at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.
Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.
There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.
i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.
I've joked that the two genders are Aesthetic and Utility before but thats just kinda the case
made a post about how I'm relieved and excited to be alive in 2026 and how I'm glad I exist in a time where music and education and communication are so expansive and accessible and said post wasn't even up for a single hour before someone started declaring that actually there are evil revolting breaches of human rights happening right now. not even an hour
just realised us foreign policy is mostly responsible for the last 5 years of post covid inflation in the entire world. well first the complicated sanctions on russian oil. this one russia is at fault ofc. then the nordstream pipeline. then the insane, randomly decided tariff regime. then hormuz.
the rupee for example has decreased in value by 20% in said time period because of this.
every time trump gambles for corruption and shocks various sectors of the economy, he prices volatility into various parts of the supply chain -> someone somewhere cannot afford something they need -> someone who was doing fine isn't employed anymore -> someone dies. this isn't doge killing millions of the most vulnerable through cutting aid; this is just making the precarious vulnerable.
I try not to meme on people I don't know, but sometimes they're just straight handing you setups. I once saw a theatre kid accuse another theatre kid's interest in theatre of being performative.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
#if they don't like being called bin chickens then they should stay out of the bins
I'm sure they would LOVE to do that but unfortunately we turned their habitats into cities and farms so now they gotta look for other places where their long beaks specialised to dip into muck and water looking for tasty crustaceans can be put to use finding them food.
Btw the heat *is* why we see water that's not really there, but mirages aren't exactly hallucinations so much as optical illusions:
It's just the changing density of the air refracting light weirdly, so it looks like there's a reflection of the sky on the ground, which our brains often interpret as a pool of water. It can also happen upwards instead of downwards, especially at sea, when the air is much colder near the surface and a warm front appears above it:
Which, btw, is one possible explanation for ghost ship sightings, so that's fun :)
romaincrisis
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