shout out to everyone who participated in the january-february mass depressive episode

Gotta prompt that just won't leave my head.

It's about Fez & Lexi meeting through Rue in college and they have a one-night stand. Fez isn't looking for anything serious because he sticks by what Kitty says about 'love being the one thing you can't trust' so they agree to not exchange phone numbers at the end.

Lexi being Lexi believes Fez doesn't like her that way even though they connected so much on a deeper level. Fez is in denial and ends up casually bringing Lexi up whenever he hangs out with Rue. Rue being Rue, stirs up the pot knowing her two best friends are down bad for each other. While Lexi goes on a date with a guy that looks like Fez to try to get over Fez (LOL), Rue knowingly brings him to the same restaurant and he has a front-row seat. Hilarious chaos ensues with an insanely jealous Fez talking shit about the guy when he has the same features as him. "So.... watch any new movies lately?" "Yeah, just last week. Went on a double date." "Oh word, with who? ... Do I know them?" "Fez, just fuckin' ask me if it was Lexi already."

"Fucken ginger ass baby head." "Fez, you're a ginger."

bro you know what just has me by the throat about fezco? “talking to you was one of the best parts of my whole year” altered the course of my existence. no one thinks this man is very bright or smooth. but here he is saying exactly what he feels—no game playing, no qualms about revealing himself. just lovely and honest in this coy, apathetic era we’re living in. and it wasn’t just “nice talking to you” or “I had a good time” he really pointedly on new year’s eve night said “I have assessed every moment in the past 365 days and just sitting here talking to you truly ranks one of the highest.” 

in a jane austen novel he would definitely be the unlikely suitor making the wildest confessions all the girlies would eat up like “I am already a man of few words and now you possess them all”

Women: “Hey, can we hire fewer blatant misogynists to direct and create media? We’d support that.”

Nerdy Male Director: “Well-spoken. Have you considered hiring me, a man who is afraid of women?”

Nerdy Male Director: “She had many masculine traits, like eating 10 hamburgers at once and wrestling Russian mercenaries while never going over 112 pounds. She learned these skills from her many fathers and brothers, never from a male partner or friend, as that may suggest she has some autonomous sexual history. No, men were all too afraid of her, except for me who has mistaken my fem-dom fetish for respect. If I met her in real like I’d hate her for rejecting me without ever speaking to her. Her breasts were D cups.”

Nerdy Male Director: “She was quirky and spontaneous and unfathomable. She was completely disarmed and alluring and so full of sunshine. She wanted to be by my side at all times no matter how much I shrugged her off, pained by my history of real women with adult-minds who wouldn’t put up with my unbearable personality. She was a golden retriever. But a human one, with boobs and legs. I made a dog into a woman and she is my dream girl. I have a degree in literature.” 

Nerdy Male Director: “She was a strong, feminist woman who was the ruler of this matriarchal nation. So strong, and so cold, and so emotionless, because i cannot figure out what sort of emotions or feelings a woman in power would have. I hate her because she is the bitter old screen-writing professor who gave me a D- on my manuscript about a sad 20 year old man finding himself through a series of prostitute encounters. She is violently killed on screen, and it is cathartic for me. Critics will praise how I handle grim realities. Her womb is barren.”

You can just say Joss Whedon

— Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” trans. Clare Kavanaugh, Poetry (June 2010)

“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”

not even risking that shit

the thing about people who are like “i don’t like tolkien that much, fantasy should move on and be better” is that i AGREE that fantasy has all the wrong holdovers from lotr. but when you ask those people what contemporary fantasy they think is better, they’ll say shit like name of the wind or game of thrones, and i do not relate to that…..at all?? or even, like, brandon sanderson, whose books i REALLY like. but if you’re still naming mostly white straight male authors, what is it about tolkien you wanted to leave behind exactly???

If y’all’s “moving on from Tolkien” is still centered in reading fantasy written by cishet white men, y’all are missing out.

Martha Wells, Books of the Raksura. Shapeshifting gargoyle-dragon-lizard people in a matriarchal society. About finding a new home and a new family. Really evocative world building that hints at much older civilizations in a luxuriant setting.

NK Jemisin, The Broken Earth series. Post-apocalyptic setting. People of color actively dismantling systems of oppression. People of color being justifiably angry at what has been done. People of color being powerful. A black woman as the main character and multiple queer characters. She won THREE Best Novel Hugos for this series.

NK Jemisin, The Inheritance Trilogy. An empire has imprisoned and enslaved multiple gods, and is using them to further their oppressive systems. The mixed race female protagonist helps them find liberation. Some polyamory and non-binary themes.

Aliette de Bodard, Dominion of the Fallen series. “Dark Gothic fantasies set in a ruined turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war.” Fallen angels, Asian dragons, Viet culture, and queer PoC in positions of power. Her website has lots of free fiction as well. Special mention to The Tea Master and the Detective, a Sherlock Holmes retelling where Sherlock is a WoC and Watson is a sentient spaceship.

Fran Wilde, The Bone Cycle. Beautiful worldbuilding, tradition, (mis)information, climate change. This series is so gorgeous I have deliberately not finished reading it yet, because I am saving the last few chapters of the final book for when I’m going through a rough patch and need something lovely to escape into.

Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass and Iron. Fairy tale heroines going “nah, fuck this nonsense, we’re making our own story”. Amal mostly writes poetry and short fiction, and all of it is beautifully lyrical. Her words are so beautiful they make me angry.

Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky. It blends several genres in one, and honestly you are better off reading it than reading any summary I could make about it.

And so many, many, many more in the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres. Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, Alyssa Wong, Ken Liu, Rebecca Roanhorse, Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, Daniel José Older, RF Kuang, Nnedi Okorafor, Jeannette Ng, Ann Leckie, Ted Chiang, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ruthanna Emrys, Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Bear, Saladin Ahmed, Nisi Shawl…

If you can’t afford them, that’s okay, you have options:

Do you prefer short fiction? So many of these authors have stuff available online, be it on their website or on zines. A brief search will supply you with more fiction by non-white-dudes than you know what to do with.

tl;dr:

Read diverse authors.

Diane Duane, Lois McMaster Bujold, Doris Egan, Ann Downer, Pamela Dean, Emma Bull…  

Reblogging so that I can remember some of these names next time my to-be-read pile is winnowed down to a point where I can get new books from bookstore or library (oh, who am I kidding, reblogging so I can get some more books and who cares that I already have piles to read…)

A very good tip! 

my fbi agent watching my deadlines get closer

He tripped out

She literally said something in feline. She had to have

This certainly got my cats’ attention.

it looks so betrayed “i thought we were friends human”

She really must say something crazy, cause my two kitties came running towards my notebook and were searching for the source crazily.

Oh my god, I played this video and my cat looked at me SO FUCKING SHOCKED AND HE IS STILL STARING AT ME LIKE I SAID SOMETHING OFFENSIVE

LISTEN UP YALLS

•If you say “meh” high pitched it would mean “help”. Kittens use it a lot to get their mother’s attention before they open their eyes.

•If you do a tongue roll with a sharp “reah” at the end it would mean “come here”. My sister and I use it to call upon stray cats.

•body language is hard to describe. You usually need a tired and relaxed look to seem calm and purrsuasive (lol).

•tongue rolls with a slightly closed mouth can resemble purring in a way that helps attract cats.

•what the person used, or said, was a “help” and “I love you”. The cats body language dictates that it is surprised that a human could use this ability.

•we can’t fully communicate without tails and whiskers.

GO SAVE CATS NOW

…. You speak cat?

This is the best Marvel edit I’ve ever seen WOW!! ❤️

BEST. EDIT. I. HAVE. EVER. SEEN. BY. FAR.

I’m… speechless

Rad as hell.

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Follow @the-future-now

This is really important and let me tell you why.

My mom has an iPhone 6 Plus and hasn’t even had it for a year when one day it suddenly died and would not charge. So she took it to an authorized Apple repair place and they charged her $50 for a diagnostic only to tell her that she would have to buy a brand new phone.

So she decided to go to the AT&T store to talk to our usual guy that upgrades our phones and handles any problems for us. She tells him what’s wrong and he takes her phone to the back only to come out two minutes later, puts her phone on charge and it comes back to life. 

She asks him what was wrong with it that he managed to somehow fix when the people at the “authorized apple repair place” couldn’t. And you know what he told her?

“There was just a bit of fuzz in the charging port.”

I FUCKING KNEW IT. Listen, I have a MacBook from college. The charger has died twice, and I had to get a new one. This happened for two years in a row around the same time each year. I’m fucking convinced that their hardware is rigged to “expire” in order to force people to keep buying their shit.

Wait, people are just now learning that Apple has some of the shadiest business practices?

You know this isn’t really just apple, company’s do this all the time, everything is rigged to expire and all they want is your money.

Ohhh no no no, this IS JUST Apple. 

All companies want you to buy their new products. None have gone to the lengths that Apple Inc. has gone to make end user repairs as impossible as is legally viable. I have been repairing electronics and computer systems privately, commercially and active duty in the US military for about 30 years. 

Apple puts extra effort into special hardware requiring proprietary tools that are only legally produced by their licensed manufacturer and can only be purchased through licensed repair shops if at all. 

Companies like iFixit can only exist as profit making companies because they are able to make workaround tools and kits that are still profitable but less of a blatant ripoff than Apple. 

Apple has been doing this forever. The way Apple treats consumers is abysmal, and people still eat their products up.

This is called “planned obsolescence” - many companies do it, but Apple has made it into an art. Basically, companies - tech companies in particular - have realized that if their products are manufactured too well, they won’t be able to sell you a new one in three years. So, in order to keep consumers coming back for more, they design your gadgets to “expire” in all manner of ways; Apple is infamous for pushing software updates that render older model phones and computers useless right before releasing a new product so that consumers will be forced to purchase the newest version of a gadget they already have.

The best way to fight back against this kind of wasteful, predatory, capitalistic schlock is to learn more about how your gadgets work so that you can repair them instead of replacing them. This man is doing the Lord’s work.

This isn’t even touching on the fact that plants exchange nutrients with other plants through their root networks and engage in constant “bartering,” sometimes withholding resources until they get something extra. This is all performed with the aid of fungi, and the fungi in turn seem to weigh options and make decisions that will best benefit both themselves and their plant symbiotes. Sometimes two plants even get territorial and try to poison one another, and the fungal network steps in to put a stop to it.

http://e360.yale.edu/features/exploring_how_and_why_trees_talk_to_each_other

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6283/342

http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/159/2/789

Pure creativeness and absolutely hilarious.

I’m not joking at all please give him a comedic educational children’s show on ecology

Pure creativeness and absolutely hilarious.

I’m not joking at all please give him a comedic educational children’s show on ecology

GETTING A JOB CHEAT SHEET!!

other cheat sheets

It’s impossible to watch this video just once😩

We naturally put millionaires and billionaires in the same general class of person, but the only reason to do that is because the words are similar. Since these aren’t numbers we can actually visualize, it’s important to understand what a billion of something is. To travel a million inches, you’d have to travel from the Southern-most tip of Manhattan and go to the Bronx. To travel a billion inches, you’d have to fly from New York to Shanghai twice. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. A million ounces is about the weight of a train car. A billion ounces is 4.5 Eiffel Towers. Use these to conceptualize what the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is, and the absurd amount of wealth we’re talking about.

Millionaire: I can buy a fancy sports car, and a huge house!

Billionaire: I can buy THE SPACE PROGRAM

Different Strokes?

I think I left the teller at the bank genuinely disturbed when I told him that “If I can’t afford it, I just don’t buy it.”  “What about a car? Do you drive a car?” he inquired, his voice toning on the edge of fear.   I told him, “Yeah, I have a vehicle. I bought it used for under $3,000.”  He looked physically pained. “What about if you want to buy some kind of new appliance? Or furniture?” he persisted. I stared at him blankly. “My couch was $5.00 at Goodwill. Like…I just buy shit cheap or I don’t buy it at all. The only thing in my life that I make payments on is my house, my bills, and my insurance, and that’s split five ways because I have housemates.”  The young man looked horrified? Appalled? And somehow also awed?  This guy couldn’t have been much older than me. But it seemed that he’d never even considered the option before of saving up for something to purchase it outright instead of using a credit card. Am I the only person in my general age group (just turned 26) who’s never owned a credit card, and who has forgone basic comforts in order to save up for items so you don’t owe money to anyone, like, ever? 

If you’re living in the US without a credit card at 26, you’re playing with danger.

No credit is viewed as the same as bad credit. Which means you could be denied if you ever do need to rent an apartment or a car. Hospitals and clinics are also less likely to allow payment plan programs for people without good credit.

The best thing you could do at this point is apply for a credit card you’re eligible for and pay a few things (I do gas and groceries myself) with it each month. As long as you keep it to zero balance each month there is no interest and there will be proof of you not having debt (instead of just the absence of debt).

what.

This is legit how it works.  The system requires records on you, or else.  So you need a credit card and worse, you need to have a record of using it, even if you pay it off every single month.  Unfortunately, the formulas used to determine credit score are secret, so we also have people suggesting that your credit rating is helped if every so often you do pay a bit of interest.  The whole thing is a complete mess.  If you don’t have a credit rating/history, then any loans you manage to get will be at extremely high interest and will require much more effort than they really should.

what

yeaah let me just go get a card that i can’t pay off because capitalism is shit, even if i literally only buy a pack of gum that’d go well

If you pay it off in full every month there is no interest.  Do what OP is doing but put some of that on your credit card and pay it off every month, and soon you will have a very good credit rating.

you skipped right the fuck over the “can’t pay it off” part huh like credit cards are just not a viable thing if you’re poor and have shit income

And I’m saying to literally not put anything on it if you can’t buy it in cash. And I’m aware that they fuck over poor people, but yeah, that’s the system that’s in place. This is advice for navigating it, which is how to obtain good credit which helps a lot.

Right like don’t make minimum payments, put your gas on your credit card then that same day pay the credit card company online then don’t worry about it for another month. It’s an absolutely shit system, but in the event of an emergency it’s good to have.

I have had to explain this to a lot of people in my life, but it’s true- no credit is the same as (or worse than!!!) bad credit. What having (and using) the card actually shows is that you are capable of (and actually follow through on) making regular payments: ie, it is proof of having a steady income (even if you do not actually have a steady income). It is showing you reliably can pay for things you purchase (you do the same thing with cash but there’s no record), and that if you borrow money you’re good for it when it comes time to repay, which is what your credit score is all about.

Think of it this way. You have a credit card, which is your credit tracking device. You use the card to tell someone “I will pay for this thing with borrowed money.” They agree to allow you to pay with borrowed money. You then turn around to your credit card company and say “Thank you for allowing me to borrow your money, I will now pay you back with my own money.” (which, if you repay them promptly enough, you can repay them the exact same amount you borrowed, rather than paying them more than you borrowed [which is what interest is])

The credit card company then recognizes that you successfully borrowed their money AND returned it safely, and they pass that information along to credit tracking companies. Each time you do this, you gain credibility. If you do this enough times, you are considered a credible borrower of money, so that if you ever are in a situation where you need to borrow a large sum of money (for example, a mortgage or a car or a hospital bill or whatever), companies with money will look at how well you have returned money in the past, and say Ah yes, this person repays their debts well, so we can lend them our money.

So like, do what the above folks are recommending. Get a credit card and use it to reasonably purchase things you already have to buy- put a batch of groceries on the card. Go home (or wherever you can use the internet), pay it off as if you had paid cash in the store for it. There is no extra fee or interest for doing this, and you are leveling up your credibility in case of emergency later on in life.

More shit in adult life they never tell you about in school

As someone who’s credit history was wiped to zero after an ex stole her identity.

Having no credit is significantly worse than having bad credit. I’ve been fortunate as of late and nothing bad has happened to me, and I’m set to inherit a house and the like. But, if say the furnace dies, or the hot water heater, or I get sick again (since my insurance company jacked my premiums to $1300/mo), I’m proper fucked.

One of the big suggestions my financial guy (I have some stocks and bonds, planning for retirement) suggested was, getting a secured credit card. Basically, it works like a normal credit card, but you put your own money down as a collateral/financing base (generally between $200-500), the financing bank/institution then puts their backing behind you. Secured cards have a near 100% approval rate for those of us with zero credit, whereas normal bank backed cards you are less likely to be approved.

I applied for one and got denied because I had low income…..

Shit I wish had been explained to me 10 years ago.

simple way to build credit: set up your monthly charges– cell, internet, Netflix, insurance– to be paid automatically on your credit card. Instead of paying each bill separately throughout the month, you pay off your one credit card bill.

My son just turned 18 (yesterday), we got him a credit card in his name that we are co-signers on.  He’ll use it to get gas for the car we share and we’ll pay the bill each month.  This way he can get a credit score.  

If you have low income and can’t get a credit card on your own, see if you can get a co-signer.  I co-signed on my sister’s first credit card, her first car loan, and her first 2 apartments.

All this.  I have credit cards that I use as a 1-month delay-of-payment: I save up, buy it on my credit card (and get airline miles for the purchase!) and then pay for it at the end of the next month with the cash I’d saved beforehand.  Ditto reoccurring fees - my monthly mobile and health care bills gets paid that way, automatically, so I never forget.  

It takes a little bit of money management, in that you have to make sure the money STAYS PUT for that month, so you have it when needed, but it’s a way to play their game to your own benefit.  You use their backing, but don’t pay them any interest on it. (start with whatever POS card you can, then work your way up to one that offers rewards.  they will eventually try to get you to increase your credit limits/offer you higher-term cards.  Just Say No)

All of the “yes, get a fucking credit card and build your score” advice is good, as are the various plans to use it without incurring any hit to your actual cash flow, but I will offer one counterpoint to the lattermost bit of advice, and explain why you *want* to increase your credit limit.

One of the factors that goes into your score (it’s one of the biggest, depending on credit agency doing the reporting) is your debt-to-credit ratio; that is, if you have $500 in available credit, and a $100 balance (because you pay your electric and cell phone bills with it, for instance), your debt-to-credit ratio is 20% (100/500).  If you talk to your credit company after you’ve been with them a while and say, “I’d like to see about increasing my credit limit,” and they see you’ve been on time with everything, they might bump you up tp $600, $750, or maybe even $1000….  if you keep that $100 monthly balance because your bills are consistent, will give you a ratio of 16.6%, 13.3%, or 10% - which makes your credit score go up, which means you can ask your credit card compaany to lower your interest rate, just in case you can’t pay your bill in full some month due to an emergency expense or whatever, so it’ll cost you less extra money if you have to do that.

But don’t take my word for it (yes, I work at a credit union, but I fix computers for a living) - here’s Equifax’ own explanation of how they calculate it: https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/how-is-credit-score-calculated

There are a shitload of things that look at your credit score now that don’t necessarily have anything, overtly or obviously, to do with your ability to repay your debts.  renting an apartment, especially from a management company rather than a local landlord - they’ll check it to see if you’re gonna be on time and pay in full.  jobs in some sectors of the market - if you look like you’re hustling to make ends meet, that could be seen as leaving you vulnerable for bribes or potentially doing shady shit at work (yes, this is shitty, but yes, it’s the truth).

plus, having a strong credit history means you can get better terms when you buy a car or house or anything else of that nature - sparkling credit will literally cut your interest rate down by 60% or more compared to someone with bad credit… if that latter person can even get the loan at all.

I have $24 to last me til Friday, what should I buy with it?

a pallet of ramen noodles

I hate ramen noodles tho

hmmmmm bees?

Are you suggesting that I eat bees for a week

This is roughly what I make sure I have in my kitchen all the time along with rough estimates of local prices (MN). I buy a lot of things when they’re on sale and stockpile them. 

instant oatmeal packets with fruit in them - $3 probably and this can be breakfast all week and maybe even a lunch or dinner too since you usually get 10 packets

bag of rice - $2-3 depending on size. 1 cup dry rice makes enough for about two meals depending on what you add in. if you get cheap rice, rinse it before cooking

canned beans - usually under $1 per can - mix the can with your rice and you have a meal. chili-spiced beans will make bean tacos. Rinse non-spiced beans before adding to anything.

Tortilla - usually around $3 but you get like 8-10 of them. Tacos, wraps, and quesadillas are all fair game here

lettuce - $2 max around here, either a head of something or bagged precut depending on preference, use as a salad or on tacos

protein other than beans of some sort - probably $5-7 for meat, $2-3 for eggs. sometimes I can get bags of frozen chicken breasts in this price range and each is usually 2 meals if I add in a bunch of veggies. fry/scramble eggs and add to any of the options. 

your favorite stir fry sauce - $3ish

vegetables - $5ish. literally anything that you can 1. fry in a pan and 2. you’ll eat. fresh carrots are usually pretty cheap. get frozen if it’s cheaper and you’re strapped for cash/prep time on this part. 

alternative to stir fry:  pasta (~$2), fresh tomatoes (~$2), cheese (~$3). 

cheese and fruit if you have extra - look if your store has loyalty cards for free that you can load coupons on for cheese there’s always one it seems like.

ahh thank you!!!

Reblogging because there’s never knowing who’ll need it.

Adding also: the single most nutritious food on earth is potatoes in their peel. Potatoes + some milk and butter = everything you need. They don’t last all that long, but they’re fairly cheap and the quickest cheat to “How do I not fuck my body up.”

(Cooked potatoes’ll last a while in the fridge. Potatoes nearing the end of their useful lives? Cook them to half-done first, figure out what to do with them later.)

Easiest baked potatoes: slice thinly but not paper-like, spread like cards, brush with oil (a silicone baking brush is totes worth the little it costs), spread salt and pepper (a little less than you think you’d like), cover with foil, stick in oven or toaster-oven at 150C for 40min. (If you have the patience, at that point click up to 180C, remove the cover and add 10-20min.) Reheats well, lasts in the fridge longer than it’ll take you to nom.

Dead-Animal-Free Whole Protein: some legumes + some grain. AKA rice and lentils, or rice and beans. (Maybe some fried onion for flavor; onion’s cheap and stays good a descent while. Fried onion makes everything taste better and keeps forever in the freezer, so frying up a bunch and keeping portions is not a half-bad idea.) (If going for the beans option - lentils are cheaper around here but fuck if I know what it’s like in your area - dump some tomato sauce and oil in; canola or soy are best health-wise, and far cheaper than olive; avoid corn.) Oh, what does instant couscous go for in your area? It keeps for fucking ever, it’s usually cheap, and it takes well to any and all added taste.

If you get to choose, black lentils taste the best and need the least soak-time (0-20min), green lentils are best for cooked stuff and red lentils are best in soups. (Red lentils + potatoes + root vegetables of choice + spices; cut into small pieces, cook, run through the blender if you wanna [stick blender’s awesome], freeze in portions.)

When possible, get instant soup mix. Get the good instant soup mix. (The kind that’s not made primarily of sugar, yeast or both. The rest is optional.) Dump 1/2tsp (or more, but start on the low end) into couscous, or chicken, or sprinkle over potatoes being stuck in the oven. Whatever. It’ll make most cooked-food-type things taste better. And again, lasts forever on the shelf.

If  you can have eggs (goodness knows they’re sometimes expensive), dump some tomato sauce in a pan (tomato sauce lasts forever on the shelf), add some oil, onion/beans to cook in it, hot peppers if you wanna, then when it’s nearly ready crack an egg or two in. Hard-boiled eggs last a remarkably while in the fridge, so when eggs reach near the end of their usable lives, just hard-boil and stick in the fridge. (Have eggs as often as you can, particularly as you have brain-shit going on. You need all the eggs, salt, and 60%-or-more chocolate you can get. Brains are made of cholesterol and salt, so folks with neuro or other brain shit need more of both. Potassium is also aces. You know what has the most potassium? Tomato paste.) Grated cheese keeps in the freezer for ever. Grated cheese will make a lot of things taste nicer. Preserved lemon juice keeps forever in the fridge. Grated cheese + oil + lemon = instant and awesome pasta sauce that’ll liven up the weeks-old dry pasta in the fridge. Slices bread also keeps well in the freezer. Try to have half a loaf or a loaf. Dry bread gets cut in cubes, mixed with oil and the aforementioned instant soup, stuck in oven at lowest until properly dry, then kept in an airtight jar to add to soups. (Over-ripe tomatoes come cheaper. They get turned into soup or sauce, then frozen in portions.)

this is a very good post but why are we glossing over the fact that the alternative to ramen is bees

i have it on pretty good authority that bees are not an affordable eating alternative to ramen.

Seriously, bees are expensive

Trufax. 

And speaking as someone who is also living off oatmeal, beans, and brown rice, if you need recipes, I have them! 

Today I made 16 bean soup with chicken sausage and it was crazy good and I got 8 servings out of the one batch (froze half). I usually get the cheapest beans I can find, and GOYA bags of beans are usually $1-2. I soaked them overnight,rinsed them, and threw them in a gallon lidded saucepan with 2 boxes of chicken stock (also on sale for $2), two bay leaves, sauteed green pepper, onion, and celery, some garlic from a jar, about two tablespoons of dried herbs de provence,and the “fancy” bit was adding $6 bourbon and apple chicken sausages. You can actually sub veg stock for chicken and skip the sausage and make it vegan and it would still taste great.

Oh and I’ve been doing steel-cut oats. I don’t buy the name brand ones, I just pick whatever store brand/generic I can get for less than $4. They take about ½ an hour to make, but they’re super tasty and I make 2 cups of dried oats at a time with dried cranberries and that’s breakfast for 4 days at least. 

I’ve also been making black bean soup, red beans and rice, and curried potatoes and chick peas. I got 100 quart and pint take-away containers from Amazon for $20 and they all stack neatly and are perf for one serving of whatever.

Additionally, depending on where you live, whole rotisserie chickens are something like $4-$7 and are easily 4 - 6 servings of protein and on TOP of that, if you stick the carcass in a ziplock bag and then the freezer you have excellent soup makings. Using bones in soup literally squeezes all viable vitamins and minerals out of the suckers. Soup made from lots of bones is great to keep around if you get sick, it’ll feed and sooth you relatively easily and as you get better you can add noodles. ON TOP OF THAT, a quarter to a half cup of soup broth added to a lot of dishes also adds those nutrients PLUS flavor.

Here’s my “How to eat for a week on $30″ post.

don’t forget Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4 A Day

Yall are clutch for this lmao cuz ima need this for about the first month after I move

Reblogging cause who knows what your followers are going through rn