Fri, 13 Jan

I tried some “Kinda” (vegan) cheese today. I read a recent review, probably in The Guardian, that convinced me to give it a shot. I used to think that vegan fish would be the final frontier, but I’ve had vegan fish a couple of times now, and in some contexts it’s actually pretty great. And, like all right-thinking people, I now 100% prefer vegan burgers to real burgers, no contest. Cheese remains the impossible dream. And I’d say with the Kinda stuff, the dream is still impossible—but it’s a lot closer. You have to be prepared for the texture to be nothing like what you expect or want. It’s spreadable, so entirely unlike, say, cheddar, but it’s not unctuous and creamy. Like if off-brand cream cheese had about 50% less water, you know what I mean? Not exactly rubbery but not, you know, cheeselike. In terms of flavor, the Garlic and Herb and the Summer Truffle are genuinely pretty delicious on their own merits. So if you’re interested in that sort of thing, I’d say they’re worth trying, as long as you know better than to think “Oh, ‘Farmhouse’ is going to approximate the consistency and taste of cheddar!” Because it doesn’t really work that way. Maybe one day.

Weird news in my inbox yesterday evening: it turns out that one of the people for whom I once acted as an agent invented yet another (young, female) internet persona after I stopped agenting for them. This time, though, that persona gained a certain amount of fame/notoriety/influence in a particular online community, and last week “she” died in a particularly gruesome (and, naturally, invented) way. I have a soft spot for internet fantasist grifters—their exploits are among my favorite modern stories—but it seems that my ex-client, while always proudly subversive, had recently gone well beyond the line of what most people in society find acceptable, in a couple of ways. It’s the kind of thing that could have been awful book drama had I even got them published (and not likely in the way that would get them a lot more sales).

My extremely itchy dog is, it turns out, simply extremely itchy. Her skin has been thoroughly tested for all things fungal and yeasty and cancerous; it turns out she just has normal skin bacteria but too much of it, and the antibiotic she has been taking should be able to sort it out. (She also has to have ear drops, which she haaaaates.) She’s actually very healthy despite being 11 years old; she may well last another 11 years at this rate.