What hasn't been talked about much on ILX?

One of my fave things about this place is that, having been around for so long and with so many different people having passed through, if you search for something there's usually at least a small discussion or two to be found. So I'm wondering, what haven't we covered much? I'm thinking larger topics, obviously you can find specific filmmakers or philosophers or writers or even musicians that haven't been mentioned.

I wanna say there's never been much science talk on ILX, but this may be confirmation bias as I'm not smart about that stuff and unlikely to click on thread for it much.

Also maybe sports not involving a ball, outside of olympics threads?

u.s. politics

Baseball

the wild west

Not much about crafty stuff. There must be some knitters, dress makers and hobby joiners here?

the possible environmental drawbacks of introducing penguins to the northern polar ice cap

Dan, true - and associated to that, I don't think there's ever been much chat about any of the pseudo-rustic hobbies that had a ressurgence in popularity this century, i.e. fermenting, beer brewing.

is there any gardening chat, really?

Tokyo rosemary used to post about knitting & crafting before she stopped posting :( xps

British TV plays and drama from the 70s and 80s (not the stuff from the "creepy vibe" thread, that's a different thing)

I guess most of the threads fall within a few categories:
- Opinions (as a natural extension of the music part: other arts, politics, state of the world)
- Humorous games / listing (something that the community is very good and creative about)
- Seeking help and sharing experiences (the community bonding and looking itself age)
For example there is not so much about mundane social media stuff like personal achievements, traveling (a few destinations aside), cooking, instruments. I guess there are a few things about skills and learning.

I wonder if the format of the board stops some topics being raised as some things are better discussed alongside pictures i.e. here’s the jumper I knitted or cake I made.

My understanding is that the site was, and perhaps still is, an offshoot of FreakyTrigger, a British music website, and that its initial clutch of participants were London-based hipster media types, or New York-based hipster media types. People who knew how to correctly rank the output of Dexys Midnight Runners, or who were broadly familiar with Japanese noise-rock.

Circa 1999 the only British people on the internet who mattered were London-based hipsters - web designers, writers, publicists, marketing types and the like - so they set the pattern for all the generations that followed. I was a "September that never ended" participant (almost literally so; I got on the internet in 1995, a year after the eternal September, and worked as a professional writer in the late 1990s, lagging behind the true hipster elite by a couple of years). I don't have access to Ilxor's numbers but I have the impression the majority of its participants have been around for a while and that it attracts a trickle of new entrants, but is otherwise fairly obscure. Dwarfed by the likes of RateYourMusic or DigitalSpy.

The late-90s internet also had computer nerds, but they didn't read FreakyTrigger, which is why there's very little about Rush or Linux. Did the average computer nerd circa 1999 know that Don't Stand Me Down was the best album of the 1980s? No, they did not. Furthermore there's a long, long history of writers pretending to be technically inept - I'm thinking of William Gibson and his typewriter - which is another reason why there's very little about computing or science. For you or I a laptop is a necessary evil and a content management system is an obstacle.

This is also why there's little coverage of sport. Circa the millennium it was fashionable to pretend to care about football, and only football, but that kind of thing now feels like a relic of the New Labour years. Politics is odd - in the late 1990s it was completely unfashionable to care about politics, because we had won! New Labour was in power. Politics was for flat, dull, literal people. Nowadays politics has made a comeback and is fashionable again, although only a narrow range of topics, and only as seasoning rather than a main course.

There's little about travel, because by the turn of the millennium half of Ilxor's participants had already widely travelled between London, New York, Tokyo, and Berlin, playing DJ sets on the way. We had already been to Machu Picchu, Cuba etc. My recollection from those days is that you were supposed to pretend to be bored with travel, because you'd already been everywhere. Or alternatively you had never left London or New York because there was nothing outside. There's very little about drugs or prostitutes, because although we're all free-thinking libertines we're not stupid enough to put that kind of thing out into the public record.

There's nothing about marriage and raising kids because long-term relationships are an admission of defeat. Look at sad little semi-detached suburban Mr Jones, going to bed at night with his wife in a house that he owns, occasionally going on holiday. What a sad failure of a man he is. When was the last time he threw up on a bus. The businessman, in his suit and tie etc.

The fact is that we are all eternally young, urbane hipsters living in London, with fashionable jobs during the week, and we party all weekend. Or alternatively we work as delivery drivers during the week and work overtime on the weekend, but we are in between fashionable jobs. Or we are working on a DJ set, or some kind of hip electronic music show involving circuit boards, and we are between fashionable jobs. Some of us have been temporarily in between fashionable jobs for twenty-five years.

And as mentioned passim we're now in our forties and fifties. Some of us are starting to wonder if it was all worth it. Some of us are starting to wonder, if we haven't already, what's going to happen if we don't die before we get old. We are aware of Vini Reilly living alone in a bedsit. Do you remember Johnny Rogan? He was a hipster of a slightly earlier generation. He knew all the right wines, metaphorically speaking, but he died alone in his flat and wasn't found for a fortnight.

???? I doubt anybody hanging out on this board in the year 2024 was ever a Nathan Barley type. We’re some of the least cool people ever. Also a lot of board members have kids.

yeah I don't think a single think in that post has been accurate for at least 20 years

"thing"

crafty stuff is a good call, although the repair thread has been getting bumped a lot

My understanding is that the site was, and perhaps still is, an offshoot of FreakyTrigger

I thought the site had some connection to Sinister, the Belle and Sebastian community? The origins were just slightly ahead of my time - I joined in 2002/3 - but already somewhat obscure even then.

Yes, Ashley's post is an admitidely charming portrayal that could only ever have applied to a minority within ILX even circa 2002.

ILX is good for travel! The Japan and Venice threads were recently helpful to me, and I hope I've helped others in the Portugal thread. The "try Glasgow more" thread was iconic enough that when I finally did try Glasgow this year that phrase was on repeat in my brain. The trouble is a lot of the travel threads are quite old and un-updated, so restaurant recs and the like are hopelessly out of date.

I remember some programming talk early on. Plus JW doing his best to cause as much chaos as possible to make threads impossible to load, which was its own version.

Footy threads have always been popular.

I remember following the collapse of Gordon Brown's government pretty much live on here. In the US of course politics are always super present and always apocalyptic - ILX saw 9/11, the Invasion of Iraq, the Dubbya years! And ofc those impacted on the UK a lot too.

Plenty of parenting threads. And in fact I think even in the early 00's some UK ILXors were already in very steady relationships, I can't think of many people further away from the idea of a hedonistic coke sniffing media class type than the creator of Fraky Trigger!

xp see also livejournal and usenet/alt.rec.music (all way before my time)

The baseball & basketball forums are some of the most active on here!

bullying

I've seen various discussions of drug use, but tbf nothing about use of prostitutes.

Oh, and the para about "there's nothing about raising kids (etc)" c'mon it's never been 1971 around here...

One dude admitted to visiting sex workers and it did not go well for him. Not ilx's finest hour, though he was iirc quite unpleasant.

I didn't agree with most of Ashley Pomeroy's post but I still enjoyed reading it.

Yes, it's got verve.

I've been here long enough to be in contention for being one of those hipsters, yeah sure. Not been to Tokyo, but possibly next year...

sex addiction issues in general are pretty much still a third rail even on 77, speaking of sex worker talk

third rail in what timespan, i mean what counts as addicted

is that a US term? u get electrocuted fyi

definitely US in origin but may have spread?

baby the first time i rail you its electric, the third time is something else

see it was a go at a joke about sex addiction

possibly not a very good one, who can even say at this stage

LOL <3

what counts as addicted

love u dude, so yeah trust me it was rough, I was lost, things are much better now, def don't feel like this is the place for it

prison reform

xp the third rail is a noun not a verb

lol LL

I feel like shakey had a prison-industrial complex thread? but yeah aside from the "abolish the police" thread not a ton

You do realize you killed that thread, right?

because at their base all addictions are alike, sexual addiction as a specific type is mostly of interest to sex addicts. when it comes to discussing the many aspects of addiction, both for the addict and those who must cope with the addict, ilx has a ton of discussion, but it tends to congregate around the more widespread types: alcohol & tobacco.

otoh, sex and allied interests even has its own board: ILTMI. Now that the bulk of us are aging with varying degrees of gracefulness, ILTMI has lost some of its allure.

I thought the site had some connection to Sinister, the Belle and Sebastian community?

Maybe not officially, there was just a lot of overlap of people. (Hi it me.)

There's a gardening thread somewhere but it's hard to post pics here so I don't.

Yes, every time I feel like posting a picture I first have to host it somewhere and then hope that I'm doing the bbcode right else everyone will laugh at me.

I had a good 12 years between last posting on Sinister and first posting on here, think maybe there is just a limited pool of people who want to chat about music on internet forums.

I don't see nearly enough cooking threads and recipe sharing here that's for sure

posting pics and memes has always been a weak point of this site

probably a lot of why i hang around here

i was on rym first but it skews young. in 2007, when i started using rym, i was already 31. by 2011, about the time i stopped being too scared of being smacked down by one of the infinitely more knowledgeable and mature posters here to actually start posting, i was 35. i can't possibly relate to rym's message boards and the post-/mu/ diaspora, and despite my classic rock nerd origins i'm categorically unfit for sh.tv. ilx was maturing out of its "edgy hipster" era just as i was maturing out of mine. i was settling down, getting married, trying to make a go of the straight life. i wasn't good at it. ilx was the closest i got. it's not very close.

i don't understand any of the stuff ashley pomeroy is saying. i almost want to take it as a troll. the ilx i know is happy to talk about sport, though mostly american. the ilx i know has very popular threads about marriage, raising kids, divorce. the ilx i know was _always_ deeply political.

it's true that there's not a lot of linux nerd stuff. the stuff i see people around me talking about that i don't see people talking about here? i don't know, warhammer? did folks here talk about homestuck?

y'all are super literate. i'm starting to realize that while i can write decently well, i can't read anymore worth a fig. which is a problem because you kind of need to be able to read in order to edit. like, it's proportionate, right? a lot of the original crew were rock critics of some distinction, and so folks here are both literate and critical - really good at both. i appreciate that about this place. other places don't have that as much.

regarding whats not talked about much on ilx, i can't really say that with a lot of authority. because if i was interested in it, i'd talk about it. there just aren't a lot of people here under about 35. a lot of places i go these days, i'm the oldest person there. that's not the case here.

i don't remember johnny rogan. i remember richard brautigan, who is similarly fabled to have died alone and not been found for weeks. the actual story is a distortion. he had friends, friends who were worried about them, but he literally had a habit of putting up death traps around his place to dissuade people from trying to help him. if i die alone, it won't be because i know who vini reilly is.

i'm a traumatized queer on a messageboard that, 25 years ago, would've thrown me out on my ear. now, i think of folks here as my people, more or less, even though i'm a relative latecomer. when i look at that generation, _my_ generation, i do see a Dramatic Crossroads, of sorts. this week i read someone asking "whatever happened to (respected former poster)?" turned out said poster flamed out in a fireball of antisemitism, throwing in a few barbs at "gender ideology" on their way out.

if figure most of the people who were going to burn out, like (respected former poster), have burned out already. i guess you could choose to see this as a long fadeaway, but i don't. i'm not planning on dying anytime soon, which is pretty much a first for me. folks here, i figure most of us reached a Dramatic Crossroads of some sort and decided to head more or less the same way. or maybe we just started heading that way a long time ago, without really much thinking about where we were going.

anyway, i figure the stuff that doesn't get talked about much here is, for the most part, stuff that folks here don't particularly want to talk about. what do i talk about that i don't talk about here? well, i talk a lot more about kink other places. i talk, believe it or not, a lot more about trans stuff other places. yeah. i _know_. that's about goddamn it, though. that's dwarfed by the list of things i talk about here that i don't talk about anywhere else.

There’s a whole board devoted to cooking!

Kate, the generational make up is a good point - not much discussion here about streamers, discussion of youtubers usually accompanied by some level of "this stuff is embarassing"

warhammer not mentioned much, though there are threads for AD&D, board games, etc.

"a British music website, and that its initial clutch of participants were London-based hipster media types, or New York-based hipster media types."

And DJ Martian too.

Also Tokyo (Momus)

It used to be much easier to share photos! Now you have to use Imgur or somesuch, bleh.

xp yeah pretty much all the millennial and younger nerd hobbies are underrepresented here, lots of gaming subculture stuff, even just video games in general the board here is pretty low traffic compared to any other online community, manga and anime, livestreaming and video 'content creators' etc.

i wouldn't have it any other way tbh, i'm into some of that stuff but have other more suited places to talk about it whereas those places aren't half as insightful on music or books or movies as here.

Yeah the oblivious Gen Xer vibe is a plus point at this stage

lol I've been half-tempted to say 'new music'

voting

I first posted in 03, possibly a few years already into my lurking.

Ilx feels a bit like Montaigne’s Essays: it hasn’t gotten round to covering every topic under the sun, but any one of those to-date neglected topics could be up next, just around the corner.

I got round to listening to Durutti Column's debut alb this week and then I open ilx and read Ashley's post mentioning Vini Reilly. New music!

our general disdain for the youth YouTubers and whatnot will eventually, if it hasn't already, make us look like sh.tv to the younger crowd coming up. but they have Reddit, where every thought sinks without a trace into the ocean of sound-alike thoughts and upvotes.

There hasn't been much discussion - AFAIK - on the private 'inner world' of daydreaming, and in particular immersive and maladaptive daydreaming....

This article ‘I just go into my head and enjoy it’: the people who can’t stop daydreaming cites a figure that "...about 2.5% of the population met the criteria for maladaptive daydreaming. That’s one in 40 people, which would mean that the condition is more common than anorexia nervosa or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and similar in prevalence to generalised anxiety disorder.

Things we like

a lot of the original crew were rock critics of some distinction

Then there was me, ho ho ho, but I kid etc. (In re Ashley's separate post, I was in Orange County being a library worker and so was away from the Centers of Hipness or whatever.)

As for the subject...I dunno, stamp collecting maybe?

speaking of Ashley Pomeroy, i did briefly consider starting an *Ask Ashley Pomeroy* thread after reading this post:

"It could be worse. A certain kind of British music writer of the 1990s would have followed the opening sentence ("I recently came across Eminem’s Hall of Fame induction speech by Dr. Dre") with "and then I wiped it up" or something like that.

Having skimmed through the article, the writing just comes across as flat and dull. I had no desire to engage with it deeply. It has the curious teenage habit of simultaneously trying to be impactful and assertive, but without attracting too much attention, as if the writer was scared. It reminded me of those indie bands from the 1990s who split up the moment their single got to number 37, because they couldn't stand the pressure. If you want to be a writer you have to be prepared to end up with blood on your hands.

More importantly I don't detect a distinctive individual voice, so what's the point? My own writing is immediately identifiable because I have a distinctive, original voice. I present myself as a crazed, fascistic demagogue delivering a sermon to a crowd of mice - a gross exaggeration of my actual personality, obsessed with pop trivia rather than the union of corporate power and the state. I skirt as close as I can to the style of fascism without actually being offensive because I am at heart a good egg. Whether you love or merely adore my writing, it is at the very least distinctive.

You know, I remember reading about Harry Harlow. He was a scientist who separated tiny little monkeys from their mothers and made them suckle from a wire monkey doll covered in cloth. In doing so he demonstrated that love is not real. It's just that we crave cloth. We love to feel cloth. There was something sadistic about Harlow's experiments. But also hilarious, because he was such an unrepentant misanthrope. And that is my goal as a writer. That is why I cover myself in cloth. Because, over time, the population of this planet will learn to stroke my cloth and also suckle from me. And not the other mothers. Only me.

Ultimately people want to be entertained. All of life is entertainment. Writing is entertainment. The article linked above is dull. It's not entertaining. It didn't entertain me. It didn't even make me angry. And it didn't encourage me to read anything else by the writer. No! I do not want to suckle from that man's teat. Not that man. Or from that woman's teat, because this is 2024 and we can all suckle from women's teats now. Not just men.

At this point the next message will probably be "jesus fucking christ", to which my responses are I admit that, yes, remember the cloth, and remember the cloth in that order."

The sociology and psychology of fandom and specific fandoms seems relatively underdiscussed, quickly dismissed with a lol when it does come up. I haven't done an extensive archive search to back this up.

I present myself as a crazed, fascistic demagogue delivering a sermon to a crowd of mice

^love this.

and that’s almost the opposite of your persona on ilx, scott…. but I suspect you know that

Comic books. I know there's an entire board devoted to them, but it never seems that more than the same 5 or so people post to it and mostly on the rolling reads thread.

Art in general (painting, sculpture, photography). I can't remember the name of the poster years ago who used to have great threads/posts on art, but in recent years I can't think of anything aside from stuff like the jokey "favorite painting" poll.

Point me in the right direction if I'm missing something, but neither of these seems to receive the same amount of attention that films or books receive.

ILComics used to have a decent cadre of regulars but yes it's pretty decimated now. One problem for me is I really can't be arsed with DC and Marvel for the most part now and that's the stuff most likely to gather discussion.

Certain types of Western philosophy have been ignored. A lot of ancient stuff (including Aristotle!), medieval theology, pragmatism (James, Dewey, Peirce), and “optimistic” philosophers such as Habermas. In general ilx is into the “cool ones”, who tend to skew post-Kant and continental.

Knowing the creature that ilx has evolved into, I'm guessing that any discussion of pre-Kantian philosophic systems would quickly become a list of podcasts.

jfc scott - have that ciggie

wait why what did i do?

Oh - my misread i think. Carry on - don’t touch that cigarette

oh you thought i wrote that? haha!

no, i was just intrigued after reading that post originally. not being familiar with the Pomeroy legacy on ILX.

Cigarettes for all! *smokes eighteen packs at once, dies*

oh you thought i wrote that? haha!

i did as well, and it made no sense coming from you!

no, that's AP writing on the worst music writing thread on ilm. i definitely did a double-take when i first read it!

My minor contributions to the galaxy of late nineties techno have remained completely undiscussed

long-time suckler at ap's teat here, hi

an ask ashley pomeroy thread would be delightful if he would deign to bare a boob for us

The sociology and psychology of fandom and specific fandoms seems relatively underdiscussed, quickly dismissed with a lol when it does come up. I haven't done an extensive archive search to back this up.

― Ippei's on a bummer now (WmC)

well it's a topic of tremendous interest to me; given the time and opportunity, i'd talk someone's ear off about it.

regarding pomeroy's post... i think it's good that he has a concept of his own narrative voice.

It's just that we crave cloth. We love to feel cloth. There was something sadistic about Harlow's experiments.

hmmm. one of the things that definitely connects to me as an autistic person is how things _feel_. different sorts of fabric, different textures... when i was an infant, i had these big cardboard books where that was part of it, but i guess maybe we're supposed to grow out of it. we're supposed to stop being fascinated. and i never did.

when i was younger, i did the... you know, the Angry Nerd thing, those sort of jeremiads. loved them. fire and brimstone. these days i talk like some old unitarian, "everything i need to know i learned in kindergarten".

There hasn't been much discussion - AFAIK - on the private 'inner world' of daydreaming, and in particular immersive and maladaptive daydreaming....

This article ‘I just go into my head and enjoy it’: the people who can’t stop daydreaming cites a figure that "...about 2.5% of the population met the criteria for maladaptive daydreaming. That’s one in 40 people, which would mean that the condition is more common than anorexia nervosa or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and similar in prevalence to generalised anxiety disorder.

― Bob Six

well, i have opinions, that's something you can say about me, i have lots of opinions. and my opinion is: "maladaptive daydreaming", pish tosh! first off, it's not anything new. maybe people these days don't remember walter mitty, i don't know. i do... i do spent a great deal of time in my own private world, like tommy westphall and his snowglobe. i mean i also... i never read "der blechtrommel", i just like the way it sounds, but whence this urge to pathologize non-conformity? give me an option, you know? give me a reason to engage with the world as it is today. i mean, science reporting being what it is, i must assume there's more going on than what's reported here. for instance, they talk about people's reactions at the beginning of covid, well, have they adjusted for the various circumstances under which people went through covid? like, maybe people who daydreamed less had an environment that gave them support, that engaged them, that rooted them in the everyday, and maybe some people who daydreamed a lot... i daydreamed a lot, and i was isolated in a house and i never saw anyone in the flesh except for my abusive partner. i feel like it's kinda understandable to want to escape that reality.

i still daydream a lot, i still have a lot of fantasies, and i don't write them down, for the most part, because there's little opportunity to communicate them. the things i think about are often esoteric and niche, things i can't talk to other people about, so i have conversations in my own head, because most people don't know about or aren't interested in the things that interest me. and i can see the framing of that as "maladaptive" because yes i do struggle with doing the things i'm _supposed_ to do instead of building worlds in my head. the stuff i'm _supposed_ to do... there are a lot of demands on me, and not a lot of support. a lot of criticism, not a lot of affirmation. if the only way i can feel good is to live inside my own head, i will. COVID just made that more acute. i was talking with someone recently... nobody talks about how _lonely_ people are. how _lonely_ we all are. how starved for touch so many of us are. i am, i certainly am, and, well, it's hard for me to reach out. there aren't a lot of safe places for me, places where i can work to build mutual trust with other people. even in as big and bustling a city as this, i'm often alone, alone and staggering under a burden of responsibility that's beyond my capacity to fulfill.

i work very hard to adapt to my circumstances in an emotionally healthy way. daydreaming? daydreaming is the least of my fucking concerns.

an ask ashley pomeroy thread would be delightful if he would deign to bare a boob for us

― he/him hoo-hah (map)

apropos of nothing i would like to complain about how small my nipples are. i would very much like to have larger nipples.

whence this urge to pathologize non-conformity?

a fucking men

kate i'm sure your nips are as generous as cornucopias

kate i'm sure your nips are as generous as cornucopias

― he/him hoo-hah (map)

well nsfw/kink i can't find a set of clamps i can keep on them for any length of time, they keep falling off, i know there are alternatives i could try that have been mentioned to me and i guess it's not a priority for me right now, people interest me more than clamps. it's just something i complain about occasionally.

I did read that article so feel free to dismiss this out of hand, but “maladaptive daydreaming” sounds more like a symptom of depression or OCD or something rather than a condition itself. It also sounds like one those things where capitalism (sorry go ahead and post on trenchant social commentary) pathologizes/demonizes plain old harmless human behavior that just happens to not be “productive” in capital terms or whatever.

lol sorry, I meant I didn’t read that article.

neither did i, i was too busy maladaptively daydreaming. about how most anxiety and depression stems from untreated trauma.

something that hasn't been talked about very much on ilx is fitness or physical culture. there's the sw0le thread, which is rarely updated now. no discussion afaict about personal training as a job. if i make the career switch i'll start one of those threads that doubles as an experience journal.

speaking of sex work and experience journals, i started a thread about my own experience being a rentboy for 3-4 months back in .. i think it was 2018. but i can't remember what the hell the thread was called. i'm almost scared to ask if anyone else remembers it and/or wants to link to it. that was kind of a rough time for me.

the sex work itself was overall pretty mellow and ho hum. i came away from it believing that it can be a good option for some people if they have the right personality (i don't).

there are parenting threads, (the politics of...) abortion threads and a parenting board but not enough discussion of pregnancy/miscarriage, I realised recently. though it's not surprising since people with uteruses have always been a minority here, and even more so now than when I first joined ilx two decades ago.
 
I had a miscarriage last year and am pregnant again now and genuinely found better/more helpful discussions for both on reddit. i don't think i even mentioned my miscarriage on here, as there wasn't a dedicated thread for it (and i wasn't in the headspace to start one).

Roz i'm so sorry for your loss

thanks NV <3

My then-wife and I went through a miscarriage between our two kids. I was surprised that probably the majority of people I talked to who'd been through their kid-having stage said they had experienced this too, and felt sad that nobody ever speaks about it. It's such a tough thing to bounce back from and that's made worse by feeling you're alone in it, or should be reluctant to talk about it. I'm glad you're pregnant again and I hope you're agree with the idea that it wasn't meant to be, generally it's a way of preventing a non-viable pregnancy from threatening the mother. That's how I chose to see it - that the embryo wouldn't have become a healthy child even if the miscarriage hadn't happened.
I hope that doesn't sound unsympathetic because I know that even with the most hardheaded rationalist take, it's still something anticipated with joy and love, which is suddenly gone. I'm glad you found support even if it wasn't here.

Really sorry for your loss, Roz.

Really sorry to hear that, Roz. Wishing you the best with your pregnancy.

Very sorry to hear that Roz.

Agreed that pregnancy isn't discussed much here, outside of joyful announcements. Lotta people in my social circle currently coming to terms with infertility, too (myself included).

Oh Roz, so sorry to hear that, I hope all the best for you with your current pregnancy.

By the way, LOL @ that Ashley Pomeroy post, what a load of pish! I wasn't on ILX at the beginning but I met a lot of the original crew at various FAPs and if they were hipsters then they weren't exactly the hippest of hipsters, to say the least! Frankly though the minute anyone uses the term "hipster" the shutters come down.

very sorry to hear this Roz and hoping all the best for you

My mental image of old school London ilxors is more "amiable thirtysomethings who talk about the moomins a lot".

Really sorry, Roz.
I have stepped back a lot from posting anything in earnest on here for a while. I think various issues to do with having a uterus have increased a certain kind of anxiety in me to the point where it's not worth the fear I get from taking people to task about the displays of misogyny I've come across on here, so leave them all to it. I mean, if at this point, you (not you) can't look at what you've posted, or how you've laughed at women, and see it for yourself then you're not going to absorb anything from a random messageboard person.

Bestest of luck with your pregnancy and baby!

(That wasn't meant to be a 'poor me' post, just noting that how I engage with Online Discussion Communities has changed)

thank you all! and apols, responding to many posts here.

very sorry for your loss too, matttkkkk. it's true that it's not talked about enough (here or irl) considering how common it is. 1 in 20 if you're above 35, and higher as you get older.

i admit that as horrible as it was, it did clarify a lot of things for me and my partner: mainly, how much we both did actually want a child, after many years of ambivalence (I have a stepdaughter but this was our first pregnancy after almost a decade together). also, even though we live in a Muslim country where abortions are illegal, it has fairly reasonable and clear policies on dealing with unviable pregnancies which made feel weirdly grateful and appreciative (reddit, like ILX, is US-centric so it was simultaneously heartbreaking and rage-inducing to read stories of how much more difficult it can be for women to miscarry elsewhere…)

Daniel_rf, I’m sorry you’re dealing with infertility issues too. This is maybe not helpful but there are a lot more options to consider these days if you’re looking for a solution - my partner and I did manage to conceive naturally but given our respective ages, it was something we were looking at previously as well.

totally get that too kinder and it’s partly why i didn’t bother posting about it in the end - was just not in the right frame of mind to be dealing with all that.

anyway, didn’t mean to derail the thread - mostly just musing on something that I had noticed was missing from ilx discussions lately. carry on… AP’s post was indeed both excellent and LOL, and I do wish there was more talk about fandom, stan culture and art in general round here.

Sorry for your loss, Roz and Matt, and best of luck, Roz. We went out at the weekend to see a new baby whose parents had previously had a nightmare in this area - I realise that's little comfort, though.

I'm not sure if Ashley Pomeroy's first post here was 'a bit' or not - if not there might be more errors than words. Apart from anything else, the engine of early ILX was the same as the engine of the entire internet in the early 2000s - bored office workers.

Wow, that is so weird to be consoled on my loss, I guess I just smoothed it over with the kind of self talk I wrote above to the point where I never felt anything more about it. It was 20 years ago, which seems absurd, but my kids are 18 and 22 now so it must be.
Ros I love that it crystallised your hope for a child - it seems like a great start in life to be so wanted. I hope you will step up your self care around the birth, it can be easy to put that aside in the face of more obvious needs but it is essential you have good support. We should revive some of the parenting threads.

I am deeply sorry for those who miscarried. My wife and I went through a couple, one of which was stillborn at 20 weeks. She has a name and our two other children know about her as well though they can’t really understand completely. It’s been almost eight years so I’m definitely able to discuss if anyone found it helpful. There’s a ton to unpack - understanding how your partner mourns and the (usually) unhelpful advice from friends and family

It also sounds like one those things where capitalism (sorry go ahead and post on trenchant social commentary) pathologizes/demonizes plain old harmless human behavior that just happens to not be “productive” in capital terms or whatever.

― brimstead, Sunday, August 25, 2024 11:44 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I spent a lot of enforced time alone, being bored, as a kid, and a think that drove me to an inner world where I could make things happen that resolved my unresolved emotions & tensions. As I got older I still used it for salving grief, nerves, anger, & generally self-calming. It slipped away from me somewhere as I grew up, and chiefly as I found other outlets for my feelings and/or had the agency to control more of my life so I didn't have to disassociate to cope. Seemed helpful at the time, and slowly course-corrected itself when irl life offered something better and realer. I kinda think the larger problem that offers more spacious and generative possibilities is why are people in contexts where waking life has nothing to offer?

I see Kate said basically the same thing actually. One of these days I'll more than skim a thread (but not today).

100%. the wildly electric color and texture of dreams is what made me want to live in them when i was growing up. i feel like so many people are in heavy denial about how punitive and meager our culture is. i imagine pathologizing daydreaming is just another twist of the knife when carried out in a certain anxiety-driven way. also i love the idea that our dreams are there to be realized. they point us to a better life.

our dreams are there to be realized. they point us to a better life

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well fuk

uh huh

❤ ❤ ❤ to Roz and Matt

...and Heez

isopods apparently

on one of my kink-adjacent servers they've been having an incredibly in-depth discussion of isopods (completely unrelated to sex and kink, to be clear) for the past couple hours. i can't possibly keep up

not everyone in this conversation is queer, but i should note for the record that queer people love insects. and cryptids.

meanwhile one of my friends has been advocating for a cover of "30 seconds over tokyo" in a donald duck voice in response to my noting that donald duck technically took part in the doolittle raid

for those of you not in kink-adjacent spaces these are, in fact, typical of the sort of conversations that happen in the kink-adjacent spaces i've been in

yeah most of the kink-adjacent folks i know are either stoners or nerds or both and the topics of conversation reflect that. also most of the people i know period, i guess. my take on this thread is that it's more like, I talk about all kinds of things IRL and then ILX is for the things that don't get talked about in as much depth there. like Tom Petty records.

Re: Pomeroy.

Has there been a poll on the correct ranking of Dexys records?

I mean, not just what is your favorite, but what is the correct relative rank?

Maybe this thread can help, particularly the last two posts:

Thoughts on Dexys Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (please reply to this one)

I don’t think there’s much discussion here of influencer culture/drama channels, that sort of thing

Ballet specifically, dance generally, either as spectators or practitioners. I know that we have a ballet thread, but I've been the only poster to it since 2019.

Roz I apologise for misspelling yr name, my mother actually goes by "Roz" and I am so used to thinking the rest of the world uses an "s".

Sorry for those who suffered miscarriages. My wife had one almost 20 years ago and it’s kinda hard to forget because it happened on July 4. We didn’t “want kids,” though we were more than willing to raise the one we were apparently to be stuck with, and then…

We never “tried”, then or since. And now we’re both in our early 50s and pretty much out of the game as far as the possibility of breeding.

I'm sorry to hear that unperson, that's something that must linger in the 'what if' part of your memories

yeah most of the kink-adjacent folks i know are either stoners

much as the stones are kinks-adjacent

but yeah, stoners, nerds. from what i can tell most people are both. lotta people are stoners cuz they're self-medicating for various forms of trauma. lotta trauma and body image issues and chronic pain and stuff like that. i haven't really been operating in kink spaces for a while myself - at some point the levels of queer trauma around here reached critical mass and as far as i can tell it's been all-drama, all the time for the past year or so. which is unfortunate because i do have a strong urge to say incredibly inappropriate things, and really it's best to say stuff like that in person. also unfortunate is that this is the one public place i say things and i say all of my most offensive stuff here.

I don’t think there’s much discussion here of influencer culture/drama channels, that sort of thing

― brimstead

i tried watching one once and it was excruciating, just somebody reading tumblr posts out loud for an hour

i have increasing amounts of difficulty reading (though i can still write just fine) but god videos where they just read and react to things are... idk. it doesn't click with me for some reason.

I think I that’s a sign of a healthy mind, Kate.

You know what hasn't been talked about much on ilx?

Yer mom.

I think I that’s a sign of a healthy mind, Kate.

― Bad Bairns (Boring, Maryland)

lol, i'll take any sign i can get of having a healthy mind :)

You know what hasn't been talked about much on ilx?

Yer mom.

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

i mean maybe but also i've talked about my mom a lot here. i'd say there's been more discussion of my mom in the past couple years than there has been of, i don't know, knitting.

or knitting at the ballet

oasis

the musical A Chorus Line, I haven't seen many ILX posts on that.

we did get this thread

Every Little Step (this new doc about A Chorus Line)

NB:

I'm thinking larger topics, obviously you can find specific filmmakers or philosophers or writers or even musicians that haven't been mentioned.

I guess you could then say "musicals as a whole"...which I think, underdiscussed maybe, undiscussed no.

The title of the theatre thread acknowledges that it is underdiscussed:
We really don't care about theatre do we?

The only significant thread about tarot here was last updated by me two years ago. Most of the thread's original posters are gone. I wish I could post images, because to me there are so many historically important tarot images from many traditions that represent different psychological, philosophical and sociological archetypes and that are beautiful as art regardless of one's beliefs.

I mean I can think of plenty of things:
- australian first nations politics/rights
- birdwatching (a twitcher thread could be fun!)
- how to survive on shoestring budgets (we have cleaning threads but I dont think Ive seen budgeting?)
- ... I want to say localised environmental activism (remake/recycle, all that kinda stuff) but surely there's something. Does the "global warming" thread get into it, or is it just about the politics?

Corn sweat

Yachting

Can’t believe no one’s mentioned Insane Clown Posse yet

...or their fan base.

The only significant thread about tarot here was last updated by me two years ago. Most of the thread's original posters are gone. I wish I could post images, because to me there are so many historically important tarot images from many traditions that represent different psychological, philosophical and sociological archetypes and that are beautiful as art regardless of one's beliefs.

― Dan S

it is a topic that's culturally important to me and i'd like to know more about... i just haven't had the time to really delve into it the way i'd like :( i have a Modern Witch deck but I don't ever really use it.

Live streaming continues to have a massive cultural impact yet it’s rarely discussed.

Wait

Corn sweat

― Bad Bairns (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, August 27, 2024 10:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I literally found out about this for the first time in my life this morning. I have so many questions. I would like a corn sweat thread tbh.

Fracking.

I’m sure we had a BSG thread.

Trees

Some chat about parents and kids but struggling to recall any discussion about people’s siblings or extended family.

- birdwatching (a twitcher thread could be fun!)

I feel like imago's posted about birdwatching at least a bit?

Wait

Corn sweat

― Bad Bairns (Boring, Maryland), Tuesday, August 27, 2024 10:03 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I literally found out about this for the first time in my life this morning. I have so many questions. I would like a corn sweat thread tbh.

Corn Sweat was real but Joe Biden whopped his ass

Some chat about parents and kids but struggling to recall any discussion about people’s siblings or extended family.

There's a family problems thread on 77?

is there ever

Yeah I feel like there are tons of threads about siblings (or lack thereof) etc.

What I need to know about corn sweat is this - does it really smell like corn outside? Midwesterners weigh in. I can't stop thinking about the corn sweat.

no, it just makes it humid af

Thank you. If nobody answered I thought I could message you to ask. I wondered because someone yesterday said in their rural town everything smelled vaguely like corn and I was . . . skeptical.

Serious suggestion: Religion is t talked about much here

Isn’t

I started a thread once about being an ex-teen christian. Forgot about it til just now!

I was a teenage christian (a confession)

remember that born again dude a nairn? closest thing ilx had to a jesus freak iirc.

I would join DJ Martian's One Holy Church of Lists and Charts.

lol I was gonna bring up A Nairn

So... how do you all post images on this message board? Is it so complicated that nobody can explain it in simple terms? I would appreciate any one poster's understanding of their path to it.

I can't believe it is some esoteric thing that everyone who knows about it wants to keep it secret.

I remember Daniel, Esq., a really good poster from the past, clearly explaining a path to me 10 or more years ago. It worked then but it doesn't work any longer. I miss you Daniel, Esq.

in the old days, you could usually hotlink with [img] html

these days, if I can't grab something from e.g. Facebook, I gotta save it as a jpg or whatever, throw it into Imgur as suzy mentioned with distaste, and link to that

http://www.website.com/image.jpeg

oops. just go to the bottom and click *show formatting help*.

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_%28tarot_card%29#/media/File:RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg

if I'm following it exactly -

http://www.website.com/image.jpeg

it doesn't work

here's an exaple of image I would like to post:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician_%28tarot_card%29#/media/File:RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg/440px-RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg

thank you! how did you do that?

You were probably doing the ILX right, but the url you were using was the wrong one. I clicked on the link you posted, and then got the actual url from the image, which is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/de/RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg/738px-RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg.

just copy the image address. and then paste it in between the bracketed img. img and then /img in brackets.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/RWS_Tarot_01_Magician.jpg

ok,that works! at least for wikipedia!

yay!

The key is to link to the image, not to a page that contains the image. When in doubt, "open image in new window" and that's your image link.

Sometimes I can't get the album image (usually cover and playlist) to display from YouTube or YouTube Music; even when I leave off the "s" in https, only the link is posted (but still works). wtf?

Religion is t talked about much here

There have been multiple threads devoted to religion from various angles, including atheism. The great majority of these threads are old and have not been revived in recent times. But they exist. here's a specimen:

Intelligence, Awareness, and Religious Belief/Experienc

one thing we haven’t talked about, at least that i can tell, is the various class composition of this community. i often feel like a lot of assumptions are made from all angles about class and accessibility, and wish we could be more open and honest about class issues here and elsewhere in our lives.

i asked uk ilx once if they were posh and they assured me that they werent

ukilxors arent u posh?

Related to class: Income is the third rail of polite conversation afaik

yes, absolutely correct

one thing we haven’t talked about, at least that i can tell, is the various class composition of this community. i often feel like a lot of assumptions are made from all angles about class and accessibility, and wish we could be more open and honest about class issues here and elsewhere in our lives.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

i think it's an interesting topic! cuz i do think there's a difference between the way class is conceived of in the us and the uk. idk. both my parents were _extremely_ well-educated for their generations, but i don't think of either of them as ever being really "high class"... i have a hard time think of them as anything but weird and fucked up. my dad came from a fucked-up background and was _very_ self-conscious of not being "high-class", called himself a "pseudo-intellectual" a lot... well, he was in fact an intellectual, but in the '80s in "high class" Republican suburbia, that didn't play so great. my mom, i don't know, she wants to think of herself as high class, but if i look at my mom's side of the family most of them are weirdos - i mean that as a compliment - in one way or another. how fucking weird can you be and still be "high class"? that's what i'm not sure of.

my thing has always been precarity. if i belong to any "class" at all, i'd say the class i belong to is the chronically mentally ill. sometimes i have money. my mom's side of the family, some of them are rich as croesus, some of them are broke. and it's not really along the _weird_ axis. it's just... getting into a situation that's emotionally stable and not completely fucked up. not having money makes things a lot harder in a lot of ways in terms of... insulating one from the worst of things. that said, money can be used to cover up fucked up shit as much as it can be used to help heal from fucked up shit. i've run into more of the former.

i haven't been homeless but i've been in situations where i've been severely lacking in material resources in ways that severely negatively affected my quality of life, and in those times, god, money just seems like it could fix all my problems. and then i get into situations where i have money and i don't know what to do with it. it's just one more thing i have to worry about losing. all of the opportunities i think i'd have turn out to be overpriced meals that i eat to try and forget how miserable i am. sex toys i'm too scared and traumatized to use.

access to healthcare - i mean, that's class in america right there, most of it. i have pretty good access to employer-funded healthcare. where i live, medicaid covers the same stuff, but they don't treat you the same if you're medicaid. particularly at my age. yeah. i'd say that's what "class" means to me. i have private insurance and a lot of the people i know have medicaid, and there's a big difference in terms of how you get treated. i have a hard time effectively getting care despite having good healthcare, but i do have that access at least.

Related to class: Income is the third rail of polite conversation afaik

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

yeah, i was raised to not talk about politics, religion, sex, or money. that was how i was raised, saying and doing all kinds of fucked up shit without openly acknowledging any of it.

religion? i still have trouble talking with people here about the ways religion has affected me because people get really defensive. which i understand. i mean i am saying their religion is structurally really bad and the world would be better off in some ways if it didn't exist. not in a "new atheist" way, more in, you know, here's all this fucked up shit that's going on that people either genuinely don't notice or pretend not to notice. i don't know what "normal" is, i don't know how to have a "polite conversation". and it kinda comes back to how i was raised.

I could swear we once did a poll to self-determine if one was working class/middle/upper etc but a long time ago. And then the terms of the discussion fell apart cuz of UK vs elsewhere concept of "middle class" etc?

i linked it

it was good, also imo quite telling, but also fairly light hearted

O I was thinking it was something other than that one but praps not!

who's the richest motherfucker posting on this board?

We did an income poll a few years ago as well: what is your average yearly income (after taxes)?

The degree to which people's "class" sense of themselves is determined (or not) by income is interesting I think. In the U.S. especially, class — at least outside the environs of old money — seems as much a function of education as wealth. Which tend to correlate up to a point, but of course the country (and ilx) is full of well-educated non-wealthy people. It's why someone like DeSantis can define "elites" to include school teachers with master's degrees but not millionaire owners of carwash franchises.

I think the basic categories of "working class," "middle class" (and lower- and upper-middle class), and "upper class" aren't really very helpful in describing how our society really functions.

Hence why I mentioned UK vs elsewhee. Australia's the same as the US in a lot of ways - everyone thinks theyre working or middle class even while they drive a beamer and live in a 4 bedroom home in a good suburb. "but I'm a plumber!".

If someone polls income again plz just use gross income.

Gross household income, really. You live a lot differently on a salary than if you're sharing costs with someone else making a salary. (And yes there are lots of other factors, like whether you have kids and whether you have family money, but household income is a base at least.)

Hence why I mentioned UK vs elsewhee. Australia's the same as the US in a lot of ways - everyone thinks theyre working or middle class even while they drive a beamer and live in a 4 bedroom home in a good suburb. "but I'm a plumber!".

This is if anything worse in the UK - lots of millionaires claiming to be working class.

ppl really wanting to not talk about wealth hm

We should do a "are you wealthy and if so, do you think you should talk about working class music" on ilm to really hit this issue (again, but this time better).

I have inherited wealth but being a foreigner still gives me protected status amongst a lot of UK lefties, it's not a bad deal.

I guess a lot of people relate more to working class culture, rather than middle or upper class pursuits and values. Culture and values don’t necessarily align with income groups.

National offices of statistics have clear definitions for middle-class, for example ours is any person/household within 70-150% of the median gross income, in France they have decided that anyone between the top 20 and bottom 30% is middle class. "Working class" and "Upper class" would be considered outdated concepts here - at least they're not linked to income anymore.

“Working class culture” is one of the most pernicious myths around. Guitars are expensive. Drums are expensive. Amps are expensive.

practice space is very expensive

i can assure you that many working class people find a way to have gear and do band practice

Also why is anyone assuming "working class culture" = rock bands? I don't think music ever even comes up when I hear ppl talk about this.

idk, is it a question of cultural imagination? we have no problem grasping that trucks and guns are expensive, but the idea of a working class person being a sculptor or a musician is a myth?

Huh? There are people with "working class"/service jobs in this literal thread who own instruments and make music, what is even happening here? No one is saying that.

Within a British context when people talk about "working class culture" it's a nostalgia associated with mutual aid groups, unions, "everyone knew their neighbour" - some of this stuff is imo important and has indeed been eradicated in recent decades, some is rose tinted and often quite reactionary nostalgia, but anyway I'm neither of the class nor country to weigh in really.

What I can confidently say is that when upwardly mobile ppl in the UK say their pursuits and values align with working class culture, what they are absolutely not saying is "I wish I had less money".

Maybe I've been away too long, I don't know who about 30% of people are and I've lost track of who's making what subtextual points.

well anyway, i only meant to post that table is otm

io, i enjoy reading your posts but i don't think we've ever interacted. i felt bad because i got the impression you were annoyed by something i wrote last week but i've just been too busy to go back and clarify what i meant.

related: when i first started posting, i worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant, and i couldn't figure out how people were able to carry on these conversations throughout the day. and i would always feel like i missed the action. and then i came to realize that people were posting at work. and i think that somewhat accounts for how things are in terms of class, idk

i am also guilty of wandering into a thread many days after it's started and posting an elliptical commentary on some point made as part of a digression and then forgetting to ever come back so

My sweet spot for buying instruments was post steady job, pre family. You have to actually justify spending money on instruments vs saving for college.

Anyway, my poorest friends are the musicians. I’m lucky my parents bore the mentality into me of always having a job or you’re fucked. It’s makes me so anxious to think of not having steady income and god bless to those doing that

Hi! I think I know which post, lol. And I think it would be an interesting convo, but I also don't have time to spend in these discussions much! I've been "away" because I'm busy at work now and not often at a desk with hours to kill. On the other hand it's absolutely correct that ilx was founded & populated by culture workers with time on their hands.

I also think table is correct, but I can't tell who darra is gesturing at.

xposts sure instruments are expensive but uhh poor people have dreams too? i mean lol they make it work if they really wanna do it.

man, thinking about it, you really have to be .. not very well-acquainted with how rich people both have a lot of money and have it all the time, like it's always flowing into their reservoirs .. you have to be pretty blind to that to say something like 'instruments are expensive' implying that if you're a musician you aren't actually poor. and pretty blind to how poor people keep hope alive - they tend to make bigger one-time purchases whenever they get a windfall etc. don't mean to single out 1 of approximately a million stupid unperson posts bcz it's something you hear all the time in the u.s., in ny times opinion columns, that sort of thing.

and in fact it's a thing that relatively well-off people tend to get really hung up on ... ticket prices of one time purchases and how other people making them means that they're richer than they claim to be.

a related topic is how one can be rich but have a really impoverished mental/emotional/psychological outlook when it comes to money and how one can be poor and have the opposite.

one thing i've really learned as a poor person is that when i have money the last thing i'm going to do is sit on it, i'm gonna fucking enjoy it.

My friend who had no money whatsoever growing up in dirt poor South Carolina and is now a part time music teacher has more instruments than I’ve ever seen one person own

i was watching an interview with gg allin's brother merle and he says he is a total hoarder because he grew up poor. they didn't have running water or a shower/toilet. 3-room cabin in the woods. he also says that he doesn't spend any money. he saves it. he just has a lifelong fear of being poor again.

I'm one of the poorest folx here but most of the time I've been on ILX, I've been in home health, a job where I mostly sit on my ass and wait for my patients/clients to give me something to do. So, I've been able to post here a lot.

All of the music that I've made has been done on a laptop that I bought for purposes other than music. The only expenses I've had so far is a $23 Distrokid account and $3 worth of Bandcamp yumcodes.

Friends “working class culture is a myth” isn’t really worth engaging with

Do you remember Johnny Rogan? He was a hipster of a slightly earlier generation. He knew all the right wines, metaphorically speaking, but he died alone in his flat and wasn't found for a fortnight.

TIL about what happened to Johnny Rogan; thanks Ashley Pomeroy poster. Now I'm imagining Morrissey's thoughts on hearing this news...:(

Maybe I've been away too long, I don't know who about 30% of people are and I've lost track of who's making what subtextual points.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit)

as someone who's... a relative latecomer and doesn't necessarily get the social nuances here, i can relate and it does suck. but i'm glad you're here.

The degree to which people's "class" sense of themselves is determined (or not) by income is interesting I think. In the U.S. especially, class — at least outside the environs of old money — seems as much a function of education as wealth. Which tend to correlate up to a point, but of course the country (and ilx) is full of well-educated non-wealthy people. It's why someone like DeSantis can define "elites" to include school teachers with master's degrees but not millionaire owners of carwash franchises.

I think the basic categories of "working class," "middle class" (and lower- and upper-middle class), and "upper class" aren't really very helpful in describing how our society really functions.

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

i think that's a good point... my parents both had masters' degrees, and i didn't get my bachelors' until the age of 40. none of my siblings got their four-year degrees until later in life either. it's not that my parents didn't value education. it's that i grew up in an extremely abusive environment that fucked me up pretty badly, and one of the effects of that was a certain amount of academic underachievement. being in my 30s and not having a job and living on my mom's couch watching '90s copaganda shows on TNT and WGN all day didn't feel like a "middle class" lifestyle, even if i wasn't ever technically "homeless".

ppl really wanting to not talk about wealth hm

― tuah dé danann (darraghmac)

i'll bore you all with my life story. my dad was a disabled veteran, got on disability after he left my mom, had income that vastly outstripped his expenditures for 30 years, died old and left his kids enough money to do stuff with. i'd just graduated college, so i moved to portland, got a professional job, and bought a house in the suburbs. since me and my then-wife had grown up poor, we kinda lived like those people you read about who live on cat food and then die and somehow have millions of dollars they never touched. i was chronically depressed and didn't see the point of spending money on things. i _am_ a hoarder but i'm a digital hoarder, which despite all the shit people say bout the "cloud" has proved actually useful in a world where youtube vids regularly get censored for talking about important meaningful issues. i have a small apartment, cluttered but not unsanitary. i have a black box the size of a breadbox that's a hoarder's nightmare. it could get taken out in a catastrophe and i could lose everything and i'd probably be basically ok. as long as i have my personal writings preserved, the rest of the stuff is interesting but basically trivial.

anyway i wound up leaving my ex-wife without knowing quite why until several years later. she didn't fight me financially. i gave her everything she wanted and she gave me everything she wanted and she insisted that i was cleaning her out financially and leaving her destitute. we sold the house and lucked into making a decent profit on it. i got about $100,000 in cash in the bank. my ex-wife also tried to persuade me that i had an obligation to kill myself. she did, in fact, persuade me, but i failed to meet that obligation, and am no longer attempting to do so.

these days, i got a job which, my boss reminds me regularly, i am not actually performing to professional standards, which i could lose at any time, which is fucking killing me. i got multiple serious medical conditions, physical and mental health, which i'm not quite taking care of adequately. i got friends, most of whom are also trans, most of whom also have insane amounts of fucked up trauma, and most of whom i can't actually rely upon for help because of said insane amounts of fucked up trauma. i got a tendency to blather on message boards because i don't know what else to do with my life.

i don't tell people i have $100,000 in cash in the bank because i been poor, and when i was poor i would see someone with $100,000 and a job that paid more than their expenses and resent them. i'd think of all the ways they could help me but weren't. i could be doing more. i could be helping people i'm not helping. my ex-girlfriend resents me. i loaned her $20,000 and said i wouldn't give her any more money and she accepts that but also resents me, even though she knows i got a right to making the decision i made. because she is suffering and i could help and i'm choosing not to. she's broke and she can't pay her bills and i said ok, don't talk about money with me and i won't talk about money with you. so what, do i talk about it to other people? i could, i guess. i am. it's personal, though. i can tell you that and you can judge me if you want but does it matter? it doesn't to me.

“Working class culture” is one of the most pernicious myths around. Guitars are expensive. Drums are expensive. Amps are expensive.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

i think this is a misunderstanding of poverty. people who live in poverty don't live a spartan lifestyle to try and get ahead. people in poverty know they can't get ahead. that however much money they have, it will never be enough. they spend money when they have it, including on "luxuries" because we got a right to feel good, we all got a right to enjoy ourselves. people who have enough money to put together budgets look at poor people and think they're being extravagant and they don't know shit about what it's like. is having a guitar a substitute for self-actualization? no. is buying a new analog synth (i hang out with trans people, i know more people who are into analog synths than guitars) when you're homeless and living on someone's couch "smart"? who the fuck cares? poverty grinds you down. poverty _is_ a mindset, that's why giving my ex-girlfriend money didn't work. i knew there was a chance she'd spend it all on things she "didn't need" and get right back into debt, because that's what you learn when you're poor. i don't resent her for doing it. i'm just not giving her any more money, is all.

oh map already said all that way more succinctly haha, oh well

anyway it's kinda like me with work. you know, theoretically i _could_ do my job. theoretically i _could_ be doing my job right now instead of posting to an internet message board. nobody accounts for how a fucked up job can fuck up a person, can make them incapable of doing things they're actually perfectly capable of. it's about your mindset and your circumstances. neither of these are what i _really_ want to be doing, i _really_ want to be writing a lengthy critical essay on _akira_ that maybe three people would read. it'd be a worthwhile and valuable thing to do and i'm fucking knocked out dead from having to deal with fucking work bullshit, and i know that's an entitled attitude of me to take, but creating is how i make meaning out of my life. if i don't write, it fucks me up. and i haven't _written_, really _written_, in a while.

one thing i've really learned as a poor person is that when i have money the last thing i'm going to do is sit on it, i'm gonna fucking enjoy it.

This has been the opposite of my mindset - when I'm flush I'm at my cheapest. There's a comma in my checking account, better hold on to it as long as I can.

It's when I'm fucked that I make the less-wise financial decisions - partially as a defense against misery but also because everything feels like it matters less. If I can't keep the juggling act up and just go bust, fuck it, not like I'm ever going to buy a house or have a 401k anyway.

ilx obviously doesn't talk about how actor Stephen Collins had an underage kid scandal years ago! i had no idea. it popped up on my youtube. even worse is when i clicked on one of the girls talking about it and how he lured her into his apartment by offering to show her his Tales of the Gold Monkey memorabilia. oof! that's sad. i used to watch that show. now he has to live in iowa and return his pop bottles for money! oh how the mighty have fallen.

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/EQiTHzldqnYMZ4xW.HeVng--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTI0MDA7aD0xNjAwO2NmPXdlYnA-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/in_touch_weekly_336/041f801a2735003407ebcd3f8ebaaaa7

This has been the opposite of my mindset - when I'm flush I'm at my cheapest. There's a comma in my checking account, better hold on to it as long as I can.

right, i've been experiencing this for the first time lately. my cash flow has been non-negative because of my side hustle. in some ways, because i've always got a long to-do list, my spending isn't as tight. but mostly i'm holding onto it, because it feels so fucking good to not have to check my bank account every day and do how-much-can-i-spend math. like, having that right now, with the prospect of it going on indefinitely, is much more gratifying than anything i could buy with it.

It's when I'm fucked that I make the less-wise financial decisions - partially as a defense against misery but also because everything feels like it matters less. If I can't keep the juggling act up and just go bust, fuck it, not like I'm ever going to buy a house or have a 401k anyway.

this was me for 15 years up to covid. then briefly this year when i lost my side gig for 6 months. it was so stressful, i'm very determined to never go back.

I've never really had any money but 5 years ago when my mother died and we sold her house I suddenly had more money in the bank than I've ever had in my life and... I haven't really spent any of it yet!

The smartest move I made when I started making real money was to not change my life style at all for as long as possible. Kept living with roommates and socked a bunch away that led to having enough half a down payment for a house

i was watching an interview with gg allin's brother merle and he says he is a total hoarder because he grew up poor. they didn't have running water or a shower/toilet. 3-room cabin in the woods. he also says that he doesn't spend any money. he saves it. he just has a lifelong fear of being poor again.

If I was Merle Allin I'd have a lifelong fear of being coated in flying faeces.

Anyway as a middly middle-class Brit (my parents were both teachers!) I've had enough working-class hero types sneering at for being 'posh', and enough private school types subtly sneering at me for not being posh, to prefer chucking the whole idea of social class into the bin as I can't work out what any of it is supposed to mean.

just imagine driving a van with gg in it across the friggin' country. yuck. brotherly love indeed.

From watching that one GG documentary by the Lars Von Trier acolyte, I think Merle should be fearful of the folks who still visit GG’s grave to pay their respects

no wonder hes haggard

If I was Merle Allin I'd have a lifelong fear of being coated in flying faeces.

― the deep cut is the firstest (Matt #2)

just imagine driving a van with gg in it across the friggin' country. yuck. brotherly love indeed.

― scott seward

From watching that one GG documentary by the Lars Von Trier acolyte, I think Merle should be fearful of the folks who still visit GG’s grave to pay their respects

― Elvis Telecom

i mean at the risk of taking said comments entirely too straightforwardly and literally, i mean yes, absolutely on all counts. the whole "hurt people hurt people" tagline has become endemic enough in the queer community that yesterday i saw a poster for a project abigail thorn is performing in with the tagline _bit people bite people_. i'm specifically _not_ making a causative link here, but commonly, marginalized people have to deal with levels of shit (metaphorical) that people who haven't experienced poverty often don't understand. that's the hardest thing for me to try and get across - the way marginalizations tend to _correlate_. i mean my personal opinion is that a lot of my chronic severe mental illness _is_ causatively linked to both the severe childhood abuse i experienced - bullying, systemic transphobia, parental neglect and abandonment, and overt parental abuse - and in turn that severe mental illness is causatively linked to my sporadic experiences of poverty, despite both the privilege i have as an educated white person in america as well as the work i have put in to heal and recover from the multiple adverse child events i experienced. that's not something that can be oversimplified as blame or even as "i'm this way because of this, this, and this", only to say that the things i've dealt with since childhood continues to have lingering effects.

honestly in a lot of ways i'd say that economic insecurity and poverty had as much effect on me as some of the stuff i've experienced in terms of abuse. when i talk about some of the stuff i've been through people tend to react with shock and horror, which is one of the reasons i don't talk about it... like the effect of it is that i tend to feel very "othered", which is a me thing and not a judgement on people's reactions of shock and horror, which are, like, i can see why people would react that way. and because of those experiences i don't judge merle allin, cuz i know when you're poor you gotta make hard choices and do some fucked up shit sometimes just to survive. it sucks but that's the reality of it. being poor in america, a country without an effective social safety net, will really fuck a person up badly, particularly the experience of constantly being blamed for the fucked up stuff that happens to people who experience poverty, fucked up stuff that people who experience poverty frequently have very little control over.

and i will say this _isn't_ something that isn't discussed or hasn't been discussed on ilx. there are a number of folks here, folks of all kinds of backgrounds, who have spoken openly about the ways poverty has affected their lives, and that's helped me a lot. particularly in terms of... one of the things about the social class i come from is that poverty was one of those things that my mom was ashamed of and tried to cover up and didn't want to admit.

if there's anything i take from the _up_ series it's that it's difficult if not impossible to make any real judgements on the subjects of the _up_ series just by watching it. that said when the totally unsympathetic toff shows up in one of the later installments to talk about his experience growing up upper-class and in poverty, and the ways in which his acting like a tory git at the age of 7 was how he was taught to cope with that situation, made me think about the ways i was taught to cover up and not talk about a number of topics for basically really similar reasons. i experienced so much guilt, shame, and blame over my family's becoming poor, a lot of which _was_ correlated with me and my siblings all being special needs children.

and the way my mom dealt with it was denial, by insisting that i was a "perfectly normal child" and stigmatizing asking for help as marking one as morally inferior. which is how she wound up lying in her own shit for days rather than calling an ambulance, even after one of her children insisted very strongly that she _really should call an ambulance and go to the hospital_. it's just an utterly toxic mindset. she could afford to go to the hospital but didn't want to because ambulances are a scam. which they are! they're absolutely a scam and this is _well-known_ and nothing is done about it, which to me says that this is state of affairs is _intentional_. the problem is known, people have the ability to do something about it, and those people choose not to. that state of affairs reflects really poorly on the structures of power in that particular culture. _but also_ the values my mom taught me about _not_ asking for help... based on the outcome of her putting those values into practice, i can readily observe that those values are fucked-up and ineffective. and i work really hard to not practice those values.

that said not getting me treatment for being a special-needs child _does_ have a lot to do with structural factors. i grew up autistic in a society that refused to acknowledge or accept that, grew up with ADHD in a society that stigmatized kids who were at the time referred to as "hyperactive children" (something I _was_ labelled as when I was a child, a diagnosis that, again, my mom strongly rejected). even as an adult, i had friends who strongly believed that ADHD wasn't "real", a culture that found it totally acceptable to make fun of furries, to make fun of people who had "self-diagnosed autism", in effect adopting the view of autism endorsed by groups like Autism Speaks. ask an autistic person what we think about Autism Speaks and you're probably not going to get a positive response, haha. ask us about ABA, which is currently _the standard_ treatment for autism in minors, and a lot of people will tell you that it's abuse. it's also medically accepted. i haven't personally experienced it but as an autistic person myself i do take what other autistic people who have experienced ABA... subjectively i feel like i take it more seriously than maybe a lot of autistic people do.

like, just as one example, the judge rotenberg center in massachusetts is still open. i read about that place, i read about its history, you read about the effects it has had on people, and it's appalling. it happens, and it overwhelmingly _does_ happen to people from marginalized communities. that's the thing, it's not just looking at the existence of judge rotenberg but _who these kids are_ who are being subjected to abuse. and what happens is people have this attitude of condescension and judgement towards these parents for sending their kids to judge rotenberg, and what gets missed is that when you belong to a marginalized group you _don't_ have the same resources that people in "unmarked" groups do.

today, i've seen this, i've known parents with autistic kids and they gotta make a decision, you know, do i want to put this child in ABA. because that's what's available and that's what's accessible. the parents get judged and blamed for their decisions and nobody thinks about, nobody questions, how fucked up it is that they have to make those decisions. raising special needs kids is hard, and then you look at when you do have resources available, it's something like ABA, and i mean... if judge rotenberg is the option a parent knows about, a parent has, even though it's clearly not _right_ to send one's child to judge rotenberg, the bigger problem for me is that this fucking place is still _allowed to exist_. again, the people i hold accountable for that are the people in the state of massachusetts who allow this place to remain open despite the very strong evidence that this place _hurts children_.

well that turned into a long middle-of-the-night ramble. hope y'all don't mind too much, even if it is a ramble it's stuff i believe in and stuff i think is important, and all of these phenomena _are_ interlinked. poverty, racism, marginalization, and abuse. in complex fucking ways. and speaking as someone who is white, who has the privilege to _not_ experience the systemic effects of racism, it's personally important to me to speak out against racism and the way it's systemically perpetuated, just as much as it's important for me to talk about the ways i've personally experienced things like poverty, marginalization, and abuse.

Related to class: Income is the third rail of polite conversation afaik

Gross household income, really. You live a lot differently on a salary than if you're sharing costs with someone else making a salary. (And yes there are lots of other factors, like whether you have kids and whether you have family money, but household income is a base at least.)

whem i said this I was iirc 'gesturing'

lookit

Xp Matt. Said snearing is experienced on all points of the class spectrum! Hard to throw out a view of the world so ingrained in our culture. Always admirable to try tho

Talking of cultural class with those scalar terms kinda dud tho. Economic-class? Sure, nice and simple. Culture (as discussed) completely transcends the economics of the individual though.

xps to sarahell: All true of course. But household income is still the baseline statistical shorthand, if you’re going to use just one number (e.g. in a ilx poll).

Lol I feel like half of my conversations with people are about income … even outside of work. Like, at one point one of my best friends was _the_ person who others would talk to about their sex lives… and I was somewhat jealous. I end up being the friend that people talk to about money.

― sarahell

sucks but you're kind of a subject matter expert (SME), it makes sense that people talk to you about money because you understand money better than a lot of people do, on a professional level

the areas i'm a SME in are 1970s progressive rock bands, which is not a topic of conversation people are interested in, and mental health... not like on purpose, it's just something i've had to pick up... that means people come to me feel comfortable talking about the messed up shit they've had to deal with. if i responded to people talking about their mental health struggles by telling them that they'd feel better if i went for a walk, people would stop talking to me about their mental health struggles pretty quickly!

Combine your areas of expertise by giving people mental health advice cribbed from the lyrics of Brain Salad Surgery and Tales From Topographic Oceans

Combine your areas of expertise by giving people mental health advice cribbed from the lyrics of Brain Salad Surgery and Tales From Topographic Oceans

― Halfway there but for you

i unironically do believe that performing the procedure emerson, lake, and palmer refer to as "brain salad surgery" can, under the right circumstances, greatly benefit one's mental health

i suppose were i to give that advice, it would be even worse than suggesting someone experiencing mental health issues go for a walk

i'm unable to give advice based on the lyrics to tales from topographic oceans because of how utterly unmemorable they are

i suppose i could combine the two and say "go for a walk on uneven ground near a lake, at a certain point in and around the lake, mountains will come out of the sky and stand there. it'll do you a lot of good"

i _do_ actually give mental health advice based on prog lyrics but it's gabriel-era genesis. "ok, here's what you do, go see an ex-nazi backroom surgeon and have your penis surgically removed. it'll do you a world of good".

this also, for the record, is extremely poor clinical advice, so i'm surprised at how well it is often received by the women i give it to (ironic acknowledgement of inadvertent double-entendre here).

man, thinking about it, you really have to be .. not very well-acquainted with how rich people both have a lot of money and have it all the time, like it's always flowing into their reservoirs .. you have to be pretty blind to that to say something like 'instruments are expensive' implying that if you're a musician you aren't actually poor. and pretty blind to how poor people keep hope alive - they tend to make bigger one-time purchases whenever they get a windfall etc. don't mean to single out 1 of approximately a million stupid unperson posts bcz it's something you hear all the time in the u.s., in ny times opinion columns, that sort of thing.

Also in terms of instruments and practice space… in some ways the “rock music “ association is historical, and is less accurate now. Instruments and space used to be a lot cheaper, especially in urban areas in the US at least, and computers & electronics used to be very expensive. Now it’s different.

Also in the historical context, there definitely was a gender difference…