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Natasha, she/her, 30s, USA lookslikeelsie.tumblr.com

[elfdragon12]

"'Let me help' rhymes with 'I love you', right?"

-"Barrayar" by Lois McMaster Bujold

[victusinveritas]

[oodles-of-boodle]

For anyone who wants an easy copy-paste into their favourite recipe keeper:

Pumpkin Pudding Pie w/Orange Zest and Cardamom Whipped Cream

(makes ~3 pies)

Ingredients:

Pie:

2 ½ cups sugar

15oz can pumpkin puree

2 eggs

½ tsp baking soda

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp ground cinnamon

¼ tsp vanilla

pinch of salt

2½ cups milk

4 TBSP butter (melted)

1 orange

1 tsp powdered sugar

Whipped Cream:

1 cup heavy cream

2 TBSP powdered sugar

1 tsp cardamom

pinch nutmeg

-----------

Instructions:

Pie:

Preheat the oven to 325°F

Prepare the pie crust (that's another recipe's job- either find a scratch recipe or buy a pre-made dough or graham cracker crust)

Blend 2½ cups sugar, pumpkin puree, eggs, and baking soda in a large mixing bowl (if using a mixer, blend with a paddle attachment)

Add the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt; blend until well mixed

Add the milk and melted butter, whisk until well mixed (if using a mixer, blend with the whisk attachment)

Pour your batter into the crust, filling right up to the edge (the mix will be more liquid than solid, but it will rise/solidify in the oven)

Bake at 325°F for 55 minutes

Remove from the oven and let it cool

Top with sifted powdered sugar

Zest an orange over the top of the pie (microplane if possible but regular zester is fine; have found that the most aesthetically pleasing version is to peel the orange and then finely dice the peel but that's a hassle!)

Whipped cream:

Put your metal mixing bowl and whisk in the freezer for at least 15 minutes

Whisk powdered sugar, cardamom, and nutmeg together in bowl

Add heavy cream; whisk until stiff peaks start forming

Serve on a cooled pie :)

[mypatchworkreflection]

Humble Book Bundle: Martha Wells' Murderbot and More by TOR

Fall in love with Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series—the engine behind the hit AppleTV adaptation—and help support World Central Kit

You guys! You can get the whole Murderbot Diaries series and have it benefit charity right now! I am so obsessed with it, I cannot recommend this series enough! And it helps feed people in need, what else do you want?!

Other works by Martha Wells, you say? Well it has that too, go look!!!

[voskhodart]

I’m always surprised that more people aren’t aware of aerial saws. It’s one of my favorite functions of aviation.

[voskhodart]

I live in South Carolina, where we have a lot of pine trees. And they like to grow right beside power lines and train tracks. You obviously don’t want tree limbs engulfing your power lines or getting hit by trains, so you need to trim them.

Your first option is a ground crew. A bunch of guys, a couple bucket trucks, some chainsaws… and now you have a way of keeping those limbs at bay. But it’s a very inefficient, expensive, slow, and dangerous method: you have to pay all those guys, fuel all those trucks, and teach everyone how to not get electrocuted (or hit by a train).

After all, ground crews are… grounded. Electricity is always seeking ground. You know what’s in the opposite direction of the ground? A helicopter with a big fucking saw dangling from it.

Problem solved. Yeah you’ve still got to pay for gas and someone to fly the damn thing, but that’s a whole lot better than a ground crew. In fact, your saw is bigger than your ground crew.

Not only is this faster, but now you can trim in more remote areas too. Can’t drive a bucket truck up that narrow mountain road? No worries. Attack it from above. Power lines and railroad tracks are already marked on aviation section maps, and they’re easy to spot from above.

Every aerial saw pilot I’ve ever met has been one insanely cool person, and I love spotting these big saws in the air from time to time. All hail the flying saw, guardian of rural electric grids.

[spindrifters]

hang on I’m trying to see something

don’t tell me the name of your pet, just tell me in the tags the name you call them that’s got nothing to do with their actual name

[napneeders]

every scifi writer: in 2025 the machines are smarter than anyone thinks they are

real-life 2025 horror: everyone thinks the machines are smarter than they are

[dvoeverie-stitches]

This pattern is where I found the insects I used in my midsummer/Kupala piece.

'Bugs Sampler' by MaryHickmottDesigns available on Etsy for download

[trollprincess]

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

[trollprincess]

Me getting slammed with notifications on this post in particular:

[abirddogmoment]

Where do you qualify your relationship with your pet?

My pet is my child.

My pet is my buddy.

My pet is my roommate.

My pet is my guardian angel / protector.

My pet is my employee.

My pet is my possession.

Voting ended onJun 22, 2025

Feel free to elaborate on what kind of pet you have!

[imstuckin1999]

90s/y2k Klutz books (pt 2)

[sweetfirebird]

The US Postal Service

I am going to ask you all to do a small but important thing. When you go to the post office to mail a package or buy stamps or shipping supplies, get a receipt.

At the bottom of the receipt is a link and a QR code to fill out a short survey about your "customer satisfaction" with the post office. You are going to fill out that (it takes less than two minutes) and you are going to give them a glowing review each time!

Why? Because they are looking for reasons to make budget cuts despite the USPS being in the constitution and a valuable public service. So we are going to make it unequivocal that we like the postal service.

Because we do!

They send medicine cheaply, they take ballots for voting (which Republicans hate). They are the only shipping service in many rural areas. AND they are basically all that is keeping UPS, FedEx etc's prices down. Privatization means everything will be more expensive.

The post office is ours. It's our right. And the workers there are also being treated like shit right now. So support them in this very simple, easy way. And do this every single time you go there. Please. (And please reblog this. Let's overwhelmingly flood the system with positive feedback.)

[fjordfolk]

anyway i'd never dare give my dogs the gift of human communication because sparty would immediately commit fraud and i don't need an amazon starter kit of talking buttons to know that troj receives messages from beyond

[mumblesplash]

scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

[kata4a]

[incognitopolls]

If you didn't need to work for money (e.g. via universal basic income), would you still work? If so, what's the primary reason?

Yes, my work helps people

Yes, I like the end product of my work

Yes, I enjoy working/being productive

Yes, to spend time with my coworkers

Yes, I need the structure/schedule

Yes, I feel an obligation to my workplace/company

Yes, another reason

No, I'd stop working

Not applicable/I don't or can't work now anyway

Voting ended onMar 11, 2025

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[cynikoii]

If it were completely safe (your dog would come back periodically throughout the day, no cars, no wildlife, etc.), legal, and acceptable for your dog to free roam, would you want them to do so? Explain why or why not in the tags!

Hell yes!

Hell no!

Voting ended onMar 9, 2025

[cynikoii]

I appreciate everyone’s thoughts on this. I’m not going to further clarify the question or offer commentary, myself, except to remind that this is just a thought experiment, and I don’t intend to advocate for either theoretical option. Just sating my curiosity!

[transfaguette]

im not saying office jobs aren’t bad in some ways but its always very telling when people treat it like the WORST job at the bottom of the rung…because they have never had to face manual labor as a real option they would ever be forced to take.

[transfaguette]

its just like, idk, alienating coming from a family of manual laborers and factory workers without college degrees, to see theres this entire part of society that cannot relate to that life. that like, going to college and “”working in the rat race”” is the rock bottom (with benefits and holidays off and your work being so frivolous a whole part of the culture is just pretending to look busy so you don’t get more work). idk man. i hate it down here.

[type-1-diabreadstick]

I can think of no better example of this attitude than when COVID first hit and the people with office jobs not only had the ability to work from home, but became pretty much the only ones acknowledged in mainstream consciousness.

So many people just being like, "Well now that we're all stuck indoors" as if "essential workers" didn't count, and virtually every commercial being like, "Welcome back!" after companies started making employees come back to the office, ignoring that some of us never "left" our work stations to begin with. Nowadays you see so many people say, "Remember when we were all indoors?" and I'm like...no, I don't actually, some of us never had that privilege.

Idk it's just incredibly demoralizing that non-office jobs are largely considered just so beneath consideration that we've even been (at least partially) erased from narratives surrounding COVID.

[roach-works]

'what were you doing during quarantine?'

i was welding the railings on luxury boats for rich assholes while our ceo and management staff thanked us ever so nicely for risking our lives.... from safely behind their zoom screens.

that kind of anger doesn't go away. you just live with it burning a hole in your heart forever.

[greenekangaroo]

I never stopped working.

People talk about these lockdowns and how they effected them and how we were all changed but I never. stopped. working. Nothing changed for me. I wore a mask to work, I got up, I went to work, I came home.

Other people in my company- the computer people, the numbers people, the 'if we have a laptop we don't come in during snowstorms while you only get four hours once a winter season to justify not wanting to die in the weather to get here' people- they got to stay home.

They were fine.

Most of them never came back to the office.

And yeah, roach-works is right. That kind of anger doesn't go away. You do just live with it forever.

Because here's the thing. It's good that those people didn't come back. Working from home or from a place of your choosing if you don't do manual labor should be standard and that they keep trying to walk it back is proof that middle management is a useless fucking job meant to terrorize people who aren't in those big expensive office buildings anymore.

But those of us who never had a fucking choice got no perks from that. We got some thanks, some pizza parties, some gift cards.

I am still expected to get up and drive in when the weather could kill me.

and those people on their computers can still wake up whenever the fuck they want and get paid more than me to pet their dogs and take long walks and answer emails whenever the fuck they feel like it.

So I'm a little goddamn bitter.

[everythingfox]

He is actually a deer