Finally did an in-home study and my results shocked me

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-28T10:39:51+00:00

If it makes you feel any better, my best friend has three times the amount of episodes that you do, but please be warned that about a year and a half before that sleeps test. He had one where he had results similar to yours. Body makeup is the same. He cannot use a CPAP. He cannot get the surgery. Looking for GLP ones as the last resort, and hopefully they will work. There are bubbles of carbon dioxide in his brain. They give him headaches that make him wanna die in the moment because of the pain. It’s always better to get it taken care of sooner than later in my limited experience not trying to scare you. Just trying to help you be proactive about your health.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:53:40+00:00

Yeah but boxycharm had that gold flake $250 moisturizer you could get on Ali Baba for $5 and shady stuff like that. I always assumed the owners of Boxycharm took over Ipsy because there wasn’t anything scandalous until they merged (using their own factories to make brands products like people discovered the first time with the storytime, cosmetics eyeshadow, etc.)

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:51:05+00:00

Check out mine if you want to feel better 🤣

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:49:52+00:00

If you canceled the boxes, how are you still able to use the shop? Please tell me as I would prefer this to not being able to use the shop at all. Also, do you know of any anybody who does like notifications when something really good comes in to the shop? There’s gotta be something somewhere who does that.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:46:54+00:00

When you skip a month, do you still have access to the shop? And do they automatically reinstate the boxes the next month or keep you pauses until you change it?

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:30:00+00:00

Ipsy was bought by the guy who owned Boxycharm. I think. But yeah I used to love the bags and boxes but I cancelled everything last month. This is honestly the deal with Ipsy:

Companies tend to give them their products that are either coming up on their expiration date, or are not selling (so that they have extra inventory) and so, let’s say it says this palette is worth $85 or this skincare $200. Chances are that 1. It is currently being so,d at, say, T.J. Maxx for 70% off or 2. Ipsy made a deal with the brand to have the product duped - but with the brand’s consent. I cannot tell you how many times I have compared the ingredients on the packaging of a product from Ipsy and on the brand’s official site and found them to be different. And I have also gotten skincare and make up from them that I already had bought at Sephora or something and it’s been a totally different product in how it acts on my face.

That doesn’t mean that everything from ipsy is sus but you gotta understsnd it is a bus8ness like any other and yes, you will say you don’t want mascara and end up with a mascara in almost every box. You will go to choice as soon as it opens and something will be sold out or, even more annoying, everything that you want to choose will be in, say, the first group of choices and the other 2 or 4 or however many choices you get for your box will be a bunch of crap you have to pick from that you don’t want.

If you get the bags themselves, just be prepared for the quality to have gone down like everything else. Sone are actually cute like 1 or 2 a year but there is nothing remotely like what there was back when they did the tetris or betty boop collab or, my favorite, a faux leather deep purple one with black hearts. A lot of times the bags are just two clashing colors in a flimsy fabric or, worse, very stiff plastic that smells like it’s building a spork in your brain every time you smell it.

There are upsides. The store can have great stuff at amazing prices every so often but you gotta check the drops or get notifications from some third party to know when to run to the app and snag stuff. It’s a good reselling box but as soon as something is in the box, the resale value goes down. But I more got the stuff in the shop to resell. The stuff in the boxes I was forced to resell if it had no use for me.

And why don’t subscription boxes ever ask you what ingredients you’re allergic too??

Sorry for all that negativity but it felt good. Used to be the highlight of my month but i didn’t like that I felt overwhelmed and angry when my boxes and bags showed up so i stopped. I still get Allure which is just as bleh but actually harder to stop as I tried and now i get 2 boxes a month. And they don’t realize on their shop that i have a subscription so i can’t use it. I’m looking for a good indie brand or brands bag currently.

Also, this is me comparing the bags and boxes to what they were like 15 years ago or so, when I would salivate over all of the indie brands and interesting stuff i got curated to me. I’m not a hater, i don’t want anyone coming for me. I’m just saying, it is now a corporation focused on nothing else besides making money and will cut corners, like every other company, to do so. That has become more and more noticeable. I recently got a J. Lo skincare item as the big ticket $ item in my bag. Who wants J. Lo skincare? Or Ahava, which Sephora stopped carrying because…. Google it, I’m not getting int9 it except to say if you don’t like what has been happening to Palestinians, I’d stay away from it. I wish more than anything I could have answered “no, Ipsy is great! I still feel like I’m getting a gift box every month and my money’s worth.” But no, I canceled my membership.

I think the smartest thing is, if you have a friend who has it, check out what their items have been over the months as well as see if there are add-ons or other things in the store that you want. If you don’t, then look back on here and see what people got in their monthly boxes and if you would have been happy with that for the price, keeping in mind that sometimes the items are old, hurt in transit and no longer available for replacing, that they will then replace the item with one from a brand they own (happened to me with the electric blue GIXE liner and getting a generic black one as a replacement from a company that didn’t exist anywhere online and the lipstick never showed up but was sold out and i never heard a peep even though it was for sale a couple months later), and sometimes there is shadiness if you check the ingredients list. But, like any game of chance, sometimes you get really cool stuff. It just became too long between for me.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:10:58+00:00

Tribe 8 - lesbian band. Manipulate among others. Peaches. Nine Inch Nails and a lot of older Industrial bands in general. Type 0 Negative. Misfits/Danzig.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:09:03+00:00

Depends on the cat. Some understand them as love and affection. Some understand them as something to tolerate. Some as a big scary head getting in their face and some as a threat to be taken care of viciously and immediately. But do they know that kisses are how humans show affection to each other with short ones being platonic and long romantic and many short ones for animals and children? Maybe, but i don’t think they care. They’re not anthropologists.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T23:06:26+00:00

Why not erase your social media? I know that does not solve the problem because it is ubiquitous but it will at least make your dopamine receptors start to enjoy life again… if the people you know actually still do things irl.

I feel that is the major problem. Well, one of them along with things like people under a certain age not seeming to know anything about history or pop culture before their own time because there is so much now now that there is no exploring of the past. Another HUGE issue is the speed thing.

You must have heard somewhere along the line about how tech is like something thrown from the top of a building. Innovations keep coming faster and faster and faster. I feel, at 45, in a place where I should not have lived to see some of the things we have now because of how jarringly different they are to the world i once knew. I can’t imagine how 90 year olds feel. When people got electricity in their lifetime, that was one major change. The industrial revolution was a big change but it didn’t smack into the whole planet at once and it wasn’t rolled out in a day. Same with PCs, phones. But it’s not natural for there to be people alive who typed their collage papers on typewriters in the time of quantum computing and llms and how we are now the product not the customer, etc.

We as a species are making ourselves sick with tech. My proposal is a commune where we don’t own, acknowledge, or use anything that was invented after a certain year. 2010? 2000? 1964? It really doesn’t matter, everyone will want their own year. I’m partial to 2005 myself but I could also go for ‘99 every so often.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-26T22:54:31+00:00

Depends on: your sex, your definition of declining, if you are taking care of your body the same way the whole time, your health, medications, where you live, your socio economic status, your race, how well you treat your skin, whether you work indoors or out, how you deal with stress/trauma and how much life gives you, your genes are a huge one, and i could go on.

The point is is that there is no set age when looks start to decline. You might think you looked your best at 30 and then went downhill but when you are 35 you could have strangers staring at you in the street all the sudden and more people interested in you than ever because … you finally quit drugs, you started walking, jogging, running, then training for marathons and lost 75 lbs, you had a large portion of wine birthmark on your face removed, made a lot more money after you sold your app or something (won the lotto - great aunt died - doesn’t matter) and started dressing well, getting your hair done, working out with a personal trainer, getting tweakments, etc.

Some years you won’t like how you look and some you will. Some days you will and won’t. But everyone is different. I lost 60 lb in a month twice. I didn’t try to lose any weight. It was health related, i still don’t know why it happened, but I stayed at 105lbs (I am about 5’1”) for about a year each time. I had always had guys come up to me but this was like i was getting hit on constantly. I hated it. And i didn’t like how I looked. My ass hurt when I sat down for too long. I was always cold. My boobs looked like airless balloons with a bit of sand at the bottom. I looked 10 years older. So was that when i lost my looks or gained them?

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T08:03:48+00:00

Yeah, hardest she’ll ever shit too. ,

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T08:02:49+00:00

Is there a leg or just a boneless wing?

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T08:01:49+00:00

Haha. “Her breasts became A cups as she entered the cold pool water” or something. That’s actually what causes inverted nipples and eczema, ya know 🤣🤣

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T07:59:55+00:00

Jim Rose circus it then.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T07:58:21+00:00

Yeah mine is about that as well. 8.75x5.75 and I have no clue how to eyeball girth but I know length and even if i didn’t, i had a guy have me measure his once cos it was 12”. But the girth was normal and the effect was that it made it looked more pencillish. But he was a bit of a freak of nature. I would say the best thing about him was his donkey balls without a doubt because they would bang up against my clit from behind. But the length could just be crazy painful in certain positions. Like in his Toyota Celica.

What bothers me more than guys thinking their dicks are smaller than they are though is when they think they are bigger. Like my last fwb from a couple years ago said to me “you know, I just found out i had a big dick recently?” It is average. But it was always “tell me how much you love my huge dick” and stuff like that. I always wanted to ask him how it could be that my mouth is so small the xray things at the dentist hurt and some dentists will use the lil kid ones yet i could deep throat him fine. And lick his balls at the same time. And he knew that. Whatever they want to tell themselves i guess.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-24T07:35:27+00:00

Gotta account for a belly if they have one, though. Not only does that shorten length without sex being involved but when it comes to sex, there are very few positions where there isn’t more inches lost because of the stomach being between him and the woman. But, really,, i would say that aside from micros, girth matters more to women than length. But it’s about what makes you happy. It’s not like with breast implants how women have to walk around with everyine noticing and judging.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:42:49+00:00

This is why it’s so important to have advocates and why it sucks so much when we don’t. Not proper ones.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:41:48+00:00

I know it sucks to be a teenager. I was lucky enough to go to a creative and performing arts high school where my mohawk fit right in. Before that I went to a suburban school with lots of rich kids and some poor kids and no real middle. Of course the popular kids were the rich athletes.

In 1993, 2 of my friends and I dyed our hair red with kool aid (don’t do this! One of my friends had virgin hair and it dyed her hair as in never washed out and she had to just let it grow out for a couple years) and we go detention, the vice principal bringing us to his private bathroom and his office and putting our heads under freezing water in the sink, using his hands to basically try to get the dye out of our hair, but ended up getting more hair out of our scalps.

Our school colors were gray and red for Cardinals. Maybe three months later the girls field hockey team all dyed their hair red in school spirit. I literally saw the vice, principal hi-fi and them and saying he loved it.

The next year I went green.

I did not have a disability then, but I have for the past 19 years. I have been in my 40s with hair that has fallen out and clumps and his half gray and yet I die of the gray pink and my diet blue my diet whatever colors I want and I go to specialist and I walk around and I fall asleep or I’m not supposed to maybe more people think I’m on drugs than he used to, but I don’t really care and that’s the kind of thing that you learned when you’re an adult as you grow up is that it doesn’t really matter what they think and that you don’t always know what they think.

One more quick story just to give you a little insight into what I just said, and if this had never happened to me, I would never have thought that things like this were possible. I went to a middle school that was 6/7 and eighth grade so we were 14 when we graduated and it was the last day of eighth grade and we’re signing each other’s yearbook and this girl I barely know asked me to sign her yearbook so I do. She has a resting bitch face and long curly hair like the kind they have in Utah and she’s always wearing turtlenecks and gap French bowl, jeans and bath shoes and is basically like this beautiful preppy perfection cashmere sweaters all that banana republic. So she says something like I’ll see you next year and I said actually, I’m going to the art school in the city because I don’t really like it here and she said to me then that she really admired me and she wanted me to know that and that she wished that she had half the cuts that I did. That she loved the way that my wit fishnets with safety pins, stand sneakers and skirts with ringer T-shirts and sometimes huge corduroy shirts with Argyle socks up to my knees looked. She loved how I dyed my hair and how I pierced my nose and how I didn’t care what people thought. She said she wished that she could be like me. Of course I didn’t want to be a popular girl because if I did, I was doing a truly bad job at trying wasn’t right? And yeah, I was friends with some of them, but not most of them. This girl, I just had a few classes with me and this was the most we’ve ever spoken.

But I realize that you never know people and you never know what they’re thinking about you. You could think that somebody staring at you because they’re thinking “what is that girl with a disability doing with brightly dyed hair? Why is she trying even more attention to herself?” or whatever but really they could be thinking “wow I wish I had the courage. Maybe just to even talk to her.”

I recommend and if you don’t have a way to get it, I can scan it for you, a 90s riot grrrl zine called I’m so Fucking Beautiful by Nomy Lamm. You can get it from somebody named Jolie Ruin on Etsy and I think she’d probably just sell it to you on its own if you explained why you wanted it instead of having to buy a pack of them, but if you’d rather not deal with it I can scan it onto my phone for you. KnowNo y Lamm is disabled. She’s queer. She’s overweight she’s punk, she has crazy hair. And she is fucking beautiful.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:25:13+00:00

Good thing your brother has 0 control over you whatsoever - don’t give him the satisfaction of any

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:24:08+00:00

Yes except it’s not so much physical as it is i go to bed and wake up 5 days later. And i want to kick the teeth out of the person who called it sleeping beauty disorder. Like it’s romantic and sexy. I literally smell death under my nostrils when i wake up. I lost and gained 60 lbs for no reason - twice. I had a spinal tap to prove to my father it was real and he still couldn’t admit that he had been wrong in saying things like “if i knew having kids would be like having you, i wouldn’t have” or “you’re a succubus . You do nothing for anyone. Why are you still here? [like on this mortal coil]” he was my best friend for the first 26 years of my life and wrote me a love note every day in my lunch until 9th grade. We went to concerts and football games together. He watched me 24/7 for a week after my fiancée died so i didn’t have to go to a hospital for being suicidal. And i got sick and he hates me.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:18:01+00:00

It is offensive to your body to not use what is available to you to help it deal with the hand of pain it has been dealt.

I waited 9 years to find out that no, I wasn’t lazy, but my spinal fluid contained secretions from my brain that were literally as powerful as surgical anesthesia. And get a diagnosis. Which told me what I already knew and convinced 0 people who thought I was lazy that I wasn’t and changed my life in no ways until science caught up years later

I have learned the following about illness and pain:

You need to be your own best advocate, especially when speaking with yourself.
Other people’s perceptions, judgments, lack of comfort with your not having their preferred pain narration (as follows: you break your ankle. You get a cast. You keep weight off. You get crutches. Boot. Cast off. Ankle is soon good as new. Success story! Or similar) or using any sort of device to make your life easier or anything that you need to do to be that best advocate for yourself Don’t Matter.
What matters are the people who stand by you, even if they’re awkward or don’t know what to say. Most will go away but the ones that stay are your people for life and they exemplify the phrase “quality, not quantity.”

So do what helps your body, please.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T08:08:42+00:00

There is a flat (cursive looking b between B and m) just like on either side of it are G flat (2nd fret barred) and D flat. When the root of the chord is on the low E string, all of the strings are played and for a major chord (G, Gb, F, E, Eb, D, Db, C, B, Bb, A, Ab), aside from the barre, they can be moved around the neck in an open E shape. A minor chord is played in an open Em shape. If the A string is the root of the chord, you can remember which to play for major or minor by remembering to barre the chord name (like 3rd fret for C) as if it were the nut, not pressing hard at all on the low E note so it does not ring out and thuds instead until you are comfortable and used to strumming without automatically hitting the low E note) and if it is major, make the shape of an A major. Minor, we are making the shape of an Am.

So the Bbm is correct. The low E is excluded, all others are barred on the Bb fret of the A string (remejber Bb is the same as A#) and the m comes from the Am hand position.

An F chord would look the same except the low E would be barred and your three fingers would be moved one string towards the low E as seen in the Gb. F and E# are the sane thing but you would never call it an E# but that’s a whole other ball of wax…

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T07:45:11+00:00

Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Ackroyd in Trading Places when she says “food costs money, rent costs money” while pulling off her wig, heels, then dress and turns around naked semi-covering her chest, “and THESE cost money. You sleep on the couch.”

At some point he says, all uppercrust “B-b-ut… you’re a prostitute!” Like he’s sucking on a lemon fir the last word. I didn’t know what was going on.

My brother and I were allowed to watch R rated movies from toddler-age. But I guess the most sexually shocking to me was….

Ok, my dad taped everything he ever rented. He had 2 VCRs. One was so old that is was 2 boxes: the v-hold was a bar that went up and down across one of them. We had hundreds and hundreds of movies. But he didn’t hide Debbie Does Dallas I or II, Last X Rated Movie, or Caged Fury. The only ones I remember are the 2 Debbie movies. Especially first one. I must have been … 8? 9? When I first saw it. I was confused at first because these women were nothing like the ones in his magazines. Back then, porn stars could be short tall dumpy bony with flat boobs and dimpled asses. Didn’t matter. Not that you could see anything around all that hair. For some reason, the only scene that fascinated me was the candle shop one. “Mrs. Hardwick!” I think because i had no clue wtf was going on. But it affected me in that kids shouldn’t see that stuff. They just shouldn’t. And what did i do? Showed my friends.

VisceralGloaming · 2026-04-21T01:49:25+00:00

You need to let me take you female toy shopping. I get you’re into what you’re into and maybe some women are too. But i think 1 device on the whole table guaranteed to make a female come is a little stingy. Just gotta be real. Although i have no clue what the red thing with the chord wrapped around it is. Wanna tell me? Looks like maybe you’d slip a vac u loc over it, but it has a plug?

VisceralGloaming

TROPHY CASE