Peter Everwine, “Rain”

The Grim Reaper, sculpture by sculptor August Schmiemann at Melaten Cemetery in Cologne, Germany

graveyard snowmen, whoever has the talent and creativity to make this, you are my hero 

Mulled Wine Recipe

All right, folks, ‘tis the season: winter.

And you need a hot beverage, and you need alcohol, and you stupidly think, I heard of mulled wine once, and search for a recipe, and find only pages of strange ingredients and paragraphs of far too much information on people’s lives. Every year I lose my recipe, and every year I regret it, poring fruitlessly and sadly sober over ingredients like star anise, cranberries, and demerara sugar.

So, to save you my grief, here is my very basic recipe, which my family–who does not drink the other 11 months of the year–finds so irresistible that they get tipsy and wonder why. (This is the recipe for one bottle, but I always make at least two.)

1 bottle red wine (cheap red wine, red blend or merlot, etc.)

½ cup - ¾ cup white sugar (you can add to taste)

¾ cup orange juice (you might want at least 1 actual orange, here’s why:)

10 whole cloves

(life is much easier if you peel the orange so that you get just the outer layer with as little rind as possible, then stab these little guys through, so you don’t have to go fishing them out later on, but feel free to fish away)

2 cinnamon sticks

Mix it all together and simmer it on low heat (don’t boil it, the alcohol boils off) until the sugar blends in. I tend to do it for 30 minutes or so, or just leave it on low and turn down to keep warm in a slow cooker.

¼ cup orange liqueur or brandy – I add this last, to make it as alcoholic as possible, but you can add it earlier. I also add both, and tend to steal the family’s brandy, but you can do this to taste.

Voila! Go, wrap your hands around a warm mug of mulled wine, reheat as desired, and spend the winter pleasantly tipsy.

Monet's Pond, Gifu, Japan

_ka0ri

“Which spices go with which foods” lists are of limited value to me because, like, I have functioning taste buds. What I really need is a “spices that need to be added at the start of the cooking time in order to properly develop versus spices that need to be added in the last five minutes because extended heating fucks up the flavour profile” list – that shit is not intuitive.

*sigh* Reminding all of you once again...

AI art is stolen art.

If you're pro-AI art, you're harming human artists. Full stop.

At this point, I don't care if it's "real art" or not because that's not even what the real issue is, it's that it's already hard enough to succeed as an artist without having our work stolen, thrown into a digital blender, and spat back out in our faces, so we can be replaced because the value of our creativity and skill has been reduced to "content" and dollar signs. Do we mean nothing to you? Is your convenience worth telling us we don't matter?

These programs and everyone who uses them no matter how many times we've told you this can get fucked. I'm done being nice about it.

Sincerely, your salty neighborhood artist.

That post about 30 year old coming of age stories?

I’ve been thinking about it all morning. What would the plot points be for that? What makes a 30 year old coming of age story?

Old folks sound off in the comments

Art Nouveau architecture of a house built in the 1880s in Brussels, Belgium

We followed a strange road today, where the surrounding landscape seemed to be getting more desolate and desaturated with every step we took. It may have had something to do with the sky getting progressively cloudier, but the way the colours seemed to be fading more and more the farther along we walked really gave rise to the thought “What’s wrong with this road?”