art Archives - Nina Paley

Vegan Terffles

Last month, when I did a mail-order experiment (password = “yum”), many people requested vegan Terffles. Recently I created a successful ganache using coconut cream instead of the dairy variety, so I decided to buy some expensive specialty ingredients to make a 100% vegan batch of Amaretto Amarena Cherries and C3 Spice, the most popular Terffle flavors.

Vegan dark chocolate is easy enough to find; Trader Joe’s 72% Dark suffices. White chocolate, with which I make the Amaretto ganache, is harder to find in vegan form, but not impossible. There are many vegan “white” “baking chips” but most are made with palm kernel oil, not cocoa butter. I ordered Pascha “Organic White Rice Chocolate Baking Chips” which do contain cocoa butter, but haven’t tried them yet. I also ordered a bag of straight-up cocoa butter, figuring I could adjust my ganache recipe and let the coconut cream, almonds, and sugar make up for the missing milk and sugar in the product itself.

Everything was going along fine…

…until I absent-mindedly mis-measured the coconut cream and Amaretto, accidentally doubling them. Whoops! Soon I was doing seat-of-the-pants cooking-by-taste (don’t worry, I never double-dip tasting spoons, I am after all a Certified Food Handler) while creating a mess:

The resulting ganache is now chilling in the fridge, and I hope to form it around Amarena cherries later tonight.

The C3 Spice ganache will be made with coconut cream and 72% Dark chocolate, but it needs something resembling milk chocolate for the coating. This was very hard to find. I eventually settled/splurged on a kilogram of Valrhona Amatika 46% Single Origin Almond Milk Chocolate, which arrived today:

It cost over 4 times the very good Aldi milk chocolate I usually use. Is it good? Yes. Have I had better? Also yes. But it’s better than cheap American Milk Chocolate, and really is quite good for what it is.

I actually think just a tiny bit of salt would improve the taste, so I will add some when I melt it for coating, along with freshly-ground cardamom.

Less awesome chocolatiers than myself would skip the pure cocoa butter and use palm kernel oil instead. They would also use dark chocolate even to coat a dark chocolate ganache, caring nothing about balance as long as it’s vegan. But I am not a less awesome chocolatier, I am my awesome self, and life is too short to eat mediocre chocolate. Even if it’s vegan.

Stay tuned.

Update March 20 2026: First batch of vegan terffles NOT AS GOOD as non-vegan ones. Taste too much like health food. I’m finding cocoa butter weird to work with. May have to re-do it from scratch.

Disabling Impairments from the SSDI Blue Book

I have now drawn all 54 “Disabling Impairments” playing cards! ~~Next I will set up pre-orders on my store, which will determine how big a print run to order.~~ Pre order here! I still have to design the box, but at least I have the blurb for the back:

THE CARDS WE ARE DEALT

52 unsettling illustrations (plus 2 ironically healthy Jokers) sampled from the Social Security Disability Insurance Blue Book, a compendium of maladies that might*, should they cripple prior to retirement, qualify for disability payments. From nerve damage & amputations to organ failures & immune disorders, these Impairments represent a mere fraction of the wondrous calamities that, sooner or later, befall every body. Enjoy them while you can!
*Talk to a lawyer

Pre order here!

Here’s the whole set:

Continue reading “Disabling Impairments from the SSDI Blue Book”

SSDI Blue Book Cards-In-Progress

Here are my SSDI Blue Book illustrations-in-progress, of categories 1-7. I’m going to go back and make the backgrounds and labels a bit more consistent; the two’s have unnecessary headers I will remove. Next up is category 8, Skin Disorders!

Thus far I’ve noticed people with chronic illnesses find these amusing, and those without find them disturbingly grotesque. Just you wait! Sooner or later you’ll get one illness/injury/incurable disabling condition or another, and then you’ll laugh along with the rest of us.

Continue reading “SSDI Blue Book Cards-In-Progress”

Illustrating The SSDI Blue Book

I just applied for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). I don’t expect to get it. Although I have at least 3 qualifying conditions — Crohn’s Disease, Bronchiectasis, and Major Depression (treated) — I haven’t been hospitalized over 48 hours for any of them.

The application process was worthwhile anyway, because it brought me to the SSDI Blue Book. This lists all the ailments that may qualify you for Social Security monies doled out in modest increments prior to retirement age. They are a reminder of the many things that go wrong with the human body: Vision loss. Hearing loss. Amputation. Heart disease. Neurological degeneration.

In addition to broad categories like Musculoskeletal Disorders (1.00), Digestive Disorders (5.00), Hematological Disorders (7.00), and so on, the Social Security Administration maintains a list of Compassionate Allowances Conditions. These are almost all fatal, and bypass the often years-long application process for a merely months-long one that may or may not outlast the applicant. Reading it gave me a sense of perspective, as well as discomfort, fear and sadness: Heart Transplant Graft Failure, Lymphoma, ALS, Hydranencephaly, Mixed Dementias, Cancer, Cancer, and more Cancer, all terminal. Kinda makes Crohn’s and bronchiectasis seem less dire.

We’re all gonna get here sooner or later, unless we die suddenly (accident, homicide, etc.). Covid brought me here to Disability Land sooner. It left me with a permanent low fever and ever-expanding autoimmune conditions I never had before. It took away what I thought were another decade or two of active mid-to-latish life. At 57 I am accumulating conditions more common to those in their 70’s or 80’s. Still, I got off easy compared to many. Crohn’s, for example, is often diagnosed in adolescents; I didn’t get it until I was 55. Many disabilities are invisible, and we have no idea what everyone is struggling with.

Plus, my pulmonologist says 57 is Old. So it’s time for me to make some art about being Old:

I’m going to illustrate (parts of) the SSDI Blue Book.
Maybe I’ll make another playing card deck with them: The SSDI Qualifying Impairments Deck.
But to start I’m just illustrating.

If there’s a specific ailment you want me to include, you can commission one here. Be sure to name the condition and let me know it’s for this project. I can also make its sufferer resemble you or another victim of your choice.

I have felt a lot better since starting this project, so even if it’s in terrible taste and everyone hates it, I’m doing it anyway.

Why can’t I Be Sick Like A Normal Person?

In March 2023 I got COVID which kept me in bed for 6 weeks. The following month it kept me in bed every other day. After that I got back to normal, except my body temperature remained a degree-and-a-half higher than before and, unbeknownst to me at the time, I developed Crohn’s Disease. I was diagnosed by the end of that year, and the first few months of 2024 I spent with worsening symptoms while getting infusions of Skyrizi, a monoclonal antibody treatment. It kicked in after about 4 months and I stabilized by Summer 2024.

Skyrizi is an immunosuppressant. I took extra care avoiding exposure to communicable diseases, wearing a mask at the grocery store, not flying, avoiding crowds. I got through 2024 without so much as a cold.

A little over a month ago, I got what I think was RSV. It nailed me in bed for close to a week; then I thought I was recovering, with “just” a lingering cough. Then it got worse, then a little better, then worse, then to “Convenient Care” where I got my first chest X-Ray (seemingly normal) and tested negative for COVID and Flu A & B. Then back in bed for a several days.

I couldn’t talk without coughing, so I stopped talking. I canceled what few plans I had. I rested, and rested some more. I watched more TeeVee than I did in the previous decade. I played a lot of Lexulous with the Level 8 practice robot, which I now beat more often than not.

I think I am finally recovering. Although I am still coughing, I am able to speak again. Yesterday I bicycled, albeit slowly. My brain is coming back online. Cori and I recorded a Heterodorx last night, first in weeks. Unfortunately, all I had to talk about was how sick I have been because I have nothing else going on. (Cori’s adventures make up for my lack.)

I just drew “Cough Monsters,”above, from a sketch I made near the nadir of my illness. The last drawing I made was still on the scanner — it was called “Exiting Winter,” which I drew the very day my cough started. Hilariously I thought the worst of 2025 might be behind me. Boy was I wrong.

Reality & Mystery

I listened to a 2-hour video of this academic saying that Reality isn’t real, there is no reality without someone to perceive it, while I attempted to hand-animate a fat Earth goddess I called “Reality,” because that morning I had imagined praying to Reality, who doesn’t care about my feelings, and also to Mystery, who might. Reality and Mystery, sisters. Systery. My animation failed but I still wanted to draw Them. Is Mystery the snake that twines around the Goddess? Is Mystery Reality’s backside? Is Reality that which can be illuminated but seldom is, while Mystery cannot be illuminated at all? Is Mystery just the parts of Reality we can’t see, or is She something else entirely?

Anyway Mr. Academic says There Is No Reality, only consciousness, and “science” backs that up. Dude, I read The Doors of Perception when I was 17. Sure, “reality” is some informational plasma that doesn’t take shape (as we know it) until we interpret it through our senses. But that plasma triggers multiple flesh-instruments the same way; it can be measured, even if measurements of Reality aren’t Reality itself. He sounded to my ears like a freshman in a late-night dorm room, however:

I do love the idea that nothing is in fact real, that everything is an illusion, because it takes a huge load off. All my pain, search for meaning, criticism, loneliness, frustration, fears: they’re just artifacts of my mind, which is itself an illusion as well as a generator of illusion. My mind isn’t real, my thoughts aren’t real, reality isn’t real. Ohm.

On the same day I saw a video of a young mother who regrets motherhood. She’d always wanted a baby girl; now she has one, and while she loves her daughter infinitely, she hates the experience of motherhood, the physical and psychic changes, the long stretches of boredom and meaninglessness, the absence of fulfillment, becoming a lifelong host for a parasite, the pain and suffering and emptiness despite the love. The disappointment.

And I think: I feel the same way about having been born! What a colossal disappointment.

She urges women to consider not becoming mothers: it’s not worth it. And I encourage ethereal souls to not become incarnated on the human plane: that’s not worth it either. Spare a mother, spare a child, solve multiple problems at once.

Luckily, none of this is real.

Ohm.