CW: Some of Stephen Gammell's charcoal pencil illustrations are genuinely disturbing. Some of them stuck with me throughout childhood, and they had lasting power on new readers as well, year after year of the classes I taught. There was a re-release of the book trilogy with a different artist (perhaps for the best, overall, especially with younger readers), but they don't hit nearly the same as Gammell's work.

Hot take

It can be movies, books, music, videogames or anything else

It'd be his first good punchline.

Does anyone remember an old meme video that used this Chatham House video of Hillary Clinton talking about China? https://x.com/ChathamHouse/status/1390284424806289410

It used the line 'You will never compete and win against them, unless you take back the means of production.' as a hook and there was music backing it. I think the person who made had their twitter account banned.

Oh shit, I better open a window as the rain has stopped. Also I better grab that book from the bedroom.

NO I'M NOT GOING TO MAKE MORE THAN ONE TRIP

Oh my partner is standing up. Please baby can you grab that thing that's 4 metres away as getting up from the sofa must be avoided at all costs.

post

I watched a video by an adoptee who advocates against the adoption industry, claiming it is akin to human trafficking, and generally arguing that adoption is immoral.

This surprised me as something that I’ve never thought much about. Are there hexbears with thoughts or feelings on this view of adoption? Preferably people with direct experience? Any reading from a left/Marxist perspective would also be appreciated.

Speedrunning making my house look like delapidated nobility. Today I found a glass display box with halogen lights, bezeled glass, and moderate damage to the hinges and one door's finish. I also found a corner cabinet with one cracked pane of glass, one door that does not sit right (but with the smoothest hinges I have ever seen??) and drawers that rapidly leave the rails.

I was going to grab this headboard and footboard I seen too but my bf pointed out it was in a trash pile and not by the side so it was probably in worse shape than it looked driving by at night.

The only vehicle I could afford was a pickup truck the same age as me and now I have become a post-modern hunter gatherer 'harvesting' furniture and firewood from the side of the road.

Since I don't have no furniture money it's nice to find these pieces but I don't have the tools or time for a lot of furniture restoration projects. Maybe once the house is fixed and full I can start with that or replace some of the pieces I got for free. Right now the only thing in here I spent money money on was buying this nice fridge from my friend's sister who said it was 'too big' for her house lol. My bed, my chairs, my little table, my dresser, my shelves I all found or got given as friends moved.

Living in the rust belt is wild because you can buy a dilapidated mansion for like 3/4 the monthly cost of renting a shoe box apartment if you can somehow save about 4 months of pay. But no one can. Honestly, I want to reinvent the mutual savings society like during the pre-WWII times with my community and get all of my friends into houses. They all been paying $600+/month for a bedroom for years so it's not like they wouldn't be able to pay a mortgage. It's just that the banks and financiers discriminate against the poor, even the most dilligent.

In summary, fuck capitalism, fuck this dying empire, but goddamn it's wild finding a piece of furniture with hardwood on a non-visible side by the road AND have the space for it.

I was just thinking that she is probably going to win. Will be pretty funny too see the Trump diehards go into a full meltdown. The conspiracies will be even more crazy. Who knows, maybe they try to overthrow the government without a sitting president

I read that thread about Gursimran Kaur

Normally I'm kinda numb to all the various horrors of imperialist-monopoly capitalist society but today is one of those days where I feel a little bit more in touch with how I feel. I can't really cry anymore but this had me on the edge of tears :(

They aren't accepting any more donations rn but I put it here anyway too: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-family-of-gursimran-who-lost-her-life-at-walmart

I started writing something expressing my sympathy and my experience working for Walmart, then it spiraled and spiraled into an essay and it started to feel out of place and I burned out when I started writing about absolute surplus value so I thought I would elevate this concept to a thread and write a little about it :/

I don't wanna overstate it but it was a fucking horrible experience. I've gone through 2 periods of working in a Walmart "supercenter" and both ended with me having some kind of mental breakdown and losing my job. Tbh the only reason I'm not homeless rn is I was able to move back in with family after the last time. I have ADHD, probably autism too, and idk... it's like I can handle it for a while, like a year or 2, and I just start progressively decompensating until I can't even drag myself out of bed anymore even with the threat of losing everything. Ofc, this is intentional, the turnover rate is extremely high and the point is to work people as hard as possible until they burn out... but I did meet some "lifers" too during my time there.

I was never locked inside a fucking oven though, I can't even imagine how horrifying an end that would be :(

I have been locked inside freezers or coolers though, I'm just glad there were people around to let me out and that store management was generally fast to get the fucking inside latches fixed. And the rate of work is usually so fast that safety is an afterthought. I've had neck-breakingly heavy boxes almost fall on me, tripped in really bad places, had people almost hit me in the head with things, like a pallet once (wtf, I was getting something from a low shelf on the sales floor and someone threw a fucking pallet right past my head onto the floor, I looked back at him and it was like he didn't even register I was there, he turned his brain off and was on automatic mode idk)

All these memories are really tied up with Marxism for me too cuz one of my work coping mechanisms was listening to theory audiobooks or podcasts all day whenever I could get away with it lol. I should have been doing union-building but I'm a total mess so instead I was doing that of building a precise model of this duplicitous world inside my head or whatever

It's all such a blur whenever I think about it, hard to pull anything concrete out of those times to put in words tbh. Bad shit would happen to me like a coworker or customer (most likely the latter) would yell at me or I would focus on and worry about some social mistake I made and I would start to break down, not be able to talk to people or keep up social conventions like the right amount of eye contact or saying the right words or.... idk, some days my brain just totally melted and I was acting "weird" I guess, idk :(

One thing that stands out to me is how many days where we could barely keep up with work or a lot of previously mentioned similar bad things would happen and at the end of the day I could just barely keep it together enough to clean up and drag myself to my car before totally collapsing and just crying for a while before I could find the strength to go home and go to bed. And the overtime , and actually I don't mean regular overtime even cuz that's really bad enough but at least you're usually not alone, I mean the overtime where you somehow got yourself into some situation where everyone else in your department has left but you're still there trying to clean up or finish something or the boss gave you something you thought would be easy but it wasn't or some similar thing. Baddddddd feeeelinngggg, cuz if you truly can't handle it on your own, the other departments DO NOT wanna help you cuz they're busy drowning in their own work so they will be really mean about it if you try to get help, mostly the management. That didn't happen often but yeh

The only positive I can remember rn, and its a HUGE positive, is solidarity with my coworkers (the non-class-traitorous ones). Cuz it's not just me experiencing all this stuff ofc, I saw other people break down in similar ways or get stuck in bad situations and I would try to help, sometimes they would help me. Even just little things like advice or help with a task or helping cover up your slacking for you lol really helps make the misery better. One of my coworkers at the last store I worked at was going through a really hard time raising a kid on her own, was really tired and broke all the time, so I would try to help her out with tasks sometimes, listen to her talk about stuff, bought her lunch once or twice, even just gave her a hug sometimes. In hindsight I feel like I have this habit of overextending myself socially, maybe should be better at setting boundaries :/

I think people bought me lunch a couple of times too lol. A lot of my coworkers were really cool, but ofc there were the misanthropic class-traitorous types who would snitch on you to the boss, rationalized their job being terrible as being the fault of all their lazy never-doing-any-work coworkers. Would try to turn it to a more class-conscious management-antagonistic direction if it came up in conversation, worked sometimes at least. Cool ones would help with stuff or give advice all the time, I'm not sure I could have made it as long as I did without that

I've been unemployed for a while now, except for a brief time at Amazon (DO NOT RECOMMEND, it was even worse), and now I don't know what to do , I'm a self-taught computer-toucher but all I know for doing for work is retail so I'm probably gonna have to go back sometime and start this working-burnout cycle again :(

I could go on but I feel like is getting too long, I hope you liked, would love to hear your stories too. Will try to reply if I have the energy lol. Feel free to ask any questions too if you want

Sorry for this being kinda a mess, I'm writing even worse than usual today for some reason

It sounded really cool atleast. For context I have ASD

I can't put it into words but the whole genre of black men replacing historical figures of memes feels wrong to me. "wouldn't it be silly if Lenin was black🤣🤣" is basically the entire joke.

Correct me if im wrong

It's the Jerboa app if that matters I'm new to lemmy in general and I don't really know where to ask this question so sorry if this doesn't belong here I tried to look it up but couldn't find anything

For the last two months, I been putting up an old friend from a punk house since I moved into my house and couldn't leave out my lease. This friend has a lot of energy and motivation issues, and generally needs a lot of support. Beyond putting him up, I helped him leave out the punk house we used to live in that was getting evicted, got him a storage unit, and have helped out with about an errand a week.

I asked him if he would help me clean out the apartment since I had been putting him up and he basically shrugged me off. On top of that, now he's trying to change the timeline for getting out, but I need to do it this weekend when I am off work otherwise it will never get done. He knows this and we discussed it weeks ago.

Thankfully, some friends have agreed to put him up for a week as an 'off ramp' but it still feels like I am evicting him sort of.

I feel shitty because he don't have a real place to go in the city. At the same time, I have done as much as I can with the energy and time I have available. It also feels shitty that we would probably be better friends right now if I had just left him on the street.

Some help sensemaking is appreciated right now.

TW: physical and emotional abuse, suicide attempt

i hope this isn't the wrong place to share or that i'm breaking any rules, please lmk if so. i just really need to let this all off my chest somewhere and i have no one in real life to share with. i know my experiences are not unique to me, i would also love to hear if you can relate to this, or just want to chat about what i wrote or anything tbh~

i was born in a muslim majority country to emotionally and physically abusive parents whom were arranged. my mom did not even know what my dad looked like until the night they got married. she was also raised and indoctrinated heavily in a different muslim majority country in the 70s and 80s that was notorious for its anti-women legislation + second tier treatment of non nationals/foreign labor. a few years after our family immigrated to canada, leaving behind any semblance of familiarity, community, and family we had simply because my dad had a selfish desire to chase materialism and wealth, and the intention was disguised as "wanting a better life for his children". we were not living lavishly before whatsoever but it was never a question of food on the table or clothes on our backs, and we were not escaping violence or religious persecution.

not too soon after reaching canada he decided to leave us and go to america because he was not satisfied with his job or income in canada, despite us having a roof and food once again. this ended up being the best time of my life; only having to deal with one abusive parent who admittedly had less of a leash on us, i loved being able to walk to school by myself, hang out in the common courtyard between the apartment buildings also full of immigrant families, or head to the community center or library to socialize and enrich myself. i had the freedom and resources to enrich my own life as young as elementary school, since i wasn't getting it from home. and while my mom was abusive and neglectful i recognized the weight of her responsibilities + the context of her childhood and early adulthood.

eventually we started visiting and spending a month or two at a time with my dad. at this point i'm not even really sure who this guy is; he was barely a father when he was physically around and now i didn't speak or see him for months at a time. this is where i had to cut out a lot i wrote but basically i became the number one target of my dads abuse. if there was a "turning point" in my childhood it was the day my dad slammed my 8 or 9 year old body into the concrete in front of his friends family because i stood up to their bully son who was 4 years older than me. must have been too embarrassing for him to handle or something? the sensation of mustering up the courage to defend yourself and speak on what you think is right, only to find yourself a split second later in pain on the ground, publicly humiliated, and being dragged to the car and immediately being blamed for "ruining the day", was really so incredibly damaging and i didn't even get to process that until 15 years later because of how far i repressed that memory.

that pretty much set the tone of my life moving forward. eventually my dad found himself working in texas and made us come permanently move with him by the time i was finishing elementary school. for a second time i was stripped away of all that was familiar to me, my friends, the culture i was programmed to be comfortable with, and this time i had actually worked to build it myself. and the shock of texas culture.... i absolutely hated it (and still do). obviously canada is far from perfect, but even as a child i could register the immense dissonance living in texas made me feel. physical abuse continued to pop up any time there was any sort of disagreement or tension, as well as emotional neglect and a complete lack of an attempt at parenting, besides keeping us alive and setting the looming expectation of us eventually assimilating into the academic and corporate life of america while still being culturally and religiously of my dads home village.

i found that i couldn't relate to my peers at all in texas, even minorities, the majority of whom were born and raised there and deeply indoctrinated/socialized with weird programming. i was also put into a "gifted and talented" program, which really ended up being severely detrimental to my already struggling socialization, and provided no benefit educationally; just a higher load of busy work than the other kids. i started to become withdrawn, fearful, self loathing, internalized self phobias relating to my skin color, features, gender, sexuality, all the good stuff. by the time high school rolled around i was deeply depressed, anxious, and attempted suicide, which then led to a horrifying two week stint in a really fucking sketchy UHS psychiatric hospital. that's a whole write up of its own

eventually i got out, parents still didn't even understand what "depression" was despite everything and made more comments about the cost of the hospitalization than how i was feeling. I was put on an outpatient program and medication that didn't help at all other than make me feel like a zombie. i ditched the meds and decided i was tired of this bullshit and i would finally "take control of my own life", the western narrative id read constantly on social medias like reddit or twitter or seen depicted in popular TV or movies, and this actually worked for a while. i "glew up", started cooking my own meals and eating actual food, worked under the table to start my own income, stopped escaping into the internet and video games and improved my socialization skills and actually made "friends".

then by the time high school was finishing up, i decided i wanted to pursue my passion of making music and forgo university. lot of disapproval and accusations that someone had cast a spell on me, and i really didn't know much about making music at the time other than the little they would share about music theory in public school music classes, but that didn't stop me and that decision set me off on a long journey of completely redefining myself to the external world, but really finding out who i actually am as a person internally, why that's worth loving and sharing, and where my behaviors and traumas rooted from (with some psychedelic help). i completely shocked myself with how far i was able to go with it--i had a fairly "successful" song, got really involved with my cities local music scene, and was just making art that actually resonated with people and even impressed myself, a feeling I'd never felt before with anything. eventually i mustered up the courage to move to new york city with a small amount of savings, subletting random tiny rooms and sleeping on the floor, and eventually was able to leverage my combined my music experience and prior work experience in youth development, to land what was in theory was my "dream job" as a fulltime afterschool music program director.

but yet now, in my mid 20s, i find myself back in my parents house, back in the same room, in texas which i've come to despise even more. new york city definitely had its problems as well, but it was much better for my mental and safety than here. i was making JUST enough to keep just myself afloat, with very little room for emergencies. i was always transient and struggled to find somewhere to stay long term even if i could afford it, because of credit and income requirements i could never meet in a million years. and very unfortunately, during a really emotionally vulnerable moment i very stupidly fell for a random out of the blue scam where i thought i was helping someone, and instead got almost $3k of the total $5k i had savings from 1.5 years of working stolen from me in an instant.

and the most important thing.... i had absolutely no support system. of course life throws struggles everyones way, but just struggle after struggle with no one to lean on eventually catches up with you. in fact, despite this what to me was a mystical and miraculous upward journey, i have always struggled with maintaining any sort of community or support system. friends groups came and went, for various different reasons. homophobia, exorsexism, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, colorism, ignorance, ill intentions, and lack of accountability always ended up popping up one way or another, and the vast majority of instances the options seem to be let it slide or be ostracized. for a long time i internalized this pattern as reflecting poorly on me, as a "if it smells like shit everywhere you go check your own shoes" sort of thing. but that just doesn't make sense when i look back on these groups and the same people are still fraternizing and engaging with the same people. people i maybe think about in a sad and longing way because i thought they were somewhat decent person whom didnt want to invest into a real friendship with me, still posted and flicking up with some of the worst nastiest people i've had the displeasure of encountering.

i ended up quitting the job as it got to a point where i was facing passive aggressive judgement for my gender presentation + while it was an incredible learning experience i started to feel like i was hitting a wall due to management and i was becoming completely disillusioned with the nonprofit i was employed by, on top of the low pay. i had some savings but i wasn't able to find anywhere that would rent to me. all this coupled with not even having a community to anchor me down led me to nomading around the country for 3 months, and then i went back to nyc to try again from the ground up... but i was just way too tired this time. i just couldn't.

all this is really to say.... i can't believe i'm back in this shitty fucking position, around my parents whom haven't taken any responsibility for their actions, in this god awful state, back at square 0. i'm tired of being held to crazy high expectations to want to, expect the smallest bit of decency. i'm tired of having to work to be insanely exceptional at everything just to SURVIVE, just to have a space of my own and a guarantee that i'll be fed. having to go above and beyond, just to be loved, seen, heard, or any effort to be understood. and this bullshit western rhetoric of focusing on self improvement and learning to love yourself and not worrying about anything else.... sorry but that only works if you have privilege and opportunities. i've done the therapy, the meditation, the journaling, the showing up to community spaces. i genuinely love and accept myself (most of the time), i love my mind and the way i think, i love my body, i love my features, i love the image i was made in and the mind and spirit i possess. it took a lot of work to get to this point. and yet i'm still broke stuck in this neighborhood with 0 opportunity in sight that doesn't involve compromising my morals or hating myself, watching everyone blindly continue to follow the indoctrination set by the imperial core.

i try to ask for help, but it has driven most people away in the past, because they couldn't "handle it" or relate. obviously money would help when i'm dead broke, but at the end of the day what i really need is a community, a way to keep myself afloat, an out from this hellscape. i deserve that, don't I?

sometimes I feel like there's no place in this world for someone like me.

Every two days a new thread with hundreds of comments of a bunch of liberals doing the same fucking talking points about the election. It doesn't even fucking matter but so many people are just so enthusiastic to be hand-wringing or smug or whatever their preferred flavor of insufferable is, presumably mostly because they've been acculturated by liberal media to the idea that Trump is the apocalypse despite the fact that we already saw how Trump bumbles his way through a term!

It's just so bad, you can't talk about it anywhere there without someone leaping down your throat to say the same shit you've heard before.

So I can safely say "I didn't vote for this shit" when Copmala or Trump get into the WH and kick off WWIII.

I'm probably being put on a kill list though.

Today at work I needed the help of another journeyman because I had a boatload of plumbing to run and just needed the help of someone who I could get up to speed quickly by just handing a set of building plans and just sort of saying ‘here, go over there and plumb this in according to these plans’ and leave them be, while I am over here doing the exact same thing.

The guys I have a pretty good working relationship with were all tied up, with their own issues to deal with. So I got the guy who just started at the shop I’m at. He is a j-man, just new at work.

Today, I got about 20 minutes into a casual conversation about what the upcoming weekend’s plans were (Im going camping at a nearby state park, and I understood him to be of a similar vein - we are both avid hammock campers) and came to the realization that he is a fucking TRAD CATH. He got married right out of highschool 25 years ago to his sweetheart. She is not allowed to work. She is not allowed to drive. I dont even think is on the bank account or the title to the home they have. She is to have his lunch ready when he leaves for work in the morning. She is the one to take care of their son. And he explained to me in great detail about how his is teaching his 6 year old son the ‘proper husband/wife dynamic instead of the sissy liberal shit on TV’. She is to make dinner every evening. And not just any dinner, either. He wants a culinary masterpiece every day. He drinks raw milk. He is an anti-vaxxer. He listens to Gavin Mcguiness (or however the fuck you spell it, i dont give a fuck how he spells his shitty racist name) daily or weekly, and has even hung out with him multiple times. He is a proud western chauvinist. He is a volunteerist, whatever the fuck it is. According to him he donates money monthly to Alex Jones. He buys the supplements AJ hawks. He firmly believes in the globalist agenda to blah blah blah….. By then I’d had enough.

jesus fucking christ.

This isnt the first time ive had other white guys signal what they are, or what their beliefs are. I hate to say it, but I probably fit a visual mold that makes them think Im of the same mind. I wear overalls, my beard is too long and going grey. I have long hair. i carry a pistol in my service truck. I am more and more disgusted by those in my profession. At least in my neck of the woods, plumbers are awful fucking people. Im glad that at the least, I dont socialize with any plumbers after work.

I ended up having him pack up his tools and call the office for a different assignment. Then I spent a half hour explaining to the office manager, and then the owner, why I ran another jman off the jobsite.

I just wanted to talk about going camping in a hammock this weekend.