[video]
(via southerncharmm)
(via southerncharmm)
Merry Goth Day to all, and to all a good night. <3
(via evilsoutherngentleman)
“What the authors of The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures (and everyone else who uses this term) fail to realize is that the only people who believe in some kind of universal taste—a consensual demarcation between what’s artistically good and what’s artistically bad—are insecure, uncreative elitists who need to use somebody else’s art to validate their own limited worldview. It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it.” — Chuck Klosterman (via katiehassomebigasstitties)
[video]
Mountain Cabin, Lake Tahoe
Oh my god.
I want to go to there.
(via southerncharmm)
Patriotic
Today, I am a patriot.
(Source: blowtreesbiitch)
Banbury Cross
(Source: littlemonsternumberone, via southerncharmm)
[video]
Unf.
(Source: temptingbliss, via southerncharmm)
I think about “I have this weird idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I’m going to try it” a lot (…for obvious reasons), and today while reviewing things, it hit me that one of the massive reasons the nay-sayers of younger generations (full disclosure: I’m 31) is the barriers to start your idea are practically zero today.
- Digital printing has made production cheap, plentiful, high quality, and customizable. Want to start a greeting card line? You can start it with dozens, not thousands, of each design to get started.
- The Mac revolutionized graphic design in the 80s, and in the past 10-15 years, things like GIMP have taken it one step further — in some ways not as high quality as Adobe, but it’s fucking free.
- The internet. E-commerce. Big Cartel (open a shopping cart powered by PayPal — it’s free for 5 items, very cheap for 25, cheap for 25+). BC even has a digital delivery system if you decide to do digital content, Pulley.
- PayPal. Pardon me while I date myself but the idea of “we’ll process your credit card transactions for a tiny percentage, no minimum in monthly volume” is common today, but when it launched, it was FUCKING AMAZING.
- Square will process credit cards for similar fees in person (hello conventions, etc.)
- Kindle / Nook eBooks. You can write a book and distribute it without upfront costs to distribute.
- Social media. Find a format that works for you and start sharing. Pick as many as you like and can keep updated, and just start chattin’
- Kickstarter. Indiegogo.
I could go on and on.
I started making things for fun and profit when I was 18, and the prevailing advice was “get about $5,000 and you can launch”.
Today, it’s more like $0 - 100.
Threadless was started with a few ideas, a small Chicago apartment, and responses to someone else’s message board. They are now massive.
Do you want me to begin rambling on the comic artists who make a living — or at least part of their living — from their work?
When the people TIME magazine targets were your age, to start a business, you had to have a solid plan, friends and family money, personal savings, and then MAYBE the bank would give you a loan, and you would have to fight tooth-and-fucking nail for every penny that came your way.
Today?
- “I have this quirky idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, but let’s see what happens.”
- Basic research
- Figure out how much you want to work on it (is it a hobby you do while watching Supersherlockingwhovianpocalypse? Is it a part time job to pay down debt? Is it a gig you love to wrk on, and it just needs to break even? Are you going to make this your full time job as it scales up?)
- Start small. Buy the minimum of everything you need to produce.
- Practice product photography. Google “product photography tutorials” and learn (part of “basic research”). If you have a fancy camera, great. If not, find a camera shop and ask about renting equipment — it can be very cheap. For photos that show up online, you need a camera with 2-3 Megapixels — i.e the cheapest, because the cheapest will be far more than 3 Megapixels. I’ll spare you the tech details, but basically, web photos require a HILARIOUSLY SMALL amount of tech.
We have the ability to craft our lives far closer to the literal representation of our desires than any other point in history.
Refuse the bullshit of previous generations that have come before you. Use your youth, your fire, your vigor, and your ideas to make this life what you want.
Start immediately, even if “starting” is taking scrap paper and jotting research notes.
Never stop.
You’re not a REAL Gatsby fan unless you’ve read the book. Unless you’ve read every Fitzgerald book. Unless you’ve read their early drafts, mailed to you by Fitzgerald himself. Unless you first read Gatsby when Scott handed it to you in a Parisian bar in 1925, apologising for the cover when he saw you disapproved. Unless you embarked on an intense friendship with him that culminated in rumours that you two were having a clandestine homosexual affair. Unless you once took him to the Louvre so you could prove to him that his penis wasn’t any smaller than those on the statues there. Unless Scott turned up, drunk and uninvited, at your house so many times that you had to move more than once. Unless you continued to exchange increasingly infrequent and terse letters with him for the rest of his life, then missed his funeral because you were in Cuba. Unless you called his literary talent “as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings” and won a Nobel prize and wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s right, you poser, if you’re not Ernest Hemingway you can fuck straight off right now. We’re on to you.
I might be Hemingway. I brought a woman to Key West once.
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Text and photo credit from: http://everydayfeminism.com/
July 12, 2012—I posted this photo set after feeling the need to express how I felt about my body. I had shitty self esteem, but it was better then than it had been in a while.
A couple short weeks later I started on a path to a better me.
I started playing roller derby. The thing about roller derby is that it’s a sport just like anything else you play as a team or with a big group of girls. But the thing is, there are girls of all shapes and sizes. It’s full of people who have been skating for twenty years, or people who have been skating for two days. The girls—at least my girls in my league—are so kind and so loving.
They didn’t look at me and see a fat girl. They saw a nervous freshie who wanted to participate in a sport that she had some interest in. It didn’t matter that I was 5’4” and weighed 220 lbs. For the first time in my life, I had found a sport and a group of people that didn’t immediately notice my weight. It was amazing.
The morning after practices I would wake up and pass by a mirror; no longer would I rush by or try to avoid it. I’d pause. “Damn I have a fine ass,” I would find myself thinking. Week after week it got better. I started exercising on my own, outside of derby. And the thing is, I was exercising to feel healthy. Not to lose weight. Not to try and live up to some impossible beauty standard. I had come to realize that even if I did lose all the weight I wanted to, I would never be a size zero. I’ve got hips that don’t lie, and I’ve got the genetics to give me some boobs that rival Dolly Parton’s. (Okay maybe not that bad, but it feels like it sometimes.) I didn’t lose a ton of weight—I still haven’t—but I was felling healthy. You’d be surprised how feeling healthy does for your esteem.
Then in September, I broke my leg. It was a long six months of inactivity, and I felt my esteem slipping. I cried when my cast was removed. My left leg was so emaciated and shrunken. Where were my beautiful calves that skating for six hours a week had given me?
But unlike the first time around, I had had a taste of what a good self esteem can do for you. As soon as the doctors gave me the okay, I hit the gym to feel healthy again. I’ve started skating again. Mirrors have now caught my glances yet again, and I’m proud of the way I look.Sure I have my bad days-everyone does. You’re never going to be happy and proud of yourself 100% of the time. But the important thing is that you take something away from those bad days and you learn how to get past them.
I’m not a size 0. I never will be. But you know what I am? I’m healthy. I’m happy. And I love my body.