I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

Vote blue.

Are those "Biden protections" in the room with us at the moment? Go eat shit and die.

They are in fact in the room with us right now.

4/26/24 - Biden/Harris administration incorporates latest rule to the ACA that includes protections on the basis of sexual orientation and improves pre-existing protections for gender identity, mandating nondiscrimination in health care and insurance coverage for LGBTQ+ Americans.

4/19/24 - Biden/Harris administration finalized a Title IX rule that clarifies the scope of nondiscrimination protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity throughout educational activities and programs.

1/9/24 - Biden/Harris administration reverses Trump/Pence era “License to Discriminate” rules.

6/8/23 - Biden personally announces a series of initiatives that include efforts to protect queer and trans foster youth, improve access to mental health services for LGBTQ+ youth and address the rise in hate-fueled violence.

4/26/23 - Biden/Harris administration files lawsuit against the state of Tennessee, challenging the constitutionality of recently enacted legislation banning age-appropriate, medically necessary gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

2/7/23 - Biden uses his SotU address to encouraged Congress to pass the Equality Act “to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.”

12/13/22 - Biden signs the Respect for Marriage Act, one of the biggest legislative wins in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality in over a decade, guaranteeing federal rights, benefits and obligations of marriages in the federal code for same-sex couples. The legislation also repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and affirmed public acts, records and proceedings should be recognized by all states.

8/4/22 - Biden/Harris administration declares Monkeypox a public emergency and wields federal power to ensure equal access in the distribution of vaccines and treatment.

3/21/22 - Biden/Harris administration takes steps on Transgender Day of Visibility to protect trans Americans that includes issuing passports with an “X” gender marker, streamlining identity verification during the travel experience and providing resources to transgender kids and their families.

And that’s just the last two years, without including any educational or research work done towards new policies or educating Americans about LGBTQ identities and politics, like displaying parts of the AIDS quilt in the White House or regularly acknowledging Pride, days of visibility, or other issues within the community.

You may be too young to remember this, but Biden was one of the first major federal-level politicians to support gay marriage, and he dragged Obama along kicking and screaming to the finish line. This administration is one of the strongest allies the LGBTQ community has had. Ever.

For the many many people who do not seem to understand how a government actually works, this doesn't mean Biden himself came up with these decisions, but they were approved and implemented by Congress because conservatives didn't have both the presidency and a majority. They desperately want the white house right now because it will allow them to make any policy changes they want uncontested.

Trump has also talked about getting as many judges as he can as young as he can hire them so they can control what the courts say for the next fifty years in the event that he keels over suddenly.

I just voted for the pro-Palestine candidate in my congressional primary. I voted uncommitted in the Presidential primary to send a pro-Palestine message. I've contacted reps and senators multiple times through multiple channels over months, telling them to support a ceasefire and aid for Palestine. I've donated some of my own money to aid Palestinians.

To my fellow supporters of Palestinian well-being: The only way for you to guilt me out of voting for Joe Biden against Donald Trump is to provide a credible account of how letting Trump take power will save/liberate more lives than it ends/subjugates. I see and share your moral outrage but it never comes with any credible strategic analysis. Losing the Presidency in this political climate is more likely to push the Dems rightward than leftward! Meanwhile Trump has urged Netanyahu to "finish the job"! I will not throw myself and every queer/disabled/poor/otherwise-marginalized person in the US under the bus just to not even help Palestinians!

The brain does not magically mature at 25. Actual neuroscientists note some 8-year-olds even have a greater "maturation index" than 25-year-olds. The myth misunderstands basic neuroscience but is still used for anti-trans policymaking like the Cass Report. https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html

"Based on data gleaned from the nearly 10 million military dependents it insures, the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly called the evidence supporting ABA “weak,” noting there is no research to determine whether the small number of participants who show improvement — 15% — do so because of treatment or simply because a child has matured. After a year of the therapy, the department reported to Congress in 2019, 76% of 16,000 participating autistic children saw no change, and 9% worsened."

People always get so weird about my participation in the Flat Earth Advocacy Group. For the last time, we aren't cranks, we aren't conspiracy theorists, we're definitely not geocentrists, and our policy think tank is fully aware of what shape the planet currently is

to have the decadence this finch is experiencing with millet seeds...

Wait a second: cuckoos are nest parasites. Do "cuckoo" and "cuckold" share a common root?

Huh. Apparently the etymology of "cuckold" is literally something along the lines of "cuckoo-lord".

@andaisq replied:

I mean, there's an easy way to find out, isn't there?

to be clear, i meant that the lucky 10,000 thing is calibrated for things "everybody knows", and etymological trivia is something almost no one cares about, present company excluded; it's the relatively tiny number of people who know it in the first place that makes it unlikely that many people are learning it at a given moment, not the saturation of that knowledge

however, i have to respect the effort to use your platform to cause 10,000 people to learn this trivium today, thus making me technically wrong about this particular 24-hour span. it's a bold move.

Technically correct: the best kind of correct.

You ever suddenly connect two things from your childhood and it suddenly clicks what your parents meant to do when they did something completely different instead?

I got trained pretty early on to not show fear. I'm aware now that what my parents probably meant to do was to reassure me that whatever I was afraid of is no reason to be scared, and I should feel safe instead, but what I gathered from it was "stop showing this emotion that they don't like to see on you", and since the praise for being So Good About It was immediate, that got immediate affirmation. Good kids show no sign of being scared.

And then once I got older and started encountering situations that were above toddler-levels of scary, adults started to suspect that I don't often seem to understand the gravity of whatever situation is going on. Like I remember several occasions of adults stressing it to me multiple times that I need to be careful, do something, not do something, etc, and had me repeat the possible consequences back to them, and still not seeming convinced that I understood the gravity of the situation.

And just now it clicked. I finally understand what they thought was wrong with me. They didn't think I looked appropriately scared for the seriousness of the situation. I hadn't been expected to never show fear. They had wanted me to only express fear in situations where they thought there's reason to fear.

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.

this is so fucking important. reblog.

I was labeled ODD as a child, and lemme tell you.

When I was eleven, I was put on a med I reacted negatively to. I don’t remember its name, but if I ever see the pill again I will KNOW. Within a week of beginning it, I told the school nurse I didn’t want to take it; I didn’t know the word “apoplectic” at the time, but that’s how it made me feel. It wasn’t irritation, it wasn’t anger, it wasn’t even rage—it surpassed all those things. The slightest issue left me literally blind from the level of anger I felt (yes, “seeing red” is a real thing). Someone bumped my desk at school ON ACCIDENT and my pencil hit the floor, and I nearly stabbed the offender with it. I was so furious, all the time, it was hard to think. I was becoming afraid of myself.

The nurse called my psychiatrist, who told him I had ODD and would naturally refuse to take my medication—even though by this point I’d been on multiple meds for many years, and I was objecting only to the single medication, it was clearly a sign of ODD and trying to manipulate my environment. I hadn’t been on the med for the full month it took to get up to a maintenance dose, so I couldn’t possibly be having bad side effects.

I had to take the medication.

The next day I hid under my desk and refused to come out. I was seeing things that weren’t there.

I begged not to take the meds. Again I was told I’d have to.

I was now on day nine of the medication and the special ed teacher literally had to physically move me into the nurse’s office.

I looked at him and said “tell Dr. X that if I have to take that pill today, he can explain to my mom why I cut my throat tonight.”

The med was discontinued, but only because my nurse took me seriously but without panic, called my mother, and asked her to call my shrink, and had me do my classwork in his waiting room while we waited for the return phone call. He intervened because he realized he’d only ever heard me object to a med once before, and it was because I was physically ill and afraid to eat (which the medication required) lest I throw up in class. On that occasion he offered me some crackers and had me stay in the office for twenty minutes to see how my stomach did, and when the crackers stayed down he gave me a few more and my medication, which I took without complaint as soon as I knew I could take it safely. Clearly if I was suddenly begging not to take a medication, something was wrong.

Without that nurse, I might be dead today, because of “oppositional defiant disorder.”

I want you to reread all of this post before my addition, and then I want you to reread my list of side effects, and then I want you to think about how many “Black person goes crazy out of nowhere, kills someone, tox report was clean, cops baffled” stories you’ve seen. I can think of at least three.

Lemme say, I'm one of a few black kids I know (especially AFAB) that got diagnosed with ADHD in the 90. Like Early 90s.

And it was a Fucking Stars Aligned MIRACLE.

Because in order for me to be diagnosed or even had it thought to be the following had to happen:

*skip Some Years and at least Three terrible teachers*

I got another doctor (white) that I was transferred to. What a lot of people fail to realize is a lot of medications that they do NOT recommend for kids now is usually because they've already tested it on kids before and it was BAD News, Jim.

So, the new white Doctor was a dismissive type of ass. The type that threatens kids because he wanted to flex his power over them. (I have literally been threatened by him. He told me he'd tell my mother to cut whatever hobby I liked then if I wasn't responsive to whatever the fuck he wanted to talk about)

At this point, I'm pretty sure he's writing up that I'm manipulative and possibly had ODD.

I was prescribed medications that they really tell you not to give kids these days unless like you absolutely last resort had to because of the side-effects.

There's one medication they gave me that sounds a LOT like Prismatic's but I don't know the name. I know what it is if I see it ever again.

But this medication definitely caused me to Hallucinate. (or rather believe I was infested with fleas) It was bad enough that my grandmother, who's a nurse, basically said Enough Of that and just chunked the meds out. All of them.

(one other one had a side effect of repressing your appetite that we didn't know about. And so I had been taking it before Lunch. It SUCKED that we didn't know about it.)

Anyway, the point of this is also:

Even when Black Kids are rightly diagnosed, we're still going to get shit from people who either think we're faking, or don't care to actually do any work about it. Instead, they'll punish us MORE. Or throw us in the SpEd classes to get rid of us in the general classes if they don't want to do any of the work.

Because that's ALSO what happened to me the following year after the Bad Year.

I actually could read quite well and could do normal course work, but they decided due to the former and my medical history that I should be in this class. (I could see it if they wanted me in there for things like Math, because it's my weakest subject and I have trouble understanding anything but.. I digress).

I was place in a class where people who actually needed it were at a very slower pace and school level than me. (and even then, the schools 100 percent failed one student who couldn't read at his grade level. He was reading at a first grade level. He was in seventh grade.)

And a large part of this is because there aren't enough POC (particularly at that time Black Doctors) in the field. Because it deeply matters when you get a doctor that is very familiar with your culture and the way your people work.

It prevents a lot of abuse and misdiagnoses. (that was literally my issues with a lot of places is because until I was in a predominately black school, I was treated pretty awful by teachers and principals that didn't Understand the Culture and didn't WANT to)

I didn't get a black doctor until my mid teens. When I've figured out how to manage shit my damn self with coping mechanics (but I definitely should've had an actual Doctor to Help. Actual people that could've given me better tools.).

He actually understood and thought I was misdiagnosed. But the main point is he treated me like a person.

He wasn't combative.

He was interested in what I had to say. He didn't dismiss me. He understood what my issues were and was able to explain them to my mother in a way that didn't give me protective mode. (that White doctor further up that was an ass literally upset my mother that I ended up hating him for it. )

My Kindergarten Teacher was also a Good Person and Good teacher. She put in the work. She tried to understand even if we were culturally different, she didn't send me to the principal's office every time I fucked up as a kid. She tried to make sense of it and tried hard to keep me in class. (I went from literally an F to an A, is what I'm saying.)

Both that doctor and that Teacher Saw humanity in me as a kid and I'm forever grateful for them in particular. (and also a few others but mainly them.)

Like if more black and other KOCs had these types of people, that ODD wouldn't even be a thing (even for white kids because I think the entire thing is just BULLSHIT excuse to be an asshole to people. Full stop. ).

Incidentally, if you want a great example of why we need to destigmatize mental health treatment, I read Manta’s comment and shot her a PM. We’re about the same age, so it stands to reason we may have been prescribed the same medication.

I NOW KNOW THE NAME OF THE MEDICATION THAT MADE ME WILLING TO KILL MYSELF JUST TO GET AWAY FROM IT. She told me what she was on, I looked up a photo, and damned near dropped my phone. In just a few hours I can call my current (very good) psychiatrist and have this name put on my file so it is never prescribed to me ever again, even by accident.

The atmosphere Tumblr has fostered, in which it is safe and acceptable to say “same hat?”, has made me quantifiably safer today. We need to work together to make it like this everywhere.

watch out

silky anteater saturday

forever tired of our voices being turned into commodity.

forever tired of thorough medaocrity in the AAC business. how that is rewarded. How it fails us as users. how not robust and only robust by small small amount communication systems always chosen by speech therapists and funded by insurance.

forever tired of profit over people.

forever tired of how companies collect data on every word we’ve ever said and sell to people.

forever tired of paying to communicate. of how uninsured disabled people just don’t get a voice many of the time. or have to rely on how AAC is brought into classrooms — which usually is managed to do in every possible wrong way.

forever tired of the branding and rebranding of how we communicate. Of this being amazing revealation over and over that nonspeakers are “in there” and should be able to say things. of how every single time this revelation comes with pre condition of leaving the rest behind, who can’t spell or type their way out of the cage of ableist oppression. or are not given chance & resources to. Of the branding being seen as revolution so many times and of these companies & practitioners making money off this “revolution.” of immersion weeks and CRP trainings that are thousands of dollars and wildly overpriced letterboards, and of that one nightmare Facebook group g-d damm it. How this all is put in language of communication freedom. 26 letters is infinite possibilities they say - but only for the richest of families and disabled people. The rest of us will have to live with fewer possibilities.

forever tired of engineer dads of AAC users who think they can revolutionize whole field of AAC with new terrible designed apps that you can’t say anything with them. of minimally useful AI features that invade every AAC app to cash in on the new moment and not as tool that if used ethically could actually help us, but as way of fixing our grammar our language our cultural syntax we built up to sound “proper” to sound normal. for a machine, a large language model to model a small language for us, turn our inhuman voices human enough.

forever tired of how that brand and marketing is never for us, never for the people who actually use it to communicate. it is always for everyone around us, our parents and teachers paras and SLPs and BCBAs and practitioners and doctors and everyone except the person who ends up stuck stuck with a bad organized bad implemented bad taught profit motivated way to talk. of it being called behavior problems low ability incompetence noncompliance when we don’t use these systems.

you all need to do better. We need to democritize our communication, put it in our own hands. (My friend & communication partner who was in Occupy Wall Street suggested phrase “Occupy AAC” and think that is perfect.) And not talking about badly made non-robust open source apps either. Yes a robust system needs money and recources to make it well. One person or community alone cannot turn a robotic voice into a human one. But our human voice should not be in hands of companies at all.

(this is about the Tobii Dynavox subscription thing. But also exploitive and capitalism practices and just lazy practices in AAC world overall. Both in high tech “ mainstream “ AAC and methods that are like ones I use in sense that are both super stigmatized and also super branded and marketed, Like RPM and S2C and spellers method. )

It had not even occurred to me that aacs would harvest data, but ofc they do. That is horrifying, every sentence you speak monitored as a commodity, like smth out of particularly lurid science fiction

they stopped selling the unscented garbage bags I was using...

does anyone have a favorite unscented garbage bag, especially black bags for medium-large garbage bins? no scents added at all? sometimes called scent free. I am allergic to scented bags.

so to anyone not from 🇺🇸the united states of america 🇺🇸

almost all of our fucking cleaning and hygiene products are scented, including garbage bags. most of these scents are labeled vague enough that people with sensitivities to added fragrance are not able to even keep track of which additives they might be allergic to. so people who have allergic reactions to scented bags, like me, have to keep up to date with which bags have no artificially added fragrance.

perfumes, added fragrance, and unnecessarily scented items and sprays are some of the biggest triggers of mast cell disorders, as in, disorders that cause sometimes life-threatening allergic reactions. the cleaning aisle in almost any 🇺🇸american🇺🇸 store reeks to hell and back and in a worst case scenario can hospitalize someone with sensitivities to added fragrance just from walking through it.

no fucking way. is this why some unscented shit still makes me sick what the fuck

@thebibliosphere

Yeah, you specifically have to look for "fragrance-free" or "scent-free". Otherwise, you'll get the "unscented" fragrance.

I can still get the Hefty "scent-free" bags at my local Target, but they're also available on Amazon if that's an option. (and if you can't get them @mamoru give me a ping on Discord. I might be able to send you some.)

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

Truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a hardboiled egg. Did Ankh-Morpork get those things, in the end?

They got truth, there was a whole book about it. Vimes didn't want it when he got it, or at least he didn't want the political cartoon section of the newspaper, but Ankh-Morpork got the free press whether anyone liked it or not.

They got justice, thanks first to Carrot and then to Vimes, forcing the City Watch to reform into an organization that helped the citizenry and would arrest the patrician or a whole invading army if it had to. Vimes had to wage a constant war with himself not to turn into just another gang leader, but he waged it.

They did not get freedom. Pratchett was very clear on that. Things got comparatively better, and immigrants flocked to the city despite it being a hellhole, because the dictator didn't care about persecuting any minority groups or whether or not people made fun of him, but it was still a dictatorship. When Pratchett was alive, fans speculated that he was subtly training Moist von Lipwig to become the new government leader- the Lipwig books always had an emphasis on Vetinari getting older- and Lipwig would have had nothing to fear from an election by popular vote, but that's all fanwank and speculation.

They got reasonably priced love right away. That may have even been one of Vetinari's first acts as patrician, since Mrs. Palm is leader of the Seamstress's Guild at least as far back as the early Watch books.

John Keel's grave got a hardboiled egg every year.

Four out of five ain't bad.

I only learned recently that people from Not America don’t specify hard cider and instead it’s just cider.

I know this is a small difference but it is surprisingly one I do sometimes have to lie down on the floor about.

I don’t like apple juice but I do like cider and every time I’ve said that around a person from English speaking Not America there’s a chance they might’ve thought I was talking about an alcoholic beverage but I was not.

The tiny tiny things that lead to tiny tiny false assumptions. They are everywhere. I can’t escape them. I need to lie down.

Basically unfiltered and very cloudy apple juice. Can be served hot or cold. When Americans talk about alcoholic apple beverage we say Hard Cider because to us cider is a sweet unfiltered fall beverage fun for the whole family.

@bitchboy-bozo

Our international reputation must be even worse than I thought if people have just assumed that we’re giving children alcohol

ID: The first image is a post reply from queerasaurus-rexx: wait… what do americans think cider is? The second image is a screenshot of tags that read: #OH- #I THOUGHT YOU GUYS WERE JUST GIVING YOUR KIDS ALCOHOL #I mean to be fair it’s not that strange of an assumption- (End ID)

I mean, European children do very much drink hard cider. But more importantly, you can’t actually buy soft cider-equivalent beverages in the UK or in the European countries I’m most familiar with.

The comments imply that “cloudy apple juice” is the equivalent, but this is not cider. In the notes people are posting comparison pictures where both drinks look like this and the only difference is the presence or absence of bubbles. It’s literally just pictures of cloudy apple juice! Cloudy apple juice is abundant and not cider.

The cider I miss is dark brown and syrupy. It leaves sediment at the bottom of the jug. It doesn’t need to be mulled because it already tastes mulled. It isn’t juice and lots of kids don’t even like it because it’s a little strange. Sometimes it’s served hot with caramel and a cinnamon stick. And I can’t have any, because it isn’t fuckign cloudy apple juice, so, you know, thanks for that.

This is apple cider to a New Englander. It's hard to describe the taste of you haven't had it, but it's not just "unfiltered apple juice". Someone in the comments mentioned sparkling cider, and although they're right about it being a celebratory drink (my family gives it to kids in wine glasses at holiday meals so they don't feel left out of the fancy glass party) it is not the same thing as this.

This is the kind that you heat up and put mulling spices in, if you are so inclined.

Exactly, it’s oxidised (brown, like apple flesh turns when you expose it to air.) it’s slightly fermented-ish (the wild yeasts on the apple’s skin weren’t INSTANTLY MURDERED, so there’s almost a spicy/vinegar/prickly tang.) it contains sediment, like mother-of-apple-cider-vinegar, and is thick and syrupy. It isn’t cloudy so much as opaque.

Saying to the world that cider is “just cloudy apple juice” is like if I told Americans, “oh yeah, British people like brown sauce, but it’s really just Worcestershire sauce. Isn’t it cute and stupid and remedial of them to call it ‘brown’ sauce because it’s brown?” And the 10k notes are people going “lmao British people, can’t cook and all their names are baby talk” with a few lone Brits crying out that ACTUALLY THAT ISNT TRUE AT ALL, THEYRE VERY DIFFERENT, WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE IS A SALTY THIN FLAVORING FOR COTTAGE PIE AND BROWN SAUCE IS A THICK VINEGAR KETCHUP FOR FRY-UPS!!! STOP SAYING THIS, IT ISNT TRUE -

Anyway that would just be mildly annoying EXCEPT that I have had a moment of precognition in which some kindly friend, thinking they are bringing me a great gift and a treasured favor, will now visit me in the UK having brought (and ferried at great expense) a bottle of fucking apple juice I regularly buy at Tesco, pictured above, with the delighted expectation of me welcoming the treat of real American cider. I can picture it and it’s breaking my heart.

Australian who lived in Canada for a few years, here to help!

Okay, first of all, it's not America we're talking about but North America. So, Canada too.

Secondly, not 'cloudy apple juice' but literally 'pressed/crushed apples'. Barely filtered if at all. You can literally go to farms in season and get massive vats of their apples which have just been. crushed. and, as @elodieunderglass says, not sterilised in any way, SO.

Thirdly: I made cider out of the cider. A friend and I got a bunch of fermentation equipment and did several experiments with farm-cider, cloudy apple juice from a shop, and filtered apple juice, with five different types of wine or cider yeast.

The absolutely best results (in terms of flavour AND alcohol content) were. The farm cider with no extra yeast, just the natural yeasts present on the apple skin. In the other brews made from the same crushed apples, the wild yeast won out in the end over the commercial yeast, but because they had that fight to win they didn't have so much time to develop and ferment, so the flavour wasn't so developed as in the [hard] cider with no commercial yeast.

Make of that what you will.

Note: the thing where soft cider makes good hard cider? That’s why soft cider is a thing.

You also can’t get soft cider everywhere in the US. In a lot of areas it’s only available direct from orchards that do enough apple processing that they have cider equipment. And soft cider is not shelf stable, and it cannot be made stable. It will start fermenting into hard cider within a few days, so it’s super perishable if you want it as itself. And it tastes different from different farms.

I miss it, but I’ve had over 15 years to get used to not having it.

Pennsylvania has a LOT of apple orchards, and also, a lot of apple cider! You can make it shelf stable by pasteurizing it, but that kills a lot of the flavor. And most people who have had it fresh much prefer it unpasteurized. But in Pennsylvania, it is illegal to sell an unpasteurized beverage.

So what they do is, all the orchards will have roadside stands with cider made fresh that day ... which they do not sell.

Instead, they sell jugs! ... which happen to contain cider. And while this is a transparent ploy, no cop or government official would ever dream of trying to nail them for it, because then they wouldn't be able to buy cider.

Pennsylvania 🤝 New York

(Having absolutely fucking fantastic apple cider)

I'm from Ontario and having made (soft) cider I can confirm it's literally just crushing apples and zero other process. If you're lucky enough to be near an apple farm with old equipment, you can make it the exact same way they did back in Olden Times: you stick a bunch of apples into the hopper of what's essentially a large meat grinder, turn the crank, and collect the cider. It's best after a couple of days, right before it hits the proper fermentation stage, but you can drink it right away and it's still pretty good.

Jumpscared by seeing my Tesco apple juice from 2 years ago!

My first experience with hard cider was when my grandmother forgot she had stored a gallon of cider in the unheated vestibule. It had gone a little fizzy, but she decided we shouldn't waste it and cooked out the alcohol for my brother's and my glasses, and proceeded to drink the rest of it herself.

Years later, @cipheramnesia and I went to a farmers market and found cider from my favorite orchard (they make THE BEST cider doughnuts, full stop) so we bought a couple gallons, drank one, and forgot the other in the back of the refrigerator. It fermented of course, as it will do, and was seriously some of the best hard cider I've ever had. It tasted more like the apples themselves than any of the commercial ciders I've tried.

My favorite device at the farm that gave tours of its century old (at the time, in the 1980s) cider mill was the press. It was huge, just layers of brown apples between layers of wood like a flower press, and it smashed them all flat and the thick juices ran out and down into a vat before the flat apples were sent to be ground into mash. It would not surprise me at all if part of the ruch flavor of that cider was due to a hundred years of mashed apple infusing the wood.

Can hard cider be made shelf stable? Or for either you have to be near a north American apple orchard?

Also what are cider doughnuts?

Hard cider has an alcohol content similar to many beers (at least as USA regulations go, other countries may vary), and like beer is often sold as shelf stable with ambient storage. But what defines shelf stable can change country to country a bit.

We currently live close enough to local orchards that getting local cider is doable, although they don't sell it in most of the chain stores here. However, as this is where @deliriumcrow grew up, they're also very particular about apples and cider quality, and are usually quick to point out that major brands like Zeigler's there aren't anywhere near as good as the stuff from the orchards.

I say this because cider donuts are a staple in the fall and winter, but if you don't get them from a local orchard or bakery, they're more like apple flavor donuts with cinnamon and sugar. Real cider donuts use actual apple cider (maybe also apples, I'm not sure) and handle the spices much better. They're still dust with cinnamon and sugar but the apple and cinnamon flavor kind of surrounds you when you eat them, not overwhelming, just a kind of deep down sensation of being wrapped in warm clothes on a fall day, how the air has that half snow smell, and also a balance of being not so sweet the apple flavor is overwhelmed, not so cinnamon that the sweet is overwhelmed. Like, you probably think of an apple fritter or an apple filling donut as similar, but it's not, it's kind of it's own thing, like the cream cheese donuts at Donut Hut in Vegas. A real local experience.

Damn you and delirium for making me want cider doughnuts