Seduce My Mind

Mystical Woodland Animal Art Prints by RivuletPaperShop

Boss made a dollar

I made a dime,

That was a poem

From a simpler time.

Now boss makes a thousand

And gives us a cent

While he’s got employees 

Who can’t pay the rent.

So when boss makes a million

And the workers make jack

Then that’s when we riot

And take our lives back.

The Monster: Am Eloquent Baby

Me, whenever I see businesses complaining about “lazy workers” because they won’t work low paying minimum wage jobs:

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

And the earliest from of beer was found in Iran and is around 7000 years old, last I checked. (Notably, the first evidence of grape vine also dates to around that, and was found in China.) Even the oldest examples of bread in Europe are 2000 years older than that.

From: [ news (dot) stanford (dot) edu/2018/09/12/crafting-beer-lead-cereal-cultivation ]

“This discovery indicates that making alcohol was not necessarily a result of agricultural surplus production, but it was developed for ritual purposes and spiritual needs, at least to some extent, prior to agriculture,” Liu said about their findings.

In her lab analysis, Liu said she was surprised to discover evidence of beer brewing in the residue samples they gathered.

“We did not set out to find alcohol in the stone mortars, but just wanted to investigate what plant foods people may have consumed because very little data was available in the archaeological record,” said Liu, who is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor in Chinese Archaeology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

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I’m guessing the above commenter just didn’t know about the 2018 discovery, and based their response on previous findings.

>>the earliest from of beer was found in Iran and is around 7000 years old

We need to be careful about saying that anything archaeologists discover is the “earliest” or the “oldest.” Archaeologists are always finding new evidence of even older shit.

And archaeologists will be the first to tell you that lack of evidence isn’t proof of absence.

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It’s perhaps worth noting:

Alcohol is naturally occurring in nature. If a beehive gets flooded with water, for example, the honey inside it turns into mead without any human intervention necessary.

That means fermentation is something humans discovered, not something we invented. Certainly we invented new techniques that improved upon the natural process, but we weren’t starting from scratch. We were basing our experiments on observed pre-existing phenomena.

Bread, on the other hand, is not naturally occurring. Humans had to come up with bread entirely on our own.

So it makes sense that humans would try to ferment grain before we tried to make bread with it.

 They look at ther future and see global warming, wwIII, unemployement, political unstability, poison in everything  they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them. 

I saw this video where someone was asking french teens in the 50s how they imagine the future would be. The war hadn’t been over for long and yet it was all positive with like peace and flying cars and such. Then they went and ask the same questions to nowadays teens and hell that was depressing. Some still had hope, but it was just that “well I hope I’ll have a nice house and maybe some kid” but there was such a hesitancy to it, like they didn’t dare to hope too much. 

People mock Greta Thunberg but what they don’t get is that when she said “you stole my dreams”, it was the truth. 

Gloin is the sexiest dwarf by dwarf standards.

Kili is the sexiest dwarf by elf standards.

Thorin is the sexiest dwarf by human standards