kestrad

[kestrad]

I prefer milk too egg wash these days, if only because I can pour out a very small amount of milk and, if I'm feeling really frugal, drink what's left after brushing down the top of my pie. You can't crack less than one egg and the remainder has to be cooked to be eaten.

Be careful about substituting flaxseed for eggs - it's a common sensitivity that, in my case, sends me running for the toilet because my guts will have a very polite but firm fit if I eat it.

My fellow American hobby bakers, demoralized by egg prices and scarcity and how you will make the American apple pie or the chocolate chip cookie, fear not. I have spent many years turning regular baking recipes vegan for my corrupt and traitorous sister who last week ate a salmon cream cheesed roll. There are many, many substitutes for eggs including but not limited to:

Mashed banana: best added to compliment flavors of whatever it is you're baking (peanut butter, chocolate) make sure it's MUSHY and ripe

Apple sauce: again, best with complimentary flavors (cinnamon, brown sugar) use unsweetened and have the rest as a snack

The big boy champ, ground flaxseed: flavorless, though it does darken your batter/ dough a bit. Bags found next to cornstarch and almond meal, etc. Instructions on how to use right on the bag! Make sure to let the flaxseed water combo sit in a separate bowl until it has the consistency of mucus 👍

Now with all of these you MUST add a bit more leavener, they don't have the lil bit of lift eggs give, so make sure you add a touch more baking powder. Sort of ok for brownies and cookies if you want them a bit more dense but KEY for cakes, quick breads, muffins and other things like that or she is gonna be SQUIDGY 🫡

[kestrad]

[kestrad]

It’s wild to me to see transvestigator conspiracy theories online that could be so easily explained by natural human variation. That woman has a deep voice? Yeah, sometimes they do. A woman has broad shoulders?? Maybe she plays rugby or hits the gym a fuckton. There’s a “bulge” in her tight pants?? Maybe her vulva is just fat. All the “markers” of trans woman that transvestigators use to harass any woman aren’t even things unique to trans women.

[kestrad]

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

[kestrad]

EXTREMELY rare w from the uk media

[kestrad]

i hate seeing people drink the openai/chatgpt koolaid 😭😭😭 genuinely feels like watching someone get seduced by scientology or qanon or something. like girl help it's not intelligent it's Big Autocomplete it's crunching numbers it's not understanding things i fuckign promise you. like ohhh my god the marketing hype fuckign GOT you

[kestrad]

The US is truly incomprehensible

[kestrad]

The cruelty of racist white men.

[kestrad]

you can leave the house with a bare face and suffer no consequences btw. if you're a woman you do not have to wear any makeup

[kestrad]

memes are fun and relatable and all that, but don't let them discourage you. all of that stuff that doesn't make it into the final product is part of how the final product gets made

[kestrad]

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[kestrad]

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

[kestrad]

Updated version of Boy Who Cried Wolf but there are actual wolves every single time and no one ever believes the boy - they get closer and closer every time he tries to warn them, until it's too late and the whole town screams at the boy for not warning them "enough", and blame him for the wolves at their door.

[kestrad]

Let's play hide and seek?

[kestrad]

I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.

[kestrad]

Okay, so Google Removed Pride Month and Other Diversity Holidays From Its Calendar App. There are many ways to respond to this, including leaving Google Calendar. If you can't do that for any reason, this project has something that might help.

Every year we make a calendar of dates that have particular significance to queer history. It has always been a pleasure project and hasn't made us much money, so when we made a Google Calendar plug-in, we made it pay-what-you-can. I'm grateful we did because it means anyone can access this now.

To be clear, this is more than Pride Month; this has near-daily reminders of queer history. Birthdates of people you may not recognize (though we encourage you to learn more about them on our website). This doesn't address everything. Google also removed Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. We have many of them on our calendar, but we can't promise we have everything Google got rid of, as this was made with no clue that Google would do this.

Regardless, we wanted to put this resource out there in response to the news. Preserving queer history is a community responsibility, and we are grateful to share any tools that we have.

[kestrad]

I'm trying to work through this whole 'Gulf of America' thing.

And it's like.

It's stupid.

It's stupid. It's a stupid thing. But it also doesn't actually hurt anyone directly, so on one hand it feels like a red herring, a distraction, a slight of hand to keep people from focusing on all the shit that does directly affect people.

But it's also being used as virtue signaling, as a loyalty test.

This is a way to easily identify dissent, and it's stupid, and I hate it.