Just passed a group of teenage girls walking downtown…. wearing cargo pants and platform crocs…. nature really is healing……
Cannot stress enough that this is NOT a condemnation, this is genuine delight that young girls in my town have stopped dressing up like Kardashians and are finally just goofing around on summer break in comfortable shoes and funky graphic shirts.
15 year olds should not be worries about having a thigh gap, they should be trying on SpongeBob bucket hats at the pier and drinking twice their weight in corn syrup like hummingbirds
just remembered the other day a teen approached me holding a rapidly melting chunk of ice in his hand and asked if i wanted to buy a “limited edition pet rock”
(Waves this around in executives faces) wow it’s almost like profitable art happens without exploiting workers. Wow. Imagine that
Also it’s good. The movie is good. It’s nice to see something where you can tell the people working on it didn’t just love the movie, but had fun working on it. Let film making be fun instead of detrimental to a person’s physical and mental health
I’m gonna puke this makes me so happy to read. Idk. I just want more good news from the industry i’m going into
Well okay, also studios, guess which movie I’m gonna go watch and support SOLELY FOR THIS REASON???
hate being the generation that remembers no ads on YouTube & the annoyance when we first saw 1 ad every 10 videos, then 1 every 5 videos, then on every video, then multiple ads within a single video, only for YouTube to market paying for Premium™️ to ‘get rid of ads!’ which weren’t even there at the start
I hate being the generation that remembers when I could easily find episodes of anime and whole ass movies on YouTube.
Hate being the generation that remembers when YouTube videos would buffer when you pause them, allowing the entire video to load and let you watch it without interruption even on slow connections.
the only bad part about going to the zoo is hearing adult men confidently tell their kids or gfs objectively incorrect information about the animals we’re looking at and having to remain silent. do u know the restraint it takes to say nothing when a grown adult man tells someone “falcons are in the same family as eagles” next to me? no babygirl. no.
fyi falcons are not closely related to other birds of prey (hawks/eagles/buzzards). falcons are actually parrots that minmaxed for a glass cannon dps build.
There’s some company, blackstone, blackwater, something like that, buying up houses that go on sale for 30k above asking price. Immediately outbidding anyone who tries to buy. Corporations are also buying property all across america.
Fuck…
Nobody comes to my tumblr for this, but Americans need to understand that THIS is why my generation can’t afford to own a house outside of Smallest-Town USA. THIS is also why people my age in bigger cities struggle to find decent apartments that don’t consume half of our monthly income.
Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That’s value they can borrow against, that’s a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that’s a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It’s probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can’t afford to take you to court.
I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who’ve lived there for generations because they can’t keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the “affordable” housing for an entire neighborhood. It’s gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that’s left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you’ve instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future “improvements” that further contribute to the commodification of communities.
Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.
These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can’t it’s because we’re lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.
I hate these fuckers so fucking much.
It got so bad in Atlanta that in 2022 they passed a law limiting Airbnb-type operators to two physical addresses, and the owner is required to live in one of them. In addition to that, they are charged an annual permit fee + additional taxes.
It’s an excellent start, but only applies to the city of Atlanta – not any of the kazillions of Airbnbs in the surrounding greater metro area.
“This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.”
“The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I’m not a trannie or a fag so I don’t care, just give ‘em the medicine they need.”
“This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility.”
One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.
Someone who says they don’t care if dudes wear dresses and makeup is a better ally than someone who says they’re a safe space for women and non-binary people. I am not joking.
If you say “art” people just think paintings in museums, if you say “media” it’s too vague and clinical, if you say “content” you sound like a YouTube terms and conditions corpo-ghoul, if you say “crafts”, plural, it sounds like you mean macaroni art and hand turkeys, if you say “craft”, singular, you sound like you sell pussy candles and migratory bird feathers on Etsy, if you say “creative expression” you sound like a lotion-handed Human Resources weasel straight out of a Mike Judge cartoon. How have we managed to completely drain the linguistic well when it comes to discussing individual and collective cultural creativity, aka Capital A Art. It’s dire!
it’s so chilling to walk through an area where the houses are surrounded by blank sterile lawns and see a big lilac bush in full bloom without a single bug on it. No bees, no butterflies, not a stir of activity.
The neighborhood association where I work hires a truck to spray the whole subdivision. It trundles up every driveway and sprays every yard with pesticides. The children excitedly tell me about “the bug man” and know which days he comes on. I know when he’s been there, because in the following days I see the beetles, butterflies, bees, and more, all struggling on the pavement, slowly dying. The children do not realize why they are there. They poke at the bugs in fascination. I hate it.
That’s. Horrible. I have no words
Like
Those insecticides are toxic to humans as well, many are proven carcinogens, and their residues stick around for years inside homes
But even if that wasn’t so, insect populations worldwide are plummeting, and the entire food chain depends on them. Most plants and animals could not exist without insects, period
Keeping the insect ecosystem in balance is important for human health and long term flourishing. Not all species are impacted equally by these toxic chemicals, and the elimination of one species can cause an explosion in another.
For example, some of the major predators of ticks are ants, spiders, and beetles
If you kill all your ants, spiders, and beetles, it’ll take a long time for them to re-establish, but ticks can return because of a feral cat walking across your grass
What’s more, scientists have found that excluding animals from an area makes the amount of ticks that can be collected in that area to explode. We’re talking 2-3 times the amount of ticks actively foraging for things to latch onto. It seems like hungrier ticks seek food sources more and bite people more. This leads to the hypothesis that global defaunation is one of the causes of the explosion in tick borne diseases in recent years
Many birds depend on insects for food, bluebirds specifically eat a ton of mosquitoes
If you wipe out most arthropods, the the small mammals and birds that eat the bugs will visit your yard much less. Guess what that means
Current projections predict that the insect declines will be heavily impactful upon bees, butterflies, and moths, but could increase the populations of…flies and cockroaches.
Not to mention that as all the natural predators of agricultural pest insects suffer, more and more pesticides will be needed to get enough crop yields and it becomes a vicious cycle of poisoning the planet and farm laborers more and more severely to avoid collapse of food systems
Your neighborhood association is creating a bleak, sick, hungry future for those kids and everyone else.
Like, think about it:
If you kill and destroy everything in your surroundings that doesn’t benefit you directly, soon the only critters that can live there are the creatures that are parasites on you directly or that compete with you for resources.
And now they don’t have any predators to keep them at bay.
reblogging this again because researching ticks changed my brain around
like I thought “Yeah re-wilding will probably increase the risk of ticks but we just need to make tick safety widespread and common knowledge”
but then I RESEARCHED it
and the research was like “Actually tick diseases have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 40 years, and tick ranges are expanding hugely and it’s mostly unrelated to climate change so far. And we did experiments and in areas where there aren’t any animals, the number of ticks that catch onto things passing through the area explodes, it’s like 2-3 times the number of ticks. Which is like, wait, weird, I thought animals spread ticks. But we think what’s happening is that when there’s no animals, the ticks engage in more questing behavior to find food.”
and I was like “Wait, but if the decline of animals is making the ticks look for food more, wouldn’t they…wait. Oh no. OH NO. We’re the food!”
and I looked at more research
and the research said “so the main things that kill ticks seems to be spiders, ants, and beetles.”
and I was like “spiders, ants, and beetles? the things that people see as pests and try to kill with chemicals that contaminate the whole ecosystem?—OH FUCK”
Basically it’s like
Expectation: destroying nature= fewer ticks, which means less disease
Reality: destroying nature= hungrier ticks that want to suck your blood way more and less spiders ants and beetles to eat them for you
The Perfect Friend - Always happy to see you. - Loves to share a smile. - A warm spot here for you. - For standing by your side. - Full of great advice. - Ready to listen on a moment’s notice. - Available to lean on. - Good for holding and helping.
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