i haven’t been on the Lemmy much lately, not for any real reason just, you know, other stuff.

1. so as for something good: i am hosting two groups at my house, one is a zen group that has practiced here for almost three years and today marks the first day that it has happened without me being involved and i love that - i am, unfortunately, sick, but the fact that the group can function without me means that it’s likely going to survive and i like that.

the other group is a vegan dinner club slash political theory study group (in the vein of Murray Bookchin). i’m middle aged and not connected with very many young people in the world, so this group brings together college-aged people, other middle aged people like myself, and some of our friends and family together. i’m the only vegan in the group but since i host, i get to request we make and eat only vegan food and everybody’s been doing great. i feel like this is my little bit of activism; get some leftists thinking about how damn good vegan food can be and maybe it will jump into their minds that, hey! veganism and leftism are interrelated!

2. looking for a vegan community that wasn’t reddit.

1. my wife and i tried making tofu the other week and that was quite an adventure. we did create an edible product! it was actually tasting but there’s a lot of room for refining in that process.

2. working on my home’s landscaping. my family abides by solarpunk and permaculture principles conceptually, so we’re trying to put them into action in real life in a couple of different ways. i have lately been putting rain barrels in place to catch what scant rainfall we do receive where i live, and am planning to install drip irrigation lines off of those rain barrels to water a pollinator garden that will be on the burning hot west side of our house this summer. i have no idea if that will be enough to help anything survive, but that’s what i’m thinking about. also finishing the deep mulching of our front yard with woodchips and cardboard. this project has taken forever but is providing a better growth medium than the bare dirt clay soil we had before.

slow cooker. i don’t like cooking but i have to feed this meat sack every day so anything that allows for that to be easier. pressure cooker, sure, but i’m a fan of “dump it in the slow cooker on my lunch break and then eat it for dinner” levels of effort.

speaking of effort, i’m an idiot and am in a go-at-your-own-pace degree program, but the semester ends in 16 days and i have… four classes to complete. gonna be a long two weeks.

i’m largely asking because my Buddhism deeply informs my vegan practice. it seems logically consistent that to believe in the morality of not killing, that same morality should be applied as universally as possible, and thus also ought to apply to my diet. that kind of logic was instrumental in my “conversion” to veganism; applying that logic in various situations allowed me to make different choices which have eventually become habits/lifestyle that rejects killing as much as possible.

two things, i think: my rice cooker is hella cheap; in fact, it was free from someone on Craigslist i think. that doesn’t mean it’s bad, necessarily, but in this case the bottom of the rice was burnt and the top was soggy. also the taste of this ended up like fairly sweet. i am wondering if there was an issue with the tomato paste i used; when i open a can i freeze little tablespoon sized balls of tomato paste and i just tossed two of those in. it just ended up soggy and weirdly tomato-sweet.

that said, there are a couple folks who recommended this recipe, so if anyone wants to give it a shot and see, it’s here.

been just preposterously busy with work as i just got kind of thrust into a new role as a sysadmin for which i am entirely unqualified, lol. but! in order to swim rather than sink i’m now learning Powershell, which will hopefully be useful long-term. we’re also in a season of needing a lot of work on our home; my wife and i just finished rebuilding a fence that blew over in a windstorm, and then as we were preparing for a flooring project we found mold in some drywall that we’ve had to isolate and will need to mitigate, and just this morning we had someone out to do a yearly furnace check and we need a new actuator in the furnace. hopefully by the time this is all done i’ll both know powershell and also be a functional handyman, ha! which is something i never had any interest in before.

outside of work and home repair, i’m trying to start a habit of yoga in addition to my meditation practice, but that’s been tough because the room i usually do yoga in is the room that closed off due to the mold remediation! lol/sob.

also just trying to stay on top of cooking. my wife and i make a giant weekly pot of Nigerian style jollof rice, and that’s been a great relief so we don’t need to figure out lunches for the first few days of the week.

so, boring life stuff but busy. never a dull moment.

I started “The Vegan Studies Project” by Laura Wright, in which she looks through a vegan lens at the trend of vampire romance… apparently, I am susceptible to suggestion, because I stopped reading that book after the chapter where she discusses “True Blood” and instead read the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, “Dead Until Dark”. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, but it was a quick read and put me in mind of its time, late 90s/early 2000s.

Now I’m back to the Vegan Studies Project. I’m not finding it terribly compelling, honestly, but that’s okay. It is at least interesting to see an academically-oriented vegan text looking at, among other things, media that I love like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

i’m sure my story’s not that interesting, but that’s never stopped me before!

i had a friend go vegan in high school, probably 2002 or 2003; i thought she was nuts. we lived in Iowa which is hardcore meat and potatoes territory. but this was my first real-life exposure to that ideology. Alice, if you’re out there, i hope you’re still vegan and know that while i was not cool about it then, it affected me!

anyway, fast forward many, many years of loving animals but never thinking about where food came from. i ate the standard American diet, drank too much, lived a sedentary life; by the time i sort of “came to” i was over 400lbs (180+kg), a pack-a-day smoker, a heavy drinker, etc. shortly after i realized what i was doing to myself i got diagnosed with diabetes and moved to Colorado. the more active lifestyle out here combined with some other choices helped me get a bit healthier, stop smoking, and some other things. i think this was the first time i tried going vegan myself, maybe 2011 or 2012. it was really difficult and my complicated relationship with food made it not work.

around this same time i began practicing Zen Buddhism, which i continue doing to this day. i tried going vegan several times over the years and never lasted longer than about six months - the Buddhism strongly encouraged the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, but it still didn’t click.

in 2022 my wife and i bought a house and got two cats. they are an absolute joy in my life, and it was that which made me realize ever buffalo wing or hamburger i ate came from a creature with as rich an internal life and as much feeling and personality as my boys, and i couldn’t do it any more. in 2023 i became a vegetarian, and in 2024 (April-ish) i became a vegan and have stuck it out since then. the kitties, the zen, and the internet have all helped.

additionally, going vegan made tremendous positive impacts on my health. for the first time in my life my diabetes is under control, my depression is moderated, my gout isn’t flaring up, and i’m almost 100lbs lighter than i was when i started all this stuff.

so… yeah! tofu is amazing.

one way that being vegan has improved my life is that it’s reduced the stress of cognitive dissonance, by which i mean i feel like my dietary choices are in line with my values and beliefs. i’m a practicing Buddhist and not killing is the first precept in Buddhism - and there’s millennia of history of at least vegetarian if not entirely vegan cuisine coming from countries and societies where other people took that precept seriously.

for me personally, another moment that impacted me was when my wife and i adopted two cats that had been discovered in an empty house. they were such playful, intelligent, and obviously feeling creatures; what in my life made me feel like cows, pigs, or chickens were any different?

anyway, that’s sort of what’s improved. it’s definitely created more complications too as so many others have pointed out. my wife’s not vegan, which bothers me occasionally. my mom totally doesn’t understand what being vegan is; she seems to think it’s basically keto somehow? i travel a lot for work and in some of the really rural places i visit, finding vegan options can be tough. i don’t mind that, but when i travel with co-workers they love to give me shit about being vegan. i keep showing them delicious food options (for example, Frisco, CO, has an amazing Vietnamese restaurant with some of the best vegan food i’ve ever had), but they still like to mock. oh well. i hope that by living according to my values, i will have an impact on them even if they don’t admit it.

just got back from a week-long sesshin (zen meditation retreat), so no reading during that time, lol. a bunch of my holds came in at the library though! “Prophet Against Slavery” about the early American emancipationist vegan Quaker Benjamin Lay, “Vegan Africa” by Marie Kacouchia, and also “Borne” by Jeff Vandermeer. gonna be on the road a lot this week so i am hoping to make some progress on these!

As for me, I’m working on “Birnam Wood” by Eleanor Catton. i’m having a slow time getting into it, but i’ve heard it’s good. likely won’t get it finished in the next week as tomorrow i’m off to a zen retreat for a week, but it’ll be waiting for me when I get back.

i’ve got a couple things specifically relating to veganism on order from my local library: “Veganism: Politics, Practice, and Theory” by Eva Haifa Giraud, and “The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror” by Laura Wright.

i’m no academic but i am a nerd, and am hoping that these so-called foundational texts in vegan studies will help me have a better theoretical and actionable framework within which to work. speaking of which, i also have on order “Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism” by Mark Hawthorne. this one i have purchased so that i can have it as a reference for actual praxis.

have any of you read any of these and have any thoughts, or recommendations?

thanks to this post i just learned about rajma! i am excited to try making it in the near future.

i did create a post about what we’re reading, but i realize now that might be stepping on toes so if so, i apologize. let me know and i can take it down in favor of whatever we collectively decide we’d like to see.

As for me, I just finished “The Future” by Naomi Alderman. i enjoyed it enough to stay up late last night finishing it. i don’t necessarily agree with some of the premises, but i found it enjoyable to read. there are a few scenes that stuck with me in unpleasant ways, but i found myself very intrigued as to what, exactly, the fuck was going on.

four out of five stars from me.

i like the idea of a book club where we just share what we’ve been reading and would love to participate! or even if we all decide to read the same thing, i just like getting recommendations from new folks about things that i might not have heard of or thought about. so i guess my vote would be 2 or 3 above.

it was great. i ended up going with the NuWave wok shown in this video, despite in the end him recommending the other one (heads-up, his channel is not vegan; there are some vegan recipes but viewer beware). at my price point and lack of a functional separate wok, the NuWave checked the boxes and worked just like i was hoping for.

lol, that’s fair - i always run my cell phone photos through Google Photos to dial up the saturation and what they call the “pop”. it makes for more interesting photos but if you have a good monitor i bet it’s almost unpleasant, ha! sorry for that.

in Google Photos there’s an option to dial up the saturation and dial up what it calls “pop” and I usually dial up both a fair bit, otherwise my photos tend to look dull and unappealing.

hella delicious!