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mmechanicat.bsky.social
sorrel 🪴
@mmechanicat.bsky.social
810 followers 600 following 1.7K posts
ranting and rambling about art, the environment, and society 🌿 they/them. 26. PDX. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (18+)

art @sorrel.ink 🌿 @juinreed.bsky.social’s silly little rabbit
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mmechanicat.bsky.social
my third question: WHAT in the capitalist propaganda???? yeah, i’m SURE you think business regulation is limiting, considering you’re using your job title and proximity to power to promote your own book and garner big name reviews! eugh!
October 9, 2025 at 4:22 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
my first question is “WHAT” and my second is “WHAT THE FUCK”
October 9, 2025 at 4:16 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
cool, so portland community college just fired this guy for ~anti-fascist comments~
About Randy Blazak Randy Blazak's scholarship on hate crimes and hate groups has made him a regular commentator in media outlets from NPR and CNN to BBC and Al Jazeera. Blazak earned his PhD at Emory University in 1995 after completing an extensive field study of racist skinheads that included undercover observations and interviews across the world. He became a tenured sociology professor at Portland State University and now works on strategies to confront extremism. His work has taken him from classrooms to criminal trials. His research has been published in academic journals, books and in the mainstream press. His co-authored book, Teenage Renegades, Suburban Outlaws, Wadsworth, 2001) and his edited volume, Hate Offenders (Praeger, 2009) have been widely adopted. Since 2002, he has been the chair of the Coalition Against Hate Crimes. He has worked with the National Institute of Justice and the Southern Poverty Law Center on hate crime research issues. Blazak regularly speaks at conferences, consults on criminal cases, and leads workshops on the topics of hate and bias. He is currently the vice-chair of the steering committee in charge of implementing Oregon's new bias crime law. Blazak is also currently on a federal grant to develop methods to prevent violent extremism.
September 30, 2025 at 6:19 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
give it up for the successful launch and amazing work of the james webb space telescope 👏👏👏
Photo of the James Webb Telescope before launch JWST image JWST image JWST image of Jupiter
September 12, 2025 at 12:09 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
bleak dispatches from the Other "art world" ig
news.artnet.com/market/intel...
“I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”
September 11, 2025 at 12:37 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
we use so many synthetic fertilizers and outside inputs to feed our lawns and gardens. at the same time, we literally throw away the nutrients that are cycling through naturally
very crude illustration of how plants fit into the nitrogen cycle. all plants need nitrogen to grow, but most nitrogen is not usable to them. “conventionally” (aka since mass agriculture and synthetic fertilizers were invented) we add fertilizer to stimulate growth. plants uptake nitrogen into their tissues and, when those tissues die, bacteria help return those nutrients to a usable form in the soil thru the decomposition process. this cycle gets majorly interrupted when we bag up the leaves, over-tidy the soil surface around our plants, etc — and then we have to add those outside inputs back in full disclosure: all of this is 1000x more complex in real life
September 10, 2025 at 6:54 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
haunted house season?
sketch of a house with a little ghostie
September 8, 2025 at 1:05 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
do these look like evil cyborg henchmen to YOU?!?!?
August 26, 2025 at 6:29 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
just two guys hangin out
August 26, 2025 at 5:38 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
so my conservative grandma kept talking about “the power grid going down in september” and this is what the US department of energy now says about the rise of serious blackouts 🤡
The analysis reveals that existing generation retirements and delays in adding new firm capacity, driven by the radical green agenda of past administrations, will lead to a surge in power outages and a growing mismatch between electricity demand and supply, particularly from artificial intelligence (Al)-driven data center growth, threatening America's energy security.
August 17, 2025 at 5:30 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
technology is amazing and my autism is being catered to
screenshot of worldmachine, a 3d modeling program for generating realistic environments
August 15, 2025 at 5:43 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
current form of my studio space after some tidying! i’m so in love with our new apartment 🥺
photo of my desk space with a computer station and lots of art supplies, paper, and plants on a huge wood drafting table. i just put nails in the wall so i can hang canvases to work on photo of the art supplies, plants, and a big book case in front of a window
August 15, 2025 at 12:18 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
balcony seats 2 the mountain goats LOCKED AND LOADED
screenshot of the mountain goats show i’m going to in december
August 14, 2025 at 7:54 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
i love my city
telephone pole with just layers and layers and layers of wheatpaste posters slapped on, like an urban sedimentary rock
August 9, 2025 at 12:39 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
😶🫡
When I think of the relationship between artists and society -- and for me the question is always what it could be, rather than what it is -- I think of the word "transcendent." It is a word I never use in pub-lic, but it's the only word I can come up with to describe what I think about the role of artists. By transcendent, I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs mu-sic, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama. I don't mean to minimize these activities by saying the artist can do no more than this. The artist needn't apologize, because by doing this, the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn't that way now. The artist is taking us away from the moments of horror that we experience everyday -- some days more than others -- by showing us what is possible. But the artist can and should do more. In addition to creating works of art, the artist is also a citizen and a human being. The way that society tends to classify us scares me. The way that society tends to classify us scares me. I am a histo-rian. I don't want to be just a historian, but society puts us into a discipline. Yes, disciplines us: you're a historian, you're a businessman, you're an engineer. You're this or you're that. The first thing someone asks you at a party is, "What do you do?" That means, "How are you categorized?" The problem is that people begin to think that's all they are. They're professionals in something. You hear the word professionalism being used often. People say, "You have to be professional." Whenever I hear the word, I get a little scared, because that limits human beings to working within the confines set by their profession. I face this as a historian. During the Vietnam War, there were meetings of historians. While the war was raging in Southeast Asia, the question was, "Should historians take a stand on the war?" There was a big debate about this. Some of us introduced a resolution saying that "We historians think the United States should get out of Vietnam." Other historians objected. They said, "It's not that we don't think the United States should get out, but we are just historians. It's not our business." But whose business is it? The historian says, "It's not my business." The lawyer says, "It's not my busi-ness." The businessman says, "It's not my business." And the artist says, "It's not my business." Then whose business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave the business of the most important issues in the world to the people who run the country? How stupid can we be? Haven't we had enough experience historically with leaving the important decisions to the people in the White House, Con-gress, the Supreme Court, and those who dominate the economy?
August 5, 2025 at 3:26 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
me 10 years ago (give or take)
now your turn
a selfie of me at 16 on a boat on a lake
August 2, 2025 at 9:53 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
this is the biggest thing i’ve ever painted
painting in progress in blue and copper tones. in a fenced yard, a naked woman is standing over a crude grave with a shovel in her hand
August 1, 2025 at 4:48 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
i think it’s hilarious when people talk about trying to avoid muddy colors bc my traditional painting process reveals the diabolical way i always approach color
August 1, 2025 at 3:53 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
working on a little painting
August 1, 2025 at 2:43 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
alright google is completely useless
July 26, 2025 at 2:33 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
just appreciating her every chance i get ❤️‍🩹🌳
photo of the oak tree photo of the oak tree photo of the oak tree, the branches kind of look like a hand
July 24, 2025 at 5:23 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
got to spend another sunset with the tree 🌳 i can see the rot, so i understand why they’re cutting it, but it’s a huge loss in so many ways. it’s shade and habitat and a PRESENCE. it’s a real shame, yet i’m really grateful to have briefly spent time under its canopy 😔
jar of acorns next to a drawing of a huge oak tree, captioned “goodbye, new old friend.”
July 23, 2025 at 4:11 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
still here but not for long. dudeeee i can’t stop crying
July 23, 2025 at 1:12 AM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
i’m so devastated. pretty sure it’s going to be gone when i get home today 🥺 RIP queen you lived a long life and created a whole world under your canopy
a huge oak tree
July 22, 2025 at 9:54 PM
mmechanicat.bsky.social
new landfill pages? ☢️
comic page, beginning with a tangled highway interchange. text at the center reads “they drove to the end of the world” over a shot of a frightened crowd at a rest stop parking lot. the view usually overlooks a mountain range, but a mushroom cloud rises up in the distance. a young boy stands at the edge of the viewpoint, staring up at the explosion unfinished comic page featuring the same highway interchange, presumably overgrown but not drawn yet. text reads “now, their old highways are scars on the landscape” in two corners are scenes from before the destruction, one featuring the highway crammed with 1960s cars and another a crinkled map of the USA the last page is a crude road being carved across a forested landscape, ending where the not-yet-drawn road crew is still building the new highway. a snowy mountain top towers above. the forest isn’t fully drawn yet, but browning leaves and patches of snow among the evergreens hint at late fall text reads, “you fear the red dirt on your hands is a wound reopening in the earth.”
July 18, 2025 at 7:04 AM