Hello, and welcome to a section of my website
where I rant about shit without a target audience.

All Hallows' Eve

I'm well aware it is currently February and I should probably be focusing on Valentine's Day, however, I hate that holiday and its colour scheme and pretty much everything about it.

I love Halloween very much, I've watched countless documentaries on it and have written many essays about it for school because it's a topic I actually enjoy researching and talking about. I will likely expand on this rant at later dates as well since I love this holiday so very much.

The Basic History of Halloween: Pagans, specifically Celts, celebrated Samhain (pronounced sawen) in the fall, Christians did a Christian and got scared of ooooOOoooOOooOOooOo spooooky heathen ghoooosts and decided to create a similar event on May 13th (I think) to celebrate the dead in The Good Christian Way™ as well as Saints, but pagans still celebrated in october and november so Christians decided to try and replace that with their own holidays and moved it from May 13th to late October/early November.

My favourite thing about Halloween is soulcakes, I've never had them but the concept is sensational. Essentially, christians believed that souls that were trapped in the earth, or between heaven and hell, required prayer in order to be saved from eternal damnation. People ate soulcakes and prayed for the trapped, wandering souls of the earth, some people, however, did not have any soulcakes so they went out, knocking on doors and asking for soulcakes, which is the origin of Trick-or-Treating. And I fucking love that.
But that's just the "treat" part.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, children pranked and tried so hard to scare their neighbours on Halloween, some of these pranks were actually considered crimes, though, so kids and teens needed to hide their identities, this is the beginning of Halloween costumes. These costumes began as ways to simply conceal their identities, but over time they decided to add to the scare factor of their pranks by dressing as devils and monsters, and so on. I suppose at some point children demanded sweets by threatening to vandalize or damage property, and later Trick-or-Treat became a common way to simply ask for sweets, regardless of any intent to actually cause harm if someone does not provide treats.

I once wrote an essay on the history of Jack 'o Lanterns, as they are the staple of Halloween imagery, however, it was extremely boring. Basically some ghost dude in Europe named Jack was haunting people and then they carved scary faces on turnips and then put candles in them to scare him away, this tradition was brought over to the Americas but due to the natural resources of the area they used other vegetables and fruits and eventually people decided on pumpkins.

I'm not a historian or anything so don't use this as a resource if yer doing a research paper or something.

"Have A Good Day"

Companies in the United States are desperately attempting to create a parasocial relationship with the public. Notice the repeated “thank you” messages on plastic bags containing yer items once ye’ve completed shopping, smiley faces plastered onto logos or plastic bags as well, advertisements entailing how much they care about and empathize with you and what a wonder their product will do to improve yer emotional state, singers endlessly groaning about their vague love interest young people can obsessively project themselves onto, as well as seemingly never-ending examples I simply do not have time to list.

Companies recognize how absolutely miserable the public’s psyche is in this late stage capitalist society, yet unsurprisingly they choose to capitalize off this too. Yer suffering is profitable, yer insecurities are profitable, yer endless hatred and misery will always be contorted into a product to capitalize off of.

"Self care" as we know it is not about caring for oneself, rather, it is flaunting bath, beauty, or “health” products and shitty recipes, meditation and an unecessary amount of time and money wasted into products and activities that do absolutely fucking nothing. It’s a joke. All of it is a fucking joke and it’s inescapable.

Now, I do not care about products putting their little company history story on the back (as I do not care to read them and neither does anyone else and, normally, it’s just in small text on the back instead of being shoved down yer throat), or small businesses genuinely adding something to show their customers gratitude, what bothers me is large companies and stores putting this mindless shit everywhere to appeal to the vulnerable need to feel like yer doing something worthwhile. Perpetuating the idea that buying shit is somehow making you, as a person, worth a goddamn so you should just continue doing it to feel valued.