Hey all, I’ve decided to open editing commissions. My Ko-fi is here if you’re interested!
I currently offer academic editing, with a separate option for double-checking references and bibliographies, and per-chapter editing of short-form fiction. If you need an editor for a longer work or something not listed, email me at even.the.sparrow.15@gmail.com or shoot me a Tumblr message!
kill the shift manager in your brain
you are not wasting time you are vibing. you are not being unproductive you are literally chilling. make a grill cheese with cheddar cheese and slather a piece of the bread with some honey and maybe you'll relax
Are you hungry? Do you have a hankering for grilled cheese sandwiches like, way more than a normal person maybe? Great news! I am about to give you the secret knowledge I stole, like Prometheus himself, from the Akashic Records—to bring back to Prudencia! And I’m even doing it without a ten hour long lecture about how the Akashic Records makes me think of idfk, 9/11, and how that relates to sandwiches.
I will, however, briefly say this: You gotta trust me when I say cooking grilled cheeses via this formula WILL grant you Bloodborne Insight. There is no fucking reason that making a grilled cheese this fucking delicious should be this fucking easy. I feel like I’m cheating God every time I do it because it takes (nearly) no extra spoons. And here’s where I show you why.
Scientifically Proven Perfect Extremely Easy Grilled Cheese
INGREDIENTS — SEASONINGS
-butter, i usually use 2 or 3 tablespoons per sandwich
-garlic cloves, I use 3 usually
-a source of heat, like red pepper flakes, or szechuan peppers
-a source of spice OR a source of sweetness, such as dijon mustard or honey. slather that motherfucker on a slice of your bread.
-a source of herbiness, such as oregano, thyme, sage, rosemary, etc in any combination that goes well together or on its own. if someone tries to tell you that you need it fresh, they’re fucking lying, the 2$ crushed powdered sage is fucking great. experiment with other spices such as ground turmeric if you're spicy
INGREDIENTS - THE METAPHORICAL MEAT OF THE SANDWICH
-two slices of bread per sandwich. this is actually a massive influence on your sandwich taste and texture as a whole. a basic white or wheat will still be fucking delicious because like I said, I stole this from the Akashic Records cookbook section and found it under “fucking perfect grilled cheeses forever”. However, if you CAN—getting bread like brioche, texas toast, brown bread, rye, or sourdough will make a sandwich already being elevated super easily to “pay 23 dollars at a fancy restaurant” level of elevation.
-one to three types of cheese per sandwich. you can get away with one type but really try for two or three if you can swing it.
this is also one of those massive influences over the sandwich—listen, i know, that’s obvious, but stay with me—what matters
isn’t the SPECIES of cheese, it’s the TYPE of cheese. getting the deli at your local Safeway or Walmart or whatever and asking for the cheese they gotta cut (or just in general the fancier, better-quality cheeses) is literally the only major requirement that I ask of you. If you are on SNAP/EBT programs, me too, and I promise you: Please do this. Please trust me when I say do not get the cheap Kraft-type cheese because it’s less money. I know it’s a bit extra but it’s only a bit to get like 1/4 or 1/3lb and you have no idea how much I’m actually getting a little emotional about this, because the “rice with butter and beans or top ramen every single day” life is soulsucking and sickening and it is genuinely one of the greatest sources of suffering
to human beings I can imagine, I’m serious. Following this formula will genuinely change your life/mental health just a bit because you know that you have one meal that is super delicious, super filling, pretty damn cheap when it comes to how much you get, and super easy to make on days where the idea of doing more than just 15 minutes MAX is gonna make you wanna die.
super sorry for that paragraph btw i just really cannot overstate how this is a lifechanger especially when youre poor/low spoons/depressed. delicious food makes me not be as depressed. this is that.
METHOD
That’s literally it. I really hope this helps.
outta my way gayboy im making this sandwich
oh. oh my god. holy fuck. what. how. why. this is delicious. i kinda burned my bread and my cheese didnt melt all the way but it's still the best thing ive ever tasted?????
oh my god. this is so fucking good. the butter melting and absorbing the spices and herbs already smelled amazing, but then i threw the bread on and it started smelling EVEN BETTER. then i took a bite. holy FUCK this is better than sex. i legitimately believe that Innes Keeper stole this shit from Prometheus, there's no other way to explain why this is so easy to make, yet so FUCKING good, other than cheating a god.
I didn't steal it from Prometheus he's my trophy husband!
ok me and my partner went back and made this. exact words upon eating were “we’ve cheated god” and “i feel like my world just got rocked” and then we were both energized to get back to drawing. proof:
please make innes keeper’s scientifically proven perfect extremely easy grilled cheese
I'M PUTTING THIS ON THE FRIDGE (WHERE I KEEP ALL MY CHEESE)
for a while there i was sympathetic to tumblr because of how much they’re in debt; i was kind of like “well of course they’re absolutely desperate for new users, they literally need the money or else tumblr goes down forever”. and then suddenly today it hit me that there’s actually no fucking reason for that debt to be causing these ui changes? the userbase has been INCREDIBLY clear about what they want from tumblr over the years, not to mention clear about the fact that even twitter people don’t need this place to look like twitter. it actually would be very… EASY? for them to just make changes in a direction people would actually be HAPPY with?
for fuck’s sake there were people trying to organize a “crab day” for tumblr despite tumblr doing nothing but telling us to go fuck ourselves for months on end. there were people spending hundreds of dollars on check marks just for the glee of MAKING FUN of twitter. can you IMAGINE how much money this userbase would donate to tumblr if they actually made ui updates geared toward what people have been asking for?
if tumblr actually crowdsourced ideas or even just LISTENED to their userbase it may have been possible for them to make way more money than they’re begging for now, they just insist on trying to drive their actual demographic and loyal userbase out for literally no reason
They are doing surveys that are really hard to find because their survey blog has reblogs disabled for some reason.
Log survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2V3MQTP
Short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HS5LP3W
Blog: https://www.tumblr.com/benevolenthellsite
i mean. look. the point of crab day isn't 'give tumblr money' so much as convince tumblr we are a reliable source of money so they have a solid basis for focusing on retaining and pleasing the existing userbase.
right now, they are not doing that, because they don't have any reason to think it will work on the necessary scale. the numbers aren't there.
the existing userbase is not useful to tumblr because we don't give them money. not on the scale on which we use up money by posting gifs. most of us give them no money.
our financial utility is as ad recipients, and we of course hate that and do our best to avoid it.
therefore, on a corporate level, they have no motivation to care about us: they are looking for a revenue stream. if they retain and even grow the userbase by catering to our needs and wishes but can't monetize us anyhow, that's useless, garbage, a money hole, so expecting them to abandon the search for money in order to keep us, a useless asset, is nonsense. it won't happen.
doesn't matter how righteous we feel about it. tumblr isn't our friend or our parent, and engaging with it like any sort of person, something we can have a relationship with, personal debts owed one way or the other, is phantasmagoric. sympathizing or not is beside the point. we are assets to one another.
'punishing' tumblr for marketing itself to us badly is cutting off our noses to spite our face. it's not a useful or coherent response, even if it feels good. like, valid to prefer to see tumblr collapse in on itself and vanish over paying for it, websites rise and they fall etc etc, but acknowledge you're making that call. not a call about whether you are bound by the social contract to help out a guy.
getting together and collectively paying for tumblr is the only realistic path toward keeping it recognizable and extant. it's not very realistic, but it beats the alternatives.
like. blogging platforms are not a natural resource. they're not even a government service. literally all that is keeping us going is the sunk cost fallacy.
Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you're reading that you get chills???
So I thought to myself
Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan
And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat
And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China
And ohhhhh my goddddd. I'm vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.
The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:
In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!
THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH
and in turn
HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS
*AND*
in its natural range, humans are the main "predator" of kudzu
"Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas."
YALL
This means
That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans
The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn't a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It's us.
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic. Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information. It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.
Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post. Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).
Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines. If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go. Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish. I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.
https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising
https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting
Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.
Academic/Reseach
https://eric.ed.gov/ - Education Resources Information Center, a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.
https://www.jstor.org/ - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, PubMed comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
https://www.researchgate.net/ - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.
https://www.academia.edu/ - platform that shares academic research
https://www.sci-hub.st/ - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers
Libraries
https://www.hathitrust.org/ – free digitized books from all over the world
https://z-lib.org/ – digital library providing ebooks for free
https://www.bpl.org/resources/history-and-political-science/ - History and Poli Sci at the Boston Library
https://www.gutenberg.org/ - free digital books, focused on works with expired US copyright – note, if you look for out of print books on Google, it will try to SELL you books that you can actually download FREE from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times)
https://archive.org/ - Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
_
Please visit my Resources for Writers page for other subject areas.
[ID: an edited Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin sits, smiling, at a lemonade stand with a sign taped to the front of the table. It reads: It's time to retire that other meme and replace it with this template. Change my mind.
Next image is the same meme but the sign reads: Steven Crowder does not deserve a meme format. Change my mind. /end]
You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.
Soon after you begin your quest, you encounter another man in a similar situation. You decide to join forces, as two mortal men stand a better chance at punching Zeus than one.
Two villages over, you encounter a woman who had relations with Zeus and was left with a highly aggressive half-boar half-man offspring. She too feels your anger and offers to join your quest.
By the time you reach Mount Olympus, you’ve amassed a large and formidable army of cuckolded/ravished mortals, demigods with daddy issues, mythical creatures with scores to settle, and a seamstress who you’re pretty sure is Hera in disguise.
Zeus never stood a chance.
What I find best about this scenario is that the original wife probably expected to be murdered for her infidelity at worst or have her relationship with her husband ruined as he grew to resent her baby, at best.
Instead this man looked at his beloved and said, “who did it?”
And she replied “Zeus,” accepting he probably wouldn’t believe her.
And then he sighed, strapped his sandals back on and said, “I’ll be back before the baby is born.”
“Where are you-?”
“The lord of the sky came into my house, molested my wife in my bed and ate my food. I am going to settle the score.”
“Darling, he’ll kill you.”
“He may try, if he would like.”
You’re so right, that IS the best part.
I’m personally caught up on the seamstress.
“The pathway up Olympus is guarded by dozens of traps and perils strong enough to thwart even the Titans. How are we going to get past all of…” the shepherd boy with golden eagle feathers gestured uselessly at the slopes above them, particularly the herd of eight-legged goats snorting fire.
“There’s a way around,” Yiorgos said, though he was not specifically asked. But he had been the first to begin the march on Olympus, and so felt obligated to take the lead whenever possible, “In the stories there’‘s always a way around whatever obstacles the Gods place in our way.”
He hadn’t meant the words to come out as a question, but they had that lilt to them none-the-less. And even though he hadn’t meant it to be a question, much less a question directed at anyone specific, it was directed at one all the same. Just as the eagle-feathered shepherd boy’s had.
“Way I heard it,” a woman’s voice said. Rough with the Mycenaean Greek equivalent of a backwoods accent, and with the depth of a farmer’s wife who straps cattle to her back to carry to market, “there’s a back path. Hidden behind an invisible door that only one key in the world can open.” Everyone’s eyes had turned to the broad older woman in heavy shawl sitting amidst supplies in the foremost cart. “Least, that’s what my grand-mammy always told me.” she added after a moment of dozens of eyes on her.
“Oh, we were so foolish!” That was Lydia, a lithe waif of a woman, many months pregnant, sitting opposite the seamstress in the wagon. “Of course there’d be a.. a quest. They’d keep such a key in the depths of Tartarus or in the golden chariot of Apollo, or, or-”
“Or”, the older woman cut her off in a voice both firm, but much gentler than she used on anyone else, “he’s like all husbands and has been promising to move the key someplace better for the past three thousand years but hasn’t gotten around to it.” She gestured vaguely to the hillside, “Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was under, say, that bush right over there.”
It was. Of course. And everyone in the caravan agreed that it had been a very lucky and wise guess from the nameless woman and for the upteenth time since she first sat herself down in the front wagon and announced she was coming along with no further explanation, each and every last member very purposefully gave no further thought to the matter.
We’ve heard about the seeming contrast of creators that make these super happy saccharine pieces of art being bitter people whose lives seem to be filled with agony whereas horror creators that thrive in the grotesque all seem to be super happy and positive people, the usual “Miyazaki Hayao vs Itou Junji” kinda beat.
There’s a similar, slightly overlapping dynamic between cuisine and blacksmithing. Chefs are the single angriest existences in the world and would piss on your grave seconds after stuffing your freshly gutted corpse in it. Blacksmiths are jovial, usually quiet dudes that work machinery and think your dagger is still very cool even if it’s got some balance issues.
Now, of course this is making reference to the Ramsay style of food shows, which is not the universal experience when it comes to the genre – I’m more of a Cutthroat Kitchen kind of guy, because I like Mario Party – but it’s always fun to me to go through an episode of Hell’s Kitchen where Ramsay annihilates his own vocal chords screaming “FUCKING DONKEY” and “IT’S RAW”, then right after, watch some old Forged In Fire and see the Filipino weapon master, Marcaida, test a short sword one of the contestants made and it fucking explodes into shards without nary a scratch on the pig’s carcass, obviously the shittiest weapon you could possibly make, damascus steel shards flying embedded in his arm, and he’ll calmly, with his signature friendly smile, lovable demeanor, and charismatic gait, face the contestant and be like
“Well, you see, Bob, your blade unfortunately suffered a catastrophic malfunction, and it can’t be tested any further. However, the handle on your weapon allowed for some very good balance and ease of swing, it fits my palm perfectly and it swings very easy. Despite the blade fracturing in 7 uneven fragments, we can see that the blade didn’t chip or roll at all. Good work, Bob” then they’ll shake on it and Bob is eliminated, and all he’ll say is “I’m sorry to have punctured 4 blood vessels on Marcaida, but end of the day, the other smiths were simply better, and I’m proud of them. I just gotta go and work on my fundamentals back at home now :)” meanwhile Hell’s Kitchen’s contestants are having a shootout with Glocks in their dorm because someone made fun of someone else’s raw scallops.
Phenomenon I feel happens a lot
most of the notes were just like "this is why we should communicate better and just say it" but i feel like this person elaborates a bit on the deeper root of this problem
i've seen lots of voice actors make audio files of funny posts on here but none of them have been more relatable than this gem by king prozd himself
