Everything Humans Do Is Art

The company I bought the unit from--and which I supposedly have an extended warranty with that they're refusing to cover, but that's another matter--quoted me 4-6 weeks to come look at the machine for a diagnostic, then warned me there was another 6-8 week wait for parts.

They also quoted me several hundred dollars for the estimated parts, which they were going to order pre-inspection (????), and told me it'd be $400 for some rubber tubing, which was the likely culprit. And then another $900 for labor, not including the diagnostic testing.

Well, thanks to the very kind people who donated, I was able to call another company that came out the next day, told me the problem wasn't with any tubing at all, but the water sensor at the base of the machine was busted, and then quoted me $700 to replace it. Bracing for the worst, I asked about the timeline for parts and how much everything would cost in total, including labor.

Yeah, turns out that $700 included parts, labor, and diagnostic testing.

Oh, and ordering the official licensed parts took a week.

I told him the other place told me it'd be almost two months to order parts, and he asked who the company was, rolled his eyes, and said, "Yeah, they've been doing that. They're trying to get you to just buy a whole new machine."

I didn’t realize there was a condor release point out by Klamath but congrats to everyone involved! You all have no idea how much I love condors. (Or maybe you do)

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

Once a day, shadows briefly bring back to life the beautiful ‘Ghost of Ungru Manor’ Estonia...

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

Gordon Parks captured the Jim Crow South with a quiet, devastating clarity—using his camera as both witness and weapon. Through intimate portraits and everyday scenes, he exposed the cruelty of segregation not with sensationalism but with humanity, dignity, and truth. Parks showed Black life in the South as it was lived: tender, resilient, disciplined, and determined, even under oppressive laws. His photographs didn’t just document injustice—they challenged America to see what it preferred to ignore.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow 

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash 

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

I made a pretty complicated cake this year with a fair number of separate components. I figured I would write up the different parts as separate recipes because they all have other uses.

Everything in this recipe can be done by hand whisking and stirring, no mixer need be used.

For the cake itself I decided to make a batter similar to that used for cake doughnuts, which my wife really likes. This recipe can be done

Cake:

4 large eggs 1 stick of butter 3/4 cup of sugar 1/4 cup corn oil 1/2 a cup or so of poppy seeds (optional) 1 teaspoon of vanilla 4 cups AP or cake flour {1 teaspoon of baking soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar}

or {1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda} 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 cup buttermilk

You will need two mixing bowls, one for the dry ingredients and one for the cake batter overall.

Whisk the flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt together in one bowl.

melt the butter together with the corn oil in a small saucepan and remove from heat.

whisk the eggs in the large mixing bowl whisk in the poppyseeds whisk in the sugar when fully blended start whisking in the butter and oil a bit at a time. Whisk quickly. Whisk in about a quarter of the flour mixture. Whisk in about a third of the buttermilk. Continue alternating flour and buttermilk until it’s all incorporated. You now have a good cake batter to put in cake pans and bake at 350 degrees. I used two eight inch round pans and it took around 40 minutes to bake fully.

However, this batter is resilient enough to handle various mix ins such as chocolate chips or nuts. I put in chunks of chocolate truffles.

Here’s a link to my recipe: https://www.tumblr.com/richardgarfinkle/815601936021815296/chocolate-truffles-using-a-microwave?source=share

I made these truffles two days before, froze them, and then chopped them up to the size of large chocolate chips or small chocolate chunks. I kept these chunks frozen. Some I used for truffle chunk ice cream. And I used other chunks for this cake. They could be mixed into the batter or (as I did) dotted into the batter in the cake pans.

Once the cakes were cooled I stacked them using a strawberry filling and grated modeling chocolate.

Double Strawberry Filling The strawberries in our local grocery stores have been fantastic this year, so I wanted to make a strawberry filling that would have some fresh strawberry flavor in it along with cooked strawberry. As is common for fruits, cooked and uncooked strawberries taste very different. Just using diced fresh strawberries can be a problem because they have a lot of water in them and they can make a cake soggy.

2 pints fresh strawberries stems and tops removed, diced. 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup corn syrup 1/2 cup water 1 package of unflavored gelatin (I haven’t baked with other ingredients that do the work of gelatin but those should work as well, but I can’t offer suggestions, sorry).

Bloom the gelatin in a bowl with 1/4 cup of water. Put the sugar, corn syrup, 1/4 cup of mater and 1 pint of strawberries in a sauce pan and cook over medium high heat until the strawberries are cooked down. You don’t need to get to jam, but you do need to cook them to a thick strawberry sauce.

stir the strawberry sauce into the gelatin. Let sit out until the mixture is 140F or cooler. Then stir in the remaining fresh strawberries. Make sure the fresh strawberries are coated with the mixture, that way they will be protected by the gelatin from bleeding into the cake. Refrigerate the strawberry filling before using.

Modeling Chocolate Modeling chocolate is a delicious pliable shapable chewy material excellent for covering whole cakes or shaping little sculptures. This time I did none of those things, instead I chilled it and grated it to make accents of flavor inside the cake.

10 oz chocolate 3 oz corn syrup

In the top of a double boiler over boiling water combine the chocolate and the syrup. Mix slowly with a heat proof spatula until fully melted and smoothy blended to a uniform brown color. pour out onto a nonstick pan (I use a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Let cool until room temperature, then wrap it up and store in the refrigerator. If you wish to do anything fancy with it, look elsewhere for suggestions for my sculpting skills are not spectacular.

Chilled it can be grated with a standard cheese grater, producing firm and chewy tasty little bits.

To keep the cake even, I did the assembly in the collar of a spring form pan (the kind used for cheesecake).

I spread half the strawberry filling on one layer of the cake, sprinkled with grated modeling chocolate and covered with the other layer.

I then put on the other layer, spread the rest of the strawberry filling on top and sprinkled more of the modeling chocolate.

I then chilled the cake for several hours to have everything firm before putting on the frosting.

Black Cocoa blend frosting This is a simple no cooking frosting that works well for doughnuts and various other pastries. It uses two kinds of cocoa powder (one regular cocoa powder and one black cocoa powder), confectioners sugar and cream. That’s all. It’s quite flexible, so I’m not going to give exact measurements instead I’ll put it in terms or parts. The amount of cream is even more flexible than that.

For the regular cocoa powder, pick a kind you would use for hot cocoa, something that tastes full and satisfying to you.

Black cocoa powder is a specialty ingredient and usual needs to be obtained form a baking supply source. I use King Arthur Flour. Their black cocoa powder is quite good. Black Cocoa powder has a flavor and color revealingly similar to that of certain famous sandwich cookies.

1 part confectioners sugar 2 to 3 parts regular cocoa powder 2 to 3 parts black cocoa powder Heavy Cream 1 teaspoon vanilla (optional)

Whisk the sugar and the cocoa powders together. Optional: Whisk in the vanilla Slowly whisk in the cream. When you start this, it will be quite grainy, keep adding cream until you have a firm frosting. You can stop here if you wish. I prefer to thin it out to a thick glaze. You can thin it further if you’d rather have a sauce than a frosting.

Frost the cake and chill overnight. Decorate as you see fit. Then serve.