murphymakestherules

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Black Menswear modelled by Black Men

Creative Director Rock Mitchell

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No matter how many times you fail to meet your own expectations, you have to forgive yourself. Despite contrary belief, dwelling on and badgering yourself over your faults doesn’t ever help you grow into who you want to be.

It’s like gardening: if your flower isn’t blossoming like you want it to, you don’t rip out its leaves as punishment for failing to satisfy you. You recognize the problem and figure out what’s going wrong with its environment so you can modify it, giving the flower a chance to bloom in its own time.

Accept your shortcoming or setback, forgive yourself, and figure out what’s going wrong so that you can plan for how to prevent it from repeating in the future. Thank your past self for trying in the first place and then give your future self the love needed to flourish.

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While Christmas Day is the last day anyone should ask for you to spend more money, I'm asking you to spend more money. A dollar. Five dollars. Whatever you've got. Elon Musk wants to own Wikipedia - one of the last reliable sources out there, and the only one not owned by a billionaire or corporation.

If you can't donate, this message isn't for you and you should not feel bad.

If you can donate to Wikipedia to keep it out of Musk's filthy, blood-stained hands, please do.

Here's the donations page.

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This is a water-seal stoneware crock. The design is ancient.

It is, essentially, a large ceramic vessel that you put vegetables and sometimes brine into. To prevent spoilage, you place those ceramic weights on top of whatever food is in the crock, and that keeps them weighted down, below the level of the water. Because fermentation creates gases, most crocks have a "water groove" in them. The lid sits in the groove, which allows air to escape but not come in. Because fermentation creates gas, the interior of the crock is positive-pressure, and because the gas created is almost entirely carbon dioxide, it's a low-oxygen environment that additionally helps prevent spoilage.

And all this would be pointless without lactobacillus, the bacteria that chomp down on the vegetables you put into the crock. They're anaerobic, which means totally fine without oxygen, and they produce an environment that's inhospitable to most other organisms. The main things they produce are CO2, which means no oxygen for other bacteria, and lactic acid, which makes the fermented thing sour and also decreases the pH low enough that many other bacteria cannot survive. They tolerate high levels of salt, which kill yet more competitor bacteria. It ends up being a really really good way to keep food from going off.

Our ancestors figured this out thousands of years ago without knowing what bacteria were. This general ceramic design has been in use around the world in virtually every place that had ceramics, salt, and too much cabbage or cucumbers that was going to rot if they didn't do something about it. It's thousands of years old, so old that it gets hard to interpret the evidence of the ceramics.

And I have crocks like this in my kitchen, where I make my own ferments, and I always think about how beautiful and elegant it all is, and how this was probably invented hundreds of times as people converged on something that Just Works.

(I do have pH testing strips though.)

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Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

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Sending love to everyone who is just... tired. Life is a lot, and sometimes the answer to it all is to just be still and silent for a while. Give yourself space and grace. Whether it’s decision fatigue, anxiety fatigue, information fatigue, routine fatigue, getting life back together fatigue, career fatigue, social fatigue, financial fatigue, or physical fatigue—take a moment to breathe and recharge. You deserve it.

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Happy Hogswatch one and all!

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Virtually everyone I've worked with in the tech industry has had basically the same reaction to unions: why would we unionize, they treat us so well here! and like. yeah. i guess. compared to a lot of folks, you are making more money and getting more perks. but consider this: If your work makes so much fucking money that the table scraps they give you are this good, imagine how much better it would be if you had collective bargaining. 'cause for every sentence i hear about how "we're treated so well", i hear the same person say "i had to work through my weekend" or "i pulled an 80 hour work week" or "i was up half the night working to get this done". Like, have you considered that the reason you are "well paid" is because it's cheaper to give you an extra few thousand dollars then it is to hire another employee to make your workload managable? it's cheaper to keep you thinking you have it good so you'll stay up all night and work through your weekends and give up your free time? because i guarentee you it is, and i guarentee you that by ignoring unionization you are leaving more on the table then you could possibly imagine, and not just for yourself. It's not just about money, or benefits. it's about time. it's about how much of your life is yours. Get that through your fucking head. and then go sign up your friends.

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I think sometimes people think eugenics is bad but its still true, like thinking that if people with certain traits have children it will change society for better or worse based upon what traits are promoted. I think its important to emphasize that eugenics is not only wrong morally it's also fake and stupid bullshit

Like eugenics was supposed to be based on the idea that "If it works with animals to select only the best ones to breed, why wouldn't it work with humans?"

well it doesn't work with animals, that's the thing. applying the eugenics ideas to domestic breeds of animals hasn't made better animals it's just made animals with more extreme expression of certain traits. turns out that when you decide which traits are the "best" and become obsessed with the genetic purity of the animals that have the "best" traits, you might well end up with some sad suffering creature like a Pug, or the Persian cats with the smashed faces that are in constant pain because their teeth and airways and brains are getting crushed by their skulls, or those meat chickens that grow so fast they can hardly even stand up after a few weeks old, or inbred race horses with tiny feet and fragile toothpick legs

like almost all traits are neither "good" or "bad" they're way more complex than that. a long tail or a long snout or a stubborn, independent personality can be good or bad depending on the situation. Who gets to decide what is a "good" trait or a "bad" trait? It's arbitrary and selecting for traits that are "good" in your opinion will often have both "good" and "bad" outcomes because the "good" and "bad" are part of each other and not separate its just part of being alive

Obviously oversimplifying everything but you get it. we did eugenics with dogs and how did that go? not very well

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Gentle reminder that newspapers can’t call incidents “murders” or “kidnappings” if no trial has taken place. They CAN say “suspected murder” or “possible kidnapping”, but they can’t outright call stuff murder etc. because that’s up to a court to decide. So yeah, they tend to use words like “missing” and “killed” instead. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this isn’t intentional erasure, this is just honestly in journalism.

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ok anyways. post this beast

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via indiarosecrawford

Frog Paints a Water Lily Pond 🪷🎨🐸

𝑓ₒᵣ ⲕᵢ𝑛𝑔 ₐ𝑛𝑑 𝑐ₒ𝑡𝑡ₐ𝑔ₑ