mr-sylvilagus

[mr-sylvilagus]

One thing I love about Watership Down is that for many novels the common narrative assumption is that male characters dominate the story scape and this is just accepted fact. I remember when I was first reading it and they found the downs, I thought to myself, “This is a little silly, there’s no female rabbits.”

But then it’s a pivotal plot point that they’re suddenly like- oh shit. We’re done just surviving and we now realize we overlooked a very major part of our survival. When we finally meet does in the narrative they’re not nameless, they have personality and depth and Bigwig’s success is hinged on the help he gets from Hyzenthlay.

I think Richard Adams played this very cleverly in putting forward a narrative that wouldn’t be questioned: a bunch of dudes go on a journey. And then once you’re bought in and he says, hey, don’t you think something important might be missing here??? And the rest of the book is devoted to the fact that without the does the heroes have failed.

[mr-sylvilagus]

i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim

[mr-sylvilagus]

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[mr-sylvilagus]

1.05 | 1.06

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[mr-sylvilagus]

The Burgess Animal Book for Children. Illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. 1920.

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[mr-sylvilagus]

Now that I have a Lightbox I can take updated photos of Archibald Asparagus Saint Sebastian

[mr-sylvilagus]

Italian Watership Down posters

[mr-sylvilagus]

my heart is with the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

[mr-sylvilagus]

"Businesses like to talk about the concept of a closed loop or circular economy, but often they’re trying to close small loops. Releaf Paper takes dead leaves from city trees and turns them into paper for bags, office supplies, and more—which is to say they are striving to close one heck of a big loop.

How big? Six billion trees are cut down every year for paper products according to the WWF, producing everything from toilet paper to Amazon boxes to the latest best-selling novels. Meanwhile, the average city produces 8,000 metric tons of leaves every year which clog gutters and sewers, and have to be collected, composted, burned, or dumped in landfills.

In other words, huge supply and huge demand, but Releaf Paper is making cracking progress. They already produce 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.

Joining forces with landscapers in sites across Europe, thousands of tonnes of leaves arrive at their facility where a low-water, zero-sulfur/chlorine production process sees the company create paper with much smaller water and carbon footprints...

“In a city, it’s a green waste that should be collected. Really, it’s a good solution because we are keeping the balance—we get fiber for making paper and return lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or the trees. So it’s like a win-win model,” [Valentyn] Frechka, co-founder and CTO of Releaf Paper, told Euronews.

Releaf is already selling products to LVMH, BNP Paribas, Logitech, Samsung, and various other big companies. In the coming years, Frechka and Sobolenka also plan to further increase their production capacity by opening more plants in other countries. If the process is cost-efficient, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a paper mill of this kind in every city.

“We want to expand this idea all around the world. At the end, our vision is that the technology of making paper from fallen leaves should be accessible on all continents,” Sobolenka notes, according to ZME Science."

-via Goodd News Network, August 15, 2024

[mr-sylvilagus]

Bluebeard from "Felidae" (novel by Akif Pirinçci)

[mr-sylvilagus]

you can discuss the problems within academia literally forever and you probably should but “historians are trying to keep information from you” is always going to be an anti-intellectual, reactionary opinion, sorry, literally no way around that

[mr-sylvilagus]

Dog said oops

[mr-sylvilagus]

I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

[mr-sylvilagus]

WATERSHIP DOWN (1978) dir. Martin Rosen, John Hubley