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National Vanilla Pudding Day 2024
Break out the whipped cream and sprinkles because it’s National Vanilla Pudding Day.
Sweet Bean
The best place to use vanilla beans is anywhere where they won’t be mixed in with a million other flavors. Anything with dairy, yogurt, milk, cream, or eggs – any custard or flan – how can it be bad? ~Alex Guarnaschelli
Vanilla pudding is pretty basic. Either you like it or you don’t.
I do.
I like pretty much every kind of pudding, but the nice thing about vanilla pudding is you can pipe it into a chocolate-iced donut to turn it into a Boston Creme or Bavarian (it varies by bakery).
It’s versatile, delicious and possibly even nutritious. I mean, mash up a multivitamin and mix it in. Yeah?
Seems like a strange thing to devote a “National Day of” to, but why not?
It’s a random Wednesday in mid-to-late May. I’m having a slow week while many of my colleagues are away at the company’s user conference.
Just like a delicious bowl of vanilla pudding, getting a little reprieve from the hustle and bustle of our usual work frenzy is a sweet treat.
I appreciate it and am savoring every moment.
How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Eat Yer Meat?
How to Make Homemade Sugar-Free Pudding : Diabetic Recipes
I’m fully on board with having dessert first. YOLO. We’re not at a retro British boarding school. We’re not at home to the pudding police. Just eat it.
I love the simplicity of a basic pudding. It’s creamy, smooth, sweet and flavorful.
I’m sure you’re wondering how I can possibly opine about something as basic as pudding, yet here you are reading it.
I’m a middle-aged guy. I can opine about damn near anything. Don’t get me started.
Pink Floyd – Another Brick in the Wall (lyrics)
Everything Has Value If You Perform Adequate Analysis
Vanilla is anti-inflammatory and reduces free radicals ~Hannah Bronfman
Okay, so that having been said, it does not necessarily follow that just because “everything” has value doesn’t mean it has value to you.
For instance, all the college protests are clearly of value to somebody. Are they of use to society at large, the college, the normal students, the surrounding communities? Fuck no.
Still, they are of value to somebody who is seeking to destabilize the US or even Western Civilization in general. Whoever that might be, I hope they are found and prosecuted.
Something that does have value to me and my future fans is that I’ve actually had a few free hours during which I was not too exhausted to get some writing done.
I’m a little over 12,000 words in and while it feels like I’m cruising right along, it’s highlighting the fact that my usual technique of transcribing the movie in my head isn’t getting me where I want to go.
I’m six chapters in and I’ve only just barely hinted at the antagonist. I feel that I need to show some explicit villainy so people have an idea of the actual stakes.
I’ve mentioned previously that the first three books of the tridecology are intended to be a “Golden Age” arc. The primary villains of Golden Age comics are gangsters / street crooks, corrupt officials / corporate types and Axis operatives.
That’s essentially what I want the initial trilogy to track with. The street criminals and/or gang members of book one will be revealed to be the operatives of the corrupt white collar criminals of book two who will be revealed as the unwitting puppets of The Conclave.
The Golden Age of Comics occurred around the timeframe of WWII and the Korean War. Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Soviets, ChiComms and NorKs were built-in world class bad guys at the time.
We have a modern day Axis of Evil that I could lean into, but I’m not going to.
Rather than the bad “others” who were an easy go-to for guys trying to churn out comic books at a dizzying pace, I’m leaning more into a shadowy cabal like Batman‘s Court of Owls, Daredevil‘s Hand, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles‘ Foot Clan, the Runaways‘ Pride or whoever happens to be bankrolling all these college protests nowadays.
Empire City has a cabal of detestable puppet-masters. I think it’s more interesting to have a site-specific “rot at the root” rather than a reactionary anti-some-adversarial-country type of adversary.
National enmity waxes and wanes. Hostile governments come and go.
Vested interests in a particular city or region are easier to defend “artistically” in the long run. Entitled fat-cats are everyone’s enemy in all circumstances without fail.
The kind of people who keep things shitty just to maintain their stranglehold on power, those are timeless villains. Readers for generations to come can agree to detest people like that.
A lot of people giving advice on AuthorTube are saying you shouldn’t give in to the cheap thrill of tropes and clichés. It’s not bad advice.
Sometimes you want to just shoot from the hip. It’s possible to take something your subconscious offers up and polish it.
On the other hand, it can be that you’re just reflexively resorting to time-worn gimmes. In the superhero genre, particularly, there are a lot of doozies that are as clichéd as a guy in a black cape twirling his mustache as he watches the damsel tied to the railroad tracks awaiting her terrible fate.
One of those would be leaning on some Axis of Evil angle. Sure, everybody loves to hate totalitarians and terrorists, but in a few years it will just read as reactionary jingoism.
What seems better to me, at least in this genre, is to have a nested network of really crappy people who are pulling the strings of other really crappy people who are pulling the strings of other really crappy people.
It’s fiction, but it’s true to life because you absolutely never run out of crappy people doing crappy things in any given echelon of society. That’s storytelling that will last.
Shakespeare is still relevant today because the characters and themes are timeless. How many versions of Romeo and Juliet can there be? Jeez, he even cribbed that from an earlier work called Pyramus and Thisbe.
Star-crossed lovers. A prince feigning madness as he investigates his father’s murder. A doting father who divides his estate among his children, who turn against each other to claw back the whole thing. A dictator who reaches for just a little too much power. These characters are set in specific periods in the original Shakespeare plays, but can (and have been) easily reset in any time period because they are archetypical.
So, it seems more prudent to pick a cabal of Empire City elders who have been pulling strings since the Dutch first paddled ashore.
Be that as it may, we still haven’t seen even a hint of them in the more than twelve thousand words I have down so far. That seems like something I need to fix.
That being the case, I’m going to stop writing this so I can go write that.
So, there’s your vanilla pudding Hump 🐪 Day. Take a quick moment for a sweet treat and keep on keepin’ on.