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I hate how people will look at popular indie artists who had one or two songs go viral on TikTok and start making fun of anybody who listens to them. "Oh you listen to Lemon Demon, Will Wood, Jack Stauber, Glass Animals, and Mother Mother? Tsk, don't you know that is stupid TikTok neurodivergent white transmasc preteen music? It's so mid and bad you should listen to real music–" you are a pit of misery

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i get into a horrific car accident while carrying a crock pot full of meatballs in the passenger seat. at the hospital, the surgeons cannot sort out which chunks of meat are me and which are not, so I end up with several meatballs sewn into my guts. despite this I make a full recovery, and they elect not to remove the meatballs because quote 'they seem comfy in there.' i go on the talk show circuit and become moderately famous as The Meatballs Woman. when i die i am buried under a gravestone with meatballs carved on it. in the year 2438, a grad student from what is now Cambodia who is studying the late pre-collapse American Empire writes her thesis on this, concluding that I probably never existed and was a conflation of several real stories and urban legends. years later, a pop-history book wildly misinterprets this and several other things, arguing for the existence of a historic American religious pantheon including figures like The Meatballs Woman, Florida Man, Emperor Norton, etc. this book sells bizarrely well and inspires a new neo-pagan movement, which in turn leads to a weird shipping community, resulting in a small but vibrant scene of ABO fics featuring me and MrBeast (who in this context has been interpreted as a god of excess and trickery)

this chilling scenario is only one of the multiple reasons I am going to attempt to not crash my car today

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Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) dir. Danny Leiner

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I'm up to the "I dunno maybe children working 13 hour shifts is bad, guys" part of Capital and it feels important to inform people that haven't read it yet that capitalists in the 19th century were not by any means wringing their hands and twirling their mustaches about employing children to squeeze out profits, they were hiring "experts" to write newspaper articles for them, explaining how "well, the socialists have these big demands about an 8-hour work day, and taking Saturdays off, but it's actually just so complicated, it's too complicated for most people to understand, we just NEED to hire children for night shifts because the stamina of their strong, youthful bodies is the only way we can survive as a business! It's science, you see. Economics doesn't work like that, just ask our economics professors at Oxford. You CAN'T turn a profit only working people 8 hours! Trust the experts, they know. It's just so complicated..."

That exact infuriating cadence that you read in New York Times articles, in the Atlantic Monthly, in the WaPo and all the other bourgeois rags where "everything is so complicated, and it's actually a lot more complicated than you think.." that has been around since the beginning. It is nothing new. So the next time you see some op-ed from Matt Yglesias or any of those other guys huffing their own farts about how "complicated" everything is, and how "unrealistic" a 30-hour work week is, remember that Marx was dealing with that exact class of "intellectuals" "explaining" how working 13 hours at age 10 was "vital" to the "moral fibre" of those poor kids.

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technique looks perfect

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the fact that elon musk is trying to claim that the government is waisting money by giving funding to "small and useless federal groups that do nothing" and all his examples have been government funded research and scientific organizations.

like, bitch those those are important. modern medicine and the prevention of diseases, technology you use every day, pretty much every single part of our lives being made easier is thanks to science and research that needs funding to survive.

and like a one time grant of less than 100k (and that's being generous) is kinda nothing in comparison to what the government actually spends its money on.

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Imagine being literally one of the largest brand companies in the world, literally nothing will bring you down you beat out all other competitors in soft drinks and whatever-

And you still said that wasn't enough, "we need to make our commercials use AI, we can't possibly afford film crews and animators"

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A common tern painted with gouache

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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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so true

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Valerio Minato's photo that won the Astronomy Picture of the Day Contest by NASA on December 25th, 2023.

In the picture: the moon, the Monviso Mount and the Basilica of Superga (on the Superga hill) outside Turin are all aligned. it took him 6 years to take this shot (and I take it as an example to never give up on your dreams).

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Shibata Zeshin, White Heron and Raven Flying, circa 1880

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Being asked complex riddles