Common [Couch] Tater

oh sure let me write it down before I forget

BUNJY RECIPE BOOK: TAX SHELTER CHICKEN SOUP

this is a variant on "marry me chicken soup", hence the name. it's really a type of tuscan chicken soup with midwest ingredients. I put dried peppers in mine, but you can omit those and it will still be insane.

YOU WILL NEED:

1 lb ground chicken

1 largish white onion, roughly diced

4 medium stalks celery, roughly diced

5 fat cloves of garlic, minced or run through a garlic press

6 cups chicken stock

4-5 handfuls of baby spinach

3 oz sundried tomatoes, cut into strips (the kind in the bag, not the kind in oil)

half a boxish of shell pasta

2/3 cup heavy cream

2 tsp smoked paprika

2 tsp dried thyme

salt to taste

splash of white wine vinegar

2-3 dried hot peppers (optional)

olive oil

INSTRUCTIONS:

as someone who is also one suletta tall seeing the sprite scaling accurate is funny like yeap those blorbos really are anime child soldiers

My favorite genre of comment. Yes!!!!! Yes!!!! The concept is existentially horrifying and the characters acknowledge it!!!

Akali pushes back against it the most! And Evelynn hates it the most so she understands why Akali is pushing her away!!!! People who love having soulmates don’t understand the rejection!!!! And being soulmates doesn’t solve everything, in fact it makes a few things quite worse!!!

And people can and do fuck outside of it and have important relationships outside of it (as evidenced by Ahri and Sarah, and Evelynn’s parents not being soulmates)

If you’re gonna soulmate, make it make problems!!!! Show everyone’s potential responses to it and how that response changes over time!!!

Ahri sniffing “who even needs a soulmate?” when she desperately wants one, Akali genuinely relieved at the idea of never getting one and so genuinely horrified when she receives three, Kai’sa going from “soulmates are the best!” -> “oh my god this is so complicated and makes me feel so bad why is this happening to me” vs Evelynn “this might as well fucking happen and I’ll do my best but i’m going to bitch and complain about it the whole time”

Heartbreaking: after months of slowly wooing your literal soulmate, you kiss in the rain and she immediately bursts into tears

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

(What I'm trying to say is, has your writing talent been lying dormant this whole time or was it just your first *professionally published* book?)

oh boy!

so when I was a kid, my favourite author was Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. she wrote her first professional novel at 14, and my thinking was, I needed to do that, because if my fourteenth birthday passed and I hadn't published a book, I'd be an irredeemable failure.

anyway. many years later, after many horrible unfinished novels, and many horrible short stories, and shelves full of books like YOUR FIRST DRAFT and 50 FIRST PAGES, I finally finished a manuscript. and managed to sell it!

I get how from an outside perspective it looks like I just wrote a book on a whim, but in actuality I am standing on a mountain of my own failures. it's just that the heap finally got tall enough for me to actually get anywhere

YES 100%

that's why I got so frustrated when I saw someone say "Greer's risographs are beautiful, but they suck at writing", because it's like....... my illustrations were shit for many, many years before I hit the skill level to illustrate professionally.

and at several points while I was learning how to paint and draw, I had PROFESSORS bluntly tell me "you're not good at this. you're not skilled enough. if people bought a book that included your illustrations, they'd be mad about the quality." and if I'd listened to any of them and stopped, I would've never have reached where I am today, where even the people who dislike me have to begrudgingly admit that I draw good.

fun story: my mom is actually the one who made the sign. she was in town for our baby shower and we were laughing about the "no boys allowed" sign and she was like "wait, hold on," switched the letters around, and voila! son boy allowed.

she used to work at a university library. her job was mostly helping students learn how to access and utilize the online resources held by the library. she was helping a student get into their account once and needed to know their password. when the student told her the pw was "son boy allowed" my mom, who is not hip to queer meme culture, said, "oh! do you know my daughter?"