kat

Get a Brother. My simple black and white laser printer has very strong "ME PRINT FOR YOU. ME PRINT! ME PRINT ALL PAGE FOR YOU" energy. The only beef we have is when he is all "NO PRINT. FEED ME PAPER" and then when fed he goes back to printing no problem.

As the daughter of a chef - skip the salt, add a bouillon cube. It's not authentic but it tastes better and half of the NYC restaurants do it already. The umami from the bouillon cube rounds out the flavour and makes it taste less like a two ingredient poverty food.

A lot of Italian dishes taste kinda unfinished until you add an umami element to them. Thats why I prefer the Croatian version the same dishes. Pasta fagioli is a beany vegetable soup, the Croatians make pasta fažol by adding a bit of pršut (smoked ham) and it completes the flavour and makes it a delicious hearty meal. That's why Lydia Bastianich has been so successful - she's been passing the typical Croatian version of meals as "authentic Italian" for decades and people like it because it flat out tastes better.

If you wanna get real advanced find some Vegeta in a European grocery store and start using it to sub salt in most meals. It's basically just a bunch of herbs, onion and garlic powder, and MSG. Use it as a meat rub, use it when making rice, use it while cooking anything savoury.

That's your experience. No matter how well I dress, I can't stop my bones from aching in the cold. On the flip side, I'm typically comfortable in the heat, even in 38 Celsius temps. I obviously have an upper limit of like 40-45C, but so do most humans.

Likewise it's not really safe to chill outside in -40 to -50C for most humans either. At that point you're getting frostbite through the wool underlayers, and the exposed skin will literally sting.

Well summer never made me want to kill myself so I tend to prefer it. Severe seasonal affective disorder is interesting.

That said these days I have ways of dealing with it. Turns out running during the winter days is kinda neat because you end up getting endorphins and UV. I also have one of those SAD lamps and they truly work for me. Nowadays I like winter a lot more - especially cozy stuff like knitting and tea.

I do think that the world's increasing waistlines affect people's attitude about summer. I know that the bigger you are, the more miserable the heat can feel. Plus wearing revealing clothes isn't fun for everyone, especially with things like chub rub. On the flip side, being skinny makes you pretty cold so the winter can be miserable. I know that no amount of layers would help the ache in my bones when I was underweight.

This is why autumn is bae. Hot enough to be outside, cold enough to not sweat, pretty colours and harvest activities, Halloween... Autumn wins. Close second is spring, which I hear is fabulous in many places, but in Canada is mostly just freezing winter temperatures, one week of trees blooming, and then just 30 C temperatures after that.

Yeah that's not how seasonal affective disorder works. I can view the starry night sky as magical the same as anyone else but not enough bright light hitting my eyeballs will result in me being depressed as fuck.

I also prefer the Cynics. Diogenes is metal as fuck, but my favourite part of Cynicism is that in my opinion, it contains the only true love story in Greek philosophy, Crates and Hipparchia who influenced Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. I'm a sucker for a good love story.

I just got into knitting and I'm already dreading wearing anything I make around my family. "Can you make me a sweater, oh come on, why are you so selfish?" I dunno because it would be a month of work and hundreds in materials and no matter what I explained to them, it would just get treated like a random polyester sweater and they'd probably ruin it or toss it when they decided they don't like the style anymore... And my family is the kind to criticise any imperfections that didn't look machine produced.

Old ladies know the value of a decent small batch yarn, especially if they're of the generation that knit around the clock as a necessity. Boomers and Gen X largely didn't knit, at least generally, so they're pretty out of touch. They may perceive knitting as something with little value - either taking it for granted that knit goods cost little due to slave and machine labor, or taking it for granted that their mother or grandmother gave them knits for free.

Many millenials and Gen Z have tried yarn crafts, and at least vaguely know it's a shit ton of work.

The fact that people took Stoicism, a philosophy that's basically cognitive behavioral therapy for emotional awareness, and twisted it to mean "stiff upper lip" or "repress everything lest you seem weak" is depressing as hell.

I surprisingly enjoy purling but I can only do it English style. Continental purling makes no sense to my brain. Continental knits and English purls for me are the same tension so that works out even if it's a bit odd.

I feel like it's more about money and international implications than whiteness. If China attacked a country like Taiwan or Vietnam, there would likely be a ton of press over it as well. An Ethiopian civil war has less economic implications globally.

Plus it's a civil war. I grew up in the Balkans and I can tell you that people gave so few fucks about the war of my country, that when the Ukraine war started they weren't bringing up Yugoslavia as a recent European conflict, they were talking about WWII. If your country isn't gonna make a huge impact on the global markets, nobody cares (even if you're blonde like many ex-Yugoslavians).

Something about equating the choice to have kids with reducing the climate impact leaves me with an icky feeling. Not all humans have the same climate impact, so not all children would, either. Instead of telling Bob not to procreate, we really need to take a long hard look at Bezos and his many private flights.

Never forget that "carbon footprint" is propoganda by the fossil fuel industry to push the responsibility of climate change onto individuals rather than large corporations who are the ones truly responsible for the mess we're in.