literally though if you feel like your life is slipping through your fingers and every day goes too fast… try doing hard things, not just taking the easy route, like reading and making art and exercising and cooking a meal from scratch and journaling, doing these things without distraction, without being absorbed on a screen… the time will stretch and you’ll be reminded that life is long and beautiful if you make it so.
one thing everyone who is struggling with cooking for themselves needs to know is that the shittiest rice cooker, like the ones that cost $5 at rite aid, can make entire meals. you can put anything you want (except uncooked meats that need prolonged temperatures to be safe to eat) in with the rice and push the button and go lie down for 20 minutes. you will learn through making slightly over or undercooked rice a few times how you need to adjust the liquid:rice ratios. you can put rice, a bag of baby carrots, whatever salt and spices, and a can of tuna (or a can of shredded chicken, beef, etc, or tofu, or canned beans, or canned tomatoes) in a rice cooker and it will be completely edible in ~20min. it costs like $1 per batch, less if you get regular carrots and cut them into chunks yourself. you should have frozen spinach and peas and corn in your freezer, or whatever frozen veg is safe for your food allergies. this kind of meal can survive in the fridge for a while and the freezer even longer. if you make it badly it wont poison you and can be salvaged with hot sauce, if you make it disastrously it can be thrown away without losing more than a dollar or two. if you make it okay it fullfills the Just Need Some Real Food requirements completely. if you need more calories you can add butter or oil, or eat sour cream on the side. if you forget about the rice cooker or fall asleep it will dry out on the bottom but wont burn. they should teach you this in 5th grade
by Rachel A. Rosen and Zilla Novikov || Food you can make so you don't die.
The Sad Bastard Cookbook
A completely free cookbook for the zero spoons crowd.
By Rachel A. Rosen and Zilla Novikov
Illustrated by Marten Norr
Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, putting it into your facehole—can feel like an insurmountable challenge. We wrote this cookbook to share our coping strategies. It has recipes to make when you've worked a 16-hour day, when you can't stop crying and you don't know why, when you accidentally woke up an Eldritch abomination at the bottom of the ocean. But most of all, this cookbook exists to help Sad Bastards like us feel a little less alone at mealtimes.
When a small mammal scrunches up and cleans its face and whiskers with its little hands very rapidly. I just wanted to give you that thought for a moment did u like it.
A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high. Western civiliza
"A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high.
Western civilization has grown remarkably climate conscious over the last 20 years, but not when it comes to building, civic planning, and especially zoning. Perhaps the interiors of buildings are becoming more climate adapted, and in some cases the facades as well, but in a way that’s a little like inventing a freezer designed to keep ice cream frozen while sitting next to a fire.
Wooden or concrete boxes arranged side-by-side across leveled ground with sprawling, largely treeless gardens and concrete sidewalks alongside wide, blacktop roads is simply a culture of construction that has to be abandoned if living in a world of 2°C or higher annual temperatures [or, hopefully, less than that, but nonetheless likely over 1.5°C] is to be tolerable.
Fortunately for Arizonans, change may have finally arrived in the form of a carless, planned community that looks and feels like a Greek island village.
In the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Culdesac has arisen as a 17-acre mixed-use neighborhood from the ground up to stay cool and local, taking the concept of the 15-minute city, where anything a resident might need is only 15 minutes away, and putting a Mediterranean spin on it.
Buildings are tall, thick, and totally white. The residential areas look like they were built atop of the ashes of the Phoenix zoning code burnt in effigy. Crammed together, they create narrow streets and alleys that are almost constantly shaded, through which wind is channeled and accelerated in passing.
Windows open towards each other, allowing wind that enters one building to exit into another, while the total lack of asphalt means that the ground temperatures are a staggering 50-60°F lower than pavements beyond the limits of Culdesac.
No privately-owned cars are allowed to enter the neighborhood, in which electric bikes, robotic mini taxis, and light rail shuttle people around town, to downtown Phoenix, or out to the airport.
The street life is lively—there are no cars to bisect movement between the 21 different businesses and eateries, among which is a James Beard Award-winning Mexican restaurant, DIY ceramic business, and some stores run out of apartments—a big no-no under Phoenix zoning laws.
“Once you pull the cars out,” Architect Daniel Parolek who designed Culdesac, told BBC, “there’s so much more opportunity to make a vibrant, thriving community.”
His inspiration was sun-soaked locales like Italy, Greece, and Croatia, where town centers were designed before the automobile and before air conditioning.
Technically speaking, the entire Culdesac neighborhood is one apartment complex, but the paseos, or little alleyways, open up into plazas of open space exactly liked one would expect in a little village in the Cyclades.
Because no one has to jump in a car to get from place to place, people run into each other, sparking conversations, relations, and breaking through the counterintuitive phenomenon of big city loneliness, which in Phoenix hits particularly hard.
“Culdesac Tempe has shown that people do want to live car-free in the US, even in a metro area like Phoenix that’s often seen as the poster child for car dependency,” says Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s government relations and external affairs lead. “This success has shifted the conversation around what’s possible in American development.”
if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.
there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)
this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before
this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".
anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.
specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)
just got a call from the american psychiatric association. you old dogs, i said, picking up on the first ring. how many times i gotta tell you to lose this number. i don’t want you coming around here anymore. “listen, toots, we’ve been doing some thinking,” they says, and i says, guess there’s a first time for everything. “you’re a real funny dame, sugardoll. reviewing criticism, we’ve determined that the biggest issue with our previous diagnostic and statistic manuals of mental disorders is the anonymity of it all. we’ve been circling around a vague figure of the mentally well without defining the traits of a mentally well person. there’s no personality. what we need is a cute broad with a couple opinions to model the psychological norm.” so i’m saying back up and give it to me straight: i’m the new standard of sanity? can i get that in writing? and they say, “as the american psychiatric association we hereby state that you are the baseline and any deviations from your personality are deviations from the very concept of sanity, at least in the united states psychiatric system.” they’re making it public tomorrow. it’s a nice gig, if you really want to know. never thought they’d let a woman do it.
