sometimes I wonder if I'm going to outlive the internet
Wheaties
joined 5 years ago
1
It's kinda strange that we have a whole set of cultural jokes for passively spectating world history as it happens
(hexbear.net)
A quick reverse search suggests that this was initially made with HL3 news in mind. I found (a lot) of very recent reposts of it.
I don't have much more to say, other than to express mild cynicism that the same joke used in waiting for a computer game gets reused for very serious historical events.
As a kid, I just assumed it was aesthetic. Like, someone for an audience of non-musicians to project themselves on to.
As an adult, I recognize that this is almost certainly not the case. Presumably the conductor plays a role that is necessary and helpful to the rest of the orchestra... but I'll be damned if I can't quite figure out what that is. Surely its not just timing? Can't the players just... listen to one another to work that out?
lol, threads
thought this was a twitter screenshot at first
I wrote this as a comment to that video about medieval bread. And, what the hell, apparently I spent two hours on it so here it is a full post. Also a tumblr link to a video of Avery Brooks giving satisfying line deliveries. One of which is "Bread...!"
The bulk of industrially produced bread differs from pre-industrial bread in the following key ways:
- Refined Grains instead of Whole Grains
Grain is a plant seed. It has an outer casing (bran, ~5% by weight) a "seed-embryo" (germ, ~15% by weight) and store of nutrients to feed the germ through its initial sprouting (endosperm, ~80% by weight). In most industrial breads, the bran and germ are removed. This improves the shelf-life of any bread you make from it... but it only lasts longer because it now lacks the gem's nutrients and the bran's fiber.
- Grinding hot and fast, rather than cool and slow
This one is pretty self explanatory. Grinding hot and fast breaks down oils and stuff in the wheat, further reducing the nutritional content of the resulting bread so that it can be produced faster. Older milling techniques also produce larger, less consistently ground flour, leaving more nutrients.
- Skipping Fermentation
After you mix the dough, it is left to rise. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for days. I feel like if you know anything about baking bread, you know this step. It's the fermentation process. Yeast slowly eats the bread, digesting and transforming it into different nutrients that we have an easier time digesting ourselves. In the same way you cannot fully understand a plant without including the soil it grows in, the microbes and fungi that surround it; the human body does not end at the topmost dermal layer. We are just as inexorably dependent on the microbial world, both within and without our bodies. Digestion begins long, long before the secretion of saliva and the gnashing of teeth .
Industrial bread skips this step. It improves shelf-life and speeds up production.
- GMO varietals rather than EMO varietals
Genetically engineered strains of wheat TEND TO select for the highest possible yield of grain for the least land and resources. Wheat that has evolved in conjunction with human agriculture often but not always has a wider nutritional spread, but lower crop yields. Specific species will have specific qualities, GMO or otherwise. You CANNOT just say all GMO is X, all heirlooms are Y.
With that disclaimer, it sounds like the high yield GMO plants most frequently used in industrial bread have gluten that is structurally different (more complex? bigger I guess?) to heirloom varietals. It's harder to digest and can trigger an immune response in some people. Apparently it's also what lets the bread remain soft for significantly longer.
Here's a scientific paper that was cited in the video. I skimmed the abstract. Those more literate than I can have fun with it: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2022.995019/full
Personal consumptive habits: what does this mean for me?
Consider switching to Whole Wheat / Whole Grain bread. Sourdough is also good.
Industrially: production favors quick baking and long shelf life. It doesn't have to. Even in a capitalist system. I'm sure there's still a profit to be made even with slower, cooler milling; proper fermentation times; and a shorter shelf life. But this also means you can't have one factory making bread for a large surrounding area. You'd need more factories with more staff, serving more locally concentrated customers. Long shelf-life bread needn't disappear altogether, but it would be reduced to supplementing the logistical shortfalls of healthier bread that is more time and labor intensive.
Actually getting the capitalists to implement this, would be another matter...
text transcription
I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”
“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
furryprovocateur:
literally why is gerrymandering legal. why is america the stupid idiot country.
ndiamichelle:
This could be counterproductive if people actually vote. Everywhere. We can blame the system and politicians all we want but if people don’t get off their ass to vote correctly or just vote in general that would probably solve a good chunk of our problems.
furryprovocateur:
enthralled at the interpretation of the world you have. the best way to vote out a system that exists to suppress votes and bottleneck specific populations from being heard is to vote harder. tell me more.
toloveviceforitself:
There’s a certain kind of democrat whose whole politics is basically “if the entire population just acted in a way they’ve never acted before on a level that borders on the miraculous, we could win without changing anything else about how democrats govern or campaign!” and they think that’s not only a useful insight, but a good justification for rejecting literally any alteration of their ideology, their strategy, or even suggestions that (on the occasions they have power) they alter the rigged system that requires such miracles in the first place.
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Genuinely hard to say. Either way, useful data should be stored in dusty microfilm boxes in library basements.