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720,000 Kilometres Per Hour.

@tigerintherain / tigerintherain.tumblr.com

High speed disaster. Astrophysicist in the Pacific Northwest. They/Them.
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Anonymous asked:

What does the "banana republic is a fucked up name for a store" post you reblogged mean? I'm afraid of looking dumb.

The term "banana republic" was originally coined to describe countries in Central and South America (mainly Honduras and Guatemala) whose economies were rendered dependent on the production and export of bananas (among other agricultural goods, but mainly bananas) by American fruit corporations leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the U.S. military and the CIA.

Throughout most of the of the 20th century, American corporations such as United Fruit, Cuyamel, and the Standard Fruit Company owned large portions of these countries' lands, to the point that in some cases they controlled their railway, road, and port infrastructure, and they engaged in a variety of imperialist actions to lower production costs, such as violence against labor activists and anti wage reform lobbying.

The pinnacle of this phenomenon was the 1954 Guatemalan coup, when United Fruit convinced the goverment of US president Dwight D. Eisenhower that the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz (who had expropriated some of the company's unused land and given it to Guatemalan peasants) was secretly working with the Soviet Union, resulting in a CIA coup which deposed the Árbenz government and replaced it with a thirty-year right-wing military dictatorship which effectively acted as a puppet government to protect the interests of United Fruit and the U.S. government.

Nowadays the term has broadened to refer to any small, economically unstable country with an economy which has been rendered dependent on the export of a particular natural resource due to economic exploitation by a more powerful country.

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So yeah bit of a fucked up name for a clothing store ngl

These companies still exist btw. Standard Fruit is now the Dole Food Company, United Fruit and Cuyamel merged and eventually were renamed to Chiquita Brands International, and the Guatemala coup is barely scratching the surface of the fucked up shit they did over here.

In 2007 Chiquita admitted to financing far-right paramilitary groups in my country as recently as 1997.

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prokopetz

It is in fact very funny that a couple of dudes got so sick of waiting for Animusic 3 that they figured out how Animusic's technique of procedurally animating rigged instrument models based on MIDI input worked, wrote their own software, and started making their own original Animusic-style videos.

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karalora

There is one key difference between this and a genuine Animusic production: the bombast of the arrangement is turned inside-out. Animusic pieces tend to start simply and acquire more complexity as they go; this one starts almost right out of the gate with the full array of instruments and big chords and such.

True, though I suspect that particular tendency of Animusic was at least as much a consequence of the videos being structured as tech demos as it was an artistic choice.

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RB if you think CD drives in computers are not obsolete, but in fact still necessary, despite being artificially phased out

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regardless of a myriad of other AI discourse talking points i'm not touching with a 10 ft pole, i think it should always be disclosed when i'm looking at something AI generated. like that's a basic level of societal courtesy, right. AI images more than any new technology that has changed the course of humanity seem to be inseparable from a purposeful obfuscation of their origin. the gimmick is to deceive human perception, their entire purpose is to make you believe you are looking at something created by sentience. AI is at its core a tool for deception and i mean that as a neutral statement. it's a mimic, a pantomime. impersonation. and that is, ethics aside, annoying as all fuck

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The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War. The correspondences between that moment and this one were unmistakable to those of us who watched, in person or through screens, as the NYPD hauled 108 Columbia University students off of their institution’s campus on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Like the campus panic of the 1960s–70s, this one is aroused by the spectacle of young people speaking out against the inhumane actions of the US and its imperial client states, as well as against the complacency and complicity of their own educational institutions. Now, as then, the act of protesting against injustice undergoes a curious transfiguration in the media, which refashions this action into the object of frantic scrutiny, surveillance, and suppression.
Harvard University professor Walter Johnson, in an essay about experience of working at Harvard since October 7 titled “Living Inside a Psyop”—the psyop being, precisely, “the campus”—calls this the “two-step maneuver” of campus panic: (1) Look over here, (2) Do not look over there. Overreact to this, overlook that.[1] Look at the US, not at Palestine. Look up at what is happening in the clouds over Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a plane trails a banner declaring, “HARVARD HATES JEWS”; do not look at what is happening on the ground in Gaza, do not look at the masses of the displaced, the bereaved, the starving, the wounded, the sick, the dying, and certainly do not look at the dead, murdered with artillery supplied by the US government and funded by American citizens’ taxes. When student protestors chant, “From the river to the sea,” hear a speculative antisemitic canard; do not hear a reference to an actual river, an actual sea, an actual and ongoing history of dispossession and occupation.
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crimethinc

“It Is an Honor to Be Suspended for Palestine”

Dispatches from the Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University

In this in-depth report, participants offer a blow-by-blow account of the events at Columbia, appraising the tactics that the demonstrators have employed and the challenges that they face.

since the white house put out a ridiculous statement condemning the protests i want to reiterate again that many of the students involved are jewish, there has always been a large jewish presence at these protests in nyc and in campus organizing for palestine

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reblogged

smth smth builder’s signature styles whatever - I love how instantly recognisable it is to be in a Bdubs build whilst not be jarring. This shot of both sides of the river is a wonderful example

The custom trees. Are so freaking tall in compare to the default, yet their presence doesn’t feel obstructive. You don’t feel ‘blocked out’ from the environment as the deliberate thinness of the trunks, what height the leaves on the pine start at give just enough breathe room to: look through, catch glimpses of the other side, and be invited to Go Through It.

He says it in his commentary, a lot of what he builds is heavily grounded in realism. This area is not meant to be the centre of attention, the purpose of these trees is to Immerse and act as transition as one leaves the rest of the minecraft world and into Bdubs’ ‘more natural’ one — where the trees are grey, and the water is clear.

I’m so fucking serious this random cut of the river is my favourite part in the entirety of this forest, I like how still it looks, I like how clear it is yet how dark it is not only to imply depth but that illusion that the river is reflecting its surroundings how you can even say the river is a dark green! Being able to come to these interpretations for something so simple to me perfectly captures what he wants in builds like these.

And it STILL doesnt feel out of place because he does something like THIS. The way the stream gets progressively more and more opaque until it meets the actual main river is genius work. It gives the impression the water in Bdubs’ place is fresh in compare to the saltier, deeper water of the larger river it transitions.

😭And a final thing, I know the white glass he used was done to suggest rushing water but I swearrr he has like a sixth sense in how to place them perfectly. (Forgive my shitty camera) From this distance if you squint you can see these dark and lighter shadows made by the trees, and by putting where the white spots are placed now highlights these small rays of sunshine poking through the leaves and shining on the river and I think that’s unintentionally the coolest thing.

whhwwh idk how to end this, I just really liked this new video for reasons above and wanted to tell the world why.

BdoubleO100 you never miss. Forever and ever.

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