The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Cassandra:

There's an excellent article about Gygax in the Believer a few months back.

This is something like what I'm trying to do, recreating menus from "Alice in Wonderland" and "Lud-in-the-Mist" for dinner parties.

I hope that this comes to Boston.

Gursky @ 105: What about "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees?

I have been dealing with clutter a lot for the past few years. My dad's office is a nightmare of papers. Once I found an unopened envelope from four years ago, junk mail, on top of his desk.
"What's in this?"
"I don't know."
"Can I open it?"
"Sure."
It was an orange air freshener. I went to throw the envelope away and put up the air freshener.
"Don't do that!"
"What?"
"Put it back in the envelope. I might need it."
"But you haven't opened it in four years!"

I thought I'd managed to get them to save the old cartridge computer I had had, because I actually wanted that, but it turns out they may have thrown it away. I'm unconvinced, and will raid the basement the next time I'm home.

I was a neat person as a child because I have very strong kinesthetic tendencies, but it's degraded as I got older and started living with my fiancee, who's clean but not quite as kinesthetic as me.

I'm currently in the process of going through 3+ years of paperwork that I accumulated in a plastic bag when I had major depression and about a 1 by 4 foot space to keep all my worldly possessions in. It's taking some time, but tax season is coming up, and the pictures of the terrifying house with a two-foot pile of old mail is just what I needed to see when the job seemed daunting.

Or, I can think of the stories my mother told of cleaning out my great-grandmother's house after her death: they found a jar of string clearly labeled "pieces of string too short to use."

Xopher: Adding to what Telophase said, I have a friend who visited that same temple complex a few years ago. She said it was amazingly beautiful and incredibly soothing.

I eat fish and seafood, so I think it would be easier to be in Japan as a pescatarian than a vegetarian or vegan, but I have heard that it can be done. I have heard that it is helpful to learn how to say things like "I eat a Buddhist diet."
You can find odd, wonderful food experiences if you know where to look: my friend's "Italian pasta bar with a live rap DJ in Shinjuku" story is a good one; she also has an amazing story about wandering into a fairly nice restaurant in the middle of Tokyo somewhere and having the staff be incredibly polite and attentive--then they told her she was the first westerner to eat there, and the restaurant had been there for about 200 years.

The Japanese culture of food is so rich and varied; there's a thousand-year long tradition of celebrating food and even food tourism has a long history.

As for Natto: I like it about once every six months, and I've found out that it's much better when fresh. It's a thing: I also really liked brussels sprouts when I was a child. (I might be spoiled because I live near a Japanese grocery). The taste of fresh natto, for me, is very close to the taste of old blue cheese, but the texture is very gelatinous.

Try lotus root. It's starchy and a tiny bit sweet and has a wonderfully delicate structure that's a delight to look at.

I am also told that you can take tours of local tofu producers and try all the different types of tofu--hard, soft, with various delicate flavors depending on the kind of water or bean, etc.

If you are interested in learning more about how to actually go about doing this, I'd be happy to ask my friends for further concrete information. Drop me an email. The address works.

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