I sincerely believed acting was something I wanted to do, because my mother manipulated and gaslighted me my entire childhood. I was completely brainwashed. By the time I was old enough to realize that not only was it not my idea, but that I didn’t have to be an actor any more if I didn’t want to, I was terrified I would be the huge failure my abusive father always made me believe I was, so I kept trying to be an actor well into my 30s.
In my 40s, I decided to retire from acting on-camera, and use what I’d learned over the years to work as a voice actor, audiobook narrator, and writer. I’m a New York Times bestselling author! And number on audiobook narrator!
I just turned 50 in July. I’m still doing the performing and entertaining work I’m pretty good at, but I’m only doing it on my terms. My favorite thing I’m doing right now is hosting The Ready Room, the official online destination for all things Star Trek universe.
I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I’m truly thriving. I’ve been married for almost 24 years, I have two wonderful children and a daughter-in-law I love like my own. It’s a really good life, but I’m not going to lie: I had to crawl through a LOT of shit to get here.
Why. Why does this exist. Why did people eat this.
I can’t stop staring at it. It’s hypnotically horrifying.
Food history time! CW: Misogyny
So a lot of these weird-ass dishes come from the 1950s to 1970s thanks to two technological advancements: Refrigeration and Packaging. Particularly the latter.
During World War II, a lot of money went into figuring out how to ship food from America (which was untouched by the war) and our soldiers in Europe and Asia. That meant building a lot of factories built around preserving food in new and innovative ways beyond just “shove it in a tin and hope there’s no surprise botulism”. After the war ended (and because America, they were privately owned), companies needed something to do with them all. So they started heavily marketing their new preserved food products.
That plus refrigeration meant there were a lot of foods making it into households at incredibly low prices. Plus the new electronics innovations in house appliances meant that cooking the standard meals of the time were easier than ever.
And the companies selling these new packaged food products made a few assumptions. 1. Housewives would feel inadequate if they weren’t “properly” cooking enough rather than just opening cans or adding water to mixes and 2. They would have no idea how to cook with these new processed foods.
So they started publishing cookbooks. And printing recipes in magazines to function as advertisements.
However, there’s only so many ways you can write up how to make green bean casserole with a can of Cream of Mushroom soup and a jar of French Fried Onions. So they had to get…creative.
Some of these recipes are just weirdness of having to make SOMEthing out of the canned and preserved foods that the company hiring the cookbook writer required. And these weird-ass concoctions ended up as filler for the cookbooks with the understanding nobody would actually make any of these recipes.
And that is why B. Dylan Hollis has a successful TikTok account.
PS. Aspics are a different thing. That became a fad because industrialization techniques made powdered gelatin dirt cheap when before it used to be incredibly expensive and used as a food preservation method by the wealthy so was seen as “high class” and was suddenly now available like if the price of caviar suddenly dropped to the price of canned baked beans.
If I recall correctly, this was part of the intro for DTV, which was Disney Channel’s MTV show in the 80s.
They edited Disney movies and cartoons into music videos for songs I loved. When I was, like, 10, I was crazy about DTV.
In fact, there’s a song called Belly of the Whale by Burning Sensations that I’ve loved forever because I saw it on DTV (they cut together Dumbo crying, the whale from Pinocchio, and other stuff I’ve forgotten or smoked away).
Wow. That’s a lot of memory unlocked by a short gif.
Anyway, if any of this resonates with you, I know you don’t wanna but you gotta schedule your colonoscopy.
Hello Mr gaiman. How old were you when you started writing stories ? I'm 14 and I try and try but they are all awful. I always give up in the middle and I can never finish what I wanted to write.
I know. I found a pile of papers of mine from my teen years and into my early twenties recently, and there were so many stories begun, so many first pages of novels never written. I’d start them, and then I’d give up because they weren’t as brilliant as Ursula K Le Guin, or Roger Zelazny, or Samuel R Delany, and anyway I wasn’t actually sure what happened next.
I was around 22 when I started finishing things. They weren’t actually very good, and they all sounded like other people, but the finishing was the important bit. I kept going. A dozen stories and a book, and then I sold one (it wasn’t very good, and I had to cut it from 8,000 words to 4,000 to sell it, but I sold it). I probably wrote another half-dozen stories over the next year, and sold three. But now they were starting to sound like me.
Think of it this way: if you wanted to become a juggler, or a painter, you wouldn’t start jugggling, drop something and give up because you couldn’t juggle broken bottles like Penn Jillette, or start a few paintings then give up because the thing in your head was better than what your hands were getting onto the paper. You carry on. You learn. You drop things. You learn about form and shape and shade and colour and how to draw hands without the fingers looking like noodles. You finish things, learn from what you got right and what you got wrong, and then you do the next thing.
And one day you realise you got good. It takes as long as it takes. So keep writing. And all you need to do right now is try to finish things.
Lots of questions coming in right now feel like this one, so I thought I’d reblog my answer to it, int he hope that it would help lots of you…
It’s SO SO SO SO SO okay to sound like another writer, for as long as it takes, until you figure out how to make your words sound like your words. I wish I’d known this, because I would have spent years – decades! – having fun, writing and telling stories, without constantly judging myself for not sounding enough (or sounding too much) like one of the writers I admired.
I’m working on this massive thing right now. It’s a huge project with all this world building, multiple points of view, all kinds of stuff I’ve never tried before. It’s scary and can get overwhelming, and I am having the most fun I’ve ever had on anything, because I’m doing little bits of it every day, bits that I can manage, and I’m putting them all into a file that I’ll compile at a later date.
This is profoundly different from barely making through a single day’s work and hating every second of it, because I’m trying so hard for it to be finished and perfect, instead of just letting it take the time it needs to … well, to compile.
And I know there’s a lot here that will get cut, stuff that I need to get me from here to there, that isn’t necessary after I’ve arrived. I don’t know what that stuff will be, but I’ll keep most of it, too, just in case it fits a missing piece in something that is currently very far away from my event horizon.
It’s easy for Neil to say this, because he’s Neil Fucking Gaiman, and it’s become easy for me to say this now because I crawled over broken glass to learn it. I hope that hearing this from both of us (I’m not putting myself in the same category as Neil. You get that, and know why it’s relevant, right?) will help someone else avoid the broken glass, or at least spend less time on it than I did.
Hello Mr gaiman. How old were you when you started writing stories ? I'm 14 and I try and try but they are all awful. I always give up in the middle and I can never finish what I wanted to write.
I know. I found a pile of papers of mine from my teen years and into my early twenties recently, and there were so many stories begun, so many first pages of novels never written. I’d start them, and then I’d give up because they weren’t as brilliant as Ursula K Le Guin, or Roger Zelazny, or Samuel R Delany, and anyway I wasn’t actually sure what happened next.
I was around 22 when I started finishing things. They weren’t actually very good, and they all sounded like other people, but the finishing was the important bit. I kept going. A dozen stories and a book, and then I sold one (it wasn’t very good, and I had to cut it from 8,000 words to 4,000 to sell it, but I sold it). I probably wrote another half-dozen stories over the next year, and sold three. But now they were starting to sound like me.
Think of it this way: if you wanted to become a juggler, or a painter, you wouldn’t start jugggling, drop something and give up because you couldn’t juggle broken bottles like Penn Jillette, or start a few paintings then give up because the thing in your head was better than what your hands were getting onto the paper. You carry on. You learn. You drop things. You learn about form and shape and shade and colour and how to draw hands without the fingers looking like noodles. You finish things, learn from what you got right and what you got wrong, and then you do the next thing.
And one day you realise you got good. It takes as long as it takes. So keep writing. And all you need to do right now is try to finish things.
Lots of questions coming in right now feel like this one, so I thought I’d reblog my answer to it, int he hope that it would help lots of you…
Not sure if you're aware, but that film Pride, during the parade scene at the end - including the last gif in that series you reblogged - the surviving real LGSM guys are walking just behind the lead actors.
That is amazing! I didn’t know that, and I love it.
