Rice expands. A lot. Two cups of it is waaay more than you would think.

Also, rice packaging seems to assume that you already know how to cook it. Although it did come from a japanese import shop, so I guess the target market is expected to have that information. Thankfully for the rest of us, there's the internet! These instructions work perfectly. (I'm tempted to stick a "the more you know!" .gif in here)

I got on food stamps, which are really called SNAP now, because there haven't been actual stamps used in about twenty years. So I'm putting forth a bit of an effort to eat more healthily, since I've basically been just given money. (I feel bad about being on government benefits, but at the same time, I can either afford rent or food with my paychecks, not both.) So I'm trying to learn how to cook, considering that the sum total of my cooking skills at the moment is eggs, pancakes, and fries (if I use my roommates miniature deep fryer). And now rice and curry. (Curry is gooood.)

I wonder if there's any sites out there that let you look up recipes based on what ingredients you already have...probably; I'll google that tomorrow - I have five pounds of rice to get through, might as well get creative. 

It's been so long since I've been on here that the layout of the 'make a new post' box has changed! Strange.

In the time I've been gone, I have...

1. Moved out of my house! And moved in next door to an aspiring percussionist. Who is an insomniac. Pretty good at the drums though; according to my roommate he's improved a lot over the past year.

2. Started testosterone! So now I have a constant sore throat and my voice keeps cracking at work. It's not gotten any deeper yet, but randomly bits of the higher ranges will go out. It's only really noticeable when I'm meowing....(typing that out, it does seem like a bit of a strange thing to do....) aside from that, I can now grow a very tiny, pitiful mustache. I know it looks stupid, but at the same time I'm reticent to shave it off. I'd fit right in at a middle school XP

I still need to change my name (and inform my parents of the name change. Now that I'm living elsewhere though it's not as nerve-wracking), and tell my work. I don't think they'll fire me, if only because where getting into the halloween/christmas season and we'll be really busy for a while. (Yes, it's September. Yes, the holiday crap is already being put out. On the bright side, it's half-justified on the grounds that it's a crafts store, and it takes a while to make a christmas gift by hand.) But that needs to happen before november, because I'm trying to volunteer at an animal shelter (Resume building! Yaaay) and I'm not sure if they check IDs, but I applied under a masculine name.

In non-personal news, people are already campainging for the presidential election next year.

On the one hand, the current president has been somewhat of a disappointment. To be fair though, that is largely in part of people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, who cockblock any attempts at compromise in favor of strictly (republican) partisan legislation.

( Polital whining, Republican candidates all suck, etc )

New York legalized same-sex marriage yesterday!

Now if only my home state would get itself together and do the same thing...as well as the forty-two other states that haven't yet as well.

Lots and lots of things have happened.

1. Graduated from both high school and college (yeah, is only an Associates degree, but goddammit, it's something)

2. GOT A JOB. At a fabrics and crafts store. So far it's going pretty well. I mean, I did fuck up on my second day and forget to give a customer her change and there was a problem with the coupons and aaarrrghhgh.....but I'm enjoying it so far. Manning the register is fairly easy so long as no one wants to return anything or use multiple coupons or use a check....or buy paper, as there's no 'quantity' button so every. Single. Page. has to be scanned individually. But aside from the fact that there's a crisis every other minute, it's pretty good. I like it. I got 8 hours this week, and I'm getting 15 next week, so that's great!

3. Set an appointment with a doctor for this Thursday to get my blood tested before I can start taking testosterone. I am slightly concerned with the voice-dropping thing becoming noticeable at work, although as I understand it, once people think you're a certain gender it's amazingly difficult to get them to reconsider. But that won't happen for another month at least, and I hope to prove to be useful enough to be able to keep my job after explaining "Yeeeaaah....there's gonna be some changes here..." to the managers. The name change also worries me. I /am/ going to have that done before fall semester at PCC starts, because I want to take Aikido then and I'm sick of having [girlname] shouted out during roll.

4. I knit some socks! Although due to the fact that I have MASSIVE feet, each skein of yarn only makes a sock-and-a-half, instead of two complete socks. So I have some interesting amalgamations resulting from mixing the leftover yarn. I also have a gloves pattern that I want to make for a friend of mine. In a month my employee discount kicks in and I get my yarn slightly cheaper! So that's good.

5. Lists are nice, but having only four items seemed like a waste.

Here's a headline you wouldn't expect to see: KKK Counter-Protests "God Hates Fags" Church.

It's a short article, but here's the gist of the story anyways:

"Members of the delightfully quirky Westboro Baptist Church showed up at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day just to remind everyone, through the use of excessive signage, that God loves dead soldiers. But luckily for people who were hoped to visit the cemetery without encountering hateful bigotry, brave members of the Ku Klux Klan showed up to counter-protest."

Absolutely hilarious.

It also amuses me that the words Ku Klux Klan get the red line of spellcheck-y death in Firefox.

This story aside, whenever I think of the KKK, I am reminded of this Mitchell and Webb sketch.




Should probably stop talking about them now. The KKK is like Bloody Mary - say their names enough times and they show up in your mirror and shout racist things at your friends. Really, try it sometime. 

Well, it's Sunday and so far nobody I know has been raptured. Oh well, better luck next time, crazy religious guy.

ANYWAY, I found some awesome stuff on the internet, so I'm sharing it with y'all. It's songs, done in American Sign Language. How cool is that? I've been watching those all day now, and here are some of my favorites, as preformed by Stephen Torrence.

This is Firefly, by Owl City


The Future Soon, by Jonathan Coulton. (the sign for 'robot wars' is hilarious XD)


And The Lighthouse's Tale, by Nickel Creek


I feel a little proud for being able to read a lot of these songs even when I mute the volume. I'd love to be good enough at sign to be able to do this sort of thing myself, it's amazing.

Ah, the joys of system restoring a computer so old, the updating system needs to be updated.(and HAS to be updated, or MSN messenger won't work, the bastard.)

My computer got the plague. Do you think that's a sign of the upcoming apocalypse? Plagues are in there somewhere, I think. (End of the world tomorrow! Grab your tinfoil hats and bibles, folks, the rapture is a-comin'!)

I am idly reminded of a quote from...somewhere... "Don't worry about the world ending today, it's already tomorrow in Australia."

( School, stuff, things, whining, etc. )

Aaaand the updates had almost finished updating the outdated updater. So I need to go now and restart some things, and hopefully the wireless network adaptor will still be working once that's finished. (it has issues...)

See ya'll

Study here. Supports the findings of another study here, which found the prevalence of ASDs to be about 6% in the transsexual community. (links are to summaries, not full text.) There's another study somewhere that places the prevalence of Asperger's Syndrome in FtMs at around 8-9%, but I can't seem to find it.

Clearly an interesting correlation.

One thing I disagree with though:

Simon Baron-Cohen interpreted the results as saying that

"Girls with a higher than average number level of autistic traits tend to have male-typical interests, showing a preference for systems over emotions. They prefer not to socialise with typical girls because they have different interests, and because typical girls on average have more advanced social skills.

Both of these factors may lead girls with a higher number of autistic traits to socialize with boys, to believe they have a boy's mind in a girl's body, and to attribute their unhappiness to being a girl."

No. Transsexuality is not caused by socialization. There is evidence of a genetic cause, and the influence of prenatal factors. And the conflict over social roles is just one aspect of gender identity disorder - this theory doesn't account for the sense of physical dysphoria that also occurs (and is, for many, the strongest aspect of the condition).

just my two cents on the matter...

According to my health textbook, "Anger is like acid and needs to be neutralized".

...

But you neutralize acids with an equally caustic base. So what they're saying is that you should respond to something that makes you angry with an equally horrible response. By that logic, if someone punches you and you get angry, you can productively deal with that anger by killing their dog!

Sure, what they're trying to say is that anger can destroy things and have negative effects on your health. But they seem to have forgotten that the thing that gets rid of acid will also melt your face off.

Two more annoying things about the health textbook:

1. Freud, as usual, was right about every single theory he ever had.

2. APPARENTLY, conditions such as schizophrenia are caused by a block in your "Third-eye" chakra. And not, y'know, a genetic predisposition to a chemical imbalance in the brain. As such, it can totally be fixed by meditation. Also, your consciousness is stored not in your brain, but in your aura. This is why lobotomizing someone has no effect whatsoever on their personality. Yeah. Totally. (and if you don't believe it, well, you're just a 'doubting thomas', whatever that's supposed to mean - seriously, they use that phrase.)

An article on Yahoo! News Bulletin caught my eye. One Size Fits Nobody, a brief look at new body scanners that tell you what your size is at each store. 'Cause it's different at every place, for some inane reason. You can be a zero at one shop and an 8 at another, so why not make a complex machine that measures you and then cross-references those measurements with that of the varying sizes for every single different brand?

Or, y'know....you could just do what dudes do and have the sizing clearly printed on the label in a way that makes sense. Waist and leg length. Do clothing outlets really believe that womens' self-esteem is so low that they would never dare purchase something that states their circumference? What possible reason would anyone have for preferring the overly vague size 10-in-one-store, 4-in-another? 

And on a similar topic, why can't shoe stores agree on a sizing scheme? Really, it gets annoying.