First post etc. Welcome!

Posted by akatookey on Jul 17, 2025

Hello, it’s my birthday! Welcome to our comradery! This first post will be an explainer and an example for things you can expect here!

Who are you?

Hi, I’m vidhya! I’ve been organizing in and around Southeast MI ever since coming out in 2016 (banger year for leaving the closet). I’ve worked across a variety of issue areas, like labor, climate justice, abolition, etc, in many different coalitional spaces, with many different tactics. I’m explicitly an anti-capitalist, abolitionist, anarchist, and work to prefigure those values in my day to day life rather than treating them as distant political vision.

When I’m not doing political work, I make crosswords! I have been featured at puzzmo, and in the "A Trans Person Made Your Puzzle" charity pack, which I am immensely proud of. I also brew terrible pokemon teams, organize social deduction games, and am a horrible gossip. I’ve also taken up streaming! I mostly play cute indie games and love puzzlers, deckbuilders, and games that are good attempts at leftist messaging.

Why should I support you?

I have currently been unemployed for just over two years after a particularly bad year-long stint with COVID. Despite being a finalist for over a third of the jobs I’ve applied to, nothing has stuck, and paid organizing and facilitating work is getting harder and harder to come by.

My class positionality allows me to take on debt, so between that and the generosity of some friends, I’ve been able to scrape by. However it’d be nice to not feel so guilt ridden about buying things for myself or feel like I am drowning in anxiety when I’m paying bills. If you are deciding between this project and local mutual aid, I highly recommend the local mutual aid, however if you have disposable income and want to support my activism, other work, and life, consider this project!

What do I get?

Great question!

• At the free newsletter tier you can expect:
  • Updates about streams, published puzzles, ways to plug in to movement work, and polished articles I think will be valuable to everyone.
• At every paid tier you can expect:
  • Semi-regular posts about things I’m thinking about and doing. Having a paid platform (maybe ironically) makes it easier to care less about writing being pristine and will enable me to do a lot more of it!
• At the 15 dollar tier you can expect:
  • Some sort of (probably virtual) hangout once a month with me! Here are some ideas, but I’m open to most anything:
    • Learn about politics together
    • Share my own political beliefs
    • Collaboratively navigate the worldly grief we all feel regularly
    • Think through what resistance can look like for us
    • Advice for conflict resolution
    • Coaching for organizing/facilitation
    • Playing games or doing puzzles together :3
• What if I want to give you MORE money
  • I am working on accepting kindnesses offered, so dm me and we’ll talk about what a tier can look like for you!

What are you up to right now? (Paid tier example)

A lot of my time has gone into Stop the Data Center (Insta, Bsky), a community based project to prevent construction of a $1.2 billion AI and Quantum research laboratory on forested land locally. Los Alamos is driving the project, largely focused around classified security research. There is a planned second lab for public facing research, but we know it’s a fig leaf, because they themselves have stated that the classified research will consume 100MW of power as compared to the 10MW from the public lab. 110MW is enough to power roughly 5500 homes, and our local power provider DTE, is joining the project to build them their own substation. This will of course, weaken the rest of the grid and draw away necessary work on grid maintenance and upgrades. The power outages here are rough.

We know that every 100 words chatGPT composes costs a bottle of water. Umich has said they plan to use municipal water, and not draw from the Huron River (which runs around the proposed site). This makes sense, but they have been less clear about what will happen with the water after the cooling process. They promise to not dump it by the river, but if that’s the case, why demand river adjacent land in the first place?

Beyond the environmental impact of course, there is the fact that it is quite close to residential neighborhoods who will have to deal with the noise and light. They’ve also promised 200 jobs that pay over 200,000 each, but these will largely be remote. If they aren’t, it’ll be massive knowledge-based gentrification, exacerbating the already horrific housing crisis caused by the university.

Also, of course, this is Los Alamos. While they have done medical research under other administrations, we know through DOGE firings that most of that research has been cut in favor of security and war centric research. If the atomic bomb was the first big revelation of Los Alamos, none of us want to be the home of the next.

Personally, I have been working on narrative and messaging, along with making sure that some of our larger meetings are successful. Our group is designed like a spokescouncil, with different spokes taking on tactics that are meaningful to them. These include disruption, creating music, engaging with ecology and nature, lobbying local politicians, doing media work, and more. I like this design because it creates a large space for a diversity of tactics, politics, and visions. Nobody interferes with each other’s work, and we all support each other’s working groups however we can. The intentionality behind this spokescouncil model has made an intergenerational organizing space where everyone can feel included, and it’s dope to be one of hundreds working against this monstrosity. I haven’t felt this sense of fulfillment in my political work in a while, nor have I felt this positive about an organizing campaign’s chance of success (more on that in a future post, perhaps).

Other than work against this data center, I’ve also been learning about and brainstorming what real immigrant defense can look like, which also feels tremendously useful. If we are, as is often said, in the time of Nazis, then it’s time to do what we can to resist genocides.

Also, boobs not bombs is a cool movement.

What have you been thinking about lately? (Paid tier example)

Parking lot for later: If you are particularly interested in any of these, or want me to talk about anything else, let me know!

1. Mutual aid vs. charity
2. Groverhaus as an analogy to the psyche of whiteness
3. “What can I possibly do right now?”
4. What words get to be interesting in crosswords (thinking about the work of “Indian garment” vs “French hat”)
5. Being a leftist in a large leftist signal group chat
6. Sustainable movement work (resistance campaigns’ ups and downs vs persistent, caring non-campaign work)
7. Organizing as losing to win

Daybreak as a game of hope:

I’ve had fun with Daybreak every time I’ve played it, but something has deeply nagged me about its presentation. In Daybreak, players represent different global powers (China, Europe, USA, and everywhere else) cooperatively working to address the looming existential threat of climate change. Like Leacock’s more well known game, Pandemic, the ominous problem gets worse and worse until players turn a corner and acquire enough resources to outpace it.

Players build up engines using different technologies represented by cards, all visible on their website. As the game progresses, players will stack technologies to collect symbols, which will lose the abilities of old technologies in order to make future technologies more powerful. For example, one might choose to sacrifice their “women’s empowerment” ability to use those symbols for “carbon capture and storage.”

That’s obviously one of my major problems. By being equally represented by cards and by being replaceable mechanically, each action loses meaning. When I played, I was just playing a game, and not interfacing with any learning. I didn’t think twice about the implications of overwriting one tech with another. Further, in real life, the technologies aren’t weighted equally either. Carbon capture is a technology heavily promoted by fossil fuel companies as a way of doing fossil fuel “cleanly.” It’s wildly expensive and largely fake. The amount of change it would create is miniscule compared to creating mass public transit. On the other hand, having better and more inclusive immigration (as indicated by some cards) is absolutely a necessary stepping stone.

However, none of the cards represent any antagonism to the problem. Where is the card for open borders? How about disrupting pipeline construction? The MVP pipeline was delayed to the point of costing the company millions. Even if it eventually gets built, the economic slowdown is meaningful work that will add up to make fossil fuels an unappealing industry to expand into. Where are more radical things like mutual aid, rewriting constitutions, democratizing workplaces, etc? There is actual, radical work being done that’s missing, and corporate supported fig leaves that are included. Similarly, the players as major world powers is a poor representation of a world where the vast majority of governments are heavily invested in climate change happening.

The truth is Daybreak relies on a representative assumption that everything we do is a good thing, and we’re all equally invested in fighting climate change. This just isn’t true. It claims to be a game that creates hope and optimism, but it’s honestly the kind of thing that can lead to despair if given fair contrast to what governments are actually doing to resist good things in the world. Rather, I think it’s important to find hope in the things /we/ do. Even if we are individually working on much smaller scales than governments, knowing that millions across the country are resisting ICE, defending forests, building mutual aid based communities, etc, feels much more reliable than waiting for change from the powers at be. When I contribute to that work actively, that is when I feel the most like we can protect our people.

Let’s get involved, there’s room for everyone in radical movement work. We need to make our own hope.

(And if you’re a game designer out there hoping to make political games, figure out how you can reclaim people’s agency over the world in your design; Daybreak misses the mark.)