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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • So you spent the day outside shoveling snow, maybe you had to walk 20 minutes to get to a friend’s house, maybe the cold itself just took it out of you because your body was burning calories just to stay warm. You finally get home and you are out of breath and just wanting to dry off and get warm again- and that’s when you thank your past self for what you did on meal prep Sunday:

    French onion soup.

    You can look online for recipes, but here’s what I improvised last Sunday (probably not definition french onion soup, but at least a variation on a theme). Mine takes about 1 hour to make (10 min prep, 50ish minutes to cook)

    Ingredients:

    • 1/4 cup butter
    • 1 tablespoon fat (I use leftover bacon grease)
    • Onions (I used 4 but you could do more)
    • garlic (I used 1 bulb, but you could always do more)
    • Apple (I used 1, but you could always do more)
    • veggies (I like zucchini and carrots)
    • mushrooms if you like em
    • protein (stew beef, ground meat, chicken, turkey, hell even sandwich meat will do)
    • cardamom
    • Curry powder
    • vinegar (I use white balsamic, but apple cider vinegar or anything flavorful will do)
    • chicken broth
    1. Cut up the onions into thick chunks, no need to get precise, just hack 'em quick so you have less time being in a tearful agony
    2. Peel the bulb of garlic, but leave the cloves whole- don’t crush them.
    3. Heat up your butter and fat, then add in the onions and garlic. Let it sautee for like… 30 minutes? If you have time to do a proper caramelizing then do that, but it’s still good if you want to make it faster.
    4. While the onions and garlic do their thing, prepare your meat in another pan. Of course if you use ham or something pre cooked you can skip this step.
    5. Slice your apple(s) however you want, I like thin slices but cubes are good too.
    6. Add in veg and apples, let them cook for 15 minutes or so
    7. Add meat
    8. A couple dashes of cardamom and curry and also pour in your broth to desired consistency
    9. Give a taste then add a dash of vinegar to see how it really cuts through the fattiness

    Dish and serve! If you want to really clog those arteries, go ahead and add some cheese on top, I like smoked Gouda. I also use a pipe sweater to torch the cheese and give it a little melty/ crispy texture. This soup should be thick and hearty to restore your energy and give you the gumption to brave the elements again. If you were link in legend of Zelda, you’re getting at least 10 yellow hearts from this.

    That and a hot tody will give you the coziness that will lift your spirits in the dark cold months.

    Good luck!













  • I’m digging myself out of a $13k credit card debt hole. I burned through my savings when a job that I had ended on my unexpectedly, and because it was contract work I wouldn’t qualify for benefits. They kept me around as a sub, promising me a full time position if I just stuck around long enough and I was foolish enough to believe them.

    I’m self employed now and making do with the best I can, but I’m planning on ending my dream as a musician/ teacher and moving home. I don’t know who would want my skills, but I know they are specialized and strong. I just gotta see what kind of work would value them.



  • meep_launcher@lemm.eeOPtocats@lemmy.worldHalp
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    1 month ago

    Thanks so much for your kind words.

    I’ve taught at a private school as a long term music sub, which while being the job that put me in the red (I kept asking when the normal teacher would come back, they never gave me a straight answer until I walked into my office one day to find her stuff there. After that they kept stringing me along in hopes that they’d start a full band program- I spent weeks putting together a proposal for it to be rejected for “various reasons”).

    I’ve been thinking about the regular job, but I have no idea what I can do to get me out of the red. Anything that would pay $80k+ just seems out of reach since those tend to be senior positions or for people who can code. I’ve tried coding many times but just can’t seem to get it. Sales has burned me time after time and marketing just doesn’t stick. I can do it for myself alright, but it’s just not something that wants me around in the corporate setting.

    Sadly so much of the music industry is for creating commercial music to be used for businesses. When music is a commodity to be bought and sold, humans aren’t really necessary. Why would I pay a human to create a catchy tune for my advertisement when Ai can pump out something that does just fine? AI is also breaking the music tech side. It’s not 100% yet, but Ai mixing and mastering is taking off. If I’m an artist, especially one on a tight budget, an Ai mixer could do just fine for my album when normally I might pay someone with the experience to do so. This might seem great for the artist, but once they have their album, they can get paid $20 a year from Spotify.

    The tech spokespeople keep trying to convince us that Ai won’t steal our work and livelyhoods. The thing is everyone in my industry, me included, don’t buy it. These are the same people who said tech would bring Seattle jobs and prosperity, but all it did was raise rents and push out the artists. Tech bros will disagree and say Seattle is just fine, but they weren’t the ones negatively impacted by the industry that allowed them to move there. There’s a group of us in Chicago who call ourselves Seattle’s artistic refugees.

    We aren’t the only ones- San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Denver- so many cities are losing their artistic communities that made them worth living in. There’s still music in these places, but you’ll notice those performances are taken by big names for people who can afford those $60+ tickets.

    Hell, even Death Cab for Cutie wrote an absolutely heartbreaking bop.

    Digging for gold in my neighborhood

    For what they say is the greater good

    But all I see is a long goodbye

    A requiem for a skyline

    💔💔💔

    I’m not trying to be doom and gloom, but I can’t keep living like this.




  • I feel like the reaper is really dragging his feet with this one.

    Grim reaper looking at list in the morning whilst holding skull mug, wearing a death bathrobe, and sporting pink fuzzy slippers

    “Okay let’s just take a- AWWWW MAN. Really? Jimmy Carter? Uuuuugh this is gonna suck so much.”

    Procedes to pull out his iBone15 to call God

    “Hey cough um god I think I got plague so I need to take take the next… 5 years off yea 5 years… No yea I tested positive. Yes I can send you a picture… No no don’t worry I’m way ahead of schedule- get it, ahead? Baha yea I’ll never forget Louis, what a laugh. Oh, no we don’t need to send in a sub… No really… No, ESPECIALLY not Reagan. Sure. Yep I’ll give a call to HR. Thanks. Bet.”

    Hangs up, calls HR

    “Hey Lucifer I need to call out…”



  • I think a huge misstep of the original argument is “career politician bad”. Biden is seen as a one man “dynasty” because he has ~50 years of experience. Obama and Clinton are only seen as dynasties because they had active First Ladies so there’s a “power couple” image.

    I think it’s fair to say there are political dynasties- the Kennedy’s, the Bushes- and it makes sense that they will tend to happen naturally. If my dad was president of the United States, at the age of 12 I’d have a much better understanding of the Washington Political Machine than most people.

    Usually when we think of “Outsider” candidates, we think of people who have 0 government experience who enter the arena. Notice that Trump isn’t mentioned in the post. Ofc Trump was as embedded in the Washington establishment as much as anyone else when he ran in 2016, having ran for president previously and using the ol’ “wine and dine” method generously to help him get a leg up in business.

    I personally don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a ton of experience in getting a lot of people to do one thing together- oddly enough that’s an INCREDIBLY HARD THING TO DO. We need all sorts of people in politics in order to represent the people accurately. The Tim Walz’s and AOC’s in congress brought so much to the table- they know what it’s like to grow up as the everyday American. The Biden’s and the Pelosi’s have been removed from that world for so long it’s understandable they might not have the most accurate picture of modern American life, but they do have the deep understanding for how to get things done. In Biden’s single term, he has outpaced most presidents in getting legislation passed. I remember being optimistic in 2020 hoping Biden would be a modern LBJ, and by gum I think ol’ Joe did it.