hey uh so I haven't seen anyone talking about this here yet, but

the amazon river, like the biggest river in the fucking world, in the middle of the amazon fucking rainforest, is currently going through its worst drought since the records began 121 years ago

picture from Folha PE

there's a lot going on but I haven't seen much international buzz around this like there was when the forest was on fire (maybe because it's harder to shift the narrative to blame brazil exclusively as if the rest of the world didn't have fault in this) so I wanted to bring this to tumblr's attention

I don't know too many details as I live in the other side of the country and we are suffering from the exact opposite (at least three cyclones this year, honestly have stopped counting - it's unusual for us to get hit by even one - floods, landslides, we have a death toll, people are losing everything to the water), but like, I as a brazilian have literally never seen pictures of the river like this before. every single city in the amazonas state is in a state of emergency as of november 1st.

pictures by Adriano Liziero (ig: geopanoramas)

we are used to seeing images of rio negro and solimões, the two main amazon river affluents, in all their grandiose and beauty and seeing these pictures is really fucking chilling. some of our news outlets are saying the solimões has turned to a sand desert... can you imagine this watery sight turning into a desert in the span of a year?

while down south we are seeing amounts of rain and hailstorms the likes of which our infrastructure is simply not built to deal with, up north people who have built everything around the river are at a loss of what to do.

the houses there that are built to float are just on the ground, people who depend on fishing for a living have to walk kilometers to find any fish that are still alive at all, the biodiversity there is at risk, and on an economic level it's hard to grasp how people from the northern states are getting by at all - the main means of transport for ANYTHING in that region is via the river water. this will impact the region for months to come. it doesnt make a lot of sense to build a lot of roads bc it's just better to use the waterway system, everything is built around or floats on the river after all. and like, the water level is so incomprehensibly low the boats are just STUCK. people are having a hard time getting from one place to another - keep in mind the widest parts of the river are over 10 km apart!!

this shit is really serious and i am trying not to think about it because we have a different kind of problem to worry about down south but it's really terrifying when I stop to think about it. you already know the climate crisis is real and the effects are beyond preventable now (we're past global warming, get used to calling it "global boiling"). we'll be switching strategies to damage control from now on and like, this is what it's come to.

I don't like to be alarmist but it's hard not to be alarmed. I'm sorry that I can't end this post with very clear intructions on how people overseas can help, there really isn't much to do except hope the water level rises soon, maybe pray if you believe in something. in that regard we just have to keep pressing for change at a global level; local conditions only would not, COULD NOT be causing this - the amazon river is a CONTINENTAL body of water, it spans across multiple countries. so my advice is spread the word, let your representatives know that you're worried and you want change towards sustainability, degrowth and reduced carbon emissions, support your local NGOs, maybe join a cause, I don't know? I recommend reading on ecological and feminist economics though

however, I know you can help the affected riverine families by donating to organizations dedicated to helping the region. keep in mind a single US dollar, pound or euro is worth over 5x more in our currency so anything you donate at all will certainly help those affected.

FAS - Sustainable Amazon Fundation

Idesam - Sustainable Developent and Preservation Institute of Amazonas

Greenpeace Brasil - I know Greenpeace isn't the best but they're one of the few options I can think of that have a bridge to the international world and they are helping directly

There are a lot of other smaller/local NGOs but I'm not sure how you could donate to them from overseas, I'll leave some of them here anyway:

Projeto Gari

Caritás Brasileira

If you know any other organizations please link them, I'll be sure to reblog though my reach isn't a lot

thank you so much for reading this to the end, don't feel obligated to share but please do if you can! even if you just read up to here it means a lot to me that someone out there knows

also as an afterthought, I wanted to expand on why I think this hasn't made big news yet: because unlike the case of the 2020 forest fires, other countries have to hold themselves accountable when looking at this situation. while in 2020 it was easier to pretend the fires were all our fault and people were talking about taking the amazon away from us like they wouldn't do much worse. global superpowers have no more forests to speak of so I guess they've been eyeing what latin america still has. so like this bit of the post is just to say if you're thinking of saying anything of the sort, maybe think of what your own country has done to contribute to this instead of blaming brazil exclusively and saying the amazon should be protected by force or whatever

remember to do your part by giving Amazon's Rings of Power show the Morbius treatment

(source, 11/30/22)

KING

something i would like people to note is the difference between piracy and plagiarism.

plagiarism is taking someone elses work and claiming it as your own, often to make money off it.

piracy is illegally stealing something, without making or spending money. every single pirated copy of anything that ive ever had still credits the creators correctly. books still say who the author is and shows and movies still include the end credits.

people plagiarize because they are assholes.

people pirate because they are too poor to afford all these expensive streaming services, because such services can take media away at any time (piracy is a great way to make sure media does not become lost, google The Mysterious Benedict Society), or because the company that made it is awful and dont deserve money (disney, bbc, netflix, amazon).

both are legally stealing, but law and morality are not the same thing. piracy and plagiarism are very different, and should be treated as such.

:/

if you live in the US and are still buying books off of amazon i am judging you forever. amazon is hard to boycott but for books you have like 100 other options. most indie bookstores ship nationwide and you can just order from their website even if you don't live nearby. just go to indiebound, pick a store, and order directly from their website. if you're in the US using audible or fucking spotify for audiobooks you're a fucking weenie, too. you can get that shit for FREE from libby or hoopla with your library card (which if yours sucks or you can't get one you can often get out of state ones pretty easily), but if you want to own it you can just buy a la carte or get a subscription from libro fm and choose a local bookstore to support. i mean damn worst case scenario you can order a lot of used and new books from better world books with free fucking shipping (and this ships to almost ANY COUNTRY)

Hi, I'm still angry about Amazon trying to turn Galadriel into a shitty YA romantasy protagonist by making her generic sword girl and taking away her entire backstory as one of the most powerful and revered of the Noldor and Queen of the Sindar and giving her a shitty enemies to lovers relationship with fucking Sauron.

The writing strike having a tentative deal, the SAG still going strong, and the FTC is now suing Amazon??? 👍👍🙌🙌👏👏👏👏

♡ Spiderweb Heart Bag ♡

Yeah Viv is going to super hell lol

I want to be shocked so badly but to the point of having most of the angels being vague black women whereas velvette/alastor are loose caricatures of mishandled lost potential I don't know what to tell this fandom anymore.

It's ridiculous how much this fandom chooses to speak actively over black voices instead of lifting to encourage the fact that vivs writing is sooooo racist as HELL<3

can toxic swifties actually gtfo the xenophobia is insaaaane.. i wld expect this from conservatives not someone who proclaims to be a “feminist”

I go into the LOTR tag to look at pretty LOTR gifs. Please stop putting Amazon Rings of Power shit in there. It's literally not LOTR.

People keep insulting the Amazon Lord of the Rings show by comparing it to fanfiction when really it's the EXACT opposite of fanfiction! It's so interesting/awful because it's like the ultimate ANTI-fanfiction! I was talking to someone the other day and wasn't aware that lots of people don't know about the insane complicated rights issues happening behind the scenes of the Amazon Show but it's wild. To give a quick summary of the Battle of the Five Rights Issues, as I currently understand it: 1. Amazon only has the rights to make a show about the pre-LOTR era as described in the Lord of the Rings books-- primarily in the appendices of Return the King, where a handful of pages give a brief timeline of some events that happened before the stories. In practice this means they are unable to use nearly all of the characters, places, and events people are familiar with when they think about Middle Earth. They have to make up everything out of whole cloth-- from characters to events to settings. This is either because of timeline reasons or for legal reasons or for both. Whenever they do manage to scrounge up the rights to something you might even vaguely remember (like Mithril) they announce it with enormous fanfare like they're a marvel movie introducing an avenger.

(Parenthetical: Another weird thing I noticed is that the series features practically zero quotes from Tolkien. I only counted about like 4 lines that were edited versions of lines from the books? While this is just a wild tinfoil hat theory, It does feel to me like there might've been some kind of limitation on the amount of Tolkien's words they were allowed to use, as well as the obvious limitations on characters and plot points and etc. The show has the rights to so few things and always REALLY wants you to know when it has the rights to something. It's desperate to remind you of the original books. You would think that, when it's unable to rely on familiar characters or places or events or plot points or music or etc, they would rely instead on Tolkien's really recognizable prose/poetry/language to form an emotional connection to the original stories. After all, language is the heart of Middle Earth, the author's love of language is the reason the world was created, and the unique prose of the story is kinda the soul of why it's memorable. And again, they theoretically have the rights to everything mentioned in the original trilogy right? Theoretically? So it's really odd that they don't use almost any of the language, unlike basically every other adaptation. It might just be a weird writing decision, but it's so strange that it really makes me feel like they were limited or at least dissuaded from including lines from the books.)

2. Amazon is legally Not Allowed to feature things that were mentioned in the Unfinished Tales or the Silmarillion, despite the fact that those are the books that contain most of the stuff about the era they're theoretically adapting. This leads to a bunch of really weird stuff where they introduce things you'd only care about if you read the Silmarillion, but can't include any of the things that would actually make you care about it. Like people who Aren't deep into the lore have literally zero emotional investment in Celebrimbor, but people who ARE deep into the lore know that you can't reference any of the reasons they care about it. 3. Amazon's series is NOT part of the same canon as the Peter Jackson/New Line Cinema films. They're not. However they obviously want to trick people into thinking they are because those movies are popular and a prequel to them would make money even if it sucked (see the Hobbit films.) But again, New Line Cinema still wants to make its own LOTR content based on the slivers of rights they've managed to grab onto, and don't want Amazon to step on their toes. So IIRC Amazon actually made a deal with New Line Cinema that they were allowed to imitate their movie franchise's aesthetic (to keep the brand popular and in the public eye)........ BUT if New Line Cinema ever felt like Amazon was infringing too much on their territory, they could step in and stop it. So the show just sorta looks and sounds like a bland knockoff of the New Line films, because that's all they're legally allowed to be XD. Like they're supposed to look/sound just enough like them to trick you, but they're not legally allowed to include the specific things from the PJ films that would actually make you feel nostalgic for them (like the famous musical leitmotifs.) 4. Part of the deal was that the Tolkien Estate could step in and change anything in the show if they felt it wasn't true to the lore-- which is ridiculous because again, Amazon basically doesn't own the rights to any of the lore so they're just making stuff up anyway. From what I can tell it seems like this basically means the Tolkien Estate can arbitrarily veto any creative decisions based on whatever they've decided “Tolkien would've wanted,” which obviously limits what Amazon is able to do (and likely prevents them from actually criticizing the awful problematic elements of Tolkien's worldbuilding)

5. Ok I don't have a fifth one. SO BASICALLY: Yes, the Amazon series is about a bunch of original characters in almost completely original settings featuring original events and original plot points that (for the most part) doesn't even include any of Tolkien's actual words, and also isn't affiliated with and doesn't include the recognizable things like musical motifs from the New Line Cinema films. But that doesn't make it fanfic. Because fanfiction is when you take another's person's characters and stories and write your own weird personal take on them, even if you don't legally own it. Who legally owns the copyright is irrelevant in fanfiction. Fanfic it's about writing a story with the characters and world you love, about transforming a story you're passionate about even if you don't legally own the rights. Amazon Rings of Power is what happens when an entire show is completely written around what you legally own the rights to. Every aspect of it only exists as an elaborate tap dance around copyright infringement. Again, I think the Amazon series is more interesting as "a study of how corporations/megafranchises can do massive harm and also weaken our ability to create good art" than it is as a tv show, alskdjfsdlf.

If fanfiction is "writing something you love regardless of whether you own the rights" then Rings of Power is "writing whatever fits within the extremely narrow box of the rights you happen to own." And that makes it....a very strange thing to exist! It’s kinda a shining example of how giant media monopolies and copyright laws designed to benefit them end up hamstringing everyone’s ability to create meaningful art, even the corporations themselves.

I'm baffled by the fact that people don't believe Galadriel was a "strong female character" without being a warrior and that she needs to go on a quest and kill some things to be called as such.

Literally look at this quote about galadriel from Sam in the two towers book :

But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.

You're gonna tell me that isn't a description of a strong character? That Galadriel needs to prove her physical strength?

Transfem Percy Jackson is a hilarious ass headcanon not because of 'huehuehue men being called women is so funni!!' transmisogyny bullshit but because it was completely untentional coding yet it's so instrinctly built into her writing that it becomes funny

Percy's always like 'Sigh.....I wish i didn't have to be a stereotypical guy but i guess i have to be to fit in......Anyway time to never actually try to act like one'.She's canonically described by the unlabeled butch and first gay boy as 'not their type' because she's not masc looking/presenting enough for her and isn't the ideal man he thought she was.The book where she officially becomes a teenager by virtue of being 13 in it introduces The Hunters of Artemis,an archaic mythological group who were a metaphor for lesbians and confirmed in-universe to accept trans girls,and a major plot point is her proving herself to be extremely different from the men they've known before along with the death of the aformentioned gay boy's older sister who she becomes an older sibling figure and pseudo-parent to and she acted the same towards said sister AND it also had her being jealous of a punk girl because she wanted to be treated and seen as same as her.She said her female love interest has princess hair when she first saw her and then it turns out Percy's dad is the king of Atlantis and told her 'The sea does not like to be restrained' and he's the same guy who found out one of his crush's was transmasc so he gave him a male body with his god powers

Her first girlfriend was a bombshell redhead weirdgirl who's obsessed with art and is an activist despite being only in high school and she was in love with her because she made her feel normal and because they could be completely honest with eachother.Her male best friend is a Team Dad like how she's a Team Mom and who's werewolf-adjacent and the walking embodiment of positive and healthy masculinity and her idea of calling him hot was to compare him to Superman and he worships the ground she walks on and they're 'two sides of the same coin' narratively.This one's not funny but her biggest villain was that older creepy guy who pretended to be her friend at her summer camp when she was 12 only to turn out to have been using her and he spends up until his death stalking her and acting entitled to her attention and he's also a canon pedophile who's meant to be an illustration of how 'hot older men' who go after younger people are in fact just losers and child abusers that use conventional attractiveness and practiced charming abilities to their advantage to hide what monsters they are so they can deny it to themselves too

She's surroended by literal male sex gods but hates all of them,Persephone favors her over other demigods,Artemis fw's her and the last book of the og series is her befriending the first ever eldest daughter in Hestia.The second book of the sequel has a SECOND instance where Percy gets an all girl mythos group plotline in the Amazons who she ALSO proves herself to.These are all literally canon,i am NOT joking guys.She deserves a blue estrogen burger and she/sea themed pronouns fries i think

Remember, if everyone does a little bit, it'll make a big difference! Reblog to remind everybody that they can do their part. :)