#im a music student...

[mcfaucet]

love as long as you can

[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.]

[tremendously-crazy]

he's so me

[barelyanartblog]

Family Therapy Hours in the Halls of Mandos

[pigeonpalacade]

Halloween movie sketch dump :P

[bittasol]

clarazz are so strong if i was (vaguely in love with and) slightly possessive of my best friend and the whole world was obsessed with him (like i was) id crash out 😭

[plan-3-tmars]

Approval Vs Demand in Milgram

> aka my interpretation of the clapping motif in backdraft and cat :3

We clap to show approval or appreciation, but sometimes, we also clap to make noise and put a demand on people. It's like Fuuta says, I think the clapping represents the "spectators" in both he and Kazui's lives - For Fuuta it's his fans and for Kazui it's his family, but I'll expand more on this later.

The first time we hear clapping in backdraft is during the clip I showed you. Fuuta's fans clap for him when he arrives in the tunnel to 'serve justice', they approve of his actions. Through his shaky smile and the description of being "surrounded by the masses" though, we can gather that he might not be as comfortable in this environment as he previously let on. This big dramatic arrival may just be a persona put on to "impress those spectators"

However, the next time we hear clapping the tone has changed. This time it's Future Fuuta watching Past Fuuta deliver the 'killing blow' to the girl. With hindsight, he knows this is the action that drives her to take her own life, and he is shown in clear distress. It's almost like he's fighting a mental battle between the demands his fans have for him to deliver justice once again, shown through their clapping, vs the added knowledge he now has that this action will land him a guilty verdict

With Kazui, it's a bit different, as cat actually shows people psychically clapping during his wedding, though there's no sound. It's his parents, the mysterious brown haired woman and the bartender, clapping in approval of the ceremony.

However, we know that this is all for show, quite litteraly in Kazui's head. His marriage is a performance and friends and family are the spectators. Therefore, I think the clapping during his wedding represents both approval and the perceived idea Kazui has of this being the right thing to do, lie and lead a normal life. Similarly to Fuuta, who had the idea of his cyber justice being the right thing to do, which was most likely only heightened by having an approving audience by his side.

In contrast, the clapping during the clip I showed represents a demand Kazui has come to learn to continue lying, most likely through his parents (father), and that what he wants to do, what is "yearning to be satisfied" is the wrong choice he should not choose. Kazui is implied to be drunk in this scene, staggering and clutching his aching head, and the clapping probably represents this mental battle of right and wrong, what the spectators wish and what He himself wants to do.

He becomes increasingly distressed while trying to choose between the demand he has been taught to follow (represented by the overwhelming clapping) and what his intoxicated mind wishes to pursue (being his true self)

The similarities between the scenes where clapping is shown in both characters makes me think this is purposeful, a fun motif, and that the clapping represents approval to conform to the expectations others have set for you, and later pressure to continue doing so when you begin to falter.

For Fuuta, this started as approval from his fans towards his cyber justice, and ended in a battle between his past actions, encouraged by his demanding fans, and the hindsight he's now gained

For Kazui, it started as approval from his friends and family towards leading a normal and (traditionally) expected life, and ended in a battle between the demand he has perceived to continue being your grade A traditional husband, and the true feelings his heart wants to express.

[productofaritual]

Odysseus and Philza would be friends only by the level of simping on their wifes. And as well they have antagonists that are pissed by how much they talk about it. Philza's antagonists are Wilbur and Tommy saying that his wife doesn't exist.

"See my wife she is the best, just an absolute gem, she's so smart and beautiful and kind and loving"

"My wife is the same, I just love her so much,"

[Insert a three hour conversation just complimenting their wives. They talk about nothing else. Tommy and Telemachus are listening through the door. They are baffled. These two actually manage to keep it up for hours. Their tea has probably already gone cold. They're still going. What the fuck]

[severalmoremutants]

I listened to the entirety of epic: the musical yesterday for the first time and ever since I have been in a perpetual state of no thoughts, head empty, only ✨✨penelope whyyyyyy you know im too shyyy✨✨

[silcoitus]

I wish I could take the images in my head and do art of them, but I did not hone that craft the same way I did writing, so I just have to continue to paint you pictures with words instead.

[evilmisto]

can someone explain to me why the journey to the heaviside layer is the same melody as mr mistoffelees

[mcfaucet]

he didn't pay attention in music theory class

des piano (spoilers)

[rainyblazepost]

Does anybody like listening to music while actively studying and repeating for exams?

If so, what genre are you into? 🎶🎶

[thewastedpotential]

Since it's Melody Piper's birthday today I would like to share my headcanon about her :

At the end of his story, when Pied Piper returned all the kids to their parents one little girl was left behind. She was about 2 or 3 years old and since the beginning, she would have followed Pied Piper all the time and wouldn't leave his side. To his benefit, Piper tried to find her parents, he really did but no one knew that kid so he adopted her. She could talk but was mostly quiet and didn't have a name ( at least that was what Piper assumed because no matter how many times he asked her what her name was she would just stare at him) he named her Melody ( as promised). Now Piper wanted to be a good father, he really did, but he had no idea what he was doing.

" Wolf you have a kid, right? Melody has accidentally eaten sand. Should I take her to the doctor? Is she gonna be okay?" " Chesire, she's been crying for 30 minutes now straight. How do I calm her down? Is this normal? Did I do something wrong?" He was never really good with kids.

At least his music seems to calm her down. She really seems to like it when he plays his flute or sings to her.

[thewhizzyhead]

if I said eisa davis' influence in making lmm actually write something rather radically progressive has subsequently inspired me to return to my roots of actually fucking thinking of making radically progressive musicals after a 3-year long hiatus in doing so, then what-

[xoxomell]