what is this site anymore?

alyssa / 24 / i haven’t been active here since 2015

[crownorclover]

playing around w texture and dusting off unused brushes. as always, a very special thank u to mr tims for being my favorite "guy in a void" subject

[jjoelswatch]

like there’s no way that donald trump will win the 2016 election but i do believe in alternate universes and i just want to take a moment of silence for the unlucky alternate universe in which he does get elected president because no one deserves that evil

[basinke]

sad wave from the other side

[pyrrhiccomedy]

based purely on anecdotal evidence from the 10 or so people I hang out with the most, I have put together a hypothesis

[secretunderwaterbunker]

[ra3kiv]

sea, swallow me

[owo]

i hate you shein. i hate you wish. i hate you temu. i hate you aliexpress. i hate you fast fashion. i hate you consumerism. i hate you planned obsolescence. i hate you plastics.

[snakeautistic]

People underestimate how much it fucks you up to be subtly excluded as a kid. I would try to talk to my classmates and be met with disinterest or annoyance. The one friend I had, who I clung to and nodded along to his every word, had other friends he liked just as much or more. And his other friends didn’t care for me at all.

I look back at pictures from the time and see how separated I was from them. I remember knowing I was different. I remember posing questions about the world to the girls playing next to me and realizing that they had never asked the same ones to themselves. That the ways we thought couldn’t be more different.

I kept myself amused with my own fanatical stories and musings in my head. I would wander the playground on a circular path, imagining a friend and being sorely disappointed when it didn’t feel as real as I’d hoped.

There was a bubble separating me from everyone else, thin, and nearly invisible, but with a pearly sheen you could catch under the right conditions. I knew it was there, they knew it was there, and it changed me

[slow-burn-sally]

Someone in an autism facebook group I'm in just asked "How am I supposed to earn enough to make a living without burning out?"

Someone replied: "You're not. Even neurotypicals can't right now in the system designed for them. We're the canaries in the coalmine. When we start failing, they know something is wrong."

[lovely-v]

It’s crazy and fucked up that being yourself is actually the solution.

[lovely-v]

It’s like. When I was told to “just be yourself” as a kid I thought it was a passive thing. Like oh easy I just have to sit here and be myself. but the reason so many people think that “being yourself” is bullshit advice is because you actually have to make active choices to do this and it WILL make your life way more fun. You have to wear t-shirts of bands that were popular ten years ago because you like them. You have to do your hair in a way that you find cute or comfortable even if it’s “so nineties”. If your friend says a food you enjoy is gross to them, you can’t be afraid to admit you casually disagree. You have to do hobbies that you’re interested in even if you’re bad at them and you cant feel like you have to get good at something before you tell people it’s an activity you do. You have to read manga and comic books in public and get piercings your relatives think are unattractive. You don’t have to tell people you dislike that you dislike them, but you don’t have to give them your time and attention either. You have to rewatch that kids show you’re nostalgic for even if you’re in your 30s. You have to change your name if you hate it, even if only a few close friends can know. You have to get fun girly drinks at the bar. You have to order hot chocolate when you don’t like coffee and black coffee when you don’t like sweet things. I am still bad at practicing this but it is the only way to make it all tolerable.

[gsirvitor]

[adiabat]

i’m not aromantic but i believe in their beliefs

[adiabat]

for me being bi has contributed a huge amount to noticing all the ways in which romance and friendship run together and i think in general people would benefit from recognizing that romance and friendship are socially constructed categories used to describe a vast, nebulous, and often overlapping range of feelings

[glowcowboy]

is this a life? i don’t know. i make another cup of coffee. stare at a tree from my balcony. write in my journal. take a hot shower. i call my sister and say nothing of value. she listens anyway. i make another coffee. read a book that gives me bad dreams. pick up my pen to write and put it back down. another flip of the calendar i carry in the center of my chest. i am learning to let my heart open up again

[glowcowboy]

i don’t know. i’m barely a person. i just want to be kind and hold someone’s hand. eat an ice cream cone. stare at the lake. feel the sun on my skin. lay in the grass. run through a sprinkler. it’s so easy to forget life is supposed to feel like a deep breath and not a gasp

[xanaxfarts]

Shearing half a sheep seemed a simple way to show a season's growth of wool, but photographer Cary Wolinsky was wrong. The half-shorn sheep tended to lose their balance and topple to wool-ward. It took many tries before merino sheep number 30 “became our hero," Wolinsky said.

[shewolfofvilnius]

*photographer wants to take a cool photo, inadvertently discovers sheep physics* is an all-timer of a story

[butchlinkle]

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

[frankenfran]

realtalk: i can’t wait for AI to get better to the point where you can have a legit conversation with your computer or phone just for the heck of it imagine how innocent they’d be, and like they don’t know what swearing is until you teach them then they go overboard with it like a child and hhHHHG

[frankenfran]

[aquilacalvitium]

For those without timestamps the original post was made in 2014

[allonsybadwolf]

"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH

[marzipanandminutiae]

as a clothing history researcher in the US, I hear a lot of "clothing used to be handmade! [including a human operating a sewing machine in that category]"

and I always respond with, "it still is"

a lot of people don't realize that clothing production...really hasn't changed that much from the days of early 20th-century sweatshops. the sweatshops just aren't in most western countries anymore

this:

and this:

are the exact same thing. just with more electricity, theoretically more regulations (which are often ignored), and different people working the machines