kinda! that stamp was the name of the baker. a number of communities throughout history have used communal ovens for a number of reasons - cost, safety, etc

the stamp was so you knew which bread was yours, and likely also a maker's mark - less likely to make shit bread if everyone knows it was you

the history of bread has been similar; there was a time period where adulteration of flour with things like alum was happening at scale

like dgmw i'm pretty introverted and i don't always want to do this, but that's just a personal preference, it doesn't make social games definitionally immoral

The USPS still has one mail route to the bottom of the Grand Canyon that's delivered by mule train every day. Amazon would never.

the fourth kind I see is someone asking "what's this thing on my wall or ceiling, please don't tell me it's termites"

(it's always termites)

this post brought to you by flipping through my obscene stack of community cookbooks and wondering if baker's ammonia was from something similar to pearlash

nope! it's hartshorn

we just don't have that ability now. all of our righteous sound and fury can be ignored unless we figure out how to do it in a large enough group

diogenes was being a smug fuck just like we are when we're winding up to honk the clown nose someone has put on themselves, but he was also providing a meaningful counterexample to someone powerful in a way that person couldn't ignore.

never mind the fact that this story is probably apocryphal

it's a temporary balm for the deep psychic wounds that constant exposure to bad news has been inflicting for decades. most of us have been carrying this unspeakable mental agony since we were very young, now. we were not built for this.

we don't get that privilege tho. we get screaming multi-layered snippets of terminally-online inside baseball into the void and hoping the echo is validating. it's not really advancing anything; it's just self-soothing