let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Please note the recalls etc. we’re already seeing with the current US government going after those regulations, and please see Doug Ford up here trying to weaken our water safety regulations again - the last time that happened, under another Conservative government, Walkerton happened and people died. Some died quickly, some lived for years with debilitating illnesses and then died.
do you know how cool it would have been to keep the blue tint of the first twilight movie going right up until the moment bella opened her eyes as a newborn? do you know how impactful the red of her iris would have been if it was the first thing the viewer saw that wasn’t tinted blue? do you understand how it would have run parallel with how bella describes her human vision vs her vampire vision in the books? do you remember how she described all her human memories looking murky to her because her vision was lacking and the world looked completely new to her now? blue tint.
National Geographic on Facebook: this is a facial reconstruction of a teenage girl who lived 9000 years ago based on her remains!
half the comments: men criticizing her looks and saying she’s unattractive and mannish
anyway this is the reconstruction and I always enjoy seeing the faces of prehistoric humans and how much we have in common over thousands of years despite how incredibly different our lives are. I support her and I think she looks wonderful.
everyone in the replies of this post saying “well I think she’s pretty!” missed the whole damn point lmao
I remember watching a documentary once where historians were trying to work out who a dead girl was and what her life was like. I’m pretty sure they dated the body back to the early Victorian era, and established pretty early on that she lived in poverty, died young, and was most certainly a prostitute.
The grand finale of the show was the reveal of her reconstructed face. Now, bare in mind that through their investigations they discovered that she had lived an awful life and died an agonizing death (syphilis iirc). So, you can imagine my disgust when the historians reacted with disappointment at the reveal of her ‘face’. This poor girl, who had suffered terribly, was obviously not the poor, tragic beauty they had been hoping for.
She was plain, maybe some would say she was ugly, but what was truly hideous was the fact that you could practically see the sympathy these historians had for this poor girl slip away as they looked at her ‘face’, and you could certainly hear it in their voices.
Even in death our value rests on the basis of our looks. Sympathy is conditional - based on where you fall on the looks scale.
Science: *gives us the miracle of seeing long-dead faces*
Yang probably knew what Adam looked like and who he was before Heroes and Monsters happened.
Let’s discuss shall we?
V2:E1
Blake is doodling Adam in her notebook because she’s starting to get stressed out. Yang asks “Watcha doin?” And Blake tells her she’s looking over notes from last semester. Yang doesn’t pry any further, but there’s a reason why they chose her to be the one to interrupt Blake’s thoughts in this scene.
Do you know what the first thing yang sees when she stumbles upon Blake at the fall of beacon is? Let me remind you.
Adam with his back turned to the camera putting himself in between her and Blake, emblem fully exposed to her.
yang xaoi long isn’t stupid. She could have easily put the pieces together. She knew. This is the guy Blake was doodling in class. This must be the guy she’s been talking about. The one she keeps thinking about. Stressing about. This is the guy Blake looked up too. The one Blake said turned into a monster. This is the guy Blake ran from.
Now he’s here and he’s hurting her.
And it makes the situation THAT much more dire and her fury 100x worse. And I’ve been crying about this for actual years so now you have to too.
“i am a monument to all your sins” is such a fucking raw line for a villain it’s amazing that it came from halo, a modernish video game, and not some classical text or mythos
classic texts have nothing on the crazy people come up with in modern times tbh
“I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me.”
– Joshua Graham, Who Is A Fallout New Vegas NPC, Something Most People Throwing This Quote Around Don’t Realize
“If the world chooses to become my enemy, I will fight like I always have.”
– Shadow the Hedgehog in what is widely considered one of if not the single worst game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise
this is the source for this text and it haunts me on a regular basis
Flowers wither away. Jewelry are simply stones, decorated with fake beauty. I can give you something pure. Honest and undying love.
“A world without forgiveness is a world without compromise and a world without compromises is a world without life, for even a simple-minded beast may forgive it’s transgressors to share a watering hole in the middle of a drought”- A meme I made at 2am before deciding to quit my last job
Thinking about becoming one of those awful steampunk rappers except that all my songs are about the actual Victorian era so it’s all shit like “they tell me my workers are a bit too young / but I say they’re middle-aged, on account of the black lung”
“I got rhythm, got flow, got plenty of gumption / coughing blood on the street, call that conspicuous consumption”
i hate it when i really ship a heterosexual pairing and they dont end up together. the one fucking time i was rooting for the straights and this is what happens to me
