she who held the moon

Mensah + Murderbot being on the same exact page all the time

The first response humorously links the behaviors of stockpiling seeds to the behavior of rodents and small birds, animals both known for caching large supplies of seeds to eat. Cardinals are not a caching species, per se, compared to other types of birds like Chickadees, but they are known to eat seeds in their diets.

The final response adds to the joke with a humorous visual. Cardinal in the early twenty-first century, can refer to small birds or high ranking officials in the Catholic church. The first is known for their red plumage, the second for their distinctive red garb unique to their specific rank.

The image depicts a squirrel in what is clearly the uniform of a Catholic Cardinal: a Squirrel who is a Cardinal. The implication of the image is that this squirrel cardinal is defensively replying to the second poster, humorously declaring that the accusation is spot on.

but would its deception hold up against the sci-fi equivalent of hbomberguy who initially was making a much smaller scale video but then kept piecing things together.....

“You get used to it” true but misleading because someday your back problems are gonna inexplicably cause stomach problems. And then you get used to the stomach problems but your thumbs start hurting because you had to do so much work on your phone lying in weird positions while waiting for the stomach problems to go away. And there are way more distractions on your phone too so while you always had adhd this just makes it more annoying/prevalent-

Following the invasion of Iraq, the US occupation of the country became a reality after the collapse of Saddam’s government. Faced with a fait accompli, the UN Security Council had to accept the new status quo.

According to International Humanitarian Law, occupation forces – in this case, the US and UK – become responsible for the well-being of the populations they occupy. So, UNSC Resolution 1483 was issued on 22 May 2003 to establish the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as Iraq’s administrator and create the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) to manage Iraqi oil revenues.

Note that Resolution 1483 did not mention the US Federal Reserve as the depositary of Iraqi funds, nor did it assign a location for the DFI headquarters or account. In fact, the resolution specifically states directed that the DFI should “be held by the Central Bank of Iraq.” It was the CPA, led by Paul Bremer, that decided unilaterally to house the account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

This decision allowed the US government to maintain tight control over Iraq’s oil revenues. From that point until today, the Iraqi Ministry of Finance has had to submit requests for funds to the US Treasury, which then approves or denies these requests based on its own criteria.

This monthly transfer of US dollars – which are literally flown into Baghdad in pallets of hard cash – determines Iraq and its 40-million-population’s ability to pay for basic needs like salaries, food, and medicine.

Whenever Washington feels that Iraq is not compliant with US regional goals, these fund transfers can be delayed or reduced. In January 2020, for instance, after the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel US troops following the assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Trump administration threatened to freeze Iraq’s access to its oil revenues.

Today, Iraq’s financial situation remains dire. Despite having oil revenues piling up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – estimated today at around $120 billion – Iraq is burdened with a growing debt that matches this amount.

source

oscar the grouch, who lived and loved in a trash can

oscar the grouch, who ate rotten bananas because he didn't have the self esteem to try for fresh ones

Across the (several) novels I wrote as a teenager, nothing ever fit into the "rough draft -> more polished drafts -> final draft" sequence.

I would write something that was supposed to be a first draft, then completely rewrite it to the point that I didn't have a first draft and a second draft, I had two different first drafts. My sense of what I wanted to write evolved very quickly, and I never reached a stable enough sense of what my stories were about that I could begin to refine it instead of being trapped in an endless cycle of scrapping everything and starting over

My adventure with Bucky Barnes fanfiction (first reading it, then writing it) led me to these things:

multiple different, mutually contradictory versions of the same story can exist and all of them can have value at the same time.

The idea that writers imagine "their own" stories and characters out of nothing is a cultural idea we made up. Nothing is really "original," we just have a (legally enforced) cultural norm of making stories appear separate by giving characters distinct names, using different plot and worldbuilding elements, not deriving too much from any one particular influence

Being a storyteller is deeply connected to being a story-listener. You have to hear the story before telling it yourself.

the concept of "originality" makes it really difficult to learn the storyteller/story-listener thing, because the way we're taught to see it is that writers can somehow, like, sublimate everything they read into raw Ideas and then use those ideas as ingredients to create Their Own Thing.

Which, yes you can pick and choose what tropes you want to use, but breaking something down to its atoms means you can no longer see how the thing works as an organism, because you took it apart.

I think our culture has difficulty seeing stories holistically because the idea of "originality" is so pervasive.

Playing in an environment where the storytellers are exchanging the same story, telling and re-telling different parts and in different ways, deriving ideas from each other and refining those ideas with further iterations until they become their own "canons" that sprout more stories, helped me understand a lot of things I didn't understand before.

In the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem, those ideas and tropes that were assembled to form the whole weren't just interchangeable parts anymore: it was clear how they supported certain themes, evoked certain emotions, explored certain ideas, and so on.

The "nodes" of story that clustered together and intensely cultivated new variations were functionally entangled with imagery, symbolism, and particular literary techniques, and seeing how different storytellers engaged these things taught me a deep understanding of their possibilities.

Therefore when I got it in my head to write my own fanfiction I had done a lot of deep thinking about what my take on the story was going to be "about" and the themes it would engage and the techniques it would use to do that. Because I had already read 30+ different iterations of the story of Bucky Barnes, the man who would become the Winter Soldier, that were all compelling in their own way.

I'm starting to think that this is a fundamental part of the storytelling process and the idea of "original fiction" has grimed it up a little bit. You have to hear the story before you can tell it.

Is it possible, I thought, that this is what a "first draft" often functionally is? I ended up writing so many "first drafts" that were just sloppy assemblages of ideas I imperfectly guessed I might like, and once they were assembled, I realized I didn't like those ideas and what they communicated.

So I thought, What if all writing is fanfiction, and when you write a first draft, you are essentially writing something to write fanfiction of.

This way of thinking of it is fascinating in what it implies. Fanfiction is not a linear continuation or refinement of the original; it can be a retort, a further extrapolation, a complementary piece, an antagonistic refutation. There's always an inversion: listener becomes teller. In other words it implies that first draft and further drafts are a call and a response, rather than an increasingly "improved" version of the same thing.

It suggests that it's actually fine or even expected to have multiple drafts that aren't necessarily linear improvements on each other. It also suggests that a first draft shouldn't be read thinking "okay how do I improve this" but "what sticks with me about this?" The failures or inadequacies of the first draft are not so much things to repair as things to respond to.

I don't know what I think about this, because honestly, after experiencing fanfiction, the intensely private nature of writing original fiction seems to run contrary to the nature of storytelling, which is communal.

Not their singular story. One story, of many.

And it is definitely one of those things exacerbated by growing up poor and then being a super poor twentysomething, but I think it's something many of us fall into.

This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.

Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do.

This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently."