#if this country was functional it'd be a nice place to live

[thefloatingstone]

for every big brand that you say either doesn't exist or isn't popular in south africa i feel like maybe life isn't so bad, maybe capitalist monopolies haven't englobed the entire earth, maybe i'm just in the wrong place to see the stars (not that the right place for me is south africa but you get it) shifts in perspective and not only america/europe exist in the world. Without the money to travel my second best choice is learning languages and see what those japanese comments under youtube videos have to say

That's actually such an interesting way of looking at it, but yeah totally!

Dude we don't have Amazon here... Or well I can order from Amazon if I REALLY want to pay an insane amount of shipping for them to use a private courier company and send it to me via Germany. But at that point it's not even Amazon any more. We don't have direct access to Amazon. We also don't get the Alexa here.

We do have Starbucks but by that I mean there is 2 in the city of Joburg and one is in the international lounge at the airport. And I think there's maybe 2 in Cape Town but that is IT.

In some cases it fucking sucks. When I needed to get me PS4 repaired I had to get an IT guy to help me because all the Sony representatives have left the country as we're no longer considered profitable to them.

We also don't have any form of public transport at all which considering the majority of the country don't have a car is... a problem.

But that's a different matter.

But yeah, a LOT of really massive American things just aren't here. No Amazon, no Wallmart (or Target or any of these big warehouse megastores) basically no Starbucks, No Taco Bell, no Subway, uh.... what else....

We do have a LOT of KFC because it's very popular here, and we have a lot of McDonalds because it's cheap food. We do have Burger King but they're not very common. (My nearest one is a 40 minute drive away).

[laureljacobs]

LAUREL JACOBS

full name: laurel jane jacobs

pronouns & gender: she/they, nonbinary

birthday & birthplace: november 19, 1984 (39); austin, tx

location: seabrook quarter

time in aurora bay: since november 2021

sexuality: lesbian

occupation: lawyer

@aurorabayaesthetic

about.

laurel was born in austin, texas, and she's country girl at heart even if she won't readily admit it. they've always got a patsy cline or dolly parton record going at home, but that's the extent of what they'll let other people see in terms of their southernness.

(alcoholism, neglect tw) her early home life was bad. her mom left at an early age and her dad was a functioning alcoholic who just worked, drank, and slept, and he just couldn't take care of her. they went into the foster system when they were six, after a CDC call when their neighbor noticed they was alone for more than 48 hours once. her dad got visitation and she spent the occasional weekend at home.

foster care wasn't good either. the homes were always underfunded and crowded, even when the parents did what they could. laurel learned quickly that there was a hierarchy in these places, and they learned to sleep with a metaphorical shiv under their pillow. they grew up with no sense of home or family, and it really fucked them up!

but she was always smart. unlike many of the kids around her, she stayed in school and focused on her work, cutting out any extra noise to do so. to cope, they just buried everything deep, deep down. she got into texas a&m for college, which wasn't her first choice, but she went for the in-state tuition. it's a party school, so they indulged occasionally and made a few friends for the first time ever, but they grinded all the while.

undergrad finished, and they went straight to law school — nyu, their first choice, which was also completely free and gave them a nice stipend, but they still took part time jobs through law school to chip away at their student debt. after getting her JD and passing the bar in new york, she got a job as public defender.

she stayed for a few years, until she was 28, but the work was starting to bog her down quickly. the complete lack of choice she had over who she represented often clashed with her morals, when she found herself advocating for people she knew were guilty of sometimes pretty heinous crimes.

so, with a good amount of money saved by then and nothing keeping her tied to new york, she quit, packed up her life, and moved to montana, specifically to the blackfeet nation, where her mother was from. they'd never known their mother, but they knew of their indigenous ancestry and had done a lot of their own reading into it. going there was a huge leap for them emotionally and spiritually, having spent almost 30 years feeling disconnected from any kind of heritage, but they eventually decided they could have a lot more to gain than to lose.

she settled in and opened a practice out of her home, though she was frequently working for pretty low pay or pro bono outright. she was sort of a one-stop shop because she was sometimes willing to work for free, able to flex a lot of different muscles outside of her speciality in criminal law.

they were there for a long time, almost ten years, and had really started to feel like they were making a life. they felt connected to the people and them and the land they were living on more than they ever had before, and life was quiet in a way it'd never been.

but then one day, laurel heard a knock on her door and answered it to someone who introduced themself as their half-sibling through their mother, and it was sort of comical how fast laurel ran. she'd managed to reconcile a lot of things with herself in her adulthood, but her relationship to her parents and her upbringing was never something she let herself confront.

they chose aurora bay basically by just putting their finger down blindly on a map, moved, took the bar in california, and quickly set up an office out of their home again, using some of the connections they'd made throughout their career to get contacts and clients early and get things moving from the get go. life's been quiet since then.

laurel is spiky, very slow to trust, and doesn't know how to take care of herself at all. they live in a big house in seabrook quarter that they maintain immaculately, has taken the batteries out of all of the smoke alarms so they can smoke inside, and has nothing but basics in their fridge. at her best, she's jocular and witty, and at her worst she's explosive.

family.

mother: minnie hudson (unknown)

father: jonah jacobs (estranged)

tidbits.

she's not very up front about her not-cis gender identity and use of mixed pronouns, but it's really because she has no interest in having a serious talk about her identity with everyone she meets, most of whom she doesn't really care to know past an initial conversation. if someone asks directly, laurel's happy to tell, and if they're ever in a situation where the need to be referring to themself in the third person, they'll switch out the pronouns. if others catch on, they catch on, but she's not incredibly pressed about it herself

a little bit of a jock, though she would never admit that. loves baseball and hockey, plays softball in a rec league like the little lesbian she is

(alcoholism tw) laurel has a complicated relationship to alcohol; on one hand, they know what it did to their father and know that being his child probably makes them predisposed to the same tendencies, but on the other they're entirely sure that they're different and smarter and actually they could stop whenever they wanted to.

connections.

ex-girlfriend of @katrinaxbeauford

close friend of/don't make her think too hard about it she'll have a crisis @margaretxalexander

went to high school in texas with @benj-hyun

bar regulars/frequent drunk debate partner w/ @clint-bennet

softball teammates w/ @cassidyxcooke

employed by @willxmeyers, @colexwalters

friend of @delilahcarreno

forever trying to steal @cricketcampbell away from her clients

foster kids who made it out alive club/avid shipper of @thewrenxharlow, @nomadjones

[3gremlins]

ngl i kind of love that ugg (style) boots are back in vogue (ish? they apparently were super in vogue in 2023 at least) like yes, you deserve a comfy ass slipper boot here in the 2020s! they look cute and they are comfy*!

*but they are not good for weather. like they are good for if you live in a place like socal (which is where the company was founded and presumably also like Australia, where the founders got the idea since sheepskin boots had been a thing there for awhile) where winters might get to 50 degrees F and are typically dry af. you can treat them with stuff to make them a little water resistant but they're still not really meant for serious Weather (rain, snow, that gross sludgy snow that's been hanging out in the road for days, etc) and they are also not really functional as a warm boot in very cold weather (like you'd actually want a real winter boot that's waterproof, with traction and shit). just like something to keep your feets cozy on cold floors or in cold houses.

related: growing up in new england, my mom and i were always so distraught at the fashion sold to the whole country that was literally only functional in southern california. like tiny skirts and cozy boots work when it's 50-70 F degrees out and perpetually sunny, but not so much when you've just had 8ft of snow in the space of a month, it's currently pelting down a "wintry mix" and it's 10 F degrees out lol. So much of why fashion didn't work for me as a teen clicked when I moved to socal lol, like "oh, these are the people/the place those clothes were for". (ofc also there's the gender stuff that factored in too) i'm sure there's something there about how applying niche fashion trends nationally is objectively terrible and also really flattening. I feel like it was a bigger issue in the 90s/early aughts with mall culture, but it might still be true (i'm sure there are and were still some niche trends, but it'd be nice if they were highlighted somehow? or if there was less of a monoculture push in the US at least). it is weird that a few fashion voices dictate "trends" for the whole country when different people/locations require different things from their clothes.