#Clear The Area

[syms-things-5]

Somebody is reading Clear The Area on A03 and they're commenting at the end of every chapter and now I'm all like 🥰🥰🥰

[lonelysatoru]

I KNEW SHE WAS GON GET HER MEMORY BACK

[moocowmoocow]

You find your way back down And I'll keep the area clear (Please clear the area) When you find your way back down in one piece Then I'll just be waiting here 

[toneelspeelster]

you find your way back down, and i will keep the area clear.

[blackkatdraws2]

These days are a bit boring and slow~ [Blank Scripts AU]

Mano or pagmamano is similar to hand-kissing. It's performed by a person giving the greeting by bowing down toward the person or the elder or taking his hand or her hand and pressing it on the forehead.

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - Kingdom of Corona

[weekindecember]

the discourse around dan and phil refusing to discuss their relationship and interpreting it as them saying that they aren't together is soooo funny to me because you know they could just. say they're not together. like that would be a very easy thing for them to do and still maintain privacy. hmm i wonder why they won't

[kivaember]

i swear arthur is unkillable bc i've dragged him through the highest level bounties where you have scaldra and techrot trying to crawl up your ass and my screen is an incomprehensible mess of flashing lights and numbers, and usually in those situations the Hex with you would get downed once or twice bc their AI gets overwhelmed but with Arthur i fight out of my dense pack of enemies and turn around to see him like this:

[victimized-martyr]

Rabbi look out! there’s a thirsty hoe behind you!!

Mr.Broflovski please… sir this is a public space… sir you’re scaring off fellow beach goers…

[your-fuccked-up-dad-volume100]

Stalking a pretty girl and seeing her smile at another man would drive me over the edge. The minute I catch her alone I'm going to choke her with both hands and fuck her while she slips into unconsciousness, "you're mine! Don't you understand that.🔪

[two-entire-bits]

Deaf Outsiders Headcanons

I'd like to preface this by saying I'm hearing, and I've only been studying sign language, deaf history, and Deaf culture from a Deaf professor for the past couple months, and I do not know everything. I've researched the medical backgrounds for the genetic conditions and injuries mentioned, but some information might be incorrect and/or I might've misunderstood some things. If it is or I have, please tell me! I don't mean any misinformation or disrespect and I apologize if I cause any offense.

These also include some other disabilities!

Some world-related stuff:

There's no deaf schools in Tulsa, but the Oklahoma School for the Deaf was founded in 1908 so the time periods would hypothetically work out

In this alternative story there would be a deaf school in Tulsa and the Curtis brothers would all attend/have attended said school

I know it's Gallaudet University, but before 1986 it was a college

For the Curtis family: all of them are deaf. I think they'd have Autosomal Dominant Non-Syndromic (DFNA) deafness, maybe a variant in the MYH14 gene, which causes those with the variant to progressively lose their hearing within the first 3 decades of their lives. The Curtis parents taught their boys how to sign ASL, which they'd use at home, speak English, which they'd only use for hearing people, and lip read, also for hearing people, to an extent when they were young. The Curtis parents encouraged their boys to talk in sign as much as possible, but also were very upfront about ableism and how the world is built for hearing people.

Ponyboy:

Completely loses his hearing around 7-10

He's good at talking but doesn't like to, and very good at lip reading so he can watch movies

He still likes to write and caught onto English spelling and grammar quick

He often carries a notebook around to write in but mostly writes quick in ASL's grammar

He also uses it to write things to hearing people when he doesn't want to speak

He signs REALLY fast, he has a lot of things to say and good motor skills and sometimes even his parents have to ask him to repeat himself

Lexicalizes words all the time on accident

Signs to himself all the time, especially when he's alone

Likes to try and figure out what the actors are saying in movies and figure out the plot without the dialogue and sign along with the lines he can follow

VERY visual storyteller

Darrel:

Completely loses his hearing around 12-15

He can talk and lip-read very well, which he doesn't prefer but it's useful at work

Always kind of dreamed of playing football at Gallaudet, but always knew it wasn't really possible

Also signs to himself, but only when he's alone

Soda:

Completely loses his hearing closer to 3-5 and struggles with speaking compared to Darry and Ponyboy.

He always had hard time understanding English, and that plus being deaf and dyslexia contributed to him feeling stupid and dropping out of school (especially compared to Ponyboy)

He and Ponyboy talk in tactile sign at night before bed when everything's dark

His parents told him "Darry" rhymes with "Dairy" in English when he was really young and half the time he just signs "milk" instead of Darry's sign name to tease him. He got Pony in on it too

Johnny:

Hearing, but has apraxia of speech and selective mutism

His parents hate him for it and sent him to public mainstream school anyways

The Curtis parents taught him ASL after they met him

His apraxia and mutism contribute to why his teachers "give up on him" and to him having to repeat a grade in addition to other learning problems he was having and struggling to get the material quick enough for the curriculum

One reason why he was so scared in the hospital was because his hands were so burned he couldn't sign

Steve:

born with x-linked recessive deafness to hearing parents. His mother carried the gene and passed it to him

An especially good driver because of this

He goes to the same deaf school as the Curtis brothers and met Soda when they were in grade school, same as the book

Doesn't know how to speak English and doesn't want/care to learn it

When he was younger, he almost got caught stealing a car's hubcaps because he didn't realize how loud it was until he was telling the gang later about how the owners came outside and spotted him and Two-Bit told him that they probably heard the clattering of the metal hubcaps on the tarmac

Two-Bit:

Hearing, but his mom and sister (Tammy) are both deaf, he just didn't get the gene

Speaks English and ASL fluently but still stutters while signing because of motor skill issues

Purposefully messes up his grammar or signs sometimes just to annoy Tammy

Dallas:

Born hearing, but has Ménière's disease because he was jumped or in a car accident (something that wasn't his fault) when he was around 13-15 and the head trauma caused bleeding in the inner ear and his hearing is fluctuating at the time of the book

He's scared and angry because it'll get better and then worse and he never knows how or when it's going to change

He gets annoyed by the tinnitus and dizzy spells, and will often hole up somewhere when he feels a vertigo episode coming on and won't leave until it's over

The Curtis parents start teaching him basic sign and things to expect and things to know if he ends up permanently loosing his hearing, but he stopped trying to learn anything after they died

On one particularly shitty day when he didn't realize how loud he was being and Two told him he was yelling and he got so pissed at everything and that he didn't even realize he was being loud that he punched Two in the face

He's angry that it was something he could've stopped, that it happened when he wasn't actively looking for a fight or driving recklessly, or that it wasn't genetic because then he'd have someone/something to actively hate and blame. He never found out who jumped/crashed into him

Bonus: Socs!

Marcia:

Acquired hearing loss due to a recent head injury while barrel racing

It's not too bad at the time of the book, but they don't know if it'll get worse or not yet

She's not too worried about it, but every once in a while when she thinks about it a lot she gets really scared about what will happen if she loses her hearing permanently

She's scared she'll have to quit dance

Her mom kept her in high school and got her hearing aids eventually when it got worse

When she starts dating Two-Bit, it's another reason why she gets along with his mom and Tammy so well

They help teach her some basic sign and about Deaf culture, and kind of quench any fears she had about not being able to be happy/live if you're deaf because she didn't know anything about being deaf

Once she's learned enough sign to have conversations, she starts taking her hearing aids off at their house

Cherry:

Hearing

She was there when Marcia crashed and comforts her when she gets really worried about her future, but she doesn't really get it or know much about it

She wasn't rude about the way Pony pronounced things or later that night, when she was waiting for Ponyboy to write out what he wanted to say at the Drive-In and he got tired enough he didn't want to have to speak, which really surprised him

Bob:

Hearing

Knows nothing and could not care less about d/Deaf and generally disabled people

Thinks he can make Johnny talk if he beats him hard enough (partial motivation behind him and the Socs jumping Johnny before the book)

He knows Marcia's losing her hearing and is kind about it

Rolls his eyes sometimes when Marcia asks Cherry to repeat herself

Randy:

Hearing

Has no clue how to deal with Marcia's crash or her losing her hearing

Just tries (key word) to comfort her but doesn't do much else, just kind of goes on as normal

Similar to Bob, he'll get annoyed if she asks him to repeat himself too many times but feels a little bad about it

Paul:

Hearing

Learned some signs when he was friends with Darry

He didn't care to remember them when they stopped seeing each other

Felt "betrayed" when Darry said he dreamed of going to Gallaudet to play football because Paul just always assumed they'd go play together at some hearing mainstream college and he doesn't want to "learn all that shit" or "be around those kinds of people that much" just to play football at the same college as Darry

Bev:

Hearing

Knows about Marcia and says she doesn't care, but every once in a while she'll say something or make a joke that's just rude and shitty

Like Bob and Randy, she also doesn't cut Marcia a lot of slack if she doesn't hear something one of them says (Cherry is pretty much the only one that does)

She purposefully tries not to think about Marcia's future because she knows she'll get really upset about it, cos she thinks (and pretty much all the Soc's and hearing population, including Marcia) being deaf means you can't live or be happy

[a2zillustration]

(It's ok Yurgir will respawn in Avernus)

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[social-cocoon]

Squid Game S2 spoilers

I think it was really interesting that the start of the season we see Gi-hun sort of running a tiny version of the Games. I saw the whole search as him, a wealthy man, offering less fortunate people money if they played a game with a big payout to the person or team who won. And the game was another children's game: hide and seek. He even had his own control room - his car with all the gadgets in it to monitor the "players". The main differences are that he wasn't purposefully sending them to their deaths over the money, they would all be paid so long as they participated, and the intent wasn't to exploit them.

The thought isn't going anywhere, I just think it's pretty neat

[opal-owl-flight]

Pov you and your buddies tried to bust down the door of the captain of the legendary Ink Typh∞n to "convince" them that youre the best replacement for their frontline who's been missing for weeks.

Ithaca saga made me think of Cap4 arc again!! She is gonna stain those hands in (more) blood.

[magicicephoenix]

Draft - The Ink Demonth 2024 (Day 15)

A tiny crack hinting at freedom, whispering of things you’ll never get to see…