And those of us who are trying to find a job aren’t able to get one because, regardless of our education, you want impossible levels of experience for falsely advertised “entry” level jobs.

People are saying "we can't work like this"

They're showing everyone, just for a few days, what it will be like if they are forced to leave those jobs because they cannot survive in those conditions

"I can't get a train to the city, I had to order online, I had to pay extra for a 3rd party delivery guy, who was a non union temp courier under extreme pressure. They lobbed it over the fence and broke my foot but I can't get to NHS A&E because there aren't enough paramedics or nurses"

This IS what the world will be like if people can't afford to work the jobs they love and have been trained in for years.

No one is striking for 'funsies'. Its a call for help.

Clark Gable, ca. 1950s

(via 7vvtutth3d7a1.jpg (JPEG Image, 718 × 1440 pixels) — Scaled (86%))

Let him die.

I don’t owe you anything. Not conversation, not politeness, not my nakedness, not my truth, not my body, not one fucking iota of me.

Let him die.  One less person who acts this way running around the planet would be great.

lmfao I love her

Unknown

— Paulo Coelho

update on what's happening in Iran:

Based on the news you have heard that they 'abolished' the mortality police.

but today when I woke up and checked the new, 2 of the famous actresses who took their hijab off yesterday, Elnaz Shakerdoost and Shaghaiegh Dehghan have been summoned by the police.

an amusement park was closed permanently (for now) cause one of the female workers wasn't wearing hijab.

they are lying. they just abolished the mortality police to calm the protests, they don't care about women now as they didn't care all these damn 43 years.

DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IRAN. OUR ONLY PROBLEM IS NOT THE FORCED HIJAB; THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC NEEDS TO GO.

What in the world would we do without our libraries?

- Katharine Hepburn

Moleskines are Bad...

This post is doing the rounds again.

Everything in it remains true: Moleskine notebooks are overpriced for what they are, and even over-hyped; they’re not the original Moleskines referred to in the Bruce Chatwin (famous travel writer) anecdote which accompanies (or used to) each one. This is a typical example; here’s an extract:

Um. No, they weren’t.

Current Moleskines are a 1997 product which resurrected a long-defunct brand. If those Great Names used them there must have been a bit more resurrection going on, because by 1997 every single one - including Moleskine’s poster-boy Chatwin - was also defunct, most of them for quite a long time…

*****

There are many other elastic-closure notebooks far more fit for purpose, especially if that purpose involves a fountain pen. My own current fave is Rhodia, with a Leuchtturm next in the queue, though I bought a few Moleskines some years ago when I still used gel pens a lot (Pilot G-2s are excellent).

Despite changing almost entirely to fountain pens, I’ve been working my way through the Moleskines because TBH they were too expensive just to chuck out. But they’re restricted almost entirely to gels again, because the wretched paper is so prone to bleed-through.

Here’s an example:

Here’s the other side. Every line is visible to some extent, and a couple of them have bled through. A broader nib, wetter ink or indeed both combined would leave marks so severe that a “120 page” notebook might have just 60 useable pages, and if the bleed-through was bad enough to mark the next page as well, maybe not even that.

There are several reasons for bleed-through: nib width (obviously a Broad nib <B> lays down more ink than an Extra-Fine <EF>), ink viscosity (“wet” flows faster than “dry”) and the way nibs vary between manufacturers, because widths don’t seem to have a standardised size.

It’s obvious that my Lamy Al-Star <EF> nib writes far broader than my Pilot MR <F>. With the same ink in both, the difference wouldn’t be as conspicuous, though I suspect it would still be there; Lamy nibs skew wide while Japanese nibs skew fine. Those variables apply to all the rest as well.

So why use broad nibs and wet ink if it’s so messy?

On heavy or just well-finished paper it isn’t, and the combination is (a) pleasant to write with, since the nib skims effortlessly along a lubricant of ink and (b) broader nibs with a bit of flexibility create more obvious line variation, and that makes for graceful handwriting…

…and fountain-pens in general, due to not needing pressure, can and probably will improve the sort of scrawl ingrained by years of using ballpoints. Voice of Experience.

The primary reason for bleed-through is low-grade paper, and Moleskine has that without a doubt. They should spend less on marketing and fancy associate-with-whatever’s-trendy-now covers and more on better materials, but they don’t need to, having settled into the comfortable “Lifestyle Accessory” slot where things sell by familiarity of brand-name, not quality of product.

IMO Mont Blanc fountain pens are there too, and have been since the early 1990s. @dduane​‘s MB-146 was one of the last without the various authenticity marks that happen once a thing becomes desirable enough to be worth counterfeiting - as in China, which churns out a lot of fake MBs. (China is also where Moleskines are made…)

DD’s 146 may also be one of the last meant for use rather than possession. Nowadays (IMO again) a big MB is the fountain pen To Be Seen With. The equivalent big fountain pen To Write With is a Pelikan.

Just don’t try using either of them in a Moleskine…

*****

And yet, rummaging through old posts, I found something which amazed me as much now as when I first saw it 8 years ago. This was done with ballpoint pen on Moleskine, and embellished with real gold.

Wow…

To add a small thing on this, the 1997 Moleskines used a thicker paper. Fountain pens worked fine back then. Several years later Moleskines dropped the thickness of the paper and they became a bit rubbish for fountain pen owners.

iirc, the paper quality had a precipitous dip between 1997 and 2008; I have some Moleskine-brand notebooks in my paper stash that pre-date the 2008 recession, and the paper quality between the two eras is immediately perceptible because the 2008-> forward books are literally thinner than they used to be with roughly the same number of pages. The paper thickness was genuinely different.

I wasn’t a fountain-pen enthusiast at the time (I was a different stratosphere of poor in the era) but I am a Pigma Micron fiend, and I remember the tipping point where I could no longer use a 03 Micron without bleeding paper, and I remember it was sometime in 2009 when I bought a new Moleskine journal and the paper was like onion skin, totally useless for the way I preferred to journal at the time (with as many words crammed into one line as possible so that my journals were somewhat unreadable to the outside world).

It was profoundly disappointing and I think it took a while for the collective conscience to recognize the bad paper quality, but it quickly transmuted from “Moleskine’s new paper is lower quality and not worth the price” to “Moleskine is a ripoff” and, frustratingly, to “Moleskine was never good and has always been expensive and overrated!!” which is just, not true, tbh

Moleskine, at one time, made accessible luxury notebooks that were a joy to write in and thus the brand earned some real goodwill and fandom. They lost much of the earlier fandom because they decided to cut costs and did so with inferior materials rather than moving the notebooks out of accessible luxury into a higher price point.

I still miss the old ones; I recently bought one of the weekly-planner style because I learned to be A Planner Person off the old original weekly ones and while I can report the paper quality has improved in the past 15 years since the recession, it’s still not as crispy and opaque as it was back in the old days.

Absolutely. I remember saying nice things in my journal about Moleskines circa 2002 or 2003 and even lending the Moleskine company one of my notebooks for an exhibition they were doing of writers’ and artists’ notebooks. And then a few years later being simultaneously delighted that Moleskines were expanding and I could get them everywhere instead of just little paper shops in Italy, and disappointed that the paper quality had become rubbish.

Chanukah 1932

"It was on a Friday afternoon right before Shabbat that this photo was taken. My grandmother realized that this was a historic photo, and she wrote on the back of the photo that ‘their flag wishes to see the death of Judah, but Judah will always survive, and our light will outlast their flag.’ My grandfather, the rabbi of the Kiel community, was making many speeches, both to Jews and Germans. To the Germans he warned that the road they were embarking on was not good for Jews or Germans, and to the Jews he warned that something terrible was brewing, and they would do well to leave Germany. My grandfather fled Germany in 1933, and moved to Israel. His community came to the train station to see him off, and before departed he urged his people to flee Germany while there’s still time.” - Yehudah Mansbuch

Written on the back of the photo: “Chanukah, 5692. ‘Judea dies’, thus says the banner. ‘Judea will live forever’, thus respond the lights”.

Today, both the Posner family’s menorah and the photograph are on permanent display in the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. But each year, the menorah is returned to the family for one week when Rachel and Akiva’s descendants continue to light the Hanukkah candles using the same menorah that was brought to Israel from Kiel 90 years ago.

From this essay: MAGA Christians Are Dancing On God’s Corpse

STOP MAKING ME FEEL OLD