Pedestrian: What Are You Doing?
Pedestrian: What are you doing?
Me, mid panic attack, holding on to a tree for dear life: just chillin’.
More Posts from Thevoidlookedback and Others
Things my grandma thinks “made me” a homosexual:
#2 My best friend had a “lesbian” haircut.
She had the same haircut.
My vocalization of this thought was not appreciated.
I did this all for you by Xana: Destiel Anthem?
“You make a mess of mistakes, I just savour the taste, but I forgave this worthless world, because it gave me you.”
“I did this all so you could have your happy after, a never ending chapter. Call you up in the middle of the night just to enchant you[…]Now I’m part of you for the rest of your damn life.”
“Said you wanted closure, it’s never really over, didn’t wanna scare ya when I lost all my composure. Wishing you would save me, am I going just crazy? Every shooting stars rolling their eyes at me lately.”
I’m gonna make a list of all the reasons the show fucked based off my half baked thoughts of improper remembrance, actually
You find out relatively late in the game that the main character’s best and only friend in the world is a secret agent getting paid to keep him compliant.
The secret base that is considered the only safe haven in the world free of corruption is named Providence.
Everyone is getting puppet mastered around by a guy so steeped in purity culture that he calls himself White Knight and lives in a air tight pressurized room cut off from the world to keep out corruption on a cellular level.
(This is both a normal thing to do, and something possible to achieve. Sure. Why not. )
White Knight is canonically kind of evil and he gets replaced by a worse guy named Black Knight.
A talking monkey sidekick uses a gun, if that appeals to you.
The doctor singlehanded tying everyone together and keeping this organization going is named Rebecca Holiday.
Rebecca: to tie or bind. Holiday: Holy Day. The religious connotations are not so much connotations as they are punching you in the face.
Theres a scientist flying around the planet in a space ship so fast that it’s only been a couple hours since the apocalyptic event that permanently changed the earth. It’s been a decade for everyone else. He does not know about the apocalyptic event.
It’s been a decade.
His parents are the ones who doomed the earth and its populace.
They also injected his kid brother with a killer nanite chip that makes him a god.
The kid mostly uses this to turn his legs into a motorcycle.
It has the unfortunate side effect of wiping the kids memories every few years. Last time it happened he forgot that he turned into Godzilla and wiped out an entire city.
The kid lived in japan where he was the leader of a mutant gang for a while. He was like 12.
There’s a guy who goes by Six because he’s the sixth most deadly man alive. I know. He is the teen robot god’s babysitter. He is also aware of the ridiculousness of this.
Generator Rex is legitimately one of the best cartoons ever created, and if I could find a way to watch it I would promptly write a 10k essay on why.
This is amazing
When self-described “ocean custodian” Boyan Slat took the stage at TED 2025 in Vancouver this week, he showed viewers a reality many of us are already heartbreakingly familiar with: There is a lot of trash in the ocean.
“If we allow current trends to continue, the amount of plastic that’s entering the ocean is actually set to double by 2060,” Slat said in his TED Talk, which will be published online at a later date.
Plus, once plastic is in the ocean, it accumulates in “giant circular currents” called gyres, which Slat said operate a lot like the drain of the bathtub, meaning that plastic can enter these currents but cannot leave.
That’s how we get enormous build-ups like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant collection of plastic pollution in the ocean that is roughly twice the size of Texas.
As the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, Slat’s goal is to return our oceans to their original, clean state before 2040. To accomplish this, two things must be done.
First: Stop more plastic from entering the ocean. Second: Clean up the “legacy” pollution that is already out there and doesn’t go away by itself.
And Slat is well on his way.
Pictured: Kingston Harbour in Jamaica. Photo courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup Project
When Slat’s first TEDx Talk went viral in 2012, he was able to organize research teams to create the first-ever map of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. From there, they created a technology to collect plastic from the most garbage-heavy areas in the ocean.
“We imagined a very long, u-shaped barrier … that would be pushed by wind and waves,” Slat explained in his Talk.
This barrier would act as a funnel to collect garbage and be emptied out for recycling.
But there was a problem.
“We took it out in the ocean, and deployed it, and it didn’t collect plastic,” Slat said, “which is a pretty important requirement for an ocean cleanup system.”
Soon after, this first system broke into two. But a few days later, his team was already back to the drawing board.
From here, they added vessels that would tow the system forward, allowing it to sweep a larger area and move more methodically through the water. Mesh attached to the barrier would gather plastic and guide it to a retention area, where it would be extracted and loaded onto a ship for sorting, processing, and recycling.
It worked.
“For 60 years, humanity had been putting plastic into the ocean, but from that day onwards, we were also taking it back out again,” Slat said, with a video of the technology in action playing on screen behind him.
To applause, he said: “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, honestly.”
Over the years, Ocean Cleanup has scaled up this cleanup barrier, now measuring almost 2.5 kilometers — or about 1.5 miles — in length. And it cleans up an area of the ocean the size of a football field every five seconds.
Pictured: The Ocean Cleanup's System 002 deployed in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Photo courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup
The system is designed to be safe for marine life, and once plastic is brought to land, it is recycled into new products, like sunglasses, accessories for electric vehicles, and even Coldplay’s latest vinyl record, according to Slat.
These products fund the continuation of the cleanup. The next step of the project is to use drones to target areas of the ocean that have the highest plastic concentration.
In September 2024, Ocean Cleanup predicted the Patch would be cleaned up within 10 years.
However, on April 8, Slat estimated “that this fleet of systems can clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in as little as five years’ time.”
With ongoing support from MCS, a Netherlands-based Nokia company, Ocean Cleanup can quickly scale its reliable, real-time data and video communication to best target the problem.
It’s the largest ocean cleanup in history.
But what about the plastic pollution coming into the ocean through rivers across the world? Ocean Cleanup is working on that, too.
To study plastic pollution in other waterways, Ocean Cleanup attached AI cameras to bridges, measuring the flow of trash in dozens of rivers around the world, creating the first global model to predict where plastic is entering oceans.
“We discovered: Just 1% of the world’s rivers are responsible for about 80% of the plastic entering our oceans,” Slat said.
His team found that coastal cities in middle-income countries were primarily responsible, as people living in these areas have enough wealth to buy things packaged in plastic, but governments can’t afford robust waste management infrastructure.
Ocean Cleanup now tackles those 1% of rivers to capture the plastic before it reaches oceans.
Pictured: Interceptor 007 in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup
“It’s not a replacement for the slow but important work that’s being done to fix a broken system upstream,” Slat said. “But we believe that tackling this 1% of rivers provides us with the only way to rapidly close the gap.”
To clean up plastic waste in rivers, Ocean Cleanup has implemented technology called “interceptors,” which include solar-powered trash collectors and mobile systems in eight countries worldwide.
In Guatemala, an interceptor captured 1.4 million kilograms (or over 3 million pounds) of trash in under two hours. Now, this kind of collection happens up to three times a week.
“All of that would have ended up in the sea,” Slat said.
Now, interceptors are being brought to 30 cities around the world, targeting waterways that bring the most trash into our oceans. GPS trackers also mimic the flow of the plastic to help strategically deploy the systems for the most impact.
“We can already stop up to one-third of all the plastic entering our oceans once these are deployed,” Slat said.
And as soon as he finished his Talk on the TED stage, Slat was told that TED’s Audacious Project would be funding the deployment of Ocean Cleanup’s efforts in those 30 cities as part of the organization’s next cohort of grantees.
While it is unclear how much support Ocean Cleanup will receive from the Audacious Project, Head of TED Chris Anderson told Slat: “We’re inspired. We’re determined in this community to raise the money you need to make that 30-city project happen.”
And Slat himself is determined to clean the oceans for good.
“For humanity to thrive, we need to be optimistic about the future,” Slat said, closing out his Talk.
“Once the oceans are clean again, it can be this example of how, through hard work and ingenuity, we can solve the big problems of our time.”
-via GoodGoodGood, April 9, 2025
It is fucking devastating when you realize how little women, particularly queer women, mean to anyone.
My city had 20 Pride Month events last year. Six were explicitly for gay men. Five more centered gay men, and happened in gay men’s bars.
Two were for WLW. One got canceled, the other got turned into a “Ladies Night” so more straight women felt welcome.
None of the posters had women on them.
I live in one of the gayest cities in the country.
Clara Lille (BadBoy17) is a trans woman, right?
I’m only a third into the game, but like. That user name is so “Egg on the verge of cracking,” and then she just kept it post coming out.
If that’s not true I’m gonna be very bummed.
Doms have praise kinks too.
Many times in my life I have come across music, stories, art, and thought…not yet. I’ll love you, eventually, one day. I’ll come back when I’m ready. You’ll find me again when I need it.
I loved singing as a kid. I grew up with a mom who kept Songs About Jane by Maroon 5 in the CD player, and a Grandmother dancing along to Patsy Cline any chance she got. My Aunt got an iTunes account just to download Carly Simon’s and Adele. My grandfather sobbing hymns.
Eventually, I got scared of sharing the music I love. I was told it was too melancholy, too angry, too overwhelming. That I was those things too. Friends would say I had terrible taste, like it was a joke, like it was obvious, like I was obtuse for not noticing.
Over the last year I’ve been trying to change that. Making music recommendations, playing Passenger DJ, singing by the sea.
I am honored by your response. Thank you.
Ready, Set, Go…
What’s your favorite Hozier song? Why? No, you can’t say all of them. And don’t choose something stupid like cherry wine (there’s nothing wrong with cherry wine. Obviously. But gods man, have an actual opinion).
You are, however, perfectly welcome to list a handful in no particular order. Here, I’ll start,
Wildflower and Barley ft. Allison Russell
“(I feel as) useful as dirt, put my body to work.”
If this song does not fill you with the incredible longing to fall in love with life, and love, and dirt, you are listening to music wrong. I am sorry, you are beyond redemption.
To Noise Making (Sing)
“Your head tilt back, your funny mouth to the clouds. I couldn’t hope to know that song and all it’s words wouldn’t claim to feel the same it felt the first time it was heard.”
“Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?”
Enjoy the moment because it will not last, but rejoice in the knowledge that more are coming, as similarly meaningful and unique and impossible to duplicate to the one you are currently living!
Make music. Make bad music. Make music for the sake of exaltation. Make art because if you don’t then what is the point in living! Make art because one of the first things a child learns is to take marker to a wall, or pudding to a carpet. Make art because it is an expression of self. Make art because it is proof of life. Live.
Too Sweet
“Don’t you just want to wake up, dark as a lake? Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?”
Get drunk with your friends and skinny dip off a pier. Ignore the rules, what are they for anyway? Find meaning in how you see it. Confront the wild beast in the woods and let it merry meet the one in you.
Those church bells in the background- Are they ringing in a wedding, or a funeral? A simple Sunday Service, or acknowledging the hour? Life goes on, always. It’s the one continuity. It never stops. So what are you doing with it?
Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)
“A cure I know that soothes the soul, does so impossibly. A moment’s silence when my baby puts the mouth on me.”
“When the meaning’s gone, there is clarity, and the reason comes on the common tongue of your loving me. And it’s easy done, our little remedy…”
Hot.
What, I can’t like music with an…oral focus? Too low brow? The beat and flow of the music takes you on a sensual journey as much as the lyrics.
Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier, Fiachra Kinder, and Rory Doyle
“Jarring of judgement and reasons defeat, the sweet heat of her breath in my mouth, I’m alive.”
“With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean…”
“With her straw blonde hair, her arms hard and lean, she’s the angle of death and the codeine scene.”
I’m gay. Extraordinarily queer. Do I need to elaborate? This sound sounds like a death march. It sounds like the echo in your ears as you dance yourself to death. Years passing away in the span of a single dance and you don’t care, as long as she is your partner. You can’t manage to rip your eyes off her to save your life. You won’t.
Almost (Sweet Music)
“I’m almost me again…she’s almost you.”
It was Almost Sweet Music. We were Almost something. I’m Almost able to be normal about this song. Seperated by a pair of parenthesis, kept apart and yet part of the whole.
Foreigner’s God
“Her eyes look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me. But still my heart is heavy with the hate of some other man’s beliefs.”
“I’ve no language left to say it, but all I do is quake to her. Break it if I try to convey it, the broken love I make to her.”
If you, somehow, have missed the message that Hozier’s music is incredibly political- If you have ignored Nobody’s Soldier, Eat Your Young, and oh, I don’t know, just about 70% of his discography… What do you think this song is about?
It’s also just a really fucking good song.
Paul Atreides is canonically nonbinary.
Seriously.
The first time I read Dune I thought-
“Frank Herbert is doing a great job explaining gender variance in science fiction in a time when they did not have the modern vocabulary for gender expression.”
Paul is his father’s son and his mother’s daughter. He’s quite literally bred to have access to knowledge and power only accessible to men or women.
RIP Paul you would have loved ‘I am not a woman, I’m a god’ by Halsey.
Generator Rex is legitimately one of the best cartoons ever created, and if I could find a way to watch it I would promptly write a 10k essay on why.
