Not Safe For Words

Donating clothes to charity has an unfortunate dark side

Here’s what actually happens when you donate clothes. First, they go to charity shops and collectors who sort through everything. The nicest pieces might be sold at the local thrift store.

But there’s a catch: these organizations receive far more clothing than they can sell. We’re talking about mountains of fabric that no one locally wants to buy.

So what happens to the rest? Some items are thrown away. But a huge portion gets packed into bales and shipped overseas.


There are lots of ways to address this issue. First, understand the problem...

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The March Meta Matters challenge is now active over on marchmetamatterschallenge. See the first check-in post here for introductions. Read the FAQ list, as there may have been some changes from previous years. See my entries from 2023, 2024, and 2025. Here are my How To list and my Meta list from 2024.

This challenge involves locating and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation. The fest recommends SquidgeWorld. There will be some prompts for creating new meta. Participants can post their goals for saving old meta and/or creating new meta. You can also collect, recommend, and save meta created by other people if it's not something you make yourself or yours is already up to date and saved.

Some canon-specific or author-specific websites have a section especially for meta about their fandom(s) to help new fans learn the canon(s), explore fandom in general, and to inspire fanworks. In particular, it used to be common for people to make fanifestos about a canon, its ships, major fanworks, etc. as guides to newcomers in hopes of growing the fandom; reviving this custom would be very helpful. Here on Dreamwidth, check out shipmanifestos. Another great type of meta is reviews; see communities such as books and book_love for those. If you know of more such resources, March is a good time to post about them so more folks can find them and make sure that meta is backed up.

An increasing issue of archiving is the decline of archival websites. Ghost barely works anymore. The Archive.fo cluster is iffy at best, and when one of its sites glitches, you can't even use your old links anymore. That was the site that used to have the best ability to archive almost anything, except PDF files. Wayback, formerly the most reliable, and the only one I found that would safe PDFs, has become increasingly slow and prone to outages. It never saved quite as wide a range as Archive.fo but now saves a lot less. It's maddening. Because every page that can't be archived is work that will be wasted when linkrot eventually kills the original.

On the bright side, Dreamwidth remains a great place to crosspost your content from other platforms as a form of archiving by duplication. This is increasingly a good idea at a time when many platforms are collapsing due to misbehavior, locking everything to members only, or disappearing altogether. goals_on_dw has a post for Full Content on Dreamwidth if this is your approach to sharing and archiving your work.


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Today is cloudy and chilly. It rained yesterday afternoon and evening.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- I pulled dead stems from some containers in the old picnic table garden and the new picnic table garden.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- We hauled the 5 new rocks to the purple-and-white garden. We hauled the huge bag of potting mix into the foyer.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a large flock of sparrows, a male cardinal, and a starling. I heard a squirrel barking in the trees but didn't see it.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- I dug up some snowdrops from the parking lot and moved them to the log garden and the purple-and-white garden. There are still a lot left.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- I dug up some snowdrops from the parking lot and moved them to the savanna.

I saw a woodpecker drumming high in a tree, probably a downy woodpecker.

EDIT 3/1/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen a squirrel in the trees.

I am done for the night.