no ty

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
kaynanarie
beemovieerotica

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

elodieunderglass

👍

nuka-rockit

boimadeofbeef asked:

you remember how the onion man said that everything is his books were real? and also that in his (third??) book a documentary on a dinosaur-human hybrid was shown to him as a child, causing him so much trauma that he learnt how to astral project? well i think ive found the documentary.

so i have been reading a book on evolution for school and this book talks about a canadian palaeontologist called Dale A. Russell came up with the ‘dinosauroid’ this as a thought experiment. the idea was that if dinosaurs had never been wiped out, would a non-mammalian human like bipedal, intelligent thing have evolved and what would it have looked like.

so this was theorised in 1982 making it definitely the right age for this to have been the thing that traumatised ole greggy-poo. what did it look like to terrify such an alpha you may ask?

a science fair / shitty museum display of a reptilian dinosaur if it had evolved to fill the same niche as a human. it is green and alien-like but most importantly it looks fucking ridiculous.ALT

as far as i know, the only documentary that has come out about this was discovery channel, paleoworld ‘troodon: dinosaur genius’ released in 1995, when onion was ~10. the full thing is up on youtube (skip to 18:45 for The Creature) and i think it might be the very video that gave greg the ability to astral project.

thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

strange-aeons answered:

Oh my god????????

probablyasocialecologist
book-quotes-and-moodboards

It was always a strange thing, coming home. Coming home meant that you had, at one point, left it and, in doing so, irreversibly changed. How odd, then, to be able to return to a place that would always be anchored in your notion of the past. How could this place still be there, if the you that once lived there no longer existed?

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (by Becky Chambers)

waveringheart
firstfullmoon

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next — if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions — you’d be doomed. You’d be as ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”

— Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin (via violentwavesofemotion)

thirdity
thirdity

“The authors of these pseudo-scientific fairy tales supply the public with what it wants: truisms, clichés, stereotypes, all sufficiently costumed and made “wonderful” so that the reader may sink into a safe state of surprise and at the same time not be jostled out of his philosophy of life.”

— Stanisław Lem, His Master’s Voice

cathkaesque
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.

image

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.

probablyasocialecologist
probablyasocialecologist

The amount of things that need to be ended is mounting. Not only do we need to end things that are harmful, like fossil fuels or pesticides or plastic bags; we need to end things that are doomed. The latter demands a shared understanding of what’s doomed. When it comes to climate change, there are parallels between managed decline and managed retreat. It won’t just be moving away from coastlines or wildfire-prone areas—it will be moving from areas where aquifers are depleted, ski towns where it no longer snows. We need a wider cultural shift that will enable us to manage all of this change and these various endings—not something that dismisses them as “all okay,” indicating that we should simply “Be resilient!” either, but something that allows for grief as part of the process.

Holly Jean Buck, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough

play-now-my-lord
killyfromblame

Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintaining planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.

killyfromblame

Advertising is an incredibly wasteful, ecologically destructive industry that intrudes on our everyday lives pretty much constantly. We’re absolutely fucked if we can’t even question one of the most distinctly obnoxious and useless facets of the ecocidal economic system we live in. Like this isn’t even something that powers our day-to-day existence like the energy sector (literally killing us but also keeping our AC/heat, transportation, etc running)—advertising just pollutes, wastes, and annoys, yet it’s been assimilated into many peoples’ sense of self and their ability to “enjoy things”

“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is these that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that in a society freed from capitalism “being” will be valued over “having.” Personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and products—the sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”

As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve the fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.

Advertising pollutes the mental landscape, just like it does the urban and rural landscapes; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.

Ecosocialism, Michael Löwy

play-now-my-lord

i learned this from reading Galbraith: advertisements for products drive up consumption behaviors for all related products. You see an ad for Coca-Cola and you're that much more likely to go out and get yourself any kind of soda. "That much more likely" isn't much, people aren't that impressionable, but the effect spread out among millions of people is enough to make it worth companies' money. The issue with it is ultimately that the levels of consumption of consumer products in our society are not sustainable, the infrastructure doesn't exist and maybe can't exist for it to be particularly efficient, so sustaining the levels of demands for every product that advertising means companies depend on = vast stockpiles of perfectly useful goods left to rot in the desert somewhere in the global south, or worse set on fire somewhere in the global south.

And late capitalism has settled on rate of growth in profits as a bellwether of economic health for firms! The current unsustainable level isn't even enough for them, they want to see us eating and drinking garbage until we choke & dumping half of the riches of the earth into a hole for their private benefit.

The consumptive affluence we live with doesn't make us happy, it isn't who we are, it's just something the number wants, so we dedicate startling amounts of our lives to it. If you wanted to start making a dent in the outsized role the global north plays in climate change, you could honestly do worse than severely restricting or even outright banning advertising spending

trans-axolotl
womenintheirwebs

image

this is so succinct and so perfect.

mimikyufriend

[Image ID: The people I know who hand-draw animated porn or film their own erotic videos can’t make a living selling their wares on Tumblr anymore. Yet countless porn bots manage to steal those same creators’ works off other sides and reupload them to Tumblr without issue. So it can’t even be said that these attempts at censorship are protecting any of the vulnerable populations they purport to. Actual human porn creators are pretty conscientious about checking their follow lists for minors, and blocking them. Porn bots aren’t. End ID]