Kit

happy disability pride month to severely disabled people who don’t have access to proper treatment or medical equipment, and are stuck without care that would ease symptoms or make their life easier

happy disability pride month to severely disabled people who won’t be getting better, and who will be getting worse, or who will be dying due to their conditions

happy disability pride month to severely disabled people with photosensitivity who can’t look at screens for long, and feel even more isolated by not being able to interact with much the disability community, even online

UK horse ads: so sorry to trouble you, but if anyone can help find a home for a lovely schoolmaster - perfect mother/daughter share and ladies’ hunter (picture of enchanting horse decorously jumping 1m at Olympics) we would be terribly grateful - please do bring your vet; the horse comes with full MOT, all previous owners have provided references, all vet visits logged in a binder, horse has British Sign Language qualification. (Video of horse doing dressage, filing taxes, and responding graciously to a difficult interview) Has been jumped, hacked, dressed at highest levels (video of most beautiful horse in the world gently taking a toddler to their dance recital) Rides and drives. Holds defensive driving license. Asking £5000 - so sorry.

@blip-bloop-bloop asked: How to make healthy food fairly cheaply, when the spoon bank is closed and you have no freezer

Thank you for this blog’s first ask!

Since you need food that’s low spoons and freezer-free, you’ll need food that’s preserved in ways other than freezing.  That leaves you lots of options, mainly canned, dried, and pickled.  

Pickled is pretty obvious- you can get a number of veggies pickled from the store, and they add great flavor/color/variety to meals without needing any prep other than taking them out of the jar.  They can be relatively expensive, but they tend to last a long time since they’re so strongly flavored that you only need a little at a time.  I’ll do another post on making your own pickled veggies.  In order to encourage my family (of two) to eat more pickled things, I sometimes put a small dish of pickles out on the table for meals.  If you do dishes by hand or the dish is otherwise spooniful, skip it and set the jar directly on the table.  If you find that you really like adding pickled foods to your meals, ethnic grocery stores often have different kinds of pickled foods than your standard western grocery.  Budget tip- don’t buy refrigerated pickled food unless you really like them and can afford them; the canned stuff is almost always cheaper.  

Canned food may end up being a staple for you, and that’s not a bad thing.  There are a wide variety of canned foods, and if you find that one particular type fits your budget really well, you can dress it up into different dishes in almost infinite ways if you have the spices.  Canned food also does well in the microwave, so it can be very quick to prepare.  I’ll include a couple of can-only recipes at the end of this post.

Dried foods are underappreciated, in my opinion.  They include things like spices and beans, but you can also get meats (chipped beef, beef jerky, squid snacks), mushrooms, and veggies.  Dried foods do take longer to prepare; options to decrease meal prep time include soaking overnight, using an instant pot, or getting a crock pot and letting it cook all day.  Some instant pots also have slow cooker options.  

Meat might be your biggest issue since it’s expensive to buy in small quantities.  I’d encourage you to check out what dry and canned meats and fish you have access to and then learn about how to stretch those into multiple meals (I’m also planning a post on this).  If frozen meat is cheaper than fresh, remember that you don’t have to keep it frozen for it to stay good.  Lots of meat that we buy “fresh,” especially fish, has been previously frozen, then thawed in the fridge.  To do this yourself, just put the meat in the fridge and keep it there.  It will probably make a puddle, so putting it in a container or on a plate is a good idea.  For fresh (or previously frozen) meat, instead of trying to stretch it into more servings, you may want to go ahead and eat bigger portions of meat but eat meat at fewer meals.  For example, stretching meat might look like making a can of mackerel into four meals instead of one by having mackerel salad, creamed mackerel on toast, mackerel fritters, and mackerel doria; bigger portions of fresh meat might look like buying a pack of four chicken breasts and having chicken (prepared in different ways) for dinner three nights in a row plus a lunch in there, then switching to beans or tofu for four nights.  Having a decent collection of dried spices can really help with having to eat the same thing “over and over.”

Meal ideas:

Tuna or chicken salad from canned meat on salad, bread, crackers, wraps, flatbreads

Green bean casserole (microwave)- two cans of drained green beans, one can of cream of mushroom soup, a handful of fried onions (the common brand is French’s in the US; onion powder will work if you don’t have fried onions).  Combine in a casserole dish and microwave till hot.  This recipe divides and doubles well too.

Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast

Dried mushroom and bean stew (all the recipes I can find have fancy ingredients that you don’t need to buy like pine nuts.  Do a google, pick one you like, and ask me for substitutions if you need to!)

Fish fritters- one drained 12-oz can of fish (we find mackerel is the cheapest for us), one or two eggs, and enough flour to make a loose dough (holds together but sticks to your hands).  Heat any oil you like in a pan on medium heat, make the dough into discs about the size and thickness of your palm, and fry till golden brown on both sides.  Flip them as many times as you need to.

How to cook dried beans: https://www.tumblr.com/tightwadspoonies/764918865665949696/dry-beans-on-the-stove-in-a-pressure-cooker-and?source=share 

Black bean soup from cans:

2 cans black beans

1 can corn

1 can chicken broth

1 can diced green chiles

1 can diced tomatoes

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tbsp taco seasoning (or to taste)

Thanks! First meal made on this system:

1/2 pack minute rice (for the spoons)

1/2 can sweetcorn

1/2 can beans

A Couscous-based one-pot meal is easy to make, and dry Couscous is typically/IME more expensive than rice but less expensive than most "Instant" starch-staple products, similar to dry Pasta, but faster to prepare than Pasta. Therefore, you should ideally have a few pounds of Couscous in your House.

Measure 1xVolume of dry Couscous into a large mixing-Bowl (4xVolume+)

Empty a small can of Tomato Paste concentrate onto it

add a quantity of broth-powder or Salt that is roughly enough to make 2xVolume water appropriately salty for soup

Boil 2xVolume water in an electric Kettle and then pour it into the Bowl

Stir with a Fork

finely-dice some fresh garlic and either pickles or a raw cucumber

Mix a few spoonfuls of Butter or Oil into the Couscous, then add the garlic&cucumber and Mix well again

If you're going to add Feta, smoked Tofu, Mozzarella, raw Tomatoes, or fresh herbs, (all of which are very optional but might make it a memorable Picknick Buffet salad instead of a bland one), dice/chop those, but DON'T Mix them in until after the Couscous has cooled to room Temperature

of critters in clover

The heat’s been brutal this summer but we still gotta eat! If you’re like me, heat might suppress your appetite, and the last thing any of us want is to sweat over a hot stove and oven when it’s already boiling outside. Here are some of my favorite hot-weather recipes to keep hydrated and fed with when the weather is unbearable! (All recipes should be un-paywalled).

NYT’s best gazpacho (lives up to its name!!)

Persian cold cucumber soup (if you like tzatziki you will like this!)

Eric Kim’s cold noodles with tomato (infinitely riffable Korean flavor profile — for a creamier and less brothy take, try these cold sesame noodles too)

Vietnamese chicken and herb salad (this is an excellent time to get a rotisserie chicken so you don’t have to turn the oven on)

Radish sandwiches with butter and salt (and in a similar vein, if you dig this flavor combo you should try this Polish cottage cheese dip on some good rye bread or even crackers)

It’s still a little early in the season, but you can never go wrong with a BLT (or, if you don’t eat bacon, try this tomato furikake sandwich in its place)

Infinite iterations of pasta salad! You can use anything you got but here is a template I like.

Assorted dense bean salads. This back pocket canned salad is a weird combo of jarred ingredients but it slaps, this hoagie-inspired one is super satisfying, and cowboy caviar is a classic for a reason.

Poke bowls! Canned tuna mixed with some kewpie mayo and sriracha is a budget-friendly riff on the usual ahi and makes everything taste like a spicy tuna roll, but use whatever proteins you like, this is more of a loose template.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s "about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Stop saying "chatGPT" when you mean "Sam Altman and his corporate cronies." Stop saying "AI" when you mean "speculative investor backed environmental destruction".

You CANNOT keep letting these fuckheads scapegoat a computer and absolve themselves of all blame.

The fucking large language models are computer programs. They are not people, and they are certainly not decision makers.