Mad Gastronomer

part of my role is going to people and gently saying "hey please stop taking photos of people without their consent. that can be dangerous for the people in the photos and you were asked not to at the start of the rally/march" and I have had people threaten to punch me over it so........

just stop taking photos. I don't care if they're "just for you" or if you "plan to redact them" you have no idea what situation someone is in and your photos will never be secure. if you want to take a photo just ask people in it first.

and of course they're always like "well what about those people taking photos" and I explain that "those people are known to our community and know who does and doesn't want a photo. people have already consented or not consented at past events to that person's photos and they know this" or "thanks for pointing that out I will talk to them too because they also should not be taking photos." this also, of course, does not solve the conflict and they continue taking photos anyways.

I have my own tactics for stopping photos when someone refuses that don't involve smashing cameras but they tend to escalate things anyways.

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.

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

The Twenty Dollar Doll That Costs Thirty Dollars

Even when we “mass produce” something by doing a batch of a dozen or so, it really is horrifying to think about how severely crafters, artists, makers are likely to be underpaying themselves, just recoup any money at all. I was inspired also, by the notion adopted by many artists on social media:

So, I set out to design a $20 doll. A little eye of providence, as made popular by none other than the US Treasury, with little leggies. Something I ought to be able to quickly make at low price point, but with room for a little flair. but Uh oh.

[text on design reads: I wanted to make a TWENTY dollar doll. Artists are always saying we love to pass around the same TWENTY dollar bill and hey, I could use a turn. I could keep it simple, and pay myself fairly. I kept track of my time and materials expended, the bare minimum I ought to ask for. For instance, this took an hour to write and edit. Drawing it into a design took 4 hours. Custom fabric costs $34 a yard to print. It costs $7 more dollars to ship to me. I knew from TWENTY years experience/vibes that to be worth my while I should make at least 10. That upped things to $102 of new fabric, plus some scraps from previous projects. At least I had enough to make a dozen of my TWENTY dollar doll, at that point. It took 6 hard working hours to sew all of them. (Here, I estimate, knowing there’s a decent chance I’m lowballing myself and the rest of this math will be thrown out of undervalued whack!) I figured that to start, I’d pay myself the state minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. I calculated that if I pay myself that and add my material expenses, it would take $189 to break even. Divide that per doll. A bit surprised we managed it, but, hey! That came in under TWENTY ! There’s one problem, though. While $15.75 ain’t bad for the customer, it’s bad for me. I can’t guarantee these sell out, and either way I gotta pay rent and utilities over $1k a month. I gotta eat. I gotta pay taxes. I have to pay for thread, and machinery upkeep, and an occasional refresh of my tools as they wear and tear. I have to cope with venture capitalists destroying the largest fabric retailer in the country this past year, (RIP Joann, you crafty bitch) and 100% tariffs on the foreign made fabric that remains. Not to mention I spent TWENTY thousand on a degree in sewing. I’ve honed my ability nearly every day for TWENTY years. In any field that sort of expert would deserve better than minimum wage. So, lets keep all that simple and say I pay myself at twice minimum wage, okay? (I sheepishly asked my office worker wife what her hourly is like and HAHAHAHA. Don’t go to art school, kids.) Uhh. Oops. Now the TWENTY dollar doll cost TWENTY THREE dollars. And, ugh. Speaking of college… I broke my back working 80+ hour weeks when I was TWENTY years old, so now I have to pay for doctors and drugs to keep my body functional enough to sit and work from 7 or 8 AM until 4 PM Monday thru Friday. My arthritic ass certainly can’t manage a brick and mortar retail job on top of manufacturing. So add on $9 to ship inventory to a shop, and the 30% overhead they charge because they too are small business owners trying to keep the lights on. Respect. Divide that by twelve again. Ahhh fuck. “Our communal TWENTY dollar bill” we small artists keep passing around is closer to $30.65 now. Sorry guys, but THIS TWENTY DOLLAR DOLL COST THIRTY DOLLARS. ]

In writing the text for the design itself, and tabulating my costs, I realized that even the very simple $20 doll I had in mind was very stupid to sell at that price point. In the time the fabric took to ship, my first month at the consignment shop I designed it to eventually debut at flopped. (Couldn’t sell a single skull in October??) I don’t have to run the numbers again to know my estimated “profit” gets worse as I pivot to selling some online where I have to absorb both shipping costs and fees.

Now the last step of this art is what my audience makes of it. What *your* takeaway is about art and commerce and labor. You are welcome to buy it at either $20 or $30. I will recover my material expenses if I can sell more than half of my stock at the lower price, but possibly not my labor. Still, I have a life to lead that costs money. Breaking even ain’t nothing! 20 bucks is 20 bucks, so thank you friend.

last night someone left the door open and none of us could figure out who did it. not a huge deal but it’s important to keep the animals in, if they were to get out of their room into the main space. since we all swore we shut it behind us we decided to look back at the motion sensor game cam to see if it bounced open or something so we could fix it so it wouldn’t do that.

i was like “it had to have somehow bounced open. it’s not like anyone out here would be breaking in.”

my friend joked, “there were a few deer in the pasture last night that looked shifty.”

Well you’re never gonna fucking believe this. 

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.