melanochrysum

[melanochrysum]

yes yes yes

yea strong woman

[melanochrysum]

the thing about italian food is that it kinda sucks when made in italy. the average italian cook is suffering under 300 different traditional family bylaws that prevent them from like, adding garlic to their sauce, or washing their vegetables or whatever. and if they were to move five kilometers away to the next town over then they'd be executed in the street for cooking it that way. when italians are released from the context of italy it's like they're taking off training weights. an italian cook with no limiters becomes a culinary apex predator. it's for this reason that italian food has, outside of italy, become one of the big three cuisines, while remaining, in italy, frustratingly under-potential. it has to be this way.

[melanochrysum]

Blind Mexican cave fish are developing cave specific accents

[melanochrysum]

I hope everyone who opposes abortion literally dies. I do not give a fuck I hope you fucking die

[melanochrysum]

if you don’t currently have any weed, you’re so fucking brave, hang in there, i’ve been where you are and i promise it gets better, you’ll have weed again soon, i’m blessing you all with that energy

[melanochrysum]

I keep seeing people being shocked and bewildered about airbnb being so crappy to use now

and it’s giving me the impression not everyone knows that is by design- all of those “disrupter” startups operate exactly the same way. So let me lay it out:

First the company starts with an enormous amount of seed money, and they enter an established industry offering the same product but dirt cheap and with the feel of luxury. They operate at a loss for years. They offer their product at such a reduced rate that they literally cannot profit off of it. They rely on their seed money and investment from other wealthy friends to get by. They do this until the other established companies in the industry are on their knees and begging to be bought out. Once all of the competitors have either collapsed or been bought out, the new disrupter company is safe to jack up its prices and reduce services/perks to get to a level that is profitable. It might end up being much more expansive than the industry was to start with, because now that competitors are gone the disrupter business has more room to squeeze customers dry without fear they’ll go to another company instead. The “we’re shaking this industry up to bring high quality products direct to the consumer” pitch has nothing to do with consumers and is entirely about eliminating competitors, particularly long standing well established ones.

This is how uber works, airbnb, all of those. It’s the same game the laundry mat chain in my neighborhood who offers free drying is playing- driving out competition so they have more freedom to price things higher.

Individual consumers often don’t have the luxury to be so choosy about what companies they buy from, but just be aware going in and don’t get taken by surprise later on.

[melanochrysum]

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

[melanochrysum]

Oh my gosh. I just found this website that walks you though creating a believable society. It breaks each facet down into individual questions and makes it so simple! It seems really helpful for worldbuilding!

[melanochrysum]

TIL Humans domesticated dogs before they developed written language

via reddit.com

[melanochrysum]

I've had enough btw

[melanochrysum]

i sincerely don't have the energy to run like 5 different social media accounts and then further split the tumblr experience down by interests and hobbies so my time here will be spent erratically

[melanochrysum]

this society-wide impetus to tear apart any understanding of how patriarchy and power dynamics facilitate domestic violence is so terrifying to me. people these days are so hard pressed to ‘balance the scales’ of domestic violence, to find or even just create women who are just as cruel and conniving as the cartoonish stereotypes of men who commit dv that permeate our culture are, all to put an end to the clamoring of people who want better. it’s almost like a game. the earnest and unproblematic perspective of “it can happen to anyone” is transformed into an immutable truth. they don’t want to hear about how misogyny or race or class or homo/transphobia or mental illness or temporary financial situation or even just a simple lack of exit neatly lays the groundwork for an abuser to approach and exploit their victim. “some people are just like that” is the desired outcome of the conversation with “this violence is unavoidable” as a quick follow up. who does this help, exactly?

[melanochrysum]

Thinking about how a year ago I was interviewed by a very popular radio show about my long COVID symptoms (I was over a year into experiencing them). They ended up not using my story because “it was too sad” and “I didn’t recover like other people”. They told me to contact them when I had recovered to potentially share my story in the future. I wrote back and told them that most people with long COVID will never recover, and that they weren’t accurately reporting on how COVID affects people. They never replied.

A year later and my symptoms still haven’t improved at all. Anyways, here’s your reminder that the COVID reporting you’re reading (at least in the U.S.) is probably not accurate and is not actually reflecting the suffering of real people.

[melanochrysum]

republicans will be like “good news, everyone! we have passed legislation that will make it legal for us to shoot you in the chest” and dems will respond with “we have listened to the SCIENTISTS and the SCIENCE says that being shot in the chest is bad! and that is why we are proposing a BOLD counter-legislation that would provide FREE bulletproof vests to individuals making less than $30,000 per year!” and leftists are like “um yeah I guess if those are our only options I’ll pick the dems but why is it legal for you to shoot us in the chest? maybe they shouldn’t be able to do that in the first place? where’s that option?” and dems will be like “shut up and vote blue no matter who you stupid fucking hippie” and then you find out that the private company that makes the bullets and the vests funds both parties

[melanochrysum]

Houseboat Maine New England

© P.Crosby

[melanochrysum]

notice how nobody’s tweeting “let’s finally talk about male victim stats” it’s all “yess finally i can call that stupid fucking slut a cunt and never believe women which i evidently never have before because they’ve been to court thrice but i only believe the verdict against her in the only trial that wasn’t with a sequestered jury!” because it was always about misogyny 🤠 fuck all of you and if i so much as hear a depp defender round the block then square up lmfao

[melanochrysum]

i'd do anything for u