Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will not be served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.
From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.
the portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.
volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.
so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.
of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.
it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.
I hate in the MCU or anything when the aliens or whatever are attacking and everyone’s just ‘oh yeah we be chilling just cowering over here’ as if seventy percent of humanity isn’t really angry all the time like catch these hands motherfucker I’ve bitten people for trying to steal my chips you think you can just steal my whole fucking planet YEET HERE COME MY TEETH film people be using responses to natural disasters but I promise if human sized things came to throw down humanity would be ready to fuck them up like yeah you got laser guns I got this dope ass stick I just found let’s go you ugly fuck
silentwalrus1: #yeah bicht!!!!!!#gimme the battle of new york with fuckin chitauri comin down and the shift manager of the times sq H&M has finally had Enough#Tracie bout to kill this alien with a traffic cone#’ JUST PRETEND THEY’RE TOURISTS’ she screams choking out goddamn Lizard Lite with her lanyard#10 feet away a park slope mom is beating an alien to death with her four year old’s knockoff eco friendly razr scooter#every single retail employee gets ten years’ worth of therapy in one day#captain america’s kill count: 83 aliens#kathleen from accounting: 94 and also her boss
Humans are biolent, angry little creatures who live under a constant state of stress and have very little sense of self preservation. #whatsmykillcount would be trending in Twitter while people posted videos on every available platform. Like honestly Earth is not the one.
You never know you’re from a Death World until somebody tries to conquer it.
Want to have one really nice set of plates and silverware for company and Thanksgiving.
Want to be able to buy a new outfit and a good bra at least a couple times a year.
Want to be able to give “just because” gifts.
Want to burn incense and candles in my home daily, and have nice soaps.
Want to be able to donate to charity frequently and without worry.
Want to buy hardcover books to read and put on a shelf for my kids to read someday.
Want to have candies in bowls for people who visit.
Want to be able to take my young siblings and cousins to a movie and let them get the big popcorn they won’t finish, because there’s magic in just having it.
Want to have a linen closet or at least a linen shelf.
Want to go see live local theater several times a year.
Want to have a bottle of wine or champagne in the house for when I suddenly need to celebrate.
Want to have a kitchen with basic baking supplies so I can bake bread on the weekend, and pies for special occasions.
I just want to be comfy.
for americans, ‘not rich but comfy’ costs about $150k a year in flyover country, twice that on the coasts, and ten times that in new york, san franciso, and los angeles. in case anyone was looking for ballpark numbers.
I had someone tell me that dislike of Umbridge is usually from ingrained sexism toward female villains. I kind of stared in shock — I mean I love my lady villains. I love nasty female villains. I love sneaky and clever female villains. I love female villains that wrap themselves up in what the patriarchy expects of them and uses those expectations to smash someone upside the head.
I tried to explain my hatred of Umbridge isn’t that she’s full of traditionally feminine attributes.
It’s that she’s lawful evil.
If you did an alignment chart, no one would represent lawful evil more than Umbridge. I don’t think there’s ever been a character that better sums up lawful evil.
And, to me, lawful evil is the most terrifying and disturbing evil there is.
To me, lawful evil is the shit that gets thousands of people killed while the person responsible walks away feeling like they did their duty.
Evil forces like Bellatrix and Voldemort are fairy tales. They’re the bad guys a good guy can chase away with a sword or wand.
Umbridge is that evil that really does lurk in the hearts of men (and women). The realness, the plausibility of it, makes her amazingly uncomfortable.
So, yeah, I can’t get as excited about her as a fantasy book creation as easily as some other female villains. Not because she’s a woman, or because of her gender presentation, but because she represents a sort of evil that’s far, far too close to home.
Voldemort is stereotypically scary, but he’s a very unreal kind of scary. Umbridge is different. Everyone’s had an umbridge.
yes because lawful evil wraps itself in righteousness and oppresses you through approved systems and hierarchies that nobody is supposed to question
similarly I’ve seen a few people say that Snape hate is based on people hating abuse victims who don’t react ‘properly’. and while I get that Snape was abused and tormented I don’t hate him for that. I hate him because I had a teacher like him whose favourite target was me. I’ve been in Neville’s shoes, and guess what? When a teacher bullies and abuses you its traumatizing as well and can have life long effects.
And I may sound like an ass, but as someone who was abused and traumatized and reacted in ways that weren’t (and aren’t) ‘proper’, anyone who takes out their trauma on children under their care is a fucking shitty person and should be immediately removed from being in charge of said children (this is why I also dislike Dumbledore, Snape may have been acting from trauma but Dumbledore wasn’t and should have stepped in).
I felt like I needed to clarify some things before we could continue any more conversations on this godforsaken website.
I’m very proud of the European Robin, I think I really captured it.
ALSO A DADDY LONG LEGS is different in the UK vs USA. I learned that by arguing with some Brits because they said there was a daddy long legs on the wall, i looked and only saw an insect, argued with them all for 45 minutes until we all looked it up and saw that we were both correct.
British badger: jovial fellow, eats toast and jam. Might invite you in for a cuppa with the Mrs. Agricultural nuisance.
American badger: pallas cat of a wolverine. Very defensive. Fuck immediately off.
Bonus African badger: Silverback gorilla of mustelids. Should be a cryptid. Bro, don’t even. You are nothing to him.
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “’what-the-fuck’ing” for years after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and a half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what wee enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now, something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And then the communiqué that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold out debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac went silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually, the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race has largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. Firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
That Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
This makes me cry
It had been so many cycles since the Drac incident, and even more since the Drake McDougal event, and the the galaxy had sort of come to the conclusion that humans were, well, human about things, and that they regarded their lives in completely incomprehensible ways.
Yet for all of the witnessed sacrifices, few warriors had ever been taught to recognise the most terrifying of human deeds. In a forgettable corner of the galaxy, in an unremarked planet with a previously less than recorded history, a party of six human security escorts bringing their rescued survivors to a hive ship became a party of five,
A lone human, holding one of their handheld ‘melee’ weapons wordlessly tilted their head to their commander, and stopped, standing in plain sight in the middle of a field.
Waiting.
When asked, the lower ranked humans simply said “She knows what’s she’s doing”. The human captain’s inexplicable statement “She’s buying us some time” made it as if their companion had stepped into some form of marketplace.
Katherine of Rescue Group’s fate was never confirmed, but no pursuit came that night. On the next dawn, when the hive ship was able to leave, the humans insisted we departed immediately, and did not go back for their companion.
We do not know for sure what became of Katherine of Rescue Group. All we know is that when pressed, the human captain explained to our own that the one who stayed had communicated an ancient human tradition, the rite of self sacrifice. In words, the captain explained, the look and the nod would mean “Go on. I’ll hold them off. It was not, as we thought, that this one warrior had sought victory over many enemies, but that they had calculated a trade off of the minutes or hours it could take to defeat a human, against the time needed by their companions.
Humans, as humans say, do not go gentle into that good night.
Worse, they do not go gentle into bad nights, worse days, or terrifying sunsets. Dawn seems to fill them with potency and rage, as if to call upon the solar gods and tell the deities to come down here and say that to their human faces. We do not know how long she bought us, but we, the hive now called K’thrn, understand what it means to have someone expend their existence for the survival of others.
Dark circles, messy hair, black nails, gentle punk, Smol, has resting bitch face, wears eyeliner, loves bitter foods, jean vest, pins and buttons on bag and every single jacket he has, is looking for a bf
House Of Crows 