Wholesale Magnesium Oxide

magnesium oxide at low low rates. writing blog. it/she.

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

faq / about

last updated sep. 16, 2022

who are you? magnesium oxide, nice to meet you.

is that actually your name? no :) but that'd be sick.

what's your deal? i'm a twentysomething transfem. i wanted to get into writing, so here i am.

why writing? i read modern cannibals by bavitz and thought "i wonder if i could do that?"

why magnesium oxide? i started taking it before bed a couple months ago. it's supposed to help with headaches, but it also causes this unpleasant floaty-fluffy feeling. i figure that's a good direction to head in artistically.

why tumblr? better than ao3.

why don't you tag your stuff? between the ungoogleable pseudonym and untagged works, i hope to sit here in pleasant obscurity. warnings and such will be above the cut for each story.

do you have an update schedule? nah.

why do you write like that? 99% of my past writing experience is roleplaying. i've probably picked up some bad habits. sorry about that.

this thing contradicts something in a previous chapter. one of the downsides of writing serialized fiction is that you might get to a point where your current plans contradict your previous statements. i do try to go back and edit the past chapters slightly whenever i have to make a retcon, for the sake of the archival readers, but that doesn't really help when reading serially. hopefully i won't have to do this with anything too major.

[junglejim4322]

British people have more respect and sorrow over dobby than any actual victims of colonialism and slavery

[enba-and-luka]

[ot3]

the whole ethics of small artist business practices discussion is also really rough because a not insignificant amount of the people who end up making that their living are doing so because they are structurally barred from more standard and secure employment for various reasons. if you, like me, are far too disabled to survive via entry level positions in places like retail or food service and lack the qualifications to get a foot in the door for a desk job then your options are extremely limited. i was trying to make a living with art after i left school because it's one of the only ways you can make money if you have to spend most of your time in bed.

i am extremely lucky to have a robust enough support network of friends and family to know that whatever happens i will never be homeless, and even luckier to have friends hook me up with a work from home position i never in a million years would have been in consideration for without a referral. it's not lost on me that it is significantly easier for me to take a strong stance on this issue than it is for other people with similar circumstances through absolutely no merit of my own. but ultimately no matter how precarious your own situation is, being in a position where purchasing cheap foreign labor to sell goods at a significant markup is even an option is a pretty notable privilege! and not only that, but factory work itself can also be disabling. Disabled People and Foreign Factory Workers aren't two separate groups of underprivileged people with competing material interests and i just can't ever let myself think of it that way. it would be wrong.

disabled people outside of the imperial core aren't a gotcha to win an argument they're not a rhetorical tool they're not a thought experiment. a lot of them are in fact disabled because of what has been done to their environment in the name of global commerce. they're real people and any politics of disability that considers them irrelevant or disposable isn't good enough.

and so the question then becomes: if you are a disabled artist, if selling merch really has been the only way you've found to make ends meet, what are you supposed to do? i don't have a good answer because i'm literally just some lady with a blog and solving all the ethical contradictions of living as a disprivileged person in an incredibly privileged parts of the world is a bit above my paygrade. but it would also be wrong to pretend like this is not a real dilemma people have to contend with.

the line a lot of people use to justify small businesses' practices to themselves and others is "why are we holding independent artists to higher standards than big corporations?" but i do think this is a bad argument for a lot of reasons. if you reframe this question even a little bit, you'll realize what's being asked is "Why do we expect our peers to behave more ethically than entities that are structured to extract the maximum possible wealth from the world, and consider human lives to be a disposable commodity used towards that end?" I would hope the answer to This particular question is self evident.

[ot3]

i really appreciate you for being so outspoken about the unethical practices fandom artists engage in. i’m from a south asian country where abuse of garments workers is extremely prevalent. before my mother remarried and we moved to the US, she worked in a factory that supplied to Target and it saddens me how americans are so willfully blind to the abuses they face. i actually never realized how commonplace it is for small fandom artists here to engage in these practices until recently i started having enough money to go to cons. even then, i initially thought everything was made by the artist themselves. so i really appreciate you taking a strong stance, especially as a western artist. i hope artist alleys have a brighter future!

yeah this is something i've really come around on just in the last few years. unfortunately it's just something that's incredibly easy to not think about too hard, especially when you're really in deep in those kind of artist spaces where like. the prevailing belief system underpinning the standard practices is that the deck is so far stacked against independent artists trying to make a living that anything you do to bring up your bottom line is justified, insofar as it is being done with your own artwork. and nothing about the difficulty and insecurity of being a working artist is exaggerated either! so the kneejerk response to be defensive to critiques of your business practices is one i understand even if i am no longer sympathetic towards it.

for me a big part of how i think about these sorts of things is. i know i'm never going to be any kind of political activist. i'm just not really a stable, confident, or educated enough person to functionally be in that position and don't see that changing any time in the near future. choosing where my money goes is pretty much one of the only avenues i have to actually live by the principles i claim to hold. so if i am going to genuinely believe that it's wrong to profit off of the underpaid labor of foreign workers in unsafe conditions, then i need to not use my money to have foreign workers in unsafe conditions do underpaid labor for me. that is the bare minimum.

you would hope that all of the labor concerns artists and other creative workers are currently experiencing regarding AI would result in them trying to develop solidarity with other groups' pre-existing labor concerns, but it seems for the most part that that's not the case. instead, it seems as if the most vocal and prevalent cohort of independent artists is closing rank, becoming even less receptive to scrutiny of their practices now that they feel the very essence of art itself is on the line. everything has been retroactively legitimized by the introduction of an existential threat to their way of life.

i think its not likely artist alleys themselves will improve, but i think instead we're going to see a split between the people who are okay staying the course on artist as Small Business Owner with all the baggage that entails, and those who find we can not maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary for that. It feels like the covid years signed the death warrant for Fandom as subculture and now it's just the culture. which means it's about time for the new subculture to splinter off. i think the divide between people who enjoy the legitimacy that comes from the mainstream commercialization of these previously niche transformative spaces and those who are detested by it instead is where that splintering will originate from.

a bit of a tangential aside, but relevant enough to feel worth mentioning. when i got my copy of the @/rftazine i was super pleasantly surprised to see that the zine shipped with a page of info about how to properly dispose of the (recyclable!) packaging and a list of the manufacturers used for the project. not only do i find this kind of transparency beneficial for everyone involved, i think that prompting people who purchase these sorts of things to think about where it all came from before they got it, and where it's all going to end up afterwards, is a necessary first step in any kind of collective reckoning with the ethics of indie merch production. i hope to see more people take this step with their projects!

[txttletale]

ftr, i’m sending this in good faith because i respect you and i think you’re very smart. this isn’t an attempt to bait you or anything 😭 but i am really curious about your opinion on suicides “caused” by ai chatbots. i’ve always been skeptical of the framing a lot of people have regarding these cases where they describe them using phrases like “chatgpt murdered this person” and such, but i also have No idea how to logically rebuff this type of hyperbole without coming across like i’m minimizing these really tragic deaths and what that person was going through.

i mean, like. you can look at the chats released in these cases, right. it's never someone going "wow my life is going really well and i'm very happy". i think obviously the way that these chatbots are like... designed to engage with people, and indeed to engage with them in these chats, is extremely irresponsible, it's perhaps the place where the sycophancy built into these models has the absolute worst consequences. but, imo, i think it is trivializing these people, and their autonomy, and the ways in which their lives were genuienly shitty, to attribute their choice to evil robot mind control, especially if you're cynically doing it to win an unrelated argument. like, parents of suicidal teens love to blame chatgpt the way they love to blame phones/the internet/video games/dungeons and dragons/secular rock music, because it's a viewpoint that completely exonerates them, the people with the most outsized and totalizing influence on the actual quality of their kids' lives

[smuganimebitch]

"let's all run websites on our personal dell laptops instead of relying on data centers" is the smelting pig iron in our backyards of the information age

[wholesalemagnesiumoxide]

we had joy, we had fun

we had seasons in the sun

when you don’t light up my phone i’m crying

[gigglesister]

its really funny seeing people my age or older get nostalgic about marketing bwfore ai while posting on tumblr. like oh yeah companies didnt used to use ai for their marketing they just posted a pic of a 16 year old employee and invited adult women to talk about how they would fuck him so it went viral and he got invited on ellen. that was way better.

[junkworldusa]

[filmphotofranz]

[frankendykes-monster]

IRL bestie is potentially being evicted, I can't afford to cover their rent, link is for venmo: @ sightseerxo.

[frankendykes-monster]

Cashapp is $sightxoseer.

[frankendykes-monster]

GoFundMe link: https://gofund.me/4aa826d9d

[deepseasmetro]

Nobody has donated to this GoFundMe yet!

per the fundraiser, aerial has 2 younger children, both of whom are autistic! homelessness is difficult enough to navigate alone, let alone with 2 kids with extra needs and considerations.

please consider donating even a couple of bucks to get this fundraiser off the ground!

[deepseasmetro]

I've just donated 5 dollars. I can't afford much else, but if even a quarter of my followers all donated just 5 dollars, this GFM would be fully funded immediately!

even a little bit can go a long way.

[frankendykes-monster]

$290 raised, every dollar is noticed and appreciated.

[frankendykes-monster]

Update: payment for a two weeks stay at a motel is confirmed, everything from henceforth will be used as coverage for a new place.

[frankendykes-monster]

Motel fell through (place should be condemned), back into emergency mode, everyone keep sharing.

[toskarin]

neural upscaling as a non-opt-in feature, presented by most modern phones' camera apps as a better zoom is like... there is definitely a way to implement this as an opt-in feature that doesn't entail implementing, as it is clearly functioning now, a highly effective psychosis exacerbator that gives vulnerable people "evidence" that they've recorded a real demon because the phone decided a few weird spots of light were dog eyes

[tajrishgp]

Due to a lack of funds The Sameer Project has had to reduce its water supply to camps in Gaza during the hottest year of the month.

It would be extremely helpful if you could commit to a monthly donation for their Food & Water Campaign !!!!

Food & Water x The Sameer Project

Translating Falasteen (Palestine), in collaboration with The Sameer Project, launched a fundraising campaign to support families in Gaza fac

Other ways to donate include (please make sure to add a message saying "WATER"):

PAYPAL and VENMO

[prokopetz]

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I don't remember what post exactly I said this in, but I remember I once saw someone doing this and had to be like "sometimes you think you're tricking the racist into agreeing with you when you're actually letting the racist trick you into agreeing with him"

[piranes11]

If you're a miserable cunt just don't be that like you don't have to argue with people at all it's like guerilla warfare you can just not talk to/ hang out with people people and it's oft unacknowledged that if u don't want to be constantly fighting u are going to have to be willing to , like, walk away from provocation sometimes

[piranes11]

-see someone being wrong

-do nothing because you don't know them and it doesn't matter

-not angry and didn't waste time and energy

-that easy

[piranes11]

the culture war does not exist and even if it did it is being fought on the scale of news agencies and billion dollar donations not individuals burning themselves out arguing with every attention seeking, centrist dickhead who holds the beliefs they hold because it's beneficial to them to believe. You cannot argue someone into stopping believing something they want to believe. They will just put it back in the basket.

[albertserra]

The Sameer Project just posted on their Instagram that they’re having to severely pause/cut back their operations due to dwindling funding. Please considering giving and signing up to be a monthly donor

[kindredspiritsandgoodomens]

Here is the link to their page.