Hegar

First time I quit i was sick and cigarettes tasted awful for a week, so I figured if I had already gone a week without I might as well quit. Whenever I got a craving I thought about how disgusting they tasted with a cold, and imagined spongey lungs filling with black tar till I gave myself a shiver of disgust.

I started up again years later while traveling, then quit for good while visiting my parents for 2 months - I know I’m too embarrassed to smoke around my parents.

Stinky tofu is usually fermented directly in rotting vegetable matter, I believe. But that sounds like the flavor, yeah.

Have you tried deep frying it? The crispy outside and soft inside is delightful. It’s often served with a little cooked cabbage.

Stinky tofu is much milder in flavor than aroma. At least the stuff I ate in both Yunnan and Taiwan was, Hunan may have a different kind.

I found it incredibly tasty, like a mild gorgonzola. Fried or boiled in soup are both amazing.

In Taiwan it’s super convenient because as soon as you get punched in the nose by the aroma of hot, unwashed crotch you can follow that scent and you’ll almost always reach an amazing night market with a range of delicious food and other vendors.

If we just extend that rule to everyone we’d have better cheaper stuff and fewer rich people to boot.

When I worked in a mall, there were no staff toilets. So I was subjected to a slightly less extreme version of that maybe 2-3 times a week.

I call that symphony “ringing the taco bells”.

If you honestly believed that democracts and republicans are identical on israel and you care about human suffering you’d look at all the other ways that trump and his fascists have promised to brutalize everyone who’s not them and minimize human suffering by voting for a democrat.

Trump killing trans people, immigrants and palestinans is not a moral victory for opponents of our genocide in gaza.

Yeah, that makes it very hard to vote for them, I feel that. But that’s a problem that gets worse by not voting for a democrat.

Republicans have promised to genocide harder and trump has already been coordinating with netanyahu to counter anything that might reduce palestinans deaths.

I don’t like it either but it’s time to be an adult, do the unpleasant thing, and vote for a democrat.

Don’t vote “for/against whoever”. Vote against trump like an adult - that means voting democrat.

Sure, picking between two options that you don’t want is legitimately hard for human brains to do. But republicans have promised and begun to brutalize minorities at ever larger scales, and are objectively worse than democrats on everything that matters.

Handing the reins of state power to fascists has never improved life for leftists or humanity.

Rebury the disarticulated ochre-painted bones of an important deceased community member!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çatalhöyük

Why would you peel a carrot?

“Edomite!”

I was getting onto a bus, someone looked me over and spat out the word. It was clear from the tone that it was an insult, but it also sounded suspiciously bronze age, so I was very excited to find out what it meant.

Turns out it’s a biblical reference used by some black nationalist groups in the US to refer to white people as unclean or diseased. Edom was one of several late bronze age Canaanite kingdoms. At one point the torah describes them as slightly paler and dirty, hence the insult.

Ah! Yep, definitely the same place!

Have you been to More Books, around the corner from the Powell’s on Hawthorne? They don’t want you to use your cellphone, are anti-wifi, only accept cash and use a handwritten ledger - all of which I find quite charming in a bookstore.

They had a ~100 year old typewritten compilation of translated Chinese sex jokes.

Not much fantasy/sci-fi but if you like books it’s got a real ‘living my best life in my bookstore’ kind of vibe that you might enjoy.

I really love seeing a well curated list, and that’s a well curated list.

Removed by mod

The musician I saw last week mentioned that he’ll get more money if you buy a CD from him now than if you stream his catalog on spotify for the rest of your life.

It’s not a question of “look[ing] like distancing or lack of empathy”, or just “bitching about people in power”.

Scientific studies that look at your brain itself - not your behavior - show that as people get more power the brain’s empathy centers become suppressed and you are chemically less capable of being a good person.

There are many contributing factors. Part of it is russian and american oligarchs spending heaps of cash to amplify any and every message that could help trump win.

The fact that power results in antisocial behavior has been understood for millenia.

Lots of societies have had cultural infrastructure of equality that attempts to mitigate this weakness in our biology and prevent harmful levels of power accumulation. The basque village layouts that Davids Graeber & Wengrove talk about, or the practise of ‘insulting the meat’ of successful hunters.

Neuroscience shows that rulers will always become evil.

Getting more power actually changes your brain, suppressing your ability to use empathy. The very powerful will always struggle to remember that others are human and don’t want to be hurt.

Humane behavior and hierarchy are mutually exclusive. Heirarchical organization encourages humans to hurt each other.