grow mushrooms

The beautiful creation I have made <3

Argh.

A lot of American cooking is really quite French and it has been for centuries and I used to not know that and everyone talked up French cooking so much and then I started actually looking into it and I was like. I. Cook like this. Everyone I know cooks like this. This is just butter. It’s butter, Michael. It’s butter. You were hyping up butter. I can already do this.

French cooking is quite good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a lot like American home cooking. Cooking with wine, butter, using a small amount of herbs, lots of meat and vegetables. Potatoes. Cream sauces. Bacon. This stuff has been in both American and French cooking since the colonial days. Home cooks read and watch a lot of things written by chefs trained in France over here. A lot of stuff my grandmother makes is quite similar to French dishes I’ve looked into. A lot of American white gravy is like French white sauce but made with cream instead of milk. A lot of soul food and comfort food over here especially southern stuff is quite French. It seems strange to me that some of these things are in five star restaraunts because like. I make stuff like this in my crock pot. Strange how much French food gets hyped up in America even though we’re basically already doing it.

There’s a lot of history, politics, exploiting of the poor, and misunderstanding in what these tags are saying. And the tone indicates to me that perhaps you’re not interested in learning it.

I love that "Kroger's" is included as a "brand" in those tags. Kroger is a grocery store in the Midwest where you purchase food items that can be cooked into meals. Nobody says "let's have Kroger for dinner tonight!" Who are these people

One interesting thing about me is that I frequently go through periods where I eat nothing but redbull and gas station sandwiches until one day I open my empty fridge and realize I have no idea what a functional human being buys at the grocery store so I have to keep a full list of everything I eat and use taped to the outside of the door so I can stare at it in a dissociative trance until the answers come to me through the void like dark knowledge from a divine being

It's great to have a shopping list but be careful to remember not to eat all of these items

are you kidding i love normal american meal of fish in ziplock bags

bloodworms

fullmetal alchemist

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST

Got tired of seeing moeblob young catgirls. Give me butch and GNC catladies in their 40s and 50s (more will be drawn)

DC's 'Twas the 'Mite Before Christmas #1 - "Lex-Tacular Christmas Carol" (2023)

silliest svsss x daemon AU

SQQ: so it turns out. the reason! noboday said jack shit! about my daemon not being the original goods's daemon was, ONCE AGAIN, your flawless clusterfuck of a worldbuilding!!

SQH: isn't it good that nobody said a thing when shen jiu's huli jing became the fattest lap cat in the world? like, you're welcome, broseph.

SQQ: D:&lt; it is not.

SQH: no but you don't see my vision here, cultivators are supposed to cultivate AGAINST THE HEAVENS i.e. their own normal boring pedestrian destiny, so the "yeah you settle into who you are age twelve and never change again" thing is just, pshh, pass, and you kept bitching about bottlenecks being supposed to be dangerous, so i made them dangerous!

SQQ: FIRST OF ALL

SQH: yes? :3

SQQ: first of all, you duck-dicked plagiristic fuck, don't pretend i can't tell you gave them pokemon evolutions.

^^^ all of this, and if you try to tell me ignoring Cap now that he's played by Sam is actually part of some long-term masterful plot that's going to come to fruition eventually, I'm just gonna laugh in your face. Marvel does not have the capacity to think like that. The MCU doesn't even attempt character arcs or recurring themes or shit like that. Disney and Marvel both have a loooooong history of shoving women and poc into controversial roles and then leaving them to the wolves and refusing to protect them from racism and sexism, and then sidelining or cancelling projects with them in it to avoid scrutiny (and to avoid losing money from bigots).

I sometimes see people argue about one of these circles as though it were all three circles.

Sometimes something can totally make sense in-universe, and fit with the themes of the story, the characters, etc... And you just don't like it for whatever reason. Maybe it wasn't done well in spite of that, or touched a nerve, etc.

Maybe you loved a story, and it was an excellent exploration of a character, but it would be totally fair to call out the technical nonsense, and how, even in-universe, it doesn't add up.

And maybe you thought this episode of a show was GREAT! But it was non-canon, nothing made sense, and, ultimately, it was UTTER NONSENSE.

And so on, and so forth. Heck, you could fairly add more circles to this. I'm keeping it simple with three.

My point is mostly that there's nuance to opinions, and sometimes, someone not liking something in a story has nothing to do with whether it made sense, or complimented the narrative.

Those things can be separate points. Stories don't have to be a failure at everything to be disliked, or succeed at everything to be liked, and arguing as though that were the case is silly.

Two simply beautiful turns of phrase from The Tale of King Arthur:

And one that made me choke because I accidentally read it as horrible memes:

(Maims, it's maims)

a video game where you're playing a government module-ed secunit could do SOOOOO much with the idea of character agency and the very idea of quest markers. not doing something or doing something too slow would make you take damage. careful interpretations of the quest log to avoid punishment. make it frustrating to play. diegetically justifying the format of a strictly linear shooter.

BUT THEN second act comes. your government module is hacked. this is now an open world game with almost no guidance. job sim elements, detective elements. learning new skills, new interactions. there HAS to be a section towards the end where the govt module is enabled again. back to the restrictions. remind the player JUST how much they've learned they can do by taking it away. regaining agency should make the player weep with relief akin to solving a complicated puzzle or difficult boss.

the mandatory motion of slavery vs the paralyzing freedom of choice.

Do You See It. Do You Understand My Vision.

Look I'm real annoyed at people getting high and mighty about whether duolingo works, and here are some hard fucking truths I have to tell you:

If you are a new adult learner of another language, you will never be fluent in that language. Fucking just forget about it. We have this bias towards learning language like it's a party trick, like it is a game that we can win. Not only is that not the point of learning a language, it's also the fuck impossible. You are not going to become fluent using Duolingo because you were never going to be fluent at all.

Now once you're done with that, chew on this part: It's okay to be shitty at things, especially languages, and most people who speak multiple languages are not fluent in all of them. Americans in particular self-report being way worse at languages than they actually are because the only understanding that we have is that perfect fluency is the only way to speak another language. It is okay to only know enough to ask where the bathroom is, because that's how you open a door to learning how to order breakfast, which is how you learn to read the newspaper, which is how you learn to read poetry.

It is okay to just know enough of a language to get by. It is okay to learn just enough of a language to learn how to read a certain kind of document. It is perfectly okay if the minute you open your mouth, someone knows where you're from. Language is a tool and not a trophy, and if you find the teaching strategies of Duolingo useful, you will probably move towards an okay conversational understanding of a language. It doesn't work miracles, but miracles are not the point of learning.

I do have complaints about Duolingo, and I vent them frequently. I think its single biggest problem is that it teaches you to think in sentences and not paragraphs, and as someone who doesn't learn great from immersion, trying to learn without a conjugation chart sucks. I do think that it is better thought about as something that you use to enrich your life on a daily basis, in the way that you enrich yourself by doing the crossword puzzle. But you were never going to sit down and study a language for an hour a day, and trust me on this one, buying a book isn't going to fucking work. I know that Duolingo makes claims that it can't back up, but the idea that it is keeping people from being fluent in a language is also absolutely unsupportable.

And now I am blacklisting Duolingo on Tumblr and moving on with my life, I'm almost up to a 1200 day streak

Just thinking about how the Time Lords erased Zoe and Jamie's memories save for the very first adventures in their own time periods. Did they take into account skills learned during that time or just the memories of their actions? Could he still read and write after the Time Lords dropped him off? The youngest Jacobite rebel seemingly disappeared in the aftermath of the battle. Maybe he managed to escape to France like the Laird and his daughter, maybe he's among the too mangled casualties to identify, perhaps he got captured after all and sold into slavery. No one knows other than some little German doctor and a pair of English got involved before he disappeared. A day or two later he's suddenly out in the middle of the highlands again, dazed and unsure what happened. Last he remembers is the battle and he has scars and a few lines of age he can't account for. But he looks at the letter someone is scrawling to send to the Laird about his reappearance, and corrects them on details/spelling. He could never read before. Pipers in clans were held with high regard but they never took much priority in learning to read. They ask him if he's been taking lessons and he can only shrug in confusion himself. When he can get his hands on books he finds himself reading for fun, but the voice in his head when he does isn't his own. It's a soft young woman's voice that he doesn't recognize but sounds familiar. He calls her Victoria.

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

Half asleep thinking about a hallmark christmas movie card game where each player's goal is to woo the heroine.

"I play my big city business man desperate for validation from father figure card."

"I play my small town christmas tree farmer card and activate my secretly descended from santa trap card."

The longer it goes the more convoluted the story gets. Potential to pit different tropes against each other like 'coffee shop owner with magical sense of favorite seasonal coffee flavor vs secretly the prince of a small european country no ones heard of.'

This sounds like it would be @copperbadge's speed

I theoretically know enough about the movies to create this with relative ease. The last costume party I went to, I wore my Hallmark Movie Hero t-shirt and handed out movie tropes on cards to people.

Join forces with @prokopetz challenge

"Damian, sometimes we should keep thoughts to ourselves." HELP, WHEN BATMAN HAS TO TELL YOU TO BE LESS RUDE, YOU KNOW IT'S BAD, I HAVE BEEN HYENA LAUGHING ABOUT THIS FOR THE LAST FIVE MINUTES.

"Remember inside voices and outside voices? That's an inside thought."