Exist to spite

Chop 1 onion and put it in a pot.

Add 1 or 2 cans of diced tomatoes. Whatever makes the ratio of onion look right.

Add a ridiculous amount of frozen peas. Peas should make up a notable portion of this sauce.

Add frozen corn also if you wanna be real fancy. If I have bacon, I'll add that too, but I very rarely have bacon.

Cook on HIGH.

While sauce is cooking, grab the nearest bottle of mixed spices that isn't obviously for desserts. Add some. How much? I dunno, enough that you feel like you've added seasoning so it's technically cooking. (For me this is most often a mix called Moroccan, but it could be anything. I've reorganised my kitchen recently so tonight it was something called Pizza Topping.)

If you happen to have green herbs lying around, add those too. Whatever you have on hand that's green.

Let the sauce boil on HIGH until all the water is gone. Stir occasionally so the saucepan will be easier to clean later. Serve on cooked spaghetti noodles with no cheese.

I am also not one of those "cooking purists", who believes that everything must be done in a specific/ traditional way (unless you are making a cooking video with the title "how to make x" in which case if you don't specify mid video that your way is not traditional god help you).

I am a firm believer in "If it tastes good, then it is correct for you".

Except in this case.

This hurts every cooking bone in my body. The latent ancestors in my soul. The judgmental elf in my brain just bit a cyanide capsule.

ok but that is still severely a food crime. a different one now but.

Chop 1 onion and put it in a pot.

Add 1 or 2 cans of diced tomatoes. Whatever makes the ratio of onion look right.

Add a ridiculous amount of frozen peas. Peas should make up a notable portion of this sauce.

Add frozen corn also if you wanna be real fancy. If I have bacon, I'll add that too, but I very rarely have bacon.

Cook on HIGH.

While sauce is cooking, grab the nearest bottle of mixed spices that isn't obviously for desserts. Add some. How much? I dunno, enough that you feel like you've added seasoning so it's technically cooking. (For me this is most often a mix called Moroccan, but it could be anything. I've reorganised my kitchen recently so tonight it was something called Pizza Topping.)

If you happen to have green herbs lying around, add those too. Whatever you have on hand that's green.

Let the sauce boil on HIGH until all the water is gone. Stir occasionally so the saucepan will be easier to clean later. Serve on cooked spaghetti noodles with no cheese.

I am also not one of those "cooking purists", who believes that everything must be done in a specific/ traditional way (unless you are making a cooking video with the title "how to make x" in which case if you don't specify mid video that your way is not traditional god help you).

I am a firm believer in "If it tastes good, then it is correct for you".

Except in this case.

This hurts every cooking bone in my body. The latent ancestors in my soul. The judgmental elf in my brain just bit a cyanide capsule.

ok but that is still severely a food crime. a different one now but.

And the director said, no no, it's for parents with kids.

So my friend and I said, wait, are we supposed to stop people if they're going in there without kids?

And she said no, they don't have to have a kid with them, maybe they have a kid who's in the children's area and they don't want to go far away.

Oh okay, so we should ask them if they're here with a kid?

And at this point the director was starting to get annoyed. No, you don't have to make people fill out a checklist before they go to the bathroom. We just expect that adults won't be hanging out in the kid's section without kids

Okay, I (an adult services librarian) said, so should I offer to go get books for them if they want a children's book and they don't have a kid with them?

And should I (my friend the children's librarian) ask adults without kids to leave the children's section? How long should they get to browse before we ask them to leave?

And the director said "I'm not asking you to police people's bathroom usage or keep all adults out of the children's section, just let me know if someone is being weird"

And the visibly trans woman who was a library regular (and who knows how many other trans and genderqueer people) used the single restroom in the back of the children's section and it was never a thing again (at least not while I was there)

But it does not protect cheap paperbacks, exploitation novels, underground comix, anonymous erotica, obscure zines, fanfiction, pulp horror, badly written shock fiction, or the work of people too poor, strange, stigmatized, or low-status to have critics rushing to declare them Important. It is worth pointing out that marginalized sexualities and subcultures have often only been able to speak through these low-status, disreputable forms.

The right to express yourself should not depend on whether your prose is elegant or meaningful in the eyes of a judge or jury. If a human made it, then it is meaningful to them, and that is enough to give it intrinsic value.

I do not defend ugly, stupid, tasteless, or exploitative books because I think they are somehow secretly noble. I defend them because freedom that only covers the respectable is a fraud.

Before the pandemic hit I have given a bunch of talks on this topic, on how the lack of archiving regarding things not being considered "culturally relevant" actually left us with a bunch of gaps in knowledge on old times. Most notably this is also why we need to archive stuff like old pulp magazines and penny dreadfuls and what not. This stuff is important, because it actually shows us a lot more about general sentiments of the time than we could have by just looking at the literature that was well regarded.

I also think that from ancient times the stuff that is actually way more interesting to look at rather than exchanges between nobles, commanders, and officers is the letters of the normal folks. This still has obviously the bias that in ye olden days a lot of people could not write at all, so their stuff is not preserved at all. But by looking only at the "important" people we miss pretty 99% of people.

Also, the fact that even the porn that has been preserved from old times gets often not discussed in historical or cultural study classes creates this idea that ye olden times were not horny. I guarantee you: they were. And to remember that... I am sorry, dearies, we gotta archive and actually culturally discuss porn.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

When I said it was birdseed she just went “oh- can they actually eat that? Is that safe?”

I didnt know how to respond like, at all, so I just pointed at the duck and said “bird”