☙Tea & Trees❧

I made this quiz in the hopes of inspiring people to give tea a try or, better yet, another try. I put a lot of effort and research into this, but it’s not perfect and it’s certainly not guaranteed that you will like the tea suggested to you. But I still encourage everyone, whether a tea-novice, a tea-lover, or a tea-hater, to give their suggestion a well-intentioned chance.

I understand this is a common perception: that tea is gross or boring, and people who adore tea are seen as freaks. Yet people lose their mind over wines, there is a billion dollar industry around different wines and wine tasting, and professionals are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars solely to taste and make recommendations of wine, professionals who themselves paid thousands of dollars in order to learn about wine. No one bats an eye at that.

Just as you don’t expect $5 wine from a grocery store to be as good as $500 wine from a fancy restaurant, the cheap bagged teas most (Western) people drink are not indicative of what tea is or can taste like. Dust off the floor of a tea factory will never be as good as the actual leaves that were treated with care and reverence. Good tea is as flavorful as it is subtle, as nuanced as it is bold, and can be paired with complementary foods to bring out absolute magic in both.

Tea needs to be savored and experienced, and you need to train your tongue to do this properly. Each steep of the exact same tea can offer you something new--heck, each sip can. If you only drink things that are 80% sugar, of course you won’t like unadulterated tea (at first), but that’s on you, not the tea.

And just like most wine is made from one simple fruit, most teas are made from one single leaf-- the Camellia sinensis. Yet (just like with wine!) the amount of variety, aromas, flavors, and colors that you can get from this single plant is astounding and exciting.

Listen, as much as it may sound like it, I’m not a tea elitist. If you love tea with loads of dairy or sugar or whatever else, go for it! If you don’t want to spend $30 on one tea no matter how good it’s supposed to taste, that’s completely reasonable! If you don’t like tea and have no interest in trying to like it, that’s your prerogative. But ragging on people for loving tea is like ragging on people for loving wine. It’s ridiculous, unnecessary, and only shows ignorance if not close-mindedness.

I made this quiz in the hopes of inspiring people to give tea a try or, better yet, another try. I put a lot of effort and research into this, but it’s not perfect and it’s certainly not guaranteed that you will like the tea suggested to you. But I still encourage everyone, whether a tea-novice, a tea-lover, or a tea-hater, to give their suggestion a well-intentioned chance.

Looks like based on your answers you had several results that were tied with matcha and it randomly assigned that one, I think. The other results were traditional oolong and traditional black, but I would recommend trying traditional or flavored oolongs based on your answers! (Sorry if that's violating orz I was surprised I started getting notifications and this quiz platform let me see people's answers which is honestly really fun for me lol).

Here's the result answers for the two different oolongs, in case it helps you:

Traditional Oolong - Complex with a wide range of flavors, oolong is the extensive middle ground between green and black teas. From earthy Fujian to creamy Milk Oolong to floral Pouchong to nutty Tieguanyin and beyond, oolong is by far the most diverse category of tea. Even excluding added fruits or flavors (which I suggest excluding based on your taste profile), you'll have plenty to browse. Every oolong is different, so make sure to read descriptions and choose a flavor profile you'll most enjoy.

I made this quiz in the hopes of inspiring people to give tea a try or, better yet, another try. I put a lot of effort and research into this, but it’s not perfect and it’s certainly not guaranteed that you will like the tea suggested to you. But I still encourage everyone, whether a tea-novice, a tea-lover, or a tea-hater, to give their suggestion a well-intentioned chance.

it's plastic.

it's always plastic.

50 years ago or so a cow died. It died in a slaughterhouse after a life on a cattle ranch. It was butchered in a meat packing plant, and it's body was sent off to a grocery store where it then became an overdone steak or a dry hamburger or maybe dog food. It was the 70s and people had only recently realized that you could put food in things that were not jello. Cut them some slack.

But its skin went to a tannery. And that skin was processed in the hide and then leather. That leather was bought by a clothing company who made jackets out of it, long leather dusters for working men and ranchhands. Cowboy shit.

The dead cow that is now a leather jacket is not technically waterproof because if you stand out in the rain for 6 hours water will eventually work its way through the seams at the shoulders. But its pretty damn waterproof. It keeps off the rain and the snow and the dust and the mud and the brambles and it doesn't melt if it catches a spark. So 50 years ago a man bought one and he wore it pretty much until he died and his wife shoved it in a closet. Decades of use, from the deserts in the southwest to the arctic, because it turns out that cowboys are wildly adaptable.

Anyway, I pulled grandad's jacket out of the closet a while back and there is nothing wrong with that coat. It does have some distinctly non-modern vibes, but more importantly it is cool as hell and looks almost new. I have seen faux distressed leather that looks worse.

It's probably also a saddle that another cowboy is still riding.

And several belts. Probably some wallets, several gloves, some riding tack.

Nobody who doesn't work with leather understands how much material you get from one cow. I have sides (like 1/4 of a cow) that I've been making things out of for years and there's still lots left in my materials stash.

Once that coat is too worn out to wear, there will still be lots of the leather that's still good. Someone who can't afford to buy hides will probably make smaller things from those pieces (that's how I started working with leather).

Even when every piece of that hide is completely unusable, it will decompose like it was originally going to, and shed no microplastic particles. A synthetic alternative lasts a fraction as long and sheds microplastics for its entire life.

You also can't use that synthetic leather for many of the things you'd use real leather for. It's not fire resistant, so welders can't use it to protect them from sparks. it doesn't have the tensile strength of real leather, so you can make equestrian tack out of it. It doesn't provide any abrasion resistance, so you can't make motorcycle leathers from it. It can't be used for protective equipment in sports like archery, because it would disintegrate under normal use.

Synthetic leather can only be used in place of real leather in fashion and upholstery applications, and it's not very good at either. It requires hundreds of times more material for the same applications due to its short lifespan, and it produces plastic pollution constantly.

There's literally no good argument for replacing real leather with synthetic alternatives. Even if you want to go the animal rights route, how many marine and aquatic ecosystems are you willing to sacrifice for the life of a few cows? Are you even saving cows, when we use them for so many other industries? Does a domesticated animal have more right to life than the wild species impacted by synthetic leather production?

close to cottagecore wallpapers

Those fragile, fleeting afternoons // Part 12