Something very sad and dumb is happening. During the slow collapse of the Roman empire we lost many "luxury" trades and techniques due to them not being sustainable in a post-roman less connected world. People didn't get dumber, and they kept using and inventing new things to improve their quality of life, but, to take an exemple out of many, the recipe of the seawater concrete that was so closely tied to Rome's monumental architectural projects was forgotten for over a thousand years simply because for quite some time there just weren't cities vast enough to attract the kind of patrons to fund them, which stopped the process known as euergetism to take place.
Somehow we have been going through the same process again over the past hundred and so years, not because there's no upper class to chase civic recognition by sponsoring the arts, but because the upper class has lost interest in sponsoring the arts at all. It seems like rich people have become more and more into the idea alone of accumulating money, and just can't think of ways to spend it that wouldn't also be thought off by the most basic dudebros around. Not to glorify rich people at any point in time but it used to be that when you had an insane amount of money you'd use it to foster a court of artist, build gigantic public baths or commission a rank in the navy to discover new continents. Nowadays it all goes towards a dick measuring contest of yachts, mansions and what just seems like the least satisfying way one could ever spend their money.
This wouldn't be so much of a problem considering the lower class has had more spending money than ever before in history, but aside from that and in lock step with exponential capitalism, rich people seem to take personal exception to the arts existing at all, opting instead to commodify everything, copy it and sell it for cheap. We're staring down the barrel of losing thousands of crafts honed over dozens of generations simply because the mercantile hellscape we live in does not, for whatever reason, value having the best possible teapot ever produced, or the best knife, or the best brush, etc... instead these products are undermined by cheap imitations sponsored by rich assholes wanting the appearance of quality over the real thing for revenues' sake, possibly because the idea that an ultra-skilled artisan class getting paid insane amounts of money completely proportional to their labor feels alien to this bunch of parasites.
And I don't think that trickle down economics has ever been a thing, but it sure as hell feels like we went from being the paid monkeys of the elite, to them not being willing to spend the piss it would take to save us from a fire.
So what this paint company does is take iron pollution from abandoned mines that are polluting soils and rivers and makes iron based red pigment paints out of it.
Basically they realized hey no one's cleaning this shit up, it's polluting the streams, killing all the fish, making the water undrinkable and there's a huge market for it so why not make money by cleaning it the fuck up?
They remove this stuff by the industrial bucket load from the rivers. The idea is if it's in a painting, if it's in your home, it's not poisoning wildlife.
anyway its cool as shit, please support tf out of these people https://gamblinstore.com/reclaimed-earth-colors-set/
my mom loves to lie and like she always swears she was NEVER homophobic or anything to me as a child “i even have a gay work friend” but a really funny memory resurfaced recently where i asked if i could use birthday money i had to buy a rainbow flag when i was like ??? 7?? because i LOVED rainbows. and she said no that means something Evil and god will hate you . so what did i do. but ask my grandmom for a rainbow sweater for christmas and proceed to only wear that sweater for three years when it got cold because i didnt like the idea that god hated colors and i wanted to challenge him
normal 7 year old with religious trauma: oh no god can hear my thoughts and punish me
me: either you are wrong about god or god is wrong and i will fight him and i will be the one to find out
me at 7: he would not fucking say that
Oh ok. Childhood memory unlocked.
When i was a little kid, i had a "4d puzzle" of new york city.
You built the cardboard jigsaw base, then the foam island, and then you had plastic buildings and bridges.
And it had instructions to place the buildings in chronological order, as well as a timeline, hence "4d".
And i just fucking remembered. In 2001 on the timeline a step was "remove buildings #xx and #xy (World Trade Centers)" with no other explanation.
And as a kid i had no clue what that meant, but looking back on it my puzzle really just told me "alright kid, do a 9/11" and i, age 5, went along with it.
i genuinely have no animosity towards ppl who get upset abt not being able to read academic texts + i do think we need to expand the pathways/methods of being exposed to critical concepts so that "sit + read for 2 hours" is not the only option.
however, as someone dx with adhd + incapable of sitting still for even a minute (actually right at this moment i am writing this instead of reading the book sitting open in front of me), i do feel like a lot of ppl do not realize that not all readings are designed to be read like a novel.
as in, it's ok + normal + good to need to reread a paragraph several times, to only read part of a book, to have to research or reference words or concepts in order to grasp the reading, to skip over large chunks of text which are not relevant to your expertise, to continue reading despite not understanding a concept. this is something 'neurotypical' academics do frequently + many of these texts, especially contemporary ones, were designed with this in mind.
there are many ppl with accessibility needs that are not being met by academic texts at this time! many texts (in my humble opinion) are unnecessarily complex in order to show off or hide the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about.
i still feel like many of the kneejerk reactions on this site are based on the assumption that their experience reading academic texts should be similar to their experiences reading a nyt bestseller, rather than a process of thinking, analyzing, researching, processing, returning. some of u are telling yourself that any challenges u face while reading are a result of some internal fault u have + not an expected + precious part of the experience.
Agree w op, if specialist language is required to explain a complex idea then so be it. Tho it is a huge pet peeve when people just shove big words into an article to sound “clever”. I had to read a whole 20 page article that was like this and genuinely the conclusion started with a sentence that was just an unnecessarily complicated way of saying “in conclusion, music changes over time” like no fucking shit everything changes over time lady what was your point
(tho uni did assign it to us to explicitly show us what a poorly written article is like ahahahahah)
