• 36 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • I got my dream job offer rescinded two weeks ago BECAUSE I AM TRANS.

    I have experienced sexual violence BECAUSE I AM TRANS.

    I am terrified of being pulled over by a cop and institutionalized or incarcerated because the government says that my license is wrong now.

    The problem is not my mental state. The problem is the discrimination.

    If I killed myself, it would to be to avoid becoming homeless - because, like many trans people, there are substantial barriers to employment. It doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court said it’s illegal to fire people for being trans, it fucking happens.

    My mental health would be peachy fucking keen if I were not part of the marginalized minority group that the government is so slavering to make a target that they tried to pretend the Kirk shooter carved trans propaganda into his bullets! They want to kill us or institutionalize us - how the fuck would your mental health be if you were walking around with a target on your back?




  • (The yellow stitches are basting stitches, meant to hold the hexagons to the paper and will eventually be removed)

    I paid about $2 for this stack of 10 t-shirts. (Avoid goodwill, go to the mom and pop places). None of these shirts were ever going to be used again. No one wants the t-shirt of a random church or police department, or a stained white t-shirt, or a high school football team.

    Instead of buying fabric - buying something new which would encourage a retailer to buy something to replace it - I am repurposing these shirts into yarn (which I knit into rugs), patches for other clothing (which would otherwise need to be thrown away), reusable bags, or scrap quilts (which will mean that I can keep my thermostat lower in the winter).

    These shirts are the kinds of things that would otherwise end up as textile waste, a pile of useless clothing in Ghana. “Reuse” in the second R in importance in “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

    I think also that the ability to repair clothes instead of throwing them away is a huge part of the equation. I had an ex that would throw clothes away for missing a button. That is not particularly uncommon.



  • There are, but if you get the little plastic thing of assorted needles you’ll be fine. Maybe $1 from Walmart.

    I’d grab black cotton thread to start out with (“mercerized” is going to be the better stuff). For mending, it’s usually either about hiding your stitches so they aren’t seen at all, and it doesn’t matter, or picking something that matches what you’re fixing.

    The thread that comes with kits is usually crappy polyester that will break if you look at it funny - it’s only really useful for “basting” (sewing something together temporarily to hold it in place while you do the more permanent sewing.) The other things in kits (pins, seam rippers, tiny scissors) are usually okay though.

    Fixing buttons is a good project to practice on IMHO. Lots of clothes hide an extra button somewhere on a tag inside, but you can also get a nice plastic jar of mixed buttons at the dollar store usually.

    Really, don’t overthink it. Even ugly stitches will hold stuff together if you put enough of them on.






  • The real issue is that mental health in the United States is an absolute fucking shitshow.

    988 is a bandaid. It’s an attempt to pretend someone is doing anything. Really a front for 911.

    Even when I had insurance, it was hundreds a month to see a therapist. Most therapists are also trained on CBT and CBT only because it’s a symptoms focused approach that gets you “well” enough to work. It doesn’t work for everything, it’s “evidence based” though in that it’s set up to be easy to measure. It’s an easy out, the McDonald’sification of therapy. Just work the program and everything will be okay.

    There really are so few options for help.





  • I did learn a lot of modding with my commitment to play gay characters at least. Thanks compulsory heterosexuality for teaching me to Google things like “Carth gay”!

    One of the first mods I tried to mess with was The Underground for Morrowind (which Skyrim’s Dawnguard is 100% a rip off of btw) because it forces you into a het relationship as part of the storyline. Unfortunately, it was such a crashy mess that just changing all the gender checks didn’t help.

    People assume heterosexual is the default and get pissy at anything else, they’re completely spoiled. I can’t really think of any video games which force you to be a gay dude, unless you’re playing like Dream Daddy? The Last of Us Part 2 has you play as a lesbian, and I guess the usual crowd did have a meltdown over Abby not looking like a Princess.






  • Goodwill wants $3 a book now, unless I go to the outlet (and that’s crowded). Gotta go to the non mega corp places, where books are maybe a quarter. It’s difficult to leave Goodwill with any cool spending less than $15 nowadays, but the smaller places often will mark things like art supplies, frames, and trinkets to a $1 or 0.25.

    I’m trying to recontextualize the entire book, cutting out any passages I find interesting. Those wooden bits I think I’m going to make into coasters, the front half of the canvas has a bunch of more Carpathia centered passages, which are more relevant to the modern day.

    It’s just funny, I had so many nightmares growing up about needing to stand up to the Antichrist, and even if I’m not really a proper believer anymore it’s difficult to see Trump as anything but.