being the most left leaning family member means everyone will always think that youre insane and then in two years they will believe what you were explaining to them two years ago but still think youre insane now. and you do it anywaybecause you love them

something i have always found really weird is when english texts italicize words from other languages.

i remember reading a book as a kid and the author continually italicizing the word tamales

there’s such an unbelievable multitude of this type of (straight) woman who’s like “when he mentions a ‘she’ 😡🥺👀” “when he calls some girl his ‘friend’ 👀👀🔪” etc and this person is like a different species to me. this person is a space alien. this type of person makes me feel like amy adams in arrival

a man’s female friends are like a car’s warranty. a woman has vouched for this guy’s ability to be normal. you should be kissing her on the mouth for her service

You get it

Endless time @jencaywood

…….thinking about this………..always thinking about this…..

Wish I was a late bronze age girl

I would have my homeland invaded by the sea peoples. I would be lain siege to by the sea peoples. My cities would be sacked by the sea peoples. I would make bronze tools and pottery. My shores would be invaded by the mysterious sea peoples. I would be mustering my armies to fend off the sea peoples.

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.

There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼‍♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼

It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:

And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:

These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.

And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this

We need to appreciate our ancient food scientists

With the caveat that this is obviously only true before The Famine, the nutrient density of potatoes made Irish peasants substantially healthier than those in other European countries whose staple food was bread! Thank you ancient Andean food scientists, for keeping my ancestors alive through a time of oppression and poverty.

Once got into an argument with a lawyer from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (which is a truly *wild* place) about why the people who had a lab to synthesise the blight resistant rice got the patent and not the indigenous community who had bred specifically blight resistant rice for generation.

Just gonna plug Professor Alice Roberts’ book Tamed, which is about ten species and how they were domesticated, including potatoes, rice, wheat, dogs, and horses. I’ve been listening to the audiobook and, yes, I did end up tearing up over the history of the domestication of wheat while washing up.

(Also it did get me seething about Monsanto but honestly that’s pretty much inevitable when talking about any domestic crop these days.)

Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:

But in Japanese it scans as:

"Psycho" to mean "someone with psychokinesis" has been an anime thing since the 70s so I knew that one but the meaning of "Mob" really never crossed my mind. I thought it was just his name for no reason at all.

Japanese read: ESP NPC

English read: MAXIMUM MURDER

if you’ve ever thought i’m standoffish, politely distant, or generally hard to befriend, know in your heart that i’m exactly the same in real life. my neighbours just showed up at my door drunk on Canada Day celebrations and told me how desperate they’ve been to meet me for the past few months and then tried to fix the water pump in my basement

one of the neighbours returned today with heavy machinery and gravel and fixed my driveway. i feel like a feral animal they’re trying to coax with little treats

they've told me the gossip which is that a few years back a 70 yr old man collapsed the bridge at the end of my road by driving his tractor over it, lost his tractor in the river, climbed back up the cliff unscathed, walked an hour home, and then the whole road fell into disrepair and all the campgrounds closed and the once popular waterfall down the road became obscure and secret. so like, be the change you want to see in the world. collapse a bridge to chase out the tourists. also you can lose widespread knowledge in under 10 years if one old man collapses a bridge

also i met this bridge collapsing old man on a walk a few months ago and he said to me "you should check out the river at the end of the road, there's a tractor in it!" like he wasn't the one who put it there

i will give tiktok one concession and that is that it has spawned a comment that contains a phrase that i think of often at relevant moments: pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

(from a video featuring someone's father/grandfather)

ⓘ A sewing machine is a device that provides a several-fold increase of the speed at which you can make mistakes

Hannah Montana is fucked up because its entire POINT as a show is that children should be protected from fame and exploitation, but it stars a REAL little girl that's being exploited. Nearly every episode carries the looming threat of Miley being outed as Hannah and losing her peaceful teenage life to the ravages of fame. Her father in the show (played by her own father in real life) wisely protected her from the trauma of fame by making her wear a disguise and live a rather quiet, interview-free life. Meanwhile the REAL Billy Ray Cyrus sold his daughter to Disney Channel when she was 11 and forced her to read dialogue about how terrible it would be to face the public eye. Like... Jesus, dude. The fictional Robby Ray is 10x the father, and it's not even close. (It's also IMMENSELY funny that her dad doesn't use his real name in the show, while she does. Almost like he wanted a bit of a disconnect between his identity and his character. Something Miley didn't get.)

the baddest bitch i fumbled? myself

— Fiona Apple