Will of the People

P.S. Sushi with brown rice is just fine. The effort to manage to get the sushi not to be horribly ugly will take some time, but it's delicious anyhow. There appears to be a fine art in using water to seal the rolls. It is an amazing thing watching the Nori turn green over the stove. This is avocado sushi.

At some point when I am feeling ambitious, I will try fermenting the rice - I've done this before accidentally, but getting the smell/taste right without making something hazardous to eat is likely a game of brinksmanship.

Ultra-simple Veggie Halfwich recipe:( Read more... )

I've been feeling rather lousy recently, but when things arn't so bad I've been doing some work on my blog software.( Read more... )

Early next month, Rage of the Stage (a local alternative theatre group) is doing an interpretation of the Rocky Horror Show, which should be interesting (their theatre being in an old warehouse in the southside, I'll actually be able to attend without twisting arms, unlike the local RHPS).

I am toying with the idea of adding some "transforms" into my mail client to remove advertisements inside messages before I see them. On some level I'm still mystified that people use mailing lists and other community sites that stick adverts into everything, and there's something weird about the idea of a world where we accept the idea of allowing things nobody wants to see to be given a "fair shot" at reaching eyes of people in exchange for them being given a service, with the more technically sophisticated of those people then using software to hide it anyway. This kind of ties in to how we percieve Google, Yahoo, and some other sites - companies that have a primary stream of revenue doing evil while being otherwise reasonably good (use of the term evil here is lightly tongue-in-cheek). Thank goodness for greasemonkey and other things that let us avoid this stuff.

Also pondering: general issues with asymmetry in broader-term relationships.. can relationships be stable given an expectation of sustained asymmetry?

Fondue 2.0: another qualified success( Read more... )

Livejournal's random feed demonstrates that there is a mind-boggling amount of slash being written all the time.

First attempt at Fondue is a partial success.( Read more... )

Yum.

When I got home from the Beehive, I failed to find anyone interested in dinner, so I made spaghetti. A twist: instead of the hearty tomato flavour, I decided to experiment with something different.. Recipe:

( Read more... )

I boiled it down into a stewlike consistency - hopefully it'll be tasty (disclaimer: I am the perpetual novice at cooking. This recipe might be no good). The broth is very good (and fairly thick) - when it cools down I look forward to seeing how it all works together.

The basic idea was to make a spaghetti stew where the very idea of mixing tomato sauce into it would be unthinkably wrong....

I have made a cooking discovery, and learned a new way of thinking about cooking stews in the process. As you may already be aware, the primary thing I presently cook is a spinach-spaghetti stew with lots of spice. Everything else I toss in varies, including at times black-eyed peas, beans of various kinds, cheeses, tomatoes, and similar. I basically toss whatever I feel like eating into the base, along with water and some oil, let it boil down for awhile while tossing anything else in I like, and eat. The new way of thinking about it is that I now have a clear conceptual divide between what I initially toss in and what I toss in later. Some things lose most of their flavour during the cooking or contribute differently depending on whether they're added initially or near the end. I have learned that mustard makes an excellent latter addition, but not a particularly interesting initial component (the discovery). I am glad to have a use for the mustard I got in France a little over a year ago at a mustard shop (don't worry -- it was sealed).

It's nice that when I got in Friday night, my cats missed me so much. They looked very upset when I grabbed my keys to head out to India Garden later that night. It's not quite the same as having a person to come home to, but it's similar in some nice ways.

Here's a pic Ivan took of me on the backpacking trip:

Today was mostly a day of cleaning, but I briefly went to yet another antiwar protest with Dmitriy to take photos. I'll put the rest of the photos up later, but I think this one is particularly amusing:

Apparently, they were FBI officers keeping an eye on the whole thing. They were looking down from the roof of a nearby building, accompanied at times by a very loud helicopter. If I had been somewhat more energetic, I probably would've stayed longer, but I was dead tired, and when my camera ran out of batteries, we went home. The next time I update the media area of my website, you'll see the other good stuff.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has provided a list of 8 "commandments" of Chinese socialist virtue. Some thoughts:

1. Love and do not harm the nation
• I don't think this is appropriate -- I believe a good socialist should not advocate national loyalties, instead valuing the revolution and the society it aims to produce. National alliances stand in the way of world progress -- our aims are world communism transcending and eventually unifying nations. One should only love the nation insomuch as it is a system that creates socialism, and not for itself. National identity is a harmful and distracting vanity
2. Help rather than hurt the interests of the people
• This is important advice that would be timely for the United States. I believe that capitalism as a system tends to create a delusion for many people that by seeking their own interests, society's interests are served. This relationship in a capitalist system is much more complex than that
3. Uphold science and enlightenment, oppose ignorance and broken ways of living
• Also an important end.
4. Work hard, don't shirk work
• This is particularly relevant to a lot of bureaucrats and owners of business and other forms of capital, in that when they start to make a significant portion of their income from owning things rather than doing things, they are on a path of privilege and degeneracy.
5. Work together, do not seek benefits at the expense of others
• This fits into the above as well as #2
6. Be honest and trustworthy, do not allow a drive for profit to corrupt virtue
• Also fits well into above. This is probably worth separate mention because this is one of the primary struggles against human nature that is characteristic of all kinds of society, capitalist or those that would be communist. In more lassiez-faire systems like the United States, many forms of corruption are out in the open and accepted parts of the system, causing some not to recognise them as corruption at all (e.g. lobbyists, astroturfing, etc). If one is to compare this to corruption in other systems, one must be careful not to simply compare the sysystems by how they compare to their own ideals -- any system with suitably low ideals should not be considered the best society.
7. Be disciplined and obey laws rather than being chaotic and criminal
• The relationship between radical individualism and criminality is a complex one -- it's interesting to me to see them linked, even if merely by accident, here. I can imagine a connection between certain rationales for criminal behaviour and radical individualism, although that bears further examination. Hmm.
8. Embrace simple living instead of seeking luxury
• This is another high virtue that would totally transform any culture that fully embraced it.

• Watch carefully for institutions of privilege, and try to dismantle/undermine them, or at least not support them, when possible
• Advances in phrasing do not entail advances in social conditions
• Do not tolerate those who would destroy society, do not aid those who would hold it back

I couldn't reach anyone to climb with, so instead, I decided to try to cook.I present to you a recipe from someone who is not a cook and probably has nocooking skill, for a food he has not even eaten yet. Here is...

NOT KEESHRecipe by Pat GunnMAY BE DANGEROUS

Ingredients:Chaumes CheeseSpinach of the Ages (read: spinach that's been a frozen block in my freezer for who knows how long, likely more than 3 months, at least 1)Indian-spiced TofuOlive OilLime JuiceGarlic Salt

Instructions:Pour some olive oil in a pan, sprinkling it with olive oil. Set stove onmedium, wait for it to begin to make a sound. Drop in the tofu, and let itbegin to brown. When somewhat brown, place frozen spinach in pan, moving tofu ontop. Squirt some lime juice to the side of the spinach. Begin rotating spinachto prevent burnt spinach. Add oil. After some of it has detached from the frozenblock, put a chunk of chaumes on the tofu. Keep rotating, as rest of spinachslowly comes off the block, leaving the tofu on progressively smaller grounds.Eventually, as platform gets smaller, let chaumes into the sea of spinach, andlet it melt, mixing it in well. As tofu falls into spinach, move it to thebottom to let it finish cooking, rotating frequently to avoid burning. A bitafter the block is entirely gone and all spinach is at least warm, with cheesemixed in, pour the thing into a bowl and serve.