goueznou

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Give someone a fish and you feed them for possibly less than a single meal, up to several days, depending on the size of the fish; then, teach them to fish and they can continue to feed themselves until scurvy sets in—that is, assuming fishing is allowed where they are, because otherwise the authorities will come by and stop them.

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Everything I write ends up turning into an exercise in imagining a world wherein every single person puts other people first because I see it happen often enough to know it's within the realm of possibility

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I wrote a thing about dandelions! 🌼 Here are some of the fun little factoids I dug up:

There are around 2800 microspecies of dandelion.

There are native species of dandelion across the northern hemisphere, including several species from North America, like the horned dandelion and the California dandelion.

European dandelions are considered an invasive species, but they aren't harmful. Once a damaged ecosystem has been repaired, dandelions tend to disappear.

Conservation efforts are needed for some indigenous dandelions, so they don't go extinct!

Dandelions are probably the most nutritious thing growing in your garden.

Dandelions have been used in traditional medicine for centuries, and scientific studies have confirmed some of their medicinal properties.

Dandelions are only considered "weeds" because of lawns.

Growing dandelions will help other plants in your garden. Their roots break up compacted soil and draw up nutrients too deep for other plants to reach.

Horticulturalists once bred dandelions as garden flowers.

They're just really pretty, let's be honest 💛

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Elon wyd

I genuinely wish I could see inside Musk’s head or at least get an explanation for how he was thinking his plans would work out.

Like it’s clear now he is fantastically out of touch with reality but I still really wanna know like, to what degree. Did he think people would accept his ultimatum? Did he genuinely think it would only take like 300 people to keep Twitter running?

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other people’s YouTube recommendations: FAR RIGHT FOX NEWS CRITICAL RACE GENDER IDEOGRAMS BLAH BLAH BLAH

my YouTube recommendations:

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Is it a coincidence that the same month is designated for growing a mustache, speed-writing a novel, and avoiding orgasm? I wonder if the last one is required for either of the first two to be successful.

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For October: “jeepers, creepers, and nonbinary peepers”

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What if “High Elves” is a mistranslation, and they’re really just “Tall Elves”?

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This is Francis Kéré, an architect from Burkina Faso and at least in my eyes, the patron saint of "afro solar punk". He builds using local, sustainable materials, and uses the education he received in Germany to improve on traditional methods already known. His first project was a school in his home village, built to enable other children to receive an education like he once was. The school has a self-cooling mechanism that does not require AC and was built cost effectively together with the community. This year he won the Pritzker Prize. You know what, just watch his TED Talk, I highly recommend it.

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Pet peeve #291: People who say “Papa New Guinea”

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Why did I never until today think of looking up what ranch dressing is made of?

Ranch dressing is an American salad dressing usually made from buttermilk, salt, garlic, onion, mustard, herbs (commonly chives, parsley and dill), and spices (commonly pepper, paprika and ground mustard seed) mixed into a sauce based on mayonnaise or another oil emulsion. Sour cream and yogurt are sometimes used in addition to, or as a substitute for, buttermilk and mayonnaise.

Main ingredients

Mayonnaise

sour cream

buttermilk

salt

black pepper

garlic

onion

chives

parsley

dill

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The phrase “synthwave Brexit” randomly popped into my head the other day, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to picture it ever since.

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Sweet and gooey? In the kitchen? Without nuts? 

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Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring one’s sense of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth.

As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was “nasty, brutish and short” until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in a childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilization that “they all ran headlong to their chains.”

These are two variants of the same myth because they both assume an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age.

Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment.

What makes David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth — what they call “the Myth of the Stupid Savage.” Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests.

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And neither of them was ever seen again.

when god closes a door i lock it

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In 2029, women will “accidentally” lose their Zoom connection to a party

The Los Angeles Record, California, May 14, 1929