Dickens of a Blog

The third iteration of Doug Bolden's various thoughts and musings.

Reading Induced Insomnia, Dungeon Crawler Carl, and Becoming Mostly Ok with Audiobooks

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On 2026-01-14

In Reading

Snagged from mattdinnamin.com. Used without permission but you should click that link and find out more. Trust me.

Something of a sysadmin style notice, but if I clicked the right clicks then this will be the first post where comments are turned completely off by default. There will probably be “discussion” posts, not that anyone discusses things on my blog, but due to all the normal reasons that people hate leaving comments over – reasons #1 through #10 being annoying spam and reasons #11 through around #24 being variations of security issues – it will only be the odd post out that has comments. I’ll leave on pingbacks for the moment, partially because I use those to form a matrix of ideas but I am not precisely attached to having to have them.

Now, on with the show…

Reading Induced Insomnia, Rank: 7 Days

I have gone too bed too late for too many nights in a row. Due to reading. I know from experience that being in a relaxed state and reading an hour or two past my sleepy-bye time tends to leave me almost nearly as rested as sleep but this past week it has gone on a bit too much so I have to cut myself off for a few nights. Grammpy Doug needs his 22:00-22:30 bedtime or he gets the fuzzy brain, Space Pilgrims.

The reason for it?

Dungeon Crawl Carl Series, Rank: 4 Books and Counting

The reason for this is exactly due to one thing, I’ve been reading through Matt Dinniman’s rather delightful Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I’m on Book Four – The Gate of the Feral Gods – and remain thoroughly invested.

It is a series that has been on my radar for a couple of years though I had misunderstood the basic setup this whole time and so a lot of references to it made no sense to me out of context.

I knew the general LitRPG concept, books where characters are player in a game and are aware of the concepts, which is funnily enough how a lot of people play their actual RPGs. “I cast magic missile using the mirror, which should give it +1 to hit!” The kind of thing that their characters wouldn’t really be able to suss out with precision, though it’s the kind of detail that would pretty unfun to try and always encapsulate in purely in-world terms. To each their own.

The misunderstanding is that I was under the impression that the Earth had been turned into the Dungeon World by using existing structures. I was expecting something kind of like a violent take on The Mall World concept. Fitting into a particular flavor of 1970s-1990s dystopian film and novel where death games were played out in bits of the real world.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a lot weirder than that but I’ll leave it to the reader to find out how. It’s probably more spoiled everywhere now, as the series is picking up more and more steam.

At any rate, I enjoy very nearly everything about the books. Carl and his caring but righteous indignation. The sassy chaos of Princess Donut. Most of the NPCs and other PCs. The skill systems and nearly ineffable game rules. The violence and extreme solutions. The cosmic horror tinged with corporate horror as people competing in death games far over their heads deal with horrors that are kind of a parody of the earth but also glimpses into a universe that very nearly makes no sense to humanity.

Carl would likely have resonated even harder with a younger Doug back when I was a bit more self-righteously angry about things, but as a slightly mollified older man with a child and having to navigate – *gestures at everything happening in 2026* – I can still enjoy a person that fits like a broken cog in a machine and getting away with it.

If you like stuff like fantasy-tech ARPGs with complex skill trees, dramatically soul crushing developments, a bunch of soon-to-be-dated references that are pretty timely at the moment, huge explosions, and sarcastic humor while people are covered in gore and being lectured by an increasingly unhinged AI “gamemaster,” give it a shot.

There are a lot of reviews out there. This is not really a review. Just an acknowledgement that in a little over a week phrases like, “Goddamnit, Donut,” and, “NEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!,” have entered a kind of general vernacular in Huis van Bolden.

Some of the foot-fetish humor, and especially the degree that the character’s distaste in being forced to engage in it while friends and companions more or less laugh at him for feeling sexually harassed is an odd glitch note in the text. I mean, sure, he’s also being forced to bash in the heads of people. It just hits funky.

Becoming Mostly Ok with Audiobooks, Rank: 1(ish)

At least around 30% of my “reading” the series has been via the Audible exclusive (?) audiobooks narrated by the absolutely phenomenal Jeff Hays. To put how good his narration is, if DCC had been a flop for me I would probably have just tried to find more books narrated by that man. He is great.

Audiobooks and I have tended to never quite get along. The reasons are many. My reading speed tends to be a bit faster than reasonable narration. I like to glance back and forth a good bit to check charts, footnotes, or whatever. Just to sometimes compare scenes and get a feeling of the writer behind the words.

While I tend to read fairly fast, I do sometimes like to slow down and think more about the situation, enter into a kind of liminal reading space. Audiobooks have ways to mitigate this, especially in conjunction with ebooks that track the progress between the two, but I can’t imagine audiobooks ever really replacing that mental space in my brain. Especially those with mediocre or particularly slow readers, which ends up just draining me and making me kind of hate the book in question.

Another reason is a bit more petty and barely holds up to scrutiny over time. Back, around 20-years-ago, when I was in library school there was the rise of three “variations” of literature among the librarians: young adult fiction, audiobooks, and ebooks. None of which were new but all of which were being simultaneously pushed as a forefront for helping to inspire reluctant readers.

For the lattermost two, there was this tribal desire to try and claim only one format as being “authentic books.” I heard multiple library students say they hated ebooks because they preferred the { smell | feel | texture | taste | whatever } of “real books” but then they would talk about how 90% of their reading was listening. “Amazon actually owns all your Kindle books,” they would taunt as they downloaded another low fidelity book via Audible [which was bought out by Amazon around this time].

These arguments are partially why I tend to refer to physical books as “Dead Tree Fetishism” (where the act of owning a bit of dead tree is more important than enjoying the text via that medium) though I obviously adore physical books.

My irritation at this, despite accepting one aspect of their argument – that good audiobooks are akin to a transformative work that approaches the material in a different way – made me cranky at the wider audiobook world.

A more reasonable final reason is that my brain is slightly incompatible with audiobooks. I tend to dance around the threads in my brain and audiobooks always had the effect of only occupying perhaps one of them at most, and sometimes the other threads would just be a bit too loud to focus. With some mental practice, I have been able to more overcome this.

I have no specific numbers, and refuse to make a specific goal, but in general I think I will try to get my “Tolerates Audiobooks” to at least a Rank 2 or 3 skill before the 2026th floor collapses and we are thrown into whatever chaos exists on Floor 2027.

Just picture, Space Pilgrims, next year’s Doug: *gestures at all that stuff going down in 2027*.

At any rate, I’m so sleepy I just dropped my keyboard while typing in some act of physics rebellion I do not understand, so I’ll wrap this up, here.

The “Cool Vegan” Letter

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On 2026-01-08

In Rants, Vegan

You occasionally come across a response or opinion that catches you off guard. The world is a rainbow and there are spectra within spectra, so I am never expecting everything to make sense to any of the MillionBillion Dougs, but still…

Name is obvious retracted, but the source was The Guardian which kind of spoils my obfuscation but I like to cite my sources.

Apologies for any readers with sight issues, but I’ll not quote it in full [see link in caption to find more] but the gist is that the person wishes to see more foods catering cool vegans and vegetarians. The opposite given would be foods like “vegetarian curries and chilli dishes.”

The first thing that caught my eye was simply the use of cool in the presumed context of “people who do not like spicy.” It is potentially a double entendre of sorts, the non-sexy kind. I tried to find if that was a common speech pattern [“cool foods”] and mostly found a website dedicated to more carbon-neutral eating and another blog that hasn’t posted in a few years.

In principle, it reminds of a complaint I read years ago in the comments on Vegan Black Metal Chef‘s videos: that vegans can only stomach their food by making it too spicy. There was a period where it was one of the gotcha arguments against plant-based diets. You can still find some remnants if you search online.

The broad argument, which I am absolutely not claiming is being cited by the letter writer [it seems more likely that they had a few dishes that were all of the spicy version and is making an incorrect generalization], is asinine and untrue. The fact that it almost always coupled with the sibling argument that meat-based foods are just more filling, flavorful, and satisfying without requiring spices is a fake you are being tricked into accepting as face value.

This is leaving aside that some variations of these arguments are clearly framed in racist tones. It’s ok, you also have arguments that veganism is inherently racist. It’s a balancing act.

I’m not sure what the logical fallacy would be called but the structure would go like this: Option A is a problem (based on Opinion C, which may or may not be related to either A or B in truth), therefore Option B must be better though I will avoid discussing it at any depth.

For example, countries with snow can make snowmen and snowmen are fun for children therefore countries without snow are bad for raising children. I’ve created an arbitrary line to judge two elements and then stated those two elements in the context of this line in a way that makes the responder think they have to respond directly to context of the line. It’s the big sister version of “Yes or No, X is bad” and then not allowing any nuance. Tracks great for snippets but not in the real world where very few things are that simple.

Because the spicy plant-based/forward food option is overwhelmed with evidence to the complete contrary.

Not only do many of the same cultures that spice their vegan dishes also spice their non-vegan dishes, the implication that someone craves meat at all times is just false.

Tastes vary greatly by all sorts of factors. As a plant-based American in Europe, I can say from some experience that most “spicy” dishes here are far below the spice tolerance that would be expected back in the States. In our recent trip to Glasgow, even some of the spiciest dishes barely triggered a proper spice response in myself (the Hot Cock is the main standout, thanks Buck’s). The only inverse I have seen is that Delhaize sells a vegan burger [sorry, EU] that has a bit too much cumin. Making it taste more like a sausage patty than expected.

A huge amount of our food stuffs are just naturally plant-based and plant-forward. Yogurt. Olives. Mashed potatoes. Fries/Chips. Bread. Scrambled eggs. Cheese [minus the rennet]. Tofu. Seitan. Hummus. Beer [minus the isinglass]. Ice cream [whether it is made with soy or cow’s milk]. Beans. A lot of soups are so close that it is trivial to cut out any meat. Gravies [at least can be made such]. Puddings. A lot of breakfast cereals that do not have gelatin-based mini-marshmallows [including the vast porridge family]. Muesli. Fruits. Vegetables. The list is extensive. Pizza and pasta is already right there and they are especially easy to play with.

In the usual “food pyramid” type structure, the only bit that isn’t plant-forward is the meat/fish/fowl segment(s). And with the notion that many breads and “calcium-group” items can be made or “replicated” without any animal products at all means only the minority is non-vegan. A few lentils, beans, quinoa, or what have you can cover that gap. It’s actually easier than that to get plenty of protein.

However, a huge amount of food-centric dialogue tries to claim that the second narrowest slice of the food plate/pyramid/etc [only “snacks” is smaller] is the core of the food experience. Sometimes aggressively so.

Fun fact, the Belgian food pyramid (or, at least, one of them) is inverted and has white meat in with the melk-en-kaas category and puts bread up in the eet-meer category, which feels so properly Belgian (though they put beer, chocolate, and fries in the “little as possible” category which is a shocking betrayal).

Inverted Belgian Food Pyramid
from https://www.gezondleven.be/themas/voeding/voedingsdriehoek

“Vegans are giving up an important part of their diet and abstaining from the full experience,” is another common fallacy that tries to liken abstaining from meat eating as something akin to self-hatred. Most food is veg*n. By centering every maaltijd around the vlees, you ignore so many flavors and structures inherent in meals.

My advice, then, if you are looking for “cool veg*n” foods, to just take a look at what you eat and eat that. Toss in some ready-made vegan food if you need (Beyond Burger, whatever). If you are at a restaurant, then ask them to tone down the spices where possible.

Another option is to use something like HappyCow to look up plant-based and plant-forward or at least plant-forward-friendly restaurants in your area.

If you need quick meals, then start with the fruits/veg options and toss in some hummus and bread. Tweak, ad infinitum, to your heart’s content. Once you stop having to start with the question of “What goes with the chicken?” you start to realize that food has so many variations that have been broadly locked out by the so-called common sense of the meat-and-two-sides meal structure.

Snow Days to Kick off the Year

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On 2026-01-06

In Daily Life, Grimbergen

It started as the wettest snow I have ever seen. I struggle, a bit, to explain it. You hear “wet snow” and you might think something like “wintry mix” but that’s not a good explanation. Think snow. Run-of-the-mill white stuff falling from the heavens. Only wet. Moving like clumpy rain.

I’m sure in the vast volumes of weather descriptions, there are words for it. Thompson’s Snow or Merriweather Flakes or some such. I could look it up but as for now, I’ll just call it Merriweather. Sounds, appropriately for this blog, Dickensian.

The above photo I took around 18:20 on 2025-01-02, a Friday, putting it at one of my first photos of the year. It is a mediocre-sliding-to-terrible photo in most metrics, but I feel it captures the essence of Merriweather Flake.

By Saturday (3 Jan), it turned into more legit snow. Here’s a photo of B and our two tuxedo cats enjoying the first or second aftermath. [Photo by Kaz]

The sun was at least partially out in this photo and the snow had stopped. It returned later that day. Then a very bright moon came out (not pictured). Then the snow returned. Then it cleared.

That was the pattern for several days. Remember how I have talked about there’s a stretch of woods we have to walk through to get to civilization? Here’s what that looked like on Sunday (and, presumably, today) [photo by Kaz]:

For those paying attention, this means B is now in the select group of people who can say they had to walk through the dark and snowy woods [sunrise is currently after her school day starts] just to get to school. There’s even an uphill, there.

A bit back, I talked about how often it rains during sunshine, here (The Devil Has a Lot of Fairs in Grimbergen + Pooping on a Train a Decade Ago). I can now attest that it also snows in the sunshine. This is around 08:30 this morning (2026-01-06):

You have to have faith there is snow in that picture. There is. Much like the last time I was talking about it, you also have to have some faith there’s sunlight in that picture.

Shortly after, the snow ate the sun and it degraded to this:

And now, circa 14:50, the sun has again taken the lead:

We are expecting more snow and, this time, a proper wintry mix over the next several days.

I’m Southern US enough that I’m still mostly fascinated by the snow. There is the downside that my post-injury stability is so low that I pretty much cannot step foot outside while there’s any chance of icy or slippery terrain so I’ve been largely stuck indoors since Friday night with only short excursions.

That is kind of ok. I just get to be the creepy guy staring out the window as folks walk by…

“It’s Gonna Be Our Year!”

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On 2026-01-01

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Grimbergen, The Algorithm

I don’t know who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to let me have so many green-tea-and-gins last night but they were a complete idiot.

Name probably rhymes with bug or rug or something similar.

Funnily, it wasn’t the gin that was the real problem. Had I mixed 2-3 shots of gin with a liter of water and drank that I’d probably feel pretty swell today. It was the couple of liters of green tea that kept me up to something like 03:00.

One year I’m just going to go to bed for New Year’s. Since Belgian parties are just getting started at midnight, it probably won’t be for a couple of years, mind.

It’s a gray day in Grimbergen which is just sort of saying, “It’s a day.” Kind of nice, though. Not too cold. Not too loud. Windy in a pleasant way. Noon but feels either earlier or later. A kind of liminal space.

I’m sitting here next to two open windows letting in 5C air and giving a thought to the standard thought that we all do on 1 Jan: resolutions. I swore off the whole thing a few years back, mostly, but sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they are hopeful.

Over on the Doug Alone, I talked about (mostly) leaving crowdfunding. That’s one of them. We’ll see how that goes.

A couple of other bigger ones in a more general sense of things (since crowdfunding is pretty much 100% tied into my solo roleplaying hobby) are (a) reducing gamification in my life and (b) generally increasing privacy awareness. And (a) is going to impact a lot of other potential resolutions.

“It’s Going to Be Our Year!”

Before I get to that, let me give you some insight into the core Doug experience. Last night, after getting the first green-tea-and-gin in myself, I started sending out pre-Happy-New-Year’s messages to a few friends and while the messages tended to be personalized, in very nearly all of them I joked about the phrase, “This is going to be our year!” Those who get my sense of humor appreciated I was both making fun of arbitrary goalposts and whispering the foulest curse of them all: hope.

It helps you have say it with a shaky voice like a person saying, “Maybe the cave troll isn’t home, we should go into the dark cave and find out.”

Joyfully nihilistic curses aside, maybe it will be. I don’t know. I just take things as they come, mostly.

(a) Reducing Gamification

This is frankly the biggest one for mental health and general well-being. I have no specific numbers (which feels like a pun) but the gamification of every single aspect of our life feels like it is increasing. Earn points for purchases. Day-week-month streaks in every app. Add five friends to earn a point. Allow GenAI to access your data? Well, we’ll do it anyhow but if you give it away you can get a badge to show off on your profile that no one will ever click.

I pay money to upgrade the “freemium” experience of Duolingo, Geoguessr, and NYTimes Games. All three are big about pushing daily plays and uses [“Please stay addicted to our services”]. Badges. Achievements. I “buy” (lease? not sure what the proper legal term would be) books on the Kindle and it sends me notifications about not letting my streak expire. When I started deleting social media, I was seeing it more, there. Stuff that has no business setting weekly/monthly/annual goals have started bundling it.

Back 20 projects on Crowdfundr.ai? You get platinum status. There are no benefits but still we love you like your parents never did. Spend $2000 on gachas? You get 1.25 points per $100 spent instead of just 1 point.

It’s an incessant noise. And the fact that so rarely do hitting any of these milestones unlock anything besides maybe meaningless in-game currency shows how effective it is to just offer up a hexagonal png to keep people reaching for a goal that only exists to increase company profits through addictive behavioral programing.

When I was first workshopping this resolution, I thought about flat out cutting out any app or system that had such systems baked in only I realized, relatively quickly, that I would more or less be able to not access the things I actually use.

Instead, the idea is to simply ignore the badges, achievements, streaks, and other stupid bullshit designed to increase addiction. If I didn’t read today, no more panic reading a chapter to keep my Kindle streak going. If I don’t feel like doing Duolingo, just let the streak die. In some cases, this will likely be tied into getting rid of some freemium upgrades. So it goes.

The irony of this is that it kind of negates the concept of resolutions. I do want to read more. Play more of my old favorite games. I want to solo play more. Take bigger risks. Lose weight. Work on fixing my ankle.

I will likely have to compromise to some degree. It can be hard to lose weight without tracking calories somewhat. It can be hard to budget better without a budget.

Just absolutely no apps to do the data for me.

(b) Increasing Privacy

Which brings us to the other major resolution. Find ways to increase my overall privacy. This one is harder to specify without sounding a bit like a conspiracy nut. Or, perhaps, it is easier to specify:

  • Stop giving private information to unlock upgrades,
  • Use more offline stuff and fewer things that require third party tracking,
  • Avoid using cloud-based systems more, especially now that so many cloud-based systems have decided that using them is akin to giving your personal documents to their AI systems,
  • Using my own storage back-up solutions, own media servers, own email servers, etc.
  • Using more encryption that isn’t designed to expose the data to the host,
  • etc

There are so many little ways this one will show up. It makes me think of something that Northerlion (the Twitch Streamer) said. He mentioned that getting cash from the ATM feels like a borderline criminal act because you get the cash and then no one really tracks how you spend it. The sense that if we just use the stuff we own, we are going dark.

After the move to Belgium, I have been watching more stuff streaming from my personal server and through physical media, partially because I would have to use VPN to watch my American-media-libraries despite paying a lot of real money to build them up and still being an American citizen.

And one of the aspects of this is that when I put in that DVD/Blu-Ray/CD then no one but myself really knows what I am watching or playing. If I play a CD a dozen times, it doesn’t get tracked and used to sell me something. I can watch a movie a dozen times and it is up to me to watch trailers to see what else I might like.

We’ve been so conditioned to accept The Algorithm(TM)’s “help” to fill every waking hour with media that we are giving up the ability to own these pieces of happiness. It is becoming increasingly obvious how much companies don’t want us to own our own media now that I kind of have to own it to enjoy the things I enjoy.

Just look at videogames. Now you buy a code in a physical case and you attach that code to your account and if that library every goes away, you bought a physical case in a store to temporarily lease a game.

Or movies where you buy a blu-ray and they want you to use the “free digital copy” code so they can keep better track of who has what. Some Blu-rays and DVDs have features that require you to access the internet to see fully.

“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is a lie. You are the customer, always, but also the product. It’s kind of up to us to set the line and we are currently losing and pretending its inevitable.

And that’s…madness.

Christmas Trip to Glasgow

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On 2025-12-29

In Daily Life, Discoveries, Food, Memories, Scotland, Travel, Vegan

It has been some time since I have been to Glasgow. The last time was a single day (plus or minus a few hours at an airport) in 2018. Went out to see the Sister-in-Law (A) and her husband (D) and to celebrate their wedding. I was officiating said ceremony. It never made it to the old Dickens-of-a-Blog because it would have been in the down years. Had it been in up years, it would have been one of the Posts All Time, no doubt.

I have no photos of my time in Glasgow at that time, for some reason. Perhaps I did not want to seem too touristy. We took the train in, ate at a vegan restaurant that was a poster child bespoke gentrification [that seems to no longer exist in 2025] and then had to take a stupidly hot bus back because the day was so hot it stopped the trains from running in the afternoon.

Here’s a photo I took walking to the train to take into Glasgow Central:

I will say it is not indicative of the actual nice quality graffiti you can see around the city. This one just made me chuckle the most.

I did take more photos this time, including this one showing off much higher quality wall art near St. Enoch:

Now, as to who exactly that is? I have no idea. My one working theory is that had the Christmas Market (Winter Wonderland, I think it was called) not been there, it possibly lined up with something in the distance. My second working theory is that there had once been something in the upper left corner of that wall for him to be holding up. This is above the Hootenanny. I probably should have just asked.

That is near the front of Adagio Aparthotel. Where we stayed this Christmas trip. It was nice. I am not one to get too hyped for any sort of hotel but I will say I would stay there again. Great location. Lots of shops. The Winter Wonderland (at least, for a couple of weeks a year). Glasgow Central station in walking distance. Several bus stops. Pharmacy and grocery stores. Waterstones. You can spend a week barely breaching a square kilometer and have a full experience.

Turn right and cross the road to see the river and you can visit some more higher quality graffiti. Cats seem to be a theme. Some QR codes. It perhaps is corporate, I have no idea.

The only two negatives were a) my brain spent a lot of time reading it as “Apartheid Hotel” (as opposed to “Apartment Hotel”) and b) there was a fire alarm test on Tuesday that I had failed to note which meant I had to make my way down multiple stories just to realize the note about it was in the elevator (aka, lift, aka the thing you do not take in the case of fire).

We took the train in. It is virtually impossible to make train rides proper exciting (on par with reviewing hotels). Passing through the Chunnel is a bit fascinating because it is so relatively dark that it makes the windows of the train look like a long row of mirrors. And it makes your ears pop.

We also took the train back which was just about as pleasantly boring. Except I tried, and failed, to snap a photo of the Angel of the North. Every time the shutter would do its shutter-type thing, a building or tree would intervene.

This was post-holiday travel which meant folks were a bit more tired, grumpy, and sick. Added some spice. Some. Never a lot.

In between was Christmas with the extended family, some shopping, and far too much eating. I also got to spend my first Boxing Day in Britain. Pull my first Christmas cracker.

Of all the too-much-food we too-much-fooded, Buck’s Bar probably wins for most memorable. American style chicken restaurant with some strong vegan options. Went to the Mount Florida location and had a Nashville Hot Vegan (aka, the Vegan Hot Cock) with extra pickles. B made out with a huge vegan not-milkshake + Oreos. Right amount of spicy. Mine, not hers.

Also in the Mount Florida // Cathcart Road area we hit up Three of Cups (astounding vegan treats and good tea) and Mount Florida Books which, as a huge book nerd with all sorts of interests in queer and odd books, I can highly recommend.

Seriously, if you find yourself in Glasgow then trip out to that section of town and look around. Worth it.

There is, in the way of things, a hundred more things I can say (and five or so more eateries and shops I could shout out) or I could have cut out half of it.

I’ll leave with this for now, though. The first three or so days, there, through Christmas, Glasgow had been on its best behavior. Then, on Boxing Day, walking back from St. Enochs I saw two guys fighting with police intervention. Only the police left to see to a wreck and the guys were going their separate ways.

Right as I was walking up, guy #1 turned around and went back to guy #2 and all I heard was… “You want my name? Here’s my first name: Fuckoff!”

Ah, hungover Glasgow was healing.

A Day in the Life 17722: Duolingo Fun, Bandcamp Friday, Still Recovering

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On 2025-12-05

In Belgium, Daily Life, Discoveries, Humor, Music

First off, and last in the title, I am still recovering from the two-fer. The cold feels in retreat but we’ll see. The ankle is still a problem. Here’s hoping tomorrow continues to improve both.

Second in the title, and second in the post, today (2025-12-05, een vrijdag), is a Bandcamp Friday. Those are days where (at least supposedly) 100% of the proceeds go directly to the artist. They are nice moments and another reason I like Bandcamp as my central hub for acquiring music. Some musicians time releases to show up on them, or have other promotions.

In this case, it wasn’t one of those I was interested in, but I had been eying Fabo Music for a minute and saving it up for one. Lots of albums which are unofficial soundtracks to Dungeons & Dragons adventures and the like. Kind of stuff I like to play while engaged in solo roleplay. One slight wrinkle is that Fabo Music often includes one-hour loops of their songs which makes sense in the context of playing as background music for RPG scenes. The downside being that it makes the zip files of the albums bigger so it is taking some time.

While fiber ever approaches (at least is showing up on the streets near us), we are still under the auspices of the older Belgisch internet. These downloads will possibly be an all morning task. I even gave up on my usual Snag-the-FLAC habit because some of them were in the 6gig range. AAC, only, for now.

And now to first part of the title. I have been using Duolingo to help learn Dutch, though it has been the, well, Netherland flavor of Nederlands. Last night, something happened where not only did my Duolingo lessons jump several degrees of difficulty but also started including more stuff about Brussels, Bruges, Leuven. Etc.

I think in technical terms I got added to some AB testing or whatnot. Who knows? It is kind of fun, though. The speaking and listening exercises are now less “De eend draagt geen schoenen” (the duck is not wearing shoes) and more, well…

This means they are less about listening and saying words and phrases I know and more about parsing sentences I do not know. The kind of thing where you jump straight from “Mijn naam is Doug” to “Je speelde als een poffertje zonder suiker!” I am very rapidly learning a lot of edge cases of the Dutch language.

At the same time, I have no idea if these are anything like actual phrases but I like them. “There’s no polder without a leevee.” “I am playing like a poffertje without sugar.” The third one is from some sort of Amsterdam noir.

“It was a quarter to eight and I was waiting at the canal…”

This means the practice rounds went from taking me around a minute to taking me more like 8-10 minutes each, but so it goes.

In the middle of this I have learned some things. Like how to say “the boys wear dresses” and “no pants, please” in Dutch. My favorite so far is: Vanwege het weer hebben wij een bakje troost nodig.

Because of the weather, we need a cup of comfort.

Suffering a Two-Fer

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On 2025-12-04

In Daily Life, Health

I’ve been struck by a bit of a two-fer this week. The first-fer is I have done something janky to my right ankle. Now, I am no stranger to doing janky things to my bones…

…but it’s often annoying. Back in the day I would have to triple wrap it and then limp the couple miles into work. Here, in my temporary semi-retirement I have more option to just homebody but there are things that need to be done around said home I body.

I am of an age and a bodily disposition that there is never really a precise HOW when it comes to the question, “How did you hurt yourself this week?” Frankly the age barely touches upon it. I one time stubbed my toe on a vacuum cleaner while getting ready for bed. I one time, at the age of eleven or so, stepped slightly incorrectly off the back of a truck. It’s a gift.

At this point, I think it was something that happened while I was running around making Bolden’s-giving (hinted at in my post about Miyoko’s butter). It can take several hours to put together a larger meal like that and there are a lot of opportunities to do something. Like just…I don’t know…walk strangely in a way that insults the ankle gods. I had gotten my COVID and Flu shots just a couple of days prior so it is mayhaps involved. Not that COVID shots give you swollen ankles to go with your free 6G tracking but more like the bit of tiredness and such made it easy to stumble at some time.

The other-fer is I have a mild cold brought about the joyous intersection of public transportation and a child in school. Which means we all have it. It is not bad as far as colds go. This is the third one from the school year which feels like it is on schedule. Perhaps a little up but we are in a strange land with strange people. A very strange land.

The problem, besides being mildly sick, is the kind of painkiller used to treat headache and sore throat go a little too well with the sort of anti-inflammatory to treat the rest. It washes me out pretty badly. Or I suffer one or the other.

At least the sunsets and sunrises have been nice. The above photo is the sunset from my dark and dank computer corner. Currently we have the opposite: sunlight pouring in from the other window across the way.

That being said, I’d put good money on it raining some time today. Because, you know, Belgium.

I just appreciate someone finally wrote an ode to Belgian Weather

By

On 2025-11-30

In Grimbergen, Humor, Music, Music Video

We are are at the time of year where the forecast in Grimbergen is permanent stuck on two alerts: “It may rain in a few hours” and “Rain may cease in a few hours.” With apologies to Mitch Hedberg, it used to be raining. It still is, but it used to, too.

Brandon Jamar Scott’s new song [Part of his Trailer Park Alien Universe], I feel, encapsulates this.

NOTE: if the “69 News” and the title of the song being wet doesn’t give you a heads up, let me just say the humor is raunchy. A wee bit. Beetje. Etc etc.

It’s a catchy song. And maybe one day we will get justice and get the missing piece of the Universe back, which was struck on grounds of Nintendo declaring it…canon.

The Real Miyoko Schinner’s Vegan Butter and Doug’s Vegan Roast

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On 2025-11-28

In Vegan

A few years ago, Miyoko Creamery’s Vegan “Butter” [that’s it, I have fulfilled my irony quote duties for the evening, EU] was simply the best there was. Hands down. No contest. It was so good that several times it was my treat food. Instead of candy or snacks I would get it and then just enjoy it over the next several days.

Then stuff happened. And then more stuff.

The end result is that one of the absolute icons of the vegan and plant-based lifestyle has her name associated with a product that she is not actually affiliated with and has no control over. Which is shame.

And, frankly, is one of the reasons I think corporate veganism needs to…well, not die…but cease to be the face of vegan discourse.

I DIGRESS…

The good news is that Miyoko has released a video showing her current take on The Real Miyoko’s Vegan Butter:

Considering I have no real care to support the Schinner-less brand AND the fact that I cannot get said butter over here, anyhow, I am all in. Miyoko Schinner is a wonderful cook and I highly recommend you see her videos.

Just in case you are curious, my other favorites (in alphabetical order) are:

Which one will vibe with you depends on a lot of factors but they each do things that I absolute love. Pick one at random and go from there.

Speaking of Vegan Foods, Doug’s Vegan Roast

While typing this up I am cooking my take on a vegan roast. It is partially a known recipe, partially an experiment. It smells reallllly good. The plan is to cook it, then cool it off, then freeze it, and then re-cook it tomorrow.

It is the “standard” vegan roast of tofu + vital wheat gluten + flavors. At its core, it is somewhere between Thee Burger Dude’s Homemade Vegan Deli Meat and Sarah’s Vegan Kitchen’s Homemade Vegan Deli Slices. Leans more to the latter but I think looking at both will give you an idea of how forgiving the differences are.

It roughly goes like this: take a block of tofu. How big? Doesn’t matter, really. Then, for around every 150g/5(ish)oz of tofu, you want to add in what I’m going to call half a cup of vital wheat gluten. I don’t know precisely how many grams it is because I take a measuring cup that is basically 4-liquid-oz and just whack it in. I could measure it, but it’s not really necessary. It can vary.

Then, also, for each of those “units” of tofu, you want around 15ml of olive oil and soy sauce. And roughly the same by volume measure of nutritional yeast.

In more American units, a pound block of tofu will need 1.5 cups of gluten (up to 2 works, but you might need a bit of water). Then 3tbsp of oil and 3tbsp of soy sauce and 3tbsp of nutritional yeast. You can also, like me, just pour it in and hope.

At this point, it starts to be up to you. I tossed in a few spoonfuls of flavoring: onion powder, garlic powder, ground mushrooms, a spicy blend I made. How much flavoring? I don’t know. Enough. I add this early with the tofu and whip it in a food processor until it’s a paste and taste it. I want it to taste strong. Not so strong that I hate it. But maybe 150% – 200% as strong as I need it to be at the end.

Pardon the pun, but go ham. Black pepper. MSG. Brown sugar. Add a bit at a time to hit the vibe. I like mine a bit spicy and a bit smokey. I had pan roasted the spice blend (which had paprika, cumin, coriander, chili peppers, and some other stuff, and was ground up afterwards) so that worked for me. Just toss in some stuff and then figure out what you did and did not like about it.

THEN you mix in the vital wheat gluten. Depending on how wet the tofu is, you might need to add in some water. With the above, I needed about 30-40ml of water extra. I like to add in a bit of baking powder. The general rule of thumb I go for is: if you make VWG to be cooked wet, use vinegar; if you are going to dry cook it, use baking powder. Both help to balance the flavor of the strong gluten taste.

Process until it is chunky and a bit damp but well mixed. Take it out. Split it into three or four, and then put each bit back into the food process and work it for a few minutes. It will go through a stage where it looks like ground meat and then sort of clump up into a dough ball. That works. Take that out and flatten it. Do it with the others. Finally, kind of mash it all together.

Where I diverged is I took that second ball of dough and I broke it up into 7 or 8 pieces. I took each piece and ran it back through the food processor on high until it got very gluten-y. Then I rolled that into a long strip. Like a little gluten snake. I would do it for 2 or three and weave them together and then take an un-extra-processed one and sort of use that to fill in the gaps. The idea was to add in variance to the textures.

Once it was assembled for the third time, I wrapped once in parchment paper and then three times in aluminum foil [ours is a bit small, here]. It is a wily beast. If you don’t wrap it tightly, it will expand a lot. You can also do a few things like pan fry it to try and lock up in a shape.

Then I bake it at around 180(ish)C for a little over an hour. Turning it ever so often. In this case, because our local tofu comes in half-kilos, I’m giving it an extra ten minutes.

Take it out, let it cool.

Like I said, I will then freeze it overnight and thaw it in the morning. This process does some interesting things with the gluten strands.

I’ll try and remember to edit in a picture after all is said and done.

Happy (American) Thanksgiving!

By

On 2025-11-27

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Food

My thanksgiving lunch was a couple of slices of avocado toast and a tomato. I might splurge for an orange for desert but right now I’m fine.

In fact, my main “celebration” will be to walk down to the Apotheek in a couple of hours and get a flu shot and COVID booster.

I apologize in advance for the crankiness that will show up this afternoon.

That and I finished up the second session for my solo play of the Dwarven Hall campaign. I know, I know, you are impressed.

The actual “Thanksgiving Dinner” for us will be this Saturday or Sunday, depending on how things go. I am not sure about the precise menu, but I think I’ll aim to make a vegan roast (using gluten, tofu, and mushrooms), some vegan mac-and-cheese, and maybe a few other things. Dressing will be different this year because cornmeal is different, here. I might try and figure something out or just make some kind of bread-crumb type dish that fits a similar niche. And then….spinach? I don’t know. I think I will miss cranberry sauce the most.

It goes without saying but American-style Thanksgiving is not a thing here in Belgium. We have different feast days here. Presumably. Hmm, I will need to look that up.

I’m sure there are some expat clubs doing something and various expat families having their own thing. We have generally had our own relatively quiet version for years so the adjustment is relatively minor. I know for others such holidays are a much bigger deal.

What we do have is Black Friday. Sort of. According to some locals, it is more recent, but there have been a few “BLACK FRIDAY DEALS” cropping up in the scant shopping space I inhabit.

America’s biggest export will always be capitalist frenzy.

Speaking of…I might actually make an order from Amazon US to catch up on a few Blu-Ray and book releases from November.

Besides that, I am off to enjoy a few quiet minutes. Then get my double jabs.

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