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Eat pizza, win free stuff. Also: a mini-giveaway from The Radical Uprise!

Hey friends! Do you love vegan pizza? Of course you do! You have a pulse, don’t you?

Now through Monday afternoon (1/30/12), take a pic of your vegan pizza and share it with us at fuck yeah vegan pizza for a chance to win one of three prize packages stuffed with goodies from Tofurky, Daiya, Lightlife, Gardein, Nasoya, Tofutti, Field Roast, Bob’s Red Mill, and Upton’s Naturals (for US & Canadian readers) - or a ginormous box of vegan meats and cheeses from Redwood Foods (for mainland UK residents).*

Even if you lose the giveaway, you still win at life! (Because you have pizza, duh!) Click through for the deets.

How about a giveaway within a giveaway, Inception styley?

Reblog this post to win a set of four vegan buttons I bought from The Radical Uprise on etsy (pictured below) and one slice o’ pizza key chain.

I’ll ship this prize anywhere in the world, so the only requirement is that you reside on planet Earth. This mini-giveaway closes Sunday night, January 29th, at 10PM US Central time and I’ll choose and announce a winner shortly thereafter.**

Good luck, and stay saucy!

* Sorry, super-sexy leopard-print bedspread not included!

** Sorry, uber-adorable, shabby chic sunflower dresser not included!

Jan 26, 2012 3:14 pm

veganpizzafuckyeah:

YOU GAIS! The second annual Vegan Pizza Day is ~~just five short days away!~~

… 157 days away! (Yeah, yeah, so Vegan Pizza Day has been rescheduled. But I’ve been planning this week’s festivities for months and don’t really wanna cancel last minute, so let’s have our own pizza party anyway, mkay? We’ll call it “Early Vegan Pizza Day.” Or “Old Vegan Pizza Day.” Or “The Vegan Pizza Day That Was,” for the Browncoats in the house! Just replace “Vegan Pizza Day” with your favorite alternative for the duration of this post.)

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m too excited to wait for ~~the weekend~~ June 28th! That’s why we’ll be celebrating Vegan Pizza Day ALL WEEK LONG here on fuck yeah vegan pizza! And by “celebrating,” I mean with PIZZA and PRIZES! From now through next Monday afternoon, share your vegan pizza photos with us for a chance to win one (OF THREE!) vegan prize packages stuffed with everything you need to throw your very own vegan pizza party!

We’ve got swag from all the biggest names in vegan pizza eats: Daiya. Tofurky. Lightlife. Gardein. Upton’s Naturals. Tofutti. AND MORE! There will be buttons, and t-shirts, and tote bags – and more free nomz than you can wag your tongue at!

To enter, simply share with us a photo or video of your Vegan Pizza ~~Day~~ Week eats from now until next Monday, January 30th at 12 noon (US Central time). From these entries, three winners will be randomly chosen to receive a superginormamegalicious vegan pizza prize package!

Due to shipping costs and product availability, this contest is only open to residents of the United States and Canada – but we also have a separate, equally awesome giveaway for our readers in the United Kingdom!

Keep reading for the deets!

The Prizes

Three winners will be randomly chosen to receive a vegan pizza prize package containing the following:

- One awesome Tofurky prize pack that includes a coupon for a free Tofurky brand frozen pizza with Daiya cheese (expiration date: 4/20/13), as well as Tofurky buttons, stickers, temporary tattoos – and a pizza cutter, to boot! Your friends will be jealous. (I know I am!)

- One coupon for a free 8oz bag of Daiya shredded cheese (exp: 12/31/12). Also: a Daiya window decal, so you can share your love of vegan cheese with your friends, neighbors, mail person, parking attendant, and random strangers!

- Five coupons for one free Lightlife item (exp: 7/31/12; maximum retail value $6 per coupon). To sweeten the deal, the nice folks at Lifgtlife also threw in a totally adorable tote bag to help you haul off all the free goodies you just scored! (The print is similar to the background image on their Twitter page. Like I was saying, ADORABLE.)

- One coupon for a free Gardein product, refrigerated or frozen (no expiration date; max value $4.99). Would you like some chicken wings to go with that pizza, madam?

- Two coupons for one free Nasoya item (exp: 12/31/12; max value $3.99 per coupon).* Take the tofu, put it on a pizza! (Ditto: the hummus!)

- Two VIP Certificates for one free Tofutti brand product (no expiration date; max value $3.99).* Tofutti, does a body good! (Seriously I grew up on Tofutti brand products!)

- One coupon for a free package of Field Roast Sausages (exp. 12/31/12; max value $7.99). Also, to spread your love of vegan sausages far and wide, a Field Roast tee! (We have one black women’s shirt, size large; one ash gray unisex M; and one sky blue unisex XL up for grabs. First to respond gets first dibs!) I especially love the back of the shirt, which offers a veg-friendly definition of “meat.”

- One package each of active dry yeast (8 ounces) and hard white whole wheat flour (24 ounces) from Bob’s Red Mill. The flour is organic and non-GMO!

- One rockin’ mustache logo tee from Upton’s Naturals. (They make seitan, yo!) Celebrate Movember all year long, vegan styley! Winner picks the size after the contest closes.

- Last but not least, I’ve thrown in a few small surprise gifts to show y’all how much I appreciate you! Spoiler alert! There will be keychains, and buttons (Two from The Radical Uprise! See if you can guess which!), and a sticker activity book. (Make your own pizza any time! I KNOW RIGHT!) You may even find a mix tape or two, because I am totes the pizza romantic.

Seriously, I’m blown away by the love and support tumblr has shown this tiny little blog. (You love vegan pizza, you really love vegan pizza!) You guys are da bomb!

Also, many thanks to Tofurky, Daiya, Lightlife, Gardein, Nasoya, Tofutti, Field Roast, Bob’s Red Mill, and Upton’s Naturals for sponsoring this giveaway. YOU ROCK!

[* Prize package #3 is slightly different in that it contains ONE Nasoya coupon and THREE Tofutti coupons. FYI!]

Contest Rules & Regs

1. You don’t need to be vegan to enter, but your pizza does! Entries must include a photo or video of a vegan pizza (or pizza-esque dish) that you’ve eaten in the week leading up to Vegan Pizza Day. (Please, be courteous and don’t include any non-vegan items in the photo, mkay?) Additional submission guidelines are available on the “submit” page. (Stating the obvious, this is also where you can submit your entry!)

2. Please just submit each pizza once. If you have multiple photos of one pizza you’d like to share (Maybe you’re the artsy type? Ain’t nothing wrong with that!), please include all the photos in one entry. If you make multiple pizzas at once, be sure to photograph and submit them separately, or else they’ll be counted as a single entry.

3. So as not to encourage binge eating, I’m capping the maximum number of entries at four per person. Of course, you can still submit more than four posts over the course of the week, but only the first four will be entered into the contest.

4. You do not need to have a tumblr account to enter! The submission page allows for submissions with a valid email address in addition to those made using a tumblr account. If you’d rather not use tumblr’s interface, you can email your entry to me at easyvegan@gmail.com.

5. If you’re submitting an entry via tumblr, make sure your ask is enabled so that I’ve a way of contacting you. If you’re submitting via email, please add easyvegan@gmail.com to your address book. I must be able to make contact with you!

6. This contest is only open to residents of the United States and Canada – but we also have a separate giveaway for our readers in the United Kingdom! (International readers, don’t hate me! I’m still working on arranging some giveaways for you!)

7. Please note your country of residence in your submission(s). This one’s important, folks! Since I’m running two giveaways at once, I need to know which one you’re entering! If your submission doesn’t include this info, I may contact you for clarification and hold your post in the queue until I have the necessary info.

8. The contest closes on Monday, January 30th at 12PM US Central time. (That’s 1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific.) I will choose and announce a winner shortly thereafter. The winner has 72 hours to respond with a valid US or Canadian mailing address – after which time I’ll randomly choose another winner.

9. HAVE FUN WITH IT!

Questions? Drop ‘em in the ask box!

HAPPY VEGAN PIZZA ~~DAY~~ WEEK EVERYONE!

(Posted with gratuitous Elf gifs because THIS FEELS LIKE A SECOND CHRISTMAS TO ME!!!! Or the first one of 2012! Whichever you prefer!)

Jan 23, 2012 12:12 pm

veganpizzafuckyeah:

Hey guys! The folks behind Vegan Pizza Day recently announced that they’ll be moving the holiday to another day later in the year. So far the date is tba, but they want your suggestions. (Me, I’m partial to March 14. NERD!)

I’m a little bummed ‘cause I’ve got some awesome stuff planned for next week, BUT THE SHOW MUST GO ON! We can still celebrate and call it Early Vegan Pizza Day, right? Or “today,” as it’s known in my house. Tune in Monday for the exciting details!

In the meantime, you may want to hold onto your lovely pizza photos, which could possibly win you some goodies from the likes of Redwood Foods, Tofurky, Daiya, Lightlife, Gardein, Nasoya, Tofutti, Field Roast, Bob’s Red Mill, and Upton’s Naturals (to name a few!) come next week. NOT TO BE A TEASE OR ANYTHING. Just sayin’.

Finally, here is a gif of a dancing pizza because it amuses me.

Jan 19, 2012 3:26 pm

Apple Flubbed It Today

Today Apple held a press conference to outline their latest venture: improving textbooks. I was genuinely hoping that Apple would do something truly innovative to education, but that was probably hoping too much. Apple, in fact, announced a lot of glitz, a new revenue stream for themselves, but didn’t come close to improving the textbook industry.

I want to first say, though, that the new iBooks format is good looking. It’s not original, really, but iBooks in the new iBooks 2 format are a big improvement over regular books. I have no comment on the authoring tools, but I view those as a plus regardless. The books themselves i have no issue with. Ebooks have come a lot way since I was reading books off of the Rocket E-Book reader back in the late nineties.

There are two main reasons I feel today was a flub. The first was that iBooks is a proprietary format that can only be used on Apple products. The future of education in this country cannot depend on proprietary solutions from one company. The future can rely on three textbook companies working in cahoots with Apple to lock in users to one platform. The country, not to mention the world, will be a heterogeneous device world. Students, who were basically treated as props in Apple’s announcement, should be able to access great content on any platform, whether its the future $80.00 (I’m speculating) Kindle Fire or the $800.00 iPad 2. The lock in is for one reason only: to make Apple money.

The second reason I thought today was a flub, was that Apple didn’t talk about a new way to get books into students hands. From what I remember from high school, books were provided by the school. Apple only mentions being able to buy books from the iBooks store. Do students need to have their own accounts or Apple IDs? Are students responsible for buying all their own books now? Apple mentioned that students get to keep the books, but how does that happen unless students buy them? Do books need to be repurchased every year? How do students get iPads? Are schools going to rent them out? Give them away? Who buys the books then, if the school owns the iPads, and how does the student keep the books? How does a school manage all this?

It’s not hard to see why Apple wants to get into this market. However, for the moment, this announcement only helps those well off enough to afford iPads and internet access, doesn’t address who buys the books, and doesn’t present a real solution for schools. It presents a solution to the problem of: How does Apple make even more money?

Jan 19, 2012 1:14 pm

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Microsoft Going GUI-less →

Very much long overdue. I can’t help but think this is a move to make it’s Azure product easier to use. Anecdotally, I’ve heard it’s a real pain to administer cloud instances of windows when you need to use the GUI for so much.

Jan 15, 2012 10:33 am

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Facebook nits

I’ve moved away from using Facebook because it’s too cluttered for me. Too much sharing, to many different columns (though I noticed the activity window no longer shows up for me), etc. For some, it’s great, for me it became noise, and I deleted all my friends on FB except for close family and friends. I am looking at a better way to follow certain people you can subscribe too, but I haven’t figured how to do that yet because of the following reasons:

1) Facebook constantly forgets my wall settings and reverse to “Highlighted Stories First” instead of “Recent Stories First”

2) Facebook hides too much. The more I “unlike” pages and people, the more stuff suddenly shows up that was being hidden before. It’s too unreliable.

Any suggestions for those who want to follow public Facebook updates but not have to use the Facebook interface?

Jan 15, 2012 9:58 am

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What’s Wrong With Bloggers These Days?

There are two main categories of blogs I read these days: Skeptical blogs and tech blogs. For the last two weeks it seems that both circles of blogs have been big on hype and low on substance. Page views seem to be the metric of choice to judge success, not on whether or not anything of value was added. In most cases, something of real value was overwhelmed by wild speculation, ad hominem attacks, and logical fallacies. The rest of this post is aimed at the tech and skeptic blogs I’ve been reading for the last year, and is not meant to be aimed at any one specific blog, as I’ve seen these issues all over the place.

Am I making a “tone” argument? Yes, I think I am. I sincerely believe tone matters. Articles that take on the tone of attack pieces or fluff pieces lower the quality of dialog for everyone. Internet comments are notorious for being terribly <insert your own>-ist and it’s a reputation that’s well deserved. Another kind of comment that is becoming pervasive is the sycophantic comment. It’s a comment that adds little to no value to the discussion, no new information, and is usually an attempt by the commenter to ingratiate themselves with the author. So we end up with two kind of comments: vile and vapid. I’m probably guilty of this myself, but after this week, I’m going to take a long look and see what I can do to avoid the “vile or vapid” paradigm.

To some, my complaints might sound like I think everyone should be nice and fuzzy, and never have a dissenting word. This is very much untrue. I’ve been in multi-hour arguments with people who I vehemently disagree with without ever needing to raise my voice or resort to ad hominem attacks. I did it many times on my podcast. I have a very rare confluence of political and moral beliefs so it’s very rare that I’d ever come across someone else who agrees with me on everything. I’m almost always in disagreement with whoever I’m speaking to on something, whether it’s my lack of religion, my belief in small government, my veganism, or cavalier attitude about what people should be able to do in the privacy of their own homes. I’m not against conflict, I’m against bad dialog caused by the desire for page views and aggrandizement.

So what are my preferences and suggestions? The simplest one is stick to facts, things you know. All to many times in blogging and in “response post” blogging, authors assume and extrapolate facts that can’t be determined, without stating the speculation in the post. The next suggestion would be, if you read a blog post and you have some violent disagreement with it, email or call the person for a deeper explanation if possible. Countless times over the last year, I’ve seen response posts attacking people without ever taking the time contact the author over the offending post. Response blogging is perhaps one of the worst forms of communication, just barely above not communicating at all. And my last suggestion is simple: keep blogging. I don’t think people should stop blogging, I think they should get better.

At various times over the last month, I’ve thought about deleting all my tech and skeptic blogs out of my reader, and uncircling them all on Google+. The skeptic blogs have almost had me decide to not go to TAM2012 this year, an event I never thought I’d ever miss again. Well, I’ve stepped back off the edge from that one, and will go again, but I hope TAM 2012 can improve upon last year. We’ll see. Also, there are so many wonderful bloggers out there, some of my favorite ones are Steven Novella, Barbara Drescher, Mike Elgan amongst others, that I don’t want to sound like a blogger hater. Just something I wanted to say, since two of my “worlds” have been having the same problems for a while.

Jan 14, 2012 10:20 am

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Google TV

Enjoying Google TV via the Logitech Revue more than I expected. I’m not certain I could call it ready for my parents, but collecting video/music content from around the world of tv, streaming and satellite is not an easy task.

In any case, I’m very tempted to get a second one, but first I need a new switch. Running out of ethernet ports in my office!

Jan 7, 2012 11:37 pm

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Switching over…

Based on my wife’s success with her Tumbr blogs, I’ve switched my main blog over to Tumblr as well. I will move all my old content over to this new platform in time.

Jan 7, 2012 4:24 pm

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Ice Cream Sandwich Review

With the release of the Galaxy Nexus, there is finally an offically supported phone running the latest and greatest version of Android. I’m not going to review the phone really, because, unlike in the iPhone world, you have many choices for Android, and you should pick the one that is most comfortable for you. For me and my large hands, a 4.6” screen is no big deal, but for others, it might be. Some might like a keyboard, some may want an LED notification, and some may not care. So for this, I focus on Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

The overall look and feel of ICS is a vast improvement over Gingerbread and Honeycomb. The new “soft buttons” which change according to context have really grown on me. Swipes between screens are smooth, scrolling is smooth, and pinch zooming is smooth. Key word: smooth. Menus and options feel really polished, while the look of modals really looks clean and crisp. This is not your G1’s Android. If you’ve ever used an Android phone before and didn’t like it, you should try ICS, preferably the pure Google experience. The launcher in ICS is so good, you may never want to use a third party one.

From here on out I will highlight different apps and features:

* Gmail

Gmail is simply awesome in ICS. It looks great, many mail functions are exposed without needing to go to a secondary menu, and of course, it’s powered by a cutting edge email cloud service that millions of people use every day. I don’t spend a second thought worrying about accessing my email, it’s always a browser or phone app away. Everything, as always with Android and Gmail, is synced instantly across all my devices.

* Calendar

Pretty much the same as Gmail really. Google Calendar was always a strong point. I update an event on my phone, and the next time I log into my calendar from the browser, everything, again as always in Android, is synced.

* Widgets

Widgets are awesome. I really don’t know how iOS people use a phone without them. With a few flicks of my thumb, I can scan all my email and my calendar, without ever needing to enter an app. They’re resizable now and allow scrolling from within the widget. All my audio apps have widgets too, and it’s not unusual for me to go hours without ever entering an app since I can do so much from the homescreen.

* Battery life

You mileage may vary with battery life, because some apps just suck with battery usage. I’ve used Touchdown to access exchange email for years and it’s always been great. However, in ICS it’s a battery pig. I had to drop it and use the built in Exchange support, which is now both excellant and great with battery. I’ve played music over wifi for 9 hours and only used up 25% of the battery. It truly sips at battery power.

I was able to find out that Touchdown was the battery pig due to the great new battery tools you have that allow you to really nail down which app sucked down all your battery. Invaluable tool.

* Cloud integration

While iCloud has stolen a lot of the recent cloud thunder, I think Android has always been a step ahead. My photos, email, calendar, chats, music, and books are all stored in the Cloud with Google’s cloud services. Wherever I am, I can get to my things. I can edit documents on my phone, save them to the cloud, and then continue updating on my desktop. I’ve done this a couple times with spreadsheets I use for work. I think if you want the true cloud solution, you want Google. To borrow a phrase from Apple, it just works. You’re not locked into an Android device either, as all your data can be access via a browser, and if you’d like, downloaded to your machine with Google Takeout. It’s a story Google has not sold enough or mentioned enough.

* Final thoughts

I’m not an Android fanboy, I’m somewhat of an evangelist. I think iOS is a good OS and the iPhone is a good phone. For me, and I think a lot of people, Android has always provided a distinct experience better in many ways than in iOS. With ICS, though, it has clearly moved the bar farther than iOS 5 did. ICS proves you can have widgets, true multitasking, cloud integration, and polish, all without killing the battery. I invite everyone to check it out when Galaxy Nexus’s are finally on sale in the US.

Jan 7, 2012 3:41 pm

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