weheartfandom:

The Ritual (2017)
Director: David Bruckner

everythingfox:

FLOWER

pnwpol:

Indigenous peoples and people of colour are disproportionately affected by our global climate crisis. But in the mainstream green movement and in the media, they are often forgotten or excluded. This is Tipping Point, a new VICE series that covers environmental justice stories about and, where possible, written by people in the communities experiencing the stark reality of our changing planet.

“My name is Paul Josie. I am 33. I am a Vuntut Gwitchin member and Old Crow is my home. It is the most northwestern community in Canada and has a population of 280 to 300, depending on the season.

Just recently, our chief, Dana Tizya-Tramm, declared a climate change emergency. Over the past few years, we have been seeing a lot of changes on the land. I guess a lot of it comes with being above the Arctic Circle. We are the front lines of climate change and we’ve known that for a long time.

I remember growing up, they would take me out in October, and we would set nets and fish the coho salmon under the ice. Now, we’re looking at December and it’s not even safe to go on the ice in some places. We are learning to travel on the land again as opposed to using the knowledge that was passed on to us from our elders on which way to go, which time of year to go.

Even just this year, we had -4 C in February when usually temperatures are at least -30 C or -40 C. I was dog-sledding in February and it was warm enough to just mush in a sweater.

In March, we had rain. We usually don’t see rain until June. A few years ago we actually had thunder and lightning at the end of May, which we’ve never seen before, where the storms were so powerful.

We’ve also been noticing the organic material that settles at the bottom of lakes is melting and creating methane bubbles. Those create holes in the frozen lakes in spring that are covered by crusted snow, so you have to be very, very cautious when you’re travelling over lakes in the spring. And spring is when people trap muskrat. I remember when I was growing up, May was still a time that we would return from Crow Flats, and now, in mid-April, it’s dangerous to travel because everything’s melting so fast.

With the warmer summer season, a lot of the permafrost is melting. A few years ago, I started to see a lot of mudslides in the Porcupine River, which runs next to Old Crow. There was a huge mudslide that almost blocked Crow River, which leads north into Crow Flats which the Vuntut Gwitchin are named after⁠, “the people of the lakes.” The erosion from the high water and the melted permafrost has made the river wider, and the land is being washed away.

With the climate emergency declaration, we want to get across how important this really is, that the land is changing, the Earth is going through this change. We want to get the word out, create a sense of urgency. And hopefully, it’ll start a ripple effect, one that creates change.”

Oct 3, 2019

mostlysignssomeportents:

Rob Beschizza:

Ellen DeGeneres’s friendship with ex-President George W. Bush became controversial this week, in light of the progressive values she claims and the 600,000 corpses left by his occupation of Iraq. She delivered a monologue on her show in response, casting their friendship as an example of civility, overcoming political differences, and having “faith in America”. So Rafael Shimunov added a simple backdrop of Iraq war scenes to her monolog, in the hopes DeGeneres might better understand the complaints. In response, copyright takedown notices flew and it was removed from the ‘net, so it is at least getting under her skin.

Here’s a copy, which I’ll update if and when it disappears.

https://streamable.com/s/n83nk/asvscx

Not one word of hers is changed, and there are no misleading or misrepresentative edits to her performance. Only the backdrop is changed, so that it now shows scenes of abuse, atrocity and horror from her friend’s ruinous war instead of the blue studio wall.

The video is transformative and offers clear editorial comment, so its creator could certainly avail himself of a fair use defense in court. But social media is not the courts, and the companies running the platforms tend to side quickly with takedown requests and respond slowly to counterclaims.

The Streisand Effect, however, is something celebs and their agents can rarely control: countless social media users are reposting the remix in response to its disappearance, spreading it far wider than Shimunov could have ever hoped.

Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres’ chilling of my antiwar criticism by filing fraudulent copyright claims on my video with 10K views, people are reuploading all over Twitter for a now collective 300K (and growing) views faster than @andylassner can file false claims.

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/09/ellens-issues-copyright-take.html

marina-diamandis:

werewolvesversus:

An excerpt from Byron Dunn’s story, as seen in WEREWOLVES VERSUS: MUSIC.

Everyone else in the chorus was making melodies and harmonies between and against each other. We weren’t The London Werewolves or Scavenge of Song. There would be no Grammys for the Kansas City United Scavenge House Junior Chorus. No blurbs in Rolling Stone saying we were the breakout hit of the werewolf community before the feature article on Beyonce’s secret project. Pitchfork wasn’t listing us in their top ten picks of “magically diverse” musical groups. That doesn’t happen to inter-scavenge extra-curricular teenage howl choruses from Kansas City.

But we weren’t those mundies singing on TV either. Put any one of the other chorus members on something like The Voice and they’d wipe out the competition—so long as no one revealed their magical status and brought out that bigot vote. I, however, was probably nowhere close to that sort of shaming. At least not from mundies.

“Emmerton Morris!” Ms. Lianne said. She waved her hands and the chorus hushed. “What was that?”

Of course people laughed. When weren’t they laughing at me?

“Uh…” I wanted to say ‘howling’ but I had no choice. The truth had to be told. “Singing?”

“Exactly! That was just singing! Shallow, human singing!” She smacked the back of her hand with each word as if she were smacking my own. “Are you human?”

The American Scavenge Association would tell me the answer was yes. More militant groups would say hell the fuck NO. My real answer would have been “Yeah, I mean… I guess> so, but—” and that was not the answer Ms. Lianne wanted. It wasn’t the answer I wanted either.

“No.” I said.

“Then why are you doing it? Howl!” She pointed at my chest. “Isn’t there a wolf in there? Is there anything in there?”

Read the rest in WEREWOLVES VERSUS: MUSIC! Download the entire issue for any price on Gumroad or Itch.io! Your purchase will benefit all of the contributors to this issue.

everythingfox:

“Hands down, the fiercest bark I ever did hear”

(Source)