Hello Everyone, Today's Post Is Serious And I Don't Think That I'll Be Able To Come Back To Writing The

Undo the Damage of Sitting

Stop, please🙏✋🚨

My name is Hanin from Gaza, a mother of two children, Mohammed, four years old, and Abdul Rahman, one and a half years old.

We have been suffering from the war for more than 560 days.

My children are suffering from hunger because of the closure of the crossings.

We have been displaced dozens of times.

We fled from the missiles and bombs that were above us. I lost many of my relatives under the rubble due to missiles and the bombing of houses.

I now live in a tent that does not protect us from the cold or the heat. My children sleep on the sand. We have no source of livelihood.

We lost our jobs, our homes, and our lives were destroyed. Please help my family.

Do not leave us to die in Gaza.

Hanin Mohammed

Chuffed

Help Hanin's family survive the war

My name is Hanin from Gaza. I have been suffering from the war for more than 560 days. The army destroyed my entire home. Many people in my

the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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You Can Help Hammad Save His Family🍉‼️🫶🏻

Chuffed

You Can Help Save Hammad and his Family; Support His Quest for Safety and Freedom

Campaign organizer notes at the bottom.

VETTED BY ASSOCIATION; Hammad was referred to me through Safaa and her campaign (vetted by 90-ghost)

This campaign is created on behalf of a very valuable and dear friend of mine, Hammad A., who is dealing with devastating tragedy and loss that none of us in the empirical core could possibly begin to imagine.

Hammad is one of the most thoughtful, considerate, and hard-working people I know -- and while he has tried his best to provide for his family under these immensely difficult circumstances, he now needs our help to keep him and his family alive.

Picture this: Your life has been turned upside down instantly; everything you have worked your whole life for -- gone in an instant. Everything you once knew turned to rubble and destruction. Your home, where you grew up and created childhood memories with -- gone. Your job, where you dedicated your energy and effort into building a career you loved -- gone. The most basic necessities we take for granted -- warmth, fresh air, the ability to move around freely and safely -- ripped away from you.

These are only a few of the difficulties that Hammad and his family have been facing for over 464 days. 

As you understand by now, there is only so much resilience the human body can endure, and the urgent need to do anything you can to save your family is the exact reason Hammad has allowed us the opportunity to help him and his family be freed from the immense suffering and stress they currently face.

His tent was recently flooded, damaging the little items that he had after losing everything, and destroying the little shelter he and his family had to protect them against the harsh elements.

Hammad needs your help NOW.

Even the smallest amount is so highly valuable in lifting a margin of stress from the weight of this tragedy off the shoulders of Hammad and his family. Your contributions to these lifesaving funds are invaluable. 

Chuffed has a waiting period for processing and transferring funds. If you want your donation to IMMEDIATELY be sent to Hammad, paypal is linked below.

June 25th update. Please don't skip without sharing (Black lives matter)

I am taking care of my 8 year old sister. I don't want to lose her again in the foster system. Due to her parents being in jail and doing drugs. I really need help keeping her housed and making I have transportation for her. I have the rest of this month to come up with the rent out I will be kicked out. I need help getting car parts as well. please if you have anything to spare please donate. please do it for my little sister. I'm mentally drained by how stress i am. I don't think i can afford rent in July either. Seems like i can't catch a break.

Goal:1500/1550 month of june

goal: 0/950 rent for July due on the 15th.

electric bill for the month of July due on the 5th 0/250

Venmo Queenloki89

Cash app $Queenloki89

Guys i left for like a few months wtf is happening in the recent chapters 😭😭😰

🚨 My Mom is on the Edge – Save Her Life Before It's Too Late! 🚨

I write these words with a heavy heart and a heavy heart. My mother, a symbol of tenderness and giving, is now suffering from unbearable pain, as she suffers from deadly blood cysts on her liver that threaten her life at every moment. The situation has become like an endless nightmare; every minute that passes brings us closer to eternal separation.

The hospital is asking for $3,789 to perform the urgent surgery, and these amounts seem unattainable in these circumstances that turn our lives into a continuous battle against death. I see the pain in her eyes, and the tears running down her cheeks, and I can only beg you with all my hope: Help me save my mother, as every donation, no matter how small, could be the difference between life and death.

This appeal comes from the depths of the heart, filled with sadness and tears, and I appeal to every kind soul to give us a second chance, a chance to keep our mother among us. If you can't donate, please share this message with everyone you know; you may be able to help save her life before it's too late.

My mom needs you now, more than ever... Please help me face these dark moments before death snatches her away from us.❤️🙏

Verified by

@bilal-salah0

Chuffed

Help Aisha and her family get basic necessities in Gaza

Hi, I am Caitlin, and I am currently running a fundraising campaign for a family who reached out to me in the Gaza Strip.

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@fancysmystery @brokenbackmolars @motoriginal @aleciosun @sericate @fluoresensitivearchived @khizuo @nesmamomen @transmutationdice @schoolhaterfoodlover-blog

Today we ran out of food and flour in our house. May God make things easier for us.

gofundme.com

Donate to Help me and my family to get treatment and survive, organized by Othman Jehad

I am one of the most affected people in the war on Gaza (dream, future… Othman Jehad needs your support for Help me and my family to get tre

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Secure a Home for Family Unjustly Evicted, organized by Rachel from Motionwarrior

We don’t have a home anymore, despite the signed contract agr… Rachel from Motionwarrior needs your support for Help Secure a Home for Famil

please donate if you can, also check out their YouTube channel, Motionwarrior <3

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