how you couldn't really hold down the chords

» Learn Your Damn Homophones

Good idea in theory, though tries too hard to be witty at the expense of instructiveness of explanations.

GUILT

Whenever I get a particularly good or particularly bad cup of coffee now, I think about all those times when I worked at this coffee shop and I maybe tamped the grounds too hard or didn’t get the amount of foam right in the cappuccino, and I would think that maybe customers wouldn’t notice. And I wonder why I didn’t realize how crappy it would feel to be paying >$3 for a not very good cup of coffee. AND THEN I would think about how I was never trained to distinguish what a good cup of coffee should taste like and how my boss didn’t even want us to drink the coffee without paying for it. And then I think about the prevalence of short-term work and deskilling and standardized customer service labour blah blah blah and how fucked up everything is and I feel bad again.

And then I wish I had a chance to do it all over again, just to get it right, despite my obvious inability to cater to people’s needs and thus unsuitability for being a cheery barista.

(Dear potential employers: None of the above is actually true.)

“ People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

—

Banksy (via ambivalence) (via wreckandsalvage)

I’ve seen this pop up a few times now. I resisted reposting it, because everyone is reposting it, but it just makes too much sense. Gotta plaster in on my webspace too.

(via boringloser)

I’ve seen it a few times too, and it’s good at getting you riled up, but seems a little naïve to me.

1) Some of the money used from selling ads on public spaces is put to use for your benefit. Not saying that’s a great system, but propose another one instead of just childishly destroying something. (There are cities that have banned advertising in public spaces.)

2) Not everyone has the talent that Banksy has. When you replace an ad with some crappy tagging, you’re just throwing a different kind of rock at my head.

In general, however, I agree that you should not feel like corporations have authority over your life, nor should you let advertising affect your self-image.

(via dalasverdugo)

I guess this isn’t not true, but it makes it sound like these institutions/corporations are so distant and bad, like nobody we know might actually work in one and have to work hard to come up with new ways to take money from you in order to make their own living. And just because someone decides to paint over some advertisement doesn’t mean somehow the business or government or whatever is just going to not scrub it off (or pay somebody minimum wage to) and stop advertising and trying to make money from you. It’s not hard to just re-appropriate the medium right back. We are all part of the system, dude. I’m pretty sure most people are aware of how advertising works and it’s easy to say stuff like this, but how many of us actually stop consuming things according how we perceive we should be by some external standard? I’m all for challenging the authority via nice graffiti art and re-appropriating public space and being subversive and have Angelina Jolie buy your art and be all V for Vendetta-like about it, and I guess it could be powerful symbolically, but at the end of the day maybe doing something like advocating for changing those intellectual rights/copyright laws to take political power away from those big bad guys “leering at you from tall buildings” would be more effective.

…Nothing is going to change! Art will only reaffirm the status quo! Creativity doesn’t exist! Capitalism will prevail in the end! This rain is obviously getting to me, you guys.

tUnE-yArDs - Top Chef

perpetua:

Yes, Merrill Garbus is the type of person who will write a song about rooting for the winner of Top Chef and perform it in someone’s backyard. She’s awesome like that. AND IT’S A REALLY GOOD SONG!

Reblogging to once more express my love for this song.

Related: Sean the Gramophone on the breaking up of Sister Suvi, which I will read later because I should really be working on an assignment that is due in under an hour.

[teclo]

Good morning.

Bob Dylan - Must Be Santa

LUV U BOB.

Boy won’t pledge allegiance

zachklein:

This boy is far more interesting than other kids in similar stories.

[sleep/talk]

[vir.gen]

(via sympathyfortheartgallery/none00)

(via scout)

blownspeakers:

Things I did not realize: brussel sprouts grow on a big stalk like this.

I also had this revelation last week.

Dinner! This is probably one of my favourite things to make/eat. Also good for bringing to school for lunch, provided that I can get up early enough to poach an egg. The half-runny yolk + caramelized cabbage combo is pretty unbeatable.

blownspeakers:

aaronleaf:

ponymalta:

theanimalblog:via Michael Poliza

When will I get over this coconut crab thing? Never, fucking never, as long as there is even the slightest chance that one of them is, right this very moment, outside my window plotting to eat me.

Anthony Bourdain eats coconut crabs at 6:55 of this video

Reblog anything Bourdain

Coconutty fat pockets/sea urchins straight from the sea/A. Bourdain-cute shark hug/out of place Gauguin quote auto-reblog!