Ordinarily Extraordinary

I think this might be the most beautiful meme I've ever seen. I just spent five minutes extolling all its virtues to my husband:

I love it and I love you for bringing it to me.

I will never not reblog this

tiktoks with vine energy pt. 8

You gotta watch this one the whole way through.

everybody else i ever met, aside from the six of you, was dust.

[image description: a stylized drawing of Taako, Magnus and Merle standing at the entrance to a cavern. Their shapes are dark and basically just silhouettes. In the foreground of the piece is a red-robed figure slumped against the cavern wall, a folded green umbrella in one of its hands.]

if you wiped every ICE agent off the face of the earth, a hundred million people would become safer overnight. if you wiped every furry off the face of the earth, the entire internet would collapse for good in a matter of hours. i know where my allegiances lie.

Everything I’ve Ever Let Go Of Has Claw Marks On It

"Every language is valid, regional dialects are a normal and natural part of the evolution of language even on a national scale, the names that other English-speaking countries give things are just as valid as yours" I say to myself through gritted teeth as I listen to Americans describe breakfast foods

Ok so I was going to launch into an explanation of how breakfast sausage is just a type of fresh sausage which, like many types of fresh sausage, can now be purchased sans casing to save you the trouble of removing it from the casing yourself...

...but then I started wondering what meat they put on breakfast sandwichs in AU if they don't use breakfast sausage and it turns out they DO use breakfast sausage, at least at McDonalds, which brings me to why I'm actually here:

What the hell is this

That's a big brekkie burger what's confusing

I want to consume that immediately with a violence of need that can only be American.

#WHY THE FUCK AUSSIES GOT BETTER BURGER THAN US#WE NEED TO INVADE

DON'T BLAME US IT'S YOUR FUCKING CHAIN RESTAURANT

Also @batmanthighhighboots - you can’t buy “sausage meat” in Australia. You can buy minced meat, but it seems to be a lot less fine than what I see Americans use in recipes online.

To try and use those recipes i just have to buy actual sausages and take the meat out of the skins.

Sausage only refers to actual sausages here. Also I’d call that a hamburger patty in the pic above, but that might just be me?

Also as Derin says- American chain 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also I gotta say, not once in my life have I considered peeling a sausage before cooking it. You can't just slice it up? Why have you gotta take his clothes off?

TIL that Australian Maccies just bung the hash browns in their McMuffin equivalent rather than having them as a side.

And is that barbecue or HP sauce, I wonder?

No we also have McMuffins, this is a burger.

ok so im on the mcdonalds AU site comparing things

is this actually sausage patty? or is this another burger patty?

Americans would call that one a sausage patty I think

yeah, it’s spiced in a way the normal beef patty isn’t, and we need some way to differentiate it so…it gets called sausage, even though it’s flat

Kinda like how, waffle variant aside, we only call the julienned potatoes prepared in hot oil fries if they’ve come from Maccas. They’re chips otherwise.

you absolutely can buy sausage meat for making patties in australia

the reason it's very easy to miss this is the profoundly unfortunate choice of many supermarkets to store it directly next to the chilled dogfood that comes in nigh identical packaging

Yeah I always just assumed that that whole fridge area was dog food

But why's it beef? Breakfast sausage is seasoned and minced pork.

In Australia, sausages are beef by default. You can buy pork or chicken or lamb sausages but your standard sausage is beef. Sausage rolls and pasties (the things that people would likely buy this to make) are also beef by default. I've never seen a pork sausage roll or pork pastie in my life (although I'm sure you can probably get them in some places).

We don't really do "breakfast sausage" here. If you have a sausage for breakfast in Australia you'd be having one of these:

alongside your eggs or whatever for a big heavy breakfast.

You know, that's the one thing that's pretty uncommon here in the US to the best of my knowledge. We have chicken and pork sausage but minced beef is never a "sausage" per se.

Everything is beef in Australia. We raise a LOT of cows here.

Everything that isn't beef is lamb.

Come to think of it I'm starting to understand the common US reaction to our sausages in bread.

You guys aren't trying to replicate this dish with a PORK sausage, are you???

if you tell an american “sausage” with no other descriptors theyre going to think pork sausage before anything else so probably

This revelation that your sausages aren't beef by default is fucking me up. I rescind the sentiment of the original post, there is a right and wrong way to do these things, and "sausage" being assumed to be beef is the correct way. Pork sausages should be a niche item. I'm not going to be able to get over this. Your country is fucking weird.

But without pork sausage, how're you gonna have a proper pig in a blanket?

IS THAT WHY THEY'RE CALLED THAT???

Yes, but like rarely are they called that. The vast majority of the time they're just called sausage roles.

We have sausage rolls here, there's beef mince in them.

Okay but do the sandwiches posted earlier just taste like regular burger? In the US them being pork is part of it but also they're spiced completely differently than burgers

McDonald's hamburger patties are beef in Australia. If you're gonna tell me that your default McDonald's hamburger patties are pork I am going to McFuckin Lose It.

McDonald's hamburgers are beef. If i go out and get a burger, I'm expecting it to be beef unless otherwise specified. But if I'm going out and getting a breakfast sandwich, then I am, by default, expecting some form of pork on it, either via sausage or bacon. So I think the question is, for the big brekkie burger, are those patties made from beef or pork?

It's not a breakfast sandwich, I'm pretty sure breakfast sandwiches are an American thing. You can put bacon and eggs on toast here but we wouldn't call it a breakfast sandwich it's just bacon and eggs on toast. The Big Brekkie Burger is a hamburger that is part of the McDonald's breakfast menu.

“It’s not a breakfast sandwich” and “it’s part of McDonald’s breakfast Menu” Is kinda a weird thing to say back to back like that. Like, yeah, you can put egg and bacon on a sandwich and decide not to call it a breakfast sandwich, but most people are going to rightly assume it is one. The fact that the place you’re buying it also markets it as a breakfast sandwich sure isn’t doing your argument any favors.

What I mean is that "breakfast sandwich" is not a distinct category of food here that would imply certain ingredients. If you called this a breakfast sandwich then we'd deduce what you meant, and McDonald's here sells the Sausage and Egg McMuffin which I have deduced from the notes of this post counts as a breakfast sandwich in America, but an Australian seeing something called the Big Brekkie Burger would not expect it to have sausage meat in it. The idea that it would have sausage meat in it because it's a "breakfast sandwich" is nonsense in Australia, that's not a thing here. It says "burger" and doesn't specify a particular meat in the name, so that means beef patties, and anything other than beef patties would be a surprise and a disappointment. It's a burger on the breakfast menu and an Australian would expect burger meat served during breakfast menu service hours.

(The Sausage and Egg McMuffin specifies sausage, and while an Australian might ask "isn't that an inconvenient shape to put into a muffin?" they would not be overly disappointed to receive the sausage meat instead because like, that makes perfect sense as an ingredient shape in the context of that food item. A completely ignorant Australian would be weirded out by the 'sausage' being pork but it's an American restaurant chain so after learning that that's what an American considers to be 'sausage' they'd shrug it off and concede that they should have read the ingredients before ordering.)

Useful context information: a lot of cafés and coffee shops here in .au sell what is called the "Big Breakfast", which consists of: sausages (usually beef chipolatas, x2), fried bacon, fried mushroom, fried tomato, a hash brown, and eggs whichever way the customer wants them (choices are usually poached, fried or scrambled), often served with a slice of toast and some baked beans (in tomato sauce) as well. The Maccas burger pictured at the top of this post contains many, but not all, of the ingredients of a café "big breakfast".

I hope this helps to either resolve some confusion, or causes more of the same (because this is a derin post and confusion appears to be par for the course with those).

I do have to say. That McDonald’s “Big Brekkie Burger” is likely not American to begin with, as calling breakfast “brekkie” is not a thing we do, nor would we call a breakfast sandwich a burger in any context. Nor would barbecue sauce be involved in any way. It may have been a short lived promotional thing, but we do not eat this.

Beef is Only brought into American breakfast when steak or corned beef hash is involved, or in some regions, ground beef sawmill gravy served on toast called Shit on a Shingle by some. It’s a military thing.

Sausage in America can mean many things, but by and large, it is pork based. We have so much pork, you have no idea how much pork we have. Plus we have national and state pork associations constantly wanting us to eat more pork. We typically have two choices for breakfast sausage, patties and links. Both are seasoned with similarly, but patties, as you have seen are without a casing. Some links also come without casings, especially at diners. Breakfast sandwiches are classic convenience food here and can be had at almost any outlet every morning. Turkey sausages are also to be had at breakfast for those inclined, but rarely at restaurants.

(You didn’t ask but my peak breakfast sandwich is indeed the sausage egg and cheese biscuit at McDonald’s. Biscuit meaning the butter and buttermilk based fluffy deliciousness of course, not a cookie.)

The only time you’ll see beef sausages here is if you are talking hot dogs, smoked sausage, or polish sausages, which are an entirely different classification of sausages. It frankly blows my mind that your breakfast sausages are beef, but now I want to try them.

"they just toss on the ol' carabineer keychain and they're like, 'see ya at the parade'" is sending me

the resurgence of Thin being In has made thin people so much more fucking annoying i keep seeing recipe and gardening videos or tiktoks that look good or are informative but the (very much thin!!) creators can't stop going "oh gotta get my FAT ASS to work in the garden!! 😂 making some tortillas because i'm a FAT LARD ASS, sorry for adding two tablespoons of oil to this i'm such a fucking BIG BACK FAT DIPSHIT aren't i 😂😂" are you not embarrassed

a lot of the time people talk about this as "self deprecation," and while i think there's a lot to be said about, well, why is fatness such an insult to you as to use it in your self effacement, i think the gleeful nature in which it's delivered betrays that it's much less about self-insult and much more about confirmation of the in-group. i think this is well illustrated by the way people will re-appropriate language around mental illness and substance use disorders, and most especially highly stigmatized diagnoses. when people call themselves "schizo" because they looked at their ex's Instagram, "ocd" because they showed up five minutes early, "a total crackhead" because they made a joke etc. it's typically not an expression of sincere negative self image or identification so much as a joke which presumes the absence of the referenced group; you're non-psychotic, i'm non-psychotic, and in the comfortable absence of anyone actually different, their life/identity/disorder/experience etc. can be used as a joking reference towards the other which, through hyperbole, affirms the norm; my experience of reality is so in line with psychiatric normalcy that asking you to text when you get home is so totally psychotic of me, an affirmation that my relationship to psychosis is so distanced as to make it more representative than anything. and in a similar way, fatness and fat bodies are so intentionally absent from these spaces that they're shouted out only as playful insults towards the behavior of skinny people, or at their most serious as a warding spell against the horror of gaining weight. when you have no fat friends, loved ones, lovers held in esteem in your mind, the idea of fat rolls or a belly or thick thighs are made references to bodies which are less human than symbol; calling yourself a "big back" when you eat works the same as calling yourself a "dog" when you express too much interest in somebody or a "snake" when you're duplicitous. we don't have to worry about offending them via the comparison, we can assume they're not present here. but isn't it funny that of all the traits and cultural products of fatness that are endlessly more praised and rewarded when taken up by our thin peers, even referencing your own body as fat is among them?

Absolutely wild to me how sometimes you don't even realize the way you'd been taught to perceive things as a kid was kinda fucked up, actually, until decades later.

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

Right. Of course. Right.

I didn’t realize how much I lived in fear of making a mistake until I was technically an adult.

My friend and I were driving to Indianapolis to meet my sister to run in a Color Run for charity. We were coming in the night before so that we could stay at a hotel and get there early to explore the park. At this time, GPS was spotty at best, and I hadn’t driven in the area before, or in any large cities, and it was dark.

We arrived at the address I had put into the GPS, as my sister called asking where the hell we were, and we realized that we weren’t in the right place. I had forgotten a W or an E in the address, and we were over half an hour away from where we were supposed to be.

My body paralyzed itself with shame and I had to focus on not just breaking down and sobbing with fear. I had ruined everything by being careless. Again.

My friend wasn’t even phased. She said, no worries, we can stop and get a soda and head back toward the hotel. It’s not a big deal.

And it really hit me. It wasn’t a big deal. It was a setback but not a serious one. Why was I so conditioned to react this way?

The next time I was home, I knocked over a cup and spilled some water on the kitchen floor, and when I turned to get a towel, my mom proceeded to snap at me to be careful and that I had never been able to pay attention to what I was doing and on and on.

I’ve worked for years to get her voice out of my head, but even so, sometimes I have to really stop and say to myself, no worries. It’s not a big deal.

"All monsters must die bloody, and by a hero's hands, and soon," he says over brunch.

He doesn't think it's a rude thing to say in front of a monster. There are no rude things to say to monsters, only rude things monsters say.

"Don't worry," she says between bites, "You're one of the good ones."

"But I am still a monster," I do not say. I do not say that I love my claws and teeth, my prehensile shadow and my glowing eyes. That I cannot imagine giving them up even for survival, that to hide my shadow and trim my claws for them makes me feel diminished. In public I cannot say that I do not wish to be human.

They're progressives, this bunch, even if he carries a hero's banner with its proud history and none of them ask him to put it away. They know there are good monsters, monsters who can speak eloquently and hold the fork right, monsters you can be seen with in public. Some of their best friends are monsters.

They do not know the monster who is invited to brunch knows solidarity with the monster who is not. Believes and understands the monster who is not invited more than the human who does the inviting.

"Isn't that a little harsh?" says a third human, and I have not forgotten I am outnumbered. "We have ways of killing monsters without blood now, painlessly. And, of course, a monster should be allowed to live if it never growls."

He has never seen me growl. Yet how loudly and endlessly I will, when I'm out of earshot. He's talking about killing monsters who cannot stoop to civility, about mother and brother and lover who were never able to mute themselves like me, and does he not know how small a child who can only growl is?

"To growl is not to kill," I say, and all heads turn toward me. It is one of those rude things monsters say.

Superman desperately scanning the street during a fight to find the most morally acceptable car to throw at his opponent, knowing that not everybody has insurance, and loss of transportation can ruin a life -

A wave of incredible relief washes over him as he spots the hard geometric lines and silver paintless sheen of a Cybertruck.

— Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) (via Regina Rosenfeld)

If you had an identical twin that you get along with, you could probably have a lot of fun by getting to know other sets of identical twins and then pulling pranks with them.

Like seeing two people who look exactly the same close proximity to each other? Yeah that's totally twins. But imagine being in an art gallery where there's a group of five people on the 1st floor, and you go up the stairs and ???? the exact same group of five people is also there?? And you didn't see them pass you at the stairs?

I was halfway through a semester of biology lab before realizing that two out of the four people in my lab group were identical twins. In my defense, they never talked about being siblings, one sat across from me and the other beside me, so I never saw them side by side, and I’m also mild to moderately face blind. 😂

All this to say, I would either have my mind BLOWN by a trick like this, or completely fail to notice. Haha.

sometimes it's not even enemies to lovers. sometimes you get handed the leash of a snarling, barking dog against your will and realize with dawning horror that you are now responsible for teaching it not to bite