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(Better Than Olive Garden) Chicken Gnocchi Soup

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Is this how you roll?

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Avengers (2012) #5

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I don't need someone to match my freak; I need someone to complement my freak. Accentuate and accent my freak. Plus, we gotta diversify our freak portfolio here -- combine our efforts to cover the greatest amount of freakage instead of seeking freak redundancy.

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The next week, in class, he discusses the anointing of the sick and clarifies that Christ only heals your marred body if it’s necessary for the salvation of your soul. “We all have the bodies we’re meant to have,” he says. We all have the bodies we’re meant to have. What does it mean if my body is not a punishment, or a mistake? I go home and pray the rosary. Maybe I don’t have to hate my body? I ask Kate on the phone. I say it aloud again just to test it in my mouth: I don’t have to hate my body. I close my eyes and picture our church: Christ’s bent body on the cross, picture of a lamb.

— McCully Brown, Molly. “Bent Body, Lamb.” Image Journal. Read the full essay here: [x].

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Every now and then you also need to do a bit of gymnastics...

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THE TROLLEY PROBLEM IS NOT ABOUT HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE A NECESSARY SACRIFICE! STOP THAT!

The trolley problem asks whether it is more moral to passively watch someone’s death or actively participate in it.

“I refuse to participate in a person’s death even if my inaction causes the deaths of more people” is a valid response to the problem! That’s the point of a thought experiment!

It’s not “virtue signaling” to have a moral principle and stick to it.

By emphasizing the damage to the group of people on the “other” track, you are saying that the person on the “switch” track is a necessary sacrifice.

By framing the US elections as a trolley problem, not only are you ignoring the purpose of the problem, you are actively framing minorities as a necessary sacrifice, which you do not need to do!!!

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Here’s a job you probably never even knew existed but is perfect for episodic stories.

Years and years ago I worked for a substitute/temp company, meaning other companies could ask for, say, five workers for any kind of job for anywhere from a day to a month and my company would then pick out five of their employees with suitable skills and ask us if we wanted to take the job.

You can imagine I ended up getting all sorts of wacky experiences. This was the job where I was hired to clean a dirty old kitchen with 10 other people at a mansion but got lost one day and walked into a cultish room with an altar and thrones lined up along the wall.

And when I say any kind of job I mean it. People asked for all sorts of unskilled work but the company also got requests for specialized work that only certain workers could do. I spent a week in an empty building where I only saw the other worker who had been hired along with me attaching wheels to carts. At another job we were sent up through a hole in the ceiling at a mall where we cleaned out old boxes. A particularly beautiful job entailed “braiding” small transparent tubes down a wall at a temporary closed factory while the sun was shining through ceiling windows which made the tubes glitter like glass. No idea what that job was about. We did anything from cleaning to preparing food to clearing a building site to factory work to hauling fish to painting to looking after animals to-

And if you like dressing your characters up you’re going to love this; our company didn’t have their own uniform because we were always dressed in the uniforms of the companies we were hired out to, or the companies would dress us in work appropriate clothes like overalls or aprons. I was once handed a cute long dress to wear while I sold pancakes.

I realize some of it sounds dangerous but it was all perfectly safe. Sometimes companies just needed extra help with something for a few days. The only reason why I stopped was because the work wasn’t stable and you never knew how far you’d have to travel to the next job. It was fun though.

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this hit me like a truck

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Favourite ship dynamic: no one truly knows what exactly is going on between the two characters, including the characters themselves. But whatever it is, it's written in the fabric of the universe.

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good news everyone! ive come to the conclusion that the worst thing a character can be is unlucky

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Remember this joke?

Well, I am going to do something similar only with photography. This is a photo someone took for an Amazon review of their Clinique products.

Honestly, it is not a terrible photo. They did some staging. They have an interesting background. All of the labels are legible. It is properly exposed. This would be a perfectly acceptable product photo for an Etsy page.

I've been taking these advanced photography courses in preparation for whenever I am able to create a new studio in the house. And my teacher is a photography badass. I just watched a 6 hour class on how to recreate a professional Clinique ad. And at first glance it looks deceptively simple. It's just some skin care products being splashed with a little water.

Which is why I wanted you to see an average person for reference.

This is what Karl Taylor came up with.

And I don't think I've learned so much about photography in one tutorial before.

Product photography is just loads and loads of problem solving. You have to light the chrome caps with a gradient. Which requires giant diffusion scrims.

Those big white panels are literally only there for the two chrome caps.

You need a pure white background, but you can't let light spill all over the studio, so you put up giant black light blockers.

And you have to add another light just for the orange bottle on the right.

Oh, and if you want the bottles to glow, well, you have to hide a silver reflector behind them.

But you still want the edges of the bottles to be darker so they have some contrast. So you add some black tape to the sides.

And in order for the reflective labels to have bold black lettering, you have to reflect black cards into them.

Ack! Karl's beautiful bald head is showing up in the chrome caps! He must put on the naughty blanket.

And once you get every aspect of every bottle perfectly lit, you finally get to yeet some water at it all.

I don't love product photography because I have a weird obsession to help greedy corporations make their wares look more beautiful. I love it because it is a complicated and challenging new puzzle every time. Every product is a different shape and requires a different technique to make it look its best.

I don't know if I will be able to live up to Karl's standards.

This is about the level I was at in 2017 before I quit photography.

I have so much more knowledge in my brain now. I'm really hoping I can surpass that.

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By the Vishanti, Loki, leave this poor man alone.

Plus, it doesn’t count as a prediction. You were involved in 3 of 4 events, you little mischievous god.

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Oh, this red string you see wrapped around my finger? You're asking if it connects me to my one true love? An understandable mistake, but I'm aromantic. This is for my conspiracy board.

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i cant think of a caption here’s a joke i spent way too long on

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I had another dream about a new NERDS book. It had a peach-colored cover and was #6. And in my dream I thought about how I keep having dreams about new books, but my dream-self thought that this wasn’t a dream, and only then I woke up!

It’s my weirdest recurring dream theme