And so the work week comes to an end! It’s been very hot and swampy this week. Looks like it might improve a bit over the weekend. Time to get absolutely blissed out in the slop.
“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”
no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it
The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.
The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign
Anastasia Trusova, “Lace over the river” Acrylic on canvas / 60 x 70 cm / 2022
Source: atrusovaartist.com
Since the virtual reality service’s launch in 2021, the so-called “successor to the mobile internet” became the recipient of a kind of soaring hype few things are ever blessed with. According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion. There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all. The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users. The Guardian reported that one of the features designed to reward users in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. Thirty-eight active users. Four hundred and seventy dollars. You’re not reading those numbers wrong. To say that the Metaverse is dead is an understatement. It was never alive.
If you’d like more detailed and comprehensive schadenfreude:
Source: thenation.com
An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station. Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a lecturer in history of science and technology at University College London (UCL) and author of the paper, said: “This innovation kicks off Britain as a major iron producer and … was one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world.” The technique was patented by Cort in the 1780s and he is widely credited as the inventor, with the Times lauding him as “father of the iron trade” after his death. The latest research presents a different narrative, suggesting Cort shipped his machinery – and the fully fledged innovation – to Portsmouth from a Jamaican foundry that was forcibly shut down.
[...]
The paper, published in the journal History and Technology, traces how Cort learned of the Jamaican ironworks from a visiting cousin, a West Indies ship’s master who regularly transported “prizes” – vessels, cargo and equipment seized through military action – from Jamaica to England. Just months later, the British government placed Jamaica under military law and ordered the ironworks to be destroyed, claiming it could be used by rebels to convert scrap metal into weapons to overthrow colonial rule. “The story here is Britain closing down, through military force, competition,” said Bulstrode. The machinery was acquired by Cort and shipped to Portsmouth, where he patented the innovation. Five years later, Cort was discovered to have embezzled vast sums from navy wages and the patents were confiscated and made public, allowing widespread adoption in British ironworks. Bulstrode hopes to challenge existing narratives of innovation. “If you ask people about the model of an innovator, they think of Elon Musk or some old white guy in a lab coat,” she said. “They don’t think of black people, enslaved, in Jamaica in the 18th century.”
Source: theguardian.com
Dust Volume 9, Number 6
Vulture Feather
Perhaps because we left it until the very end of the month, we ended up with a truly massive collection of short reviews this time. Bill Meyer got especially busy with nine entries this time, but lots of writers did more than two, and a few who rarely participate made an exception for June. It’s a diverse collection of musical artists, jazz, metal, folk, pop and indie, something for everyone. Have at it, and enjoy. Contributors include Bill Meyer, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ray Garraty, Ian Mathers, Bryon Hayes, Jim Marks, Christian Carey and Tim Clarke.
Oh right, I got so caught up in the midyear exchange I forgot to reblog this one. I’ve got a blurb on the new Hypnodrone Ensemble in here, which is both hypnotic and droning! Love a descriptive name.
help needed
hey! i'm frog k, trans internet creature. you might know me for my strange gnostic posts here or twitter. i've just moved apartments, both me and my gf are looking for stable work, and in the interim between bills and moving expenses i'm broke. i was already down to the wire and running out of groceries and a bounced check left me having to cover $275 on short notice. i'm hoping to raise about $400 to cover the check, a round of groceries for the week, and the sort of random bullshit you need to replace after moving out of a punk house. cashapp - $asimplefrog ko-fi (for paypal users) - frogk
please donate if you can and reblog either way. thank you!!
redcabooze-moved-deactivated202
reblog if youre an idiot. reblog if youre just a fucking fool.
Ask not for whom the gurdy hurds. It hurds for thee.
And all of our lists! I’ve already played some records since submitting that would have made mine if I’d gotten to them sooner...
George Catlin - Portraits of a Grizzly Bear (1846-48)
Ooh, I saw (and loved) the middle one years ago, but the others are new to me!
Many people think the problem with cultural appropriation is inauthenticity (vague, nebulous) rather than marginalized people functionally getting robbed
The discourse afaik started with the very real and very insidious practice of white producers functionally dominating Black music for decades, paying Black artists peanuts or nothing & pushing for (better-paid, more mainstream-palatable) white artists playing in Black styles. In the sphere I'm most personally familiar with, it looks like most indigenous artforms that white people encounter in their lives being produced by and for settlers, and the profits largely being aggregated to settlers while traditional ndn artists struggle. I think using the terminology and losing sight of the economic damage - especially in favor of more nebulous frames like cultural authenticity - is doing real harm by dilution and contributing to the very thing it purports to fight
anyway the “nice cock jason” tiktok is playing in my head at all times on repeat indefinitely
I love bears but I think they would be an absolute nightmare domesticated animal. Like, their only goal in life is largely being left the fuck alone. They’re not like wolves where they’re prowling around and doing shit all the time. I think they’d truly resent labor tasks to do. Which I respect.
And so the work week comes to an end! A long weekend, during which I will also truly resent labor tasks. Going to be a weird work week next week, we've got Monday off and the Americans have Tuesday. And I'm going to (at least mostly) finish Tears of the Kingdom somewhere in there too. That's going to feel weird.