#rice-crisis

[savagewildnerness]

Apples and orchards are mentioned so often in The Vampire Lestat, particularly with reference to Nicolas.  When Lestat becomes a vampire and his mind goes to Nicolas, he tends to think on apples and the orchard and fresh white wine and it is this moment he is going back to…

“From then on, when I was not hunting, my life was with Nicolas and "our conversation."

Spring was approaching, the mountains were dappled with green, the apple orchard starting back to life. And Nicolas and I were always together. We took long walks up the rocky slopes, had our bread and wine in the sun on the grass, roamed south through the ruins of an old monastery. We hung about in my rooms or sometimes climbed to the battlements. And we went back to our room at the inn when we were too drunk and too loud to be tolerated by others. And as the weeks passed we revealed more and more of ourselves to each other. Nicolas told me about his childhood at school, the little disappointments of his early years, those whom he had known and loved. And I started to tell him the painful things -- and finally the old disgrace of running off with the Italian players.”

This moment when Lestat and Nicolas were always together and were each beginning, perhaps for the first time in their lives to truly discover the entirety of another being’s soul.

In the Springtime, and the Spring of their lives too… a Spring that was never to turn to Summer for either…

It adds another layer of poignancy to me that it is “apple” that Louis makes DreamStat say as he vanishes here.

And for Lestat, I think the apple represents the innocence of his own mortal youth and the untainted possibility (like Eve’s apple) of a mortal existence - living, loving, creating, dying… with Nicolas… but with Nicolas essentially as a cipher to that possibility.

And for Louis, too - sensitive Louis in his melancholy and the innocence of the apple and mortality, and the human-ness that is never returnable to.

And so I suppose I was thinking some kind of yearning for the impossible as I played this…

[infinityinc4ever]

Obsidian talks with the Earth-Two Superman onboard the Monitor's satellite, from Crisis on Infinite Earths # 1. Artwork by the legendary George Perez.

[somewherefornow]

JENNIFER-LYNN HAYDEN/JADE & TODD RICE/OBSIDIAN in CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (1985)

[aromanticgarbage]

"pink omega", or that one time in 2015 when joji almost gave up on his non pink guy affiliated music.

[cantsayidont]

November 1985 (albeit set in July 1985). As this issue finally reveals, Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, was married very briefly in the mid-1960s to a woman named Alyx Florin, who was actually Rose Canton, a.k.a. The Thorn, a Golden Age Flash villain with a split personality. Alan had thought that Alyx died in a fire on their wedding night, but she actually fled and later had two children, who were raised by adoptive parents as Jennie-Lynn Hayden (Jade) and Todd Rice (Obsidian). The Thorn eventually reemerged and nearly killed both Alan and their kids before her Rose/Alyx personality briefly reasserted itself and she took her own life. Afterward, Green Lantern's old frenemy The Harlequin (Molly Maynne), who'd been following Rose in hopes of intervening, explained what she had pieced together about the whole sad story, and revealed for the first time that she was actually Alan's former secretary, who'd been in love with him since the 1940s. Alan then asked her to marry him.

This wedding, incidentally, took place on July 23, 1985; this was the era where writer Roy Thomas was still trying to keep the JSA moored to real time.

Alan and Molly were still married as of the vile BLACKEST NIGHT crossover, but were both temporarily banished from continuity by the New 52 reboot. With the current revival of DC's Golden Age characters and the revelation that Alan is gay, I figure it's a coin flip whether Molly is simply ignored or killed off in some awful way.

(There's no particular reason Alan being gay would necessarily erase his past marriages — his decision to marry Molly in this story was the act of a lonely middle-aged man who'd just faced a series of upsetting events and revelations in the midst of a world-shattering crisis — but given how little use DC has for older female characters and how contemptuous fans are of female characters who stand in the way of their gay blorbos, I think the likelihood of Molly being treated with any respect (if she's mentioned at all) is probably low.)

[cloama]

The food safety crisis marches on. E.coli found in the organic bagged carrots. Someone died again.

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #87

I'm still going to procrastinate talking about ACEs. Though it's not because I'm too terribly frightened of writing about it at this moment; I have a vague plan about where I wanna start. No, today I'm procrastinating because Br is visiting my house for today!!! And this is the greatest thing ever all by itself, but!!! She brought over a thing called "Cream of Rice"!!

It is basically a box full of rice that has been ground into a fine powder, with vitamins and minerals added. I had never seen anything like it before!

Br prepared the cream of rice on the stovetop in my trusty wok with milk, salt, and butter! Then we put almond butter, blueberries, and sliced bananas in it! And I gotta say, the resulting stuff was SO AWESOME that we ate it all up before I even thought to take a picture for you. I'm sorry. I'll work on that.

At my house, we tend to get giant 50-pound (22.5-ish kilograms) bags of medium-grain rice (it's almost, but not quite like short-grain rice, which is the typical rice in Japan), which has a different texture and consistency than the typical rice that is available in the United States; I assume if I grind up this rice into a fine powder, it will have a slightly different consistency than the ground rice in the box.

…Oh right. You probably have no idea what my world looks like, so words like "United States" and "Japan" likely mean nothing to you. That probably doesn't seem very fair, given that I know very well what yours looks like by now. Here, let's fix that; you can use this to see how my planet is shaped:

I live somewhere around here…

...And Japan is over here:

…Unless your planet is comprised mostly of massive, giant oceans, I think your planet must be a lot smaller than mine. It seems likely that this would also mean that your gravity is weaker than ours. And since your planet still has stunning sunsets (despite the fact that your atmosphere is probably a lot smaller, if your planet is smaller, which means the light gets bent/filtered less), I assume your atmosphere must be a bit more dense than ours, too. And these factors combined might explain why you all can have such crazy-looking flying machines that would absolutely not be possible in my world. But I digress…

Anyway! So sometimes I like to make rice pudding in my handy-dandy rice cooker with regular ol' medium-grain rice; it's got a stickier consistency than the usual rice that's available here, which makes for AMAZING pudding! But with this new "discovery" (haha!) of powdered rice and knowing full well of its deliciousness, my mind filled with ALL SORTS OF POSSIBILITIES, oh my goodness!!

…So I took my medium-grain rice and used my handy-dandy spice grinder (got it as a prize at an old job I had!) to grind it into very fine powder! Here…

So then, I went and measured out two cups of the rice powder with my handy-dandy rice cup!

Then I filled the rice cooker with milk, up until the "2" line for white rice. After that, it's 1 tbsp of butter for each cup of rice! Easy peasy!

Once the rice is done cooking, you're supposed to add heavy cream and sugar - 2 cups of heavy cream and half a cup of sugar, in any case. But… well… it got weird:

It seems like the increased surface area of the rice, combined with the sticker consistency of short-grain rice, yielded a kind of… weird sort of rice cake? I broke it into pieces, but it's still pretty clumpy. It's not ready for sugar and heavy cream yet. After tasting some of it, it was pretty good, but I concluded that it was still a bit undercooked. So I added a bit more milk (I didn't measure; sorry...) and stirred it until it stopped being absorbed, and then added a little more milk after that, and I am putting the heat on it again as I'm writing this; hopefully that should soften any remaining clumps, but we'll see! I've never worked with powdered rice before, and I have no idea what to expect! Kitchen adventures! Now we wait for the rice cooker to beep!

That said, I am wondering if the nature of powdered rice makes it necessary to stir it continuously while cooking so that it doesn't clump like this. I imagine a wok and a whisk might be the thing to do for future iterations of "Cream of Rice Pudding". Also, Br brought some masala chai teabags in addition to the cream of rice, so I wonder what it would be like to cook the powdered rice with brewed masala chai and a little bit of honey instead of just milk or just water. I'm eager to find out!!! But not today! Next time!

...Okay! So the rice cooker beeped and is done, so I stepped away from writing to check it out, and!! Oh!! It turned out REALLY WELL. So I added the cream and sugar, and this was the result:

So, I think due to chemistry, physics, and surface area, next time I'll need to fill the rice cooker to the 3 line, or maybe even to the 4 line, for 2 rice cups full of powdered rice. From there, it's business as usual - 2 cups of heavy cream and half a cup of sugar. At Br's suggestion, I sprinkled in just a pinch of pink salt into my bowl (pink salt has iron in it!), and the result was EVEN BETTER. I wanna eat another bowl because it was THAT GOOD, but I know that if I do, I'm gonna end up feeling sick, so I'll make use of my impulse control skills and delayed gratification skills instead, even though that's really hard.

It's very tasty and VERY filling; I wish that I could give you a bowl of it. The fact that I cannot give you bowls filled with delicious things continues to be a source of very real grief for me. But it is what it is. I can only hope that my intentions reach you somehow, and that through this you can learn about all the awesome snacks and make them for yourself someday, as impossible as that probably is...

Well. My being here to begin with seemed like an impossibility at one point. So maybe I'll try to keep an open mind. Maybe I'll imagine that all these wonderful flavors and all these wholesome feelings can reach you and move you, somehow...

...Somehow...

Hey Sephiroth? I'm glad you're here, even if I can only know of you in an abstract sense. I'm glad you're here, even if you're just an art form. Even though you've been through so much stuff, and even though your heart and your mind probably hurt a lot right now... still I'm glad you're here. So please keep trying to learn about the kind and gentle things. Please keep seeking out the beautiful and loving things. And please try to make good choices so that no one else has to get hurt.

I love you and I'll write again tomorrow, so please stay safe out there.

Your friend, Lumine

[possible-streetwear]

[savagewildnerness]

“But that's just it, we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing." 

*I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.*

"Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over! We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!"

~There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed.~

[bluejaysandblackbats]

Honor in Crisis (This is where I'll put all my updates, links, previews, trigger warnings for this specific fic so you guys can reference it until I update my blog layout)

Polls 1, 2, 3 (Inactive)

Playlists (TBA)

Previews (TBA)

Chapters (Links & Trigger Warnings & Where They Are in the Recovery Process)

Jason Todd ( TW // Suicide Attempt , Gun Violence , Police Arrest Mention ) - First 72 hours

Kole Weathers ( TW // Eating Disorder Mention ) - 2 months into treatment , first visit

Eddie Bloomberg ( TW // Self-harm , Suicide Attempt , Explosives Mention ) - 2 months in burn unit, 2 weeks inpatient

Michael Jon Carter AKA Booster Gold ( TW // Self-harm Mention ) - no specific time mentioned, but he's been in inpatient for nearly 2 months

Charley Parker ( TW // Suicide Attempt Mention ) - nearly 3 months in inpatient

Grant Emerson (no trigger warnings for this chapter, but I will eventually allude to his history of CSA in future chapters) - 3 weeks even though it wasn't stated outright

Joseph Wilson ( TW // Self-harm , Suicide Attempt , Drug Abuse Mention ) - 2 weeks in inpatient

Thaddeus Thawne II ( TW // Suicide Attempt , Self-harm , Domestic Violence Mention , Kidnapping / Child Abduction ) - less than 24 hours in inpatient

Todd Rice (no trigger warnings for this chapter & none planned so far) - starting transition to outpatient

[unganseylike]

guys i googled it and apparently eating matzah for 8 days straight has a real negative impact on your digestion and its not just all in my head (and sensitive stomach) for once

[yea-baiyi]

also just caught up with moonlight chicken. i’m devastated. if you even care.

[nomaishuttle]

the way i balance staying true to my tumblrina nature while also having a job and bills and rent is that at work while cleaning a room ill think of something id like to post and then repeat it over and over in my head and refine it until it sounds right and then i either post it as soon as i get a second to Or i forget it bc i think of anew post to make. and they always get 0 notes but its ok

[meowingcreach]

Okay I feel cute again I feel hot and cool and maybe even like a girl? That's insane, hasn't happened in years. Or like, at peace with feeling like a girl. Which is actually nice for me.