bloop

I learned this from my cousins after they moved abroad. It was their quick, easy, low stakes method of reconnecting / staying connected with family, like if they went for a bike ride by a lake taking a picture and sending it to us like "went for a bike ride by the lake today and the lake was so pretty!".

When I'd been feeling pretty isolated because a chronic fatigue condition was making going out and socializing too exhausting for me, and one of my cousins sent one of their messages, it was a big lightbulb moment like "hey wait a second, why don't I just do this to stay connected with the people I've been drifting from since this chronic fatigue condition has been keeping me from spending as much time with people as I'd like?" and I did.

I'd take pictures of wildflowers and send it to people with a little "look at this cool wildflower I saw today, it smelled so good", and doing this with cats, and birds, and whatever cool or pretty or interesting things I'd encounter during my day. Maybe sometimes doing this with interesting dishes / culinary projects, you get the drift.

I'm not saying it was a complete replacement for actually going out and spending time with people, but it was amazing how much of a difference it made in how isolated vs connected I felt, and subsequently the difference it made in my mental health.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

The title presents this dynamic between Suzuki and Tani as if it's some sort of wild absurdity.

But really, this is just the standard practice of extroverts kidnapping introverts and claiming ownership of them. Tani belongs to Suzuki now. That's how it works.

so potatoes (along with tomatoes, peppers, and tobacco) are part of the nightshade family, right. Solanaceae.

fun fact: potatoes have flowers, and also fruit. do not eat the fruit (hopital). the fruit is highly poisonous. even the tubers can be poisonous under the wrong conditions. (the specific toxin is called solanine.)

way back in the past, before potatoes were domesticated, all the tubers were poisonous. but people ate them anyways! specifically, the Andean people living on the Andes mountains in Peru. They ate (and still do, iirc) them with clay sauce. yes, clay, like you dig out of the ground and make ceramics with. (apparently it tastes pretty good, too.) the clay absorbs the toxins, preventing them from being ingested.

and there are thousands of varieties of potato! more than 4,000! someday i want to go to the potato museum in Peru. that would be cool af.

anyways, so the Andean people domesticate and cultivate potatoes, right. and then Columbian exchange starts happening. exploitation and colonization and all that bullshit.

and the thing is, the potato is kind of, like. insanely overpowered. there's a reason u can't grow potatoes in vintage story. absurdly unbalanced food. nutritious, can grow in tiny little bits of soil, etc etc.

so this is where the sociological impact kicks in (and where my sources get a lil sketchy). colonizers in South America start using potatoes to feed their slaves. sailors use them to ward off scurvy. generals in Europe start feeding them to their troops.

My beloved 18th century food scientist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier serves as an army pharmacist in the Seven Years War, gets captured by the Prussians (on five separate occasions), fed near exclusively potatoes, and notices he's not as malnourished as he should be.

my man wrote essays. recipe books. prescribed potatoes to patients. invented potato bread. (unlike most forms of potato, which i am ambivalent about, i actually REALLY like potato bread.) Single handedly takes the potato from being literally illegal to grow in France (on the grounds that it looked sketch and might cause leprosy) into a respectable and even popular food.

spurred on by Parmentier, world leaders start hosting publicity stunts to introduce potatoes to their reluctant populace. Marie Antoinette (of "let them eat cake" fame) and her husband wear potato blossoms as accessories. Thomas Jefferson holds potato dinners.

peasants start surviving wars across Europe, because they have food.

the Irish, being systematically starved out by the British, survive only through the grace of the potato. A family of four can supposedly survive indefinitely (extremely uncomfortably) on an acre of potatoes and a single dairy cow. (and then the blight hits.)

Articles and books I've read will go as far as to credit the potato with kick-starting the age of industrialization. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I think it was likely a significant factor.

anyways. potato is cool 👍

for further reading, check out the Smithsonian article linked below, as well as the Wikipedia articles on Solanaceae, Potato, and Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.