peak of his career really did turn out to be prancing around at a few gas stations in an ugly coat trying to look tough.

time for more local organizing while they try a new tactic.

this right here. every news source is refering to that crowd as “thousands”. most protests dont even get a mention in local papers.

thats what they picked minneapolis for. expected some nice viral moments of vilent protests like we’ve had and a big show of force putting us down. an all they’re gonna get is footage of the ice director parancing around town at gas stations. if they send in the military, and yes i have zero doubt they want too. they have to know for a fact they have one willing too start shooting its own citizens. because they’ll have too. and trump backs his ass down off threats of that faster than he folds on attacks abroad. im not saying this isnt an active terror campaign. it absolutely is. armed men in masks have been stalking the grocery store i shop at the past three days. i know they want violance in return for that. im just also saying they are beatable with wistles and cameras.

im sure most of whats happening here isnt getting past the geofencing and content mods in regular social media. but they have not had enough resources to control even individual neighborhoods. even after bringing in more agents than the entire combined police force of the most populated metro area in the state. every increase in violance by ice drives more volunteers into community patrols. the administration cant subdue one medium sized midwestern city. they’re weak and its showing.

its not about directly harming ice. its about community building between the various labor unions, neighborhood groups and small businesses. giving people in the area a way to participate who are not in a position to do so in other ways.

nobody is avoiding the small deli with an ice out sign that has to be open today. people get that weeks into this they likely cant afford to miss even a bad days worth of business. its a reminder to hotels, large grocery chains and national resturants that when ice leaves we’ll still be here and we’ll remember who was silent or even profited from the siege.

AAA and Link 80 were my intro to ska in the late 90s. someone tossed 17 reasons, all fall down and question the answers in my lap and was like “this is your music, im sorry”. so skacore is just where it starts in my brain. then it skirts around the gross pit of anything tim armstrong touched and moves to 2tone, then new tone.

little surprised JER and bad opperation didnt pop up in the comments here. but i suppose it’s comment thread about ska in a shit post community, not a music specific one.

Modern Ska i’d say

Flying Raccoon Suit afterglow

We Are The Union Out Of Patience

Half Past Two Barrier For Entry

of the older stuff, a few greats i havent seen mentione yet would be

Against All Authority All Fall Down

Link 80 enough

meahtastic has a local groups section. your area may have one thats not in that list, most of the big US meshes arent. if you’re in the US chicago, austin, msp and san fran all seem to have active communities of varying sizes. those websites and discord/signals/whatever will have great resources for meshing in your area. a node for someplace like austin isnt going to have the same design concerns as say minneapolis or toronto.

in the US at least its about broadcast power level. HAMs can broadcast louder but cant enable encryption. default firmware shipped to the US limits your power level so you remain legal.

*i should add that is MY understanding of the situation and i’m no lawyer.

oh this is a dilemma. does the desire to torment an autistic sub outweigh my own need for symmetry? i don’t like this question.

this is never going to be and was not designed to be a secret spy movie text network anymore than it is an instant messager replacement. the encryption has a ways to go yes but its also come a long way. the benefit of the platform is zero licensing entry with cheap gear. that communities can stand up together and use. or organizers can flash devices between uses and swarm a mesh if needed.

its fun building meshes that can cover a hundred miles but, to function like that you have to drastically shorten the messages. and repeat messages to deal with drops. the encryption overall is fine for what the mesh can do and what the appropriate use cases could be. not great but it’ll do.

for the handheld portables like a tdeck stick to flexible whips. it’s lesson you want to learn before breaking your first tdeck.

generally though these pocket devices are not stand alone solutions. they become useful in an established mesh network. If your area doesn’t have an existing community for this stuff, you dont travel to places with established meshes or you’re just getting started. plan on picking up at least one other small device. a heltec or rak with decent antenna would let you place it at a high point and experiment with what kind of range the tdeck gets.

i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.

if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.

if your username can also share your gender and pronoun prefs it save a ton of time.

maybe the denver school shooting can be the last one this bobblehead pushes out of a news cycle.

if you’ve already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.

that place looks beautiful and it’s a very long hike back. maybe suggest to your partner that you just live there now.

Think I’ve now recovered from doing a human thing Friday. Friend i only see every few years was in town for a night, so it was a social human thing i actually really enjoyed and made recovery easier. Unfortunately a mutual friend is determined this out of state friend and i get together, and keeps trying to get us to hookup at the bar. While knowing i don’t enjoy drunken hookups AND have stopped drinking entirely since the last time she tried this scheme. So now i get to have the “life isn’t a 90s rom-com” discussion and it’s gonna feel a little like telling a 6yr old santa isn’t real.

https://wearetheunion.bandcamp.com/track/boys-will-be-girls

the community has learned through multiple rounds of astroturfing attacks to be cautious. this post is formatted like something that gets passed around “autism mom” facebook groups. that shit gets exhausting to filter out.