A petition was filed with the National Labor Relations Board today requesting a union election. The petition includes 66 staffers at Warner Bros. Animation and 22 at Cartoon Network, including roles like production manager, digital production assistant, IT technician, production coordinator, production assistant, design production coordinator, assistant production manager and senior assistant production manager.
They are involved in such Warner Bros. projects as Batman: The Caped Crusader, Harley Quinn and Teen Titans Go! and Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake, We Baby Bears and Craig of the Creek.
The workers also requested voluntary recognition from management at the Warner Bros. Discovery subsidiaries.
A tweet was issued confirming the move, which was officially announced earlier on a joint Zoom call.
“Although many might not think it, production is a specialized skill; we might not be artists or writers, but what we bring to the table goes beyond traditional creativity and gets content on the air,” Warner Bros. Animation production manager Hannah Ferenc said in a statement about the organization effort. “Having lived through the existing state of the animation industry for the past seven years, I want to make sure that not only our current workers, but all those who choose to join us in the future, can feel secure in following their passion by earning livable wages and being treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.”
The Animation Guild has already established bargaining units on shows like Rick and Morty, Solar Opposites, The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad! It also is active at studios like Titmouse New York and L.A. and ShadowMachine. Establishment at Walt Disney Animation Studios is currently in progress.”
the thing that makes me out of my mind about gur sevraq. is that he was given a task by his god, who he ran a church for, to singlehandedly put together god’s body so god could destroy the planet. so they decided to become part of the revolution to maybe convince god not to do that. and because of that while gur was busy the authoritarian regime started to steal god’s body parts for their own gain. then while gur was beating themself up for this they got into a deadly argument and ended up as a ghost on an island and neither god they had ever worshipped would speak to them after years of being a prophet. now the only person he can communicate with is his hideous imperialist rival who he thinks he should probably kill but he’s understandably scared of losing his only remaining connection to the world, so he doesn’t, and he feels he’s a coward for that. they tell themself that their closest friend will handle the god’s body situation except very soon after said friend dies trying to get revenge for them. and on the same day said friend dies the public and presumably gur themself find out that gur’s actual body is being puppeted by the imperialists to spout propaganda that twists gur’s own recorded words and beliefs. five years later that puppet has become so famous as a mouthpiece of empire that they have entirely replaced “gur sevraq” and gur can no longer claim his own identity. and the rival who is their only connection to the living world has decided they’re not real and she doesn’t have to acknowledge them. it has lowkey been implied they’ve lost some of their faith in the previously mentioned god they were the prophet of. and they are millions of miles away from their home planet, which got taken over by the empire, and they have to wonder if they could have changed things if they’d been smarter and less prideful and less of a fool.
so anyway that’s the thing about gur sevraq i think about the most. how about you all, what’s your favorite gur thing
women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i’m going to fucking kill
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genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don’t lean into diet culture / body shaming?
also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don’t want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.
Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.
He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it’s good for easing yourself into things.
You also don’t have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don’t want to/can’t. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don’t have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.
I second Hybrid Calisthenics, that’s the program I use. It’s run by one guy who’s taken it upon himself to make exercising more accessible and it’s completely free! Each exercise has different variations based on your ability and each variation is further divided into different levels of difficulty so you can work up to where you want to be. If you can’t do a single push up for example then this program will help you work up to the point where you can, and if you’re a master of push ups then there are more advanced body weight exercises you can tackle so you can keep moving forward in your training without stagnating. The routine offers a full body workout with absolutely no equipment required for the beginning levels. The only reason you would need to buy anything is if you want to work up to a full pull up, at which point you would need actual pull up rings
Here’s his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that’s easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial
when the unresolved psychosexuality of the relationship is way better than whatever resolution it might hypothetically have and actually its own being unresolved is the crux and the paradigm of what the characters have going on between them:
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
i love when you see skinny pre t guys on here saying they want to be a bear some day. fantastic life aspiration. start eating
being hairy and fat myself (im 19 so i feel weird calling myself a bear, yknow? cub, maybe.) its really refreshing to see a trend of guys who are interested in hairness and fatness after ive seen so much fatphobia and shaming in the transmasc community. it’s nice.
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn’t compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn’t sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at… putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn’t have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that’s what they did.
I don’t know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
Body horror is weird when you know a lot disabled people because some times people say body horror and it the most deep wrong dread scary things and some times people say body horror and it will be a normal human with the body type of my friend alex who has marfans and the walking pattern of my friend kahurangi who has cerebral palsy and the hands fingers of my friend marama who has a congenital limb difference and bad arthritis
The weirdness of American narratives regarding pre-modern Africa as a whole being opposed to the institution of European slavery is just baffling, especially in media. It’s as if people really think Europeans just invented the slave trade and sold powerful ethnic groups and centralized states on the idea of it, when in all reality they just co-opted a plethora of interconnected systems that well predate contact with Europe. Chances are is if a group was vehemently opposed to slavery, with exceptions of course, they likely were regularly subjected to slave raids. The concept of slavery was not new or controversial, one could argue that in pre-modern Africa it was a normalized reality of a lot of societies.
Weirder is that some people think slavery in Africa was “more humane” as if there’s a way to humanely own another human being as property.
I think there’s a real sense in which chattel slavery, in being highly capitalistic and pseudo-industrial, was more cruel than most forms of slavery, historically. This doesn’t mean that other forms of slavery were ok, of course, they were horrific and unjust. But in much the same way that the Holocaust was arguably the first (and possibly only?) example of a truly industrialized genocide, and is in this sense unique despite genocide itself being a common historical reality, I think there were elements to chattel slavery which were genuinely unique in their cruelty.
First of all, there was simply the nature of the work. Sugar production from sugar cane is incredibly grueling. Other plantation crops like cotton may have been better, but not by much. In general, agricultural labor is brutal. And chattel slavery consisted almost entirely of agricultural labor, to a historically unusual degree. Slavery in e.g. ancient Rome was relatively diversified, including what might have been comparable to plantation work on rural latifundia, but also household work, skilled trades, and so on. Again, not that this makes it in any sense ok, but merely to point out that many of these jobs were far less physically vicious than plantation labor.
The second reason is that chattel slavery was capitalistic to a historically unusual degree, it was driven by profit-maximization in a relatively modern way. Slave labor on plantations was industrialized. In fact, is has been widely argued (though I am not able to assess these arguments’ credibility) that the concept of the factory emerged out of the organizational structure of the slave plantation. All the cruelties that are characteristic of early industrial factory labor—long hours performing repetitive, hyper-specific tasks, strict managerial control of workers with punishments for inefficiency, a general pushing of human beings to their absolute physical limit in the name profit maximization—were also present in plantation labor. These things, certainly, may have existed here or there in the historical record. But industrial labor as such, the social technology of the factory and the production line, did not exist until the early modern period. This social technology was the crux of the industrial revolution (indeed, it preceded the mechanical technologies we generally associate with it). That these techniques were implemented at the very least simultaneously, if not initially, on slave plantations made plantation work unusually brutal on the workers.
That is not to mention, of course, that when a manager identified a factory worker as “slacking off”, they could fire them, or maybe get away with some level of corporal punishment. If a manager identified a slave as slacking of, the slave was routinely whipped, beaten, or sometimes killed. Plantation slavery had all the crushing organization of modern industrial labor, the transformation of human beings into machines to be worked to their physical limit for profit, together with an absolutely unrestrained physical brutality that has no parallel in the modern world.
The third reason that chattel slavery was so horrible in the degree to which slaves were at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy, with essentially no room for advancement. This is not always the case under slavery. In the Ottoman Empire, for instance, one of the principle uses of slaves was in staffing the civil bureaucracy. Slaves could in fact achieve relative power and relative comfort, if no matter what they remained unfree. The slaves-as-functionaries system is actually not uncommon, and IIRC was one of the forms of slavery present in West Africa during the early era of the slave trade. Again, this is not in any sense just. A few slaves being able to achieve comfortable lives does not make slavery ok. But this kind of thing, present even in ancient Roman slavery to some degree, was essentially unheard of in chattel slavery. This was exaggerated by the fact that slavery was racialized, slaves were visibly, phenotypically different than the rest of the population (free black people did exist, but were rare and were routinely re-captured into slavery despite this being illegal). This meant slaves could be immediately identified as slaves, and even if they were freed, could be immediately identified as members of the lowest possible social caste. Even escape from slavery was no escape. This contrasts with non-racialized forms of slavery, especially in the premodern and pre-buraucratic world, in which freed or escaped slaves could potentially go on to live relatively normal lives.
Last but not least, the sheer scale of the thing was unique. Mass transport of human beings to be used and discarded for their labor had never before been organized at such magnitude. In fact, the demand for slaves was so great that many African states basically reorganized their entire economies around providing slaves to North and South American plantation economies in the early modern period, which resulted in catastrophic collapse when the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was finally abolished. While it would be an exaggeration to say that states like the Kingdom of Dahomey had economies purely based on the exportation of slaves, I think it’s not untrue to say that their relationship to the Euro-American powers of the time vis-à-vis slavery was not dissimilar to that of Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis oil today. When the British banned Dahomey from the slave trade in 1852, king Ghezo reportedly said:
The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.
West African economies were built on slave exportation, and American economies were built on slave importation. It’s not an exaggeration to say that under the Atlantic slave trade, nearly three continents held the mass bondage of human beings as their fundamental economic principle. Due to the larger populations and more advanced sea travel in the early modern period relative to other eras, they were able to organize an international slave economy of an absolutely unprecedented size.
And, again, this is where early industrialization plays a big role. Slaves were traded as mass-market goods in a way that simply did not exist in earlier eras. Average losses on a slave ship making a trans-atlantic crossing were nearly 20% at some points, and figures like this were dryly included in profit estimates. Humans were bound and packed below deck like crates, without the ability to move, for maximum packing efficiency. In the Americas, slaves breeding farms were established to produce and sell more slaves. The sheer, incomprehensible dehumanization of it all, the absolute reduction of human beings to an economic good, is I think genuinely unprecedented in human history.
I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that chattel slavery was the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. It was capitalism in its most unmediated form, property and profits raised above all else, buttressed by a racial ideology that allowed this horrible brutality to be justified for over three centuries. It happened because it was in the interest of the powerful everywhere involved. West African states got rich selling slaves, American states got rich using slaves. The entire trans-atlantic world was built on this system. In Africa, the empires made by slavery are long gone. In the Americas, though, former slave states still rule. So I think there is good reason to discuss chattel slavery specifically, above other forms of slavery, as a unique atrocity with uniquely persistent present-day consequences.
I suppose I’m not really disagreeing with the OP, and to some degree I just got carried away and ended up longposting about chattel slavery in general. But I do think it would be most accurate to say something like “Pre-modern forms of slavery, in Africa and elsewhere, were not typically as brutal as chattel slavery. In the early modern period, a uniquely brutal, industrial form of slavery developed within the plantation economies of the Americas and Portuguese Atlantic islands. Together with West African states, these Atlantic colonies built an international system of human trafficking for the purpose of slavery that was, likewise, uniquely brutal and industrialized. All parties involved bear responsibility for these horrors.”
Ok but why does Supernatural have so much evidence that Cas is a sexy wavelength
A lot, if not all of the people who call him ‘pretty boy’ and whatnot are. Angels. And demons. Who can see his wavelength.
He’s really charismatic?? Angels flock to him like sheep! Yeah he’s got an obviously bleeding heart but what if he also had pretty privilege. Then what.
Also. Dean.
Dean has seen Cas’ wavelength arguably once or twice. One of those times should be when he was a demon and Cas literally hugged him into submission.
And. In his next scene with Cas he’s like “looking good ;)”
THERE’S A LOT OF EVIDENCE IS ALL I’M SAYING. CAS IS A SEXY SEXY WAVELENGTH OK.
from 9.10 he is literally so handsome and I love this about him
zine by Anne Pasek on how ICT (information and communications technology) climate politics and digital decarbonization issues look productively different if we focus less on green consumer behaviours and more on opposing infrastructure expansions.
What’s the carbon footprint of our digital lives?
I made this zine because I keep getting asked this question. There’s a growing number of people and organizations who are anxious about climate change, aware that digital stuff plays a role in that, and sincerely want to do something about this in their personal or professional lives…
It’s encouraging to see so many people pose this question. I’m part of a community that studies the energy and carbon impacts of digital networks, and it used to feel like our biggest challenge was just getting people to understand that online files and services aren’t the immaterial stuff of sleek corporate infographics or the whole metaphor of ‘the cloud.’ That cloud, we’d endlessly reply, is just someone else’s computer. Most likely, it’s a computer stuck in an enormous data center somewhere sort of rural, where it consumes impressive amounts of electricity (to power the facility) and water (to cool down all those hot servers).
…
If you, as an individual or non-tech organization, are looking for a place to dig in, I’d like to suggest that the best place to do so is around resisting data center expansions. … If we can stop the next data center from being built (or endlessly expanded), and if we can create a wider movement contesting the social and ecological licence of these facilities, we can directly impact the climate trajectory of the tech sector overall. And, even if we fail, raising a fuss increases the likelihood of winning better economic concessions and legal regulations for these things down the road.
[My background in working in data centers, including “racking and stacking” the servers in the warehouses] is what informs my view, and I think that also is what prevents me from being fooled. This applies even to things that seem esoteric like machine learning, GPT-3 or DALL-E or what have you. I’m seeing data centers. Others see, oh, you know, artificial general intelligence is on the way. But what I’m seeing are computers in racks generating heat. And that’s why my question is always, okay fine, the mathematics is interesting—you’re not producing intelligence, but the mathematics is interesting, as even Chomsky would say—but tell me what’s going on in that data center. 'Cause that tells me what the actual cost is, what the power consumption is, the industrial process that informs what you are presenting as this ethereal, science-fiction-y thing that you’ve built.
A plan to build a Google data centre that will use millions of litres of water a day has sparked anger in Uruguay, which is suffering its worst drought in 74 years.
Water shortages are so severe in the country that a state of emergency has been declared in Montevideo and the authorities have added salty water to the public drinking water supplies, prompting widespread protests.
Critics claim that the government is prioritising water for transnationals and agribusiness at the expense of its own citizens. Daniel Pena, a researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, said: “Only a tiny proportion of water in Uruguay is used for human consumption. The majority is used for big agro industries, such as soya, rice and wood pulping. Now we have Google planning to use enormous quantities of water.”
The search giant has bought 29 hectares (72 acres) of land to build a datacentre in Canelones department, in southern Uruguay. The centre would use 7.6m litres (2m gallons) of water a day to cool its servers – equivalent to the domestic daily use of 55,000 people, according to figures from the Ministry of Environment obtained by Pena through legal action. The water would come directly from the public drinking water system, according to Pena.
[“Whenever we rely on a capitalist, imperialist system to provide vital necessities, we can guess that the provisions will be fragile and inadequate, and designed to transfer far more wealth toward the populations those systems were designed to support: white people, rich people, straight people, and men. Often, the concessions are never delivered at all, only promised in an effort to quell resistance.
One pattern that is clear in regard to concessions is that, because the aim of elites is to concede as little as possible and maintain the status quo as much as possible, we get more when we demand more and build bolder, bigger pressure. It took mass movements threatening capitalism’s very existence, like those seen during the Great Depression and the 1960s uprisings against racism, just to get stigmatizing, ungenerous welfare benefits. Decades of uprisings against police brutality yielded only surface police reforms, many of which expanded police budgets and numbers. Even unsatisfying concessions, in other words, only come with big, sustained, disruptive mobilizations.
Nonprofit leaders and politicians frequently encourage “pragmatism” and peaceful incremental change, but the most radical imagination of what we want, and the escalation of direct action to get it, is what is truly pragmatic if we seek to win real change. Concessions won in crises—crises of sudden disaster and crises created by powerful social protest—will be as strong and lasting as the mobilizations that made them necessary. Elites and their nonprofit gatekeepers encourage us to make small, “reasonable,” or “winnable” demands, and they try to redirect our action to official channels that are non-disruptive, with narratives about “peaceful protest” and “coming to the table.” They encourage reforms premised on the assumption that the systems we seek to dismantle are fundamentally fair and fixable. We have to refuse to limit our visions to the concessions they want to give—what we want is a radically different world that eliminates the systems that put our lives under their control.”]
I just finished playing Immortality and it’s really good. It felt like if Mulholland Drive and This House Has People In It had an experimental video game baby. 10/10.
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