I had to make a crossover with X-Men. They all live in New York, Nightcrawler is halfway to looking like a gargoyle already, and canonically gets along great with them:
I’m feeling all bleh and bored and dissatisfied and it’s really wild because, like, when I feel like this the idea of doing something is so *itchy* and unattractive, but I’ve learned that what I need to do to get /out/ of the blehhh feeling is *one* thing. like, just pick something and do it and bam, I start feeling better. Even this, posting on tumblr, counts. I can read a chapter of a book (fanfiction does /not/ count for some reason, I think it’s the physicality of reading a book) or do a little sewing, or do the dishes, as long as it’s a task that has a clear goal. so like, figuring out how to sew a dress for my 3.5 inch catgirl bjd, that wouldn’t work. but sewing a seam on the dress/jumper I’ve been working on for the last month or so, that counts.
Restricting food Does Stuff To Your Brain. “Restricting” doesn’t mean stopping when you’re full. I feel like this is what gets misunderstood a lot. It means placing rules and limits on food that supercede what your body is signalling that it wants. Let’s use cookies as an example. Restricting would be:
- I can only have cookies when I deserve them.
- I can only have cookies when I’m alone.
- I can only have two cookies.
- I can only have low-calorie cookies.
- I can only have cookies on set days, or so-called cheat days.
- I can’t have cookies.
- I can’t have cookies in the house.
- I’m bad when I eat cookies.
- Cookies are a bad food and I must compensate for having eaten them.
Whether or not you stick to the restrictions you set, your brain is learning to be an anxious mess around cookies. It might want to avoid anywhere that has cookies. It might feel shame for wanting or eating cookies. It might get exhausted from suppressing the craving and decide to binge. It might go into binge mode every time you eat cookies because you’ve taught your body that This Will Not Be Available Whenever. It might feel ridiculously important to eat all the cookies while you can.
I know we’re all so used to constantly talking about food, diets, weight and bodies, and it’s completely normalised to look at absolutely everything you eat and assign it the level of guilt you’re gonna feel for eating it, and to brag about not eating this and that, and to announce that you know it’s a Naughty Indulgence when you eat anything sweet.
But oh my god, it’s such a huge weight off your shoulders to just let yourself eat cookies because you wanted cookies and stop when you feel satiated and know that the cookies will be available next time you want cookies because you don’t need to earn them in any way. Because a brain that knows it can have cookies whenever it wants cookies, doesn’t crave cookies all the time. Nor does it feel any self-loathing when it does crave cookies.
And I just wish everyone a very chill brain and some cookies
Seein’ too many Twitter refugees asking if they’ll get in trouble for saying “kill yourself” to people and while no, you’re not gonna get nuked from orbit, that is maybe something you just shouldn’t be doing in general perhaps?? Maybe telling people to kill themselves is bad actually?? Some of y'all are wild, why is the first thing you can think to ask on a new platform if you can send one of the worst kinds of harassment to people?? Grow tf up and learn how to use the block button. It’ll do wonders for your mood, trust me.
“kill yourself” isn’t a bannable offense but it is a dick move and not nearly as funny or witty as you think it is.
One time I told a girl “actually, suicide baiting ISNT funny, what the fuck?” And then all her friends suicide baited me because “Erm, we were talking about doing it to TERFS! You TRANSPHOBE!”
Then when someone informed her I was a trans woman she said, “Oh. Well she was annoying so its fine.”
ZERO thought for those around you. Dont be like that.
I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.
[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]
OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?
Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.
Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.
What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.
Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.
You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.
When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. Iwasplanning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.
Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.
It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!
I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.
Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.
Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.
@dollsahoy does the fabric guru mind weighing in on the benefits of this, if any? i found a bunch of how-tos but not much more
I’m afraid I don’t know anything about this process for regular clothes, sorry! 😅 (I’ve only used it for vintage feedsack fabric that had obviously shared quarters with a smoker at some point)
(but I am firmly on the side of “don’t use fabric softener ever, because what it does is coat the fabric with wax” and I suspect a lot of laundry stripping is dealing with that, too)
i think as adults it’s our responsibility to be nice to kids and treat them with the respect we wish we got at that age and im not kidding or exaggerating in the least
I feel very defensive about the “goth is bougie” shit because it is historically incorrect, yes, but also and more personally, because it just erases the generations of goth kids who grew up in trailer parks and project housing or just straight up homeless, helping each other out.
I suspect this may be the topic that draws me out of my torpor about updating the actual Gothic Charm School site, but some quick asides here:
The majority of goth fashion in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was DIY out of necessity. Even when there WERE pre-made goth clothes (Lip Service, Bogies, indie designers), most of us couldn’t afford them. Even basic goth staples like fishnets and black lipstick or nail polish weren’t available year-round. We waited until Halloween and cleared out the costume aisles of our local big-box retailers. A group of friends spent an evening pouring over the pages of the big fall fashion edition of Vogue that one of us bought so we could see what dark style clothing would be trickling down to the mall department stores so we could hit the clearance racks in January, or the thrift stores in March. We memorized the discount day schedule for thrift stores and bought wedding and prom dresses to hack apart and dye. We saved for shitty plastic-boned “corsets” from Frederick’s of Hollywood to wear over those hacked-apart dresses.
Goth, especially in the previous decades, was about getting whatever you could afford and figuring out how to make it spooky. Plain black leggings + thrift store or clearance black slip + layers of thrift store or clearance belts were a standard “goth uniform” for femme goths. Did we look amazing? No, not even half the time. But we took whatever we could afford and made it work as well as we could.
my birthday is soon and I have been trying not to let that convince me to spend money on silly things but when I saw this for $5 at the thrift store of course I got it
it’s 19" x 14"/ 48cm x 35cm (not including the hanging chain)
I left a few similar, but smaller, faux iron Halloween decor items behind, but one did have a Haunted Manor tag and a Marshall’s price tag
