TIL that Gary Chapman, the creator of the “five love languages,” is a Christian homophobe. He has an advice column and has given advice to pray the gay away. On his website he speaks about how sex is reserved for a man and woman in marriage.
He isn’t a psychologist or anything related to that field. He was a Christian pastor and he based his “languages” on things he thought up when counseling the members of his church. It’s all built on his beliefs and anecdotal hypotheses. His “languages” are what actual research scientists call “behaviors performed to enact intended relational maintenance.” As in, people in relationships doing things on purpose, not unthinkingly acting on their subconscious ways they express love.
One of his examples: a wife gets mad that her husband didn’t notice she did the laundry. She likes acts of service, so she was mad that her husband didn’t see her act of service.
My counter-point: idk if a wife gets mad that her husband didn’t notice or thank her for doing the housework maybe she has a point?
Anyway, this sucks because now I have to take a useful cultural shortcut phrase out of my vocabulary but also lmao the categories were stupid anyway
*shoutout to Shinigami Eyes for highlighting the link to his Wiki page and sending me down this rabbit hole
They did this book on the “if books could kill“ podcast, and so many of these advice books by dudes are just them talking about their own relationships, but not even aware that’s what they’re doing. They assume that if something worked for them ( or even that they just thought it might be something that worked for them), it must be a universal truth
hey, don’t cry. one cup heavy whipping cream, two tablespoons granulated sugar, three tablespoons cocoa powder and whisk until stiff peaks form for three ingredient chocolate mousse, okay?
This works great, it halves very easily, and still makes a good portion for one person with a sweet tooth, and also, Trader Joe’s – and possibly other grocery stores as well. I don’t know - has shelf stable whipping cream, so you can just have some for emergencies without worrying about it going off on you 
A MOUSE BAR DURING PROHIBITION WOULD BE CALLED A SQUEAKEASY!!!
this came to me in a vision btw. the vision was of a little mouse bartender yelling, “cheese it! it’s the cops!” and all the little mice flipping the bar and turning it into a fromagerie.
Three cats died after their owners used an anti-inflammatory cream used to treat arthritis. The Food and Drug Administration warns to keep drugs away from pets; a tiny bit can be toxic.
Important for spoonies with cats!
Creams with Flurbiprofen are fatal to cats.
Brands that use this chemical (Not a complete list):
Myoflex Traumeel Capzasin
If you have cats, check your pain relieving cream for this, and keep them from ingesting it, please!
All NSAIDs are toxic to cats - this includes ibuprofen (Advil/Motrin), Aleve (naproxen), Voltaren – which also comes in a gel form – (diclofenac), Mobic (meloxicam), aspirin… If you’re unsure, ask your pharmacist or check drugs.com.
hey, don’t cry. one cup heavy whipping cream, two tablespoons granulated sugar, three tablespoons cocoa powder and whisk until stiff peaks form for three ingredient chocolate mousse, okay?
i realized that i like the format because it’s the exact opposite of the recipe blogs with 1000 words before they get to an ingredient list.
But what grueling ordeal did your relative barely survive that led them to this recipe? If I don’t read that and 100 of the most irrelevant ads of my life I won’t be able to perfectly recreate the angst and despair that are the true secret ingredients of blog recipes.
When I was a little kid my mom worked grueling hours. She had a long commute, a stressful job, and very little time in her hands for keeping house.
She came from a very poor family - her parents met in the Depression in a mattress factory where workers stayed until they had worked enough to earn the price of a mattress, at which point they were paid with a mattress and moved on.
Being a large family with five kids and two working parents, my grandmother had a collection of recipes designed to feed a lot of people with minimal time and effort. Cottage cheese lasagna, wet dog chicken, and three bean chili were staples in her household.
My mom’s mom died when my mom was still in high school, and her dad passed a year later. My mom went to college on a scholarship while her older sisters cared for her younger siblings. There was a falling out in the family because of this - my mother couldn’t help to pay for her father’s headstone as an orphaned college student working at a Bob’s Big Boy, and her two eldest sisters were so offended that they cut contact for years.
After Aunt Beth died in a house fire with her two children, my mom and her sister Yvonne finally mended fences. Along with a renewed relationship with her sister, my mom also got access to her mother’s collection of recipe cards. She learned to make wet dog chicken, cottage cheese lasagna, and three bean chili and often left them cooking in the crockpot on her long days, slightly modernizing over the cast iron Dutch oven that her mother had used.
When I was old enough to stand at the stove I looked through this history of love and effort and tragedy and took a moment to reflect, because every one of those recipes sucked dog balls.
So when I want to cook something I search “easy [recipe]” and work backwards until I find something in my skill range that generally matches the ingredients in my pantry and doesn’t require washing more than four dishes. Then I tweak that recipe until it is gluten and corn free, and tastes good to me. And then I share it on tumblr so that other people can be spared from the horror of cottage cheese crockpot lasagna.
I just learned that Trader Joe’s labels some of its food as “Reduced Guilt.” There’s a brand of popcorn called “Lesser Evil.” I had to see an ad on Tumblr for a popular yogurt brand with the tagline of “Less sets you free.” I read the back of a food product once that described the food as “sinless.”
People literally choose a bag of carrots based on the calorie count. I’ve had to hear multiple people claim that fat people shouldn’t be allowed to eat fruit. There was a water brand at the grocery stored that advertised itself as having “zero calories.” A woman saw me next to some diet culture smoothie products and made small talk with me about how she didn’t understand why the diet culture smoothie made out of fruits and vegetables she was using to replace an entire meal with had a whopping 300 whole calories.
A man talked to me at the store about how he was there to buy a snack, which consisted of two hardboiled eggs and a packet of black pepper. He then told me about his weight loss dreams while being average-sized and thinner than I am.
I saw a post on Tumblr of someone praising a “bread” made out of tree bark that ancient Finnish people ate as a last resort during times of starvation, and they praised this “bread” because it had a fourth of the calories of regular bread—calories that would have saved the lives of countless Finnish people during those famines who instead had to die.
People on here passed around a video of some diet culture soup that promised a loss of 15 pounds in a matter of days, and all of the comments were people laughing at how it did so by making anyone who ate it shit their brains out for a week, yet the people who did were still satisfied with the diarrhea-induced weight loss.
There are so many accounts fat people can give you of thin people who did nothing to obtain their skinny person genetics physically taking food out of the fat person’s shopping cart because “You don’t need this.” And what the thin person decided a random fat stranger didn’t need was a fucking melon.
I’ve talked about this stuff before, but diet culture has legitimately become a cult that destroys lives and kills people by the hour. And yet public outrage isn’t about all of this. What people are so worried about is the fact that fat people merely exist. And that is apparently so horrible that we gotta make sure to tax sodas until us fatties go away, which people genuinely think will work.
What really adds insult to injury is how we have known for decades and decades that dieting has never worked from the beginning. But that doesn’t make corporations billions of dollars nor one group of people higher on the social hierarchy, so none of that research makes headlines like the next fruit that causes cancer or the new diet that pinkie promises it’ll work this time.
I want to scream.
Hey, could somebody summarize the maintenance phase podcast in one beautiful rant on Tumblr?
