ya idk how I got this url either @the-official-account - Tumblr Blog

this post has reblogs off but i think about it all the time. truly evergreen post

I went to a market recently that was absolutely swimming in appropriation of First Nations religious and cultural items.

I'm talkin white people selling rattles and dream catchers, white people banging First Nations style drums, white people teaching talking stick workshops, that kinda shit

So what do you do when you see this crap? How do you show your disapproval in a way that makes them give a shit?

I'll tell you what I do. The point is to show them that appropriating Indigenous cultures will lose them customers.

When I see fakey Native art I say something like "Oh wow, you make dreamcatchers! What nation are you from?" (Use tribe in the states)

I used to ask point blank if they were Native, but I'd nearly always get some Cherokee great grandmother bullshit, or even "I'm not sure, I could have some Native in me!"

Most of the time they don't know what I'm talking about, because they're not Native and don't know that this is a very normal thing to ask when meeting another Native.

When they ask me what I mean I say "I mean your tribe, which First Nation are you from?"

This is the point where they sheepishly mumble that they are not First Nations.

I let my face fall and say something like "Oh. That's disappointing" or "Wow. Unfortunate."

I let it get awkward. And then I leave, shaking my head in disapproval.

You may feel like you need to educate them on cultural appropriation but here's the thing: it's 2025. They know. Brenda the middle class reiki shaman is FULLY aware that her smudge fans are stolen culture. She doesn't care. The only way to make them care is to hit them where it hurts: the wallet.

Make them think that you would have purchased what they are selling if it was AUTHENTIC.

If you wanna go the extra mile send an email to the organizers, in your best white people voice, and tell them that you are disappointed that they are facilitating culture theft.

Go out and make Brenda uncomfortable!

biophonies

not to be a snitch, but if this is happening in the US you can also straight up report Brenda for a fine up to $250k under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

pingo1387

having a headache while hydrated is so unfair. you were supposed to protect me.

dogpuppy

mandywondering

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

dietspam16

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

koiagain

Frantically screamingWAIT WAIT WAIT As tumblr refreshes and the Most beautiful piece of fan art i’ve ever seen DISAPPEARS

boobachu

dogpuppy

blackhole-ntp

I'm starting to feel like some of you guys don't actually have that good a grasp of what a data center is or what it does

blackhole-ntp

"We need to get rid of data centers" says the tumblr user who has a career doing gig work via cloud apps

Well, I know pretty well what a data center is, and you are wrong.

You don't need data centers to serve Tumblr. Or your gps maps. And for sure not to use a gig jobs app.

You need a server, indeed. That server is basically a computer that needs to be somewhere with a good internet connection. If the site or app has a lot of usage, you may need several of them, rarely more than the lower two figures. That's it.

"the internet we know" doesn't rely on data centers. Data centers, as we know nowadays, basically were invented by Amazon, who started selling them "as a service" maybe 15 years ago. Before that, companies used to, well, have their own servers. Often in their own office buildings. Sometimes in MUCH smaller facilities dedicated to host servers.

But the modern concept of data server? That is needed mostly for data mining and selling processing power as a service, so shitty startups can try to invent the next torment Nexus without needing to hire people who actually know how to work with physical servers nor spending big money on hardware.

But most of the apps and websites you use everyday? Any shitty laptop could very well be used as their server and support a couple of hundred concurrent users without breaking a sweat.

Honestly, they are just needed for the worst parts of the internet.

blackhole-ntp

Favourite parts of this post:

Read "gig jobs using cloud apps" and thought I meant Uber Eats

Unironic Torment Nexus reference in a serious discourse post in 2026

Implication that companies running their own data servers locally is a more energy efficient model than renting cloud VMs

"The Internet you know could run off of your laptop"; ??? 80+% of all user Internet traffic is HD video streaming via YouTube, Netflix and Tiktok etc - no, you don't get to dismiss that in the tags! The average Internet user watches almost two hours of such footage per day. Each of these services is shifting anywhere up to an exabyte of data daily, and literally all of this traffic is processed via data centers and routed over services hosted on the cloud. Like buddy, what the actual fuck are you talking about

blackhole-ntp

At this point the primary function of the Internet is to serve streamed video and to a lesser extent other multimedia content. Like, that is just what the system is now.

Sure you can say it's a blight on society and we should dismantle the internet as experienced by its six billion strong global userbase, but if you think that you should say that outright instead of pretending you could swap that out for a Dell laptop running bulletin board software in the basement and that nobody would notice

Sorry, but this "internet traffic is mostly HD video streaming" state is a very recent development (recent as in "5 to 10 years ago), so no, I don't consider it part of the core internet experience.

Should billions of people get their internet leisure usage disrupted just because of the energy needed so they can watch hi-res videos while they commute? Yes, yes very much so.

This is like saying you can't be against fracking or against running oil pipes through protected nature areas because people are used to cheaper oil prices and preventing that would make it more expensive.

Companies running their own data centers _was_ more energy efficient. The magic of "the cloud" is called scale: 15 years ago, a peak of usage meant that your service was going to be unavailable until your engineers purchased and installed some very expensive hardware that may not have been needed anymore once the peak was gone. Nowadays, "the cloud" makes it trivial, and cheap, to be over scaled by default. Even services that haven't launched yet are running servers that will handle millions of users just because it costs the company less than what they spend on pizzas for the developers. The Internet, in general, may be over scaled by one or two orders of magnitude nowadays. So yeah, a company running their own server (singular, believe it or not, 90% of the internet services would run perfectly fine in a single PC) would be way more energy efficient than what they do now

megpie71

In a lot of ways, modern data centres are an example of computing heading back toward the model of computing that was around when the internet was originally launched back in the early 1980s - large central computing facilities built around mainframes, generally owned by governments or large corporations (because they were the only ones which had the money to purchase them), the power of which was made available to users via "dumb terminals" (that is, machines with very little native computing power) connected to the central machine via network. Certainly today's laptop computers and palm-sized devices (phones, tablets etc) which are primarily designed to ensure local users aren't storing stuff locally (not enough storage space - use the Cloud instead) would qualify quite easily as "dumb terminals" - and the fact the network that connects them to the main supply of computing power is wireless doesn't make them any less dependent on that central processing source.

Of course, once you've been around enough businesses (and enough government departments and agencies) for long enough, you start realising these things run in roughly a twenty year cycle - first everything centralises, and everyone thinks it's wonderful for about the first five years but after that it's a process of finding faults with the system; then everything decentralises, and everyone thinks that's wonderful ... for about the first five years, at which point people start finding faults in the system, and start suggesting centralising things again; and around and around we go.

Give it another decade or so, and we'll see everything heading back out to personal machines, and individual firms owning their own servers, because they will have discovered the problem with large data processing facilities (namely: any server you can't personally threaten with a hammer is not your server; any data on a server you can't personally threaten with a hammer is no longer your data, and you have no effective control over what other people choose to do with it; and, enshittification will happen to the data centres the same as it's happened to everything else, as the profiteers try to extract the maximum amount of money out of the system).

A lot of the newer internet services may well wind up crashing as a result. Most of the older ones that run the infrastructure (which were written to run politely in kilobytes of computing space, rather than gigabytes) will carry on blithely shuttling bits from one end of the internet to the other.

ralfmaximus

The cycle thing is very true. But now it's overlapping cycles.

We're already seeing "run AI as a local service on your phone!" stuff from Google while at the same time Microsoft is trying to get everyone to login with a Microsoft account to use their local PC.

hotvampireadjacent

ralfmaximus

It's 2026.

You can have delicious peaches AND 9/11 conspiracy theories.

perfectday1972

i do wonder how mamdani would have solved a problem like the green goblin

damejoansutherland

side benefit of communal all-gender restrooms is that they may be our best chance to shame cis men into washing their hands

damejoansutherland

i was in a communal all-gender restroom today and as i was washing my hands a middle-aged man came out of one of the stalls, started to make for the door, clocked me standing at the sinks, and changed course to wash his hands with a real hangdog look on his face

batmanisagatewaydrug

friend of mine recommended a video essay that's like 5 hours long about why it's currently a whole Thing for fascists to claim they only eat meat and demonize vegetables etc etc, and it's genuinely quite well researched in many places and contains some fascinating history and has made me feel very weird about my status as an adult who enjoys drinking milk. but I've not finished it and I genuinely don't know if I will because at one point the ol' "you can't say you care about animals and also eat animals" chestnut got dropped by the white vegan essayist and it put such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to leave instantly

batmanisagatewaydrug

like idk man it just feels genuinely parodic to dedicate hours to analyzing how foodways have frequently been used as white supremacist propaganda and then casually toss out an argument that pretty invariably demonizes indigenous hunting practices with 0 regard for traditional knowledge and land stewardship guiding those practices

deramin2

Every time I hear a white vegan say that I want to throw the rubble of the Klamath Dams at them.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

The Klamath River Runs Free

supreme-leader-stoat

#also do you have any idea how much conservation is funded by people who want to eat those animals#at least in the us anytime someone buys ammo or hunting equipment or hunting licenses that money goes directly to state wildlife agencies

autistic-reptile

sorry I saw a post about AAVE and got fired up and had to make this

fagcrisis

do you guys remember the magnus archives

fagcrisis

one of my mutuals got death threats for saying martin slapping jon awake that one time was not abuse

fagcrisis

multiple people were cancelled to the point of social ostracization for shipping two characters, just because jonny fucked up the timelines and one of them might have been a lot older. or not. they couldve been the same age

fagcrisis

people called each other racist for being negative about a character who was not canonically a poc

fagcrisis

people accused jonny sims of faking his height on twitter and it got so bad he had to tell them to stop on a stream

fagcrisis

@astral-circuitry I FORGOT ABOUT THAT.... they were trying to cancel that man over absolutely everything. like the episode that was based on the grenfell tower fire and everyone decided it was problematic

fagcrisis

some good ones from the notes