ARainbowCryptid'sRamblings

my brain:

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

like people want to think any disabled person who is after money is morally suspect some way, because they're not asking for "treatments" or "accommodations" like a lot of our issues can be fixed way more easily with money. can't drive? paying for a taxi is often one of the more accessible alternatives. can't cook? you can pay more to have prepared food delivered to you. food restrictions? that food straight up costs more money. can't clean? you can pay for someone to do that. house inaccessible? having (lots) of money can help with that, you get the gist.

my brain:

B.Yellowtail --- jewlery, clothing, and home goods designed by Bethany Yellowtail, citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and from the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation

Cheekbone Beauty --- sustainable, low-waste beauty products from Jenn Harper, an Anishinaabe artist based in Canada

Trickster --- atheletic products from Tlingit and Deg Hit’an Athabascan siblings (Alaska)

NativeHumboldt on Etsy --- the artist, Shayna McCullough, and their fiancé make designs inspired by traditional designs from their culture; she is from the Yurok tribe and descended from the Hupa, Karuk, Redwood Creek, Pit River, Yuki, Wintun, Pomo (tribes in California), and Chetco tribe (in Oregon)

OklahomaThirtyNine on Etsy --- they mostly sell beaded work, particularly earrings, as well as some necklaces

xBeadsByMandyx on Etsy --- handmade beaded earrings, from a Cherokee veteran

food products, from wine to sauces to teas to mixes to fish to jerky and nuts, sorted by store with details beside each store

It's really difficult to automate the process of picking the coffee cherries, so most coffee harvesting is done by hand. Since this is, again, happening on a steep mountain slope, this is pretty arduous labor.

One website I read said that harvesting coffee is 10x harder than harvesting grapes for wine, and I 100% believe them.

Once those cherries are picked, they still need to dry in the sun and subsequently turned into coffee, a process that has multiple steps and also requires a lot of labor.

If not everyone can drink wine or eat refined white flour in your setting - if not everyone can wear finespun fabrics with indigo dyes - then not everyone should be drinking coffee.

The amount of backbreaking labor still that goes into coffee to this day means that we shouldn't be flippant with the way we treat it. People in the Global North are just allowed to act like it's cheap bc we exploit the Global South. If everyone involved with the production of coffee was paid fairly and allowed to work in ways that didn't break their bodies, coffee would be a luxury product. 100%.

And you can get around that in your setting with magic or whatever - Between Two Fires is set in the plague. There's not enough people left to make wine. Demons use necromancy to perform a wine harvest + make wine that has bits of corpses falling off and getting mixed in. You could do something similar with coffee.

Which says all the more about the fact that people don't. There's so little interest and respect for history/craft, so prevalent the exploitation, that authors genuinely don't think about it or can't be bothered.

"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."

I am not an expert by any means, so please chime in to expand on this if you know more, but what I’ve read indicates coffee was originally a normal trade item, not a product of conquest. So just having coffee present isn’t a sign of European colonialism from a historical perspective. Having large amounts available is a completely different story, however.

Approximately 200 years after coffee reached Europe, Europeans took coffee and forced enslaved and colonized peoples in the Caribbean to cultivate it. They then began to do the same in other tropical colonies. Coffee is grown in most tropical locations due to colonialism, and historically was available in Europe from existing trade networks with Yemen.

So to recap, coffee was historically cultivated by Yemen, who traded it with Ethiopians and people living it Saudi Arabia. It spread from Saudi Arabia to the Levant and Turkey. Turkey was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which covered south Eastern Europe so coffee was available there too. Venetian traders then spread it to more western regions and it became popular throughout Europe.

Thinking about it, this post was referencing Europeans forcing colonized people to cultivate coffee in tropical plantations. Which took place in the last 2.5 centuries so Europeans could have large amounts of profit and coffee available. As coffee isn’t native to the vast majority of tropical areas, people writing stories set in tropical settings should consider if they want to include coffee as a product of colonization, or to deliberately include or exclude it as a naturally occurring plant.

It's about the fact that Ethiopia and Arabia EXIST. That coffee does not grow in Europe, but comes from elsewhere. Same with chocolate, same with the foodstuffs of the Americas like potatoes, tomatoes and maize. Those things come from a different cultural context, and when they appear in a pseudo-medieval pseudo-european fantasy setting without explanation, it implies that the places and peoples associated to those things don't exist. Which is poor worldbuilding because it results in a more boring, stale story, but it also reflects eurocentric biases in how people see the world.

"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."

I am not an expert by any means, so please chime in to expand on this if you know more, but what I’ve read indicates coffee was originally a normal trade item, not a product of conquest. So just having coffee present isn’t a sign of European colonialism from a historical perspective. Having large amounts available is a completely different story, however.

Approximately 200 years after coffee reached Europe, Europeans took coffee and forced enslaved and colonized peoples in the Caribbean to cultivate it. They then began to do the same in other tropical colonies. Coffee is grown in most tropical locations due to colonialism, and historically was available in Europe from existing trade networks with Yemen.

So to recap, coffee was historically cultivated by Yemen, who traded it with Ethiopians and people living it Saudi Arabia. It spread from Saudi Arabia to the Levant and Turkey. Turkey was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which covered south Eastern Europe so coffee was available there too. Venetian traders then spread it to more western regions and it became popular throughout Europe.

Thinking about it, this post was referencing Europeans forcing colonized people to cultivate coffee in tropical plantations. Which took place in the last 2.5 centuries so Europeans could have large amounts of profit and coffee available. As coffee isn’t native to the vast majority of tropical areas, people writing stories set in tropical settings should consider if they want to include coffee as a product of colonization, or to deliberately include or exclude it as a naturally occurring plant.

It's about the fact that Ethiopia and Arabia EXIST. That coffee does not grow in Europe, but comes from elsewhere. Same with chocolate, same with the foodstuffs of the Americas like potatoes, tomatoes and maize. Those things come from a different cultural context, and when they appear in a pseudo-medieval pseudo-european fantasy setting without explanation, it implies that the places and peoples associated to those things don't exist. Which is poor worldbuilding because it results in a more boring, stale story, but it also reflects eurocentric biases in how people see the world.

How is it sealed(wax or rubber), flexible medical tubing(rubber), distillery(rubber), soles(rubber), insulation(rubber)

Rubber makes your life so much easier as a writer and borderline grows on trees. It's okay to add rubber folks

It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.

DO NOT TRUST ANY GOFUNDME OR REQUEST FOR CROWDFUNDING THAT PALESTINIAN BLOGGERS HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

At this point I'm fine receiving a bunch of inbox messages asking me to vet x y z so y'all can avoid this shit. But please have some critical thinking!

Whether you wanna read the whole thing or not idc.

REBLOG IT.