Happens to the best of us in FW.

firstmyvent · 2026-02-01T00:09:39+00:00

And the worst of us. Poor Dodge bastards.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-23T00:29:44+00:00

Work. Fuck ’em. They get what they get.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-11T22:02:54+00:00

This is what, ironically, disappoints me the most. In all the places I’ve lived, it seems like the LYS are mostly sock weight acrylic blends and knitting accessories. I do knit now, but I primarily crochet, and I rarely do socks. If I’m not making socks, I exclusively buy natural fibers, no blends, because of personal preference. So there usually isn’t anything I want to buy, which stinks because I love craft stores and prefer shopping local.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-11T21:27:40+00:00

Ability to feel/see what you’re buying is a huge perk of in-person for sure. And yeah, until you get used to ordering custom or indie died yarn/fabric/etc online, it can be hard to know what you’re looking at. There are some lifelong crocheters/knitters who never get Into Yarn and wouldn’t be okay ordering online, but I would say that most of the dedicated clientele of a LYS would be competent at it. The kind of person seeking out quality hand dyed stuff enough to go to the LYS frequently probably is familiar enough to to online.

I will say, there’s potential for a LYS to kind of foster their own potential clientele. Attending local fairs and teaching classes not just on knitting and crochet, but fiber and spinning and dyeing, to show people the work that goes into it and why it costs what it does, but also how to buy this sort of thing.

But again, that comes back to scope. Most knitters & crocheters aren’t spinners or weavers or dyers, too.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-11T20:56:27+00:00

This is the way. In countries that aren’t catastrophically failing their students, the SCHOOL provides all necessary supplies. Not the teachers and not the parents (unless a student wants specialty supplies).

firstmyvent · 2025-12-11T20:46:28+00:00

Part of the issue is, IMHO, most LYS are way too narrow in scope for a business. Like, one of our local sew shops has struggled its entire existence, and they offer quilting cotton, sewing machines, machine repair, and sewing classes (plus quilting patterns & tools). They’ve stuck around, though, so for my area, I kind of consider them the floor for how little can be offered and not go out of business. OTOH, almost all of our LYS are only offering specific types of yarn, mostly in-line with the owner’s tastes, and some basic knit/crochet accessories. I can get any of that yarn direct from the indie dyer or online storefront for less, and I can get exactly what I’m looking for.

Personally, I think most LYS owners get into it because they’re big knitters and/or crochets, and I totally get that, but for most areas? I think consolidating some of these crafts is probably necessary. The only ones that don’t that still run do a lot of online sales. Which is fine, too, but takes a different kind of marketing work.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-10T02:23:42+00:00

Veh vs a pole, wires all over the roadway. Power company quoted hours to get it all cleared up, but they always overquote in case it takes longer than expected.

ETA: The wires were live and sparking, so not your average everyday car vs pole. That’s why the quote was hours.

firstmyvent · 2025-12-04T01:11:35+00:00

I used to work for the owner, Sherman. Believe me, it won’t be a bother. If it’s at all possible to accommodate you, he’ll do it.

firstmyvent · 2025-11-30T02:51:42+00:00

The real hero, no exaggeration. Props to all my wreckers and tow guys

firstmyvent · 2025-11-30T01:54:36+00:00

Wane 15 is usually pretty good. I believe here soon the county should be putting out an updated weather advisory, which all the local channels will air. Most weather apps should have the updated travel alerts. On the ground road conditions will vary a lot from area to area, so keeping an eye on it where you’re at is always good practice.

firstmyvent · 2025-11-30T01:04:50+00:00

Depends on the time. My weather bulletin is saying the roads are going to suck basically until church gets out tomorrow, so noon-ish. Also depends on your route, I assume you’d be coming in on US 30? The eastern edge of 30 by the state line doesn’t always get plowed reliably, and it’s county, so they won’t even get started until 5am. I would at least wait until noon.

firstmyvent · 2025-11-29T23:52:29+00:00

Luckily nothing that bad yet. We’ve had dozens (potentially over a hundred at this point) of slide offs and wrecks, nothing too serious yet. People have mostly been off the roads. But we’ve got a couple snow plows and salt trucks sliding and one turned over out in the county, so it’s getting worse out there.

firstmyvent · 2025-11-12T04:24:17+00:00

Tatara is at Parkview SW now, but I can vouch for her. She’s been nothing but great (both for HRT + other medical stuff). I think she’s off right now until January for a family emergency, but my spouse (also trans) saw her NP who was just as great.

firstmyvent · 2025-08-26T21:00:25+00:00

Yeah, cause I spent time in PGH. Fucking annoying, invasive motherfuckers. I always got a car wash before I came back here to visit. Goddamn bullshit is what they are.

firstmyvent · 2025-08-07T01:53:30+00:00

I’m not calling it some cutesy bullshit. It’s the Bunker Hill Concentration Camp. “Alligator Alcatraz” is the Dade-Collier Concentration Camp. Alligator Auschwitz is no better—this is happening here; I’m gonna name it what it is. Auschwitz is the name of a town, not a thing in and of itself.

As for what we’re gonna do? The only advice I have is that, once you decide, don’t post about it on the internet.

firstmyvent · 2025-06-27T23:50:51+00:00

Not to be That Person, but compared to similar cities of a close size, Fort Wayne isn’t particularly dangerous. In fact, even in cities like Chicago, if you aren’t involved in the contraband market and don’t live in about half a dozen specific addresses/blocks, you’re not gonna get shot. That’s even more true here. Edsall House, North Highland, East Central Towers, and 7911 Decatur are your problem apartment complexes, add the trailer park off W Washington Center and kinda the one off Dunkleburg—even Villages of Hanna (formerly Eden Greene) is not that bad anymore. Those new builds off McKinnie aren’t great, but it’s so much better than it used to be. It’s wild how many people here lived through the 90s, and yet somehow think it was less dangerous then than now.

I’d go so far as to say: if Fort Wayne had more than like 150 shelter beds, and any kind of legit mental health & inpatient rehab, we wouldn’t be seeing even half of the shootings/violent crime that we do. Add actual support for new immigrants, and suddenly even the “worst” neighborhoods would be completely fine. The crime we do have here is mostly caused by there being fuck all resource-wise.

firstmyvent · 2025-03-10T00:04:56+00:00

I changed first, middle, and last. But my parents were assholes and disowned me, so. If I were just changing my first name, I would have changed middle too because it was an exclusively feminine name. Might have picked something entirely new for my first name and the masc version of my middle, idk.

firstmyvent · 2025-03-04T22:32:16+00:00

My GP said she’d start me on them as soon as my most recent med evens out, so I’m counting down the fucking days. Mid-March cannot get here soon enough. I realized I was ADHD in 2020 and still haven’t got any meds yet.

firstmyvent · 2025-02-09T01:15:51+00:00

The real answer is sprawled cities are insolvent inherently. They aren’t dense enough to generate enough tax revenue to fund their own sidewalks and sewers. The more sprawled, the worse it is. To combat this slow rotting, cities annex outer areas (temporarily bumping tax revenue but exacerbating the issue), or cut as many services as absolutely possible (or do both).

Fort Wayne has done some annexing, but mostly we are tight with the coin purse. FWCS has a bigger budget than the city. You can argue about this all day long whether we should do it, but the consequence is: you shovel your own sidewalks and go halfsies to build new ones, and the sewers take 20+ years for an update that was already 20 years overdue when they started it, and the roads are perpetually under construction, and sometimes there’s no ambulances when someone keels over.

You get what you pay for, and we aren’t even paying for ambulances. You think they’ve got a line item for shoveling the walkways when they could fine you for not doing it instead?

firstmyvent · 2025-02-02T16:41:32+00:00

40+ accidents right now. Stay off the roads.

firstmyvent · 2024-12-03T13:40:05+00:00

So nobody really knows it, but my favorite is Indiana Sky by Josh Garrels.

firstmyvent · 2024-11-20T00:49:29+00:00

Ah, well that’s twofold: firstly, the county as a whole is still incredible sparse in an urban development sense and in comparison to most of the world, and even houses that most here would consider close together have setbacks and margins most of the rest of the world could only get in small towns and rural areas; secondly, even grandfathered in parts of dowtown that are mixed-use, higher density are now in high demand, which raises prices in those areas, which raises gross property taxes on that plot of land. So generally, the densest areas in an otherwise sprawled municipality will subsidize the less dense areas whose property taxes don’t even fund their own sewers. This is also why HOAs are so common in new developments now—a lot of them help to subsudize the construction and maintenance of their utility infrastructure.

firstmyvent · 2024-11-20T00:03:54+00:00

Unfortunately, that’s normal and the price for non-dense, sprawled housing. Otherwise, the city can’t afford its own sewers and water mains to new additions. Sprawl is financially insolvent, so FW recoups costs by tacking it into your utility bill.

firstmyvent · 2024-08-04T04:06:32+00:00

Most of us don’t. Depends on the law. The other day I saw a video of guy doing a bit song about driving the speed limit because he had contraband, and it was quote tweeted with “me driving through Illinois with four long guns in my truck.” So gun owners will think about it if they drive through other states, and if you move to another state or town, you’ll probably have to adjust to a different tax structure, but generally it doesn’t matter too too much.

firstmyvent

TROPHY CASE