fun story: most of my experience with durians comes from the game Don’t Starve, where durians a) are monster food and b) negatively impact your sanity. the best use for them is either to just let them rot, or use them as part of a fruit salad. anything else runs the risk of turning your meal into monster lasagna
I guess it’s either genetic or cultural taste, which basically means “idk try some and see if you like it?” As a southeast Asian who grew up eating it like once a year, it would seem to me that most folks who thinks it ABSOLUTELY nasty would probably find that it tastes nasty, because to me durians smell amazing. Although there are people who likes the taste despite the smell.
On my own experiences: There this distinct, indescribable cocktail of flavours that makes the “right” Durian taste, some creaminess, slight sweetness, very slight sharpness. Now, I’ve had some HORRIBLE durians where that raw-onion sharpness just pervades the whole taste, and it feels like eating plastic (I don’t know if it was ACTUALLY bad because everyone else ate it fine, and I was the only one gagging).
Thinking again, this was shortly after I had a durian feast because someone’s aunt has some durian trees on their back yard and were VERY eager to provide for her visiting guests. I guess it’s either I just got exposed to very good, homegrown durians and became a durian-snob and the widely available ones became Lesser, or that my body is Literally Done With Durians Forever after eating so much of it in one sitting.
Just going to massively respond to everything on my screen from this thread at once, it’ll save time.
@Maxyai While I agree with them having some elements reminiscent of the Allium genus, though my own experience has been more toward minor garlic or shallot tones than onion, I’d debate “yogurt” and instead suggest “custard” with even some of the sulfuresque eggy elements coming to bear. Of course my own experience is very limited *shrugs*.
@Hellespont Yeah, lychee is one I will never understand the appeal of on a texture level.
@Pablo360 It’s not just that taste is subjective. Different specimens of the exact same thing (say two durians taken from the same plant for example) can be near completely different based from all sorts of variables and their complex interactions and that’s before you add in the physiological variations between two different people tasting them and then you have the psychological aspects involved in taste subjectively changing how each perceives that taste. Put short, it’s not just the subjectivity of taste but the complexity as well.
Grape isn’t a bad comparison from my experience. But denser. I love lychees, haven’t had them in AGES. When I try to put them into fruit salad they don’t make it that far.
The reason is because some poor scribe wrote the latin word for “apple” instead of “evil” circa 600 AD/CE, which is actually an easy mistake given that the words in question were “melus” and “malus”, they sound very similar Medieval Latin, and easpecially in Anglo-Saxon England it was often times very hard to tell whether one was supposed to use an “a” or an “e” because Old English is confusing as hell.
Makes no sense to be an apple anyway, apples didn’t grow in the Middle East.
In Hebrew, it’s just “fruit”. Common interpretations are pomegranates (associated with fertility and female sexuality), or figs (since they covered their nakedness with fig leaves, it would kinda make sense to be standing at a fig tree).
It made sense for people in Europe to assume that the Forbidden Fruit was an apple anyway; apples are traditionally connected to death, godhood, and the other world in European mythos.
In at least one early version of Snow White, the poisoned apple is a “love apple” or tomato! In medieval Europe the tomato was thought to be closely related to deadly nightshade, and so it’s fruit had to be exceedingly poisonous. Fortunately, this myth faded, imagine European (or Italian) cuisine without the humble tomato. The horror, the horror…
Technically speaking, they weren’t wrong about the relation. Tomatoes, potatos and peppers are the edible members of the otherwise very dangerous nightshade or solanaceae family of plants. All the edible solanums are from the Americas, not just tomatos. So Italy didn’t start out with tomato any more than Ireland did with potatos.
what i heard is that the reason why it was considered poisonous is because when you eat tomato on a pewter dish (which is what most dishes at the time were made out of), the acids react badly and it becomes poisonous. when we started to move away from pewter then it stopped being poisonous, lmao
Also, for whatever reason, a lot of people way back when used “apple” to just mean “fruit”. Sort of like how in some areas of the South use “coke” to mean any kind of soda. (Fun fact, that’s how we got “pineapple,” it used to be an alternate way of saying pine cone and then someone thought this new fruit looked like a pine cone.)
Similar idea behind the word ‘corn’. ‘Corn’ used to be a general word for any grain, not specifically to the American grain. Teosinte, or Maize, was referred to as ‘Indian corn’ by Western settlers, and eventually the ‘Indian’ was dropped.
It was then rapidly forced into nearly every fucking dish anyone has ever cooked in the American Midwest. I kid you not, I’ve seen corn in goddamn spaghetti. There’s so fucking much of it here, we’re piling it into dishes it doesn’t belong in, just to get rid of it.
You don’t even need to farm it, you get swamped by just a backyard garden.
There’s a joke common in rural Massachusetts about a city slicker who comes up to visit and is told to be sure to lock his car. He asks if they have trouble with car thieves in the nice small town: “Oh no. It’s worse. They’ll leave zucchini in it.”
Only ever had zucchini in bread or fried. Fuckin’ Illinois, by the way, frying everything or turning it into bread… Is it actually worth eating in any other form?
With respect, that sounds like folk etymology. Particularly since ‘evil’ doesn’t make sense in that context, assuming I’m getting the context right. Do you have a reference for this?
Ok, just got out my old Latin dictionary (I took it in high school) and it turns out both evil and apple are “malum” in the singular nominative case, making such a screw up even more likely.
I’m not disputing that they have similar-to-identical spellings. I’m disputing that translating to ‘apple’ was an error and they really meant ‘evil’. Again, contextually, it doesn’t make sense.
What is “umami”, even? I’ve seen it used as a replacement for “savory”, but then why not just say that? The only consistent example I’ve found for what the hell “umami” is supposed to describe, is tomatoes, especially ketchup.
Or cherries during the cheap season. At least round here they can be 2 bucks a pound one week and 8 bucks a pound the next while Raniers (oh God Raniers!) have dropped to 3 for some reason. It all depends on when things harvest.
Yeah, I don’t think Raniers are out yet. Just remembering from other years. Most of the time they’re much more expensive than normal cherries, and when you taste one you realize why.
every so often I buy some fruit, then I don’t have the spoons to chop it up or something, and so it ends up in the compost.
except the dates; once the bag is reachable from the computer, it doesn’t last long. I wish I could buy a bag of pre-cut/washed fresh fruit that wasn’t 90% weird melon stuff. I guess there’s canned fruit, but does that still have much vitamins?
it irreparably changes the texture, though, so then you have to blend or cook them. I can’t talk myself into putting in that effort unless I’ve got so many spoons I can make pancakes.
I just end up eating Dirty Unwashed Fruit
I mean you don’t really need to slice anything except melons
or oranges
or any citruses
but I mean bananas can be opened in 10 seconds and apples and pears are just eaten the way they are and berries you just have to spit out the core for some of them but others you can literally just grab and eat by a mouthful…
ah waiting for the season when they are not horribly expensive ;~;
(other than apples and bananas. those are a year-round treat)
If it were up to me (ie: I was making all the grocery decisions, and could afford it), there’d always be Clementines in the fridge (also, banana slices and strawberries in the freezer).
Are you one of those weirdos who just leave their fruit out on the counter, like some kind of serial killer? If I go to someone’s house and see fruit out in the open (except maybe bananas), I immediately start looking around for potential escape routes, just in case.
…. okay, now I’m wondering if diced apple would work in mac and cheese.
…..
….. I’m thinking NO, not if it’s the normal chedderish-cheese. (Or American or whatever). But if you could do mac and cheese with, say, havarti sauce, that would work.
Very much so. I don’t do desert often, but I’ve made some really nice desert nachos before with apple (cin-sugar tossed fresh corn tortilla chips topped with baked apple slices, cheddar and a mint sour cream).
That said, boxed mac and cheese has a weird taste to it’s cheese and I could see cooked apple having a potentially unpleasant texture next to that pasta.
The pastas, in order of best to worst:
• Farfalle
• Ravioli
• Fettucine
• Angel hair
• Rice noodles
• Lasagna
• Kiddie pasta with fun shapes
• Lasagna
• Oversized pasta shells
• Breadsticks
• Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
• George Romero
• Mono no aware
• What happened to Kars at the end of Battle Tendency
[…]
• Mostaccioli
I cannot deny buying 20 boxes of farfalle at 69c a box last time pasta was on special. Now, if only peas, cream, garlic, ham and cheese were all on special at the same time…
At least until they change the recipe and then gloat about it by proclaiming that nobody noticed.
Well I noticed. It just doesn’t taste the same as it used to. And yet I buy it anyway because it’s cheaper than food.
Lesson learned: nothing is sacred, but that’s okay, because you’ve got no room to care. (Eat at Arby’s.)
Even the Eat at Arby’s gag is not sacred. Before long people will recognize it for shallow repetition masquerading as wit but long robbed of any of its original innovation and spontaneity by our endless revisitation of it. It is doomed to the death spiral of all great humor. Loved in its infancy, abused in its maturity, hated and shunned in its decline for its fame and predictability, enjoying a brief mid-life resurgence through metahumor, understood as a relic of a bygone generation in its dotage, as all the things we love will be as we ourselves grow old, and then, as ourselves, invariably dying and being lost to the obscurity of history.
Until then, Eat at Arby’s. You are only delaying the inevitable.
I use tofurkey sausage (when I’m not using shredded chicken) and one of Costco’s frozen veggie mixes. They had a nice one recently with black beans, soy beans and corn.
Also, I add some real cheese to bulk up the sauce. And recently discovered that flavoured butter works well 🙂
Macaroni & cheese with hamburger and peas, just like Mom used to make*. Rotini is the best, but elbows are also a valid choice. Miss me with those fucking shells, though. Shells are for the heavy Velveeta sauce.
*In fact, she still makes it, and I swear to you, I will empty that fucking pot if nobody stops me.
Hi everyone, old time reader but first comment here for me…
I’m from Italy so I felt kind of compelled to write something since everyone is talking about pasta 🙂
Do you get paccheri in the U.S.? They’re awesome!
I’ve never seen it, but there are many kinds of pasta shapes that you can’t find in the US. For example, I had never seen orecchiette until my local grocery store did a “taste of Italy” event with a bunch of import products. Now I go out of my way to find it.
Never did understand why people go for ramen, when they can just as easily by a big-ass bag of rice or some other equally-cheap grain. It stretches further, the texture isn’t shot all to hell if you leave it alone for more than 20 minutes, and you won’t get nearly as many looks of pity for having a ton of rice.
I like some fruit, but the biggest problem with fruit and vegetables is that if you don’t cook a lot, or you’re not in the mood for them, they can get moldy or go squishy much faster than a lot of things you could buy that will usually last until you’re in the mood for them.
Frozen or canned fruit/vegetables last longer and are just as good for you, but there is also the stigma that they’re less healthy… because they were frozen or canned.
So usually people stick to what they prefer. Plus, vegetables are a pain to use because recipes always ask for like, half of this, a quarter of that and two of those, cook for 3 hours, and you have to figure out how to use up the left over bits and mac and cheese never asks for this, it only asks that you own a microwave and can set a timer.
See, this kind of thinking is dangerous, because it allows pasta salad to be considered a salad. The frothing chimps around here like to slap mayonnaise, mustard, chopped bacon, pickle relish, and various other fatty/salty condiments on pasta shells, call it a salad, and then claim that, because they’re calling it a salad, it counts as healthy eating. Potato-, egg-, tuna-, chicken-, and taco salad, I’m fine with. It’s these disturbing pasta concoctions that are keeping me up at night.
But the veggie quantities in recipes are always lies anyway! Or, more charitably, approximations.
I guess YMMV on this and I’m a pretty experienced cook, but I find that I can reliably use from 1/2 to 2 times the indicated amount and it turns out totally fine. And if necessary, my use-it-up recipes for droopy produce are fried rice or soup for veggies, and smoothies or crisps for fruit.
But yeah, it’s super dependent on where you live and how easy it is for you to shop/garden. I’m from California’s Central Valley so I am totally spoiled for choice. (You mean people PAY for oranges?)
It can be a lot more expensive to shop for healthy food than unhealthy food, since said food tends to be much cheaper and easier to buy in bulk, especially when you have a family to feed.
A big part of the expense to eating fresh food is buying food you don’t actually end up eating. Buy just enough for what you actually plan to scarf and you radically cut how much eating fresh costs. Between 40 and 60% of what goes into your fridge gets tossed out. I say this as I have a huge bag of onions sprouting in my kitchen that only maybe 2 onions were eaten.
But that still requires time and transportation to increase the frequency of shopping trips. Back when I was wholly reliant public transit (and before I moved into an apartment by myself), the buses I had to take to get to the grocery store only ran once an hour. And I had to take once bus just to get to the stop where I could get on the bus that actually went by the store. There was no way I could make that trip more often than once a week.
The term “food desert” was coined for just such a situation many folks find themselves in. It describes how this country has so much food and that “last mile” of getting to many people is a problem.
On average we have plenty of food, and good enough food, to feed everyone. Of course, that’s the same kind of “average” which says I can hyperventilate for ten minutes, and hold my breath for the next ten.
But much food is cheaper if you buy in bulk. The big bag of onions is cheaper per onion than buying one or two by themselves.
And some things aren’t sold in convenient sizes. Or plans change or time and energy available for cooking change.
I do throw out more veges than I’m really happy with.
Look, I could buy one good-sized onion for $1.26 and use the entire thing within the week, making exactly what I wanted and wasting nothing. Or, I could buy this big bag of onions for like $3.50, use exactly the same amount of onion I would have with just the single one and then forget I have them until the smell of decay becomes overpowering.
It’s obviously still a better option to buy in bulk, because look at all these onions.
Of course, if those are the real prices, it’s a better deal to buy the big bag if you only wind up using 3, even if some go to waste.
Of course, my default cooking style is to start sauteing up the onions and garlic while I figure out what I’m actually going to make, so I may use a few more onions than you. 🙂
I did, because I didn’t get why it would work. And…it didn’t. It’s not too hard to make a “p” sound with your tongue sticking out, and I’d never have guessed it was supposed to sound like an “s”.
On the other hand I couldn’t actually say “asshole” without it turning into “athel”. So I don’t doubt that this is a prank some kids play, but the sound sure wasn’t convincing to me.
The success of the prank, at least in my long-ago-and-poorly-remembered experience, depends a great deal on the prankster and pals gleefully and loudly proclaiming “Ha! Ha! You said ‘asshole!'” as many times as necessary to override the victim’s protests that the prank didn’t work.
Another important variable is whether the intended victim gives enough of a shit about you to perform your arbitrary sequence of dumbass actions with basically no payoff. I swear, half the boys in my class tried to get me to do this and similarly-pointless things, from kindergarten to 7th grade, and I just gave them a blank stare. Well, it was more like a cross between a “WTF” face and a death glare, eventually shifting entirely toward the latter once we reached 7th grade. It’s a wonder they didn’t vaporise and blow away in the wind out of embarrassment, at that age.
Honestly, apples and mac n cheese make a good combo. Like hot dogs and mac n cheese. Or fried chicken and mac n cheese. Or balsamic-drenched steamed brussel sprouts and mac n cheese.
I just started reading a webcomic that I think some people here might be interested in called As the Crow Flies. http://www.melaniegillman.com/?p=96
Per its about:
As the Crow Flies is a story about Charlie — a queer 13 year old girl who finds herself stranded in a dangerous place: an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp.
Just what I need — another webcomic to read. My backlog’s clogged enough already, between webcomics, audiobooks, and actual books. At this rate, by the time I finally get around to watching Moonlight, Cartoon Network will have rebooted it as a slice of life show that nobody likes but they keep promoting anyway.
I’m a bit confused about the definition of “queer” at the moment. I thought it just meant “gay”, at least for the last decade or two, but lately I see people using it to cover other LBGT+ labels, so… is it turning into a word for all that stuff because the acronym was getting too long? or does it only cover a subset?
I just googled it, and got a lovely rainbow background… but the definition only had the way the word was used, like, 30+ years ago.
wikipedia says it covers both non-straight and non-cis… and looks like an interesting read for later 🙂
Queer acts very much as an umbrella term, though I wouldn’t say it’s a replacement for LGBTQ+ as it’s still a term some people feel uncomfortable having applied to them.
I often describe myself as queer in reference to both my orientation and gender, though for my gender I may also use non-binary or agender to be more specific.
Queer really means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and to me that’s part of the beauty of the term.
Queer has been a general community term for awhile now (hence Queer Studies, etc…), as LGBTQIAP, etc… has a lot of gaps in it whereas queer is all encompassing and intentionally inclusive of traditionally marginalized groups like bi, trans, and so forth who were instrumental to early rights but got shut out by mainstream gay and lesbian voices.
As Yumi said, it can also be an orientation or a gender, but it’s main role is to cover everything that is the full community, all the letters, all the people. Together, in protest, in anger, in struggle, in community.
It was the worst slur in the bad ol’ days, and would’ve been very edgy when folks like Queer Nation famously reclaimed it in 1990.
Most of us who came of age after that have mainly positive inclusive empowering experiences with the word. To be safest, though, I wouldn’t call somebody else Queer unless they did, first, especially if they’re born before, say, 1970.
…man, every time I comment late at night, I read it in the worst possible light and I just want to self-destruct it. Hello Internet, I intend only good things and not bad things, please have mercy on my doofy posts.
*hugs* No worries, I just get a little prickly on this topic because “queer is a bad slur” gets used as a justification to horrendously abuse young aro and ace kids, especially ones just first starting to come out and find community.
Thanks yall. It’s been a tough day.
And yes, Queer is totes a valid and spiffy identity! I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that people shouldn’t be Queer, or that people shouldn’t find it affirming and great. That would be the doofiest implication of them all.
In particular, a lot of nonbinary people (or people who are attracted to nonbinary people) people who are into multiple genders use to describe their sexuality and romantic orientation, as it many find it makes it easier to explain or because nothing else works. Or it just feels the most accurate.
I also know a lot of older folks (as in, from pre-1970s) use it because they were involved in reclamation efforts.
Excellent point.
I need to hang out with way more queer people who were born before 1970. Anybody who helped reclaim ‘Queer’ is probably a pretty rad person.
The way I found some of them was reading someone who was doing activism in the 90s blog. It had a lot of useful history about the term! It’s been used as a self identifier since 1910 (before gay was popularized as a self-identifier, actually! Both are reclaimed slurs).
Because a few years ago TERFs and truscum, plus other asshole bigots, got on a big tiff about it because it included trans people, bi people, etc. in the community and they didn’t like it. They mostly used social media, which tended to be used by people young enough not to remember the campaigns to reclaim it, which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, and lead to it becoming the academic and journalistic community term of choice (at least on a level to compete with LGBT+).
BBCC- Yup. And said group of asshole TERFs specifically trained a new movement of AERFs (asexual/aromantic-exclusionary radical feminists) to go after young ace and aro kids and abuse them.
Often specifically targeting heteroromantic aces, heterosexual aros, and worst of all aro aces and arguing that these groups were somehow “stealing community resources” by existing and seeking out other queer community.
When that wasn’t working all that great, they shifted to hard-selling “queer is a slur” so that they could claim that these groups were secretly “cis-hets” who “revealed their homophobia” by using the most widely accepted community term to refer to the queer community and thus “justifying” the abuse the AERFs are waging against them.
It’s pretty much because queer as a term inherently and intentionally folds in groups like trans folks, non-binary folks, aces, aros, bisexuals, etc… that these regressive haters despise for existing in “their” gay and lesbian community.
It’s also a direct repeat of attempted exclusions in the past, most specifically bisexuals who were currently in relationships with different gender people and gay trans people (because in TERF eyes that’s just a “broken” straight person) as well as straight and bi trans people who insist on standing up for the fact that they are in fact straight or bi.
And pretty much about resentment to these intentional inclusionary reclamation efforts in the 80s and 90s as well as how they were often tied to marginalized community activism that was POC-led (TERFs, AERFs, and other similar bigots tend to be racist as fuck and lean hard in on the regressive hate movement in order to try and sell the idea that there is no racial privilege, because “all gay and lesbian narratives are the same” and happen to just look like middle-class white experiences).
Is there an age-related component? I’ve noticed that people, say, mid-30s and younger are totally comfortable identifying as queer, using it as a blanket term; whereas people older than that tend to be less comfortable with the term and tend to put more restrictions on its use.
Kinda? Folks older than that tend to fall right into the age bracket where it WAS used popularly as a slur. Usage as a slur tended to vacillate between that term and ‘gay’. In the early 1900s, it was gay, then somewhere it shifted, and then back, and etc. So, yeah, many older people have bad memories with that word. Other people older than that were involved in reclaiming it, so they tend to be very touchy about people refusing to use it.
You’re not wrong. But near as I can tell, ‘gay’ was reclaimed after ‘queer’ was. So if you’re wary about using queer and not gay, I’m curious about why.
It kinda vacillates back and forth about which is the more common to use as a slur. Right now, far as I can tell, it’s ‘gay’, but that might be different in some areas? Yet the pushback regarding ‘gay’ is much smaller, and mostly comes from people who are not gay objecting to its use as an umbrella.
Right now it seems to have settled on ‘unless you’re LGBT+ you should only use that word to refer to someone who is using it for their orientation, be that sexual, gender, romantic, or something else’.
I personally had a few bad experiences with “queer” when in school as did my group of friends so I still have really hard time using that word. And that was back around the 1999-2004 years (I was born in 1990 for reference). I’m generally getting out of that because I’m only just now learning it’s a reclaimed word, and that I’m not actually the token straight guy in a group of eight otherwise queer people. I only really recently started questioning my orientation because of romantic feelings. By which I mean I dated another guy briefly but didn’t feel any sexual attraction, so I assumed I was straight as a result. But lately I’ve been thinking I just wasn’t physically attracted to him in particular because I am definitely biromantic, and the more I think about it, I think I might be bi with a heavy preference for women. I’ve been very hesitant to use the term “bisexual” though because I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t want to be that one exception that bigots use to say bisexuality isn’t real or that sexuality is a choice or some bullshit like that, and because I’ve never been in a relationship that was really serious and casual sex is something I’m just not interested in. I first brought this up one, two months ago and (and I want to thank her again for this) Cerberus reassured me that “questioning” was an ok and valid identifier. Since then I’ve started dating again for the first time since college, and my girlfriend is a chimeric intersex individual (she identifies as female when it comes to gender though). What I’m trying say is that I was very uncomfortable using “queer” for the longest time but I am now ok using it. Most of the time.
……..
(Also Cerberus, if you’re reading this, thanks again for the support when I said I was actively questioning my orientation. It helped a lot. Also, it turns out that my friends weren’t expecting “possibly bi” but thought I was unconsciously genderfluid or trans because I was always willing to play female characters in RPGS and apparently did a very good job of role playing as “strong queer woman”. They had a little betting pool going on as an inside joke. No one won, and we all ended up laughing about it.)
Also, thanks to all the food talk on this page (and my brain finally stopping the dark-night shit for a while) I went out yesterday and got fruit and vegetables and actually ate them! 🙂
Yeah, it’s lovely.
Though now that I’ve finished my binge read, I worry a bit about the pace of it. I might end up just checking on it every now and then rather than every update, but I look forward to seeing where it goes.
I’m in my thirties and I STILL can’t wrap my head around the fact that people my own age are having kids. People MY age can’t possibly be responsible enough to raise children!
There are kids running around and talking and acting like miniature people and I’M old enough to be their dad! How does that make any sense??
I mean, I’ve gotten better at adulting over the decades – you kind of have to when there isn’t anyone else to make you do the responsible thing, but I know I’m nowhere near responsible enough for kids.
Unless I had to be. Then I probably would be. Which is what happens to most people, I suspect. At least those who do turn out to be responsible enough.
Granny Smith is fine for cider and most cooking, but is too strong for apple sauce or eating uncooked. Give me McIntosh, Jonathan or Melrose for eating and something like a Rome or Grimes for sauce.
Not too strong for me! Yes, it bites back, but I’m okay with that.
It’s also probably a factor that, growing up, Granny or Red Delicious were my only two options. Now you’ve got all sorts of cultivars… I couldn’t begin to name them all, let alone pick a favorite. All I know for sure is line 1, and Reds are mealy crap. :p
I did have a bad one recently though. If that apple matches the experience other people are getting then I’d understand why others don’t like them but usually the ones I get are good.
Not weird, per se. They are still holding their own as a cultivar for a reason, even if a big part of that reason is due to their ability to store and travel long distances much more easily than many other cultivars and hence their ability to be brought to market in a much larger region from where grown.
For many of us they are both too subtle or bland of taste and too soft of flesh to be appetizing alone and don’t work well for cooking or cider, even if they are the only apple to be had much of the year.
Despite all that they also sell quite well, even with other varieties concurrently available, across a wide swath of the US and are generally considered “good enough” out of season by most people.
Red Delicious are soft? My experience is that they have a Styrofoam quality. But everything else you said I agree with.
I vaguely recall something about RDs being much better when I was a kid. Not nostalgia, the literal selection and breeding of the fruit has made it worse tasting now vs. then.
I have the feeling texture is going to depend where you live. My own experience and that of people I’ve discussed apples with in my area is “soft” is the best single word descriptor we can manage for RDs. They are firm enough right up until you bite them, then they essentially become apple sauce texture in the mouth without even chewing them.
As far as being better historically, I can see it as that’s a problem with near all produce anymore. With the huge shipping distances and long storage times involved in modern produce, there’s a lot of push on the biggest cultivars of most plants to be able to “box ripen” and not easily bruise so they look and feel the best for consumers in the store.
When for some reason a red delicious is foisted on me, I end up mashing it inside of the skin, bruising all around the outside. Then I bite into it and suck out the apple sauce innards like an apple vampire. Also makes for easy no tool peeling in a pinch.
Fruit is uncommon to rare for me now just because of the natural sugar content. There’s good reason that for a long time, they were treated as desserts.
OK, that raises no fewer than three questions, if I may ask:
-where do you live that fruit is no longer treated as dessert?
-why is not no longer treated as dessert?
-just what is it treated as now?
Everywhere I have lived (a fair portion of the Southern US) fresh fruit is seen as a breakfast or snack first. Watermelon is the closest I’ve ever seen coming to being treated as a dessert, and even then only belatedly.
Chop some strawberries up into small pieces, sprinkle with sugar, then put them in a sealed container (or a bowl covered with plastic wrap) for at least a few hours. You should end up with strawberries in a light syrup.
Put a Twinkie in a bowl and cut it lengthwise almost all the way through, like a hot dog bun. Fill the slice with strawberries. Top with whipped cream (or Cool-Whip) and drizzle with sugary strawberry juice.
One of my occasional regrets is that for various reasons, including the difficulties of juicing them on an industrial scale, it’s hard to get/find straight strawberry juice (unless you’re a restaurant or something). I usually have to resort to looking for daiquiri mixers and such.
Yeah, I’m starting to think what I really need to do is buy bagged frozen ones and do it myself.
but effort. *whine*
I want to be able to just buy strawberry juice like I can apple, orange, etc.
She’s likely eating fruit when she goes out to eat, like in the dining hall. I think if she never ate fruit at all she’d just say that rather than, “I never buy fruit for myself”. I think she meant she just never buys any at the store to take home.
I wonder if Becky is thinking of Leslie as the gatekeeper of lesbian and is hoping that Leslie will approve of her lesbianing and give her the thumbs up. Hence the trying to set her up and the queer fashion and the constant bringing up of “teach me how to be gay” and her jumping around questions.
She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and fuck it up, not realizing or fully believing yet that Leslie won’t reject her, especially as her own father and community rejected her after telling her for years they wouldn’t.
Sadly I think that is very likely, and sadly that’s something of a default state for Becky. Display a persona (and overdoing it), while testing the waters.
But if ANYONE can see through it and help reach out to the real Becky, I think it is Leslie (and – adorably – Dina, although for completely other reasons)
I think so too. And this might be the arc where we see her as she adjusts to no longer running start to loosen her masks and take a peek around as she actually is and at the level of coping and emotions that she actually is rather than the one she feels everyone else needs from her.
She’s also (becoming) a surrogate mother, and even after (or because of) Hank’s wonderful gesture, we know that Becky desperately craves approval from that quarter.
I tried it on myself, but I feel like it doesn’t work unless I hold my tongue further back than I would if told to hold my tongue.
But, I have a weird tongue anyway, so.
Way back in the Bible/Temptation always comes along
There’s always somebody tempting somebody into
Doing something they know is wrong
Well they tempt you with their silver
And they tempt you with their gold
And they tempt you with the pleasure that the flesh doth surely hold
They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple, but me I ain’t going for that
–I’m going for your Pink Cadillac…–Bruce Springsteen
I want Becky to give her opinion on all things. Like, I want her to be shocked that lesbian vampires and the Camarilla web series exists. For a really random example.
When I first heard that song I was in a giant queer phase and so I was all like, wow, I love this song, but it sounds exactly what a confused closeted queer girl would write. There’s so much alienation and no real actual interest in the boys she feels she should be pursuing.
Only if she was either tenured or in a different country. (The American education system, much like our infrastructure, healthcare system, energy program, (lack of) banking regulations, and history of treating First Nation peoples and black peoples, is in a very fucked up state)
Actually (speaking as a secondary teacher and someone who went to a Big 10 university), I’d expect her salary to be worse than the average school teacher’s, based on what I’ve seen. (Salaries at least used to be public record at my college.)
In which we find out Becky has a better nutritional awareness than Leslie. Of course I speak as someone who doesn’t like mac&cheese.
…
Please don’t smite me for this sin oh mighty god of the comment section Lord Willis. Craft just doesn’t mesh with my palate well.
Why would he smite someone who isn’t competition? That would be like him smiting someone for NOT trying to snag that one Transformer he’s trying to find on shelves.
…..
YES I KNOW THIS RETAIL MODEL IS TEN YEARS OUT OF DATE IT’S A JOKE ROLL WITH IT.
I’m intrigued by Becky’s facial expressions this strip. She’s not doing her wacky Becky smile, but rather super subdued. But she doesn’t look as tense as when she was hoping for Hank’s support and continued acceptance. Someone noted that Becky seems more relaxed and that she might be seeing Leslie as someone safe to let down the guard a little around and I hope so.
Becky deserves to have a place she can relax and just recover.
Panel 1: But I think they are also both a little nervous, this dynamic is new and feels more heavy and important than it likely is. Becky is likely seeing it partially as her interview to the land of lesbian, hence the questions on how to be a lesbian, the offer to set up Leslie, the even-more queer fashion than usual, and her trying to avoid going full wacky Becky. And is definitely nervous of rejection as her family and community rejected her so cruelly when she got outed.*
*Which I feel intensely. It has been real slow work building back my ability to trust that people aren’t going to turn on me out of nowhere in brutal fashion and if I’m fully honest, I’m not fully there. So when someone does try and reach out, I regard it warily and with a distance because I don’t want to end up repeating that nightmare. I don’t know if Becky is going through the same thing, but I can definitely see how she could be.
And Leslie seems to be treating it as a statement on her ability to support her former self. A means of saving her own past… which I feel intensely as I do the same going out of my way to try and prevent kids feeling as lost and alone as I was when everything went wrong for me. Trying to make it so kids like I was don’t have to go through all their school feeling like a freak no one was like.
And it’s somewhat adorable that Leslie is so lost here on how to do the mom part of this. She knows abstractly that she should present an adult role model and get healthy food and so on, but she’s also fairly young all things considered and got robbed of a lot of her youth and is not really fully settled into the whole “typical adult” thing.
And that dynamic of contrast of wanting to be the perfect mentor but knowing she’s just a geek with a penchant for crappy food and cartoon marathons.
Step 2 will be realizing that that cartoon-loving geek can be a mentor in her own right. Hell, sometimes that can be a key component of communicating with “the youth” as it were.
And for Leslie I think the other half of it is that she views this as partially saving her past self, which I feel deeply. Sometimes the person you reach out the most to save is yourself.
Panels 2-3: Becky distracted on her phone and almost melancholy in this story. Like, it’s an important story, but if she is dropping her guard it means this is also a cutting story that hits hard. Like, having Joyce be mad at her for a week likely was like torture for her, especially at 17 when this might have been close to when she lost her mother.
And that’s not to say what Toedad likely did about it when or if he found out about it (which he likely would, these sorts of church communities tend to be vicious gossips and view the parent as needing to know of any “sin”).
Plus, I dunno, I can’t help but read a bitter tone into her Panel 3 statement. Like, yeah, I know I’m massively behind in both social and academic material, thanks past. Which again would be absolutely fair given what she’s been through. I’m still a little bitter at how anemic my HS biology and gender education was and how much I had to make up in early college.
And I love Leslie’s eyebrows. She sees it as an opportunity to bond over the shared experience and that softens her panic about being this surrogate mom a bit.
Something you said gave me an idea for a time travel story about someone who goes back in time and helps themself get through a time where they’re rejected by the world for being queer, and their assistance to themself puts them on their feet just enough that they end up getting the opportunity to go back in time in the first place. Original idea do not steal but if I ever get around to it I’ll be sure to give you a dedication. And maybe a cameo.
A good friend of mine essentially started writing a story like that, where basically their self went back to their past self and served as a fairy godmother to them to help them have more resources to cope and recognize their immense queerness and transness.
I actually already have a fictional universe developing that could easily support this kind of story, and I even have a few different characters in that universe who could easily fit the role of their own time traveling queerly oddparent. Because I’m an overzealous worldbuilder.
First off, I love that sort of idea. Because it a) means that people don’t have to be afraid of who they are in such a story and b) it actually avoids the grandfather paradox. Or the whole, “If you went back in time to kill Hitler how would anyone know to go back in time to kill Hitler” paradox. Also c) if the interference causes a new timeline due to multiverse theory, then it’s actually a really selfless thing to do, because original you doesn’t get the benefit but alternate you does and can help others thanks to original you’s help and the ripple effect helps create a better alternate universe. So it’s such a cool idea to hear that I’ve never heard before. Sorry, kind and hyper from a combination of caffeine and comic goodness.
Pablo360 don’t worry, even though time travel to help one’s former self is a common story line another person would have to be you to steal your version of it. (How that might work could be a story in itself!) That’s what will end up being wonderful about the story only you can write.
Panels 4-5: But if Becky is dropping her guard or opening her brain to these sorts of fears, then she might also be a little nervous about Leslie, especially when she’s acting oddly. Like, Becky jumps on the fact that Leslie has been holding the apple for awhile looking at it and I definitely feel that hyperawareness and looking for what could be a potential sign of a bad turn.
And it feels like that might be partially hinted at with her leans in on all of this apple stuff and her more downturned face as she does so. Like it might be over-reading into it, but it feels like its evocative of that worry and hyperawareness. Where even things like this feel heavy and big and serious.
And Leslie, wanting so much to be “the adult”, but realizing she is woefully underprepared for this sort of traditional mother-daughter role.
But I think both of them as they continue to feel each other out and relax into their spaces, will build something wholly non-traditional but super strong out of this. And I think Leslie will have gained a daughter out of this at the end of the day.
Is it a little wrong that I’m thinking of writing a fanfiction where Bonnie is still alive and Toedad is dead instead and Bonnie and Leslie are dating? So Becky’s fully out and really excited to potentially have lesbian stepmom, and it turns out that Bonnie was secretly gay and is much happier that both she and her daughter are out but does still have a history of depression? Or am I being a horrible person with this type of thing? Because the thing is, I just really love Becky and Leslie’s developing mother-daughter relationship, but I also want an alternate universe to exist where Becky can have both moms.
I can’t write polyamory very well, and unless like Hank was secretly Becky’s biological father I would be very uncomfortable with the idea of Becky’s father remarrying. Wait a minute. Alternate timeline forming in head. Must find paper. Typing not good idea. Will forget where file is.
According to the angara: no. (I would just like to preface this by saying that I enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda even if it didn’t live up to the hype, had traces of “Humans are Special/Mighty Whitey” tropes, only introduced two new sapient species in a brand new galaxy while cutting out some of my favorites like quarians and drell, and was basically a rehash of Mass Effect 1 story wise without as many big choices.) You get to have as many mothers as there were female angara involved in raising you. You do however acknowledge your birth mother as your most important/closest mother. The same happens with fathers. You also have tons of siblings (15 is considered a small number of brothers and sisters) and because you have a huge number of parents who all have a huge number of siblings you have a ridiculous number of aunts and uncles and a ludicrous number of cousins. For angara, a family literally is a community in and of itself. They make it work by being completely honest and open with their emotions in communications. As said in the game:
Ryder: But don’t people get hurt if you’re honest all the time?
Jaal: Yes. And then we know about and address that hurt and move on. That’s the point.
I only asked because I want to be respectful towards Bonnie’s sexuality and we don’t have a canon answer on that topic (or at least I don’t think we have had any canon confirmation of Bonnie’s sexuality).
I think you are completely right about the hyperawareness. That makes me wonder how Becky has spent the last three days. Is this her FIRST morning with Leslie, or has this become part of their morning routine?
i feel like it’s her first morning, mostly b/c Becky expressed discomfort with Ruth’s discomfort in ignoring her just now and this hasn’t been talked about before and they haven’t established any ground rules yet
The wake up scene earlier definitely read like “first morning”. Which also raises the question of “Where did she sleep the other nights?” Was it all dinosaur snuggles?
More interestingly, if Becky chickened out from the dinosaur snuggles (see what I did there?) and slept in Billie’s bed for those two nights before coming to Leslie’s….. how did Dina take that?
Now I want to make a reference to all those cases where a illegitimate daughter is passed off as the mother’s little sister. (I.e. pretending that the grandmother had a late in life child.)
Yes, Becky, she’s an adult. However, she thinks like she’s a low-income grad student. This doesn’t usually allow for healthy eating. Maybe having Becky around (and feeling responsible for her) might change her outlook a little towards caring for herself too!
Very much this. I personally went through this earlier in life than typical (ie late high school through my early twenties) due to helping care for a bedridden parent on a strictly limited diet while being the only one with a significant ability to cook besides her. Most, though by no means all, people seem to get to this point when they have kids.
I assume she is not a full professor, and I gather that means she is probably not paid very well these days. And now she has to feed two people on her food budget.
(Are teenage girls as voracious eaters as teenage boys? You never hear about the former, but that’s probably because of [listofsocietalsexistBS].)
I seem to recall Willis as being on the record that most of his food consumption is or was macaroni and cheese, and thus I assume the “staring at an apple, imagining eating it, and instead always buying mac and cheese” bit is a real-life author reflection.
This is me, usually, but sometimes I get a MIGHTY CRAVING for a salad.
(With dressing, of course, I’m not gonna just sit down and eat greens, duh.)
Cobb, caesar, or chicken are best.
Gotta be romaine base, though. I don’t like cabbage and iceberg is just water in natural cellulose bubblewrap; there’s no there there.
sometimes i eat a bunch of vegetables and then i’m like “oh my god, my body has been craving this for how long??” and i consider going vegetarian for like five seconds but instead vow to add more vegetables into my diet. and then fail to do so
The IGA nearby has pre-made salads with romaine and iceberg lettuce, a little bit of shredded cheese, some cherry tomatoes, a hard-boiled egg (halved or sliced), and that’s where the variety starts. They have those with chopped up chicken strips, slivers of chicken, broccoli and cauliflower, cubed ham, crumbled bacon, and another one with peas and an overly-sweet dressing I couldn’t stomach. So, there’s plenty of variety, and if they weren’t like $4 each, I’d eat them for every single meal. Okay, not every meal, since I’d eventually get salad fatigue and turn to the equally-tasty $1 boxed sandwiches (hamburger, chicken, spicy chicken, sausage & cheese, or BBQ riblet). I promise you, those sandwiches are much better than you’d expect from something that’s been put into a plastic bag, then a cardboard box, then sold for a buck.
She can buy apples. She knows she should buy some, and eat them.
But she knows from experience that, given her usual habits, she won’t. Instead, she’ll just consume more junk food.
Outside the sodium content, she’s not doing too poorly presuming her Walkyverse height and weight on Walkypedia are accurate and close to right for her DoA version.
One box of Kraft (prepared by on box instructions) is 20% of her fat intake covered, 50% of her carb intake and 60% of her protein intake covered per day. If we assume she’s doing something like a tuna salad sandwich for lunch each day and cereal with whole milk and buttered toast for breakfast she’s fine on macro nutrients (ok, maybe a bit high on protein and low on fat). The bigger issue is such a diet is deficient on many vitamins and minerals and almost dangerously high on sodium.
But those weren’t the choices. And even if they were, I dispute your statement – half a livable wage lets you live just as much as a no wage (i.e., not), and it eats up your time that you could be using to try and secure a livable wage.
OR you buy the bell pepper chop of the top, boil it for 10 ish minutes and fill it with boiled/fried rice and cheese. (Maybe a little meat and mushrooms to)
I’d be more inclined to go with onion, carrots, and celery. They’re significantly cheaper and the texture fits better. If I’ve got splurging money, broccoli and radishes are also going in.
Nerdette here: why does everyone in the Walkyverse actually like that disgusting, gluey crap? Walky, Joyce, Leslie… can anyone eat raman, or frozen dinners, or hamburger helper, or other gross, cheap food that takes no effort and tastes more like the cardboard they’re packed in than like boogers?
Oh c’mon, Leslie, apples are like Level 1 adulting fruit. Cheap, healthy, very easy to store, available pretty much all year round, very long-lasting (esp. if you keep them in the fridge).
Would I be wrong in thinking that Beckys upbringing (traditional, mom at home, fundie) would mean that she probably had a pretty decent diet growing up?
Depends! I’m guessing ToeDad probably refused to cook since he was a man, even after Becky’s mom passed, so maybe they went from good home cooked meals to… not so good. Plus she was best friends with Joyce who is notoriously picky.
Yeah thats true, I can’t help but feel Joyces pickiness is based around trying to assert some form of control so yeah since Becky probably did eat at the Browns a fair bit though she probably followed suit
I still don’t get the whole american mac and cheese thing though, it looks really runny and bland to me and not very appetizing
More than 2 cups of cheddar cheese you shred yourself. 🙂
Doesn’t taste as good either. Preshedded usually has additives and even without that has more surface area exposed to air so loses more tasty volatile compounds.
That recipe has changed a wee bit, but not as to the essentials. You’re making a basic white sauce (bechamel) with the flour and butter and milk (it can even be skim milk) and then grating in your sharp cheddar cheese to complete the sauce. The dry mustard is key to making this grownup food. The original recipe used white pepper instead black pepper (like you should for any white sauce) and used simple bread crumbs for a topping, said crumbs having been mixed with some melted butter, so that they get crispy-brown in the oven.
However seeing how she was a home-raised Fundie girl she probably learnt to cook herself from her mother… or learnt later from Mrs. Brown or on her own. Since she was “supposed to be” a good Fundie girl.
In a way Becky might be more experienced at housework than Leslie.
If I remember correctly, Bonnie’s death was fairly recent, a year or two ago at the most. When they visit Becky’s house, one of the flashbacks shows them together, and Becky looked pretty close to her current age
like. my fundamentalist mom was all about the fruits and vegetables and eating healthy. but like she a) is from California and b) wanted to be a nurse. so she kind of had a leg up, as it were. and she still really struggled with making it all taste good. my fundamentalist grandma, who grew up in foster care, is more about just making meals. she also tends to find spices “weird”. (i bought her thyme. god help me, she thought this was weird.)
a lot of my experience with midwestern cuisine has been heavy on the starches, carbs and fats. baked ziti, casseroles, boiled green beans, funeral potatoes, bacon. it would really depend on the background of Becky’s parents more than anything else, I think. Becky’s mom was heavily depressed, so she might not have had energy to do anything more than basic meals – she might even not have had energy to cook at all, leaving Becky or her dad to do it.
and then it really depends on her dad – would her dad have learned to cook at all? would he have seen cooking as demeaning of his role in the household, or would he have seen it as the price of taking care of his wife and daughter? would he have made Becky do the cooking? these questions have answers and my inquiring mind avidly hungers after answers to them.
I could easily see Becky getting out the church cookbook and trying to teach herself how to cook so that there’d be a meal ready before her dad came home, though.
Now I am imagining any number of nasty scenarios with Ross expecting Becky to take over all the housework and cooking in addition to her home schooling work. While both of them are trying to deal with grief.
(With their background, would they have gotten the freezer full of casseroles thing after the funeral?)
Becky is remarkably resilient and capable for someone who just survived getting kicked out of her college for her sexual orientation and who had their dad kidnap and threaten them with a shotgun. I Theorize that the reason she’s like this is because her dad had her take on a lot of the tasks of an adult woman around their house, especially after her mom died but possibly also before. This would give her the sense of competence that we see from her, as well as the self-possession that marks her personality! i.e. she knows she can survive because she’s survived worse before, and she has a confidence born out of that.
(I think so!!! This would be a good community for that sort of thing.)
Ok so I’m trying to be careful here but if this is the case then that’s at least something good to come out of this for her
Like being able to cook, clean and basically run a household is a skill sadly lacking in a lot of people so once she sorts herself out with proper accommodation she’ll be better placed then most people her age to keep herself healthy, hell she’ll probably be able to sort Leslie out
Like eating healthy is not a hard skill to master but its so important (how does Leslie not have rickets yet?)
that is one of the unfortunate things about abuse. every abuser is a person, and therefore a mess of complicated good and bad things. in an abuser’s case, more bad than good, but that doesn’t mean the good things don’t exist. but like: just because you adapted in a resilient way to your abuse does not mean a) that you took no damage or b) that it was appropriate for the abuse to be done or c) that your life wouldn’t be better if you hadn’t ever had abuse in your life at all
like. Running a household is a tremendous responsibility to put on the shoulders of a teenager. That’s time she didn’t get to spend on studying for school, or hanging out with her friends, or doing dumb teenage stuff. That’s time she had to be an adult before she was really ready for it, and that is irrevocably damaging.
Being able to do it is not the same thing as doing it competently, and in some cases it could damage to do the thing at all. like – my dad was a fan of the “if you push your kid harder they’ll be capable of more things!” approach. as a result I can start a fire, carry firewood, clean a ridiculous amount of dishes in a short time, cook mostly competently, and do a lot of basic household maintenance. But does this mean I want to do most of these things??
The answer is pretty much an absolute no, because the associations I’ve built up with doing them are mostly negative. If I don’t do the dishes, my dad’s going to take twenty bucks out of my bank account and give them to my brother for doing them. If my brother doesn’t do the trash, he’s going to get yelled at for not doing the trash – but he’s going to get yelled at for not doing the trash anyways, because our family built up trash faster than he could reasonably keep up with. My sister drags her feet on basic hygiene habits like keeping her room clean because leaving it a mess is the one thing she reliably has control of in her life.
And for Becky those things could be really fraught with panic – like, my first year away from my parents I was basically in constant panic mode about being able to take care of myself, to the point that my panic was getting in the way of my ability to take care of myself. the emotional damage is just as big a problem as the physical and mental damage.
idk just because you’re able to retrieve good things out of the wreckage that has been your life doesn’t mean that, like, the wreckage wasn’t awful to begin with. and it’s not something you have to be grateful for. like, teaching her basic life skills was the least Becky’s parents could do for her. it was their responsibility as her parents. and pretty much the only reason why they would have taught her that was so that she could be a good wife and mother to a man they approved of.
teaching her that fear was normal?? teaching her that she had to destroy herself in order to preserve her Christianity? teaching her that her only worth was her relation to a man, however soul-crushing? neglecting to teach her how to communicate her basic needs and desires? nothing makes up for that.
idk check out Anne with an E on netflix – the pilot has a really good example of this type of thing and how damaging it can be
sure I wasn’t trying to suggest Becky should be grateful but more like it was a bad situation but shes learnt something that will make her future better, hopefully
it’s not you specifically it’s just….something i’ve gotten a lot, From Others, who are trying to make the best of my situation without engaging with it at all
but yeah, speaks more to becky’s abilities than anything else
“My sister drags her feet on basic hygiene habits like keeping her room clean because leaving it a mess is the one thing she reliably has control of in her life. ”
huh. I wonder if that has something to do with the way I sometimes *desperately* don’t want to do basic self-care and/or chores… hmmmm….
Not necessarily. Probably ‘mom at home cooking’ type deal, yes, but moms aren’t necessarily going to make better food than most people will make for themselves.
Well that’s true, my mom was a great mom, the type of mom everyone should have but its fair to say that cooking wasn’t one of her strengths.
She was born in ’41 so her view on cooking vegetables was that you boil them until all the crunch and flavour has left them…and them boil them some more just to make sure
I’m not a very confident cook but the meals are at least healthy and reasonably tasty but then I’m not cooking for five people
Mind you her fry ups and roasts were a joy to behold 🙂
Yeah, and if Bonnie was depressed (and imo, it’s implied she was) she may have gone with food that was simpler to make or that she enjoyed making (or that Becky enjoyed) rather than what would equal a balanced diet. So, breakfast could end up being waffles or cereal or something easy like that, lunch is something like sandwiches and then dinner ends up being pancakes (or, I dunno, soup or something or whatever people who don’t eat pancakes for dinner eat). That is not a healthy day, but they’re easy things to make and they’re quick.
is that still robin’s…? I feel like with the huge deal the comic’s made about Becky not having a phone, they’d have made a big deal of her getting one, even if it was during the timeskip
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they’re forbidden anyway
or was that figs
myeh
it’s whatever symbolic fruit we most dislike at the moment
so durians
But durians are symbolic of Steven Universe
ho shit, symbolism misnavigated!!!
mostly i was going with they are big and smelly and delicious on the inside
You managed to find a tasty durian? They taste like onion yogurt.
i heard they were tasty????
i d k
It’s not like taste is subjective or anything
Yeah, some people may like the taste of onion yogurt.
fun story: most of my experience with durians comes from the game Don’t Starve, where durians a) are monster food and b) negatively impact your sanity. the best use for them is either to just let them rot, or use them as part of a fruit salad. anything else runs the risk of turning your meal into monster lasagna
Is it anything like green onion dip made with sour cream?
…. MAYBE caramelized onions could work?
Durians are delicious. Now lychee, they are dark balls of mucus.
They give you a whole extra heart, of course they’re tasty!
I’ve got some simmered fruit in my inventory that gives me twenty extra hearts. Shoutout to the durian.
I guess it’s either genetic or cultural taste, which basically means “idk try some and see if you like it?” As a southeast Asian who grew up eating it like once a year, it would seem to me that most folks who thinks it ABSOLUTELY nasty would probably find that it tastes nasty, because to me durians smell amazing. Although there are people who likes the taste despite the smell.
On my own experiences: There this distinct, indescribable cocktail of flavours that makes the “right” Durian taste, some creaminess, slight sweetness, very slight sharpness. Now, I’ve had some HORRIBLE durians where that raw-onion sharpness just pervades the whole taste, and it feels like eating plastic (I don’t know if it was ACTUALLY bad because everyone else ate it fine, and I was the only one gagging).
Thinking again, this was shortly after I had a durian feast because someone’s aunt has some durian trees on their back yard and were VERY eager to provide for her visiting guests. I guess it’s either I just got exposed to very good, homegrown durians and became a durian-snob and the widely available ones became Lesser, or that my body is Literally Done With Durians Forever after eating so much of it in one sitting.
Just going to massively respond to everything on my screen from this thread at once, it’ll save time.
@Maxyai While I agree with them having some elements reminiscent of the Allium genus, though my own experience has been more toward minor garlic or shallot tones than onion, I’d debate “yogurt” and instead suggest “custard” with even some of the sulfuresque eggy elements coming to bear. Of course my own experience is very limited *shrugs*.
@Hellespont Yeah, lychee is one I will never understand the appeal of on a texture level.
@Pablo360 It’s not just that taste is subjective. Different specimens of the exact same thing (say two durians taken from the same plant for example) can be near completely different based from all sorts of variables and their complex interactions and that’s before you add in the physiological variations between two different people tasting them and then you have the psychological aspects involved in taste subjectively changing how each perceives that taste. Put short, it’s not just the subjectivity of taste but the complexity as well.
The lychees I’ve eaten don’t have that texture. they’re more the texture of grapes iirc. maybe slightly rubbery grapes if the quality is low.
Yeah, what the hell? Lychee is practically *crisp*.
Dunno, Lychees always seemed extremely rubbery to me. Like you could play squash with them
Grape isn’t a bad comparison from my experience. But denser. I love lychees, haven’t had them in AGES. When I try to put them into fruit salad they don’t make it that far.
I thought that was ube now?
wynaut both
yams aren’t fruit
Just the symbolic food, not symbolic fruit.
Not with that attitude they aren’t
Cavendish bananas can go take a hike, the flavorless fucks.
I want Gros Michel bananas back.
Genital jokes abound
But half of those jokes flop.
One source says it’s pomegranates.
Would that source be Persephone by any chance
Apples are jerks to Becky anyway
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/darling/
The reason is because some poor scribe wrote the latin word for “apple” instead of “evil” circa 600 AD/CE, which is actually an easy mistake given that the words in question were “melus” and “malus”, they sound very similar Medieval Latin, and easpecially in Anglo-Saxon England it was often times very hard to tell whether one was supposed to use an “a” or an “e” because Old English is confusing as hell.
Neat!
Makes no sense to be an apple anyway, apples didn’t grow in the Middle East.
In Hebrew, it’s just “fruit”. Common interpretations are pomegranates (associated with fertility and female sexuality), or figs (since they covered their nakedness with fig leaves, it would kinda make sense to be standing at a fig tree).
It made sense for people in Europe to assume that the Forbidden Fruit was an apple anyway; apples are traditionally connected to death, godhood, and the other world in European mythos.
Ooh. That makes the poisoned apple in fairytales way cooler, too.
In at least one early version of Snow White, the poisoned apple is a “love apple” or tomato! In medieval Europe the tomato was thought to be closely related to deadly nightshade, and so it’s fruit had to be exceedingly poisonous. Fortunately, this myth faded, imagine European (or Italian) cuisine without the humble tomato. The horror, the horror…
Technically speaking, they weren’t wrong about the relation. Tomatoes, potatos and peppers are the edible members of the otherwise very dangerous nightshade or solanaceae family of plants. All the edible solanums are from the Americas, not just tomatos. So Italy didn’t start out with tomato any more than Ireland did with potatos.
what i heard is that the reason why it was considered poisonous is because when you eat tomato on a pewter dish (which is what most dishes at the time were made out of), the acids react badly and it becomes poisonous. when we started to move away from pewter then it stopped being poisonous, lmao
Also, for whatever reason, a lot of people way back when used “apple” to just mean “fruit”. Sort of like how in some areas of the South use “coke” to mean any kind of soda. (Fun fact, that’s how we got “pineapple,” it used to be an alternate way of saying pine cone and then someone thought this new fruit looked like a pine cone.)
Who are these Coke blasphemers? I’ll ruin their economy, I swear it.
Similar idea behind the word ‘corn’. ‘Corn’ used to be a general word for any grain, not specifically to the American grain. Teosinte, or Maize, was referred to as ‘Indian corn’ by Western settlers, and eventually the ‘Indian’ was dropped.
http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-word-corn
It was then rapidly forced into nearly every fucking dish anyone has ever cooked in the American Midwest. I kid you not, I’ve seen corn in goddamn spaghetti. There’s so fucking much of it here, we’re piling it into dishes it doesn’t belong in, just to get rid of it.
Could be worse. Could be zuchinni.
You don’t even need to farm it, you get swamped by just a backyard garden.
There’s a joke common in rural Massachusetts about a city slicker who comes up to visit and is told to be sure to lock his car. He asks if they have trouble with car thieves in the nice small town: “Oh no. It’s worse. They’ll leave zucchini in it.”
Only ever had zucchini in bread or fried. Fuckin’ Illinois, by the way, frying everything or turning it into bread… Is it actually worth eating in any other form?
With respect, that sounds like folk etymology. Particularly since ‘evil’ doesn’t make sense in that context, assuming I’m getting the context right. Do you have a reference for this?
(Trying very hard not to say ‘citation needed’…)
Ok, just got out my old Latin dictionary (I took it in high school) and it turns out both evil and apple are “malum” in the singular nominative case, making such a screw up even more likely.
I’m not disputing that they have similar-to-identical spellings. I’m disputing that translating to ‘apple’ was an error and they really meant ‘evil’. Again, contextually, it doesn’t make sense.
Many scribes were not what you would technically call “literate.”
Compare also the modern “would of”, which makes absolutely no grammatical sense but sounds like an actual, correct phrase…
I thought it was pomegranates.
Yeah, I basically never buy fruit. Not that I don’t like fruit, I just never do. #adulting
i love fruit
one time i was at college and was feeding myself poorly and bought a carton of strawberries
and they were so delicious i cried
There is nothing in life sweeter than a fresh bunch of grapes!
Except a barrel of puppies
Or a barrel of pure cane sugar
a carton of blueberries with sugar sprinkled on top
I think in this instance we’d need some brown sugar. Vary up the flavor palette a little! 😉
Or a barrel of thaumatin
Puppies are more salty / umami.
….
…. or so I would imagine.
….
*flees*
What is “umami”, even? I’ve seen it used as a replacement for “savory”, but then why not just say that? The only consistent example I’ve found for what the hell “umami” is supposed to describe, is tomatoes, especially ketchup.
How about a sugar cane to chew on?
peaches at that perfect point where they’re not rock hard but haven’t gone squichy yet.
Or cherries during the cheap season. At least round here they can be 2 bucks a pound one week and 8 bucks a pound the next while Raniers (oh God Raniers!) have dropped to 3 for some reason. It all depends on when things harvest.
I got a couple pounds of cherries last night at $2/pound. Haven’t seen Rainiers yet though.
I was so turned off by artificial cherry flavor when I was younger, it took me a long time to discover how amazing real cherries are.
Yeah, I don’t think Raniers are out yet. Just remembering from other years. Most of the time they’re much more expensive than normal cherries, and when you taste one you realize why.
The idea of fruit being adult is a bizarre bizarre thing to me. Fruit is sweet and good.
Probably because it’s in the part of the supermarket where none of the food has a free toy inside!
We need more free toys with our fruit
You can play gatling gun with a mouthful of watermelon seeds, does that count?
every so often I buy some fruit, then I don’t have the spoons to chop it up or something, and so it ends up in the compost.
except the dates; once the bag is reachable from the computer, it doesn’t last long. I wish I could buy a bag of pre-cut/washed fresh fruit that wasn’t 90% weird melon stuff. I guess there’s canned fruit, but does that still have much vitamins?
Frozen is probably better, and can be a much cheaper way of getting berries.
it irreparably changes the texture, though, so then you have to blend or cook them. I can’t talk myself into putting in that effort unless I’ve got so many spoons I can make pancakes.
I just end up eating Dirty Unwashed Fruit
I mean you don’t really need to slice anything except melons
or oranges
or any citruses
but I mean bananas can be opened in 10 seconds and apples and pears are just eaten the way they are and berries you just have to spit out the core for some of them but others you can literally just grab and eat by a mouthful…
ah waiting for the season when they are not horribly expensive ;~;
(other than apples and bananas. those are a year-round treat)
Enjoy your bananas while they fucking last.
I only buy pears usually, but occasionally get some apple slices from mc donalds
If it were up to me (ie: I was making all the grocery decisions, and could afford it), there’d always be Clementines in the fridge (also, banana slices and strawberries in the freezer).
Why would you put the clementines in the fridge? Or most fruit, for that matter…
Because moldy fruit is not very healthful.
Secondarily, cold juice is delicious.
Are you one of those weirdos who just leave their fruit out on the counter, like some kind of serial killer? If I go to someone’s house and see fruit out in the open (except maybe bananas), I immediately start looking around for potential escape routes, just in case.
I keep 1 apple and 1 orange on the counter, rest in fridge. replace warm one with cold one when eating. Peaches and bananas, only by 3-4 at a time.
Uh, por que no los dos?
On a teachers salary!?
…..
…. okay, now I’m wondering if diced apple would work in mac and cheese.
…..
….. I’m thinking NO, not if it’s the normal chedderish-cheese. (Or American or whatever). But if you could do mac and cheese with, say, havarti sauce, that would work.
I dunno, apples and cheddar cheese is pretty delicious
Very much so. I don’t do desert often, but I’ve made some really nice desert nachos before with apple (cin-sugar tossed fresh corn tortilla chips topped with baked apple slices, cheddar and a mint sour cream).
That said, boxed mac and cheese has a weird taste to it’s cheese and I could see cooked apple having a potentially unpleasant texture next to that pasta.
Exactly. Not only would these be cooked apples, they would have had most of the sugar leached out of them and overwhelmed by the surrounding cheese.
mac and cheese will never break your heart
Unless you order mac n cheese but they use mostaccioli instead of macaroni like a PLEBIAN
mostaccioli is lies!
The pastas, in order of best to worst:
• Farfalle
• Ravioli
• Fettucine
• Angel hair
• Rice noodles
• Lasagna
• Kiddie pasta with fun shapes
• Lasagna
• Oversized pasta shells
• Breadsticks
• Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
• George Romero
• Mono no aware
• What happened to Kars at the end of Battle Tendency
[…]
• Mostaccioli
And I just noticed I forgot to include macaroni on that list
you also forgot Radiatori, the best pasta i’ve found for sauce:noodle ratio.
Also, you left out couscous. You tabouli-hating heathen!
theres no room for tabouli hating heathens here! BE GONE!
Where does Sergio Leone fit on this list?
At the bottom.
I cannot deny buying 20 boxes of farfalle at 69c a box last time pasta was on special. Now, if only peas, cream, garlic, ham and cheese were all on special at the same time…
And penne? I love penne
Penne is baby mostaccioli
Good. Eat ’em while they’re young, I say.
What about rotini? That shape holds on to sauces best.
Giant shells take the #2 spot from ravioli when they’re stuffed with ricotta and parmesan.
Anything takes #1 when stuffed with ricotta and parmesan. I’m only considering the noodles here.
At least until they change the recipe and then gloat about it by proclaiming that nobody noticed.
Well I noticed. It just doesn’t taste the same as it used to. And yet I buy it anyway because it’s cheaper than food.
Lesson learned: nothing is sacred, but that’s okay, because you’ve got no room to care. (Eat at Arby’s.)
Even the Eat at Arby’s gag is not sacred. Before long people will recognize it for shallow repetition masquerading as wit but long robbed of any of its original innovation and spontaneity by our endless revisitation of it. It is doomed to the death spiral of all great humor. Loved in its infancy, abused in its maturity, hated and shunned in its decline for its fame and predictability, enjoying a brief mid-life resurgence through metahumor, understood as a relic of a bygone generation in its dotage, as all the things we love will be as we ourselves grow old, and then, as ourselves, invariably dying and being lost to the obscurity of history.
Until then, Eat at Arby’s. You are only delaying the inevitable.
well done.
not that anyone will care.
i often add tuna fish and peas to my mac and cheese.
If somebody does that, and throws in hot dog slices (or real sausage, dare I say), I will commit crimes for them.
I use tofurkey sausage (when I’m not using shredded chicken) and one of Costco’s frozen veggie mixes. They had a nice one recently with black beans, soy beans and corn.
Also, I add some real cheese to bulk up the sauce. And recently discovered that flavoured butter works well 🙂
What about bits of salami, and topping it with bacon crumbles?
I did that in my student days. Preferred to add canned salmon, however.
Macaroni & cheese with hamburger and peas, just like Mom used to make*. Rotini is the best, but elbows are also a valid choice. Miss me with those fucking shells, though. Shells are for the heavy Velveeta sauce.
*In fact, she still makes it, and I swear to you, I will empty that fucking pot if nobody stops me.
It will, however, clog it.
Hi everyone, old time reader but first comment here for me…
I’m from Italy so I felt kind of compelled to write something since everyone is talking about pasta 🙂
Do you get paccheri in the U.S.? They’re awesome!
I’ve never seen it, but there are many kinds of pasta shapes that you can’t find in the US. For example, I had never seen orecchiette until my local grocery store did a “taste of Italy” event with a bunch of import products. Now I go out of my way to find it.
Adulting is hard.
I have cereal for dinner. I’M AN ADULT!!1!!
…a broke/poor adult, but the sentiment still stands.
Wait, you mean you’re not stuck eating ramen?
ONE-PERCENTER! ONE-PERCENTER!
Never did understand why people go for ramen, when they can just as easily by a big-ass bag of rice or some other equally-cheap grain. It stretches further, the texture isn’t shot all to hell if you leave it alone for more than 20 minutes, and you won’t get nearly as many looks of pity for having a ton of rice.
Oh Becky, adulthood just means you’ve reached the age where you’re legally responsible to take care of yourself. Nobody said you had to be nutritious!
Also, Leslie doesn’t have a ton of cash. Fresh fruits and vegetables are ‘spensive.
i keep hearing this and get more and more disappointed like
i love fresh fruits and vegetables
I like some fruit, but the biggest problem with fruit and vegetables is that if you don’t cook a lot, or you’re not in the mood for them, they can get moldy or go squishy much faster than a lot of things you could buy that will usually last until you’re in the mood for them.
Frozen or canned fruit/vegetables last longer and are just as good for you, but there is also the stigma that they’re less healthy… because they were frozen or canned.
So usually people stick to what they prefer. Plus, vegetables are a pain to use because recipes always ask for like, half of this, a quarter of that and two of those, cook for 3 hours, and you have to figure out how to use up the left over bits and mac and cheese never asks for this, it only asks that you own a microwave and can set a timer.
Salads. You can make a salad with whatever you have in any proportion you have it.
I will have a mac and cheese salad please. Without lettuce.
See, this kind of thinking is dangerous, because it allows pasta salad to be considered a salad. The frothing chimps around here like to slap mayonnaise, mustard, chopped bacon, pickle relish, and various other fatty/salty condiments on pasta shells, call it a salad, and then claim that, because they’re calling it a salad, it counts as healthy eating. Potato-, egg-, tuna-, chicken-, and taco salad, I’m fine with. It’s these disturbing pasta concoctions that are keeping me up at night.
But the veggie quantities in recipes are always lies anyway! Or, more charitably, approximations.
I guess YMMV on this and I’m a pretty experienced cook, but I find that I can reliably use from 1/2 to 2 times the indicated amount and it turns out totally fine. And if necessary, my use-it-up recipes for droopy produce are fried rice or soup for veggies, and smoothies or crisps for fruit.
But yeah, it’s super dependent on where you live and how easy it is for you to shop/garden. I’m from California’s Central Valley so I am totally spoiled for choice. (You mean people PAY for oranges?)
yuuuuuuuuuuuup
Le Sigh
Really? There’s a produce stand about two miles away from me with fruit for less than $1 a pound in some cases. And I live in a coastal city.
But I’m sure mac n cheese has its advantages as well. Maybe you really hate pooping, for example.
It can be a lot more expensive to shop for healthy food than unhealthy food, since said food tends to be much cheaper and easier to buy in bulk, especially when you have a family to feed.
A big part of the expense to eating fresh food is buying food you don’t actually end up eating. Buy just enough for what you actually plan to scarf and you radically cut how much eating fresh costs. Between 40 and 60% of what goes into your fridge gets tossed out. I say this as I have a huge bag of onions sprouting in my kitchen that only maybe 2 onions were eaten.
But that still requires time and transportation to increase the frequency of shopping trips. Back when I was wholly reliant public transit (and before I moved into an apartment by myself), the buses I had to take to get to the grocery store only ran once an hour. And I had to take once bus just to get to the stop where I could get on the bus that actually went by the store. There was no way I could make that trip more often than once a week.
Yep. I lived in an apartment like that once.
The term “food desert” was coined for just such a situation many folks find themselves in. It describes how this country has so much food and that “last mile” of getting to many people is a problem.
On average we have plenty of food, and good enough food, to feed everyone. Of course, that’s the same kind of “average” which says I can hyperventilate for ten minutes, and hold my breath for the next ten.
this irritates me so much.
like. why not have size adjustability???
so that you throw it out and have to come back for more!!
But much food is cheaper if you buy in bulk. The big bag of onions is cheaper per onion than buying one or two by themselves.
And some things aren’t sold in convenient sizes. Or plans change or time and energy available for cooking change.
I do throw out more veges than I’m really happy with.
right, but it’s cheaper in bulk because they sell in bulk
and then you end up wasting the food anyways
so like what money have you actually saved here
Look, I could buy one good-sized onion for $1.26 and use the entire thing within the week, making exactly what I wanted and wasting nothing. Or, I could buy this big bag of onions for like $3.50, use exactly the same amount of onion I would have with just the single one and then forget I have them until the smell of decay becomes overpowering.
It’s obviously still a better option to buy in bulk, because look at all these onions.
Of course, if those are the real prices, it’s a better deal to buy the big bag if you only wind up using 3, even if some go to waste.
Of course, my default cooking style is to start sauteing up the onions and garlic while I figure out what I’m actually going to make, so I may use a few more onions than you. 🙂
The price of fresh food varies A LOT and if you’re in a poorer area and/or food dessert you’re lucky if they even carry fruit that’s in decent shape.
(Apologies from the Dept of Redundancy Dept for my using “food desert” upthread before reading your post.)
I fucking love apples. The idea of having even one lunch without one baffles me.
how many of you just now held your tongue and said the word “apple?”
I did, because I didn’t get why it would work. And…it didn’t. It’s not too hard to make a “p” sound with your tongue sticking out, and I’d never have guessed it was supposed to sound like an “s”.
On the other hand I couldn’t actually say “asshole” without it turning into “athel”. So I don’t doubt that this is a prank some kids play, but the sound sure wasn’t convincing to me.
This. Not quite seeing how this prank is supposed to play out. Though if anyone could pull it off, it’d probably be Joyce.
The success of the prank, at least in my long-ago-and-poorly-remembered experience, depends a great deal on the prankster and pals gleefully and loudly proclaiming “Ha! Ha! You said ‘asshole!'” as many times as necessary to override the victim’s protests that the prank didn’t work.
Another important variable is whether the intended victim gives enough of a shit about you to perform your arbitrary sequence of dumbass actions with basically no payoff. I swear, half the boys in my class tried to get me to do this and similarly-pointless things, from kindergarten to 7th grade, and I just gave them a blank stare. Well, it was more like a cross between a “WTF” face and a death glare, eventually shifting entirely toward the latter once we reached 7th grade. It’s a wonder they didn’t vaporise and blow away in the wind out of embarrassment, at that age.
I’d already run numerous tests while in elementary school
Becky! Looking dapper!
Honestly, apples and mac n cheese make a good combo. Like hot dogs and mac n cheese. Or fried chicken and mac n cheese. Or balsamic-drenched steamed brussel sprouts and mac n cheese.
I like mac n cheese is what I’m saying
Fruits are the best Leslie. Grapes are the shit. Watermelons are hype, Apples are Funky, Bananas are bros, Strawberries are Crunk.
Get with the program.
“Bananas are bros”.
So many jokes
Bronanas.
C’mon, Leslie, take it to the fridge!
I just started reading a webcomic that I think some people here might be interested in called As the Crow Flies.
http://www.melaniegillman.com/?p=96
Per its about:
As the Crow Flies is a story about Charlie — a queer 13 year old girl who finds herself stranded in a dangerous place: an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp.
Just what I need — another webcomic to read. My backlog’s clogged enough already, between webcomics, audiobooks, and actual books. At this rate, by the time I finally get around to watching Moonlight, Cartoon Network will have rebooted it as a slice of life show that nobody likes but they keep promoting anyway.
I think Charlie might be intended to be non-binary, like the comic’s creator.
I feel that too, but that’s what’s on the comic’s about page. I could definitely see Charlie as egg mode NB, though.
I’m a bit confused about the definition of “queer” at the moment. I thought it just meant “gay”, at least for the last decade or two, but lately I see people using it to cover other LBGT+ labels, so… is it turning into a word for all that stuff because the acronym was getting too long? or does it only cover a subset?
I just googled it, and got a lovely rainbow background… but the definition only had the way the word was used, like, 30+ years ago.
wikipedia says it covers both non-straight and non-cis… and looks like an interesting read for later 🙂
Queer acts very much as an umbrella term, though I wouldn’t say it’s a replacement for LGBTQ+ as it’s still a term some people feel uncomfortable having applied to them.
I often describe myself as queer in reference to both my orientation and gender, though for my gender I may also use non-binary or agender to be more specific.
Queer really means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and to me that’s part of the beauty of the term.
“Queer” means “not cisallohet”.
Queer has been a general community term for awhile now (hence Queer Studies, etc…), as LGBTQIAP, etc… has a lot of gaps in it whereas queer is all encompassing and intentionally inclusive of traditionally marginalized groups like bi, trans, and so forth who were instrumental to early rights but got shut out by mainstream gay and lesbian voices.
As Yumi said, it can also be an orientation or a gender, but it’s main role is to cover everything that is the full community, all the letters, all the people. Together, in protest, in anger, in struggle, in community.
Queer is a reclaimed word.
It was the worst slur in the bad ol’ days, and would’ve been very edgy when folks like Queer Nation famously reclaimed it in 1990.
Most of us who came of age after that have mainly positive inclusive empowering experiences with the word. To be safest, though, I wouldn’t call somebody else Queer unless they did, first, especially if they’re born before, say, 1970.
I hope I didn’t condescend just then, it was unintentional if I did, I just think history is neato. 🙂
…man, every time I comment late at night, I read it in the worst possible light and I just want to self-destruct it. Hello Internet, I intend only good things and not bad things, please have mercy on my doofy posts.
-pats gentle like- you seem good to me
personally im going by queer right now b/c it just feels the most…validating and ambiguous, tbh
*hugs* No worries, I just get a little prickly on this topic because “queer is a bad slur” gets used as a justification to horrendously abuse young aro and ace kids, especially ones just first starting to come out and find community.
Thanks yall. It’s been a tough day.
And yes, Queer is totes a valid and spiffy identity! I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that people shouldn’t be Queer, or that people shouldn’t find it affirming and great. That would be the doofiest implication of them all.
In particular, a lot of nonbinary people (or people who are attracted to nonbinary people) people who are into multiple genders use to describe their sexuality and romantic orientation, as it many find it makes it easier to explain or because nothing else works. Or it just feels the most accurate.
I also know a lot of older folks (as in, from pre-1970s) use it because they were involved in reclamation efforts.
Excellent point.
I need to hang out with way more queer people who were born before 1970. Anybody who helped reclaim ‘Queer’ is probably a pretty rad person.
The way I found some of them was reading someone who was doing activism in the 90s blog. It had a lot of useful history about the term! It’s been used as a self identifier since 1910 (before gay was popularized as a self-identifier, actually! Both are reclaimed slurs).
All our terms are reclaimed words.
This is part of what I find interesting with how people (especially a couple people I know) in response to “queer” as opposed to “gay.”
Because a few years ago TERFs and truscum, plus other asshole bigots, got on a big tiff about it because it included trans people, bi people, etc. in the community and they didn’t like it. They mostly used social media, which tended to be used by people young enough not to remember the campaigns to reclaim it, which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, and lead to it becoming the academic and journalistic community term of choice (at least on a level to compete with LGBT+).
BBCC- Yup. And said group of asshole TERFs specifically trained a new movement of AERFs (asexual/aromantic-exclusionary radical feminists) to go after young ace and aro kids and abuse them.
Often specifically targeting heteroromantic aces, heterosexual aros, and worst of all aro aces and arguing that these groups were somehow “stealing community resources” by existing and seeking out other queer community.
When that wasn’t working all that great, they shifted to hard-selling “queer is a slur” so that they could claim that these groups were secretly “cis-hets” who “revealed their homophobia” by using the most widely accepted community term to refer to the queer community and thus “justifying” the abuse the AERFs are waging against them.
It’s pretty much because queer as a term inherently and intentionally folds in groups like trans folks, non-binary folks, aces, aros, bisexuals, etc… that these regressive haters despise for existing in “their” gay and lesbian community.
It’s also a direct repeat of attempted exclusions in the past, most specifically bisexuals who were currently in relationships with different gender people and gay trans people (because in TERF eyes that’s just a “broken” straight person) as well as straight and bi trans people who insist on standing up for the fact that they are in fact straight or bi.
And pretty much about resentment to these intentional inclusionary reclamation efforts in the 80s and 90s as well as how they were often tied to marginalized community activism that was POC-led (TERFs, AERFs, and other similar bigots tend to be racist as fuck and lean hard in on the regressive hate movement in order to try and sell the idea that there is no racial privilege, because “all gay and lesbian narratives are the same” and happen to just look like middle-class white experiences).
Is there an age-related component? I’ve noticed that people, say, mid-30s and younger are totally comfortable identifying as queer, using it as a blanket term; whereas people older than that tend to be less comfortable with the term and tend to put more restrictions on its use.
Kinda? Folks older than that tend to fall right into the age bracket where it WAS used popularly as a slur. Usage as a slur tended to vacillate between that term and ‘gay’. In the early 1900s, it was gay, then somewhere it shifted, and then back, and etc. So, yeah, many older people have bad memories with that word. Other people older than that were involved in reclaiming it, so they tend to be very touchy about people refusing to use it.
Cerb: Very nicely summarized, thank you.
YayFuck gatekeeping, in all its forms.You’re not wrong. But near as I can tell, ‘gay’ was reclaimed after ‘queer’ was. So if you’re wary about using queer and not gay, I’m curious about why.
It kinda vacillates back and forth about which is the more common to use as a slur. Right now, far as I can tell, it’s ‘gay’, but that might be different in some areas? Yet the pushback regarding ‘gay’ is much smaller, and mostly comes from people who are not gay objecting to its use as an umbrella.
Right now it seems to have settled on ‘unless you’re LGBT+ you should only use that word to refer to someone who is using it for their orientation, be that sexual, gender, romantic, or something else’.
I personally had a few bad experiences with “queer” when in school as did my group of friends so I still have really hard time using that word. And that was back around the 1999-2004 years (I was born in 1990 for reference). I’m generally getting out of that because I’m only just now learning it’s a reclaimed word, and that I’m not actually the token straight guy in a group of eight otherwise queer people. I only really recently started questioning my orientation because of romantic feelings. By which I mean I dated another guy briefly but didn’t feel any sexual attraction, so I assumed I was straight as a result. But lately I’ve been thinking I just wasn’t physically attracted to him in particular because I am definitely biromantic, and the more I think about it, I think I might be bi with a heavy preference for women. I’ve been very hesitant to use the term “bisexual” though because I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t want to be that one exception that bigots use to say bisexuality isn’t real or that sexuality is a choice or some bullshit like that, and because I’ve never been in a relationship that was really serious and casual sex is something I’m just not interested in. I first brought this up one, two months ago and (and I want to thank her again for this) Cerberus reassured me that “questioning” was an ok and valid identifier. Since then I’ve started dating again for the first time since college, and my girlfriend is a chimeric intersex individual (she identifies as female when it comes to gender though). What I’m trying say is that I was very uncomfortable using “queer” for the longest time but I am now ok using it. Most of the time.
……..
(Also Cerberus, if you’re reading this, thanks again for the support when I said I was actively questioning my orientation. It helped a lot. Also, it turns out that my friends weren’t expecting “possibly bi” but thought I was unconsciously genderfluid or trans because I was always willing to play female characters in RPGS and apparently did a very good job of role playing as “strong queer woman”. They had a little betting pool going on as an inside joke. No one won, and we all ended up laughing about it.)
*hugs* I’m really happy for you. 😀
You’re not the only one it helped, iirc. 🙂
Also, thanks to all the food talk on this page (and my brain finally stopping the dark-night shit for a while) I went out yesterday and got fruit and vegetables and actually ate them! 🙂
Thank you, I stopped reading half a year ago because it appeared to have stopped, but apparently it’s back on. I like the drawing style very much
Yeah, it’s lovely.
Though now that I’ve finished my binge read, I worry a bit about the pace of it. I might end up just checking on it every now and then rather than every update, but I look forward to seeing where it goes.
Oh Becky. You can dress like an adorable plaid wearing adult but yiu have yet to learn that mac and cheese is adult at its finest.
God I feel that SO HARD, Leslie
Ain’t none of us real adults in this bar
“Ain’t you an adult?”
“ONLY VERY RELUCTANTLY.”
I’m in my thirties and I STILL can’t wrap my head around the fact that people my own age are having kids. People MY age can’t possibly be responsible enough to raise children!
There are kids running around and talking and acting like miniature people and I’M old enough to be their dad! How does that make any sense??
It doesn’t get any better.
I mean, I’ve gotten better at adulting over the decades – you kind of have to when there isn’t anyone else to make you do the responsible thing, but I know I’m nowhere near responsible enough for kids.
Unless I had to be. Then I probably would be. Which is what happens to most people, I suspect. At least those who do turn out to be responsible enough.
Apples are great. Well, not Red Delicious apples, but other apples.
Granny Smith or get out!
Granny Smith is fine for cider and most cooking, but is too strong for apple sauce or eating uncooked. Give me McIntosh, Jonathan or Melrose for eating and something like a Rome or Grimes for sauce.
Not too strong for me! Yes, it bites back, but I’m okay with that.
It’s also probably a factor that, growing up, Granny or Red Delicious were my only two options. Now you’ve got all sorts of cultivars… I couldn’t begin to name them all, let alone pick a favorite. All I know for sure is line 1, and Reds are mealy crap. :p
Am I weird for absolutely loving Red Delicious?
Honey crisps are awesome save for the price.
I like them too.
I did have a bad one recently though. If that apple matches the experience other people are getting then I’d understand why others don’t like them but usually the ones I get are good.
Not weird, per se. They are still holding their own as a cultivar for a reason, even if a big part of that reason is due to their ability to store and travel long distances much more easily than many other cultivars and hence their ability to be brought to market in a much larger region from where grown.
For many of us they are both too subtle or bland of taste and too soft of flesh to be appetizing alone and don’t work well for cooking or cider, even if they are the only apple to be had much of the year.
Despite all that they also sell quite well, even with other varieties concurrently available, across a wide swath of the US and are generally considered “good enough” out of season by most people.
Red Delicious are soft? My experience is that they have a Styrofoam quality. But everything else you said I agree with.
I vaguely recall something about RDs being much better when I was a kid. Not nostalgia, the literal selection and breeding of the fruit has made it worse tasting now vs. then.
I have the feeling texture is going to depend where you live. My own experience and that of people I’ve discussed apples with in my area is “soft” is the best single word descriptor we can manage for RDs. They are firm enough right up until you bite them, then they essentially become apple sauce texture in the mouth without even chewing them.
As far as being better historically, I can see it as that’s a problem with near all produce anymore. With the huge shipping distances and long storage times involved in modern produce, there’s a lot of push on the biggest cultivars of most plants to be able to “box ripen” and not easily bruise so they look and feel the best for consumers in the store.
Yeah, red delicious is like eating the rind of watermelon. Hard, watery and flavorless
When for some reason a red delicious is foisted on me, I end up mashing it inside of the skin, bruising all around the outside. Then I bite into it and suck out the apple sauce innards like an apple vampire. Also makes for easy no tool peeling in a pinch.
Where them Fujis at?
On their way to being digested, if you know what I mean.
Galas are the best for eating raw, but red delicious survive better when you’re making pie.
If you’re eating raw, galas or fujis. If you’re making a pie, granny smith.
Galas are the best!
Macs for me, but they have to be from Ontario/Quebec, B.C. macs don’t taste right.
Anyone here ever heard of Empire apples? They’re a cross of Red Delicious and MacIntosh.
And they’re amazing.
I learned about that apple thing from one of the DoA print books. Foreshadowing??
Fruit is uncommon to rare for me now just because of the natural sugar content. There’s good reason that for a long time, they were treated as desserts.
OK, that raises no fewer than three questions, if I may ask:
-where do you live that fruit is no longer treated as dessert?
-why is not no longer treated as dessert?
-just what is it treated as now?
Everywhere I have lived (a fair portion of the Southern US) fresh fruit is seen as a breakfast or snack first. Watermelon is the closest I’ve ever seen coming to being treated as a dessert, and even then only belatedly.
Is there a breakfast food that can’t also double as a dessert? I suppose the meats and eggs, if you’re not into that, but otherwise?
Fruit as a dessert on its own, yes, but as a component of other desserts(pies, cobblers, etc) less so.
Get strawberries, they’re delicious. Hashtag Real Adult.
Chop some strawberries up into small pieces, sprinkle with sugar, then put them in a sealed container (or a bowl covered with plastic wrap) for at least a few hours. You should end up with strawberries in a light syrup.
Put a Twinkie in a bowl and cut it lengthwise almost all the way through, like a hot dog bun. Fill the slice with strawberries. Top with whipped cream (or Cool-Whip) and drizzle with sugary strawberry juice.
Holy…I need this in my life now.
They absolutely are. Raw, frozen, pureed, jammed…
One of my occasional regrets is that for various reasons, including the difficulties of juicing them on an industrial scale, it’s hard to get/find straight strawberry juice (unless you’re a restaurant or something). I usually have to resort to looking for daiquiri mixers and such.
Daiquiri, you say? Sounds like a bonus, to me.
I don’t like alcohol. I do like strawberries.
Though most of the mixes I’ve seen aren’t really anything juiced strawberries.
OTOH, starting with frozen strawberries makes a good frozen daiquiri. 🙂
Yeah, I’m starting to think what I really need to do is buy bagged frozen ones and do it myself.
but effort. *whine*
I want to be able to just buy strawberry juice like I can apple, orange, etc.
So, Leslie is suffering scurvy? Also, apples aren’t an adult food. Apples and peanut butter are my inner child food that keeps me from dying horribly.
She’s likely eating fruit when she goes out to eat, like in the dining hall. I think if she never ate fruit at all she’d just say that rather than, “I never buy fruit for myself”. I think she meant she just never buys any at the store to take home.
Becky is doing that non-commiting thing again she does when she is nervous.
“Do you like apples?”
“Speaking of apples, here is a funny Joyce-story”
Bless her heart, she REALLY want Leslie to approve of her.
And bless Leslie’s heart. Sometimes, when it is hard to be an adult for yourself, you can be an adult for someone else!
I wonder if Becky is thinking of Leslie as the gatekeeper of lesbian and is hoping that Leslie will approve of her lesbianing and give her the thumbs up. Hence the trying to set her up and the queer fashion and the constant bringing up of “teach me how to be gay” and her jumping around questions.
She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and fuck it up, not realizing or fully believing yet that Leslie won’t reject her, especially as her own father and community rejected her after telling her for years they wouldn’t.
she just really needs the validation
Without validation, her digital certificates won’t be accepted by the secret lesbian Internet.
the true dark net
Sadly I think that is very likely, and sadly that’s something of a default state for Becky. Display a persona (and overdoing it), while testing the waters.
But if ANYONE can see through it and help reach out to the real Becky, I think it is Leslie (and – adorably – Dina, although for completely other reasons)
I think so too. And this might be the arc where we see her as she adjusts to no longer running start to loosen her masks and take a peek around as she actually is and at the level of coping and emotions that she actually is rather than the one she feels everyone else needs from her.
She’s also (becoming) a surrogate mother, and even after (or because of) Hank’s wonderful gesture, we know that Becky desperately craves approval from that quarter.
where has this prank been all my life
I need to try it out on my brothers tomorrow
also I imagine Joyce being all huffy and crossing her arms and sulking for a week until Becky gives an apology and a hug. Teens. 😛
I tried it on myself, but I feel like it doesn’t work unless I hold my tongue further back than I would if told to hold my tongue.
But, I have a weird tongue anyway, so.
And the hug lasts a little too long and Becky turns red and runs away at the end and Joyce is just now realizing oh gosh holy heck
Berries! Can’t go wrong with berries. (Strawberries aren’t real berries, don’t let them deceive you.)
If you want a good berry, grab a watermelon.
Yes you can.
Oof, yeah. I rescind my statement.
NYEH
Way back in the Bible/Temptation always comes along
There’s always somebody tempting somebody into
Doing something they know is wrong
Well they tempt you with their silver
And they tempt you with their gold
And they tempt you with the pleasure that the flesh doth surely hold
They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple, but me I ain’t going for that
–I’m going for your Pink Cadillac…–Bruce Springsteen
I want Becky to give her opinion on all things. Like, I want her to be shocked that lesbian vampires and the Camarilla web series exists. For a really random example.
“Becky reacts to things” sounds like an awesome podcast
You mean Carmilla? I don’t think the vampire Camarilla have much to do with lesbians.
I dunno, it depends on the Signature NPC. 🙂 Becky playing LARPs would be awesome.
I have long wanted to see Joyce as Goth (or rather, her idea of what a Goth looks like). Now I want to see Becky as a vampire larper.
And incidentally, our Sabbath larp had some wonderfully gender/sexuality transgressing tzimisce.
Well, Willis and Jeph could do a crossover so Dora and Raven could Gothify Joyce.
(Remember DoA exists a couple of years before the start of QC.)
A Willis/Jeph crossover would just be a series of escalating butts, wouldn’t it?
“When we were 17… and again, yesterday. She’s still mad.”
“I knew the truth at seventeen…”
“It was a very good year.”
(Wow. Am I less young than most folks here?)
Nothing wrong with Sinatra.
If you’re thinking Janis Ian marks people as young, yes. I mean, I was too young to know that when it came out and I suspect I’m older than most here.
When I first heard that song I was in a giant queer phase and so I was all like, wow, I love this song, but it sounds exactly what a confused closeted queer girl would write. There’s so much alienation and no real actual interest in the boys she feels she should be pursuing.
Then I googled Janis Ian and smiled my head off.
Becky: Aren’t you a teacher with a job and stuff? Can’t you afford both?
Leslie: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA! *cries*
She teaches at a college though, so wouldn’t her salary be better just due to that?
Not necessarily incredible, but not “butt of all jokes” bad?
Only if she was either tenured or in a different country. (The American education system, much like our infrastructure, healthcare system, energy program, (lack of) banking regulations, and history of treating First Nation peoples and black peoples, is in a very fucked up state)
Dammit that second “peoples” I should just supposed to be “people” autocorrect!!!
Indeed. I’m guessing she’s not an adjunct because then she’d need a second job.
Actually (speaking as a secondary teacher and someone who went to a Big 10 university), I’d expect her salary to be worse than the average school teacher’s, based on what I’ve seen. (Salaries at least used to be public record at my college.)
Leslie. Put down that apple, because you are a peach.
“What’s the point in growing up if you can’t be a little childish sometimes?”
— Tom Baker, The City of Death
That’s right, that quote comes from an old British sci-fi show in an episode literally called The City of Death.
” an episode”
Possibly the best epp f classic who imho.
Yeah, I actually own it on DVD and it is really good. Fred is the best companion.
Four is basically the personification of that quote tbh
Ironically Tom Baker himself is kind of a violent asshole
being an adult =/= being responsible
Oranges, man. Oranges are where it’s at.
I don’t know what it is, but oranges have got it.
How do you like them apples?
Screw that noise. Get the apples! And get some peanut butter!
And put the peanut butter on the apples!
don’t forget the chocolate chips!
My Jewish mom brainwashed me into thinking it should be apples and honey.
…. or apple pie.
…. or apples and cheese.
…. okay, so I wasn’t brainwashed.
Ok, apples and cheese is a new one. Now I have to try it.
…
Ok, that’s pretty good actually.
In which we find out Becky has a better nutritional awareness than Leslie. Of course I speak as someone who doesn’t like mac&cheese.
…
Please don’t smite me for this sin oh mighty god of the comment section Lord Willis. Craft just doesn’t mesh with my palate well.
Why would he smite someone who isn’t competition? That would be like him smiting someone for NOT trying to snag that one Transformer he’s trying to find on shelves.
…..
YES I KNOW THIS RETAIL MODEL IS TEN YEARS OUT OF DATE IT’S A JOKE ROLL WITH IT.
Comic Reactions:
I’m intrigued by Becky’s facial expressions this strip. She’s not doing her wacky Becky smile, but rather super subdued. But she doesn’t look as tense as when she was hoping for Hank’s support and continued acceptance. Someone noted that Becky seems more relaxed and that she might be seeing Leslie as someone safe to let down the guard a little around and I hope so.
Becky deserves to have a place she can relax and just recover.
Panel 1: But I think they are also both a little nervous, this dynamic is new and feels more heavy and important than it likely is. Becky is likely seeing it partially as her interview to the land of lesbian, hence the questions on how to be a lesbian, the offer to set up Leslie, the even-more queer fashion than usual, and her trying to avoid going full wacky Becky. And is definitely nervous of rejection as her family and community rejected her so cruelly when she got outed.*
*Which I feel intensely. It has been real slow work building back my ability to trust that people aren’t going to turn on me out of nowhere in brutal fashion and if I’m fully honest, I’m not fully there. So when someone does try and reach out, I regard it warily and with a distance because I don’t want to end up repeating that nightmare. I don’t know if Becky is going through the same thing, but I can definitely see how she could be.
And Leslie seems to be treating it as a statement on her ability to support her former self. A means of saving her own past… which I feel intensely as I do the same going out of my way to try and prevent kids feeling as lost and alone as I was when everything went wrong for me. Trying to make it so kids like I was don’t have to go through all their school feeling like a freak no one was like.
And it’s somewhat adorable that Leslie is so lost here on how to do the mom part of this. She knows abstractly that she should present an adult role model and get healthy food and so on, but she’s also fairly young all things considered and got robbed of a lot of her youth and is not really fully settled into the whole “typical adult” thing.
And that dynamic of contrast of wanting to be the perfect mentor but knowing she’s just a geek with a penchant for crappy food and cartoon marathons.
Step 2 will be realizing that that cartoon-loving geek can be a mentor in her own right. Hell, sometimes that can be a key component of communicating with “the youth” as it were.
And for Leslie I think the other half of it is that she views this as partially saving her past self, which I feel deeply. Sometimes the person you reach out the most to save is yourself.
Panels 2-3: Becky distracted on her phone and almost melancholy in this story. Like, it’s an important story, but if she is dropping her guard it means this is also a cutting story that hits hard. Like, having Joyce be mad at her for a week likely was like torture for her, especially at 17 when this might have been close to when she lost her mother.
And that’s not to say what Toedad likely did about it when or if he found out about it (which he likely would, these sorts of church communities tend to be vicious gossips and view the parent as needing to know of any “sin”).
Plus, I dunno, I can’t help but read a bitter tone into her Panel 3 statement. Like, yeah, I know I’m massively behind in both social and academic material, thanks past. Which again would be absolutely fair given what she’s been through. I’m still a little bitter at how anemic my HS biology and gender education was and how much I had to make up in early college.
And I love Leslie’s eyebrows. She sees it as an opportunity to bond over the shared experience and that softens her panic about being this surrogate mom a bit.
Something you said gave me an idea for a time travel story about someone who goes back in time and helps themself get through a time where they’re rejected by the world for being queer, and their assistance to themself puts them on their feet just enough that they end up getting the opportunity to go back in time in the first place. Original idea do not steal but if I ever get around to it I’ll be sure to give you a dedication. And maybe a cameo.
A good friend of mine essentially started writing a story like that, where basically their self went back to their past self and served as a fairy godmother to them to help them have more resources to cope and recognize their immense queerness and transness.
Okay, I’ll differentiate mine by adding wizards
I actually already have a fictional universe developing that could easily support this kind of story, and I even have a few different characters in that universe who could easily fit the role of their own time traveling queerly oddparent. Because I’m an overzealous worldbuilder.
Remind me to tell you sometime about Xael Rod.
First off, I love that sort of idea. Because it a) means that people don’t have to be afraid of who they are in such a story and b) it actually avoids the grandfather paradox. Or the whole, “If you went back in time to kill Hitler how would anyone know to go back in time to kill Hitler” paradox. Also c) if the interference causes a new timeline due to multiverse theory, then it’s actually a really selfless thing to do, because original you doesn’t get the benefit but alternate you does and can help others thanks to original you’s help and the ripple effect helps create a better alternate universe. So it’s such a cool idea to hear that I’ve never heard before. Sorry, kind and hyper from a combination of caffeine and comic goodness.
I’ve been fantasizing about that since I was, like, nine.
Pink has made a great song about this:conversations with my 13 year old self.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sDUuLWZRaq0
Thank you so much, I’d forgotten about that song. And oh does it hit a lot harder now than it did the last time I heard it…
Pablo360 don’t worry, even though time travel to help one’s former self is a common story line another person would have to be you to steal your version of it. (How that might work could be a story in itself!) That’s what will end up being wonderful about the story only you can write.
And then I’ll go back in time and give myself the idea to write it.
Secretly I am Cerberus
Shhh. Your younger self can’t be allowed to know yet.
Wait, what? *gets knocked out by time enforcers* Ugh, why does that keep happening when I scroll down the page.
Staring really hard at the vegetable aisle and feeling guilty counts towards 5 a day, right?
Panels 4-5: But if Becky is dropping her guard or opening her brain to these sorts of fears, then she might also be a little nervous about Leslie, especially when she’s acting oddly. Like, Becky jumps on the fact that Leslie has been holding the apple for awhile looking at it and I definitely feel that hyperawareness and looking for what could be a potential sign of a bad turn.
And it feels like that might be partially hinted at with her leans in on all of this apple stuff and her more downturned face as she does so. Like it might be over-reading into it, but it feels like its evocative of that worry and hyperawareness. Where even things like this feel heavy and big and serious.
And Leslie, wanting so much to be “the adult”, but realizing she is woefully underprepared for this sort of traditional mother-daughter role.
But I think both of them as they continue to feel each other out and relax into their spaces, will build something wholly non-traditional but super strong out of this. And I think Leslie will have gained a daughter out of this at the end of the day.
And I’m rooting my head off for them.
Is it a little wrong that I’m thinking of writing a fanfiction where Bonnie is still alive and Toedad is dead instead and Bonnie and Leslie are dating? So Becky’s fully out and really excited to potentially have lesbian stepmom, and it turns out that Bonnie was secretly gay and is much happier that both she and her daughter are out but does still have a history of depression? Or am I being a horrible person with this type of thing? Because the thing is, I just really love Becky and Leslie’s developing mother-daughter relationship, but I also want an alternate universe to exist where Becky can have both moms.
Personally, I’m just disappointed that you’re stopping at two moms.
I can’t write polyamory very well, and unless like Hank was secretly Becky’s biological father I would be very uncomfortable with the idea of Becky’s father remarrying. Wait a minute. Alternate timeline forming in head. Must find paper. Typing not good idea. Will forget where file is.
I kinda think Leslie is writing that kind of fanfiction in her head too.
… I mean Becky
I’d read it. 🙂
That sounds like the exact thing fanfiction is made for! 😀
is there a limit to the number of moms a person can have?
Around 150.
A monkeysphere entirely of moms?
mommysphere.
(yes, I know the original ref. and to add one of my own, I’ve been known to say to people, “You were raised by the wire monkey, weren’t you?”)
Stephen Universe is currently working on answering exactly this question.
Hmmm, let’s see.
Pearl = Helicopter mother.
Garnet = A mom who was in the closet and is therefore much more open and happier now that she’s told her son.
Lapis = A mom who was heavily abused.
Peridot = A new mom very much rapidly adjusting to this new place and new son.
And, imo, Amethyst is meant to be as close to a teen mom as possible for Steven without CN getting cranky.
I thought Amethyst was the helicopter mother
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/steven-universe/images/1/16/Message_Received_Helicopter_Amethyst.png/revision/latest
At first I was confused and then I laughed. A+ pun
*bows*
Thanks, I’m pretty proud about that one. 🙂
Approximately 3.75 billion people and counting.
…. they… might not all get along.
According to the angara: no. (I would just like to preface this by saying that I enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda even if it didn’t live up to the hype, had traces of “Humans are Special/Mighty Whitey” tropes, only introduced two new sapient species in a brand new galaxy while cutting out some of my favorites like quarians and drell, and was basically a rehash of Mass Effect 1 story wise without as many big choices.) You get to have as many mothers as there were female angara involved in raising you. You do however acknowledge your birth mother as your most important/closest mother. The same happens with fathers. You also have tons of siblings (15 is considered a small number of brothers and sisters) and because you have a huge number of parents who all have a huge number of siblings you have a ridiculous number of aunts and uncles and a ludicrous number of cousins. For angara, a family literally is a community in and of itself. They make it work by being completely honest and open with their emotions in communications. As said in the game:
Ryder: But don’t people get hurt if you’re honest all the time?
Jaal: Yes. And then we know about and address that hurt and move on. That’s the point.
I only asked because I want to be respectful towards Bonnie’s sexuality and we don’t have a canon answer on that topic (or at least I don’t think we have had any canon confirmation of Bonnie’s sexuality).
You had me at “Toedad is dead”.
Also “Mom 2: Mom Harder”. Because Marten Reed shouldn’t be the.only one who gets to make that joke.
That sounds great!
I think you are completely right about the hyperawareness. That makes me wonder how Becky has spent the last three days. Is this her FIRST morning with Leslie, or has this become part of their morning routine?
i feel like it’s her first morning, mostly b/c Becky expressed discomfort with Ruth’s discomfort in ignoring her just now and this hasn’t been talked about before and they haven’t established any ground rules yet
but i could be mistaken
The wake up scene earlier definitely read like “first morning”. Which also raises the question of “Where did she sleep the other nights?” Was it all dinosaur snuggles?
Damn the Gap! We need to know.
Becky blacked out from Hormone Overdose just after Joyce left the room. She has slept on Leslie’s couch for three days solid.
More interestingly, if Becky chickened out from the dinosaur snuggles (see what I did there?) and slept in Billie’s bed for those two nights before coming to Leslie’s….. how did Dina take that?
Leslie can’t be Becky’s mother but can be her big sister and friend and teacher.
citation needed
Alas, Becky had to do most of her growing up herself and is now….yes….an adult herself.
pretty sure adults can have moms
Now I want to make a reference to all those cases where a illegitimate daughter is passed off as the mother’s little sister. (I.e. pretending that the grandmother had a late in life child.)
“Now hold your tongue and say ‘I live on a pirate ship.'”
Arivanaparafip? I don’t get it. I can’t hear what it’s supposed to sound like.
Don’t bite into the fruit, Leslie. At least not this one.
If you eat the apple, you can never leave the supermarket.
Only one month per bite.
Tru
+1
Don’t worry, Leslie. A good chunk of adulthood is considering fruit and going with Mac-n-Cheese anyway.
Yes, Becky, she’s an adult. However, she thinks like she’s a low-income grad student. This doesn’t usually allow for healthy eating. Maybe having Becky around (and feeling responsible for her) might change her outlook a little towards caring for herself too!
Very much this. I personally went through this earlier in life than typical (ie late high school through my early twenties) due to helping care for a bedridden parent on a strictly limited diet while being the only one with a significant ability to cook besides her. Most, though by no means all, people seem to get to this point when they have kids.
I assume she is not a full professor, and I gather that means she is probably not paid very well these days. And now she has to feed two people on her food budget.
(Are teenage girls as voracious eaters as teenage boys? You never hear about the former, but that’s probably because of [listofsocietalsexistBS].)
Yes she’s an adult. and that’s what adults do ^^
Crap she’s been infected by Walkerton
Becky needs a different adult, a more health oriented one XD
Hey, it me.
Apples are overrated. Get some plums or peaches instead. Bananas are good as well and they provide potassium.
There’s a whole world of fruits out there!
Plums are bullshit.
Or they soon will be, in any case.
What, are they going extinct or something? Good riddance, I say. I’ve never met a plum I liked.
not sure if serious or
sir how dare you
Hypocrisy, thy name is maturity.
I seem to recall Willis as being on the record that most of his food consumption is or was macaroni and cheese, and thus I assume the “staring at an apple, imagining eating it, and instead always buying mac and cheese” bit is a real-life author reflection.
I believe one day you’ll eat a fruit, Willis!
“Vegetables? That’s what food eats.”
“you brought the food my food eats”
This is me, usually, but sometimes I get a MIGHTY CRAVING for a salad.
(With dressing, of course, I’m not gonna just sit down and eat greens, duh.)
Cobb, caesar, or chicken are best.
Gotta be romaine base, though. I don’t like cabbage and iceberg is just water in natural cellulose bubblewrap; there’s no there there.
sometimes i eat a bunch of vegetables and then i’m like “oh my god, my body has been craving this for how long??” and i consider going vegetarian for like five seconds but instead vow to add more vegetables into my diet. and then fail to do so
The IGA nearby has pre-made salads with romaine and iceberg lettuce, a little bit of shredded cheese, some cherry tomatoes, a hard-boiled egg (halved or sliced), and that’s where the variety starts. They have those with chopped up chicken strips, slivers of chicken, broccoli and cauliflower, cubed ham, crumbled bacon, and another one with peas and an overly-sweet dressing I couldn’t stomach. So, there’s plenty of variety, and if they weren’t like $4 each, I’d eat them for every single meal. Okay, not every meal, since I’d eventually get salad fatigue and turn to the equally-tasty $1 boxed sandwiches (hamburger, chicken, spicy chicken, sausage & cheese, or BBQ riblet). I promise you, those sandwiches are much better than you’d expect from something that’s been put into a plastic bag, then a cardboard box, then sold for a buck.
Hungry for apples?
(yeah, i know it’s just a ripoff of “got milk?”)
My man!
Get the apple, add brown suger and butter where the core was, then chuck in the microwave.
I’m sure its still healthy.
Nyeh? Great, now I can’t stop reading Leslie’s dialogue in Joey’s voice from Yugioh The Abridged Series.
Papyrus for me.
¿Porque no los dos? 😛
That last panel is so relateable, it hurts!
those are… apples… you can buy apples… why aren’t you buying apples… I will never understand Americans
like okay I get it a lot of fruits can be expensive but apples?…
I think maybe she doesn’t like apples? But idk
She can buy apples. She knows she should buy some, and eat them.
But she knows from experience that, given her usual habits, she won’t. Instead, she’ll just consume more junk food.
Most of what passes for maturity is really just fatigue.
You have just explained my life. But the workday is almost over so I’m going to go home and watch cartoons.
“It’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.” – Heinlein.
That’s gotta be really bad for her health, just relying on one food source. Like, besides the fact that it’s junk food, where is she getting protein?
Dairy actually has protein in it.
Not defending a mac and cheese only diet, but THAT’s not the problem.
Outside the sodium content, she’s not doing too poorly presuming her Walkyverse height and weight on Walkypedia are accurate and close to right for her DoA version.
One box of Kraft (prepared by on box instructions) is 20% of her fat intake covered, 50% of her carb intake and 60% of her protein intake covered per day. If we assume she’s doing something like a tuna salad sandwich for lunch each day and cereal with whole milk and buttered toast for breakfast she’s fine on macro nutrients (ok, maybe a bit high on protein and low on fat). The bigger issue is such a diet is deficient on many vitamins and minerals and almost dangerously high on sodium.
Sugar – that Kraft Dinner sneaks in a lot of sugar – as much sugar(s) by weight as there is protein
Btw, what’s the point of a tie that blends into the underlying shirt?
Same as a tie that doesn’t blend in, portable napkin.
Maybe it’s actually a snake who is using Becky as transport?
It’s a chameleon tie.
Subtle yet distinct. Very stylish.
Texture.
C’mon, you lot, I try to cheer for you, but you gotta give me something! You vote AGAINST a livable wage?
If the choice is half-livable wage or no wage, half is better.
You asked for something, not something good. 😛
But those weren’t the choices. And even if they were, I dispute your statement – half a livable wage lets you live just as much as a no wage (i.e., not), and it eats up your time that you could be using to try and secure a livable wage.
Look, it’s very simple. Buy a bell pepper (red, orange, or yellow), chop it up, and add it to the mac and cheese.
OR you buy the bell pepper chop of the top, boil it for 10 ish minutes and fill it with boiled/fried rice and cheese. (Maybe a little meat and mushrooms to)
Okay, you didn’t say to scoop out the seeds. You’re mean. 🙂
But the point was to compromise by still having mac and cheese, but also sneak in a veggie somehow.
…..
…. okay, now I’m imagining a stuffed pepper with mac and cheese filling. And maybe breading on top.
if you want to ruin mac and cheese, sure
how is it possible to ruin Kraft Dinner ??
Add bell pepper(s). He just told you.
Kraft mac and cheese is in a state where further ruination is barely possible. Its label might as well read – “Now, with Twice the Botulism!!”
Hey, plenty of people pay quite a bit of money for botulism.
“If I had a million dollars
We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner
But we would eat Kraft Dinner
Of course we would, we’d just eat more
And buy really expensive ketchups with it
That’s right, all the fanciest Dijon ketchups”
Barenaked Ladies – If I Had A Million Dollars
And just what’s wrong with pepperjack?
I’d be more inclined to go with onion, carrots, and celery. They’re significantly cheaper and the texture fits better. If I’ve got splurging money, broccoli and radishes are also going in.
Nerdette here: why does everyone in the Walkyverse actually like that disgusting, gluey crap? Walky, Joyce, Leslie… can anyone eat raman, or frozen dinners, or hamburger helper, or other gross, cheap food that takes no effort and tastes more like the cardboard they’re packed in than like boogers?
Oh c’mon, Leslie, apples are like Level 1 adulting fruit. Cheap, healthy, very easy to store, available pretty much all year round, very long-lasting (esp. if you keep them in the fridge).
plus, sweet and delicious
you can even eat the dishes~
bread bowls are great aren’t they
Would I be wrong in thinking that Beckys upbringing (traditional, mom at home, fundie) would mean that she probably had a pretty decent diet growing up?
Depends! I’m guessing ToeDad probably refused to cook since he was a man, even after Becky’s mom passed, so maybe they went from good home cooked meals to… not so good. Plus she was best friends with Joyce who is notoriously picky.
Yeah thats true, I can’t help but feel Joyces pickiness is based around trying to assert some form of control so yeah since Becky probably did eat at the Browns a fair bit though she probably followed suit
I still don’t get the whole american mac and cheese thing though, it looks really runny and bland to me and not very appetizing
Americans don’t ‘get’ the made-from-a-box mac and cheese either, once they gain a glimmer of how to cook.
One nice USA diner food is a homemade fish cake set atop a bowl of mac and cheese (equally homemade) spread with a chopped-tomatoes-and-veggies sauce.
boxed mac and cheese is just really easy to make and really cost-effective
Try the recipe from a box of Mueller’s elbow macaroni – worlds beyond the Kraft Dinner
http://muellerspasta.com/recipe/old-fashioned-baked-macaroni-and-cheese/
the recipe is here
ok but how much does 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese cost
Often somewhere around a dollar – the Kraft Dinner is generally more expensive, it just takes less culinary infrastructure.
More than 2 cups of cheddar cheese you shred yourself. 🙂
Doesn’t taste as good either. Preshedded usually has additives and even without that has more surface area exposed to air so loses more tasty volatile compounds.
:oooo
yeah homemaking stuff can be less expensive but more timeconsuming which can be more expensive
That recipe has changed a wee bit, but not as to the essentials. You’re making a basic white sauce (bechamel) with the flour and butter and milk (it can even be skim milk) and then grating in your sharp cheddar cheese to complete the sauce. The dry mustard is key to making this grownup food. The original recipe used white pepper instead black pepper (like you should for any white sauce) and used simple bread crumbs for a topping, said crumbs having been mixed with some melted butter, so that they get crispy-brown in the oven.
If you’re going to be all fancy and french and stuff, it’s a Mornay sauce (bechamel & cheese).
“Pasta ala Mornay” sounds a lot more adult than “mac and cheese”, doesn’t it?
{I just wanted to see what spellcheck would make of ‘bechamel’}
However seeing how she was a home-raised Fundie girl she probably learnt to cook herself from her mother… or learnt later from Mrs. Brown or on her own. Since she was “supposed to be” a good Fundie girl.
In a way Becky might be more experienced at housework than Leslie.
If I remember correctly, Bonnie’s death was fairly recent, a year or two ago at the most. When they visit Becky’s house, one of the flashbacks shows them together, and Becky looked pretty close to her current age
it depends???
like. my fundamentalist mom was all about the fruits and vegetables and eating healthy. but like she a) is from California and b) wanted to be a nurse. so she kind of had a leg up, as it were. and she still really struggled with making it all taste good. my fundamentalist grandma, who grew up in foster care, is more about just making meals. she also tends to find spices “weird”. (i bought her thyme. god help me, she thought this was weird.)
a lot of my experience with midwestern cuisine has been heavy on the starches, carbs and fats. baked ziti, casseroles, boiled green beans, funeral potatoes, bacon. it would really depend on the background of Becky’s parents more than anything else, I think. Becky’s mom was heavily depressed, so she might not have had energy to do anything more than basic meals – she might even not have had energy to cook at all, leaving Becky or her dad to do it.
and then it really depends on her dad – would her dad have learned to cook at all? would he have seen cooking as demeaning of his role in the household, or would he have seen it as the price of taking care of his wife and daughter? would he have made Becky do the cooking? these questions have answers and my inquiring mind avidly hungers after answers to them.
I could easily see Becky getting out the church cookbook and trying to teach herself how to cook so that there’d be a meal ready before her dad came home, though.
Now I am imagining any number of nasty scenarios with Ross expecting Becky to take over all the housework and cooking in addition to her home schooling work. While both of them are trying to deal with grief.
(With their background, would they have gotten the freezer full of casseroles thing after the funeral?)
yup yup yup that is my headcanon
Becky is remarkably resilient and capable for someone who just survived getting kicked out of her college for her sexual orientation and who had their dad kidnap and threaten them with a shotgun. I Theorize that the reason she’s like this is because her dad had her take on a lot of the tasks of an adult woman around their house, especially after her mom died but possibly also before. This would give her the sense of competence that we see from her, as well as the self-possession that marks her personality! i.e. she knows she can survive because she’s survived worse before, and she has a confidence born out of that.
(I think so!!! This would be a good community for that sort of thing.)
Ok so I’m trying to be careful here but if this is the case then that’s at least something good to come out of this for her
Like being able to cook, clean and basically run a household is a skill sadly lacking in a lot of people so once she sorts herself out with proper accommodation she’ll be better placed then most people her age to keep herself healthy, hell she’ll probably be able to sort Leslie out
Like eating healthy is not a hard skill to master but its so important (how does Leslie not have rickets yet?)
that is one of the unfortunate things about abuse. every abuser is a person, and therefore a mess of complicated good and bad things. in an abuser’s case, more bad than good, but that doesn’t mean the good things don’t exist. but like: just because you adapted in a resilient way to your abuse does not mean a) that you took no damage or b) that it was appropriate for the abuse to be done or c) that your life wouldn’t be better if you hadn’t ever had abuse in your life at all
like. Running a household is a tremendous responsibility to put on the shoulders of a teenager. That’s time she didn’t get to spend on studying for school, or hanging out with her friends, or doing dumb teenage stuff. That’s time she had to be an adult before she was really ready for it, and that is irrevocably damaging.
Being able to do it is not the same thing as doing it competently, and in some cases it could damage to do the thing at all. like – my dad was a fan of the “if you push your kid harder they’ll be capable of more things!” approach. as a result I can start a fire, carry firewood, clean a ridiculous amount of dishes in a short time, cook mostly competently, and do a lot of basic household maintenance. But does this mean I want to do most of these things??
The answer is pretty much an absolute no, because the associations I’ve built up with doing them are mostly negative. If I don’t do the dishes, my dad’s going to take twenty bucks out of my bank account and give them to my brother for doing them. If my brother doesn’t do the trash, he’s going to get yelled at for not doing the trash – but he’s going to get yelled at for not doing the trash anyways, because our family built up trash faster than he could reasonably keep up with. My sister drags her feet on basic hygiene habits like keeping her room clean because leaving it a mess is the one thing she reliably has control of in her life.
And for Becky those things could be really fraught with panic – like, my first year away from my parents I was basically in constant panic mode about being able to take care of myself, to the point that my panic was getting in the way of my ability to take care of myself. the emotional damage is just as big a problem as the physical and mental damage.
idk just because you’re able to retrieve good things out of the wreckage that has been your life doesn’t mean that, like, the wreckage wasn’t awful to begin with. and it’s not something you have to be grateful for. like, teaching her basic life skills was the least Becky’s parents could do for her. it was their responsibility as her parents. and pretty much the only reason why they would have taught her that was so that she could be a good wife and mother to a man they approved of.
teaching her that fear was normal?? teaching her that she had to destroy herself in order to preserve her Christianity? teaching her that her only worth was her relation to a man, however soul-crushing? neglecting to teach her how to communicate her basic needs and desires? nothing makes up for that.
idk check out Anne with an E on netflix – the pilot has a really good example of this type of thing and how damaging it can be
sure I wasn’t trying to suggest Becky should be grateful but more like it was a bad situation but shes learnt something that will make her future better, hopefully
it’s not you specifically it’s just….something i’ve gotten a lot, From Others, who are trying to make the best of my situation without engaging with it at all
but yeah, speaks more to becky’s abilities than anything else
“My sister drags her feet on basic hygiene habits like keeping her room clean because leaving it a mess is the one thing she reliably has control of in her life. ”
huh. I wonder if that has something to do with the way I sometimes *desperately* don’t want to do basic self-care and/or chores… hmmmm….
Not necessarily. Probably ‘mom at home cooking’ type deal, yes, but moms aren’t necessarily going to make better food than most people will make for themselves.
Well that’s true, my mom was a great mom, the type of mom everyone should have but its fair to say that cooking wasn’t one of her strengths.
She was born in ’41 so her view on cooking vegetables was that you boil them until all the crunch and flavour has left them…and them boil them some more just to make sure
I’m not a very confident cook but the meals are at least healthy and reasonably tasty but then I’m not cooking for five people
Mind you her fry ups and roasts were a joy to behold 🙂
Yeah, and if Bonnie was depressed (and imo, it’s implied she was) she may have gone with food that was simpler to make or that she enjoyed making (or that Becky enjoyed) rather than what would equal a balanced diet. So, breakfast could end up being waffles or cereal or something easy like that, lunch is something like sandwiches and then dinner ends up being pancakes (or, I dunno, soup or something or whatever people who don’t eat pancakes for dinner eat). That is not a healthy day, but they’re easy things to make and they’re quick.
Wait, whose phone is that?
It’s a knife.
Galasso pays well.
It’s the only thing that keeps his peons in line. Er, at least the peons who don’t cow easily. For those peons, fear is sufficient motivation.
is that still robin’s…? I feel like with the huge deal the comic’s made about Becky not having a phone, they’d have made a big deal of her getting one, even if it was during the timeskip
Nah, Robin’s phone was orange. Becky must have bought her own before taking Leslie up on her offer
Could it be Leslie’s?
The best part of being an adult?
Getting to decide what ‘adult’ means.
Best part of being an adult is eating chocolate cereal for dinner whenever the hell I want to!
…says the guy who hasn’t eaten chocolate cereal in years.
As much as I’m enjoying this little storyline, especially with Becky and Leslie (Becky looks neat in a tie) Willis is really starting to frak me off
I know right, its like “whats happening to Joe and Danny” or “whats happening to Joyce and Jacob”
C’mon we need to know!
When I was a kid, the prank was to hold your tongue and say, “I was born on a pirate ship.”