This post is your reminder that you are not obligated to blog about current events.
Things are bad. Really bad. Do not let people guilt trip you into tormenting yourself even further over the fact that things are bad. Doomscrolling is not activism.
If you’re just on tumblr to blorbopost or reblog pretty pictures, you are not harming people by inaction.
You are not a bad person for not dedicating every aspect of your life and leisure space to whatever disgusting mask-off attack on human life and dignity some government has decided to enact.
Take action where you can, but don’t confuse doomscrolling and digital self harm for action.
If you need to lose yourself in blorboposting, go for it.
If you need to log off for the day, whether it’s to take irl action or to protect what little sanity any of us have left over the past 7 years, then by all means, do.
Morale is important. Hope is important. Small joys keep us from burning out completely in times like this. Do not let any “if you don’t reblog this I’m judging you” guilt trip convince you otherwise.
Once upon a time I worked in this little burger/coffee/ice cream shop and a lady came in one winter and asked if we had a caramel apple drink and we were like ‘well we have cider’ and she was like ‘no I don’t remember what it’s called but this place made a drink that was chai tea, apple cider, and caramel’ and Breezy offered to try and make something for her but she changed her mind and left so Breezy and I were like ‘alright let’s try this’ because we had chai tea, instant cider mix, a shit ton of caramel, instant hot water from the espresso and too much free time.
And let me tell you it was delightful. It tastes like watching the leaves changing color and dancing in the wind. It tastes like picking out pumpkins and gourds and fresh apples at the farm up north. It tastes like witches and freedom.
I make it every year now and this year I walked in the house on the morning of October first with all the ingredients and shouted ‘FALL DRINK’ and my roommates were like ‘????’ so I made them Fall Drink and now every time they get home from work they’re like ‘Fall Drink pls?????’
Anyway I remember literally nothing else about that woman but I’m very grateful to her.
for anyone wondering about proportions/etc here’s op’s answer from the repiles:
@gaslightgallows I feel this would be relevant to your interests.
I don’t like caramel but I can vouch for hot chaider being amazing.
Deareat @simonalkenmayer I feel like this is relevant to your interests.
Also, I do something like this in the crock pot with the overly sweet Growers Pumpkin Apple Cider, chai spices, cloves, a bit of orange juice, and some super dry Pinot Grigio.
Mix, heat, and serve on a nippy night best spent cuddled under blankets with a book.
My friend, you have essentially backward engineered a wonderful winter drink from the Stuart period.
White sack wine, cider, spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger) tea, sugar, and if you want it authentic, a bit of cream or whipped egg. All this is brought together in a low temperature and then stewed for a time. It can also be “pulled”, a process in which one “stirs” the concoction by using a ladle and pouring it repeatedly from high in the air. Makes it foamy and frothy.
Serve warm.
On a cold night, this is a delightful thing. Believe it or not, we also used to make it with a stout beer instead of wine. For a darker richer flavor.
One Black Tea Bag, One Cup Apple Juice, 2tsp butter, 2tsp brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to taste will also accomplish something similar (just melt the butter and brown sugar together and whisk them around a pan a bit - don’t bother making proper caramel) Make your faux-caramel then you add the apple juice and then the rest; heat it up to a boil then turn off the heat, drop the tea bag in and let it steep for 3 minutes, serve with gingersnaps.
Nothing better than tumblr recipe posts
Started making something similar last year, old cider (Irish, alcoholic), chai tea bags and a mulled cider flavour sachet (sugar, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg mainly). You don’t need caramel because it’s already pretty sweet and lightly boozy! Great with popcorn, banshee bones or Halloween picnmix
There was a place that (before the pandemic and a change of ownership for the worse) served hot cider - either alcoholic or not, customer choice - with a dab of butterscotch butter melted in it. The first sip was pure cider, then you got the butterscotch hit as an aftertaste.
And for people having a low spoon day, pour cider in a mug, drop a cinnamon stick in there, dust the top with pumpkin spice (optional) and microwave for a couple minutes.
Pumpkin spice at its most basic - 2 parts cinnamon, 1 part clove, 1 part nutmeg, 1 part ginger - is pretty much a premix of all the mulling spices already mentioned. If you don’t want powder floating in your drink, buy some of those fill-it-yourself tea bags.
“Marge everything is corrupted by capital. Have you ever sat down and read this thing? Technically the way we close a car door is fascist.”
I think people maybe don’t understand that this isn’t an exaggeration – it is literally something Adorno says in this book.
“RETVRN TO TRADITION. Things were so much better in the olden days. I am very antifascist.”
I know people are going to make fun, and this deserves it, but when you carry your groceries home walking on the shoulder of a road with a 40 mph speed limit, occasionally cutting into a muddy ditch because that part of the road has no shoulder, that stuff about the car causing people to subordinate themselves to the logic of machines in ways which encourage sudden, violent action and discourage slowness or contemplation…
I dunno, after the third time someone almost hits you in a parking lot because they were looking for other cars instead of literally directly in front of where they were going, well, you might think there’s maybe something to all this.
Also I was talking to a friend who had lived without a car for years and was now getting back into driving more often, and he said something like,
“The hardest thing is re-learning to make split decisions again, like when you’re driving you can’t just stop and think, it’s much better and safer to just make the wrong decision quickly then it is to slow down and not be able to decide, and it’s taking a while to relearn that mindset”
So like…
PS - Fascism uses the idea of the past for propaganda purposes but is a generally modern doctrine and in practice is often incredibly frustrated by and violently hostile to the messiness of the past.
I mean, I genuinely don’t know, are there a lot of right-wing fascists in Italy who think the unification was a mistake and want to return to the time before Italian nationalism?
One of the earliest and most intellectually interesting Fascists, the futurist leader Marinetti, lionized the automobile as a way of inculcating fascism on basically exactly the same grounds Adorno is doing here, the only real difference is that Marinetti thought that fascism was a good thing.
Doctrines which long for a return to the past can be non- or even anti-fascist, precisely because Fascism is so modern, but by the same token Fascism sells a lot better so not many people actually commit to those alternative ways of lionizing the past.
Just today, as I was walking home, I saw an older man in the middle of the street who had gotten stranded trying to maneuver a handcart and way too many bags. He had jaywalked into the middle of the street and couldn’t gather up all of his possesions in such a way that he could move when the light turned green.
I had to restrain myself from rushing out into the street to help him on the grounds that I might well get run over by one of the oncoming cars; there are two shrines to people who were run over crossing the street within walking distance of where we were.
Traffic simply maneuvered around him; drivers were probably feeling that if they stopped for him, they’d get rear-ended so people in the lane he was standing in just swerved into the other lane a little bit.
Once there was a break in traffic I ran over and helped him get his stuff to the sidewalk.
How else to describe this process but as one of pure functionality, which does not tolerate freedom of conduct? The car will move down the street; to interrupt that motion is to put your life at risk, so the people surrounding this old man find themselves at least unwilling, and quite likely actually unable to stop and help him reach a safer island.
Basically I have never had a more Hannibal.jpg reaction to anything on Tumblr than I have to that page of Adorno.
GO OFF BITCH
It’s very possible a guy whose lifetime included the mass machine-gun deaths of thr World War I trenches and who left Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, only to see the industrialized mass slaughter of Jews and queers and so forth take place, possible that guy may have a different perspective of the role of mechanization and machines in the lives of humans is all.
Roomba kept crying because she couldn’t find her spring toy and uh. Well, she had a good reason for it.
spring
She’s blind, she makes a lot of different sounds, and her poor social skills mean she tries to groom any other cat she bumps into. She doesn’t bump into furniture or walls anymore but she used to. Whenever she bumped into something, she’d just turn around and keep going.
I used to watch this in playgroups, too, and what I really hated was the way that it’s not just families, it’s everything. The preschool line was one of the worst.
You’d have a kid coming for months to the community centre playgroup and he was just a sweet kid - sometimes he got angry, just like all the rest of the kids, sometimes he wanted to be a dinosaur or a scary lion, just like the rest of the kids, but he also loved the baby dolls and played house and wanted a pretty hat just like the rest of the kids. Some of them would even really explicitly like Dora the Explorer or they’d love Doc McStuffins or whatever, wouldn’t care. Would also love Bob the Builder, my point is that this shit’s gender appropriateness wasn’t even on their radar, and their parents were clearly fine with that, including the somewhat bro-y dads.
Then they’d start attending actual pre-school. And suddenly whether or not things were for Boys or Girls was Important. Suddenly Dora wasn’t acceptable; she was for Girls. Suddenly, Boys don’t play with baby-dolls. A lot of it is peer pressure - not kidding, in all innocence peer pressure, at four years old, because some of the OTHER kids HAVE been taught the world has Boy Things and Girl Things and it’s absolutely bad for Boys to like Girl Things.
One mom I talked to noted that on the one hand her kid loved pre-school and also she needed the care hours, and (as a valid concern) she did want her kid to know how to socialize with the rest of the world, but she was also pretty pissed that he’d spontaneously given up what used to be his favourite things because they weren’t “for boys” and was sad about it, and also four, so she couldn’t actually explain to him why he didn’t need to. (She’d tried.)
These were just people who hung out in the same nice liberal neighbourhood I nannied in and attended that playgroup at the community centre; I don’t know how things turned out for them, as we lost touch.
But this shit is toxic and it starts so early, and we have got to figure out how to stop it. We have got to figure out how to just let boys be fucking children, let them enjoy the things they enjoy without making them constantly check themselves to make sure it meets with Masculinity Approval. Do not do this to your kids. Dads, especially, do not do this to your kids but Moms too*.
And as a de jure woman stg when I see other women reinforcing this shit and I possibly can I will fight you. Do not fucking do this. Do not push your boy at “boy” stuff and demand they avoid girl stuff. Do not tease them for being scared, or bug them about doing “girly” things, or whatever. Do not. I will fight you. Don’t do it to them, and don’t do it to their dads/your male partners either. Your sons are listening. Don’t help this toxic bullshit.
[*if you are a parent who does not fall under dad or mom and you’re still enforcing gender roles I don’t know what to do with you but I will probably challenge you to a duel in a public place should we ever meet.]
