#BUDGET BUY

[stil-lindigo]

Bisan is calling for another global strike!

I saw some posts just outlining Jan 21st, and wanted to clarify that Bisan has called for a full seven days of action.

What a global strike would look like is:

calling in sick to work

purchasing bare essentials ahead of the week so you can observe the general boycott of goods / buying as little as you genuinely can

putting in a concerted effort to elevate Palestinian voices and make it clear that this strike is in support of a permanent ceasefire!

For those who will have to purchase necessary goods during this time, please observe the brands that the BDS movement is asking us to boycott!

♢♢♢

Right now is also a good time to mention some better uses for your money during this week.

Available e-sims in Gaza are running low!!

Mirna El Helbawi and her team are working round the clock to continue to connect Palestinians as Israel does its best to cut them off from the rest of the world.

You can learn how to purchase and send e-sims here, and below you’ll find a list of what is currently needed (the areas in brackets indicate what region you should select to buy e-sims in).

--

CareforGaza is an organisation that does verifiably good work, distributing supplies directly to Palestinian families.

They have a Gofundme set up at the moment, but because of Gofundme’s poor track record regarding refusing to transfer funds to Palestinians, I’d recommend continuing to donate directly to their PayPal here.

Good luck to all of you. Don't turn away from Palestine!

[gotchibam]

Shiny Masquerain & Shiny Aggron ko-fi doodle for cyrus!

[livmondcole]

i miss him 😔

[pocketfullofsimshine]

really wish the build/buy that came with lovestruck was better :/ I love the little bit it came with, but cannot believe we didn't get any new items to make a proper traditional mexican kitchen

[emlan]

resellers if LoP had merc

[why-the-heck-not]

whiskey & writing this thesis bc the introduction chapter is taking more linguistical creativity than what I have with just caffeine (idk what to write in this without it sounding like a 3rd grader’s essay yikes)

[halfagony-halfhope]

proud owner of a darcy bust 😉

[foldingfittedsheets]

I am full of book woes.

I picked up The Midnight Lie because somehow it ended up in my library tag to check out. It was great, I liked the style a lot and I could clearly see it trending toward a sapphic train wreck ending, but it was a train wreck that made sense and was satisfying.

After the cliffhanger ending it was clear there’s another book to potentially straighten it all out. Turns out my library doesn’t have that one though. So I get to wait until I have spending money in a few weeks and buy it if I want to know what happens.

Then I got my hold for Clockwork Boys and devoured it but it’s four weeks out for the follow up to that one. Worried I’ll lose my momentum and forget details in the interim.

Book club is embarking on The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry next which I’m excited to reread but frustrated that I can’t finish either of the duologies I just read.

[bodhrancomedy]

Me: I do not need anymore t-shirts, I have so many I need to get rid of some because my crappy chest of drawers don’t fit very much in them.

Also me:

Hehoheha Professionals T-shirt

I also just realised I can get more duvet covers if I want to, and they can be nerdy.

[szaryherbatnik]

Im so bad at crafts but kremy has a tophat now :)))))

[hellenhighwater]

Hmm....how hard can large scale mosaic possibly be? I feel like my plans for the room I'm working on could use something really shiny and impactful and maybe I want to make a fold-down cutting table and maybe I want to do it out of mosaic, even though that will be ungodly heavy.

It's a fun idea. I'm not sure if it's a good idea.

I haven't done mosaic since a one-off high school art class but I feel like the component skills are ones I already have, sooooo....

I have been keeping to a blue and gold celestial theme for both my guest room and my art workspaces, because if and when I move those spaces are likely to be combined. Cutting table, even though it would be for a different room, falls in the same vein, so I'm thinking something with a nice dark night sky and maybe some branches or leaves...

[sunshineandlyrics]

🏷️ Harry as me when shopping 🛒

[57sfinest]

kim is such a funny little guy like he emphasizes how little the rcm salary is when you ask about it (5500 reál annually- 460/mo) but here he is with his nice electronic sports watch and his little instant camera and his fancy revolutionary cosplay for plainclothes and he's living in the GRIH which can't be cheap and he's got his fancy little mnemotechnique notebooks which are like the moleskine of elysium i guess and his fancy little ballpoints that he does NOT want to share with you which i bet is because they cost him like a week of salary. and this is the rcm he's not getting stipends for supplies or watches or housing or probably even the gas for the kineema. poor as fuck but he is going to buy himself his little treats god damn it. if he lived in our world you know he'd be out getting himself a $9 vanilla soy milk half caf dirty chai iced latte every morning on the way to the station and eating instant noodles every night to claw out room in the budget for it

[anime-moreanime-animeagain]

Just finished Ascendance of a Bookworm 4.6 and I am cackling! Poor Syl, Kars, and Ferdi 😂 Their responses were gold. The understandable ‘how?!’ and ‘why?!’ were a delight to read.

Also I can’t believe Rozemyne wrote her reports like that. Even if others are missing some details everyone else’s report seemed like a report. But Mynes? Why did hers read like a text to a friend at the end of the day? (Spoilers)

Hey bestie, had tea with the librarian today and she apparently lives here I am jellyyyy. Got a new book from the state over isn’t that great! Maybe we should send one to the prince too? Tootles

Like I cannot her reports and neither can they 😂 🤣

[cjgladback]

I went to my first fiber festival this past weekend! Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival; if I'm still in this state come June next year, I'll probably be back and would love to meet anybody else there. Socializing/hanging out/talking to people without feeling like I was obstructing Real Customers was the one thing I missed, though I didn't really get to any of the free lectures so maybe that's where I could've met some people. Since it was an unknown situation with a lot of people and nearly an hour drive each way, I strategized to make sure I'd go:

First day, I signed up for a couple volunteer shifts. Absolutely a recommended strategy.

Got to be helpful!

They happened to have goodie bags, to help me justify the gas and time (I now have a nice tape measure to replace the one that's been vacationing with a missing sewing kit for a couple years and a lasercut wood two-inch gauge window that might help me with consistency versus my suboptimal practice of just trying to knit perfect squares when swatching in pattern)

I got to learn things about the layout and schedule I wouldn't know to ask when answering questions and acting as a gofer -- especially true working two different locations

And of course, some people were pretty much guaranteed to be happy to see me!

Second day, I signed up for a workshop in the morning so I'd be there and able to shop for anything I needed at the end. Ombre yarn dyeing was the class! It's acid dyes, something I'm several years off from wanting to get into enough to commit to dedicated cookware, full pots of dye powder, etc. The room with the workshop was a barn that had plenty of outlets--but they did not represent plenty of breakers. So there weren't quite enough functional heating elements for the class to have sufficiently cooked our yarn before leaving, and I did need to risk a giant stock pot at home for three batches of four jars, almost-simmering in a water bath for thirty minutes each, of the yarn that hadn't proven it was done (all but the two palest greens). I was a little worried the delay/drawn out heat situation would affect the results but if it did it wasn't much; I got pretty much exactly what I was hoping for with my two color gradient and the single is great too!

The single dye gradient is the color Moss, which did some interesting things with the red portion separating out once they were heated. Every skein has redder blotches, so I'm not bothered about any inconsistency -- if anything it'll help my finished product camouflage stains. Though it was definitely a surprise for me and the other Moss user in the class when our first yarn to have exhausted the dye was the complementary color to what it went in as.

The two color gradient used Rhodamine Red on one end, which was one end of one of our instructor's samples where she chose a cool-green for the other end to show how multi-component dyes mix less predictably than most paint. (It was kinda like shading with markers where you can still see washes of the pink and green in what you squint at and call a grey-brown.) The other end was Cantaloupe, which was one of the maybe three colors she didn't have a sample cut of yarn for. But she described it as the flesh of a perfect ripe cantaloupe and obviously I had to see that, and it sounded like it would be fairly guaranteed to combine nicely with the magenta while being just enough around a bend in the color wheel to be interesting--warm orange versus cool pink. As I said, it turned out pretty much exactly as I was picturing. Not anticipated was how much the jars looked like they were full of some delicious dragonfruit-mango beverage. Were I still a barista I'd be trying to recreate this for my shift drink.

Image descriptions under the cut.

[ID: Five images following fourteen small skeins of sock yarn dyed in individual glass jars, in two gradients. One gradient is six skeins from a medium forest green through a pale creamy pink, the other is eight skeins from a vibrant yellow orange through an even more vibrant magenta. The first photo is inside under fluorescent lights, showing the 32oz glass canning jars with metal lids and rings, full of dye and yarn on a table at the end of the class in which they were filled and heated for a short time.

The next two images are animated gifs. The first gif is two frames showing the finished dye jars sitting in grass, with their yarn and with it removed. The green gradient left only transparent blue color in its jars, and most of the pink to orange gradient's water looks more orange without its yarn, aside from the third and fourth jars from the orange end, which shade toward a neon lilac with the peachy pink yarn removed. The second gif is a view of the inside of the bright green wash bucket, with just the pink-orange yarn in it, then all of them mixed up, all as they were after a soak with the rust-brown water, in the first rinse, and that rinse water alone showing its transparent but still brown tint.

The last two photos show the gradients lined up along a weathered wooden bench on the side of a deck. The first photo has the wet piles of yarn bundled in front of each of their respective jars with remaining dye. The final photo has the clean, dry yarn wound into center-pull balls and still vibrant in the direct sunlight. End ID]

[post-human-oddity]

i live in a walkable ish city, for the first time in my life

i just paid $7.50 for a coffee

the price of coffee has gone up has increased so much over the years (bc of inflation i don’t even think this was a particularly expensive coffee), and it would be easy to just make it at home for a fraction of the cost…

But also… for $7.50 (which is a lot of money when you are disabled level broke) I was able to:

- Leave my house

- Get 15 ish minutes of feel good movement, walking and learning to navigate my local area

- Engage with 3-4 community members, not even trying to socialize, just ones i’ll likely bump into the times i go out; thus helping to establish my place in an unfamiliar environment

- Achieve the sense of fulfillment that comes with independently carrying out a desire, engaging with the world, and feeling autonomous and capable

I don’t even like coffee. This was not about the coffee.

i could have also walked to the grocery store and spent $1 on a bagel, and checked likely all the same boxes. today i just chose to try a coffee shop, but as a broke person i have to over analyze the cost of things, which led me to philosophizing over this in a way i wouldn’t have had to if it was only $1..

which led me to the conclusion, as always, that you cannot budget your way out of systemic poverty, and you’re not a bad poor person for spending a couple extra dollars on something premade from a cafe