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lavenderemo

@lavenderemo

Nonbinary lesbian(they/them) ft. weirdness
la-laborista-republiko

If you want to spread class consciousness you can just cut the bottom off of the class consciousness before you peel it and then stick some toothpicks in it so it suspends over a glass of water and put it in your kitchen window

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poblacht-na-n-oibrithe

aw fuck I got class consciousness and sweet potatoes mixed up again

Common mistake. Class consciousness you can spread by mixing flour and water into a soupy batter, then feeding it once a day for four days until it’s nice and active and bubbling with wild yeast. Then you can either dry it into yeast flakes to preserve it or bake class consciousness with it roughly daily, replacing what you take with more flour and water to feed the starter.

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poblacht-na-n-oibrithe

Yeah, that’s the one

Don’t forget, you can also give portions of class consciousness to all of your friends and relatives! They’ll need an airtight container to store it in and basic care instructions, but it’s super neat to know that all of your loved ones got their class consciousness from you. IMO it’s even neater to know that, now that they’re growing and tending it themselves, it’ll take on elements from other local class consciousnesses!

You can also make specialized class consciousnesses from rye flour, which uses a slightly different and more delicate system to form structure but when made into a bread can be safely consumed by people who have only mild gluten intolerance. It’s really cool.

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this is so dumb but there was that interview andrew garfield did with stephen colbert where he said grief is just all the unexpressed love we have left for someone who is gone and that no matter how much you tell someone you love them or show them, you will still have all of this love leftover when they're gone, and it's really helped me frame loss in a healthy way. like grief isn't a weakness. you will have it no matter what. it's proportional to the amount of love you had for someone and tried to show them every day and that's something you can take comfort in. or at least i do.

My rabbi said something similar. Grief isn’t about having lost the person, but the possibilities. You will never go to the beach together again. Never talk on the phone. Never ask for or give advice. All the things that constituted you-and-them are gone. When you grieve a person you grieve because they made part of you, and the rest of them is now missing.

2022 reads!

since everyone is doing this, i figured i might as well join in! i track my reading through thestorygraph and aim for 30 books in a year, though i don't usually count shorter texts read for class or the plays i skim when looking for material in my acting classes. favorites in each category are bolded. feel free to ask questions on any of these!

FICTION: 

  • House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
  • Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters
  • Sula – Toni Morrison
  • The Infinite Noise – Lauren Shippen
  • A Neon Darkness – Lauren Shippen
  • Some Faraway Place – Lauren Shippen
  • Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
  • Paradise – Toni Morrison
  • Gideon the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir
  • Harrow the Ninth (Reread) – Tamsyn Muir
  • Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers
  • This is How You Lose the Time War – Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid
  • A Room Called Earth – Madeleine Ryan 
  • Nona the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir
  • Frankenstein (Reread) – Mary Shelley
  • Hell Followed with Us – Andrew Joseph White
  • Dracula (through Dracula Daily) – Bram Stoker 
  • Eartheater – Dolores Reyes (trans. Julia Sanches)
  • My Heart is a Chainsaw – Stephen Graham Jones
  • Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 

NON-FICTION:

  • Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right – Angela Nagle
  • Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Reread) – Alison Bechdel

POETRY: 

  • War of the Foxes – Richard Siken
  • Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology – W. Todd Kaneko & Amorak Huey
  • Life on Mars – Tracy K. Smith
  • Anglo-Saxon Judith – Unknown
  • Beowulf – Unknown
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – The Pearl Poet

PLAYS:

  • Cloud 9 – Caryl Churchill 
  • How I Learned to Drive – Paula Vogel
  • Mr. Burns and Other Plays – Anne Washburn
  • In the Other Room (The Vibrator Play) – Paula Vogel
  • Becky Shaw – Gina Gionfriddo
  • The Skriker – Caryl Churchill
  • The Tempest – William Shakespeare
  • This is Our Youth – Kenneth Lonergan
  • Bully – Amina Henry 
  • The Merchant of Venice (Reread) – William Shakespeare
  • The Marriage of Bette and Boo – Christopher Durang
  • Measure for Measure (Reread) – William Shakespeare
“‘Streets’ are understood to be populated by the untrustworthy, the dangerous. Young people strolling are understood to be prowling the streets and up to no good. Public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a street corner? The term 'public’ is itself a site of contention.”

Paradise, Toni Morrison

sodhya-deactivated20181218

This got me dying

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the-bitch-goddess-success

who paid for this study bruh

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pettyeol

it’‘s literally seasoning.  that’s it. that’s what make food taste good.

Bro it’s more complex than just ‘ey they used seasoning’ 

It’s HOW they used seasoning, compared to other areas of the world. 

Indian seasoning does this neat color wheel of flavor, fitting a bunch of spices that are very DIFFERENT from each other, to create a huge range of complex flavor. 

Meanwhile in Italy for instance, they tend to use flavors that are SIMILAR. For instance, Basil and Oregano, or Sweet fish with Sweet wine. It makes foods less likely to contrast weirdly in your mouth, and it’s the basis of why fancy european people pair red wines with steak and white wines with chicken. Savory with Savory, Light with Light.   

“ That like flavors should be combined for better dishes—an unspoken but popular hypothesis stipulated by recipe-building in North American, Western European, and Latin American cultures—is an idea essentially reversed in Indian cuisine. “

well yes, spices need to not just complement the food but contrast against each other. to get maximum flavour when cooking indian food:

1. use whole spices, dry roast small quantities of individual spices together and then grind them to a powder. balance is what you’re looking for, not just chucking in handfuls of seasonings willy nilly because quantity does not equal flavour when it comes to spicing indian food. 

2. whole spices go in the oil first. always. also everything gets fried on its own before it’s chucked into the sauce/curry. even the curry base is started off by frying onions/ginger/garlic/tomatoes or any combination thereof. basically…FRY THAT SHIT. i don’t know of any regional cuisine in india that uses stock for simmering. frying everything individually is how we add flavour instead.  

3. indian food needs to be cooked long and slow for the flavours to really merge. don’t skimp on the cooking time if you can because that makes a huge difference. 

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thresholdofzero

This was so enlightening

I feel a need to mention that the researchers for this study are NOT white, as stated above. They’re Indian. It’s Indian people saying “why does our cuisine work and taste so vastly different than anywhere else in the world?” To quote from the article:

“Researchers Anupam Jaina, Rakhi N Kb, and Ganesh Bagler from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur ran a fine-tooth comb through TarlaDalal.com—a recipe database of more than 17,000 dishes that self-identifies as “India’s #1 food site”—in attempts to decode the magic of your chicken tikka masala or aloo gobi.”

There’s a major misunderstanding in how a lot of people understand science. There’s this idea that there’s a frontier of stuff we don’t know and a big block of stuff we do. Their first reaction is to scoff because we already “know” that Indian food “uses spices” and that’s why it tastes good. Why waste time re-treading that ground to come to the conclusion you already have?

In reality, the frontiers of knowledge are everywhere. Most of what gets studied is common everyday stuff because we generally have a good grip on what stuff does but the holes are in the “how it does it”. And we don’t know anything to perfect certainty, only degrees of relative certainty, and in varying levels of precision. 

The person who says the Earth is flat isn’t making a terribly large miscalculation of the curviture of the Earth, and on a local scale it may not impact their day to day life, but they are still wrong. The person who says the Earth is round is also wrong, but the model is off from reality significantly less. The one who says the planet is an oblate spheroid futher brings the model into precision, but ultiamtely, the only perfect 1:1 model of the planet, is the planet. 

Every measurement is going to have a margin of error. Doesn’t mean we should just stop at the sphere, or even the oblate spheroid.

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From what I understand from the article, it’s even rougher than normal content moderation: a lot of these workers were hired to train AIs like ChatGPT away from, well, all the worst that the web could provide, to detoxify it for the end users. They are specifically given the worst stuff that can be dredged up from the depths of the internet, and asked to label it - so that the AI can use that data to identify hatespeech, suicide ideation, racism, CSA, etc etc.

It’s an awful job, and some are paid less than $2 an hour. Workers have PTSD. Are they being offered counselling, support, compensation? Fuck no, they get punished for speaking up.

Good luck to the African Content Moderators Union, I hope they get the protections and compensation that their workers need.

having anxiety is like being given permanent unwanted custody of a halter arabian. like okay buddy is it panic time again. cool you probably need more exercise and an apple and then maybe you'll calm down.

taking my stupid walks for my stupid mental health with my stupid hypervigilant brain horse

thoroughly enjoying the notes on this post because it's equal parts people with anxiety going "yeah that's what it's like" and people with arabians going "yeah that's what they're like"

SURVEY QUESTION: what is your personal favorite cold sandwich to make at home. alternatively, what is the fanciest sandwich you make

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on the topic of sandwiches i like a lot of things but i think if you want sandwich info you can't get better than sandwichtribunal.com. a theoretically infinite list of exant sandwiches and detailed descriptions and explorations and new research of their history, development, preperation method, and flavor. really delightful passion project by mostly one guy who just really, really likes sandwiches, with a couple of guest pieces by fellow sandwich enthusiasts

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a great place to start is this article on the history of the club sandwich, an article that took the author months of independent research through tons of old cookbooks and magazines and newspapers. he ends up making basically every example he can find, moving through time on a sandwich train. it's a really fun read!!!!

tumblr user grubloved i respect you so much

i put the sandwiches in the notes in a spreadsheet. it is here

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HAPPY SUPERBOY MAN OF TOMORROW (2023) TO ALL WHO CELEBRATE

[id copied from alt text: a drawing of superboy doing a backbend in front of a graffiti'd concrete wall. the graffiti outlines his body in yellow, with the superman S-symbol in red below the outline. he is in his current hero suit with his leather jacket, which is halfway off of his body, as are his shades. he is sticking his tongue out while throwing up a peace sign next to his face. /end id]