THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Guys!!!! GUys!!!!!

I just got my copy of the Secret History in the mail!!!!!!!! I am So HyPeD!!!!! I hope its as good as i think it’ll be!!!!

An angel

in a sea of devils

is a terrifying

prospect to those

who only

know

pain

- My soul is shattered glass but i am not unfix-able

Question: Why didnt they just cut off Dumbledore’s arm when cursed with the withering curse? Is there an actual in-world explanation or was it just for the plot and the drama of Dumbledore asking Snape to kill him?

ok satellites are all alone up there just searching for everything and anything and it’s so beautiful and I hope they aren’t lonely

i say i like tragedies and everyone’s all like ‘why do you like sad stories? are you depressed?’ and never ‘how was the catharsis? was the catharsis fun?’

i think what’s on a person’s nightstand is very telling so reblog this and put in the tags the things you have on your nightstand

Broke college student tip:

Learn to love cooking. Like get into it. Enjoy it. Get excited to cook. Why? When you learn to cook and enjoy it you'll save money. Lots of money. And you'll be eating better, healthier food too.

For example. I'm eating seafood and veggie pasta right now with a white wine cream sauce. In a restaurant, this would be a fancy meal, costing $20 or so for a small portion. Literally cost me like $5 or so in ingredients to make. And like 20 minutes to cook. And I made enough for lunch AND dinner. When you know how to cook you can make cheap foods taste amazing.

Here's some advice how to make this easier:

Buy frozen things. Frozen veggies, frozen fruits, frozen meats, etc. Frozen lasts longer and saves you money and stress.

Have basic herbs and spices on hand. Salt, pepper (red, black, and white), thyme, rosemary, basil, garlic powder, onion powder, turmeric, bay leaf (chopped is best), cinnamon, paprika, cumin, and sage are my most commonly used ones!

Common recipe ingredients to keep on hand: pasta, rice, lemon/lime juice, garlic, onion, white wine, frozen veggies, potatoes, frozen meats, sugar, butter, pasta sauces, tomatoes, eggs, soda/pineapple juice/beer (great for marinades or cooking meat).

Frozen things when stored properly can be stored for a couple months and portioned out making quick meals easy!

Learn flavor profiles. Citrus, basil, rosemary, butter, salt, garlic, and onion are all fairly universal in their uses while things like cumin and turmeric have a stronger, earlier flavor and are great for stews, curries, pastas, soups, and sauces!

Learn to shop. If it's non-perishable and bogo, get it! Bogo (buy one get one) is basically half off and now you have two things for when you need it! Walmart brand pasta is like $0.98 a box. You can also get a bag of frozen extra small shrimp at Walmart for like $5 and there's about 50 in a bag. Shop non-perishable items by weight (price per ounce) and perishables by size.

Pasta sauce can be put in the freezer and if stored well can keep for like 3 months!

Sauté your veggies! They taste so good that way!!! A little butter, garlic, rosemary, and onion. Sprinkle with salt after and viola!

It's easy to fall into a food rut, so treat yourself every now and then with something different or challenge yourself by limiting yourself to 5 ingredients or something to make you exercise your skills.

Make your own barbecue sauce. It's so fun! All you need is molasses, ketchup, brown sugar, and whatever you want to customize it. I usually put honey and bourbon in mine.

Go on pinterest and find easy recipes! The great thing about a recipe is every single one you see is customizable and was made to the cooker's preference. You don't like mushrooms? Don't put them in and add something earthy and unami like turmeric or sumac in its place.

Tofu is easier than you think.

Rice is very filling and goes with most everything.

Keep fresh herbs fresh by putting them in water. You might even root and grow your own!

Frozen fruits are amazing for marinades or more "tropical" tasting recipes. Frozen citrus and pineapple are great for making a citrus chicken and rice! Just defrost in a bowl and then add the chicken to the bowl.

Tortillas are amazing and keep for a while in the fridge.

Print out recipes and keep them in a binder so you make notes and changes directly on the paper!

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

Deviser

DEVISER is an upcoming Sci-Fi Horror Audio Drama, created by Harlan Guthrie. In this series Son wakes up aboard a spaceship bound for earth in an effort to recolonize. What he discovers however will change everything he knows about his world and himself. All episodes of DEVISER release May 1st. Find it wherever Podcasts are found. www.deviser.ca Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey all, Today I’ve released a 7 Part Limited Sci-Fi Horror Audio Drama series called DEVISER. It’s a dark, gritty, horror story told through your headphones and one that I’m very proud of. All 7 episode are available now to listen to and I did everything on the show from the writing, acting and editing, to the music and promotions. All save the art, which was done by my amazingly talented friend Rob Donaldson. If you like Sci Fi Horror stories, find a quiet moment - a good set of headphones - and please check out my show. I’d really, really appreciate it. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review. Thanks so much, Harlan

From Anthony Bourdain:

Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal, and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—we sure employ a lot of them.

Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, and look after our children.

As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs.”

But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as a prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, probably, simply won’t do.

We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.

So, why don’t we love Mexico?

We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires.

Whether it’s dress up like fools and get passed-out drunk and sunburned on spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.

In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us.

The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in L.A., burned out neighborhoods in Detroit—it’s there to see.

What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead in Mexico, just in the past few years—mostly innocent victims. Eighty thousand families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.

Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace.

Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness.

It's archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over tortilla chips. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply “bro food” at halftime.

It is in fact, old—older even than the great cuisines of Europe, and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet, if we paid attention.

The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation—many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe—have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling heights.

It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, and was there—and on the case—when the cooks like me, with backgrounds like mine, ran away to go skiing or surfing or simply flaked. I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them.

To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North.

I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.

In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.