birds words

Huh. This still exists, I guess? Maybe I ought to start updating it, again.

A lot of this is stuff I also liked before I became veg. Assume I'm talking vegan/vegetarian versions for those!

Apple sauce
Artichoke
Baingain bharta
Bananas
Barbecue shredded/pulled "meats": any type, and one of the few cases of me still liking something pork-flavored
Breads: pumpernickel, sourdough, naan, raisin bread
Burritos
Chana masala
Cheeses: brie, blue, mozzarella, pepper jack, Wensleydale, good cheddar. NEVER Swiss. I hate the taste of Swiss cheese.
Chili (but man, have i had some mediocre chilis. So many people just seem to have no sense when it comes to this...)
Cold sesame noodles
Corn (maize), especially boiled and then very lightly grilled
Couscous
Dolmas (especially with currants and pine nuts)
Doughnuts
Dried fruits: raisins, figs, craisins, apples, apricots
Everlasting Gobstoppers
Falafel
Galuste cu prune (Romanian plum dumplings)
Gigandes plaki (baked giant beans)
Guacamole
Hamburger: ideally, with cheese, mustard, pickles sliced in long thin strips, tomato, lettuce, and ketchup.
Horchata
Hot dogs with mustard, vegennaise, a dash of Tobasco, and salsa
Jelly beans
Jerky (oh my gods i miss jerky. Vegan jerky that doesn't taste cheap is so rare, and it's never tough enough for my tastes)
Lemonade (with actual sugar. No sticky-tasting HFC)
Maple candy
Mămăligă and polenta
Mashed potatoes
Meatball sub
Mochi
Mole sauce
Muffins (especially blueberry or cranberry)
Mushrooms
Nuts: walnuts, cashews and peanuts if you want to count them, pecans. Rarely almonds on their own.
Okra
Onigiri (rice balls)
Oreos
Particular flavors: coconut, tamarind, chocolate with orange, maple syrup, barbecue sauce, spicy stuff if balanced with sourness or sweetness, vinegar in general, coffee, ginger, lemongrass, "smoke", orange, grape, rose, pumpkin, garlic, scallion, azuki bean, plum, tomato, eggplant, paprika, MSG
Persimmons
Pickles: cucumber (especially Israeli or Palestinian-style or half sour), daikon, garlic, sometimes tomato
Pizza. My favorite toppings are pineapple and garlic, which even my own stomach thinks is terrible together- but my mouth loves it.
Potato chips (especially thick-cut, slightly soft home-style ones)
Pudding (the creamy U.S. kind ), but never flan.
Rahat lokum (Turkish delight)
Ribs: barbecue or "spare" style. Vegan "ribs" are one of two exceptions to my utter disgust with anything tasting remotely like pig meat.
Rock candy
Rotini (especiall chilled as antipasto)
Salată de vinete (eggplant salad)
Salmon
Sarmale (stuffed cabbage)
Seeds: pumpkin, sunflower, flax
Sodas: Ginger beer, cream soda, any all-natural-flavors soda, Red Bull Cola (i wish they still sold this in the States), birch beer, Manhattan Special
Spaghetti
Spinach
Soups: butternut squash, tomato, black bean, tom yum, udon (especially kitsune udon), ramen, and thick pea soup. I used to love clam chowder, but haven't had a chance to try a vegan version.
Spare ribs
Sushi: Avocodo rolls, kappa maki, salmon or tuna, ume shiso rolls, inarizushi
Stuffed pepper
Taiyaki
Tacos, especially with a soft tortilla around the hard shell.
Taro
Tea: jasmine, lapsang souchong, assam, white teas, genmaicha
Ting Ting Jahe
Tisanes: orange leaf, rooibos
Turkish coffee
Wild scallions

And as a special note, if you put marzipan anywhere near me, I may smack you. It is so gross.

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."
--Robert Anton Wilson       

I made a couple big mistakes yesterday in dealing with people and a certain situation, and it looks to have cost me at least one very dear friend. I let someone else's advice take precedence over my own knowledge of the people involved and how they might react, and now I'm going to have to pay the consequences for being unwise. I just hope that those folks who are involved will be okay with each other.

I'm probably gonna go do the turtle thing and hide in myself a bit until my skin is thick enough to deal with this sort of thing.

Via Boing Boing - Toronto: global epicenter for oppression of sex and gender minorities

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Seriously? People are actually putting up with this kind of shit in a nation with regular media access? That's terrifying.

Happy Heroic Hanukkah
by ~ayellowbirds
on deviantART

Science and science fiction has predicted a lot of technological innovations that never came to pass. So often do we wind up with antiquated ideas of what the future will look like, that there's a neologism (coined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in the Meaning of Liff) to describe things that are at once futuristic and badly outdated- "zeerust". These ideas are usually based on current technological and social trends, ignoring the impact other trends may have on the technology of the future, or simply due to inability of the predictors to relate to the population at large. A good example would be early personal computers- the Honeywell 316 was designed for the home, created in '69 by people who could not think of any possible home use for a computer other than organizing recipes. Purchase of the $10K 100 lb unit included a two week crash course in programming- there's no evidence that so much as a single unit sold.

As absurd as the H316 seems, especially with its painfully sexist advertising slogans, i have a certain strange love for the style. There's something wonderful about the World of Tomorrow (that never came) that was so ubiquitous during the middle of the last century, perhaps due to all the old Disney and Warner Bros animated shorts I viewed as a kid.

What's your favorite zeerusty concept? Personally, I wish we had automats everywhere. I love the notion of walls of vending machines with every kind of food item you could desire, there's something delightfully absurd about it that makes me giddy.

Every now and again, I start looking for reference images for illustrations. Some of these illustrations have mature content, so I look for mature references- in other words, I visit porn sites. These sites are free, and usually based around user-made content, since I don't want to bother with paying over thirty dollars a month for films of people being really badly objectified.

Unfortunately, the social nature of such sites means that I can see comments from other visitors to the sites, and that means I get pissed off.

Aside from the horrible racist comments on any image of a non-white, there's the rampant sexism and close-mindedness about gender, sexual identity, and appearance. Any woman whose abs are not perfectly flat or concave is labeled as "chubby", and if she also has breasts larger than C, she's apparently fat. If there's an image of a woman with visible clitoris, unshaven body hair, or any kind of muscular development exceeding what would be necessary to move, then at least one out of every five or six comments will be people saying that she's a post-op transsexual (in the most horrifically transphobic terms). Actual trans women are the subject of constant attacks even from people who profess to be attracted to them, especially if they don't fit the viewer's narrow ideals of what is feminine- as above, any muscular development is attacked, and gods forbid they should be anything other than submissive recipients of cisgender males.

Oddly, trans men seem to get the least in terms of offensive comments- more often, the worst were from people who apparently had no idea that people transition to male, too; they didn't understand what they were viewing. The latter is more a case of eduction, i guess?

Is it too much to hope that porn-viewers can be intelligent?

It occurs to me that I tend to be much more active on DeviantArt than on here, but that I don't really ever post stuff from DA to here, although I can. Here's a kind of random sampling of recent stuff.

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This is more a note to myself for when I have the cash, but anyone who's feeling generous come the holidays can consult it, too.

* Hand of Eris medallion, preferably copper
* Glass evil eye beads, doesn't have to be from this site.
* spherical/round apple-wood beads
* large, loose crystals
* found wood or sticks with interesting or unusual features
* Cotton hamsa scarf
* Scrabble tile hamsa necklace
* Acetone paint thinner, without any additives. As much as is practical.
* Art commissions- contact me for details.
* Recaning sticks
* Sword beads, two different ones. Contact me for exactly what i want
* Transformers. Heck, i don't even care if they're inexpensive foreign-made copyright-violating knockoffs, or other brands of transforming robots. I especially want the Marvel Crossovers Thor, Cybertron Primus, and/or Vector Prime.