Day 286 of quarantine I have discovered www.webstaurantstore.com
It is, I BELIEVE, a website intended to be used by restaurants for bulk ordering food and utensils. And this is bringing me such unbounded delight scrolling through and recognizing that I, a single individual, ALSO can order ridiculous obscene enormous offensive-to-all-common-sensibilities shipments of BULK FOOD, to my LITTLE LITTLE APARTMENT, for PENNIES on the dollar. I have this god given power to flood my entire living space with bulk grains and it is one single button click away from my reality.
30 POUNDS of chocolate for $100. 20 POUNDS of peas for $13?? $13!!!! I will wake up every single morning from now on knowing that a box of donuts and a sack of dried split peas heavy enough to bodily injure someone both carry equal monetary weight. 25 POUNDS OF ONION POWDER for $50. Do you understand the enormity? the accessibility? the potential here? With the single click of the button I can put myself in a position of bequeathing more than a humanly comprehensible amount of onion powder in my will. AND IT WOULD ONLY COST ME $50 TO MAKE THIS A REALITY.
But what gets me
What truly gets me
is the 50 POUND BAG OF RICE
FOR LESS THAN $20
Do you know how much that kills me? How much I’m losing my mind? that I can order MYSELF WORTH OF RICE for something to the tune of $50? I can OUT-RANK MYSELF WITH RICE, DEMOCRATICALLY OVERRULE MYSELF WITH RICE, IN MY OWN APARTMENTfor the fucking PENNIES that is $50
I’m so sorry for the normal person I’ll be after quarantine because the cabin-fever version of me I’m inhabiting right now is perhaps just uninhibited enough to follow through on this dream I’ve just discovered of out-ricing myself.
real talk though, if you had a large number of people in your community who wanted a particular food item and couldn’t afford it (for instance if you’re in a food desert and need produce or if you’re a part of a large disabled and/or overworked community who all need prepared frozen food), you could pool funds and get an order from a supply store like this.
it requires organizing for finance management, ordering, transport, and distribution, but if you build a stable mutual aid network, it’s genuinely within the realm of possibility.
This idea is called a buyers club (or buying club, buying coop, etc) and it’s a great time-tested method of mutual aid. And there are guides and tools for starting your own at managemy.coop
that neurodivergent feel when you find that one fucking person who it doesn’t drain your battery to talk to. like a person with whom conversation is consistently fun and non-tiring and even sometimes relaxing/energizing which is of course absolutely insane as a concept
multiple people have responded with “yeah and i married them” and ya’ll are hella valid
In English, we say you don’t drink beer, or you’re not drinking beer. The negative applies to the verb—the drinking part.
In German you drink no beer (du trinkst kein Bier). The negative applies to the noun—the beer part.
You can say das Bier ist nicht schlecht, the beer is not bad, and that’s fine, because schlecht is an adjective. But you’re not allowed to use nicht to convey that you’re not performing the action of drinking beer. You have to say you’re drinking no beer. Like Eowyn proclaiming “I am no man!”
I suppose it feels a bit dramatic to me because of that slightly high/archaic-feeling Eowyn construction which obviously is technically legal in English but Jesus Christ. Or at least, idk, overly categorical and assertive. But fine, chalk it up to German being German and English being an attenuated Germanic language that once was more so, it’s fine, I’ll just stop ascribing portentousness. This is still in some legitimate sense problematic syntax because a simple negation like this should be about the verb, dammit! The noun is just there; you’re either verbing it or not verbing it. It’s literally not possible to affirmatively drink no beer! No beer isn’t drinkable! You can’t drink the void! Fuck.
(I don’t have a serious point here, I think I just needed to type out how this works because it’s blowing my goddamn mind)
literally traumatizing to learn that the london bridge is in fucking arizona
this is rocking my world view i feel like i have to call my family
….where did people think ‘london bridge is falling down’ came from?
i don’t necessarily conflate “falling down” with “being dismantled brick by brick and shipped to arizona to be rebuilt” but i guess its not my area of expertise
Lake Havasu City is an odd town, kind of cool, more than a bit conservative, huge retiree,. Snowbird, community that comes in from October to May from parts of the country that get lots of snow. 116 (47c) in the summer.
It’s also a town of 50,000 that’s the biggest thing for a 2 hour drive in any direction. And yes the original land developer bought the bridge that was going to have to be demolished and reinforced it and reassembled it over a man made channel creating an island with expensive homes. Lots of people have boats (typical house will have a 30-40 foot deep garage). It’s also semi-rural Arizona so be prepared to see everything from classic Corvettes to razr dune buggies in the parking lot for Starbucks and don’t be weirded out by the Glock the granny in line in front of you at the grocery store has on her hip.
the thing about people who are like “i don’t like tolkien that much, fantasy should move on and be better” is that i AGREE that fantasy has all the wrong holdovers from lotr. but when you ask those people what contemporary fantasy they think is better, they’ll say shit like name of the wind or game of thrones, and i do not relate to that…..at all?? or even, like, brandon sanderson, whose books i REALLY like. but if you’re still naming mostly white straight male authors, what is it about tolkien you wanted to leave behind exactly???
If y’all’s “moving on from Tolkien” is still centered in reading fantasy written by cishet white men, y’all are missing out.
Martha Wells, Books of the Raksura. Shapeshifting gargoyle-dragon-lizard people in a matriarchal society. About finding a new home and a new family. Really evocative world building that hints at much older civilizations in a luxuriant setting.
NK Jemisin, The Broken Earth series. Post-apocalyptic setting. People of color actively dismantling systems of oppression. People of color being justifiably angry at what has been done. People of color being powerful. A black woman as the main character and multiple queer characters. She won THREE Best Novel Hugos for this series.
NK Jemisin, The Inheritance Trilogy. An empire has imprisoned and enslaved multiple gods, and is using them to further their oppressive systems. The mixed race female protagonist helps them find liberation. Some polyamory and non-binary themes.
Aliette de Bodard, Dominion of the Fallen series. “Dark Gothic fantasies set in a ruined turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war.” Fallen angels, Asian dragons, Viet culture, and queer PoC in positions of power. Her website has lots of free fiction as well. Special mention to The Tea Master and the Detective, a Sherlock Holmes retelling where Sherlock is a WoC and Watson is a sentient spaceship.
Fran Wilde, The Bone Cycle. Beautiful worldbuilding, tradition, (mis)information, climate change. This series is so gorgeous I have deliberately not finished reading it yet, because I am saving the last few chapters of the final book for when I’m going through a rough patch and need something lovely to escape into.
Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass and Iron. Fairy tale heroines going “nah, fuck this nonsense, we’re making our own story”. Amal mostly writes poetry and short fiction, and all of it is beautifully lyrical. Her words are so beautiful they make me angry.
Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky. It blends several genres in one, and honestly you are better off reading it than reading any summary I could make about it.
And so many, many, many more in the fantasy/sci-fi/horror genres. Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, Alyssa Wong, Ken Liu, Rebecca Roanhorse, Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant, Daniel José Older, RF Kuang, Nnedi Okorafor, Jeannette Ng, Ann Leckie, Ted Chiang, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ruthanna Emrys, Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Bear, Saladin Ahmed, Nisi Shawl…
If you can’t afford them, that’s okay, you have options:
Make sure to check them out at your local library.
Don’t want to go to the library, or don’t have a means to do so regularly? Ebooks! Overdrive/Libby is your friend–you just need to get a library card and then you can borrow ebooks through their ever-growing database.
You can even recommend books to them–authors will get a sale if the library buys the book! They also have a growing audiobook supply, and you can recommend those to your library as well.
Libby has a phone app that is perfectly functional, so if you don’t have a dedicated e-reader but own a smartphone, you can get your books that way too.
Do you prefer short fiction? So many of these authors have stuff available online, be it on their website or on zines. A brief search will supply you with more fiction by non-white-dudes than you know what to do with.
tl;dr:
Read diverse authors.
Hell take it back 50 years and grab the Pern Novels or Wizard of Earthsea both.
Mercedes Lackey’s novels had the first LGBTQ protagonist I ever read, which for a middle class cishet white kid in 1989 was a serious departure.
