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[meikuree]

"The US could stop the genocide in Gaza tomorrow!" Yes. As the biggest weapons supplier, the US could stop the genocide. But so could the EU, and that's not getting enough attention.

Israel's economy couldn't survive without the EU, not even for a short time. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner and the biggest investor in Israel (nearly twice as big as the United States) and the EU is the main destination for Israeli investment.

Firm economic sanctions by the EU would not be some long term pressure builder, they would have immediate effect. The EU could stop the genocide in Gaza tomorrow. They choose not to.

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My deepest fantasy is to be mercymorn's stupid underling who she treats like I'm useless but due to my many years in customer service and my blatant autistic tendencies I pretend I'm too oblivious to notice until she has to admit her days are much easier when I'm working versus admiral sarpedon and gradually my combination of feigned innocence, ability to empathize without technically agreeing to anything, genuine human emotion peeking out from underneath several tantalizing layers of deflection, and let's be real my status as a nonthreatening gay friend remind her of the past she's left behind and she finally imprints on me to the point where she's left broken when I leave for $2 more per hour at a different job and has to confront who she truly is in a way she hasn't in 10 thousand years

[meikuree]

For a while now I've been trying to piece together a cohesive understanding of the recycling industry as it applies to clothing items. In France, the circuit is three-pronged: old clothes put in the collection bins are re-sold in France (if they're in a decent state), re-sold in West Africa (if they're too worn to be offered to Western consumers but still technically wearable or fixable), or turned into geotextiles/various other textile byproducts (if they're very damaged or stained).

Anyway I was working on building a more precise understanding of the West African circuit & reading both about the people who resell those old clothes & the people who buy them, when, reading the news, I encountered a fascinating tidbit. The main French actors involved in the sorting & reselling of old clothes have been complaining that the finances of the industry have become extremely fragile in the last decade or so: they've got more money coming out of the bank (higher salaries, higher energy costs, inflation generally etc) & less money coming in. Now that last aspect was always presented in a way that led me to suspect there was something going on underneath that no-one really wanted to own up to, because it was incredibly vague: the constant decrease in income was attributed to "the rise of fast fashion", NOS. I figured, perhaps people buy less second-hand clothing because they can get new clothes for very little money? Maybe clothes are worse quality now & more usually end up turned into shreds sold to the textile byproducts industry & which can't be worth much? But then why not say that? Well, someone said the quiet part out loud in the papers yesterday:

[But the African second-hand market collapsed in 2024. "It's being strained by Asian actors which are offering African wholesalers containers of new or second-hand textile products at much lower prices than those coming out of France or Belgium," explains Maud Hardy, Refashion's executive director. "And so our historical European exporters progressively find themselves in a very difficult situation, as they can't sell the collected clothes, which leads to a saturation of sorting facilities and of the actors in the collection circuit."]

So I investigated further. People are extremely cagey about this, as it turns out, but here's my current understanding:

most donated clothing is burned, buried, or turned into textile byproducts (geotextiles, insulation, stuffing...) - I can't find exact figures about this, but the general consensus I'm seeing is that it's the majority

about 1% is recycled in the usual sense of the word (the fibers are reused to make new clothing)

of the remaining clothes, which will be sold as second-hand products, only 5% of those are sold in Europe. 95% of the second-hand market for those clothes is overseas

The second-hand market is by far the most lucrative. Second-hand clothes are graded on a letter scale based on quality (A is new or nearly-new; F is "shreds"), & then are also graded on separated scales based on type of textile (winter clothes vs summer clothes, clothing vs other items like bedsheets or towels, etc) & area of origin: textiles collected in Paris, London or New York are worth more than textiles collected in Pristina or Tehran. As such it's hard to find precise wholesale prices (especially because pricing is sometimes expressed per kilo, sometimes per container, sometimes per bale, etc), but they appear to hover between 0.50€/kilo & 1€/kilo, with peaks over 2€/kilo for clothing coming from particularly desirable areas (clothes collected in major US cities & Switzerland seem to be especially expensive). They're sometimes randomly much cheaper for reasons I don't quite understand & can't account for, but that's the ballpark. Meanwhile, "high-quality" cotton or terrycloth shreds, i.e., large, without stains, etc, & which are usually sold either to upcyclers or to various industries as cleaning rags, go for about 0.60€/kilo. "Low-quality" cotton or terrycloth shreds (small, stained, dirty, etc), which are also used as rags, go for about 0.30€/kilo. & it's all downhill from there. I've seen prices as low as 0.0012€/kilo for hosiery shreds (this means you can get 1.000kg of product for 1€!), which are fundamentally useless outside of some highly specialised applications & which typically must be used mixed with other products.

So the image I'm seeing emerge is this: from the prices I'm encountering, & from the generalised panic focused specifically on the collapse of the second-hand market, it's pretty clear that this specific reduce-reuse-recycle industry really only makes money from the sale of second-hand clothes (either wholesale or in their own shops, which is even more lucrative - in France the usual resale price in second-hand shops is around 7€/kg). But 95% of those sales occur overseas - for French clothing collection specialists, mostly in West Africa.

So this industry as it operates in France is basically subsidised by former French colonies: it can really only operate because it can sell collected clothes as second-hand products to consumers living in those countries (who mostly want/need them, & who must accept the low-quality products they are sent, because they are still recovering from the legacy of colonial exploitation & are currently being systematically underdeveloped). This constant influx of low-quality second-hand clothes has terrible effects on the local economy, which are well-documented, in addition to causing far-reaching issues with pollution (because French sellers offload on their West African buyers a variety of products which can't realistically be sold, usually mixed in bales with other, more desirable items, & so those products end up in landfills or burned, but that's not counted as "destruction" on the European side - those clothes are counted as "reused" in statistics, because they've been sold as second-hand items, & what actually happens after that is not our business). There's also the matter of some of these clothing collection specialists operating their own second-hand shops in West Africa, which means they're not reselling at wholesale prices & so make a lot more money (they usually keep the best items for themselves & resell the rest wholesale, so that means the competition with other West African second-hand sellers is biased: you've got a situation in which the competing shop across the street also controls the supply chain, & picks out all the best products while leaving you their discards).

Neocolonial logics, of course, abound in the context of what one might term "ecology" or "sustainability", but this is an interesting example: for second-hand clothes to be made available to French consumers, & for textiles generally to be reused "sustainably", it is absolutely imperative that money come in from formerly-colonised countries. Without that steady influx of cash, the whole system comes crashing down (as is beginning to happen now that new actors are entering the scene - of course Chinese & Indian & Malaysian & Pakistani businesses which handle a large part of the sorting of old clothes realised at some point that there was more money in selling that stuff wholesale themselves, instead of sorting & repackaging items, charging a fee per ton, & then sending them back). The availability of second-hand clothes to French buyers, & even just the existence of the clothing recycling chain as a whole, is 100% dependent on the existence of this huge, exploitative market, because the income that it produces is most of what is keeping clothes collection specialists afloat.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm not done exploring this topic & my understanding of it is still shallow. But I guess I'm thinking, as usual, about all that underpins what we call "fairness" & "equality" & "sustainability", & the price at which we buy those images. "The Butcher's Share", or whatever.

[meikuree]

top 5 ancient artistic cultures (not sure about phrasing. yknow like "jomon style" or "anglo saxon art")

the jade creatures of Hongshen, a late Neolithic culture of northeast China contemporaneous w the latest stages of Sredny Stog and just about all of Yamnaya. attempts to find analogues to these critters in nature have borne little fruit, not least bc the Hongshen appear to had been perfectly capable of pursuing realism in their art – when they wanted to. this article argues the creatures draw inspiration from the shape of human bone and cartillage, like so:

the rest go as follows:

2. figurines of Bronze Age Scandinavia. I just think these look really aesthetically pleasing. look at those curves! idk what to think about attempts to interpret the figurines as depicting historically attested Nordic deities. the most famous artefact to survive from the Nordic Bronze Age, the Trundholm Chariot, seems to depict a myth of only marginal significance to later Norse civilisation

3. the erotic pottery of the Moche, predecessors of the Chimor, who flourished on the coast of northwestern Peru prior to their conquest by the Inca. this post goes a little into the various theories concerning the purpose of the so-called "porn pottery" – I like Larco Hoyle's idea that the pottery (none of which appears to depict penis-in-vagina intercourse) was used by the Moche in order to teach and show methods of natural birth control. but ofc there's a direct analogue in depictions of sodomy on Greek pottery, which doesn't really seem to had served a didactic purpose

4. the Thinkers of Hamangia - not much of a "style" given that it's only these two figurines, I suppose, but these two are my favourite sculptures to come out of Neolithic Europe by far. could write a whole post about them, honestly; definitely among my favourite pieces of prehistoric art in general. afaict, the figurines are nowadays mostly interpreted as a prehistoric equivalent to Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? - I personally prefer to think of them as analogous to his Grape Harvest at Arles

5. cosmetic palettes of late Neolithic Egypt, or what is properly known as the Naqada III phase of Protodynastic Egypt. I just find them to be really pretty – and I kind of love the idea of decorating what is basically a make-up container with depictions of your country's military conquests. the most famous of these palettes is the Narmer Palette; my personal favourite is the Bull Palette, shown on the left. I'd totally use them to mix my kohl

[meikuree]

to Me mr leonhart is some kind of SEAsian and everything we learn from eldians in marley about the rest of the world and notions of race and purity is infinitely more interesting than mikasa being related to the shogun (ew); the split second at eren's hearing after trost where they point to mikasa and say "is she even human" is the realest her identity ever gets imo, i do not give a fuck about the azumabitos

mr leonhart and udo's family are damned by eldian blood, but also too distant from the fritz family (mixed) to have had any chance of hiding on paradis a century ago. karina braun has the right idea about selection and abandonment, but her blond ass does Not have it worse than the conditions udo alludes to. if eldia and marley were "white" empires, probably more like rome and britain or tbh britain and spain in terms of rivalry, udo and mr leonhart are doubly Other wherever they are

i imagine RBA being surprised when they met mikasa, idk how known her mother's family/the walldian noble families would be to marley or if that would be relevant to their mission, but i wonder if mikasa reminds annie of her dad sometimes

[meikuree]

Be a teachable individual YOU DO NOT know everything

[meikuree]

añil (indigo) dye-infused clay chunks & thread from the municipality of Santiago Niltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico

IG image credit: NDOnoticias

[meikuree]

zenin mai biopic blogging aka writing thoughts in no particular order

I am so ready for this fic to be over and yeet it out so I can move on with my life. to recuperate from writing woes here are some thoughts alongside theories/heuristics I use to try and troubleshoot/debug/unfuck drafts when I feel stuck:

the line between 'this feels wrong because there's something technically awry that will sour the reading experience' and 'this feels wrong because i'm being a neurotic asshole to myself' is thin

on a purely in-text level or at the interface of prose, I think there are a few basic ways of including poetic feeling or intent: poetry via language/phrasing; poetry via objects/noticing; poetry via staging and setting; poetry via framing device or what happens implicitly and off-the-screen.

first-order vs second-order descriptions, a very simplistic framework for ~culturally situated~ descriptions

I cannot create plots to save my frickin' life. if writing was all about producing aimless introspective character pieces I would be winning but it unfortunately is not

[this is taken from my notes app] assimilation, immersion, using words and thought patterns character themselves would: sometimes you speak outwards to the reader; sometimes you speak inwards to the fictional dream (cr. Rebecca McClanahan)

[also from notes app] word economy, precision, deftness: i do this thing where if i notice myself going on for too long with bland/trite description i find a way to fold/pleat them all together through a higher-order description

the trendy advice in fashion styling circles is that you should think of 3 Main Words you want to encapsulate your style. I thought about whether you could apply this to writing styles...

I'm also using tips from this post about writing longfic to unfuck my draft. elsewhere, when I really am stuck, I go back to one of my favourite writing-adjacent activities: thinking of images and central imagery or metaphors to associate with a fic. I do art in my free time and visual thinking seems to come naturally for better or worse. in this case, those images are eclipses, reflections in a koi pond, callouses from practice, hollow myths.

[meikuree]

I haven’t thought about snk in ages, but I revisited my meta tag on a lark today and rediscovered this lovely commentary… thank you for writing this! you were far more succinct than I was in the OP and incisive with that point about the transactionality/mutually exclusive equation of the shifter children’s lives with other modes of living and thriving or the wellbeing of others important to them. they get reduced to or measured as resources on the most metaphysical and existential level, even!

no other intelligent thoughts, but I’ve thought offhand about my disconcert over the fandom image of Pieck as ~best faultless girl~ and the greyer picture of what we see in the manga, where she’s in some ways not a best case scenario but a worst case scenario of who annie or her shifter children peers could be: someone with tendencies towards nurturing and fostering and looking out for others, but who has had those tendencies defanged and disconnected from their power to heal and or contribute to politics, and had them bulldozed instead into a flat ethical ontology (lol, I’m so sorry) of floating acts which look insignificant in the long run.

or in less obtuse terms: she is a Very Generous and Caring Girl, but the paths available to her under Marleyan governance guide her so only certain choices are possible or become plausible, such that her generosity and care end up being neither here nor there in terms of good/bad and in fact perhaps exacerbating the bad at times. those virtues of her get warped into a pale imitation of what they theoretically could have been.

but I’m also intrigued by her unusual openness to Ideas — although here we’re heading into the groundless territory of my headcanons — which may have led her to briefly acquaint herself with Yelena based on a shared sense of anti-Marleyan politics. insofar as you believe that happened, the natural question is: what good did that do? Yelena still joins the yeagerists, and any dalliances or sympathies Pieck extends to ~the enemy~ doesn’t help prevent the egregious ideology rock from rolling down the hill.

the topography of pieck’s grey morality

at first glance there is a sort of tragic, damning irony in the way that Pieck is cognizant of the terrible system she and everyone in marley participates in, and yet still continues to have quite a prominent hand in maintaining it. every warrior is inflected by this irony in spades, and all of them face the common bind of having to make terrible choices in conditions that are structurally abject from the get-go, but what distinguishes Pieck from the others is her approach for responding, or her stance towards the world and all the misfortunes it brings.

unlike Annie who literally cordons herself off from being appropriated by wider forces or Bertolt and Reiner who have relatively explicitly articulated moments of outburst and struggle with marley’s tentacular influence and ideology, any resistance Pieck can be said to have is quieter and more attenuated. she jokes, she uses sarcasm, she renders quotidian comfort and benevolence to people she’s bonded with, and she makes observations in quiet about people who might not have her or her allies’ interests at heart. but just as true at the same time is the way she participates in marley’s various imperialist strikes (e.g. in the middle east war) and unambiguously is both directly and indirectly responsible for many deaths; she does not necessarily rebel against marley in the material and practical where it counts.

of course, it’s difficult for any of the warriors to do so, and she’s hardly unique in this aspect, but alongside her mode of response it makes her a morally grey character in ways others aren’t. she has her declaration of dissent in 116, but it is overshadowed by the realities of the situation at hand: she is part of a mission that will bring her even further away from her ideals of eldian liberation if it succeeds. it is also possibly undermined, depending on how you read the scene, by the fact that they were made for the purpose of deception: she spun her statements specifically to ingratiate the enemy long enough to lead them where marley needed them (i.e. they had some grain of truth to them, but she was definitely leaving out nuances/complexities in that moment for the sake of more instrumental objectives at hand).

her approach of going along with a regime that has none of her interests at heart is probably just informed by practicality (to ask her to go against marley in that moment would’ve been a tall order), as well as coercion and the sheer absence of any tenable alternative. but I think it also builds into her characterization as someone who rebels not through loud antagonism but through banal moments of care for others. she tries to work in the system and carve out small pockets of prefigurative care and hope, that won’t contest the system at large but might be able to alleviate life within it.

what makes this morally grey in the eyes of some readers is the question of how far this is distinguishable from rolling along unthinkingly with the system. she ideologically opposes everything marley does but the total effect is the same regardless of whether she does so: her actions still amount to the maintenance of marley’s imperialism.

(i suspect one reason some people chafe at the widespread adoration for her is that the tenor of that adoration overlooks how, in some respects, pieck has very much been capable of indirect moral cruelty and direct, obvious forms of physical harm against innocents such as those caught in the crossfire of the middle east war. she’s not all sunshine and wholesomeness.)

this is only one reading however. it is a tempting one, but also potentially superficial, and elides the fact that the game for pieck and the others was already rigged from the start. no matter how she responds, any decision will have untoward costs. if she defects, her father likely gets it. it’s impossible for her to speculate about some hypothetical benefit that will accrue to her if she defects, and thus to judge whether the benefits outweigh the price of more explicit, resistant dissent.

this reading would also ignore the fact that her acts of everyday survival have significance of their own beyond their power to contest the system. pieck, in trying to cultivate optimism/relief within the unremarkable margins of her and the warriors’ lives, is also trying to dwell as well as she can in the boundaries of the life marley has circumscribed for her. she could very easily not do all the nice things she is known for: to be bitter, be more excessively cruel, be impersonal. but in making the attempt at all, it is as if she is saying that there is potential to resist in quieter, more unremarkable ways. as if it is worthwhile nonetheless to sustain the tolerability of life until a day when more overt revolution will be feasible. quiet, everyday resistance– a la James Scott’s “weapons of the weak” idea if you will– still matters on its own terms, especially for extending the resilience of those living in unfeasible conditions, and even if it’s not as demonstrative or effective as outright resistance. canon doesn’t exactly frame it as a big resistance vs. small resistance debate. but given how canon consistently depicts her comforting others and dedicates valuable panel space to their significance (see: pieck squeezing gabi’s hand!) and the manga’s themes of trying to rise above predetermination and the hand given to you by fate, it’s possible to say that these are far from useless choices of acts. whether unintentionally or not, the manga seems to be making statements about the meaning of these acts.

pieck overall appears to be the walking embodiment of the “beauty in cruelty” message for some people. for others, trying to find beauty in a system of cruelty without doing anything to oppose it is a morally grey act or even… downright condemnable. i think that reading can have value for some, but my take is that: pieck’s character isn’t so much about “finding beauty in cruelty” as “beauty coexists alongside cruelty” (because pieck very much has the capacity for some cruelty) and also “precisely because beauty coexists with cruelty within people, and you can be responsible for both at any one time, it is an active choice to uphold that beauty and try to nurture what is good for other people, and the agency committed in that choice must not be understated; the choice to cultivate beauty also could be read as a refusal to give in to a system that does not encourage kindness and encourages lots of cruelty”.

[meikuree]

screenshot redraw <:)

[meikuree]

the upside of this sort of ampersand-slash confusion and two-body problem with fictional siblings is that you can read and write twice the fic. double the tags to browse!

the problem with passionately enjoying both the gen (&) and / configuration for a sibling ship is that sometimes when you sit down intending to write gen fic the wires get crossed and all your brain can come up with is incestuous stuff that’s barely legal if not illegal by gen standards

[meikuree]

(eagerly following for recs) I’m a fragrance plebeian but my current everyday one is the Franck Oliver White Touch EDP, it has a fresh & aquatic but very floral sprightly scent with a dewy drydown… it’s like if you were caught in the rain but that rain and the petrichor after was floral and sweet instead of earthy. its main top note is water lily which makes me spray it just so I can relive pleasant morning walks and lotus sightseeing in Chinese gardens back home.

otherwise I have the Salvatore Ferragamo Signorina Eleganza EDP which I scored for £2 off someone doing a house clearout. very much a palatable mainstream corporate scent and ‘Chanel’s little sister’ to quote someone but it caught my eye because of its osmanthus note and that’s another flower I miss the smell of.

please tell me about your perfume, or one of them —

what is it, how would you describe it, what does it make you feel, why does it sway you so, what brings you back to it, when do you wear it, where do you apply it, where do you see yourself when you close your eyes, what are you wearing, who sees you, who approaches, what do you want them to know

[meikuree]

in Kenya people are at present protesting their government for acceding to brutal IMF- and WB-imposed tax increases on essential commodities. since we have been talking about the benevolence of US-run international development institutions today....

al jazeera / wiki / eastleigh voice

[meikuree]

Isn't it fucking insane that so many people think that IQs are real. Like people genuinely believe you are born with one set level of intelligence that can be measured on a scale from 1 to ~200. As if intelligence wasn't extremely nuanced and completely subjective. And the fact that the majority of scientists that have advocated for IQ tests in the past have been eugenicists doesn't seem to concern anyone either

[meikuree]

[meikuree]

FUMI NIKAIDO as OCHIBA NO KATA in SHŌGUN (2024–) Chapter Six: Ladies of the Willow World

[meikuree]

migraine meds are a miracle