#Quotes & extracts

[yourgirlfoe]

Ya'll ever go, "fuckin' hell, I know this smell!" and it's the smell of a February evening from 2017 ?

[earlywintermourning]

that old lady and her damn vanilla extract

[p1nkshield]

Jason: What are you making?

Dick: Haute cocoa.

Jason: Hot cocoa?

Dick: No. Haute cocoa. I am making the best, and fanciest cup of hot chocolate in gotham.

Jason: Is that a cup of corn starch? How much milk are you using?

Dick: Equal parts!

Jason:...Equal parts?

Dick: I gotta make it thick somehow! All fancy hot cocoas are thick. Now where is Alfred's homemade vanilla...

Jason: mmkay. ALFRED! DICK IS MAKING NON-NEWTONIAN HOT CHOCOLATE WITH YOUR GOOD VANILLA!

Dick: Shh Shh Shh! No nonono please! Why would you tell him that!

Alfred: Master Dick...

Dick: -hOW DID YOU GET HERE SO FAST!

[mintytrifecta]

[theholmwoodfoundation]

Final quote extract from our first recording block, now that everyone has been cast and all our scripts sent off in time for next week!

What horror has poor Jonny encountered? Why is he running? Wrong answers only.

[somerabbitholes]

— index cards, moyra davey

[quixoticanarchy]

Finished reading Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and he does a good job showing how the cobalt supply chain is inextricable from incredible human suffering, near-slavery, rampant exploitation, environmental devastation, and child labor. And it’s very clear that no promise a tech or battery manufacturer makes that their supply chain is clean means literally anything bc industrially and artisanally mined cobalt are mixed into the same supply untraceably. And the book also covers the fact that cobalt supplies are finite and when the DRC’s cobalt is exhausted the industry will move elsewhere, rinse and repeat, and the people in the Congo will be left with the ongoing and unremediated -maybe irremediable - damage. All of this so that we can have smartphones, electric vehicles, iPads, electric scooters, almost anything with a rechargeable battery.

It’s also clear that the tech and battery industries are interested in good PR and making empty statements about human rights when they should be taking responsibility for the working conditions of small-scale miners (and minors) dying at the bottom of their supply chains. What Kara doesn’t really address is the demand side of this equation, not just the demand by companies whose products use cobalt-containing batteries but also the consumers sustaining that demand, who buy every new smartphone and eagerly pin their hopes on electric vehicles to let us keep our car-dependent world without the fossil fuel guilt. The book takes it for granted that cobalt will be required in high quantities for consumer electronics and for “green” tech, and to some extent this is true - as in, none of those demands or uses will cease overnight and in the meantime we should worry about how to address industrial and business practices and government corruption in order to treat Congolese miners as human beings.

But it feels incomplete without also asking questions like: should that demand continue? Can it? Do we need this many devices? What costs are acceptable? Can we really have our cake (smartphones, EVs, etc) and eat it too (slavery-free, non-exploitative supply chains that don’t kill the people at the bottom and lay waste to the environment)? What if - as the book would seem to suggest - we really cannot? If one goal of the book is for people to realize what conditions underlie the extraction of cobalt, what action is then incumbent upon us? Personal consumer choice will not undo all this harm, but it is a necessary step in rethinking or attempting other ways to live. Is it a right to have a smartphone, a new one every year or two, if it comes at the price of other people’s human rights? At what point do we say that it is not an acceptable cost that the extractive industries are perpetuating neocolonialism and near-slavery in order that we should have comfortable lives?

We know we have to stop relying on fossil fuels or we’ll burn down the planet (to a greater degree than is already locked in) but the “green energy transition” is not clean at all. Capitalism seeks the lowest price for labor and the highest profits; obviously these extractive relationships owe a lot of their horror to being conducted in a capitalist milieu. But even thinking about, say, a socialist world instead, if it aspires to still provide smartphones and electric vehicles en masse and maintain the comforts and conveniences of the “Western” lifestyle then we would still be relying on massive amounts of resource extraction with no guarantee of less suffering. The devices are themselves part of the problem. The demand for them and the extent to which “modern” life in “developed” countries relies upon them is part of the problem. It is unsustainable. It is built on blood and it makes a mockery of purported values of dignity, equality, and human rights. The lives of Congolese cobalt miners are tied to how we in the “developed” or colonizer countries live and consume. I do not think their lives will change substantially unless ours do.

[aquiescentmoon]

I want to see my mother’s childhood, wish there was a thing like i kept my palm on her forehead so I can see her vision, something like that...

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

Karkat: WHY IS IT THAT WHENEVER I SEE YOU EAT, IT'S SOME DUMB SHIT LIKE BUILD GRIST BREAD OR SOPOR PIE?

Gamzee: ThEy HaTe To SeE aN iNoVaToR cReAtE a MaStErPiEcE

Jade, taking a bite of fully irradiated steak: it's like no one knows how to take care of their body anymore!

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

Sanna Wani, “Who is the Sun, Asking for Sleep?”, My Grief, the Sun // Brenna Twohy, A Coworker Asks Me If I Am Sad, Still

[arrowmaker15]

(Black Bat pulling Spoiler out from a warehouse after she got dosed with truth serum, again, for the second time that week)

Spoiler: Have I ever told you about how much-

Black Bat: *injects her with sedative and catches her the second the blondes mouth opens*

Black Bat: Told by Red Robin to not let you talk. Gave me this. Must thank him.

[2x55]

[shershayariaayi]

There is something comforting about a bookstore being placed on a busy street. It is like having a white piece being surrounded by black pieces in chess; like that one kid quietly eating their lunch while being surrounded by kids who are running, screaming and creating chaos. It is like being on a crowded beach with noise cancellation earbuds. It’s being different in the midst of commoners yet somehow not so different that everyone starts noticing you.

- z.t. (Extract from a story I want to finish)

taglist: @curseofaphrodite

[marejadilla]

“… To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that's real… … to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong ... believe me, (can you?)... what's wrong…” ― Anne Sexton, "A Self-Portrait in Letters", (extracts)

[votive]

— Alejandra Pizarnik, Small Prose Poems

excerpts from: Extracting the Stone of Madness

[positivelypresent]

Your wisdom is yours to keep!