Moon Custafer

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

What we consume, we digest; what is consumed, is no longer what it was. Such is how we are nourished.

Wondermark #1587; And Onward One Opines

Peter Pan edited by Anne Hiebert Alton (2011)

(sorry to interrupt joke post but) this is true!

Children not clapping did happen too, (and some were even expected to have hissed, which was later written into the 1928 playscript and 1911 novel). But my all time favourite anecdote about it is from Pauline Chase (who played Peter)'s intro to Peter Pan's Post Bag 1909:

Children love to clap their hands at the play because then they feel that they are really part of it, and you can see them holding their hands poised ready to seize an opportunity. Their great chance is when I ask them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and so save Tink's life. But they are very wrathful if any one claps who has the reputation of being a cynic, and once there was quite an uproar in the front row of the dress circle because of a girl who clapped. Those about her pulled down her arms angrily. "How dare you clap," they cried, "when you know you don't believe in fairies!" There was one dreadfully hard-hearted little boy who came to the theatre not to clap. That was his object for coming, and he came round "behind" to tell me so in the middle of the play. His teeth were firm set. "I won't clap," he said doggedly; "I'm not going to clap." And when the time came he didn't clap; above the clapping of all the others I could hear him shouting from a box, "Peter, I'm not clapping."

One stone two houses three ruins four gravediggers one garden flowers

a raccoon

one dozen oysters one lemon one bread one sunbeam one groundswell six musicians one door and its doormat one gentleman who was awarded the Legion of Honour

another raccoon

one sculptor sculpting napoleons the flower which we call marigold two lovers on a big bed one tax collection officer one chair three turkeys one man of the cloth one boil one wasp one floating kidney one racing stable one ungrateful son two Dominican friars three grasshoppers one jump seat two ladies of the night one uncle Cyprien one Mater dolorosa three doting fathers two Peter Rabbits one Louis XV heel one Louis XVI armchair one Henri II dresser two Henri III dressers three Henri IV dressers one drawer that doesn’t match one ball of string one safety pin one senior citizen one Winged Victory of Samothrace one accountant two junior accountants one man of the world two surgeons three vegetarians one man-eater one colonial expedition one ungelded horse one cup that runneth over one tsetse fly one lobster Americaine one French garden two Yorkshire puddings one lorgnette one footman one orphan one iron lung one glory day one giving week one month of Mary one year of affliction one minute of silence one second’s lapse in attention and…

five or six raccoons

one little boy walking into school crying one little boy coming out of school laughing one ant two lighter flints seventeen elephants one vacationing prosecutor sitting on a folding chair one landscape with a lot of green grass in it one cow one bull two beautiful love stories three church organs one veal marengo one sun of Austerlitz one siphon of seltzer one glass of white wine with a slice of lemon one Hop-o’-My-Thumb one pattern day one stone calvary one rope ladder two Romance sisters three dimensions twelve apostles one thousand and one nights thirty-two positions six parts of the world five cardinal directions ten years of faithful service seven deadly sins two peas in a pod ten drops at every meal thirty days of jail time with fifteen days in segregation five minutes of intermission 

and…

several raccoons.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

this Youtuber best known for (very funny!) videos mocking luxury fashion brands posted a video about the history of "poverty-core" fashion

I was immediately concerned

her thrust was the Consumptive Chic quasi-myth (ARGH NO BAD), but she followed it up with "women were literally taking poison to look like this." End Video.

thing is, if she was talking about what I think she was talking about. it IS an example of Poverty-Core! just a different, more commonplace kind of Poverty-Core!

in 1851, Johann Jakob von tschudi published an article in a Vienna medical journal documenting a village in Styria where the inhabitants took small, regular doses of arsenic. this practice, he claimed, made the women's complexions beautiful (in what way, he didn't specify). cue cosmetics companies in cities jumping on this idea and producing "arsenic complexion wafers"

this ad also specifies that the wafers are free of certain abortifacient herbs. just in case ladies think it's that kind of coded Female Irregularity ad. fascinating

note that these ads generally tout the product as "safe." the idea, not so foreign to us today, was that a tiny dose of a dangerous substance could have a beneficial effect. Botox, anyone?

...except not like Botox, exactly, because a Boston medical journal tested some popular brands in the 1870s and found that they were mostly dried lactose with no detectable arsenic. womp womp.

Oh For the Simple Country Life :3 was a really common kind of Poverty-Core in the 19th century! and it was being used to scam people into buying products they thought contained poison, with only a random ad's assurance that the products were safe! this Youtuber could EASILY have talked about that and been 100% factually correct!

so i do wonder if people really just can't see it very clearly, either, because if they could, they'd have to admit how much of their own lives are based on what is essentially the same sort of advertising bullshit without much, or any, real science behind it at all. and then they'd have to admit they're gullible, which seems today to be the worst thing one can be. not saying your youtuber fits into this category, but how many influencers and the like would.

like, how different is it really, getting this kind of 'advice' from a wellness influencer, than someone reading an account of a guy reporting that some place in styria has female villagers all taking small doses of arsenic to beautify themselves?

(via bsky)