I finished textually transcribing and posted Ro and Joanna Piekarski's zine, Trail Cooking: Clean and Green, published in 1995 and seemingly impossible to find. I found it in a free box, and while the Piekarskis are apparently the kind of people who categorize raisins and unsweetened carob chips as "dessert," their thing about light, cheap, vegetarian backpacker food seemed like it shouldn't be totally lost to the void.
We were at the nearby Indian grocery store to stock up on yogurt (only they sell it in the giant quantities we require), when Biff noticed something new: enormous Ziploc bags filled with clearly-homemade momo (Nepalese dumplings). There are a few momo joints around here; maybe it's some sort of mysterious shadow kitchen thing?
Anyway, there were tons of these big gallon-size Ziploc bags, crammed full and tersely labeled in Sharpie as to their contents: (halal) BEEF, (halal) CHICKEN, and... VAG (veg).
It's Pride. We bought the VAG MOMO.
And guys, they were delicious. So flavorful! Cabbage, carrot, (probably?) chickpeas, onion, cilantro (we think), herbs and spices. We've bought bags of potstickers from the (southeast) Asian groceries around town, and they tended to be pretty bland. Nice, but bland, so we took to cooking them with sauces to flavor them up. But these? These packed all the flavor they needed. More support for the "ghost kitchen" idea.
They were expensive ($32), but they were so worth it. That bag will last us a long time; we spent half the bag feeding us and two roommates tonight, and we had leftovers, so that's an easy six meals' worth in one bag, a good treat item. And if I'm going to shell out for food, I'm happy to be giving it to my local Indian grocery and this mysterious momo chef!
something that comes with the territory of being autistic1 is that you will occasionally become fully obsessed with something to the point that it occupies much of your waking thought. something that comes with the territory of bipolar2 II3 is that this can also flip on a manic4 episode, which means you'll have even more waking thought to devote to whatever it is you're now obsessed with!5
WACCA is a 2019 Japanese arcade rhythm game developed and published by Marvelous in collaboration with indie record label HARDCORE TANO*C. Its final update, WACCA Reverse, was released on August 10, 2021. The game went offline on August 31, 2022; all cabinets received a final update that allowed the game to function without network services.
historians can only guess at why WACCA had such a short lifespan. its first major update, WACCA S, was released in January 2020; as far as i'm aware, nothing significant happened in 2020 that could have impacted the arcade industry, so it's really a mystery why the game failed to take off.
by all metrics, WACCA is a dead game. official6 support ended nearly three years ago; if you go to your local Round1 you'll often be confronted by a machine in poor condition with an anemic song list that costs an absurd amount of money to play7.
but if you go somewhere OTHER THAN your local Round1........ you might find nothing because these machines aren't that common8. but if you DO find something, you will find a machine that appears to be online still? how could that be?
simple: by wanting it more than anything and waking up every morning grinding and hustling9
i first learned about WACCA through nb1rs's excellent showcase at SGDQ 2024. i was interested, but didn't have access to a cabinet nearby so kept it on the backburner.
in april, i was in charlotte visiting family and went to Super Abari, which has a WACCA cabinet10 and unfortunately became obsessed. i immediately looked up where the closest one to me was and learned it was in Worcester at a barcade. so the next weekend i went to Worcester to play more WACCA. and then i started looking into buying a cab. and then i kept going to Worcester11. and then the arcade actually close to me got a cab and i started going multiple times a week.
i've reached the point of obsession where my friend commissioned gift art of my fursona as one of the game's characters. i spent my birthday, the day after flying back from the other side of the country, playing WACCA. i'm reverse engineering and trying to clone cabinet-specific hardware so that i can build my own (assuming i'm not able to buy one, they're kinda hard to come by). basically as soon as i hit publish on this post i'm leaving to go play more WACCA.
the author getting a bunch of 1-misses on their birthday
and now here we are. as of now i'm at 27 hours of total session time with 315 plays. these numbers may sound impressive, but experienced rhythm gamers know that this is bullshit baby time. i haven't even scratched the surface yet. i only got my first rainbow-pace score last night. i've got so much still to go in this game.
graph charting my rating over the last two-ish months. constant progress.
i'm competing in a tournament in august. i don't except to win, but i also don't expect to get my ass beat. i'm gonna channel my dear friend christine love and become God's Most 2-2 Warrior. i'm there to have fun and be myself. it'll be streamed so if you wanna watch you can.
it's wild to look at a calendar and realize that it has, somehow, not even been three months since i started playing this game. i have fallen head first into the depths of WACCA and it has, somehow, actually been good for me. a side effect of going to an arcade to play is that i am leaving my house way more often than i was before. it's a very cardio-heavy game, especially at higher diffs. i am seeing legitimate improvement in my life by becoming obsessed with a dead rhythm game. maybe the same can happen to you! only one way to find out!
if you want to learn more about WACCA, there's a good english language discord you can join. if you wanna play it, check the zenius-i-vanisher arcade search for a cab near you. if you only get one thing from this post, it's that you should go play the funny lights and sounds aluminum can game. it's good.
this is the only answer you're getting out of me on a public blog post. i would like for these cabs to keep working and loose lips sink ships.↩
also SegaSonic the Hedgehog, which i can confirm from firsthand experience fucking sucks↩
45 minutes each way without traffic, but since it was a barcade it only opened at night so i had to go there after work, which meant it was closer to 90 minutes.↩
Hey guys! I read a great women’s sci-fi anthology from 1989 in the sci-fi library. It gave me a lot of new additions to pluralstories, but one story that really stood out to me (and has no spirited/many-selved content at all) is Barbara Krasnoff’s "Signs of Life." It’s about sign language interpreters in a universe where the Deaf are overwhelmingly the space pilots. Krasnoff had some training in the field (though she didn’t end up entering it) and reading it made my hard-of-hearing ass very happy. I really wanted to share it with y’all, but the Visions and Memories anthology is long out of print and paper-only. Alack!
So I found Krasnoff online and asked about it, and she posted the story on her blog, so now I can share it with everyone! Hooray! Here it is: https://krasnoff.wordpress.com/signs-of-life/
That anthology was really ahead of its time, and I’m glad some of the stories are finding new life (and hopefully new audiences)! I hope y’all like it!
This week's Minimum moods are: Enthralled, Happy, Indescribable
This week's Medium moods are: Discontent, Gloomy, Anxious
This week's Maximum moods are: Impressed, Jubilant, Loved
I'm in a hurry to get to bed this week, so I don't have a lot of discussion-promoting text this time around. Still, if you want to talk about any of these moods, or if you're having trouble finding inspiration, or are having an easy go of it, I hope you'll still take the time to chat; let's talk about it!
So, that's two events in a row that've been financial busts, and regrettably, between moves and stuff, we have no Pride events lined up.
So we made a Crisis Planning e-zine, which collates and cleans up all our crisis planning essays (and adds a little new stuff besides) and put it up for sale for $5.
Crisis Planning: Legal Stuff: Wills, Organ/Body Donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST Forms Series: Essay (Crisis Planning) Summary: A guide to living wills, health care agents, organ/body donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST forms (i.e., how to make sure you get the care you want and not the stuff you don't when you're unable to make your desires known). Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support my work, join LiberaPay or Patreon and get double-weight for your votes. Also, these crisis plan essays have proven so popular (and regrettably necessary) that we have made a whole ebook of them up for sale for $5 here.
Nobody likes to think about this stuff, but seriously, think it over, especially if any of the following is a concern of yours: • Ending up under the care of your abusers if medically incapacitated. • Being denied medical care you need, leading to your “merciful” death. • Making sure your loved ones know what to do if you’re in a coma. • Donating your body to science.
by Ro and Joanna Piekarski Illustrated by Cathryn Clark
* total vegetarian, low fat * hearty, healthful, and delicious * lightweight and inexpensive * quick and easy * no-soap cleanup * keeps the garbage out of your body, your pack, and the environment
Copyright 1995 Golden Glow 192 Porter Road Morrisonville NY 12962
Trail Cooking - Clean and Green
You're about to discover that you can enjoy delicious, healthful, quick-and-easy, "all-you-can-eat" food while hiking, bicycling, or canoeing, without any overpackaged, undersized, overpriced prepared "camping foods." All it takes is access to a good natural foods store or coop and some planning.
Location: The Foundry 101 Rogers st. Cambridge, MA
We will have a bunch of short-run prose collections, including Perspichor Freelance Explorer (an asexual monster romance), Disabled Cyborgs, and more! Cone say hi!
This week's Minimum moods are: Determined, Devious, Energetic
This week's Medium moods are: Stressed, Excited, Optimistic
This week's Maximum moods are: Horny, Good, Grateful
As a quick discussion reminder, I do want to keep this comm friendly for all ages, so if there's something 18+ -ish that you want to do with Horny, please either hide it under Details/Summary tags, or post it in your own journal and link it back in the comments.
Other than that, have at it as usual! What are your thoughts on this week's moods? How do you think you'll portray them? "Good" in particular seems tricky to me; what are your thoughts? Let's talk about it!
Thanks to everyone who took part in the cat fostering! The day before I moved, I got to run by and finally meet Dude and Skeeter, the fluffballs who have occupied so much of my mental real estate.
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lb_lee) wrote2025-06-14 06:14 pm
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