I want that twink Obliterated

yo tunglr how goest it

so! things keep Happening. i am like "i should make a post" and then things happen and i would need a whole additional post

so uh. where to start. i was in minnesota. i did not like minnesota. the social services are pretty damn solid but i did not know anybody except john and it was looking like a three year wait to get into housing, and i had to park a mile and a half away from the shelter because clearly letting homeless people park their cars next to the homeless shelter encourages them to remain homeless or something :P

and i have been trying for ten years to get back to the east coast, to the only place where i know more than one person in meatspace in the entire world. and then my tax refund came out to be Enough that i could afford to go to there. so i was like fuck it i will go to there

(can i afford to exist on the east coast? probably not. but i can't afford to exist anywhere that allows trans people. may as well be not affording to exist in a place where i have some sort of a network.)

so first i went to leia's and got a bunch of my stuff. mainly electronics and knitting. and then i came to here. i had arranged with a friend to use her address to receive mail and do laundry and shower and all those fun things you cannot do in a car. also i acquired some car-camping gadgets that plug into my car's cigarette lighter, such as an electric blanket.

(i even found out that my car has a 15amp cigarette lighter circuit like a semi truck, instead of a 10amp circuit like most passenger cars, so i can use a trucker's cookbox to heat up food! very exciting. still don't have an electric kettle but i saw a hopeful looking one at a truckstop, i'm just trying to pinch my pennies.)

anyway SO! got to friend's house. things went well for 2 nights. i successfully tested riding the metro and did not get the motion sickness. this was excellent news as i had to quit my last job in this area due to inability to arrive on time as i kept having to hop off metro and let my tummy settle

then friend's husband decided actually the plan that we thought had been cleared with him was Not okay, because he had managed to hear a totally different plan that only existed inside his head. (he does this. he has not managed to grasp that friend is against the palestinian genocide. they are both jewish so this is. a topic of regular conversation let us say)

so. i have been put up in a hotel for a week. very cozy. i just figured out how to use the coffee maker to make hot water for instant mashed potatoes. the week is running out but i have been looking into options.

so yesterday of course my phone had to go and fucking brick itself. (i think it was yesterday. time has been. somewhat. look i don't have a phone okay i can't exactly look at the date every five seconds as normal)

phone repair place gave me a free diagnosis, which was, the battery swoll up just enough to pop the back slightly open (it is not a phone that is supposed to open) and let water in and now the motherboard is ruined. it cannot be fixed

thank fuck i had picked up my electronics at leia's, thus i was able to communicate via ipad and laptop that this Had Happened. navigation is being *really goddamn hard* because i have to memorize directions from my wifi-only ipad before going out, and then somehow correlate them with very bad interstate signage (the only way i survived getting back from the phone repair place is that i'd been to an aldi in the same shopping center while my phone still worked)

i mean i could take transit but have you ever tried to take transit without a phone when transit maps are digital only

any fucking way. so then i went to the department of food stamps and all that stuff, to ask about assistance. the department told me i would have to be a resident in the county for nine months before i could even get into a shelter. also i got shuffled between several desks that were supposed to help me applicate for food stamps and medicaid before my name just... fell off the big monitor that showed all the people waiting and where they should go.

so my friend mara who is well connected in the local activism community began making Noises and we emailed a bunch of people. there is a place (nondenominational even! in minnesota you had your choice of the catholics, the "union gospel mission", or the sally army) that does free hot meals and helping applicate for shit and sometimes has charities come to give away free phones and so forth. sounds very much like the big central shelter and help center i was at in minnesota, except crucially not catholic.

(the catholics are better to deal with than the folks who require you to attend services in order to receive help. but they're still very... catholic about it.)

anyway that place says i can park there and not get towed, which is my largest concern. i have not actually gone to there yet because i did not feel like driving that far from my hotel with no gmaps until i have to. but it sounds extremely promising. i have some other emails to follow up on too but today i went and got one of my roughly-annual migraines so i was flat on my back in a dark room all day.

(at least the migraine had the decency to hit while i have a room and a bed and darkness all available. very polite of it. this has not been the case any time in the past six months and it has been a worry)

anyway i can't friggin get my lifeline provider (aka free government phone service for teh poors) to log me in on their website to look for a new phone without them being able to text my old phone, even though they offer me email verification and then just don't load the next page, so there is a solid nonzero chance i may lose this phone number. my contacts *should* be backed up to my gmail if i can get another android phone though.

so. uh. let's see. a new smartphone and service would run me close to $200 minimum. (i've been checking on a cheap service i had before becoming eligible for lifeline, which i was happy with. their very cheapest smartphone is like $114 on sale and their cheapest from a brand i've ever heard of, which i would strongly prefer, is a motorola running about $140 on sale. it's giant and clunky with a badly placed fingerprint reader but "able to get cellular service and run google maps therefrom" is my main priority right now.)

i have about $200 of my tax refund left in the bank. also i still need to buy gas. and some more food soon, i'm about down to canned chili (very edible cold in tortillas) and instant mashed potatoes (can make with cold water but they are significantly less delicious that way). and probably some other things i'm forgetting, and i haven't even started looking into the emissions test or my maryland ID and license plates. which i also wanted to budget about $200 for in case i have to pay excise tax for moving states like i did in minnesota (i don't know if i was supposed to or if the dmv fucked up). i forgot to ask if the one place does gas cards but i need to.

anyway i have to be out of my hotel room saturday morning so i am planning to spend tomorrow packing my shit back up and hauling it mostly down to my car. also i need another bath at some point. too much has been happening

sleeping in a bed has been very nice though. hadn't done that since august. i can sleep in my car and it's mostly comfortable but i'm fat and my steering wheel does not respect that

anyway. um. until more things explode i guess that is my update? jesus murphy. it's holy week and you can friggin tell. really bringing my catholic out. tomorrow is good friday and i definitely expect something more to explode. hell, my micro sd card was making noises about being corrupted and i was going to transfer stuff off it onto a new one via my computer and i haven't even started that yet because i've been so frazzled. it better not die along with jesus tomorrow, it's got all my music on it

I've been writing lilac sky bit by bit each day for the past few days and I seem to make it more and more sad with each word.

working at a grocery store has only made me even angrier about inflation and how food, water, and shelter isnt free

like just looking at groceries (not water or shelter) i see just a few bags (maybe around 5 or so) of food costing over $125 USD regularly. I've seen orders upwards of $600. and sure those have been bigger orders but no food should cost that much.

my coworkers and i shouldn't be complaining about the price of food when we get employee discounts.

a single bag of food for myself (usually containing some small pizzas, crackers, milk, and cereal) regularly costs between $50-60. minimum wage in my state is 15/HR. thats about four hours of work for one bag of food

a coworker who works on the front end of our store prides herself on being able to catch theives. everyone says how good she is at it. and sometimes it makes sense, sometimes people are just stealing to steal. but how do you ever know?

when the card reader we take outside is broken we are supposed to have the customers come inside to pay for their groceries if they're paying with EBT. there's a woman who's a regular who has a few small children and when she comes to pick up groceries they're usually asleep in the car.

am i supposed to make her choose between leaving her children alone in the car or waking them up and taking them inside?

four hours of work for one bag of groceries. is this not also theft?

four hours of work. let that sink in. four hours for one small bag of groceries.

we aren't supposed to accept tips but if we don't accept tips then how else are we supposed to afford our groceries?

i haven't seen a single person stealing food. you cannot steal whats already stolen.

although im no longer a christian, the teachings of my childhood have stuck with me, and in the bible it says "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Leave them for the poor and for the foreigner residing among you."

society has reaped right up the the very edge and beyond of its fields, so it's up to us to reap what we can

four hours of work for one bag of food

saw a take so fucking rancid on twitter i almost deleted the entire app from my phone jesus fucking christ

first of all ao3 is an archive site. this is like going to the library and saying "oh i dont like this" on every piece of media you find that you dislike and thinking they should be stamped with some sort of a marker just cause you didnt like it

you can always click back and leave. fic writers owe you nothing to explain themselves and their creations. if they have mistagged or miscategorized fics, then i understand, however there are report tools for that instead of yelling at the artist tbh

im not saying free works arent necessarily above criticism. but this is just. fucking wild. its common courtesy to just enjoy stuff (or fucking leave if you dont, the back button is free) and if the artist specifically asks for critiques, then give one - constructive that is, shitting all over someones work is not proper criticism, mind you

i just find it fucking wild people are treating art and archive sites as social media these days like this and everything needs to be policed and ~catered to the algorithm~ like. no. ao3 doesnt have an algorithm. you should be able to fucking tell what you like and what you dont like and steer away from that kind of content and let people fucking be with their art. they dont owe you anything (except trigger warnings i'd argue, but i know some people disagree with that as well for some reason), and imagine how much more energy you'd have if you only engaged with things you liked and spent time looking at instead of going to places where you dont enjoy yourself. let alone spending time telling other people you dont enjoy what they enjoy. what a fucking life

they weren’t kidding that frisk someone can sure strange

anyway so the “see you in the next hell, losers” is inspired by this video ! it made me Think. undertale was their first hell(possessed by the SOUL), deltarune is their current hell(wants the SOUL back)

and the “try as you might, you continue to be yourself” is from when you get a second red flag in Ball Game in undertale ! thought it’d be ironic since. theyre kinda not acting like themself since they don’t have the SOUL anymore. not that they even really know who they were without it

also knight chara is here

someone should have stopped me from putting these side by side but here we are. i can't do this anymore what the fuck.

a difference from at least six thousand years—and they are completely different people, crowley is absolutely right about that. the starmaker was lost in the fall, and crowley has been trying to find himself again ever since.

the final fifteen robbed him of anything light that was still persevering, because crowley's don't bother is him giving up. he's done. he can't do this anymore and then he still waits.

he still waits.

and he will keep waiting.

DONT REPOST THIS thanks

the catholic guilt and the “second chance”… i think at the core it’s just eddie desperate for the forgiveness that only he can grant himself, but keeps refusing to

Highkey so sad to see Kim's character get butchered by people who see Harry as whichever addict wronged them in their life.

tbh i think the transmisogyny problem on this site is so widespread at this point that nothing short of a complete overhaul of moderation protocol is going to fix it. the current system as outlined by that guy on staff whos digging his own grave rn is apparently purely based on responding to user-submitted support tickets, which relies on A) the users on this site having enough trust in the moderators to believe that submitting a support ticket might actually make some sort of difference, and B) the users on this site not WEAPONIZING that same support ticket system to unfairly target users who they dislike for personal reasons. Neither of these conditions were likely to be met even BEFORE staff had multiple scandals regarding unfair moderation of transfeminine users' content, and any trust that users may have had in that system has been completely eroded now. If staff GENUINELY wants to address this problem, they need to be proactive about it. there are plenty of tags where these people are known to gather. There is literally an entire third-party browser extension dedicated to flagging unsafe individuals. It's not like they're difficult to find. We've seen pretty clearly that staff has the ability to nuke blogs and tags entirely. The fact that they won't even HIDE tags like #radfem, #terfs please interact, etc. shows that they don't actually have any intention of making this site safer for trans women. they just want everyone to shut up about it. Even just removing the ability for terfs to find each other on this site could make a huge difference, but rather than do the bare minimum staff has decided to let one guy make whiny excuses and very loudly and publicly misgender a trans woman who they nuked for no reason. fucking embarrassing fr

I know most people want gentleman Husk to Angel

But I would like to argue back that gentleman Angel?? Kissing Husks knuckle after he gives him a drink? Making him a fully homemade (Italian) dinner with drinks? So many ideas I have

(the superior answer is that it's both of them in different ways at different times and everyone around them is honestly jealous) ((and wants them to finally kiss god dammit))

Wholeheartedly

survival chance: 42%

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Thinking a little bit about that one "I'm an English major and a professional as opposed to you amateurs" anon. Gonna roast 'em a little bit, but with the intention of addressing a thing we've had in mind for a while.

Real talk, coming from someone who WAS an English major; majoring in English is not necessarily a guarantee that someone is a good writer. For one, you can be bad at your major, full stop. For another, it's not even a guarantee that someone identifies as a writer to begin with. English as a major is pretty broad, and it covers reading too, among other things. There's library science, analytical academia, historical preservation & interpretation (MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS HELL YES), editing, nonfiction trades (often crosses over with STEM majors), marketing (crosses over with business majors), and also book design and typography (<3 <3 <3 our favorite, crosses over with art majors).

Someone can major in English and take a specific minor with the goal of falling into a trade that is not writing literary fiction. In fact, we would argue that most people who get something useful out of their major are the ones that do that.

It's also worth noting that it's possible to be an English major focused on "lowbrow" fiction. There are people who major in English and use the experience towards the end of writing erotica. There are people who major in English with the intent to write genre fiction. There are people who major in English to study the history and social context of fanfiction.

These things are, in fact, worthy fields of study! The realm of the "amateur" is the realm where a lot of cultural conversations and innovations happen!

Expecting English as a major to be a tract specifically for producing acclaimed literary fictionists is not realistic, not how the discipline typically works, and it's certainly not a thing you can use to hold over other writers' heads. It is perfectly possible for people to write good things (professional-grade things even) without ever touching a college course.

I sat through so much bad writing in college. Technically bad, thematically bad, gramatically bad. And I routinely bump into non-graduate authors who write texts, formal and informal alike, that blow my own writing clean out of the water with their quality.

In short, dismissing other people in your general field as "amateurs" who are beneath you is an incredibly unprofessional thing to do.

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah