#not whatever the fuck particleboard is supposed to be

[gender-trash]

the post about fast fashion/sewing one’s own clothes blew up again… honestly the more i think about it the angrier i am about it. with both clothing and furniture we sort of live in a world where the market is being overtaken by disposable items made with cheap materials at the lowest possible labor cost. and like, not to diss ikea or anything — god knows they’ve supplied me with enough cheap bookshelves — but this is exactly why i ended up building my own desk.

my dad tells stories about his mom, who was very talented at sewing — it wasn’t her “day job” but in that part of rural iowa in the 60s she was the person you called if, say, you needed a wedding dress on next to no notice. (i’m also told she was excellent at baking pies, but that’s beside the point.) at that time and place, it was legitimately *cheaper* to make your own clothes than to buy them from the store. they would be made of much the same materials, except that you would substitute your own labor for that of whoever assembled the storebought garment.

today, the fabric to make a shirt will almost certainly cost you more than an equivalent department store shirt would. to say nothing of the cost of your time and labor. part of this is that people who sew their own clothes generally don’t want to waste their time on shit fabric, so fabric stores don’t sell quite the same grade of shreddable polyester. part of this is that our modern globalized supply chain has minimized both labor and materials costs as hard as it can, and this optimization has intertwined labor and materials sourcing a lot more than they apparently were in the 60s.

let’s turn back to the subject of furniture. the equivalent of the cheap polyester department-store shirt is the ikea desk. the desk surface is made of laminated particle-board, which is lighter and cheaper than actual wood; the desk is sold to you flat-pak, and you assemble it yourself, thus saving on labor costs. the laminate surface will probably delaminate after a few years’ use. also as with the cheap shirt, any damage is near-impossible to fix — you could sand and refinish a scuffed plywood surface, but there’s no sanding laminated particle-board. it’s also harder to modify to suit one’s needs — i can drill a neat hole for a monitor arm in my plywood desk much more easily than in a particle-board surface.

in both cases, what do you do if you want a slightly higher grade of item? well, obviously you’ll have to pay more money — but it’s difficult to be sure you’re really getting your money’s worth. you have to spend ages and ages comparison-shopping and reading reviews about how quality has really gone downhill since production moved to [new country]. often — especially with clothes — the thing that your money is actually paying for is Style, as separate from Substance. or good advertising. i’ve been halfheartedly in the market for a decent couch for some time, and i’ve noticed that nearly every apartment makeover video on youtube is sponsored by the same furniture website, which of course has provided a free couch — that the youtuber assures us is Really Good, For The Price. as soon as a manufacturer acquires a reputation for Quality, it is in their economic interest to sell out as hard and fast as they can and pocket the increased margin from selling crap at the price of quality until people notice. and in a world where most shopping has moved online, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re still in the actual-quality period. i’m not sure if there even *are* furniture stores around here at quality levels in between ikea and danish concepts (suggesting a market for a mid-tier scandinavian furniture purveyor, perhaps hailing from norway or finland).

because of the sort of person that i am, i tire rapidly of the endless comparison shopping. i don’t want to become a damn couch supply chain expert, i just want to retire the folding chair from my living room. it can’t be *that* hard to build a couch, can it? well, not if one is privileged enough to have the tools and time and space to do it in. i think most of the comments and tags on the fast fashion post are from people wishing they had one or more of the above to make their own clothes with. speaking from direct personal experience, a sewing machine is at least both cheaper and easier to find space for than a minimally equipped woodshop.

the other common piece of advice is to buy used, buy from a thrift store or an estate sale. unfortunately hunting down all your shit used also takes a lot of time and effort, and particularly in the case of furniture hauling the stuff home is a nontrivial logistical problem. again, money or more nebulous forms of privilege (the friend with the truck) are needed to smooth these roadblocks. and it’s really amazing that the solution to “i want an item that is not garbage” is “buy an item manufactured at a time when they were not yet garbage”. yes, of course, the less-durable instances won’t have survived the passage of time, but that’s only part of the effect. things genuinely used to be manufactured to a higher standard of quality. my sewing machine is from ebay; it’s the same model my *other* grandma had, a baseline singer consumer-grade machine. all its gears are metal, and it has a heavy-ass cast metal housing, too. the other household sewing machine is a modern singer consumer-grade machine and for all its fancy stitches it looks sort of like a doll’s toy — the plastic gears are going to break at some point, or the motor will burn out, and if it turns out that the motor on the modern edition is designed to be user-replaceable i will personally eat a hat. i suppose we also used to ask a lot more of our consumer-grade sewing machines, back when sewing one’s own clothes was a baseline household skill for everyone but Rich People, instead of a hobby that consumes more money than it saves you.

i don’t know if my post really has a conclusion. i’m just angry that we live in a fallen world full of miraculous technology and yet we have not solved the seemingly simple economic problem of exchanging a reasonable amount of money for a newly produced durable good that isn’t a complete piece of shit. i am a *robotics engineer*, for the love of fuck; i have a complicated, rare, well-compensated skillset. it cannot *possibly* be a comparative advantage for me to spend my time building a couch or sewing a shirt instead of paying someone to do it for me (ideally also, if i may ask for a miracle, someone who gets things like fair pay and healthcare and vacation time). why is this transaction so damn hard??

#the trashcan speaks #to say absolutely NOTHING of the way modern design has optimized for manufacturability above all other aesthetic concerns #uniqlo seems to have recently rediscovered the arcane knitting technology of ‘increases and decreases’ and is advertising it HARD #because of course these are dead fucking easy for a hand knitter but slow things down on a machine a lot more #and even midcentury modern furniture — at the time a lot more minimal in adornment than what came before (also due to increasing pressure #towards DfM) — is a lot froofier than most modern items. it has like. trim and stuff #the midcentury version of Cutting Corners was using a cheaper wood for the less visible bits and staining it to match #not whatever the fuck particleboard is supposed to be #sewing machine go brrr #civilizational (in)adequacy

[ezwhump]

Russell meets Lennon - pet whump, collars, swearing

Russell thought that maybe some kind of odd prank was being played on him when he pulled up to the trailer. Sure, he’d been in worse places, but there was something off-putting about the whole scenario; driving to some dingy scrapyard on the outskirts of town was supposed to help him close up a business deal? Christ. 

A solitary streetlight lit up most of the property, washing everything in a muted yellow and making the encroaching darkness seem even more sinister. Russell turned off the car, making sure it was locked a few times before he steeled himself. 

“It’s just business.” 

A gangly man in a truckers hat and a heavy jean jacket met him at the door, swiping his sleeve under his nose and spitting out onto the dirt in front of Russell. 

“Y’here for the account papers?” 

Russell couldn’t help but pick up on everything going on behind the man; more washy yellow light concentrated from dusty mismatched lamps, the trailer's kitchenette barely spanning 3 feet, dishes piled in the sink. He pulled his eyes to meet the man, setting his shoulders. 

“Yeah. Russell Barlowe.”

“Stu.”

Stu turned into the trailer, leaving Russell in the doorway, still a little on edge. He was going to have to call Pete after this, if only to penalize him for offering up a “middle man to make the transaction smoother” that turned out to be a grizzled, secluded trucker. 

This Stu guy better be a fucking finance wizard. 

“Y’comin’ in or y’gonna piss on my porch all night?” 

Russell almost choked, taking a few halted steps inside and breathing deep to adjust as fast as possible. It smelled like tobacco, stale sweat, and kibble. The couches were stained and a little torn up, singed foam jutting out at the end cushions, but Russell took a seat anyway. 

“Y’want somethin’ to drink? I gotta print some shit out before we wrap this up.” 

Russell remembered the sink. “I’m alright, thanks.” 

That’s when he spotted the food bowl. A flimsy silver dish, about the size of a bread plate, with the name ‘Lennon’ crudely carved on the lip. It looked like the only clean thing in the entire trailer. 

“You got a dog?”

Stu snorted, hacking up a cough and spitting again, this time into the sink. Russell kept his face neutral. 

“Hck, yeah.” And then he stalked into the back of the trailer, presumably where his printer was.

Russell busied himself by thumbing through the calendar on his phone, trying to memorize his schedule for tomorrow, what meetings with who, when to call Pete and lay into him, but he was interrupted.

A shape was moving out of the back of the trailer, and Russell leaned forward on the couch, offering out his hand for Stu’s dog to sniff. To show he wasn’t a threat. 

A boy shuffled along the grimy particleboard on all fours, keeping pressed to the wall, and Russell stood up. 

“What the fuck.” It came out as a whisper, a sharp release of air. 

The boy was rangy and thin, dirty like the rest of the place, his hair slightly matted. Scars and bruises littered his skin, visible even beneath his ragged white t-shirt and boxers. The material was too thin to leave anything to the imagination. His eyes were huge and blue and teary, skittering from Russell to the back room over and over again. But Russell was laser-focused on the thing around the boy's neck. A thick, wrought-iron collar with a chain that fed into the back room, but was long enough that the boy could crawl to the food bowl. To Russell. 

“Git.” 

The boy scrambled back into the dark room, and Stu emerged holding a fresh manila folder.

“Sorry ‘bout that. He’s a nosy fucker. Got him too young.”

Russell tried to slow his breathing, to appear unfazed. Stu had a pet. 

“How old is he?” It felt like an unobtrusive enough question. 

Stu took off his hat and scratched through his hat-hair with long fingernails. 

“Old enough.” 

Russell didn’t know much about pets, but he was sure that it was illegal to own a pet under eighteen. The kid looked like he’d been here for years.

“Right.” Russell cleared his throat and took the folder from Stu, ready to get the hell out of there. “Thanks.” 

Stu spat into the sink. “Not a problem, Mr. Barlowe, sir.”

Russell sat in his idling car, staring blankly through the windshield into the dark surrounding the trailer, the folder untouched in the passenger seat. He should be pulling out of here, getting home, taking a fucking shower. 

Adrenaline made him shake, his hands tight on the wheel, the stench of the trailer still lingering. What the hell was he supposed to do? Charge back in there and snatch the kid? Call the police? Animal control? 

“Fuck. Fuck. Okay.” It took him a few minutes to gather himself, to come to a decision that would alleviate whatever burning pyre of responsibility he suddenly felt for this kid. For a pet. 

He’d do the only thing he really knew how to do when it boiled down to it.

 He’d make a deal with Stu. 

#whump #pet whump #captive pet #sorry this is my first time tagging so if i missed anything pls lmk