According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state. “Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure. But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.

Also they actually are working on regenerative agriculture:

Also they do blog articles about adaptive baking:

Private Equity: Pestilence (they are parasites that voraciously strip the value out of a healthy business until it withers and dies)

Workforce Optimization: Famine (cutting hours and employees until the business is starved of staff, barely functioning)

so, he starts chopping wood. lotus pier was planning on expanding, anyway.

he chooses a small forest on the outskirts of yunmeng, and finds that he likes the repetitive motions, that the burn in his muscles distracts from his feelings, and the slowly growing pile of wood is tangible proof of his efforts. it seems like the perfect solution.

that is, until he is confronted by the god of the small forest.

the god is angered by jiang cheng cutting down so many trees. he demands reparations. and jiang cheng, irritated that he can't even have this, that he's going to have to find something else to distract him, challenges the god to a duel in a moment of anger.

the god agrees.

We all know the "jokes" about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they're not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don't understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a "legitimate" position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We've had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn't going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN'T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a "fake" sexuality and "pretending to be oppressed" and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of "pedophilia" in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes "child porn", and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don't Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to "sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn't even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed",

We've seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance "it's us vs. them so anything they don't like is Good",

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I've seen in recent years hasn't come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren't exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they're the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn't resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We've seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don't know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

Americans:

From Wikipedia: A graham cracker is a sweet flavored cracker made with graham flour.

The next ingredient (which is also extremely traditionally American but slightly more variable) is typically Hershey's chocolate, but you could probably swap this out in the UK with any plain chocolate bar.

Last ingredient is big marshmallows, the kind you do the chubby bunny challenge with, like the size of your thumb and twice as thick.

A proper s'more, the most traditional possible variety, involves to graham cracker squares, two slab segments of Hershey's chocolate, and one to two marshmallows depending on your preference for filling and gooeyness. You put a slab of chocolate on one of the graham cracker squares. Your marshmallows should be toasted, usually over a campfire but if you're doing them at home over a gas stove burner is fine, but the fire part is critical. You can toast them to whatever degree you like, some people like them nice and golden brown but still kind of firm in the middle, me personally? I want that bitch to CATCH ON FIRE, I want it gooey and sticky as hell in the middle, crispy and burnt on the outside. Slap that motherfucker on your graham cracker and chocolate square, top with the other one so your marshmallow and chocolate are sandwiched together by graham cracker on the outside. You do this with your freshly toasted marshmallow because ideally it will be hot enough to start to melt the chocolate so it sticks to the marshmallow and the graham cracker and, combined with the gooey marshmallow, it keeps the whole thing together, and for that reason some people will let them sit for a hot second to let the melting process happen (especially if like me you have chocolate on BOTH graham cracker squares, not just one, because you're a sugar fiend), but if you are a young child you do not have that degree of patience and you eat that shit immediately, unmelted chocolate and all. Consume your summer camp delight like a tiny club sandwich, get gooey sticky marshmallow and chocolate all over your hands, and enjoy.

Graham crackers are a distinctly American thing. They were created by a minister during the temperance movement who believed that the way to get people to stop masturbating was to feed them a diet of only dry, sugarless crackers made from a coarsely ground wheat.

This is a way we can fight imperialism. Why get a Starbucks that supports horrible shit, when you can go to a local cafe and get a better cup of coffee or tea? If McDonald’s is gonna be $15 for mediocrity, why not go to a local burger joint for the same price?

And at the same time, if you need to buy from big chains, due to time, energy, or money, that’s ok. This isn’t about shaming you. We are stuck in this society for now and while we work to turn the rudder of this big ship, we can make changes to do so, without burning out or harming each other.

My point is that perfect is the enemy of the good. Expecting and demanding perfection, which is impossible.

Instead, practice acceptance, knowing you can’t be perfect, and that’s ok. Progress is still better than being paralyzed by a need for perfection and ultimately accomplishing nothing.

People who tell you that you must be perfect or else you are bad, have unhealed trauma and are perpetuating the harms they’ve been subjected to.

You don’t have to be perfect to be better every day towards your own ideals and values. You don’t have to be perfect to fight against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism.

You just have to keep getting back up and trying again when things go awry, and work together with others who don’t expect you to be perfect.

“But small business is still capitalism because they own the means!”

Yup and yet they’re not the main powers pushing everything further into oblivion, that’s the largest billion to trillion dollar chains.

But you have an iPhone!! Yup. And people can still have an iPhone if Apple was employee owned and operated and used no unethical means or practices in a non-capitalistic society. Hell we could still have Apple as a cooperative making phones in a moneyless society. But the first step is doing what we can with our dollars, our votes, our voices, our aid, our communities, and our values.

Where are you now?

What happens to the Exit Strategy Company Gunship Bot Pilot?

It makes its presence known right from the start:

“The gunship’s bot pilot pinged me curiously. Active SecUnits are never carried on gunships because they’re right, it’s too dangerous; we’re shipped on unarmed transports as cargo. The bot pilot had communicated with SecUnits over the feed on missions, but it had never had one aboard before.”

Ooh bot pilot! You know how dangerous SecUnits are supposed to be, and you’re pinging it? Curiously?

Not just curious:

“The bot pilot was curious and friendly”

Then the first indication the ship is under attack:

“I lost the rest because I caught an alert from the bot pilot to the gunship’s human captain. ”

Go bot pilot, trying to get the humans to see the danger!

Things escalate pretty quickly—

“I slipped all the way into the ship, into the pilot bot’s hardware.”

Ahem, Murderbot—you’ve only just met!

“The bot pilot asked if the Attacker was a construct created from human neural tissue, rather than a bot, and indicated points in the analysis that would confirm that theory.”

So this pot pilot is bright! Keeps calm. You’ve got a SecUnit in your hardware and you’re under attack and you manage to spot what the Attacker is! Go bot pilot!

“The bot pilot wanted to know what we should do. It was a good question.”

“Then bot pilot disengaged SecSystem.

I knew we had to do it but it was terrifying to be so vulnerable. I could feel Attacker bearing down on bot pilot, on me. I told bot pilot we needed to protect this important information so the company could retrieve it later and that I would hide it in the shuttle. Bot pilot ripped the confused ShuttleBotPilot out of its memory core and I dumped the data bundle into its place.

And Attacker transferred itself into the shuttle’s system.

Three things happened at once: (1) ShuttleSecSystem walled the shuttle’s comm system. (2) Bot pilot deleted its own comm system codes and I overloaded and fused its hardware. (3) My body told Dr. Mensah and Pin-Lee, “Now.””

Phew! Murderbot and bot pilot working as an integrated team! Yay!

“The gunship was moving slowly at that point, so the shuttle didn’t drop very far away, but with our comms fried it might as well have been on the other side of the wormhole. Attacker was gone, trapped in the shuttle.

Hah, I thought. Take that, you fucker.

Ship’s feed and system codes were trashed, but bot pilot was already reasserting control. SecSystem did the system equivalent of staggering drunkenly to its feet. Someone on the flight deck said, “Oh, mothergods, we’re clear!”

Bot pilot regained control of its weapon system and queried the captain. The captain said, “Confirm, fire.”

I stayed long enough to enjoy the boarding shuttle disappearing in one explosive burst, and the multiple impacts breaching the Palisade ship’s hull, then pulled my scattered code together and dropped back into my body. It felt weird.

Mensah and Pin-Lee still stood in the corridor, watching me worriedly. “We’re clear,” I told them.

Pin-Lee made an excited whooping noise and Mensah grabbed her and swung her around.

I felt weird. Very weird. Very bad.

Performance reliability at 45 percent and dropping. Catastrophic failure—

I felt my body crumple, but I didn’t feel myself hit the deck.”

So…quite the adventure for bot pilot! And the last it sees of Murderbot is: when you’ve grabbed your guns, got you human pilot to give permission, and you and the SecUnit watch the fireworks together…

And then, it’s gone.

I mean, this has GOT to have been the most intense date any bot pilot has ever been on?

It surely is never going to be quite the same? Its human pilot is surely going to notice? Does it miss Murderbot? Does it now have a strange obsession with Sanctuary Moon?

Does it miss Murderbot?

Summary: Working in Hero Force’s mail room is the equivalent of being a poison taster for monarchs – it wasn’t a matter of if a disgruntled citizen was going to send Hero Force a bomb, but when.

Based off this prompt (X)

--------.

Travis, your supervisor, makes you take Disposal Training every two weeks to keep your skills fresh for the inevitable day something does show up in the mail.

“You’re lucky,” Travis says with his wide arms folded over his chest. He still wears the mail uniform from the 90’s with the pale blue, short-sleeved button down and the darker blue pinstripes. The Hero Force mask covering half of his face is in the new “regulation black” that every Hero Force personnel has to put on at the start of every shift. You hear Travis complain that they won’t let him wear the old brown one a lot. “But luck won’t ever take you further than training, kid.”

You aren’t a kid. In fact, Travis could almost be your kid. Your pension isn’t supposed to start for another three years, so that’s how long you need this job to last. There are rumors that Travis is trying to get you to quit before then as a way to prevent you from collecting retirement benefits from Hero Force. Save the company some money. You don’t think that’s true. You think that the extra training every second week is actually Travis’ way of being kind – you get to sit in the air-conditioned office for two hours and watch the same videos with your feet propped up.

Still, it is unusual that you haven’t opened anything criminal yet. Lots of people cautioned you against taking the job. Your neighbors, friends, your husband…even your eldest -who also works for Hero Force and who suggested it to you in the first place. They said it was the equivalent of being a poison taster for monarchs – it wasn’t a matter of if a disgruntled citizen was going to send Hero Force a bomb, but when.

“I don’t think it happens as often as people think,” you’d told your husband and child when the offer letter came. What you didn’t say was we don’t have a choice. You’d laughed and petted the coffee table. “Now maybe we can think about getting this old thing refinished, hm?”

I use Kobo, which uses a slightly different method. Some publishers already don't use DRM. Great! You're good to go. Most others will be listed as using Adobe DRM. For that, you'll need Adobe Digital Editions.

Download the DRM file. This will be an ASCM file (Adobe Content Server Message) called 'URLLink.ascm'. This isn't an ebook, it's basically just a link.

Open in Adobe Digital Editions. It should automatically download the ebook.

Locate the actual file location. By default, this is Documents > My Digital Editions. This will give you the epub file, with DRM.

Follow the above instructions to install DeDRM in Calibre.

Drag the epub file into Calibre. If you've installed DeDRM correctly, there'll be a button up the top labelled 'Convert books'.

Up the top of the window, there'll be 'Input format' on the left, and 'Output format' on the right. Input will default to EPUB, select whatever you like (including EPUB again) for output. Select 'OK' (bottom right).

Locate your Calibre file. For me, this was Documents > Calibre. By default, books are listed in subfolders by author, then title. Open the folder for the book you converted, and you should have four files - a cover, an OPF file with metadata, your new EPUB file, and an old version with the file extension of .original_epub.

Not necessary, but I prefer to do this for organisation - you can now place the DRM-free EPUB file wherever you like. I have folders for my own library that I can back up as I wish.

You may want an ereader not tied to a particular platform. I use one for my phone called Moon+ Reader. It has a free option with unobtrusive ads (which only show when you close a book). Otherwise, using Calibre on my PC has its own epub reader.

You should still be able to use the PC and mobile apps, and in browser reading, but your device will be entirely reliant on WiFi (which isn't always available or reliable!). Here's 1 article on it.

I've been using Epubor Ultimate to remove DRM from all of my ebooks so I can convert and save them, able to read them either in Kobo or Kindle, or in Calibre. I can save them as Epubs, PDFs, or what have you.

Also keep in mind Bookshop.org, an online store that interacts with independent booksellers, now has an ebook app and options from those indie stores. You can even set it specifically to your own favorite local bookstores if you want.

I get a lot of ebooks due to space issues, being a rental/apartment dweller. So the cracked and converted books are saved to my PC and external backup drives. I bought them. They're mine. I ought to be able to read them, and not worry about them being "updated" or removed on some whim*.

-

I love how you can clearly see:

a) The exact moment Jiang Cheng decides to make this excruciating for everyone

b) Wei Wuxian's realization that Jiang Cheng has committed to the bit and is fully prepared to just stand there and demand that they lie to his face.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

The most decorated unit in US Army history was the 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up of discriminated against Japanese American soldiers many of whom were drawn from the internment camps. They went on to earn more decorations, awards, and purple hearts than anyone else. they took so many casualties they had to replace the equivalent of three times their combat strength.