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I'm not here to fuck spiders

@trashboy

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trashboy
gator-tators
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abominationimperatrix

A short list of extremely-specific lesser-known mythical monster tropes which I didn’t expect to be super widespread:

1.  Ogres which, when slain, spawn huge amounts of mosquitoes out of their bodies.

2.  Humanoid horrors that lurk at the tops of cliffs and kick passerbies down off of the ledge so that their mates and/or offspring can kill them.

3.  Depraved ex-human cannibals for whom one of their feet has rotten away into a spike of bone which they then stab people with.

4.  Creatures which resemble pitiful old men and beg people to carry them but their legs are actually tentacle-like “straps” which they use to kill or enslave their victims.

5.  Hairy ogres with axe-heads sticking out of their chests.

6.  Grotesque female humanoids with enormous, pendulous breasts, one of which they throw over their shoulder.  (That last detail specifically shows up more times than you would think possible.)

7.  Flying detachable heads.  Organs hanging down frequent but optional.

8.  The “animal that cannot lie down,” i.e. a monster without joints in its limbs that, you guessed it, cannot lie down and has to lean on things.

10.  So.  Many.  Backwards.  Feet.  Usually as a means of making trackers think they went in the opposite direction.

11.  Swallowers.  I.e., monsters that swallow huge amounts of victims but keep them inside in their stomachs before spitting them out when slain.  Most famously present in Sub-Saharan Africa, but basically everywhere.

12.  Bisected humanoids.  Creatures with only half a physical body, cut vertically.

13.  Headless monsters with faces on their chests.

14.  Natal revenants.  The undead remains of women who die in childbirth, usually as some sort of ghostly Succubus.

15.  Female creatures with hollow backs, the main giveaway of their supernatural nature.

16.  Living meteor demons that spread disease.

17.  Chicken-snake hybrids.

18.  Rattite-snake hybrids.

19.  Parrot-snake hybrids.

20.  Monsters that fly around in the atmosphere, and if you look at them you die.  (Related to number 16.)

21.  In arid regions, RAINBOW TASTE YOU.  (Because it signals the end of much-needed rain and is therefore seen in a negative light and personified as something malicious.  

22.  Owl demons!  Tend to be witchy/hag-like.

23.  Succubi whose only giveaway of their monstrousness is a single hooved foot.

24.  People cursed into becoming weird donkey-things.

25.  River blockers.  Monsters who block off water supplies in order to cause droughts, and must be slain for that reason.

26.  Monsters who inflict some kind of seemingly unsurvivable body horror on you, before resurrecting you long enough to go home at which point you promptly die for reals this time.

And many, many, more, but I’m tired right now.  Might update later.

Update:  Wow!  I did not expect this blow up, or for this many people to be interested!  This was very spur of the moment and off the top of my head, I assumed I would just be infodumping into the void.  I’m going to write up examples for all of these, I’m just going to need a little bit of time to get my sources in order to make sure they I don’t misrepresent or misremember anything.  How common a lot of these are varies, some tend to be primarily amongst neighboring cultures in specific regions, others tend to be downright global.  And some have dozens of instances while others are more like that Doofenshmirtz meme.  (I’d only have two nickels but I’m surprised it happened twice).  

trashboy
elodieunderglass
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everythingeverywhereallatonce

a reading list on the human labor behind AI, machine learning, data labeling, and content moderation

bringing a global labor perspective to the “ai is gonna steal our jobs!” discourse that usamerican creative workers don’t really like…

(based on this twitter thread)

Google’s AI Chatbot Is Trained by Humans Who Say They’re Overworked, Underpaid and Frustrated (12 July 2023)

“If you want to ask, what is the secret sauce of Bard and ChatGPT? It’s all of the internet. And it’s all of this labeled data that these labelers create,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at New York University. “It’s worth remembering that these systems are not the work of magicians — they are the work of thousands of people and their low-paid labor.”

The Hidden Workforce That Helped Filter Violence and Abuse Out of ChatGPT (11 July 2023)

ChatGPT is one of the most successful tech products ever launched. And crucial to that success is a group of largely unknown data workers in Kenya. By reviewing disturbing, grotesque content, often for wages of just two to three dollars an hour, they helped make the viral chatbot safe. WSJ’s Karen Hao traveled to Kenya to meet those workers and hear about what the job cost them.

The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution: The global labor force of outsourced and contract workers are early adopters of generative AI — and the most at risk (11 July 2023)

Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.

Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human (20 June 2023)

You might miss this if you believe AI is a brilliant, thinking machine. But if you pull back the curtain even a little, it looks more familiar, the latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run.

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic (18 January 2023)

OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models.
To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. … The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour…

The ‘Invisible’, Often Unhappy Workforce That’s Deciding the Future of AI (9 December 2023)

Among a range of conclusions, the Google study finds that the crowdworkers’ own biases are likely to become embedded into the AI systems whose ground truths will be based on their responses; that widespread unfair work practices (including in the US) on crowdworking platforms are likely to degrade the quality of responses; and that the ‘consensus’ system (effectively a ‘mini-election’ for some piece of ground truth that will influence downstream AI systems) which currently resolves disputes can actually throw away the best and/or most informed responses.

The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence: Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.” (13 October 2022)

So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical development and deployment of AI systems.

A factory line of terrors: TikTok’s African content moderators complain they were treated like robots, reviewing videos of suicide and animal cruelty for less than $3 an hour (1 August 2022)

“The devil of this job is that you get sick slowly — without even noticing it,” said Wisam, a former content moderator who now trains others for Majorel. … While TikTok does use artificial intelligence to help review content, the technology is notoriously poor in non-English languages. For this reason, humans are still used to review most of the heinous videos on the platform.

Human Touch: Artificial intelligence may be making some jobs obsolete but it has given a new lease of life to one group of people who play an unglamorous but critical role in the machine learning pipeline: first generation women workers in Indian towns and villages (20 July 2022)

“Any major technology company in the last 10 years has been powered by a throng of people … At some level, there’s denial. Investors like to hear that technology sells itself once you write the code. But that’s not really true.” … “Data work has a racial and class dynamic. It is outsourced to developing countries while model work is done by engineers largely in developed nations … Without their labour, there would be no AI.”

Desperate Venezuelans are making money by training AI for self-driving cars (29 August 2022)

How the AI industry profits from catastrophe: As the demand for data labeling exploded, an economic catastrophe turned Venezuela into ground zero for a new model of labor exploitation (20 April 2022)

Most profit-maximizing algorithms, which underpin e-commerce sites, voice assistants, and self-driving cars, are based on deep learning, an AI technique that relies on scores of labeled examples to expand its capabilities. … The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labor to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work” … is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.
Over the last five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become a primary source of this labor. The country plunged into the worst peacetime economic catastrophe facing a country in nearly 50 years right as demand for data labeling was exploding. Droves of well-educated people who were connected to the internet began joining crowdworking platforms as a means of survival.

Facebook Faces New Lawsuit Alleging Human Trafficking and Union-Busting in Kenya (11 May 2022)

“We can’t have safe social media if the workers who protect us toil in a digital sweatshop… We’re hoping this case will send ripples across the continent—and the world. The Sama Nairobi office is Facebook’s moderation hub for much of East and South Africa. Reforming Facebook’s factory floor here won’t just affect these workers, but should improve the experience of Facebook users in Kenya, South Africa, Ethiopia, and other African countries.”

Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop (14 February 2022)

Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user. …
The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook… is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe

Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon: Big tech relies on the victims of economic collapse (22 September 2021)

Microwork comes with no rights, security, or routine and pays a pittance — just enough to keep a person alive yet socially paralyzed. Stuck in camps, slums, or under colonial occupation, workers are compelled to work simply to subsist under conditions of bare life. This unequivocally racialized aspect to the programs follows the logic of the prison-industrial complex, whereby surplus — primarily black — populations [in the United States] are incarcerated and legally compelled as part of their sentence to labor for little to no payment. Similarly exploiting those confined to the economic shadows, microwork programs represent the creep of something like a refugee-industrial complex.
(an excerpt from the book Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism by Philip Jones)

AI needs to face up to its invisible-worker problem (11 December 2020)

A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans. (16 August 2019)

A.I. researchers hope they can build systems that can learn from smaller amounts of data. But for the foreseeable future, human labor is essential. “This is an expanding world, hidden beneath the technology,” said Mary Gray, an anthropologist at Microsoft and the co-author of the book “Ghost Work,” which explores the data labeling market. “It is hard to take humans out of the loop.”

[book] Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts (June 2019)

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material—sometimes thousands of items per day

[book] Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri (May 2019)

Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. … services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none.
[follow-up articles about the book here and here]

Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor (28 March 2019)

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. … “The hook is that we have this kind of hype circulating around AI so that we can masquerade really old forms of labor exploitation as ‘reforming prisons,’… They’re connecting social movements, reducing it to hype, and using that to sell AI.”

How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine: Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen (5 February 2014)

Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish. … But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never happened.
trashboy
gallusrostromegalus
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play-now-my-lord

i go to the job interview. there is a square table set out with a dish of assorted unwrapped candies, and an HR manager sitting on one chair facing the door. if i were a cis woman i would sit across from him, whereas if i was a cis man i would sit next to him. in either case i would take one piece of candy and slip it into my pocket for later. the HR manager rises to shake my hand. there are a million strategies to make a good impression on an interviewer with the correct handshake, but this isn't my first rodeo.

ignoring his hand, i plunge my hand into the bowl of candy and deftly grab a handful, then begin feeding the HR manager. initially he's agitated by my approach but i calm him down with my gentle demeanor. pretty soon he's eating candy straight out of my hand. good sign. when he sits down i brush off his lap with a handkerchief (shows respect for his clothes by not using a bare hand, shows concern for cleanliness and thorough nature to clean off his lap).

i sit directly on his lap, and he winces in pain from my weight. "easy there, big fella. i'm not gonna hurt you." i pat him on the head and reach into my pocket. i pull out a stick of wintergreen gum. the scent and flavor of the wintergreen calm his wild spirit and give me free rein to reach into the pocket of his trousers. "you won't be needing this anymore," i say, placing his wallet just beyond his arm's reach on the table. "that life is behind you."

carefully, i take his shoes. this is the hard part - even taking loafers off of an HR manager can startle them, make them bolt. but he trusts me. i put his shoes on my feet. they fit perfectly. i'm now ready to take his jacket and work badge and release him into the wild. he'll be disoriented at first, but within a few months, he'll rehabituate to the natural environment, maybe even find a mate and start a family. i'll be a valued employee at my new job by then.

don't worry about his clothes and wallet. he'll find new ones, they always do. nature provides for all creatures.

trashboy
cloudstrifing
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viridianriver
KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users' Mental Health Crises for "Content"

I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.

Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)

But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.

I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:

  • What you say on there won't be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn't even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
  • Also, what you say on there? Is now...
  • Koko's intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
  • Publicly performing or displaying your "content" (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
  • Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
  • Sell / share this "content" with other businesses
  • Any harm you come to using Koko? That's on you.
  • And Koko won't take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)

I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)

They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.

So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.

(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)

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auressea
trashboy
quixoticanarchy
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literallyaflame

“fanfiction,” as a concept, only exists because of intellectual property. at the end of the day, it’s just fiction. some of it is great, some of it sucks ass. sometimes, it can reveal something damning about the author—prejudices, biases, whether or not they think cats should be left indoors, how they feel about offshore tax evasion, whatever. that’s the nature of fiction. this is not news to anyone who’s ever opened a book

what’s truly unique about fanfiction is that it’s anonymous and free with a barrier to entry that ants wouldn’t notice climbing. also, it’s amateur by necessity; barring a few notable exceptions, nobody expects their gaudy slash fiction to win them an award or make them a million dollars. this crock pot of internet fuckery lends itself to two things—a monumental diversity of skill level and buck wild nasty behavior

fanfiction is neither god’s gift to all man kind nor an incurable blight. it’s just a thing. that exists. it’s neither defenseless nor indefensible. it can be harmful, helpful, or benign. more importantly, it’s not going anywhere, so i wish we’d stop arguing about whether or not it’s “legitimate” and talk about what’s actually happening with it instead

trashboy
ekjohnston
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shorthistorian

The current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are great evidence of how foreign unionization has become to American workers. Currently, only about 10% of the workforce belongs to a union. In the 50s and 60s, that number was more like 30%.

No wonder well-meaning people are confused about picketing, scabbing, and bargaining. Most Americans, particularly those under 40, have no experience with unions.

The good news is the unions will tell you exactly how they want you to support them. Please listen.

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fans4wga

This is very true! On the upside, now is a fantastic time to learn about unions and strikes, because the writers are great communicators. Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything) is a great resource to start with (on Twitter, Youtube and Tiktok.)

trashboy
ofdarklands
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foone

I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.

He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven.

trashboy
ofdarklands
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theabstruseone

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

  • Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
  • The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
  • The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
  • The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
  • Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
  • The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
  • Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
  • He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

  • Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
  • Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
  • The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
  • The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
  • The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
  • TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
  • This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
  • This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
  • X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
  • Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
  • The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
  • One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
  • Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
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dduane

When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.

trashboy
ofdarklands
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cathkaesque

The local population in countries that export bananas typically eat different varieties grown primarily by small farmers. The ones for the Americans and the Europeans, Cavendish variety bananas, are grown in huge, monoculture plantations that are susceptible to disease. The banana industry consumes more agrichemicals than any other in the world, asides from cotton. Most plantations will spend more on pesticides than on wages. Pesticides are sprayed by plane, 85% of which does not land on the bananas and instead lands on the homes of workers in the surrounding area and seeps into the groundwater. The results are cancers, stillbirths, and dead rivers.

The supermarkets dominate the banana trade and force the price of bananas down. Plantations resolve this issue by intensifying and degrading working conditions. Banana workers will work for up to 14 hours a day in tropical heat, without overtime pay, for 6 days a week. Their wages will not cover their cost of housing, food, and education for their children. On most plantations independent trade unions are, of course, suppressed. Contracts are insecure, or workers are hired through intermediaries, and troublemakers are not invited back.

Who benefits most from this arrangement? The export value of bananas is worth $8bn - the retail value of these bananas is worth $25bn. Here’s a breakdown of who gets what from the sale of banana in the EU.

On average, the banana workers get between 5 and 9% of the total value, while the retailers capture between 36 to 43% of the value. So if you got a bunch of bananas at Tesco (the majority of UK bananas come from Costa Rica) for 95p, 6.65p would go to the banana workers, and 38p would go to Tesco.

Furthermore, when it comes to calculating a country’s GDP (the total sum of the value of economic activity going on in a country, which is used to measure how rich or poor a country is, how fast its economy is ‘growing’ and therefore how valuable their currency is on the world market, how valuable its government bonds, its claim on resources internationally…etc), the worker wages, production, export numbers count towards the country producing the banana, while retail, ripening, tariffs, and shipping & import will count towards the importing country. A country like Costa Rica will participate has to participate in this arrangement as it needs ‘hard’ (i.e. Western) currencies in order to import essential commodities on the world market.

So for the example above of a bunch of Costa Rican bananas sold in a UK supermarket, 20.7p will be added to Costa Rica’s GDP while 74.3p will be added to the UK’s GDP. Therefore, the consumption of a banana in the UK will add more to the UK’s wealth than growing it will to Costa Rica’s. The same holds for Bangladeshi t-shirts, iPhones assembled in China, chocolate made with cocoa from Ghana…it’s the heart of how the capitalism of the ‘developed’ economy functions. Never ending consumption to fuel the appearance of wealth, fuelled by the exploitation of both land and people in the global south.

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cathkaesque

Just realised I forgot to post the sources but I got this from Bananalink, a really cool organisation which supports banana workers’ unions in the UK’s supply chain, specifically these two pages.

trashboy
notwiselybuttoowell
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keow

Realistically I could never get rid of tumblr because it gives me the illusion of a community of strange young women all around my same age, all slowly figuring out how to live too

trashboy
crowley1990
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temptedbythemorningsun

When tumblr collapses I will email you all a monthly newsletter with my diary entries and make collages to simulate my reblogs. and I will want you ladies to do the same and also possibly send back a heart to "like" it

trashboy
crowley1990
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lesbianomens

i refuse to join more social media websites. if all the ones i'm on die, i hope i can recover my teenage self's ability to read a book a day instead

trashboy
ofdarklands
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phantomrose96

In the canon context, there is something extremely funny about Phantom running around with so much ghost gear from Fentonworks.

I assume the Fentons make enough of a spectacle with their ghost hatred that everyone knows they're out here hunting Phantom for bloodsport. Like there's no uneasy truce or tense partnership going on like the Fentons have not partnered with Phantom in any way. There's not even any chance of a secret partnership because the likes of Jack Fenton would not be able to keep a secret like that.

Which really just leaves the conclusion that Phantom stole all that gear. All of it. Repeatedly. And he's still doing it. He's got some brand new FentonTech-of-the-week every week and he Absolutely is not supposed to have that. Like some raccoon in the trashcan the Fentons can't keep out despite all their broom-swinging and lid locks.

The ghost-net wristwatch that Jack Fenton is parading around with at 10am is on Phantom's wrist by 11am. Jack and Maddie have so many pieces of matching gear but if One piece is missing from One of them you can almost certainly bet it's clipped to Phantom's beltloop somewhere. Sometimes Fenton gear on Jack or Maddie will vanish and then reappear and the best idea anyone has is sometimes Phantom steals too many things and just gives the least fun pieces back.

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phantomrose96
trashboy
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
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jeonwonwoo
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becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

I love videos like this, where you get to see someone genuinely skilled demonstrating those genuine skills via delivering an incredible performance while half-battling the technology. With eyes shut I wouldn't know this was a strained production, as it were.

Reminds me of that pianist who sat down to play with an orchestra and realised, as the concert began, that she'd practiced the wrong symphony. And while the orchestra played their opening bars she clearly wants to cry, and is sitting there with her head in her hands. And then it gets to her cue and she turns to the piano -

and plays it beautifully, because while she hadn't practiced it, she's still a classically-trained professional pianist, and "doing her best" means something phenomenal.

Same vibes here, like... this man is not a fluent English speaker and spends most of his time rapping. He's playing with half a body. He doesn't miss a beat.