“Think of the two major possibilities here: Either the studios owe untold millions to their talents and paying it out will decimate their stock prices, or they owe so little because there really is no money in streaming and the bubble of their entire 21st century business model will burst in spectacular fashion. And make no mistake: this is a bubble. This is the inevitable climax of a stockholder-driven hunger for infinite growth, despite the fact that, by design, such a thing cannot and should not exist. The infection of Wall Street has overwhelmed the entertainment industry beyond repair, leading to cultural vandals like David Zaslav to be appointed with the callous duty of strip-mining decades’ of artistic beauty for pennies of tax write-offs. The past and future are frivolous in comparison to the short-term demands that the line keep going up.”
I watched this as a kid and internalized it for forever
Lilo and Stitch really said “This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good.” And i still live by that
a family can be your gay uncles, the best disney prince, and your parole officer
After shoving Hansel in the oven, the witch turns to Gretel - who is currently fending the witch off with a gingerbread chair - and says:
“I can’t believe you thought a trail of breadcrumbs would save you. I mean, honestly, this is a forest! It’s full of animals. Honestly, the very idea that a dumb shit like you thought you could get the better of me is absurd.”
Gretel hits her in the face with said chair. To be fair to the witch, she takes the chairshot like a champ.
“Ow!”
“Did you know,” says Gretel, “that crows are capable of facial recognition?”
“Eh?” Says the witch, clambering to her feet and pulling a candy cane sledgehammer off the wall. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Not only that,” Gretel continues, “but they can remember both friends and enemies. And they’ll often follow people they remember as friends.”
The two fence with their sugared weapons for a moment, before the witch knocks the chair out of Gretel’s hands.
“Enough with the bird facts! Honestly, this whole attempted escape has been utter clownshoes. Get in the fucking oven!”
She seizes Gretel by the collar. Gretel immediately sandbags, letting her whole body go limp. This eminently practical defense forces the witch to try and deadlift her. Which is hard, as the witch often skips leg day.
“For example,” Gretel says, as the witch struggles and grunts, “if you feed crows a lot of breadcrumbs, they’ll probably start to see you as a friend and follow you in the hope of more food.”
The witch stops. Outside, she hears the thunder of wings.
“They’ll even bring you shiny things they find as presents!” Says Gretel, as a corner of the gingerbread ceiling is suddenly cut away by a large crow with a knife in its mouth.
“Oh shitballs.” Says the witch, as the crows descend. “I hope you know this is a great unkindness.”
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
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If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
The Studios: *speak*
Botanists and other Tree Experts:
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My mom said when she used to go to business meetings at GM in Detroit in the 1980’s, they would close the sidewalks to “repave” them whenever the unions were preparing to strike, making it more difficult or impossible for them to protest outside. This is a thing, this has been happening for decades. They know what they’re doing.
Please add a custodian paid $12/hour cleaning the whole fucking office complex (who the boss doesn’t even give healthcare coverage to) for added accuracy
Let me stress once again that THIS is capitalism. Not “free markets”, not “advertising”, not “consumerism”. Those things predate capitalism by millennia.
Capitalism is about having a class that owns most of the capital (capitalists, in the classic definition, businessmen or investors in modern lingo), so they end owning the means of production (as in the tools and organizations needed to create value by doing any labor), so the people doing the labor yield to give them most of the product of their work in exchange of using those tools or being part of those organizations. So they end getting most of the profit from the people doing the work without actually doing anything themselves, just by owning the capital.
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