breathe in starlight

australian | late 30s | she/her

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Thou wouldst not downloadeth a car

[squeakitties]

[necromosss]

As the person who got their R keyboard broken and the world mocked me for being forced to use the uwu language as replacement

My condolences

[commodore-64]

put that back

[the-davest-of-uncles]

National Lampoon, October 1985

[cdplayer]

"sound of the summer is this song" WRONG. its cicadas

[cdplayer]

for the 40th to 200th million summer in a row

[adamsmasher]

WE WERE ON JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!!!

[rouge-the-bat]

thank you for coming to my this #mythis

[greelin]

still love this gif more than anything

[shybuprofen]

everyone’s got a daddy kink until you respond with 👍 to their sexts

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

[anka-dm]

My illustrations the most based poem about tigers by Nael, age 6

Every time I read it I feel space inside my chest expand in very *emotion* way.

[zandraart]

bloop bloop

[fairycosmos]

clicking not interested on something used to mean they stopped showing it to you

[lilaccatholic]

I got this while scrolling on instagram to try to convince me to join threads and I—

We did it. We finally saved her.

[reinanova]

[terror-billie]

[alphacrone]

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

[squigglyworms]

love the end of the two towers where gandalf looks into the sunset talking bout "yea frodo had to go it alone it was his destiny and there is no changing it he will be ok 😌✨" and aragorn is like "sam went with him btw" and gandalf is like "oh fuck thank god"

[writingdose]

a million times this. “I don’t like these xyz fics” then don’t read them. THEY ARE NOT FOR YOU!!!!!!! no one forces you to read anything you don’t want to read. no one forces you to consume art you don’t enjoy. it’s so easy to click that mute or block button. instead of insulting fanfics or fan art for not fitting your personal liking, either choose something that does fit your personal liking, or write the fic you want to read yourself / draw the art you want to consume yourself.

fanfic writers and fan artists create as THEIR hobbies. they create for themselves and their own enjoyment. they don’t create for strangers’ approval

[redlipstickresurrected]

Clotilde Olyff (Belgian, b. 1962, based Brussels, Belgium) - Stone Alphabet, 1994. She collected these over a 14-year period from the banks of rivers and oceans.

[contemptible-scoundrel]

THINK LIKE AN OBELISK

ACT LIKE A TOTEM

WORK LIKE A CAIRN

FUCK LIKE A MONOLITH

[swingsetindecember]

i feel like people think companies will be altruistic and do the right thing regardless of government intervention. like no, companies are driven by capitalism. to make the most out of the day and money they have and maximize profits, especially fortune 500 companies

like without government intervention, strawberry jam would have wood in it. like it's a thing. food companies realized that they could use less of the expensive strawberries as ingredients and just use wood. there are laws you cannot legally call it strawberry jam if you do this. you have to call it a strawberry product or spread. food companies are always trying to get that shit through. they have lobby groups pushing that all the time

it is more expensive to put metal detectors in a food processing plant. companies want to cut costs. it is a legal requirement in a lot of countries to have them. so it forces companies to install them.

also to do routine inspections. that is a government requirement. so are building codes. a lot of codes are the bare minimum. like some companies will exceed the code and have more protections but a lot don't. like if it is not in the code, they don't do it. so that's why having governing bodies that regulate building safety, worker safety, food safety and product safety are crucial. because without them, your employer will not see the need to have exit doors with quick release handles, or do routine fire sprinkler inspections or have road salt for the sidewalks. some of it is basic fucking stuff.

companies when left alone do not regulate themselves. it's been historically untrue. companies want to give you a product that is cheap for them to make and that they can sell at the highest price so they can get the most profit. for everyone who loves capitalism, that's what it is. the free market will not self-regulate. if you don't have anti-monopoly laws and anti-wage theft laws and workers' protections, the open market will not fix that organically.

when government officials talk about removing protections it is not good. like they were put in place for a reason. like drinking water and food regulations were written in blood. same with human rights and freedoms. like people died for the building code to be written. people died for occupational healthy and safety codes to be written. there is a reason food safety codes are there. companies will look at 100 people dying and say it was the cost of doing business. it is the government's job to say that is an unacceptable and for companies to do better

[bundibird]

Manufacturers of matches knew that the sulfur they were using was making their employees sick, but the safer alternative was more expensive so they buried the knowledge for as long as they could and only swapped to the safer option once word got out and they were forced to make changes.

Arsenic miners knew that their fun little green colourant was killing people, but green clothes and furniture and wallpaper was super in vogue at the time and the miners were making bank, so they hid the knowledge for as long as they could.

DuPont/Teflon knew that their non-stick coating was poisonous, but it was super popular and making them loads of money, so they buried the information and kept making it (knowingly poisoning their employees) and emptying their waste into local waterways (poisoning local communities and animals) and selling it (poisoning their customers).

Cigarette companies new the harm that their products caused, and buried it for as long as possible. PG&E knew that they were causing cancer clusters, and they tried to bury that. Purdue Pharma knew their drug was addictive, and they not only tried to hide that fact, they also did their best to get as many people hooked on it as possible. Watch makers knew the paint they had their employees using was horribly toxic well before they stopped using it.

There are countless examples of a company knowing full well that their product or processes or etc were causing harm, but choosing to persist anyway because making money is more important to them than the health and wellbeing of their employees and customers. Thw only thing that has ever stopped them from doing this is public outcry and legislation.

People dont say "those regulations are written in blood" for no reason. They are literally written in the blood of all those individuals who were sacrificed before the rich and powerful were forced to stop their harmful practices. The second anyone starts talking about stripping back protective legislation, you know theyre either an absolute moron or theyre on the payroll of someone who wants to get very rich at the expense of people's lives.