The cup song would have been the worst thing to experience during the tiktok era

I think the moment that convinced me the operating logic of our society is truly fucked in a way that cannot merely be reformed was after that eclipse in 2017 when the articles started coming out about how much money had been lost by productivity dropping from people stopping momentarily to watch it happen. To measure the world by the metric of the dollar to such a devotion that any cult leader would be jealous of that you would look at one of the most sublime experiences in nature which we, our ancestors, and even a not insignificant number of non-human species, have been observing in awestruck wonder for millennia, and decide that such a moment of profundity is something to be fought and preferably expunged from the human experience because it briefly impacts quarterly revenue.

It's a feeling that has been coming up repeatedly, but with increasing frequency in the last few years. That being: what is all of this for? Where are we going? Nobody who defends the status quo can seem to answer it. What's the point of an uninterrupted quarterly revenue stream if we can't even look at an eclipse every few years? What's the point of hustling and grinding 50, 60, 70 hour weeks if you never have time to have dinner with your friends, talk to your family on the phone, but on a bigger spectrum, what's the point of all of that if you still don't have any way of retiring in the future? With the way that our lives are being increasingly monetized and squeezed every second, what is there to look forward to?

distance is dumb. we should be able to just pinch the world between our fingers when we need 2 so we can walk from one continent 2 another. & then u can smooth it back out again.

Spirited Away (2001)

reblog to give warm bread to your mutuals

Not to be all "old man yells at cloud" but back in my day we had a movie about a young teen who couldn't wait to be "Thirty, flirty, and thriving," and now I get confronted with anti aging products aimed at 20 year olds.

ALT

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

(id in alt)

I can't do a more deep opinion on this orca thing because yeah one can say "go orcas!", it feels good, doesn't it?...

but in fact those must be very scattered cases that won't change the fact that the current situation is that ocean transport is noisy, it's everywhere, and it must be driving these very, very sensitive animals crazy. Before motors, a whale could listen to what was happening in South Africa from the Argentine coast. Now their range of communication must have dropped to only a few kilometers: moreover, all the noise must be insane. There have been studies saying that even things like lawnmowers can make permanent ear damage to small rodents, and birds have had to adapt to city noises (their songs changed to a more "natural" pattern during the pandemic lockdowns) So I can't imagine what such things must be doing to the minds of orcas, one of the animals with the most complex and intelligent behavior registered outside of primates, and extremely sensitive to sound. Can we even understand what they're going through right now.

And this is not to mention the widespread whale (baleen whales, not orcas) hunting that decimated their populations to an absurd degree. All the world is currently going through a beyond worrying trend of defaunation, but whales were particulary hurt. There were 250.000 (estimated) blue whales before whaling, and they were decimated to less than 2000. Even today, with strict conservation measures, there's around 10-25k blue whales, and that's one species. Let that sink in.

Is there a solution to this, besides returning to the age of sail and banning ocean explotation? I don't know, there might be. I hope there is.

When I read about orcas, about their behavior, about their pods with their own almost cultural quirks and even dialects, so much we don't know about them, I only remember Arthur C. Clarke, when he spoke about blue whales: “We do not know the true nature of the entities we are destroying”

by alexbeckett_

Reddit management threatening note to protesting moderators:

ALT

If I were a pro-protest subreddit member with sneaky intentions, here's what I would do:

I would get together with some other members and, after privately contacting the existing mod team to make sure they are on board, we would apply to be moderators. Then we would use this generous offer to become senior moderators and displace the protesting moderators like the scabs we are. Then we would reopen the sub.

Then, after a few hours to allow management to enjoy their victory, we would close it again.

After a couple of days, another band of clean-cut Company MenTM would step up and displace us. And then they would do it again.

I have faith in Redditors. They are the most thrawn of social media users. They can win this fight.