#I blame this on capitalism

[ashe-withane]

“Can I call you over lunch?” Absolutely NOT. If I’m not paid during lunch then I am not about to Work during lunch thank you very much.

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[autisticrosewilson]

Um if you write Jason having to get drugs for Catherine I want you dead btw. Not only does it tell me you assume the average drug dealer would give the hard shit to a very small child and then not supervise them at all (classist stereotype that all drug dealers are inherently evil + lazy writing with no grasp on reality) and you genuinely think that Catherine was CONSTANTLY high, as if that's even possible without overdosing far sooner than she did. That's without even getting into the bad mom Catherine propaganda.

[cognitivejustice]

Fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with five responsible for a quarter of that, based on the findings 

The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just five companies.

Altria [Kraft] and Philip Morris International made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, Danone and Nestlé produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.

“The industry likes to put the responsibility on the individual,” says the study’s author, Marcus Eriksen, a plastic pollution expert from The 5 Gyres Institute.

“But we’d like to point out that it’s the brands, it’s their choice for the kinds of packaging [they use] and for embracing this throwaway model of delivering their goods. That’s what’s causing the greatest abundance of trash.”

[bikananjarrus]

if yord had lived he'd be leading the hunt for qimir and osha and we would've gotten the most delicious tension between him and qimir. qimir would start out frustrated that yord got away, intent on finishing what he started. and yord, once hunted, now hunter, once an exemplary jedi, and now solely focused on revenge disguised as righteous justice (which it is also a bit of that). and qimir starts to enjoy the game, the chase. and in this timeline, sol still dies, osha still goes with qimir, but yord was unconscious, recovering in a bacta tank, so all he knows when he wakes up is that qimir is out there and took osha, his friend, away. so then you also have the tension of that confrontation, the realization that osha has willingly turned, and that maybe yord can't blame her for that, because what has he been doing these past many months, years, maybe, but give in to the selfish desire to finish what he started too?

[uncanny-tranny]

I despise the idea that you can only do a certain art project once. You can only release an idea once in this world before you can't. You can't re-try, can't ever re-do, can't ever revise the idea or project because, like marble, it is sculpted and could never change.

You're allowed to paint the same subjects. You're allowed to write the same types of stories. You can crochet the exact same bags. Who cares about if your ideas are "unique" and "revolutionary to the art world"? You can do the same shit forever and ever. Art and love on planet earth <3

[field-cryptobotanist]

The funniest part about delicious in dungeon for me is that I've gotten those exact reactions from people about eating regular blackberries or wild strawberries I just picked from the forest, like you're not ready for monsters if just foraging is a completely foreign concept

[lighthouseas]

it's so fucking sad that preteens are raiding sephora for makeup products meant for adults and not only are said adults bullying them online for views, they are also not addressing the actual issue at hand, which is that there is literally no third space for these kids and they're basically being raised on ipads where they have unrestricted access to the internet at all hours of the day, which is why they are so desperate to imitate what they see online by buying $80 makeup products meant for ADULTS. that's terrifying actually

[balkanradfem]

In my neighbourhood, there was a small abandoned-looking backyard, filled with grass and flowers. An old abandoned house next to it, small metal fence protecting it from the road. I liked walking past it because I love abandoned houses, the nature starts to take over them and I dream of sneaking in, exploring, finding a weird bug or a trinket that looks interesting. I also loved seeing the grass and the flowers, allowed to grow naturally, bees buzzing in it happily.

That was 8 years ago, and since then, the city decided to build a hotel nearby, and the whimsical backyard was to hold a road connecting to it, and to be converted into a parking lot. I mourned the loss of the grass and the flowers, watched them do construction on it, walking past every day. In the end, they left a little patch of soil, planted a few decorative bushes on it, and a few very small, decorative trees. They poured a bunch of tree bark around them as mulch, so grass wouldn't be able to grow anymore. Few meters of bushes and trees was the entire landscaping that the hotel got.

They didn't maintain it though, so eventually the bark decomposed, and grass grew once again. I missed the old big patch of green, but I liked the little patch, bushes and trees well enough, and I hoped the trees would grow large, make some shade, house some animals. They did buy pretty big bushes, and I can imagine the tree saplings also cost them some, so I hoped they would grow to be a part of the neighbourhood.

I was, of course, wrong. I walked past it last week, and found the orange plastic fence all around it, big machines flattening everything to the ground. Trees, bushes, grass, all gone. Another painful punch to my heart, and also general disappointment and frustration to my faith in humanity. It was more profitable to them to clear the area completely than to let those few bushes and trees grow. I don't know yet what they're planning to do with the area, I can assume they're going to pour cement over it first.

Similar goings-on have been happening all over the city. When I first moved in, there was a grassy patch where people would park their car, and then there was also an interesting well-like brick tower in the middle of it, which I found magical and cool to look at. One day the tower was missing, and the grass was flattened, to make it a regular, asphalted parking lot. Parking on top of the grass patch just wasn't good enough I guess. Tower was blocking the space where one car could have been parked.

There was a big space of abandoned bushes, trees and some very big walnut trees, just right next to where I live. They were such a big source of oxygen, walnuts, beauty, and not only that; they were blocking the sound of cars and vehicles on the main road, making our neighbourhood quiet and well shaded. Cars would park under the big trees, cooling in shade while their owners were off. One day as I was going home, two people with chainsaws were cutting it all down. Huge walnuts trees were lying next to the parking lot. I stared in shock and disbelief, and they ignored me. In a few days, the entire green area was cut to the ground, trees collected and hauled away.

The noise from the main road now reaches our building, and it ruins spending any time on the balcony. There's no more green backdrop, no more pretty sights to see, only empty space and buildings. The cars have no shades to park under. The area didn't stay brown for long; invasive species planted themselves within weeks, and are now covering the area. It's covered in thorns and ferns, impossible to navigate trough. They didn't do anything with the area except clear it, and now it's left to it's own devices. I still don't know why they did it.

I've talked about this to a few local people, and they're not as upset about it. 'They're probably going to build a factory there, or a store' was the common response. They've been surprised to hear I'm mourning the trees and the grass, as if such thing has never occured to them before. Technically, we do still have some trees and grass left, but I can see it disappearing, bit by bit, every year.

This lets me know that I'm living among people fully ignorant of what is going on in the environment. They don't know pay attention to how their area is slowly being cemented and asphalted over, soon to be unhabitable to any plant life. They don't know what happened to such areas in more commercialized countries; they are not afraid of food deserts, of what will happen to the air quality, the dust and heat of hot sun reflected in the white asphalt. They don't realize their children will soon be out of safe places to play with, or that soon being outside will become untolerable.

Progress can't be stopped, people will clear out the areas of nature to build something that brings them profit. They'll make money by building a store, or a factory, or a parking lot. The green area doesn't generate money. And money is all we need, it's all anyone on this planet needs.

But will the money-making area still be habitable by humans, 10, 20 years on? When the climate change hits harder, when the temperatures outside are over 40 degrees commonly, just walking from one building from another will become sickening, dangerous. A giant tree surrounded by grass and flowers would be invaluable. A green area shaded and life-supporting, would make it possible for people to be outside, to hide from the sun. An area filled with green spaces, trees and bushes and balanced plant life, would be able to actually decrease temperatures and stabilize everyone's ability to survive. It will become invaluable.

But you can't build a green city in a year, like you can build a parking lot, or a store. You can't bring back the huge walnut trees that shaded you and gave you a refuge from the hot sun.

But they don't think like this. Once the city is out of areas that can be lived in, the heat is overwhelming, the buildings and asphalt reflecting the sun back into people's faces, making it impossible to breathe – people will just take the money they earned and go live in another green space that wasn't ruined yet. As green spaces become monetizable, the more scarce they are, the more people will be willing to pay for them. Then the unlivability of the cities will become an incentive to charge people money to go spend summers outside of them, and only poor people will remain struggling with the heat, missing the big walnuts trees and the green grass that once was theirs to enjoy.

This would not have happened in any circumstances where nature was held sacred and protected by the people. If we understood that our lives and our happiness came from those trees, from the grass and the green spaces, a person would not be able to cut them down and rationalize it with personal profit. Only capitalism could support this brutal destruction of everything that supports life. The moment we started regarding to nature as 'resources', we had it wrong. Nature is where life comes from. The trees and the soil and the rocks, the rivers and the mountains, forests and grasslands, they're the reason we're able to live, to thrive. Taking them away is like taking life away. There's nothing valuable enough to give this away for.

[liyrical]

thinking about pre-2020 korean bls and how a good lot of them had relevant topics and addressed queer people in their society and how the whole scene got commercialised massively post pandemic so now even as more works get churned out they all slowly feel less and less authentic

[chelstory]

Wow it’s been almost a year since I posted here 😭

Took a bit of a hiatus from posting bc quite frankly… I’m tired lol

There’s so many socials to keep up with, work, being perceived is annoying, rebranding, trying to figure out how to have fun and be professional online at the same time has been a headache, finding energy to draw, deciding when and what to post, Instagram has the whole AI shit going on, PLUS life/adulting stuff (hey wtf is a 401k), the state of the world is driving me bonkers, aaaaGHHH it’s so much.

BUT, despite all that, I wanna tell stories and I wanna get back to just… making stuff without feeling like I have to perform in order to get a job, keep a job, and be hire-able 😅

So yeah, for those still following, thanks for sticking around! I’m still figuring out who I am as a story teller and artist in general but tbh, I think I’ll be doing that until I’m dead, so…

ANYWAY, YEAH ART!! I’m gonna continue posting my old story stuff from last year that I didn’t cross post here yet and THEN I’d like to start (for real this time) posting stuff from my sketchbook and future stories I wanna work on! I really wanna show my process and just be more candid here but in a more ✨structured✨ way if that makes sense

2024 is almost over but tbh, the year didn’t officially start for me until March anyway so whatever

[obviouslypancakes]

Hey, btw!

I sell stuff now

[kitkatkey]

Finally got around to watching Our Flag Means Death this week and now, mere days later, season 2 of Good Omens has dropped and Both of them Hurt Me in the Same Way

I got a double dose of gay angst and I am Upsetti Spaghetti

[un-pearable]

“the one who causes all the problems (stan) and the one who faces the consequences (ford)” uh. did we watch different shows or did you just fall for ford’s ego

[uncanny-tranny]

By implying that children are too stupid and rude to learn about the world and learn how the world works and how to interact with others, you are casting responsibility away from the people who are responsible for that child's upbringing and placing the blame on the children (who don't have the autonomy given to them to be allowed to decide what they want) who can't help what they do and do not learn, often.

If the children aren't okay, then investigate why before turning to thought-terminating clichés of, "Well, the kids are just stupid and dumb and aren't even worth the effort because they're lazy!"

[northern-passage]

first day of nano i managed a little over 2k for blood choke aaand. 500 for tnp 💀

i worked yesterday and didn't get any writing done but i'm going to play catch up today. i have a lot of time off this week cus i finally have my first two dental procedures (cries) but i'm hoping to be productive 👍 remember if you're doing nano not to push yourself or be too hard on yourself if you miss wordcounts. 1k+ everyday is a lot of words and everyone writes at their own pace :-)