you can tell this website is autistic as hell because someone posts a video with a mildly catchy phrase in it and no one shuts up about it for an extended period of time. or image even. image with a mildly catchy phrase in it even. we love phrases here on tumblr dot com love to repeat them. due to the autism
you can tell this website is autistic as hell because someone posts a video with a mildly catchy phrase in it and no one shuts up about it for an extended period of time. or image even. image with a mildly catchy phrase in it even. we love phrases here on tumblr dot com love to repeat them. due to the autism
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
Anne Carson (2009)
Arthur S. Way (1898)
George Theodoridis (2010)
Ian C. Johnston (2010)
E.P. Coleridge (1910)
Theodore Alois Buckley (1892)
John Peck, Frank Nisetich (1995)
R. Potter (1906)
M. L. West (1987)
William Arrowsmith (1958)
Philip Vellacott (1972)
Michael Wodhull (1782)
Kenneth McLeish (1997)
David Kovacs (2002)
Andrew Wilson (1993)
Euripides - Original (408 BCE)
Anonymous asked:
Wait wait you can't just drop that off and not elaborate. What do you mean is there a mafia presence in Wales?? Please spill, what things did you notice??
Okay so bearing in mind that I have ADHD and Chronic Terrible Observational Skills:
- I am in Cardiff
- For a concert I am attending solo
- Doors open at 5
- 4:15 ish I go 'hmm I should eat something'
- Cardiff is - unsurprisingly, being tiny and yet home to FOUR concert venues - Very Busy
- Find McDonald's
- McDonald's is very full. I recall my last concert related McDick's experience, and promptly bounce
- Directly across the street
- Is an Italian restaurant
- It looks closed but fuckit maybe I can beg for like. Bread or some shit
- Go over
- Am immediately pounced upon by the hitherto unnoticed chain-smoking woman hanging out by the door mostly hidden by a potted ficus(?)
- "I was wondering if you were open and if-" "yes yes we are open what would you like?" (strongish Italian accent)
- Inside restaurant is Deserted
- Explain that I'm sort of in a rush, am assured it's fine
- Order chicken milanese which is generally a pasta dish with a breaded chicken component
- Am led to seat nearish the front and promptly provided with a pint of coke in a glass tankard
- Am then provided with a front row seat to an absolutely incomprehensible series of people entering and exiting (and in one case walking directly into) the door to what I can only presume is the kitchen
- Starting with the guy who had been sitting at a table chain-smoking over a pile of papers
- I counted at least three people exiting at least twice without actually entering in between
- Am finally brought food
- It is a breaded, butterflied chicken breast approximately the size of my face and a small pile of pasta approximately the size of my fist
- It is all delicious
- Chain-smoking papers man reappears, now wearing a chef's apron labcoat thing
- Go up to pay, chain-smoking ficus lady is now having a very loud argument in a language I did not recognise but was not Italian Welsh English French russian Gaelic or Spanish
- She sees me, says, and I quote 'ah little girl lost, one moment' and promptly hangs up
- I am 27 and only nominally female
- I am not remotely lost
- She charges me for the pint of coke but not the food
- I try to point out that she hasn't charged me for the food
- 'do you want to pay for the food?'
- '.... Not if I don't have to?'
- 'good'
- I leave. The door is now full of half a dozen very tall very Italian men and one absolutely adorable cocker spaniel
- I ask if I can pet the dog (I have my priorities straight okay)
- I am allowed to pet the dog. The dog and I are now best friends
- The dog lead holder asks me in extremely accented but impeccably correct English if I had enjoyed the food
- 'yeah it was great!'
- Everyone laughs a bit
- I smile and pet the dog and realise I'm now late for the concert and hurry off
- I see a post on Tumblr about mob fronts and several connections are made in my brain all at once
SLEEP I want to try
Pillow is my favorite guy
REST I need some more
into bed where I go snore
PHEW I go honk and shoo
have a blanky feel the snooze
Tired system overload
Everybody SLEEEEEEPINGGGG
Do not attempt to out-malicious-compliance the staff at the malicious compliance conference.
Some dipshit decided to pay the conference fee ($250) in quarters. He handed us a wrapped plastic bag full of loose change. "It's all there," he said with a shit-eating grin, "you can count it."
Oh buddy. We're going to count it. What were you expecting?
At about the time I got to $60, he offered to give us $300 collateral so he could get his badge and go to the conference.
No, bud. You get to watch the most dyscalculic staffer count to a thousand while all your friends go in to the breakfast and find seats for the first talk.
"Ruining someone's day" is the favorite hobby of everyone here. Why would you hand us the perfect opportunity to wreck your shit and think that was an own? Half the con is calling him "Untraceable," the other half is calling him "Quarter Boy" and nobody cares what he says his handle is.
I spent an hour counting that and made him go fetch me baggies to hold it every fifty dollars.
This ended up being a good bonus prank for me too, because when the counting was done I wrapped the bags in gaffer's tape and spent the rest of the day handing it to people very casually while saying "oh here, hold this for a sec" and then watching they weren't ready for the weight (I only did this to people I know well enough to know this wouldn't hurt them).
It's an infosec conference, so it's a weekend in a hotel full of people whose favorite thing is breaking the law and whose second favorite thing is following the letter of the law while cheerfully violating the spirit.
Thank you, that means a lot coming from you, @unyanizedcatboys
The point of accepting the loose quarters even though we could have refused them was that it was worth my time and the hassle of accepting quarters to make a public spectacle out of quarterboy.
Also c'mon what hacker con is a hacker con without like eight guys who have vintage arcade cabinets? We had traded away thirty bucks of quarters for cash by the end of the first day because one of the arcade guys was testing something.
Also: yes, I *am* an asshole. It is an assholish subculture.
I think Americans in general should maybe start taking xenophobia more seriously. Because with the. Everything going on in the world right now. It's gotten really really bad. And while lefties might not be reactionary to the same extent as republicans it's still very much prevalent. I went to dinner with my family recently and the stuff they said about my cousin's family who emigrated from Russia made me feel like I was losing my mind. He's 2 years old. How are you going to discriminate against a baby with a clear conscience. Then you read the news and it's like "China is spying on you with TikTok and weather balloons" and you hear people on all angles of the political compass repeat it. Are you hearing yourself right now. Are you for real
This, but the entire Western world. You are not immune because you're from Australia or Canada or France or wherever the fuck, this is not an American problem this is a problem of the Western world in general you do not get a pass just because you're not American.
Remember when someone was like “haha the funniest thing tumblr could do right now is make it so you get a badge for looking at 600 posts instead of what twitters doing lol” and then they did it. That was pretty awesome. I think the funniest thing tumblr could do right now is stop flagging trans women’s post as sexual right fucking now lol and fix prev tags and get rid of the fucking bigots and racists and nazis for once haha and also apologize for this shit. Wouldn’t that be pretty funny lol haha it would be so funny if they did this
fr it's so bleak that free the nipple faded into irrelevancy like the fact that as a society the Feminized Nipple is something so taboo to be seen in public is just pathetic. if you personally can't handle a bit of nip I hate you. you are psychically weaker than a baby. grow the fuck up.
This is why I strongly advocate for an alien invasion movie but set in like 1142. The Anarchy is in full swing.
it’d be so good. Everyone would map theological explanations of the aliens onto them. It’d be so much fun.
Aliens: Take us to your leader. Jocelyn, Peasant: All right. Um, which one? Are you for King Stephen or the Empress Maude? Aliens: Um– Jocelyn: I recommend Empress Maude. King Stephen is a lying usurper. Aliens: All right, Empress Maude. Take us to her. Jocelyn: I always new God was on our side. Aliens: Jocelyn: You’re angels right? Come to bring us portends and tidings of the divine? Aliens: Or to massacre you. Jocelyn: That makes sense. We’re very sinful. We deserve whatever punishment it is God has seen fit to bestow upon us. Aliens: Aliens: Aliens: Wow.
explosiveflygon
One day that tiny baby will be a big shark able to rip people to shreds
most blacktip reef sharks are no more than 5.5ft long when mature. not only that, blacktip reef sharks are timid and shy, with no fatal human attacks documented. don’t comment stuff like this on my posts, save it for another post and stay off mine. thanks
vikturi-is-mine
gentlesharks has hAD IT
Grandi has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food; this is the first time he’s spoken to the foreign press.
Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. […] And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.
[…] “It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.
[…] Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention.
Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.
“Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian,” Grandi says squarely.
[…] Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era.
[P]oliticians understand the power of what Grandi terms “gastronationalism”. Who cares if the traditional food culture they promote is partly based on lies, recipes dreamt up by conglomerates or food imported from America? Few things are more reassuring and agreeable than an old lady making tortellini.
It wasn’t always like this. “The grandparents knew it was a lie,” Grandi tells me, finishing the last of his prosecco. “The philologic concern with ingredient provenance is a very recent phenomenon.” Indeed it’s hard to imagine that people who survived the second world war eating chestnuts, as my grandfather did, would be concerned about using pork jowl instead of pork belly in a pasta recipe. Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.”
[…] As Grandi points out, a tradition is nothing but an innovation that was once successful.
the most hated man in italy is a historian on a mission to prove that most immemorial italian traditions—like many elsehwere—date from 1860-1960
Mario creepypasta fundamentally doesn't work because you know what Mario would actually do if we saw some dimension-warping hundred-handed cosmic horror? He wouldn't lose his mind; he'd take one look at that Shin Megami Tensei looking fucker, pull out his dorky little mushroom-shaped cell phone, hit the fourth number down on his contact list, and go "hey, Kirby, I think-a one-a your boys got lost".
"Or he'd just fight it himself" no, he would not, for two reasons:
- This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Mario's central plot structure. Mario always gets his ass beat in his initial encounter with an outside context problem, then spends the bulk of the game going around gathering allies and kicking the legs out from under the outside context problem's support structure.
- This sort of thing clearly falls into another protagonist's idiom, and Mario is a union man – he's not going to scab on Kirby. Perish the thought!
"I wouldn't take-a the food from another video game mascot's plate!"
"I don't think Kirby gets paid for this."
"That's-a not what I said."
*off-screen vacuum sounds*
do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button
anyway just a reminder for the myth lovers out there
king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.
on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.
i’m just saying in my experience a lot of these legends had been so anglo-fied in the past and it’s like, all this cool shit is celtic welsh legend.
Arthur’s wife was called Gwenhwyfar first.
Like the kraken I emerge, summoned by the English theft of Arthur
- Arthur is a Welsh name. It means ‘bear’. He’s likely derived from a Gaulish bear god
- In the form of King Arthur, he is an anti-Saxon mythological WELSH figure, representing the native Brythonic people of Britain against the Anglo-Saxon invaders, dating from the 500s AD
- The version appropriated by the English in the 1100s is the shitty boring sanitised version - they did it because they were trying to compete with the romance tradition on the continent at the time but didn’t have anything of their own to romanticise
- Merlin is called Myrddin
- Percival is Peredur
- Kay is Cei, and also was subject to enormous character assassination in the English version - in the Welsh version he’s much closer to Arthur’s right hand man
- Guinevere is Gwenhwyfar
- There is no Lancelot, no Galahad, no tedious affair story
- There is no Camelot. Arthur’s seat was Caerllion - modern Caerleon, putting him into both the region of the Silures (one of the most fearsome and warlike of the British tribes, modern South East Wales) and the old Roman fortress, which would have been an impossibly huge Palace for a warlord at the time.
- They all have super powers and get up to wacky hijinks involving hair care, giants, strange giant wildlife, spectral revolving/glass fortresses in the Celtic sea, and a really fucking weird chess match. Also a cloak made out of beards.
- What the fuck is the round table
Anyway it’s particularly irritating because traditional Welsh culture and beliefs have been so thoroughly stripped away and destroyed by England over the centuries, and Arthurian legend is one of the few surviving fragments we have left to preserve. And he’s specifically an anti-English figure. So the ubiquity of the boring and appropriative English Arthur across the whole fucking world is… Well, it’s not great.
This is so interesting! Does anyone know a good source/reading material where one could get more of the original Welsh versions of the stories?
The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies is your best bet! It’s got a bunch of big-ass Welsh myths in, but most relevantly it includes Culhwch ac Olwen, which is a full-on Arthurian text (plus a couple of interesting ones).
There’s a whole bunch more that’s survived in fragments, but they’re all in Old Welsh - fully readable if you speak Welsh, but obviously not much use if you don’t (I don’t know if you do or not but from context I’m guessing not lol).
Trioedd Ynys Prydain (literally “the Triads of the Island of Britain”, though in English they’re usually called “the Welsh Triads”) are a huge collection of lists of three things from Welsh lore, including a lot of Arthurian lore. They’re not stories, but they contain fascinating allusions to stories, to whole strains of the Arthurian tradition, that we may or may not have elsewhere.
Absolutely fantastic addition, yes, Rachel Bronwich’s Triads are glorious.
being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
attentiondeficitstarscream
someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help
me: my what
What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.
when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.
Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.
So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’
1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!
2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:
a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!
In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.
I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose
b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!
c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface
d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)
e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them
f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.
g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.
h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.
And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.
This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.
Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.
so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!
How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense
stupidlittlereblogs
Reblogging to save a wrist
Too many people are forgetting these things too quickly:
-SESTA/FOSTA passed. Despite the many, many warnings of sex workers.
-A bunch of apps started their censorship policies because Apple directly threatened their revenue if they didn't promise to cut down on the amount of porn on their sites
-MasterCard and VISA tried to outright stop processing OnlyFans work SPECIFICALLY because of the association with sex work, and no other feasible financial reason.
There is not a sudden regressive movement among individual people. Free The Nipple didn't fade into obscurity because people didn't care. It was stopped. By policies. By laws. By arrests. By censorship. These things have been purposefully put in place by companies and politicians. They saw the work we were trying to do wrt bodily autonomy, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom, and they forcibly put a stop to it.
Dude has a death wish
Delighted to announce this bird is real and is a corvid.
Truly the family that just keeps giving.
I haven’t seen it in the notes yet, so afaik, here’s the source of that video! So now you can see the funny poison bird much more clearly.
It was taken by a biologist that studies birds so it seems like he knows what he’s doing. For the most part. Here’s his caption:
You all know that he 100% licked his fingers after handling that bird
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.
What I find frustrating about these discussions is that no one wants to mention the other reason why people buy fast fashion - price.
I would love to spend £20 on a good quality t-shirt that will last a decade if not longer, but I don't have £20. I buy what I can from charity and second hand stores, but what's available is limited and rarely in my size. I can get a plain t-shirt that fits well and is made from recycled materials at Primark for £2 to £5
Same with having kids. They grow fast, and some of us don't have the money or storage space (or certainty that we'll be living in the same place in a month let alone a year), so you can't invest in clothing that grandkids and great grandkids will potentially wear. Fast fashion will kit out your child in t-shirt and joggers that will last until their next growth spurt for less than £5, and when every penny counts that is a lifesaver