Idk if i can return to normal society after living in a basement and working at an insect z*o for three years. i just saw a bug on the floor and casually reached over to pick it up with my bare hand (thinking it was a cricket) but when it zoomed away I realized it was a house centipede and i was like sorry to bother you sir please be on your way. Thats not normal
one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they’d have jobs throughout the show’s entire run… but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.
and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week… for twenty or thirty years… and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can’t stop thinking about it. it’s indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
can you imagine.
[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy– there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]
Salt to Stars: The Environmental and Community Impacts of Lithium Mining.
A comic by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice with art by Sophie Wang, text under the cut. This is part of a toolkit to challenge greenwashing in the climate movement. Please share to support Indigenous water protectors and non-extractive decolonial solutions to climate change!
