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otter helping mama cat with her babies

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Striking New York Times tech workers have created a “Guild Builds” page dedicated to strike-themed games you can play, including a spin on Wordle, a word search, and the custom Connections I reported on earlier today. As part of its strike announcement on Monday, the New York Times Tech Guild requested that people don’t cross the digital picket line to play the NYT’s daily puzzle games. This collection of five other games offers an alternative if you want to support the striking workers but also do some brain teasers.

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Knightober 2024 by Hannah Alexander Artwork

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kensyouen_Y

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Plot twist: the two boys you're choosing between are polyamorous, but they also hate eachother's guts so you still have to pick one

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The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course

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Apropos of (almost) nothing: I'm the kind of pedant who dislikes calling tentacle porn "tentacle porn" not because I think it's aberrant but because, 98% of the time, what's being depicted are octoform arms or tendrils, not tentacles. Tentacles are defined by the clubbed ends, which are the only part that have suckers. If it's tapered and has suckers all the way down, it's an octoform arm; if it has no suckers at all, it's a tendril.

You're welcome.

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a nsa agent in a suit looking through my laptop camera: she’s on her phone…….. our data shows that she’s got tumblr open on her laptop but she has tumblr open on her phone………. double check her browser?

some nerd hired straight out of college: *types rapidly* she’s definitely got tumblr open on her laptop

the nsa agent, softly: so why is she looking at it on her phone…..

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is it just me or does the way people treat like "dopamine" and "serotonin" in modern pop psych context read exactly like balancing the humors

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As soon as I read this article I ordered a copy for myself. I prefer physical books for cookbooks so I am waiting for it to arrive next Monday. (I enjoy flipping through, discovering interesting recipes and seeing the pictures without being online.)

This is the book I've been dying to read, as I told Jules when I found him on twitter. He's very kind and says he looks forward to hearing what I think after I've had a chance to read and use it.

Before this the only thing I found was a guide to baking with brain fog on the King Arthur's flour site. Useful but I needed so much more.

I look forward to more volumes, such as Cripping Your Outdoor Kitchen. I'm guessing this first book will start many conversations and that will lead to a mass sharing of tips and tricks throughout the Disability Universe. We Spoonies already discuss getting calories in on days when it seems impossible. But this makes me think that cooking more often may be doable with a bit of guidance.

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A Pie Shop on Chicago’s South Side Serves More Than Dessert

With her first brick-and-mortar bakery, Justice of the Pies, the pastry chef Maya-Camille Broussard focuses on creativity — and inclusivity for people with disabilities.

By Kayla Stewart

The South Side of Chicago brims with inimitable African American culture and history, and the pastry chef Maya-Camille Broussard is adding her brand of sweetness to the place where she was born and raised. In June, Ms. Broussard opened the first brick-and-mortar store of her longtime delivery and wholesale pie business, Justice of the Pies. The shop, in a former dentist’s office in Avalon Park, one of the South Side’s many historic, predominantly African American neighborhoods, serves Ms. Broussard’s inventive pies and pastries, such as her calling cards — a blue cheese praline pear pie and a strawberry basil Key lime pie — along with unorthodox items like her salted caramel peach pie and a deep-dish chilaquiles quiche.

Ms. Broussard, who lost 75 percent of her hearing in a childhood accident, may be the industry’s most prominent hard-of-hearing Black pastry chef. She has gained a following for her pies through social media, pop-ups and appearances on the Netflix competition show “Bake Squad.” “I realized that being a member of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community actually gave me a superpower,” she said, “and that superpower includes a heightened sense of smell and taste.” Ms. Broussard chose her bakery’s location in hopes of encouraging other chefs and entrepreneurs to join her. “I want to force people who don’t look like me to come to the South Side if they want my pies,” she said. “I want to force people to come to a neighborhood that deserves private investment, a neighborhood that has a blighted corridor, a neighborhood that has empty storefronts.” Zella Palmer, an author and professor at Dillard University in New Orleans who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, said neighborhoods like Avalon Park deserve more inventive Black-owned businesses. “There’s a huge pride in the community to see this gleaming pie shop,” she said. “This is a pie shop that looks like it could be in Brooklyn, or on Magazine Street in New Orleans, but it’s here.”

Several of the shop’s counters are 32 inches high, meeting the height standards of the American Disabilities Act and making them accessible for wheelchair users. Each section of the shop has a different floor tile texture, which helps patrons with limited sight who use a walking cane navigate the store. “How can I be an ambassador for people living with disabilities and have a space that isn’t accessible?” she said. Signs in the shop carry Braille inscriptions, and language is designed to be inclusive, too. (In the bathroom, there are “personal hygiene products” rather than “feminine hygiene products.”) A service door that has a bell and a flashlight allows Ms. Broussard to remain aware of important deliveries.

more at the gift link

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mini uchiwa icing cakes / creema

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This is super exciting! Invertebrates are often overlooked in favor of the charismatic megafauna, but in a lot of ways they're even more ecologically crucial. These little native snails are detritivores, helping to break down decaying matter and convert it back to nutrients more accessible to other living beings. The invasive snails that overtook their habitat--the African giant land snail and the rosy wolf snail--don't fulfill the same ecological roles. The former voraciously chows down on live plants, while the latter is a carnivore that hunts down other snails.

It's even more important to be reintroducing the native partula snails, because these species have been declared extinct in the wild. The last few members of each species were brought into captivity and bred in safe enclosures, and now their descendants are heading back to their historic range in places that have had all of their predators removed so they have a good chance of building up a healthy population before spreading out beyond those safe confines.

And to that I say: "Go, little snails, go!"

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the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura

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perfect