meal ideas!
low energy ("do not ask me to do any prep work at all, so help me god")
mozzerella cheese wrapped in pepperoni ("pizza tacos"!)
hummus and pretzels or naan (putting the naan in the microwave for like 10 seconds...heavenly)
canned chili (with shredded cheese and sour cream if you have it! boom done!)
instant miso soup (warm and lovely! put tofu in it for protein!)
cheese and cured meat, olives, canned fish, crackers, dried fruit, or whatever easy "charcuterie" type items you like
alternate bites of apple and spoonfulls of peanut butter (mixing honey or chocolate chips to the peanut butter is my favorite)
a "deconstructed sandwich": bites of lunch meat, pickles, cheese, cherry tomato, etc (I love roast beef and white cheddar for this)
yogurt and granola or fruit
put frozen potstickers + frozen edamame in the steamer/rice cooker, chill elsewhere with a timer set, then boom
tortilla chips + canned refried beans + cherry tomatoes + cilantro + jarred salsa con queso (or warm shredded cheese on top of the chips in the microwave for 30 seconds)
bagel + cream cheese + lox
microwave scrambled eggs (add things like green onion, soy sauce, or anything else you like!)
cottage cheese and fruit (mixed together or just on the side)
bowl of shredded rotisserie chicken + buffalo sauce + a bit of mayo + green onion (use a kitchen scissors to cut them right in!)
medium energy ("I'll boil water but don't ask me to chop shit")
boiled eggs and fresh veggies (put a little salt on top of the eggs!)
buttered noodles (my go-to nausea meal, it has never failed me. ideas of things to add: frozen peas, imitation crab, roasted garlic)
baked potato with toppings (I like cheese, bacon, broccoli, green onion, and sour cream)
quesadilla (add some canned beans, cilantro, or avocado!)
pot roast (requires a lot of time but not a lot of actual work. I love it with peas!)
cuban sandwich (bread, swiss, pickle, mustard, ham... my favorite thing to panini-ify by far)
pan-fried tofu with scallion sauce (this sauce goes well with everything and tofu is no exception)
pancakes or waffles! (I love mine with jam)
ham, pickle, and cream cheese roll-ups
fried eggs (with toast and lots of butter...so comforting)
fruit smoothie (bananas, frozen strawberries, yogurt...or whatever!)
I hate salad but could write essays on this copycat olive garden salad (throw it in a bowl! chopping required if you use onion)
spaghetti (controversial maybe but angel hair > spaghetti noodles)
pasta salad (olives broccoli fresh mozerella... those little mini pepperonis... yeah)
stir-fried thai garlic shrimp (I like using the mini frozen salad shrimps, it's easy! use jarred minced garlic to avoid chopping!)
tuna mayo onigiri
slow cooker ribs
buffalo chicken wrap (or any number of other wrap options! shred pre-cooked rotisserie chicken to make it easier)
if your local grocery store sells pre-cooked gyro strips, that can turn into an easy wrap with store-bought pita & tzatziki with tomatoes and onions!
couscous and chickpeas
tortellini + pasta sauce + spinach
high energy ("I don't mind chopping some things up!")
stuffed shells with spinach
chicken and roasted garlic (oh my god.....one of my all time favorites)
beef tacos (I like mine with cilantro and onion, and when I'm feeling especially high energy I love a tomatillo salsa)
chicken alfredo
tom kha gai (a thai soup and my absolute favorite! you just need access to galangal)
lasagna! (freezes well and then boom! low energy meal for later)
pad thai! (not as hard as you'd think, as long as you have access to tamarind paste!)
potstickers! (this is a lovely group activity if you want to cook with housemates!)
rice and beans
bang bang shrimp (ogughfhgfuh I love it. you can also do bang bang tofu!)
minestrone soup (so many nice veggies!)
fried rice (put whatever you have on hand in there! broccoli, peas, carrot, and beef is my favorite combo)
broccoli cheddar soup
spring rolls and peanut sauce
skewers (such as beef, onion, zucchini, bell pepper... you don't need a grill, oven works!)
roasted turkey with garlic parmesean asparagus
pork chop with mashed potatoes
panang curry
chicken gnocchi soup (use store bought gnocchi or make your own if you have a high energy day!)
bibimbap (super customizable depending on what veggies you like best)
butter chicken
plus! things that have helped me meal plan:
whenever you think of a meal you'd like to make, take 3 seconds to google search it, take a screenshot of the image results, and put it in a "food ideas" folder. instant visual menu!
the concept of "meal prepping" makes me recoil but I've learned that it can simply mean preparing shredded chicken, boiled eggs, or some other simple protein that you can customize throughout the week. shredded chicken can turn into wraps, salads, pasta dishes, etc... you don't have to meal prep yourself into the same meal all week!
when I have difficulty working up an appetite, I'll scroll through my favorite restaurant menus! there might be some foods I can't make at home, but many times they're very simple to recreate because the ingredients are literally listed!
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Sorry that this post is long but I would appreciate it if other white people read it and thought about it. I've been reading a lot of posts and the tags on them and I just want to make it very clear that this conversation isn't really about Ray getting 'attention' or his talent getting acknowledged. We should not be minimising this to “we need to acknowledge that Ray is an excellent guitar player” because everyone knows that, all you need is ears. True, it went largely unappreciated by fans at the height of mcr’s fame, but at least that's different now. What we're talking about now is about so much more than that - in fact, part of the problem is Ray getting reduced to nothing but the guy who shuts up and does the solos. We're talking about a pattern of behaviour that has been so deeply rooted in this fandom for so long that it's almost invisible to white people. It's a collective problem but it's perpetuated by individuals and needs to be addressed at an individual level first before it can begin to change.
I will acknowledge that, at least in my circles, things have started to change a little bit this tour in regards to people noticing him and discussing him beyond just his solos. But on the flipside that's only highlighted the larger issue, which boils down to how differently Ray is treated from the rest of the band. This is a consistent pattern. If he's not being ignored, he's behind separated out and set apart from the others - either being put on a weird pedestal or given suspiciously backhanded compliments.
Back in 2020 when I'd be lucky to see three posts about him a day on my dash I used to spend a lot of time scrolling through old inactive blogs to queue Ray pictures. Back in the pre-breakup days, if he wasn't being called "princess fro fro" he was being called ugly or he was the target of straight-up racial slurs. There was a weird narrative that he like, lowkey bullied Frank or took more credit than he deserved for mcr's guitar parts (which is painfully ridiculous and only proves that nobody paid attention to a single word Ray's ever said). Until very recently, the punchline of one of the main "jokes" (quotation marks because the word joke implies it was ever actually funny in the first place lol) in this fandom relied on Ray being at least casually homophobic. And these were blogs that posted Ray - I can only imagine how much worse the people who actively didn't like him would have been.
Nowadays, I post a lot of Ray content so I see a lot of tags from people outside my circle of mutuals. Let me tell you, there are Patterns. First of all, there's the classic "tags that completely ignore Ray to make the Ray post about Frank and/or Gerard instead." But more and more often what I'm seeing is if he's not being infantilised, he's being treated as some hyper-masculine, omni-competent, suave sex god or something - each of these things are equally reductive and dehumanising - and each of them are different manifestations of racist stereotypes and common fandom attitudes towards people of colour. Sure, Frank also gets weirdly infantilised a lot, but in a very different way - Frank is woobified in the way people often treat their fictional faves out of affection and horniness, whereas Ray is just reduced down to a personalityless nice guy - something that is also very common with fictional characters of colour. Then there are people who act like he's some kind of long-suffering untouchable genius who puts up with the little weirdos in his band because they worship his talent or something, as if he's not on equal footing with them as their peer and creative partner. And then you get the people characterising him as some kind of rough macho domineering dude because he's…tall? I guess? And plays guitar with confidence? Or is it just because he's brown.
I just..genuinely want you to sit down and think about a reason Ray might be singled out and separated from the rest of the band like this.
Is it because he's quiet in interviews? Mikey was always quieter. Also, Ray has done a lot more interviews than you think, they just haven't been circulated by fans as much. Also, he's literally the second-most featured band member in lotms - you know, the almost sole source for their fandom-driven personalities back in the day.
Is it because he's less feminine than the others? Both Mikey and Frank regularly present as more traditionally masculine in their fashion choices and mannerisms etc. The only thing “more masculine” about Ray than the others is...his body type I guess. There’s a whole conversation there about the intersection of gender and race and racist perceptions thereof.
Is it because he's private and keeps out of the public eye? So does Gerard.
Is it because people historically found him less attractive than the others? I shouldn't have to explain that that was the racism all along (yes, I know there's no accounting for taste, but Ray was regularly and actively mocked for his non-white features, and noughties beauty standards, especially in the alt music scene, were overwhelmingly white and racist. I regularly get tags to the effect of "when did Ray get so hot???" and honestly it's pretty telling that he's only widely acknowledged as attractive now that he's lost weight (whole other important discussion on fatphobia in this fandom here btw) and his hair has changed texture and beauty standards have shifted so certain racial features are fetishised rather than mocked.
Is it because he wasn't involved in one of the iconic bandom boylove duos? News flash, all "ships" are made up fan theories. Rpf and/or tinhatting is based on what fans notice and what rumours they perpetuate. Besides them kissing on stage a few times to make a point over 15 years ago, you know frerard lore because people talk about frerard lore. You know petekey lore because people talk about petekey lore. The truth is nobody cared enough to pay attention to Ray back then. (To be clear, this isn't me trying to tinhat anything about him, I'm just once again pointing out the obvious disparity in how Ray is treated compared to the others.)
I consistently see people acting baffled at how he's been behaving this tour - skipping or bouncing around the stage, eating his solos up, being physically affectionate with his bandmates. I can tell you he has literally always acted like that. Sure, this tour is special - he's certainly a lot more confident than he used to be and seems happier than ever, but really the biggest thing that's changed is now we get full footage of every show so it's literally impossible to overlook.
I also see people acting baffled when others point out the way Ray's been mistreated by fandom - being shocked that anyone would crop Ray out of band photos etc. I guarantee you that almost every single one of you has reblogged pictures where he's been actively cropped out, because some of the most iconic Frank-and-Gerard pictures that constantly get passed around on here are just that. "But how would we know" - sure, it's not your fault, but it's a small example of the way the more blatant Ray erasure from the past gets passed down to new fans and perpetuated by them unknowingly in turn. Cropping him out of pictures is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how his talent and personality and significance to the emotional heart of the band has been overlooked. I can't tell you how many iconic well-known quotes from interviews or paragraphs from Not the Life it Seems directly precede facts about/quotes from Ray that nobody seems to have heard.
So again, this is not really a popularity thing - it's hard to measure but I'd say in the past few months Ray's overtaken Mikey in terms of mass popularity, at least on tumblr. You don't need to performatively post once a day about how Ray Toro Is God or how much you want him to rail you or how much you want him to rail your white fave because "he's the only one who can top" (you Realise how this sounds right?). I'm just asking you to confront your internalised biases and the external biases ingrained in the culture and history of this fandom, and start treating Ray the same way you treat the rest of the guys. He's not an untouchable god and he's not a sunshine cupcake, he's just Some Guy who's really fucking good at guitar. He's a proud stay at home dad, he's cringe as fuck, he loves to cook, he listens to podcasts about fucking Apple products for fun, he writes (very) shitty poetry, he takes his sons to women's rights marches, he invests in bitcoin, he cries when his mom sends him postcards, he drives a douchey car, he loves children's cartoons, he's a corny liberal just like the others, he loves his friends wholly and openly. Just…please acknowledge the history of racism in this fandom, think about how you as an individual might knowingly or unknowingly perpetuate it, and try to do better. And please just treat him like a human.
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better alternatives to purchasing from devilinspired
after seeing the 40,000th video of lolitas ordering from sites like devilinspired and my-lolita-dress and seething/coping/fuming/etc, i’ve decided to make a post giving resources for better alternatives if you want to purchase from brands on taobao and receive better pricing and customer service while doing so!
“but why are devilinspired/my-lolita-dress bad?”
they’re not necessarily evil sites that need to be boycotted per se, but they don’t exactly have a high standard for quality control (including selling design and print replicas), price gouge pretty badly, and have had less than stellar customer service, so i thought it would be better to give people resources for smarter purchasing!
here's a 2018 breakdown comparing the prices between the shopping service 42agent and buying through taobao directly
here's a tutorial on how to navigate and purchase from taobao directly without the use of a shopping service/agent
and here is a link to 42agent’s lolita vendor site, 42lolita, which has consistently better brand quality control, lower pricing, and better customer service than DI or MLD
i’ve also crossposted this info to twitter via a thread :)
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