Over the years dude and I have come up with our own sundae...

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Over the years dude and I have come up with our own sundae recipe called The Unspeakable Ice Cream Disaster. Someday we’ll custom-order it, but not tonight– the joint is jumping! (at King Condrell’s Candy & Ice Cream)

Farm Fresh? Natural? Eggs Not Always What They're Cracked Up To Be

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In case you were curious, as I was. I often see “Vegetarian-Fed” and wonder WTF? Chickens are not naturally vegetarian. 

The short answer: most of the stuff on egg cartons is legally meaningless. The rest is misleading at best. 

okay so random question (which you may or may not know the answer for...?) if you want to buy eggs t

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Well, as the article points out– pasture-raised is the gold standard. It at least means the chickens are outdoors and have theoretical access to insects and the like. 

Your best bet is to go to the farmer’s market, if you have one, and ask questions. Different farmer’s markets also have wildly different standards! The one my sister’s farm sells at has very stringent requirements; vendors can only sell things they produce. Other markets don’t have requirements like that, so the vendors could well be selling grocery-store eggs. Asking is the only way to know for sure. 

(To give perspective, at my sister’s farm the chickens are pastured on fields on the farm, and they have a rolling coop that is moved weekly to fresh pasture so that their supply of grass, weeds, insects, etc. is frequently renewed. For these animals, plants, seeds, leaves, insects and even rodents and small snakes are a normal and healthy part of their diet; their scratching and dust-bathing helps till the soil and kill weeds, and their manure fertilizes the soil, and they are part of the rotation of crops and livestock on the farm. Other farms are less stringent about moving the chickens, but do make sure they have access to grass. If the chickens are penned in one place, they will within a month or so have the area stripped down to bare dirt. This is still better than an indoor space, but it’s not as nice. Legally, though, there’s no difference.)

(I was shocked because I thought free-range meant more than it does. But, knowing chickens– if “free range” really meant they freely roamed around, they would mostly be dead, because chickens are delicious and everything eats them.)

In terms of the eggs being safe to eat, normally a spoiled egg will be obviously bad. There’s actually not much that can be done to make an egg not safe, because they’re sealed packages! Whether the exteriors are washed or not is more or less superficial in terms of safety. Just, keep all eggs refrigerated unless you’re very confident in the source and you know the eggs are unwashed and have never been chilled. (Once chilled, keep chilled.)

And don’t eat them raw, unless, again, you’re supremely confident. (Most dangerously, chickens can harbor salmonella– but it makes them sick too, so the producer would know within a relatively short time period if their chickens had it– but there’s nothing legislating this. I know my sister wouldn’t sell her eggs in that case, but other producers might. It’s a hard living.)

oh for fuck’s sake. i just pasted the kes/shara

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oh for fuck’s sake. i just pasted the kes/shara thing I started writing 3 days ago into a proper Scrivener document for organization/formatting/final polishing because it was composed in a google doc full of other fragments, and for the first time i see a wordcount. i had previously counted it at like 3500 words, and i knew it was at least twice that. 

…

it’s 18k words long you guys.

what the fuck.

so much for a single chapter oneshot.

what the fuck.

I’m going to go re-count and make sure I didn’t paste in any deleted scenes or whatever (protip for highly prolific writers: never really delete anything, it costs almost nothing to keep it and it’s sometimes amusing later), but I think that’s real.

Fuck.  Nope, it’s really that long. 17,903 words.

I guess I haven’t been as useless lately as I thought? 

Doesn’t change the fact I still gotta fix chapter 7 by Wednesday! 

Norasol is maybe my favorite character I’ve ever

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Norasol is maybe my favorite character I’ve ever invented? Only I don’t feel like I invented her. She was named Abuelita at first, and then I decided against that, and she was Marisol for a hot minute, and then I changed it because of the Dave Van Ronk pronunciation of “Noah’s Dove” in Fare Thee Well. [If I had wings, like Nora’s dove…] 

But almost everything else about her, she has invented herself, I swear. Writing this Shara/Kes thing, she’s only about forty, and she has informed me that she’s a lesbian hedgewitch, and also not psychic. I am really enjoying the shit out of her. I don’t know where she came from. 

“I thought we had a chat about this,” Norasol said. “I thought we agreed you were going to stick to boys, on this trip.”

“You suggested that,” Kes corrected her, “and I told you I’d keep it in mind. I didn’t promise anything.” He managed not to roll his eyes, because he knew that would be a fatal mistake. “It’s not like I’d be any safer with boys.”

“You can handle yourself,” Norasol said, “I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about the fact that every girl you sleep with, you want to marry. And you’re twenty, Kes, so of course they break your heart, and then I have to carry your mopey ass home and deal with your shit. Listen to me and don’t sleep with any more girls until you’re thirty.”

“What could that possibly fix?” Kes asked, too amused to be angry with her.

“It would fix your problem,” Norasol said, “because no girl wants to marry a boy of twenty, but a man of thirty, maybe that would be sensible behavior from.”

“That happened one time,” Kes said.

hansbekhart: escavel: sopphistries: tittyrants: fire-lord-frowny: It really, REALLY bothers me...

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hansbekhart:

escavel:

sopphistries:

tittyrants:

fire-lord-frowny:

It really, REALLY bothers me when I hear people frame climate change and other environmental crises as something that everyday, average-ass people are responsible for, and not corporations and entire governments. 

Like literally, how can a regular-ass person ~opt out~ of all damaging behaviors while still being able to function in society? 

You literally can’t. 

The future of our planet is not down to whether or not someone recycles their water bottle. 

It’s down to whether or not governments and corporations decide to quit sucking up all our resources and poisoning the earth with reckless abandon. 

I mean obviously people should still live as cleanly and as sustainably as they can manage where they are and with what they have, but like. THAT isn’t the major issue. 

govts and corporations have deliberately put the onus on yr individual choices so the system can continue being as destructive/profitable

God bless this post this pisses me off so much
Also this hyper-individualist shift of responsibility is largely an American thing and consumerism is framed as a solution- e.g., buy more shit that’s sustainable! That’ll fix the problem (buy a new, green water bottle! buy a new, green car! buy a new, green whatever-the-fuck that’ll just ultimately produce more waste)!

I took a course in sustainable engineering.

The professor mentioned that even if every private individual in the world were to conserve resources and the environment the ol’ Jimmy Carter way- by turning down the thermostat, recycling your glass and plastics and metals, cut down on luxuries, take shorter showers, etc., it would only get us 10% of the way to where we need to be in order to avoid global catastrophic climate change.

The vast majority of freshwater use is from industry and agriculture. http://ift.tt/1nj1uBd 

The vast majority of CO2 emissions is from industrial and electrical generation sites and associated vehicles. http://ift.tt/1PjQ2lf

Private individuals hardly make a dent, even in ideal conditions.

I disagree completely.

Look, yes - in our individual buying choices, one person’s decision to use glass or plastic, or to turn down their thermostat, doesn’t mean much. But the individual consumer absolutely has the power to change the behavior of corporations.

Social media, guys! Go on the Facebook of your favorite brands and ask them whether they guarantee all of their products are made in safe conditions, using non-toxic materials. Send them the latest dumb email forward your Grandma sent you about formaldehyde being found in products like theirs, and ask them what they’re doing to ensure their stuff is safe. Ask them what they’re doing to address modern slavery in their supply chain - especially food brands! There is shitloads of slavey in manufacturing of food.

Make it loud and public. Tweet at brands that you won’t buy their products until they publish statements on their website, their packaging, their social media accounts, that everything they do is as ethical, safe and non-toxic as possible.

It makes a difference. And I know this for a fact because when the social media admin, or the sales person, or whoever sees these messages, they ask someone like me what we’re doing about this stuff. Are there slaves making our products?? Is this thing we make toxic?? I work in Quality Management, but in other companies it’s Production, Supply Chain, etc etc - there are people whose jobs it is to make sure the answer is no.

You as an individual consumer have enormous power to change the behavior of corporations. We’re not going to do anything to address these problems on our own, because guess what? Ensuring your products are lead free is expensive. Making sure it’s food safe is expensive. Ensuring my factories aren’t dumping waste water is expensive. Verifying that your products aren’t being outsourced to a building that’s about to collapse or get set on fire is expensive. Identifying modern slavery three steps away in my supply chain is expensive and also a huge investment of time and resources!

We aren’t going to do shit about it because we think the only thing consumers care about is the bottom cost. And as long as you only shop discounts and off price and flash sales, we’re right.

Because that’s what you’re paying for - you, personally, are contributing to misery overseas and in your own country. The answer isn’t, buy more shit that’s sustainable, the answer is make some noise to force us (corporations) to realize that you give a shit. Your voice is amplified more than you know, through social media. Vote with your dollar. Don’t let us look away and pretend that our margins are more important than the welfare of the people making it.

Yes– the last point is really important.
When I was a kid all the farms in my rural area got sold for subdivisions.
Now I’m in my thirties and a lot of those farms are getting bought back. There are organic farms now, there are CSAs where people subscribe to get food. There are farms where you pay part of the cost of your weekly box of veggies by coming and helping with the harvest. It’s not impossible to do, and the more people who do it, the more demand there is for it, the more farms there are. My sister just bought the farm she was apprenticed on, with the help of massive state grants to purchase the development rights in perpetuity– because all the surrounding hillsides are covered in McMansions, but her 200-year-old farmhouse and its outbuildings and most crucially, the acreage and its little streams and trout hatchery– those are preserved by New York State for agriculture.
Because taxpayers want that, because volunteers banded together to lobby for it. Because we want to grow our food near our homes, not truck it in from California. Because the people picking our strawberries should make a living wage and not be indentured slaves paying back the coyotes who human-trafficked them across a border and now literally own them.
It’s important to demand accountability from your producers.
No, recycling your water bottle won’t save the world.
But asking who picked your strawberries is a good start.

Hi I'm just gonna ... set up a little camp here in your Star Wars headcanon universe I like it here.

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MIND you? I want to join you! I have an unholy and abiding love of S’mores. 

They’re not just headcanons, I’m gonna get them up into a Final Boss Form on AO3 at some point. I think. 

I’m just deciding if I should end the Kes/Shara story at the point where it is, which is that they’ve decided not to kill each other, or if I should actually do an epilogue where there’s Poe. I mean, I’m in this deep already, right? 

I was congratulating myself about managing to have a story not involve social media or music at all but then I made myself super sad about it being one-dimensional. I don’t really Art but maybe if I can get myself together I’ll make myself an embroidery thing to be a section break. 

Kes pulled out a scrap of flimsi when they got to the market, and Shara peered over at the spiky, cryptic writing. “A shopping list?” she said.

He grinned a little sheepishly. “Norasol had planned to come along,” he said, “but she was nice enough when I told her I wanted to go with you instead that she just sent me with a list.”

Most of the things on the list were things that Shara had never even heard of, herbs and plants and things, and Kes gave the market stalls a thin-lipped once-over. “The weather shifted to autumn,” he said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Most of this stuff’s gone out of season now.”

“Out of season,” Shara said, trying to parse what that meant.

“Yeah,” he said, and only after a moment did he slide her a glance. “Because the plants only grow in the summer.”

Shara had never really considered this before. “Oh,” she said. “And it’s autumn now.”

I had already made  Yavin 4 a very farm-y society so it seemed to me that must be Kes’s people; for contrast, then, Shara is a spacer, born and raised on ships and space stations, and has never lived on a planet long enough to know what a season is. 

magickedteacup: Okay! After that long-winded critique commentary, I thought I really should do my...

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magickedteacup:

Okay! After that long-winded critique commentary, I thought I really should do my gushing commentary on one bit that I absolutely adore from @bomberqueen17 ‘s Kes and Poe fic bits. 

“You said that was a protection spell,” Poe said. “Magic.” Norasol was deeply superstitious. So was Kes. Poe always pretended he wasn’t. Nobody knew about the invisible designs he sometimes drew inside doorways, or the wordless little prayers he made sometimes. It wasn’t superstition, it was just giving himself a little mental space to process the stress of his life. It was a healthy human impulse.

Religion, belief, and superstition is something I’ve always kind of… tilted my head at in a bit of confusion, in terms of how I want to talk about it in fic, or if I want to talk about it at all. It can be hard to talk about, or embarrassing, depending on the context and who’s doing the talking. 

I guess I’ll talk about it indirectly by telling a story. So, I once knew a guy, half-Chinese, half white European descent, a friend, who–something I noticed about his fic was that every once in a while there’d be this reoccurring theme in his characterization, of belief and having protective superstitions. Like, he’d flesh out a character by elaborating this aspect of them that wasn’t maybe even in canon, but sort of added in by him. I didn’t know what to make of this, and didn’t ask. But in hindsight, I wonder–I could be wrong of course, but I wonder if this was because it was something about himself he was talking about, or something of close family. 

I’ll tell another story. My family is Vietnamese. Both my Dad and my brother are deeply religious, but my Dad, while kind of raising us interfaith, also is deeply attached to Catholicism. My brother is deeply, conservatively Hindu (long story, but not that far-fetched; ask him sometime about Hinduism in early Viet history; or don’t; he may never stop). I’m kind of in-between. So between us and my Catholic grandparents, I guess there’s a lot I could say about the practice of belief, but I usually don’t. 

So to see someone talking about belief, especially in the way that Poe does here–it’s like seeing this wonderful, most intimate part of someone, about a topic that isn’t talked a lot about, necessarily. It brings out a gushing part of me that goes: Poe, let’s be friends! The stars are out. Hold my hand. Etc. XD

Faith and belief are *super hard* for most writers. I feel like we don’t get good representations of a lot of it in fiction. Part of it is that either you are a writer who shares this belief/faith, and thus your writing is taking place within its context and is sort of opaque to anyone outside it, OR you are a writer who does NOT share this faith, and thus you’re probably poking fun at it or at least not being a respectful (see: like, all anthropology). OR, worse yet, you are a writer who shares the faith you are describing and are writing a persuasive tract, and that is the very worst and colors all other perceptions of faith-related texts to the point that nobody goes near them ever again. 

I was raised Catholic, but that was a result of my pragmatic parents negotiating before they even entered into a relationship: mom was Dutch Reformed Protestant, and they both agreed that a church was a good context for children, and Dad was like my church will throw me out if I don’t pick it, and my mom was like oh the Dutch Reformed are super chill and also there isn’t one near our house so, fine, you win. So I was raised Catholic, but my mother never converted and was always slightly eye-rolly about it. (Add to that how my father expressly gave us permission to ignore any homily that mentioned earthly politics at all, and indeed gave us a list of keywords we were to instantly disregard, and it was quite tolerable overall.)

Anyway. It’s really hard in a fantasy setting especially to convey people’s beliefs, because you have so much to lay out already, and it’s got to be an integral part of the person’s behavior, and it’s very very hard to describe without seeming to judge. That’s how I feel, anyway. 

And I’ve done a super crappy job so far in A Home Out In The Wind at conveying any kind of spiritual or supernatural or superstitious belief in any of the characters. Finn, I think, would be very divorced from that as a separate consideration– traditions and superstitions may be impenetrably put together in Stormtrooper culture and he wouldn’t natively know which was which.

My only excuse is that Poe is so concerned with the presentation of his character to others that he has made all of his superstitious and ritual beliefs so intensely private that nobody even knows what they are. And I’m going to stick to that. 

Maybe once upon a time Norasol sewed tiny protection symbols into the hems of all his undershirts, but it’s been so long since he’s been home that he’s worn all those out and thrown them away, and he doesn’t have the glyphs anywhere anymore. And he knew about them, but they were just silly. Except how maybe all the terrible things that have happened to him in the last couple of years are possibly down to the loss of that protection. 

My queue spit out that post about the marketing of the lie of individual responsibility for climate.

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My queue spit out that post about the marketing of the lie of individual responsibility for climate change, and I reread it and thought about it more, and like– yeah– it’s just so frustrating to live in a “representative” “democracy” where your vote doesn’t count, and it’s also frustrating to live in late-stage capitalism where you can vote with your limited dollars but if you dig deep enough almost all your options are a) horrible and b) identical.

So I guess I just wanted to point out that– yes, engaging with your consumption is a good and healthy thing to do and you should vote with your dollars wherever possible

but I’m also super over judging people who don’t because the vast majority of us have so little actual choice in our lives that it super sucks to get browbeaten about the few choices we do make.

So like. Live how you live and do what you gotta do. and if you can, seek out ethical consumption choices and vote with your feet and your dollars. It is empowering and makes you feel better; it’s lovely to succeed at finding local producers of stuff, and even online, making connections with small businesses truly does make you feel better about the shit you have to buy anyway. 

And I’ll point this out– even Amazon. Most people don’t know how Amazon works. But part of their evil genius is that they don’t actually sell most of the shit on their website. Go in and search for a thing you want. Look at your buying choices. If it’s something popular, you’ll probably get an automatic product page where you can just add it to your cart. But if you look, usually there’s more than one person selling it. 

Do you want to know how Amazon works, from the perspective of someone who uses the site as a seller? This may be a weird aside, but I’m going to explain it: 

If it says “ships from and sold by Amazon.com” it’s really them. If it says “Fulfillment by Amazon” it means some other company owns it but has sent it into Amazon’s warehouse so that when it is ordered, Amazon will pack and ship it. Since Amazon gets better rates with UPS and other carriers, that means the “free shipping” the customer gets costs less than it would directly cost the company who owns the product you’re about to buy if they shipped it themselves. If it says “ships from and sold by [some other company]”, then you’re buying whatever it is directly from this other company, and Amazon gets a cut but has no other actual involvement. (There won’t be Prime shipping on this because Amazon’s not shipping it. I get confused questions about that a lot. No, I don’t have access to Amazon’s loading dock, I can’t give you Prime Shipping, I’m just some lady with a tape gun and some recycled alt-newsweekly papers and a box, and a UPS pickup scheduled.)

This is why the tiny local camera shop I work for is still in business. Because of Amazon. Our local market could not sustain a camera shop. But because of the platform Amazon gives us, we sell all over the world and can just about scrape out a living. It’s pennies per item, but a huge volume. We pre-buy large amounts of things and send them to Amazon’s warehouse for them to use for Fullfillment By Amazon orders. That in turn has propped up the business enough that we can keep retail locations open and offer classes and field trips and community events, and keep employing our sales floor staff who mostly show little old ladies how to use their smartphone cameras. 

So, even things like that– just know who you’re buying from, when you use the world’s largest retail site, and maybe you’re still shopping local. Local to somebody, anyway. 

So I was perusing the Googles to mull over imagery and general concepts of backstory, atmosphere,...

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So I was perusing the Googles to mull over imagery and general concepts of backstory, atmosphere, etc., for the various stories I’m working on, and of course trying to psych myself up for fixing chapter 7 like I’ve been not doing to the point that I wrote a novella about something else entirely, because my brain meats are really something else. 

And somehow, I don’t remember why exactly, I wound up buying the Kindle version of I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman In Guatemala. So I’m reading that. And it’s. Oh. I mean. I knew what it was about, my mom’s a Spanish teacher, and she felt kind of single-handedly responsible for educating the high schoolers in our very isolated rural middle-America town about the entire rest of the world since they weren’t going to learn anyway. I think I read part of the book as a teenager; it’s familiar. But it’s. It’s entrancing and vivid and terrible. It’s not, like, suffering porn; she’s very matter-of-fact, very straightforward. 

It’s a good perspective. And it’s an excellent insight into the structures of how these kinds of atrocities take form. It’s also a wonderful and loving recounting of a culture from the inside. I think my favorite parts are the times she keeps saying “but there are other things, Indian things, that are secret and I can’t tell you because it would be a betrayal”– But what’s really getting to me is her recounting all the stories about adapting. Living high in the mountains as she did, with the other people of her village, that wasn’t them living traditionally. That was them living as refugees, trying to find a place to be left alone, trying to adapt their traditional ways– and it’s a culture that places a very high value on the transmission of knowledge, on learning by rote and imitation, on repetition of fundamentals, on universality of understanding– to living as fugitives in their own ancestral homelands. Trying to carve out enough space that enough survive to pass on the knowledge. Knowing that out of eight or nine children, only one or two might survive illness and malnutrition, to go on and have children of their own. 

Anyway. I need to go on and do other things but I had to mention a few impressions from the book. 

softpunkbucky: maakomori: like our cultures are not up for grabs theyre not there so you can mark...

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softpunkbucky:

maakomori:

like our cultures are not up for grabs theyre not there so you can mark your fantasy culture as Other and Strange you cant strip us out of it and then make like youre so diverse now when your universe is fundamentally based on the process of the neocolonial assimilation of our cultures to your understanding

like i get that tfa is a massively important film since none of our three main leads are white men but the b a s i s of the entire universe is based off theft from indigenous americans and asians and itd be nice to talk about it more

whenever i see padme amidala in her mongolian wedding outfit or her lips painted the way qing dynasty royals did or the jedi wearing their outfits that are so obv based off east asian monk robes it makes me uncomfortable and we shouldnt be asked to accept this and dismiss its impact just bcos it did something else well

esp because there is such a history – within science fiction especially – of co-opting specifically indigenous american and asian histories as both the foundations of genre to begin with and as othering tactics

there was that quote from junot diaz that im thinking about right how science fiction (esp exploratory science fiction) is based on experiences of settler colonialism and first contact with indigenous people

and its just really frustrating tbh

like ive def contributed to the hype train and im so so happy that john boyega and daisy ridley have become the stars they deserve to be

but the sw universe fundamentally does not sit well with me no matter how much i enjoy and like the films

#i was thinking about this post today and i was gonna make my own post but i’m gonna jump off this one instead #but ok i haven’t really reblogged a lot of padme amidala aesthetic posts and am kinda uncomfy with them #because a lot of them add a lot of elements that are obviously south/southeast/east asian inspired #and also use natalie portman as padme in the same graphic?? #like it’s one thing if you’re re-casting padme as asian #but to just use those elements as part of her ~aesthetic~ is another thing #and like honestly it’s disrespectful that star wars has never had an asian character as part of their trio #and yet have borrowed so heavily from our culture #so yeah i saw another padme aesthetic post and thought of this #surprisingly i haven’t reblogged this post before?? #star wars #movies #if you’re non-asian please reblog this (via @skywalkerd )

yup so I read enough of Rigoberta Menchu that I was

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yup so 

I read enough of Rigoberta Menchu that I was like, yo I gotta chill. (It was enough context at least that it got me through the incredibly dry yet terrible History subsection of the Guatemala wikipedia page. In case you were wondering, it’s the CIA’s fault, almost everything that happens to Rigoberta and her family is the CIA’s fault directly or indirectly, so go forth and get fucking furious about that because that’s some shit.)

So I uh. Was overtaken by a need to eat corn tortillas. So we went at 3:30 pm and had margaritas and huitlacoche tacos at a trendy local eatery. The waitress was a girl I used to skate with and I told her, sort of Eeyore-like, that I was a terrible human because that was my response to reading about the death by starvation of a bunch of indigenous Central Americans. I maybe did make a positive dent in the world by explaining to her that all those vanished great civilizations we learn about in school are in fact not actually vanished, which duly surprised and impressed her. 

I mean. I’m still a jerk though. But I’m glad I got my masa craving taken care of because i forgot, Cinco de Mayo is coming up real soon and that is some shit I do not need to get hung up in, ugh. 

I was thinking about traditional Mexican foods though and it struck me that with all their exotic cocktails there should be something crazy made with chocolate, since like, the Aztecs basically invented the stuff right (I don’t actually know that), so I Googled around and found out about atole, which was mentioned in Rigoberta’s memoirs, and champurrado, which is the chocolate version of it. So, just in time for it not to be winter, I’m suddenly obsessed with thick hot drinks. (THAT’S THE SECRET THERE’S MASA IN IT IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW.)

Fortunately there’s a Mexican grocery store about a mile from my house.