September 2024 Contributors
Paintmonkey Studios
John Trotter, the illustrative artist behind Paintmonkey Studios, is responsible for all of the illustrations on the website as well as the physical editions of the almanac. I owe a great deal to his unwavering support, and my favorite way to repay him is to take great pictures of delicious food and send them to him, in order to taunt him for not being able to have any.
He is fluent in a wide range of styles, and is as biting and incisive in his political cartoons as he is nuanced and sensitive in his fine art portraiture of animals. All kinds of things are available from his site, from fun stickers of Cereal Killers for your laptop to watercolors of a giraffe contemplating the Boltzmann brain for your wall.
Destiny Gardner-Shen
I met Destiny in my dorm building freshman year of college. Bright and sweet like a lemon drop but raucously hilarious and always unapologetically herself, she’s been an amazing member of my village and I’ve been so very lucky to have her in my life.
Around the time I met Destiny, I was quite indifferent to astrology. I thought it was harmless fun at best, and I don’t remember going out of my way to hide my thoughts from her. But as she is with everything, she was kind about it and respected my thoughts at the time, while continuing to amass more and more knowledge in this field in her self-assuredness and authenticity to herself.
When I began developing a real interest in esoteric spiritualism and advanced astrology (including biodynamic viticulture), Destiny was there to be my knowledgeable guide and endlessly funny companion on the journey. She still gently leads me to the most reliable, respected sources of astrology in all of its global traditions without a single word of “I told you so,” which is how you know she is a much better person than I am.
Leila Hobbs
No acknowledgements page of mine would be complete without a shoutout to Leila Hobbs, my best friend of 20+ years.
I go into this in further detail in this article, but in order to get to where I am today in my ethos and political thoughts I had to break down quite the rigid framework built from an extreme fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Ironically enough, Leila (with her entirely secular upbringing even in the deep South) showed me the grace and love I had been looking for in so many congregations—all through my right-wing, deconstructionist, and now far leftist periods.
She also happens to have brewed the very first alcoholic beverage I tried—a deep, broody stout.
I very much look forward to spending the rest of our lives after the fall of capitalism together.
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