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.

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…