ironically i love thrifting but ive never thought about using ebay, do you have any tips or keywords you use on it to find deals and shifty stuff/wording to look out for?
honestly I don't find ebay to be shifty for buying stuff! people are scared about using it sometimes and I think it's a little funny lol
I guess the tip would be that if you search for an item with vague enough terms, you'll get some SHEIN-esque mass produced clothes muddying the results. and you know it when you see it, because those listings look like shit btw. this type of thing:
like, these are real listings and everything, and you'd get the product, but they are obviously not what you're looking for.
you can ignore these, but if you want to filter them out, you can just narrow the search to SPECIFICALLY pre-owned items.
There isn't really any wording to look out for-- the only other thing would just be to make sure the stuff you get can be returned, bc sellers can specify whether or not they'll take the items back!
137 notes
·
View notes
Rating Autism Shirts
I got a targeted ad for one of these and it sent me down a rabbit hole of the weird world of autism shirts. There's a pretty huge range in quality, so I have three metrics:
Is it good autism representation?
Is it well made/ aesthetically pleasing?
Would I wear it?
This is about what I expect from autism merch. We've got puzzle pieces, we've got dabbing, we've got an image that's photoshopped onto a photo of a person wearing a different shirt. It's bad, but almost compelling because it's so so bad. Representation: 1/10, aesthetics: 4/10, would wear: 6/10
Overall: 4/10
This is a masterpiece. Really weird, not infantilizing, acknowledges autistic people can experience the full range of the human experience (including being dtf). Representation 10/10, aesthetics 10/10, would wear 10/10
Overall: 10/10
Now this is a worst-case scenario. It centres the feelings of caregivers rather than autistic people, assumes autistic people are all going to be male children, uses puzzle pieces, is super hard to read, and it's just worst kind of millenialcore design. Representation 0/10, aesthetics 1/10, would wear 0/10.
Overall: 0/10
This has a lot of the problems of the previous shirt, but look at that sweet dinosaur wearing sunglasses. I know it's bad. It's got the puzzle pieces, it's got light it up blue, it's got that unreadable colour choice for the font, but something about this is really funny to me. Representation 4/10, aesthetics 6/10, would wear 10/10.
Overall: 7/10
I'm torn on this one. Is cringe culture still dead? I think whether or not I like this shirt would depend on who's wearing it. Like, autism mom puts it on her son? 0/10 for the mom being embarrassing and pushing compulsory heterosexuality. Queer autistic woman wears it? 10/10 humour. I'm just going to call this one un-rateable.
Overall: ???/10
This joke is too on the nose to not have been made by and/or for autistic people. The drawing is cute, the font is readable, the leaning into stereotypes is whatever you make of it. Representation 8/10, aesthetics 10/10, would wear 8/10
Overall: 8/10
Holy fuck they're bad. The dad one is terrible. Your kid is disabled no matter how great of a parent you are, and buying your kid something like this is the parenting equivalent of sucking your own dick. Bad.
The mom one is also terrible in a different way. If you can't read the image it says:
They whispered to her, "you cannot withstand the storm." She whispered back, "I am the storm."
I added punctuation to help it make sense, but the "storm" you're referring to is your child. You're advertising your bravery at "withstanding" an unchangeable aspect of your child's being. How is your kid going to feel if/when they see this and realize how you feel about them? Parents are allowed to feel their feelings about raising their kids, but maybe don't show the world how much you resent the human you're supposed to love unconditionally.
So bad they broke the rating scale.
Overall: -10/10.
We gotta end on a high note. Look at how perfect this is. Something about fake-edgy autism skeleton shirts just hits so right. We've got a blurry skeleton with two guns and the word "autism" is on fire. Not a puzzle piece in sight. Just the strange joy of being. We've got ourselves another 10/10 across the board.
Overall: 10/10
53 notes
·
View notes