Fam, I felt kind of bad that your honest feedback about the new congestion toll has been downvoted so much. And if you truly found nothing in Boston (and presumably Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Allston, etc.) that interested you then… OK, I can respect people’s differences. And if you say walking to work through Manhattan would somehow be bad, and that the only reason you live there is to be close to work… sure, there are people like that, I get it.

But I think your situation is kind of like living in Hawaii and then saying it’s unfair that you can’t just drive to the mainland.

Punk is probably easier / lower-cost.

• find the oldest t-shirt you own. turn it inside-out. A) if you do NOT want to keep the shirt, spraypaint or marker an “anarchy” symbol on it and tear the sleeves off. B) if you DO want to keep the shirt (or if the shirt is black), make the symbol using masking tape.
• the denim jacket approach sounds promising. print out a bunch of punk band logos/names on card and safety-pin them to the jacket. If you can get your hands on a flag of some sort, pin that to the back. If you can’t, just get a plain cloth, scrawl with a marker some punk-related slogan (in my days it’d be “out of step” or “too drunk to fuck” or “no future” or something - edit: if you want to make it obvious you’re a punk, write “punk’s not dead”) on it and safety-pin it to the back. get some lightweight chains (cheap at hardware store if you don’t have) and safety-pin them to the jacket.
• if you have any really old jeans, those would work great, just safety-pin a couple chains. if you don’t want to tear/cut them, use some black masking tape to make a couple random lines on them. If you have black boots that would work OK.
• spike your hair… look for temporary dye… maybe do a mohawk… I’m not familiar with that stuff but you can probably find tutorials online

That’ll get you 90% of the way to a costume version of a stereotypical punk. FWIW back in the day if you went to a punk show most of the people there would just dress like regular people (jeans and a t-shirt).

yeah, lemmy.world is a good starter server. To find your next one:

• look here to see the relative server sizes (sort by “MAU” = Monthly Active Users): https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
• look here to see who is defederated from each other: https://defed.xyz/

Their world got worse when they moved away from goth. Turn them on to She Past Away and Molchat Doma, and let the healing begin.