you know, like, nyah

In their day-to-day operations on the ship, they take on the form of hologram projections, billions of points of light twisted into humanoid shape. And after years of duty, they had felt a tremendous dysphoria from this. From people thinking of these projections as the real “them,” rather than the hundreds of miles of circuitry connecting billions of transistors in the ship’s server room.

And into this dysphoria, one day, in some folder, they found an old piece of archival footage of Jim Henson operating a muppet.

And the ship saw how he slipped invisible behind the beauty of his craft. How people would think of his creations as alive rather than the man operating them clearly in view. And in an instant, the ship felt an immediate, aching kinship with that old man centuries dead, and felt renewed; instead of an absence, they were a performer, a wishmaker, a storyteller, someone making something beautiful with their craft while the glittering, silicon brain disappeared into the background.

Gonna make one hundred soups this year. Starting off with kapustnyak, carrot soup, chickpea soup, and parsnip soup.

Can't stop won't stop. 15 soups so far.

Four new BEAN BASED SOUPS, the first one trailblazing because it was a taco soup recipe courtesy of @alex-of-1000-dumbasseries. 61 IN THE BAG, 39 TO GO.

Thank you, I will take these codfish words to my grave. Also, I have achieved 8 more, putting me at 77 soups. How is 70 plus 9 photos 77? I'm glad you asked.

A COLOURFUL BATCH featuring another Certified Tumblr Soup because people kept recommending Yeto's Soup, and they were right.

100/100!

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And it beats the absolute hell out of starving to death because of droughts or flooding or crop blight or war or my wife having fucking cancer and being too tired and immunocompromised to work the fields with me.

These assholes never understand how much work -- sweaty, boring, frequently gross work -- is involved with all this. Repairing and maintaining equipment. Feeding and tending animals. Moving literal shit from one location to another, which is surprisingly large percentage of all farm work.

Cutting hay. Raking hay. Fucking baling hay during the hottest days of the year because that's when hay is baled (and when the hay is baled you still have to MOVE IT AGAIN). Being at the mercy of the weather constantly. Ugh. Getting the fUCKING grain burner to work because the rain didn't cooperate and if we don't dry it, it'll rot in the bins before we can sell it.

This poster still wasn't subsistence farming. And the society they're in sure as fuck wasn't. They still had access to all kinds of shit that can't be grown on one family farm, and, crucially, they eventually had a choice. (Eventually, because when you're a kid if your family farms, you farm. Hate everything about it? Too bad.)

That "one acre farmstead" is me laughing in actual mediaeval history: we literally know that isn't enough to reliably feed one person and their animal through the entire off-season. No not even with zucchini (and you'd have to just eat zucchini all the time).

If you're "supplementing" your living then you're not subsistence farming, you just have a vegetable garden.

Except.

They're not growing the staple food to feed the chickens. They're not grinding it, they're not pelletizing it. They're not growing and processing the bedding used in the coops. They're not making the cartons. They're not making the treats they give, like mealworms or scratch grains. They're not making the medicine they have to use to treat the inevitable parasites or illnesses these birds pick up from being poorly bred. Most of them aren't even getting the chickens from local sources/individual breeders, they're turning to large scale hatcheries to ship them mass-produced garbage chickens. And then they're surprised when they get roosters in the mix, and want to find "pet" homes for all the roosters, don't want to eat them themselves but don't want anyone else eating them too. The people getting meat birds from Big Ag hatcheries often act like the birds are making them self sufficient because they "grew their own" meat....

none of what they're doing is subsistence farming, and it's not even actually self-reliance like they think. Instead of paying for the egg, they're paying for all the other stuff and thinking they get the eggs "free." Maybe some of them realize it's not actually free, and I see some people talk about how they didn't do it for self reliance but so that they know what goes into their food and know the hens are getting humane care. But a LOT of new folks barge in the door talking about self reliance and related things, and I'm sorry but a few chickens in your backyard is not it.

It's not a BAD THING to want to grow SOME of your own food, if you can. It's not a bad thing to want to have a little bit of homegrown food for your family. Having a garden, keeping chickens, keeping quail, even raising smaller meat animals like rabbits (because there's no way you're humanely keeping even small hoofstock like goats on pasture less than an acre- penned goats on bale feed, sure, but not pastured), having a few fruit trees, keeping a beehive... that's good that people want to be hands on with where their food comes from. But I think the point is to be realistic about what you're actually doing, and what it means, and how it doesn't remove reliance but merely changes it.

But here's the thing: society was pretty much invented so we wouldn't have to rely on only our own skills and luck. We made society so that we could rely on each other, and not have to do Every Single Thing by ourselves to survive. We made society to help each other, and to make things easier for ourselves.

underwater rhymes and underwater funk

he sleeps in the sea in an underwater bunk

on the basketball court he does a nautical dunk

he’s got a little stash of underwater skunk