al-gatone

[al-gatone]

Look, I made a collection of Fandom cakes that I found!

I like cake.

#psychic damage #reblog

[al-gatone]

love the people talking about microorganisms as if there's a meta

#looking forward to the Myxogastria meta once the classification patch notes are released #reblog

[al-gatone]

During a time in my life where I was desperate for money, I worked for a call center soliciting donations. You're very right. Here are some additional tips and explanations.

Don't give reasons - the person behind the phone has a literal script booklet full of counters for 99% of normal reasons a person can give. Instead, offer zero justification. So when the internet company calls asking if you want to upgrade your package, don't say "I don't watch TV" or "I don't own a landline" or anything other than "no".

To a salesperson, a reason isn't a refusal, it's the beginning of a negotiation.

They will eventually give up - it's not an endless slog, regardless of how it feels sometimes. If you say "no" enough they WILL leave you alone. My old script was for "three no's" - after three responses of "no" and attempting to negotiate / counter reasons, we were supposed to wish them a good day and give up.

Even if the sales tactic is different, this is fundamentally a numbers game - if you stall them long enough, they will give up on you to go chase lower-hanging fruit. Additionally, call center employees are often ranked on average call time, so at a certain point you are bad enough for their stats that they will leave you alone.

Ask to be removed from their list - Swearing at the call center employee will only make their day worse, it won't actually help get them to stop calling you. You'll just get put back in the queue. Faking your own death may not even work, depending on who is calling. What you want to say is "please remove me from your contact list".

Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.

[al-gatone]

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

#reblog

[al-gatone]

figured out why there's been an uptick in me getting blocked by seemingly cool people recently. apparently my description looks like this on ios:

it's supposed to say "transmisogyny not welcome". tumblr fucking "coolsville sucks"ed me. i'm literally a trans woman.

#tumblr is a functional website (lie) #reblog

[al-gatone]

I’m not a comics expert by any means but I think that superheroes would be way less famous if they existed in the real world. Like irl, a lot of cities have local celebrities that are inside jokes for the people who live there. And between there only being 1 or 2 vigilantes in a huge city and the press not having great access to them I just can’t imagine them being any more famous than a citywide meme.

Like imagine you go to Gotham or some shit and this big fuckoff man in a black cloak and mask wooshes right past you while you’re in line for a burrito and you tweet about it and you get like 5 quotes being like “lmfao tourists don’t even know about batman anymore” like. The bat?? man??? And he’s just some guy that runs around assaulting criminals??? Or you visit your friend in NYC and see some wierdo in a red and blue gimp suit eating a hotdog and no one bats an eye and you’re like “do you think that guy is okay no judgement but like what is up with him” and they’re like “omg wait did I forget to tell you about spiderman?” And you can’t tell if this is just a New York thing or if you are actually losing your mind. Like can you imagine

#reblog

[al-gatone]

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

#reblog

[al-gatone]

So here it is, my great mystery project - now finished!

On my search for a new crochet project that's at least sort of unique, I had the insane idea to recreate one of my favourite works of art. And well, I did. I'm honestly pretty proud of this one too because it took obviously quite a bit of effort and I'm still a beginner at crochet. Well, I'm sure someone else did it before and most likely even better, but if so I couldn't find it ;) (Not even a crochet pattern for the full thing!)

And because my photo skills aren't the best, just as usual...here's another photo taken with flash where you can actually see the stitches pretty well. Not sure if you should actually look at them closely though, lol.

#reblog

[al-gatone]

#reblog

[al-gatone]

reblog to bite

#reblog

[al-gatone]

But they were all of them deceived…

Learn more about heeled boots archery both I guess on my Patreon!

#reblog

[al-gatone]

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

#reblog

[al-gatone]

girl's night

#reblog

[al-gatone]

Sammin'

#reblog #queue

[al-gatone]

bella was lucky she didn’t have a cell phone of any kind because you know ya boi edward would be blowing up that phone 24-7 going “saw a snail today…. effervescent” or some shit equivalent

#reblog #queue

[al-gatone]

This is my favourite interview strategy

#reblog

[al-gatone]

#reblog #queue