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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m going through Robert Brightwell’s Flashman tales: prequels to George MacDonald Frasier’s Flashman book, featuring the original protagonist’s uncle.

    They are very well researched (as were GMF’s) and generally engaging, but having just finished Flashman and Madison’s War, I found it to be the waekest so far - lacking a strong narrative thread to tie the scattered, episodic historical events together. The next in the series is Flashman’s Waterloo, which shouldn’t have that problem.

    I am very pleased to see how Brightwell has updated the original conceit - taking the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays and using him as a mouthpiece to entertainingly deconstruct the Victorian boy’s-own colonial genre - to fit a more modern audience, whilst retaining the spirit of the originals.



















  • My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

    My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

    So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren’t many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

    I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

    Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.