On The Top Left Is Some Food That I Got At A Korean Restaurant After The Virus No Longer Had A Chance
On the top left is some food that I got at a korean restaurant after the virus no longer had a chance of jumping to someone else.
Top right is some bread and butter that i comforted myself with.
bottom left is the chai spice macarons.
bottom right is gracie. she is doing well.
More Posts from Foggedupforsaken and Others
what gets me about every instance of clubbing/partying discourse on here is the Jughead complex people bring to it. Oh I'm weird I'm a weirdo of course I've never been to a party or the club only cool normal people have access to those things. Which is just completely false the biggest freaks I know are partying harder than anyone you just have to pluck up the courage to go the first time and then you'll see there's nothing special about these spaces and nobody at a party when you're an adult is going to care if you're socially awkward
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
A Better World - create an alternate history timeline
Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game
Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet
Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games
Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones
Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy
ZenGM - simulate sports
Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi
IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)
Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface
The Cafe & Diner - mystery game
The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game
Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions
Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game
Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game
Miniconomy - player driven economy game
Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes
BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators
Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil
Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
Herb's Properties
Basil: money, luck, prosperity, happiness
Bay Leaf: energy, cleansing, can be charged with almost any intention
Camomile: Caring, kindness, luck, growth, self-love growth, confidence, avoiding negativity, happiness
Cinnamon: passion, quick success, fire magick
Chia seeds: Growth, health, kindness, Property
Chilli flakes: Pride, confidence, power, strength, Passion
Cumin: Courage, bravery, protection, loyalty
Dandelion: wishes, charisma, success, good luck
Dill: sexual love, luck, protection
Eucalyptus: cleansing, healing, purifying, relaxing, comfort
Fennel: hate, anger
Flax seeds: Prosperity, growth, new beginnings
Ginger: fiery passion, success, and personal power
Jasmine: love, dreams, sensuality, luxury and kindness
Lavender: love and attraction, purification, relaxation, restful sleep
Nutmeg: luck, Health, Fidelity, Love, Prosperity, comfort, loyalty
Oregano: comfort, love, warmth
Paprika: Pride, confidence, power, strength
Parsley: Cleansing. purification
Peppermint: healing, purification, love and energy, cleansing, prosperity
Poppy seeds: protection, intuition, self-assurance, hexing and cursing
Rose: love, beauty, harmony, romance, attraction
Rosemary: cleansing, purification, wisdom, protection
Sesame seeds: Prosperity, growth, health, nurturing
Spearmint: love, cleansing, renewal, blessing
Sunflower seeds: happiness, growth, joy
Thyme: beauty, strength, courage
Turmeric: confidence, creativity, energy
Vanilla: love and sexuality
tip jar
09/22/2022
I'm celebrating the Autumn Equinox today--a day late, I know, but considering everything that happened yesterday, I won't be too terribly harsh with myself.
This is my favorite time of year--the time of harvest festivals and dark mornings and long nights. At a different time, I would have decorated accordingly, but I am so tired these days, I will settle for rest and being kind to myself for the things I can't do.
Jonathan did not call last night. Good. I told them not to. They said it was because they fell asleep without meaning to, but I'll tell myself that they were listening to me when I said to stay away from their devices and focus on recovering.
I'm not a particularly spiritual person--I believe that the supernatural is, always, natural--that is, that magic is only science that we do not yet understand. That said, I don't think that makes it any less magical.
For example, I don't believe that tarot readings tell the future--at least, not in the way that its often posited. That said, I don't believe it's useless, a scam, a hoax, etc. I would go to a tarot reading, if I felt the need to. I think that tarot is, above all, a very useful tool for introspection, offering one the opportunity to view a situation from a different perspective--or reinforcing a perspective they already knew was accurate, but were scared to admit to themselves.
It's like flipping a coin to make a decision. If the coin lands on Option A, and you find yourself upset that it didn't land on Option B, then you now know that what you really wanted was Option B.
All that said, by offering a different perspective/offering reassurance for a current perspective, I believe it helps shape the future by influencing the receiving party's decisions.
In a similar manner, I don't believe in ghosts as the movies put it: I don't believe in vengeful apparitions that linger after death due to unfinished business. That said, I believe that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and that the brain is full to the brim with electrical impulses--and that that energy has to go somewhere. I would not be surprised if there were some form of life after death, even if only as wisps of static electricity in the air.
My supervisor is working from home today. It isn't reflective of the season, but I brought rice with kimchi furikake and mayak gyeran for lunch, along with a slice of cream cake that I made the other day.
When I get home, I will make an apple galette--hopefully with a maple caramel sauce to drizzle over top. It all depends on how much energy I have.
Then, butternut squash soup for dinner. I will have to make bread to go with it. That will be nice.
You weren't raised to love tender x
Some notes on worldbuilding with carnivorous cultures:
Animals feed more people than you think. You don't kill a cow for just one steak, this is a modern misconception since we're removed from the actual animals we eat our meat from; a single cow has several kilos of meat. In fact, slaughtering a single cow often means a feast time for possibly dozens of people. Every part of an animal can be used, and you can see this in cultures that live by ranching and transhumance.
Here, you should look at the Mongols and the people of the Eurasian Steppe, the people of the North American Plains, the people of the Pampas (fun fact; Buenos Aires was called the "carnivore city"), European and Asian cultures that practice transhumance, and those of the Arctic circle.
There are many ways to cook meat, but arguably, the most nutritious way to consume meat is in stew, as it allows you to consume all the fats of the animal and add other ingredients. In fact, mutton soup and stew historically was one of the basic meals for the for people in the Eurasian Steppe, who are one of the people with the highest meat consumption in the world.
Of course, meat spoils away easily. Fortunately, from jerky to cured meats, there are ways to prevent this. In pre-industrial and proto-industrial societies, salted meat was the main way of consumption and exporting meat. This makes salt even a more prized good.
Often, certain parts of animals like eyes, the liver, the testicles, the entrails, are considered not only cultural delicacies but as essential for vitamins and nutrients unavailable in environments such as the poles. The Inuit diet is a very strong example.
Pastures and agriculture have often competing dynamics. The lands that are ideal for mass pasture, that is, temperature wet grasslands, are also often ideal for agriculture. So pastoralism has often been in the margins of agrarian societies. This dynamic could be seen in the Americas. After the introduction of cattle and horses, the Pampas hosted semi-nomadic herdsmen, natives and criollo gauchos. The introduction of wire eventually reduced this open territory, converting it into intense agriculture, and traditional ranching was displaced to more "marginal" land less suitable for agriculture. Similar processes have happened all over the world.
This also brings an interesting question to explore. Agriculture is able to feed more people by density. What about species that DON'T do agriculture, because they're completely carnivorous? The use of what human civilization considers prime agricultural land will be different. They will be able to support much higher population densities than pastoralism.
Pastoral human populations have developed lactase persistance to be able to feed on dairy products even in adulthood. This mutation has happened all over the world, presumably with different origins. In any mammalian species that domesticates other mammals such a thing would be very common if not ubiqutous, as it massively expands the diet. Milk provides hydration, and cheese, yogurth and other such products allows long lasting food sources.
What about hunting? Early humans were apex predators and we are still ones today. However, humans can eat plants, which somewhat reduces the hunting pressure on fauna (though not the pressure of agrarian expansion which can be even worse). An exclusively carnivorous species (for example some kind of cat people) would have to develop very rigid and very complex cultural behavior of managing hunting, or else they would go extinct from hunger before even managing domestication. These cultural views towards hunting have also arosen in people all over the world, so you can get a sense of them by researching it.
It is possible for pastoral nomadic people, without any agriculture, to have cities? Of course. All nomadic peoples had amazing cultures and in Eurasia, they famously built empires. But they traded and entered conflicts with agrarian societies, too. They weren't isolated. Most of nomadic societies were defined by trade with settled ones.
The origin of human civilization and agriculture is still debated. It would be probably completely different for a non-human carnivorous society. One possible spark would be ritual meeting points (such as the historical Gobleki Tepe) or trade markets growing into permanent cities. But in general, pastoralism, hunting and ranching favors low-density populations that would be quite different.
Fishing, on the other hand, is a reliable source of protein and promotes settled cities. One can imagine acquaculture would be developed very early by a civilization hungry for protein.
Other possibilities of course are the raising of insects and mushrooms, both very uncommonly explored in fiction besides passing mentions.
Of course, most carnivorous species have some limited consumption of plant matter and many herbivores are oportunistic predators. The main thing to ask here is what the daily meal is here. For most human agrarian cultures, it's actually grain (this is where the word meal comes from). What about species that cannot live with a grain-based diet? You will find that many things people take for granted in agrarian society would be completely different.
As I always say: the most important question you can ask is "where does the food comes from?"
I hope you found these comments interesting and useful! I would love to do a better post once I'm able to replace my PC (yes, I wrote this all in a phone and I almost went insane). If you like what I write and would love to see more worldbuilding tips, consider tipping my ko-fi and checking my other posts. More elaborate posts on this and other subjects are coming.
genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital
Know what I’m salty about?
In all my art classes, I was never taught HOW to use the various tools of art.
Like yes, form, and shape and space and color theory and figure drawing is important, but so is KNOWING what different tools do.
I’m 29 and I JUST learned this past month that India Ink is fucking waterproof when it dries. Why is this important? Because I can line something in India Ink and then go over it with watercolors. And that has CHANGED the ENTIRE way I art and the ease I can create with.
tldr: Art Teachers: teach your students what different tools do. PLEASE.
Ok you know how sometimes you see a post on your dash that starts out good but then it turns into people talking about how many notes the post is going to get? You can just go back to a version of the post before all that shit and reblog that!
This can be you! This can be me! Together we can make our dashes less boring and repetitive and unfunny!
How to REALLY Learn Tarot in One Day
Reading tarot like a master requires a natural talent for divination. Barring that, years of constant practice will suffice.
But anyone can learn the basics. And it should not take longer than a day to cover. Start in the morning, and by evening, you will be a tarot reader.
This post is Day 1 of the Divination class that I teach. By 8:30 PM, my teenage initiates were already correctly predicting each other’s crushes and the winners of tennis matches.
THE DAY BEFORE
Get a deck and a resource.
Acquire a Rider-Waite deck or a clone of it. You may opt for something else, but be forewarned that you could lose out on a multitude of symbolism. The Rider-Waite may not be the prettiest, but there is nothing more complete.
Find a reliable resource. The Ultimate Guide to Tarot by Liz Dean is a perfect book for beginners. So is Labyrinthos’ website, if you prefer something free of charge.
THE DAY ITSELF
9–10 AM
Pick one keyword for each card.
With a belly full of breakfast, quickly skim through your resource and pick just one keyword per card. For example, “destruction” for The Tower, “happiness” for The Sun, and “wealth” for the Ten of Pentacles. Note it all down on paper or on your phone.
10–11 AM
Associate the word with the image.
Look at your keyword side by side the card. Make an undeniable connection.
Why is The Tower “destruction”? Because the tower on the card has been “destroyed”.
Why is The Sun “happiness”? Because the child on the card looks “happy”.
Why is the Ten of Pentacles “wealth”? Because the family on the card looks “wealthy”.
Memorization becomes much easier when based on visual correlation.
11 AM–12 PM
Quiz yourself.
Hide your notes from view. Keeping in mind the word-image associations you made, go through each card, reciting its keyword. Put in one pile all the cards you remembered the keyword for, and in another, the ones that escaped your memory.
Then look at your notes side-by-side the second pile to remind yourself of what you missed. Go through the whole pile again, repeating the process until you can recite the keywords for all 78 cards without making a mistake. One card, one word. Should be as simple as pre-school.
12–1 PM
Take a break.
Have a meal. Nap a little. Stretch a bit. Give your mind space to absorb everything you just memorized.
1–2 PM
Quiz yourself again.
You are guaranteed to forget some of your keywords. That is fine. It is why you are doing this again, to strengthen your memory. Be patient with yourself, and keep going through the whole deck until you are no longer making any mistakes.
2–3:30 PM
Pick a key phrase for each reversed card.
Quickly skim through your resource again. Now that you know the upright meanings, reversals should be fairly easy, because they can only be one of three: the opposite of the upright card; the upright card watered down; the upright card made worse.
To illustrate:
If The Devil upright is “addiction”, reversed it is “overcoming addiction” — the opposite.
If the Nine of Cups is “fulfillment”, reversed, it is “fulfillment delayed” — watered down.
If the Seven of Swords upright is “manipulation”, reversed it is “betrayal” — made worse.
Note it all down next to your upright keywords.
3:30–5 PM
Quiz yourself on both upright and reversed meanings.
Hide your notes from view. Keeping in mind the upright-reversed meaning associations you made, go through each card one by one, reciting its upright meaning followed by its reversed meaning.
Like before, put in one pile the cards you had no problem with, and in another, the cards that escaped your memory. Look at your notes for those you missed. Go through the whole pile again, repeating the process until you can recite the upright keywords and the reversed key phrases for all 78 cards, without making a mistake.
5–6 PM
Take another break.
Have another meal. Nap some more. Stretch again. Let your mind and body breathe.
6–7:15 PM
Quiz yourself again on both upright and reversed meanings.
Go through each card one by one, reciting its upright meaning followed by its reversed meaning.
Like before, put in one pile the cards you had no problem with, and in another, the cards that escaped your memory. Look at your notes side by side the cards you missed. And go through the full deck again until you are no longer missing a beat.
7:15–8 PM
Read.
For the last time today, bring out your resource, and from it, choose any spread you like. But if you really want to do it right, the Celtic Cross spread is recommended. Do not worry about being overwhelmed. You can leave the book or the website open on the page where the spread is.
Ask tarot your question. Without looking at your notes, interpret its answer to the best of your ability using the keywords and key phrases you just memorized.
Congratulations. You are now a tarot reader.
But if you wish to keep learning, then keep reading.
THE DAYS AFTER
Day 1 – Day 4
For the next four days, quiz yourself again on both upright and reversed meanings, to really cement them in your mind. Then perform the same spread you did the first time, but ask a different question each time. Interpret the cards to the best of your knowledge. This should only take an hour at the most.
Day 5
By now, everything you learned has been drilled into memory. Feel free to expand your knowledge. Read your book cover to cover. Fully explore your chosen website.
Most of the new meanings you will learn will be related to the ones you committed to heart, so do not worry about being confused. For example, if your keyword for The Empress is “abundance”, you will find that its other meanings are “harvest”, “creativity” and “fertility”. “Harvest” is financial abundance; “creativity”, an abundance of skill; “fertility”, an abundance of growth. They vary slightly, but they are all the same, essentially.
All the best in your tarot journey.
