The Paper: Nuñez on Daniels' Pitch for "The Office" Universe Return
Aug. 30th, 2025 03:37 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
What if solving the climate crisis were as simple as playing a game? … is what we would write if we were trying to bullshit you with happy talk, because getting the world off fossil fuels is going to require serious, sustained government policy actions and systemic changes, like the US finally started doing under Joe Biden, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and a whole bunch of regulatory changes that Donald Trump has been trying to reverse.
But here’s where I suddenly change course again, because I am in some kind of mood today: We definitely can build communities and work together, and even have fun doing it, to help move those larger changes along, which is why hell yes, individual choices still matter.
Which brings us to these nutty Hungarians who compete with each other to pull plastic waste out of the Tisza River, a major tributary of the Danube, and one of the most plastic-contaminated rivers in Europe. They call it the Plastic Cup, or PET Kupa, and they’ve been doing it since 2013. Small teams build boats and rafts out of wood, with collected plastic bottles bundled together to provide floatation, and then they head out with canoes and small boats to scour the river and its banks for plastic trash of all sorts, using the raft as a mothership to collect their haul. The team that collects the most wins bragging rights.
Here’s a video from one of the competitions this year; click on the “settings” and set the captions to auto-translate to English.
We’ll admit we got a little teary-eyed around the 5:50 mark, where after a day of playing on the river while collecting plastic trash, the teams come ashore and trashbag-brigade their hauls to a central pile, with little kids happily pitching in. Damn dramatic soaring soundtrack.
The guy who came up with the idea for the Plastic Cup, documentary film director Attila Dávid Molnár, was making a movie about birds nesting along the Tisza’s banks in 2008 when he and his crew came on a stretch of the river that had so many plastic bottles floating on it they could hardly see the water.
“I knew we had to do something special about it,” he says. “This was not something that called for individual action or a warning video, it rather called for a movement.”
The Tisza, which drains into the Danube, is one of Europe’s most heavily plastic-contaminated rivers. Together, these rivers contribute the bulk of the plastics polluting the Black Sea. Globally, plastics make up 80 percent of all marine pollution, and scientists predict that at this rate, by 2050, they could outweigh all the fish in the sea.
Molnár took inspiration from David de Rothschild, who in 2009 built a sailboat out of 12,500 plastic bottles and recycled plastics, named it the Plastiki — after Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki — and sailed the sucker from San Francisco to Sydney to call attention to oceanic plastic waste. Out of that grew the Plastic Cup, which started with just four teams and boats in 2013 and now has between three and five competitions every year.
Over the years, competitors have removed over 450 tons of plastic waste from the Danube and tributaries, and the organization has branched out into preventing new waste from going into the rivers, as well as an outreach program in schools and universities. “Thousands of volunteers from five countries have participated in hundreds of river clean-up actions. And the project has also demonstrated that over 60 percent of riverine plastics can be recycled once properly treated.”
That’s especially important, given that so much of the “plastics recycling” business in the US is little more than a greenwashing scam promoted by the plastics industry and Big Oil.
As we like to say, go read the whole thing; it’ll give you a nice recharge of hopium —while also putting the challenges of dealing with plastic pollution in a larger context.
So with that in mind, we started wondering if there are other ways to “gamify” the fight against climate change, and by gosh, it turns out that’s also a big topic in the environmental education field. We found out, for instance that there’s an expansion pack for the classic “Settlers of Catan” board game called “Oil Springs,” in which players have to decide whether they’ll limit oil use for the common good, or be a sleazy Donald Trump type and trade the good of everyone for a pyrrhic victory. We aren’t sure whether a player winning that way is then shamed by the other players; we hope so.
Other, more hands-on efforts educate kids about pollution through augmented reality games using air quality sensors, which sounds kind of neat, and reminded me of that bit in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of “Cosmos” where he said it might be easier to motivate people to care about greenhouse gas reductions if we could actually see the CO2 coming out of car tailpipes and the like.
Those of us driving electric cars could brag about our batteries using far less of that purple shit from the local utility, or none at all if we charge using home solar.
We also found ourselves thinking of other group games around climate, like maybe having teams debunk Donald Trump by visiting wind farms and counting all the dead eagles that aren’t at the base of each wind turbine, and then tracking how many members of the group don’t immediately get windmill cancer.
It’s sort of a work in progress. If you have ideas for gamifying ways to address climate (no, competing to set fire to the most SUVs is not allowed), bring ‘em up in the comments, which of course we do not allow.
[Reasons to be Cheerful / Decision Lab]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to power up with a one-time donation, this button will give you 10x Bonus Points!
Happy Saturday! I figured out that I can bulk-open my synced tabs from my phone to my computer, which makes putting these posts together just a little bit easier. Huzzah!
osteophage created some site logos (SVG format) for fandom-friendly websites, including Dreamwidth, Squidgeworld and AO3!
vampiremedia is hosting a friending meme!
journalsandplanners put up this 12 question meme for stationery fans that’s been going around a bit over here.
Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.
Saturday
Opening Ceremonies for Firefly’s fifth birthday consisted of me, and my trusty meter stick, retrieving five springs from beneath the bed!
The Birthday Cat assisted by trying to wrestle the meter stick out of my hands while retrievals were underway.
It was very exciting. So exciting that Birthday Cat and spectators are now having a wee dram of cat food to recruit their strength.
Birthday Cat demonstrating singleton hall blocking technique.
So the rock show is a roaring success and I hope the vendors have a profitable weekend. When I arrived at the site, a little after 10:30 (show opened at 10), the lower parking lot was already full, so I parked up top, which was, eh, about a third full.
The room was very crowded, and I had a good time talking rocks, asking questions, getting confusing answers, and all such things that we do at shows of this nature. In fact, it was a lot of fun right up until the point when I should’ve met up with Steve at our prearranged point, so I could show him all the Very Cool Things I’d seen, and he could ditto, which I guess is never going to stop being A Thing.
I will say that things have gotten much more expensive than the last time I was at that rock show, which will have been a year or two before Steve died.
I did manage to buy a pair of hammered silver earrings, which I guess now that I have holes in my ears again, with be A Thing, and some tiger eye marbles and a piece of rutilated quart, because of course I did.
At this show people were differentiating their rutilated quartz — this piece had tourmaline inclusions, this had gold — which was instructive. There’s also a new way of cutting and polishing fragments of geodes, so that the rock the crystals live in is smooth and shaped to be a kind of holder, like an art piece. Very pretty. No, I did not buy one.
I am … very tired, despite having slept a long time last night, with the window open so I could hear the rain. I’m cooking macaroni and steaming some frozen peas, and that’s looking like lunch. Then I’ll see what else is on the schedule.
Here’s a picture of the astronomically correct moon necklace Steve gave me for my 60th birthday, and the earrings I bought today. I think they’ll make a nice set. Note: the earrings are silver. The gold glow is light from the windows.
On August 30, 1996, workers at the Lusty Lady theater in San Francisco became the first sex workers in American history to form a federally recognized union when they joined Service Employees International Union Local 790. This is a great opportunity to center sex work in our labor history.
First, sex work is work like any other job. This is where we have to start this conversation. The second-wave feminist critique of sex work as nothing but complete exploitation by women without agency is stale at this time. Equally unconvincing is the counterargument that often comes from customers of sex workers and sometimes the workers themselves that in fact, most sex work is liberating. The truth is that it completely depends on the individual.
Some sex workers do enter that line of work because they went through the foster system as a child, were sexually abused, get hooked on drugs, and do this as part of a desperate life. Other sex workers had completely normal healthy childhoods and just really like sex work and do find it empowering and liberating. If we can’t have a nuanced conversation about this line of labor, then we can’t create policies around it or even understand what is happening here.
The truth about most sex work is that it’s a crappy job. That doesn’t mean it’s a worse job than other crappy jobs. Again, it depends on the individual and what choices they have in entering this trade. But it is a trade. As I’ve discussed writing about sex work in the early twentieth century, the choices for a lot of women were sex work or factory work and there wasn’t much reason to think factory work was safer than sex work and it sure as hell wasn’t more lucrative. It was a completely rational economic choice for many young women to make. Moreover, while certainly not safe in the modern context, it wasn’t really any less safe than working in, say, the Triangle factory. That is until moral scolds decided to make sex work completely illegal in the 1910s, closed down the red light districts, and forced women onto the streets, where they could easily get murdered in isolated places.
Shockingly to the Progressive Era moral scolds, sex work did not go away. Nor will it ever. The moral scolds still want it to go away, but it never does. The fact that a lot of women now watch pornography complicates this all the more. A more rational set of decision making would suggest ways to make the work safer and give these workers more power to control their own bodies, but for too many feminists of a certain era, the power to control one’s own body meant a lot if you need reproductive care or want birth control, but meant much less for sex workers who want to engage in that field of work. Some sex workers responded to this hypocrisy by expressing power at the workplace.
The Lusty Lady was a peep show club with branches in Seattle and San Francisco. When the future feminist scholar Siobhan Brooks was a 22-year-old college student, friends told her about the money she could make dancing at the Lusty Lady. A big part of the issue at the Lusty Lady was racism. Simply put, Black women did not get hired much and when they did, they didn’t get treated as well as white women. Moreover, the club had recently put in one-way glass, which meant that customers could film the workers without their consent. Being Black, Brooks noticed right away just how racist the place was. She later reported that in fact, most of the management was pretty nice and the male support staff was quite helpful.
However, a lot of customers simply didn’t want dancers of color, or at least so management thought, so they were rarely scheduled for the high-paying peep shows. Brooks talked to white men at the club who said they were interested, and that was especially true of younger men. The white dancers weren’t particularly sympathetic either. Like a lot of white liberal politics, they did understand the issue and said they supported the women. But then the white dancers pushed a petition to allow the dancers to keep more of the money they earned, which without addressing the racism would only lead to a greater income gap by race at the club, and even when told this, the white dancers just decided they wanted more money.
What did bring the dancers together regardless of race was the surreptitious videotaping. That really got the ball rolling. Brooks found this somewhat frustrating, because even here the white dancers did not want to do much about the racial wage gap. But the workers joined SEIU Local 790 and won an election for that union to represent them on August 30, 1996.
The victory did lead to some concrete changes. Workers received four paid sick days a year, contract language about sexual harassment and racial discrimination, wage increases, a grievance procedure, and the ability to switch shifts. The male workers, who were part of the bargaining unit, generally supported the union even though most of the issues didn’t apply to them, since the dancers were their friends. Unfortunately, a similar effort to unionize failed at the Seattle branch of the club. A lot of the post-unionization issues, according to Brooks, had to do with a lot of the white women’s distinct discomfort with the growing number of women of color working at the club.
In 2003, the Lusty Lady’s owners decided to close the club. The workers themselves tried to run it as a cooperative, but that very rarely works and it didn’t here either. Still, despite limitations and disagreements over issues of race, what this union did was place sex work under the National Labor Relations Act for the first time, which was hugely important. However, further attempts have largely failed. A club in San Diego did unionize, but then the club owners managed to win a decertification campaign a few years later. Other clubs, especially in the West, have successfully organized but never won a first contract, as employers have largely captured the NLRB process.
Sex work will never go away. We can either treat it as work and provide these workers the same rights as other workers. Or we can let them get exploited and sometimes brutalized and murdered.
Siobhan Brooks, “Exotic Dancing and Unionizing: The Challenges of Feminist and Antiracist Organizing at the Lusty Lady Theater” in France Twine and Kathleen Blee’s Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice.
Gregor Gall, Sex Worker Unionization: Global Development, Challenges and Possibilities
Catherine P. Mulder, Transcending Capitalism through Cooperative Practices
Kitty Krupat and Patrick McCrerry, eds., Out at Work: Creating a Gay-Labor Alliance
Becki L. Ross, Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sin, and Sex in Postwar Vancouver