kontextmaschine

I’ve finally got the weeds in the grass under enough control that I can spare gardening time on other things, so I’m moving on to pruning trees and bushes.

Did some studying up before I went out and freestyled, learned how apical dominance and auxin work, I’m like wait, plants are laid out with gravity-powered logic? That’s neat!

Whenever people ask what’s new in my life I tell them about all the yard work I’ve been doing, which I’m afraid sounds like a grind. I love it! It’s like when I got a house I unlocked the quest line that gives you plant husbandry skills.

fuckyeahitsbrutalism:

Charles R. Drew Junior High School, Miami, Florida, 1960s

(Herbert H. Johnson)

thelongview:

Regina Coeli Prison, Rome, Italy

does it bother anyone else that the cars parked in the upper right are melted into the pavement and this whole shot looks like some architecture-themed SCP object in general?

The gunslinger robot movie? Never seen it, but could roughly reconstruct it from the parodies and tributes I have seen.

kontextmaschine:

That post about fibers got some attention - well, 2 likes and 2 reblogs, which is 2/2 more than I expected, so not being one to pass up an opportunity to draw structural connections between things in the format of a story that makes my life sound more interesting than spending so much time on the internet would imply, let’s expand on it.

I went to Maui a few years back to celebrate my mom’s not, after years of treatment, having cancer anymore. She was born on the Big Island as a Navy brat, went back after college as a secretary in a TV station for a few years, so she’s got some history in the area. She was even given a Hawaiian name, which was kind of funny because then she couldn’t find any of those “if this is your real name, this would be your Hawaiian name” keychains at the souvenier stores.

Maui was kind of the boring island; my dad booked the trip (through an honest to god travel agent) and only seems to know how to book golf vacations. I hear it’s a nice golf island.

Things about Hawaii I noticed: even the Haole use native Hawaiian words a lot - not just “aloha” but the top 40 radio in talking about some community event would mention “…and plenty of games and rides for the keiki”, men’s/women’s bathroom signs would be “kane/wahine”. For a while I wondered if this was actual culture or just a schtick everyone agreed to pull, but on thinking of it I guess actual culture is a schtick everyone agrees to pull.

There was plenty of constant road repair and resurfacing, with larger work crews than I’ve ever seen, even though the roads were by any standard perfectly fine to begin with - I guess that’s what happens when you hardly have any roads but still have two senators to claim your share of highway appropriations.

Bunch of Samoans on the island. I’d heard those guys were built big and solid, but holy shit.

Lot of hitchhikers. Apparently land prices and rents are insane anywhere near the centers of the tourist trade, so people commute from hella far out, and car/gas prices are absurd too. Not many bikes though, which is maybe because “hella far out” tends to mean “halfway up a mountain”.

A lot of native/secessionary flags, handpainted signs, etc. in front yards.

A lot of rocks - like, maybe half a car-sized rocks but not otherwise very distinguished - roped off in the middle of, like, someone’s yard with a plaque being all “this is a sacred rock with a proper name, people might come around to hold cultural events here every now and then, but otherwise don’t mess with the rock”.

OK, so this tour. It was an ecotourism/ziplining thing, because why not, because I was getting kind of tired of sitting around on the beach with my parents. We went up a hill and the guides, natives all, pointed out things about the region. Saw a pineapple farm, they talked about how you’d have to harvest them in like, multiple layers of heavy clothing in the hot as fuck sun, because a pineapple farm is basically a field of goddamn razors with fruit in the middle.

I could see why people would grow marijuana on Hawaii, because the whole place was verdant as fuck, full of ridges and hollows, full of native plants that didn’t really look that far off from cannabis from the air, or even up close, to begin with.

Oh and also the plant I mentioned, which grew near the base of these trees near the top of the mountain, had these brown, downy fibers, softest thing I’ve ever felt, the guides said that the locals used to use them to stuff pillows with, but that the government protected them and kept people from exporting or farming them. Which, on the way out of the airport, yeah you passed through 3 different inspections checking your stuff for native plants.

Now that’s nominally about environmental contamination and invasive species, but I was sure there was an economic protection angle and on looking it up, apparently yes, there’s a big thing of industrial espionage agents sneaking into forests and smuggling plants out. But that’s how it’s always been in the tropics - spices, rubber, tea in China, whatever. You want to keep a monopoly on that shit.

I mean it’s not like the Americans are developing that industry, but I guess the idea is to prevent anyone else from developing it instead. Like, we don’t think about it much now but economically speaking fiber is fucking critical. Making clothing is the most fundamental thing distinguishing humans from other animals, textile production has always been the first step of industrialization, and development of a new and better fiber source will FUCK SHIT UP.

Like, China figured out silk production, and it was like “oh, great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a millennia or two”, just the act of moving it from place to place completely dominates the history of western Asia.

Like the British developed a wool industry and it was like “oh great, now we get to dominate half the fucking world for a few centuries, first we just need to take all these people in Scotland and northern England, kick them off their farmholds, and turn them into a pathetic wreck of a population working in hellish conditions 14 hours a day, wracked by disease, homelesness, addiction, and violence”.

Like, the Americans figured out the cotton gin and were like “oh great, now we can establish a massive feudal slave empire, and kickstart a development process that will end up with us dominating half the fucking world for a century at least”.

And then the British, in order to hold on to their existing half-the-world empire were like “oh fuck, better conquer Egypt and India and place a few hundred million people under the lash to compete”.

Fiber will FUCK SHIT UP, don’t you forget that.

This about the college parodies book? The camera adds 15 grams.

awwwcastiel:

awwwcastiel:

rockandrollchick:

awwwcastiel:

rockandrollchick:

is satan gay?

No. He has a wife, Mrs. Claus

what

What?

OH

nosaintswithoutsinners:

bryanthephotogeek:

Encountered on the train while crossing the bridge.

That reminds me, we’ve been so happy to push the Bush the Younger years offstage that we haven’t really digested that a Texas oilman became President and then for a few years our post-Cold War operations and public face were remade on the energy-services contractor model

(which is not a facially ridiculous idea for contingency management in territory that is rough and infrastructure-poor yet full of spot events that briefly become incredibly important)

and then we were like “pff” and that plotline completely got scrapped

sinesalvatorem:

For the past few days, my parents have been watching a TV show where a group of British people try to survive on a tropical island. The show is meant to be adventure-entertainment, where the viewer sympathises with the struggles of the contestants in harsh conditions.

My parents have been spending the whole time laughing at how dumb white people are for not understanding everything from saltwater to coconut trees. I mean, what kind of idiot doesn’t know common sense things, like the fact that plucking an entire bunch of bananas will prevent the tree from bearing again, or that the smell of citronella oils wards off mosquitoes? The kind of idiots who didn’t live their whole lives on tropical islands in the Caribbean, it seems. Those poor, summer children.

But what else can we do but laugh? The harvest cycles of a dozen tropical fruit trees are the kind of basic knowledge you’d expect anyone with a brain to pick up. Everyone knows it.

****

During my time in the Bay, I learned that many Americans have a strange device called a “garbage disposal” in their kitchens. I never learned how they worked or where they went, because I prefer to avoid dark magic where possible.

But, the first time I heard someone turn one on, I thought I was going to die.

collapsedsquid said: I think of him more as an oil groupie than oilman

I know! Remember when he said that Kanye giving him shit over Katrina was the lowest moment of his presidency? I believe that, because “capably responding to a large-scale life-threatening emergency” is what that model can DO, and put to the test he didn’t live up to the image

this is what my kitten’s been up to

liartownusa:

Ghost Puncher: Spirits of the Old Plantation

occultlylittlespace:

whateverstop:

I’m sobbing omfg

Kitties are solar-powered. It’s true.

warm-blooded animals maintain heat by expending calories which means that external heat sources have value comparable to food

so up to the Verizon sale I didn’t hear the autoplay audio but I noticed the ads getting shittier, also worse targeted, I was getting Spanish-language mass-market stuff on the reg for a day or two

since then Tumblr’s been giving me eerily-precisely targeted stuff, political ads from the Oregon lumber lobby appealing to Portland lifestylers, other stuff pitching things I was already just on the edge of considering

don’t know if that really is what a skeletal ad team looks like under rapid deadlines vs. healthy, don’t even know who would benefit from juggling this stuff around but hair on my neck’s still at half-staff

mapsontheweb:

Australia’s electricity and gas networks.