twentysomething. @demonic_caffeination on AO3. this is a sideblog! i follow back from @json-derulo. terfs, cops, and nazis will be blocked on sight. everyone else, welcome! 💖
i have a vision and no art skills with which to execute it but imagine the jake gylenhaal ferret gif with drayton slinging around a dratini like a wet noodle
you have permission to pick that 2 year old "abandoned" project back up. it's not mad at you for setting it aside. and maybe time and distance have helped ease or erase the things that made you put it down in the first place.
my unfinished battle jacket was hanging in a closet for two years + an entire move with some patches pinned on just waiting to be sewed in place. when i picked it back up everything was still waiting for me to start stitching.
as a writer, it’s very important that you know this: whenever you tell yourself “this will only be one-chapter-long” that is a lie. your brain is lying to you. it won’t, in fact, be just a short one-shot
Writing is lonely in a specific way that is hard to explain to people who don't do it. not lonely like isolated. lonely like you are trying to build a bridge to another human consciousness using only words on a page and you will never actually know if you got there.
You send the thing out and maybe someone reads it and something moves in them and they have no way to tell you exactly what moved or why and you have no way to know if it was the thing you meant or something else entirely.
You're working in permanent uncertainty about whether any of it lands. and you keep going anyway. you have to develop this strange faith in the act itself, in the value of the attempt separate from the outcome, because if you need confirmation every time you sit down you will never sit down.
Most of the writing happens in a silence that never fully gets broken. you learn to be okay in that silence or you don't last.
Something so funny about rereading one's own unfinished fics. Like wow this is pretty good! Almost as if it was written exactly according to what I personally like in fact! Someone should finish it!
I love thai iced tea. if you've ever had it, you probably love it too. I want it all the time in the summer. "what if I could make it myself at home?" I thought, when I was young and unafraid and dreams were made and used and wasted.
what I made, dear reader, was not thai tea, but something that should probably be sold at gas stations as a party drug.
the first step of my quest was to look up recipes for thai iced tea; most called for a combination of cheap black tea, a bunch of whole spices that seemed tricky and uneconomical for me to get my hands on, and red food coloring, plus the sweetened condensed milk and half-and-half that are standard add-ins when serving. but I found a tea blend that promised it all in one (except the milk), and a recipe that, when I skimmed it, seemed to call for such a tea blend—they even mentioned the same brand as one of the teas they'd recommend if their top choice is unavailable.
I ordered the goods. they arrived. today was the day to make my tea dreams come true.
I followed the instructions as written: boil 4 cups of water, add 1 cup of thai tea mix and 3/4 cup of sugar, simmer for 3 minutes, then remove from heat and allow to steep for half an hour before you strain it. I waited. I ran out to buy coffee filters because I forgot how straining works. I came back. the house smelled amazing. it probably took a little longer than 30 minutes in all, but that was no big deal—after all, the recipe said the more concentrated the tea was, the better it would be!
straining it took a weirdly long time. I went through 4 or 5 coffee filters! and at the end I only had like, maybe 2 cups of a near-opaque, viscous black fluid that seemed to absorb all the light in the room. here it is held directly in front of a lamp:
but hey, it smelled exactly like thai tea! I'd nailed it! and as the recipe author herself said:
I poured up the requisite one cup or so in a glass, added ice and half-and-half, and took the first sip. and it was thai tea! except, for some reason, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck and triggered a faint ringing in my ears? but all the sugar and milk really mellows out the flavor, so I still had about four sips total before my body fully caught up and began to respond as though I'd just downed the same number of shots of espresso.
it was at this moment that I, as someone who is more sensitive to caffeine than the average bear, began to suspect maybe, just maybe, I had fucked up.
the recipe called for "1 cup of thai tea." the tea I ordered online came in individual tea sachets, so I tore them open one by one and dumped the contents out until I had enough to fill a standard measuring cup. the recipe did not mention that step and at no point in that process did it occur to me that maybe, just maybe, there's a difference in the brew strength of bagged tea vs. loose leaf, and by "1 cup of thai tea," they were referring to the latter. by my count, I tore open like, 12 tea bags?
the instructions on the back of the tea tin say to brew 1 bag in 300ml of water. in yankee measurements, 300ml is 1.5 cups.
expected: 1 bag in 1.5 cups water = 2/3 bag per cup for 3-5 minutes
actual: 12 bags in 4 cups water = 3 bags per cup for 30+ minutes
so, even if we ignore the fact that a tea which has the consistency of coffee grounds has a lot more surface area than loose leaf (and thus will produce a much stronger brew), I used almost 3 times as much tea as I was supposed to, and brewed it for about ten times as long. in conclusion,
status update: good news is I'm still alive and the heart palpitations have mostly stopped! bad news is it's nearly 9PM and I am still w i r e d. it's drizzling but I might go for a walk to try and burn some of it off. time is moving incorrectly. I somehow still have not put away the laundry
here's a better picture of the demon tea from directly underneath the light fixture so you can more easily see the nothing through it:
it looks like the west coast sunsets I used to get
a few final updates, now that it's the following day and I didn't die:
I originally estimated that I used 12 tea bags, but since I didn't actually count as I was tearing them open, I couldn't be sure. I figured maybe I'd exaggerated the number in my head. so I decided to count how many tea bags are left. 28 of them remain. assuming the good folks at Cha Tra Mue didn't rip me off and there were actually 50 in there when I opened it yesterday, that means I tore open 22 of them. I underestimated how much tea I used.
so the REAL numbers are:
expected: 1 bag in 1.5 cups water = 2/3 bag per cup for 3-5 minutes
actual: 22 bags in 4 cups water = 5 1/2 bags per cup for 30+ minutes
also, many lovely and well-meaning people have chimed in with some variation of, "duh! this was a recipe for thai tea concentrate, silly! you were supposed to dilute it with water before serving!"
my rebuttal is that with the exception of tearing open the tea bags to obtain the "1 cup of thai tea" and straining it using paper coffee filters instead of a reusable cloth one, I followed the recipe linked in the original post to the goddamn letter.
there is NO step where you dilute it with water—per the author, once it's strained, it's "finished Thai tea." the only additional thing that gets added is the half-and-half, and she says to use just 2-3 tablespoons per 8oz glass!!! that's LESS than I used for mine!!!
HOWEVER, someone did comment about the volume of the output being less than they expected, and the recipe author replied:
so if 2.5 cups is intended to serve 6, then each serving is...less than half a cup of tea, plus 2 tablespoons of half-and-half, and I guess just a lot of ice to fill up the remaining empty space in the 8oz glass??? but each of those not-quite-half cups is packing like 4 teabags' worth of a caffeine punch. this recipe is wild
sometimes artists worry if their art is actually capable of making the world a better place, or if its all just wasted effort. what you need to remember is: all art is evil, and the sole aspiration of the artist should be to maim as many onlookers as possible.
*putting my hand in the cavernous space between what you are and what you pretend to be, and wiggling it around* woah haha is there meant to be that much emptiness here? lol are you like okay bestie? omg this kind of tickles my hand does this tickle your nothing? #yournothing <3
most difficult problem of writing fanfiction is when you need a character to express the particular surprised/dismayed/disappointed sentiment of going "jesus christ" but this isn't a lore friendly thing to say and there's nothing lore friendly that conveys quite the same emotion
abandonment issues are sooooo funny. "i'm scared people will leave me so i push them away and leave them first to avoid being hurt" girl the prophecy is self fulfilling!!! the sabotage is coming from within!!! you forgot about the cycle!!!!!!!!!
