#Plastic Logic

[codexofforbiddenknowledge]

The irony is real! 🤦‍♂️ Everything I buy is wrapped in plastic… but I can’t get a plastic bag to carry it home? 🤔♻️

[catenary-chad]

Slick: “Average person eats a credit card worth of plastic a week” factoid actualy statistical error. I, Microplastics Georg, who live in an oil refinery adn eat 10,000 credit cards worth of plastic each week, am an outlier who should not have been counted.

[bannock-freak]

not to be a raging queer but i love how

Okay.

Mean Girls 2004.

Cady's POV.

We're shown Cady's crush on Aaron Samuels in a few ways. Lingering close ups, like she's memorizing his features. The camera follows him throughout his day to day life, as though she's watching him closely and appreciating the little moments where he's simply doing his thing and being himself. I really appreciate how we're shown the romantic attraction there, and that it's not just taken for granted.

I appreciate even more that the same thing goes for Regina George but dialed up to eleven.

In addition, Cady talks even more about how she wants to appeal to Regina more than she wants to appeal to Aaron. She has a crush on Aaron, Cady does, absofreakinglutely, but he's almost there as a by-product of Regina.

I'll never get over how we're shown Cady watching Regina George and the camera goes into slow motion and captures every little moment and refuses to falter even when Regina blows a kiss. Yes it's a good way to demonstrate Regina's superiority in the school and single her out - iirc she might actually be the only one who gets a slow-mo shot from Cady's POV - but because it's singling Regina out from Cady's POV, it effectively romanticizes her IN Cady's POV as well.

I'll never get over this shot/reverse shot. Get you a girl who looks at you the way Cady Heron looks at Regina George.

It's the same face with which she checks out Aaron for the first time too btw. The only difference is the softer indoor light.

Mean Girls was a milestone moment for 00s era queers just with Damian's existence and how he was portrayed alone. He has a big personality, he's at the forefront for all of it and has amazing lines, his gayness is brought up several times both textually ("too gay to function") and metatextually (him singing Beautiful by Christina Aguilera, him owning a pink shirt - in 2004 him having that was a declaration in and of itself). He is not anywhere NEAR the closet except for his clothes. And he's also accepted. He goofs off with his fellow art geeks at the art geek table - it's not just Janis who's laughing at his class clown antics. Hell, Janis is the one who rags on him the most FOR being gay, and we're meant to understand that she gets a pass and her openly stating it is effectively an act of solidarity and acceptance even if she is kinda a dick about it.

But for me, the ability to read sapphism into it so freaking easily also qualifies it as that. It's not textual. It was 2004. Damian is the only 'framed as a good person battling the evils of highschool dictatorships' protagonist who isn't shown smooching a love interest by the end of the movie. Hell, he kisses Janis instead as they get caught up in the atmosphere, even though they both immediately curdle in disgust and "No, no, nope" it. So Cady and Regina can't be TOLD to have that kind of tension.

But we're SHOWN it. Oh BOY are we shown it. It even practically ends on it. In the final 'the class barriers have been broken down' scene, we're not shown Cady giving a long look at Aaron as he walks by with his team mates and smiles at her, giving her a nod in camaraderie to show that they've both made it into this new beginning and they can put the fights of the past behind them. He's literally not even there.

Who's in that scenario instead? Cady, yes.

And Regina Motherfucking George.

also please note that the final breaking point for Regina, the one that sent her flying home in a screaming and flushed rage, the one who made her voice tremble, was CADY. It was Cady's betrayal. Cady singular. Not The Plastics as a unit, no, it was Cady and her Kalteen bars. It's not The Plastics as a unit whose picture she butchers for the Burn Book. Just a picture of her and Cady, arm in arm, smiling for the camera.

One of the most common 'couple breaks up' tropes btw, next to eating ice cream, is cutting up pictures to literally cut the ex out of the POV character's life. Just saying.

Further, Regina won't hesitate to weaponize herself and throw herself under the bus (lol) to get her way. It's part of what makes her such a formidable opponent and villain. It can also tie into this inextricably if you think about it.

Mean Girls, above all, is about 'girl politics' and the way girls, especially teenage girls, flounder and struggle and assert themselves in a patriarchal society. It's about how girls are and aren't allowed to act, behave, think, even what they're allowed to look like and who they're allowed to hang out with. About what they are and aren't allowed to BE. And so it isn't only the platonic feminine bonds that suffer in this. It's everything else, too. After all, it was accusations of lesbianism, the notion that Janis was in love with Regina, that excommunicated Janis from Regina's kingdom.

But it was also Regina who brought it up, and who demanded the performance of compulsive heterosexuality in the first place.

[aropride]

who do we think did chase's top surgery

[girderednerve]

i have been listening to plastic capitalism (vanatta, 2024). i'm like a third of the way through but here are my thoughts so far

okay just for background plastic capitalism is a history of the credit card industry & related regulation which runs from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s. this is the book i said has dissertation voice, so it is pretty dense, but i like it. okay moving on

one thing i have seen people say on here & elsewhere as a sort of yardstick for the recency of women's liberation (such as it stands, yikes) is that "women couldn't get credit cards until 1978." this is an interesting sentence which has become fascinating to me with more context

credit cards developed out of two major antecedents: travel cards (e.g., diner's club, introduced in the 1950s for jet-setting executives, & accepted at nightclubs, bars, airlines, & so on) and revolving credit plans offered by major retailers, which operated more like store accounts. the idea of attaching one's credit to a card came from the latter context, and they were the far more common credit offering. these cards were intended very explicitly to be used primarily by women

the people who pull out that 1978 date aren't wrong, though! women were the target audience for department store accounts, retail charge plans, early bank charge cards, but those creditors specifically targeted middle-class housewives & issued credit in their husbands' names (very 'you do the shopping & he gets the bill,' pearls & a red lip in the department store)

the 'credit cards for women' thing is interesting because if you are into the history of credit cards the big breakthrough in 1978 wasn't access for women, it was marquette v. first of omaha. marquette is the case in which the supreme court decided that a credit card transaction would be governed by the laws of the state in which the issuing bank was chartered, rather than the state in which the transaction physically took place. it sparked a sort of regulatory race to the bottom for a lot of states, as they tried to attract larger banks; this is why citibank's head office is in south dakota, despite the titular citi being located in (where else) new york. south dakota had no consumer credit law, and new york had a relatively low interest cap. hmm.

there's a real friction around consumer credit, because the postwar american lifestyle relied (among other things!!!!) on access to cheap consumer credit, but being a debtor is, speaking very generally, a disadvantaged & stigmatized social position. so on the one hand there's a precariousness attached to being in debt, but there's also the atomic-age glow of convenience & affluence attached to credit [sidebar plastic was a novel & exciting material when bank of america began issuing its industry-defining bankamericard in 1958]. why should women want credit cards in the first place? well, because they're now a requirement for full participation in the modern economy. this is why you see a sort of warm & fuzzy posture around signing people up for bank accounts & credit products, even though many of them will undoubtedly incur fees or have other problems as a result: they are being included! they are being offered Opportunity™

the framing which treats credit as a pathway to future success is more or less predatory marketing, but in the 1960s when these regulatory fights were being hammered out, there were a lot of civil rights activists who accurately pointed out that black people were systematically denied access to good credit. there is a wrinkle here where many black people were denied good credit because they had first been violently denied remunerative jobs or capital ownership, which had the very secondary consequence of damaging their creditworthiness, but it is very true that 'creditworthiness' is a subjective trait which was assessed by racist white bankers. it is also very true that people who need cash quickly & cannot access traditional forms of credit from a bank are pushed into riskier & more expensive forms of credit (pawnshops, payday & car title loans, etc.)

related to this tangle is one of my favorite regulatory bugbears, i.e. the thing where the united states does not have a federal usury statute & instead has disclosure laws [pattern in consumer protection more generally]. vanatta has a whole bit on the legislative history of the truth in lending act of 1968, & the two main arguments for disclosure instead of a federal ceiling on revolving credit were: 1) efficiency, in the sense that some freshwater economists wanted the market to regulate itself & in the sense that traditional state-level usury laws tended to have all kinds of bullshitty carve-outs for different kinds of lenders, so it was a huge mess, and 2) placating jim crow segregationists who resisted any attempts at all to expand federal power on principle. states' rights! so that's the background.

the weirdo fragmented state-level financial regulation was a deliberate outcome of the new deal's financial interventions. the new dealers wanted to expand credit to stimulate demand (as per the ideas of my man john maynard), but they had concerns about credit & wanted to limit it by keeping it tied closely into the traditional community relationships around local banks. this is a weird idea to me because i hate bankers but i did not become an adult until the twenty-first century. vanatta doesn't talk about antisemitism or cultural ideas about bankers at all so far, which is fine because the book can't be about everything, but i am very curious about it now. anyway that's the background for why marquette happened at all: on purpose, most financial regulation in the united states occurred at the state level, which is incredibly stupid but then here we are #laboratoriesofdemocracy

i should really read mehrsa baradaran's how the other half banks next. writing that down so i remember. i want to know more things about informal credit, the gray economy, regulatory failures, things of that nature

mastercard [well, the bank card network that became mastercard] was founded in buffalo because visa [well, the bank card division of bank of america, which became visa] had a very specific franchising strategy in mind & they didn't care about upstate ny as a market. those clowns #upstatepride

[iwatcheditbegin]

This isn’t a dig at those who do cosmetic enchantments, but please explain to me the logic of all these women who clearly have fillers in their face but are this concerned about red 40

[placeofwonder]

hey uh. this kid on the episode of Grey's Anatomy I'm watching right now is the first character with my disability I've ever seen in any piece of media. ever

[banenotreally]

No because Shrike IS this LPS.

No other LPS could be more fitting than #1

[jaredthebc2]

Sorry for reblogging Skylanders stuff in the year 2024 like it’s still an active series. It will happen again

[thebusylilbee]

not the skinniest (female) friend I have telling me she took up swimming to lose weight.......................................

[revenantlore]

It has been established already that Detroit has a vintage, cracked Tamagotchi he names Avy [named after the smear of nearly illegible ink found on the back of a polaroid he has pinned to the wall beside his bed, featuring a group of smiling strangers at a festival of sorts, something about this preserved history appeals to him, a lot] … but what should he name the one-eyed rubber ducky he also finds at Mattix’s pawnshop?

[ceaselessbasher]

No joke, I am still haunted by Colin's specificity with the logic gates

[sol1loqu1st]

idk if it's dysphoria or just regular ol insecurity or if maybe i just have a more Autistic Face/Body Language than i realized but when i see pictures of myself smiling there's like a 90% chance i look at them and kind of flinch. i've never seen a picture of someone else smiling and thought they looked bad but i feel like i look like a huge dork in pictures when i'm just candidly happy and it makes me really sad that other people just sort of effortlessly look good in photos and no matter what i do i look like the Bullied Social Reject Who Gets Asked To Prom By A Popular Kid Who Wants To Come Off As Kind And Empathetic

[sar3nka]

This bruise refuses to go away 😑

[ghosts-devilman-wip]

Im making a neocities to replace and improve upon this blog. Very exciting development

[daeluin]

got so angry yesterday after the match i went to sleep mad and just woke up to go to work still mad