#we have a local co-op that we're actually a part of

[woundedheartwithin]

TSC is evil for obvious reasons, but also because my doe who has chronic mastitis needs her probiotic treats and fucking Atwoods doesn't carry them???

[becomingkatie]

I started at this company 10 years ago as a co-op student, and I am now using a first-session co-op on a project. Hooooo boy it is tough! I'll give him a task, and hours later he'll be just barely started, or he'll be "finished" but have forgotten whole portions of it and the part that's done is super wrong. I have to remind myself about the time I said "Hey Greg I finished that model" and gave the engineer a model that I now understand was so so so so completely not usable, and it had taken me ages, and the engineer just put on a nice face and said, "You're definitely moving in the right direction with that," and then helped me understand what we had to do to actually produce something we could run analysis with. I picked this project to use a co-op on because we had a pretty wide schedule margin and I knew using a first-session co-op would be slower than doing it all myself, but it was a good project for a student to learn on, but I underestimated how slow it would go and I'm feeling the pressure to get a move on.

Unrelated, but last Christmas my brother and his wife gave Ken and me a gift card for a local spa in the amount to cover a couple's massage so we're finally going to do that this weekend. I want to look up restaurants nearby - I scheduled it so it'll be dinnertime afterwards to make a date night out of it.

[twistedingenue]

The hardest point of something like GenCon for me, with chronic pain and social anxiety isn't the event itself. Don't get me wrong, that's hard (hello extra painkillers and xanax just to enter the vendor hall), but the need to take the day AFTER I get home off is the worst. Because there are things I need to do (cleaning, cooking, unpacking) and all my body wants to do is recount every bit of soreness and strife from the last Best Four Days in Gaming.

Anyways, next year we are going to try to get a connecting hotel because I'd really like to go to some of the later events. Being by the airport meant condensing the day together. What helped was actually scheduling some events this time and accessibility services.

I got to skip the will call line since I started with my cane (another good call on my part) and not having to stand for an hour was wonderful.

FYI: We stayed at Crowne Plaza --Airport. Our AC was struggling, but the rooms were clean and quiet. The hotel seems to be at the tail end of some big renovations, and we never quite knew what new thing would open up. We ended up eating there every day -- the breakfast buffet was WONDERFUL and well priced. It wasn't a huge buffet but everything tasted good. Their lounge was open and had a small dinner service, that was a little more uneven. A salad was underdressed but my ribeye with a sriracha glaze was amazing. If they added a shuttle service towards the convention center, it would be a great budget option.

Next year, more writing workshops and seminars. Those were fun. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding one and one on children's lit. I've got an idea for a novel percolating right now, and I hope I can actually start writing with it soon.

We also tested out the following games, all co-op: Sail- a wonderful 2 person card game. Very simply to pick up the rules (even I could do it). A great game to have around for like -- internet or power outages, camping. They didn't have any copies available (shipping delay), so we'll be looking out for it at our local game store.

Conquest Princess: Fashion is Power: Do you like sci-fi? magical girls? mechas powered by your pets? Fashion is Power? TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCES? And arcade game mechanics? This is your game. The mechanics are a little more complicated than I usually like, but I picked up on it by the end of the hour. It's a bag builder game, the artwork is lovely, and both my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We played a demo copy, but the game is fully funded and in production. You can late pledge for it here.

Avatar the Last Airbender: Crossroads of Destiny: A rehash of the series in board game form. There are 12 plot-point scenarios to play through, in any order, and you can do one or two at a time. Mechanics are pretty simple and easy to learn, and it really encourages the co-operative behavior. By the time we tested it, Funko had sold out of what they brought with them, but we ordered it off of Amazon because I really want to play more of it.

Other than that, I bought a few gifts, tea, enamel pins and small bits of artwork and books. Husband bought tshirts and pre-ordered a modular backback system that will probably arrive in time for next gencon, lol.

I wasn't planning on going back next year, instead doing a resort type vacation, but it looks like we're getting a group together and let's face it, that's more fun.

[maniculum]

I showed this to my co-host, and her immediate response was to ask how this interacts with the medieval / early-modern practice of animal trials -- if animals can sin, surely they can also be held responsible for their crimes, yes? (Animal trials are exactly what they sound like, trials where the defendant is a nonhuman animal, and yes they were a thing.) And then I got caught up in the Implications, so this is going to be a whole post.

(Obligatory shameless plug: we did do an episode on Animal Trials back in 2022, and I'm going to put a link to it at the end of this post for anyone who wants to check that out.)

Disclaimer: for the remainder of this post, I am working from the premise that the whole lapsarian, original-sin, fallen-state-of-humanity framework is accurate, and that the claim referenced by OP regarding menstruation as punishment for same is true. This should not be taken as any indication of my actual beliefs; I'm just playing in the space, so to speak.

Second disclaimer: any nonsense or unusual diction present in this post should be considered in light of the fact that I have been drinking wine this evening and may be less sensible than usual.

Putting a cut in here because length.

So anyway. As I understand it, the traditional line on animal sin (in Christian doctrine) is that animals do not have souls and are therefore exempt from the whole concept. However, if we accept the argument:

1. Menstruation is punishment for original sin 2. Some nonhuman animals menstruate ∴ Some nonhuman animals have sinned

Then I feel that implies:

3. (As previously mentioned) Creatures with no souls are incapable of sin 4. (As established above) Nonhuman animals are capable of sin ∴ Nonhuman animals have souls

Moreover:

5. Animals who menstruate have sinned 6. Most animals do not menstruate ∴ Most animals have not sinned

In short, we're left with the idea that while man and spiny mouse have sinned against god, this is not the case with all animals -- and, in fact, most species are ensouled creatures who exist in a state of prelapsarian grace.

The theology is relevant here, because we're talking about this in relation to animal trials, which were generally carried out by the Church rather than the civil authorities. If the religious authorities are the ones claiming jurisdiction, the religious aspect is an important part of the question.

A clarifying note. The Church was in charge of animal trials partly because nonhuman animals weren't really seen as under temporal jurisdiction like human citizens were, but perhaps more importantly, because they were often the only ones who could carry out the sentence. In all of the really weird en masse animal trials you hear about, when the defendant is a whole lakeful of eels or something, the sentence was liable to involve Doing A Miracle. It was Understood that people invested with divine power could drive away animals through that power -- most famously today, driving the snakes out of Ireland. So you needed a religious authority to banish the eels, and it was expected that this would work if you went through the correct process first. (Hilariously, this included excommunicating the animals in question.)

Now, here's the next thing. I am not aware of any animal trials against a species that can menstruate. No elephant shrew, to my knowledge, ever stood as defendant in an ecclesiastical court. And if an animal is free of sin -- as, presumably, all of the defendants in medieval animal trials were -- can a religious body hold them accountable for their so-called crimes?

In the early 16th century, the court of Autun in France brought suit against the local rats for eating their barley crop. The defense was headed by Bartholomew Chassenée, who deployed a number of creative arguments to aid said rats:

... he excused the default or non-appearance of his clients on the ground of the length and difficulty of the journey and the serious perils which attended it, owing to the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats, who watched all their movements, and, with fell intent, lay in wait for them at every corner and passage.

(Source for this and most of the other material here is "Bugs and Beasts Before the Law" by E. P. Evans -- it is public domain and may be found on Project Gutenberg.)

An argument which I do not believe he made, but which I will make here, is that, as rodents who do not menstruate, rats must be assumed to be free of sin until determined otherwise. What gives France or the Church the authority to expel them from their own barley-filled Eden? Their small rattish souls are unstained, a statement which I wager no human present in that court would dare claim of their own souls.

There are, however, certain biological questions. In Bern, Switzerland, in 1478, a case was brought against a population of weevils, also for eating crops. (This is where the "creeping secretly in the earth" line comes from, BTW -- the actual phrasing is as follows.)

...which creeping secretly in the earth devastate the fields, meadows and all kinds of grain..."

Weevils also do not menstruate -- but is that a reasonable metric for insects? Their biology is sufficiently different that it wouldn't really make sense. Perhaps they, and other non-mammalian species, are subject to different punishments for any instances of original sin. Big question mark, there.

I would argue that, in order for a religious body to hold a creature responsible for its crimes, it must be established whether that creature is in fact tainted by sin. If their species has never fallen from grace, then what right does a human institution have to pass judgment? They do not exist within the same framework of Right and Wrong as mankind, and indeed could be argued to exist on a higher metaphysical plane.

There are multiple cases where a pig was put on trial for eating a human. Is this... fair? There's of course always the argument that if it's not murder when a human kills a pig, it is equally not murder when a pig kills a human -- to which the typical response is that humans and pigs don't exactly carry the same moral significance. However, if pigs -- who do not menstruate -- exist in a state of grace, surely they should if anything receive less blame. The pig is free of sin; can the human court make the same claim? How dare you, members of a fallen species, sit in judgment of the unstained pig? What right have you to condemn it when god has not?

No -- henceforth, the ecclesiastical courts only have jurisdiction over various species of primate, a number of bats, the elephant shrew, and the Cairo spiny mouse.

Anyway. I think it would be fun (whether in your worldbuilding or in real life is left as an exercise for the reader) to have a heretical order dedicated to figuring out which nonhuman species Have Sinned through a variety of recognized metrics (since it can't just be menstruation), and revering the ones who Have Not Sinned as transcendently innocent souls.

Sorry for all the nonsense here, below is the link I mentioned previously, goodnight everyone.

"menstruation is punishment for original sin" is a fairly common doctrine (altho in my experience it's usually more implicit than just baldly stated like that)

anyway this implies that of all the animal kingdom, humans are not UNIQUE in sinning, but are joined by bats, the elephant shrew, and the spiny mouse species Acomys cahirinus. (according to my 5 seconds on wikipedia at least)

[the-firebird69]

Freya Ridings - Castles (Official Video)

We have a lot of stuff to talk about how people need to learn that we need this stuff we need regular cars we need bikes and now and he says you can sell the frame and the suspension and it's like a rolling chassis but with the lights and light kit and everything set the motor and a transmission and he and suggest one from the lawn mowers and Dan was excited he said that's an easy way to do it and a lot less liability and you have instructions on how to do it and people will figure it out they really need to and they'll get these damn lawn mowers right on lawn mowers and so now I understand he's on it and this is going to go and other people will be making the frames and the seat it's important to us and suspension in the forks and handlebars and tires brakes brake system and flight system and battery and then you have like this thing that hooks up to the motor somehow it says it's like a small capacitor with with a voltage regulator inside and will and Bill say that's what it is that's really a charger so that's nice to know you guys and the other goobers and he wants to do goober Meister I want to do goober Meister with him and he says I don't want to do goopermeister it's goobermeister. And yeah that would be fun it says hurricane arrange it she's looked a little like you before that's fun as well but really all you have to do is start like a consortium like you guys do with your food places it's like a co-op and you have coops that link together you can start it with a co-op actually cuz you could use him hemp and I actually got to do that that sounds like intriguing stuff and really they let you do that kind of thing cuz I think it's silly but we'd be starting a gear company and we'd start like this level one and level two and we have it all written down and I want to do it but we need this motorcycle idea it's a smaller bike it's good everyone's small you used to bring some Stratton and it has a special exhaust that you don't need to use a like the smelly catalytic converter and it sounds real loud and it sounds real good and I want to do that and really they're performance these days of the basic parts is really good and we're going to have to start this up and we need to and boil this would be a lot of fun having bikes that fit us and tons of them and really making the bike and the frame it's like a rolling chassis with the light system and brake system and usually they're way too much money but this would be a lightweight frame and inexpensive parts I made from local suppliers and he's saying maybe we could get recycled parts going and start recycling like madness and Dan says some of them are and it's a great idea and if you kick some parts in a hard to get for them front forks are impossible even the Springer would be great and so they're going to look at that and you can use the Springer for any of the bikes except for like a dirt bike but so we're going to look at going ahead and doing that too and trying to do our own and it's going to be a fad and it will kick in and it will be something everybody starts doing it's hard for a regular people to do cuz they can't get the motor in there and it really need to have instructions for your people that work and we get that too they won't be able to if you don't so you have to be careful with it but I want to go ahead and make mine and he says do you have a frame that's like smaller instead I might have one kicking around that we were using since it's one compete a little because my shop is kind of small and he gets that and you might get ideas and I might do it for mine and we can get these lawn mowers out of our yards we have tons of these damn things

Freya ridings

I like this idea a lot of making the rolling chassis with the lights and shocks and brakes it is really not a unique idea but it's a great one it's a little unique cuz you have the lights in the brakes everything you need except the motor but really actually it is unique I take it back as for a lawn mower and you can include the sprockets that make it go pretty much the fastest and with one gear and he says you really have two gears there sort of a gear and a half and I get that it's because the sprockets make it faster so we are going to go ahead and start to make our own cuz nobody's doing anything

Mac daddy

Max usually don't do it and mac daddy too but really they don't have anything and people are running out of stuff that works and these bikes would be great for a while and then people would make the v twin motor for the Briggs & Stratton company and they still run it and they are easy to make and they come out fast and boy are they nice they're decent motors and we're hoping this idea works

Thor Freya

Olympus

[hakesbros]

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[4evamc]

Misha Tweets

Transcript

Ed Levine: Welcome to Special Sauce 2.0. Serious Eats podcast about food and life. Every week on Special Sauce we begin with Ask Kenji, where Kenji Lopez-Alt, Serious Eats Chief Culinary Consultant, gives the definitive answer to the question of the week that a serious eater like you has sent us.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Generally, sort of like delicate leafy herbs like cilantro, parsley, basil, they tend to not be very good in their dried counterparts. Thyme, rosemary, oregano, they actually work pretty well in their dried forms.

EL: After Ask Kenji, a conversation with our guest, today in house, Misha Collins. He is, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel. Did I pronounce that right?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, and has now written with his wife Vicki Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time.

EL: Now it's time to meet Misha Collins. He's, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, which has had an insane run, right? It's like 2008 to 2019.

MC: Yeah, we're in our 15th season right now.

EL: That never happens.

MC: No, it doesn't. I don't know why they kept us on the air.

EL: Collins is also the co-founder and board president of Random Acts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding and inspiring acts of kindness around the world. He's also a published poet. Very impressive dude.

MC: Thank you.

EL: And has now written with his wife Vicky Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time. So welcome to Special Sauce, Misha.

MC: I'm very happy to be here.

EL: So the first question I always ask, in your case it's particularly relevant, is tell us about life at your family table growing up. Your family table was not exactly traditional.

MC: That is true. I was raised by a single mom. My parents separated when I was three years old and I visited my father on every other weekend for most of my childhood, but he wasn't really a cornerstone of my upbringing. But my mother and my brother and our dog were a very tight family unit, and we lived in Western Massachusetts primarily growing up and moved a lot. We were in a new home I would say on average once every nine months or so. I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15.

EL: So you were like an Army brat, only you were a different kind of brat.

MC: Right. An Army brat without the parents building up a pension plan.

EL: Right.

MC: Another thing I think that an Army brat family has is a cadre possibly, of other kids that are going through the same experience, and I was generally going to a new school every year and meeting kids that were in fairly stable childhoods and who knew one another and who were familiar with the school, so I was always approaching schools and new towns-

EL: You were the permanent new kid.

MC: Yeah, with a little bit of trepidation, and trying to figure out how I could ingratiate myself to the new communities and the new schools. My mother was very eccentric and iconoclastic. She talked about the revolution a lot. I was born in 1974, and we lived through a tumultuous political time in our country, and she didn't want to have us grow up being conventional young men, so she would do things like dress me up in pink tights and paint my nails and send me off to Cub Scouts. Which I think in 2020 might actually fly, but in a working class community in Massachusetts, when you show up at Cub Scouts in the boys' locker room with nail polish and long hair-

EL: Not so much.

MC: And pink tights, you're ostracized. So, I kind of had to find a way to blend in and disappear a little bit as a kid in new schools, and I think that it built a lot of character in a lot of ways, and made me more resilient and adaptable and independent than I otherwise would have been. But at the same time, there's a certain lack of stable foundation that was challenging.

EL: I had not the same kinds of travails in my own childhood, but you do become resilient and eminently adaptable, but it also has a cost. It exacts a cost that you can't deal with as you're going through it, but you almost have to deal with it at some point in order to really resolve some of the issues that came out of it, I assume.

MC: Yeah. I'm sure you've found the same thing, but I feel like I'm a 45-year-old man and I'm still discovering things and unpacking them and repairing them, I think. There are definitely things that you take away from a childhood like that that give you real strength.

One of the things that I love about my childhood is that I know that you don't need money to be happy and you can get by on just about nothing, and that gives you, I think, quite a bit of power going into the world because you don't feel beholden to the comforts of ... I don't feel beholden to the comforts of money. I'm okay with scarcity. At the same time, I don't know that I was really terribly good at connecting with people or making friends, and I probably still struggle with that.

EL: Yeah. So, you wrote this amazing piece in The Times, and you wrote that “times were often lean, but one luxury we always had an abundance was food, even if it came by the five finger discount. My mother taught me how to steal peaches from the Stop and Shop grocery store when I was four. We were stealing from the man. It was a justified rebellion against an unjust system.”

EL: So, whoa. Okay, those sentences made me stop in my tracks. That's pretty intense. I was actually thinking about this movie, Shoplifters. I don't if you've ever seen it.

MC: Oh yeah. Yeah.

EL: Because in there the father figure, who turns out not to be the father, teaches the kids how to steal so they can eat. And so, wow. I mean, talk about that. Talk about getting conflicting messages from your mother. It's like, whoa.

MC: It's funny, because now hearing you read that, it paints a portrait of a parent who was raising children without a moral compass, and I think that was not at all the case. This was righteous rebellion. We were stealing ... We would never have stolen from the local co-op, but this was from a corporate entity, and these corporations were out to exploit the proletariat. I actually felt the exhilaration of feeling like I was part of a rebellion at that point, and frankly indoctrinated into that at a really young age. At the age of four, I was aware that it was us against them. We were the little guys and that we had a justice on our side. At the same time, it's a complicated thing to be training a little four year old how to steal.

MC: I have a very distinct memory of the fruit island in the Stop and Shop, and me grabbing a peach. This was the first time that I remember ever shoplifting anything. I grabbed the peach and then I ducked down behind the island, and my mother said, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do it like that. You have to take it. You have to be very calm. You have to not look around. You can't show that you're distressed at all or that you're nervous, and then you put it in your backpack." Then we would go up to the cash register and we would pay for some of the groceries, so that we were distracting them, and then scoot out the door.

EL: And you just, I assume, felt that there was nothing particularly abnormal about this because you had nothing to compare it to.

MC: Right. Yeah, this was my normal.

EL: Yeah. You weren't stealing from somebody or something that needed the money, you were stealing as part of an ethos. Right?

MC: Right.

EL: As part of like, this is the way we work the system to fight the man.

MC: Right, precisely. Yeah.

EL: You also wrote, and I'm going to quote a couple of more sentences from the piece because it was so beautiful, "My upbringing taught me you didn't need money to be happy, that you didn't have to play by the rules, that the whole world was just begging to be explored. But now by the hindsight of fatherhood and from the comfort of a therapist's couch, I see that while my childhood had been rife with adventure, it also had been lonely and frightening and wanting." So you were always reconciling those two things, weren't you?

MC: I wouldn't say I was always reconciling them, because as a child I struggled at times. I felt sad and lonely, but I didn't think that it was because of my childhood.

EL: Got it.

MC: I thought my childhood was full of adventure, and I was proud of my childhood. Up until when I was 25 I don't think I looked back on it and thought that there had been any damage done by that.

EL: Right, and that there was anything dysfunctional about it.

MC: Right. And on balance, my childhood was incredibly ... I think I had a secure attachment with my mother. My mother was there. She was loving. She never failed to convey that love to me and my brother. So she served as my anchor emotionally, and that was unfailing. But because the rest of our life was so fractured and so nomadic, she was my only anchor.

EL: Yeah, because as you said, how do you establish connections with any kids when you're moving every few months?

MC: Right, and when you're showing up at school in pink tights at a working class school you're also getting alienated by your peers, and so the other kids actually ended up being kind of frightening to me.

EL: I read your Wikipedia page, and somehow you escaped and you ended up at a prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon, and then the University of Chicago. What a narrative your life has been. How did that happen?

MC: Now that you're asking the question, I'm reflecting on it possibly for the first time. But one thing that I know happened as a result of my childhood and and partly as a result of feeling like I wasn't fitting in with other kids, is that I was a smart kid and I could win the favor of my teachers. So when I was in school, I did very well in school. It was like the thing I could throw myself into and be safe and get some accolades.

EL: Some positive feedback.

MC: And some positive reinforcement. So I did well in school, and we lived in the town of Northfield for a little while, which was where Northfield Mount Hermon is. They had a program that had been implemented from the inception of the school where local day students could get pretty much a full ride if they were in need, and we were in need, so I could go to a fancy high school for free as a day student. Then I ended up basically getting the same deal at the University of Chicago.

EL: Amazing.

MC: Yeah. At the time, I thought I was going to go into politics, so I was sort of on a very clear path. And that wanting to go into politics was also born of my childhood and of my mother talking about politics all the time, and making me and my brother very aware of the plight of people in need in our country and around the world. It felt like that was the right place for me.

EL: Yeah. Again, and this is the final sentences I'm going to read from the Times piece, because it gets us back to food. Which is, "I recently found an old journal in a box in the back of my closet, and on the page from a decade ago where I had taken inventory of the good and bad of my upbringing the word cooking is circled and underlined with urgency in the plus column, as if I was thinking that food had been the cornerstone of happiness in my youth." Elaborate on that. I mean, that's an amazing statement.

MC: I think as a nomadic family, we moved around and we brought with us what we could, and in terms of material objects, there was very little that was a through line. But we did bring with us from place to place the tradition of sitting down for family meals every night.

EL: Even if you were in a teepee or in a park.

MC: Right. Even if we were sitting on a log in the woods in the rain, we would be sitting down and eating together. There were no distractions. There was never a television on, and there was no coercion in getting to the dinner table. There was no question about it. Not because it was an edict from an authority figure, but because we all just coalesced around dinner and loved it.

EL: You needed it.

MC: Yeah.

EL: It was a permanent form of glue for the family, right?

MC: Yeah. It really was important to us. We would go spend Christmas with my mother's mother, my grandmother, and she was a cook as well, and food was a centerpiece of that family interaction. And for me now that I have kids, I notice that when I'm feeling like a guilty or absent father, the way that I most quickly show my affection and love for my kids is I just make them food. It's like the way that I know to convey to a child everything's safe, everything's okay, and I love you.

EL: Yeah. But in 21st century America, and maybe all around the world, it's hard to do that, right? There are lots of pressures that are forcing people not to eat together.

MC: Right.

EL: Both parents are working, kids are all over the place. But you obviously, I think as a result of your upbringing, it was important when you had a family and a wife that you made that same time for dinner.

MC: Yeah. It feels very important to me. I think sometimes I'm actually kind of maybe forcing my agenda of cooking on my kids. Like, "Come on guys, let's make something in the kitchen." A lot of times they want to go outside and I want to work in the kitchen, and I have to check myself and say, "Okay, we'll go play a little bit of soccer first before we get to canning the pears."

EL: Right. Because the act of eating a meal and preparing it is imbued with so much more meaning for you than it is for them.

MC: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah.

EL: So you end up being an actor, and I'm just assuming that like all actors, you struggled for many years before you found yourself on the set of Supernatural. So, tell us in a few sentences the arc of your acting career.

MC: Well as I mentioned earlier, my intention after college was to go into politics. I interned at the White House and I got a job at NPR in Washington, DC, and I was really disappointed with what I saw at the White House, and I thought, "Oh God, I have to come up with a whole new plan here." I thought it was going to be the best and the brightest minds under one roof. This was the Clinton administration. And instead what I found was the halls were filled with people who were sycophants, whose parents had donated money to the campaign. They were all yaysayers. There was no real discourse about political ideas, which of course is actually what you need in an administration. You need people who are going to be in lock step and are going to support your decisions, but I was too young and naive to know that.

So when I saw it, I thought, "This is not for me." I thought, "I will try to find another way that I can have an impact." I think there's a lot of hubris in this, but I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll become an actor. I'll get famous and then I'll parlay my celebrity into some sort of political influence."

EL: Oh, because that happens all the time.

MC: Right. I mean really, really completely naive, and totally full of myself. Then I moved to LA and I thought it was going to take a couple of years to attain a certain level-

EL: To become rich and famous.

MC: To be rich and famous. And it took a long time to become-

EL: It took a decade, probably.

MC: To become moderately comfortable and a C-list celebrity. But somewhere along the line I stopped thinking about that end goal of I'm on this path so that I can have influence, blah blah blah, and I just started becoming an actor, and I was just acting for the sake of acting and not for this aspirational, high-minded goal.

Then a couple of years ago we got a new president, and that lit a fire under me. It was actually during the campaign when I started to think, "Oh, Trump might get elected. Oh, this is serious," and then my C-list celebrity started to come into play and I thought, "All right, well I can use the platform that I have."

EL: By the way, I think it's at least B-minus, okay?

MC: Well you, as everyone knows, grade on a curve, so thank you for your charity. In a strange way it feels to me a little bit like it's come full circle, and now that the show's ending and after 15 seasons I'm asking the question, "Okay, how can I be of use in the world?" I don't know what's next for me. I don't know if I spend a lot of time on television sets after this or not. I'm trying to do some soul searching and figure out what I really want to be when I grow up. But that's, in a nutshell, my path.

EL: It's an amazing path, and you accomplished much more as an actor than almost any actor I know. To be a working actor and to have made some money doing it is actually an incredible accomplishment, and maybe it's to the resilience you discovered you had in your childhood.

MC: Yeah, I think possibly. I think obviously there's a lot of dumb luck that comes into play. It's not my fault that the show that I'm on has been on for 15 seasons or has the devoted fan base that it has.

EL: There are conventions for Supernatural. I notice this-

MC: We have conventions. There are tattoos with face on them. I mean, it's hard not to be full of yourself in this context. But yeah, we have a really, really devoted fan base, and it's quite remarkable to be a part of.

What was it? I think it was Freakonomics at one point. Maybe it was in the book Freakonomics, but they said that pursuing a career in acting is like pursuing a career as a drug dealer. It's very, very difficult to be one of the kingpins, to be successful in the field.

EL: Right.

MC: The odds are so bad that it takes a certain personality that's defective that wants to even pursue that in the first place, because 99 out of 100 people are going to fail at that and then you're just going to be a low level street corner drug dealer, or barely getting food on your table as a background actor.

EL: Yeah. Well Misha, we have to leave it right here for this episode of Special Sauce, but you're going to stick around and tell us all about your two terrific kids, West and Maison.

MC: We just say Mason.

EL: West and Mason.

MC: Yes, we anglicize the French spelling.

EL: And your wife Vicki, and your family collaboration on The Adventurous Eaters Club. Thank you for spending so much time with us on Special Sauce.

MC: Thank you so much for having me, and I can't wait to talk about the book.

Listen to the podcast here

[mxinevitable]

We're taking off we're getting there darlings. a point to local leader so we can get a few provisioners out in the world soon. Grabbed the vitomatic from Vault 81 and the engine outta Corvega with Lily. The uhhh power armor raider with the chaingun tore me up but I managed to get a good crit on his fusion core. Jared is still up there for now oops. Getting into the habit of scrounging and breaking down guns for parts. It's been a while since I started another settlement but I'm gonna pack out Abernathy, Starlight and Tenpines before I get to sunshine co-op or taffington or God forbid covenant which I haven't actually cleared out lol lmao

Learning the vibe so to speak. Without planning you are not gonna be surviving on scavenged ammo for your guns. It's really a barter economy! Cricket is getting CLEANED OUT of 20ga and 45s and 10mm ammo when I find her skinny little ass.

But now I'm kind of starting to think about leaving specific stuff in specific places like consolidating the combat carbines and 223 rounds to like... idk County crossing and keeping more of the more common stuff closer to concord. Having a few sets of gear for when I'm gonna be going at synths (energy resistance who would've thought) or like robots (ngl I haven't hardly fought robots I'm not looking forward to it) but since the difficulty is REALLY BAKED IN locationally it seems prudent.

Since local leader ALSO buffs the minutemen and flares it'll be another priority but when I do a wander run I wanna be way more intentional and maybe get a bit more outside my comfort zone.

But in the interest of doing this right Hensa's gotta get some intention so I went with the big surprise that our lady was an abolitionist and in the interest of that we will assume she was freely using subterfuge in order to support and participate in armed struggle against the state. Been in a few brief gun fights, maybe more. No stranger to conflict. I think this is supported by me being a fucking AWFUL shot.

So she pops out and does what she would've done anyways. Organize for self defense.

A sidearm and a long gun, manual action pump shotgun or a carbine. A nice weave in a red suit is kinda her look right now but I'm gonna try to have a few key sets for certain regions (TERRIFIED TO GO TO THE GLOWING SEA)

I keep dogmeat with me (problematic) and just swapped R4-04 for Curie (I want to teach her to be mean) but I don't really have a specific companion in mind to focus on. But I am excited to see them specialize along with gear I upgrade em with.

Anyways I guess she's gonna infiltrate the brotherhood

Haha oh

Life in the Ruins is a top tier modlist for fallout 4 holy fuck

[fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive]

The area I live in is host to a lot of small, local businesses, many of which are heavily involved in community outreach and support (including of one another!) Many of them are foodie-related; we're only a couple hours from Portland, so locally-sourced food is a Big Thing, whether it's restaurants or the local co-op grocery, and we have a proportionately large number of breweries. The turnover of employees is fairly low, for the food service industry, because for the most part employees get treated like Actual Human Beings.

And guess what, people have brand loyalties! They're pretty polyamorous about it, but they wear merch, they make a point of getting beer from their favourite brewery even if it isn't as convenient as one of the big chain groceries, they go to a local restaurant once or twice a month instead of fast food all the time, etc.

A lot of those people, @featherwurm and I included, are millennials. We do have brand loyalties. We just don't have loyalties for the big, corporate brands the economy wants us to.

The reason most millennials don’t make a scene when an establishment doesn’t treat them right is because we function more on positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement. For Boomers, they can make a scene because they know negative reinforcement gets them what they want; they want to PUNISH these establishments or workers, but Millennial purchasing patterns are very different.

Growing up in the computer age, we’ve become masterful at filtering junk information, and that includes advertising. It doesn’t matter how much a politician or restaurant or whatever memes, we’ll find them funny, but we’re still not going to shop there or give them our money of we dislike them. The way brands become successful with Millennials is actually just word of mouth.

So when an establishment treats us poorly, we don’t make a scene. We simply never go back and don’t tell our friends about it. Conversely, places that treat us well we immediately go tell others about.