still thinking about the brainrot that fast fashion has caused in people, like i made this pair of pants that are black and white with a cool flowery design, and an acquaintance saw them and said "wow i'd pay like 20 dollars for you to make me a pair" and i could barely think with how utterly horrified i was at that; i told them that 20 dollars wouldn't even cover the materials, let alone the hours of work that went into cutting, sewing, ironing, hemming, altering, etc. they just had this look on their face when i told them that, when i said i wouldn't make them a pair for even 100 dollars because that was still way too low of an amount, a look that said "you're crazy for thinking that those cost 100 dollars" and maybe i am crazy but holy shit, 20 dollars for a pair of handmade, durable, lined pants fitted specifically to your measurements? 20 dollars for upwards of 60 hours of work? 20 dollars for several yards of high-quality fabric, thread, and buttons? 20 dollars???
okay tumblr’s exclusion from the twitter social media ban list is hilarious but genuinely we do not belong on there. if a real human person asks “where can i find you on social media” and your choice is a swift death or revealing your tumblr, most of us would simply expire. half of y’all change urls every week like you’re in witness protection. just imagine for one second attaching your wholeass government name to your latest two am clownposting and tell me that didn’t send a cold chill down your spine. the only place i ever want to see the words “connect with me on tumblr!” is on the ao3 profile of an author i’m actively stalking. anyone in the world can follow me except anyone i personally know. antisocial media.
decided i’m gonna get this printed as a poster and just hang it above my bed so each morning i can wake up feeling like a victim of medical malpractice
i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers
you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.
AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character
see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.
mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.
at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
there's something about butches reclaiming protectiveness and chivalry from an imposed "caring, nurturing" character associated and often forced upon women. something about how while straight men often try to present as careless as possible, masculinity and care are not only not conflicting in the butch identity, but inherent to it. there's something there.