The Rookery.

A rookery is a colony of rooks. Eggs come in, get sat on, hatch, fledge, and eventually fly off somewhere with the shape of where they came from in their feathers. That’s the metaphor and I’ve stuck to it.

The Rookery is the part of holoflow where people who like what the studio makes can sit and talk to each other. Light-painters comparing camera bodies. Makers arguing about belt-printer settings. Flow-arts people who already know what the kata feels like, looking for more of each other. Photographers curious about the rig but not yet curious enough to build one. People who just want to be near other people who give a shit about this kind of work. Anyone, in other words, who’d find the journal interesting and would like to talk back.

I run this. I’m Dimona — light-painter, twelve-year poi practitioner, trans woman, Salford. There’s a small monthly subscription at the door. It does two jobs at once: it pays the hosting, and it acts as the bouncer. Anyone willing to send a trans woman a few pound a month has, by paying, demonstrated they don’t hate her for being trans. That’s the filter. No vibes-check, no pledge to sign, no allyship to perform — the cheque does the sorting the moderators in free communities do by hand. Bigots won’t work with me. Anyone the door lets in is welcome on the perch.

The longer version of why lives on the About page. If you’ve read this far, you’ve already worked out whether the Rookery is for you.