I'm a 26 year old graduate student in DC. I enjoy reading, global politics, and writing. The fandoms I follow are: Animorphs, Steven Universe, Evangelion, Warhammer 40k, and more. I tag nsfw for those who wish to avoid it.
best thing about uncle iroh is that if you pay attention he is actually just as much of an idiot as zuko but has just mastered the art of coming across as a wise old man. the even better thing is that zuko is the only one on the planet who somewhat realizes this and no one would ever believe him because he’s zuko
like uncle iroh 100% does dumb shit on purpose sometimes to get people to underestimate him and keep zuko from capturing the avatar, but other times he just, and i cannot emphasize this enough, does impulsive dumb shit for no reason other than the fact that terminal stupid presumably runs in the royal family’s blood
uncle: “you never think things through, prince zuko!”
also uncle:
once got captured by the earth kingdom army buck ass naked bc he really wanted to go to a hot spring in enemy territory
betrayed zhao at the Northern Water Tribe with no escape plan and then spent 3 weeks starving on a boat
immediately went to a spa resort upon publicly committing treason
ate a poisonous plant and, in the spirit of Two Fish Hook Sokka, was going to solve the problem by eating another potentially poisonous plant
decided the safest place in the world they could go was the city he once FAMOUSLY laid siege to for 600 days
instead of lying low or giving a modicum of a shit about people recognizing him, overachieved himself into becoming one of the most well-known restaurant owners in said city
in fact overachieved so hard that he got an invite to meet the earth king (whose city he, again, once FAMOUSLY LAID SIEGE TO) which he fucking? accepted????
I’m more of an animorphs adult cause i didnt get around to pickin it up until someone posted the pdfs online but i DO like it so here’s Ax trying to eat a bag of doritos
Last year, I was talking with my mom about parenting and she said “well at least I never made you feel like I didn’t love you”
I proceeded to tell her about a time when I was a kid and she was yelling, screaming, and throwing things, and I said “I love you” in that small timid kid voice and she said
“well I don’t love you right now”
Our relationship was never the same after that and she didn’t even remember that it happened.
I drew an andalite too because people seemed to really enjoy the hork-bajir! Sometimes I feel like I’m just posting into the void but this wasn’t one of those times. I’m still not understanding Tumblr but I saw all of the reblogs and your nice tags on them and…appreciation andalite for you. ❤️
I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane
To phrase this more clearly: “public indecency” laws were the primary tool for brutally enforcing gender and sexual conformity, so applying a “public indecency” lens to pride parades of all things is a slap in the face of everyone who ever suffered under gender & sexual oppression and took their anger (and yes their pride!) to the streets. If it makes you uneasy or uncomfortable maybe you’re not on the side you think you are!
I *knew* that companies have been trying to shift blame for damage to the environment onto regular people’s buying habits, but it has still somehow been a shock to research a topic and find the internet totally dominated by the narrative that “consumerism” and the desire to buy more stuff is entirely responsible for pollution and landfill waste, instead of factors such as planned obsolescence.
It’s insidious—this widespread idea that average people are too greedy, and that’s what fuels climate change and pollution. Not greedy companies.
“Consumers shop for clothes to stay on-trend and throw away perfectly good old clothes.” “Consumers only wear clothes a few times before throwing them away.” “A huge amount of landfill waste comes from clothing that consumers throw out.” “Consumers replace their wardrobes arbitrarily to stay on-trend.” “Consumer demand for ‘fast fashion’ is rising spite of the environmental impacts.”
Statements like this make it sound like regular people want to buy and waste vast amounts of resources, and normal people’s unchecked addiction to shopping is causing environmental devastation. It’s horribly misleading when products are being deliberately designed to break or wear out within one or two years and to be impossible to repair.
Instead of “Americans are buying way more clothes than they did 20 years ago, causing lots of landfill waste!”
Where are the articles entitled “Clothing brands are selling poorly-made clothes that have to be replaced much more often than 20 years ago, causing lots of landfill waste!”
Then note that fast fashion is decoupled from the demand economy. What this means is that clothing items are generated based on algorithms determined by corporations. They’re not driven by current demand, or consumption, or consumer desire: they’re driven by prediction of how much the corporation can sell. Because the items are practically worthless, the corporation risks little by generating extra/unwanted items. So if they generate 10,000 unwanted tops, they can simply destroy them again and send them to landfill. They don’t have any motivation to recycle, donate, or give away these items. It does not matter if 15 more people swear to give up fast fashion and -15 items are purchased. The machine of fast fashion operates independently of consumer demand, because its settings are set to increasing profit, not what people claim to want or what’s good for their workers or what’s good for the earth.
If your goal is to live a better and more connected life - a life that will be resilient and joyful in the face of coming changes - you absolutely can, should and must avoid fast fashion. Do it for your soul. Do it for your ethics. Do it because an informed, caring person cannot do anything else. Do it because wearing these items would make you feel ill. That is what I, and my household, do. It is good for us, but does not liberate you. I do not call it activism, but a way of living in the world.
But if your goal is to break the machine, you cannot break a machine whose settings are “infinite profit” by pressing on levers marked “consumer demand.” Those levers aren’t even connected to the economic machine. It operates on separate principles. I’ve written about this before: there are plenty of ways to break the machine, but “declining to interact with it” is not activism and won’t kill it.
In science policy we do a lot of stakeholder mapping, which really shows where power lies, and here’s a proposed European strategy for forcing fast fashion into the circular economy. Interestingly, as with many circular economy things, the levers involved include end-of-life pressures: if you stop textile manufacturers from burning their surplus items for their own convenience, they’ll have to find other solutions. If the countries being used as dumping grounds for textile waste effectively organise and resist, it will be less economical to be wasteful. This is how you influence economies: cut down the current systems that insulate corporations and allow for infinite growth on a finite planet.
Consumers certainly have a role to play, but in my opinion, this role isn’t as easy and smug as buying/not-buying fast fashion. Instead, consumers must grapple with and influence material desire. Why is it so nice to buy new things, and how can we change that? Can you get those feelings from a community clothes swap, or would we actually be happier if our psychology just hated the whole concept of new clothes? For people who enjoy bullying: instead of bullying people for buying clothes, which is cruel and unkind, why not bully the entire concept of consumption? In the healed world, we won’t be entertained by watching a video of someone opening a large bag of new clothing; we can start living in that world today.
Further, consumer desires actually do influence investors. It’s less sexy but involves more money being moved around. Ideally the healed world won’t involve markets that float untethered on the power of random beliefs, but if you’re into it for now, you might as well look into how the complex network of investment keeps undesirable business practices afloat, how much that relies of delicate forces of confidence, and how quickly industry pivots to follow investors. Long story short, investors have more money than you do, but only because of psychology.
In conclusion, these machines are complex and don’t care much about your $5. This is neither a reason to despair, or to run out and buy Primark. It is a reason to become educated.
Alternatively, you could simply have a Revolution and break all of this down, which would be a fascinating change and would certainly be something new.
I’m sorry I can’t read that book you recommended. Yeah, no, it’s just that beginning something new that I don’t know if I’m in the mood for is to me what plastic bags are to horses and if you play 30 seconds of an unfamiliar audiobook I WILL spook and break two of my legs.
I can’t even bring myself to read books I WANT to read, what the fuck makes anyone think they have more power over me than the dopamine-sucking rat inside my own brain? You say a movie is super good and want me to watch it so we can talk about it? No. That’s homework now. My brain selects what is Acceptable based on something between ornithomancy and letting a cat knock over some cups. Nobody understands it. I am ruled by it. Doctors refuse to adequately medicate me for it. I will watch the latest Pixar movie when and only when you prop my corpse in front of the television and the coins fall off my eyes.
Yes this is about ADHD.
Can these kinds of things apply to folks who (afaik) do not have ADHD? because I LOVE to read, but by gum, if it’s made a task, like I’m getting paid for editing a piece, or beta reading an advance copy of a book in return for a review, or something like that, it is so much harder!
this–“You say a movie is super good and want me to watch it so we can talk about it? No. That’s homework now.” describes that so well! fascinating.
It is about ADHD, but not ONLY! about ADHD! Take it, it’s yours now!
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