link to PDF
Excellent resource if you're new to sewing and want to start doing some clothing repair!
Professional seamstress here, who has taught intro to sewing many times, saying: this guide is excellent!
good info to have no matter what, but also super valuable in sustainability and punk scenes
For anyone who is in the position of caregiver to an abusive or formerly abusive elder: you may benefit from the book Your Turn For Care, which is the only book I've seen on this specific topic. I haven't finished it yet but what I've read is excellent.
It talks about how to make decisions in a situation where, yes, caring for someone in this kind of context is painful. It doesn't tell you what decisions to make, but it helps you understand how to balance self-protection with considerations like cultural expectations (which may be important to you even if they make things more difficult), compassion for the elder, and different financial situations.
Hi! Im Hank, also known as Pansy Leatherwork. I'm a fat, butch, tgurl leatherworker based out of Chicago. I started working with leather last June after working a retail position at a large leather shop in my city. One of the big things that led me to leave that job is how they thought they were making stuff that was inclusive to everyone but just frankly... weren't
Where was the stuff for the transsexuals, the fat bitches, the girlies getting paid $15/hr, the freaks that make up the actual communities I exist as part of?, the freaks like me? So I put in my two weeks, started doing phone sex again to cover my bills, and bought some tools and got to learning
Now, just under a year out, I'm genuinely astonished at how well my work has been received. I operate on sliding scale, even on my website, and getting to hear how my stuff gets used or seeing it in action genuinely fills me with an amount of joy I can't properly express.
If what I do seems interesting to you, you can check out my work at Pansy-Leatherwork.com or my Instagram, @pansy.leatherwork
Listen to me!!
I did not scroll back through 2 hours of posts just for you to ignore this.
These leather prices are great. Downright criminal even.
You see those beautiful, hand painted CUSTOM stamped collars? That shit would usually be EASILY 100 bucks
Do you know how insane that is??? Do you know how insane it is that that quality is available practically at cost if you’re struggling???
Pay as high as you can to make this something she can continue to do for others.
Job postings these days are like
Wanted: Virgin, with 3 years of sexual experience
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Re-blogging again because that comment fucking killed me
reminds me of that one story where a person ran across an add asking for five years experience in a particular code language. This person had helped create this particular code language, three years ago.
Whole swarms of companies are using "entry level" to mean "this is the lowest-level job in our company" rather than "you don't need any particular job experience or licensed skills to do this."
(Of course, they lie about that, too, because they will fucking put "entry level" on a divisional manger job; no, I don't know what the internal logic for that is.)
The good news for job seekers is: 90% of those "requirements" are bogus. They are listing the experience that they think fits "what this job needs, AFTER you learn how to do it."
Also it's illegal to require a degree for a job that doesn't specifically need it - turns out a lot of places were using "must have a 4-year degree" as a roundabout way of saying "we only want to hire white people" and that went to court and got slammed down. So now most of them say "Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience."
Most job listings are made by copying last year's job listing from a related department and editing the details as little as possible. Repeat for three generations of job openings and you wind up with a list of "requirements" that relate to six different departments.
The "skills/experience required" section is often used as "our fantasy hire has these" rather than "we won't speak to applicants who don't have these."
Ignore ALL of the experience/education required. Look over the list of actual job duties (if, sigh, you can figure them out... "grow revenue via enhanced customer service" tells you fuck-all about what you actually do on the job) and if you think you can do those - apply for the job. Don't lie about your experience, but be ready to answer questions with "no, I haven't worked as a [job title] before BUT I have done X in my job as a [different job title]."
Some of the requirement listings are legit. If they're looking for data analysts who are specialists in Tableau, you can't fake that with "I have poked around in spreadsheets and a bit of mysql." But if you can figure out what the job actually needs, and you have those skills - apply, regardless of whether you meet the checklist.
Maybe they'll learn to edit their job listings.
Two job-hunting resources that changed my life:
This cover letter post on askamanger.com. A job interview guide written by Alison Green, who runs askamanager.
Shout-out to @ms-demeanor for putting these on my dash again, I’d like to add this exceptional interview question “answer guide” that explains traps and “the best” way to answer over 64 common questions. I don’t know who to attribute it to, but here it is: PDF from tri valley one-stop career center.
Hey some of these answer templates helped J get an offer letter from her dream job; strongly recommend you read them if you’re job hunting
This is a great resource! I’m an interviewer (UK) and I would like to add my top tips.
1. Never be afraid to ask for a moment to collect your thoughts before answering a question. I want your true answer, I don’t want you to blurt out something on the spur of the moment and then worry about it later.
2. Try to ask a memorable question. When I got hired for my current position, one of the questions I asked was about the mental health support and practices at the company. Once I had been hired, they told me that they’d never had that question before and it made me stick in their mind - plus mental health support is something that’s very important to me.
3. Brag! Please brag about your accomplishments! I want to know about the things you’ve done and I have no way of knowing them unless you tell me. I need to know what you can bring to my team. Interviews are NOT the time to be modest or reticent. If you’ve done something relevant/ important/interesting, say it! This will also make you more memorable, even if it’s not directly relevant to the job. Tell me about your hobbies and show me your dedication to learning. The last question I always ask my interviewees is “is there anything you want to brag about that we’ve not already discussed?” (or some variation on the wording) because I know people will be reticent.
Hey kid you want a job?
Great get online and go to a job board. Indeed, Linkedin whatever. Now you're gonna search for a role that's in your city, fits your qualifications, and doesn't seem like a bad time.
See that easy apply button? Don't hit it they just throw those in the trash. Now you're gonna want to go to the company's website and check their careers page.
Oh? That job doesn't exist anymore. Cool go back to the job board and find another one.
Great you found another job, you're on the company's career page and the job exists!! So you're going to need to make an account on the career page website. They're using Workday, the same site as the last job you applied for? Who cares? You need to make another account for THIS job's workday page.
Now you're going to upload your resume. That'll autopopulate about 15 boxes with everything on your resume, except formatted wrong and with tons of errors. So just go through and painstakingly check the dates on all of that and rewrite everything you already laid out in an aesthetically pleasing format on your resume.
Ok time for the cover letter, explain why this specific job and company are deeply important to you. You love their mission statement and wouldn't even laugh if their ceo was gunned down in the street. You'll really want to reiterate the things you just spent the last 20 minutes filling out on the resume section
(Remember to include language from the job description, people who work in HR are lower than dogs and they need patterns or they get confused.) Write about a page, but hey don't sound too desperate or robotic this is where they judge your character!
Maybe add your portfolio site at the end here, who knows if that helps no one has ever clicked mine haha.
Anywayyy time to hit apply! Congrats! You'll see that confirmation email come in and you should be getting the rejection letter in about 2 weeks. Unfortunately your resume didn't have the right buzzwords and the AI auto rejected you :(
Time to start again and try not to kill yourself!
Listen to me
Listen very closely
The above is exactly why half of my friends come to me, and cry they're suffering, and I get to bestow my job hunting knowledge on them. I love this shit, it's a game.
For credentials my fastest job hunting time has been 1 week. I searched for 1 week, got an interview, and was hired within a week. My slowest was 1 month, while out of work, while telling ALL my interviewers that I quit my work without notice (I was testing my interviewers to see how shocked they'd get when I'd tell them why, anyone who wasn't shocked I would tell them at the end that I will keep them in mind (not)). My entire average is 2-3 weeks.
Firstly, what you're gunna do is pick a job sector. You're gunna pick a few of these by the end, but for now pick one. Maybe you wanna do bookkeeping, maybe you wanna do something in doggy daycare. Maybe you're a sous chef. Idk! Figure out what abouts you want first. Do not apply to anything yet. You're gunna look at the job description, I've picked out a few for bookkeepers below.
Now what you're gunna do is you're gunna look for "buzz words", or rather words that are gunna appear commonly and indicate the tone for that job. I've highlighted some, but not all in my examples below
Just look at that snout at how similar those descriptions are!
Now that you've got your buzzwords, you're gunna slap those babies into your resume! You see, since your resume is usually read by a computer first, you're gunna trick the computer into giving it to a person. Really what the computer is scanning for is how similar your resume is to the job description. Remember your bullet points, and to keep it short, try to only have 3 to 5 bullet points per job:
- Processed over 500 invoices a day in an efficient and accurate manner
- Curated reports for management review by utilizing available data
- Monitored and recorded over 100 submissions each day increasing accuracy by 50%
These are some great, made up examples I pulled from those buzz words. You might notice I added some numbers into there. That's something you'll wanna try and note for yourself, how much of something you can do, how accurate, how much efficiency you increased, these look GREAT when your resume gets past the computer and is moved in front of a real person.
Now you have your sector-based resume with lots of buzzwords. This is great! Now for the easy part. You're gunna channel your inner "IDGAF" And you're gunna send that to every listing you like on indeed. Filter for "Apply on Indeed" and spam that shit. Sometimes you gotta answer a few extra questions, but if they give me more than 5 quick questions I trash the submission and move on.
Don't waste your time jumping through hoops, streamline it for yourself and use the same methods companies are using. Push MASSIVE amounts of average quality resumes out. The more opportunities taken = the greater the chance of success. For every opportunity taken you've now pitched a chance of success, for every resume you cannot submit because you're piddling around on their stupid website or answering 50 interview questions online, you send out a 0% chance of success.
So go, try this, and see how it works for you.
Some additional things to consider:
- Add random shit in your resume, I added my "Board Game Club" (BDSM group) into my resume for hobbies and discussed how I got my start using sparklines there
- Never underestimate the flair of a little Clipart fleur-de-lis or something on your resume. Never put colored Clipart, but a little floral or swirl design located somewhere nice makes it stand out
- if you don't have a degree that doesn't mean they won't pick you, twice now I've come to a job without a bachelors and being honest that I was only getting an associates before I think of my next steps
- Embellish, do not lie. Jargoning your job description to make it sound cool and professional is GREAT. Do not give me a resume saying you can use CNC machinery when you've only used a 3D printer. Just tell me you know how to program and manage a 3d printer and want to learn CNC machinery.
- Keep. Your. Resume. To. Two. Or. Less. Pages. You don't need EVERY job, only the relevant ones, if your interviewer asks about the gap, tell them what job you had during that time (or if you wanna lie say you were taking college courses and were on a break, you dont need a degree to say you took courses) and that you only wanted to showcase the most relevant ones
- I'm serious on that last one I'll eat your fucking resume
This is called the "analog loophole" and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it. They can encrypt and copy-protect all they want, but eventually the file has to be sent to a speaker and/or screen, and it has to get there in a human-readable form because that's the whole dang point
The simplest way to exploit the analog loophole is just pointing a camera at a screen or a microphone at a speaker, but direct recording is also always possible and always will be. Anything that can be displayed can be saved and displayed again
Back in the day, people also used to share software over the radio with this technology. Because computer programs and files are really just sets of binary code, and that code can be turned into audio tones.
The resulting audio file can be played over the radio (sounding a bit like the old dial up noise, as it's just two quickly oscillating notes) and recorded to a cassette tape, which you can then give to your computer to "decode" back into 0's and 1's, which gives you the program file. You can then run it as if you'd installed it from a disk.
NPR did a very cool podcast about this.
Lads. We used to put phones on computer peripherals.
My pc can produce moans
I hate that I’m always trying to find cool biology themed stuff to wear but all the “nature inspired” clothing companies just have like two crossed arrows or a minimalistic mountain on a sweatshirt. Fucking lame, that’s barely even nature-adjacent. Put the life cycle of a salamander on a jacket, put hyena skeleton patterns on leggings, put a damn field guide of birds of prey on a peacoat and THEN you can have my money. Do NOT give me a shirt with a leaf on it that says “stay wild” or some bullshit I would much prefer clothing that broadcasts to everyone around me how many teeth an adult Jaguar has or how some pitcher plants can catch and digest rats.
recommendations from the notes :)
CM MENTION!!!!!! thanks so much :-)
here's a few more great nature themed small biz shops for you to check out!
MOTEL777 nature goodies with a cryptic twist
Curlworks cute critters with a hint of silly
Fossilforager especially good if you're a bug or amphibian fan
Quailtea Goods wide range of animal art including mythical ones!
Loonpflug specialty on plants and insects!
Come support some cool small businesses for your nature inspired shopping! 🌟🍁
the UK’s wildlife charities raise money by selling stuff!
this tweet has given me more motivation to stretch than any "it's good for you" post ever will
I want to recommend qigong, and particularly shifu Yan Xin's youtube channel. He has GREAT energy. Qigong especially is amazing for working your lungs and other core muscles, and it's low intensity so it's relatively easy to do. For someone like me that didn't start doing regular stretching until I was 30, it's a great way to begin!
Hiding government and public services to reduce how much they're used and "prove" that they're unneeded is a tried and true Republican technique. It's not a conspiracy, these things are deliberately made difficult to access to discourage people from using them because "more use = more funding" and "less use = less funding" is how public service funding is generally decided.
Musk outright lying about "deleting" a whole IRS program for low income tax filing is just a progression of common Republican tactics. Don't fall for it.
I can confirm that I filed using the irs direct file several days after Musk claimed it was gone. It's still there.
People have been fighting for this option for years, and while it's limited in many ways I found it easy to use and didn't require some random other company to have access to all my information.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/irs-direct-file-for-free
Important reminder:
These people are liars. Blatant. Bald-faced. Whenever they crow about a major victory, double check--they're liars and they can't be believed.
this tweet has given me more motivation to stretch than any "it's good for you" post ever will
I want to recommend qigong, and particularly shifu Yan Xin's youtube channel. He has GREAT energy. Qigong especially is amazing for working your lungs and other core muscles, and it's low intensity so it's relatively easy to do. For someone like me that didn't start doing regular stretching until I was 30, it's a great way to begin!
something you don't learn until you get really far into the making and tinkering life is that there's no such thing as "glue" really. there are so many kinds of substances that stick other substances together and they are all very different and if you just go look at the adhesives aisle in the hardware store the packaging never actually tells you anything useful. it's like "this is SUPER T-REX POWER GLUE" and the fine print says "good for use on wood metal and plastic". okay. but WHICH PLASTICS MY GOOD BITCH,
because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.
I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.
anyway. once you start learning how many kinds of sticking things together there are, the people at 3M start to seem like witches and I don't know if they're the kind we can trust with that level of arcane knowledge
Can I introduce you to one of the most useful sites from the early web? It’s thistothat.com and it tells you what kind of adhesives work to stick different types of substances together. It looks like it was designed in 1999 with some ads slapped over the top, because it was designed in 1999…. But like most things from the early web, it does what’s on the label: tells you how to stick this to that.
Arcane knowledge my ass, the internet used to be useful about shit.
Dudes healthcare is so fake. My ADHD meds are $940 without insurance. But they gave me a website of "coupons" which straight up looks like a scam website, and I got it today for $60! Just a coupon from a random website and it was $900 cheaper. America, I am confusion!! America explain!!
For all my uninsured judys out there it's for Walgreens only: walgreens.rxsense.com
as a pharmacy technician i can share with you some websites that give you those "coupons" for your meds!
goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you
some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!
if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too
good luck out there 👍
another one is singlecare.com, brought my duloxetine from $240 a month to $20
and there are coupons for hrt on there as well :) different options for different pharmacies
some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.
I couldn't remember the word "doorknob" ten minutes ago.
ok but the onelook thesaurus will save your life, i literally could not live without this website
REBLOG TO SAVE A WRITER'S LIFE
It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.
Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.
In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.
Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:
Gardening
Country/Rural Living:
Sewing/Mending:
Sustainability/Land Stewardship
Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"
Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.
These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!
