#Waste Less

[this-user-is-sus]

I participated in a waste audit for two days this week. (Won't say for who. Won't say where. Privacy and all that.)

Unsurprisingly, so much recycling and compostable food goes in the trash. So much trash goes in the recycling. So many items are created only to be discarded. I knew that. I know that.

What the audit really drove home for me was every action matters. What was my defining item for this? Coffee creamer cups. You know, those tiny little plastic cups with about one tablespoon each of liquid, most-fake-dairy creamer?

One coffee creamer cup? It's just a tiny thing, right? No harm done, right?

Seeing the waste from the coffee station where everyone uses "just one" coffee creamer cup, and suddenly you have an entire 30 gallon trash bag full of the things? They add up. (Plus they can't be recycled with current all-in-one-bin systems. See my palm test post. Once they're used, the material is going to be lost: buried to leach into the water supply or burned to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.)

It makes me sad, because if the business had just had some of those fancy metal carafes of creamers, or even just cartons of milk, this could have been avoided. Milk jugs and cartons are easily recycled, and generated fewer pounds of waste overall.

Every action matters.

[healthyskillz]

TRASH SOUP - soup made of vegetables you saved from the trash!

Today's version features radish tops and Romanesco/broccoli stalks & leaves. Just add a base of onion/carrot/celery/garlic and some potatoes for creaminess and you are good to go ☺️

[kedreeva]

There's some dude (derogatory) on FB who is PISSED people are pricing their farm fresh eggs at $2 and $3 a dozen instead of $4+, saying it's "disrespectful" and "undignified" and "I'm trying to feed my kids" like Sir, you are on a Facebook group page bitching about your neighbors egg prices because your pet chickens aren't earning you a living wage and you think it's your neighbors' fault, you do not have a leg to stand on here wrt dignity.

Also half the answers are like "I give them to friends and family free" or "I donate them to food banks" or "I'm making them affordable to folks who might not otherwise be able to get them now that they're so expensive in the store" and "if you think you're going to turn a profit keeping backyard chickens you have been wildly misled" and so on, and so forth, and I'm so living for it.

and I can tell you right now, he did NOT like my answer of "if you're trying to feed your kids, I hear eggs are edible."

[nollimet]

Just some late night post card making ft Gars

[ID: horizontal lines of blue and white identical garfish with orange and yellow stars interspersed. end ID]

[unnamed-atlas]

There's something really funny to me about Mumbo spotting the "Free us" banner Bdubs built in the cyber punk city and going "oh wow that's so dark omg" only to immediately return to building the ecological disaster destroying and poisoning the farmlands and water supply of his hometown caused by the lab he works in. My man, I'm not sure you have room to judge in that department, actually aksglsgsksb

[siphersaysstuff]

dumbest

motherfucker

on the goddamn planet

[ali3nboyfriend]

transformers would be so good if it was good

[unpretty]

this may come as a shock to you all but it turns out bread lasts a really long time in the fridge

[idontmindifuforgetme]

I hate to be that one person who’s like when ur so busy ur not consumed by other people or being in a relationship blah blah blah …. But truly when u have ur hands full you could fucking care less and it’s so liberating

[rockpaperscissuhs]

Band of Brothers Episode 5: Crossroads

for HBO WWII Rewatch: Week 10 - Black

[marzipanandminutiae]

two Bad History Takes don't make a Good History Take

right: throughout history, many non-European civilizations have had impressive technologies for their time periods, and this is often minimized by white supremacist interpretations of the past. just like their counterparts in Europe, they had a complex range of advancements and limitations given the materials around them, their worldviews, and the areas of technology on which their society placed a high priority

wrong: the Aztecs had FLYING CARS and the British were EATING FRIED SHIT AS A DELICACY

(and before anyone says "um but Europe WAS disgusting!" the whole point of this post is that that was also mostly a myth. come on, people)

[viro-lil-goat]

[resiliencewithin]

Having a moment where I think I need to be perfect and if I’m anything less than perfect OMG end of the world.

No.

I’m fucking releasing myself from that pressure because whether or not this half bag of spinach goes bad before I can use it is not the life or death situation my brain is making it out to be.

[imjustheretomooch]

'Dark Academia Fullmetal Alchemist' doesn’t exactly describe Blood Over Bright Haven. It’s not a ‘girl takes down the empire’ nor is it mystery or action. It’s a little of all of these things, but really thinking about it I've come to the conclusion that it’s best described as a fusion between a scathing criticism of American Imperialism and a power fantasy for people who really fucking hate their coworkers 

[chocolatepot]

I realized that the best example to make my point is the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby.

The Ladies were a pair of female friends who ran away together in 1778, dressed in men's clothes; they were caught and separated, but made another escape attempt that was more successful, and their families reluctantly allowed them to go their own way. Minor celebrities, their neighbors just knew them as a pair of eccentric ladies who kept house together while people in the know came from far away to visit them.

They habitually wore masculine-styled riding habits. They were buried in the same grave (along with the servant who helped them elope, Mary Caryll). Butler left a diary that said nothing about them having sex. Some in the period suggested they were lesbians and they reportedly were shocked. This was an era where men and women had same-sex "romantic friendships" that were more effusive than what we'd consider platonic today. Anne Lister, Definite Lesbian*, visited them.

All of these data points can be interpreted in two ways, one implying they're queer and one taking it for granted that they weren't.

Riding habits: They're the closest women could get to men's or gender-neutral clothing in the Georgian era / They're practical and hard-wearing

Same grave: They were in love and wanted to be buried like spouses / They were best friends and didn't want to be separated

Diary: Butler didn't want to provide proof of what would have been considered wrongdoing to anyone who found her notes / Butler just didn't have any romance or sex to record

Shocked: They worried about exposure and had to pretend to be horrified at the thought / They genuinely were not behaving as anything except platonic friends and were genuinely shocked

Effusive: Many romantic friendships were in fact what we'd call queer today, acceptable to the world as non-sexual homoromantic relationships / Romantic friendships were between straight friends, like it says on the tin

Anne Lister: Lister recognized a kinship with these women and wanted to be part of their network or validate her sexuality through their acceptance or something / Lister was imposing her own take on their relationship or just admired them as independent women

Neither option is more objectively true. The first interpretations are simply using a different lens than the second, one that presumes that the Ladies being queer is a possibility.

Our culture generally teaches us that straight is the default, that everyone is far and away more likely to be straight than anything else, so it's not only safe, but the most sensible thing to do to choose an interpretive lens that doesn't bother engaging with the possibility of queerness. With this assumption in place, any reading of historical evidence (visual or textual) that doesn't exhaust all possible straight readings before moving on to a queer one is suspect as not having scholarly rigor. (It's also, of course, seen as much worse to consider someone queer if they would call themselves straight than to do the reverse, in general.)

People on the street do this and historians who don't have any background with queer theory do it too. That doesn't make it the only correct way to talk about the potential queerness of historical figures, and in fact more historians are developing the ability to balance potential queer readings with others!

Complete rigidity about this these days is, in fact, generally a sign that someone has very little interaction with real, contemporary historical scholarship. The study of history is not an attempt to determine all the facts of the past, but an attempt to interpret them in many different ways in order to illuminate what might otherwise be ignored.

If you want to read more about the Ladies of Llangollen, how they've been perceived, and how good historians deal with the ambiguity of queer readings of history, I would recommend “Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community by Fiona Brideoake, which appears to be open access.

*Anne Lister, I should mention, has only been considered a Definite Lesbian herself since the translation of the sexually explicit parts of her diaries from code, because We Must Always Presume Straightness even if a historical woman behaves highly unconventionally for a straight woman of her time. Actually, they were decoded in the early 20thc by a Lister descendant and literally hidden again because, if only 100% serious proof allows a queer interpretation of someone's actions, lacking that proof means that nobody will be able to seriously speculate without getting called a loser writing fanfiction.

[tennessoui]

giving the best dialogue to anakin and padmé divorcing once more lol <3

“If it were your best friend who choked on flowers he couldn’t give you, what would you do?”

Anakin blinks, more than a decade’s worth of Jedi training the only thing keeping him from reeling back. “What?” Padmé’s eyes gleam back at him, hard as flint. “If Master Kenobi developed hanahaki for you, if you saw him in pain because of you, would you have done what I did for Sabé?”

Anakin shakes his head, suddenly lost and feeling rather like the trap has been sprung. “You didn’t do anything wrong to her,” he says helplessly. “You said you paid for her surgery–”

“There were two things I could have done,” Padmé replies. “But I was a good wife. I didn’t even think about the other option. I didn’t even try. Because of you.”

The other option. The only other cure for the flowering disease: for the love to be returned.

Anakin cuts his eyes away from the face of his wife. They jump from the fireplace to the open doors leading to a balcony, to a chair in the corner to the old-fashioned books tucked neatly away in their alcove. “Don’t ask me this,” he says, begs, because Padmé is his wife and once, he loved her ardently.

But she is also a politician, and she knows to never give in when she is so close to her victory. “Tell me what you would do,” she demands softly. “Tell me you would do the same. If it were Obi-Wan dying, tell me you would hold his hand as he underwent the surgery. Tell me that you would remember me.”

“He would never develop flowers for me,” Anakin snaps as if the words have been ripped from his throat, and his hands loosen behind his back, grab at the ends of his hair and then scrub roughly over his face.

Padmé’s lips curl and her eyes flash, a spark of embers beneath a blanket of ash. “Put aside your belief that your master is too much of a Jedi to fall in love, that is not what I want—”

Anakin shakes his head, once, sharply. He feels cornered. Like a wild animal, biting at anything that encroaches into his space. “You asked me to speak and now you will not listen,” he snarls, and he is being cruel. This is cruel.

But this is also the truth, and it is what she wanted. 

“He would never develop flowers for me,” he says again. “Because you only develop flowers when the love is unrequited. And there has never been a moment in my life that I have not been in love with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Is that what you wanted to hear, Padmé?”