From the bottom of my heart, baking is a lot more flexible than people talk about it on here.

Do not let random funny posts about baking vs. cooking intimidate you from trying a hobby that can be fun, practical, and community-reinforcing.

But to start you do need to be able to:

-identify ingredients accurately and NOT do substitutions as a beginner. Seriously don't. There are so many recipes out there, if you have special dietary needs start with a recipe that accommodates them. If you forgot to buy the right thing at the grocery store, STOP. You are not making that recipe until you buy the right thing.

IF your brain is the kind that goes "cake flour, all purpose flour, self rising flour, surely it's the same" this WILL be a problem.

-measure fairly accurately. You don't need to stress about "how level is level on my cup." And as a Yank I am doing this shit with cups and tablespoons and such, even though I have a cooking scale and could fuck with grams if I wanted to. People have been baking well LONG before digital scales were easily available.

BUT if you have a brain that will not hold information about how many cups of flour you've already put into the bowl, you will need to figure out a way to accommodate for that.

-be able to plan ahead/accept the laws of thermodynamics. A recipe's baking time, if it's a tested recipe from a trusted source, can vary by 10 minutes or so based on your particular oven. You need to be able to check and monitor your baking around this time. As a beginner, DO NOT try to speed up the baking time by increasing the temperature. That's how you get burnt edges with a raw middle. Also, your baked good is going to take as long as it takes to cool. You have to accept this and plan for it otherwise you'll try to frost a warm cake and the frosting will melt off and you will be upset.

Time blindness and difficulties in being confident you WILL do a specific thing in 45min to an hour (or more) are issues you will have to accommodate for.

-stay humble and develop skills in identifying good sources of information. What I mean is that people have been baking for thousands of years. There are so many experts that can tell you how to make substitutions. There are so many recipes that have been tested. You don't need to, and shouldn't, just randomly substitute pumpkin for carrots in a carrot cake or whatever. There is a recipe for pumpkin cake out there, I promise.

Anyway, I realize this may not sound like "baking being flexible" but these are my tips for beginners. You're not handling radioactive material in a lab. Do not be scared of baking. You're not on a TV show. Relax, don't skip steps, and don't randomly modify things until you've got a better sense of what modifications do.

I dig this, and just wanted to add that if you do struggle with measuring or just want to reduce the amount of utensils and measuring cups to wash and deal with, a scale is SO nice to have. They're not too pricey and you can pour ingredients right into your mixing bowl without using extra cups, etc, and it really makes things easier! Definitely the next step up that's worth it

Giant hermit crab in a box truck!

I have been looking forward to this one for a long time. I got it from an Etsy print farm. As far as I know, it's not from any game in particular. It would certainly fit in a Necromunda or Wasteland Warfare game. If it goes to something, let me know!

Edit: this beast is from Fallout 4 & 76. Much appreciated. :)

This thing was so much fun to put together. I spent a lot of time staring at crab pictures trying to figure out a plan, ended up going with this.

Rawr.

Here's a coconut crab, which I kinda based this on. They're the largest terrestrial invertebrate on Earth. They have their own shells, unlike hermit crabs.

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.

My mom tells stories of skipping school to sneak across the border and spend the day at a bar in Mexico. I was threatened with not being allowed to graduate because of senior ditch day. One of my friends had to go to his first hour class on senior ditch day because the teacher, who almost exclusively taught seniors, arranged a huge exam that day with no available makeup days, specifically to punish kids who took part in ditch day. Our wild and crazy ditch day was playing mini golf and then stopping for ice cream on our way back to one of our friends' houses to play cards against humanity.

Don't get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?

Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.

My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women's football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn't afford to go there anyway.

We've made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.

Then they become adults and it doesn't go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you'd better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they've deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it's a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there's any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?

My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she'd write me up for improper use of sick leave because you're not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don't know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.

I dont really know where I'm going with all of this. I guess I just don't understand the point of it all. We spend our youth working hard to provide a future that we still can't afford. We have to be responsible and professional as teenagers. And we get nothing out of it. We can't afford life or friends or fun. At least our parents got to have fun being young and dumb, we just got groomed on kik.

So I'm not the only one noticing this. I wish I had an answer or at least something to say about it. But I dont. I'm just tired.

Original report (waybacked PDF) is from 2007. That's Gen Z kids.

When I, Gen-Xer, was about 12 - in my rural home, I had about a three-mile range. (Could've pushed it to more, but didn't want to walk that far.) In the city, it was about a mile. Not that anyone was checking; again, that was about the distance I wanted to walk, and besides, that covered all of "downtown."

My kids? Closer to that 300 yards limit at the same age. Not because I wanted to restrict them, but we live next to a freeway on-ramp and between two sets of train tracks... and there is absolutely nothing kid-friendly within a half-mile for them to visit.

I spent my 21st birthday bar-hopping. My kids spent their 21st birthdays at home with a nice meal. I don't think either of them wanted to go bar-hopping - but yeah, as a society, we've removed a LOT of teen-friendly options.

See also: End of Third Places, switch from video game arcades to home consoles (hey, then every kid has to buy their own copy--great for game-makers!), shutdown of malls or restrictions on youth at them, closure of public parks, reduced/removed after-school programs, etc. Plus the places that think it's illegal for a 12-year-old to walk to the corner store unsupervised.

I am, however, DELIGHTED to hear that the booze & other vices industries are panicking over Gen Z not going out to party. Like, you spent 30-odd years removing all the places and ways people can hang out together and have fun outside of someone's personal house, and... guess what, when people hit milestone events (graduation, milestone birthdays, job promotion, whatever), they don't immediately flock to the Party Zone that they have never been welcome at. How shocking.

It sucks that Gen Z does not get to party, does not have good celebration options. REALLY sucks that that's often because school or job has decided to tell them not to celebrate, rather than just not having places to go. I'm just not upset over party capitalism taking a hit.

oh yeah as a teen librarian also this is so fucking real. like, i was a square so i didn't do anything anyways as a teen, but i did notice that people didn't really....do much when i was in high school.

and nowadays?? we've made the bar so fucking high for these kids. i participated in this mock interview program as an interviewer guest from the library, where seniors would get a chance to pretend interview for a job with me to get some experience before they entered the workforce.

and my god. the resumes on these kids. they're pumped full of sports, arts, extracurriculars, awards, volunteer work, like 60% of them had already had at least one job, and at least 2 of them had already started their own fucking businesses.

like. i'm impressed of course, overall this isn't a terrible thing. but when do these kids get to take a break? when do ANY of us get to take a break?? we have made society so back-breaking that 15 year olds are starting businesses while they run the student council, attend five clubs, volunteer on the weekends, and do ever increasing mountains of homework to maintain a 4.0 GPA.

Like again. I was a fucking square in school. I had all A's in everything and i did extracurriculars, i even did some volunteer work here and there. but mostly i went home, i read books for fun, i went rambling in the woods near my house for no particular reason. i chilled out with my friends and doodled pictures and wrote piles of fanfiction. i spent so much time in high school just...relaxing and playing.

when are these kids getting time to do that, between all the stuff we expect of them? where are these kids getting the space to do that as we continue to push them out of every single physical space, because teens hanging out in a gaggle of friends is somehow threatening?

why are we expecting this much out of kids, out of young adults, while we refuse to offer even a fraction of what our parents and grandparents were given for a fraction of the work we're putting in?

we're running ourselves into the fucking ground. and for fucking what?

R.E.M. - Country Feedback

i love drama that does not matter at all

After the hell of the past two days, this reminded me of what America could and should be about. It’s a little pocket of hope when our administration is trying to extinguish diversity and community and basic human decency and replace them with fear and hate and division.

More CDs need to come with maps and lore 🔥 also this album absolutely rips

Oh and even better:

TRUST no-one outserved her!

Artwork i made back in 2023 for Municipal Waste

TURA! (2025) Documentary Review

Some documentaries whisper their subjects' stories. Others shout them from the rooftops. And then there's "TURA!"—a film that kicks down the door, struts in wearing black leather, and dares you to look away from one of cinema's most gloriously uncompromising figures.

Director Cody Jarrett (who directed Tura Satana herself in the 2009 film “Sugar Boxx”) has crafted something that feels less like traditional documentary filmmaking and more like an archaeological dig through the grittier corners of American entertainment history. With Margaret Cho's perfectly pitched narration guiding us through the labyrinth, we're introduced to Tura Satana—a tough-talking femme fatale who didn't just break stereotypes, she grabbed them by the throat and threw them off a cliff.

The genius of Jarrett's approach lies in how he mirrors his subject's own philosophy: no down-playing, no apologetic explanations, just raw truth served with a side of "deal with it." When the film opens with the horrific details of Satana's childhood assault, it's not exploitation; it's establishing the foundational trauma that would forge one of cinema's most iconic revenge fantasies into flesh and blood.

What emerges is a portrait that's simultaneously heartbreaking and empowering. Satana's transformation from a 10-year-old gang-rape victim to the leather-clad badass in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" reads like the origin story of a superhero—that is, if superheroes were forged in burlesque clubs and driven by a very specific kind of righteous fury.

The talking-heads roster reads like a who's who of counterculture royalty: John Waters brings his trademark irreverent wisdom, while Dita Von Teese offers insights that feel both scholarly and deeply personal. Friend and costar (from “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens”) Kitten Natividad provides personal insight and a level-headed overview of the business. But it's the inclusion of Pamela Des Barres—legendary groupie chronicler—that adds even more emotional depth. Des Barres' connection with Satana transcended mere professional admiration; they bonded over their mutual worship at the altar of Elvis Presley and their shared commitment to female independence and personal sexual freedom. Des Barres brings both insider knowledge and genuine affection to her recollections, painting Satana as a kindred spirit in the ongoing war for women's autonomy in entertainment.

It's Satana's own daughters, however, who provide the film's most poignant moments, painting their mother as simultaneously legendary and heartbreakingly human—the kind of woman who could intimidate Tony Curtis but struggled with the mundane realities of maternal domesticity. "She wasn't a 'Hey, let's bake cookies' kind of mom," Kalani and Jade note with the weary wisdom of children who grew up in the shadow of a force of nature. Not only that, they drop a couple of truth-bombs towards the end that feel like scripted plot twists.

Jarrett wisely positions Satana not just as a cult cinema curiosity, but as a prescient figure who weaponized her own fetishization decades before such concepts had academic terminology. She was doing intersectional feminism in go-go boots before anyone knew what to call it, claiming agency in an industry designed to strip it away.

The archival footage crackles with authentic grit. These aren't polished Hollywood behind-the-scenes clips, but raw Super-8 glimpses into a world where entertainment and survival intersected in dangerous ways. The candid photos of her with her children, her friends, and lovers—sans the polished cat-eyed dominatrix look—show off her considerable natural beauty.

Most impressively, "TURA!" manages to honor its subject without canonizing her. Satana emerges as wonderfully, messily human. She was a woman who could exact revenge on her childhood attackers (the film's most tantalizingly vague subplot) but couldn't quite master the art of avoiding controlling, chauvinistic men as her partners.

"TURA!" is that rare documentary that understands its subject on a cellular level. It's a love letter to feminine rage, a meditation on survival, and a reminder that the most potent and useful acts of rebellion happen in black leather on a drive-in movie screen. Tura Satana may have been exploitation cinema's queen, but this film proves she was so much more: she was America's reckoning with its own contradictions, served up with a knowing smirk and zero apologies.

= = = S.L. Wilson

This is now streaming for free on Kanopy.

I think that after sending risky emails you should be allowed to disappear into the sea until you get a response and when that happens a mermaid or sea creature of your choosing will just come up and kindly gently whisper what the response was in your ear. I think that this is just a general support feature that life should offer if we are going to have to face the horrors of sending emails.

My account is still blocked from searching/tags/etc on my business blog @foundfamilyadventurecrafts so I'm posting this here. There's something very bad happening with Small Business, Tech, and Amazon. What else is new?

Links: Bobo Design Studio for Updates & Submitting Information

Arrows Aim Greenhouse + Chroma Rex are putting together a complaint with WA State Attorney General's Office + Templates for complaints / opt out

Articles:

Amazon's Buy For Me Information Page

Reuters Article

Ars Technica Article

Business Insider Article

my favorite reads of 2025

Ursula Le Guin’s writing schedule