03/03/2026

It's coming up to one year now, a whole 12 months, that I have been unemployed. It's such a bittersweet feeling and not an easy thing to endure. Allow me to explain, from my own perspective of course.

Looking for work itself has become one of the most demoralizing and dehumanizing things you could ever do, especially for neurodivergent and/or chronically ill people. You are expected to sift through hundreds, thousands of job adverts practically every day in an attempt to find something that will, at least, help pay the bills and rent. That's the easy part.

The hard part is the one that slowly strips away your will to live or even find a job in the first place as you try your best to navigate this impossible maze of non-existent job adverts that companies just post online to make themselves look good to the shareholders, adverts that don't mention the salary (or the more egregious ones that just say "Competitive" instead of an actual figure), adverts that expect you to have 10 years experience in a programming language that has only been around for 5 months, adverts that fool you into thinking you're applying to be a telemarketer but the interviewer actually wants a door-to-door salesperson, adverts where they say you will be paid but when you get there it's a voluntary position... to be clear, some of these are from my own personal experiences and some are from friends, but all of these situations have happened and are real.

But that's not the end of it, oh no! You are expected to TAILOR and PERSONALIZE your curriculum/resume for each job advert that you apply for, after all, it would be too simple to just have one fucking document to apply to all of these jobs, right? No, it's not enough to just have your work experience on a piece of paper, your piece of paper has to contain the exact words that will pass the filters of the hiring software, or even worse, the A.I. that company has implemented to instantly approve or trash your curriculum/resume before a human has even had the chance to look at it.

And even if you manage to cross that barrier, sometimes you don't even get offered an interview with a human, instead you have to go through some sort of personality/aptitude/situational awareness test or worse, you get interviewed by an A.I.!

The job market worldwide is a flaming dumpster fire right now. It's more difficult than ever to find a job, even part-time, and the process of applying for one has become a minefield. Even places like supermarkets or fast food restaurants, which, back in the early 2000s these were the types of jobs you'd get if you were in a tight spot and just needed something to pay the bills for a few months until you found something better, are starting to adopt hiring practices like they're a bank or a hospital. It makes absolutely no sense that Primark, a fast fashion giant, forces you to do a situational awareness test before even giving you an interview.

And don't even get me started on the issue of expecting literally everyone to be able to hold a job lest they be deemed "benefit scroungers"... but that is an issue for another day.

And remember kids: hydrate, unionize and strike if needed. <3

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01/03/2026

I was born in the late 80's. I witnessed the birth, rise and fall of the Internet as we used to know it in my lifetime. It's scary and sobering thought, if I'm honest.

It used to be a space for innovation, culture exchange, discovery and funny GIFs. But slowly, that Internet was taken from us, monetized and sanitized to an extreme that is becoming unbearable to witness. And now, with the widespread (and might I say shody) implementation of A.I. everywhere, from our phones to the goddamn toasters, it feels like we're all past scraping the bottom of the barrel and being forced to dig into the groud beneath with our bare hands.

In an ideal world, AI could have been a valuable tool to make a medical diagnosis, write legal reports, type emails, trascripts, etc based solely on the information it was provided, it would have to run on a local computer or network and only the people who used it would pay the increase in electricity and water consumption that the AI needs. We wouldn't be getting useless "AI tools" like Copilot shoved in our faces. And we certainly wouldn't be generating slop, whether that's text, music or images, based off of stolen works from other artists.

Since the dawn of time, art has always been accessible to everyone without exceptions. The tools, however, might be a different story: I'm not saying a DAW, a drawing tablet or a sewing machine are cheap, that's incredibly relative to one's income, but pencils and paper have been around since 1560 and 105 CE, respectively, and the internet is full of free and/or open-source software so... when I hear someone say that AI makes art more accessible, my bullshit-o-meter immediately goes off. Of course, these are just some examples, the same could be said about hand-sewing, making pixel art in MS Paint, editing audio with Audacity, making digital art in Ibis using a 2nd hand Huion tablet, using free trials of programs to learn 3D, etc...

And let me tell you, as an artist myself who also knows hundreds of other artists in various mediums, whenever someone wants to make art, they always find a way. A missing body part, brain damage, mental health, chronic illness, colourblindness... those obstacles might stop someone temporarily or make the process a bit more difficult, yeah, but we always go back because the process of making art is joyous, therapeutic, cathartic and freeing.

"But Sunny, my art sucks!" I hear you say. GOOD! That's a sign that you are trying, evolving and learning!

Your pen scribles on a bar napkin, your fanfiction that you haven't touched in 16 months, your slightly off-center photo of a beautiful sunset will always be worth more than whatever hot gargabe AI spews out.