulfilling. I've been waking up with the first light every morning, this morning I climbed the lighthouse to watch the sunrise 🌄

Hey everyone! Just reminding you that my main source of income is patreon, so if you enjoy my work online please consider supporting me there so I can afford to eat and pay my bills and buy silly little outfits to wear.

I have new video content in progress, and I'm aiming to get two shorter video essays and one quite large project I've been working on for a long time out by the end of the year. I've also recently started working on a project for 2026 where my partner and I are experimenting with LoRa devices to see what communication and information technology alternatives people could invest in if they lost access to the mainstream internet for some reason [gestures at the current state of politics in the imperial core]

Updates for all my projects, behind the scenes stuff and early releases of text essays and finished videos are all available on my patreon, and as I've said patreon is how I afford to stay alive so please subscribe and also share <3 ty tumblr

In 2026 I'm going to be moving house at some point and then have a long term debt to pay off, so I really would appreciate all possible support from people who like my work. If you already financially support me as much as you are able, please also remember that it helps me out when you share my work or recommend my writing to people

Really taken with this still from the filming for the new vid. Like I really became a beautiful woman and I'm trying to wrap my head around it a bit I just keep coming back to this one still. I like my pfp but I also kinda wanna make it this

Being lied to always fucks me up really badly. Like I've talked with my therapist about how trusting of people I am a lot and done a tonne of work on it and still I wind up again kicking myself for being gullible and it sucks. I often think when someone says something I find fishy that they mustn't be lying because lying is a stupid thing to do but as my wife says this is me "assuming other people are making good decisions". It just sucks is all and it makes me feel very stupid and small whenever it happens so pls if you know me don't lie to me about stuff because I'll believe you and then I'll be sad

I already said this on bluesky (but seriously fuck bluesky) but I saw this recently and I guess I've been sitting with it a lot since and ?? percolating I guess ??

I wish social difficulties was split up more in this because I'm quite successful at masking a bunch of the time but I'm also very naive and gullible a lot and these definitely represent different axes of what "social difficulties" could mean because socializing is a complicated and many-faceted thing y'know

Tbf being lied about fucks me up more

Being lied to always fucks me up really badly. Like I've talked with my therapist about how trusting of people I am a lot and done a tonne of work on it and still I wind up again kicking myself for being gullible and it sucks. I often think when someone says something I find fishy that they mustn't be lying because lying is a stupid thing to do but as my wife says this is me "assuming other people are making good decisions". It just sucks is all and it makes me feel very stupid and small whenever it happens so pls if you know me don't lie to me about stuff because I'll believe you and then I'll be sad

I already said this on bluesky (but seriously fuck bluesky) but I saw this recently and I guess I've been sitting with it a lot since and ?? percolating I guess ??

I wish social difficulties was split up more in this because I'm quite successful at masking a bunch of the time but I'm also very naive and gullible a lot and these definitely represent different axes of what "social difficulties" could mean because socializing is a complicated and many-faceted thing y'know

Trans people in the UK need to organise!

I think our priorities should be on making harm reduction structures and starting assemblies to form democratic systems to meet our needs. In this video I talk at length about the specifics and even have a template assembly structure for people to use if they want to start organising meetings asap. Please watch and share, we have to organise to save trans lives

Trans people in the UK need to organise!

I think our priorities should be on making harm reduction structures and starting assemblies to form democratic systems to meet our needs. In this video I talk at length about the specifics and even have a template assembly structure for people to use if they want to start organising meetings asap. Please watch and share, we have to organise to save trans lives

An absolutely exceptional video. Very important to watch, I think, even if you're not from the UK. I especially liked the focus on harm reduction. I think that's a very important idea.

New best pictures of Saturn from a trip out to the local park

Left: auto-stacked 1080p frames from a short video processed through ffmpeg and autostakkert, Right: best single shot at 4060p

I can't say no to Mocha when she does this

Lunar Eclipse

Just got back from the park! The lunar eclipse was incredible. Like 3 dozen people came out to watch it and loads of strangers had a go on my telescope, it was incredibly cute. Unfortunately the ancient curses of Britain conspired to give us cloudy weather, so when the blood moon rose completely red at 7.30ish it was behind a wall of cloud for us and by the time it came out from teh clouds it was moving out of the penumbra already. It did make for very dramatic cloudy shots though

And what was nice as it went on was seeing what a Pittsburgh friend described to me about the eclipse earlier in the year. She said there were loads of colours in the edge of the shadow including blues and greens and I could definitely see it. In the composite shot I took I tried to make all the colours pop out a bit more to show what we were seeing at the time

The UK won't get a fully overhead, middle of the night lunar eclipse with a blood red moon until 2029, and I think it's a quite haunting feature of cosmological coincidences like eclipses that they remind us how teeny tiny small the human scale really is. See you in 4 years blood moon, wherever we all are then

Lunar Eclipse

Just got back from the park! The lunar eclipse was incredible. Like 3 dozen people came out to watch it and loads of strangers had a go on my telescope, it was incredibly cute. Unfortunately the ancient curses of Britain conspired to give us cloudy weather, so when the blood moon rose completely red at 7.30ish it was behind a wall of cloud for us and by the time it came out from teh clouds it was moving out of the penumbra already. It did make for very dramatic cloudy shots though

And what was nice as it went on was seeing what a Pittsburgh friend described to me about the eclipse earlier in the year. She said there were loads of colours in the edge of the shadow including blues and greens and I could definitely see it. In the composite shot I took I tried to make all the colours pop out a bit more to show what we were seeing at the time

The UK won't get a fully overhead, middle of the night lunar eclipse with a blood red moon until 2029, and I think it's a quite haunting feature of cosmological coincidences like eclipses that they remind us how teeny tiny small the human scale really is. See you in 4 years blood moon, wherever we all are then