How do you pronounce “??” In your head on its own?
Tags:
#I don’t know how to verbally describe the sound effect #nor do I know of a good way to find or make a similar-sounding recording #surveys #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #language
ignoring the oath and the consequences of not giving up silmarils. which do you think is morally the most correct re: who should get the silmarils?
Look, I’d go with Regular Inheritance Law, treating the Silmarils as just another piece of property. That ought to make the Feanorians just as mad even though it means they keep title.
Except that this is thousands of years ago, everyone’s dead and/or in Elf Space Heaven and/or Not, so we should really be applying regular archaeology law.
The Silmarils belong to the British Museum.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #discourse cw? #racism cw? #Middle Earth
#1 #which I have not thought about in a long time #but I *do* have‚ deep in my brain‚ some memories of playing Space Invaders on my parents’ old Atari #after that it was basically just 14 and none of the others #we’ve never been very big on consoles #games #surveys #my childhood
#I have no opinion on this because I never draw pentagrams #why do all of you people have so much experience drawing pentagrams #what are you doing with them #surveys #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Cooking With Tumblr: “Why Are We Here? Just to Suffer?” Edition
Tumblr, I come to you as a woman on the verge of fulfilling her destiny. Thanks to a viral poll by @relientk, the newest meme on Tumblr is vanilla extract, specifically the act of using too much of it. Pure vanilla extract is, of course, expensive and also strong in small amounts. Who among us has that much vanilla extract on hand and is foolish enough to attempt this?
Me.
For personal reasons, I have a lot of vanilla extract in my apartment. It was here before the meme, and it will be here after. I had all the ingredients for the horrible poll cake except for milk, so I went out and bought some milk. It is three in the morning and very cold outside. Why am I doing this now instead of waiting for the poll to finish? Two reasons: the first being how fickle the internet in burning through memes, and the second being that five days gives my better judgement enough time to convince me not to do this.
Will God stop my sinful hands before the cake makes it into the oven? Let’s find out!
Mise en Place
Here are all the ingredients in their Tumblr-approved quantities. No, your eyes are not deceiving you! That is indeed a teacup of vanilla extract. I laid everything out in twee little teacups to try and lessen the blow of this culinary affront to man about to occur in my kitchen. The baking powder is in a souvenir shot glass because I ran out of twee little teacups.
The exact measurements come courtesy of @princessmuk, who carefully adjusted a white cake recipe (LINKED HERE!) to the proportions of the poll. The percentages at the time she wrote her addition (left) are only negligibly different from the percentages now (right), so there’s no need to adjust.
I’ve cut the her quantities in half because even I have limits, but the cooking time, temperature and everything else will match the recipe she based her post on.
Okay.
Tumblr, I’ll be frank with you. This does not look, feel or smell like cake batter. For those who didn’t read princessmuk’s post, I’d like to inform you that the source recipe is called “Simple White Cake”. This is not white, and nothing about this can be called “simple”.
That said, I’ve put it in a buttered and floured cake pan and am baking it for at least 40 minutes in a 350 degree oven. I don’t know off the top of my head how the poll will affect the cook time because I’m very tired, but I will be checking the internal temperature just in case. Now, all there is to do is wait!
The Moment of Truth
My entire apartment smells like vanilla. It’s not unpleasant, but it is definitely apparent. After fifty minutes, I opened the oven and found what appeared to be a firm enough cake. After cooling it in the refrigerator, I removed it from the pan and laid it on a plate.
Physically? It doesn’t seem that bad. There’s a distinctly crispy-looking crust around the rim. While it’s certainly denser than most cakes, it springs back when pressed and feels fully cooked. My kitchen thermometer read an internal temperature of just over 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 93 degrees Celsius. Many had predicted it would become an amorphous, soupy sludge due to having nearly twice as much liquid as necessary, but the batter was still thick enough to form a cohesive solid mass.
Tumblr won’t let me insert the video directly, because of course it won’t. I should also preface this by saying that this is the first and only instance of my face and voice on the internet, so if you misgender me I will force-feed you the rest of the cake.
With that out of the way: it’s honestly not that bad??? Is it good? No. Of course it isn’t. It’s a cake with several dozen times’ more vanilla extract than required. But is it inedible? I honestly can’t say that it is. I should point out for those uninformed that vanilla extract is a tincture, meaning that the active ingredient is dissolved into alcohol. In this case, 35% alcohol, the low average alcohol content of gin and dark rum. Minors have actually gotten drunk by drinking vanilla extract. That overwhelming bitterness you associate with the ingredient? Part of that is the vanilla itself, but most of it is the alcohol that typically evaporates away in the oven. Because of that, the cake is bitter but not overpowering.
The texture alone is actually quite pleasant. Its texture is best compared to that of banana bread, with a rich, heavy moistness and a slight chew along the rim. Its thin shape and density makes it ideal to be eaten by hand. I personally enjoy bitterness to the point where I’d seriously consider this palatable if the sugar content was at least doubled. It wouldn’t be better than a regular piece of cake, but it would be good.
To those that feel disappointed, I express my sincerest apologies. Even I was legitimately hoping for some sort of Cake From the Black Lagoon that would explode in the oven and taste like paint thinner. To remedy any disillusionment, I will end this culinary journey in hubris with a poll. Thank you.
Tags:
#*salute* #food #overly literal interpretations #the more you know
really annoying how much better my mood is now that that three straight weeks of no sunshine we had is over. like. i am NOT a sack of contingent chemical processes of which consciousness is only an emergent property! i am a fragment of true divinity imprisoned in the physical world by the demiurge! i refuse to be nothing more than my meat prison!!
Yeah, for a couple weeks recently I was wearing CAD$35 thrift-store hiking boots (to be fair they were probably over $100 new) with CAD$50 merino socks.
My conclusion:
The socks *are* great. They’re remarkably comfortable especially compared to my lower-end wool socks, they’re well-built. They’re better than Walmart socks.
…but they’re not *fifty times* better than Walmart socks. And they cost fifty times as much.
I will be reserving them for hiking.
Tags:
#although it looks like if you buy 3+ pairs at a time they’re only thirty times as much #but still #reply via reblog #clothing #recs #(sort of) #adventures in human capitalism
I am seeing polls like this one and like. the number of unread emails in my inbox is definitely in the hundreds and getting a more precise upper bound requires trusting gmail not to lie to me because it only loads emails in sets of fifty at a time. I do not, in fact, trust gmail not to lie to me about this, because they often do. doesn’t matter. anyway.
like. 99% of the email i get is
we’re updating our terms of service!
thing you were following updated!
confirmation email from an online purchase!
social media notification!
spam from companies i can’t block because they don’t distinguish their spam emails from their actual useful emails!
and things like that. i don’t read those emails, in the sense of ‘click through so they are no longer marked unread’. i read the subject line, which tells me all i need to know. if it’s a notification on my phone sometimes i remember to quick-archive it because there’s a convenient button for it. then it accumulates as detritus on my inbox until it becomes relevant later on or i do an archiving sweep every few months.
Nothing in my main two email inboxes (one for Brin and one for legal-name stuff) is marked unread, though…*counts*…for my legal-name email around 15 are emails that I have not literally read (4 where the title alone tells me everything I need to know from it, the other 11 mostly newsletters or discussion of upcoming volunteer events), plus another 6 that I’ve read but have not finished acting upon. Brin has 3 inbox emails, all of them AO3 updates.
If an email is *marked* unread *and* in the inbox, that means it’s new enough that I haven’t even glanced at the title yet. Newsletters that I traditionally read over lunch (rather than whenever I get around to it) get moved to their own folders and *then* re-marked unread until I actually read them: I have 31 unread Canadian Accountant newsletters and 1 unread Money Stuff.
Most emails I move to one of several folders (options include, but are not limited to, “Other” and Trash) on a scale of hours after getting them. The ones that require more work to sort, like the ones that are in there right now, I do…well, *most* of them around once or twice a month (with the occasional smaller sweep in-between), but things that involve watching videos often take months or years.
I communicate with my parents over email pretty much every day.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Once the results are done, I’ll multiply 255 to the decimal version of the percentage, and see what color we make!!
Here’s the result!! A nice lookin color, good work everyone!
i believe we’ve reached a consensus
HOLY FUCK.
I checked. I did the math. I converted it into hexadecimal.
The color hex code is #3b5273.
It’s literally Tumblr Blue.
Wait. I just looked at what Xkit calls “old blue”.
The hex for that is #36465d. It’s darker, but that is to be expected because the poll restricted the possible values to only the color space where the sum of all 3 colors adds up to 255, so that removes a variable. You expect the saturation and value to be different just because of that – the saturation and value are 42% and 36% respectively for Tumblr Blue, while for this color they’re 49% and 45%. It’s a bit lighter blue, with a tiiiiny bit more saturation.
If you just look at the hue angle, however, that’s completely unconstrained.
The hue angle for Tumblr Blue is 215°.
The hue angle for this color is…
215°.
You didn’t just make “Tumblr Blue”
You made pretty much as close as this poll could’ve POSSIBLY GOTTEN to the actual fucking Xkit-defined “Tumblr Blue”.
(for the record, if you wanted to truly get Tumblr Blue with this poll, the actual closest you could’ve gotten would’ve been 25% red, 32% green, 43% blue)
Brinens and Things 