Just a life update, for anyone who cares.
Two years ago, my husband had a great job, with insurance and everything. My health improved. We scrimped and saved and bought a house...old, not in great shape, but ours.
And then everything went to hell. My husband was replaced with AI. When he lost his job, we lost our insurance.
Immediately thereafter, SpyBoy got sick and we maxed out our credit cards trying to save him.
Jonathan got a job unloading trucks at a grocery store. We lost SpyBoy. My health got steadily worse.
J's job has kept him at 39 1/2 hours a week so they wouldn't have to give him insurance. And now they've cut him back to 2 days a week.
We don't have a car, so he walks over a mile to work. There are no buses here, so he's limited to work within walking distance.
We lost our food stamps. I was denied for disability, again.
We divided our house in half and turned the other half into a rental apartment.
We are drowning in credit card debt. We have no assistance. J makes less than a thousand dollars a month.
I started my Etsy business back in February. I make funny little creatures, sparkly pride merch, magnets, and more! It's doing well, for a new business with no advertising budget.
But not well enough.
We are desperately trying to refinance the house, but it's a 50/50 proposition at this point, because of our low income.
I've been trying to keep things together, but we're going under.
It is 98 degrees here, feels like 117. And we're going to have our electricity cut off next week if I can't somehow find $389. Part of my disability is poor temperature regulation. If we lose the a/c, I'm going to end up in the hospital, which we can't afford.
We're only a few months from losing the house at this point and ending up homeless.
If anyone can help, I still have my entire library for sale:
https://www.ebay.com/usr/featherinyourcapnola
Here's my Etsy store:
https://mardigoth.etsy.com
We have a gofundme:
https://gofund.me/145eb9d3f
I have a kofi:
https://ko-fi.com/idiomagic
I have a wishlist for cat stuff:
https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/BK56PZUL2A76/ref=nav_wishlist_lists_2
If anyone can help at all, we would be so very grateful. Reblogs help so much!
The past two years have been an unrelenting hell, one blow after another. Please, please help us.
maybe Iâm greedy but I donât want the tumblr sexyman poll to kill mitch mcconnell heâs already on the way out. I think we can dream bigger. what if it kills him
i think americans should have to put a banner above their post that says U.S. CENTRIC ADVICE/INFORMATION. i think political posts should clarify that they are giving protest/societal/class information relevant only to the USA i think i would like to stop getting halfway through a post with really good information and then realising it is not widespread advice and is only applicable in the united states of america
for the love of GOD can we PLEASE stop treating us-centric advice as applicable to the whole entire world. Please. beyond anything else, i do not think you guys understand how difficult it makes it for young people to interact with and learn information relevant to them.
at a certain point, treating us-american advice as universally applicable borders on misinformation. i am not saying that it is done maliciously, but it is dangerous at worst. i do not want younger people going around assuming that certain laws do/do not apply to them and getting in trouble because of it. i worry about what 'fundamental/constitutional/labour rights' are only legally defensible in the USA. i worry about kids who do not know yet to wonder where the advice is for, and take it as fact because a post that reads "EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS" begins with "EVERYONE".
okay yes all the tags are very very good points but i would like to point out the main reason i made this post, which is that
if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.
i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations
(please do not chalk this up to 'if you don't do research then you are stupid'. i made this post with young people in mind. that being said i am willing to bet it also applies to others, ie those who are newer to non-local internet, older folks, or those escaping high-control environments.)
I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore đ
Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the appâŠ. Which requires your login informationâŠ.. and also stores your card information so even if you didnât use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.
I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.
Sure. Thatâs how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:
Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.
No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.
So hereâs what weâre gonna do gang:
Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:
Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.
Express that you didnât actually want it, you just couldnât see on the shelf how much it was.
POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.
When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you donât want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)
If itâs a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If itâs a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.
In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.
Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.
I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.
I worked in retail for years. If this had happened while I was working retail, I would have been delighted and felt great solidarity with anyone who was wasting my employer's time and money and giving me busy work as an act of protest. In point of fact every moment the employee spends carting items back to the shelves is a moment not spent standing at a register.
"Tomato girl, that girl, clean girl, coconut girl, downtown girl, it girl, soft girl, dark feminine girl, light feminine girl, ballerina girl, coquette girl, cottage core girl, vanilla girl, strawberry girl, party girl, indie sleaze girl, west village girl, east village girl, french girl, italian girl, riviera girl, mermaid girl, rockstar girlfriend, trophy wife, old money girl, new money girl, office siren, pilates girl, yoga girl, beach girl, farmerâs market girl, e-girl, cool girl, weird girl
What was once a fun way to find your niche or like-minded people has now become a part of the cyclical hell now known as the micro trend. These âaestheticsâ used to be lasting and instantly recognisable like the more foundational subcultures that came before them, but nowadays weâre really just saying shit. What do you mean you can just order a whole pre-curated style package because a TikTok slideshow told you that youâre like soooo #y2k?A âcuratedâ Y2K TikTok shop package
Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.
Punk was a response to Thatcherite Britain. Rave culture was a reaction to the Criminal Justice Act. Goth emerged from post-industrial bleakness. These subcultures had music, politics, community; you didnât buy into them, you lived them. So what on gods green earth is Tomato Girl reacting to? A slow summer and a Pinterest board? What does coquette stand for politically? What is the Guinness moustache 2 dot swap boy rebelling against? Nothing.
Weâve kept the aesthetic shell of subculture and hollowed out everything that made it mean something.
And look, letâs not get too nostalgic about it, weâre not sat here pretending there was ever some golden age where fashion was pure and untouched by money. Malcolm McLaren was selling punk from a shop on Kingâs Road before half those kids even knew what they were rebelling against. Subculture and commerce have always been in bed together; obviously, thatâs not new. The difference is the speed; people used to spend years, genuinely YEARS, developing a look.
Trying things, abandoning them, finding a silhouette that felt like theirs, wearing something until it fell apart. Now you get three weeks before the algorithm decides itâs over, and youâre already behind. Itâs not that fashion got commercialised, itâs that the commercialisation got so fast and so all-consuming that thereâs no breathing room left to develop an actual point of view before someoneâs already packaged it, sold it and moved on.80âS PUNK IMAGE: SHIRLEY BAKERS
âNow the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.â
Now, back to my previous list of micro niche TikTok aesthetics or whatever you want to call them. I wonder if you may have noticed a word repeating itself a wee bit. Weâre no longer women, weâre now, in fact, perpetually girls. And honestly, I donât think thatâs an accident. A girl is easier to package than a woman, easier to sell back to herself, easier to reduce to a mood board and an Amazon storefront; a girl can be a Pinterest board. But a woman, she has contradictions and weird phases and a jacket sheâs had since she was seventeen that doesnât go with anything, but sheâll never get rid of, and quite frankly, thatâs a lot harder to shift units with. The word girl implies youth, softness, the kind of smallness that makes you easy to categorise and easier to market to. Which, if youâve been paying attention, is exactly the point.
As Rayne Fisher-Quann, aka the Internet Princess, famously stated in her essay âStanding on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters,â
âItâs become very common online for women to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consumeâŠthe aesthetics of consumption have in turn become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable.â
These âaestheticsâ previously known as subcultures are now entirely about consumption; itâs no longer about politics and musical taste but more about buying or being perceived as someone who might buy something. For example, the quiet luxury trend was not about actually being rich and being quiet and graceful about it, but in fact, the point was more for people to think that you might be.
And although many would argue, really, thereâs no such thing as personal style - cue the cerulean blue scene from The Devil Wears Prada - thereâs no denying that across all media, people both facially and in terms of fashion are all starting to look the same, slowly moulding into one big beige lip flip slick back bunned fox eyed blob. Yet to make ourselves seem original, we declare that weâre wearing these items in a different way than the âother girlsâ.
âIâm not wearing Ugg boots in a clean girl way, Iâm wearing them in an off-duty ballerina Slavic girl winter wayâ
Okay, girl, whatever you say. Either way, youâre still following the trend, and these big corporations donât care whether your shoes are being worn in a basic way or a coquettish way because the money is still going into their pockets.
Itâs become a performance of proximity, who got there first, whoâs wearing it in the right way or the new way, who is in the know, who started the trend or really gets the trend and who is just a follower, like seriously if I had a quid for everytime I heard or even said myself âbut they just donât GET IT like I doâ I would be lying on a beach in Thailand right now.
We speak of those with basic style as less than not for political reasons, or because we want to help the less fashion inclined, but because we want to inflate our own egos, we are better than you because we chose to follow a different trend. Although you may deem it as cooler, a trend is a trend, no matter the outcome.
And itâs not just how we dress, itâs who gets to be in the room. Thereâs a Reel doing the rounds at the moment thatâs said what weâve all been thinking â stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.
Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, weâve got people who couldnât name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while itâs still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about? Apparently not, babes. Open bar, free food and a branded photobooth? Guess weâll see you at the next one.
Weâve now reached what people call cultural stagnation. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, whenever the aesthetics become politicised, then fascism is in trend, when it seems like art, beauty and fashion have hit a wall because we keep repackaging the same shit. The average person is no longer developing their aesthetic taste, and nothing feels new because we only seek algorithmic approval, so our taste is intrinsically tied to whatever gives us the most social clout. After being told what is considered to be the pinnacle of beauty, we find ourselves all trying to wear the faces of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner while trying to achieve the bodies of the likes of Gracie Abrams (convincing women to dedicate all their energy to worrying about their weight is a whole other conversation). And we really do sit and complain about âeverybody looks the sameâ until somebody actually looks different, then we hit them with the âGreek gods would go to war for you/ I love your confidence!â type comment section.
âStop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.
Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, weâve got people who couldnât name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while itâs still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about?â
We buy bags with pre-added charms and jackets that are pre-distressed because the trend cycles go so fast, our clothing doesnât even get the chance to feel lived in, everything is a signifier and canât just be worn because itâs loved, but more to show or prove that you are someone. If she wears tabis, sheâs a ârealâ fashion girl; she goes to art galleries and posts fit check TikToks with her photographer boyfriend; if she wears Arcteryx, sheâs chill, she drinks Guinness and goes on hikes for the gram. If she wears fur coats, she loves a messy night out, smokes tabs and is let in everywhere, no questions asked, because she knows the band. If she wears Tomâs trunks, she went to private school, loves drum and bass and goes skiing on the weekends.
None of those things have to be true; we just have to believe that they could be. Itâs like weâre all desperately trying to make a point about ourselves, and really weâre all just performative asf. And duh, life itself is a performance, but weâve essentially turned getting dressed into a personality test we administer to ourselves every morning, desperately asking, are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?
And when you actually clock what these aesthetics are, they are almost entirely built around a femininity that exists to be perceived. Not felt from the inside but read from the outside, filed correctly, appreciated from a distance. Somewhere along the line, the question stopped being how do I want to feel in my clothes and became will they get it? We absorbed the male gaze so young and so completely that we now curate ourselves for it voluntarily, document it ourselves, post it ourselves, tag the brand ourselves and call it self-expression. And babes, that is not self-expression, that is free advertising.
âAre we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?â
Gen Z gets blamed for this, but it makes sense when youâve grown up in an attention economy that demands you be legible at a glance. Personal style used to be the accumulation of a life: a concert tee, a dead relativeâs coat, shoes worn down on one side. Now itâs a mood board made real, assembled to be read rather than felt. Weâre not getting dressed, weâre making a case for ourselves. Weâre at a point now where when we see somebody online showcasing their beautiful individual look, we are no longer inspired to find originality for ourselves, but instead find ourselves in comment sections demanding a step-by-step tutorial on how to copy the entire look.
And before you boys get too comfortable, youâre doing it too. The Salomons hiking boy whoâs never been further than the Peaks but owns three shell jackets and needs you to know he could survive a Norwegian winter. The moustache mullet patchwork tattoo guy who keeps his keys on a carabiner, the boy who wears vintage band tees and beat-up Sambas, whoâs definitely seen Fontaines D.C. four times and will tell you that every time you play âFavouriteâ. The raw denim enthusiast in full Oni selvedge whoâs been to Japan once, visited one workshop in Kojima, and hasnât stopped talking about it since. The record store guy in a deadstock flannel and New Balance 574s who needs you to know he has the original pressing and absolutely did not find it on Discogs. The âI donât really follow fashionâ boy who somehow owns every single piece from the Uniqlo U drop and is inexplicably head to toe Margaret Howell. The skater boy who hasnât been on a board since 2019 but exclusively wears Rassvet, Fucking Awesome and one very specific Supreme drop from 2017, he got resale. The âI just threw this onâ boy in a perfectly proportioned Rick Owens leather and Lemaire trousers, who, to make it clear, did not âjust throw it onâ.
Men have spent years mocking women for being trend-followers while quietly developing their own just as rigid aesthetic uniforms. The difference is they call it âhaving tasteâ rather than following a trend, which is somehow the most on-brand thing imaginable.
There was absolutely no need for us to reduce our interests to an aesthetic, to fit people into boxes. You are a complex, contradictory, multidimensional person; you are allowed to play and explore and like multiple styles of clothes and decor all at once. Not everything has to be curated to fit into a repostable TikTok. Unless itâs a really good one, in which case send it my way."
We need to bring back calling people posers. I'm not one to encourage bullying, but when everyone is being fake and performative, we need to call that out. I'm so tired of being punished for being genuine, and never following trends- how do people even have the money to do that, when everyone's poor and struggling?
You said it, not me đ€· I was just telling my partner the other day that we should bring back the word 'poser' for this exact reason.
I do think the word poser was pushed to the brink of extinction because people abused it and were pretentious about it back in the day. Like calling a teenage girl a poser because she had a budding interest in the alt scene that she was just starting to dabble in but hadn't fully committed to yet, or calling someone a poser because they liked a couple of Green Day songs but couldn't list the entire biography of all the band members. And it was often gendered, and was rightfully criticized for that.
But there is a difference between that and what this article is talking about. There is a difference between someone curiously dabbling in a subculture vs someone hallowing out anything that gives it meaning to just profit from it (financially or socially). So I propose we bring back the word poser, but use it responsibly this time.
Many people in the comments are saying âtraumaâ, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. Itâs called Childhood Amnesia, and itâs a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to âtrickâ your brain into remembering with different tactics.
This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It canât be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.
This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is âstored in the bodyâ, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories wonât generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.
reblogging this because Iâve legit seen people freaking out when they realised they canât remember some of their childhood, thinking they might have some repressed trauma.
read books that you don't understand. read books where you have to pay attention. read books that make you reread a page eight times to figure it out. read books that you need to take notes on. read books with words you have to google. read books that don't make sense without research on the setting. read books that make you feel stupid because otherwise you'll just be stupid.
Does ANYONE have a complete list of everything that was unlocked for all tiers vs only class tiers in the WbN Kickstarter?
I'm torn with the extra 20$, because the shipping will already be terrible to my country and I'd like to make a decision but I'm having trouble with accounting what goes where in the different tiers
one of the best feelings is knowing that youâre wanted. knowing that someone wants to talk to you, wants to know how youâre doing, wants to see you.
The other day my wife told me about this influencer who said she needed to go on ozempic so she could go from 130 lbs down to 115 and I really cannot stress the degree to which we have so COMPLETELY lost the plot with this glp1 shit. Like not only are people are going on this shit for purely cosmetic purposes, the cosmetic purposes are delusional. This is the kind of mindset that gives people eating disorders but now because you can get a prescription instead of having to starve yourself or enduce vomiting a big swath of the general public seems eager to go along with it. Body Positivity did not go fucking far enough because I am being so real when I say that fatphobia is more of a public health crisis than obesity has ever been
artistsuniversum: âKathin Marchenko is a textile artist and designer known for her expressive embroidery on delicate tulle fabric.
Using a "painting with thread" technique, she creates portraits, anatomical forms, and ethereal figures that seem to float within wooden hoops, blending craft with fine art.â
