💀 Living the Dream 💀

Elder Millennial - She/Her - Leftist/Ancom - So Tired

[animentality]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[heraldic-thunderbolt]

"history will absolve me" as the e-mail signature

[depsidase]

[isuggesteatingtherich]

i have a suggestion

[animentality]

[concretechrysalis]

On the one hand, fuck the Pope

On the other hand, this one particular thing is pretty alright

[anxietyproblem]

[fruitviking]

Reblog to give a hug, a forehead kiss, and a grilled cheese cut diagonal to the person you reblogged it from. 

[achillesinhighheels]

[thevampirecrow]

fellatio sounds like a supporting shakespeare character rather than oral sex on a penis to be honest

[northerlygale-deactivated202307]

[throwitonthepile]

[sporifluorous]

Dave Brandt was so much more than a meme. He partnered with universities to experiment with and expand soil conservation and cover crop techniques, worked to educate other farmers through worldwide conventions and direct mentorship, founded the Soil Health Academy, and was called the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health" by the chief of the USDA's conservation department.

There is no healthy planet without healthy ag practices, and this guy was a legend.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The A-horizon on his farm was 4 feet deep

You do not understand

Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.

His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.

I-

I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.

Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.

50 inches. The mind reels.

[improvrich]

This is so much more impressive than I can understand and comprehend and I would love to know more about A horizon

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Do you love the color of the Soil?

Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.

Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.

A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.

This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.

Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:

Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.

Exactly

[isuggestrevolution]

i have an agricultural suggestion

[animentality]

[orcboxer]

honestly "oracle that nobody believes" is such a solid trope. imagine trying to convince anybody in 2006 what the next two decades was gonna look like

[concretechrysalis]

Fuck, that would *not* have helped me find the will to survive my suicidal years

Kinda funny, finding the will to live just in time for shit to get extra fucked up in new and terrifying ways

[queeranarchism]

Let me settle the 'is it fetishism and is it bad?' debate once and for all:

Being attracted to any kind of body is normal. Fat bodies. Trans bodies. Disabled bodies. All normal. Being extra attracted to a specific kind of body is normal too. Totally normal to have a type.

Not unlearning the societal stigma attached to those kinds of bodies, the people who inhabit those bodies, and the people who fuck them, to the point where you do any of the following:

Only want to date/fuck the person in secret.

Reduce the person to the feature that you desire and ignore the rest of who they are as a person.

Expect the person to be a walking porn fantasy instead of a real person with their own sexual preferences and boundaries.

Would no longer love the person if the stigmatized aspect of their body changed.

Consider yourself superior to the person, think the person should be 'grateful' that you love their body, etc.

See the person as a temporary adventure while planning to eventually settle down with someone whose body isn't stigmatized.

Is bad and harmful and you shouldn't be dating anyone until you've worked on your shit, because this makes you a very terrible partner. This doesn't mean you are a bad person with bad-fetishist-desires who can only desire people badly, it means you need to unlearn societal stigma so you can be a better partner to the people you desire.

Thank you for coming to me ted talk.

[queeranarchism]

And please don't describe your interest in a marginalized human body shape as 'kinky' or 'being into some freaky shit'.

Imagine what it means to tell a person that sexual attraction to their body isn't normal.

I love kink but liking a type of body is NOT kinky and it sure as hell isn't freaky. It's regular human-to-human attraction. It's as vanilla as it gets.

[animentality]

[fortunes-haven]

I have a theory this is partially Uber's fault.

See, Uber made its money by inserting its app in-between the people who needed rides and the people who provided those rides. Did the app provide anything of value? Not really, which is why it was heavily subsidized for like a decade as investors poured millions and millions of dollars into it until it almost became a monopoly (Lyft stubbornly managed to hang on, but a monopoly was the stated goal). Then they proceeded to jack up the prices, play mindgames with the drivers to get the most service for the least dollars, and generally "enshittify."

Ever since Uber appeared on the scene, every single damn Silicon bro with an app has claimed "it's like Uber but for _____!" And they very specifically mean, "it's an app that will suck money out of an industry by inserting a middle man where there wasn't one before."

Enter AI. It's Uber for your brain. It's putting a goddamn middle-man money-sucking app between you and your brain.

I hate it so much.

[nonaferatu]

people hate it when i say "black people getting cancer is racist" but im literally fucking right because systemic racism has led to chemical dumping being acceptable in black/brown neighborhoods and black people have higher rates of cancer as a result

[transgenderwerewolfautism]

For years there was literally a giant pile of used car tires just casually sitting in one of Dallas' Black neighborhoods and the city kept refusing to come get them for so long that people started developing respiratory issues just from having to live near it. Those people will almost definitely go the rest of their lives w/ a heightened risk of developing specific cancers.

[storyweavingspider]

I met more <50y/o Black women who actively had, survived, or regained cancer, within a year of living in one of the poorest neighborhoods of DC, than I did the rest of my time in living in/around DC.

[nonaferatu]

people hate it when i say "black people getting cancer is racist" but im literally fucking right because systemic racism has led to chemical dumping being acceptable in black/brown neighborhoods and black people have higher rates of cancer as a result

[transgenderwerewolfautism]

For years there was literally a giant pile of used car tires just casually sitting in one of Dallas' Black neighborhoods and the city kept refusing to come get them for so long that people started developing respiratory issues just from having to live near it. Those people will almost definitely go the rest of their lives w/ a heightened risk of developing specific cancers.

[storyweavingspider]

I met more <50y/o Black women who actively had, survived, or regained cancer, within a year of living in one of the poorest neighborhoods of DC, than I did the rest of my time in living in/around DC.

[marisatomay]

This Pride I hope that all of you never ever forget that no amount of sanitizing your sex life or sanding down of your LGBT edges will make bigots accept you. So, don’t debase yourself by capitulating an inch to them, especially in ways that throw your fellow community members under the bus.

[marisatomay]

You are a degenerate faggot in the eyes of bigots whether you’re wearing a nice button down and slacks with combed hair or leather daddy kink gear. So stand with the freaks who will stand with you until the end—long after the bigots have abandoned you despite your claims to be “one of the good ones.”

[northstareclipse]

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.