Pip's Squeaks

Canadian girl in an irregular world

[lifehackable]

This is potentially life saving information everyone should know.

[tarcroach]

No you guys this post helped me find my cat. He was missing for almost a month and I’ve had him for over 12 years. After seeing this I put his favorite blanket he always slept on outside hoping he would smell mine or his scent and he was back the next fucking day asleep on it.

[ittygittydiddynator]

When my cat got out, we called and called for him, and then, later that night, I remembered similar advice to this, and so put his little scratching pad, which he adores, on the front porch. Not even half an hour later, I heard a thump, opened the door, and there was his big butt, meowing at me.

[sparklesmccheesy]

Important and vital

[natasha-romvnoff]

I don’t care that I reblogged this today I’m reblogging it again

[whi-light]

I guess I just really love Sammy and flowers

[skeletalroses]

So this is a totally useless rant, but as a skinny girl, I’m getting extra, extra tired of fat-shaming.

I work for a corsetier at a Renaissance Faire. We sell corsets. Not flimsy bullshit costume corsets; like real, durable, waist-training corsets. Today a woman came in with her boyfriend, so I helped her pick out a corset and try it on. While her boyfriend—who was decidedly enthused about the whole corset thing—sat watching me lace her in, he told me, grinning, “Of all the good jobs at the Renaissance Faire, I think you have the best.”

I shrugged in agreement. “I touch butts and reach down cleavage all day; I mean…” Because we like to be a bit rakish at the Faire, and, y’know, it’s true. Tying people into corsets pretty much invariably requires getting handsy.

The couple laughed at that, and the boyfriend said, “That’s the job I would want!” But then he chuckled again and said, offhand, “Or maybe not; while we were looking at the racks, there were some pretty big sizes on there!”

Our sizes are all done in inches, and the biggest we make is a 46. And you’d better believe our large sizes sell. For a second I wasn’t sure what to say to the guy’s comment, but I answered him casually. “We get a lot of beautiful big ladies in here.” Because we do. “We make corsets for real women, not Barbie dolls,” I added. Wasn’t trying to be smart, just kind of tossed it out there because that’s the line we like to use when people ask about larger sizes, and because, again, we do.

The boyfriend went quiet at that; I didn’t think anything of it, I just kept on lacing. A moment later, he said, a little awkwardly (but sincerely enough), “Didn’t mean to be offensive.”

I quickly smiled and brushed it off, said he wasn’t, said I was just saying. (Don’t want to make the customers uncomfortable, you know?) And that was the end of it. His comment had rubbed me the wrong way, but it wasn’t a big deal. Now, I wear a 20-inch corset. I’m a few cup sizes short of being one of the Barbie dolls. Like his girlfriend, I’m one of the “hot chicks”; he doesn’t have to worry about offending me by implying that I wouldn’t be fun to poke and pull at.

Honestly though, of all the people I fit sexy technically-undergarments to in a day, fat girls are maybe my favorite people to lace up. Because they are just so damn happy that we have stuff that fits them. They are so damn happy that the corsets we make in their sizes are all the same pretty, shiny colors and cool flower/dragon/skull/etc. prints that the smaller corsets are, not ugly beige and boring “granny” colors. They are so goddamn happy that at least one (of several on the grounds) corset shop carries things that they can wear, that they actually want to wear, and that they look fucking awesome in. This is only my second season working, and we’ve fit 60+ inch waists and double-K busts. The only people we’ve ever had to tell sorry, we don’t have anything that fits them, are twelve-year-old kids.

It’s half-wonderful, half-heartbreaking how excited those women get. Women who say with sad smiles, when we ask if they want to get fitted, “Oh, no, you don’t have anything that fits me,” and then are stunned when we’re 300% confident that yes we do, and we have options. Women who can’t stop smiling and looking at themselves in the mirror after we’ve got them laced in.

I had a lady last week whose waist I measured (cinching the tape tight, as per procedure) at 41 inches—honestly not all that big. So she picked out a 41-inch corset to try on. I could tell halfway through getting her laced that it was going to be a bit big for her, so I mentioned it and said she might do better to try a smaller size. She started crying on the spot. She was so overwhelmed; she couldn’t believe someone had just told her that a 41 was too big. She told me about how hard clothes shopping was for her, how her mother would tell her she needed an XXXL instead of an XXL, how she had recently lost weight but still couldn’t wear certain colors because they didn’t fit or she wasn’t confident enough.

She did end up getting her corset, and after I checked her out she asked if she could give me a hug, so we ended up standing there hugging each other for a minute. While we did, I told her, “Do not ever let anyone tell you any bullshit. You are gorgeous.” She said, “I have a new boyfriend and he keeps telling me that.” I told her he was right, and to just keep telling herself she’s gorgeous; it was okay if she didn’t always believe it, but to keep telling herself anyway. (That’s how I talked myself through shit when I had bad anxiety.)

We all know fat-shaming is bad. The stupidity, fatphobia, and misogyny of it has pissed me off since I first became aware of it. But working with clothing, especially as figure-hugging and precise as corsets, has given me a new perspective on it—how much it affects people and just how shitty it is. Like, what does it say that I had a grown, only average-big woman crying into my shoulder because she was so overjoyed not to be the uppermost extremity of what a manufacturer can clothe?

My job rocks and it’s really rewarding, but sometimes it highlights some of the ugliest shit about society. I’m so glad I work at a shop that’s not bullshit about body types and operates with more people in mind than just scrawny white chicks like me. The fat women I work with are a ton of fun to lace up, and they’re so much more than their size—they’re cool, they’re smart, they’re funny, they’re sweet, they’re great to talk to, and yes, they’re hot. I’m so damn done with them getting short-changed and shamed by petty fucks who refuse to make them nice clothes, who refuse to even try to work for them, who refuse to consider them pretty. This whole rant was useless and won’t get read, but I had to vent because it’s been driving me nuts.

So actually, screw you, random dude. Fat girls are the highlight of my job.

[scarabsinthestardust]

Going to add this bit: I’m overweight. I’m not really big, but I’ve always had issues with my weight and the shit I get from people. I was actually getting fitted for a corset and was told I needed to go down a size. So I understand how that girl felt. I know that it’s “just a number” and it shouldn’t bother me, but that made me feel awesome.

[lacqueluster]

I read every word of this and it made me want to cry and buy a corset.

[roachpatrol]

i should make a low-effort cookbook

like you get those ‘i hate to cook! 101: easy meals for the kitchen novice!’ and it still wants you to make a three-cheese spinach casserole

mine would be like

did you know you can put chocolate chips on a spoonful of peanut butter and obtain the perfect snack

did you know if you crack some eggs into your pasta sauce and stir there’s more protein in it so you can go longer without having to make another goddamn meal

did you know you can mix a cup of cooked rice to any condensed soup instead of water and now you have dinner and breakfast

also put cheese on it

put cheese on fucking everything

and finally here’s a list of things you can microwave in a short enough time that you won’t walk out of the kitchen, go back to bed, fall asleep for four hours, and totally forget you attempted a lunch

[isozyme]

frozen pizza is expensive but!  biscuits in a can + last dregs of jar of tomato sauce + some shredded mozzarella cheese = EIGHT MINIPIZZAS

dump all your chinese delivery into a hot pan and crack two eggs into it, stir, now it is soft and good

if you add a kraft single to mac and cheese from the box it’s magically more delicious (and if you also add hot sauce then it’s spicy)

nachos: chips + shredded cheese + salsa + rummage in fridge in case there’s other things?  and then under the broiler for a minute or two.  if it’s hot it counts as a meal!  works good on stale chips.

an incomplete list of vegetables that won’t instantly rot on you: anything frozen, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes (they get wrinkly but u can still eat them), carrots, onions…i throw away a lot of veggies that have gone soft :(

i love parchment paper.  $4 for a roll but lay it down on ur baking sheet and know you’ll never have to scrub cheese or cookie crumbs off it again.  perfect for cooking with low spoons.  nothing sticks to it!

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT

[ursavorpalis]

also: mug cakes also also: if you cook rice you might as well dump some canned tomatos and canned beans in it. TADA NUTRITIONALLY COMPLETE MEALS in the list of foods that last: apples. apples can last an entire fucking winter. also also also: cottage cheese + bell peppers + crackers = what I ate for dinner for like a year

[leahazel]

1. You cook the rice in a pot. No spices, no nothing, just water oil and rice. 

2. Just before it’s ready, when there’s about a pinkie fingernail’s worth of water on the top, add in a tablespoon of peanut butter. 

3. Stir. Cook the rest of the way. 

4. It’s a meal! It has carbs and protein, it’s filling, it tastes good and it looks and feels like a legitimate dish, which is great for lifting the spirits a bit. 

5. If you feel fancy, add a teaspoon of honey or a handful of crushed peanuts. 

[hagar-972]

Alt., mix the rice with lentils. Cereal (rice, wheat) + legume (lentils, beans) = complete protein. Most people’s bodies will accept that in lieu of animal products.

Since no-one explained how to cook rice: (1) put bit of oil in pot, heat up on medium flame, (2) add 1-1.5 cup rice, mix up and add a bit of salt (you may need to reduce flame), (3) while you’re doing that, boil water in an electric pot, (4) add 2 cup water for each 1 cup rice; reduce flame a few seconds before you do that and mind the steam won’t hit you, (5) cover and set a 20min timer.

Pasta: (1) boil water, lots of water (covered pot goes fast; you can also use an electric pot for a shortcut and bring to a full boil on the stove - experiment), (2) up to 100 gr pasta per 1L water will work, but the more water per pasta the better, (3) reduce flame to medium (light bubbling), add pasta, set time to 10min, (4) check and add time as necessary - you may not need to.

Egg or bean noodled cook faster than pasta - like, half the time.

Easiest pasta sauce: 20-50gr of butter, melt; 1-2tbs lemon juice, homogenize; dump in pasta (and possibly peas, boiled from frozen). Taken 5min or under and will liven up pasta that’s been sitting in the fridge.

Easiest cream sauce: 1 standard (250ml) cream carton, 1 tsp shredded cheese (keeps well in freezer) or more, 1 tbs cottage cheese, spices to taste. Heat in a small pot on a small-to-medium flame while stirring constantly (if it’s too hot to stick a finger in, it’s too hot). Takes maybe 5-10min. Will keep in fridge up to 1 week.

Rice freezes well. Pasta doesn’t. Plain pasta (and most noodles) will last for up to a month in the fridge, though, and just dump it in the pan with some ketchup/tomato paste(+oil + water) and you’re good.

…nobody said that dry onion lasts? Dry onion lasts. Fried onion freezes well and keeps forever. So does diced garlic. If you like ‘em but worried about them going bad/don’t always have the time or spoons to deal with ‘em, there you go.

Fresh bread freezes well. Keep emergency bread in your freezer, sliced. It’ll thaw in the fridge/on the counter overnight, or you can stick a slice as-is in the toaster (just turn it up 1 notch relative to your usual preference).

Potatoes in their peel are the single most nutritious food. (You can, actually, survive on mashed potatoes.) A boiled potato will stay good in the fridge for a couple days. Boil partway (should still somewhat resist a fork), turn over/toaster oven on 150C (350F) or higher while you do the rest, slice potato(s), spread like deck of cards, brush oil over (with the sort of silicone brush one uses for eggs - costs next to nothing and you’ll be glad you got it), bit of salt, stick into oven and come back 20-40min later. Will re-heat well.

All of the following are good in eggs, just (1) dump them in the pan before the eggs, (2) the more you fluff up the eggs the betters: cubed semi-boiled potatoes, sliced/cubed tomatoes, tinned garbanzo beans (<-legume), tinned/frozen corn. Tinned and frozen stuff lasts forever. A pre-boiled potato and a couple eggs will save your ass on a cold, miserable morning.

3 shortbread cookies + 2 glasses of milk = 500kcal balanced dinner. Or breakfast.

1 cup cooked pasta + couple fluffed up eggs + shredded cheese (from frozen) to taste, in a stove-top pan or in the oven for ~20min = full meal.

Black lentils, cooked, will last nicely in the fridge - and unlike other legumes, they don’t need a pre-soak and only take 20min to cook. ½ bowl + 3 tbs oil + 2 tsp lemon juice + ¼ onion = dinner so nutritious you won’t believe it.

Cottage cheese and honey. No really. You only need a couple tsp honey for 250gr cottage tub.

1tbs peanut butter (flat as you can make it) + 3 tbs soy + 2 tbs maple/honey + 1 tsp vinegar = marinade for ~500gr of whatever. Takes ~5min to mix, 20min-2hr to soak, 5-10min to fry (non-stick pan and you don’t need oil). This + pot of rice (<-make while chicken/meat soaks) = lunch for a week. (Or dinner, if dinner’s your main meal.)

A tin of mayonnaise will last for months in the fridge. Hardboiled eggs last a nice while, too. 3 hardboiled eggs, chopped + 1tbs mayo + 1/3 onion chopped = 5min of work and egg salad for a few highly nutritious meals.

Ever make yourself hot chocolate? Make it with milk instead of water, for fuck’s sake. A large cup of hot chocolate is a legit small meal.

[m-winnike]

Buy broccoli and green beans frozen. For a couple dollars you can get a big enough bag of either to get at least 8-10 servings out of it and it keep for at least 6 months if you keep the bag closed. Buy a jar of chopped garlic in olive oil as well. That’ll keep in your fridge for months and adding a little bit to a handful of broccoli or green beans and sauteing(lightly browning them in a pan or pot on the stove) them together until everything is warm is a cheap, easy way to have a flavorful snack or meal. 

Also, ramen, drop an egg and a handful of some kind of frozen veggie(the previously mentioned ones or even some mixed carrots and peas) it adds a lot of nutritional value to your ramen, makes it so much more filling, and makes it have way better flavor than plain ramen. 

Buy a jar of Better than Bouillon. Amazon has them for as cheep as $2.99 a jar and one jar has enough in it to make a couple gallons of broth. Just one teaspoon of this stuff added to 1 cup of water will give you a deliciously broth for soup. Pick your flavor and drop whatever veggies or noodles you’ve got leftover in the fridge and you’ve got dinner. It’s also great to add to the water you’re cooking your rice in to give it some flavor as well. 

Don’t buy boxed Kraft mac and cheese. It may seem like an easy approach but there is a cheaper approach. A 3 lb bag of macaroni noodles is only a couple dollars and you can get a 1 lb bag of the powdered cheese just like in Kraft for $10 on Amazon. I bought a bag of cheese powder that size and it lasted me more than a year and I made mac and cheese once a week. You can also mix it with milk and broccoli and you’ve got a great dinner of broccoli cheese soup. 

My biggest tip for saving money on food is to make things that will freeze well. Say you make a pot of spaghetti. You could get 5 or 6 servings out of a full pot easily, if not more, but you’ll get tired of spaghetti before it’s gone. Stick servings in plastic baggies(which are fine to rinse and reuse!) and freeze them! Then you’ll be able to take out just the amount to eat for a meal and have some back up meals for when you’re loaded down with work, homework, etc and have no time to make a meal. 

[lovelylovelyartist]

ALL OF THIS

[quonunc]

fried rice:   cook a ton of rice, get some frozen veggies, whatever you like.  Fry the veggies in olive oil for a couple minutes, add the rice.  whisk two eggs and about a tablespoon of soy sauce.  Add in.  Cook until no longer wet. 

Tada - comfort food, you can freeze it, it tastes good, complete meal.

Also rice and pasta sauce is surprisingly good.

[lina-breeze]

In connection with…

[rambled]

succulentsaurs

[divineirony]

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

[fromonesurvivortoanother]

This doesn’t surprise me. I’d also propose that since Chinese has no plural nouns, only context, that a greater sense of belonging to a group or community is present among native Chinese speakers, while English speakers feel more individualistic.

[triflesandparsnips]

So I feel like everyone should immediately go read Ted Chiang’s amazing SF short story “The Story of Your Life,” which is about learning an alien language that has an emphasis on knowing how the sentence about to spoken will end — which leads to an overall advanced understanding of time itself.

It’s a fantastic story. It’ll massively fuck with your mind. Read it.

[ironperennial-deactivated201810]

[bomberbee]

Eggs in the eggs

[ufishal-deactivated20201213]

Who takes out 6 eggs and cracks them and puts them back on the shelf out of their carton

[ephilog]

I don’t know about you but I’m so sick of that omnipresent association of sports/fitness with weight loss as the ultimate goal.

(PS: I’m not sure how efficient punching people is for building muscle mass but I’m afraid she’s had a lot of opportunities so I guess four pounds is probably realistic?)

[eskiworks]

I wish… I WISH I could somehow reblog this HARDER and with MORE LOVE.  Sorry to put more non-art stuff in my main tumblr here, but goddamn I feel this so hard.  I’ve been hitting the gym with the goal of making a good habit, so that when winter comes around and the inevitable S.A.D. creeps back into my life, I’m more likely to get some exercise as a coping mechanism just out of habit.  I’m also weightlifting because I want to get strong (like ox, you might say). 

I do not care if I lose weight, I’m not keeping track of my pounds, and if I stay chubby but get stronger I will be just as fucking happy.  So glad I found this comic, and so glad I found your art Ephi!  New watcher ahoy!  <3

[alice-moran]

How to come up with names for your dystopian teen lit:

Try to say regular names with a bunch of Oreos in your mouth!

Examples:  Jocelyn = Jorslun.  Elizabeth = Lisbit.  Daniel = Dannel.

You’re welcome.

[alice-moran]

Following up on this idea.  I tried this method with a hamburger in my mouth, in lieu of Oreos. Results:

Alice = Allit.   Mark = Marth.  Tommy = Domi.

[alice-moran]

Confirmed: a mouth full of President Choice White Mac and Cheese  produces a subset of names with a more badass tilt to them.  

Examples: Chris = Rith.  Brittany = Brickney.  Megan = Mayhem. 

[heyyy-its-j]

I JUST CACKLED OUT LOUD IN PUBLIC

[thehuricange-deactivated2022051]

Chose your team.

[onikik]

During this whole fiasco, Inuyasha was the first person to ask Shiori what “she” wanted to do instead of blinding deciding for her on account of his own feelings about the situation. This is huge. This is giving her the opportunity to reclaim her agency and that means a lot to a half-demon who could not help the way she was born. 

[jannelle-o]

Oh you’re looking for shoes too Venonat?

[anyaismythical-deactivated20160]

@jannelle-o I think he found some that fit!

[jannelle-o]

Oh those look like some snazzy shoes~!

And Venonat loves them uvu

[lesbianshepard]

i keep thinking about how pokemon go is probably driving baby boomers up the fucking wall. packs of millennials roaming all staring at their cellphones. 

[chirasul]

[just-a-trans-nerd]

its starting

[jui-ci-fer]

We were out yesterday catchin and hatchin and we stopped at an ice cream shop and a group of olds came in and started bitching about kids on their cell phones playing that fucking videogame so i dropped a lure and suddenly the place was swarmed with kids. Ice cream shop got a nice bit of business out of it, too

[celtic-romulan]

[peredurthefool-deactivated20200]

chaotic good

[robotsandfrippary]

yesssss excellent~~~

[jigglypuffsvevo]

never thought that becoming a Pokemon trainer would also make me exercise

[everydayamermaid]

by salamispots