i took my friend to Hocking Hills state park yesterday and on our hike I talked all about the (now retired) park naturalist who mentored me years ago, along with the professor who also mentored me and how they got me my first job in my field after college, like I went on and on about my memories of them and the time I spent with them in the park, and then we got to a cave and they were both inside. I hadn’t seen either of then since I moved away seven years ago and then I went back to the state park for the first time since and they were just there. in a cave. they went to the cave together. one of them saw me and said “oh hi! what are you doing here?” like hey fancy us all being here in this cave together huh.
i can’t express how much this felt like a video game cutscene encounter. i established the lore for two hours about these specific two Guys and then they appeared, like, in their map.
it was this professor btw
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and you should! you’ll also avoid crowds! we were two of roughly five people on the Old Man’s Cave trail. If you’ve been there in the summer, you understand how dramatic that difference is. BUT bring ice spikes for your shoes or get really excited about sliding all over the trail in peril 🫶
the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it’s like. i’ve been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there’s been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california’s agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.
anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone’s feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it’s. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i’ve been watching this trend for the past decade and it’s fucking real.
anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way
it is extremely relevant that pistachios are so easy to acquire here, but acorns, which are an indigenous California food staple crop, are impossible to find even in the best stocked grocery stores, and knowing how to prepare them for consumption is a rarer skill than sourdough starter
For people who can’t get the video to load: it’s about how there’s a free (and ad-free) youtube channel for PBS news that streams (TRUSTWORTHY) news info on a nightly basis, so if anyone needs a reliable source of info about what’s happening right now but you don’t have a tv or paid subscriptions to anything, this is probably your best bet! Here’s a link to the channel:
Note, I got the name of the place wrong because Djinn Designs is who is making the shirts for them, and the place was not identified in the original video. The name of the actual store is The Blade Bar.
So bad. We take local smoking laws into account on deciding where to travel not because we smoke but because we don’t.
we remember going to a gay club in cambridge (england) just after the smoking ban kicked in, and it turns out there are Other Smells (mainly sweat and cologne and poppers)
but at least we lasted more than 20 minutes in there, which had been our previous limit when everyone in there smoked
Every time you hear about a judge blocking one of 49% eo’s you better look up which judge it was, because odds are it was one of the TWO-HUNDRED THIRTY PLUS judges Joe Biden appointed as president
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amhrancas 