#tangent.txt

[mtndewsangritablast]

i know nobody talks about "canada" but i haven't read like, Any detailed posts about this. all the provincial liquor store workers in "ontario" have been on strike since july 5 and will be potentially continuing this action for the forseeable future.

there are some locally specific reasons for this- namely that our premier is making a lot of changes regarding liquor sales in the province- but this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as reasons go for the strike.

even without knowing someone who works there to corroborate this, anyone who has gone to an LCBO more than a few times can tell you they probably saw the same few employees working every time, even if they didn't notice at first. that's because the LC is allegedly notorious for understaffing and refusing to give out full-time hours. this is what you'll hear from a good deal of employees if you ask; you don't get hours unless you are somehow related to someone in upper management. there's also the fact that LCBO cashiers either make minimum or less than minimum wage, while the company's CEO makes 20x the yearly average of a full-time employee.

working at the LC is a government position that ought to come with government benefits. this is my opinion, but the people behind the bulletproof glass at the liquor store probably deserve better compensation than the people whose main job is signing off on installing those bus stop benches you can't lay down on. i digress. the point of full-time work, besides earning full-time pay, is getting benefits. by supposedly consistently giving out nominal hours, the LC has allegedly created an environment where a good deal of their workers need to work 2 jobs to make ends meet, and don't get benefits from either of them.

the LC has also claimed that the union made additional demands right before agreements came to a close and that is why the strike is continuing. union reps have claimed that LC reps have failed to properly sign return to work orders. legally speaking it is up to you which of those statements to believe, but from a personal perspective i have called bullshit on a lot of the LCBO's statements during this strike.

anyway just wanted to talk about this because the internet never notices when workers from this "country" go on strike ✌️

[mtndewsangritablast]

normally i would not crawl out of the shadows to reblog my own anon after the fact but i have a slight correction to issue to this and i thought it would be weird to send another really long anon about mountain dew to a stranger.

livewire is actually currently more widely available than i indicated here. it seems to be on limited spring/summer rerelease in select regions, specifically here in southern "ontario" where it is not normally available. (i discovered this after sending this ask).

tangent-mode but code red is also currently available in cans here, which is not normally true, and this combined with the livewire rerelease and the recent expansion of the baja family is very unsurprising to me. given the fact that the current vibe of the general mills v. kellogs saga is firmly "early 00s nostalgia-bait", it's only fitting that pepsi should be reaching more clearly back to their catalogue of classic oldies as well. i want to say that by 2025 coca-cola will finally reap what they've been sowing with freestyle machines and rerelease surge, hi-C, or both. (surge was actually nicknamed The Mountain Dew Killer in production, which is embarrassing in hindsight). whichever drink they choose (please be mello yello) in my opinion the chance of no big 00s revival coming from coca-cola either this summer or spring 2025 to match this energy from pepsi and the other Big 10 companies is slim to none. feels like a bit of an on-the-nose, last-ditch effort to market to gen Z, who they are aware inherently hates them.

anyway, i should stop pulling before i come unraveled. mountain happy returns i mean many

hello. i have autism and my special interest is the brand/production history of mountain dew. facts about baja blast for you. (you can decide if they are fun facts or just facts).

so, pepsico chose to develop baja blast specifically for taco bell because mtn dew was already taco bell's most popular soft drink. taco bell customers were apparently around 1.5x more likely to get mountain dew with their meals than anything else and each brand wanted to capitalise off that. the thing about this plan though is that if two things are already a perfect pairing there isn't always much room for improvement, and baja blast is allegedly just normal mountain dew with more lime and a bit of blue colouring. people often think of it as the second successful flavour variant after code red (don't get me started on Dew Red, sans code) but it is actually technically the third. Dew Livewire, an orange variant which is considered a regional flavour today, was released for an exclusive run in the summer of 2003 after the discontinuation of coca-cola's competitor product Surge but before it was more or less replaced by Vault. after the release of coca cola's Vault, Livewire became a permanent flavour but is still subject to a fairly limited availability. today, baja blast exists as one of 14 "baja" themed dew flavour variants, and is one of the only dew flavours that is also specifically sold in an alcoholic form. the weird thing is that baja blast is a taco bell branded drink, but a line of frozen baja margaritas is also sold exclusively through red lobster. they are not now nor have they ever been operated by the same parent company, so i have always wondered about the licensing deal there.

have a good dew i mean day

these ARE fun facts thank u

[mtndewsangritablast]

nerdy bullshit analysis of what i think some of the edible crops from the cookie clicker garden probably taste like under the cut

there is no fun wording in the description to suggest that there is anything interesting flavour-wise about either baker's wheat or thumbcorn. gildmillet likely just tastes like normal millet seed (therefore delicious.......). ordinary clover is just a clover, golden clovers likely taste the same.

cronerice's description says it is related to the weeping willow, which is edible but apparently disgusting. it's usually used moreso as a medicine than for food, and apparently it's largely used to soothe achey joints. orteil is really funny.

elderwort is said to have a strange heady scent and for some reason that instantly makes me think of lily of the valley. i don't think lilies are edible (hence no shimmerlily on this list), so i'd probably say it is similar to how roses taste. i know it's probably inspired by creeping bog wort since it looks so much like it, but bog wort aoparently doesn't have a super distinct flavour besides being vaguely floral.

bakeberry is the one that perplexes me most, i think. as far as a crunchy outer shell i want to say it's something hazelnutty, or maybe something carob adjacent, especially given the description of bakeberry biscuits as being really good with hot chocolate. it might be a chocolate outer shell, but this does not seem Joyous. that said the creamy red inside could really be comparable to anything. red velvet ganache? red bean paste? god forbid, might they be cherry blossoms? (do they have cherry blossoms outside "canada"?)

chocoroot is apparently a normal bramble covered in something like chocolate syrup. i'd assume, then, that this chocolate is maybe a little sap-like. probably more like molasses in texture than traditional chocolate syrup and perhaps has a slightly earthy taste to it. from the appearance and the fact it grows out of the ground it might have more of a dark chocolate flavour. there are no specific flavour descriptors given for the root itself, or indication on whether or not it is edible.

white chocoroot is just a chocoroot with paler, sweeter syrup. this is Relaly interesting to me since real-life chocolate and white chocolate are not related and white chocolate is not actually chocolate at all. this implies, to me at least, that white chocoroot does not actualy quite taste like normal white chocolate but more like milk chocolate, since it is related to chocoroot.

whiskerblooms secrete a white milky substance that may or may not be edible. i might compare this to the sap that comes from a dandelion, considering dandelions also have a cat-themed name, and since the whiskerbloom seems to be a similar plant with long angular leaves that congregate at the bottom and one large flower that grows from a single stem.

drowsyfern is likely some kind of mint or mint-adjacent plant, given its appearance and use as a relaxing herbal tea. not a lot to say on this one.

keenmoss it probably less used for flavour and more used for aroma and scent. i have some oak moss scented candles that i love and i can only imagine keenmoss is like a slightly sweeter, fresher version of that. i didn't need to do a sidenote for this but i Love the smell of moss.

the queenbeet is a sweet ass beet that apparently produces white sugar. knowing that orteil is a funny silly guy i'm going to assume this means literal, processed, granulated white sugar. which i like. she tastes like sugar, next question. juicy variant is the same but Juicy.

duketater is just a sweet tuber, but interestingly it is also described in-game as having a "yellow" aftertaste. what the fuck that means, i do not know.

the only in-game description of the shriekbulb calls it a "nasty vegetable", and visually it looks exactly like a radish. i like radishes, but i get that they are polarizing. likely, this is just a radish that screams. (hell yeah).

i'm now also faced with the equally nerdy but interesting question of which garden plants are technically edible, which are typically eaten, and which are strictly inedible. i'd say most of the molds, rots and fungi are likely inedible, besides ichorpuff and cheapcap, which are typically eaten, fool's bolete which is technically edible but not tasty, and crumbspore, doughshroom and wrinklegill which might be edible. (crumbspore is a mold, but may still be edible. doughshroom is a fungus and it smells appetizing, but that doesn't make it good to eat. similarly, wrinklegill makes you hungry when you smell it, but no word on whether you should eat it. the fact that it makes you hungry is just a thematic thing in this context, but in the context of reality it would likely mean that the fungus was parasitic and spread through being eaten. this does fit the theme of wrinklers pretty well so i'm willing to accept it as canon, and it may be worth mentioning that this is kind of supported by white mildew being a rapidly spreading, ostensibly inedible substance that is intentionally appetizing (creamy and sweet-smelling).)

[mtndewsangritablast]

i know that there were a lot of IRL reasons why she couldn't physically be in the scenes and i understand all of them but did no one else find it fucking weird, the way the shameless writers handled the fact that fiona was not in attendance at ian and mickey's wedding? or i guess the way they chose not to handle it? like they have that conversation about how monica is gone and it feels fucking out of place, for a few reasons. number one for me is that i believe a few years ago this would have been written as a scene between fiona and ian. number two is the way they inject monica into the scene. like, she would love this wedding? would she? do we know that about her? because monica's characterization on the US version of shameless seems to be that she is mentally ill and bisexual, and that's about it. the UK version of monica would love a wedding, but she's not the same character at all. US monica is a walking talking depiction of bipolar disorder, wherein it is clear that she has some kind of personality underneath her impulses and mood swings, but we never get to see what it is. at most i can say that i think she likes cute things. "monica would have loved this" is such a vague, weird way to bring her up and while i can't technically say that it's provably false, there is No evidence to suggest that it's true, either. a third Weird fucking thing about this scene is that this could have easily been a conversation about fiona. in the absence of that conversation we are left with a massive woman-shaped hole in the episode and the ending of the series as well, and a lack of conversation about monica simply wouldn't have had that effect. no one would have minded if monica was never mentioned. some people may have noticed, especially since they made a point of having frank there, but no one would have cared. they could have bullshitted any old line at any point in the ep about how fiona couldn't catch a flight or something, and had a reason for her not to be there other than everyone seeming to forget that she ever existed. this shit is set in the summertime in chicago but the LA-based screenwriters forgot thunderstorms existed. fucksake write her in a pregnancy. too pregnant to fly. this is america and she has prior charges, she could feasibly be stuck at TSA for the majority of an entire day. my point is that there are 1 million simple lines of dialogue that could have been included Anywhere in this episode to explain away fiona's super notable absence and they chose to just do nothing and hope nobody would notice. it is Weird as fuck to me.

[mtndewsangritablast]

to the guy who runs the free clinic FUCK YOU heartily; im sure your "rodent repellent" needs to be so loud that i can hear it inside my house past the doors and windows. i am so sure you're just keeping away mice and rats with the blinding floodlights and squealing machines you've set up outside that make it impossible for any living being to be comfortable within a 1000 foot radius. i am like so sure it is unrelated to the fact that your dumb ass set up a free clinic in the ghetto and expected that no drug addicts or sex workers might wait outside overnight for you to open. FUCK YOU me and my neighbours and my mouse and my cats all hate your ass and the squirrels do too.

[mtndewsangritablast]

i'm a bit engrossed now in this horrible henry stuff and from what i can tell it's significantly worse than that post makes it out to be? like okay here is what i'm getting

the parents are clearly Supposed to be bad but i still don't understand why

henry feels coded as having some kind of executive dysfunction

the parents also mistreat the little brother and seem to only tolerate him because he is an overachiever

the brother is actually heavily implied to be afraid of the parents, specifically the mother

even random adults who are unrelated to the family seem to hate henry, like his teachers straight up do not care why he might be acting out because they also don't like him

henry's parents volunteer each other to spend time with him as a way of getting back at one another

his parents are also openly Very selfish, there are several episodes where they take away one or more of their children's amenities for self-serving reasons, there are multiple episodes where the parents do not know where their children are for the majority of the runtime.

i swear to god henry's dad threatens to ban him from using electricity

henry is at least self-aware, like he has at least not been gaslit by his parents into thinking he is actually horrible

little brother on the other hand? he will have psychological damage up to here

[mtndewsangritablast]

also just because im already talking about mountain dew i just. would like to briefly mention the coke competitors. coke-petitors, if you will. (F for sundrop which is absolutely the original version of this drink).

1. surge

surge was obviously popular but i do have to point out to the people who only know about it from nostalgia-related content that it was only available for 5 years and was really only ever so culturally relevant because coca-cola is a marketing giant. they are honestly probably Very pleased by the fact that all that advertising paid off because really surge was Not nearly as popular as mountain dew and was basically just a caffeinated version of that thing where you mix orange crush and sprite. today surge is only available in restaurant freestyle machines.

2. mello yello

mello yello is so alluring and tantalizing to me. i have never tasted its sweet embrace but, again, it has unfortunately been marketed flawlessly. i largely associate it with my very own little guy Q*Bert. it was discontinued, but has been rereleased as of 2011 with very limited, regional availability. it was allegedly also banned in australia!

3. vault

to me, vault is most notable for having too many slogans, all of them bad. the following is a sub-list of vault slogans.

get to it!

the taste. the quench. the kick.

drinks like a soda, kicks like an energy drink.

get it done, and then some.

chug and charge!

i left chug and charge for last because it's my favourite. anyway, vault is otherwise pretty boring. it was coca cola's replacement for surge spurred on by mountain dew's livewire. it had weird as fuck commercials with a misogynistic vibe and it was discontinued after 5 years just like surge. (6, if you count its limited early release).

HONORABLE MENTION: Urge

urge was actually the predecessor to surge, released in norway in the mid 90s. now, urge is an honorable mention because it is still Massive in norway. apparently (i havent dug too deep on this claim, so i wouldnt put a tremendous amount of weight on it, but) it has literally not had a widespread advertising campaign since its launch and holds 10% of the market share for norwegian soft drinks. basically, it is the citrus pepsi max. (i say, as though everybody else just has this reference on hand).

[mtndewsangritablast]

today's niche drama: alpaca farmer beef

i have to talk about this because omg. this post will get long because there is so much and it requires so much background info.

so if you watch a lot of animal videos on youtube you have probably at least been recommended a video from morgan gold of Gold Shaw Farms. basically he is this guy who abandoned his 9-5 city life to move to Vermont and become a duck farmer/egg breeder. (these details are relevant, trust me).

he's been involved in some controversies before (outside general discourse of whether or not farming is even ethical to begin with), most notably for purchasing purebred dogs from apparently disreputable breeders and for allegedly buying livestock guardian dogs without doing the proper research into it first. to summarize key points from his storied farm dog controversies, he bought two purebred maremma sheepdogs to raise as LGDs, one has recurrent genetic health problems and has a history of chasing down and killing the chickens she is guarding. his other dog toby was diagnosed with lyme disease from a tick bite in July 2022, there is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that morgan was not taking his due diligence in protecting the dogs, who have long hair and regular access to grazing fields, from insect bites. also, i don't know where else to mention this, but morgan actually initially bought abby to breed with toby, but decided against it because of abby's temperament issues and health problems. he would later discover that despite abby being purchased from a breeder all the way in california and toby being from vermont, these dogs are so inbred that they are actually each other's genetic cousins. again, please remember that he purchased this dog specifically to breed her.

there was also some drama with abby's breeder, where she accuses him of mistreatment and poor training, and he accuses her of running a puppy mill. both of them make both correct and incorrect points here but abby's breeder kim is more outwardly rude and has her own backstory full of controversy so morgan gains the internet's favour on this one. i refer to this as drama and not controversy because both parties milked the audience engagement it resulted in for all it was worth. this truly was a very serious issue but morgan and kim treated it like a clickbait competition.

fast forward to last year and morgan is now raising highland cattle. you might recall that highland cattle started getting really really popular online last summer, specifically on youtube shorts. to remind you, morgan runs an egg hatchery. he mainly raises and breeds chickens, ducks, and geese. it's not an incredible stretch for him to shift focus to cows, but it's a bit outside his normal sphere. people pretty quickly accused him of exploitation, saying he only purchased the cows for more popularity and questioning whether he had put enough research or training into raising cows. again, morgan went from being a full-time corporate employee to a farmer, so while he has 8 years of experience with birds he does not have much professional experience with other animals and it is not unreasonable to question his level of preparedness. what's interesting to note that i haven't seen pointed out yet is that duck farming was actually on a steady increase in popularity and profitability in the US during the late 2010s. i had a suspicion this might be true, because i unfortunately remember too turnt tony, and the hallmark of an animal's popularity is an influencer making one their schtick. i looked into the numbers and according to the Iowa Farm Bureau, the demand for pet ducks, duck meat and duck byproducts hit a real spike in north america in 2015, one year before morgan gold chose to open a duck farm. not necessarily causation, but definitely a correlation there. (isn't this post about alpacas?? i know. we're getting there.)

it is now 2024, and market researchers have determined that we are currently in a highland cattle farming bubble. in economic terms, that basically means that a shitload of people have recently decided to start farming and breeding them for profit. economic bubbles are sometimes (oftentimes, if we're being honest) artificially produced and inflated, meaning that some government body or lobbyist group went out of their way to advertise something to the general public until it was popular. economics are fake, so i don't have too much detail on the specifics of the current highland cattle bubble other than that it exists and that it is clear to see from what gets pushed to me on social media. what's relevant for this discussion is the fact that this information has lead many people to reignite the accusations against morgan gold. i dont watch his content these days but i found he always had an overly clinical, overly corporate, "city-slicker" approach to farming that painted his animals more as commodities than beings; i think of him as a family vlogger, but his kids are birds. he knows people are just here to see the cute animals from the thumbnails, but he styles his channel as a sort of how-to guide on starting and running your own farm. he discusses his animals as products, yes, but he also places a heavy emphasis on lifestyle and admits he was drawn to a quiet country life and the self-fulfilment of running his own business.

with that out of the way, the alpaca stuff. before the highland cattle bubble, the 2000s and very early 2010s saw the rise and fall of the alpaca bubble. like with any bubble, among the trend-flitters you're bound to have people who are genuinely dedicated to their field of work and do it without real financial motivation. morgan recently reached out to a few members of the alpaca farming community under the pretense of collaborating on a video, comparing the highland cattle bubble to the alpaca bubble and discussing the history as well as the reality of each. to be very clear, the people morgan reached out to for this video are currently alpaca farmers. these are not people who bought into the bubble in the early 2000s, but people who are currently involved in farming and breeding alpacas. again, i have my own opinions about the ethics of farming and breeding, but they're not relevant for right now. what is relevant is that morgan conducted interviews with these people for a video, told them exactly what the video was intended to be about, then went and used them in a completely different video without anyone's knowledge or consent.

morgan released a lengthy, heavily edited video on his second channel decrying the entire alpaca farming industry as a multi-level marketing scheme. i would say his logic is hard to follow but the thing that is difficult to describe is the way he doesn't actually attempt to explain this stance. he covers a lot of ground in the video. some of it is plain misinfo, some of it is just misrepresented, but the interesting thing is that his actual point of focus throughout the video seems to be explaining why alpaca farming might not be very profitable. this is the main point he seems to argue, when he isn't just explaining what an MLM is. also, i mention the heavy editing because a lot of the video's runtime is padded with clips from shows, movies, and interviews, as well as what i can only call anti-alpaca propaganda. videos of alpacas mating, making strange noises, and spitting, with weird mocking voiceover and captions. also, AI generated art of especially ugly-looking alpacas. this is not conjecture. he really generated AI pictures of alpacas that looked grosser than real ones. of the claims he makes about alpaca farming, well, you might notice fairly quickly that a few of them are exactly the same accusations that are being leveled against him. i will get back to this in a second but there is something even weirder.

during this video, and i am not joking, he takes a stance against breeding, against for-profit farming, against commodifying animals and against making seriously huge business decisions based on your own romanticized ideals of certain lifestyles.

i personally disagree with all of these practices, don't get me wrong! commerce is evil and killing our planet. it is not cute that rural areas are desperately underfunded. but this is coming from a for-profit duck breeder, who runs a youtube channel where he commodifies his animals and encourages people to quit their day jobs so they can move to the country to become farmers, which is something that HE did!!! this is like dumbo releasing a statement against being an elephant while he tromps through the circus eating peanuts.

to add to this vibe, he claims that all alpaca farmers buy animals without doing research first and end up mistreating them or in some way harming their development. he claims that most people think alpacas are incredibly lucrative and are only interested in owning them for profit. he claims that alpaca farming is nothing but a breeding chain, that the wool is not actually worth very much and the real money is in simply passing alpacas from one farm to the next to he re-bred and re-sold. these are all things he has personally been accused of. he specifically sells hatching eggs, and does so because selling duck eggs for breeding rather than for food is more profitable. he breeds all his animals and again even had plans to breed his dogs. he has been accused of failing to research consistently since the early days of his channel and has even admitted in the past when he gets in over his head with a new animal (his geese come to mind specifically). he has a habit of buying animals for one purpose or another and then just breeding them. the things he said about alpaca wool being worth basically nothing are not even true and most alpaca farms make WAY more money selling knitwear than baby alpacas. this is true of chicken farms outside of the meat industry whose profits mainly come from breeding.

anyway that was my rant i dont even know how to end this off besides saying isnt this RIDICULOUS