This Illumination Has Everything

Work with schools, environmental benefits, saving restaurants money...

Stefon approves!

Today's Illumination comes to us from New York's Billion Oyster Project. The organization has set up a program in which restaurants collect the shells from their oyster dishes; those shells are then cured, cleaned, and brought to a high school with a training program in marine sciences; and the students use the shells to essentially seed new oysters. Once the oysters are big enough, they get moved to a structure that helps them form a reef in New York Harbor.

Oysters, evidently, are pretty magnificent creatures. (Calling the world your oyster makes a little more sense to me now.) They filter the water, promote biodiversity by providing food and shelter to other marine life, and protect a shore against a hurricane's waves. Admittedly, none of these things make me more likely to want to eat them, but I can at least appreciate them more.

On a personal note, since it is Coming Out Day...hi. I'm queer. To be specific/pedantic, I'm bi-romatic demisexual. Essentially, I can have heart-feelings for anyone, regardless of gender, but it takes someone really, really special to get the pants-feelings going. Thankfully, I found my someone special nearly 14 years ago, and reader, I married him (come on, how could I resist a good Austen reference?). So, yeah. That's me.

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Wanna Hear Me Talk?

I mentioned in my last post, but now I'm doing the official promotional thing. I'm going to be doing a couple of presentations at the Flights of Foundry convention next weekend! Specifically, I'll be doing a game demo for Rolling Realms on Saturday, September 28 at 1pm Pacific. On Sunday, September 29 at 3pm Pacific, I'll be doing a panel presentation on copyright and public domain basics; finally, also on Sunday, September 29 at 5pm, I'll be on a panel sharing my handwork (specifically my crochet, cross stitch, and blackwork) with a few other fantastic people. This is my first time doing this kind of presentation, and so I'm a wee bit nervous. Still, I'm super excited, and the fact that it's all online means that I'll at least be in my home, and the cats may or may not make an appearance on camera. So! If you're interested in what's looking to be a fabulous online convention (that's FREE!), come join us next weekend!

Calm Your Mind with Needle and Thread

I was fortunate enough to be able to host a workshop at GeekGirlCon last weekend, which went extremely well. My friend Erin was in town for the convention and was kind enough to co-host the workshop with me, which worked wonderfully because she was able to answer some questions that I didn't know how to answer, and also keep us on time (she's a professor, so she's experienced with dealing with classrooms full of people). I thought it would be a good idea, for my own benefit if nothing else, to document the first part of the workshop, which was a talk about embroidery and mental health. I've made the PowerPoint and list of resources available on a separate page of this blog ( here ). I don't know about you, but the last few years have not been especially kind to my mental or emotional health. I discovered early on in the pandemic that going back to something I learned when I was a child, cross stitch, was something that could help ease my anxiety and give me somethi...

Hope is a Four-Letter Word

I've been bouncing around with this for the last few weeks, ever since I read a couple of quotes from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book overall had some interesting ideas about reframing the idea of trying to get everything done. Even though there were a couple of things that made it clear the author was not approaching things with an eye toward neurodivergence (his discussion of distraction, for example, only talks about the "choice" to be distracted, and not how some people's brains simply don't focus the same way others' do), I was feeling generally positively toward the book until I got to the last chapter, and read this: "Hope is supposed to be 'our beacon in the dark,' [environmentalist Derrick] Jensen notes. But in reality, it's a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment - the government, for example, or ...

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