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Dr Taz

@tazrider / tazrider.tumblr.com

I speak rock fluently
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rimonoroni

adhd symptoms are always just mild enough to seem fake but just severe enough to make everyone on planet earth think you’re an asshole for having them. not a big fan of this paradox tbh

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Despite my current creative uncertainty, one thing's for sure: I'll be writing at least one more fanfic before everything's said and done. Perhaps it will be yours?

My Fandom Trumps Hate profile can be found here. Bidding starts March 5th!

Organizations this auction benefits: Winning bidder's choice of any of the listed non-profit groups (See full list.)

Type of fanwork: Written fanwork Subtype(s): fan fiction (new) Fandom(s): Assassin's Creed, Horizon Zero Dawn, A Plague Tale (Videogame Series) Highest rating: E Length/scope: 5 -10k words. Minimum Bid: $5

Especially interested in: I write F/F and gen stories about "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey", but could write for the "Horizon Zero Dawn" and "A Plague Tale" series of games as well. I'm at my best writing stories from the POV of the main protagonists or major NPCs: Kassandra, Kyra, Aloy, and Amicia, but if you've got someone else in mind, let's discuss. I'll write F/F smut if you want; please take a look at my profile for examples. Prompts involving consensual BDSM/power play are welcome if that's your jam. My OTP is kyssandra (Kassandra x Kyra) but if you're my highest bidder, I'll make an exception for you if you're hankering for something else. (That said, please do review my NO list below.) I can write fluff, angst, and pretty much anything in between. Third person, first person, past or present tense are all fine by me.

Things I won't write: male protagonists (sorry, I can't do them justice!), kasspasia (Kassandra x Aspasia), X-reader/reader insert, Omegaverse, genderbent characters, non-con/dub-con, underage, BDSM involving scat/watersports/bloodplay

Other notes: The development of your prompt will be a collaboration between us. You've gotta bring big ideas you're excited about, and I've gotta vibe with your prompt to write something good. I work best from generalities and broad sketches—if you're looking for a very specific scenario with lots of fine details you're expecting me to include, I might not be the writer for you. After we agree on a prompt, I'll write a brief plot treatment and run it by you. Then I'll write the first draft, which you'll be welcome to advance read (AR) and offer feedback. Then I'll edit the work to the best of my ability, and if all goes well, we'll end up with something we're both proud of. My goal as a writer is to make you feel like you're right there in the action, fighting and fucking, laughing and playing. I will make you feel like you're somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

[Bidding instructions soon to come...]

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mamoru

quaker is clearly trying to not recall all their products at once. there is widespread salmonella in their production line. there is no fucking way they had no idea their other products, like their oats and oatmeals, have been making people sick. I myself got sick from quaker oats products that have not yet been recalled.

stop buying anything from quaker oats. the quaker oats guy shits in all of the products personally

This post and the recent recall bring up an important and developing issue in food safety. How did "the quaker oats guy shit in all of the products?" And why is Salmonella showing up in so many low-moisture foods lately?

(Please note that my area of research involves dry sanitation methods for Salmonella cross-contamination within raw flour on equipment surfaces, not oats. Since they are both low-moisture foods, I feel confident using some generalizations to provide a bigger picture.)

1. Some Salmonella strains have desiccation resistance.

For those unfamiliar with microbiology, desiccation resistance means that the bacteria can survive in dry environments. Most bacteria need a certain amount of water available to them to survive. Salmonella serovars like S. Typhimurium, S. enteritidis, and S. Mbandaka can thrive in dry environments. These serovars have been linked to food recalls in the US for the past decade. Additionally, the dried bacteria can resist heat and chemical treatments, making it very hard to kill. This ties into the next problem.

2. In dry production environments, you can't use water to clean or sanitize equipment.

It's important to keep dry food products dry during processing. If they get "too wet," yeasts, molds, and bacteria can grow, impacting the quality and safety of the product. This is the main reason why the industry can't use water or water-containing sanitation solutions on their equipment. To clean, the industry uses brushes, scrapers, and dry ice blasting to remove debris. To sanitize (kill bacteria), some techniques include non-aqueous sanitizers, UV radiation, and superheated steam. These methods can take a lot of time and labor to complete, especially on gigantic processing lines like Quaker.

3. Pressure from upper management to "produce as fast as possible" may have cut down on time for sanitation.

This is slight conjecture, but I went to a sanitation workshop last year and chatted with some sanitation professionals who work in dry environments. I asked them about this problem specifically: "How do you get everything done in lets say, six hours?" One of them laughed and said "It's more like four and a half!"

The pressure from upper management to continuously produce is on everyone in the facility, especially the staff working on the line. "Time is money," and any time not used to make products is lost money. Product safety, something lauded by producers, is always at odds with profit and sometimes isn't achieved. An interesting example is Hello Fresh, who earned an esteemed award for food safety in April 2022, but issued a recall for potential E. coli in their meal kits five months later.

So how did the products get shit in them?

We don't know yet, and we might never know. Keep an eye on updates from the FDA and CDC. You may be able to receive additional information from a FOIA request, but that can depend on a ton of factors like confidentiality and who created the document trail. Instead, let's look at the problem from a systems context.

Oats can be contaminated with Salmonella (among others, see this survey for other indicators) from multiple sources, whether it be from soil, wastewater runoff, or contact with actual shit from known Salmonella vectors like birds. If these products were contaminated with desiccation resistant serovars, the Salmonella could have survived the cooking process (if applicable to the product) and contaminated production equipment. With inadequate sanitation, the equipment could have contaminated newly produced products, leading to where we are now. Additionally, Salmonella could have entered the production line from a roof leak (birds like to hang out on roofs) or other structural issues in the facility. There are tons of possible scenarios here.

Government agencies and external validation sources are getting better at detecting Salmonella in foods due to advances in sensing techniques (PCR, ELISA, etc...). The industry, the government, and research institutions are aware of these issues and are trying to find solutions for dry cleaning and sanitizing to keep this from happening. It's a hot topic these days and everyone wants to solve it. We can generate all of these potential solutions, sure, but it's up to the companies to implement them properly since there are no federal guidelines for dry cleaning and sanitation (yet). Most companies do their best to clean and sanitize because nothing loses more money and customers than a recall.

TL;DR: Salmonella sucks. Profit over product safety sucks. Throw out any foods linked to the Quaker recall for your safety.

this is an amazing and informative post. thank you for writing it. however I really need to say

hit me like a fucking freight train

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Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins. 

We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.

Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.

This post is now one year old and my favourite thing about it is that no French person in the notes has ever seen a Chirac candle before, which strengthens my theory that my primary school teacher was making them herself, at home, as a hobby, and with this exact purpose in mind.

Believe it or not but a few months after I made this addition, the origin story of the Chirac candles was brought to light in the French press… In this interview from late 2021, our former President of the Constitutional Council was photographed in his study with a little Chirac candle on a shelf behind him! When asked about it he explained that a member of Chirac’s party made one or two thousand of these candles back in the day, and he (who was also Minister of the Interior and President of the National Assembly) has kept his Chirac candle in his study for the past 20+ years because he finds it hilarious.

Little does he know that a few dozens of these 2,000 candles ended up in the hands of a bunch of feral children somewhere in France who obsessed over them, disfigured them with diabolical glee and went into galaxy marble debt trying to buy the most grotesque Chiracs at auction.

I’m glad that at least one aspect of this mystery has been lifted. It’s still unclear how my teacher came to own so many of these limited-edition candles (I don’t think she was a fan of Chirac or a member of his party…), and of course the thought process that led her to connect the concepts of charity drive and letting kids burn the President in effigy will remain a mystery.

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brehaaorgana

From the book Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD:

  • Putting a coat on the back of a chair by the door is fine, but if you prefer, use coat hooks and a large catch-all basket for dropping keys, hats, gloves.
  • Small bookcase end-table next to the couch to store craft projects, books, and other things being worked on for easy access.
  • Add a storage unit near the dining room table to transition between eating and working there.
  • Daily toiletry items should be stored in a basket that you can move easily
  • Extra toiletries and medicine cabinet items go in open shelf/basket storage so they can be seen and used easily. If items no longer fit, purge the excess. Don't obscure the view!
  • If you disrobe in the bathroom, place a tall hamper in there.
  • Keep a set of cleaning supplies in each bathroom

Reblog and say what project you currently have spread on your dinner table in the tags

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