All we are, and all we have… // Part 4
shapechangersinwinter
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour 1 tsp vanilla ½ tsp salt Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
So I tried this recipe.
And it is GREAT.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.
Life hack: add white chocolate chips and sea salt
I made these today for the equinox with sea salt caramel chips and they are simply amazing. Let’s see how long they last with six people in the house!
Noting for later (as we need more butter for this, and probably won’t do a grocery shopping till the weekend).
The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.
your desire to write the same trope over and over again
🤝
my desire to read the same trope over and over again
[video description: a white cat is laying down and rests its chin on one end of the strings of a yellow and white guitar. the cat’s eyes are only partially open, so it looks extremely contented, and it appears to be smiling. offscreen, a person strums the guitar strings. a caption on the video reads “my deaf cat loves vibrations.” End description.]
Nikolai : The Darkling as Wylan : Kaz
#it's about the narrative foils who have so much in common despite drawing their moral boundaries in different places #w/ the first set of characters knowing when to step back while the second set keep barreling ahead #but also the first set having certain privileges (both on a watsonian and doylist level) #that conveniently allow them to escape having to make some of the worst difficult decisions that the second set aren't able to escape #idk i have Thoughts™ about this #including thoughts about the way that the primary canon love interests for nikolai and wylan #are characters who initially were into their foils (the darkling and kaz) #there's just a LOT to dig into here
babe wake up first usa stripper union jus won !!!!!!
some of you have never had an unpopular female character as a hyperfixation and been forced to scroll through pages upon pages of bad hot takes about how terrible her character is while trying to peruse her tag for actual fanworks and it shows
#100%#this is almost equally true for a MOC character who gets in the way of a (usually white) preferred ship#or refuses to kowtow to a (usually white) fan fave character#and it's doubly true if the female character in question is a WOC—and 2.5x if the character is a black woman#with the obvious caveat that it all depends on how popular/widespread the fandom is#also a problem: encountering limited outright bashing but LOTS of minimizing of the character in their tag#with 95% of the available fanworks depicting them only as the caretaker/sassy friend who plays a brief/minor role#//#fandom life#fandom problems#sexism in fandom#misogyny in fandom#misogynoir in fandom#racialized misogyny in fandom#racism in fandom#among others:#martha jones#mace windu#joan watson#sally donovan#sansa stark#queen guinevere#guinevere pendragon#camille saroyan#\\#is better than you#and deserves a better fandom too
coffee-fr
Clean the mold out of your reusable water bottle including the cap and straw
Mold poisoning will kill you and has a high chance of causing severe hallucinations and nightmares while it's doing it. My final message goodbye
Oh, hey, yea that's a good reminder! Wait a second tho
A year or so ago I saw someone who studies bacteria on food surfaces talking about how she never ever uses a water bottle for longer than 2 days without washing it with hot water and soap or running it through the dishwasher and I've become really adamant about it ever since. Everyone has enough water bottles to keep them cycling through the dishwasher and in use.
Also please don't die.
Yup to all of this, but also, if you read this and went “lol, I have too much ADHD for that - do you know how many water bottles I would actually need to buy?”
I need you to listen closely, right now
Yes, you might, in fact, need to buy a mountain of water bottles
“But the plastic-”
There comes times when disability, sustainability best practices, and your health cannot co-exist
And you cannot stop being disabled
You might need to not only buy a mountain of water bottles, but also keep prepackaged single use water bottles for emergencies when every surface of your house is covered in reusable water bottles that haven’t been cleaned, and you find yourself asking “what’s the harm in using this one for one more day?” for the seventh day in a row
Or going “well, I’m not that thirsty anyway” and stopping drinking water altogether
Don’t make yourself ill holding yourself to standards you cannot meet
End OTW Racism: A Call To Action
A fan protest against the lack of action from the OTW on addressing issues of harassment and racism on AO3 and within the organization
This is a Call To Action for Fans of Color and Allies
AO3 has acknowledged that they have a harassment & racism problem that its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), needs to address. Currently, people can use AO3 to harass others through fanworks, comments, and tags. Just a few examples include: racist Untamed “spitefic” that used anti-Indigenous slurs and was written specifically to lash out at fans of color; a Transformer fic that used its Black-coded character to reenact George Floyd’s murder in July 2020; someone naming a fandom scholar who criticized their Nazi omegaverse fic in the tags of the fic specifically to incite harassment to the scholar; writers using racial slurs against commenters who pointed out racism in their hockey fic; and so much more.
In June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the OTW committed to addressing these issues. It has been nearly three years and they have not yet implemented any of the changes they promised, other than a blocking/muting tool that was already in development before 2020. We need to hold the OTW accountable to their own promises. (See the section further down on “Why Are We Doing This” for even more detail.)
As fans, together, we are powerful. We are organizing to protest the lack of action on promises made by the Organization for Transformative works to deal with issues of racism and harassment on their platform, Archive of Our Own.
We call on fans to do any or all of the following actions any time between May 17 to 31, 2023 to send a message to AO3 and OTW that we will hold them to their promises.
On AO3
- Change the title of ten (or more!) of your most recent or most popular fanworks to include ‘End Racism in the OTW’ in the beginning, and provide a link to this post in your summary or first/top creator’s note
- Post a new fanwork any time between May 17th to 31st with “End Racism in the OTW” either as the title or at the beginning of the title. The fanwork does not have to be long - it can be a 100-word fic, a quick sketch, a podfic of a ficlet, a 20-second vid/edit, a short piece of meta, etc. In the summary or first/top creator’s note, provide a link to this post
- If updating any WIPs with a new chapter, add ‘End Racism in the OTW’ to the title and provide a link back to this post in your summary or first/top author’s note
- Update your AO3 icon using the profile pic graphic in our Social Media Toolkit
- Plan to maintain these changes until May 31, 2023, or longer if you wish
- Send a message to the OTW asking for an update on their 2020 commitments!
- For Readers: leave encouraging comments on fanworks with the "End Racism in the OTW" title to show your support of this initiative.
On tumblr
- Reblog this Call to Action with the tag #End OTW Racism
- Update your profile pics and banners using the graphics in our Social Media Toolkit
- Follow this account for updates and signal boost our posts
On Twitter
- Follow @/EndOTWRacism (remove the backslash) and signal boost our pinned tweet
- Update your profile pics and banners using our graphics, and change your display name to include #EndOTWRacism
- Use sample tweets and graphics from our Social Media Toolkit to tweet about your fanworks, and use the hashtag #EndOTWRacism
Help us make this a long-term campaign - sign up to help with other anti-racism projects and future actions!
What Do We Want?
Since their June 2020 statement, OTW has been working on updating their Terms of Service (TOS) to address racist and bigoted harassment, but with little transparency and only the vaguest of updates. It has been three years since their commitment to this update - we want to see the results of their work implemented in the next 6-12 months. Their TOS updates and complementary policies should include:
- Harassment policies that can be regularly updated to address both on-site harassment and off-site coordinated harassment of AO3 users, with updated protocols for the Policy & Abuse Team to ensure consistent and informed resolutions of abuse claims
- A content policy on abusive (extremely racist and extremely bigoted) content; by abusive, we are talking about fanworks that are intentionally used to spread hate and harassment, not those that accidentally invoke racist or other bigoted stereotypes
These points are not particularly new and are not our own innovation; please refer to Stitch's article written over two years ago, asking for several of these very things.
OTW has also already committed to various process-based actions for longer-term works towards centering antiracism, including hiring a Diversity Consultant. The last update that OTW published said that the consultant would be hired within the next five years (after already having had three years to work on it since their original commitment). That is not soon enough. We want to see the following process-based actions implemented:
- Hiring a Diversity Consultant within the next 3-6 months
- Committing to a policy of transparency on this topic, with quarterly updates on the progress of these projects including challenges and their plan for overcoming those challenges. These quarterly updates should be published on OTW News page and newsletters, not solely discussed in Board meetings
Why Are We Doing This?
16 years ago, Astolat famously published her manifesto calling for a fandom Archive of One’s Own. In that time, AO3 has grown to be a central pillar of fandom, likely far outstripping its founders’ original vision. It is more than just an archive now; it is a central hub of the modern fannish experience. AO3 and the OTW must continue to grow and evolve with fandom over time to remain a healthy and functioning pillar of fandom. To that end, there are several areas in which the organization, as it admits itself, is lacking.
In June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the uprising of the Black Lives Matter Movement, The OTW published a “This Week in Fandom” referencing the works of Dr. Rukmini Pande and Stitch, among others in which they discussed ‘making change for a better society’ through ‘conversations about race and racism’. In response, Dr. Pande and Stitch submitted a letter to the OTW calling for a more formal public statement than an offhand reference in a News Roundup that only served to call for thoughts and discussion without any indication the organization intended to do anything, policy wise, to address the issues being raised.
Eventually, the organization did remove the references to the works of Dr. Pande and Stitch and then made an official statement on the issue of racism within the organization and AO3. In it, they identified several things they would be prioritizing to combat harassment and benefit users. Some of those have been implemented (notably those that were already under development). However as of this writing, little else has been done especially in regards to:
- Improving admin tools for the Policy & Abuse team
- Reassessing the current mandatory archive warnings with the possibility of implementing others
- And, most importantly, reviewing the Terms of Service (TOS) to allow the Policy & Abuse team to address harassment that is currently not covered by the existing TOS
By their own admission, the current tools and policies of the OTW are not sufficient to deal with issues of harassment and racism.
Several people who were involved in the founding of the OTW, including previous OTW Board members and staff on the original OTW Content Policy Committee, acknowledge that the founding of the OTW in 2008 and early board iterations failed us as a fandom by not doing enough, and by not even considering the way racism is perpetuated in fannish spaces, despite a long history of racism in fandom.
It has been nearly three years since the original commitment by the organization with little visible, measurable progress on these three crucial issues and a complete lack of transparency on where they are in regards to even beginning to deal with these issues. In fact, in Q&As, it was heavily implied by a member of the board that those calling for OTW to deal with issues of racism (which OTW had already acknowledged as a problem!) were not really fans but outside agitators.
This has cast significant doubt on the organization's sincerity and commitment to their stated goals, and on their position as leaders of a central fan tent-pole. Fans of color are not outsiders. They are right here, members of our community, and they are being harassed and targeted and driven out while space and platforms are being given to racists.
We, as fans of color and our allies, find the current state of fandom and current actions (and lack thereof) unacceptable. Fandom is our space, all of ours. We, as a fandom, have a right to a racism-free space and have a duty to our fellow fans to create that space. Unlike so much of the world, this is a space we can control and make better. It is a space we must make better. To read even more about this movement, visit our FAQs.
Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on " inside a cinema " or something like that. Then, BAM. Here's a list of smell and sounds. I can't remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3
This is going to save me so much trouble in the future.
girls when a piece of theater can be performed a million different times a million different ways but the ending will always stay the same
Someone in my fb chicken group has a little bearded bantam that likes to sit on shoulders so they did a pirate photoshoot and I am losing it
Just look at it!! THE LITTLE HAT!!!
I was supposed to post this on the 9th but I fell sick and couldn't finish it on time. Anyways!
Sansa Stark Month 2023 - Day 09 - Wardrobe Appreciation
Sansa's Winterfell outfits were probably simpler, with shapes made for a child, not hugging her body. The patterns are abstract and inspired by scandinavian ones.
Kings Landing is opulence and more fabric than what you really need in one dress. Lots of silks and shiny embrodiery beffiting of the Heir's bethroted or the Hand's wife. Inspired by italian fashion in 1490 and The Borgias TV show.
And The Vale finds Sansa a little bit older so the dresses look more womanly and fitted but she's still a bastard so the color paletter can't draw the eye too much. Inspired by the Tudor era and The Other Boleyn Girl movie.
it is my belief that any good modern holmes/watson dynamic relies on the following core tenets: 1) watson being at least as unhinged as holmes, thereby making it an insane4insane feral4feral ship 2) mutual respect for eachother, while paired with mutual disrespect for eachother's boundaries 3) a healthy dose of emotional co-dependency 4) watson being the absolute centre and bedrock of holmes' entire universe and the one person who he is unwilling to lose, unwilling to compromise, unwilling to ever cause pain for
this is what makes elementary holmes/watson so satisfying to watch as a healthy platonic m/f friendship who get to live happily ever after together, what makes house md house/wilson cathartic to watch as the depiction of a self-destructive, unhealthily intense, doomed-by-the-narrative tragic romance that you still root for. pinnacle modern holmes/watson but in completely opposite directions
I just remembered I was actually able to (mostly) finish this drawing.