the blue cheese incident

Jul. 27th, 2025 10:37 am
runpunkrun: silverware laid out on a cloth napkin (gather yon utensils)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
I played a hilarious trick on myself. I had a coupon for a free Follow Your Heart vegan cheese, and the Kroger had fake parmesan (with ingredients I avoid), fake feta (but they were out), and fake bleu cheese (which I didn't like even when I could eat cheese).

But the coupon was about to expire and it was free, so I got the bleu cheese style crumbles as an experiment. Hilariously it tastes (and smells!!) just like blue cheese, only not quite as strong. I sprinkled some on my salad and didn't hate it and so I kept sprinkling because I don't get many novel flavors these days, and now it's actually starting to grow on me. It's tangy and creamy and kind of melts into the salad dressing in a pleasing way. If only it didn't taste like blue cheese.

Anyway, if you're a dairy-free-ish person who likes blue cheese, I recommend this! It's vegan, soy-free, and gluten-free, and I had my dad, a cheese-eater and gorgonzola enthusiast, try it and he was surprised at how good it was, saying it could pass as the real thing. I'm really looking forward to trying their feta. I have high hopes that it's similarly realistic.
Current ingredients: Filtered Water, Organic Coconut Oil, Modified Potato Starch, Sea Salt, Potato Starch, Natural Flavors, Less than 2% of: Potato Protein, Organic Vegan Cane Sugar, Calcium Phosphate, Lactic Acid, Caramel Color, Spirulina, Beta Carotene for Color.
wychwood: Marcus and his pike (B5 - Marcus pikal envy)
[personal profile] wychwood
I meant to post yesterday, but I was distracted by reading a season and a half of transcripts of Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, which is a delight. I don't do well with podcasts, but I am a big fan of transcripts.

I'm currently having a very frivolous week off; S came up with her baby on Tuesday, and we went and visited my parents and then had lunch; I have read some things and eaten many things and done all the backlog of ironing and washing up (the kitchen was a very sad post-graduation place). And played many more hours of ME:A.

Have also cleaned the worst of the dust from the inside of my computer and am now transferring my Steam library to a new hard drive because apparently 2TB is not! enough! and I see no prospect of kicking my game-buying habit and also everything is 60GB a game now.

I also bought several new and secondhand books and have run out of money until payday, because "frivolous overconsumption" is apparently my motto for July. Except that I promised Miss H cinema snacks for Superman on Friday (in return for a lift!) so I can't stop just yet. I am getting £9 back, though, because Rebellion sold me three 99p ebooks, charged me four times, and then told me that the order had failed so I couldn't download them. They were both polite and rapid at sorting it out though! I've bought plenty of books from them before with no issues, so not entirely sure what went wrong...
ride_4ever: (Fannish 50 Challenge)
[personal profile] ride_4ever
[personal profile] squidgiepdx has been showing fandom the love for 31 years (he founded Squidge.Org in 1994 to provide both website hosting and mailing lists for fandom and in 2020 he created the SquidgeWorld Archive) and I'm here to say let's have fandom show some love back with a successful fundraiser. (And I'm putting my money where my mouth is: I donated $100.00 to this fundraiser.)

Click here for detailed post about the fundraiser and about how to donate.

Click here for Fanlore page about Squidge.Org and SquidgeWorld.

What I'm Doing Wednesday

Jul. 23rd, 2025 06:22 pm
sage: a white coffee cup full of roasted coffee beans (coffee)
[personal profile] sage
books (Oken, Hope, Tarnas, Hamaker-Zondag) )

yarning
no yarn group this week. I was all showered and dressed and ready to go, and boom, migraine. Apparently my pulse skyrocketed to 144 when just out of the shower, so that triggered the migraine. Stupid hEDS.

healthcrap
Had a useless appt with physical medicine Monday, where they put me on the Hypermobile Spectrum Disorder spectrum, instead of doing a full exam for hEDS. Irritating. They also confirmed that they couldn't help me, since I don't need further PT or equipment (like a walker or wheelchair) at this time. HSD is basically the same thing, but you don't meet the diagnostic criteria of hEDS. I wish I'd been up to arguing with them, but I wasn't. Also, still haven't worked out. :(

dirt
I watered the plants today for the first time in over 3 weeks, which means I've been taking my terrible mood out on the innocents in my household. I hope I haven't lost any, but it's the (moderate) depression's fault if I have. At least I did get them watered. That's something.

#resist
August 2: 50501 Rage Against the Regime National Protest
August 3: first Move On "Won't Back Down" rally.

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333

Book recommendation

Jul. 23rd, 2025 10:00 pm
luzula: a Luzula pilosa, or hairy wood-rush (Default)
[personal profile] luzula
My friend Annick Trent has a new historical m/m romance out: By Marsh and by Moor. It's about a pressed English sailor running from the press gang during the Napoleonic wars, and his companion on the run, who is running from something else entirely. Obviously I am not impartial here, but I've been enjoying beta reading this book even when I haven't been reading much other fiction.
runpunkrun: Dana Scully reading Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' in the style of a poster you'd find in your school library, text: Read. (reading)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
A good old fashioned young adult novel about being stranded on an inhospitable planet and struggling to live off a steadily declining cache of resources. In one case, it's an alien world far in the future, and in the other, the dying Earth those colonists left, where the last inhabitants are about to extinguish themselves through nuclear war. Ah, children's lit.

This is actually a sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, but if you're a chaos demon you might be able to read this without having read the first. Partly because it stands on its own while gently reminding the reader what happened in the first book, but also because it fully retreads some of the same ground.

Because half of this book was telling me stuff I already, basically, knew, I was much more interested in the sections on the alien planet with its frontier survival vibes and foreign mysteries. I wanted to spend all my time there rather than on Earth, since I already knew that was a lost cause, and any new information we got in those sections could have easily been worked into the future segments and much of it, in fact, was. But it wasn't a chore to spend time with the original versions of Ambrose and Kodiak as they come to terms with the lies they've been told and try to undo some of the damage they caused, and together the two parts of this book tell a full story that comes to a satisfying conclusion, whether or not there's ever a third book in the series. But if there is, I'll be there.

Contains: queer dads; child harm and references to child death; wild animal harm/death; mental illness with intrusive thoughts; gun violence; nuclear apocalypse; climate disaster.
rhi: Typerwriter.  "Writing is good for the soul." (writing)
[personal profile] rhi
This is not my work, not my doing, but it's too good not to share, and it's not like we've put out much of the fires yet. So. Here.

How to Write Fiction When the Planet is Falling Apart (2172 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: No Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Meta, Writing
Summary:

I think a lot about writing and its place in the world. I wonder if it matters, if it's enough. I wonder how we're all going to survive. The world is on fucking fire and even in fandom we can't pretend that it's not.

A guide to writing anyway in the age of despair or, a love letter to writers.


Poem

Jul. 22nd, 2025 02:24 pm
mergatrude: (writing - poetry)
[personal profile] mergatrude
Last night I went to That Poetry Thing. It's a Monday night gathering of poets at Smith's Alternative, the bohemian place to go in the city. After half an hour of open mic, my sister-in-law read some of her poems (I think I've posted a couple either here or on [community profile] poetry) and they were beautiful. The other invited poet was Kai Jensen. I liked his poems enough to buy his book, The Zebra Path of Tree Light.

A taste )

#661, Bashō

Jul. 21st, 2025 11:27 am
runpunkrun: john sheppard and teyla emmagan in uniform and standing in a rocky streambed (hold the stillness exactly before us)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
a wild boar
is also blown about
by the typhoon
     -1690

Translation by Jane Reichhold.

俳句 )

@fan_writers

Jul. 20th, 2025 10:07 am
runpunkrun: benton fraser writing a letter (a long letter on a short piece of paper)
[personal profile] runpunkrun
Banner with text: fan_writers.dreamwidth.org: talking about writing. Black and white image shows hands typing on a laptop and a pen making revisions on a piece of lined notebook paper.
New comm for meta about writing! Moderated by fandom staples [personal profile] mific and [personal profile] china_shop!

We grieve the weirdest things

Jul. 18th, 2025 12:36 pm
mergatrude: a gang gang cockatoo eating red berries. underneath is "mergatrude" in red text (merg_gang gang)
[personal profile] mergatrude
Yesterday, the blokes finally installed our new reverse cycle air-conditioning system. They decommissioned the ducted gas heating (the increase in gas prices and carbon emissions being the reason for the change-over), but also the evaporative cooling system. I loved that damn thing. It was the first major improvement we did on our house back in 2001, and it made the house bearable during the summers. I'm sure I'll get used to the new system and it won't wake me every time the fan starts up, but I'm ridiculously grief-stricken right now. Definition of first world problems, I guess.
ride_4ever: (Make America Kind Again)
[personal profile] ride_4ever
Five years ago today Representative John Lewis -- an icon of civil rights -- died, but his message lives on and we declare it today all across America with this Good Trouble Lives On National Day of Action. As Representative John Lewis said: "Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America".

Click here to find today's event details including a map that shows where a "Good Trouble" event is taking place near you today.
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