Its Wild - Tumblr Posts
Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.
Help this might be the most canon ai chat I’ve ever witnessed
My car just died.
The first thing I did was call my partner. Without hesitation.
Do you know what it feels like to be able to do that?
This is beautiful
whats the deal with proven winners?
okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this.
proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses.
like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region.
it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild.
now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale:
-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™.
-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?
-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects.
-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab:
FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….
you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias.
small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol
AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.
see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company.
you get inspected by the plant police.
im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous.
proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao
I regret to inform my followers that I've fallen headlong into Dream SMP lately, and it’s one of the wildest media experiences I’ve ever had. Some of it reminds me very much of the SCP Foundation experience.
It previously existed in my consciousness as "that fandom that shows up on my dash as either a very weird textpost, or fanart that's 50/50 about Dream SMP or Homestuck." The actual media delivers on inexplicability. I think of it as the Untitled Goose of fiction, because every aspect of it radiates chaos and it causes problems everywhere it goes.
In brief: The Dream SMP is a private multiplayer Minecraft server. A bunch of Twitch/Youtube streamers roleplay on it regularly. It grew a “plot” based on improv which later became somewhat scripted in advance. There are arcs, seasons, worldbuilding, factions…
Some meta reasons I love it and compare it to the SCP wiki:
Non-linear.
If you want to get into it, your best bet is starting with a list of youtube videos on a carrd. Or watch 20 million hours of livestream vods. Or summary videos / “movie” edits made by hardworking fans. Either way, you will miss some stuff.
Everyone is literally the protagonist of their own streams.
The in-character/out-of-character line is blurred.
It didn’t actually become a roleplay until a while into the first “season”. Only a few events are scripted, and I get the impression the “script” is pretty freeform.
Obviously this sometimes becomes kind of a problem for, like, inappropriate fan interactions, which is tough and which I don’t want to trivialize.
Anyhow the line is very blurred within the universe too.
E.g. Technoblade canonically hears his Youtube livestream chat as voices in his head. Nobody else does, except for when they do.
Decentralized ownership and storytelling.
Canon is a spectrum – some things are clearly comedic “bits” and some things are well-established worldbuilding – but there is so much leeway in there.
E.g. At one point, there’s a marriage. The streamers in the marriage now disagree on whether the marriage was canonical or not. But it's not a big deal.
This is real SCP wiki "there is no canon" energy.
You can watch the same event from various character's perspectives and get totally different takes on the same event. (short non-spoiler example)
Unusual delivery format.
You don’t expect emotional depth or great creativity or horror or etc out of a Let’s Play… but my god, you will get them here.
Fun exercise: Grab your boomer parents and try to explain your latest interest to them.
Amateur storytellers.
I mean, they’re making a living from it, so they’re professionals now. But the average server age is 22 and it grew out of a casual hobby, and you can tell.
Every single stream, including the very dark introspective ones, have a bunch of chaotic banter and dick jokes.
There are these really serious bits except that the characters are named things like “Quackity” and “BadBoyHalo”.
This is the polar opposite of a polished narrative.
Many of them – and I say this with great, great love – are not amazing actors. It still works. The vibe is more “a bunch of friends fucking around” then, like, "watching a professional TV show.”
Mechanics are integrated in interesting ways.
Sometimes for plot:
Ability to gather resources – skill, the amount of time they spend digging for material, cool builds and contraptions, etc – do influence how much power they have.
But also sometimes for storytelling or expression - this is Minecraft, you know, the Blocks Game - the actors don’t really have access to normal body language. But it turns out you can fit a lot of meaning into crouches, gentle hits, jumping, looking around, what item you’re holding, what you’re wearing.
Sometimes this is hilariously dissonant:
E.g. Someone saying “look at me” to make emphasis, and the streamer has to look at… the expressionless minecraft head of the person? It’s such a vibe.
Sometimes it’s delightfully innovative and format-specific.
E.g. There are no chairs in minecraft, but there are a lot of occasions in real life where people sit, so people will use staircase blocks as dining chairs, couches, etc, and then either crouch or stand on the block to "sit". In a recent stream, during a conversation, one character went to a crafting table, made a staircase block, put it on the floor (of the other character’s house), said “you’re going to want to be sitting down for this one,” and then refused to proceed until the other character was standing on the staircase block.
A lot of these players are really good at the game, among the best in the world. Some aren’t, or at least aren’t on that tier, which is also endearing.
So if you know Minecraft, then there’s a lot of competence porn, but it's interspersed with a lot of very familiar gameplay.
They also do some non-Vanilla-Minecraft elements. They’re not common, but they keep you on your toes.
And most of them are subtle but also, like… for characters living in a minecraft world, if you’re familiar with the game, the phrase “canonical access to Creative Mode” will and should strike fear into your heart.
So fun seeing the combinations of crushes y’all have. Its like a fun little personality test.
Like what do you mean you are stuck between March and Reina? Huh?
What do you mean you are stuck between Valen and Eiland?
What do you mean you would sell the world for Landen but will settle for Juniper?
You all are fascinatingly multi-facted and I would like to study you. Pleease tag your top 2 crushes even if they arent romanceable thank you
been a bit since ive posted— but like my school has a fuckin brown widow infestation 👁️👄👁️
