kawaiiitalia

[kawaiiitalia]

[kawaiiitalia]

what is it about boobs that makes them so fucking excellent 

[kawaiiitalia]

idk what european needs to hear this, but making fun of school shootings or police brutality or americans’ lack of access to healthcare isn’t funny or a joke. i would love to know why some of you seem to think traumatized / dead children, ppl getting shot by the police for just minding their own business, + ppl getting sick / hurt or dying bc they can’t afford something their insurance won’t cover is something you can use as a punchline or something you can use to dunk on the stoopid americans.

[kawaiiitalia]

ok but when will freaks w “asian” aesthetics stop rbing creepshots of school girls. they’re so easy to identify:

creepshots:

• person does not look aware they’re being photographed

• creepy angles. (panties, legs, can’t see face)

• looks like it was taken where photos aren’t typically taken (bus station, sidewalks, etc)

examples: 1, 2, 3

not creepshots:

• photos that showcase fashion

• the person being photographed is facing the camera. knows theyre having a photo taken.

examples: 1, 2, 3.

they’re easy to identify but now there should be no excuse to rbing these photos. it’s gross and fetishizing

[kawaiiitalia]

But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it. 

But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables. 

When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades. 

Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them. 

The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.

Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.

[kawaiiitalia]

whats the deal with proven winners?

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™. 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao

[kawaiiitalia]

Television is engineered to make you watch more television and buy more of the advertisers’ products. Television’s aim is to perpetuate itself. That it also perpetuates the status quo is a symptom of the fact that the status quo is and has been since—at the very least—the turn of the previous century a consumption machine. I hear people talk about the damaging “messages” they see on tv; recently I read an article about how tv of the ‘80s was designed to masculinize men and infantilize women. The message of tv is simply and always its own name, forever; that the exercise of consumerism requires idiot men and childwomen means that these qualities are inherent in consumerism. Television has no aim but itself.

Television will never be on your side; television can never be a tool for social change; television has never been progressive or healthy or good. The viewer’s relationship with television is inherently imbalanced, because television stands to gain by you and it will do anything to remove you from your capital and secure you in its sway. It will say that women are ugly and men are great if this will capture you. It will say that all bodies are beautiful. It will say that love wins. It will say that whores ought to end up on a Law & Order slab. Television doesn’t care.

The only way you will see yourself represented on television is if television’s fiery eye finds you and understands you as a holder of capital. By the time you see yourself you have already been exploited. Television is your enemy whether it insults you or praises you, and this will always be the case.

[kawaiiitalia]

[kawaiiitalia]

We regret to inform you the writer who

Created a race of slaves who are happy to serve, whose abolitionist allies are seen as out of touch or weird

Created werewolves who were metaphors for AIDs and then made a character who deliberately infects people

Has only given LGBT+ representation outside the actual content of her works

Appropriated large portions of Native American culture and spirituality in order to make an American School!AU

Made Jewish caricatures out of Goblins and had them all run banks

Might not be a good person.

[kawaiiitalia]

(source)

[kawaiiitalia]

Honestly really wish we’d normalize respecting children more. We’ve got parents treating their own children like property, whole ass governments trying to figure out if they deserve toothpaste and soap, and grown ass adults bullying/stalking them on Twitter, like it’s just absolutely fucking astounding how much people just refuse to interact with children like they’re actual human beings.

[kawaiiitalia]

the whole ‘kink at pride’ discourse honestly feels like a goddamn man ray meme

[kawaiiitalia]

the internet is an inherently haunted place if you think about it like. it's so weird to see long abandoned discussion boards stuck in a snapshot of the past, old conversations between kids from over a decade ago who have now grown into their own lives, obituaries taking the form of half finished profiles. and the silence that fills the gaps between. there's a constant ghostly record of each generation's thoughts, fads, their sense of humour. back when the future was at their fingertips. even stranger, people you used to know exist openly in that space, and they watch you watching them. if you want, deceased musicians can play through your headphones. there's always an underlying sense of reminiscing and time escaping our ever shortening attention spans. what a fuckin graveyard

[kawaiiitalia]

If my future s/o doesn’t stare at me like I’m their whole world while I stand like a crackhead in the candle section of target smelling every single candle before buying one then whats the point

[kawaiiitalia]

We are sharing some of our favourite gifs each day this month for Antifa International’s fifth anniversary. Today: Nazi monuments being destroyed after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

[kawaiiitalia]

me: fuck the church i hate those bastard houses its all a scam dude

me: [sees the exterior and interior of a cathedral]

me:

[kawaiiitalia]

folks, I’m just gonna say it. I don’t think it rains for long enough periods of time. it rains hard, it sounds good, I’m comfortable inside, but within 5 minutes the jig is up. the dream is over. I think it should rain for longer periods of time than it presently does