Hermann Hesse, Wandering: Notes and Sketches (1920)
PLEASE JUST SHOW ME THE CASSEROLE RECIPE
For a split second my dumbass thought the Fukushima nuclear accident had fried the rice
🦀 Annual report of the New Jersey State Museum Trenton, N.J.: MacCrellish & Quigley, State Printers, 1902-1915.
it's wild that virtually all modern digital infrastructure is built to constantly spy on us and harvast our data for advertising yet online advertsing is still basically worthless and nobody seems to actually be benefitting from all this
a vast rube goldberg machine of privacy violations all working together to deliver the most precisely targeted ads straight into my adblocker
Foraging
Monday I picked dandelions and violets to experiment with flower-flavored syrups. It was time-consuming, but I just felt like trying something new. I have done violet jelly before, although the results were mediocre.
The first step after separating the petals from the greens was to pour boiling water over each kind and let them sit for a day. The violets had a greenish-blue extract by evening, and by morning it had settled into a deep blue. I tried adding a couple of drops of lemon juice, which shifted it to blue-purple. Violets have the same pigment, anthocyanin, as red cabbage, and it is pH sensitive. I am curious why my tap water (from a well) would have a pH of 9(ish), but I'll go ahead and blame limestone.
I cooked the dandelion first, adding sugar equal to the amount of liquid (1.25 cups). I cooked it for a while and then bottled it when it seemed like it had thickened up (the bubbles start to PLOP instead of 'pop', if that makes sense).
Here it is, compared with honey. The color is virtually the same!
Then I started with the violet. As I heated it, the color shifted BACK to greenish-blue. I added a little more lemon juice, and it ended up weirdly purple from some angles and blue from others, depending on how the light hit it. It's also DARK, too dark for me to photograph and show you much color. When it cooled down it a) turned a steely blue-grey and b) crystalized.
That. that is NOT what I was going for. It also doesn't really taste like anything. Just 'sweet'. Drat.
Wow.
You should really listen to the WHOLE thing because this woman does not mince words
glad to see those spreading the truth
Rb to force new people from twitter to eat bees
Oh, hey, I was wondering when I’d get to use this again.
did you just fucking have this
One of my least favourite dialogue tropes is when a man tells a woman, “You can’t do that” or “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” and she says, “Why? Because I’m a woman and therefore too weak to handle this/can’t take care of myself?” or something to that effect and the guy replies with, “No, because everyone who tried that ended up with a bullet in their brain” or something equally reasonable and not gender-specific that paints him as the rational not sexist guy and the woman as an irrational paranoid feminist who searches for sexism in everything. This whole scenario is built on the idea that sexism is over and women’s fears and suspicions don’t have a leg to stand on. It’s also self-congratulatory pseudofeminism bc it’s supposed to make the viewer/reader/listener feel that in this specific work of fiction women are treated respectfully and as equal with men.
huh.. never thought of it like that
But, what if the male character isn’t sexist? I meam…their fictional sure but…I’m not sure how to phrase this
Its not a question of the character themselves- its how the writers are portraying them. The way this trope plays out, the whole moment revolves around the woman looking foolish for assuming that there is sexism happening. She is characterized as being irrational, jumping to conclusions, even insecure. While the dude is characterized as the calm, rational one.
It is a trope that specifically works by taking a woman standing up to sexism and saying “haha it wasnt actually sexist at all! Isnt calling out sexism foolish and silly. Thats what you get for assuming that men are sexist!”
I have the same reaction with homophobic jokes set up like this. Like the whole “you can’t marry a woman”, “why bc you think its wrong” “no we haven’t found you the right dress yet silly!” Or stuff along those lines.
It feels like someone setting up to punch you and then you duck and the person goes “haha, i wasn’t gonna punch you at all, why would you duck? You shouldnt just assume someone’s gonna deck you because they have their fists up.”
saw someone once describe those kinds of “jokes” as winding up they’re going to punch you and then laughing when you flinch.
some fluffy birbs for your viewing pleasure
“oh no, my audience has begun to guess the big twists of my story and are accurately predicting what will happen!”
incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go
correct response:
can someone elaborate on the “make hoax” and “post angry tweet about “leak”“ part. i’m stupid and don’t understand things
sure!
(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)
I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.
now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.
hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:
…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).
it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.
personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.
plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.
and now you know!
if your audience guesses the ending of your story
don’t:
- change the ending
do:
- gaslight them
:)
if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more
the other day I was out at lunch with some people I don’t know too well & they got talking specifically about West Virginian accents in the context of a movie that takes place there & that the movie opted out of doing accents & one of them laughed and said “I mean, can you imagine if characters sounded like that in serious moments??” I was like yeah I can because everyone where I’m from does sound like that. Y’all are so annoying.
no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.
west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).
For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.
Likewise it’s not an accident that dialects like AAVE are treated as a joke. Easier to dismiss civil rights leaders if you think what they say is inherently comedic or uneducated.
hey don’t cry. trees grow out of the ground.
the night sky has sparkles on it
the creatures live in the grass.
Butterfly collection. The Boy's Own Paper Vol. 1. 1879.
THESE OLD MEN (THE NORTHERN BOYS) SHOULD BE DOING NUMBERS HERE ON TUMBLR DOT COM !!!!!!!!!
PENANICAL VAGANICAL MECHANICAL MAN!!!!!!!! C'MON!!!
im going to tell my kids this is cabinet man