when oscar wilde wrote “there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands” i felt that
By Steven McIntosh (Entertainment reporter)
“Go to Google Images right now,” says photographer Mihaela Noroc, “and search ‘beautiful women’.”
I do as she tells me. Millions of results come back.
“What do you see?” she asks. “Very sexualised images, right?”
Yes. Many of the women in the top pictures are wearing high heels and revealing clothes, and most fit into the same physical mould - young, slim, blonde, perfect skin.
“So beauty all the time is like that,” Mihaela says. “Objectifying women, treating them in a very sexualised way, which is unfortunate.
“Women are not like that. We have our stories, our struggles, our power, but we just need to be represented, because young women, they see only images like this every day, so they need to have more confidence that they can look the way they look and be considered beautiful.
“But,” she adds, “Google is us, because we are all influencing these images.”
Mihaela has just released her first photography book, Atlas of Beauty, which features 500 of her own portraits of women.
The Romanian photographer’s definition of beauty, however, appears to be that there is no definition. The women are a variety of ages, professions and backgrounds.
“People are interested in my pictures because they portray people around us, everyday people around the street,” Mihaela explains.
“Usually when we talk about beauty and women, we have this very high, unachievable way of portraying them.
“So my pictures are very natural and simple. And this is, weirdly, a surprise. Because usually we are not seen like that.”
Each of the book’s 500 portraits has a caption with information about where it was taken, and, in many cases, the subject.
The locations are varied, to put it mildly. They include Nepal, Tibet, Ethiopia, Italy, North Korea, Germany, Mexico, India, Afghanistan, the UK, the US, and the Amazon rainforest.
Some locations, however, proved more problematic than others.
“I approach women I want to photograph on the street. I explain what my project is about. Sometimes I get yes as an answer, sometimes I get no, that really depends on the country I’m in,” she explains.
“When you go to a more conservative society, a woman is going to have a lot of pressure from society to be a certain way, and her day-to-day life is carefully watched by somebody else.
“So she’s not going to accept being photographed very easily, maybe she’s going to need permission from the male part of her family.
“In other parts of the world they are extremely careful because there might be issues concerning their safety, like in Colombia. Because they had Pablo Escobar and the mafia for so many years.
"So they say ‘OK, so you’re going to take my picture but I’m probably going to be kidnapped after that because you’re part of the mafia and you’re not who you’re saying you are’.”
She adds: “If somebody were to start this project just with men, it would be much easier, because they don’t have to ask permission from their wives, sisters or mothers.”
Mihaela says she occasionally puts pictures through Photoshop, but not for the reasons you might think.
“When you take a picture, it’s usually raw, and that means it’s very blank, like a painting, you don’t have the colours you had in the reality.
"So I try to make it as vibrant and colourful as it was in the original place. But I’m not making anyone skinnier or anything like that, never, because that’s very painful.
"Because I also suffered as a woman growing up from all kinds of difficulties, I wanted to be skinnier, look a certain way, and that was also related to the fake images I saw in day-to-day life.”
It’s safe to say Mihaela’s photography book is quite different tonally to, say, Kim Kardashian’s 2015 book of selfies.
“These days, the bloggers, the famous people of our planet have set this unachievable and fake beauty standard, and it’s very difficult for us as women to relate to that,” she says.
“Kim Kardashian has 100 million followers on her Instagram page and I have 200,000, so imagine the difference - it’s astonishing. But slowly, slowly, I think the message of natural and simple beauty will be spread around the world.”
So what’s the best piece of advice Mihaela could give to anyone keen to get into photography? Buy a good quality camera? Learn about lenses and angles?
Not exactly.
“Buy good shoes,” she laughs, “because you’re going to walk and explore a lot.”
I really needed to read this today. Thank you.
Potato girl has her life goals in order.
This is a game changer.
Aries: “Have some fire. Be unstoppable. Be a force of nature. Be better than anyone here, and don’t give a damn what anyone thinks. You’re on your own. Be on your own.” - Cristina Yang
Taurus: “If you aren’t willing to keep looking for light in the darkest of places without stopping, even when it seems impossible, you will never succeed.” - Amelia Shepherd
Gemini: “We’ll try again and we’ll fail again because that’s what progress looks like. Progress looks like a bunch of failures. And you’re going to have feelings about that because it’s sad, but you cannot fall apart.” - Meredith Grey
Cancer: “People can be broken but what’s broken can be healed and no matter how dark things can get the sun is always going to rise up again.” - Meredith Grey
Leo: “If you love someone, tell ‘em. Even if you’re scared that it’s not the right thing, even if you are scared that it will burn your life to the ground, you say it, and say it out loud. And then you go from there.” - Mark Sloan
Virgo: “Oh, screw beautiful. I’m brilliant. If you want to appease me, compliment my brain.” - Cristina Yang
Libra: “I think you can’t wait for someone to fly underneath you and save your life. I think you have to save yourself.” - Meredith Grey
Scorpio: “Not everybody has to be happy all the time. That’s not mental health. That’s crap.” - Meredith Grey
Sagittarius: “The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need.” - Meredith Grey
Capricorn: “It’s good to be scared. It means you still have something to lose.” - Richard Webber
Aquarius: “A little coffee. A little sunlight. Your troubles will get smaller.” - Richard Webber
Pisces: “Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He is very dreamy, but he is not the sun. You are.” - Cristina Yang
The internet went from showing food recipe videos to alchemy in less than a decade. There’s going to be a quick video on how to make the philosopher’s stone from tomato sauce next week.
I WANNA DRINK THE TRANSPARENT SODA
leave milk out unrefrigerated in your house for 2 days
Some days ago, my sibling sent me this video out of the desperate hope I could provide the catharsis of seeing it torn to pieces. It has now been coming on 72 hours, and only now have I recovered enough to be able to do much of anything but scream, “WHAT?!” and “NO!” at the screen.
We had a long discussion about what in the twelve hells this video even is. A surreal, dadaist parody so obscure that our brains aren’t operating on enough levels to comprehend it? The Instagram lifehack equivalent of those terrifying procedurally-generated animated Youtube videos that farm ad revenue by playing millions of times to babies whose parents left the iPad on autoplay? A coded message designed to activate the combat programming of brainwashed cyborg sleeper agents? A post that slipped through a wormhole from an alternate dimension where the laws of reality are different? An emanation of a vast and alien chaos god?
I cannot bring myself to confront the claims in this video in the order they are put forth without losing my will to live after the first one, so I will start with the least crazy and work my way up.
Bananas to ripen things: More or less true. You’ll sometimes see advice to cooks to store underripe fruit in a paper bag with one piece of overripe (but not rotten) fruit to ripen it more quickly. Misrepresentations: It will probably take longer than overnight to ripen something as green as some of those tomatoes, and it doesn’t have to be a banana.
Coca-cola and milk: The coke is more acidic than the milk and curdles it, resulting in solid globs of milk protein which settle out. The brown dye in the coke sticks to the milk protein globs, leaving the excess liquid more or less clear. Misrepresentations: The video has been enormously sped up, which the editing does not make clear; the reaction takes hours.
Ketchup to clean metal: To my mild surprise, this is actually a thing (though you could just make a paste out of salt, flour, and vinegar and scrub with that and not get ketchup stains on everything)… Misrepresentations: …for cleaning copper and bronze. Which the jug shown in the video is not. The acid in the ketchup might take some of the tarnish off, say, aluminum, but at that point you might as well just use vinegar.
Sparkling water omelet: Omelet souffles are a thing. Misrepresentations: You… literally do not need the sparkling water… you can just beat the eggs until they’re fluffy…
“Warm water clears wax from fruits!”: This is a mysterious and arcane procedure called “washing.” Misrepresentations: I don’t know what the hell they even did to the video on this sequence but as a person who has washed many apples in warm water, it does not look like that and the thin layer of edible wax applied to make them look good in the grocery store does not come off that easily.
Sprite to clean earrings: Again, this will take tarnish off some metals just due to the acid, but… Misrepresentations: DO YOU WANT GROSS STICKY EARRINGS AND EAR INFECTIONS? JUST USE VINEGAR WATER. Also, “dirt” is not a kind of molecule. (Incidentally, if the earrings are silver, there is a vastly better method that actually reverses the tarnish instead of removing it.)
Insta-freeze bottle: This is a real thing… Misrepresentation: …which absolutely will not happen if you follow their instructions, because a) they neglect to mention an important caveat (the water needs to be purified/distilled) and b) 5 minutes is not long enough for a water bottle to supercool. If you google any of the myriad videos and articles of people doing this trick, you’ll see numbers like “3 hours in the freezer” or “40 minutes in a salted ice bath.”
There is video of the trick working. Either that footage was taken from someone else, or they knew how to do it, did it, and then deliberately lied about the time for no apparent reason.
Putting a broken plate in milk for two days magically fixes it: To my immense surprise, they didn’t make this one up; the idea is that the milk protein casein can form into a plastic at high temperatures and bind to the ceramic. Googling it turned up some hobbyist potters commenting that they’d used it to salvage things that had cracked slightly in the kiln. Misrepresentations: Once again, they’ve misrepresented the method: everything I saw talking about how to do it said to boil the milk and then soak for an hour, not leave it out for two days like an offering to the pixies. And most of what I saw reported about it also said it only really works on hairline cracks, not full breaks, and doesn’t hold up long-term because the real structural damage isn’t repaired. And may leave a faint and persistent odor of boiled milk.
“Reveal the genetic memory of the honeycomb”:
This is the kind of gibberish predicated on so many nonsensical assumptions that unpacking it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Plus, well, I can barely see anything with the low video quality, but what I can see of the vague blur doesn’t look much like a honeycomb in the first place. Suffice to say:
But at least that I could potentially attribute to ignorance rather than deliberate intent to deceive, unlike…
Hot coals and peanut butter
This is the reason it’s taken me this long to post this. Every time I think about it my soul starts to leave my body. It’s such a mind-boggling level of bullshit that every time I’ve tried to put words around an explanation I’m quickly reduced to staring at the screen and mouthing “No” to myself in a voice of quiet despair, because I can’t even figure out where to start.
Well, okay, I guess I might as well start by saying I think their… let’s say inspiration on this was articles about scientists who made diamonds out of peanut butter and carbon dioxide. …With a press that’s designed to recreate the conditions of the earth’s mantle, and which is prone to exploding. So, you know, not something you can do in your kitchen. Unless you have one hell of a kitchen.
You can see the direct links to this in the nonsensical claim that this “works” because peanut butter contains carbon dioxide. (It doesn’t, particularly. It’s crushed peanuts mixed with oil. You know what would have a lot of carbon dioxide? The fire you pulled that glowing lump of charcoal out of.) It also mentions “pressure” when no particular pressure is involved, presumably because we’ve all heard about turning coal into diamond under heat and pressure.
Chemically speaking, there’s very little to make that crystal out of except carbon, unless you want to posit a mass migration of all the sugar molecules in the peanut butter to the center of the coal. And “carbon crystal” = “diamond,” and do you think if it was that easy to make diamonds they’d be that expensive?
I will guarantee you that crystal is a lump of quartz they covered in black crud and then peanut butter to pretend it was the charcoal.
But, of course, all of that is irrelevant, because by reblogging this at all, even to performatively despair that the internet does not seem to have come all that far since the days of Infinite Chocolate, I’m playing into their hands. Lifehack clickbait has done this forever- they deliberately seed in wrong or awful advice because people will share that to say how stupid/wrong it is. They led with complete insanity to get attention, and I gave them eyeballs on the video watching this, and I’ll be giving them more from writing this.
Maybe I’ll stick to the chaos god theory. It’s less depressing.
Thanks to this wonderful smackdown, the only comment I feel the need to make is that evidently pouring a massive blob of ketchup straight into your hand will literally force the soul from my body for 20 minutes.
Burtka-Harris Family Halloweens (2011-2018)
I really appreciate them going so hard with the family costumes every year just to remind people that Halloween belongs to the gays
Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.
he is causing the rain
this makes my heart ache
Silverstein always has been, and always will be my favorite poet because he doesn’t even need words in his poem to make people open their eyes.
is everyone who reblogged this okay?
no
fucked up how cooking and baking from scratch is viewed as a luxury…..like baking a loaf of bread or whatever is seen as something that only people with money/time can do. I’m not sure why capitalism decided to sell us the idea that we can’t make our own damn food bc it’s a special expensive thing that’s exclusive to wealthy retirees but it’s stupid as hell and it makes me angry
bread takes like max 4 ingredients counting water and sure it takes a couple hours but 80% of that is just waiting around while it does the thing and you can do other things while it’s rising/baking plus im not gonna say baking cured my depression bc it didn’t but man is it hard to feel down when you’re eating slices of fresh bread you just made yourself. feels like everything’s gonna be a little more ok than you thought. it’s good.
bread is amazing and it’s also been sold to us as something really hard to make? Every time I tell someone I made a loaf of bread I get reactions like “you made it yourself???” and “do you have a bread machine then?” I haven’t touched a bread machine in probably 10 years. You CAN make your own bread, folks, and it’s actually pretty cheap to do so. I believe the most expensive thing I needed for it was the jar of yeast. It was about $6 at the grocery store and lasted me MONTHS (just keep it in the fridge.) The packets are even cheaper. destroy capitalism. bake your own bread.
You can also make your own yeast by making a sourdough starter, so that cuts cost even more.
But you have to feed the starter daily/weekly and that means it grows quickly, but there are tons of recipes online for what to do with your excess starter. Cookies, pretzels, crackers, pancakes, waffles, you name it!!
Here’s a link to The Home Baking Association’s site. It has recipes and tips.
Make it even easier - “No-Knead Bread”. All YOU do is mix the ingredients together and wait until it’s time to heat the oven. The yeast does all the rest.
Here’s @dduane’s first take on it and the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.
Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat - it takes about 10 minutes - until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.
Here’s what before and after look like.
My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.
Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever - we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…
You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.
Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.
Here’s some of our bread…
Here’s our default bread recipe - it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.
Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.
I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf. We’re happy to have it on our table.
Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…
can we have more posts like this in future please? this is really useful and could help those who are struggling
…it’s not hard?………shit….I always thought it was
depression is the voice telling me I need to runaway in order to feel better, that i don’t like people, that people really sucks depression twisted my reality and tell me to cure my loneliness with more alone time depression tell me to convince everyone around too, let them know that i am just fine on my own
and then one day depression hits me in the fucking head and i’m dead
don’t listen to that voice, it is trying to get you alone to kill you
if you care, don’t listen to what it says, stay.
