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In Search of Forgotten Colours | Sachio Yoshioka and the Art of Natural Dyeing

“Sachio Yoshioka is the fifth-generation head of the Somenotsukasa Yoshioka dye workshop in Fushimi, southern Kyoto. When he succeeded to the family business in 1988, he abandoned the use of synthetic colours in favour of dyeing solely with plants and other natural materials. 30 years on, the workshop produces an extensive range of extremely beautiful colours.”

Film by: NHK Enterprises, Inc. and Art True Film

girlmostlikely

Amy’s Kitchen workers in Santa Rosa, Calif. have joined forces with the Teamsters in calling for safer working conditions, better health co

The irony of a predominantly vegan food based company to treat their employees like shit is absolutely disgusting.

closet-keys

On February 26, the workers were joined by union and community leaders and vegan activists for a press conference near the company’s corporate headquarters in Petaluma, California to raise awareness about the allegations and call for a boycott of Amy’s Kitchen products. Organizations supporting the boycott include Veggie Mijas, a vegan collective for women and nonbinary people of color, and Food Empowerment Project, a vegan food justice organization.

Leaders from Veggie Mijas and Food Empowerment Project argue that standing with workers for the boycott is both the right thing to do and aligns with their missions as vegan organizations. Although veganism is, in its most narrow sense about not eating animal products, many activists also consider worker justice and fair food practices part of their mission.

“There can’t be food justice without worker justice,” says Alejandra Tolley, a Los Angeles-based organizer and editorial content manager at Veggie Mijas. “We need to see how our food purchases, our food choices, impact other human beings.”

https://www.vegetariantimes.com/news/amys-kitchen-boycott-safety/

probablyasocialecologist

Decades of war, poverty, and fossil fuel extraction have devastated the country's environment and its people.

As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, it is easy to find soil and water polluted by depleted uranium, dioxin and other hazardous materials, and extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau — one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency.

lissar-deactivated20220127

do you remember that beautiful quote recited at the end of the film the shape of water, directed by guillermo del toro, when the lovers embrace underwater?

here’s a truly fascinating article written by a librarian who researched the original writer of this poem and fell down a rabbit hole. i encourage everyone to give it a look!

news-queue

As the temperature in Grand Island, Neb., soared to 91 degrees that July day in 2018, two dozen farmworkers tunneled for nine hours into a thicket of cornstalks, snapping off tassels while they crossed a sunbaked field that spanned 206 acres — the equivalent of 156 football fields.

When they emerged at the end of the day to board a bus that would transport them to a nearby motel to sleep, one of the workers, Cruz Urias Beltran, didn’t make it back. Searchers found the 52-year-old farmworker’s body 20 hours later amid the corn husks, “as if he’d simply collapsed,” recalled a funeral home employee. An empty water bottle was stuffed in his jeans pocket. An autopsy report confirmed that Beltran died from heatstroke. It was his third day on the job.

Beltran is one of at least 384 workers who died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. in the last decade, according to an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations, the investigative reporting unit of Columbia Journalism School. The count includes people toiling in essential yet often invisible jobs in 37 states across the country: farm laborers in California, construction and trash-collection workers in Texas and tree trimmers in North Carolina and Virginia. An analysis of federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s.

CJI and NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including workplace inspection reports, death investigation files, depositions, court records and police reports, and interviewed victims’ families, former and current officials from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, workers, employers, workers’ advocates, lawyers and experts.

CJI and NPR also analyzed two federal data sets on worker heat deaths: one from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the other from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both are divisions within the U.S. Labor Department.

Among the findings:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), whose primary responsibility is to protect workers from hazards, has failed to adopt a national heat standard to safeguard workers against rapidly rising temperatures, resulting in an enforcement system rife with problems.

For at least a dozen companies, it wasn’t the first time their workers succumbed to heat. One worker collapsed and died after repeatedly complaining about the heat; another died after hauling 20 tons of trash for nearly 10 hours. In some instances, employees died after not having ample water and scheduled shade breaks. Many died within their first week on the job.

OSHA officials often decide not to penalize companies for worker deaths. When they do, they routinely negotiate with business owners and reduce violations and fines.

anexperimentallife

imanes

The long read: It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain

arundhati roy’s scathing and harrowing article is a tough read but it is a very thorough indictment of modi’s government if i ever saw one. “The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.”

hungwy

sleep time, being one of the last escapes from the work addiction of capitalism, is of course something capitalism would naturally try to rid itself of (through sleep deprivation by constant overworking) or at the very least reframe into an indulgence of capitalist efficiency (quantifying sleep into an ideal amount so one can be maximally mentally and physically prepared to work at the lowest temporal cost, instead of sleeping whenever and waking whenever and working when you feel like it)

hungwy

and the reframing of sleep as an exception to or an obstruction to a natural state of working is just like... people don't even know what its like to be rested, consistently rested. they only know convulsive reactions to exhaustion. sleep is a waste of time, sleep is inefficient, sleep can and should be ignored as long as physically possible, as much as possible. an anxiety about human existence brought on by capitalism

buddhawithoutorgans

You CAN enjoy sound sleep under the constant terror of capitalism with this three thousand dollar mattress!

darthsofa-deactivated20230912

France has always and I mean ALWAYS had a history of Islamophobia...but, for those of you who don’t know what’s going on right now:

They’re trying to ban the slaughter of Halal chicken, citing animal cruelty and claiming Halal (I believe they also discussed Kosher) methods of slaughter are unethical compared to the European practice of stunning the animal (the Halal way of slaughter would be a cut to the jugular vein so that the animal feels no pain).

They then proceeded to ban the wearing of the Hijab (the Muslim headscarf) for girls under 18 in public places.

They also banned Hijabi mothers (women who wear the Hijab) from accompanying their child on school field trips.

Furthermore, they banned the Burkini (a swimsuit that a lot of Muslim women wear) at public swimming pools.

These restrictions (I have definitely not covered a lot of them) fall under France’s Separatism Bill which still needs to be passed by the National Assembly. France maintains that these actions are to uphold secularism (the separation of religion and state).

However, these targeted laws and the statements accompanying them...

The Hijab ban was the “prohibition in the public space of any conspicuous religious sign by minors and of any dress or clothing which would signify an interiorization of women over men.” This is a commonly used trope about Islam and Muslim men; that they are oppressive of women which is absolutely not true...take it from a Muslim woman! 🧕🏽

Emmanuel Macron said that Hijab is “not in accordance with French ideals”. This again alludes to the misconception that Hijab is oppressive and that by taking it away, we are liberating women. I don’t deny that there are women who had Hijab forced upon them, but what France is not acknowledging is that the forcing of any religious action upon people is completely the opposite of Islamic teachings and that there are actually women out there who can make decisions about what they want to wear...Surprise! It may come as a bit of a shock to them...

...just showcase how deeply rooted these laws are in Islamophobia and how France is maximizing restrictions on daily Muslim life just to...be a white saviour?

There are five million Muslims in France right now and they are all being affected by this.

As of right now I’m trying to find ways to counteract this. @feel-like-studying has linked a petition in the replies of this post. I’ll also link it here:

Hijab Ban France

gnostick-deactivated20210607

the age of social media: a reading list

note: all hyperlinked texts are either open-access academic works or public-facing articles, & most other texts are accessible through various pdf-hosting websites.

books

the age of surveillance capitalism by shoshanna zuboff (2019)

the burnout society by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2015)

control: digitality as cultural logic by seb franklin (2015)

dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness by simone browne (2015)

the death algorithm and other digital dilemmas by roberto simanowski, tr. jefferson chase (2018)

the end of forgetting: growing up with social media by kate eichhorn (2019)

in the swarm: digital politics by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2012)

the politics of dating apps: gender, sexuality, and emergent publics in urban china by lik sam chan (2021)

the transparency society by byung-chul han, tr. erik butler (2015)

weaving the dark web: legitimacy on freenet, tor, and i2p by robert gehl (2018)

articles

ambivalent influencers: feeling rules and the affective practice of anxiety in social media influencer work by mari lehto (2021)

capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour by christian fuchs (2017)

children are our future: resistance, addiction and the digital natives by rob horning (2010)

#dadtribe: performing sharenting labour to commercialise involved fatherhood by mario campana, astrid van den bossche, and bryoney miller (2020)

disintegrated bodies from cyborg microcelebrities to capital flow: a post-phenomenological investigation of disembodiment by riad salameh (2021)

the drama of metrics: status, spectacle, and resistance among youtube drama creators by angèle christin and rebecca lewis (2021)

#familygoals: family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and justifying young digital labor by crystal abidin (2017)

fragments on microcelebrity by rob horning (2012)

imagined affordances of instagram and the fantastical authenticity of female gulf-arab social media influencers by zoe hurley (2019)

improbable curators: analysing nostalgia, authorship and audience on tumblr microblogs by dinu gabriel munteanu (2017)

instagram use, instamums, and anxiety in mothers of young children by mara moujaes and diarmuid verrier (2020)

micromicrocelebrity: branding babies on the internet by crystal abidin (2015)

power through the algorithm? participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious by david beer (2009)

“running the numbers”: modes of microcelebrity labor in queer women’s self-representation on instagram and vine by stefanie duguay (2019)

selling brands while staying “authentic”: the professionalization of instagram influencers by loes van driel, delia dumitrica (2020)

seo and the disappearing self by rob horning (2010)

social media as masochism by rob horning (2016)

social media is not self-expression by rob horning (2012)

speaking to no one by rob horning (2017)

verbal venting in the social web: effects of anonymity and group norms on aggressive language use in online comments by leonie rösner and nicole c. krämer (2016)

vlogging parlance by sophie bishop (2018)