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The gelatin in film stock was made from the hide, bones, cartilage, ligaments, and connective tissue of calves (considered the very best), sheep (less desirable), and other animals who passed through the slaughterhouse. Six kilograms of bone went into a single kilogram of gelatin. Eventually, the demands of photographic industries generated so much need for animal byproducts that slaughterhouses became integrated into the photographic production chain. Controlling the supply chain became key to Kodak's success. In 1882, as Kodak began to grow as a company, widespread complaints of fogged and darkened plates stopped production. The crisis almost ruined Kodak financially and resulted in the company tightly monitoring the animal by-products used in gelatin. Decades later, a Kodak emulsion scientist discovered that cattle who consumed mustard seed metabolized a sulfuric substance, enhancing the light sensitivity of silver halides and enabling better film speeds. The poor-quality gelatin in 1882 was due to the lack of mustard seeds in the cows' diet. The head of research at Kodak, Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, concluded, "If cows didn't like mustard there wouldn't be any movies at all." By controlling the diet of cows who were used to make gelatin, Kodak ensured the quality of its film stock. As literary scholar Nicole Shukin reflects, there is a "transfer of life from animal body to technological media." The image comes alive through animal death, carried along by the work of ranchers, meatpackers, and Kodak production workers.

—Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

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So Israel ransacks a Palestinian-owned bookshop in Jerusalem, seizes books and detains its owners, citing a literal colouring book as the main piece of evidence, but Israel isn't a frenzied fascist state?

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Thesis Deadline Swiftly Approaching and yet i am pacing around doublet unbraced stockings downgyved to my ankles muttering shit like "the ghost in hamlet is kind of a cognitohazard if you think about it"

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OK this is an excuse for me to be a little pretentious/pedantic, but I figured others might also want the opportunity to be a little pretentious/pedantic, so I'm making a poll out of it!

My pretension: I like reading (duh!), and I'm OK with a little inaccuracy for the sake of artistry. I mean, there are definitely authors who never bother to google basic terminology in a field, or try to write convincing history (or fantasy) without actually knowing much history...but if an author I otherwise like gets a little detail wrong about some specialist thing, I'm not likely to even notice. Except! If the thing is about boats/sailing. Examples below, but first, the poll:

I'm sure there's some technical mistakes (especially related to boats I'm less used to, like tall ships) that still slip by me. But I've had a couple times recently (different books/authors) where I was reading and enjoying myself and was suddenly twitched out of the story by an inaccuracy. One book where someone was asked to secure the boom after a tack (on a nice 45-ft modern sloop) which already doesn't make a ton of sense, and then she moved to a strange place in the boat to apparently do this. Another where the author twice mixed up jibing and tacking in dialogue (on the lines of "Don't sail to close to the wind or you'll jibe!" At least once the speaker was supposed to be an expert sailor).

Anyway, I still enjoyed the books overall, but I noticed both times I literally had to stop reading a think for a second, like wait, was I imagining it wrong? No, it's the author's fault! So now I'm telling you all about it.

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i need to make better use of my time and also make different habits. unfortunately this is so hard

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happy Barely Keeping It Together Wednesday to all who celebrate

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three times a year we have the monastery poetry slam but some of the brothers are taking vows of silence so they just get up there and look at us for a while and then we all clap

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im honestly so tired of failing and people telling me aw you tried your best. i DID NOT. i failed badly because i did NOT try my best. my best is so good you people could not even imagine.

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LAWRENCE OF ARABIA -1962, dir. David Lean

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rip dmitri karamazov you would’ve loved synthetic canaboids and molly

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americans need to be more ashamed like what is w that post w a list of good american culture things thats pretending the entire world hates or devalues american culture. brother turn on the tv. there you go. theres your positivity. your shit country owns entertainment and news you have positivity and americana inspo literally everywhere. stop whining bc people online are meanies oh my god dude

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i’m always hesitant to be like “ophelia is JUST a facet of hamlet and the feminine” because ophelia is fascinating and shouldn’t be reduced to that much (and this essay proceeds to get into that). but. due to my condition (not caring about cis people disorder) i am thinking… about transgender hamlet again. obviously hamlet’s words are misogynistic regardless of what gender hamlet is, but something something ophelia as reflecting hamlet’s self-loathing by being The Feminine Part Hamlet Wants To Destroy–in the case of transmasc hamlet, because she’s who he used to be, a walking deadname, and in the case of transfemme hamlet, because she represents a sort of womanhood/femininity she’s not allowed to access and is terrified to think about. what does ophelia reflect back at hamlet that he can’t stand? and what might she know about him because of it?

[image description: a screenshot of the following paragraph from Elaine Showalter’s “Representing Ophelia”:

A third approach would be to read Ophelia’s story as the female subtext of the tragedy, the repressed story of Hamlet. In this reading, Ophelia represents the strong emotions that the Elizabethans as well as the Freudians thought womanish and unmanly. When Laertes weeps for his dead sister he says of his tears that “When these are gone,/The woman will be out”—that is to say, that the feminine and shameful part of his nature will be purged. According to David Leverenz, in an important essay called “The Woman in Hamlet” Hamlet’s disgust at the feminine passivity in himself is translated into violent revulsion against women, and into his brutal behavior towards Ophelia. Ophelia’s suicide, Leverenz argues, then becomes “a microcosm of the male world’s banishment of the female, because ‘woman’ represents everything denied by reasonable men.”

/end description.]

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What the fuck, Richard.

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