Small businesses are awesome.
This guy, a veteran and park ranger named Steve, opened this place called TreeRock in Asheville, NC as a sort of passion project, to celebrate Mead and Cider, and showcase an incredible selection of the world's first alcoholic beverage.
I just had an hour and a half long conversation with the guy. He's so personable and knowledgeable, and I had an absolute blast- I tried like 10 different drinks, and they were all awesome, and he told me about the history and making of each and every one. After a while, I decided this is my new favorite place to go.
But they're closing, in March.
These past few years have been devastating for small businesses, and they are no exception. They are going to close in March, unless something drastic happens that changes things.
So if you're in Asheville, or you know somebody in Asheville, or you have been meaning to go to Asheville to bury that body in the trunk of your car somewhere along the Appalachian trail but you just haven't gotten around to it yet, please stop by TreeRock for a flight of meads, ciders, and beers from all around the world, for less than the cost of a Chipotle burrito.
(also they love dogs!!! my dog had a great time, and I'm sure yours will too!)
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It’s never too early to vote for Ice Bear. He’s the only valid candidate, everyone else is nonexistent, so you have no choice. He’ll make the world a better place.
Ice Bear for President 2024
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the hollywood studios are the dumbest people alive bc now every american city with a large film/TV industry (LA, NYC, Atlanta, etc) are going to be overrun by grown up theatre kids (professional writers and actors) hanging out together in public for months on end with nothing to do but emulate newsies. whole american cities are about to look like the inside of a suburban dennys at 11 pm on a saturday after a high school musical closes. they have trapped millions of people in a hell of unimaginable proportions.
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gojo loves the marks you leave behind on his skin. it’s like they’re proof you were there, underneath him as he presses his cock deeper into the tight hug of your pussy— feeling your nails burn vermillion lines along the smooth skin of his back and shoulders with every orgasm he pulls from you.
he likes to admire them in the mirror, feeling a little smug despite the way he hisses when the steady stream from the shower head makes them burn slightly — aching everytime he’s trying to sleep at night.
but with every little shock of pain, gojo can remember the pretty face you made as your walls hugged around him— crying out his name in quick pants as his hips smacked against yours and he wouldn’t call himself a masochist but he loves it. he loves you.
even when he’s got you bouncing on his lap, his long fingers squeezing into the space where your thigh meets your hips, he’s intoxicated by the way you bury your face into the crook of his neck— his free palm curling at the back of your head, pressing you deeper until he can feel your teeth nipping at the skin there. his crystalline eyes almost roll back, snowy peaks of his hair framing his flushed features and he’s never came as hard or as fast as he did when you laved your tongue over the blooming marks you left across his throat.
gojo can’t help but press his fingers against them as he looks at himself in the mirror, hissing at the sting but he sees it as a silent little claim — teasing you about it later on, about how you “want everyone to know i’m yours, huh sweet thing? ‘ts cause i’m so handsome, right?”
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im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:
videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.
and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.
this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.
there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.
there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.
for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.
i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.
here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."
eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.
we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.
"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"
thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.
it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.
an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.
and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."
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also, that Dracula knew the exact day to lock Jonathan in his room to avoid any solicitor escapes tells me that 19th century fedex is better at telling their customers when their packages will arrive than any courier service in 2022. I haven’t had a package arrive on the day they said it would for a really long time. Yet here’s Dracula effectively stopping his pet lawyer from running out of the front door like a naughty cat when he opens it to sign for his lovely travel coffins.
customer service has gone to shit these days smh
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I've never felt more vindicated in my opinion that BG3 is an absolute crap Baldur's Gate game and only works as a Larian game than just now when I saw someone on tiktok say (and I quote)
"BG3 didn't get me into the Baldur's Gate series, it got me interested in Larian Studios' work."
BRUH.
No shade to the commenter because I absolutely get why they feel that way, that is not my issue. I'm just absolutely flabbergasted how you can fumble the "making a sequel" part of your job so bad, people legitimately don't give a shit about the previous installments or where the story might go from there. Maybe that would be understandable if the OG games were bad, but those are literally genere-defining classics???
People who haven't played BG1 and 2, don't play Durge and/or read up on the topic largely don't even know that Baldur's Gate is The Bhaalspawn Series because Larian almost completely stepped away from that in favour of making a self contained DnD original while still keeping the name. I feel like I'm going insane because I can't be the only one who is bothered by it? Right?? Hasn't Hollywood been getting shit for nostalgia bait constantly for the last few years? Yet people say this like it's a good thing, an achievement on Larian's part and a testament to how good the game is. Idk, it just leaves such a sour taste in my mouth.
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Hello Richard Club! Remember that post I made talking about an explicitly queer reinterpretation of Richard II, set in disco era NYC, and starring a Black nonbinary actor? Well that production was filmed and has just been released on the Stratford Festival’s streaming service: here is a link. The site offers a 7 day free trial.
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