Normal People: We’ve Had A Child!! ❤️💙💙💖💖💖

Q:  What is it about this particular generation’s diversity and point of view that’s different from previous generations of space opera? Martha Wells: Older science fiction, especially way back towards the 50s and 60s, anticipated these big technological changes in these far future empires and these faster-than-light ships, but they didn’t think about changes in society. And you see these older works where everybody’s in a little nuclear family and the gender roles are so stratified and stilted and everybody’s smoking. There’s just no anticipation of changes in society, not even little things like that.

And I think we’re kind of in a generation where people are imagining changes in society, how society will be different, what it might look like, and how relationships would be different and how relationships would be changed by technology and the ability to upload your consciousness or relating to a machine intelligence and all these other different things … That’s one reason why I think space opera’s gotten a lot more exciting.

- Author Event: Martha Wells In Conversation with John Scalzi, on YouTube

NO ONE knows how to use thou/thee/thy/thine and i need to see that change if ur going to keep making “talking like a medieval peasant” jokes. /lh

They play the same roles as I/me/my/mine. In modern english, we use “you” for both the subject and the direct object/object of preposition/etc, so it’s difficult to compare “thou” to “you”.

So the trick is this: if you are trying to turn something Olde, first turn every “you” into first-person and then replace it like so:

“I” →  “thou”

“Me” →  “thee”

“My” →  “thy”

“Mine” →  “thine”

Let’s suppose we had the sentences “You have a cow. He gave it to you. It is your cow. The cow is yours”.

We could first imagine it in the first person-

“I have a cow. He gave it to me. It is my cow. The cow is mine”.

And then replace it-

“Thou hast a cow. He gave it to thee. It is thy cow. The cow is thine.”

hi. i made some images.

feel free to take them and use for whatever you may need them for. no credit required

People who use the word “literally“ for something that can’t be literal is the reason I want man kind to be extinct.

i am about to bestow upon you the secret butter technique. i am sorry, but it is french. i am sorry again, this only works with cow butter. i am certain plant based butters wouldn’t work, and alternative animal butters may or may not work

has this ever been you: you have a nicely steamed vegetable, or maybe you want to make the best butter noodles, but you know that if you put butter on those it’ll just melt and you end with kind of greasy noodles or vegetables? don’t you wish it was instead a luscious buttery glaze?

introducing: beurre monté

you will take a small sauce pan, and begin heating it with 1-2 tablespoons of water (use very little water) and bring it to a hard simmer or boil

turn the heat down slightly, and add Butter. how much? however much you dare. (start with 3-4 tablespoons and go from there)

you are going to either whisk Aggressively or you can pick up the saucepan, still holding it over the heat, and swirl aggressively so the butter is skating around the sides of the pan

done correctly, you will have liquid butter that is still emulsified. you have made Butter Sauce. season it with a little salt, and toss whatever you want in it.

if you’re butter splits, i’m sorry. you didn’t agitate it enough to maintain the emulsion, and now you have melted butter.

you can use this knowledge to make other sauces by swapping out the water for another liquid. white wine becomes beurre blanc. red wine is beurre rogue.

you want to CUM? sweat minced shallot in a tiny bit of butter, add white wine and cook it out until it’s reduced by about half. then whisk butter in hard. a few flecks of minced thyme or fennel frond stirred thru, and you eat that with a nice seared fish? or scallop? or even shrimp? wow. you will Nut

your boxed mac and cheese game can also be elevated by cooking your pasta and making a beurre monté first, tossing your pasta in that and adding the cheese packet. wow. hey; you’ll cum

go forth now with this butter secret

life really is just like. you meet people you love them and then you lose them and you never see them again. and it's inevitable and it happens to everyone and there's nothing you can do about it

While I'm also fond of a lot of what G.K. Chesterton wrote, I'm a little surprised and disappointed by the fact that in your many mentions of and tributes to him you have not drawn attention to his frequently reactionary and frankly antisemitic views, nor the influence he had on his nephew A.K. Chesterton - who would grow up to be a member of the BUF and later co-found the National Front. I know many members of your family were murdered in the holocaust, and while I don't think his writing should be dismissed entirely by any means, I do find it odd that you've been such a champion of his without any caveat. Perhaps you expect readers to work out his views themselves, which is an understandable though optimistic view of people. I write this not as admonishment but out of genuine curiosity.

Also, when's the leather jacket coming back?

And I, for my part, am not actually surprised and disappointed that in your obviously extensive readings of what I've said and written about Chesterton you've somehow missed the bits where I talked and wrote about both his antisemitism and his racism, because the world is big and nobody can be expected to read everything or even Google to keep up. But I've talked and written about it -- for example, here on Tumblr in this very blog. Chesterton was a big person and he contained multitudes: that doesn't mean that he gets a Free Pass for the small-minded and disappointing and sometimes creepy bits of the writing, but it means that I'm more interested in the bits where he was better than that.

The leather jacket will come back when my hair is either white or mostly gone and when I look like an old guy who doesn't care what people think and is wearing his leather jacket because he loves it, and not like a gentleman in late middle age wearing a leather jacket because he misguidedly thinks it might make him look younger.

Neil Gaiman

The Inexplicably Enduring Appeal of Hilaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales”

Hi there! I have noticed something watching the lockdown video: under the pile of Chesterton's books we can see a Belloc's one as well. I kn

“Got the morbs”