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oh this is a life saver

So these are both “Aw Fuck I’m outta real food” meals BUT ALSO:  if you’re learning how to cook, these are great “baby steps” meals to learn how to cook basics into something enjoyable without “wasting” anything expensive.  Though I maintain that even cooking screw-ups are valuable in terms of lessons learned.

Also they’re great for when you get absorbed in something and you realize your blood sugar is dropping and you need to make something Quick.

Making basic storecupboard or fridge ingredients less basic and more nutritious.

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow

This is the most comforting, warm and important piece of text I have ever read, and it is so true. No life is wasted that is spent sharing and loving.

My mother never became a professional artist. She became a social worker, then later taught emotionally disturbed children. But our home was filled with photographs of wildflowers and wildlife. Spice racks, shelves, and other useful objects were adorned with small paintings. She taught me and my sister that we could make things beautiful, even if in small ways, and let us glue glitter and fake gems on our cheap kids furniture and make it ours. Capitalism tries to say that art isn’t successful unless it makes money. But that’s not why humans make art. We make art to convey emotion. To make an object or a moment or a story OURS. And making someone smile when they hear you sing, or look at something you made for them is as valid a reason for creating as any other.

I lent my mom a book before I read it and apparently right at the beginning they tell a true story about all our chestnut trees dying and it made my mother SO DEPRESSED that she couldn't sleep and now she's been researching chestnut trees for the past half hour looking sick

She's right!!

Chestnut trees used to define forests in the South -- some estimates say about 1/4 trees was a chestnut tree. And they were huge! Growing more than 100 feet tall (with trunks more than 10 feet in diameter), they were called the "redwoods of the East." They were a characteristic food source of the South, too. A mature chestnut tree can produce upwards of 50 lbs of nuts a year -- many of these were gathered and eaten by poor families, or turned into chestnut flour and used to make "poor man's bread."

But, at the beginning of the 20th century, a fungus called the blight was brought over from Asia. Over the next 50 years, every single American Chestnut was infected and died. While some root systems are still alive, they're considered functionally extinct.

People cut down huge areas of forest trying to prevent the spread of the blight and save the trees -- but they failed. And now several generations have never even known the chestnut tree. We don't even know enough to miss them.

But now, with advances in genetic technology, the chestnut trees may be coming back! Through a group scientific effort led by the American Chestnut Foundation, researchers have created a "transgenic American chestnut tree with enhanced blight tolerance" called Darling 58. Darling 58 is genetically modified to be able to coexist with the blight.

Darling 58 American chestnuts are currently being reviewed by the USDA-APHIS, EPA, and FDA. But researchers hope to be able to reintroduce them soon -- one huge step towards restoring our forests.

You can follow the chestnut trees' progress (and request a Darling 58 tree when they're available) at https://acf.org/ .

Thank you I'm gonna share this chestnut revitalization news with her!

Most of the info in this is super solid but a quick correction that every single American Chestnut did not get infected and die, although they are indeed gravely endangered. A few thousand mature trees still live, most of them outside of their original most abundant range. There's a subsection on the American Chestnut wikipedia page devoted to surviving specimens!

I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.

[image ID: a screenshot of the notes on this post, featuring several people indicating they want to know more. End ID.]

OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself “necessary” is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?

Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.

Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (I’ve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, there’s a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. I’ve been going for 12-24.

What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.

Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.

You will notice I didn’t suggest any further pretreatment, and that’s because 1) you don’t want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.

When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatment…to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to “well, it’s old” dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. “I need to reshape it” is nothing.

Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but we’ve been trained to believe it’s all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is “normal wear and tear” and can’t be fixed.

It’s utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from “I keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasons” to “I could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectable”! The pajama bottoms I’m wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!

I do not know how often you’re supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention it’s way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I don’t wear white, so I can’t test the “it will make whites look almost-new as well” claim, but I’ve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.

Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.

Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.

a group of children are tasked by a mysterious wizard to complete a heroic quest in a magical land. since this is a form a kidnapping, their middle-aged parents follow them through the portal and precede to wreak havoc in the style of Liam Neeson’s Taken 

Do the parents have their own magical skills, or mundane skills, or just immense righteous fury?

I vote one of each.

#‘Taken to Fairyland’ #a wand a shotgun and a frying pan #let’s gooo

At least two of the parents were also Chosen Children, and they are the only survivors of their group. Like hell is the damn immortal wizard using THEIR children for that impossible Quest! Again!

Emma wrapped her hand around a weed, and yanked. It popped out, roots and all - she might not have magic here, but she still had a touch with plants that few could rival. The weeds weren’t going to choke out her carrots, not while she had two hands and the disposition of a particularly persistent patch of ivy.

She’d nearly won the argument with the weeds over who got to use the vegetable patch when she heard a noise from her nightmares. A kind of ringing whistle, like the hum of a wineglass mixed with the sound of storm winds under the eaves.

A Portal.

The next chapter is now up!

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AO3

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

Where do I copy-paste these to? "My filters"? "My Rules"?

'my filters'! if you look closely you'll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters

More and more I’ve been getting distressed over how “long ago” certain “chronological events” were. But I think I’ve come to the conclusion that time is not linear and anyone who claims it is is a scammer or a cop.

2013 was 10 years ago. 2014 was 6 years ago. 2017 was recent, but the kind of recent with a comfortable buffer of aged time around it, like a nice cheese. 2019 likely did not happen, and if it did happen it was a filler year that is optionally skippable and doesn’t actually contribute to passing time. 2020 lasted 2 years but in a side timeline that does not actually push 2014-2018 any farther back. 2021 and 2022 were a single year. 2018 was 2.5 years ago. The last 9 months were the void where the tape recorder runs out. Do you get it?

@/chloeinletters on instagram

rats can drive cars btw. if u even care

fun fact: the lab rats got into the cars and drove on their own free time, even without any treat or reward being offered

fun fact #2: the scientists actually found that the rats stress levels were lowered while driving, implying that rats find cars therapeutic

I love the whole branch of cognitive experimentation that just amounts to “we taught rats a fun new game and they really liked it”

i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it

Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”

Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”

@sineala

#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan

“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “by clasping hands…”

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”

Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”

The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.

Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:

I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.

Hey so I looked into this at one point and that handshake literally created a lifelong telepathic bond between the two of them, and basically all of Solkar’s descendants were later obsessed with humans, including freaking SPOCK, so I’m not saying that handshake was so gay and good that it created an intergenerational telepathic bond between Solkar’s descendants and humans, but I’m also not….not….saying that.

actual footage of first contact makeouts

The slow deliberation with which Solkar takes Cockrane’s–I’m sorry, Cochrane’s–hand… The sheer sensuality witch which Solkar infuses an otherwise borderline impersonal social ritual… It clearly shows a very conscious knowledge, on Solkar’s part, of what the significance of the handshake is in Vulcan terms and of how affected he is by it.

That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.

I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.

No wonder Solkar is all like, “TAKE ME, YOU WILD-MANNERED BARBARIAN WITH ENTICINGLY ROUGH CALLUSES.”

And so we find out that yes, there is such a thing as bottoming in Pon-farr.

Every time this post comes round my dash, it just gets better.

#somehow the idea of vulcans being Horny On Main always gives me the giggles#like literally all they had to do#was be like actually#hand contact is very intimate for our species#and im p sure humanity as a whole would not find that insurmountably weird#there are human cultures that dont shake hands#vulcans are logical enough to think that through on their own#so clearly that vulcan was just down to fuck#down to fuck in a public#professional diplomatic situation no less#and he did not fucking care who knew it (via kittykatthetacodemon)

Some Vulcan: we could probably just explain that handshakes are intimate in our culture

Solkar, rubbing lip gloss on his hand: don’t tell me how to do my job 

I wish Americans fucked with more foreign music. You don’t have to know the language to appreciate a good record. Folks in other countries listen to our music and don’t speak a lick of english. Music needs no translator

yall wont trick me into listening to kpop

You can try Radiooooo.com - The Musical Time Machine!!

choose a country, pick a decade, and GO!!

you’ll get an endless streaming of songs (ad free!).

I personally found myself loving 1970s Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire! Also 1920s and 1970s Japan for sure! Cambodian music: spectacular. Love Armenia and Mali as well. I’ve been told 70s Germany is weird and 30s Algeria is cool but I haven’t gotten around to those yet. Italy’s 1960s is bomb ofc but I’m biased ;)

This is the best website anyone has ever shared.

A post about missing home and moving on.

@itsashlyperez post / Circe by Madeline Miller / spookyrich / comic by @shhhitsfine / post by @fairycosmos / The Office S9 Ep 23 / unknown, please tag author / my photo, IKEA review / unknown, please tag author /Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

A post about missing home and moving on.

i'm helping out at a creative writing workshop for uhhh i think 10-12s? 10-14s? idk. but that age range. and anyways

a) i forgot how fun this is

b) it's really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just "hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!" bc i'm an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i'm just so excited for their ideas!!!

c) little boys write cool stuff like "what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?"

d) little girls out here writing like "aunt melanie's skin was sloughing off the bones as her beloved dogs tore her apart, turning on her in blind animal instinct. the second she stopped providing food, she became food." and a lot of body horror and dark themes about group pacts and betrayals and ritualistic murder/sacrifices. like a lot

there's a board filled with dozens and dozens of little construction paper thought bubbles that have some pretty generic plot points in them (what if there were aliens? what if you time travelled? what is true love? what if you could talk to animals? kinda stuff) and we encouraged them to write at least a paragraph for each one and not just pick the one that sounded coolest, just to see what sparks inspiration.

EVERY single little girl took the 'fall in love one' and did something unconventional with it.

some of them were stories about self-empowerment and falling in love with yourself, or falling in love with the mundane, life itself, a pet, a garden, a hobby, just loving being alive! (😭🥺🥰)

but a lot of them were deeply fucked up stories about like "what if you fall in love with a guy but he doesn't like you the same amount back, so you biopsy his liver (??) because you found an old polish love potion/spell, but it backfires like some kinda djinn wish and you actually mind control him and it takes you years to notice that you're whole love life has been a deception bc you accidentally turned on god mode without realizing it, and now you're questioning if you're even lovable at all bc this is the only person you've ever allowed to love you, and it wasn't even real, so now you're spiralling into a breakdown, but that old polish spell book you buried under a tree is whispering your name so you try to fix it and make everything worse?"

me, turning to the teacher who is also doing this: hey so, i'm personally really cool with the tone and direction these girls take, but is any of this? how you say... a red flag?

teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they're puppeted by society in real life. they'll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn't go away.

me, who was also a weird little girl who phased in and out of weirdness depending on social settings: nice.

Update: the children have discovered collaborative writing, plunging their weirdness to new depths via team effort.

they are now creating a story/comic(/movie??) that seems to be a thinly veiled allegory for killing authority figures via psychic powers gained through a ring tainted with frog poison that also kills the wearer, but you can only kill one other person so its a 1:1 death ratio/murder-suicide for the greater good, so the characters start out willingly sacrificing themselves to 'rid the world of evil' but, like all things of this nature, it becomes corrupt and they start forcing people to do psychic murders

i have this disease called i will open your message and get distracted and forget to reply and then the notification will be gone so i will not have replied for ages and you will think i am ignoring you but. i am not. it’s incurable

did you guys see the poem from a couple of days ago in poetry dot org’s daily poem it was so good and a treat to read 

been thinking about it since i read it