I keep seeing people make fun of it online but that sounds like something I’d enjoy. My drink of choice for a few years now has been the depressing combination of whatever carbonated water is available with whatever better-than-rotgut-but-only-just vodka is available.
Rotgut-tier is also fine in a pinch. But the bad stuff here will make you blind.
(I’m also a fan of “give me your sweetest, fruitiest, girliest drink”, which was great fun back in uni when all the dudes around me were ordering bitter beverages they clearly didn’t enjoy. By trying to project masculinity to the girls around us, they were actually betraying an underlying insecurity about it - and by ordering my girly drink I was gently lampshading that idea. Fun times.)
I know this is what the solarpunk space is for, but it really is frustrating to have to separate prepper weirdos from actual self sufficiency discussions.
At least for me the frustration is that it isn’t always easy to explain why a certain image or idea gives you bad vibes. The modern petty fiefdom obsession with lawns and land and wasted urban density is very very icky to me, but these illustrations, some of the other posts on here, they do speak to a certain fantasy that I myself have.
It might help that where I am, a lot of rural housing is smaller 4-5 floor apartment buildings where each floor is typically occupied by one sibling and their nuclear family. So a homestead for me, conceptually, wouldn’t be my prepper enclave with 3,000 each of guns, cans, toilet paper packs, and flashlights, it would be a family area with a whole lot of fresh vegetables, fruits, herbs, composting, a few chickens, and pleasant places to sit around.
And it’s not a fantasy for me at all, because I have pieces of that, so I know how it works. Chickens, solar panels, herbs. A bit more than that in my family home, where my relatives live (I just visit).
Cattle is a bit far fetched for me, lol. Chickens will eat most organic waste and give you eggs, they’re great and convenient. Cattle are a whole other thing.
This is the missing middle I hear people online (especially from the US/Australia/Canada) complaining about. This makes so much more sense to me than borderline nonsensical suburbia.