Just another human trying to find their way in this crazy world.

You must unlearn this.

You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.

internet shaquille’s basics but especially:

making rice

making scrambled eggs

making oatmeal

levels of cooking meat

using & storing vegetables with recipes in the description (this one has a bit of Sassiness directed at people who dont like vegetables but the content is solid)

food safety + a recipe to demonstrate

how to learn to cook (just a list of subtopics, no actual tips)

cooking techniques playlist

how to cut x

basics with babish s1 & 2, but particularly:

freezer meals,

weeknight meals,

kitchen tools (although the specific suggestions are pretty expensive even with the lower end scale items the basic categories are solid, and you can evaluate what items you will realistcially need - eg. if you dont need to read temp for steaks etc the temp reader will not be relevant) &

kitchen care (mid-high advanced home cooking)

basic knife skills

picking the right pan for each recipe

j. kenji lopez-alt’s tips and tricks playlist

egg recipes

a little more complicated, involved, and longer than any of the rest of these but good breakdown of flavor & how and why to use the basic seasoning/flavor profiles

and then recipe channels representing various cuisines:

j. kenji lopez-alt (various)

marion’s kitchen (southeast & east asian, western/asian fusion)

maangchi (korean)

future neighbor (mostly korean)

the western supermarket playlist of chinese cooking demystified (more recipes available but these are accessible if you dont have “specialty” ingredients)

family recipes playlist by made with lau (chinese)

not another cooking show (various)

cooking with boris (bear with me here i know he does it exaggeratedly humorously but a lot of them are actually solid and beginner cook friendly. mostly slavic/russian)

you suck at cooking (also falls into the intentionally humorous category but most of the recipes are pretty solid anyway)

how to cook that (baking, also does debunking videos of viral cooking hacks - breaks down the reasons the hacks dont work, pretty important to understand those basics imo)

internet shaquille (various)

babish culinary universe (various)

i REFUSE to recommended joshua weissman because he is fucking insufferable but if you want you can try if you can deal with it, the techniques/recipes seem fine for the most part

I thought I was the first person to come out on either side of my family, but like three years after I came out, my mom was like, “By the way, my Aunt Mildred was a lesbian.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah. My mom just told me this story the other day about her. She also had really bad depression, so bad that she was hospitalized. Her father flew out to San Diego to see her there. The nurses caught him on the way in and told him the no matter what she said, he was not allowed to get upset.” (This is the Catholic side of the family. Like, serious Irish Catholic with eleven kids and multiple priests in the family. Also super-duper Southern. And this was the 1940s and it was illegal.) “And he got real scared, but he went in. And she said, ‘Daddy, I’m a lesbian.’ He threw his hands in the air and hollered, ‘OH THANK GOD! I was worried it was gonna be something bad.’”

So. Shoutout to my Great Aunt Mildred, because she got there before I did.

Further shoutout to my second cousin Jared, who thought he was the first in even the extended family until he turned up for Granny’s 90th birthday, saw me for the first time in probably fifteen years, and heard me utter the words, “My wife…”

Resenting the male gaze but also being obsessed with how you’re perceived by others

Mainly because makeup itself, the generic concept, is an integral part of human identity. People have always done it (even Neanderthals used makeup) and we’re always going to keep doing it. The concept of decorating our faces/bodies with colored pigments is practically hardwired and on a deep level just plain FUN (look at how much kids love to get their faces painted at fairs and carnivals and so on). The concept is also totally gender neutral. In some societies, men traditionally do it more than women, for example. Using your own body as a canvas for art taps into a mystical, childlike sense of wonder. First you look one way, then… another! Like magic. 

But mainstream commercial makeup culture as it exists today is incredibly exploitative, misogynist, colonialist, colorist, and hurts women, especially poorer women and women who don’t fit the racial ideal as expressed by the mainstream corporate beauty industry. And a big part of that is pushing “natural” looks. All women are supposed to look “naturally” poreless, for example (which isn’t realistic or healthy) and are punished socially and often financially if we aren’t. Another example: contouring is supposed to accentuate the “natural” lines of your face but for me and a lot of other Asian women with moonfaces, it’s the furthest thing from natural! The further you are from the rich thin young lightskinned bigeyed straightsmallnosed highcheekboned look, the more weirdly artificial the word “natural” becomes. We’re supposed to sink all this time and money and resources into achieving this bullshit “natural” look until it all feels a bit like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill.