This man lives in my head rent free

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

time for round 3 of the @need-him-pregnant-poll tournament and here's my propaganda for why you should vote for Aku rather than Gomez Addams: because Gomez would vote for Aku.

If you found this before May 18, the poll's still live. Don't vote for the lesser evil! Vote Aku here!

aku's percentage is climbing, but that'll stop if this post doesn't spread beyond my own followers. by reblogging this post to reach more people, YOU can make a difference in a silly internet poll.

ESPECIALLY if you went "i would've voted for aku if i'd seen this comic first": you have the power to make other people see the comic first.

do not taste plants if you don't know what they are

do not identify a fruit as edible just because it tastes sweet

hope you didn't eat any fucking seeds, bro

I saw the photo in my feed and went ohh, dude, no, we do not handle yellow rocks with our bare hands until we know for sure what they are. And I know that orange...

In comments, they continue:

and that's where I started cussing at the computer monitor. But someone else had got there first:

I will add:

- Apps like Seek are often good at helping to narrow the identity of a plant down to its family or genus, but very often fall short of an actual species ID (I should specify, they fall short of providing a *correct* species ID. Most will be extremely happy to give you a species ID, even though it is patently false). Once the app gets you close, it’s time to crack open a field guide or consult an expert.

- Speaking of field guides; BEWARE OF ANY PUBLISHED POST-AI. I’m serious. Once people figured out they could generate whole books using those bloated chatbots, foraging guides (which had experienced a surge in popularity following the threats of food insecurity during the beginning of the COVID Pandemic) were one of the first genres to be overloaded with ai slop. Look for trusted authors like Samuel Thayer, and publishing dates before 2023.

- A good field guide should offer detailed verbal descriptions of the physical characteristics of various plants, using specific botanical terms, and will often contain a glossary with definitions of those terms. It should also feature maps of the known growing ranges of those plants, and ideally, photographs of the plant during various stages of growth, and at different times of year.

- Start slow. Learn a handful of “easy” plants or fungi that have distinctive characteristics and few toxic lookalikes, and learn them well. Learn the toxic lookalikes as well as you learn the edible species.

- Once you are confident you have a positive ID, try a little bit and see how it agrees with you. Just because it’s “edible” doesn’t mean you aren’t allergic to it.

To my friend, that sounded like the cowards way to deal with a broken masticator. He decided to blaze his own trail and to that end, he bought a blender.

Everything he would have normally eaten, he blended.

Everything.

When he told me this I was paralyzed with horror.

“Everything? Like. Steak? Burgers? Tacos? You blended it?”

“Yeah,” he cheerfully informed me. “The trick is finding the right liquid to blend with. You can’t just go with water or milk, that would be gross.”

“THAT’S what would be gross?!”

“Yeah. So with tacos I made them with a hot sauce blend with extra spices to offset the liquid. They were pretty good!”

I was shuddering in agony as the story went on. He told me he’d started a book of recipes when he found a good proportion on something so he could blend it again and that he occasionally still blended a taco.