the pandemic is at an awkward point right now but we’ve finally hit the sweet spot for an important opportunity, which is that it’s the best possible moment to mask in public using like a darth vader or daft punk or immortan joe kinda mask. you could set it up to also be filtered if you want it to actually work as a mask, but the important thing is the fashion statement
see earlier this wouldn’t have worked bc people wouldn’t have trusted that it was compliant, you had to wait for masking rules to be relaxed to the point where a lot of people weren’t wearing them. and later it won’t work because it relies on the shared knowledge that people do still wear masks a lot for health reasons; the soul of the bit is that people know it’s covid-related rather than just cosplay
so, get out there is what I’m saying. clock is ticking
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#yesterday I had an exchange with a customer: #Him: ”What’s the respirator for?” #Me: ”I have immune problems.” #Him: ”Oh‚ so it has nothing to do with– okay.” #and now I’m so curious what he was planning to finish that sentence with #I feel like it might have been related #(I *know* I’ve had at least one customer who was under the impression that I’d chosen a respirator over a surgical mask for the Aesthetic) #(it’s quite possible that a *lot* of them are under that impression‚ and it just mostly doesn’t come up) #I really don’t know what’s going to happen to the abovementioned shared knowledge #apparently SARS-1 made a lasting impact on the masking cultures of the places it hit #and yet people in the Roaring Twenties forgot the lessons of the Spanish flu quite rapidly #I suspect there’s going to be a lot of geographical variation #for one thing‚ some people live in places where they see me around town‚ which is certainly a reminder #(I saw people’s reaction to seeing me when they walked into the restaurant in the spring and summer of 2020) #(the way I was a living public-health notice) #tag rambles #covid19 #clothing #transhumanism #illness tw #discourse cw? #amnesia cw?
(it’s about a kink caption which is picture of a dude in his underwear talking about ‘slutweed’, which is, ofc, weed that makes you slutty)
two replies:
i found this blog back when this screenshot was circulating just to see what kind of unhinged shit they were posting and it was all in this genre of making men brain dead and desperate to fuck. some of it was written from the pov of the guy losing his capacity for intelligent thought and read more like a horror novel than porn. i am an archaeology student btw
that’s why bottom povs aren’t very common. It’s not a fun time for us usually
hm.
(screenshot from readonlymind.com’s tag page. i have no idea how representative that is of like, the broader internet, i just picked it because i happen to know it has tags for that, and also because making people ‘brain dead and desperate to fuck’ is definitely the kind of story you find there)
(i’m just saying. maybe it’s just not a fun time for you)
Mm, Read Only Mind got conquered by the Affini Compact has a distinct audience that I *do* suspect skews more bottom than, say, the Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive.
But also yeah, a lot of people are in fact into the idea of having that done to them.
But also also…hmm…*reads over replies very carefully*…if I’m *very* generous I *can* see the second one as being an outburst of frustration about how hard a time they’re having finding porn that *isn’t* aimed at people who fantasise about being the top in an erotic horror. (If I’m being honest with myself, though, I think I’m just projecting.) First one definitely does seem to just be mocking, even if it does in fact suck how often I run facefirst into horror when I was looking for fluff.
—
…I appear to have written so many commentary tags that I ran out of tag display limits. You know what, here:
#if you’d asked me two days ago I’d have included a bit about how every work of erotic fiction has *something* subjectively wrong with it
#it’s not like it’s *exclusive* to horror about turning people into mindless sluts
#every porn has something (usually many things) in it that’s squicky or where it’s obvious that the author’s view of what’s hot is thirty degrees clockwise of yours
#nobody’s tastes are ever going to be a perfect match
#you just have to make the best of it and try to find works with tolerable good-to-meh-to-ugh ratios
#and try to cope with the growing sense of frustration in the back of your mind muttering about how *none* of these people have any fucking *taste*
#if you’d asked me two days ago I’d have said that
#yesterday‚ however‚ I came across a fic on AO3 that is‚ in fact‚ perfect
#there is nothing wrong with it (that is to say‚ grating about it) whatsoever
#no horror‚ no rape‚ no genitals‚ no BDSM‚ not even a tickle scene
#and the *choices* about where and how to place the narrative focus are…they’re…they’re *correct*
#it reads like the porn *I* would write if I were good at writing porn
#I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is a thing that exists
#I feel like I’m repeating myself here because I already wrote a glowing review for my comment/link roundup
#but I haven’t posted that yet‚ so from the perspective of the rest of you this is the first I’ve mentioned it
#I guess what I’m saying here viscerally is that “Give These People a Break” in the AO3 Anonymous collection is a new bar in quality and every other MC writer in the world needs to get on its level
#(*yes* including the writers who think “MC” stands for “motorcycle club’’‚ why not)
#and what I’m saying here intellectually is that I acknowledge that they won’t do that because actually their tastes are different from mine and Their Kinks Are Okay
#but it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between venting and kinkshaming from the outside
#(P.S. to be clear I have nothing against affini fic)
#(many of them are quite good)
#((”Abscission“ especially is well worth reading for the proverbial articles *alone*))
#(but it *is* striking how large a percentage of the front page it makes up)
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#reply via reblog #tag rambles #now with added hyperlinks and segments longer than 140 characters #nsfw text #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #venting cw #discourse cw? #recs
so the apple cake we made a few days ago is, supposedly, an old family recipe: we just asked partner’s mother, who said “it’s my mother’s recipe, and before her, my grandmother’s – it’s an old eastern european jewish recipe”.
… it’s almost identical to this recipe – partner’s version has more orange juice, and drops the vanilla, and the whole thing has been scaled up a little.
i’m just charmed by the way everyone thinks it’s a family recipe, and in the end, everyone got it from a magazine or a neighbor (who in turn got it from a magazine).
And the recipe, it didn’t come from her mother or her mother’s mother (“My mother? Bake a cake? Ha!” my mother said.) but a clipping that a neighbor gave her from some now-defunct magazine.
My grandmother makes a very similar cake in a bundt pan. I liked to make up stories that it was from her mother’s mother and filled with mystery and mystique and then she told me she got it out of a Home and Garden magazine only 20 or so years ago.
We have something in common! This exact recipe was considered a family heirloom. I remember adding it to my family tree history for a school assignment. My father made up stories about it – something about escaping Poland with it. And then one day my mother came clean, it was just a recipe my mom got at the tennis club from one of her friends. The horror!
I kept thinking, there’s no way this could be the same recipe as MY mom’s apple cake, right? WRONG. It’s exactly the same recipe.
No way! My grandmother and mother make the EXACT same apple cake, and have passed the tradition on to me. I am, incidentally, amused to report that our recipe comes not from the old world or even an old neighbor, but instead from a 1960s Catholic church community cookbook.
now, what partner and i suspect has happened is this: oodles of eastern european jews immigrated to the US between 1880-1925, and with them came, if not recipes for apple cake, then at least the memory thereof. distinct-by-family apple cake recipes abounded.
at some point, some genius put orange juice in their apple cake. this recipe has a lot going for it: all the measurements are nice round numbers: 1 cup oil, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 4 eggs. there’s a secret ingredient (orange juice). it’s hard to overbake it. it tastes great even if you mess up the ingredients. you bake it in a bundt pan and it looks pretty nice without any kind of glazing, maybe in a little bit of a retro 50s coffeecake kinda way, but the flavor’s good enough it doesn’t need anything extra.
so yeah, this recipe outcompeted all the other sharlotkas and szarlotkas out there, and now it’s everyone’s family recipe.
the earliest written version of it that i could verify (conceivably – i don’t feel like getting my mitts on that book) is apparently some 80s church cookbook, which is, y’know, kinda funny:
The cake may have first been written down in a church cookbook from Smith Island, Maryland in 1981, alongside spectacularly non-kosher items like “crab loaf.” I suspect that the cake is “Jewish” in the same way that old recipes label anything stir-fried as “Chinese” or anything with corn as “Mexican,” except with the weird bonus that the cake actually is easy to bake in kosher households, and, I suppose, that my actually Jewish family adopted it as our own.
(eta: it’s a cookbook for and by a community, certainly, but it doesn’t seem to actually be a church cookbook. also eta: i’ve figured it out; it was printed in two cookbooks within a few years of each other, the earlier being “Favorite Recipes from Trinity Church”, 1981 Maryland. )
there’s some similar apple cake recipes pre-1980, like this 1973 Teddy’s Apple Cake, but that one’s missing the orange juice.
it’s a very, very, very good cake, by the way.
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#hmmmmm #holding the eggs constant (because the number of eggs here is simply double ours)‚ our cake has: #less apple (and the apples are sliced‚ *not* chopped) #((god that cake looks wrong‚ all *pebbly*)) #more sugar on the apples (but the same in the cake) #slightly more flour #more baking powder #(butter for the oil‚ but that’s a known variation) #no salt (and no‚ we don’t normally use salted butter) #much more orange juice (4x) #(no walnuts‚ but that’s a known variation) #baked in a loaf pan‚ not a tube pan #three layers of apple‚ not two #honestly I think it’s primarily that there are only so many ways to make a cake #though it’s very possible that this recipe is in the genetic lineage somewhere #food #history #amnesia cw #embarrassment squick #Judaism #tag rambles
i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this
I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”
No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.
No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.
Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.
All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.
Be kind.
Most of the responses to this are about how gross bodily stuff shouldn’t be stigmatized, it shouldn’t be viewed as a moral failure, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and it shouldn’t be covered up or lied about, especially since it can be very important information for health.
Which is indeed the important message here, so I’m glad there are so many responses like that!
But I do want to go back to the initial post saying that “grossness is a vital aspect of life” and “we cannot deny ourselves this”.
Maybe it’s just saying that our lives function a certain way right now and we aren’t currently able to change that. But a phrasing like “vital aspect of life” really sounds like it’s going beyond that. It sounds like it’s saying that if it was possible to live a life free of this gross stuff, that in itself would constitute some sort of impoverishment of experience.
And sure, maybe deep grossness (as opposed to just, like, finding the architectural style of someone’s house to be vaguely yucky according to your personal tastes or whatever) is something that some people would miss having in their lives if they somehow didn’t have it; maybe they actually would feel impoverished and would go seek out gross experiences, and I want them to be able to get what they want!
But not everyone would miss that. If it was possible to live without the gross aspects of life that are currently inescapable, that would be a great thing for some of us. I wouldn’t be losing any important part of who I am, if I had the choice to live without that gross stuff and I took it.
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#…yeah to me the obvious reading of OP is ”escapist fiction is wrong‚ if you’re not disgusted by what you’re watching you #ought to get a different movie” #(I originally wrote ”reading” and ”book” there‚ but actually this is a much bigger issue with video because it’s harder to skim) #the stuff in the comments about the importance of having forewarning about aging is good‚ but… #…are they *sure* they’re actually agreeing with OP? #I’d be a lot more willing to reblog that comment if it weren’t attached to OP #originally I’d decided against it‚ but with this new addition I’m leaning towards #(I guess the main argument I can see for not reading OP that way is that #there’s a difference between saying *more* media should be gross and saying *all* media should be gross) #(but…what media environment are they living in such that the grossness levels are far too *low*?) #(*I* go upstairs in the afternoon and find Mom watching a movie about people dying horribly of hyper-Nipah‚ you know?) #((and that’s if I’m lucky and she doesn’t try to watch it in the living room over the speakers)) #(and honestly I’m still not 100% over the very visceral food-poisoning scene in Minority Report) #(people in movies are *constantly* yelling in each other’s faces‚ making out‚ getting covered in blood) #((sometimes all in the same scene!)) #(yeah‚ yeah‚ I know‚ something something pathogen-stress hypothesis) #–((it’s a different person‚ but I notice the aging-forewarning commenter casually mentions viral gastroenteritis as ”a day”)) #((which‚ uh))– #(but god‚ please‚ don’t make *me* live at *your* setpoint) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #unsanitary cw #discourse cw #medical cw
#1 – 2. I don’t know‚ why can’t you #3 – 5. fast-food restaurants (and also grocery stores) #no you don’t have to pay‚ and it weirds us out when you ask our permission to use the restroom #you *do* have to ask for water because we’re supposed to check that you’re filling your cup with water and not soda #although the probability of getting an employee who doesn’t give a shit about that is fairly high #(many people buy bottled water from us and I look down on them) #(there is a water fountain (with cups!) Right There) #really almost any non-tiny store and some of the tiny ones will have public bathrooms #6. masks are a solution to many of life’s problems #(let’s face it‚ it’s ragweed season‚ the air wasn’t going to be breathable anyway) #(also I do hear vehicle electrification is gaining a good foothold) #(including the buses) #7. I don’t live in cities because they exist in a state of constant sensory overload #good luck re-designing that #no‚ really‚ I wish you luck #(in the cities I’ve visited‚ though‚ the things I listed above were still true) #(is this‚ like‚ an America thing?) #(no that can’t be right‚ the American cities I’ve visited weren’t like this and also this guy’s username is albertvancouver) #(what the hell is going on out in Vancouver) #(maybe move to Kitchener‚ you poor thing) #(you already have right-of-abode there) #(life doesn’t have to be like this) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our home and cherished land #autism #venting cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #scrupulosity cw? #illness tw?
Maggie Silber-Lin knows that eating is a normal part of human life. There’s nothing inherently shameful about it. It’s just hard, sometimes, to make a living writing about food, when it’s such a sensitive topic, even inside her own head. But everyone has to – well. Survive.
(A series of vignettes in a world that looks more different from our own than it is.)
I finally posted my creative writing thesis! A series of vignettes about food. Also about sex. Also about trying to be a real person when you’re kind of a disaster.
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#I saw (via moral-autism) transgenderer’s post calling this a ”really good bit of sociological specfic” #”presumably they posted it on their blog but i cant find it”‚ she said‚ when linking it herself #either my Tumblr-fu is better or I’m just more stubborn‚ because I found the author’s own crosspost #seemed polite to reblog that one instead #this is interesting stuff and I recommend it #for best effect‚ read it while high off your gourd on hormones‚ having already been contemplating other twists your wiring could have taken #it’s an experience #it’s not‚ I admit‚ an experience available to you‚ dear reader‚ but it’s an experience #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #food #storytime #recs #(I do think it carries some of that all-too-common vibe of privacy/sanctity/profundity-as-something-learned-and-something-best-unlearned) #(although you could also interpret it as…not *knowing* how much of it is learned‚ and having no way of knowing‚ and #having to make your peace with that) #((I know I’ve told the yo-yo story a couple of times now)) #((but I also know that most people never had an opportunity to find out if they were the kind of kid who would react that way)) #((and I know that of those who *did* have such opportunities‚ I rarely-to-never hear of any who reacted like I did)) #((so there’s that)) #tag rambles
Solar panels are getting cheap. If you’re like me, then this is all the incentive you need to think about buying solar panels. Sure, there’s a lot of other points that appeal: reducing your dependency on fossil fuels, not leaving free money on the ground, sticking your middle finger in the general direction of the power company. The core rationales for me, though: cheap and new toy. Also, the power company cut me off a few weeks ago. It’d be nice to charge my phone without having to go to the library.
Of course, I don’t exactly own an intact-enough house upon which to put heavy solar panels on the roof of. And, legally, the landlord’s next of kin could figure out where he went to and seize the house along with my panels. So the next best thing was to tek-screw them into the roof of an old Dodge Caravan that I found in the airport parking lot. Insurance doesn’t even blink paying out for thefts from there, and to be honest, anyone with a 1993 Caravan who also engages in long-term international air travel is up to something anyway.
Once the immobilized Caravan had been hooked to my house’s electrical system through a series of illegal and highly dangerous male-male extension cords, I was in business. The sun beat down upon the van, and started to fill up my crappy old phone battery. Excellent!
Unfortunately, that’s where things started to go wrong. You see, my yard is already full of broken cars, which left me with no room for the Caravan. As such, I parked the stricken Dodge in the alley, and had to run the extension cords back from it to my home. The natural place for these cords was underground. With a copious amount of swearing, I pushed them through the trenches that the phone company had abandoned when they fled my neighbourhood.
What I didn’t expect was that the presence of electrical current inside the trenches would soon attract a backhoe. My lights all blinked out, and I came outside to find a group of confused construction workers who had accidentally dug up my previously perfectly good extension cords. It’s for the best, anyway: sooner or later I would have forgotten to unplug the van before moving it, and then we’d have a fire on our hands. The water company cut me off, too.
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#unreality cw #storytime #I’m aware that OP is fictional‚ but in all seriousness: #you do not have to resort to a fancy five-digits-expense fixed-address solar setup to charge your phone #a Ryno Tuff 21W camping solar panel costs ninety-five CAD‚ weighs one pound‚ and #can keep *several* phones charged if you rotate them out regularly #there also exist pocket-sized power banks with integrated solar panels‚ which are nice-to-have though I wouldn’t bet my life on the quality #(plus you shouldn’t leave a lithium battery baking in the sun repeatedly anyway‚ because it’ll eventually swell up and burst into flames) #(I have a solar power bank but I’d only use that panel if I were caught without my main panel) #(thus far I’ve never been that desperate‚ so I’ve just been using it as a regular power bank) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #tag rambles #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
See, this is the actual reason for rail. We can split to population into 16,000 walkable towns of 20,000 residents at a density of roughly 4,000/km2. Each will be situated on about 612 km2, and separated by about 13km in distance (the radius of the town itself will be around 1.25km).
Each town will have a single rail depot in the center with N/S and E/W lines. Buses will connect to this depot, with the short distance allowing for a trip duration of 5-10 minutes.
Trains will move at an average of around 60-70km/h, including 5 minute stop times, for about a 15 minute hop per town. This provides the population of a sizable city within a 30m-1h commute range – for every town.
A high speed express service traveling at 150 km/h might increase the reachable population to closer to 2 million. (Somewhat less due to headways and transfers.) In two hours, maybe 7 to 9 million.
Every town in America could have the network power of New York City.
There is of course the small matter of the cost of the trains, the town construction, issues with not all sites being ideal for all industry, limiting the town populations, etc, but those are just details to be sorted out later.
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#that one post with the thing #war cw? #discourse cw? #story ideas I…honestly I might actually write this #maybe…*pokes search engines trying to get a better sense of what 4k people/km^2 looks like* maybe sprawl it out a bit more #a big part of the point‚ in terms of the world I’m building here‚ is that #it lets people do the carlessness thing and the network-power thing *without the sensory overload of dense cities* #the towns I’ve been in with populations of 10k – 20k seemed to be pretty much the perfect size #the 1k – 5k towns I’ve been in were a little too small but they were close #the 100k – 200k cities were somewhat too big #Toronto was *way* too big #I’ve never been to NYC even though I used to live less than 100 miles from it and that’s probably for the best #(*looks at NYC on Street View* wait WTF this basically looks like downtown Kitchener) #(did I pick the wrong part of NYC?) #(is the idea just that it’s downtown Kitchener but it keeps up that pace over a larger area?) #((okay I guess to be fair the NYC buildings do look somewhat taller)) #((but the amount of overwhelmingness at ground level looks like it would be about the same)) #((so‚ like‚ not great‚ but not *quite* to the point of curling up in a little ball)) #((I’d still pick‚ say‚ Wellesley-but-with-a-train-station over Kitchener any day)) #tag rambles #geography #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
genuine question for those of you who are comfortable answering: how old were you when you started using the internet & do you regret using it that young
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#like six maybe? #I read a lot of Nethack guides #had an email address but only emailed family members #at nine I hung out on the official Chalkzone fan forum and enjoyed my time there #I don’t regret *my* childhood Internet usage but also I wasn’t wandering through the wilds of TikTok as a toddler #like OP describes being horrified by #I think probably by the standards implied in OP’s tags I started Using the Internet [lurking] at 13 and Using the Internet [posting] at 17 #everything before that was pretty small-pond and/or child-friendly stuff #(I mean I did run into some pornographic pop-up ads once as a kid) #(I just calmly closed them and moved on) #(admittedly my parents were surprised I took that so well) #…I think there *are* still‚ like‚ child-friendly games and stuff out there? #obviously I don’t seek them out anymore‚ so I don’t know about stuff *specifically* for children #but like I meet quite a few people on Flight Rising who are openly children (and probably more who are less open) #and that’s a pretty chill environment too? #we trade pixel dragon money and I politely warn them if they’re offering me a deal too strongly slanted in my favour #(I politely warn adults and unspecifieds too) #tag rambles #surveys
me in my head at the supermarket: nobody is ever going to fucking love me. omg 25% off
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#the wounds in the world are innumerable‚ a constant aching wrongness whose healing is a Sisyphean task #oh fuck yes the cashews for $6/lb are still in stock #re: prev tag #(”it is only by the grace of god that i am not a highly active couponer”) #I am absolutely a couponer† and it’s great #it’s like accounting except you can’t fail the job interview #you just show up with your carefully optimised lists and buy $300 of groceries for $200 #(some people in the notes are saying that grocery stores are *especially* Like This) #(I agree that grocery shopping *was* a wild emotional ride in 2020 #–(…OP wrote this on 2020-03-14‚ so there’s that)– #but if you filter out enough of the aerosolised anxiety particles it’s fine) #†(the Canadian manifestation of this focuses more on price-matching‚ though literal coupons do make an occasional appearance) #tag rambles #food #anxiety #adventures in human capitalism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
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