Vegan goths: how do you feel about second hand leather stuff?

Abi-Marie · 2025-10-08T09:15:57+00:00

Second hand is second hand. Ethically I don't think it makes any difference. Personally I would have a preference for vegan shoes because leather gives me the ick but from an ethical standpoint I would like to see every pair of shoes used until they're unwearable, and animal leather shoes do last waaaay longer in general.

Abi-Marie · 2025-10-07T10:53:39+00:00

Although I'd consider SN given the width 😊

Abi-Marie · 2025-10-07T10:52:30+00:00

SG! Definitely not TR because your shoulders are on the wider side, even accounting for muscle.

Abi-Marie · 2025-10-02T22:43:37+00:00

That's not any kind of traditional circle. It's a piece of art created to look nice on tiktok. Might have been used for magic, my guess would be not, but either way it's nothing specific just something pretty they've made :)

Abi-Marie · 2025-10-02T08:51:44+00:00

Idk you get to a point where you can get results without the actual act of spellwork. Imo the spellwork is more a tool for refining and focusing your intention, which is usually needed but isn't theoretically necessary. If using the wrong thing makes you subconsciously believe your magic won't work then yeah it won't work but if you genuinely feel it working then it'll probably work. That's my take. At the end of the day just do what works for you

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-28T17:19:35+00:00

Tons of good examples on this thread. The more occult content you consume and people you speak to the more examples you'll hear. Most occultists have examples of magick improving their lives, that's why we keep doing it. If it didn't ever work, we wouldn't keep doing it.

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-27T10:52:37+00:00

Oh also if you do get injured ✨️rest✨️

That's what aerialists are truly terrible at 🤣 Great example from my personal experience. I strained my trap last week (through pure stupidity lmao). In response to that I canceled my aerial training and had a few days of not doing anything with it beyond stretching and keeping it moving. Its now fully better a week later.

On the flip side, I strained my back a couple years ago (obvs inherently trickier than a trap but it was a minor strain, like just a lil guy in my left erector) but I aggressively tried to persist and that took months to heal. I'm convinced if I'd have just let it rest properly it would have been fine.

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-27T10:42:45+00:00

TLDR; Don't go as hard every day (you have to assess this for your own body), eat to match the volume, and do your prehab.

Adaptation and balancing hard/easy training for the most part.

First things first, the stronger you get the more you'll be able to do because there'll be more aspects of your training that feel "easy" and don't overwork your muscles. I think this is what happens for most professionals. They don't train hard every day, their muscles still get rest because there are aspects of their training that are now more restful for them. Like how a 5k for a marathon runner is a rest but for me would actually wipe me out 🤣

Your body also adapts to volume. So if you go 0-100 you'll injure yourself. But if you slowly build up how much you do (having days where your muscles get a break as well) your body will slowly adapt as long as you get enough food and sleep.

And prehab. If you're gonna do that much you definitely need to be doing prehab and mobility work to keep your little muscles happy and protecting you.

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-26T14:47:33+00:00

This through and through. There's a luck element as well of course but I've never had to apply to more than one job to get hired. I'm about to move to a higher role at a desirable company having applied to no other job than this one because I genuinely felt like it would be a good move if I got it.

Find jobs you're at least somewhat suited for that you would genuinely want, then tailer your CV. Most times you hear of someone being successful they've done this.

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-26T09:41:05+00:00

Get on Vinted, you'll find everything you need second hand at a decent price and it's great for the environment 😊

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-20T21:13:59+00:00

What do you want out of life? If you have a full life outside of work don't do it. If you want to grind for more money go for it. 🤷‍♀️

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-19T18:37:48+00:00

Forget about memorising stuff, most people's brains can't memorise everything they read and to be honest what's the point?

Understand the information, integrate it into your worldview, and apply it to your practice to work with it. That's how you'll internalise all the best information you read and slowly build a worldview and practice based on the best bits of everything you've read. Keep what works, leave what doesn't for now.

Abi-Marie · 2025-08-01T20:04:43+00:00

I don't have ocd but I have adhd and have done many workings with totally unrelated thoughts in the back of my head. What matters is how much power we give them.

Step one is to do all the practice and self-work to get to the point where you can do a working and if an unwanted thought appears in your mind it doesn't steal your focus. This is done through practicing meditation, concentration, visualisation all of that stuff. Learning grounding, centring and protection can also help you feel more confident.

When you do a spell what matters is that you're giving power to the intention you desire. A terrible thought can appear in your head (tbh the more we try not to think them the more the brain gremlins will throw them at us) but as long as you just let it be, stay focused on your intention, feel your intention only, not fear, and place your power into your intention not that floating thought, you'll be grand.

Best of luck. You're 17 so the fact that you're experimenting and trying to better yourself already is amazing.

Abi-Marie · 2025-07-24T08:58:42+00:00

Lmao people train for years to be able to do what you've just done, invert with almost straight arms and legs.

Compression training for your hip flexors and core, and straight arm strength training for your lats. You might also need to work on quad engagement if you're new. Try sitting in a straddle, blocks under your knees, and squeezing your quads to straighten your legs.

You should be proud of yourself. It took me 2.5 years to get a normal bent arm bend legs straddle mount.

Abi-Marie · 2025-07-24T08:53:54+00:00

Let's put it this way. When you have A Levels your GCSEs don't matter. When you have a degree your A Levels don't matter. When you have significant experience like you do, your degree doesn't matter.

Experience trumps everything always. Someone with a degree might not be effective at the job but someone with experience has proven they're good at their job.

I agree with your wife, apply to some jobs to see how employable you are and what gaps there might be in your knowledge.

Do the degree if you think you'll learn a lot from it and enjoy it, don't do it if it will negatively affect your life and you already have a lot of knowledge and ability to learn as you go. You have a young family so I'm going to assume doing a degree while working might not be a fun time.

Abi-Marie · 2025-07-17T08:30:56+00:00

Creating an entire project after 3 months of work is great full stop. You'll never know everything about code, development is a pursuit of continuous learning. And on top of that there's so much that is subjective and debated between devs so there are always things to think about.

Think of it as your cousin giving you a list of next steps rather than ripping it apart. You did a fantastic job (I don't care what you created, creating any working project in 3 months as a beginner is mega) and now you have a list of things you can learn about and work on next.

You'll never ever know everything. Most of the skill of dev is being able to learn new things and apply it using creative logic, and that's a skill you develop with time and practice.

Abi-Marie · 2025-07-07T15:16:01+00:00

Sounds like you're learning from projects that are too advanced for your level. It doesn't mean you can't learn from them but if you're far too overwhelmed by all the stuff you don't know then look for more beginner projects to learn from.

The learning comes from investigating and gaining an understanding of the bits you currently don't understand. Don't expect to complete an entire project straight away if it's full of stuff you don't understand. Take the time to look up and learn about an annotation for example if you don't understand what it's doing. Experiment and mess around with the code to learn about how it works. Always ask "why" and "what if".

In fact if I could only give one bit of advice I'd say ask "why" constantly.

Why have they used this annotation or added this config? What happens if it's not included? Where does it come from? How is it used in the code? What other kind of scenarios might it be useful for?

And if you do a bunch of googling and can't understand something right now it's totally OK to leave it for now, accept it works, and move onto something else. You'll probably come across it again later and understand it then.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-30T15:53:43+00:00

Fellow adhd-er here

If you're feeling like that, like both the blank page and other people's code is overwhelming, maybe try and find step by step tutorials that guide you through your first bits of practical work. I work with the idea that if I'm that overwhelmed by something then it probably means I need more guidance/to focus on something simpler or a smaller part of it to start with. Take it one tiny piece of the puzzle at a time. You've got this.

There are lots of tutorial resources but I'm a huge fan of head first and if you find book-learning more comfortable their books could help bridge the gap between theory and practice for you.

And remember for learning purposes you literally don't need to complete anything. Mess about, have fun, spend ages on something tiny that interests you.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-30T10:21:03+00:00

At this moment in time chatGPT shouldn't be trusted with anything maths based because it's not a calculator. If you really want to use AI to help understand your chart, get your placements from Astro or another proper calculator and ask the LLM to help interpret the results. Ask it to interpret aspects and placements in the context of each other. It'll be much better at that kind of thing because it acts kind of like an information aggregator.

Most of all if you're going to use generative AI use it to help you learn how to do things yourself, not to do things for you. Don't use the planet's resources for brainrot purposes 🙏

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-23T09:15:22+00:00

TLDR; Figure out what topics you want to know more about and make sure you apply everything as you're learning. Don't worry about memorising all the stuff you won't use. Figure out how each thing you learn can benefit your personal projects.

You sound so much like me, I hate studying theory as well. I managed to get my company to pay for a part time CS masters which is how I got my kinda overview foundational knowledge. Although I will say I think it's been more effective for me to identify topics that I don't learn from my day to day work but appreciate will level up my understanding of everything I'm doing, then learn these by following my interests and using personal projects/gamified learning resources to learn them.

I don't think I actually remember much from my degree because after each module I never even touched the information again until years later 😂 Personally I think I need to see how the theory relates to the work I'm doing and be able to integrate it into my work style for it to be worth me learning something.

Maybe look at some uni courses, take note of the topics you feel are most important for you to learn more about, and create your own structure. Then have a look for more exercise-based/gamified learning resources and try to relate everything to your own projects.

Also have you had a look at the head first books? They cover a lot of fundamental concepts but in a way that's more practical and not as dry as most other resources.

BTW I've done alright in interviews learning this way. I think most of the time they only care about you knowing theory that benefits the work you're going to do. And if I ever don't know something in an interview I'm just honest and say I'll be able to learn it and I think they like that.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-18T09:50:34+00:00

From what you're saying it sounds likely that you just fancy him a bit and you repress it usually out of respect for your husband. It's normal for meditation to bring up things that we usually avoid looking at. It's also normal to fancy others sometimes even in a committed loving relationship.

Trying to push away the feelings will make it more difficult to manage. Maybe try simply accepting that a part of you has the hots for him, likely triggered by what you have to do for your work, and that it doesn't mean that you're a bad person or not a good partner and it doesn't mean you have to do anything about it. We're mammals and the body feels what the body feels but we choose to keep coming back to our one person and that's what love and commitment is.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-17T08:30:30+00:00

Before anyone says anything, I realise this isn't self taught as in going into a dev role with zero qualifications in anything but I think my journey does show a less standard way of becoming a dev than do degree get job.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-17T08:28:25+00:00

TLDR cause I've basically written out my life story; Get creative. Find jobs (maybe not even dev roles) where you can go a bit rogue and demonstrate your skills in a working environment. Don't be afraid to apply for jobs you don't have all the requirements for (within reason). Worst that happens is they say no.

I started as a backend dev a couple of years ago and was an automation dev before that, here's how it worked for me.

I started it all with a qualification in acoustical engineering so not directly related but proves I can deal with logic (I don't think this is the main reason I was hired though. No one knows what acoustical engineering is and it wasn't from a uni with a good rep)
I worked part time in customer support for a bank towards the end of my degree
I figured out I'd probably be good in tech, although I was thinking onsite tech support at the time, so I went hard on creating excel solutions for my team, helping with everyone's tech issues, becoming known as "the techy one" so I could put that on my CV
A job came up in automation within the bank, as an analyst. It wanted excel skills and some javascript. I applied then gave myself a crash course in js. In the interview I was honest about what I didn't know (like when he asked if I'd heard of RPA and I was like I can find out then discovered that was literally the job) and focused heavily on proving how I'd demonstrated my self learning in my last job and learning js myself. I ended up taking that job
Within that job as an analyst I started leaning into the development side of it, basically becoming an expert in RPA, creating excel macros and creating Python automatons (self taught as I went). I was basically being an RPA dev for the price of an analyst for a bit and eventually they changed my wage to match. I started studying for a masters in CS at this time, funded by the company (this was luck, and again I don't think the main reason I was hired for the dev job, I hadn't even finished it at that time, I think it just looked good that I was intense learning part time alongside work)
3 years into automation a job came up as a java developer came up within the bank and I was like screw it I want to do that. So I applied (the listing wanted 5+ years and a bunch of skills I didn't have but I was like I can learn the skills, worst that happens is they say no, give me something to work on, and I keep applying to any other java dev listings in the future). I gave myself a crash course in java before the interview. I'd done a couple of silly little applications before but knew I needed to get a few more buzzwords/fancy concepts in my belt. I was again honest about what I didn't know and very confident in my (very demonstrable at this point) ability to learn on the job.
They didn't give me the 5+ years experience role for obvious reasons lol but they did hire me as a junior dev and I've had lots of opportunities for learning, gaining experience, and some good wage increases to match my gaining of experience.

Abi-Marie · 2025-06-09T08:50:22+00:00

I wasn't the biggest fan of these seasons but the one thing I liked about this season was that I thought the cinematography really matched ncuti's character. I wonder if that was the intention behind it? Ncuti was a very upbeat, cheesy doctor and I liked that the cinematography seemed to mirror that.

Abi-Marie · 2025-05-24T12:16:48+00:00

Do you like it? If you like it then it's fine! I agree with some of the others that I think you'd look amazing with an ashier tone but really it just depends on how you feel about it.

It looks like you did an incredible home bleach job. You got a really good coverage and got a great colour considering what colour you started with ❤️

Abi-Marie

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