I think we're back! Hey boardies, your favourite Australian has returned (thanks NYCgaf for the notification).

Whatever personal news: I still hate my parents and myself, I'm 20 years old now, I'm up to the second year of a uni degree, and basically everyone 'accepts' me as female now. I'd love to talk with all y'all again though, so please say hi! <3

Guess who's back, back again. Claire is back, tell a friend ...


Welcome back. :)

I’m As Mad As Hell and I’m Not Gonna Take This Anymore!

waddup choc o claire. Glad to hear things are progressing.

Hey

Hey! How's my bro going? :D

Life is alright lol

Overworked, feeling a little under the weather but hope I'm better before Easter here

You?

I'm unemployed unfortunately, have been having a pretty tough time of it lately with uni and emotional stuff. Keeping my head up!

You're young still. You get more calloused to the bullshit as you age. It never gets easier, but you grow tougher. Stick to your studies, but don't throw yourself into financial debt over them. There is no true path. Don't be afraid of change and growth.

Keep at it, and keep it simple. It helps.

Word. That's one of the positive features of growing older.

Keep up the good fight. The world will show you when you are on the right path through synchronicities.

@claire

i disagree with eugene's "no debt" admonition. there's good debt and there's bad debt. good debt is an investment that fuels growth and speeds you up, like wings; bad debt is a chain around the neck in deep water, and it drowns you.

so, of course don't get into bad debts for a useless degree (my useless degree was thankfully debt-free, though it took up years of my life, so it was an economic loss regardless. then again, i'm weird and do not mind).

but if you're getting a useful degree that will increase your income, then it makes sense to borrow sensibly. that is if you agree with the life cycle theory/hypothesis.

it basically states if you borrow when you're young and poor, save when your earning power is high in midlife, and spend your savings in old age, your consumption evens out throughout your lifetime for maximum marginal utility.

e.g. see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l...hypothesis.asp
https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-t...thesis-5209285

well, the hypothesis is descriptive not prescriptive, but you can use as a prescription/theory if so inclined (some financial advisors do).

the other thing to add is that i'm shocked at the fact that you can find no employment because the world needs (desperately) people like you who are competent with logic and reason and numbers.

you don't have to be a math genius--just competent--to find work. (also aussie unemployment is superlow and your central bank is raising interests to stem inflation.) can you tutor, or work with computers, or in something dealing with statistics, etc? e.g., here in the usa there is a huge demand for IT workers, accountants, actuaries, etc. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice...-job/stem-jobs

best of all is that skilled jobs pay more and you have to work fewer hours than doing unskilled labor to get the same money. so why not be nerd and proud, produce what you're good at producing? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c...eadvantage.asp

anyway i hope you take some economics classes to help you make sense of these things. because... why suffer?

last, i hope you can find some support system/therapy, because you're a smart person and my guess is that it's emotional issues getting in your way. university campuses (at least in the usa) offer a large panoply of support groups and services. how is it over there?

Fortunately I don't have very much debt to worry about, my payments for now are small enough that I could in theory pay it off with savings even after a year of being unemployed (but that caused a huge breakdown when I tried, so I didn't). It shouldn't be too bad honestly, I'm just worried financially in the meantime.


Well...this is my fault, I haven't really been looking. I live in a regional area so not much of the work is white collar, and it would be difficult to get anything that I can do around uni and transport...especially since my goal is to move closer into the city, something hard to do without losing a job.


I'm not doing any economics in my course (except for, currently, a work placement class I'm flunking), and even if I was I'd probably try and skip it because I think that the sort of people who study economics at uni...


Most of my emotional issues are just feeling like a loser, not having much in the way of social interaction (see above) and doubting fixing that (also see above). Plus way too much time spent pining for those across oceans... :o

there's quite a bit to unpack there so i'll just tackle it by bits. ok? this one for now:


that's rough. it sounds to me like you're depressed, and the rest of your problems (lack of motivation, flunking courses) stem straight from there. please take care of it? :(

depression is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, hard to pin down if depression causes negative mind chatter or if negative mind chatter causes depression, if depression causes lack of exercise or lack of exercise causes depression, if sleep deprivation causes depression or depression causes sleep deprivation, if depression invites disaster or disaster brings depression, if depression causes isolation or isolation causes depression, but... the cycle needs to be broken.

fuck, this is hard because all i can do here is say things, which feels kinda useless. but i'm trying to say anyway that this is not isolated or separated from other areas of your life, but actually central to all the rest of it, and it's important, an emergency even, so... please please please find help for it? and... keep trying until something works? because there are things that work.

also, depression is very common in university settings, so that's something for one to feel like one belongs lol. just please don't stay stuck there (in depression i mean).

continuing,...


ah yeah, "business types" maybe?

yeah i wasn't recommending it for the social scene lol, but as a basic form of literacy which... i think everyone should have. it's a fundamental reality too many people ignore. it's like... imagine if a majority of people were flat-earthers. we're that bad when it comes to our understanding economics.

economics is, at its best, a subspecies of philosophy, a kind of highly abstracted anthrophology and psychology, showing us how people behave under conditions of scarcity. it's really amazing shit.

and we are all under conditions of scarcity, because resources are always limited (right?) while desires are unlimited (of course). and to figure out how we go about solving that tension as a species... is really cool.

then again a university course might not be the best place to learn those things, not in that way anyway. instead of an intuitive grasp of ideas they might just give you formulas and boring equations to memorize, but that would depend on the teacher i guess.

i'd recommend some books for personal consumption but i imagine you're swamped right now.

and also

yah i was hoping you could flee to a big city, but anyway, in the meantime, do they have student jobs at your universities? college campuses in the usa are all staffed with students. and sure there are crap cafeteria jobs but there are more interesting things in labs and libraries and academic departments. and sure library grunt work doesnt pay a lot but it gives you access to the motherlode... and labs and departments are door openers to so much. particularly labs which is where the money gets generated...

and student jobs arent marriages. they arent for life... you can try a new one each semester. well at least i did lol. not sure im an example of anything, maybe more of a cautionary tale lol, but i had fun haha.

Will get around to all of that as time goes by. For now, it's election day here.

Just worked ten hours counting votes, didn't get home until ten minutes ago (1.40am). A few quick notes:
*the right-wing Liberal Party have fallen to pieces, losing about twenty seats to go from narrow majority to clear opposition
*the supposedly-left-wing-but-actually-centrist Labor Party are all but certain to form government, but may not reach the 76 seats needed for outright control because
*there is a massive crossbench, both out of a strong vote for the Greens and a big movement of "teal independents" who are generally conservative but advertising themselves as different to the LNP - as well as being pro-climate action
*things will be very interesting

well, congrats on your environmental shift. and fingers crossed.

life is good :-)

I have a mouse, and it's not a pet :(
Hopefully it's only one, haven't seen only one at a time so I guess it's all the same one. I've set several traps, so far it doesn't help. Several different types, some with poison which it doesn't eat it. And some trappers, with peanut butter as bate. It has ate the peanut butter but the snapper don't snap.


I live on the third floor of a four story apartment complex. How the hell can I get a mouse!! And how the hell can I get rid of it!! It makes me very paranoianical.

someone else must have attracted it. traps, btw, need to be flush against the wall with the snapper perpendicular to it (and facing thr wall). mice tend to walk alongside walls rather than in the open.

but... your whole building might need an exterminator i think. just an idea.

thanks for the tip about the trap placement. I didn't know that, and had placed them near the wall, but at a ~10cm distance and parallel to it. I figured they would smell the bate....



Coming Wednesday we have our yearly owners meeting, and I'll have it discussed. I was wondering the same. My place hasn't been the cleanest lately, but it must come from 3 floors down or one floor up (or two up if the roof is also a floor for them mice ;) )

Howdy folks. Hope all is well :)

The internet introduced me to this wonderfully terrible Prince live bootleg cover today. It's both the most horrifying and carpenteresque misfire of a fanart attempt, but it also kind of gives me life. I once named a team of video game characters after famous musicians. When it came to Prince though, a typo made its way in and the character from then on would only be referred to as "Prnice". This cover is Prnice without filters. It's the purest distillation of the Prnice way. And it is everything.

perhaps this was because it's still in the early morning. But I initially thought you were referring to the Carpenters with "carpenteresque"

I caught the?/a mouse today! I'm so proud of myself :D
yeah whatever. I've put traps for months, and ow all of a sudden it walked into it. It wasn't even fresh bait, two weeks old peanut butter.
You read that mice walk along the walls. Maybe US mice are different from Dutch mice, this one walks everywhere except along the walls.


Let's hope there was only one, and the entire family doesn't come looking for daddy tonight ....

hahahahahahaaa! goddamn. dutch mice are smart but all die in the end.

well i'm glad it was caught in a trap and not poisoned. having rodents die inside the walls has to be very smelly....

now i'd say continue laying traps because where there's one there might be many... and your mice seem to like their peanut butter "aged"

The NY Times art crirtic, Jerry Saltz, posted a pic of himself on Twitter asking artists to do what thou wilt. I did this. He LIKED IT. hahha!!

https://twitter.com/Robinstigator/st...03445924630528

hahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

bravo, sir

*Takes a bow*

I wrote a very long and rambling thing about the Chile vs Soviet Union football playoff in 1973: https://fuzzybluerain.substack.com/p...hets-chile-and

jeff beck


























....too soon?

haahahaaa! that's mean... xD

he was a good musician. i never got into his stuff, but he played his instrument well. what more could one ask? i mean at least he didn't fuck it all up by singing.

haha, it's long! it's also very well written. but it goes from genesis to revelation so i started reading it in random chunks. biba la anarkía.

i'll let you know when i finish. btw if you wanna make it even longer, write about why the british ultimately protected pinochet and why margaret thatcher advocated for him. total clusterfuck,

ok here you go lol: https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ohn-osullivan/

the argentinian junta were fucking nazis too though. in the style of pinochet but on an even greater scale.

Thank you, haha! I enjoyed writing something for non-uni reasons because it means that I don't have to constrain myself to structure or formal referencing or length...

I briefly touch on that, and have a footnote detailing Thatcher's affection and support. That article you sent me is interesting - the way I've internalised that relationship to myself is that Thatcher's Britain deeply envied the sheer economic vandalism, and Pinochet's Chile was just looking for any chance to jump in on the Argies :p

And the Argentinian stuff is horrific in sheer scale, which I talk about as well - nine thousand dead in six years, and that's possibly an underestimate, and yet who knows how many people even know about it. I spend a few pages talking about the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, which is extremely relevant given 2022's locale.

cool ass shit choc-o-claire

Jeff Beck is the Linda Ronstadt of guitar.

what did linda ronstadt do? something about a pony i think? i can't recall hahaha.

also, this should be telling: when i was a kid i got a jeff beck cd because i had heard he was a great guitarist bla bla etc.

but today i can't remember the name of the record, nor a single tune from it, nothing. it probably disappeared in the floor of a car. i didn't hate it, i think, but i didn't really like it. so i forgot it until yesterday. so what you said above is true for me, lol. but it's still mean hahaha.

but anyway, he had his fans, and they're sad now, so who am i to say. he wasn't my enemy though. i don't remember being attacked by him the way i feel attacked by christmas music, country shit, or the millennial clap.

besides, he didn't pester anyone with singing. that should be a lesson for a lot of musicians, to shut the fuck up and play the instruments. so, much respect for that alone, hahaha.