#being in debt

[bitchesgetriches]

I'm kinda freaking out because apparently a medical bill of mine got sent to a debt collector-- I didn't even know I had to pay this because my parents usually pay my bills and when I asked them they said not to worry about it. (I was 20 then, and I'm still on their insurance so they usually take care of it all). Is this going to ruin my credit? I don't even have any loans or credit so far so this is the only thing that's happened to it. I would have paid if I even knew but they never sent me a letter or an email until the one letting me know about the debt collection. It says I have until the 18th to dispute the debt. I don't really know what to do. Would calling to clear this up and paying right away do anything or am I just screwed?

Call them and pay it. You can and will recover from this! Your credit is going to be fine.

Also... make sure you tell your parents they screwed up. You don't have to be confrontational, just say something like "Hey, did you know about this bill? Because it's in collections now. I've paid it, but in the future, please notify me if you receive any bills for my medical treatment so I can handle it properly without it damaging my credit."

In general, if you can't pay the full amount of a bill, it's best to contact them and pay something. Here's more advice:

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke 

If you found this helpful, consider joining our Patreon.

[masonpowellposts]

The 'Credit Score'

I only recently got inundated with credit scores, though I had avoided them for years. Just another manipulation of the credit industry.

But then I actually saw credit scores: and I was incredibly horrified that Americans have been trained to believe they are something positive.

What a credit score measures is How Much In Debt You Are.

If you pay off your credit, and stop owing interest, your credit score goes down.

Its not a good or positive thing at all. The higher your credit score, the worse off you are!

[inkskinned]

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

[bet-on-me-13]

Bruce Wayne was never Batman.

So! The night that Bruce Wayne's parents got shot, he developed an Unbreakable Resolve. He needed to get rid of the Crime that had taken his Parents away from him, no matter what.

But that night, he also developed a deep-seated fear of Death. He was face to face with his own Demise and instead of dying himself he saw his Parents die instead. He was Terrified of ending up like them.

But he still needed to stop Crime. He couldn't just let criminals go unpunished, and while he was still using his wealth to try and prevent it before it began, he knew there needed to be something to stop crime After it had been committed. And the Cops were useless on that Front.

He eventually found a solution while looking through his Parents Family Heirlooms.

Ancient Books dating back to the founding of Gotham and even before then, telling of a Creature from another world who his Ancestors had helped in the Past. A Being of Fear and Shadow, who owed a debt to the Wayne Family. He needed that Being. A Monster of Shadows and Fear was exactly the answer to scaring criminals away from committing crimes and punishing those who did.

But he needed to find the Being from another world first.

So he left home, traveling across the Globe training with the best Magicians and Demonologists in the world in search of the Monster who owed his Family a Debt. His travels took him far, from the streets of LA where he met a man named Zatara, to the Snowy Mountains of Nanda Parbat where he learned of the Lazarus Pits and the Demon's that came out of them.

While studying the Lazarus Pits, he was trained by the organization who guarded them. They despised Weakness, and while their leader was in awe of his Intelect he was less impressed by his body's conditioning. If he was to study the Lazarus Pits, he would first have to earn the Right in Combat.

He eventually managed to pass their Tests and eventually left them, having handed over a Copy of his research as the price for being allowed to Study the Pits.

Years later, he finally returned to Gotham, fully equipped to Summon the Being that owed him a Debt.

Bruce drew up the Summoning Circle as perfectly as he possibly could, he had one shot at it.

A drop of his blood and a splash of Lazarus Water later, and the Circle began to glow an ominous Green. Slowing, a shifting shadow began to emerge from the Circle, at first only a mass of writhing darkness before their form Solidified.

The Books he had found on the Spirit said that it would take the form of the Summoners Greatest Fear, which just so happened to be Bats for Bruce. The Form that the Spirit chose reflected that, with large Dark Wings falling over their form as if they were a Cape, and horns looking like the Ears of a Bat. From the Darkness, two glowing eyes appeared.

"Spirit, hear me. My name if Bruce Wayne, and I am calling in the Debt owed to my Family centuries ago. My City is plagued with crime and malice, rotting from its Core. My efforts to prevent Crime from the side of the Light have been in vain, Crime persists despite my efforts. In order for my vision to be fulfilled, the Criminals of this City must have their hearts pierced by Fear. Fear of Retribution. Fear of Consequences. Fear of Vengeance."

Thoughout bis Speech, the Shadowed Figure stayed silent.

"That is why I have called you here. I want you to stalk these streets, punish the criminals of this City and strike fear into their hearts from the shadows, so that they know to stay in the light. I don't want you to Kill them, never kill them. Let them live with that fear in their Hearts until their final days."

After he finished his speech, the Figure finally spoke.

"Your Quest is an Honorable one. You seek the betterment of your people's, and are unafraid to resort to drastic measures to achieve that goal. It reminds me of my Liege's resolve." It Spoke, it's voice low and rumbling. "Very Well. From this day forth, I shall protect your City from the Darkness in its own Heart. I shall be your Dark Knight."

...

Had this idea out of nowhere and needed to write it down. In this AU, Bruce still wants to protect his City from crime, but is understandably traumatized from seeing the Deaths of his Parents. He has a deep-seated fear of Dying, so he chooses to forgo fighting crime himself.

Instead, he finds out about a Spirit that his Ancestors helped long ago, and decides that the most logical next step out be to Summon a Demon to protect his City. Instead of training his Body for a decade to become Batman, he trains his Mind and Studies as much about Magic and Demon's as Possible.

He still knows how to fight because he trained with the League. He approached them with an offer to study the Lazarus Pits and give them his findings, and they accepted. But Ra's didn't want a weakling on his Base so he also required Bruce to train his body. He saw his potential for combat, and was so disappointed that Bruce had chosen a different path. He could have been Great!

Bruce still has a thing with Talia that produces Damian, he is still a point of interest from Ra's since he is insanely smart and has huge potential, and he knows how to fight pretty well. Albeit not as well as in Canon.

Bruce becomes the Benefactor/Guy in the Chair for Fright Knight (who is the one he summoned if you couldn't tell), who looks like a "Bat Man" because of Bruce's fear of Bats. Fright Knight agreed to this because 1.) He had a debt to pay, 2.) Bruce reminded him of Danny, and 3.) He respected Bruce's ballsyness to Summon a demon and command it to protect people.

Bruce still adopts his Kids, but there are some changes.

Dick is adamant about fighting Crime, and eventually Bruce is forced to let him go on patrol with Fright Knight, who has started going by Batman. Thankfully Frighty managed to give him some blessings so he had minor powers and would be safer.

Jason is mostly the same, and he is so excited that Robin actually IS Magical. When he dies, Fright Knight, who had gotten attached to their Family, goes into the Zone to search for him. He is unsuccessful unfortunately.

Tim is kind of funny. He figured out that Dick was Robin, and Jason was the 2nd Robi , but assumed that Bruce was Batman. When he approached Bruce about becoming Robin so he would stop going down his violent Cycle, Bruce Redirected him to talk to Fright Knight, who was not taking his failure to find Jason well.

Damien grew up knowing that his Father was a Genius, and the Master of the Batman, which gave him a bit of an Ego. At first he thought of Fright Knight as a Servant, and tried to command him like he did with Alfred. Frighty corrected him quickly enough.

Any more ideas for this AU? I have so many, but I think I need to stop for now.

[pinkhairswagtourney]

help a disabled nonbinary lesbian get their life back together

hi everyone. i'm shroom and you've probably seen my posts before. my life is still a shitshow and nothing is coming together like it should. can't find a job, can't save up for a car, can't save up to escape this abusive household. bare necessities like food and medication and doctor's appointments take every last cent that i have. i'm also dealing with c0vid right now and it's kicking my ass completely; i've spent the better part of the last two weeks laying in my bed. i can't even complete commissions my energy is so low.

please help me. i'm hungry, and i'm tired, and i can't do this on my own. i don't have IRLs to help me like most people do. please send a few dollars my way or spread this post or commission me, anything so that i can move forward instead of sitting still and rotting away

commissions post p-yp-l c-sh-pp k-fi

[shokujin-art]

So... I started a side run with a new PC to add a top / defiant to the family ✨

Barely 40 days in, beating whitney's ass to save him from dismissal and kicked away 3 people at the same time to save Robin. I can sense Lyra judging him from her save slots 😂

[qifreyplushie]

Hear me out- Imagine hualian just being hualian, but with He Xuan secretly fangirling in the background. Maybe, despite all of his cold words and lack of care for what's going on in Hua Cheng's life, He Xuan is actually hualian fan number one. I think there's a lot of untapped potential there. Like, ghost guys forced together for centuries, with He Xuan forced to listen to Hua Cheng's constant reverence about Xie Lian, I like to think that fish man would actually become quite invested in the relationship. (Sorry, I needed someone to see my vision and it just hit me while I was scrolling through your blog, so you get it handed to you like I'm a cat dropping a dead mouse at your feet)

not a day of peace for black water sinking ships

[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.]

[loktauri]

Tma au where nothing is wrong ever and Jon gets to pet as many cats as he likes

[very-poorly-drawn-tgcf]

Episode 1: Back to Heaven now, by accident

Bonus under the cut! (Warning tgcf spoilers but then again Why Are You Here If You Haven't Finished TGCF Yet Off With Ye)

[ave-immaculata]

I obviously am a big fan of forgiveness meaning loving the person, i.e. willing their good, but I'm slowly becoming more and more obsessed with it in a very Our Father sense, i.e. releasing them from the debt they owe you.

Release them from the debt of an apology they owe you.

Release them from the debt of understanding and acknowledging that they hurt you.

Release them from the debt that they owe you recompense.

And saying it, out loud, in the name of Jesus.

[sergle]

yall are about to piss me off by not having any PASSING basic knowledge of the way the u.s. military manipulates its recruits into joining by typing up one of your uninformed, unresearched, unempathetic, individualistic, unbelievably annoying posts about how 100% of the people in the military ended up there because they just Love America So Damn Much! they're extremely mature and informed at time of recruitment, they can totally leave anytime they want, they totally had tons of other avenues in life they could've taken, there was no rush at all to get income as fast as possible, and everyone in the military also totally is part of the combat divisions and personally enjoys being IN the military very much, big believers of violence. everyone in the military is shooting guns all day, that's how that works. they LOVE BLOODSHED. also I love the "amewicans haha" twang to this type of shit because you're actually TOTALLY stealing our Thing, which is turning systemic issues into Individual Issues. Instead of talking about the powers that be, it's so Personal Choice up in here. It's, "well you shouldn't have done it then. I totally wouldn't because I know better." you don't wanna talk about the military industrial complex as a whole, and you don't want to talk about recruiters, you just want to pin the blame on Specific Individual People one-by-one, as if they're responsible for the system that they're being ground up in. someone was in the military? bad person, no matter what. it's easier to believe that, I guess, than to acknowledge that Normal People (with high school educations) are manipulated and incentivized into joining a system that is Bad. at like age 18. but yeah no that 18 year old should have just been smarter lol haha anyway here are some screenshots for no particular reason

side note this reply of someone going "umm just get loans and go into a high paying field it's easy XD" as a direct response to someone trying to explain how most americans joining the military are being funneled in that direction out of a need for money.

and another person who Decided that americans join the military just CLENCHING their teeth thinking of other people, and not thinking completely selfishly about their own selves and their own income/housing/healthcare.

[starry-bi-sky]

changeling danny has his wretched little claws in me so here's some AU fey lore

Okay so, i've got a lot of ideas for the Fey Lore in this au. But to start out what may become a sling of posts: a simplified set up of the Infinite Realms. I think I mentioned it before in a reblog of the original changeling danny post, but the fey wilds exist in the IR. In most fanon I see the same scale as the rest of the realms, however i have a different idea for it.

In simplified terms, the fey wilds and the ghost zone are two different things. They both exist in the Infinite Realms, however, they exist on different planes of existence. In simplified terms, there are three separate planes in the Infinite Realms.

The Long Far: Highest realm in the infinite realms. Home to most, if not all, the Ancients. Beings that reside in The Long Far are eldritch abominations, gods, personifications of concepts, and other celestial-type beings. The only way to access the Long Far is through the Starflare Currents in the Feywilds. Which are a nebula of stars that work similar to the ocean currents in Finding Nemo. They are a rapid vortex full of stars that pass over the feywilds that can be seen at night. In order to reach the Long Far, one must fly up to the Current and latch onto one of the stars rapidly flying past. And then they must stay on the star until the currents begin to ascend rapidly upwards. This is harder than it sounds. Ever been indoor surfing? Where you lie on your stomach on a small board and try not to get flung off? Exact same concept. It’s basically the world’s most terrifying escalator to the gods.

The Fey Wilds: The Fey Wilds isn't exactly strictly home to the Fey, however for convenience sake I'm calling it the Fey Wilds. This is the home to fey and other folklore and mythological creatures that may not want to reside in the Ghost Zone. There are no Fey in the GZ. It's not that they hate being down there, but. well.. they hate being down there. They think the place is ugly. The Fey Wilds has ever shifting, expanding amount of biomes. These biomes range from massive redwood forests, to swamps, to essentially Pandora from Avatar. The place can look almost entirely human one moment, and then like a different planet the next. Fey and other inhabitants know how to navigate this easily -- but ghosts? Not so much. There are currently two known ways to reach the Fey Wilds from the Ghost Zone and vice versa: Lake Portals, and Cave Tunnels. Which I will expand upon in a moment.

Ghost Zone: Exactly how it sounds! The Ghost Zone is, well, the ghost zone! It's essentially the same as canon. Same looks, same everything. This is the home of mortal souls and the occasional mythological creature or two, as well as weaker concept spirits. By that I mean like, ecto-octopi. Concept spirits can manifest in both the GZ and Feywilds. Ghosts tend to stick inside the Ghost Zone and avoid venturing into the Fey Wilds because, well, they're still mortal souls. They're gonna get jumped by a fey looking for a new decoration or a new pet/servant/whatever. Best to honestly avoid the fey wilds as a whole.

Now, I just mentioned that there were two known ways to reach the Fey Wilds from the Ghost Zone: lake portals and cave tunnels. I made goofy little visual aides which I will attach below, and then I will explain how they work.

I'll start with the Lake Portals. They are, well, as the name suggests lake portals. Not every lake in the fey wild is a portal to the ghost zone, and vice versa. They're rather uncommon to find in both planes, but it's not like they're hard to recognize.

In the Fey Wilds, lake portals will have a sheen over the water like an oil spill. But instead of the regular rainbow-y colors, it will instead have the ghost zone's colors swirling in it; green and purple. The water will have that sickly green tint to it, and have a slight glow. The plant life surrounding the water are not typically what you'd find in the Fey Wilds, but might in the Ghost Zone. They look different from the regular noxious swamp bogs in the wilds, so its easy to tell that they're lake portals.

In the Ghost Zone, the lake portals will instead be shimmery and blue like a tropical ocean. And just like how there are GZ plants in the fey wilds surrounding the water, there's fey wild plants on the island where the lake is.

How these portals work is rather simple. You dive in and begin swimming down. It's a long swim down, but that's all you gotta do. It will get dark, as there are no plant life in these portals, and no aquatic life either.

It starts getting complicated when you reach what I like to call the border. The border is as the name implies; its a border between the planes. In the lakes it's not physical, however you will feel when you've reached the border and crossed it. Intense vertigo washes over you as your sense of gravity begins to shift and flip; up is becoming down, down is becoming up.

Your goal at this point is to try and push through that vertigo and discomfort and make it to the other side of the border, without getting flipped upside down and swimming back to the surface you came from. This is harder than it sounds as you become dizzy underwater, and since there's no light anywhere, you will try and instinctively seek it out and follow it. You're down too deep to know where that light is.

Once you've reached the other end of the border successfully, your gravity will have flipped without you needing to do anything. You are now swimming up to the surface, and once you do, boom! You're in the ghost zone! Lake Portals are faster to use than tunnels, but very disorientating.

Now cave tunnels are longer, but simpler. Essentially some caves have tunnels that lead into the ghost zone, similar to how in greek mythology there are random entrances to the underworld in the mortal world. I haven't exactly figured out what the tell is for when you're in a tunnel leading to the Ghost Zone, but I know that when it's the other way around it's rather easy -- as you start to climb up.

It's a less complicated explanation: essentially you are descending into the ghost zone through this tunnel. You are on your way down like Orpheus in search of his wife, or like Heracles doing his twelve labors. It can get claustrophobic and of course there is the border.

Unlike experiencing a shift in gravity, you're instead hit with the intense vertigo and an intrinsic fear to turn around. It's an instinctual response to your surroundings changing on a molecular level, and your body in response is telling you to Flee. Basically, you've taken a rip of the Cave Gasses and you feel like you're losing your mind. Once you exit the border its smooth sailing.

Sometimes you get unlucky and there's a Pit Drop and you're suddenly Alice in Wonderlanding your way down to the Ghost Zone. But hey! At least you're not swimming.

those are currently the only two ways i've come up with for traveling between the GZ and Fey Wilds. But all in all, it's meant to be very disorientating stuff; vertigo and nausea-inducing, with just a dash of Existentially Terrifying. Traveling between planes usually is.

[annemarieyeretzian]

something something dorian keeping orym close to his chest and orym keeping dorian at his side something something,,, you get it

[justanothersanjilover]

I feel like Zoro would have way too much fun, if he got turned into a woman 😂 Like come on!

He wants booze?

Zoro: “Sanji! Can I get some booze?”

Sanji: “No!”

Zoro: “Look over here” *lifts shirt and shows his boobs*

Sanji: *handing over booze* “Please…just…cover up…!”

He wants more food?

Zoro: “Cook! Give me more!”

Sanji: “You just ate a whole plate of…”

Zoro: *shows cleavage*

Sanji: “For the love of…fuck…here” *shoves a whole plate of food in his face*

He wants a snack?

Zoro: “Cook! Snacks!?”

Sanji: “Shut it, Marimo! I’m not falling for that again!”

Zoro: *bats his eye* “Pleeeeeease! Cook-san!”

Sanji: “Shit…” *gives him all the snacks he wants*

The snacks are too sweet?

Zoro: “Can you make some salty snacks? Or better with wine filling?”

Sanji: “I’m gonna fill you with wine!”

Zoro: “Promise?” *shy smile with red cheeks*

Sanji: “You…what…? Stop that!” *stands an hour in the kitchen to make some wine-filled dark chocolate pralines*

Zoro: *casually training on deck - shirtless like always*

Sanji: *walks by, realizes it, dies of bloodloss*

Sanji: *standing at the railing, watching the sea*

Zoro: Can I join? *stands beside him*

Sanji: What do you want this time? * purposefully not looking over*

Zoro: *standing on his tiptoes and pressing a kiss to Sanji’s cheek - breast pressing to his arm* “Sorry for annoying you, Curly.”

Sanji: “It's…it’s…it’s fine! Marimo…Just fine…”

😂😂

[noireservoir]

Methinks its time to move back home actually