@katerosebee.bsky.social
(she/her) digital security for movements with Digital Defense Fund, building a research and community space in the PNW, rural privacy advocate, editor of the Skamania Dispatch, horror weirdo.
I use the fine dice on the croc chop to make Japanese-style egg salad. I mix the yolks/sauce part in the main container and then just slap-chop the whites into it in those perfect little cubes. A bizarrely fancy one dish meal!
It is wild how actually useful this croc chop is. I get a perfect cube and dice on veggies and other things in like, seconds. ototodesign.com/products/cro...
My new Purity Litmus Test for any Democrat in politics is to at least talk like uhh this cato institute gentleman
Now they’ve got me thinking about an Antifa Hallmark movie, an organizing romcom: Love Signals.
Life in rural America: our sheriff installing flock cameras, local defense drone companies testing their optical tracking tech on our towns, govt agencies scrubbing us down with viewshed software for violations, conservation org volunteers driving around to photograph our homes for violations.
The American West is so governed by people's perceived right to a beautiful view, and yet these same places are where they put things they don't wish to look at, like dumps, data centers, jails. The conflict is staggering, and rolled together with use of surveillance tech to enforce aesthetic rule.
Our nation's wealthiest people move out to places like Jackson Hole or here in the Gorge, buy sprawling tracts of land, assemble a ring of "conservation easements" around themselves to enforce their perceived right to absolute privacy. They then complain about how a nearby trailer park is ugly.
How badly I want to report on the conflict ripping across the American West around "what is privacy?"
How rich people use affinity for protecting public lands as a way to enforce their privacy, how rural communities want privacy but are easy to surveil, where surveillance tech is built and tested.
We had an entire colony of tuxedo cats on the mountain that we had to catch one by one and find them homes, some of them her grandkittens. Fanciest feral colony ever. 😅
in case you've never seen it, this is Roger Ebert on The Mummy
No thoughts, just kibble. I truly do not know how she survived outside by herself for 3 years.
My (formerly feral, always thinks she's starving) cat keeps bonking her face into her automatic kibble dispenser, thinking somehow she can dislodge more kibble.
The only result is that she sometimes gives herself a bloody nose from smashing her face too hard, and I don't know how to get her to stop!
A municipality in the rural parts, but that can look a bunch of different ways depending on where you are. Ex: I am in an unincorporated town, and we are struggling against extremely strict UGB-type rules that exclude us from adding a lot of what we need to function.
An estimated 2% of my rural county's residents are unhoused, many of them trying to shelter in public forests.
We have some of the strictest urban growth boundary regulations in the country. People literally die waiting for homes, and I just wish we were allowed to solve our own problems.
I support vacancy taxes, but a person currently living and working in a rural area about to be priced out of their rent can't just then move to an urban center on the hope that taxes will free up an empty house soon.
When people fight housing development in rural areas, saying, "New housing will only be allowed inside Urban Growth Boundaries," and then people in the urban centers say, "No new housing. Go away, we're full," then what is anyone supposed to do?
Bellingcat analysis makes a strong case that a US tomahawk hit that girl's school in Iran, contrary to U.S. government claims
www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...
Clothing production is also a leading industry in consumption of water, and makes about 5-7% of global waste in landfills.
Mechanical looms are still deeply necessary to our world, and why who owns the profit of tech advancements, conditions of labor are as salient as they ever were for Luddites.
The callbacks to the luddites during AI discussions are more apt I think than people realize. Mechanized looms indeed changed the world, and have made much of our modern life possible, and certainly that is why the labor conflicts they raised were as real and urgent!
There are states where they're trying to identify ideal renewable wind/solar corridors and improve the amount of permitting fast lanes for projects, incl transmission lines - where we are most behind bc of multiple jurisdictions. I'd love to see cities do the same across their zoning categories!
And trust me, I think local zoning laws should change to make it easier to do distributed solar. But I want people to have some curiosity about why it's one of the principle barriers to renewable energy goals. It's why it takes ~10 years to start a solar project on one property in one jurisdiction!
People love to say instead of solar farms we should "put solar on buildings and over parking lots."
It's a nice idea, but we generally don't because the amount needed for grid-scale generation would invite an impressive pileup of permits for dozens of private properties, easements, jurisdictions.
If you see a message from “Signal Support Bot”, no you didn’t
I get it, people used to have very little sense of the consequences of clear cutting v plantation forestry.
In the first pic you can see how bald our area was when steam ships consumed 2 cords of wood an hour. People planted back in, added oaks (we added vine maples) and it really did recover.
Exactly. I get that so much of the fear and caution was built out of real ecosystem destruction. Grateful for how much has and continues to change for the better.
I think that’s it. I get that it looks shocking, but it’s a 25-50 year rotation. And we often have so little idea of how much we live around was what just grew back in the late 20th century ex: when we stopped deforesting to fuel steam power.
How much timber we can harvest in America is extremely regulated, to the point where poor rural timber counties like mine are given (highly volatile, sadly politicized) grants to NOT harvest, putting our schools constantly on a knife’s edge of closing when the republicans slack on reauthorizing.
I live in a county where almost all of the land is owned by the Fed, and the US Forest Service logs it for cash too! We have human emotional reactions to the harvested parts but really, it does grow back. It captures even more carbon, and grows unique cycles of native plants as it does so.
I don’t like getting in people’s mentions about it, but I have to wonder: if you’re against logging (which has come a long way in terms of legal compliance and science-backed sustainability practices) what do you think your house is made of? Where does the next house come from? “Somewhere else?”
Both of them.