Shado the one and only

Shado, 21, they/them

[polarcell]

I was just talking with a friend who hates cooking which is so wild to me bc I love cooking so much it is hard for me to understand people that don't like it, but i know many exist. my parents don't like cooking either, but my grandmothers both do, so i feel like it jumped a generation for us. and then i also wonder how much of it is learned and how much not. so! poll time

do you like cooking and were you taught to cook by your family?

i like cooking & i was taught

i feel neutral & i was taught

i don't like it & i was taught

i like it & i was not taught

i feel neutral & i was not taught

i dislike it & i was not taught

nuance

Voting ended onAug 4

[butterflypeaflowertea]

trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

[definitelynotkiddanger]

“It’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing” I’m in love

[randomalistic]

Your artstyle is like your gut microbiome in the way its everything you consume and like and it also has all your bacteria up in it. Thats probably how that works

[randomalistic]

SO TRUE

[bedupolker]

Holding hands 💛💛

[tiifu-ndovu]

[pixeljade]

more than anything i want a world where a trans girl realizing she is a trans girl faces zero fear from that realization and subsequent coming out. Where she can say "Oh sweet, I can just be a girl? Sign me up!", no worrying if shes girl enough, no worrying if society will accept her, no worrying if she'll be an attractive girl as she transitions, no worrying at all in any way shape or form.

[doomtemparts]

one of my friends in a discord server was talking about how they were nervous about their first scheduled acupuncture appointment. another friend offered to do a tarot reading for them. sent this picture.

[dogpuppy]

[cowboyhatesithere]

250 years and most native tribal groups continue to not be federally recognized. Embarrassing!

[cowboyhatesithere]

Hey so a small thing that literally everyone who sees this is capable of is correcting any “used to” statements about native people in this country.

“Native people used to live in this National Park” No. They still do.

“Native people used to tell these stories-” No. They still do.

“Native people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-” No. They still do.

Better yet, familiarize yourself with the tribes local to you. Odds are, they do not yet have federal recognition. You can still read the stories they have to share, you can share their ongoing battle for recognition with others, you can sign petitions and spread the word to others to do so as well. But do something.

[what-even-is-thiss]

One of the most common ways you preserve pork without refrigeration is keeping it in really salty water. This makes the pork borderline inedible because it’s so salty. What you don’t see in medieval fantasy is people soaking their meat in water for a bit before they cook it.

That’s also a reason to boil your meat though. Like yeah meat tastes better if you sear it first but sometimes you’ve gotta get that salt out.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You can also smoke your meats and make them into jerky basically. It’s not as juicy as pickling them though.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Also medieval peasants had more meat than you’d think because of these preservation methods. You can feed a pig scraps for the whole year and then butcher it at the start of winter and preserve the meat. Because of this they also often had access to lard.

Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.

These days chicken is usually the cheapest form of meat available. If someone is eating a chicken in a medieval setting though it’s either because they didn’t need that chicken anymore or because they’re rich enough to have chickens for eating.

[what-even-is-thiss]

If we’re talking mutton, European sheep are more often kept for wool or milk while middle eastern or African sheep are more often kept for eating. Europeans would of course eat sheep sometimes but it’s another one of those cases where it makes more sense to keep the animal alive rather than eating it.

Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.

Goats weren’t super popular in Europe during medieval and ancient times. Very common in the Middle East and North Africa though both for milk and for meat.

[figtreeandvine]

A cow or ewe must have a calf or lamb every year to produce milk. Half of those offspring will be male, and thus will not produce milk. Ergo they were eaten, because you only need one bull or ram for a much larger number of breeding females.

The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder--there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs--all the males and some of the females--would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or "baby beef", depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.

Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that's much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.

Pork was plentiful due in part to the large size of a sow's litter. Over-winter one sow, and you get eight piglets or so, much more than a cow's single calf or a ewe's one to four lambs. Even if you didn't keep your own sow, buying piglets to raise and fatten was common. Most medieval pigs would forage rather than being fed scraps--hence the ubiquity of swineherd as a humble occupation.

[chillyfeetsteak]

listen to jane

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[arrgh-whatever]

🦄 Request a Pony here! 🦄

[witnessings]

happy last day of pride to the gay snails who hug and kiss for hours without mating

[brick3621]

[free-my-mindd]

[kingbedlam]

[nihilisticlinguistics]

adulthood notes:

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.

[aveloka-draws]

Weeping Fountain, watercolor and ink.

Illustration for the @cotl-yoa 's zine✨