Pokémon Human Character Tournament: THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

Nick Butcher & Nadine Nakanishi / Sonnenzimmer, Carrier Shell: Waste Matters, (9-color screen print with UV spot varnish and puff), 2020, Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies [© Sonnenzimmer]

Medieval stained glass fragment incorporated in a later window at the church of All Saints, East Barsham (Norfolk)  

image from here

1980s Nerd Plush

an internal memo leaked from ceo steve huffman saying the "noise" of the blackout will die out and they just need to weather it until we give up. fuck you spez.

first of all it's OVER EIGHT THOUSAND subreddits that went dark.

second of all he clearly doesn't give one single shit about the users or the UNPAID army of mods who slog through a million miles of shit every day to keep illegal and offensive content off the site (i'm a mod in a small fandom subreddit and even the shit i've seen is beyond the pale) and therefore make it appealing to the advertizers.

you have no fucking business without us. and you don't care one single bit about it.

he clearly did not mean for this memo to leak, but someone at reddit thought it was important enough to send it out anyway. please spread it (spreddit?) especially because so much of reddit is still in blackout.

This feels very similar to the uproar they LITERALLY JUST HAD in the D&D community over changes that would have negatively impacted third party creators. People started canceling their subscriptions to the paid service and Wizards of the Coast really thought they could get away with it by issuing a weak apology and waiting it out.

The community got angrier, so WotC thought they could get away with it by backing down to a half measure.

The community got even ANGRIER.

WotC ended up backing down to such an extent that they not only canceled all of the planned changes but released their core material under a creative commons license to boot, putting them BEHIND their starting position.

This is what we should be aiming for. I've used reddit daily for like fifteen years, but sometimes the only thing you can do to save a community you love is to genuinely be willing to walk away until the corporate bigwigs in charge get it through their heads that they actually NEED users. I want to make this the year of companies fucking around and finding out that unhappy users can cause them problems. Starve the bastards out and make them realize they need us more.

From: Jet Set Radio Future

Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox, 2002).

Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion (Lucasfilm - PC - 1996)

friendly reminder that if you're in your 20s and don't have your cutie mark yet then you're broken, you're a failure. and you're not going to make it

pony roleplay blogs on my post trying to curse me

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!

It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.

Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this

There’s some company, blackstone, blackwater, something like that, buying up houses that go on sale for 30k above asking price. Immediately outbidding anyone who tries to buy. Corporations are also buying property all across america.

Fuck…

Nobody comes to my tumblr for this, but Americans need to understand that THIS is why my generation can’t afford to own a house outside of Smallest-Town USA. THIS is also why people my age in bigger cities struggle to find decent apartments that don’t consume half of our monthly income.

Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That’s value they can borrow against, that’s a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that’s a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It’s probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can’t afford to take you to court.

I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who’ve lived there for generations because they can’t keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the “affordable” housing for an entire neighborhood. It’s gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that’s left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.

If that wasn’t bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you’ve instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future “improvements” that further contribute to the commodification of communities.

Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.

These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can’t it’s because we’re lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.

I hate these fuckers so fucking much.

people need shelter. corporations that exploit this at the expense of humanity are a nightmare.

the original idea of airbnb is that people would let out their spare rooms, or their own while they were out of town. that was wholesome. what it has become is just not.