My income didn’t really change from 2024 to 2025. My accountant is the same, and my business is the same. I paid $4000 more in taxes in 2025.

I have and continue to qualify for Medicaid in my state.

The plutocracy is intentionally widening the divide between the wealthy ruling class and the working class by driving the working class into poverty. And when I say working class, that includes white collar workers. It doesn’t include people who work as a hobby because their yacht is in the shop and they’re bored

So a company taking anything you’ve created (posts, memes, videos, art, etc.), and using it to train their AI is perfectly okay, yes?

Mine too. He was on a decline for a while, so I began the grieving process before he passed away. His one year deathiversay hit a lot harder than I expected. A friend of mine said he gets hit every year, and has learned to expect it

I let the feelings pass through me. Sometimes I use the Litany of Fear if it’s really bad, just to remind myself that the acute pain is temporary. I used to share pictures of my jobs with him, and we’d talk about work and different things we had done to finish difficult jobs. I miss him the most when I take a picture of something I’ve done that looks great. It’s the little stab of remembering he’s not here

My faith helps a little, but it doesn’t dull the pain of missing him. Even though I think I’ll see him again, I can’t see him now. If you have a faith in seeing your dad again, hold onto it, and know that missing him is normal and okay. If you don’t have that hope, cherish the memories you have. As long as his name is spoken, he isn’t fully gone

♥️ anything by Simon and Garfunkel, The Eagles, or the O Brother, Where Art Thou OST.

When I first read “beginning to seem old” I thought “what rock have they been living under?” Then I thought about my dad’s slow decline and how striking it was when I realized just how close to death he was. His body had fallen apart over the course of five years, following a major heart attack. He went from a vibrant 80 year old that still did carpentry work and could beat me in arm wrestling to a sallow-faced shadow of the man he was.

I know this is a media piece and I believe the staffers are “shocked” about as much as comatose sloth. I can also see how obvious decline can be missed by those closest to them. Dunno where I was going with this. I’m gonna go think about my dad some. I miss him

Lol, nice

North Carolina, California, Texas, and Washington. Wild

I AM EL NIÑO! ALL TROPICAL STORMS BOW BEFORE ME

I think I did trying to read it

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Squeezing? Maybe? I’m old enough that I’m not going to do anything to restrict the flow that my prostate isn’t already doing lol

They gotta keep them quotas

Νεατ¡

Completely unrelated.

Do you run a script to automatically convert th to Thor, or is it a key binding to the symbol? Or something else? Just curious.

Also, yes, addiction and fascination are two different things. I miss when headlines were puns

So I got curious and went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Here’s the first paragraph from the apple butter article:

The roots of apple butter lie in Limburg (Belgium and the Netherlands) and Rhineland (Germany), conceived during the Middle Ages, when the first monasteries (with large orchards) appeared. The production of the butter was a perfect way to conserve part of the fruit production of the monasteries[1] in that region, at a time when almost every village had its own apple-butter producers. The production of apple butter was also a popular way of using apples in colonial America, well into the 19th century.

So yeah, apple butter has roots in Germany, at least for central Europe. However, other fruit butters have other origins, such as Lekvar and Powidi, as you mentioned. At the same time Latwerge and Apfelkraut were developing in Germany, monasteries in the British Isles were also developing apple butter as a preservation technique. It seems the tradition/technique developed in parallel as a communal way of preserving fruit.

Since grandma’s recipe included a sweetener it likely has its roots in the British Isles, where honey would be added to the preserves as a sweetener. Her apple tree produced a fairly sour soft apple, which also would inform that decision. The pies were amazing

I had tomato ice cream and tomato beer in Iceland. It was better than the fish jerky

Not sure if joking so I’ll answer seriously…

Like apple butter, or pear butter. Maybe it’s an Appalachian thing, I dunno. You chop up the fruit, let’s say apples, and slow cook them for a few hours. Then puree them, add cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, whatever, and a bunch of sugar. Can the results. We always used small mason jars that had been in the family for God only knows how long.

Grandma wouldn’t use a blender, she was old school. She’d add all the ingredients together in a big stock pot, drop a silver dollar in the bottom, and stir for hours, until she couldn’t hear the coin move around anymore. I say she stirred for hours, but she’d “enlist” the help of the kids, and later, daughters-in-law, and eventually grandchildren. She was born in 1912, so I reckon it was just her way

Tomato butter is a little different, after you separate the tomato buttercream and add seasoning and vinegar, add back the tomato buttercream until the consistency is where you like it

Ketchup is a fruit butter, not a jam.

Cooked, pureed fruit with sugar and spices, no pectin. Not a jam