Large Nerd™️

No credit is viewed as the same as bad credit. Which means you could be denied if you ever do need to rent an apartment or a car. Hospitals and clinics are also less likely to allow payment plan programs for people without good credit.

Think of it this way. You have a credit card, which is your credit tracking device. You use the card to tell someone “I will pay for this thing with borrowed money.” They agree to allow you to pay with borrowed money. You then turn around to your credit card company and say “Thank you for allowing me to borrow your money, I will now pay you back with my own money.” (which, if you repay them promptly enough, you can repay them the exact same amount you borrowed, rather than paying them more than you borrowed [which is what interest is])

The credit card company then recognizes that you successfully borrowed their money AND returned it safely, and they pass that information along to credit tracking companies. Each time you do this, you gain credibility. If you do this enough times, you are considered a credible borrower of money, so that if you ever are in a situation where you need to borrow a large sum of money (for example, a mortgage or a car or a hospital bill or whatever), companies with money will look at how well you have returned money in the past, and say Ah yes, this person repays their debts well, so we can lend them our money this time.

1. get your first baby credit card with the bank that you already bank with. If it has cashback rewards, even better (that’ll be free money later).

2. set that shit up so it pays the full amount, automatically, every month. you don’t have to remember to go home and pay it off, or worry about it at all. You won’t pay interest.

Your first card, especially if you have no credit, is going to have a small limit. Like $500. This is important: credit companies want you to use a certain percentage of the card every month. This is 1-9%. I usually just go straight 5%. If you use too much, you look like a wild card (even if you pay it off every month) and if you use nothing than you’re not proving to them you can be trusted.

So your first card has a $500 limit. 5% of 500 is $25.

Your goal is to use $25/month.

This is about a tank of gas for me. So once a month, I would fill up with this card, and then put it in the back of my wallet until next month. The payment was made automatically by my bank from one account (debit) to the other (credit). Rinse and repeat. I did this for a year.

Then after a year, my credit had skyrocketed (because I had nothing before, and added this good habit for a year). So I called up my bank and asked for them to increase my limit based on my new credit. I had shown them I was good at borrowing a good amount of money and paying it back on time every time.

The bank increased my limit to $5,500. Like holy shit, at the time I was definitely not expecting that.

So new math. 5% of 5500 is $225. So now instead of gas, I put my cell phone bill ($50), my car insurance ($130), and my dog food automatic order ($40) on it.

The best part is everything is automatic. I keep this card in the back of my wallet permanently; all these bills and the automatic payments are, well, automatic. My credit goes up, I rack up cash back rewards, there’s nothing to it.

And, if I ever get in an emergency, like a vet bill for one of my dogs, I can use that card to pay the $3,000 emergency bill without worrying about whether the place will take my dog if I have no money. I can then go home, change the settings from “pay in full every month” to “pay $X every month” (more than the minimum!) until it’s paid off, and then go back to just my bills. My credit might take a little dip during that time, but will bounce back pretty quickly.

There’s several other factors to credit (hit me up if you want more info) but this was literally the only measure I took for my first year, and my credit went from 525 to 700 in a year. Another year later, I’m now at 753, have a mortgage with a great rate, and can get a monster ass loan if I really need it in case an emergency or hard times fall.

a hard to read snippet from @ghostingtheinternet and others infamous monsterfucker debate, where we spent at least an hour if not longer just arguing about what counts as a monster

This new bill has been introduced in both the house and the Senate.

Among other things, it will:

Raise the monthly disability income by just over 30 percent - bringing it to poverty level.

Remove penalties for recieving financial help from friends and family.

Increase the amount of assets a disabled person may have from $2,000 to $10,000 (this hasn't been updated since 1989)

Update outside income restrictions to allow disabled people to receive up to $399 a month without reducing their benefits.

REWARD, not penalize, people who want to receive additional income while on social security income.

REMOVE THE MARRIAGE BAN YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT THIS WILL REMOVE THE MARRIAGE BAN

For those unaware current regulations do a lot to oppress disabled people. In fact marriage equality doesn't even extend to disbled people who risk having their benefits reduced or outright taken away if they marry someone. This means that in common law states disabled people can't even live with their significant other or they risk losing their financial independence.

Current regulations mean that if you're disbled you can't have so much as one penny over $2,000 to your name. So buying a car and gaining more independence or freedom is largely out of the question for disabled people.

Current regulations penalize social security recipients who receive income from outside sources, even if those sources are reimbursement. Did you get paid to babysit for a few hours? That's income, and you get your benefits reduced. Did you loan a friend $10 and they pay you back? The government considers that $10 income, and you get your benefits reduced.

These aren't mere anecdotes - these are all examples of actual things that have happened to disbled people I know, and if you have any disabled friends in your life I'm sure they can tell you the same stories.

I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.

but then this fucking shit happened. around 2015 is when it really kicked into high gear. “discoursers” or exclusionists or aphobes or however you want to refer to them consider asexuality to be a joke and that everyone who identifies as ace is a cringey cishet college-aged white girl who loves dr who. recycled biphobia, homophobia, and even terf rhetoric made its way into the mainstream tumblr conscious by reframing the arguments to target ace people (you’re only X because you’re ugly/can’t get laid; you aren’t part of the community if your partner is of a different gender; maybe something happened to you to make you this way; have you had your hormones checked?; by accepting this identity you are allowing the oppressor to infiltrate our spaces; etc.). you know, in case you think this is just about “snick snack” memes.

this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces. 

younger people are being discouraged from exploring the possibility of being asexual by exclusionists for reasons that vary from internalized homophobia to asexuality being a side effect of SSRIs. they are being told that they are “actually” something other than what they say they are, or that they are broken, or that they’re too young to know, or that our ace identity is simultaneously something that must be excruciatingly examined to determine its “cause” yet so irrelevant that it’s unworthy of discussion or representation—”nobody cares that you don’t want to have sex”. i WISH i had known about asexuality as a teenager, as a kid. I wish i had saved myself from so much grief, abuse, pain, and corrective rape by not subjecting myself to experiences that i hoped would “fix” me. 

and older people like me, who in the grand scheme of things is uhhh really not that much older than the majority of tumblr, are ridiculed for having a presence on tumblr in general, let alone as an asexual person. aces over 30? 40? 50? unicorns. conjured rhetoric. people straight-up don’t believe they exist. people ten years my junior attempt to deny and erase the lived history of aces by saying asexuality was “invented” only ten years ago. i have been terrified of attempting to enter Q* spaces irl because i have heard from even my IRL gay friends that aces do not belong, that “it’s not important enough to form an identity around”, that we are not oppressed enough or we just desperately want to be oppressed. 

i have only heard in passing of people much older than i am who are ace. i have absolutely zero examples to turn to of people like me continuing to live a long life or any evidence that i am worth loving unless i become a parent, which i don’t want to do. when you’re a teenager there’s more discussion about sexual boundaries, but what about dating in my 30s? what adult is going to be satisfied knowing i can never validate their sexual attraction, unless they were ace like me (less than 1% of the population)? am i forced to be alone forever? you can imagine how bleak my future feels. 

it pisses me off that i’m seen as a curmudgeon who “just doesn’t get the young people’s humor” when i have to beg people that i consider friends, for the eight billionth time, to stop making/reblogging jokes about how “cringey” aces are or are tongue-in-cheek declaring themselves to be aphobes, and then those people try to assuage me with respectability politics about how it’s about “THOSE” aces on tumblr and not, yknow, me, who is “one of the good ones”. and since the jokes themselves are so juvenile, it further compounds on the poor social graces and stoicism assumed of asexual people if I’m getting upset over ace war criminal moodboards or whatever the fuck. EVERY time i post about asexual ANYTHING on tumblr, to this day, i lose followers. without fail. people dont bat a lash when i spam 20 untagged posts in a row about a fandom they dont care about but i post two positive words about asexuality and theyre gone.

ASEXUALITY WAS NOT INVENTED BY TEENAGE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

For more information on sexual history read this http://wiki.asexuality.org/Asexual_history

Before aromanticism was used as a term there was non-limerant. Limerance described romantic attraction and so a non-linemerant person didn’t experience romantic attraction. It has a lot of similarities to aromanticism and it’s first documented appearance was in a book called ‘love and limerance’ published in 1979.

Aromanticism was also not invented by white girls on tumblr.

AROMANTICISM WAS NOT INVENTED BY WHITE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

I did know I needed this. But I never thought it would get me to tears. I never knew I needed it for me, to show to myself, to tell me it’s fine to be me.

This is why representation is important. This is why visibility is important.

Sometimes I see exclusionists shooting their mouths off about how the way you can tell aces aren’t oppressed is that our main need is for representation, that our positivity posts are about being valid.

And I’m just like… you have maybe temporarily forgotten what it is like to not see yourself reflected anywhere?? You maybe have been lucky enough to find people like you in history and in media before you came out?? Perhaps you are blissfully unaware that if you don’t have that kind of representation, the only messages you get are that you are a shitty gross broken person that doesn’t have any worth????? Possibly you do not know the effect of hearing that from both the straight and the “LGBT” communities at once??

I don’t know if anybody has studied this (I’m gonna find out!) but I would bet a lot of money that that stuff has a huge impact on health, and that it’s a big part of the reason that m-spec and a-spec people (including aros) have such incredibly high rates of things like suicidality.

One of them specifically came to Tumblr to be a resource for younger aces (the one in her late 40s) and left in horrified disgust over the level of direct, awful harassment she received.

We especially can’t escape when it’s purposefully flooded into our positivity tags. 

So: I am asexual. I hate it when people are actively working to shove us back into the closet and fracture our community when we have been acknowledged as existing since ancient times, and when we have had a term to name ourselves since the 1900s. 

This is our history, we have always been here, we will always be here. 

- sasha is terrible at doing makeup, so she always asks gertrude to help her out before institute holiday parties. she quickly realises that gertrude isn't much better, given her somewhat shaky hands, but continues asking because she wants to let the woman feel motherly for once

- once gertrude catches sasha moping over tim and gives her a 40-minute lecture about how she's too good for "that surfer boy"

- gertrude is constantly telling sasha to drink more milk in order to strengthen her bones. sasha does not understand why she is so concerned about this, and is slightly disturbed by the reminders

- one time when elias turns his back on sasha, she flips him off on instinct before realising gertrude is there. sasha IMMEDIATELY starts apologising for being unprofessional but gertrude just smiles and pats her on the back with a thumbs up

- sasha is the only archival assistant allowed to bring gertrude anything when she's out for a week with pneumonia, because gertrude is adamant that no one else know where she lives. secretly this is 90% because gertrude thinks sasha is the only one capable of using a microwave to heat up soup without killing herself

- sasha convinces gertrude to rap a verse on the institute's elias diss track. it is surprisingly well worded, but also really confusing? like, she rhymes "greasy little boner" with "body-hopping jonah" and when tim asks her why she would have mentioned jonah magnus she just rolls her eyes at him. it's actually the lyric that makes elias jam a letter opener into the wall, so the gang figures gertrude knew what she was doing

- sometimes when sasha is working late she hears weird cackles coming from gertrude's office, like someone is practicing? the first time it happened she went in to see if she was ok but it was just gertrude there poring over some statements so she just kinda ignores it

- gertrude unloads a bunch of old cardigans on sasha when she's doing spring cleaning one year. they are absolutely hideous but she feels obligated to wear them so she does

- everyone assumes that gertrude is really passionate about the institute, but when sasha starts going OFF about how elitist it is gertrude starts clapping, confusing everyone

- sasha gives gertrude some glasses chains once, half as a joke, but she wears them constantly afterwards. once she walks into her office to find her running a finger over them with a little smile on her face

- once when gertrude is particularly tired she rants to sasha for a good 30 minutes about how tea is technically soup. sasha is too shocked to argue

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.

they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.

the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.

if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.

and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.

but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.

This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.

Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain. 

“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior. 

This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad. 

Willamette Valley Dream Clinic

Yup! He’s been recording music for the episode on that screen, and well we don’t really get to see much but it’s cool to see them working on it!

“i am Martin Blackwood and I’m not lonely anymore - I am not lonely anymore!”

It’s Looking Back