Month: October 2013

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

can-u-not-my-wayward-son:

 

slepaulica:

golden-zephyr:

bubblewrapstargirl:

brum brum motherfucka jfc
this made me so fucking hungry omg. i’m off to the shop to get maltesers 

all the things i miss about the UK in one post.

(except 90% of these are not gluten free *sob*)

and I have wanted a kinder egg but obv. they’re ILLEGAL

I can walk to my corner shop and buy a gun in less than an hour

BUT I CAN’T BUY A KINDER EGG???!!!!!

so if someone mailed an american kinder eggs would a swat team bust in or what?

and england! you send your big english stores like tesco into our eastern european countries and you neglect to send us cadbury cream eggs just once in my life i would like to try one if it’s gluten free which it probably isn’t but a girl can dream. while you’re listening england, there aren’t any gluten free frozen pizzas in my entire country you could have monopoly please.

1. I’m pretty sure they just confiscate any Kinder eggs they find in the normal course of duty. Choking hazard. (They don’t ask you when you’re driving into the U.S. from Canada (land of Kinder eggs) if you have any with you.)

2. Last I checked (though that was a decade or so ago) you can get malted milk balls in America if you buy them through the Scouts (I don’t remember if it was Girl or Boy) during the relevant sale (I believe both possibilities are in the autumn). They suck, and I suspect the problem is inherent to malt and a mere brand switch could never make them good.

3. The OP probably should’ve pointed out the claimed superior taste of British Cadbury bars to justify putting them in this list.

My Girl Scout troop did a taste test with American bars and bars bought from a place specialising in importing British food into America. Everyone else agreed the British one was much better, but I couldn’t taste the difference and thought they were equally lovely. (My too-good-for-its-own-good ability to detect subtle variations in processed food takes several months of regular-basis eating to rev up, but since everyone else could taste it my unprepared tongue ought to have done. I’m starting to wonder if there was a mix-up and I accidentally got two American bars.)

4. Smarties also suck. Too sweet, funny aftertaste. M&Ms are far better. (Canada, by the way, has both, calling the American Smarties “Rockets”. So now you know what to ask for if you’re in a Canadian store and want to get some.)

5. So British Milky Ways are North American 3 Musketeers. That doesn’t sound like a big deal. (Fun fact: the “45% Less Fat!” on the wrapper may seem like pure pandering to a diet-obsessed culture, but the old formula gave me stomachaches and the new one does not.)

6. Cadbury Creme Eggs are commonplace in America, during the Easter season and lately the Halloween season as well (with the appropriate change in food colouring). They, once again, suck. And I don’t mean the chocolate shell: that’s the good part. However, I am perfectly willing to admit this is just my own dislike of gooiest sugariest things. (Well, I suppose that general idea applies to all the sucky things on this list.)

7. I concede that chocolate frogs are a good idea even when un-magical. I’d say we ought to have them, but I would not be the least bit surprised if we do and I haven’t noticed. (I tend to ignore the finger-sized candies.)

Tags:

#food #reply via reblog #I always forget how particular I am about my candy #until Halloween comes and I end up with a wide variety #at least half of which I hate #(worth trick-or-treating for the other half) #(and maybe I can trade some of the crap away)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slepaulica:

killsmedead:

lizznotliz:

gigidowns | courtenaybird:

The Get More Out of Google Infographic Summarizes Online Research Tricks for Students

I consistently forget these tricks. Now I have a visual. Thanks, Internet.

image

I wish I’d known this in undergrad.

Sending this to my coworkers on Monday.

the site:website.com thing doesn’t seem to be working anymore. :/

Really? Works fine for me. I even tried putting a space between site: and the URL and it still worked.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #useful things

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

urbancatfitters:

do u guys understand how creepy the pledge of allegiance is though like every day when ur a kid everybody just chants how great america is every morning it’s creepy

 

holmes-sweet-holmes:

You do that every morning???

 

jolivet:

EVERY MORNING.

 

youblowuponesun:

wait

wait

is this a real thing i thought that was just in the simpsons

 

jolivet:

no son

 

youarelookingatthis:

Wait, other countries don’t do this.

 

wholock-rab:

*whispers* Not even Russia

 

khito:

i know its the weirdest thing to move to the US partway through your schooling and everyone recites this prayer to the flag every day wtf

 

plures:

the Pledge is so fucking creepy! we were just thinking about that about an hour ago. the patriotism in this country freaks a lot of us out… ~H.

 

ophiuchusdenied:

oh, and you can get detention if you refuse to say the pledge at some schools.  or at least get scolded by your teacher, get your parents called, or be socially ostracised.  all because you refuse to swear fealty to a piece of fabric as a daily ritual.

How do they know if you refuse to say the pledge?

Being homeschooled, my first exposure to routine Pledging was when I tagged along at my little brother’s Cub Scout meetings. By which time I was nearly eleven, had read Guardians of Ga’Hoole, and therefore knew how to look like I was taking part in a group chant without actually doing so.

(Yes, that does mean not Taking a Stand, but I personally think one should not Take a Stand against brainwashing cults until after one has escaped them. And I was still slightly too young, by my parents’ standards, to stay home by myself on a regular basis. (Mom was helping out with them, so I couldn’t stay home with her.))

Tags:

#reply via reblog #jingoism

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

oldfuckingspook:

weremalade:

a dangerous gang of queers with a tough asexual member whose preferred weapon is heavy blunt objects. they call hir the “ace of clubs”.

“Four of a Kind”

  • The Card Sharps – A street gang based out of St. Louis, MO. and known for tagging their territory with street art portraits reminiscent of face cards. Typically these feature celebrities, historical figures, and politicians, but city authorities are uncertain if these figures are viewed positively or negatively by the gang. Many consider the Card Sharps borderline vigilantes, as their victims are overwhelmingly sexual predators who have skirted justice, anti-LGBTQIA+ activists, and the more violent among the abortion clinic protesters.
  • Ellen Hinson – An asexual trans woman of 28 years old and standing at 5’9 (when she’s not wearing her signature 5 inch stiletto pumps in bright red suede) with Harlow-blonde hair and bright blue eyes and looking like a silver screen vixen, Ellen is known in the community for volunteering as a face-painter at elementary school carnivals. She works as an optometrist, but spends her nights and weekends at Busch Stadium. She pitches for a community team— and heaven help you if you call her a softball player. But to the St Louis Police Dept, she’s known as the Ace of Clubs. While the alias has never been traced back to her, Ellen is responsible for the carefully-fractured kneecaps of the enemies of the Card Sharps— always carried out with a leather-wrapped Rawlings baseball bat. 
  • Katraine Webb – A second generation Dominican-American, age 34, Katraine has only begun to use the word ‘asexual’ to describe herself in the past 4 years, but she and her common-law husband Levi have both acknowledged her identity as such— without giving it a name— since they began their relationship in 1997. She is 5’6” and heavyset, and though she worked as an over-the-road truck driver for much of her life, she changed careers to open her own nursery in 2008, when treatment for melanoma left her without the use of her right eye. She teaches bonsai classes on Thursdays, but her weekends are devoted to snipping limbs of another type. She typically follows up on the people for whom a few innings with Ellen proved less than fruitful. At this writing, she is responsible for six unsolved deaths and two disappearances, and the people of the metroplex have come to fear the Ace of Spades. 
  • Lux Alexander – An asexual Scottish-Kiowa two-spirit, age 24 and standing at 5’7, Lux is working on her masters degree in communications at St. Louis University, with plans of working in social media. She lives a solitary life, as her parents (a highly successful public relations entrepreneur and her schoolteacher husband) took an early retirement and relocated to Denver. Lux remained, worked some years as a swimming instructor while her parents paid for her housing needs, and then invested her extra income in a classmate’s startup. When the startup took off, she reaped the benefits, set up a saving account and began building a retirement fund. With her parents continuing to pay tuition and rent, she began to amass a small fortune, and used it to purchase equipment and studio space for her own vlogging business. Having cashed the bonds that her parents purchased for her each year, she now provides the Card Sharps with a stream of untraceable cash. In return, they provide her studio with security while she films her LGBTQIA+ education series for YouTube. The Ace of Diamonds is all but unknown outside of the gang itself.
  • Eli “Gran” Wilcox – A 64 year old former Air Force Colonel, Gran prefers “they” pronouns. They are 5’6” and weigh roughly 100 pounds soaking wet, and in their retirement they run a specialty bakery and catering business, partially funded by donations from Lux. Their bakery’s basement is used as a community storm shelter— and a base of operations for the Card Sharps. They don’t take part in the activities of the gang, but nevertheless provide its members with treats of all sorts. As they are medically trained, they are occasionally a boon to gang members injured on the job, when approaching a hospital would garner suspicion. Gran stitches up stab wounds and bullet holes, but they are also available to members who need a shoulder to lean on. Gran is entirely nonviolent. However, curiously, after Ellen spent a tearful evening sampling their newest macaron recipe and recounting her boyfriend’s infidelity, she later spotted the same boyfriend maneuvering with crutches and a swollen nose. He assured her he had slipped on his iced-over front steps. Gran is not an official member of the gang, but they are considered an honorary Card Sharp, and is occasionally referred to as the Ace of Hearts.

Tags:

#story ideas I will never write

Slepa Ulica: your shoestring is longer than my shoestring

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slepaulica:

adelene-dawner:

adelene-dawner:

slepaulica:

i hate those websites that purport to teach you how to feed yourself on a shoestring budget and they’re all “meals for $10!” and they have people eating lots of stuff from entire categories of food that are closed off to me for economic reasons. if i want to eat a meal for $10, i’ll wait till…

Those websites are definitely for people who are middle class or higher and think they’re poor. $10 isn’t even close to shoestring level here unless you’re talking about a meal that’s supposed to feed a family of four or five people, and really not even then. My average meal costs about $2-3, and that’s taking into consideration that I eat a lot of convenience foods because I don’t really have the executive function to cook most of the time. Something for $10 that wasn’t from a restaurant would be a splurge, and a fairly major one at that. And I’m not desperately poor, either – maybe not even poor at all, depending on how you define it.

Yeah. Out of curiosity (because I am very bad at estimating, really), I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the cost of the food I’m putting up for the winter this year, and it comes to about $170 per month or $5.70 per day. And that’s for a menu that includes kielbasa, hot dogs, cheese, milk, ice cream, potato chips, and even a couple expensive heat-and-eat things that I particularly like. (The relative lack of veggies is mostly because they’re expensive here, though, more than because the point of the exercise is to avoid having to go to the store. A $0.50 meal here wouldn’t be veggies, it’d be plain rice or pasta or instant mashed potatoes.)

Dunno what you’re reading, but it sounds ridiculous because it actually is.

cool and thank you. i get popsicles sometimes, they’re about 50 cents, and i tell myself i can spend my daily food money however i want to, so when i have a little extra, i’ll get a popsicle. or i’ll make a half litre of pudding sometimes (~20 cents for pudding powder, 70 cents for a half litre of milk) because it’s really filling and yummy and warms me up in the winter. (i eat it hot). i also make potato chips. my friend gave me one of those slicer things that slices the vegetables really thin, so i slice the potato and lay it out so it doesn’t overlap and i sprinkle it with salt and spices and put it in the oven for 5-10 minutes and then i have potato chips for 2 cents instead of potato chips for $1.

it seems (from the internet) like in america there are a lot of cheap convenience foods, which is why the poor there rely on them as staples. here, healthy foods tend to be cheap and convenience foods are seen as luxuries and can cost as much as an average priced restaurant meal.

and it seems like neither way is the good way. for disability related reasons i would love to have something i could just put in the microwave  or take it out of its package and put it in the oven for 10 minutes (frozen pizza). but due to the price (and also due to figuring out that gluten was why my stomach hurt everytime i ate, which means there aren’t any frozen pizzas i could even theoretically eat) i have to make most things from scratch. and if i have a migraine and can’t really cook that day, there’s not much i can do about it. or if my brain isn’t working well and it’s too hard to hold onto all the steps involved in boiling water without sticking my hand in it…well that sucks. so it would be really nice to have access to cheap, tv dinner type things that don’t cost $5 each.

but poor people in america, they should be able to have fresh vegetables and fruit and milk. they shouldn’t have to buy a big tub of cheap ice cream because it’s the cheapest way to get their daily calorie needs satisfied. neither way is good.

i went and looked in my browser history.

here’s an example of “cheap food for $10/meal”:

http://www.ivillage.ca/food/recipes/cheap-eats-10-delicious-dinners-under-10

this one was the England one I mentioned that seemed relevant to actual poor people: http://agirlcalledjack.com/

also:

http://busycooks.about.com/od/inexpensiverecipes/Inexpensive_Recipes_Meals_under_10_Cheap_and_Easy_Cooking.htm

http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/08/cheap-meals-recipes-for-under-ten-dollars.html

but the title of my post was inspired by http://glutenfreeonashoestring.com/ which doesn’t say “cheap meals for $10”, she doesn’t tally up the prices for each entry, but i guess it’s supposed to be cheaper than something. what i’m not sure. i follow the blog because maybe someday some of it will be useful for me, but most of it is way out of my financial league. for me, gluten free on a shoestring is corn flour ($1/kg) and otherwise just eating naturally gluten free stuff like potatoes and rice. i really do like that blog, with the pretty pictures of all the nice foods, but almost every post on there makes me jealous!

$10 for four servings (which those meals are) isn’t terribly expensive for dinner if (and only if) you’re including meat, but it’s far from shoestring. On the other hand, it’s only about as hard to wrap my brain around the idea of $2.50/meal being “shoestring” as it is the idea of ground beef costing $15/kilo. (I went and checked and the ground beef we just bought was $8.15/kilo.)

(We’re still clinging to middle class thus far, so I don’t have the prices of every food I eat regularly memorised, but from what I know the six or seven non-dinner foods* I eat a day are usually in the range of ~40 – 80c each. (Or, for some context, ~2.3 – 4.7 minutes of minimum wage work.))

*I’m much better with many smaller meals than few larger ones. They’re more like snacks.

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#reply via reblog