I keep finding unused packs of 100 for like a buck at thrift stores I could make a few thousand copies of some b list Ashton Kutcher movie then shingle my house with them.

But did he show you how cool it is to microwave them?

Ok, but would you put 2009 above or below your predictions did 2026? Frankly I’d take another 2020 at this rate, at least then I could afford food.

I wish I had 1998’s optimism.

One of the few I miss from reddit is r/gunnitrust. Diy firearms really does fit with the vibe here and the artist quality of some of them was gorgeous.

I’d also thought about making a goblin market. Sort of a barter only swap meet for all the weird and wonderful things that we in the goblincore community gather.

Also some sort of practical activism group.

Funny, management can’t be held accountable either.

This is clever, but my dude, have you considered getting laid? Like, your thirst is drying me out lol

But look at him hug his little deets why he sleeps!!

Oh you are in for a treat! it’s an antique instrument with a very distinctive sound.

That you either passionately love or viscerally hate droning instruments.

I was casually dating for about 2 years I actually had put it down for a while and opened the app accidentally when she popped up.

Too many beautiful sculptures melt under the scorching gaze of capitalism.

It’s not quite the same as you describe, but I do carry the tenets of that old steampunk to my modern crafts. Right now I’m making an electric hurdy gurdy cello out of a broken guitar, a kitchen mixer, and 3d printed models of my own construction. If steampunk taught me anything it’s that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I’ll have to listen to this after work, but I already feel at home in the comments.

I’m much the same. When I got into it, the brass goggles forum required you to hand make and chare your goggles to be a full member. By the time I had the skill to do that, the forum had died and the fandom was a tag on Etsy for dropshippers.

I have a tangentially related thing. I got big into steampunk decades ago when it was still young. Back then, it was a maker culture, a loosely defined idea of cogs and boilers that gave you a fun little world to practice your craft in. It wasn’t just form, it was function. Hammering brass to make functional goggles, learning the Victorian techniques to whalebone corsets, clockwork to accomplish something we only do now with variable controllers.

Now I look for my people and I find a rusting husk of I knew. Gone are the color and texture, replaced by brown on brown in cotton and leather. Where once gears and cogs were carved to spin and move, now they serve only to be glued to cheap accessories. The gleaming promises of brass and copper and steel, userped by soulless luster of plastics.

We should Never have let the world in.

Lovecraft was my first experience with seperating the artist and the work. Since then, I’ve had to deal with it frequently but eventually you get used to it.

On one hand, they were absolutely crap to deal with and awfully predatory. That said, I met my spouse on Hinge so I guess I owe them enough to say it worked. Just don’t pay and don’t get discouraged when it takes time to get there.

How the fuck they gonna get to the moon if they can’t get to Kiev?

Speaking from personal experience, that’s simply not true. Narcisism is a mental disorder just like any other and can be treated with it’s own form of therapy. You are right that it can be difficult to treat as the onus of understanding falls on the patient choosing to want change in their life which means they have to admit they are wrong. That’s not impossible at all though and many full on narcissists often have a eureka moment when their cognitive dissonance can’t write off an event. On top of that, hormonal changes through life can also play a big role with many people literally growing out of it with different stages of life. Lastly, it’s often adopted by people as a trauma response, meaning that fixing the traumatic stimuli can lead to lessening narcissistic tendencies.

I personally was raised to be a narcissist, lived only with narcissists, and still have narcissistic tendencies that spawn from formative points of trauma. My moment was finding myself alone with a kid I never wanted to have and realizing that I literally had no one in my life to blame anymore. When you put yourself on an island alone so other people can’t fuck up your life anymore only to find out your life is still steadily fucking up on its own, it’s hard not to realize it’s actually you. Couple that with the pressures of parenthood, hormonal changes that no one warns men about, and the realization that I was going to do to my kid what was done to me until he found himself on that same island at 21, I decided to take drastic action.

It’s been a decade. I compartmentalize by joking that I killed that person and took his place. I still occasionally slip, I have a hard time being corrected by people I don’t respect, I instinctually judge things I don’t like as inferior, and I’m sensitive to people blaming me for things, but all of these are now within normal human response levels instead of where I was. Having that kid taught me a lot about empathy. I’m a lot more understanding of people because i realize threat people that aren’t exactly like me aren’t just idiots and fuck ups.

Narcissists are people and nobody is incapable of change.