forestofglory

For the first time I'm offering to create something for the Fandom Trumps Hate charity auction! I'm offering to create an annotated bibliography related to Chinese history. If you ever wished I would go down a research rabbit hole and tell you about it now is your chance!

See more here

I made some different Tang dynasty doll hanfu same shirt but I made a different skirt and added a jacket. I'm thinking about try and Hufu/cross dressing look next but I'm not sure how the collar is supposed to look. (I also might try making something me sized at some point)

Today at ladybusiness I posted Chinese History Starter Pack with lots of recs for cool books and papers to read if you are interested in Chinese history but don't have a lot of background knowledge.

It was nice to take a break for writing my fic WIP which has been a struggle in multiple ways, and work on this which came to me pretty easily. (Now to avoid working on my fic I'm writing an annotated bibliography for it)

I’ve been thinking about race and the landscape, and how one can and can’t see race in my neighborhood. I live in the hills, in a neighborhood of big houses on big lots. If you stand between two houses can see the Golden Gate Bridge. In the way of expensive neighborhoods in the US not many Black people live here. Still when I take a walk there’s not much that I see that makes me think about race. The most notable things are the Black Lives Matter yard signs.

It seems quiet and calm. But of course this is a landscape that hides a lot of racial conflict.

You have to teach yourself to see the history of the neighborhood. Some things are easier to learn than others. You can learn to look at a building and guess when it was built. You can learn something similar with street plans, to see a grid of streets or cul-du-sacs and know when the town was planned. It’s trickier to put that together with the history of racial conflict and see who might have been excluded.

Here, maps can help. For most major US cities you can find a Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) map from the New Deal era. These “Red lining maps'' show where the government and banks would make loans, and where they wouldn’t. Looked at today, these maps show society’s systemic disinvestment in non-white neighborhoods. On the HOLC map my calm, green neighborhood was rated A1, the best possible rating, colored green on the map. Meanwhile my city's downtown was rated D, the worst rating, and colored red. You can’t see this as easily when you’re walking through my neighborhood, but it matters. It shapes the city.

What you can see on the ground is a history of investment in my neighborhood. We have nice sidewalks, well maintained streets, good street lights. This is the kind of investment nice white neighborhoods get.

You can also see race in the lack of police presence; there’s a combined police and fire station that I sometimes walk by, but unless I’m right in front of the station, I never see cops on my walks.

Going back further and further into the past, racism is still here. This land is the home of the Ohlone people. The Ohlone are still here, but the way they relate to the land and the land itself have changed. Before settlers came, there was vastly different landscape. It’s hard to see that landscape in the neighborhood I walk through. There is a glimpse -- in the shape of the hills. In the live oaks and redwoods that grow among all the introduced tree species. But not in the hard sidewalks and paved roads. Not in the clear property lines and title deeds. When I walk, I often stop to admire the oaks, but I don’t often think about the people who once depended on their acorns for food.

It's easy to walk around my neighborhood and forget racism that destroyed the Olhone's land and redlined this neighborhood for investment and others for decay all this history. But these days I’m trying to see, and to remember.

Today I found a really cool graphic essay about restoration and wilderness its called Knowing Prairies.

As you might remember I've studied ecology and environmental history and am pretty interested in how people think about wilderness. I thought this comic was a great introduction to the topic. It is not long only about five pages so check it out if that interests you.