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The National Wildfire Coordinating Group glossary gives this definition of an anchor point:
An advantageous location from which to start building a fire break or line. If done properly, this will prohibit fire from establishing itself on the other side of an unsuspecting crew who could otherwise end up being surrounded, with little chance for escape.
The first thing you learn at fire school is the acronym, LCES. LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes, and Safety zones. You will repeat it to yourself while sharpening your Pulaski and your chainsaw. You’ll say it again while wearing your stiff new boots into the shower, and later when you hike up steep trails with your new crewmates, each of you carrying around 40 pounds of gear strapped to your backs in 100-degree temperatures. It’s printed on the back page of every firefighter’s pocket guide, and on stickers handed out, which will later show up on helmets, bunks, notebooks, and water bottles.
Next comes the video you’ll sit through at the beginning of every fire season until you retire. Short, low-budget clips featuring interviews with survivors of tragic fires. Close-ups of haunted faces recall having spent interminable moments pressed tight to the ground in their foil shelters taking shallow breaths, breathing prayers against the dirt to their families and Gods while roaring flame fronts consumed the oxygen outside.
The camera pans away from the faces of the survivors to several small, white, weathered crosses high on a lonely mountainside that soon fade to black, and you can practically taste the ash and smell the faintest whiff of burning flesh coming from the bodies of firefighters who lived just long enough to stop thinking or feeling anything.
You are going to need a mantra. Throughout your career, you will have many. “LCES’ is as good as any to start with. The “L” in LCES stands for “lookouts.”
Post a lookout, whenever there is a need for one. There is always a need for a lookout.
Now, if you can, imagine another kind of fire; the kind of fire that starts within a human being. Alcoholism is that kind of fire.
Trying to control alcoholism is as complex and harrowing as learning to fight wildland fire, and because I happened to undertake both labors at the same time, the lessons I learned from each informed the other until I eventually rose from the ashes of my former self.
Barely into my first fire season, I began to notice I was no longer able to rocket out of bed in the mornings after nights spent drinking with the crew, no matter how much water I drank or how hard I exercised in an attempt to sweat it out. I was tired all the time. At thirty-six, I was the oldest firefighter in a close-knit fire crew of twenty and thirty-somethings. Maybe I was just too old to be playing with fire.
Older though I was, I was the happiest I could remember having been because I had finally stumbled into the work I was born to do.
Still, the beginnings of more serious health problems related to my alcohol consumption began to show themselves and by autumn there was a persistent hollow ache in my stomach.
When you decide to stop drinking only to discover that your willpower can’t keep you stopped, posting the analog of a fire lookout is a good idea. Survivors of tragic fires and late-stage alcoholism each told me in the early days that retreating into a survival shelter to wait out the fire is a tactic one should never rely on. Sure, you might survive fire or early sobriety by insulating yourself from the world in a hot, airless cocoon, but the ultimate goal is to expand your world by developing healthy interdependence with others. Together and connected, everyone increases their chances of surviving whole and resilient, instead of suffering alone beneath a heavy blanket of smoky darkness.
The first step I took toward sobriety was accepting that the fire had been there for a long time, quietly burning my life down.
The “C” in LCES stands for communications. Many tragedies could have been prevented had supervisors listened to lookouts’ warnings, or if someone—anyone—had spoken up in time to retreat from oncoming disaster.
Similarly, many alcoholics could have avoided lost time and opportunities, and later grave injuries to health and relationships, if they had only listened when their friends and family told them, “we’re beginning to worry about you.”
Abstinence isn’t sexy, no matter which social media influencer decides to take a public journey on the wagon. Although moderating is no big deal for a person whose alcohol problem is minor or temporary, for a real alcoholic, “dry January” is edge play.
When I fully removed alcohol from my life, I suddenly felt skinless, with all my nerves exposed to the air wherever I went. My body and mind felt like riverbanks being overrun by waves of unprocessed grief and trauma. It was necessary to find or create alternative escape routes and safety zones until new pathways developed through my interior moonscape of fading fire scars, which at some point miraculously began to fill in with new green growth.
The “E” in LCES stands for escape routes. What is an escape route? In wildland firefighting, it’s simple: Pick two directions. Face the danger. Make sure your pathway is clear, even if you have to cut your own path through chest-high brush with your saw. When first becoming sober, finding an escape route seems impossible: Alcohol is everywhere, and it feels like a social mandate. Work, sports, vacations, and activities of every kind involve the ever-present friend that one must now treat like the traitor it has become.
At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things; it is also another kind of deceptively simple escape route from the need to use a substance to deal with life’s pain. You’ve probably known people who have ultimately chosen one of the others; sickness, insanity, or death.
Phone numbers of friends who can be counted on to call back, and taking my own car to social gatherings were among the first and most effective escape routes and safety zones I developed early on. Years later, I still rely on them although recovery no longer is about the fear of drinking again. These days, I use my tools to help remain steady in a world that is often on fire and in an upheaval of its own.
The “S” in LCES stands for “safety zones.” Safety zones are meant to be large, well-considered areas easily accessed from the fireline, but in reality, they rarely are. On the ground and in life, crews learn to prepare the best they can with the resources and time they have.
When fighting fire, the last step is called cold trailing. I learned to take off my thick gloves designed to protect firefighter’s vulnerable hands from burns and feel for any remaining heat around the blackened edges of the former blaze where it bumps up against the green. Where heat is found, the hot dirt is dug up and spread, allowing it to cool. Unbelievable amounts of heat can be found sometimes in deep pockets of warm soil. All it takes is a breath of wind and one spark for a drowsing fire to be reawakened.
While I still occasionally stumble upon hidden hot spots in my sober life, it’s been many years since I’ve stopped trying to put my own fires out with alcohol. I regularly invite other seasoned sober people to help me cold trail the edges of the old burns. Together, we take up our collective tools and legacy knowledge to open up the haunted ground, exposing our still-smoldering secrets to sunlight and air. Somehow, this is how we stay sober.
It took years from the time I realized I wanted to be a wildland firefighter for me to begin to walk toward that goal, while also leaving the biggest obstacle to achieving it behind.
**
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
A global coalition of authors articulate the environmental violence of megafires by focusing on the myriad experiences of multispecies grief in their wake.
The post Multispecies Grief in the Wake of Megafires appeared first on Edge Effects.
This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on September 11, 2019.
I. Sister
For her twenty-first birthday, Kiều’s younger siblings set fire to her bed.
It was intentional, of course, and when she came home from work to find thick black smoke billowing out from under her shared bedroom door, as she stood before the remains of her pitted mattress crackling merrily in shades of red and gold, she wondered if it was time to leave at last.
This was a futile contemplation—they would have to murder her and roll her stone-cold body to a crematorium before she’d abandon them—but in the moment, her pulse leaped in time with the flames, her blood heated till she thought it might combust and melt her into fuel.
“Mai!” she screamed. The culprit could very well have been one of the boys, but no one was capable of stirring up trouble on the level of her little sister.
The pattering of plastic flip-flops reached her before Mai did. “Wow, Chị Kiều,” said Mai, tipping up her face to frown in mock concern. “You don’t look so good.”
Indeed Kiều’s eyes were blistering and tinged crimson from the smoke, and her teeth were bared in a twisting snarl. She stabbed a finger at the fire, which, while burning strong, was unnaturally contained to her half of the room. “Put it out.”
Mai pouted, though her almond eyes were gleaming in satisfaction. “I can’t put out something I didn’t start.”
Minh and Kỳ Lân materialized at the end of the hall, looking considerably more cowed at the sight of both sisters, one towering and furious, the other four feet tall and grinning. “Who?” Kiều snapped. “Which one of you little shits did this?”
Kỳ Lân, the second-oldest at fifteen, opened his mouth first to confess—which meant the culprit was quiet Minh, easily swayed and forever tucked under his older brother’s protection. “Minh,” she said. “Come here and put this out. Now.”
He shuffled forward, not meeting her eyes. The smoke parted around him, twined about his skinny legs but never touched, and when he raised his palms, still chubby with baby fat, the fire shrank as if it were a foal being coaxed, and finally sputtered out. “Sorry,” he mumbled in Kiều’s general direction. “I thought it’d be funny ‘cause we didn’t have candles or a cake.”
Kiều hadn’t the slightest inkling of how setting fire to her bed might come off as funny, but she was always softest on Minh—he so often had peculiar notions like these, and it never helped that Mai was there to play them to her advantage—and she’d just come off a ten-hour shift, and her weariness drove bone-deep. The smoke dissipated, inconsequential to their nonexistent alarms.
“Did you eat?” she said at last, addressing all three. The question was habit; it was comfort, a crutch; it signified home.
They all nodded.
“Homework?” It was a Saturday night, but a necessary follow-up. They nodded again. “Then go to bed.”
Kỳ Lân asked, “Where will you sleep?”
She glanced at Mai, at the anticipation and guilt warring across her little sister’s face. She knew Mai had hoped to get a night—tonight, of all nights—of sleeping alone. Minh’s pyromaniac idea had simply been a convenient tactic.
Kiều also knew she could repair her own bed with a wave of her hand and a bit of concentration. But she was exhausted, and her sister needed the space. “I’ll crash on the couch tonight. Go to bed now—we’re up early tomorrow.”
In the cold quiet of the living room later, unable to fall asleep, Kiều played with stars. A twitch of her fingers, wiggling them above her face the way an infant discovers its hands, and bursts of light perforated the darkness. Not exactly stars, in the astronomical sense; these were a multitude of colors, the shapes that swam across her eyelids when she rubbed her eyes too hard. Kiều watched them zing across the stucco ceiling. Tiny shreds of magic in a land otherwise devoid of it, a land intent on breaking down people like them. You had to seize such joys when you could. She liked to imagine the little powers they possessed had originated in the depths of an untamed jungle across the Pacific, where tigers ran rampant and spirits ruled the rivers and mountains, and a many-greats ancestor had been blessed or cursed with the ability to conjure fire and stars, and it had tracked their lineage across generations, across an ocean, to provide comfort in this lonely land. Immigrants who might lack in power of the institution, but whose veins ignited with an innate power all their own.
Down the hallway in their split room, Mai might have been doing the same—if she shared the same strange blood that ran in the others’ veins. Mai was their youngest sibling, of that there was no doubt, but she had never been able to raise or quell a flame, conjure sparks at her fingertips, drench a room with sudden rain. She blamed herself—no. She blamed Kiều. Especially on two particular days of the year: today, March 29, their father’s sixth death anniversary, and April 30, their mother’s third.
Kiều wasn’t around often enough to feel that blame directed at her. She blamed herself for that, too.
The photos taped on the wall above the couch crinkled and wailed as they sensed her sorrow. Only the two photos propped up on the altar in the far corner, one portrait for each parent, was framed. Pictures left to hang without barriers of glass or plastic tended to make more noise, audible only to their ears, and none of them could yet bring themselves to un-mute their parents.
“Shut up,” she muttered to the loose photos, and snuffed out the stars, and forced the sleep to draw to her like a rushing tide.
II. Younger Than
The temple was a sea of brown. Brown robes over brown skin over brown earth, from monks to nuns to regular Sunday devotees. The sea undulated with the pulse of the masses as people shuffled in and out between two meditation halls and the kitchens, chattering in rapid Vietnamese, bearing platters of homemade and temple-cooked offerings, discarding sandals at the doormats and thumping cushions on the bare wood floors. Usually Kiều would not have dragged all three children to Sunday prayers, preferring to leave them home and drop by before her shift to catch the final chants. But today’s weekly remembrance service would feature their father—and Mai knew her sister was nothing if not a dutiful daughter.
Mai bit down on her protests as Kiều shouldered a path through the crowd, instructing them all to keep their heads down. Orphans drew attention, invited sympathy. Especially at a gathering of a community with too little power and too much to prove. It’s on us to survive, Ma had said. Family means family and no one else. Subtext: dependence was a weakness when exercised outside the bonds of blood. Even Mai had understood that at eight years old. The only thing she didn’t understand was why Ma hadn’t brought her along to the supermarket that day nearly three years ago instead of Kiều, because Ma knew she was going to die, had possessed a terrifying ability to predict the time and place of a person’s death, and Ma knew Mai was not powerless, knew that her youngest daughter had been practicing bringing freshly dead little birds and mice back to life. But Ma chose Kiều—was always choosing Kiều, the hardest worker, the smartest student—and in the last desperate moments of her life, her oldest daughter was unable to save her after all.
By the time the four siblings found cushions in the back row of the meditation hall, Mai was throbbing with fury. The temple always brought this out in her. Maybe it was the constant battle of faith and loss exuded by the devotees’ breath, or the wall plastered with the wailing unframed portraits of late sangha members, or the simple fact that there was no escaping people in general. It wasn’t fair—her older siblings thrived off collective energy, siphoned threads of it to amuse themselves, perfectly at home in the community. Mai could only quash her irritability and anger, the effort blocking any possible concentration needed to resurrect even a fly. She was forever em, the younger and youngest, the pronoun connoting love but also less. Nothing she could do would ever measure up. Well—saving Ma’s life would have, but that chance, too, Kiều had stolen.
As she shifted to stretch out her sleeping feet she noticed a drop of condensation track its way across the floor. Minh brushed his index finger in an idle circle in front of his cushion, and the water answered, drawing from the exterior of cold bottles and the moisture in the walls, slowly pulled to the stirring of his finger. Kiều noticed. Said nothing. The monks leading the chant at the fore of the hall droned on and on.
Another time, Mai might have ignored them both. But yesterday’s attempt at getting Kiều to crack had been far from fruitful and the rising late morning heat broke her out in sweat and all she wanted was for Kiều to punish Minh as she would punish her, for life to finally be fair, and she was so, so close to boiling over.
Crowds and anger were blocks to her power. Fine. There were other cards to play. She was still a child, after all.
With a deep breath she threw back her head and let loose an ear-splitting wail. The intoning monks stopped short. The entire congregation twisted, still cross-legged, to stare at the little girl shrieking and weeping in the back. Kiều’s entire face blotched red. She snatched up Mai’s arm and towed her to the doors, smiling awkwardly and holding up a hand in apology, the boys hurrying after.
To Kiều’s credit, she waited until they were all piled in the battered family van before whipping around and screaming, “What’s wrong with you?”
Mai had ceased her display the moment the van door snicked shut. She glared at her sister, not knowing how to condense all her wild fraying thoughts into words on her tongue, not knowing how to say you’re not being fair, you don’t understand without sounding even more like the child she didn’t want to be.
So instead she yelled back, “I don’t want to be here! I don’t want this! I hate you!”
Kiều just clenched her jaw and faced forward and sat for a long, pregnant pause before turning the key in the ignition. The van was dead silent the whole way home.
III. Less Than
Kiều didn’t show her face at the temple for a month after Mai’s episode. And just like all the previous times when Mai had acted out in one way or another, she never brought it up again other than confiscating her dolls for a week. She had no idea how to prevent her little sister from pulling such stunts—in fact, she was fairly sure Mai no longer even played with dolls, but she had no other possessions to take away as punishment.
And so life continued as it had for the past three years. Kiều went to work, six and a half days a week. She’d gotten her AA in accounting from community college last year, and was always meaning to apply for a bachelor’s program, but there were endless bills to pay even though the mortgage itself had been covered before Ma died, and how could she leave her siblings even more alone?
Once every so often a well-meaning woman from the temple would call her, offering to babysit or inviting them to birthday parties. Kiều always declined, politely. She enjoyed being around other families, but she had also been raised to be self-sufficient. Slacking on responsibility was not, would never be, an option.
Their little house was quiet—subdued—for the next weeks, until one Friday night Kiều returned to find a large shaggy dog loping about the living room, barking like mad as the boys laughed and tossed it bits of last night’s beef.
“Mai!” she yelled immediately. “What is this?”
To her shock, Mai dashed out of their bedroom with a wide grin that was pure elation, no malice. “Chị Kiều! Look what I did!”
“What’d you do? Where’d this dog come from? Why is it—”
“His name is Tiger, and look at his left side!”
The dog slid to a halt before her, panting happily. She leaned over to peer at its side and almost gagged. There, sunken in and nearly concealed by its shaggy black fur, were undeniable tire marks of reddish-pink skin. She looked up at her little sister in horror. “Explain.”
“I’ve been practicing for years—just the little sparrows I find in the front yard sometimes, and one time a mouse—”
“Practicing … on dead animals?”
“I’m not powerless!” Mai cried in joy. “I can do what all of you can!”
“None of us can bring back the dead,” said Kiều, even as her mind whirred, dredging up terrible memories she’d worked so hard to bury—the car ride, the final words—
Mai was already frowning, withdrawing, sensing her older sister’s distress rather than the astonished pride she had hoped for. “Well, I can,” she snapped. “I found Tiger down the street coming home from the bus and Minh helped me drag him back and Kỳ Lân got home and screamed a little but I did it, I saved his life!”
“Dead things are meant to stay dead,” hissed Kiều. “We don’t understand how our own powers work—what if it took your life to revive it? How do you think I’d feel, coming home to find you dead or hurt over a dog?” Fat tears brimmed over Mai’s eyes, but Kiều drove on. “Don’t try this again. Kỳ Lân, go put the dog outside. It probably wants to go home to its family.”
“No!” screamed Mai, but Kỳ Lân silently rose and herded the dog to the door. There was no arguing with Chị Kiều when it came down to it. Fear forbade it; hierarchy permitted fear. Mai and Minh and Kỳ Lân were all little siblings after all, em to chi, loved but still lesser.
Mai let out a shriek of helpless fury. “You’re always taking things away from me!”
They all dispersed to separate corners of the house after the dog was gone.
This time, the stars were ice. Frost webbed over Kiều’s hands as she manifested the miniature stars, again sleeping on the couch to avoid Mai’s temper, and she welcomed the bite. She considered making up with her sister by getting a real dog from the pound and immediately dismissed the idea—there was no way she could afford another mouth to feed.
Was this destined to be her life? Was she doomed to play guardian to three children who weren’t hers, not exactly, until they grew up, if they grew up? They weren’t an American family, even if their passports, bound in neat navy blue after Ma and Ba passed the citizenship test, said otherwise; she couldn’t just kick them out once they turned eighteen.
A twinkling shard of ice, illuminated from within by a heatless red light, fell on her brow. She brushed it away irritably. A traitorous shred of her heart jumped at the color, even if it wasn’t the exact shade she had come to fear.
Three years ago, that icy winter day, shifting in the passenger’s seat as Ma raced down the highway to get to the supermarket before closing, Kiều’s hands had glowed red. It was sudden—one second she was staring out the window and in the next she’d glanced down and shrieked, because the only other time her palms had shone that violent crimson was when Ba was in the operating room and five minutes later the surgeon had walked out with somber, pitying eyes. Ma looked over at Kiều’s hands and an inexpressible sorrow had clouded her gaze.
“There’s a reason for everything, con,” she’d murmured to Kiều. “I can see a lot of things, most of them things I don’t want to see, but there’s no preventing what’s meant to happen.”
“Ma,” said Kiều, a sick feeling ballooning in her stomach. “What do you mean?”
Ma only gave her a small, weary smile. “Con, nhớ chăm sóc em nha.”
My child, remember to look after your little siblings.
And then the car slipped on ice to the left, into opposing traffic, and the ringing went on forever.
Lying there beneath the twisted metal, Kiều had believed she was paralyzed. But that was only the shock, the doctors told her after, because she’d escaped with not a scratch on her body. She’d never broken a bone or experienced a major injury before in her life—she’d never had an opportunity before the crash to realize she was unbreakable.
Now, with floating ice dotting the living room ceiling, her head spinning years away, Kiều squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of nice things, bland things, anything to drive away the memories: electric bills, grocery lists, Sunday pizza nights, upcoming birthday gifts—
You’re always taking things away from me.
In the chaos of the dog, that particular cry had gotten lost. Of course, Mai had meant the dog, or the dolls that had been confiscated—
Kiều recalled how Mai had begged to go to the grocery store that day, how Ma had refused with a firm and knowing glance, had chosen Kiều instead. And Kiều had turned out to be unbreakable, but Mai—Mai had turned out to be a resurrectionist.
Ma had known. Said nothing. What was more, Ma hadn’t needed to bring anyone with her in the car, if she’d known she was going to die.
The great family arsenal of guilt, ancient and brutally effective. Kiều had been drawing from the seemingly bottomless well of it ever since that day. Had used it to keep herself working, praying, moving at all times; had used it to maintain that distance between herself and her little siblings. Nhớ chăm sóc em.
She sat up and got to her feet.
There were things that needed to be said.
***
Rumpus original art by Dara Herman Zierlein.
***
A note on Vietnamese pronouns: Chị is used to address an older sister or general older woman. Em is more versatile, and can be used to address a younger sibling or general younger person (regardless of gender), though it does tend to carry a connotation of femininity. It can also be used to show affection (a boyfriend to a girlfriend, for example) or to call out a person’s lesser status in a social hierarchy.
I2P is one of the many darknets floating around (running over?) the internet and I’ve been playing around with it since, like, high school. It’s peer-to-peer, censorship resistant, and overall just super cool. And by peer-to-peer I mean that you can share files over the network (using torrents) while both remaining anonymous and not being a nuisance to other users (unlike Tor).
Also unlike Tor it doesn’t have its own “browser bundle”.
I mean, it did at one point. But then it got discontinued.
Before the browser bundle I had to rely on a manually configured secondary browser, which I am now back to doing. It’s not a majorly inconvenient process, but wow was that browser bundle very convenient.
I’ve been a die hard user of Firefox (and browsers based on/related to Firefox, like Camino or pre-Chromium Flock) since the early/mid 2000s and I have no plans to ever switch over to Chrome or its ilk. Even though the browser wars are over, I will forever continue the struggle as part of the dissident Firefox-users campaign. Sure, I have to rely on Google for plenty of other things (like my phone, calendar, contacts, cloud storage, captcha protection for this site, and so on), but they’ll never get my browser! Or email! Or web searches (mostly)!
You can have my Gecko layout engine when you uninstall it from my cold, bricked, SSD.
So obviously, I’d use something Firefox-ish for my manually configured secondary browser. And the Firefox-ish browser I’m using here is SeaMonkey; the direct descendant of the original Mozilla Application Suite which Firefox, as well as Thunderbird (which I still use as a desktop mail/RSS client), were spun off of from.
In addition to a browser, SeaMonkey includes an email (and newsgroup) client, an IRC client, an HTML editor, and an email address book.
So, why SeaMonkey? And not, like… a separate Firefox profile or container tab or something.
Well, for all their similarities (both being darknet-proxy-software things and all), I2P and Tor are different. They fill different niches, I guess. While they both have hidden services and out-proxies to the clearweb, Tor’s focus is definitely on the latter, while I2P seems to focus more on the former. And I2P’s hidden services aren’t all websites (I’m not saying all of Tor’s are though); I2P also has email, and IRC, and torrents too!
And also I’m already comfortable doing things this way. Leave me alone.
The first thing I did here was actually getting the software. I did a manual download/installation rather than relying on my machine’s package manager, because I didn’t want to have to build possibly outdated versions from the AUR that may overwrite whatever changes I made after an update. Links to download both SeaMonkey and I2P are below.
Download SeaMonkey → https://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/
Download I2P → https://geti2p.net/en/download
Like I said before, I2P hidden services aren’t all websites, but that is a large part of them, so configuring SeaMonkey’s browser was going to be necessary.
Configuring the browser is pretty straightforward. The process for SeaMonkey is more-or-less the same as the process for Firefox, the only difference being the location of where the changes needed to be made. In SeaMonkey, the Preferences are in the Edit menu, and the proxy settings will be in Proxies under the Advanced section.
And once that’s configured (and once I2P is running) the router homepage can be found here: http://127.0.0.1:7657
I will admit that it has been a bit painful when I have to run updates for SeaMonkey, as I’ve had to temporarily disable the proxy. Updates to I2P, however, are done entirely within I2P! Via torrents!
I love torrents.
Thanks to the mysterious and venerable postman, getting an I2P email address is super easy. And it works like any other email address; messages can be sent to whoever! And that ain’t just limited to other folks with I2P email addresses. It works Clearnet-to-I2P (and vice versa) as well!
I don’t really make use of the email service, because I’d really only be sending encrypted emails talking about encryption (relevant xkcd), but it’s still a useful tool for folks that need it. And by default, I2P actually has a pre-configured browser-integrated mail client that works great.
But sometimes having a dedicated(-ish) mail client is good. It’s not something I need, but still, I can do it with SeaMonkey.
If you can set up a mail client for a normal email account then you can do the same for an I2P mail account. Only POP3 works though, so that’s what I had to use; no IMAP. Also, I didn’t have to select any encryption/connection security settings because all packets being sent through I2P are encrypted anyways.
I used 127.0.0.1 as the host for both POP and SMTP over ports 7660 and 7659 respectively (as mentioned in I2P’s list of used ports). By default, these ports are tunneled to/from the mail service that postman runs, but if I wanted to use another service I can change them in the I2P tunnel settings.
I was able to configure the IRC client, Chatzilla, pretty quickly as well. It was just the matter of adding a network named irc2p, and then adding a server under that network, with the actual “server” being 127.0.0.1 and the port being 6668.
And again, no encryption/connection security settings were necessary here either because everything’s encrypted anyways.
I2P has some documentation on configuring other IRC clients that’s definitely worth a read.
Like the email service, the mentioned port (6668) is also set to tunnel to/from the a service run by postman, but I can always change this if I want (same way as the email stuff).
Since I did a manual install of both SeaMonkey and I2P, I had to do some manual work to actually set up a shortcut. I installed both pieces of software in the same directory (i2p-browser) and then wrote a bash script to, first, start the I2P router (in headless mode) and, then, start SeaMonkey. After SeaMonkey exits, I then stop the router.
FreshRSS #!/bin/bash
/path/to/my/i2p-browser/i2p/i2prouter start && wait
/path/to/my/i2p-browser/seamonkey/seamonkey && wait
/path/to/my/i2p-browser/i2p/i2prouter stopI then created a .desktop file to point at this script, and stuck it where all of those custom .desktop files go in GNOME (~/.local/share/applications/). That way a shortcut will be in my applications menu, and I can start the whole thing with one click.
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=i2p Browser
Comment=
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;Security;
Exec=bash /path/to/my/i2p-browser/i2p_browser_start.sh
Icon=/path/to/my/i2p-browser/i2p/docs/console.icoYeah, I use GNOME. Fight me.
By default, when I2P starts, it will open the router console in the default browser. Since I didn’t want this, and wanted to use SeaMonkey, I unchecked that settings in the router config.
A web browser, mail client, and IRC client. That pretty much covers everything that’s part of SeaMonkey. And once it’s all configured, it’s on to browsing the invisible internet.
But what about torrents? I’ve mentioned torrents a few times here. How am I going to start using those? Well I could try configuring my normal torrent client, Deluge, to proxy traffic through I2P using a SAM Bridge and…
I2P actually includes, by default, a browser-accessible torrent client called I2PSnark! And, because of how I2P works, it’s totally anonymous! Since, like, everything is encrypted. And also I2P is a darknet.
I2P has plenty of other cool features that I really need to explore, like anonymous git hosting. Maybe after I play around with (finally) setting up my own hidden service on I2P (they’re called eepsites) like I did with Tor I can finally do that.
Aboriginal burning regimes have become popular as a solution to prevent catastrophic wildfires in Australia. Mardi Reardon-Smith argues that Aboriginal peoples’ fire knowledge is not static and contemporary burning regimes result from colonial histories and the intercultural co-creation of environmental knowledges.
The post When Aboriginal Burning Practices Meet Colonial Legacies in Australia appeared first on Edge Effects.
A 30-year-old gentleman tried to steal gas while smoking a cigarette but, predictably, his ill-conceived stunt blew up in his face.
The Washington man was siphoning gas from another person's vehicle when the gasoline caught fire, not only totaling the car but also damaging the siding of the victim's house. — Read the rest
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
People gathered for a vigil for Abigail Zwerner, the first-grade teacher who was shot at Richneck Elementary School.
In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.
We were still in Colorado when we booked a first appointment with a realtor in Rhode Island. In the hour before our video call, my husband suggested we make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features in a house. He wrote “3 BR” in the must-have column on a page in his notebook, because we each wanted our own office, then leaned back in his chair. “Built-in bookshelves would be nice,” he said. We’ve always wanted built-in bookshelves. We didn’t yet know we were going to run out of space in the shipping container we’d rented and would have to throw out all the shelves we owned. “A fireplace,” he added thoughtfully. I went into my strident mode, a part of my bad personality that for some reason I cannot change. “A fireplace isn’t optional!” I said, taking the pen and writing “fireplace” in the must-have column. “I’m not going to buy a house without a fireplace.”
We’d spent eleven years in Denver, all in the same apartment, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because every year, when our lease renewal came up, we never felt much like moving. We had moved out there from Boston with eighty or ninety boxes of books, and we didn’t want to pack them up again. We kept hitting that snooze button. Finally John convinced me to move back to New England—he was born in Connecticut, and he never stopped missing it, the trees and the stone walls and all that. What pushed us over was the housing market, which was more reasonable in Providence than in Denver. John kept showing me listings for adorable Colonials with mortgage payments not much higher than our rent. They looked cozy, and I thought I could be happy in New England if we had a little house to settle down in—one last move for us and for the books—if we could cozy up together on a couch and read by the fire.
We drove across the country at the end of March 2022, arriving in John’s hometown in early April—an old mill town in Southeastern Connecticut, an hour from Providence. Our plan was to stay with his mother for a few months. This had a dual purpose. We’d save money on rent and recoup the costs of moving while we looked for a permanent place to live. We could also help Linda with some things around the house, and keep her company—John’s father had died the previous fall. We felt useful, helping her clean out the basement, which had flooded the previous summer, and manage the yard, and so did she—on nights when we had to work late, Linda made dinner.
It’s strange to return. I lived in Boston in my twenties, and now I’m in my forties. One weekend in April we visited friends in Cambridge, then stopped in Harvard Square to buy Linda a Mother’s Day present. There was still a bitter chill in the wind that morning, and as we drove around looking for a spot to leave the car, we kept passing places where I remembered being cold. Once I slipped on some ice coming out of a bar on Mass Ave. It must have been 2007. There was frozen, jagged snow all over the sidewalks, and I tore my jeans and scraped up my knees and the palms of my hands. A couple days later I got food poisoning—it was particularly miserable, vomiting while down on my wounded knees.
During the spring and into summer, whenever anybody asked me how the house hunt was going, I’d make the same unfunny joke. We’re facing two problems, I’d say, and they’re related. The places we like, we can’t afford, and the places we can afford, we don’t like. During the nine or so months between our decision to move and the actual move, housing prices had gone up something like 25 percent. We had told our realtor the absolute top of our range. A week or so later, he asked for a reminder of that figure, quoting back a number fifty thousand dollars higher than the one we’d given him. I didn’t know how to respond. The places in our price range lacked our must-have features, to say nothing of nice ones. I felt like a fool.
When I was twelve or so, my parents converted their wood-burning fireplace to gas. The idea was that it would be so much easier to light and extinguish that we’d use it more often. But the fireplace lost almost all of its appeal. It no longer gave off any real heat, and it didn’t smell delicious—it didn’t smell like anything—and worst of all, it didn’t crackle. I love the sound of a wood fire, and I got through many a winter in that Denver apartment by burning a special kind of candle with a crackling wooden wick, and by playing ASMR white noise videos on YouTube with names like “Cozy Reading Nook Ambience” and, my favorite, “Crackling Campfire on the Windy Tundra of Norway.” My family’s new gas fireplace offered no drama. As Jun’ichirō Tanizaki once wrote of electric heaters, “without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost.” After the conversion we only lit a fire once a year, on Christmas, and in a perfunctory fashion. In Providence, I thought we might have to settle for a gas fireplace. But most houses we looked at had no fireplace at all. And with interest rates increasing, we couldn’t afford those houses either.
It was a world-historically terrible time to try to buy property. People kept saying that prices were bound to come down eventually, so we decided to wait. We had a place to live. I thought I could do it—not indefinitely, maybe, but almost indefinitely. Then in October I sprained my ankle; I was on crutches for a week, and wore an orthopedic boot for several more. I missed long walks desperately. My anxiety ratcheted up. We told our realtor we’d start looking again after the holidays. Around Thanksgiving I started having nocturnal panic attacks—I’d wake up with a shock, like I’d been shocked with a defibrillator, then start sobbing uncontrollably. I listened to a podcast about why people cry—there’s a theory that it serves a social function more than anything else. Literally, a cry for help. In December we both got COVID—for the first time, somehow—and had to cancel our trip to Texas to see my parents. On my third day of COVID, I threw out my back and cried laughably hard. The tears seemed to actually leap from my eyes—projectile tears. I am sometimes amazed by the depths of my own self-pity.
One good thing about time passing is, you get to watch It’s a Wonderful Life again. My mother-in-law had never seen it, so we all watched it together. I’ve seen it dozens of times, but on this occasion I heard a line I’d never noticed before. George is trying to explain to his father that he doesn’t want to stay in the family business, which is a building and loan association. “I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office,” he says. “I want to do something big and something important.” His father says, “You know, George, I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.”
Roof and walls and fireplace. I thought of philosophers and their furniture: Plato’s “chairness,” Wittgenstein’s disappearing chair: “I say ‘There is a chair’. What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight.? —‘So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion’.” Not all houses have a fireplace, but I read somewhere that when children draw houses they often add a chimney with smoke coming out. I remember doing this myself, the chimney coming out of a pitched roof, though our own roof was flat. I remember believing that snow smelled like fire, because every time it snowed, I smelled woodsmoke in the air.
There’s a big stone fireplace at Linda’s, and ever since the clocks changed, once or twice a week John will ask me, in his soothing voice, Would you like me to build you a fire tonight? I’ll open a book but only look at it part of the time, because I love looking at a fire. If there’s a TV on in a bar, I’ve noticed, and there almost always is, the movement pulls your eye to it, no matter how boring what’s on is. A fire is the same, but a fire is never boring. It’s mysterious that it isn’t. Or maybe it’s not mysterious. It’s this miracle life-giving thing you can build in your house, the same thing cave people built in their caves. I have not lived a day without a sunset, but a sunset is never boring. Apart from being beautiful, it reminds you there’s a giant ball of fire in the sky and we only see it half the time. The transitions remain interesting.
Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance, out from Soft Skull in September 2022, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the “On Poetry” column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.
The shooting at Richneck Elementary School on Jan. 6 prompted school officials to install metal detectors at all school buildings in the district.
