Inky Xward

hello everyone. i hate having to make these posts every time, but the past two weeks have been just a successive continuation of punches to the balls.

i am the sole breadwinner of a household of two soon to be three, and after rent, food, and meds, we generally have maybe 400 dollars a month to hold things together, of which we usually can save 0, maybe 20 on a really good month. about a week ish ago, a cat in our care died, which cost $1300 for the vet visits as she declined + cremation. two weeks before that, my parents heard my laptop broke and decided to chip in for a new desktop, and then did not get me a screen, mouse, keyboards, and speakers, because "i could handle it", which cost about another $250 ish. before that, $250 on laptop repairs.

and also yesterday i had to send my laptop into the shop again for repairs. $100 just to peek inside to see if the charger port was broken (in which case they could reseat it), $150 to just yank the charger port out and replace it. i said fuck it and paid the $150 because what the fuck else can i do, my livelihood depends on having access to a computer.

meds are expensive when you are disabled and in a wheelchair. so imagine my unpleasant surprise when today i found out that suddenly, between the start and end of june, my insurance stopped covering <medicine x> which, btw, out of pocket costs fucking $1350 i'm so god damn mad. thankfully i could coupon it down a little but it's still just shit on the pile after shit on the pile after shit on the pile after shit on the pile and now i have to either go off of it (extremely bad) or argue with insurance (bad and slow). and my boyfriend needs help moving out, which is its own thing that i need to help with, so he can get here.

i am applying to jobs every god damn day. you would think a career developer with a well-stocked portfolio of professional projects and excellent references would be able to get something, anything, even a contract position. nothing. i am trying and trying and trying and i hate begging on the internet but i am at the end of my damn rope here and it's causing me enough physical stress that it's degrading my already perilous health, given my autoimmune disease.

so. if you have anything to chip in, i know this corner of the internet is just gay people passing 5 dollars back and forth until it vanishes down a hole. but it would be really, really appreciated. every new catastrophe i've had over the past like three years has just drained more and more of my savings and i do not know how much longer we can weather it before it starts getting bad. it's just too much for me to handle.

there's somethign that riley quinn from the trashfuture podcast keeps saying -- "if your job can be replaced by AI, it was already being done by AI". which is to say, that jobs most at risk from AI replacement are ones that were borderline automated anyway. like, i say this as someone who used to write, not for the website buzzfeed itself, but buzzfeed-adjacent Slop Content for money -- i was already just the middlewoman between the SEO optimization algorithm and the google search algorithm. those jobs vanishing primarily means that middlewoman role has been cut, computers can tell other computers to write for computers.

& similarly this is why i keep saying that, e.g. stock photographers are at risk from this, because the ideal use case for generative AI content is stuff where the actual content or quality of the image/text doesn't matter, all that matters is its presence. and yknow, living in a world where many people's livelihoods were dependent on writing and art that is fully replacable by inane computer drivel is itself indicative of something about culture under capitalism, right?

& to some degree, like i'm always saying, the immiseration of workers by advancement in technology is a universal feature of capitalism -- i recommend you read wage labour & capital to see how this phenomenon has persisted for well over a century. it's simply nothing new -- like, the stock photographers who are most at risk from this already are already employed in an industry that itself decimated in-house illustration; think about how any dime-a-dozen reomance novel you can pick up at a store nowadays has a hastily photoshopped stock photo cover when fifty years ago it would have had a bespoke cover illustration that an artist got paid for.

Is formatted to be as unconvincing to the nonbeliever as possible