Thursday Bram's Newsletter — August 2022 Edition
Another month, another newsletter! Who else is ready for some autumn weather?
So many heat waves
Portland has experienced multiple heat waves and heat advisories so far this summer. I have a feeling we're not done yet — at the very least we've got several more days above 90° Fahrenheit coming. I'm continuing to maintain a Heat Wave Resource Sheet. It has information on preparation, as well as timely updates as I find them. I've also done a bunch of Twitter threads. I hope you and yours are making it through these back-to-back disasters safely.
PDX.Vote articles
My work on PDX.Vote continues. Recent articles include:
A voter's guide for the August Special Elections in Clackamas County
A breakdown on local government efforts to respond to heat waves and why they aren't working
Jewish Zine Fest Pop-up
I organized a local pop-up for Jewish Zine Fest and it went amazingly well. I've put together an after-event report if you're interested in organizing details.
Several people asked me if there will be another Jewish zine event in Portland and, at least for now, I think that depends on whether someone else wants to help organize in the future.
Other posts and updates
I submitted my Hugo ballot for this year. I'm considering writing up a comparison between Hugo elections and other ranked-choice voting methods — maybe as a way to discuss the proposed changes to elections for the City of Portland.
Attending Jewish Zine Fest gave me so many new ideas for zines, so I've been working on a couple of those ideas in my copious amounts of spare time.
We're heading into the High Holiday season, with Rosh Hashanah starting the evening of September 25. My availability will be low into mid-October as a result.
Other folk's work
The Portland Zine Symposium is happening September 17th and 18th. If you go on TKdate, you'll see me there, along with a ton of amazing zine makers. PZS has made some changes to ensure COVID safety and I feel comfortable with their precautions.
Affect is adding to their "Disabled and Here" stock photography project and shared some early behind-the-scenes shots. So far, it looks like the new collection will be lots of outdoors gorgeousness. Of course, Affect's projects are dependent on donations, so consider sending some money their way, especially if you use their amazing stock images.
Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series is about to get another installment on September 13, so I'm rereading the series (and some fanworks about the series, because keeping the timeline straight is non-trivial). There's a good chance I've already recommended this book to you if we've talked in the past three years. If you haven't gotten around to it yet, though, and you like the idea of lesbian necromancers in space, today is a good day to pick up a copy of Gideon the Ninth (Purchase / Borrow).