@unpretty

it’s DIRT

unmute for comically aggrieved farmer

Gerard P Donelan

I love the notes saying this femme knows exactly what she's doing and it's all part of her flirting technique. You get it.

More of his stuff and about him

My absolute favorite of his work

Actually my dad was that dude for awhile. He’d did snake rescue and he’d do a little Snakes Are Our Friends spiel and let kids pet a boa constrictor named Clutch.

…this backfired at my elementary school one day when Clutch got loose in his convertible and crawled up under the dashboard. Dad had to go back inside (he’d had lunch with me) and explain to the principal that there miiiiight be a six foot boa loose on the school grounds. She panicked and went into full lockdown even though he explained very clearly that Clutch could not possibly eat a first grader even if he wanted to.

Unable to locate the snake after an hour long search, he turned on the car and Clutch came out from under the dash like “Well, now it’s too hot back there.” The principal canceled the lockdown but for some odd reason Dad was never invited back.

When I had to re-home Peaches (moving into an apartment and not realizing until I get to literally the last page of the lease agreement that they don't allow reptiles), I ended up giving her to one of my mom's coworkers at the time who was also The Reptile Guy. Because Peaches was so used to being crowded and petted by my niblings, and is a very predictable bearded dragon who gives a lot of warning before she hits bitey mode, she ended up becoming one of his ambassador animals. From videos I've seen him post, she still loves to climb on top of heads to perch proudly, and most kids are delighted by this.

happy halloween 

part 2

I keep thinking about a post I saw the other day, and likely won't be able to find again, which proposed as a response to "you'll be fine if you have nothing to hide" the phrase:

" I have nothing to hide, but I don't trust your intentions and judgement"

Was it this one?

"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgment and intentions are."

"Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'." - Snuff, Terry Pratchett

the funniest dynamc between my boyfriend and i is the chef/baker divide runs so deep. experimentally my boyfriend is a genius with figuring out what flavor profiles will not just taste good together but also will be enjoyed by the specific audience he is cooking for. a recipe is not a guidebook so much as a suggestion and he will frankenstein ideas together to get exactly what he wants to happen. he also didnt know that sugar will not work properly if you dont mix it with the wet ingredients in banana bread and when i asked 'why didnt you do it in the order of the recipe' he said 'i didnt really think it mattered'. autistically i exploded his head in my mind

when your pumpkin loaf or banana loaf is not delightfully moist and soft and sweet like the pillow of a cherub and instead is like a dense fruitcake brick of misery we will see who is pretentious then. beast

Cooking is an art. Baking is a science (legit, it's chemistry you get to eat afterwards).

Anyone who is good at both is a witch.

Do any of u have decent recipes that are like 5 ingredients (not including spices) and take 45 mins or less to prepare i gotta stop eating sandwiches for dinner

yeah hang on

ignore the title of this google doc because it's a long story but it's a really solid recipe for southwest chicken alfredo

this is a vegetarian potato curry recipe that's about 75% spices; once you get the potatoes in there you can really do whatever you want with it

this is literally just pasta, broccoli, and cheese babey and you can live off that shit for DAYS it makes such a big portion

bro this spinach/pesto/3 cheese flatbread is so fucking tasty bro

also you can make the flatbread yourself it's super quick!!

oh hey I'm eating this white chickpea chili right now, much like the curry it's mostly spices and you can do p much do whatever you want with it

don't let the name fool you these potatoes are delicious any time. not just breakfast.

this is slightly more than five ingredient when you add them together but if you have time and really wanna fuckin treat yourself I recommend these chicken strips + this cornbread + either these potatoes or these buttered veggies on the side.

These are my two favorite comfort foods. They're very easy to make and dont take long to cook.

Garlic butter rice

Orzo mac and cheese (comes out a little bit soupy)

this recipe for gogumabap (sweet potato and rice) saved my life when i couldn't eat hardly anything for a long time. the recipe itself calls for a heavy bottomed pot but you can absolutely use a rice cooker and put the rice and diced sweet potato in together and just let the machine do its thing

A bit more than five ingredients but this is quick, easy, cheap, packed full of vitamins, and reheats extremely well.

Brown 1 pound of ground beef in a soup pot, crumbling it as it cooks. Add in either chopped onion or dried onion to taste while cooking. Drain, add back into the pot. Throw in a small (one of the little ones) can of tomato sauce, cook for a minute or two with the meat and onions. Add in a can of stewed tomatoes, a couple peeled and cut up potatoes, and a peeled and cut up carrot if you have it. Add more tomato sauce if desired and use the tomato sauce cans to add enough water to cover everything comfortably. Simmer until potatoes and carrots are almost cooked, meanwhile drain cans of corn, green beans, peas, and sliced carrots if you didn't do a raw one before. Add in the veggies and finish cooking (potatoes cooked to soft, canned veggies heated through).

Makes a great lighter soup that's packed with veggies, and you can usually find the canned vegetables on sale from time to time, so it's cheap as well. Reheats amazingly. Kids tend to love it and it's a great way to get vitamins and nutrients into them.

Standing on the picket line is a cute gesture, but let's not forget how he prohibited the rail workers from striking for safe minimum staffing and the ability to take sick days.

Also, this “cute gesture” is something no US President has done.

Fuck off with yourself now.

Obligatory Biden not perfect disclaimer blah blah blah (do you people still expect to get perfect politicians??? apparently I guess)

But.

Going to a picket line is actually a huge deal. There is a reason no other president has done it.

Brief explainer:

A picket is not a protest. They have different goals and they are viewed differently under the law. A protest is meant to disrupt and to draw attention to an issue. A picket is meant to stop scabs from entering a workplace to replace the workers picketing outside.

This means that, historically, pickets were often very violent. When people in the 1920s wanted to stop you from entering a factory, they did not confine their tactics to angry yelling. This is why the courts treat pickets differently, and they do not enjoy the kind of broad free speech protections that protests have.

Biden standing on a picket line is huge in a number of ways. It's a statement by a sitting president that no one should go to work at that workplace, for one, which kind of wild in and of itself when you think of it. Who the fuck is gonna scab when you have to walk past a picket line that includes the fucking president.

It's also granting a kind of implicit sanction to picketing as an activity that it has never historically gotten. Picketing is one of those things that even the FDR administration was a little wary of. The law tends to approach it as something that is techhhhhnically allowed and we can't stop you...but it's something that needs to be reined in, controlled, corralled.

And like, is this the most radical thing a president has ever done? No. Is it going to magically fix everything related to organized labor? Absolutely not. Is Biden the most pro-union president ever? No again because FDR existed. But he is the most pro-union president of my lifetime.

And as someone who knows a lot of labor history, having a sitting president on a picket line is honestly kind of breaking my brain a little.

Other things that the Biden administration is doing or has facilitated (by getting non corporate hacks into critical positions for example) which are not getting talked about:

2024 is coming.

The Republicans have the 2025 Project that wants to literally imprison and genocide queer and disabled people.

The Democrats are giving us our money and lives back.

Show this to EVERYONE WHO YOU KNOW.

Tell them the difference.

Get them out to vote.

We have a chance to have a country that is worth living in if Democrat candidates keep winning.

Holy crap, I didn't think Biden would be able to get the Climate Corps established without Congress. This is SUCH fantastic news.

--

"After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.

In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.

Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.

“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that has led the push for a climate corps.

With the new corps “and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible,” Prakash said...

...Environmental activists hailed the new jobs program, which is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, as part of the New Deal...

Lawmakers Weigh In

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also encouraged Biden to create a climate corps, saying in a letter on Monday that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale.”

The lawmakers cited deadly heat waves in the Southwest and across the nation, as well as dangerous floods in New England and devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, among recent examples of climate-related disasters.

Democrats called creation of the climate corps “historic” and the first step toward fulfilling the vision of the Green New Deal.

“Today President Biden listened to the (environmental) movement, and he delivered with an American Climate Corps,” a beaming Markey said at a celebratory news conference outside the Capitol.

“We are starting to turn the green dream into a green reality,” added Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation with Markey four years ago.

“You all are changing the world,” she told young activists.

Program Details and Grant Deadlines

The initiative will provide job training and service opportunities to work on a wide range of projects, including restoring coastal wetlands to protect communities from storm surges and flooding; clean energy projects such as wind and solar power; managing forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and energy efficient solutions to cut energy bills for consumers, the White House said.

Creation of the climate corps comes as the Environmental Protection Agency launches a $4.6 billion grant competition for states, municipalities and tribes to cut climate pollution and advance environmental justice. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants are funded by the 2022 climate law and are intended to drive community-driven solutions to slow climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants will help “communities so they can chart their own paths toward the clean energy future.”

The deadline for states and municipalities to apply is April 1, with grants expected in late 2024. Tribes and territories must apply by May 1, with grants expected by early 2025."

-via Boston.com, September 21, 2023

For the people in the news asking how to join or get involved!

Here's an article that compiles what we know about the program and how to join as of September 20, 2023.

It also mentions that the program plans to link with the smaller climate corps that are being established by California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington. So if you're in one of those states, you can also check and see when your state's climate corps plans to start hiring!

The Biden administration has also set up an official page where you can sign up to get info and updates about joining the Climate Corps!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/climatecorps/

reblog to give warm bread to your mutuals

pspspspsps

(…note to self: time to make some rye bread.)

Don't usually share work stuff but I do work in climate policy and nearly every memo I write includes some variation of "government funding for this obscure but necessary area of climate mitigation research has been multiplied (sometimes by like, 1000x) under the Biden Administration" and while I know the oil permitting stuff is much splashier news there's a whole world of work that needs to be done under the surface that Biden is doing. And if he doesn't win in 2024 all that progress goes away and the climate is absolutely fucked

Like I get that it’s not eye-catching but Biden spending $6 billion on demonstration projects to decarbonize heavy industry is probably on its own the most climate-friendly thing a president has ever done

And this is how a human gets adopted by a cat

There's an adult cat without a collar that's been hanging around our place and possibly angling for a spot in the household. We're not opposed, he's just still uncertain because it would mean sharing a house with four dogs and another male cat.

I've been calling him Smokey.

Idea: interspecies TF but it doesn't go like a werewolf movie, over in seconds or minutes, but like HRT.

Every morning you look in the mirror, pulling your mouth open to get a better look at your canines. Is it just you or are they a little bigger?

You turn your head sideways, seeing how much your face is stretching into a snout. You occasionally catch yourself looking at your hands, seeing how the skin on your palm is hardening into pawpads, how the tips of your fingers are stretching, your nails coalescing into claw tips.

You spend a while looking online at r/TFtimelines/, looking at other furries with a mix of envy and lust. God, you hope someday you can look a tenth as monstrous as them. You look up doctors in your area to see their ratings for bottom surgery (which is getting a tail), and wonder if your insurance will cover it.

It's not all physical changes, of course. You're noticing how your emotional state is shifting. You're staring at spreadsheets at work, in need of another coffee, and you have that thought again of just running into the woods. Your clothes seem tight and restrictive on you, and you know it had nothing to do with the fact you've gained 5 inches in height over the last year. It's more to do with feeling you shouldn't need to wear this business formal nonsense, you should be covered in fur and hanging out in the lonely woods, not in a crowded office moving numbers around for your boss.

Ugh, your fucking boss. It's getting harder to not listen to him talk without inadvertently thinking about what it'd feel like to rip his throat open with your teeth, and leave him as a warning for the others not to mess with the wolf...

Not that you'd ever do such a thing, of course... But those pills you're taking every morning have been waking up millions of years of instinct that are saying "this supposed leader is weak and ineffectual and doesn't deserve your loyalty. Kill him. Take his place, or his poor leadership will get you all killed when the winter comes."

You sigh, and keep typing on the keyboard. One day you'll come out to these anthrotypicals. You'll be recognized for the mighty wolf you are, and they'll stop treating you as just another human.

You make a note to email HR about that "I'm a human" CAPTCHA they put on the company's website. They don't know, of course, but they should be more considerate. Not everyone wearing a pantsuit and operating a boring Dell computer is a human, after all.

You glance at the clock and think about getting dinner once this slog is over. You'd been a vegetarian before starting your transition, but there's a new steakhouse that's opened up on your walk home, and every time you walk past it, you keep thinking about biting into a nice steak... Rare, of course. It's probably just the smell. You can smell so much better now, and from what you've heard from others, it's only going to get better.

Well, better is relative. You've learned the downside of having a better sense of smell. It's sometimes unbearable walking to work on Wednesday, when everyone has their bins out. So much rotting food and spoiled milk and bacteria festering in all those cans waiting for the trash trucks.

It gets better once you're in the office. The AC kills a lot of the smell. But now you can tell exactly how many days it has been since your coworkers have showered, and you'll never look at Simon from accounting the same way again.

And it was a bit of a faux pas (or should that be a faux paw, ha!) when you congratulated Cindy on the baby she was expecting... She hadn't told you yet. She hadn't told anyone yet, other than her spouse, but you forgot that it wasn't as obvious to everyone else.

You don't know how that can be overlooked (oversmelled?). The hormones are all different. Was there really a time in your life when you couldn't smell this? Huh. You can't remember anymore. This is your new normal. You've come farther than you think. You should have taken more pictures at the start, so you could compare them to now, but it was so hard to look at yourself then. You looked so... Human. Ugh.

It's getting easier to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning. Your fur is coming in. Your body is changing in so many ways. You're finally starting to look like you.

For a while in my life I legitimately considered moving to Germany. There’s multiple reasons I inevitably ended up staying in the US but one of the big ones was that one time when I was in Germany and wanted some salsa the closest thing I could find was basically just tomato sauce.

You crave a burrito. You ask your aunt, hey. Can we make burritos? And she says, sure. But we can’t use tortillas. They don’t sell those here. And you learn to your horror that she plans to use flatbread. Which she insists is basically the same thing as a tortilla. It is not. It’s not. It’s adequate but good lord it’s not a tortilla.

There’s the near impossibility of dual citizenship, the pay toilets, my difficulty with the language, being really far away from most of my family, the difficulty of finding a job as a foreigner, the lack of diversity especially in rural areas. But also in there. Is buying a bottle of supposedly habanero “hot” sauce and it being so mild that I could drink it.

I know how to make tortillas, guys. Perhaps also read the rest of the post. With a lighthearted tone, preferably.

You have my deepest condolences.

Okay so I’m American and I live in Scotland and let me tell you about this fucking abomination:

I once found corn tortillas in a Sainsbury’s. Oho, you may think, that’s a lovely find! But no, my friend. These were flour tortillas… with cooked corn rolled into them. Individual kernels. Like one may find blueberries in a pancake.

I still see red when I think about it.

I have… no words. Beyond stunned.

In honor of my tags passing peer review, i would like to inform everyone that when i make quesadillas my german gf dips them in mayo

(via)