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@orbis3 on vmo

thank you all for loving her with me. hug your animals a little tighter for me, and if you feel like it, leave a glass of water out for nora as she goes.

i could still use the help if anyone can spare. thank you all for making me -- & nora -- feel loved.

ground beef prices are expected to soar to $20 a pound after a screw worm infestation has infected US cattle herds for the first time since the 1950s. Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE gutted all the funding for the agencies responsible for monitoring our food supply, so now the whole system is collapsing and sending grocery prices soaring. No problem for Big AG — they just pass the price on to YOU.

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this isn't across the entire industry but it is still concerning. there are 5 confirmed cases so far, infecting 3 baby cows and a goat in texas, and a dog in new mexico, but they're still testing flies and animals in both areas to see how far it's spread. no confirmed cases in humans yet and this isn't dangerous to the average consumer but could be for communities animal and human alike that surround slaughterhouses and animal agriculture farms (as well as the animals inside obviously)

the USDA plans are to drop more sterile male flies around the texas/mexico border and eventually open a fly factory in hopes to stop them from reproducing, which is the method the US adopted in the 1950s, but it won't be operational until late 2027 at the earliest. but that method previously stemmed the screwworm population all the way down to Panama.

we could've discussed how it wanted to be two different movies the whole time: one aesthetic-driven, classic analog found-footage horror, and a more introspective commentary on the themes of mental illness, oppression, and the ways we are unintentionally and intentionally caught up in their spirals. we could've discussed the themes of hyper-consumerism; how we discard the still-warm husks of our society as we endlessly chase after new and shinier things while discarding and disregarding the people that can't keep up. that could have never kept up due to how society is structured top-to-bottom to keep them down. even fucking- the series constantly touches on corporate greed and how corporations and governments constantly put innocent lives in danger to pursue the tiniest advantage over their competition. where was that? async was kinda just thrown around a little at the beginning and end with no further exploration. when you think about it, it wanted to be three movies. it wanted to be found-footage of what happens when a group of people stumble into the backrooms. it wanted to be an introspective and suspenseful thriller that meaningfully engaged with its themes. it wanted to be a commentary on the inherent horror of corporate greed. ultimately, it could not get away from its shallow roots in true aestheticism. it failed, but it still clearly wanted to be more.

but it's literally not even worth it to engage with it on these levels because ultimately parsons and soodik and whoever else was responsible for the choices made in this film made racist art. casting a Black actor and then refusing to analyze the script any further was a racist choice that ended in making a caricature out of the only Black character and was so disgusting and hateful to watch, that it completely ruined whatever goodwill i had left for the movie.