During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

april fools day is actually the most sensible day of the year because it's the only day on which people will read something on the internet and stop for a second to consider whether or not it's actually true

"AI accidentally made me believe in the concept of a human soul by showing me what art looks like without it."

It's not a mistake to hit a series of white cars with precision munitions, on a street they're allowed to drive, on cars marked as ngo aid workers, traveling a path they disclosed to the idf. Hitting those cars is not a mistake, it's the result of a mostly illusory and murderously lose roe.

A mistake is when I type the wrong key into a keyboard, there are supposed to be controls for this shit.

For the love of G-d, HP fans, we are begging, please read a different series.

The money you're giving her, that you're pretending is harmless and okay, is being used to fund movements to strip trans people of their legal rights. Period.

There is no more excuse.

Look, some mammals still lay eggs, friend.

I mean, I don't want to sound stupid, but I always assumed that the Ancient Romans were mammals

Y’all Aaron Bushnell watched Andrewism. He dreamed of a better world, a free world without scarcity.

Y’all he dreamed of a solarpunk future.

Cool Uncles

evil infodumping where you just tell lies

just in case it gets deleted

pro-AI in the sense of "they taught a bread scanning computer to recognize cancer cells" etc etc

against AI in the sense of "we stole artwork from hundreds to thousands of artists, didn't credit them and didn't financially compensate them"

The test of time? It's been around for a blip of our civilization’s existence, and in that entire 200 year history it has been nothing but a problem. It has continually funneled all of society's resources upwards while causing starvation for the lower half. It’s a force only sustainable by making people fight for scraps so we don’t notice the riches disappearing. Every time society starts to notice that maybe rich people are the problem, money starts mysteriously getting burned to create new moral panics to distract you. Satanic panic, gay panic, communist panic abortion panic, and now? Trans panic.

Without fail, every time a large enough portion of the populace starts to notice that the black and the white, the middle class and the poor, the immigrant and the native, the straight and the gay have FAR more in common with each other than with the upper class, and far more to gain working WITH each other than FOR a baron/ceo/what have you.

Artist credit:

Image text: "I'm so sick of living life on survival mode. I want to live in creative mode."

The World Of Becca Blake

Art by Dan Schkade