bark.

Nautilus expedition live streams (+ their commentary) 2020 / 2021 / 2022

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.

But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me

Oh my goodness thank you!!

return of the king

I think I’m going to think about this youtube comment forever

i love momotaru

since the cowboy and the samurai were both dying out in the 1800s i want an action adventure historically wildly inaccurate comic about the last cowboy and the last samurai teaming up BUT one of them is gay and the other doesn’t understand what being gay is and there are multiple comedic mishaps resulting from this

after lots of frantic googling of “were samurais gay” “were cowboys gay” “how did gay samurais work” “did gay cowboys love each other” ad nauseam i have decided that it’s actually funnier if both the cowboy AND the samurai are gay but not for each other and also they both have their very culturally specific understandings of gay social politics so both of them still are equally like “dude why are you like this” to each other

samurai, trying to comfort the cowboy who just got dumped over pony express: when my lover left me for another man, i killed both him and his new lover, and proved to all in shudo that it is what happens when you leave me for another, and i felt much lighter. would doing that also help you?

cowboy, absolutely reeking of the flask, who stopped howling purely out of confusion to try and figure out if the samurai was being serious: dude what the fuck is wrong with you

the depictions of homosexual identity at the time are painstakingly accurate and very clearly heavily researched, and this is purposefully in direct contrast to how absolutely absurd and crazy the entire rest of the premise of the comic is

i love when characters don't get to die

this is about villains/antagonists/general horrible people who finally face up to what they've done. especially if they try to pull the good ole "Dramatically Does One Good Thing To Redeem Themselves And Dies," but despite their best efforts they DON'T die. like yes motherfucker there's no easy way out for you, there's only the slow, awkward and painful process of learning to live with yourself. of learning to live with the weight of your mistakes. you get a second chance regardless of if you think you deserve it. you get to try to make amends and do good. you get to live.

this is also about every self-sacrificial bastard of a protagonist who puts themselves in harm's way again and again and again to a wildly unhealthy and unnecessary degree. see, there's something so compelling to me in the unspoken suicidality of repeated heroic self-sacrifice, and the thing about implicitly suicidal characters is that i want them to live. and that can be used to make a death so much more tragic and impactful - noble sacrifices and last stands certainly can and have been done beautifully - but there's also something special to me in seeing such a character make it. because you'd die for the people you love, yes, but would you live for them?

when i was a kid i had moments of being so fucking diabolical because i realized at some point the best way to leverage power over my family was to do shit that would make everybody late

our house was in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods so when i decided i didnt want to wear dresses anymore if we were going to some event & my parents insisted i had to wear a dress i would just go hide in the woods. was so committed i almost made us miss a flight once bc my mom packed a dress in my suitcase

i only promised to stop doing this if my parents got me formal boys clothes to wear which eventually they did. i don't feel bad about resorting to violence bc i asked politely and they said no. proud of 10 yr old me for evil annoying lesbian behavior

5th grade was the last time I wore a dress for school pictures. When my parents attempted to force the issue for 6th grade, I climbed onto our roof and pulled the ladder up after me. My dad borrowed the neighbors ladder. As soon as it touched the roof I pulled it up too. By the time I had 3 ladders they were willing to negotiate, and 2 hours late for work.

what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”

That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?

Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food

I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.

(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)

Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.

I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D

that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine

<3 FOOD HISTORY <3

Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?

Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:

In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.

So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot! 

Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!

I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.

Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.

The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents. 

Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.

That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.

Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).

Super interesting.

And that’s BEFORE we get into replacing a staple crop! So in the Southern US, you have two groups of people, one who used oats and one who used plantains, and they BOTH replace their staples with corn. And then you get Southern food.

For those interested in a really deep dive on Chinese food in the United States, I cannot over-recommend Jennifer 8 Lee’s Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

Nothing like a trip to the uncanny valley to boost your mood

this motherfucker actually just tweeted this in the middle of his own championship match at wrestlemania

just in case you’re doubting me

he lost, btw

I dont think anything on this earth tickles me so hard as how busted white people look in the yakuza franchise

its so dhsjdjfjxjfjgk

Captain Shart

God just is making anyone these days

does anybody else remember that reality show where they gaslit a bunch of americans into thinking they were competing to marry prince harry but it was really just some guy

The way you change your immediate reactions to things is that you catch yourself having an uncharitable/bigoted/overly judgmental thought and you catch it and replace it and then you do that a hundred times a day for your whole life and eventually one day like five years later you realize that you think differently now and you’ll always be working on something but that’s how life goes and that’s fine.

Say you have a bad habit of thinking all other people are stupider than you and want to respect other people’s intelligence more.

So you start paying attention to your immediate first reactions to things. You notice that when other people around you are struggling with a math problem and ask you for help you default to seeing them as annoying and stupid.

Instead of chastising yourself for having that thought, interrogate it. Replace it. Think, why do I assume people with different strengths are dumber than I am? I need help sometimes too. I’m glad they’re comfortable enough with me to ask me for help. I’m glad I’ve got a reputation of being the math guy and can help people with that.

And the first time, perhaps the first few dozen times, it’ll feel disingenuous. The cynicism in your brain will fight it. But in time it’ll become as easy as breathing. First thought, replace thought.

And then one day you don’t need to replace that thought. That might be a month from now or twenty years from now. And it’s annoying to get there. But you do get there.