#escape rooms for families

[escapetimemd]

https://www.escapetimemd.com/gifts-under-50/

🎉 Only seven days left! 🎉 Don't let the office party plans slip away! Grab everyone on your list and give the gift of excitement with EscapeTime gift cards. Family outing? We've got you covered with thrilling Escape Rooms! 🔐 #CountdownToFun #EscapeTimeAdventures

[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.

---

ok, found some

---

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.

---

---

---

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.]

---

---

---

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.]

---

---

---

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.

---

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.

---

---

---

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.]

---

---

---

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.]

[rooolt]

have yet to stop thinking about the plane ride to Barcelona, aka the worlds most awkward plane ride in the world. Like who do we think sat together? Did Devon talk to any of them, like is she’s friends with any of the other teens? Did Eli and demetri drag other people into their drama, was demetri very obviously trying to avoid Eli, messing up the assumed plane seating arrangements? Was Robby brooding over his missing girlfriend and her dead mom the whole time? Were Daniel and Johnny still beefing or do we think they tried to save face for the kids? Is there any chance that Miguel and Sam were able to just have a nice time hanging out with each other on the flight or did they get dragged into everyone else’s drama? I’m so obsessed with the logistics of the Barcelona trip, not to mention the flight is like 11 hours long if it’s non-stop. it sounds like the trip from hell

[fleet-off]

I will never be normal about this scene taking place after the end credits.

Because here we are, literally after the end of the story. And here is the comedic sidekick occasional-mentor, having survived his self-sacrifice for the hero at the end of Act II, having been torn open and loved in the dark, having emerged to realize that he can no longer be a blank moldable surface in his own life.

And here is the villain, having lost too early, having been cradled and seen and afforded grace, having emerged to realize that he cannot be the heartless evil he was made to be, having fought and failed and lived rather than died at the victors' hands.

After the story has been told, Pete is not a background character in service to someone else’s story. He is, in this place, the most important person.

After the curtain falls, Vegas is not a villain—and he is not lost, is not abandoned as comeuppance for his terrible flaws. He is a young man thoroughly, despicably, mutually in love.

Because after the finale has played out, after all the chess pieces have been tidied away until the next game, after the credits roll—the narrative roles Vegas and Pete were prescribed lose their sway. And they hold each other in the aftermath.

[kitmarlowe]

CTRL/ALT/ESC “You've just got to get yourself out, Dad. You can do it. I know you can.”

[science-lings]

"A Magician never reveals her secrets!" is the rule but Trucy's family has always been completely made up of other magicians. They've taught her all she knows, cards and throwing knives and sawing people in half and how to smile no matter what. So she may call Phoenix 'daddy' pretty much immediately but when she starts really thinking about him as her family is when she starts to teach him some magic.

She can tell that he's already a bit of a performer as well, his false smiles are practiced and perfected, he appreciates some theatrics, he knows the security that comes with an act. He's her father now, so she teaches him some sleight of hand and how to throw knives so he stops coming back from work all bruised from a card game gone wrong.

Just... the Wrights being a completely in-sync duo who above all, are performers, acting out the life they want others to think that they have. They have smiling iron masks that can only be seen through by each other and they're all each other has.

Phoenix didn't adopt Apollo when he figured out his parentage, no, he figured it was too late when Trucy started making him her magical assistant.

[olenvasynyt]

you are going to be stuck in an escape room with 4 of the Vanserra brothers (from ACoEaS). Who are you choosing for your team?

AGHHHH I SQUEALED AT THIS QUESTION LMAOOO I LOVE THIS

Oooh okay so I'm going to take this very seriously okay? I need to think about 1. who would cooperate with who vs who would just fight with each other,and 2. how entertained do I want to be vs "this is a life-threatening situation we need to get out now guys please".

Eris and Raivis (the second oldest) probably would sort of cooperate with each other but I think the snide remarks they would make towards each other might end up with both of them getting some bruises. Being trapped in a room for hours with each other would definitely stir up some bitter feelings. I feel like as long as Elmar isn't stuck with us (he likes poking the bear), they would maybe be fine...they used to be really good at working with each other! Most of the fighting between them would be after they get out of the escape room and they both try to say that they did all the work while the other fucked shit up or something

Galeti (the fourth oldest) has the ability to steer arguments in a better direction while also staying out of the crosshairs so he would be good. He is also very charismatic and entertaining so he would make me feel less stressed 😂 He wouldn't attempt to solve the riddles even though I think he would be one of the first to figure it out, but he just keeps the answers to himself. Most of his job is steering Raivis and Eris away from bickering

I am stuck between Aatos (the 3rd youngest) and Lucien for my fourth because Lucien is very very clever but I feel like the younger version of him is a bit of an ass and would not only poke the bear but be really stubborn and refuse the demands Eris and Raivis would make. Eris and Raivis tell him to help? Nah, he's going to chill in the corner with Galeti and make fun of how red Raivis's face gets when he's thinking. So I feel like Lucien wouldn't be helpful in an escape room with his older brothers😂 Aatos is clever too and he is also literally trained in hunting for tracks since he trains the hounds, but he is also quiet and kind of a fawner who does what he's told and I feel like his older brothers would not listen to his imput and ideas that he'll try to make

Eris and Raivis may be a dangerous combo lmao but my final answer is Eris, Raivis, Galeti, and Aatos!

[khawlat]

Describe where Eddie comes from. He’s part of this family he has relative distaste for. But really what he represents is the dying power of British aristocracy. At the height of British power, they held all the cards, they held the judiciary, they held the landmass, they were the most powerful. [Eddie’s] not corrupted by death or violence or something as simple as that. It’s realizing his family lineage has lost its power. And now the only way you can have power is through the darker arts. (x)

[fiendishartist2]

KEEP GAME CONSOLE RUNNING

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

What wouldn't I give for a bonkers crack au with Carissa-Bastian family reunion where Ezio and his father still survived

[caterjunes]

this sucks. this all fucking sucks. i wish my dad cared about me like he thinks he does, or like he wants me to think he does, or like he pretends he does. when it's not inconvenient, when he isn't forced to remember i'm trans/mentally ill/disabled/unemployed/unemployable/a Failed Citizen.

i wish anybody was treating it like a big deal that i traveled halfway across the country to spend time with them. it felt like a big deal to me.

[spiritsong]

wretched. absolutely wretched. ambrose saying this to lucanis in the wigmaker's job hits different after playing the game

[sandu-zidian]

I'm having Yunmeng Shuangjie feelings I am losing it over the way these two idiots try to rationalize the decisions and emotions towards the other through duty and obligation.

Wei Wuxian attempts to rationalize the golden core transfer and his subsequent actions of secrecy and running away by trying to convince both himself and JC (and others) that he made those decisions out of duty, debt, and obligation: duty to JC, debt to Yunmeng Jiang, debt and obligation towards the Wen siblings. By doing so he hopes to mask the deep truth that his singular most important decision -- to transfer his own core to JC -- was done not out of duty, but out of love. If he admits to how love pushed him to try and fix JC, he would then have to grapple with the blatant truth that not only did the decision break the trust between himself and JC, but in fact did the opposite of fixing JC. The event only further breaks them apart. WWX refuses to acknowledge any feelings of regret he could possibly have about the golden core transfer -- either because did not understand how terrible living without a golden core could be, or because he knows that what he did to JC was agonizing -- by only accepting his actions as done by a servant for a master, as a disciple for his sect and sect leader.

Jiang Cheng also suffers from this rationalization. When WWX defects and later dies, JC attempts to reinforce his righteous anger and rage towards WWX by viewing his betrayal not as done by a close friend and brother, but as betrayal done by a sect member and first disciple. By publicly and internally deriding WWX as a traitor to Yunmeng Jiang, forgoing his duty and obligation to his sect leader and the sect that took him in, JC can delude himself into accepting the derision and gloating exalted by the rest of the cultivation world and reject the complex and often contradictory feelings of grief and loss he feels towards WWX that stem from the painful truth that WWX hurt him not because he was a trusted discple, but because he was a close confidante and an almost-brother. Such pitiful emotions are unacceptable for someone so hated as WWX. So, JC aligns his emotional turmoil with the rest of society by refusing to remember the whole truth of his relationship with WWX as not just a trusted disciple, but as a dear friend and an older brother. In doing so, JC's negative emotions are quite unfair (though in his defense it's not like JC knew the truth behind WWX's confounding actions) and also never allow JC any chance to actually come to terms with WWX's betrayal and painful downfall.

I think the best Yunmeng Shuangjie reconciliation stories are the ones where JC has to admit that his comtempt towards WWX during the 13 years that he was dead was unneccessarily unfair and allowed him no place to truly accept and grieve for the loss of his brother, and where WWX has to admit to himself the true reason for the golden core transfer and how he cannot run away from the reality of the pain such a decision caused both himself and his brother, and perhaps even admit that it wasn't really the right decision, if there even is a right decision for that scenario at all. I need JC to yell at WWX about how the whole golden core transfer just serves to prove that WWX never accepted himself as family to the Jiang siblings when JC and JYL both cared for him deeply as a brother, while WWX yells back at JC about how he could possibly dare to see JC as family when all he has done in the years since his resurrection was act as if WWX was nothing but a sect traitor and stranger not worthy of a truthful conversation.

[vigilskeep]

Whenever I think about your Keir I think about Bethany telling Anders he reminds her of Malcom. I’m sure that won’t ever affect Keir ever.

bethany is my favourite mage bc she never misses with that psychic damage

but really he and anders aren’t even a thing in act 1 so it’s less like “PLEASE stop comparing my crush to our father” and more like “oh fuck off i spend my entire life trying to act like our dad and one (1) mage rolls up and suddenly he’s dad??”

[indihome-suck]

Selamat Iedul Fitri! Minal aidzin wal Faidzin, mohon maaf lahir dan batin guys!!!!! Happy Eid Al Fitr!!!!!!!