behold, a lucy!

I am Lucy and I think superheroes are great!

[multifandomhoodies]

Mutuals can have my home address before discord can have my ID

[shadeslayer]

art by Tima Lotah Link (Chumash) for the Native Voices 16th Annual Short Play Festival

"merciless indian savages" is a direct quote from the US declaration of independence, and this is referencing the art of "manifest destiny" as a white woman standing over the us countryside

[buggycat]

oc that starts as a representation of yourself -> completely different character with their own personality

oc that was NOT supposed to be like you at all -> representation of the deepest parts of your soul

[gin-juice-tonic]

I used to be a proficient googler who never wasted a word but since Google is near useless no matter how good you are at it now I have reverted to just typing in entire questions like an old person

[isbergillustration]

The Quiet In Late January, Before The World Wakes Up

[asksailorpluto]

…She always had been a curious girl. 

[guilhernunes]

dogs on an unforgettable night at the club (commission)

[bolaneno]

Linda Infante Lyons, The Sovereign of the North (2022)

[mollyjames]

I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

[serenityvalleyradio]

I work at a nonprofit, and it is absolutely wild explaining to folks that being part of a program that reduces their energy bill actually helps us get funding to help even more people get energy bill savings.

You aren’t taking resources from anyone by using programs you qualify for. You are making a case for those programs being important enough to continue to exist and (in many cases) grow.

[headspace-hotel]

We live in a world so controlled by the idea of resource scarcity that we reason "If I get help, that must be taking help away from someone else!"

[tolerateit]

[sodafired]

a reminder for you all

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[utopians]

This local arts and crafts fair is pretty cool but I just wish there was somewhere I could buy a 3d printed dragon fidget toy or a crocheted potted plant

[seren-starlight]

There is literally no circumstance where I support age verification to access a website. As I've said before I'm very much the "there's nuance here" person on almost everything but on this issue there's no nuance for me, it's awful and horrible in and of itself and it also sets an awful and horrible precedent

[traycakes]

I'm fine with "click here to confirm you're an adult" because it keeps people from finding it by accident.

I do not give a shit if the people checking the box are actually adults, and oppose any effort to confirm that they are.

[sovietnam]

[jessebloom]

this almost makes me want to go back to law school

[fatehbaz]

[I]n poststructural adjustment Africa, established ways of getting ahead and getting by were sabotaged, producing a sense of ruptured temporality and reversed or forestalled “development” […]. The West Africanist Jane Guyer has argued that the erasure of incremental time is a global phenomenon: the precarity brought about by neoliberalism […] leaving us […] with the instantaneous now (“punctuated time”) […]. Ferguson’s pioneering work examines how colonial era social investment in African mining underpinned an expectation of the longue duree, and of mining futures now past (Ferguson 1999, 2006). The historic, neoliberal shift from socially and temporally “thick” to socially “thin,” hit-and-run extraction informed a number of other changes related to work and time in Africa, including the concentration of political sovereignty around “mining enclaves” […].

—

[E]xtractive economy in tantalum, tin, and tungsten (referred to in NGO circles as the “3 Ts”) shapes experiences and understandings of space, time, and value in the Eastern DR Congo. […] Much of this product is eventually sold to electronics manufacturers, ending up in many high tech devices. All of these aforementioned substances are essential to digital devices: tantalum is needed to produce digital capacitors […]. Tungsten is found in laptop screens and is used to make cell phones vibrate […]. Global demand for tantalum increased by 24 percent per year during the 1990s, alongside the emergence of the “information age” and so-called knowledge economies […]. 

[T]hese minerals’ prices are also strongly influenced by digital cultures. Congolese “3 Ts” are traded on spot markets, so their values fluctuate radically and rapidly: for example, online speculation helped produce the spike in coltan prices in late 2000, when Sony ran out of the tantalum it needed to meet Christmas demand for PlayStation 2 […].

—

The rupture of incremental time and predictable work is central to the experiences of those involved […]. [This is a] process of “temporal dispossession” in Congolese mining areas - or the usurpation, by others, of the ability to produce social relations […]. [M]any Eastern Congolese experience war as the instrument […], and time and price are among the many “resources” through which war is carried out. Transnational networks […] have expropriated Congolese resources […]. Rather, price remains beyond their control for entirely social reasons: because a network of powerful agents continues to manage events in their pursuit of Congolese wealth, in an ongoing […] way […].

—

All text above by: James H. Smith. “’May it never end’: Price wars, networks, and temporality in the ‘3 Ts’ mining trade of the Eastern DR Congo.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 2015. DOI at: doi dot org slash 10.14318/hau5.1.002 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]