Concept: PG-13 movie of a Shakespeare play, allowed one F-word. Where in the screenplay do you insert it?
When Fortinbras enters at the end of Hamlet. It’s his only line, and the play ends immediately after.
d e v o n

No title available
Not today Justin
No title available
hello vonnie
tumblr dot com
trying on a metaphor
RMH

Kaledo Art

oozey mess
styofa doing anything

Love Begins
Jules of Nature
Game of Thrones Daily
todays bird

if i look back, i am lost

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

tannertan36
will byers stan first human second
KIROKAZE
seen from Poland
seen from Canada
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Indonesia

seen from Germany

seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from Netherlands

seen from Malaysia
@spiteandchocolate
Concept: PG-13 movie of a Shakespeare play, allowed one F-word. Where in the screenplay do you insert it?
When Fortinbras enters at the end of Hamlet. It’s his only line, and the play ends immediately after.
A real page on the White House website
In case people missed it, another real page on the white house website pretends to "reveal the truth about ALIENS" and once again means immigrants, which it calls "its."
4chan took over the country.
This is actually fucking insanely horrifying what the fuck
I was talking to my brother-in-law yesterday about how the current state of the US government is a direct consequence of the Gamergate movement, and I think these examples are just more proof of that. Turns out trollocracies are a pretty shit form of government: the only thing they’ll give the masses is bread and circuses, but the bread’s all moldy and the clowns ain’t funny
They say that sudden, intense cravings for very specific foods are usually a sign of a vitamin deficiency. If so, that I'm presently making myself french toast, scrambled eggs, and a bacon and cheese sandwich at 11:45 PM must mean the vitamin I'm missing is grease.
I cross-posted this to Bluesky and got followed by a bunch of folks with blog headers clarifying which exact flavour of Christianity they adhere to because they thought I was making a hashtag-relatable post about cheating on your diet. Now we get find out how many of them are also comfortable with posts about werewolf cock.
maybe this is not my place to say because I am monolingual, and I'm sure it's part of a larger, more nuanced discussion about visibility and accessibility on the internet, but I think it'd be cool if people posted in their native languages more instead of in english. I see people do it way more on other platforms than on tumblr which is almost exclusively in english
El problema es, como bien has dicho, la accesibilidad y la visibilidad.
Tumblr en concreto es muy anglocentrista y un gran número de los usuarios no habla más que inglés. Si quieres que tus cosas lleguen a gente con gustos u opiniones similares, escribirlo en inglés asegura que la gente por lo menos lo pueda leer. Suma a esto el hecho de que bastantes series y tal son originalmente de habla inglesa (y a veces ni se traducen a tu lengua madre), lo que crea un fandom principalmente angloparlante.
Más allá de eso, también hay que tener en cuenta las diferencias culturales que surgen entre fandoms de distintos idiomas. Por ejemplo, durante mucho tiempo el fandom de Vocaloid angloparlante y el hispanohablante han chocado con respecto a temas como la piratería. En ocasiones es complicado manejar estas expectativas, y si sabes varios idiomas, peor incluso.
A mí me gustaría subir cositas en español y encontrar a gente que comparta mis gustos, pero en Tumblr en concreto es casi imposible. Tumblr ya es de por sí mucho más «nicho» en espacios hispanohablantes que otras RRSS como TikTok o Instagram, y si tus intereses no son muy populares, despídete.
La lingüística de los espacios de fans también está hipercentrada en el inglés. No es una pareja, es un ship; no es un universo alternativo, es un AU; no es destripar, es hacer spoiler, etc. Incluso las siglas: en español es LGTB, pero lo que sueles ver es LGBT. Parece una tontería, pero esta disonancia cognitiva hace que resulte muchísimo más complicado hablar en tu propio idioma en un fandom. Por no hablar de las innumerables referencias a posts o a memes... en inglés todo, por supuesto. Como te atrevas a hacer cualquier referencia cultural no inglesa, no te entiende nadie. Pierde la gracia.
Casi todo esto se puede achacar al imperialismo cultural estadounidense. El inglés es útil para comunicarse con gente de todo el mundo, pero su omnipresencia sirve de barrera para todos los demás idiomas. Quizás habría que reflexionar un poco sobre por qué coño el resto del mundo tiene que tragarse años de clases de inglés para hablar del juego que le gusta en una red social mientras muchos angloparlantes no se dignan ni a meter un texto en un traductor automático y prefieren pasar de largo.
The thing about Miss Piggy is that she kind of has a Roger Rabbit comedy superpower where she wins nearly any conceivable fight she's in. But unlike other characters of which that's true, like say, Bugs Bunny, who tend to win because they make the opponent play the game with their rules, Miss Piggy wins because the joke is that she can beat the shit out of literally anybody.
Bugs Bunny beats Thanos by setting up an airport and making him take off the Infinity Gauntlet to go through the metal detector.
Miss Piggy beats Thanos by karate chopping him in the face and sending him flying.
autism tests are so funny. I'm extremely literal most of the time, but people don't tell me that generally, so I'm inclined to answer disagree. because I'm taking the statement too literally
^not my post but same sentiment
i am constantly saying a job should exist where you look through forms and identify questions that are ambiguous to the point of being misleading to at least some readers.
and i should be given that job. and paid 100k a year for it
It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.
#i don’t think this is what pterry meant by ‘a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’
I absolutely think it is
I read Jingo for the first time when I was 13.
I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.
Terry was a comedic genius
#shoutout to the one in Soul Music about the leopard that got thrown out of the circus because it couldn't hear the ringmaster#it was several months after my second or third time reading the book that I clocked it was a Deaf Leopard (via @morkaischosen)
god DAMMIT
When I was informed that “Vetinari” is a pun on “Medici”. That pun was so painful I couldn’t even see it.
...are you FUCKING KIDDING ME.
*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*
get out here Terry I just wanna talk
Twurp’s Peerage made me throw a book (gently) at a wall.
In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u.
The Book of Silly and Annoying People, based on the real thing with a pun on the name thrown in for good measure.
OMG I FUCKING *KNEW* VETINARI WAS A JOKE ON FUCKONG SOMETHING I JUST COULDNT GRASP IT. I THOUGHT IT WAS A REFERENCE TO WIND SOMEHOW
I am not a talented punster so I was today old when I realised about Vetinari.
guys it's fucking close to water
Latinclass ca. 9th grade: the text we had to translate contained the words trans means "on the other side of" or in german it can be translated to "über/ hinüber". Also silvas; silvanis means "the forest" or in german "der Wald".
Trans silvas very simply translated into german would be über den Wald
Trans silvas -> Transsilvanien -> Überwald
My latin teacher gave me a very weird look as I suddenly facepalmed myself and groaned quietly.
The Venturi and Selachii feud is what killed me when I got it.
The Venturi Effect is a scientific term referring to the acceleration of a liquid through a narrow tube (like a jet).
Selachii is a classification of sharks. (I discovered this when my stepson got really into sharks)
... fucking HELL Terry.
In Carpe Jugulum, Count Magpyr boasts of having helped write the Malleus Maleficarum, along with the Torquus Simiae Maleficarum, the Auriga Clavium Maleficarum, and in fact the entire Arca Instrumentorum.
The Malleus Maleficarum is a very real, very nasty and absolutely batshit insane book from late 15th-century Germany, basically laying out the procedure for catching, torturing, and executing witches. Its title translates to The Hammer of Witches. The other titles are Pratchett's inventions.
Malleus = "hammer" Torquus Simiae = "monkey wrench" Auriga Clavium = "bucket of nails" Arca Instrumentorum = "box of tools"
I was debating pre- and post- smartphone existentialism with an older gentleman today and he stopped part way through and said “Why are you a security guard? Why aren’t you teaching this at some college somewhere?” And I didn’t know what to say so I went with “Well I used to make art but nobody pays an artist”
I want to invoke thought and wonder and introspection and encourage the passions of every soul I meet forever and ever and dig until I find the glorious potential for creation and experience and joy in every single one but unfortunately I must pay rent and so I stand, a meat shield, an NPC with unlockable dialogue
#capitalism brain tells you that anyone interesting must fight to the top of their interest#and precludes the possibility of everyone everyone everyone already being interesting
on the alberta oil sands
If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.
So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.
There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.
The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.
The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.
This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.
The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.
Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.
Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.
And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.
Which brings me to Kate Beaton.
Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.
So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.
The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.
The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.
And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.
What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.
And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.
The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.
And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.
Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.
There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.
Same as it ever was.
on the alberta oil sands
If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.
So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.
There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.
The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.
The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.
This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.
The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.
Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.
Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.
And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.
Which brings me to Kate Beaton.
Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.
So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.
The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.
The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.
And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.
What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.
And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.
The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.
And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.
Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.
There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.
Same as it ever was.
Praxis, sister🙏🌈
You can get any Nuns print + the Nuns collected comics booklet in a discounted set in my shop! https://emilyscartoons.myshopify.com/
Did you hear the scientists have found a way to grow colored cotton? Thoughts?
It’s not a ‘scientists have found’ and much more ‘people have been already doing that for thousands of years and it’s just gaining more attention recently’
Scientists didn’t know. It should be “Scientists just found out”
There’s actually been a load of vitriol leveled against folks who try to raise traditional colored cottons, because a lot of cotton growers don’t want the colored cottons cross-pollinating with their standard white cotton.
But anyway cotton can be grown in lovely natural shades of greens, reddish-brown ochres, and browns, all of which deepen with a good boil in water with a bit of washing soda thrown in.
The color obviously doesn’t fade or run, because it’s not dye. It’s the intrinsic color of the fiber itself.
I....I want clothes made out of those colors. They don't hurt my brain!
Aren’t they lovely?
I’m biased because I love the natural earth tones of many fibers, of course...browns, blacks, creams, copper-reds, ect...but I think they’re just gorgeous.
https://www.vreseis.com/shop
If anyone wants to know where you can get yarn or cotton like this!
Scientists did not "just find out", and this is more of the same anti intellectual bs as the post that goes around claiming archaeologists were too stupid to know that hair could be sewn for elaborate styles.
Anyway, scientists DID figure out how to grow colored cotton. They genetically engineered it to be bright fuckin pink, and they didn't "just find out" about it, they already knew which is literally what inspired them to attempt the thing they just accomplished. Begging y'all to stop pretending that scientists don't know things, don't have interests, don't grow up in farming communities or have family who taught them this. Scientists are people. Do you seriously think people who use genetic engineering to make eco-friendly pink cotton don't know anything about textiles?
Anyway. Bright pink cotton without dyes, because science is awesome
Yes. CSIRO scientist Doctor Colleen MacMillan led the team that figured this out. They used tobacco plants for testing because of the genetic similarity. Basically if the tobacco leaves produced colors when injected with a bit of the experimental genetic material, the scientists on the team already understood that the color change would affect cotton bolls as well.
They grew bright red and bright yellow in a petri dish.
And yes, Doctor MacMillan knows lots of things. Here's a list of some of her publications.
@csirogram on Instagram
Additionally folks are researching how to create flame resistant cotton and black cotton. If a variety of black cotton becomes viable, it can stop a LOT of environmental damage caused by chemical manufacturing of black dye.
"Be careful, there're mimics in this dungeon. They can take on the shape of any object!"
"Wait, they can do that? I thought they just look like chests."
"No, they can grow into all sorts of shapes."
"Do they maintain that shape after they die?"
"Yes. Why are you asking?"
"I just had an idea for a new business venture."
[ID: An edit of the Ikea logo to say "Mimikea" End ID]
Necromancer to their friend in the Mimikea parking lot: hey, you wanna see something really funny?
proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.