starpeace:

god this scene i haven’t written would be so emotional if it came with 50k words of context i also haven’t written

cthulhu-with-a-fez:

spinosaurusenjoyer:

icryyoumercy:

cthulhu-with-a-fez:

piratepolls:

no, they actually do mean kites

as in, a loooooooooong piece of steel cable with the sail at the end of it

of course it’s ~basically a sailing ship~ but you can’t stick masts on a container ship, that is a disaster waiting to happen for so many reasons

you’d only really get one point to anchor the mast, and that is right where it meets the deck, the containers get it the way of any ropes you might wish to use further up

you’d have to build entirely new container ships or some sort of … mast container frame to account for the fact that the ships are built to exactly fit the containers, and sticking a mast in the middle of it will mess with that entire system by not being the size of a container

loading and unloading around the masts is going to be hell for the crane drivers and there will be damage to everything given the speed they usually work with, so every harbor will hate you if their cranes even have the height to work around the masts

and if you still decide to stick masts on a container ship, they won’t be easily and quickly removeable, so you have to recertify and reclassify the entire ship, and it’s going to take ages and ages to do properly, and they’ll have to figure out how to do it so it’s either expensive as fuck or they may refuse entirely. a steel cable on a winch is by definition removeable (that is, uh, uprollable?) so you don’t have to deal with any of this nonsense. hell, if you calculate the pre-determined breaking point properly, it’ll even fail safely

this isn’t ~ooooooooooh we invented sails! we’re the smartest~

this is “hey, we finally figured out how to do this tried and tested thing in a way that works with the circumstances we’re working under”. it’s a good thing, even if it is presented badly

Thank-you for that info ^ because this is very heartening then. Transport really is so awful rn in what it’s doing to our atmosphere. Looked this up and this is actually a really neat prospect for the planet if it gets implemented.

oh that is very cool actually!! i fully retract my reactionary bullshit meme in favor of the new information, thank you :D

airbenderedacted:

spiribia:

glados would love making AI art. she would be like heres a picture i drew, for you. thats you falling in that fiery pit. your arm is on backwards . i did that on purpose, as a metaphor for how you’re so backhanded. here, let’s pull up another one. that’s you dying from neurotoxin. oh, dear, your hand’s been replaced with an image of anvil. i also did that on purpose. honestly, youv'e got to figure that one out yourself, you can’t possibly expect me to explain all my symbolism.

twodragonsinatrenchcoat:

twodragonsinatrenchcoat:

Talking to myself out loud like a point and click protagonist

Losing it over some of y'all’s tags btw Here’s my favorites

and lastly.

good night

petermorwood:

weaselle:

only-tiktoks:

not a salt or a pepper, but a secret third thing

TL;DR - The third thing was Sugar. Not mustard, not paprika, not dried herbs, not something lost in the mists of time.

It was sugar, and there’s historical proof.

*****

ETA: I’d put about 70% of this post together before @dduane said “Have you seen this?”

“This” was from @jesters-armed, in first with my notions about The Fifth Element Third Condiment, and even a mention that the posts were “…a bit long(ish)”.

Ahem.

Yes they were, with no change here. You have been warned. :->

Well, okay, there’s one change. The pix in this post are new and, combined with the illustrations in older posts, go even further towards confirming that what I once called a theory, I now regard as Fact.

*****

Here are a couple of 19th-century table caddies, proper name “cruet sets”. Take a look at the labels. They answer the “what was it?” question asked by that TikTok in a single word.

Sugar.

Not just in English, Spanish too.

Azucar.

Even without labels to tell them apart and even when the containers were of matched size and shape, sugar-casters always had larger holes than pepper-shakers.

Sometimes not much larger, as here…

…but usually, like those below and above, more than big enough to ensure no confusion between sugar and pepper.

A container of similar shape with no holes, as in the set above, held mustard.

Mustard was never a shaker seasoning; it didn’t work that way. Its spiciness doesn’t activate until the dry “mustard flour” was mixed with water, vinegar, beer or wine and left to stand for several minutes.

This produced a runny-to-stiff paste which was at first transferred from pot to plate on the point of a knife, but soon got its own dedicated spoon.

There’s a slot in this mustard-pot’s side for a spoon, and the set pictured above may also have such a slot, unfortunately facing away from the camera.

A matched spoon became part of any mustard-pot set…

…and was such a uniform size that “mustard-spoon” was a recipe measurement along with dessert-spoon, tea-spoon, salt-spoon and even cayenne-spoon. (I’ve posted about cayenne as a table condiment elsewhere).

*****

Where’s the salt-shaker in those sets?

When sets like those were in common use, salt-shakers weren’t.

*****

So how did people use salt if it wasn’t in a shaker?

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance salt was put out in ornate dishes called a Salt which were often spectacular works of art.

This was placed at the top end of the table where important people sat; those seated further down were “below the salt”.

Later, and still nowadays in formal settings, salt went into smaller dishes - salt-cellars - which like mustard had their own spoons. These were set on the table between two or four guests.

They took salt with the spoon, and instead of sprinkling it all over, they made a little heap of salt on the side of their plate and added pinches as required with finger and thumb.

*****

The same side-of-plate thing is done with mustard.

English mustard is extremely pungent *, far more so than the Grey Poupon which TikTok Guy slurps so casually off his finger. A little can go a long way, too much can be overpowering, and slathering it over an entire plateful of food can make that food inedible.

(* I’m aware Chinese and Russian mustards are even hotter; they’re not relevant here.)

I once had the educational (okay, also entertaining) experience of watching a friend from the USA putting Colman’s English on their hot-dog as if it was French’s Yellow, then taking a bite. Even then they were lucky, because mustard is hottest when made fresh and the shop-bought from a jar was much weaker than it might have been.

“Made mustard” of the kind which went onto Regency, Victorian and Edwardian tables packs quite a punch, and dishes of that period was far from bland; it took two world wars and their associated rationing to give British food its rep for being dull.

Here’s an example of how mustard is used.

Even though it’s from a jar and feeble by comparison with fresh-made, it’s likely that most of this will remain untouched when the meal is over.

Jeremiah Colman, founder of Britain’s best-known mustard company, was only half-joking when he claimed that the firm’s excellent sales record, and his own fortune, came from not from mustard eaten but from what was left on plates.

Whether on the plate or on the food, mustard for table use never came out of a shaker.

*****

The TikTok cites Bill Bryson, an American writer who, though living in the UK and presumably familiar with local grocery shops, failed to connect the proper name of the shaker (“caster” - TikTok Guy uses the name himself) with a grade of sugar sold by Irish / UK shops right now.

Here are the three standard grades - coarse, medium and fine. Note what the middle grade is called.

“"Caster” has become a single-word description for “fine-grain quick-melting fast-mixing general-purpose cooking-and-baking sugar” but is a literal description both of how it was used (“cast” as a verb) and the container (“caster”) it was in.

*****

TikTok Guy mentions the “expense and effort” of using sugar.

Expense:

From the Middle Ages up to the early 1600s sugar was indeed expensive and only for the rich.

Good Queen Bess’s teeth were in an appalling state because of her sugar consumption, and less-wealthy people sometimes blackened their (healthy) teeth, to suggest they too could afford enough sugar to cause rich-people tooth decay.

However, increased use of slave labour on sugar plantations meant the end product became more and more affordable, and by the mid-1700s sugar was no longer “a luxurious delicacy”. It became a household staple, enough that in 1833 politician William Cobbett ranted about how overindulgence in sugary tea had sapped the vitality of the English working class.

His remedy was home-brewed beer, and lots of it (!)

Effort:

TikTok Guy uses the word as if it’s something out of the ordinary, and seems unaware of how much physical labour - from preparing and cooking food to fetching water to washing dishes to tending the fire or range - went on every single day in a pre-modern-gadgets kitchen.

For instance, before electrical ease or hand-cranked convenience, whipping cream to thickness or beating egg-whites stiff enough for meringues meant thrashing away with a bundle of twigs “until it be enough”, however long that took.

By comparison, breaking down a sugar-loaf was quick and easy, especially since there was a tool for the purpose called “sugar nips”.

There’s a set in one of the TikTok photos, though TikTok Guy didn’t comment on them. He may not have known what they were.

Once nipped off, sugar chunks were reduced to the required texture with a pestle-and-mortar, exactly as was done with every other crushable ingredient in that period kitchen.

This and everything else wasn’t effort in the way TikTok Guy thinks; it was just - especially if a mortar was involved - The Daily Grind.

*****

Conclusion:

I’ve posted about sugar casters before, and the first time (six years ago) was amusingly cautious:

So that third container was IMO for sugar.

Since then, backed with increasing amounts of hard visual proof as shown here and elsewhere, I’ve gone from caution to Certainty.

The “mystery” third container in table cruets was for SUGAR, with enough historical evidence in the form of specifically labelled and shaped containers to confirm it beyond doubt.

*****

And they all sprinkled happily ever after.

The End.

dancinbutterfly:

cairistiona7:

mademoiselleenjolras:

pencilbent:

if-only-angels-could-prevail:

the saddest sight in the world is a married couple at a musical and the wife is super excited and happy and the husband looks like he was dragged along and he’s making a big deal about how much he doesn’t want to be there and the wife gets embarrassed or ashamed. this isn’t a funny post, it’s actually heartbreaking and i see it happen at like every other musical i attend.

Yeah, as an usher what makes me sad is when I see wives clearly dressed in their Sunday best, beaming and buying merch and smiling at me as I hand them a program, toting some guy dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt who declines a program. And that’s at least a quarter of the couples who come in or more. Like come on man, she really loves this stuff, can’t you try to enjoy it for her at least?

About as bad as when you see a big-eyed kid who looks like this is the greatest day of their life, all excited to see this show, and their parent/grandparent/aunt/Cousin/Friend/whoever they convinced to take them keeps making fun of them and saying how dumb or ridiculous they’re being. For Gods sake, this is a person you care about and this is a thing that means a lot to them. Smile, get off your phone, and be happy for them.

This goes for ANY loved ones’ interests. Doesn’t matter the interest, doesn’t matter the loved one. Example: my hubby loves airplanes. He works in the aviation industry. He basically has avgas flowing in his veins. No matter where we go on trips, he’ll find an aviation musuem. I don’t mind aircraft museums, but he will literally stop and take photos of rivets. Seriously. One time I was with him at the National Air and Space Museum and I had my nice DSLR camera and he asked if I could take some photos of the seams of the SR71 with “your good camera,” and you know what? It wasn’t my favorite subject to photograph, but I gladly did it because it made him happy.

BTW, we’ve been doing this for the 30+ years we’ve been together. He comes with me to symphonies and art galleries and lets me have the remote during hockey season to the point where he’s now a fan. I know he’s daydreaming about airplane engines a majority of the time, but he’s there and trying and I love that about him.

So yeah, be present for your favorite people and make an effort. It will pay joyful lifelong dividends you can’t begin to imagine.

I do not give a shit about yoga or education. My sister loves yoga, my mom is in love with her teaching job with her whole self. You better believe I will get excited about that shit. Least I can do for the amount of times they’ve listened to me fangirl various media properties.

desolationlesbian:

Explaining to all companies that the three requirements for me to use a social media with any frequency are:

• A chronological follow-only feed, ideally which I can set as default
• Anonymity (my real name and face are not required)
• Have a desktop version

You may call me boomer or whatever but if a social media doesn’t have bare minimum these three things then I will never use it ever. I won’t even make an account. You can suck at everything else but these are non-negotiable. The fact that they are anathema to profitability does not matter to me. If you cannot provide me these three things then I will simply not use any social media at all.

skylordd78:

Here’s a bunch of anti memes (the best type of memes)

videogamedogbracket:

.

oneirocartographer:

onion-souls:

kineticpenguin:

kineticpenguin:

kineticpenguin:

Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn’t committing to the bit

I mean, we’re talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.

“Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week.”

Look, there’s this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. “Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze” no they don’t, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.

The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive “philosopher’s cocaine.”

#why else do you think theyre called high elves (via @krisiverse)