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🍽️ Baking Brownies
The pandemic is making everything harder, which is probably a theme in everyone’s life. People I love are far away (something I’ve said thousands of times) and my work is kind of killing me; today, after a particularly grueling morning to top off an already stressful half-week, I decided: let’s make brownies! I’m sort of picky—I want them to have a crispy top, but a gooey-inside, and a lot of recipes I’ve tried have just produced a denser cake-block. There are two methods I’ve found that have worked: one is sub 1/3 cup of cocoa for the flour in BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookie and bake in an 8x8 glass dish at 350 degrees until it just feels right. The other, more simply, is this one, recommended by my friend Selena. No cocoa. No baking soda/powder. No vanilla? You can add that. I put orange zest and used orange chocolate. Fuck it. Bake brownies in the middle of the day! The world is horrible and time isn’t real. At least you can enjoy yourself.
– Summer
📱 Alt accounts
For our first bonus letter, I wanted to write about something that has been very dear to me pretty much as long as I’ve been shitposting on social media. An alt account, for the uninitiated, is a private social media account that you use to post all the stuff that’s too weird and personal for your public account—for your closest internet friends’ eyes only. I’ve had an alt account on Twitter since I was in high school, and a private finsta for the last couple of years. I use them for the less-polished, more-vulnerable version of myself that I don’t want strangers (or my parents tbh) to see. I really cannot recommend it enough!!! We all deserve to have spaces online where we can be our truest selves!!! I could talk about why I love alts for hours (so hmu if you want) but I will leave you with this: posting absolutely sucks but it’s also great, so you might as well tweet whatever you want, even if it’s behind a private account.
– Jillian