Author Archives: Silver Arrows

Stupid Article in Metro About Milk and Milk-Alternatives

Just caught this article by chance, and had many WTH moments. Please excuse typos; I had to manually type it up as it doesn't seem to be published on their site. Full article, plus my observations. No copyright infringement intended, but I have to call this writer out (warning: I get snarky when I lose my patience).

Should we be mooving away from 'filk'?

Fake millks may be fashionable, but are they any better for you than cow's milk, asks Nicole Mowbray.

Stand in the queue in a coffee shop and you're almost certain to hear someone ordering themselves a latte with dairy-free soya, almond, rice, oat or coconut milk. Or as I like to call them, 'filks' (fake milks).

"Filk"... Seriously. And in answer to the first question: yes.

A quick glance at recent statistics shows why. Over the past 25 years, there's been a ten-fold rise in the number of Britons purporting to suffer from food and drink allergies or intolerances (the term given to symptoms of irritation or discomfort, rather than violent allergic reactions). And it's not only adults. In the UK, two in every 100 children have an allergy to cow's milk.

Indeed, lactose or other milk intolerances are not to be sniffed at. GPs agree that, for some, dairy products contain some allergenic elements. Alongside lactose, the naturally occurring protein casein can also cause bloating, stomach discomfort, vomiting and sinus issues.

... and what else?
http://www.livestrong.com/article/257495-casein-protein-dangers/
http://nakedfoodmagazine.com/casein-and-cancer/

Cancer, potentially. You forgot to mention cancer.

These issues go some way to explaining why sales of milk have fallen by 30 per cent over the past 30 years. In comparison, the consumption of substitute milks is soaring, up 17 per cent in the past year alone, with the market being valued at £139million.

Except you forgot to mention that there are plenty of other reasons for giving up dairy, not least the fact that the dairy industry inflicts extreme cruelty on the dairy cows and goats.

Continue reading →

Hand-made Moisturiser Update

I was meant to post an update to the state of my home-made moisturiser a while ago, but I just forgot, on account of spending most of my time covered in paper and glue.

So what happened?

Well, my main batch, surprisingly enough, went mouldy. Remember, this was the batch I kept in the fridge. However, it was mouldy only on one side, which seemed to be the bit where I had last scooped out my replenishment batch. The rest of it was fine. Also, the smaller batch I kept in my room, which had my fingers dipped in it at least twice a day, showed no signs of mould, neither did the smaller container which I kept in my bag for use at work.

So I guess it was in fact the Continue reading →

New Project: Paper Mache Dolls’ House (Merged Posts)

(I've merged several posts, because I'm sick of this dumb project. I should have made it in 1:24 scale or smaller. Seriously, I overcomplicated this project so much, what a 鈍臭い)

I've mentioned before how much I want a dolls' house. Not a toy one — I do have one of those, although don't ask how that came to be — but a proper collector's one. And though I could afford to buy one, having more money than sense, I can't justify spending £1000s on one (have you seen how much the furniture costs?), especially when you can make a real-life house for £150.

In any case, I still want one. I've actually been planning on making a paper mache tower for YEARS now. There are long panels of cardboard festering away behind my wardrobe, for seriously. But I never did get round to it. So a few weeks ago, I felt like I wanted to get on with it, so I looked up paper mache dolls' houses online to see if anyone else had done it. And I came across only one site that mentions it, and that's lolasminihomes. Looking at that, I learnt some tricks to making my dolls' tower, only now I am more ambitious. Why make a tower when you can make a restaurant? Heck, why make a teeny-tiny restaurant when you can make a BIG restaurant with LIVING QUARTERS above? You see, I never do things by halves — and then set myself up for disappointment, because I always get bored halfway through and give it up. So how far do you reckon I'll get into this project before I get bored?

The other problem with doing such a big building is WHERE THE HECK AM I GOING TO PUT IT? My room is already jam-packed and it doesn't help that I have to share it with my two idiots -- I'm talking about my birds.

Birds who will also mess all over my dolls' house, meaning even if I do find space for it in my room, it will have to stay covered all the time just to not resemble the bottom of their cage (seriously, they can projectile poo, it's crazy).

Anyway, just to bring this whole blog back on topic, I used Sims 2 to plan out a basic design, so here it is:

Continue reading →

Blast from the Past! Sindy

It started with a painful childhood memory. You see, the first ever Sindy I got, as a present at the tender age of three, was the Superstar Sindy. Sindyyy, Superstar Sindy, you're everything I want to be! Superstar Sindy, dance with me! You're everything I want to be! Superstar SINDY! And she had this cool silver microphone. And for some reason, my mum let me take the doll with me to school, complete with all accessories. In hindsight, she may well have tried to convince me to leave them at home, but that's not important.

What's important is that I did take them. And one day, the nursery teacher — we shall call her Mrs A — didn't like that I was playing with the microphone while she was talking to the class about something or other, and she said to give the microphone to her and she'd look after it. I didn't want to, because I knew, even at the age of three, that grown-ups rarely keep their word. But she pressured me and in the end she took it from me and put it in a box and I never saw it again.

So you see, I was right to never trust a grown-up at their word.

In any case, it had a lasting effect on me. I still feel the pang of loss. Even when my little sister, three years later started nursery, I asked her to keep an eye out for it, being so upset I deluded myself into thinking it must still be there. More years later, when other girls I knew started nursery, I plaintively made the same request of them.

Continue reading →

More Hand-Made Moisturiser (Vegan — No Beeswax!)

As I mentioned in my body butter post, I was planning to make a home-made moisturising cream. Because the body butter is nice, but it's purely fat-based, and I wanted something with water in it as well.

So I ordered my glycerine and emulsifying wax, and had a root through the various recipes I'd accumulated over the last 10 years (yes, that really is how long it's taken me to get to this) and settled on this one I'd found recently:

http://www.herbal-howto-guide.com/creams-and-lotions.htmlarchived

Distilled water is not so ubiquitous here in the UK for some reason, and certainly not so cheap. So instead of the cold infusion recommended in the recipe, I just made regular old bush tea (rooibos) the old fashioned way (with boiling water) and left it to steep for a few hours (that part was unplanned. I just couldn't get a free hob on the cooker for ages). Also, the recipe above doesn't use glycerine, but I wanted to include it for its humectant properties.

creamv-whip

As you can see, the bush tea gave it a really lovely golden hue.

So here is what I used (I wasn't too exact with the solid ingredients):

Continue reading →

Page 18 — Reminiscence 3

Main story translation by Hikari Kaitou, editing and the rest by Silver Arrows.

Hikari's Notes: "Around the time of the Hanami Festival." Flower viewing (hanami) season is a big deal in Japan, where a lot of people make a point to visit parks with flowering trees and hold picnics and drinking parties under their branches.

p18-memories3

Episode 6 — February 2005 Issue

Takushuu Column — Ace Attorney 3

Hello! Last time and the time before, we looked back on the trilogy, but now we come to the end.

Ace Attorney 3.

Actually, at the point that AA2 was completed, I already had an image of what AA3's final story would be. The final version was completely different, but this time, let's start with that story.

In front of an extravagant hotel, an assassination, seemingly by a professional hitman, takes place. The hitman's name is Koroshiya Sazaemon [Shelly de Killer]. However, 17 years earlier, he was already declared dead. His final moments are revealed, and we learn Sazaemon's true identity... Continue reading →

Nearly Organic Homemade Body Butter

This dry winter air is really damaging my skin. Lately my hands have been so dried that the skin splits at the slightest thing. My hands are currently a mess of scars, scabs and cuts. I've had a bag of cocoa butter sitting neglected in a drawer for ages, so I thought it's about time I used it. Looking at recipes online, they all used beeswax, which is definitely NOT vegan (however much some may like to kid themselves). So I went without. There was a vegan recipe online somewhere, but I couldn't find it, so I winged it. Here's my recipe, which is way quicker than the ones I found:

Continue reading →

Vegan Omelette — Two for the price of one!

I do miss eating Indian-style omelettes. Eggs are the only thing I really miss from my pre-plastic-vegan days. Egg and chips, pancakes, scrambled egg toasties, all full of yum. Also years of malfunctioning kidneys from all that animal protein 🙁 But that's another story.

Well lately I've been thinking of the omelettes my mother makes. Continue reading →

Fun with pH Testing Strips

My sister used to have a really cool chemistry set when we were younger. She was so lucky. Chemistry sets in those days weren't like the airy-fairy elfin-safety crap we have now. Her set had meths (methylated spirit, what were you thinking), iron "fillings", a mini bunsen burner, copper sulphate and all sorts of awesome. Also, she had UNIVERSAL PAPER.

She was so lucky to be able to test out the pHs of all kinds of things.

Well, some 20+ years later, I finally get to live the dream!

Continue reading →

Soya, Oestrogen, Cows’ Milk and WAPF-Logic-Fail

The folks at WAPF are always good for a laugh. If you're interested in vegan nutrition, you're bound to have come across this claim at some point:

"The most serious problem with soy may be its use in infant formulas. “The amount of phytoestrogens that are in a day's worth of soy infant formula equals 5 birth control pills," says Mike Fitzpatrick, a New Zealand toxicologist. Fitzpatrick and other scientists believe that infant exposure to high amounts of phytoestrogens is associated with early puberty in girls and retarded physical maturation in boys.
-westonaprice.org/health-topics/soy-and-the-brain/

What I find incredibly amusing about claims like this is that the people who love to throw out this "fact" are the same ones pushing milk.

Now let's just get one thing straight. Soya comes from a plant. Plants are not female mammals.

I'm gonna say that again.

Plants are NOT female mammals.

Therefore, they do not produce oestrogen. They don't. They just don't.

Now let's think of an animal that does produce oestrogen. Hmm, let me think. Oh yeah! Cows! Cows produce oestrogen!

Now here is an extract from a very interesting article I came across the other day (emphases are my own):

Continue reading →

Garden Update – 11/10/14 — Things Aren’t Going So Well…

It's been a pretty bad few weeks. It started with...

watercress-disease

I was really looking forward to eating the cress, but one by one, the plants all ended up like that. White patches, followed by tiny black dots. I had no idea what it was and therefore, no idea how to treat it. It was an absolute mess.

Now you may (or not) remember, but the parsley I kept on the spare room windowsill, since my own was getting a bit cluttered. Well, my mum didn't like that and I had to bring it into my room.

Continue reading →

New WordPress Editor Sucks

They've done an Australis on us. I thought it was just my browser being all buggy as usual (Palemoon doesn't seem to like me much, but I'd rather soldier on with it than go back to the crummy FF29 or whatever crappy version they use now with its crappy interface).

Anyway, WordPress now officially SUCKS too. Yeah I know I whinge every time they bring in an update. I remember how much I disliked the changes they made way back in 2004 (or sometime thereabouts. You old timers will know what I mean). But as much I disliked the change initially, at least the ruddy thing WORKED.

Now if I notice a typo and want to be able to quickly change it by clicking the edit button on the actual post I'm sent to this load of crap:

wp-beepboop

And that's all it does. I'm not willing to wait another 10 minutes to see if anything happens. I said I wanted to edit my post, not look at some dancing dots until I fall asleep!

But it turns out it's not my browser throwing a tantrum. It's just WordPress doing their Mozilla impression.

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/beep-beep-boop-screen-is-a-joke-is-this-a-glitch?replies=945

Quote from WP staff member rootjosh (last page)

Continue reading →

MCoG Series Two!!!

Wait! For seriously! No! How the heck did I not know about this?!! Apparently my nephew has been watching this on Kix! for some time now and I had no idea! Although I vaguely remember hearing his singing the theme and asking where he learnt it. Hmm. Only a couple of days ago he just caught the end credits and that reminded me to go looking.

See, I knew they were planning a series 2 for real this time, because was it Chalopin or Ryshpan who said the second series work was underway on the DVD interviews, but I am so seriously late to the party. I just haven't been keeping up. Rabid Fangirl is losing her touch 🙁

So as soon as I heard that the second series was out (I'm soooooo late to the party!) I had to go search on youtube. I must have read an old post that said it was only in French at the moment, so I didn't hunt down an English version. Luckily my French is good enough to understand most of what they are saying, even if there is a big lag between hearing the words and understanding the words.

So far, it's actually all right. I was scared they'd do an Adult Icarus and ruin everything (see NAEZ), but they've kept the style faithful to the original, and even kept the theme tune. I like that the voice casting (for the French version; a review says the English voice cast is pretty awful) is also faithful to the original. Zia seems less helpless in the new series and I'm not so keen on the way Esteban's facial expressions are animated; it seems to change his character somewhat*. But overall, I'm not disappointed.

So I've just ordered my DVD set and I'll do a full review when I've watched it!

* I remember who he reminds me of the way they've animated him. Ben 10 Series 1. Seriously!