#mxt answers

[mbta-official]

Chugga Chugga?

screech screech. bitch

[marshymeds]

Who is your favorite character from each of the 3 MXTS books?

This is…so hard 😭 I love so many characters. But I’ll try to pick some

TGCF: I’m gonna go with Shi Qingxuan. I love Xie Lian and Hua Cheng and…so many more but that feels like a boring answer

MDZS: Maybe one of the juniors? Jin Ling. I wish Lan Jingyi had more content. But Jin Ling is fun to draw

SVSSS: Shang Qinghua. Yeah this one wasn’t that hard 😭

[carmnyc]

NEW TODAY ON THE SKINCARMA BLOG! | MXT. AI-POWERED CUSTOM SKIN CARE MADE TO ORDER | Link in bio 👆🏼 _______________________________________________________ Hands down, this is the coolest custom skincare brand I’ve come across. Meet Mxt! The innovative brand was founded by a team of creatives and beauty industry professionals who sought an answer to this one simple question: “What if beauty products weren’t always in stock, but rather were custom made to consumers’ needs and specifications?” They found their answer in the AI-powered skin care brand they created to personalize products on-demand. Mxt. harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to offer more than 40 million possible formulations in a broad range of product forms — including serums, moisturizers, scrubs, mists and masks — each infused with hundreds of proven active ingredients like AHAs, antioxidant botanicals, vitamins, Retinol, peptides and even multiple forms of Hyaluronic Acid. With dozens of options for personalizing any formula with pro-skin health ingredients, your skin gets exactly what it needs. And nothing it doesn’t. Of course, no one knows your skin better than you do — and that’s where the true customization magic comes into play. How cool is it? Find out about my experience with Mxt. custom skin care on today’s new Skincarma Blog! Link in bio. ✅@mxt.co | Mxt. x Carmine Deep Hydration Fluid Treatment ✅@mxt.co | Mxt. x Carmine Ultra-Quenching Non-Foaming Cleanser ✅@mxt.co | Mxt. x Carmine Super Nourishing Vital Serum ✅@mxt.co | Mxt. x Carmine Luminous Clay Mask ✅@mxt.co | Mxt. x Carmine Ultra-Quenching Water _______________________________________________________ Check the Skincarma blog for smart product reviews & ingredient knowledge. I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Links in bio 👆🏼 🖤 SKINCARMA _______________________________________________________ . . . . . . . . . . #skincarma #menwhomask #customskincare #mxtcustom #justdoyou (at Fort Greene, Brooklyn) https://www.instagram.com/p/B00TTzVHqoz/?igshid=a9j2wiw7okk2

[oneweekoneband]

LIKE MY FATHER’S COME TO PASS: “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

I told myself I wasn’t going to write about grief in this letter, and especially not the first one.  But grief is selfish and greedy and its worst quality is the way it makes you like to it.  I have been trying to find a way to write around the hole my father left in my life since the day he died.  I have been looking for words that would come without forcing me to confront a howling absence.  They haven’t come.  Loss is like a black hole, and until you deal with it it will exercise the same level of gravity upon you as a black hole does until you are crushed within it.  I said that I look to letters to find honesty.  Well, here is my honest truth: it hurts.  It hurts so much that I am scared to look it in the face, still, even now.

I still don’t know who I am, this new, wilder beast rubbed raw against the edges of death’s implacable brutality.

I wrote these words over two years ago now, but they are as true today as they were then. Grief makes you strange to yourself. Grief re-orders your entire fucking world, and all it takes is an instant.

My father is dead. My father is dead. Six years have gone so fast and my father is still dead and he is always going to be dead, now, and I have no real better idea of how to deal with it than I did the day the call came and I broke a mug across the floor of my tiny London kitchen.

Billie Joe wrote this song about his father, who he lost even sooner than I lost mine. There’s no ordering of grief, no claim to a greater portion of it because your tragedy is somehow bigger or worse; we are all swallowed up in the force of it when it comes. But I got more time with my dad than Billie Joe did with his, at least. I am grateful for that.

What is grief? I have dedicated years of my life and considerable amounts of academic focus to that question. It’s not one that can be answered rationally, aside from “the yearning for something that is not there, will never be there again,” and that is not, will never be enough to explain the tiniest fraction of all that grief is, all that it does.

To turn to poetry, and music: 

Sappho says in the house of song there shall be no mourning, but all song is mourning. All shapes reflect absence; I have collected all the bits of soap, every trace that can still float, and strung them from the rafters. I am here with my flesh and my thoughts, trying to let go of you.

- Sina Queyras, from MxT

It took less than a year after my father’s death for people - well-meaning, kind people, who just wanted to see me get “better” - to start to ask me, gently, hesitantly, if maybe I needed to get over it. “Let go,” is the phrase they used.

But you don’t “get better” from grief, just like your loved one will never (unless they are a comic book character, I suppose) “get better” from death. Despite what our current, western, self-help and power-of-positive-thinking culture might like to believe, there are some things in life that simply can’t be fixed. Grief is one of them. The only thing you can do with grief is carry it, and learn how to live with your new weight.

I don’t know how to let go, anyways, not properly (David Foster Wallace: Everything I have ever let go of has claw marks on it.) and I wouldn’t even if I could. It would mean letting go of my father, too. Billie Joe, I think, understands this: Drenched in my pain again / Becoming who we are / As my memory rests / But never forgets what I lost / Wake me up when September ends.

Sara Ahmed, from The Cultural Politics of Emotion

When you suffer loss, the feeling isn’t actually of something going away from you; rather, it becomes something you have to carry with you - forever. You can’t fix it, you can’t get over it - because the only thing that would do so is the one thing that you cannot get back again, whether that be a person or a relationship or a stage of life or an innocence. Trauma recurs; we know this. It returns to you again and again and makes you relive it. Why are we so hesitant to admit that grief acts in a similar way? 

It comes down, I think, to our cultural fear of death. To grieve, openly, publicly, is to remind yourself and everyone else that we, too, will die. Any mention of death, in our culture, is a memento mori, and we do not want it. This is, aside from the somewhat clumsy political statement, why I think the official video for this song is something so unrelated to what the song is actually about. It’s a narrative that glancingly acknowledges the possibility of death, but does not solidify it - it blinks and looks away at the last second. This is what most people prefer to do.

So what do people like me, or Billie Joe, or others like us, do with the grief we have to carry?

To return to Anne Carson, who I mentioned yesterday:

Grief and rage–you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die.

from Grief Lessons

Over twenty years after his father died, Billie Joe wrote a song about it. Five years after mine died, I wrote a thesis. We put our separate griefs into the boxes afforded us with the tools we had at our disposal, and we let them play out.

It’s still there, still needs to be held, still heavier some days than others. But almost everything is easier to carry when you have a box to put it in.

- Jacqui // @sandovers

[mbta-official]

Mbta threesome when?

we’ll see

@mbta-unofficial @charlie-official thoughts?

[mbta-official]

How am I most likely to die if I take the green line?

well. my friend suggested hanging your severed head from the ceiling of the boylston station. i guess in their mind that's the most likely, but i disagree. cutting off the head and then putting it out in the open like that would be both impractical and unoriginal.

theyre right about one thing, though. boylston would be a good place to be killed. your screams would mingle with the screeches of the trains and the lighting is harsh but still manages to be dim.

anothing thing about boylston is that it has an old streetcar on display. if you were killed in some relatively non-destructive way, pcc 3295 has been graffiti-ed in a way that had to be from very close, so you could probably hide a body there. would be far more interesting to have a dead body in an unused fenced off streetcar, their limp silhouette visible through the window, than to just have a decapitated head hanging from the ceiling.

on the d line specfically, you intend to disembark at newton highlands or eliot, somehow miss not one but BOTH of them, and die slightly of embarrassment while waiting for a train going the other way because you know you'd get lost if you tried walkign from waban

[mbta-official]

what's the best stop?

newton highlands. not taking feedback

[mbta-official]

I work by an Amtrak station north of Boston and last night I saw the Downeaster, 697, that broke down north of Woburn during its southbound trip and was running 3 and a half hours late coming back up, being hauled back up here headed towards Brunswick by one of the T engines strapped onto the front end of it. Lemme tell you what, the experience of seeing an Amtrak engine, followed by a T engine, followed by a second Amtrak engine, followed by The Rest Of The Goddamn Downeaster, was an Experience and I thought you and @amtrak-official would get a kick out of it

that sounds like quite the sight. wish i couldve seen it

[mbta-official]

official tagging system of the mbta

#mbta official: anything actually related to the massachusetts bay transportation authority.

#mbta updates: informational posts relating to the mbta. when we say that itd be faster to crawl down the green line and such

#maintenance: posts related to the workings of this blog. like this post right here

#mapposting: posts having to do with the mbta maps

#[color] line: post related to that line of the t

#[letter] line: the green line thinks it's sooo special

#mattapan line: the red line also thinks it's special. but i forgive it because the streetcars r pretty cool actually

#mxt talks: posts with personal commentary

#mxt answers: asks tag

#rider commentary: used for asks/submissions/posts where other people talk

[carmnyc]

PREVIEW TOMORROW’S NEW SKINCARMA BLOG ARTICLE ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW | MXT. AI-POWERED CUSTOM SKIN CARE MADE TO ORDER | Link in bio 👆🏼 _______________________________________________________ Did I really spend $74 for a 1oz tube of cream? Yeah, that’s a lot. But the real question is whether the Drunk Elephant A-Passioni Retinol Cream is worth it. With a ridiculous 63 ingredients in the formula, you have to ask yourself why. Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that. 63 ingredients is borderline insane. A-Passioni is a very complex formula and it does work as intended. But I’m not sure DE has done a good job of marketing it well. They’ve been on this big kick over the last year recommending customers “cocktail” their products — blending A-Passioni with Protini moisturizer and B-Hydra serum, for instance. The point is to get people to buy into a DE regimen by buying more of their skin care. And this exact thing made @carolinehirons’ head explode in her blog 2 weeks ago. It’s completely unnecessary to layer this with anything. And it’s kinda crazy to formulate a 1% Retinol treatment with 62 other ingredients, too. That said, the stuff really does work. Though I prefer using a straight-up Retinol serum in my regimen, there’s something to say about a potent, well-rounded Retinol cream that does the trick. It’s best to think of A-Passioni as a powerful anti-aging cream that does all you need on its own. There are plenty of pricy anti-aging creams from La Mer, La Prairie, Chanel, Lancôme and Lauder that couldn’t even be remotely described as “anti-aging”. (Psst…most of their anti-aging clinicals come from a moisturizing benefit.) Look, I’ve used this a lot over the past 2 weeks — in fact, I used it 2 nights in a row and found it sensitizing like a good Retinol should be at first. It works. Period. No need to cocktail it with anything. I’m collaborating again today with Michael @skincare.product.ratings! Swipe left to see how he rates this product and read his insightful review on his page. ✅@drunkelephant | A-Passioni Retinol Cream _______________________________________________________ . . . . . . . . . . #skincarma #menwhomask #drunkelephant (at Fort Greene, Brooklyn) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0xy1hqnpms/?igshid=mqvz7ape57fx

[carmnyc]

CATCH THE REST OF MY SUMMER MOISTURIZER RECOS ALL THIS WEEK ON THE SKINCARMA BLOG | Link in bio 👆🏼 _______________________________________________________ Hands down, the most intriguing of the ten summer moisturizers I’ve been reviewing is the one I created myself! I didn’t do it alone, I had help — from the articifal intelligence technology at LA-based skincare brand Mxt. Mxt. was founded by a team of creatives and beauty industry professionals who asked themselves a simple question from the very beginning: “What if beauty products weren’t always in stock, but rather were custom made to consumers’ needs and specifications?” The answer to that question is in the AI-powered skincare brand they created in order to personalize skincare formulas on-demand. Mxt. claims to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence to offer more than 40 million possible product formulations in a broad range of product forms — including scrubs, serums, mists and masks as well as hundreds of state-of-the-art ingredients like AHAs, antioxidant botanicals, vitamins, Retinol, peptides and even multiple forms of Hyaluronic Acid. With dozens of options for adding pro-skin health ingredients to nearly any formula, skin gets exactly what it needs. No one knows your skin better than you. With the help of the Mxt. AI, I created my own Custom Mixed Deep Hydration Fluid Treatment. It’s the perfect moisturizer for my skin in the humid NYC summer heat. Read all about it on this week’s new Skincarma blog — and be sure to catch up on all my summer moisturizer recos. Link in bio!! ✅@mxt.co | Custom Mixed Deep Hydration Fluid Treatment _______________________________________________________ Check the Skincarma blog for smart product reviews and ingredient knowledge. I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Links in bio 👆🏼 🖤 SKINCARMA _______________________________________________________ • • • • #skincarma #menwhomask #laneige #mxtcustom #hanyul #clinique #kiehls (at Fort Greene, Brooklyn) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bzh850Tn2Uy/?igshid=k6zqzhzaazrn