shopping watch list

[haptalaon]

One really good thing that's happened in my life is, we've had a stroke of economic good fortune - & when you're in the sort of life situation I'm in, one never really stops being precarious (but is anyone, really, ever more than one run of bad luck away from that? Some people are just more aware of it than others) - I'm frightened by an impending visit by my landlord, because he could make various decisions which swallow the fortune hole.

Still, yeah it's kinda nice to look at consumerist culture like "oh wow, I get to be involved in this now?". And like, a sigh of relief, that maybe I don't need to make all my decisions from a place of terror. I still think most shopping is like. a profound moral outrage. but the sense of alienation that comes from living outside of consumerism is really intolerable - it's a good position politically and spiritually, but emotionally and interpersonally not so much. A lot of the time, it's just constraint, and I spend so much time in a cold panic about that I can't make good use of its beneficial opportunities. Like, I can think about ways I want to expand.

Digital Storage

I have my stuff on my laptop, a spare laptop, the website and a single hard drive, which isn't secure, given the time I've put into it and importance it carries. My backup hardrive is rated for 3 years and I've had it for at least 10. As they say, one backup is none and two is one. The general rule is Three backups, Two different formats, One offsite.

This is expensive, but I think it needs to be the highest priority. I think I'm going to get this asap, because why wait. I've managed to dig out a 2008 hard drive from a defunct computer and rig it up as an expansion drive. This is also a very precarious storage media (it's old, it's been bashed about in a box) - but all I need is for it not all to fail on me at once. Two laptops, two external hard drives, one website and this blog is adequate coverage, if I'm careful.

Shed

So I got this shed to use as a little ritual getaway shrine, & its trashed. It was standing in situ, but the lowest planks have rotted away, & it's uncertain whether I can get it back up. I don't want to buy new objects if I can absolutely help it, but I'm struggling to skip-dive wood and nobody is giving it away for free. The minimum number of planks to make the base stable is, I think, essential. & I feel like oh no, this is going to be a stealth-very-expensive project by the time it's all done. But I need it out of my psyche and space.

As part of this, I really need one of those cutting benches to handle wood safely, as I've been doing all sorts of DIY hacks for years like strapping wood to the bedframe, & that's clearly good for neither the bed, the wood nor me.

I can order wood online, which might be the thing to do as our car's was taken out in a crash & I can't risk scraping the hire car.

Watercolours

My watercolor palette has rotted & I don't think I can safely use any of the paints any more, although I confess I would be tickled if some of my oracle cards began to fester and blossom and come to life.

It's a proper bind not having them, as making cards is one of the low-spoons high-chill things I'm quite good at settling down to. I have a set of inks, so maybe this is my sign from the universe to get better at using them. All the same - I know Rackham used inks, but I find it hard to dull them down for earth tones. My painting isn't great and I want a familiar tool.

I'm waiting for a Cass Art sale. I also need card protectors for what I've already painted, and I'm working on making a cardboard box. I've recently developed an incredible papier mache technique which is just layers of cereal packet and tacky glue, which becomes phenomenally strong with very little effort and time.

Warmth

Winter is coming, & I've been saving these glorious mats of sheepwool all year. I need to get some 100% wool fabric because I've got this vision of like, quilted body-hugging vaguely Medieval jerkins to allow us to retain core body warmth but still move around during the winter. Last year was horrifying, properly like, somebody might die cold. I could feel the heat seeping away from my body.

I really loathe the popularity of 'polyester clothes are good because some people can't afford natural texties :(' online. They're not good, what you're describing is a shit tradeoff. People need and deserve clothes that do the job they're designed for.

A good way to get into the real textiles game is that a second hand 100% wool military blanket is around £30, and mine was and is a lifechanging thing. I use it in place of a coat. I sleep on it when hiking. It's the most important thing in my life, I'd grab it first in a fire.

This is a high priority - it's going to come sooner than I think, and the cold last year was disabling, I just couldn't do anything, so when the night draws in will be too late. I've also got some wood in the shed I was going to make a medieval bed canopy from, old technologies to keep the warmth in the dark.

Shoes

There's holes in my hiking boots, which are now 6 years old. The top priority has always been my husband's shoes, but I'm walking more than I used to now, and at some point it'll be a problem. They don't keep water out any more.

Bivvy etc

I planned to go rambling this year but it's been one thing after another. I want a portable hiking then sleeping kit - something pleasurable to carry, but gives me the freedom to bed down anywhere.

The issue here is that you trade off weight for cost, but i do have the sense that I would be using it frequently. I don't want something so weighty it takes the fun out of the rambling. I've idly wondered if I could get a small pony. I also struggle to sleep under a lightweight cover, I need my big feather duvet.

All religious practices have goals - like, zen meditation is for achieving enlightenment, for example. The combined goal of Walking and Disconnection is to spend all your time outside and getting weird about it. I think this is closer to doable than i think, at least compared to the average person. & I think the freedom to just walk, and worry later about how I get home, is going to be transformative. This intersects with the warmth, developing a set of functional gear to deal with the elements.

i really want to get this second hand because I know people are giving up on their expensive camping investments all the time, & I don't ever want to buy new if it's viable to avoid it. But everything on gumtree round here is like, the 6 person tent with all the trimmings.

Driving

They cancelled my driving test 5 times last year; still, I'm ambivalent about learning, I want and would use that freedom, which is perhaps a good reason not to have it.

Ritual Garb

At my last rite, i really felt the absence of a costume. I'm not wholly clear what I want to look like - I want it to 'pass' as both normal and otherworldly, my village is too small to go about in fancy dress, and I want to heighten my experience but don't want to feel LARPy. I do magic in the here and now, and so I want my look to be a little bit of a glamourbomb within the contemporary.

I think my vision for it...because it's not going to be robes, and I don't think I can be a elf princess or girl witch for much longer...is maybe like, scruffy wanderer, wandering wizard. A bit Odin, a bit Michael Palin In Worzel Gummidge, a bit bardic bad boy - lots of layers, practical, the historic answer to being a tactical camo gear bro. In short: Strider. The work clothes of a ranger.

No new clothes and minimal plastics is one of my non-negotiables - I've only bought underpants new since like 2015 and I love that record.

Books

I've had Shauna Aura Knight's Ritual Facilitation on every birthday list for literally years & I think it's just time to get it for myself. It's on my mind because I recently permanently missed out on some books in that category, & that will remain a regret. I was crushed by the abrupt closure of Network Television, one of my first treat money stops for years - they published the back catalogue of forgotten British telly, and goodness knows how hard those things will be to find now, the wrong mix of worthless and forgettable and utterly unpiratable, precicely because nobody really cares. I also want to read The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology & the English Folk Revival by Georgina Boyes.

Plants

Landlord has been hassling me about the garden - we've been here 5 years, I can maybe take a risk on buying some plants. I'm not a great gardener and my problem in the past has always been the ongoing expense of it, it's never ending needing new pots and soil and this and that, which is why I've embraced wildlife gardening (& never been happier).

Still - there are a couple of beds which I'd like to put some witch plants in. I'm looking round the neighbourhood for plants to, uh, borrow: I've nabbed some lavender to try and get it to grow, and I've always wanted a hawthorn.

Handicrafts

I want more subtly pagan old lady handicrafts in my house - cushion covers and cross-stitches - but I nee d a better sense of what designs I want first, & I want to find these second hand or independent-local-organic, for miasmic reasons. I find when we talk about Bad Consumerism, we tend to gravitate towards things with the wrong aesthetic - Funko Pops - but it's all bad, and handicrafts can seem non-bad because at least you're intervening in the production process a little bit, but I suspect that's less impactful than one wants it to be.

Home Server

Storage decays when it's used, and preserves better when it's being moved & accessed as infrequently as possible. Now I've got my radio station running, I want to enjoy it, but that means accessing my storage device all the time. I think the best model is music in one location, and streamable, and everything else on my two spare drives.

Music can ultimately be replaced so long as I have a list of the albums, & I do need to periodically make lists of what are on my playlists. I wrangle RA by using tags. Playlists stop working if you move the music files and folders about, which I tend to do - I like it to be neat on the File Explorer level. Instead, on MediaMonkey I have a custom metadata field set up - Fenvibes - and when a song strikes me as notable, I add it using the structure [fen0tag], so fen0lammas or fen0landmother. These write to the files, and then I can generally search in any music program to get my playlists back and fully updated. I'm working on a how-to which will explain how to then turn that playlist into a HTML text based list (in other words, so losing the music files isn't a total loss)

The goal of the home server would therefore be twofold - to preserve the longevity of my other storage devices, and also facilitate just chucking on some music without interacting with devices which might draw me away from the body and the day. At the same time, this is more in the 'want' category. I think this is like, in the Black Friday zone.

in my heart, what I want is a real home server which could serve the actual Radio Astercote to allcomers and self-host the website. There are legal issues with this, & it seems to be one of those things you can get away with right up until the moment you can't. But I feel so much longing for, like, the elegance of sleepbot or the tactility of the setup that msx.gay has, truly things of deep desire to me.

Sound System

I've been pinning all my dreams on running free parties (and possibly rituals), for which I need to bring the sound, but I also want the sound in my own space to be as beautiful as it can be. This will be expensive far beyond my means and also beyond my skill, so I'm not really sure what to do. I want to watch films and get inside them through sound.