Ask and Ye shall (possibly) receive an answer here.

blake kathryn
occasionally subtle

Product Placement
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Three Goblin Art

Discoholic 🪩

if i look back, i am lost
Acquired Stardust

Andulka

titsay
Cosimo Galluzzi
art blog(derogatory)

No title available
cherry valley forever

pixel skylines
Jules of Nature
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
No title available

Origami Around
wallacepolsom

seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Venezuela
seen from Germany
seen from South Africa
seen from United States
seen from Lithuania
seen from Germany
seen from France

seen from Italy

seen from Germany

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Germany
@fry-score
Ask and Ye shall (possibly) receive an answer here.
(to the tune of mary had a little lamb): mary had a little lamb
i hate the word spicy can we bring back calling things erotic
“Gawd this erotic ramen is too erotic, I need milk to quench the erotic.”
in other developments re german/anglo cultural exchange on breadstuffs, this image was posted to a facebook group yesterday
the following events ensued:
1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldn’t you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?
2. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my band name” jokes
3. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my stripper name” jokes
4. one “ah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa town” joke
5. this absolute masterpiece:
hi this tag perfectly encapsulates the FML coefficient of my life as a non-german speaker living in germany and i’m going to frame it
ⓘ Im anerkannten Kurort Bad Schnitzel ist das Betreiben öffentlicher Bordelle nicht gestattet.
ⓘ In the officially recognized spa town of Bad Schnitzel, the operation of public brothels is not permitted.
this fic is so good i hope i write it
Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”
there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)
there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while
Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?
Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?
Please do
I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.
Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.
People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.
If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.
In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.
People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.
It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.
I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.
Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.
There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.
I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.
Nope, beer came first. Mead is also very old.
Thanks, ancient humans!
Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.
The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.
There's a vegan restaurant near where one of my friends lives, and it's pretty good; I've had some of their bowls from time to time (I'm not vegan and have no interest in becoming so, but like…It's not as if I'll explode if I don't have meat or dairy at a given meal)
And they have a sign out front that says "eat planet-based," with the E very small so planet kind of looks like plant from a distance
Quite apart from my general annoyance with the extreme oversimplification that is the whole "you should be vegan if you care about the environment" chestnut, the sign has some quirks that crack me up every time
Because you see, the words "eat planet" and the word "based"" are separated by a little drawing of the Earth. The first two are at the top of the drawing and the third is underneath it. And the words are in all capitals 
So every time I look at it, my mind reads it as:
"EAT PLANET. BASED."
went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning
Hell yeah
He’s in the right for that this is so cool
FOR THE CURIOUS: the big eye points up to scan for predators, the smaller eye points down to search for bioluminescence from creatures in the abyss below
this is literally how this interaction went down , no edits were made , entirely verbatim
Imagine the level of whimsy I could reach if I just had $5M in my bank account rn
Dude... allow me to add to your trove.
I have a folder of these on my phone... I'm not sure what that says about me!
This has always bothered me too and it didn't make sense until someone older told me that when they were growing up "scare quotes" were used the way we used *asterisks* or ALL CAPS for emphasis
Edit: Oh. The fake kid's book is... dark.
The amount of time scrolling through my camera to find this wasn't worth it but I "had" to share this sign in virginia that seemed to imply that they may be willing to slip you some back alley clam juice if you know the secret code
It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!
this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks
there is no such thing as the perfect steppy
only the next steppy
People who are younger than you but taller
People who are younger than you but better than you at something
People who are younger than you
People
Being turned into a llama
A LLAMA?! HE’S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD!!!
yeah… weird
the word “sabotage” is p much short for “fucking shit up with a wooden shoe”
what
fucking shit up with a wooden shoe
oh my god
well wooden shoe look at that
I’M FUCKING CRYING AT THAT PUN BE MY FRIEND PLEASE
For those who have missed it, a tourist in Hawaii decided it would be fun to chuck a rock (a BIG rock) at a monk seal. He missed, but he was captured on video, and when told it was illegal to interfere with them, said "I'm rich, I can pay the fine."
Is the best part that he got doxxed? No.
Is the best part that he got tracked down by a local and beaten? No.
Arrested on state at federal charges, looking at up to 5 years and 50K? Nope.
The best part is the local city council's reaction.
And the best part of that is the look on the attorney's face.
More of this please, everywhere.
After the incident, another video went viral showing what appeared to be that man getting a beating. The Maui Police Department said they had no record of any reports of disorderly conduct or assault related to the monk seal incident.
Even the local police are being cool about this.
I've posted about this before but back home at my old job I used to get pho so fucking often that the owners of the place stopped asking me what I wanted and stopped handing me menus when I walked in. After I moved to NY and I could only go back to Chicago like once a year, I sat down and they gave me a menu and I was like "Oh no I already know what I want, can I get--" and they were like OHHH #36 WITH EXTRA NOODLES YOU'RE BACK and I almost cried