“… It’s not an ot3 quite yet at this point and Drift kind of backs off. Then the war stuff happens. Drift doesn’t have much contact with either at that point, but I might reconsider that now if I ever actually write this…”
Leah Penniman made it her goal to start a farm for her neighbors, and to provide fresh food to refugees, immigrants and people affected by mass incarceration.
Leah Penniman (left) and Amani Olugbala tend to beans at Soul Fire Farm.
Leah Penniman was told she wasn’t welcome, from her first day in a conservative, almost all-white kindergarten.
She enjoyed learning and did well, but she also found solace in the natural world.
Penniman later got a summer job farming in Boston, and she was hooked. She learned about sustainable agriculture and the African roots of those practices, but she also moved to Albany, N.Y., to a neighborhood classified as a food desert. To get fresh groceries from a farm share, she walked more than two miles with a newborn baby in a backpack and a toddler in the stroller, then walked back with the groceries resting on top of and around the sleeping toddler.
She made it her goal to start a farm for her neighbors, and to provide fresh food to refugees, immigrants and people affected by mass incarceration. She calls the lack of access to fresh food “food apartheid” because it’s a human-created system of segregation.
Penniman and her staff at Soul Fire Farm, located about 25 miles northeast of Albany, train black and Latinx farmers in growing techniques and management practices from the African diaspora, so they can play a part in addressing food access, health disparities, and other social issues. Penniman’s new book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, details her experiences as a farmer and activist, how she found “real power and dignity” through food, and how people with zero experience in gardening and farming can do the same.
I will admit, the one modern fandom complaint that instantly turns me into Salty Old Grandma is when people complain that the top-kudosed fic for their fandom/pairing (or the one that updates most often, or however they prefer to sort stories on AO3) is one they hate, and they always have to scroll past it.
Like.
Children. Children.
Let me take you back to 1995, when you’d have to visit about fifteen different WEBSITES before you found one that did fic at all, paging through endless discussion boards and galleries of blurry screenshots that took eight minutes to load, pursued from site to site by endless loops of autoplayed miditunes, to eventually find – in flickering rainbow text against a black background, on a site that automatically turned your cursor into a comet whether you wanted it to or not – the same story you’d discovered last week. And hated.
And then you’d read it anyway in sheer desperation.
(And I’m well aware that that experience would have been considered sheer luxury by the generation before me, who were sending mimeographed zines to each other through the post.)
But please. Tell me again how annoying it is to scroll past the top fic on your list of 17,688 carefully tagged fics. :p
(Psst, Drift/Ratchet/Pharma anon – I’m really sorry but I’ve got a part 1, part 2, part 4, and part 5 from you. No part 3. I don’t suppose you kept a draft? :/)
Ooooh, but I really like this idea! That is absolutely something Tarantulas would do. He thinks what Prowl’s doing is just inspired, but since Prowl’s so concerned about seeming squeaky-clean in front of all those other, small-minded Autobots – well, how will he react when his own brothers find out?
I think Side Burn might actually feel more betrayed. He’s the one who was always accepting and supportive when Prowl needed him, but supporting his big brother through anxiety and burnout is very different from standing by him when it turns out he’s been doing terrible things – to Autobots and neutrals as well as Decepticons, no less. Especially if Prowl was in any way an influence on Side Burn to join up as an Autobot, that’s got to sting. X-Brawn, by contrast, might feel a weird sense of relief – like, it’s bad, it’s very bad, but he always knew there was something, and at least now he knows what. (But he’d very much expect Prowl to at least want to do better, and would probably be disgusted if they got out, only for Prowl to say that he had no intention of changing.)
He lived to be 95, but his creations will long outlive him in the minds of those who love them. His work has become an inextricable part of our cultural mindset, and that is no small legacy.
Chromedome/Pharma would be especially fascinating, given Pharma’s similarity to Prowl in a lot of ways (temperament, turn of mind, even looks to an extent). I think that Pharma might even have been good for Chromedome back in the day. It seems like he did have a strong sense of ethics, once, before his time at Delphi broke him, and he may well have had Thoughts about Chromedome’s injecting and what it was doing to him, physically and mentally. I love the idea of Pharma braving his boss’s wrath to stand up for Chromedome’s health.
Drift/Ratchet/Pharma has me very intrigued. Would it be a pre-war thing, like, Ratchet and Pharma are in an established relationship and one night Ratchet brings home this half-starved little slip of a thing from the Dead End? Or could we be talking about post-war, post-Delphi hurt/comfort, with Ratchet nursing a repentent Pharma under Drift’s watchful optic… or even a wartime AU, with Pharma dealing with the fact that one of the most dangerous Decepticons has an obvious crush on Pharma’s husband? Because yes, to all of these. 🙂 (And now I’m thinking Drift/Ratchet/Pharma/Tarn…)
I’m definitely a Prowl & Pharma BrOTP fan, but I’m also now intrigued by the idea of Starscream & Pharma – I mean, it absolutely makes sense, fliers who’ve been told their whole function that they’re only good for war or transport, fighting for the chance to pursue careers in science. I wonder whether it would have ended up with Starscream pulling Pharma into the Decepticons along with him…
Decepticonsensual's Armada 