Ropa vieja is hearty stewed beef with a complicated history. Translating as “old clothes,” this dishes’ name most likely comes from the fact that the beef (usually skirt or flank steak) is shredded rather than cubed or sliced, giving it a metaphorical resemblance to threadbare clothing. Some go so far as to attribute the name to a folktale about a desperate farmer cooking old clothes until, through the force of his love, they transmute into beef stew. The name may instead refer to how ropa vieja is often made from the leftovers of other meals, an “old dressing” for something else.

Descended from recipes most likely invented by Spain’s Sephardic Jewish population before the Spanish Inquisition, ropa vieja spread through southern Spain and then the Canary Islands. It was most likely from Canary Islanders, overrepresented among Spanish settlers in its new empire, that ropa vieja arrived in Latin America, where it spread across the region. Like many dishes with Spanish origins, ropa vieja has variations across Spain’s former colonial holdings, as far away as the Philippines, with subtle differences and local customizations throughout, but it is most famous as a fixture of Cuban cooking.

Ropa vieja is the national dish of Cuba, and restaurants across the island and its diaspora proudly feature this fixture of the Cuban palate. It is time-consuming to prepare from scratch but deceptively simple in both ingredients and execution, hearkening to its centuries-long history. Neither simplicity could save ropa vieja from the trials of its homeland, however, and the dish spent several periods of Cuban history fading into its own background. Long periods of privation sometimes made beef difficult to procure, pushing Cuban cuisine in other directions, and substitutions with more easily acquired pork or lamb were not always sufficient to keep ropa vieja a mainstream dish in Cuba. This classic would not be lost in or out of the island, however, and not just because the rest of Latin America and the Cuban diaspora kept it alive. Enshrinement as the national dish and increased beef availability have revived ropa vieja into a mainstream, if still more expensive than ideal, dish in Cuba, and it remains a treasured taste of home for Cubans far away.

This recipe serves eight and reheats well. Ropa vieja is typically served with rice, often in the congri style, and fried plantains (tostones) or yuca. Note that this dish has a long cooking time, upwards of three hours, and should be planned accordingly.

This recipe is based on one from ¡Cuba Cocina! by Joyce Lafray.

Equipment

You will need a large pot, a food processor, your preferred tool for occasionally flipping a large piece of meat, a cutting board, your preferred knives, and a blender or food processor.

Ingredients

• Fennel, 1 bulb
• Skirt steak or flank steak, 800 grams
• Water, 2 liters
• Bay leaves, 2
• Green bell pepper, 1
• Cuban oregano, leaves from one long branch
• Canned whole tomatoes, 796 mL
• Red cooking wine, 15 mL or 1 tablespoon
• Red or orange bell pepper, 1
• Sazón with culantro and achiote, 2 tablespoons or 30 mL
• Frozen chopped spinach, 50 grams
• Frozen peas and carrots, approximately the volume of a fist
• Black pepper, to taste

Common Food Restrictions

• Gluten-Free: This recipe is naturally gluten-free.
• Ketogenic / Low-Carb: Decide how you feel about the carrots, peas, and fennel.
• Low-FODMAP: This recipe is optimized to reduce FODMAP content. If necessary, switch sazón for salt.
• Vegetarian/Vegan:  A specific meat is the centerpiece of this stew, so a vegetarian substitute is unlikely.

Preparation

1. Separate the fennel stems from the fennel bulb and reserve.
2. Dice the fennel using a food processor.
3. Combine the diced fennel from Step 2, the steak, the water, and the bay leaves and bring to a boil.
4. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 2.5 hours uncovered. The steak is done when it can be shredded easily by hand with two forks. By this point, the water should have mostly evaporated. If not, remove all but ½ cup after the cooking time is complete.
5. When meat has cooled, shred the steak until it consists of threadlike strips.
6. Blend the green bell pepper, Cuban oregano, and canned whole tomatoes together in a food processor until no large chunks remain. It may be helpful to chop the green bell pepper first.
7. Combine the shredded steak from Step 5 and the items from Step 6 and cook on medium for 7–8 minutes.
8. Chop the red bell pepper.
9. Combine the items from Step 7, the sazón, the chopped red bell pepper from Step 8, and the frozen vegetables and continue cooking until the sauce reaches the desired consistency and the frozen items are heated through and thoroughly mixed with everything else.
10. Add black pepper to taste.
11. Spoon onto plates with desired accompaniments and serve.

It might be a recent addition to my culinary repertoire, but ropa vieja is destined to become a regular part of my rotation. Few things can taste more like home or feel cozier than the national dish of one’s ancestry, and I look forward to many comfy evenings with old clothes. May this dish be as pleasant for you.

The post Ropa Vieja, Alyssa Style appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

As the description of my Patreon benefits reveals, one of my pastimes is diving into the filtered folders of my Facebook and Instagram messenger accounts and engaging with the …entities…I find within. I do so while taking on comedic personas ranging from “vampiric last queen of Hungary” to “demon cultist seeking sacrifices” to “someone who collects and tans the hides of infidels.” Once each month, I perform a dramatic reading of one of these chat logs and post it on Patreon as a benefit for my patrons. I’ve been doing this for a long time and the results have been both very funny and decidedly edifying. Let’s begin.

Anatomy of a Rando

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: actual, worthwhile human beings attempting to connect sincerely represent a vanishingly tiny minority of the unsolicited messages one can expect to receive on social media, full stop. They happen, but they are such a small fraction of the pie chart that the main reason to mention them at all is completeness. Most sincere connections on social media start elsewhere, in groups or comment threads, making any ensuing message exchange no longer unsolicited.

Who, then, are the teeming others?

One might expect these contacts to be a comparative cross-section, if not of humanity, then of speakers of one’s preferred language, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Social media randos are extremely, improbably specific in nature, and those specifics paint a rather grim picture.

Facebook

On Facebook, the standard rando is a resident of North Africa or southwestern Asia, with Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan overrepresented. He is a man between 20 and 40 years of age. He is frequently unemployed. His English is competent but not exemplary. He is very curious about your location and whether you’re single. He will often decide apropos of very little, even nothing at all, that a woman who responds to him is his partner, lover, or wife and address her as such. Whether or not he does, he will request photographs, and he will react with confusion if those photographs arrive in the form of an Instagram link. Regardless of his employment status, he will never, ever make a purchase or send money, even if that would be the most obvious path to something he requests, and he will react with wounded, downright whiny frustration at the mere suggestion. After all, you’re his lover/wife/partner now, and those are just things lovers/spouses/partners do together.

Facebook randos usually last a long, long time. Regardless of the intensity of the comedic persona one establishes for dealing with them, even if one directly insults them, they will keep coming back for more. Some of them seem to desire little more than to trade greetings every morning and contribute virtually nothing to a conversation, in a pattern women on dating sites will find familiar. Younger randos often fill an exchange with animated GIFs and emojis proclaiming their love. Randos of all ages will send dick pics before long, mixed in with selfies, and their stammering confusion when one likens their photos to walruses giving birth to farm equipment or someone taking a meat-tenderizing hammer to a sack of boiled shrimp never gets old. Some of them have wives and children, but most of them give off a sense of eternal, pathetic singlehood, mixed with the unstated but pervasive goal of getting an immigration sponsorship.

With or without hilariously premature proclamations of love, it does not take much for any of these men to start discussing their sexual fantasies in detail, even with a comedic persona seemingly intent on removing their bones or who likens their genitals to bucket of gunk from an abattoir and their face to a diseased foot. Most of them assume I have a penis and place special emphasis on this detail. These fantasies often arrive in single long messages rather than chains, which makes them difficult to interrupt with the same madness I offer between their other missives. Sometimes they do this repeatedly.

All of this adds up to some truly unpleasant conclusions: these men are here because they think random Western women will give them something they want and they get annoyed, however patiently, if they don’t get it. And since what they want is sex, a spousal immigration sponsorship, or both, it paints a rather disgusting picture of what they think of Western women in general. To spell it out, the archetypal Facebook rando is a man who thinks women from the US and Canada are his for the sexual taking and who faces the idea that said women might expect anything from him in return with annoyed bafflement at best. These men are inept, gross, patriarchal, transmisogynistic, desperate, sad, deceptive, unpleasant characters and for all that there’s an undercurrent of tragedy in them, I take great pleasure in milking them for all the content they’re worth.

Instagram

Bizarrely, Instagram’s randos are a very different beast. There are plenty of randos on Instagram who match the Facebook pattern above, but a far greater proportion of Instagram randos are residents of the United States or Canada, with language proficiency to match. Whether Anglophone by childhood or adulthood, they carpet-bomb the inboxes of every attractive woman they can find, but what they do with the rare acknowledgement varies.

A lot of well-spoken randos assume that any attractive woman they encounter who posts a lot of selfies is a sex worker and immediately start haggling over price, often with a dick pick in between as, I suppose, a bargaining chip. These men are obnoxiously cheap, much like the men who haggle with craftspeople on Etsy, and they have a habit of lobbing insults when they don’t like the price or a woman’s willingness to hold it. And they really don’t like when she won’t take video calls for free, or when she’s just as content to not get the client because the price she sets is more about dissuading these men than turning a profit. I did get one who paid me to “watch” him masturbate, though; I minimized the Instagram chat window, stared into the camera, waited for the squelching noises to stop, accepted payment, and sent him on his way.

A similarly large subset is here because, to them, Instagram is a dating site. These men are much, much more awkward than they think they are and their attempted smoothness would be endearing if it weren’t so overtly pathetic. Instagram is, after all, not actually a dating site, so it makes no attempt to sort people by compatibility or even facilitate connection between people near each other, so these men are pleasantly surprised when one of their contacts not only acknowledges them at all but turns out to be in the same country, let alone the same city. These men, too, are shocked to learn that a woman won’t video-call with strangers within minutes of meeting them, especially strangers who, often, think a dick pick is a good third or fourth entry in repartee. Notably, they react with a special brand of aggrieved frustration when they find out that she might accept that call for a fee. If he’s treating Instagram like a dating site, any suggestion that the person he’s talking to thinks of him, not as a prospective lover, but as a potential client, is an insult.

Amusingly, this side of Instagram is often how I find out when there’s a rash of right-wing goons heading to Ottawa to pitch a US-sponsored truck-themed fit about “freedom,” because they turn up in my inbox hoping to get laid while they’re in town. It is a treat to disappoint them.

A noteworthy minority of Instagram randos are, effectively, an extreme version of Facebook’s randos. These men, usually from the same North African and southwestern Asian countries as their much more pathetic Facebook counterparts, assume that any western woman who acknowledges them at all, especially one who posts a lot of sexy selfies, must be desperately eager and freely available for sexual purposes. These men start talking sex, or attempting to initiate video calls, immediately, often in lieu of a greeting. Whether these men react with hurt or rage when I tell them there’s a fee for those calls depends on their mood, but in between, they’re by far my favorites. Their sheer determination to get their rocks off means they continue even when my contribution to their sexual escapade is talking about how I’m going to harvest their teeth in their sleep and their attempts to keep twisting my madness toward their arousal are very, very funny.

The other surprise of Instagram randos is that, presumably thanks to this site’s crop having a larger number of people fully comfortable in English, Instagram randos (specifically the ones who think it’s a dating site) are disproportionately likely to play along with a comedic persona I employ and turn it into a collaborative art project of sorts. The results are often the most fun I ever have in this line of work.

The true strangeness of Instagram really sets in, however, when we talk about the other kind of rando that turns up in every filtered inbox: scammers.

Scams

Filtered message folders on Facebook and Instagram are those sites’ versions of the Spam folder in every competent Email service, and like those spam folders, they are absolutely crawling with scams and grifts. What’s interesting is that the kinds of malfeasance in each service’s inboxes are vastly different.

Facebook’s quintessential criminal is running an advance-fee scam, better known as the “Nigerian prince” or “Spanish lottery” scam. In this structure, the scammer dangles a sizable payout before their victim and then tells the victim that accessing this payout requires a small fee paid in advance…which, of course, will never actually lead to that payout. Whether the payout is the internationally locked money of African royalty, the winnings of a foreign lottery, or (the situation I encounter most often) an advance payment for becoming some anonymous millionaire’s sugar baby, the structure is always the same. Indeed, the same scammer might use multiple versions in different messages or forget which one he is using this time and suddenly start talking about “payroll” for sugar babies. Advance-fee scam accounts tend to be created and maintained just for this purpose with the most anodyne white-man names imaginable, and they are usually run out of cubicle farms in Anglophone developing countries; one way they reveal themselves is that they usually put the dollar sign after, rather than before, the amount. A scam account is a temporary, consumable expense rather than an asset to these scam farms, as mass reporting by those who interact with them tends to get Facebook to delete them before long, leaving a long trail of blank “Facebook User” messages in my inbox. The absolute funniest scammers try to trick me into handing over the information needed for identity theft once it’s clear I’ve seen through the advance-fee scam.

Other scammers on Facebook hawk investment opportunities, which might be more advance-fee scams and might be other kinds of scams like investing in cryptocurrency.

On Instagram, however, actual scams (that is, the outright lies noted above) take a back seat to grifts (dodgy investments that might pay off for the victim but will definitely pay off for the person pitching them if the victim buys in). Any given Instagram spam folder is filled to the brim with accounts all making the same pitch: pay “shipping only” for some merchandise, give a positive review on one’s page and sometimes on theirs as well, and get further perks and even cash payouts if one’s post generates a lot of traffic or sales. The accounts are all temporary and often unmonitored, directing people to message an “official” account because they know they will get mass-reported to oblivion before long. They also know several other convenient facts: the user does not know whether “shipping only” is actually “shipping only”; only a tiny minority of accounts that get this pitch actually have enough reach to start getting paid for their work; and if the victim is sufficiently eager, they might not even notice that these grifters usually refuse to lay out contract terms in advance or otherwise provide any assurance that anything past the initial “shipping only” promo code is real.

If Facebook’s advance-fee scams feel like a relic of an earlier time, of a piece with Email chain letters from decades past, then Instagram’s influencer grifts feel like a sadly modern plague: preying on the hopes of people who see the low barrier to entry and glamourous results that life as an Instagram influencer promises and extracting near-uncompensated labor from them in the process. I did get one of these to start hitting on me after I dodged their grift and another one to curse me out in Cebuano, though, so it’s not all bad.

The Horny Underbelly

Acknowledging the cesspits that adjoin one’s various inboxes is not for the faint of heart. The people who find their way in there are, with only rare exceptions, some of the least appetizing creatures the Internet has to offer, and they are by turns pathetic, grotesque, offensive, and useless. These people have no redeeming qualities and, often, are so openly despicable that antagonizing them is, if anything, a public good. The randos I confront often make me think of my favorite quote from the film Sin City: “I love hitmen. No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.” And for someone who knows how to toy with these useless sacks of their parents’ regret, they are also a source of tremendous amusement…as long as one is prepared to live the life of that one GIF of Lindsay Ellis getting pelted with hot dogs. By Cthulhu’s jowls, there are so many hot dogs.

The post Rando Farming appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

It turns out, if you have artist friends, you can pay them to make art and then they’ll make art for you.

A while back, I commissioned an artist I know, Jenn St-Onge, to create a grand tableau for me: nine of my past Dungeons and Dragons characters, sampled from across the decades that I’ve been a tabletop RPG player, filling seats in a tavern. Like every trans person who has played D&D, the characters I’ve created over the years have reflected aspects of myself and shifted as my self-concept evolved, and etching that evolution across a shared, warmly lit scene sounded wonderful.

And it is wonderful. Gaze upon the magnificence that the lady St-Onge created for me, or as much of it as this site’s image compression permits. Take in the sheer opulent massiveness of the new 90-cm-wide digital painting on my wall. Behold.

But who are these nine stars of so many of my free hours? Let’s meet the cast of my grandest art acquisition yet, starting counterclockwise from top right.

Laertes

Raised in a monastery and schooled in unarmed combat, this lizardfolk monk lost his home in a gnoll attack shortly after he found out he was a prophesied champion. The prophecy didn’t amount to much in his life, but seeing the world took him far indeed. Principled and courageous, he never did get the hang of his rather more freewheeling adventuring companions. Laertes was my first serious “DMPC,” created to help fill in a too-small party the first time I served as a long-term Dungeon Master for my high-school D&D group.

Laotzuas

An odd addition to a low-magic campaign loosely themed on The Lord of the Rings, Laotzuas was a half-troglodyte ninja, using racial traits I created myself and a class from a third-party handbook. Laotzuas grew up among his reptilian kin and left them as an adult to find out more about his human heritage. Before long, he reunited with his father and joined his father’s ninja clan, the Order of the Serpent. The biggest impression he made on the wider world was his habit of collecting and preserving the heads of interesting adversaries. Laotzuas was a connoisseur of poisons, a dirty fighter, and generally not a nice person, but he was the right addition to a team of fighters who needed all the stealthy help they could get. This character served me during a time when my high-school D&D group had five different campaigns running at once, switching between them depending on which player (if any) couldn’t make it that Saturday.

Arduis VællaŒtikos

Arduis was my first character, a half-elf fighter with improbably good stats, big armor, and a huge scythe. He drank hard, he fought hard, and he was fond of spinning attacks that made the whole area around him a killing field. Roleplay was not yet a skill I had cultivated and Arduis’s personality was not well developed, but he took on the mantle of the war god’s favorite with steadily increasing aplomb and remains a pleasant memory.

Becksorack of the Mammoth Clan

Created in part to take advantage of a generous reading of several rule interactions, Becksorack of the Mammoth Clan was a human raised by Neanderthals who learned to channel his barbarian rage into the ability to take the form of a dire wolverine, in honor of his primal patron spirit. Confused and unimpressed with the trappings of urban life, he tore through his foes like a hot wolverine through a bear’s better judgement and needed to be told multiple times to not let his pet wolf hunt stray pets within city limits. I used this character for a friend’s first time in the DM seat and I cannot for the life of me remember who the rest of his team was. The big man of the Mammoth Clan, it seems, was larger than life.

Cochikuka kha Wiki’i

Created for a short campaign focused on Lovecraftian threats, Cochikuka was a variant goblin druid who left his desert village to advance his healing arts and defeat alien threats. Kind, peaceful, and a skilled summoner, his true goal was to become a skilled enough healer to restore the hands of his love, Namatagi’na, which were mangled in a monster attack, to enable her to paint again. He never did get that far, as the campaign did not last long, but his healing skills were much appreciated by his new friends. Cochikuka was one of the last characters I played with my first Dungeon Master, and likely the most different from the others.

Torklirlia

During my bachelor’s degree, I ended up playing with a mostly new group, and I took on the mantle of Dungeon Master in an early test run of a campaign setting I was writing. The group was, once more, too small, so my DMPC was Torklirlia, a small humanoid with long tentacle arms called a choker. (Cue post-hoc transfeminine giggling.) Torklirlia trained as a specialist in grappling and proved very good at it, but what he is most remembered for is how he contracted a mutagenic fungal infection that caused his eyes to skin over. Once a faithful, lovelorn servant of the Queen of the Chokers, Torklirlia began to reevaluate his life when he realized that his choker society was in thrall to mind flayers and his queen’s mind had been replaced with one of their creation. Originally tasked with helping his adventuring party fulfill the Queen’s goals, he ended up part of the team that slew her and, eventually, saved the cosmos.

Avanthika Rigby

A more recent character, Avanthika is the first in this crowd created with the current fifth-edition Dungeons and Dragons rules and devotes herself to a strange insect-like being with the oaths of a warlock and paladin. A seeker of knowledge and defender of those who seek and spread it, Avanthika wears a lab coat, fights with a halberd made of giant insect parts, and transforms her clothing, weapons, and armor into her “guardian form” when danger is afoot. Avanthika has had appearances in two different abortive campaigns and remains a concept I enjoyed crafting.

Rokaru

By far my most outgoing and madcap character, Rokaru is a giant anthropomorphic parrot with the power to create orbs of psychic force, accompanied by a spidery levitating crystal and carrying a club studded with shark’s teeth. He is deeply claustrophobic, more than a little insane, and prone to fits of suicidal bravery, including a time when he took an exploding cannonball to the face for no good reason and his remains had to be retrieved from all over the city. Rokaru was a lot of fun to roleplay.

Anastrianna Wrenfoot

Awkward, naïve, and all-around excited to be here, Anastrianna Wrenfoot is a half-elf wizard whose wizardly specialty is catching the magical beasts she encounters and turning them into her summoned allies. Yes, I homebrewed a wizard specialty themed on Pokémon, and I enjoyed the fruits of that effort. Anastrianna never met a meeting she couldn’t start by asking whether the host had put a kettle on and never met a lie she couldn’t improve by claiming to be the local “rat inspector.” Pet black caiman by her side, menagerie on her belt, she was ready for anything, and made a good impression on the team of wizards she was helping explore the southern end of a tidally locked planet. Perhaps someday her griffon egg will hatch.

Since I commissioned this piece, I’ve added one more character to my roster, but this scene was full with its existing nine and adding another would have required redoing most of it, so that was a nonstarter. Maybe I’ll arrange another painting after I accumulate another nine noteworthy characters, set up to be a commentary on this one in some way. I’ve been playing a lot of Lancer lately, though, and mixing mecha pilots with fantasy RPG heroes in the same art presents, shall we say, a challenge of scale.

Mostly, though, I want you all gushing at this art with me. I’m so pleased.

Now go pay Jenn St-Onge for delights of your own.

The post Check Out This Art! appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

I recently trained as a bookkeeper to diversify my skills and bring new functions to my workplace. It’s not much like my official role as a science writer, but it was a natural fit for someone as comfortable with spreadsheets as I am. Entering this distinct sphere was an interesting experience that broadened my horizons more than I expected. Bookkeepers are the unsung heroes of so many human endeavors, places where records all combine and become comprehensible summaries to guide the future. Bookkeeping is an extraordinarily old profession, and its current form traces back to the practices of 14^th-century Venetian merchants.

Despite literally predating capitalism, bookkeeping is also one of the places where the base logic of capitalism sneaks into our lives, and it starts with the accounting equation.

The Accounting Equation

One of the first things that bookkeepers learn is the accounting equation, which defines the various categories where money can be. This equation has two versions. The short version is used to track the state of the business at any given moment, and what it might look like to an outside buyer.

Assets = Liabilities + Equity

Assets are material or non-material objects the business owns or controls and can further be divided into numerous categories: cash on hand, inventory, office furniture, prepaid rent, intellectual property, and more. Liabilities include loans, sales that clients paid for in advance, gift cards sold, and anything else that represents money that the business currently holds but must return to another person in some way, whether as items, cash, or services. Equity is money directly contributed by the business’s owners, including the results of selling shares on the stock market.

Because this is an equation, the two sides must balance; an imbalance means something is missing or has been counted twice. Balancing this equation is the bookkeeper’s core task.

Perceptive readers may already see the capitalism sneaking in, but it gets more obvious with the expanded accounting equation used to track changes in the business’s accounts over a defined span of time, such as a month or a year:

Assets + Expenses = Liabilities + Equity + Revenue

In both versions, the left side of the equation is what the business spent money on, and the right side is where that money came from. Businesses spend money to acquire new assets or on their expenses, and that money comes from debt they take on, funds provided by the business owners, or revenue brought in from clients.

(There are modified versions of the latter equation for specific business models, including contexts where stockholders are involved.)

A World Apart

The accounting equation is perhaps rather abstract and befitting of bookkeepers’ reputation as cold and stodgy, but it also maps onto the roles that humans play in business. Equity neatly maps onto the activity of the business’s owners, as noted above, and one can think of the Revenue term as customers.

Question for the reader: where do employees fit in this equation?

If you guessed Expenses, well done. Employees don’t show in the basic accounting equation at all and in the expanded one, they nestle neatly among the office supplies, toilet paper, utility bills, and other costs that don’t directly result in a long-term owned asset or sellable inventory. Employees are a cost to track and minimize, with the same brutal logic that would have businesses switch to lower-cost pens and install low-flow toilets. Employees are instrumental to the business’s operations and, in perverse irony, bookkeepers must treat them as instruments, little different from the tools they use to perform their duties. The value they generate, in turn, becomes assets balanced with equity, and the employee is accorded no claim on it.

Owners are so central to the bookkeeping process that the equation term where they appear is called equity, literally the word for making the equation balance. Anything unaccounted for elsewhere is theirs.

But math is math, and centuries of precedent do not have to last. Equations can balance a lot of different ways. It’s not that difficult of a switch to start considering employees as more than rented tools. Indeed, ownership structures already exist that expand the concept of owner. Arguably, selling ownership shares provides such an expansion, as does providing those shares as compensation to employees. More pointedly, cooperative business models where most or all employees are co-owners and large chunks of equity belong to them directly address and correct the owner/employee imbalance, at least as far as bookkeepers are concerned. Capitalism might be planted deep in the soil of the bookkeeper’s trade, but it can be uprooted.

The post The Capitalism in Our Ledgers appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

I used to write about atheism, until I said everything I needed to say about it. Anything I write about it now would repeat my own past words. I’m just as unimpressed with the tangle of sometimes consciously illogical and impossible things religions expect people who take them seriously to believe; I am just as uninterested in community that comes bundled with authority figures; I am just as convinced that the wonder of nature does not require a magical guiding hand to explain or enjoy; and I’ve already said all those things. Saying them again is, at best, a game with search engine optimization. I’m bored of it. People still need those messages, but I’ve already written them.

Trans issues are another topic of my attention. They’re personally relevant and reliably grim. The right wings of the world have declared people like me their new favorite target, less foreign than immigrants and more lurid than mere gays, and there’s always another news story about a court case, horrific law, or deadly violence. It’s a beat that never runs out of stories, a blogger’s dream. But I’m not a legal reporter, not a gender scholar, not even a consistent observer of either. All I would be doing, all I could ever be doing, is parroting the work of other people who are already doing it better than I ever could. Past information, past passion, past viewpoint, all I find in myself is seething rage and dejected resignation. I vacillate between anger that things are the way they are and despair that they’ll ever be better, without even the hope of a grander narrative to hold all the horrors together. What’s left after that is polemics I deliver as speeches to those who know the fire I can bring, and this blog has become their well-earned home.

Urbanism is a recent addition to my repertoire, and one where I sometimes find I have thoughts other people haven’t had already. Most of those thoughts, unfortunately, are a little too tied to where I live and shitty men with an axe to grind already have too many ways to find out where my home is. Maddeningly specific rants about individual streets, corridors, and trails will have to wait for safer days.

Geography and history lost me a long time ago. The welter of their complexity made the grand sweeps of events through time so much harder to appreciate. Recent events have changed my perspective on the sorts of subtopics I once found engaging. It’s dull and anxious now.

Participating in the internal discourses of any community I inhabit went from feeling like a civic duty, to feeling like blog research, to feeling like a chore, to feeling like a disease. I set that burden down and the world has been so much lighter, but so has my blog output.

I still have biology and its cousin aquarium-keeping. Finding stories in those fields that feel suited to the blog format is tricky, but it’s at least occasionally doable. It’s still something other people are definitely doing better than I have time to attempt, especially Ze Frank, but I am at least passionate enough about it to do it anyway. But even my usual level of examination is more energy than I can give this topic a lot of the time, especially when my day job sometimes requisitions those thoughts and often draws from the same energy. It’s been a long time since I was energized enough to try to put together biology presentations for my friends.

Fiction is a passion that will never leave me, but of all these it takes the most inspiration, the greatest emotional toll, and the most substantial abandonment of greater hopes. Fiction has been the most consistent kind of writing I could sell, once science writing became my day job, and using it as blog content means abandoning the hope of selling it. There is too much out there for this level of self-published work to get the light of day unless it becomes wildly, improbably popular. It has happened to others, but I have no illusion that it will happen to me.

I can still post the occasional recipe, once I change something enough that it’s not simply a duplicate of whatever recipe I consulted. It takes time and effort to try new recipes and develop them enough to be worth immortalizing in bits, but it’s something I enjoy, so I have that going for me.

Other life obligations sink their demands into me like serrated teeth: a novel that has been languishing in editorial hell, the hope of digitizing the trove of VHS cassettes my parents brought from Miami, maintaining a social life, grocery shopping, participating in literally any leisure pursuit I haven’t already monetized, pet care, on and on. All of these eat away at the energy I can put toward finding a topic to write about, let alone actually writing it. I keep up with my Patreon obligations because that’s what they are: obligations, linked to specific paying tiers and owed to the people paying for them. After that…I don’t know anymore.

I look at that long list of ways that my previous foci ceased to hold me or became more trouble than they were worth, and I wonder what the future of the Perfumed Void could be. I don’t know. Most of the things I ever wanted this blog to be have stopped holding any value for me and others aren’t possible or practical. I don’t know anymore.

So here’s to 2024, I suppose. Perhaps inspiration will find me then.

The post The Worst Sound is the Silence appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

Delivered as a speech for Trans Day of Remembrance on 20 November 2023, adapted from a previous speech.

Today is a somber occasion. Every year, hundreds of us breathe our last in Brazil and Turkey and the United States and, yes, here in Canada. Too many of them endure one more cruel postmortem indignity by way of obituaries and funeral services that don’t acknowledge who they really were. Every year those of us who feel safe all being in one place at a known time gather and make our sad pledge: remember the dead and fight like hell for the living. We say their names because, too often, no one else will. If the ordinary funeral service is, far too often, a performance for bigots, we provide one for the truth of who they really were, that they may pass into oblivion known for something other than what they worked so hard to leave behind.

The list is also a warning. Every name we recite today is someone whose name was not on last year’s list. Every one of us lives until we don’t. The dangers that face us all might discriminate by home country and occupation and dozens of other ways that sociologists can catalog and we can embody—there are so many names from Brazil—but they nevertheless wait for us all. The list is a call to action: fix this broken world or we, too, might be next.

On Trans Day of Remembrance, we who are fortunate remember those of us whose dice were not so kind and declare our dreams of a world in which the consequences of a bad roll are not so hideous. And there are whole categories of tragedy we can face that are far harder to catalog, that I want to add to our contemplations tonight: those whose lights go out long before we could ever find them.

Most trans people have one fondest fantasy: that we could have found our truth sooner. Every year earlier that the realization comes is one year less of living a tragic and discontented lie. Some of us even know what lies ahead before we experience puberty and can benefit from the modern top of the clinical line, which prevents the wrong puberty from taking hold at all and spares us physiological ravages that are expensive or impossible to undo. To have been spared the widening of my upper torso, the deepening of my voice, the thickening of my androgenic hair…these are beautiful thoughts, too pure for the sullied world we all have the misfortune to inhabit.

Some people in this country want very much for this world to stay sullied. We see it in their outrage that any media depicts gender variance, acknowledges unusual pronouns, or recognizes that romantic relationships don’t have to involve one man and one woman. We see it in their outrage about “gender ideology” and their favorite turn of phrase, “shoved down our throats.” We see it in their repeated efforts to pretend that “desistance therapy” and “conversion therapy” are anything other than child abuse in medical guise. We see it in their invention out of whole cloth the idea of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” as some kind of social contagion rather than what it really is: children hiding their truth from unsupportive parents until it can no longer be hidden. We see it in the sadly necessary reality of any teacherly inquiry into a child’s preferred pronouns requiring a separate checkbox for whether that child’s parents should be allowed to find out.

If my parents were more attuned to the Anglophone internet, they would have been all over the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria. I look back on my tragic imagined boyhood and see sign after sign after sign of the woman I would become. I took decades to recognize the course that became inevitable the moment I saw it before me, that hindsight makes all too obvious. When I told them, they shouted, they wept for the son they never had, they accused me of driving my ailing grandfather to heartbroken death, they threatened to withhold my final tuition payment and derail my doctoral studies, they refused to use my name or pronouns for multiple years, and they tried to conceal my grandfather’s death from me so that my presence would not “disrupt” the funeral. They treated the moment of my self-actualization as a crime for which I was both victim and murderer, and they sought to both punish and forget. If they had their way, there would be no remembrance.

There are people in Canada who dream of that being the inescapable fate of every trans person.

They fight against modernizing the sexual education curriculum because, among other updates, modern ones acknowledge that trans people exist and that the students receiving this education might be among us. They fight against the possibility of puberty suppression for trans youth, in defiance of all science. They concoct new talking points about “giving parents a say” because they know they can leverage this to prevent anything remotely progressive from ever happening in schools, lest bigoted parents not get “their say.” Their goal is, in no uncertain terms, to replace every incipient trans boy and girl and non-binary child with a miserable, confused, misunderstood youth who cannot ever be allowed to know how much better things could be. To those bigots, this is victory. Better a miserable pretend man than a happy trans woman. Better a sad pretend woman than a contented trans man. Better dead than trans.

They don’t want us finding ourselves. They don’t want us being able to act on that knowledge if we find it anyway. They don’t want our legal identities to reflect our realities. At every step, they want us disappeared through the cracks of ignorance, denial, and depression. They want the very possibility of someone like me, who found herself as an adult, to be too lofty a dream for today’s trans youth, and for the still-better versions my friends’ children get to live today to not only be impossible, but criminal.

In much of the world, even the developed world, a harrowing number of us never get to find ourselves. We slide into statistics about teenage depression, we self-medicate to oblivion, and we appear in the obituary pages before anyone could see our true light, even ourselves. Thanks to adults who have conservative morality where their recognition of their child’s best interests should be, untold multitudes of girls and boys and non-binary people never find out what they are and live with the preternatural sense of wrongness that comes with that denial, until they don’t. And if anti-trans ideologues have their way, every happy trans eleven-year-old looking forward to prom photos that reflect their true self will be replaced with one of these. Better dead, they say, than trans.

And not one of them would make it to the Trans Day of Remembrance list.

That is the cruelty that anti-trans ideologues crave for us: to bury us so thoroughly in denial and self-loathing that we never find ourselves or each other. They want the very idea of people like us to be so utterly expunged from our collective sense of possibility that the next girl who could grow up to be me, the next boy avoiding chest scars via puberty blockers, and the next non-binary child who finds a name for what they are and smiles at the recognition that they aren’t broken, is instead another case of “untreatable” teenage depression and another line on the obituary pages. They want us to die unseen, unknown, unloved, and unwanted.

They kill us because they find us both titillating and shameful. They kill us because they hate what we represent. They kill us because our existence upends the tidy order of their universe. Their brutality reminds us that acceptance is fragile, life is fleeting, and progress remains to be made. And the crime atop all those crimes is that they don’t just want to kill people, but possibilities. The ones who died their tragic deaths after finding themselves, choosing their new names, and living a life that crossed the edge of safety one time too many are only the opening salvo of their firing squad. To do justice to this day, we must remember more than the ones who died visible enough to arrive on our sad, sad list. And today, I make special emphasis for the ones we never got to meet because this world, and the same people killing us directly, took them from us before they could even know themselves.

I want to remember those people because, more than the anti-trans violence that finds too many of us every year, it is this fate that our enemies want to impose, and there are photographs to prove it.

We have all seen the famous photo of a Nazi book-burning. The heap of books, the flames, the crowd tossing more onto the pyre, it is etched into our memories through every history book. Far less commonly known is where those texts came from. The place that the fascists looted that day was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexual Studies, and the documents on that pyre included pioneering research on transgender people. As early as the 1920s, Hirschfeld and his colleagues had data on the power of hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery. The loss of Hirschfeld’s archive set the science about us back decades. Like all right-wing monsters, the Nazis saw those archives as a threat. They wanted us, not just us the people but us the idea, us the possibility, expunged. It was the worst kind of funeral.

I want us all to remember that underneath the bootheel of every conservative demanding that gender-affirming content be removed from school curricula or put up to bigoted parents’ “personal choice” are untold multitudes of gender-variant children who will, with that loss, never learn the facts about themselves that will enable them to see life as worth living. I want us all to remember that the price of denying puberty blockers to trans youth is measured not in dollars saved but in newspaper snippets full of the phrase “taken far too soon.”

I want us all to remember that part of the reason conservatives get to pretend that being trans is some newfangled cultural contagion is that their ideological compatriots destroyed so much knowledge about us that we are only now ascending past what was on the pyre in the most famous book-burning photo of all time.

Trans Day of Remembrance is a funeral for the unloved subaltern of this world, and some of them died so unloved that they themselves did not know the community that could have held them close.

It is also a call to action, a demand bellowed into a thankless sky: no more. No more deaths, and no more denial. Not one more child struggling to articulate that she’s a daughter, not a son, lacking even the language to explain why this is her last day. Not one more child told that, thanks to the results of some election, that the puberty he thought he could keep from twisting his body is now inevitable. Not one more that we never get to meet because the last trace of them on this earth is an obituary under a name that isn’t theirs.

That is what this day is. This day is our annual reckoning with those we have lost, those we never knew, and those we demand have the chance to know us someday.

We will remember, and we will be remembered.

They burned Magnus’s archive. They’re still killing us in the streets and in our bedrooms.

But ideas are tenacious things. And so are we. And we will not forget.

The post Elegy for the Ones Who Never Got to Be: Trans Day of Remembrance 2023 appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

The server arrived at my table holding the leash of a young woman otherwise clad only in lingerie and leather straps. The young woman knelt next to my chair and looked up at me with eyes of pure devotion. Above her, the server held out the leash for me to take. With a frazzled sigh, she exhaled, “Sorry, we were out of cheesesteak, so we brought you a sub.”

I placed my hand on my new submissive’s head, where her thrumming enthusiasm was plain to feel, and I couldn’t help but smile. I had never been more pleased with my superpower. No one here knew that I was none other than the Prefixer, and my cosmic gift was the ability to swap items that share abbreviations.

Tomorrow, when my arch-nemesis goes in for his monthly cognitive behavioral therapy, he will learn to never cross me again.

The post We Brought You a Sub – Flash Fiction appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

When I stayed on the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia, breakfast at the resort was served as a buffet. It included a characteristic spread of cured meats, cheeses, croissants, fresh fruit, pancakes and eggs prepared to order, and similar fare, all the staples one might expect of hotel and resort breakfasts, all clearly influenced by the tropical and French setting, but it also had one distinctively Polynesian offering: a bowl of poisson cru à la tahitienne, usually translated as “Tahitian ceviche.” Known in Tahitian as “i’a ota,” simply “raw fish,” but more commonly described locally with its French name, this dish instantly captured my heart and my palate, and few breakfasts passed without a ladle-full of it next to the cheeses and croissant on my plate.

I’a ota is not just a bowl of raw fish, of course. Like Latin American ceviche, the fish is mixed with a weak acid, typically citrus juice, to render its exterior opaque, and it is here also mixed with various vegetables and, importantly, coconut milk. I’a ota is usually tuna caught locally, but other seafood can be treated similarly, usually with a different name. The result is somewhere between a soup and a salad, depending on the amount of coconut milk used, and it tastes the way the Mo’orea beach feels: breezy, sweet, salty, rich, light, and above all, tropical.

Given that the mix of vegetables used in poisson cru à la tahitienne at the resort where I stayed features such European classics as cucumbers, carrots, and tomatoes, one might be forgiven for thinking the dish is a postcolonial innovation. That was certainly my read of the dish when I encountered it, especially given the French name. Delightfully, however, it turns out that i’a ota is a distinctively Polynesian invention, with variations found across the entire Polynesian triangle and predating European contact entirely. The citrus fruits used in i’a ota, likewise, are Polynesian cultivars spread between the islands as the Polynesians populated them rather than more recent additions to the island landscape. I’a ota has not been static since European contact, of course; in addition to now usually going by its French name, its mix of non-fish additions now reflects previously unfamiliar vegetables and fruits. (Hawai’ian poke is a distant cousin.)

This recipe serves six. I’a ota is shockingly stable when refrigerated, so it is safe to prepare enough for several days at a time. The acid continues to slowly “cook” the fish over time even in the refrigerator, so the experience slowly shifts accordingly. Poisson cru à la tahitienne makes a lovely breakfast, lunch, or dinner, as needed, and is especially welcome on hot summer days.

Equipment

You will need your preferred cutting tools, a wooden spoon, and a mixing bowl. Depending on which ingredients come to you already processed in some way, you may need additional tools such as a citrus reamer or additional bowls for reserving ingredients before mixing.

Ingredients

• Sushi-grade tuna, approximately 400 grams. I buy cubed sushi-grade tuna frozen in packages approximately this size. Bluefin is traditional.
• Crushed pineapple, 398 mL. This is the volume of one can that I buy.
• Limes, 2, for juicing, or the equivalent volume of lime juice.
• Carrots, 142 g. I buy shredded/matchstick carrots for this recipe and use ½ a bag to get this amount.
• Tomato, 1 or 2
• English cucumber, ½. Substitute 3 mini/Lebanese cucumbers.
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Coconut milk, 400 mL. This is the volume in one can that I buy.
• Scallions/green onions, as garnish. Chives are traditional but the French embassy has not yet arrested me for using scallion greens, so it’s probably fine.
• Variants: Chopped onion is a traditional inclusion, but I find this recipe works better without it. Leaving out pineapple reduces the intensity of its tropical sharpness. Recipes from western Polynesia often add chopped spicy peppers. There are similar dishes from all over the region that use other kinds of seafood, such as mussels, crab, and eel.

Common Food Restrictions

• Gluten-Free: As written, this recipe is gluten-free.
• Ketogenic / Low-Carb: Choose included vegetables with their carbohydrate content in mind. Coconut milk is naturally low in carbohydrates.
• Low-FODMAP: This recipe already makes several digestion-friendly substitutions. Leave out onions.
• Vegetarian/Vegan:  This recipe is meant to showcase fish, but leaving out the fish would make a zesty salad, I suppose.

Preparation

1. If your tuna is not already cubed, cut it into cubes no more than 1 cm on a side and reserve.
2. If your pineapple is not already crushed, cut and crush it and reserve.
3. If you are using limes rather than lime juice, thoroughly juice the limes with a citrus reamer. Reserve the juice and discard the peels.
4. Cut the carrots, tomatoes, and cucumber into suitably small pieces and mix in a bowl with salt and pepper.
5. Add the tuna to the bowl and mix.
6. Add the lime juice and crushed pineapple to the bowl and mix.
7. Add the coconut milk to the bowl and mix.
8. Serve in individual bowls garnished with chopped scallion greens.

I hope this bright, simple piece of the Pacific islands can bring you some tropical joy, the same way it brightens so many of my days.

The post I’a Ota, Alyssa Style appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

People who visit my living room are often struck by the sheer, jungle-like lushness of the vegetation in my 125-gallon aquarium. The tank has such a profusion of plant life that its fish sometimes fight for the clear spaces or disappear for weeks on end in the thickets, living as they would in only the most abundant natural settings. This is a far cry from the aquaria I maintained as a child, when the only plants I could keep alive were the most beginner-friendly, least demanding species, if even then. Perseverance got me to my current skill, and a key part of that perseverance is learning my way around more advanced tools of the aquarist trade. And for someone who takes great joy in aquatic plants, that means carbon dioxide (CO₂).

All in the Balances

Plant metabolism hinges on carbon dioxide. Via photosynthesis, plants and their algal cousins convert carbon dioxide into sugar using energy they collect from light, underpinning most of our planet’s ecology in the process. The good news for aquatic plants is that water has a phenomenal capacity for carbon dioxide, far in excess of the levels typically found in air. (This is in contrast to water’s capacity for oxygen, which can be upwards of 20 times lower than air’s and explains some quirky animal biology along the way). The bad news is that, because carbon dioxide enters water through simple diffusion at the water’s surface and through the exhalations of aquatic life, the actual level of carbon dioxide in an aquatic setting is rarely much different from that found in nearby air and can be much lower in still water with few animals in it. When simple diffusion is the entry method, carbon dioxide exits the water at the same rate that it enters, which means water’s high capacity for carbon dioxide becomes mostly irrelevant. Fortunately, these two facts dovetail rather neatly once humans get involved. By administering external carbon dioxide, an aquarist can make use of that excess capacity and provide more of what their plants crave.

It is not quite that simple, however. A planted aquarium effectively has three resources that need to be kept in balance: light, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, which here mostly means the nitrogenous waste of fish and other animal life.

A mistake many beginning aquarists make is overfeeding their tanks. This creates an overabundance of nitrogen in their systems. With beginner lights that are not especially bright and no CO₂ injection, any plants they might include cannot take in that excess nitrogen, but algae can. These aquarists then contend with the bane of most fish tanks: an algal bloom. Over-abundant algae are an aesthetic issue, encrusting every surface that gets enough light for their minimal needs, but they can also become a practical problem: when they respire at night, they drain oxygen from the water, and enough of them can make the tank uninhabitable by anything else.

Similarly, a key part of the photosynthetic process is light. Without light in comparable abundance to any carbon dioxide on offer, plants cannot take advantage of more CO₂. The excess, then, ends up feeding algae and/or reducing the pH of the system, which might be a problem for fish that prefer more alkaline water and especially for snails, crustaceans, and other shell-building animals that might be present. Conversely, too much light in a system without CO₂ and nitrogen to match can cause, you guessed it, an algal bloom.

This means that adding carbon dioxide to a planted aquarium is best done in tandem with getting high-end, plant-optimized lighting for one’s system, to make sure that the resources one is putting such effort into providing are actually available to one’s plants. In turn, the balance between the three key resources must be maintained, by keeping an eye on feeding and stocking levels, keeping the carbon dioxide flowing at a good rate, and making sure the lights match.

Lesson one: If you’re getting into CO₂ injection in your planted tank, also get higher-end lights than you’d use for a non-CO₂ system.

General Layout

Getting set up with carbon dioxide for aquaria requires four things: a CO₂ source, a way to regulate dosing, tubing that connects that source to the aquarium, and a distribution system within the aquarium. All CO₂ systems, no matter how complicated or what their price point is, have these four parts. Decisions made at early points in setup can influence what forms these parts take, so, let’s start from the source.

Three Ecosystems

There are three different carbon dioxide sources one can use in a planted aquarium, each of which effectively piggybacks off another hobby that has uses for carbon dioxide. These sources occupy three different price points, levels of complexity, and general success at achieving what planted aquarists are trying to achieve, and picking one dictates what options a person has thereafter for the other parts of their CO₂ system.

• Yeast fermentation produces carbon dioxide via yeast consuming sugar and exhaling it. Systems that rely on yeast fermentation are the most basic possible CO₂-injection setups and can be built at home from leftover airline tubing and soda bottles. They are also commercially available, and the ones available for purchase typically come with Venturi pumps, better tubing, and other niceties that make them more effective. In one of these systems, a small quantity of yeast is added to a large quantity of sugar and warm water and the yeast’s metabolism releases CO₂, which is then piped into the aquarium. These systems typically must be refilled monthly as the yeast poison themselves with their other waste products and die, and since that waste product is ethanol, these systems should also be kept out of reach of children. (This is the first few steps of making bargain-basement rum, essentially, prior to distilling it.) Yeast fermentation systems are difficult to control, since they depend on a biological process, and don’t produce much CO₂ even when they are working at their best, so they are the safest carbon dioxide system to add to an established setup when fancy lights are not available.
• Paintball CO₂ uses the pressurized gas canisters sold for use with paintball, airsoft, and similar compressed-gas projectile games rather than a jug of water, sugar, and yeast. A whole system of gas flow regulators has been invented to make these canisters usable for aquarists, since they are already widely available for their intended hobby. CO₂ vessels meant for use with paintball tend to be relatively small, reasonably standardized, and built to be disposable, so the regulators that use them can be smaller and less expensive than those used below, but this also means that the expense of this method adds up over time as those canisters need to be replaced.
• Brewing CO₂ uses industrial-style compressed gas cylinders meant to deliver carbon dioxide to people brewing beer. This style of cylinder is also used to deliver oxygen for people on breathing assistance, deliver oxyacetylene and hydrogen for welders, and various other applications, so their cylinder sizes, valve sizes, screw threads, etc are standardized and easily looked up. The cylinders themselves range from “fits in an aquarium cabinet” to “the size of a person,” allowing this method to match even the most extreme planted-aquarium situations. In the long term, using brewing-CO₂ equipment provides the greatest efficiency, since the cylinders can be taken to home-brewery supply stores to refill and don’t have disposable parts, but it also has the largest upfront cost.

Lesson Two: The CO₂ source dictates almost everything else about the system.

Stay Regulated

Regardless of the source chosen, the chance that carbon dioxide will exit that source and reach the tank at the perfect rate continuously forever is essentially nil. Getting as close to that as possible requires some manner of gas flow regulation.

• For yeast fermentation, very little control is possible. Systems that feature Venturi pumps usually enable the rate of water flow within the pump to be adjusted and this affects the rate of CO₂ diffusion, but the whole system is ultimately dictated by the rate at which the yeast generates CO₂, and that varies with the yeast’s life cycle.
• Paintball CO₂ and brewing CO₂ systems use formal gas regulators with valves and gauges. Because of the different sizes of the connection points to their respective carbon dioxide sources, the regulators used in these two systems are different and it is rare that one meant for one source can be used with the other.

The best gas regulators for aquarium use have two gauges (one reads the outflow pressure, the other the pressure in the gas canister), needle valves and bubble counters for making fine adjustments to CO₂ flow rate, and solenoid valves that can shut off CO2 flow at night (if connected to a timer) or during a power outage. These systems can deliver enough CO₂ to affect water pH if plants aren’t using it, such as when plants are unlit for extended periods, so being able to shut off gas flow on these occasions is useful. Two-gauge regulators are common enough in industrial applications, but the addition of needle valves, solenoid valves, and bubble counters is peculiar to aquarists. These parts can all be purchased separately and attached with a good wrench, some know-how, and some elbow grease, but all-in-one aquarist-oriented regulators are also on the market and save some headaches, fine-tuning, and leak-checking. This regulator is typically the most expensive part of getting into aquarium carbon dioxide, alongside the lights.

Lesson Three: Invest in a good regulator.

Tubular

Once gas exits the source and regulator, it needs to travel to its destination, and that means tubing. Yeast fermentation systems often use ordinary airline tubing of the sort used for air stones and other accessories that create bubbles of air in an aquarium, but this tubing is gas-permeable and does not lead to optimal CO₂ delivery. Savvy keepers, especially those using paintball or brewing CO₂, use dedicated gas tubing that is usually black in color and much stiffer than airline tubing. It is important not to induce sharp bends or kinks in this gas tubing, as this compromises its integrity and can cause leaks. This gas tubing typically has the same diameter as airline tubing.

Lesson Four: Proper gas tubing saves trips to get more carbon dioxide.

End of the Line

At last, we get to the part where the carbon dioxide reaches the dihydrogen monoxide. Here, there are many options to suit many applications.

• For yeast fermentation systems, CO₂ flow is rarely high enough that it especially matters what system is in use. Commercially available kits typically include an electric Venturi pump that mixes the gas outflow with water at an adjustable rate, but completely passive systems are at least theoretically possible.

Paintball CO₂ and brewing CO₂ systems can use either glass diffusers or in-line diffusers.

• Glass diffusers have several shapes available, including small inverted bells that fill with gas and shower-head-like shapes that disperse their gas into small bubbles. These connect directly to the gas tubing and can create interesting visual effects via the mist they often generate. In a properly clean tank, the diffusers themselves are often nearly invisible and don’t usually complicate the look of a tank. These are ideal for small tanks due to their small and unobtrusive nature but can struggle to deliver enough CO₂ in larger systems.
• In-line diffusers are Y-shaped structures that are placed inside the outflow lines of external canister filters. The stem of the Y faces the filter itself, one arm of the Y stays in line with the filter tubing, and the other arm of the Y connects to the gas tubing and, from there, to the gas source. These are ideal for larger tanks, which are disproportionately likely to use external canister filters, and have the additional advantage of keeping the entire CO₂ system out of sight wherever the filter is.

In-line diffusers are widely considered the gold standard for carbon dioxide in planted aquaria, especially when connected to brewing-style CO₂ cylinders.

Accessories

When working with carbon dioxide in aquarium settings, the system itself is only most of what’s needed. One other accessory that is helpful is a CO₂ indicator, which takes the form of a small glass vessel containing pH indicator fluid affixed to the inside of the tank. The indicator’s shape keeps water from getting inside, which keeps the (non-toxic) indicator from escaping, and the air inside will be in chemical equilibrium with the aquarium water. The color of the indicator provides an at-a-glance read of the pH of the system, which is critical information. Carbon dioxide forms a weak acid in water, so depending on the buffering capacity of your aquarium, it is possible that overzealous CO₂ dosing can have negative effects on water chemistry and animal health. Similarly, a slow increase in tank pH might be an indication that the CO₂ source has run out and needs refilling or that there is a leak. Indicators are best placed at the far end of the tank relative to the CO₂ distributor.

Another accessory that can be useful is a gas line splitter. Similar to splitters used with airline tubing, these splitters can enable a single source and gas regulator to serve multiple nearby aquaria. Since the gas regulator is generally the most expensive part of a CO₂ system, this can save a tidy sum. (This is, alas, no help with the other most expensive part of being a planted aquarist, the lights.)

Happy Planting

With luck, this rundown of what’s involved in getting into aquarium CO₂ is helpful to someone. Let me know how it goes for you.

The post A Field Guide to Aquarium Carbon Dioxide Systems appeared first on The Perfumed Void.

Humans are very, very bad at biological categories. We focus on general shapes and ecotypes and miss the biologically significant details that truly trace the history of life on our planet, and again and again our colloquial terms fall short of the expansive splendor of reality. I’ve written before about how the basic categorization schemes humans use don’t quite capture the way turtles versus tortoises, frogs versus toads, and other dichotomous pairings relate to one another, and today, we dive into a still-deeper morass: what is an antelope?

This seemingly simple question is actually such a mess of corner cases and evolutionary accidents that it not only defies an easy answer, but drags the concept of “deer” down with it. Let’s have a look.

“Antelope” is a word of complicated etymology used to refer to a variety of hoofed mammals around the world, principally in Africa and Asia. These animals are nearly all lightly built, agile, and fast. Some of them are among the largest hoofed mammals in their ecosystems, such as the giant eland, while others are tiny, such as the dik-dik.  They are all even-toed ungulates, uniting them in long-range kinship with pigs, peccaries, hippopotami, and whales, and they are all ruminants, closer to each other than they are to any of the previous.

But within that, they are a bit of a mess, and the mess of the antelope also manages to take deer down with them into the realm of biological incoherence.

The Cast of Our Show

In order to get a handle on this conversation, it is necessary to lay out which animals get called “deer” and “antelope.”

“Deer” in general refers to a group of ruminants that usually have antlers on at least one of their sexes at least part of the year. Some deer have tusks, either in addition to or instead of antlers, and are included with other deer based on general physical resemblance. Most deer live either in forests or in the transition zones between forests and plains. Although typically much smaller than cattle and larger than goats, deer include the moose, Alces alces, one of the largest ungulates alive today.

“Antelopes” are a group of ruminants that usually have annulated rather than smooth horns. Most antelopes are relatively small and agile, balancing thin frames with herbivores’ characteristic large guts for fermenting their low-density diet. Antelopes are diverse and highly speciose, including the cattle-like nyala and nilgai, the goat-like oryxes and saigas, small gazelles, and giant elands.

All ruminants, including deer and antelopes, are artiodactyls, or even-toed ungulates, and kin to pigs, peccaries, camels, hippopotamuses, and whales.

There are many ruminants, including giraffes, cattle, goats, and sheep, that are generally not considered to be either deer or antelopes, at least in common thinking.

Although it is relatively easy to point to an animal and say with confidence “that’s a deer” or “that’s an antelope,” the actual evolutionary descent of these animals does not follow these tidy human-centric definitions at all.

The Antelope Tree

The most primitive ruminants are the Tragulidae, known commonly as mouse deer or chevrotains. These tiny ungulates generally lack horns or antlers, instead bearing tusks, and tend to look more like gangly pigs than like the deer they are named after. Despite being colloquially called deer, the Tragulidae are not closely related to any other animals with “deer” in their common names. Their shape is generally in keeping with fossils of primitive ruminants and indicates that the starting anatomical position of this group is small, lightly built forest dwellers who have not yet developed other ruminants’ trademark cranial weapons.

Other ruminants are grouped together as the Pecora, or “horn-bearers.” Ironically, this group has three different kinds of cranial weapon among its members, only one of which is technically horns, in addition to also having a few members with chevrotain-like tusks.

The Pecora divide into two primary extant lineages. One contains the giraffe and okapi of Africa as well as our first antelope, the American pronghorn antelope. The pronghorn is the animal bearing the common name “antelope” that is least closely related to any of the others, such that many push for it to lose that moniker and become simply the pronghorn, and it is the one that presents the greatest challenge when trying to rescue “antelope” as a word with biological, cladistic meaning. Incidentally, the giraffe family is where one finds one of the two non-horn kinds of cranial adornments among the ruminants, in the form of their skin-covered bone ossicones, and the pronghorn is also the only mammal with branched horns and the only one that sheds its horns seasonally, by growing a whole second horn under the first until the first falls. Pronghorns are weird.

The other main lineage within Pecora is the Bovimorpha, which includes true deer (the Cervidae) as well as the tusked musk deer (Moschidae) and cattle, sheep, goats, muskoxen, and the rest of the antelopes (Bovidae). Within this lineage, the musk deer are actually more closely related to Bovidae than they are to true deer. It was detailed genetic study that revealed deer as three distinct lineages that only superficially resemble each other, only one of which (the true deer, Cervidae) has all the classic deer traits, including bony, temporary antlers (the second non-horn cranial weapon within the Pecora).

Antelopes, somehow, are still more tangled, as we’ll see within the Bovidae.

Prattle About Cattle

Antelopes are all over the bovid family tree. Nearly all members of the Bovidae are colloquially thought of as antelopes, and the ones that aren’t all count supposed antelopes among their close relatives.

Cattle correspond to the group Bovini, which includes domestic cattle; their wild and semi-wild cousins such as Cape buffalo, American and European bison, and Asian water buffalo; and a mysterious animal from Asia known as the saola. The saola and a few of the others have the slim builds and small stature associated with antelopes but tend not to be referred to with this word. The closest relatives of the Bovini, sharing the larger subgroup Boodontia/Bovinae with them, are various antelope species, including the nyala, kudu, and nilgai.

Sheep and goats are both within the Caprini, a subgroup of bovids that includes them, numerous wild relatives, and seemingly unlikely kin such as the bulky, tundra-dwelling, cattle-like muskox. Outside of the core goat and sheep genera, Capra and Ovis, the species in this group are variously referred to as sheep, goats, goat-antelopes, antelopes, and various local names, with the same animal often bearing several depending on the culture or authority consulted.

Surrounding the Caprini are numerous other antelope lineages, containing well-known creatures such as the impala, the klipspringer, the various gazelles, the Siberian saiga, the migrating wildebeest, and the majestic oryxes. With the Caprini, these groups make up the Aegodontia, sister to the Boodontia mentioned above.

Rescuing the Antelope

Antelopes are a “wastebasket taxon,” into which most hoofed mammals with horns were dumped before genetic testing could sort out their relationships to one another. The result is that “antelope” has since proven taxonomically incoherent as a concept and trying to define a group that contains some or all creatures commonly referred to as antelopes has expansive and sometimes silly results.

With the pronghorn included, “antelope” can become a valid biological category, encompassing the last common ancestor of all creatures called antelopes and all the descendants of that ancestor, only if “antelope” is equivalent to the whole of Pecora. That means that the giraffe and okapi, all true deer, all musk deer, all cattle, all goats, and all sheep are antelopes, and the only ruminants that are not antelopes are the chevrotains.

Since the pronghorn and its giraffid cousins are so clearly distinct from the other contenders, they are often excluded, and keeping them out of our thoughts here makes the rest of the story easier to manage. This means that animals outside the Bovidae are all definitely not antelopes, which helpfully removes the true deer and musk deer from consideration, but it does not make the Bovidae any easier to sort out. Cattle (the Bovini) are relatively easy to define, and they can even be defined separately from antelopes if the rest of the Boodontia (the nilgai, four-horned antelope, and several spiral-horned antelopes of the group Tragelaphini) are declared Not Antelopes, Actually Cattle. This leaves the other part of the Bovidae, the Aegodontia, as The Antelopes, but this subgroup inescapably includes goats and sheep. Goats and sheep are easy to define cohesively, whether narrowly as their core genera Capra and Ovis or broadly together as the Caprini, but both are so deeply embedded in the grand assemblage of (Aegodontian) antelopes that neither option creates the possibility of defining antelopes without including goats and sheep as subsets.

“Deer” are similarly impossible to rescue as a single monophyletic group in their fullness. The three subgroups of deer are so far apart genetically that the only group that includes all of them is ruminants as a whole. To take the most expansive view makes all ruminants, including the mouse deer and the entire conversation about Pecora above, into deer, and “antelope” thereby becomes a subset of “deer.” Deer are not quite as difficult to disambiguate as antelopes, however, because they form those three distinct groups, which can simply be regarded as separate from one another. If mouse deer and a musk deer are both Not Actually Deer, then “deer” refers only to the Cervidae, and order is restored.

A Primitive Name

The messes above are the clear sign that a name describes a primitive condition. Much like “turtle” tends to be used to describe any aquatic or semiaquatic chelonian regardless of lineage, “antelope” has been used to describe any ruminant that is not obviously something else and “deer” is only a little more coherent. This is similar to how the word “reptile” is useful in a colloquial sense, where it unites a diverse assemblage of mostly ectothermic, mostly scaly vertebrates, but can’t be defined in evolutionary terms without including birds. Most hoofed mammal groups alive today, including the artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates), perissodactyls (odd-toed ungulates, including horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs), and proboscideans (elephants) have similar-looking deep ancestors, which were almost always small, forest-dwelling animals built to nimbly navigate complicated underbrush. Antelopes are not quite the same as these ancestors, since the ruminants are themselves fairly deep within the even-toed ungulate family tree, but a similar idea applies. The “antelope” shape is not a derived condition, marking a cohesive group, but a primitive one, whose descendants have taken various other shapes as they spread around the world into different niches. Those that evolved to attain large size and become grazers usually got called cattle; those that took up residence in mountainous regions often became called goats, sheep, or goat-antelopes; and their close cousins with different habitats or habits usually kept the general name “antelope” or received a specific name used by the people who live near their homes.

That’s the trick: cattle, goats, muskoxen, and sheep are all derived, specialized bovids, and “antelope” is deployed as a catch-all for bovids (and sometimes just things that look like bovids, such as the pronghorn) that don’t register as special cases to English speakers. The most natural solution, then, is to consider “antelope” generally synonymous with the Bovidae. Cattle, goats, muskoxen, and sheep are, in this view, all special cases of antelope: highly derived, specialized for unusual habitats, and (other than muskoxen) having a special place in human history as animals whose domestication changed the path of human history.

It’s not quite as elegant as an impala prancing across the landscape, but it’ll do.

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