Good and bad things with celiac

Things I particularly miss while avoiding gluten include:

• Bread and bagels. I've been too cowardly to try substitutes – if I don't try any bread substitutes then for me they exist in a superposition of being adequate and being inadequate, but if I try them and they're inadequate then I'm certain.
• Refried beans. You would think this would be fine, since they're beans, but I like plain black refried beans with a few spices but no added oil or sugar, and nobody I know of who does gluten free refried beans also makes those. I should arguably try for a batch at home but then it wouldn't be a convenience food.
• Mock chicken nuggets. All the vegan nuggets are coated with wheat bread crumbs. There are dead-chicken nuggets that are gluten free but I have been virtuously not buying them, for which I deserve all the points.
  • Same goes for vegan hot dogs.
• Broth concentrate. Better than Bouillon, I miss you so much. I want something full of yeast extract and garlic and onion, not MSG and sugar.
• Chinese-style soy sauce. Yes, it is different from Kikkoman.
• My preferred instant ramen. Instant rice noodle soups aren't the saaaame.
• Being chill about cross-contamination and sharing dishes.
• Restaurant food. Even when a restaurant claims to be gluten-free it's basically a gamble.
• Buying cheap store-brand foods. I pay like 1.5x the price for canned chickpeas these days.
• Carmex lip balm. My understanding is the company also does products with non-certified-GF oats and I don't know if they do anything about cross-contam.
• Using arbitrary brands of soaps. Stop putting barley in things!

Things which are surprisingly fine include:

• Desserts
  • I can make banana-chocolate muffins at home which are pretty good.
  • Same goes for brownies.
  • The grocery store has premade cakes which are also good. Expensive, but cakes are for special occasions anyway.
  • Chocolate tofu pie is easy to do a gluten free version of, you just need a premade GF crust.
  • Most Breyers ice cream flavors are gluten free.
  • NuGo does a bunch of gluten free protein bars.
• Chips
  • Tostitos plain tortilla chips are generally gluten free.
  • Kettle Brand chips also are.
• Tater Tots
• Hot cereal: I personally seem to tolerate certified gluten free oats, possibly, but for people who don't there's Cream of Rice which can be cooked in the microwave.
• Any old dry beans, as long as I sort and wash 'em first.

Non-game software recommendations

jpegtran is a command-line tool for losslessly cropping jpegs. I think JPEGclub is not a crazy website to link here. Great for making icons.

ImageWorsener has the fancy dither options you wished GIMP had. There are extra dither modes to be had, if you remember that you run a modern computer with the memory for them.

yt-dlp is a YouTube downloader that can automatically add metadata, grab your preferred resolution, download only audio and not video, et cetera.

itch-dl is useful for downloading games from itch.io, though sometimes you have to pre-decompress a brotli file it might produce.

SvgPathEditor is great for getting into the little details of SVG path strings while still seeing what you're doing.

FanFicFare is a useful downloader that can even handle fiction.live and SpaceBattles.

Infinite Mac is neat for running old software.

trash-cli lets you put things in the trash from the command line, instead of immediately deleting them.

Pandoc does format conversion.

poppler-utils extracts images from PDFs.

pngquant does lossy PNG compression, which is pretty different from lossy JPEG compression and suits different sorts of files.

Qalculate! has a decent command line calculator mode. It sure beats opening up Python and then having to import math.

mpv is better than VLC at handling some video formats, and also supports going backwards one frame at a time, not just forwards.

Computer game recommendations

Demon Bluff is a turn-based single-player card game derivative of Blood on the Clocktower. It's very compute-intensive but I like it. The itch.io "demo" is in fact a complete game.

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a bunch of little puzzles. There are mobile app versions with no ads or such.

Loop Hero is a paid game where you restore features to a world by playing cards as the hero walks through it, and you also get to improve a camp. I think it's pretty fun, though some optional content could be better implemented.

Timberborn is currently in Early Access but it's pretty fun to see someone else play.

Jazzybee's Stardew Valley Character Creator is a neat dollmaker (are dollmakers games?). With itch-dl, it's easy to poke through the assets for recombination, too.

Also Stardew Valley and Terraria are good too, but I expect people here already knew that.

On Silksong Wishwalls

Silksong has some “wishwalls” where people post requests. A wish board that is “empty” of requests for Hornet's purposes still seems to have markers on it, just smaller ones.

These could, perhaps, be quests Hornet feels other people can handle.

So maybe someone else is looking at the board and seeing things like this:

Shawl Stitching
"My shawl is falling to pieces and is no longer befitting of a pilgrim. With a bit of thread, it could be good as new."
Repair Pebb’s shawl.
Reward: 5 rosaries.

There's also plausibly wishes specifically asking for other NPCs, the way some of the wishes specifically ask for Hornet.

Story recommendations

I did the book cover for a supervillain web series, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant.

Someone's leading a sci-fi worldbuilding project called the Atmaverse. It is, so far as I understand, intended as hard scifi plus an FTL method. There is a significant focus on alien civilizations.

People who dislike isekais with slavery will perhaps like the John Brown Isekai.

I recommend a lot of Saphroneth's work. It's better-organized on AO3 but more up-to-date on SpaceBattles.

Comprehension Castle (Part 2) is a set of 'screenshots' from a fake game.

If you want to see someone's overpowered OC beat up everyone, Mitraka is fun. I have some complaints but I keep reading it.

The first several Starship's Mage books feel like the author was like "what if we had a bunch of cool stuff all in one setting? wouldn't that be super awesome?" and then committed pretty hard to it. (I haven't finished the series yet.)

1632 sends an entire town into the past. You can read the first book free.

The Wicked + The Divine is a finished comic series.

Chunks of Worm is a set of Worm snippets. (I haven't finished Worm, so take my Worm recommendations with a grain of salt.)

Of the Coming of the Star Warrior is a brief Kirby/Silmarillion crossover.

The Background Noise of Defiance is a cute Star Wars series.

Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue is an HP fic where the non-wizard government gets involved.

The Legend Of Zelda: Speedrun Of The Wild: What happens after speedrunner Link beats up Ganon in his underwear with improvised weapons?

Something to Fear / Someone to Fight: Steven Universe post-movie fic.

Wolf Incident Postmortem is a Boy who Cried Wolf epistolary fic.

Spinning Silver is a fairy tale inspired work in which lots of minor characters all have their own goals and take actions towards those goals. It feels very well-put-together and complete.

Karl K. Gallagher does some decent short stories.

Conditional Release is a fic in which the Valar take a different strategy with Melkor.

Empty Graves, the fic where Martha Kent keeps encountering time travelers.

Sherden Pact is someone's Khornite faction in Warhammer 40K which is focused on Effective Murder Maximization. This sermon may be a decent intro.

Constellations is a Worm/Ōkami crossover where Taylor gets a canine friend.