Here’s the necessary clarification for non-USAmericans who are confused by how confidently USAmericans are claiming these are not the same thing: American biscuits are almost identical to British scones. But not American scones. Behold the continuum:
American biscuits:
These are layered quick breads. They are almost always baked in a round shape, and when they’re not, they’re baked square; you will pretty much never see a triangular American biscuit. They’re usually made with buttermilk, which gives them a nice slightly tangy flavor. They’re not at all sweet on their own, but they’re also not particularly savory, and as a result, they’re a bit of a blank slate: they pair well with butter and jam, but alternatively, they pair equally well with a savory sausage gravy. There are recipes that are firmly on the savory side by virtue of adding cheddar cheese to the dough, but in those cases, people will usually specify “cheese biscuits” or “cheddar biscuits”. American biscuits can be a breakfast food, or a lunch food, or a dinner food, all about equally.
British scones:
These are very similar to American biscuits, but a little bit lighter, and noticeably sweeter. You can have these with butter and jam (or, more likely, clotted cream and jam), but unlike American biscuits, I’d never dream of serving them with anything savory like a sausage gravy. You will sometimes see bits of dried fruit, like currants or dried blueberries, baked into them, but this isn’t all that common, and it’s basically the extent of weird baked-in flavorings. You will sometimes see these baked into a triangle shape, but more commonly, they are round. They’re great as a breakfast food, but they’re better with an afternoon tea; you’d probably never see them as the accompaniment to a hearty, savory dinner.
American scones:
American scones are denser, sweeter, and significantly more buttery than British scones, without the more clearly defined layers that British scones have. They are almost always baked in a triangle shape, and only very rarely baked round. American scones come in a variety of flavorings – it’s not uncommon to find pumpkin spice scones, double chocolate scones, lemon strawberry scones, blueberry scones with fresh blueberries baked right in, etc. It’s also not uncommon to find them glazed, like a doughnut (but usually slightly less so). You do not typically top these with butter or jam, or indeed, with anything – they are eaten as-is, as an accompaniment to coffee or tea. They are mostly a breakfast food, though they may occasional feature at an afternoon tea, if someone even has one of those, which in the States, people mostly don’t.
American cookies:
American cookies are exclusively a sweet dessert. They are often baked soft, and best eaten warm, although they’re perfectly fine to eat cooled, and you can certainly find shelf-stable cookies in stores (which are usually hard, rather than soft, see eg. Chips Ahoy). Oatmeal raisin cookies come the closest to the place that American scones leave off, and it isn’t very close. All sorts of flavorings and mixed in bits are common, although chocolate and nuts are more popular mix-in additions than dried fruit. Glazes are fairly uncommon, but not unheard of. The archetypal accompaniment for American cookies is a glass of milk, although they’re perfectly nice to enjoy with tea or coffee. They are not, however, a breakfast food. Americans do consider shortbread and gingerbread to both be types of cookies, but if you refer to “cookies” in the abstract, those aren’t what people typically think of.
British biscuits:
British biscuits are like American cookies, but pretty much always hard and served at room temperature. I’ve even heard the opinion that a British biscuit should always be “crisp”, with softness as a sign that a biscuit isn’t fresh. Americans are familiar with this style of treat, and generally think of British biscuits as “the type of cookies that you get in a tin” – they’re very much a thing in America, but they’re considered a smaller and much less popular subset of the broader “cookie” category. Like American cookies, these are often eaten as a dessert, but they are much more commonly seen as an accompaniment to tea than the American cookie is.
Tl;dr: This is like an even more complicated version of the crisps/chips/fries thing, I’m afraid. We’re simply talking about different things.
genuinely friendly reminder to never EVER share someone’s location/information without their explicit permission. you do not know why that person is asking, what they plan to do with that information, or even if the asker has that person’s best interest in mind at all.
OP is also not exaggerating how common this is. my abusive parents successfully kidnapped me from work once because a coworker who didn’t know my situation told them when my next shift was. my parents didn’t even know where I lived at that point in time, which was very much on purpose. it took me days to get away again. ALWAYS tell the person that is being looked for that someone is looking. never share personal information or even how to get in contact them. you can take information in and pass it along, but you absolutely cannot give any out.
[image descriptions: screencap of tweets from rahaeli @rahaeli 7/9/21.
Hello friends, your regular reminder that a not insignificant number of social media “missing person” efforts are actually someone’s abuser trying to get them back, especially with missing older teens. Please don’t share unofficial missing person flyers–
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen a site wide “missing person” turn into the person writing in to ask us to enforce the restraining order, or the custodial parent begging us to shut down the non custodial parent’s attempted kidnapping
Every time I say this, someone says “but what if it’s real, better safe than sorry” and no, it absolutely is not. For a good while I got “this is my abuser, please make them stop” requests for 70-80% of the viral unofficial missing persons crossing my feed.
This number is obviously anecdata–I’ve never been able to find a peer reviewed study attempting to pin down prevalance. But based on those experiences, I absolutely advise never sharing one of those posts.
(I used to finish this PSA thread saying that if a missing person alert came from police or a federal agency, it had likely been screened for abusive tactics and was more likely to be real. I no longer say this.)
This should be your principle for any time someone wants you to connect them with someone else, btw. Never give someone’s info to the person who asked. Tell the asker you’ll give that third party THEIR contact info instead.
–and if you do spot/know the person in them, tell THAT PERSON someone is looking for them instead of providing any information to the person doing the looking.
I will probably be muting this in a bit, but some followup: for those questioning “just how often does this happen, even?”, I wasn’t keeping an exact count but I think we just hit double digits of people saying “this happened to me/a friend” in replies to QTs of this
As in, of the current 70 or so quote tweets, around 10% of them have a person telling a story about a time their abuser faked a social media post expressing concern over them as a missing/vulnerable person in order to continue abusing them.
It’s not rare. It’s not unusual. It is, in fact, vastly more common than *any* dangerous situation in which social media attention can do literally anything to improve the situation. (I’ve rarely seen a dangerous situation massive social media attention can improve, honestly.)
To the people who want to argue about this advice: I have, more than once, personally seen an abuser’s viral missing persons post end in suicide or homicide. I have never in 20 years seen a case of stranger kidnapping at all, much less one that’s resolved by virality.
All I’m asking you to understand is that the abusers who do this are very, very good at convincing you their “missing person” is irrational, in danger, or has diminished capacity. You will never be able to spot these situations by reading over a single post. Ever.
If you want to retweet missing personsviral alerts because you want to do good in the world, please understand that there is a much, much greater statistical chance you are *actually* contributing to making things much worse for the person instead. Please just think about that.
And to answer the “well why are you qualified to say this”, since this has gotten way out of my usual circles: hi, I’ve been working trust and safety/ToS on social media for 20 years now. I am never, ever the person with the worst stories when I go out drinking with others.
/end id]
If you’re doubting this the thing you have to remember is that stranger kidnapping is very rare, for either children or adults. The vast majority of the time, when someone is kidnapped or held against their will, it’s by someone they already know, someone close to them: a parent, a partner, that sort of thing. So if someone has been kidnapped or whatever, the people closest to them (who are usually the ones to put up missing posters and whatnot) should be the first suspects, not the last. It’s possible that the person putting up the missing person fliers is the parent who has custody and the noncustodial parent kidnapped the kids … but it’s just as possible that the person putting up fliers is the noncustodial parent who is doing this as part of a plot to find the kids so they can kidnap them. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
And when people choose to leave voluntarily and cut all contact with people close to them, they don’t just do it on a whim. There’s pretty much always a reason. For example, the people they’re cutting contact with might be shitty and abusive. Now, the reason might also be “the person leaving is messed up by drugs” or whatnot, or “they’re being forced by an abuser to cut contact.” Those are also reasons. Buta lot of people who cut contact with someone in their life do it for very good and valid reasons. You can’t tell which is which just from seeing the flyer.
rb this version with image descriptions please
remember this especially now with so many trans and gay people fleeing states that are passing anti lgbtq laws
i guarantee there’s going to be homophobic families saying their “mentally disturbed family member” is missing
There once was a man from the sticks Whose limericks stopped at line six. They were fine till line five Then they took quite a dive — But the problem is easy to fix If you just ignore the last line, it doesn’t even follow the rhyme scheme oh god I’ve really lost control of this thing I’m so sorry…
There once was a fellow named Dan, Whose poetry never would scan. When told this was so, He replied, “Yes, I know– It’s because I try to squeeze as many syllables into the last line as I possibly can.”
This is why I hate competitiveness in the arts. I hate award shows. I don’t care about box office/sale returns or what most critics have to say (most of my favorite movies and album releases went overlooked by audiences or panned by critics).
If we expect too much based on the approval of others, nothing will ever get done.
Surprisingly, this is not a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference, but an actual fact. From Burnout: Solve Your Stress Cycle, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski
That’s the percentage of time your body and brain need you to spend resting. It’s about ten hours out of every twenty-four. It doesn’t have to be every day; it can average out over a week or a month or more. But yeah. That much.
“That’s ridiculous! I don’t have that kind of time!” you might protest - and we remind you that we predicted you might feel that way, back at the start of the chapter.
We’re not saying you [italic] should [end italic] take 42 percent of your time to rest; we’re saying if you don’t take the 42 percent , the 42 percent will take you. It will grab you by the face, shove you to the ground, put its foot on your chest, and declare [image ends here, mid-sentence]
We’re not saying you should take 42 percent of your time to rest; we’re saying if you don’t take the 42 percent, the 42 percent will take you. It will grab you by the face, shove you to the ground, put its foot on your chest, and declare itself the victor.
