lockscreens

has this ever been you: you have a nicely steamed vegetable, or maybe you want to make the best butter noodles, but you know that if you put butter on those it’ll just melt and you end with kind of greasy noodles or vegetables? don’t you wish it was instead a luscious buttery glaze?

introducing: beurre monté

you will take a small sauce pan, and begin heating it with 1-2 tablespoons of water (use very little water) and bring it to a hard simmer or boil

turn the heat down slightly, and add Butter. how much? however much you dare. (start with 3-4 tablespoons and go from there)

you are going to either whisk Aggressively or you can pick up the saucepan, still holding it over the heat, and swirl aggressively so the butter is skating around the sides of the pan

done correctly, you will have liquid butter that is still emulsified. you have made Butter Sauce. season it with a little salt, and toss whatever you want in it.

if you’re butter splits, i’m sorry. you didn’t agitate it enough to maintain the emulsion, and now you have melted butter.

you can use this knowledge to make other sauces by swapping out the water for another liquid. white wine becomes beurre blanc. red wine is beurre rogue.

you want to CUM? sweat minced shallot in a tiny bit of butter, add white wine and cook it out until it’s reduced by about half. then whisk butter in hard. a few flecks of minced thyme or fennel frond stirred thru, and you eat that with a nice seared fish? or scallop? or even shrimp? wow. you will Nut

your boxed mac and cheese game can also be elevated by cooking your pasta and making a beurre monté first, tossing your pasta in that and adding the cheese packet. wow. hey; you’ll cum

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Unfortunately, that second billboard is a photoshopped fake. BUT the real billboards that went up are just as fun!

So PETA put up that top billboard in 2018 in Baltimore, and the restaurant across the street, Jimmy’s Famous Seafood, put up a response. They also debuted a beer called, appropriately, PETA Tears, but I digress.

The ME was a subtle call out, a warning shot if you will.

But earlier this year (2023) right in time for Lent in very catholic Baltimore, PETA decided to try again.

To which Jimmy’s decided fuck that, let’s get two billboards this time. (WaPo)

denial: i love you, it’s ruining my life

anger: you don’t get to tell me about sad

bargaining: am i allowed to cry

depression: old habits die screaming

acceptance: i can do it with a broken heart

I can’t quite remember for sure if they’re fully external, in that they’re not living within the tissues of the nasal passage but are instead hanging around on the surface, or if they still reside in the tissue like normal macrophages; but regardless these cells are very, very close to the surface of your nasal cavity.

In other words, when you breathe in all that cold air, they’re getting exposed to it directly. And they’re not built to withstand that, they’re fragile little cells that need to be kept warm in order to function properly, and by breathing in cold air you’re quite literally killing them off by freezing them to death. Those cells are there to defend you from all the microbes constantly going through every time you breathe, and breathing in cold air destroys them, and makes it easier for microbes to invade.

So you’re not imagining it, you really do catch more respiratory infections in cold weather. The cold itself isn’t making you sick, no, but it is rendering an important aspect of your immune system unable to function by killing off those macrophages lining your nasal passage.

Anyway, extracellular vesicles (EVs) are little packets of any number of things your cells yeet out to go somewhere for any number of reasons. In what we’re specifically interested in here the EVs are responsible for helping deliver some genetic material that helps regulate different aspects of the immune system (helps promote antibody production for one example of something it does) and for binding to the virus particles and basically blocking them from grabbing ahold of your cells and infecting them by binding to the sites they use to attach, thereby neutralizing them as those attachment sites are now blocked off by the EVs and can’t be used to attach to the cell.

What they found was that cold exposure not only decreased the amount of EVs the body was able to produce, but also lowered the amount of genetic material each individual EV was able to package and reduced the ability of the EVs to bind to the virus particles. So basically it cut down how many EVs were being produced and also made the ones that WERE produced worse at their jobs.

So, yeah. Keep your nose nice and warm everyone. It needs it in order to do its job.

Study:

1. Simply vaping or exhaling a cigarette clearly shows fine particles are able to penetrate it even when properly worn

2. Scientific research and even fauci concluding himself that masks didnt work nearly as well as the narrative said?

I am disconcerted by the fact that probably 8/10 people are unaware that viruses are significantly smaller than say , bacteria that causes bacterial infections. Masks probably are an objectively good way of preventing bronchitis, but i am very skeptical of viruses themselves , including corona chan. It is surreal to me that people are still pushing this idea 4 years into corona existing. And when presented with debate they often just berate and screech without proper counterpoints , despite being supposedly on the side of science (which should lend itself well to debate).

Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and shag a nun.

Around 1678 (she was like fourteen or fifteen), she was making a living in Marseilles by doing fencing exhibitions, dressed in male clothes, with her boyfriend who was on the run because he killed a guy in an illegal duel in Paris.

Then she joined an opera company and fell in love with a young woman, but the woman’s parents decided to put her in a convent to, you know, protect her honor and all that…

…so yeah, that’s when the whole “sneaking into a convent to help a nun sneak out and also putting the room on fire” thing happened.

She wounded a guy through the shoulder with a sword in a duel because he had made fun of her clothes. They became friends after she came back a few days later to ask if he was okay.

She beat a singer who was quite famous at the time because he was being a jerk to some women from her new opera troupe in Paris.

She kissed a young woman in front of everyone at a society ball, and that angered three noblemen who were there, so she beat them all in duel and fled to Brussels. Then she resumed her opera career there.

Then she returned to the Paris opera and had yet more problems with the law because she beat up her landlord.

She retired to a convent after the death of her love Madame la Marquise de Florensac, and died at only 33 years old.