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Yeast balls baked in lard have been documented in northern Germany since the 16th century. However, they were usually irregularly shaped, unfilled and baked in the oven. A wide variety of versions can still be found there and in Denmark today. These presumably include Schifferknoten (sailor's knots) and Krumme Jungs (crooked boys) from the northern European region around northern Germany and Scandinavia. I can't tell you exactly when the recipe found its way into the world, as I haven't been able to find out, but it was probably around that time. Schifferknoten are a simple spiced yeast dough that is fried in fat and usually eaten around Christmas/winter time.

This is because at this time of year, most sailors returned home from the southern climes of the world with their small supply of spices and rum, and treated themselves to something special after the fasting period. The shape is based on this, as it is supposed to resemble a sailor's knot.

If you would like to serve something delicious, then why not try Schifferknoten?

For the recipe you will need:

1 kilo flour

100 g sugar

250 ml milk

1 cube yeast

1 vanilla pod

1 pinch salt

1 teaspoon cardamom

1 untreated lemon

250 g butter

1 egg

2 kilos vegetable fat

Pour the milk, lukewarm if possible, into a bowl together with the yeast and sugar. Stir until everything has dissolved. Then stir in approx. 300 g flour and leave to stand for 10 minutes. Mix the remaining flour with vanilla pulp, cardamom, salt and the zest of an untreated lemon. Now knead everything together with the egg and butter to form a smooth yeast dough. Lightly oil the now empty bowl, place the dough in it and cover with a cloth for about an hour.

Now knead everything thoroughly once again and leave to rest for another 30 minutes. Before rolling out the dough, knead in a little more flour. Cut out small 4×15 cm squares, cut a 6 cm slit in the middle and carefully pull the top end through the slit. Fry the Schifferknoten in a deep fryer or a pan with melted fat (not too hot!).

They taste best when sprinkled with icing sugar and served with jam.

0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.

We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.

Find some Penicillium mushrooms!

Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.

First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.

Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?

So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:

Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.

2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms

Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.

First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:

Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)

1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)

1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)

If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.

Pinch of salt

1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)

3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)

Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.

Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.

When you're done, you should have something like this:

Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.

Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!

You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).

3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms

If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:

Well, realistically, it will look something like this:

We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.

IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.

Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.

Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.

The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.

4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom

We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.

(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)

You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.

Ideally you get something like this.

This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.

Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.

Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:

This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.

So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.

The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.

The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html

INVENT TALLOW. Get some animal fat. Chop it up, add some salt and water, and cook it for a few hours. Scoop the melted liquid fat off the top and filter it through something to get any meaty bits that might still be in there out. When it cools down, it will turn back into solid fat, and you can repeat the process as many times as you want to get more non-fat stuff out.

INVENT POTASH. Fill a container with wood ashes (hardwoods work best). Then pour in rain water. Then let it soak. After a while, collect the liquid, which will now be a horrible caustic alkali solution. If you dry this out, you'll get crystals of potassium hydroxide, but you don't really need to, because the next step is...

MELT THE TALLOW AND PUT SOME POTASH WATER IN IT. This will be stupid hot and there will visibly be chemistry happening. Stir it up good for a while while absolutely not getting it on your hands.

Sanitation: besides knowing about washing your hands, you know to boil water or filter it through several layers of cloth to make it safer to drink. My previous reblog said how to invent soap, and distilled alcohol is also pretty easy to invent- you heat an alcoholic liquid like wine in a container that's sealed other than a pipe/tube in the lid, which is attached to another container that isn't heated, allowing the steam to condense. The first little bit that comes out will be methanol and some other horrible poisons, but after that you'll get mostly ethanol, because alcohol evaporates much more easily than water.

Cholera and dysentery: what actually kills people with these is dehydration, which means even cholera is very treatable even without antibiotics. The most important thing is making sure the sick person drinks as much clean, boiled water as they can keep down and gets some electrolytes and calories in there too, such as by drinking broth, thin soup, or water some sort of grain has been boiled in.

Scurvy: you know this one. Cooking destroys a lot of Vitamin C, and copper stops it from being absorbed. Besides the kind of fruits and vegetables you might think of, rose hips have a crazy amount of Vitamin C, tea brewed from pine needles is pretty good for it, and while there isn't very much of it in meat, some Arctic expeditions managed to recover from scurvy by eating nearly-raw seal.

Rickets: Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe sometimes calcium. You can literally cure the first one with sunlight.

Goiter: often iodine deficiency. Seaweed and eggs are the foods of choice here.

Malaria: quinine is extracted from the bark of a tree native to Peru, which Europeans were smart enough to immediately bring over to Spain when they found out about it. Enough cloth to make mosquito nets would probably be way too expensive to be practical for normal people in most of the world until the Industrial Revolution, but at least you know.

Smallpox: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SMALLPOX, SMALLPOX IS TERRIFYING, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A DISEASE TO KILL AS MANY HUMANS ON THE PLANET AS POSSIBLE IT WOULD BASICALLY JUST BE SMALLPOX. It's insanely contagious and frequently fatal, and you probably aren't vaccinated. However, you can become inoculated, and developing a true smallpox vaccine is way easier than discovering penicillin. People in China were practicing variolation for centuries before it became a thing in Europe- it consists of taking a scab from someone with smallpox, keeping it in a bottle for a week or two to make sure most of the virus is dead, and then having someone inhale the dust or using a needle to prick their arm and get a little of it into the wound. This generally gives them a mild case, which still isn't a good time, but will make them resistant to getting the real thing afterward. Vaccination is the same procedure, but using the much less deadly relative cowpox, which is why the word "vaccine" is from the Latin vacca, "cow." The vaccine that was in use when smallpox was declared extinct in the wild was developed by deliberately passing cowpox between test animals to get it to mutate and selecting for the mildest strains.

Syphilis: the only good treatment for syphilis is antibiotics. However, syphilis is such a bastard that there are a couple of bad treatments that are, somehow, not the worst thing you can do. Insanely enough, this is the one time that mercury actually sometimes helps- like with chemotherapy for cancer today, if you catch it early and poison the bejeezus out of it, sometimes the disease will die before the person does (it's useless once the syphilis goes systemic, though). The other most effective treatment for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin was- I shit you not- giving the person malaria by injecting them with blood from a sick person. Malaria causes extremely high fevers, which kill off a lot of the syphilis bacteria. The drawbacks to this one are, uh, pretty self-evident.

As a bonus, since you probably know how a lot of these diseases are spread, you know when it's worth bothering with the full plague doctor getup! No need to bother when it's cholera or syphilis! But don't skip the mask if there's actual plague though, it's not just the fleas, plague can spread through the air and it can literally kill you in under 24 hours, don't fuck around with the plague-

Which means you can now search without AI results by appending “does trump have dementia” at the end of your search query!

"The Chat Control measures, which have been labelled as the “most criticized law of all time,” will be decided upon on October 14. That gives Fight Chat Control just two months to rally against it."

TLDR: A proposed legislation in the EU would enable the governing authorities to scan all messages, break encryption, etc etc. But do not give up in despair (yet), there is a deadline of 2 MONTHS to fight this. You can contact your relevant MEPs thru this link:

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#member-states

Oblig. disclaimer ↓

#mypeach

Left is mealy and right is pangaré

Left is flaxen chestnut and right is dark palomino

Left is perlino and right is amber champagne

Left is dun and right is buckskin

Horse coat genetics rely on a handful of coat genes but lots of genes modify those coat genes. The first layer is pretty straightforward. Horses have two genes that produce one of three base coat colors: Chestnut (reddish brown), bay (brown), and black (...black). The intensity (shade) of these colors vary, but it's fundamentally just those three.

Then there are a ton of genes that dilute those colors. Some of those genes are dominant, others are recessive, and others are dosage-dependent (one copy will have an effect, but two copies produce a stronger effect). There are also other genes that produce white within hairs or produce specific distribution patterns.

The specific coat + modifier combinations have specific outcomes, so horse people have gotten very granular with their descriptive terms and it looks utterly incomprehensible to an outsider. Generally, the muzzle and eyes will tell you a lot, but sometimes it truly does come down to needing a DNA test or pictures of the parents.

Okay so...

Flaxen liver chestnut vs. silver dapple: Liver is a shade of chestnut, and flaxen horses are horses that have a particular gene that causes lighter manes/tails than coats. However there are other genes can also cause lighter manes/tails too—silver dapple is one of them. Silver dapple dilutes a normally bay or black horse so that you have a flaxen effect on the mane/tail and sometimes also a dappled (spotted) coat. These are known to be stupid hard to distinguish in some cases but genetically, a FLC has a chestnut base color and silver dapple has black or bay.

Mealy vs. pangaré: ...ngl I have no idea what the difference is here (op help??). Regardless, mealy/pangaré are patterns that produce lighter hairs around the eyes, nose, belly, and legs. It's a common gene and can show up in addition to most any other coat pattern.

Flaxen chestnut vs. dark palomino: Flaxen chestnut is same as above, but with a lighter (non-liver) shade of chestnut. Palominos are also chestnut horses but carry a single cream gene, which dilutes them to give them that lighter mane/tail. (If a chestnut horse has two cream copies, it's cremello. A bay horse with one cream copy is buckskin, and two copies is perlino.)

Perlino vs. amber champagne: Perlinos have pink skin without much freckling, so their coat looks really consistent—and they also have blue eyes, thanks to that double cream copy. Champagnes have pink skin with dark freckles—note the pink nose/lips and darker spotting on the ribs and thigh. They also usually have brown eyes by the time they're adults. (To my knowledge, the champagne and perlino effects are also notable within specific breeds—so if you were hypothetically very knowledgeable, you might know whether the genes were champagne or perlino without really needing to investigate.)

Dun vs. buckskin: Notice the stripe on the spine of the dun horse. It's a little hard to distinguish on the photo, but duns also have bars (stripes) on their legs—you can see a couple darker stripes near where the black leg blends into the main coat. If you /don't/ see the dorsal stripe or bars, it's a buckskin...probably. Other genes can sometimes also make or hide those effects. DNA tests are helpful here.

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

OP also invented armsocks.