bytes you bytes you bytes you

hope chests were something young women would do in their teens in the 19th/early 20th century. basically they would collect, make, and be gifted homemaking supplies throughout their teens; things like cutlery, china, quilts, jam jars, pillowcases, sheets, pots and pans, etc. They would keep all these in a big ol’ chest so that when they married and moved to live with their husbands and start a family, they already had a bunch of homemaking equipment. 

Been seeing a few people using this OC template but the original has no transparency, so I made a version that would hopefully be easier to use, source and original under the cut

are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it gives that question a name and a physical presence and a weight and an aesthetic and a horror. It's like TV static. It's like falling asleep on the car ride home. It's like living with a light inside you crawling to get out. It's like suffocating to death. It follows that thought to its logical conclusion and, in a frankly extremely painful and hard-to-watch but deeply needed way, excruciatingly draws out what that looks like. Suspended animation. Stasis. A life that is not your life.

*using linux* i'm a freakkyy goth hacker chick about to get my dick suxxed cyber style. superuser do me and she barely GNU me. i'm ready to put my therian life on-the-line for free and open source software. rawr

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!