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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2324 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 15, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In my next life, I want to be a song by Dim.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CBtL8ogXZcw

My girlfriend wants to show me the movie The White Ship. The full movie has been uploaded to YouTube, but the only English subtitles available are the Russian auto-translation, which aren't great. Anyone know where I could track down accurate English subtitles? Failing that, somewhere I could buy the movie on DVD with English subtitles would be fine.

I don't think one exists, searched for a fair bit. Maybe contact someone at the American University of Central Asia? Either in the television cinema media arts department https://auca.kg/en/tcma_faculty_staff/ or the late film director's son who is a vice president of the university https://www.auca.kg/en/auca_news/5254/

For what it's worth, here's a translation of the book version https://archive.org/details/whiteship00aitm/mode/1up

Huge help, thank you!

So I've really been enjoying Against the Storm the last week. It was kind of a splurge when I got an email from GOG that it was out of Early Access, and it looked right up my alley.

It's basically a colony building game in the style of Settlers. You build your town workshop by workshop, home by home, and manually assign workers to various task. You are expected to beat the levels, not play them forever. I saw some people didn't like this? That seems really bizarre to me. Like, it's not that kind of game? Play one that is.

It has some fun mechanics that set it apart though. Has numerous fantasy races that each excel or have boosted resolve at different tasks. They also all have different needs to keep them happy. If they get unhappy enough they will leave your settlement. At lower difficulty settings this seems unlikely unless you really suck at the game. On "normal" it can be a real risk as the level progresses. Haven't tried the hard difficulty setting yet.

Because for various reasons, as you get further and further through a level, the "threat" from the forest grows, lowing your population's resolve. Random events pop up that you need to respond to, and sometimes as part of the choices you are presented with before consequences happen the least bad option is one that spikes this even further.

It has a fun meta progression. Instead of a simple campaign of hand crafted levels, each introducing a new mechanics, it has a rogue like design. At least that's what I see people say. I don't see it personally. I hear rogue like and that makes it seem like you are intended to fail until they give you enough honorable mention trophies to buy upgrades that let you win. I haven't lost once in this game, and it lets you pick the difficulty on a level by level basis. It's up to you to set your risk/reward threshold.

The individual levels are fun enough so far for me. The building you have access to are random, and so you'll rarely have a perfect supply chain. But if you establish trade routes and spend liberally at visiting traders, you can patch the holes you may have in it. At least enough to get past the finish line of the level. It's very much a dynamic and interesting puzzle, that engages me a lot more than going through the motions with the same 10 buildings every session.

Anyways, I guess that kind of turned into a mini review. Anyone else been into it lately?

I considered it, being a fanboy of the publishers, but declined. Neither the gameplay pitch nor the visuals do anything for me.

I might know what you mean about the visuals. There is a certain style of soft, bright, cartoonish, often utopian woodland fantasy art that started off as annoying to me, and grew into an all consuming hatred.

The art and theme of Against the Storm is not that, thankfully. It has a distinctly Lovecraftian vibe to it, had Lovecraft been born in dark ages Germany and feared the deep wood, instead of late 19th/early 20th century New England and feared the mongrelization of America.

I enjoyed it well enough but found myself blocked on progression due to no artifacts and that raising the difficulty made it quite unfun and frustrating.

I played it a little while back, enjoyed it for a little while.

Was the difficulty a setting, or just based on how far you are from the central place? I think difficulty was based on how far you went from the central tower thingy. If I remember correctly once your ramp up the difficulty, the game changes from "always winning" to "always losing". To the point where unless I got lucky roles on some starting races/abilities/map areas I felt better off just quitting the level and not wasting my time.

I'm a very sore loser when it comes to single player games, so I stopped playing after I stopped constantly winning. Definitely a reversal of the normal difficulty curve for rogue-lites.

I still played for about 20 hours, so I don't regret my purchase. Just wasn't the right game for me I guess.

Was the difficulty a setting, or just based on how far you are from the central place?

Both I think? There is definitely a difficulty setting you can choose before you start a level, either Settler, Pioneer or Veteran. I haven't unlocked the last one yet? Settler is definitely baby mode where villagers eat less food and hostility is super slow. Pioneer seems like "normal" mode. Veteran activated blightrot and corruption, and I'm probably about ready to jump up to that since Pioneer has gotten easy.

But I've only done the first seal, so we'll see how difficult things get when I really start stretching my legs.

I haven't unlocked the last one yet?

Certainly not- there are actually 20 more difficulty levels on top of Viceroy, each of which cumulatively adds a different complication to the settlements.

That sounds really fun. I'll buy it if/when it ever costs $1-2. Have you tried Frostpunk? It's a city-building game where you're literally trying to survive against the storm of a global freeze. I highly recommend it.

Yeah the gameplay was, strangely for a city sim, really just a vessel for the writing, and it was more than sufficient for that. I love the interplay between gameplay and story where if you play well enough you can save more refugees from the cold. Have yet to find another game half as good at that.

I wound up with Frostpunk at some point. I forget how or why. Didn't click with me. No idea why.

Frostpunk is kind of the opposite of a post apocalyptic city builder. It's about surviving the upcoming apocalypse, not rebuilding after. The city building isn't really very deep or even the focus of the game.

It was given away by Epic Games.

" I hear rogue like and that makes it seem like you are intended to fail until they give you enough honorable mention trophies to buy upgrades that let you win. "

For the record, that's not what roguelike means. Or at least, not what it used to mean. For a long long long time before modern "rogue-lites" came along and got super popular.

Oh I know. I played Nethack once upon a time. But all the same, I see something tagged "Rogue like" or "Rogue lite" on Steam and I assume my comment above about it.

Well man I have to say - change starts with us! The first step is associating that shit with roguelites and keeping roguelikes distinctly cprgs balanced for iron man mode, preferably with random generation and ascii graphics.

Oh, ok.

Antidepressants or Tolkien?

Can you guess which words are from Tolkien's legendarium and which are drugs?

18/24. Tolkien rarely used ‘x’ and some other letters and letter combinations in fantasy names, while 6/7 names with accents are Tolkien.

13/24 and the only one I knew for sure was Bilbo.

15/24. Basically 50/50 coin flips apart from the really obvious ones like Bilbo and Sildenafil.

Got 24/24 but that's sort of cheating because I've played this before. There's one name on it which tripped me up the last time because it accurately follows Tolkien's naming conventions.

22/24.

One of the ones I missed had an á or é. I didn’t know drug names did that. Must not have been American?

Great quiz though. Got me to pause a few times.

Yes, there was one drug name with an accent which seemed designed to trip people up.

14/24, barely better than 50/50 guesses.

Nigga what the fuck

Sildenafil is many things and an indispensable miracle drug for many middle aged men around the world, but I have yet to see anyone call it an antidepressant. I'm sure it has antidepressant-adjacent properties, in the sense that most people would get at least a little depressed if their dick stopped working. Doesn't make it part of the same class.

At any rate, the only reason this particular format works is because Americans are fond of their stupid brand names while more enlightened countries use generic. I'm pretty sure I can recognize almost any generic antidepressant by name, including the atypicals, but it's like calling Genghis Khan "Bob" and then expecting everyone to know who he is.

Yeah, I clicked the link thinking, "how hard can it be, IUPAC naming scheme is massive, but mostly logical!"

I wrapped up the latest season of the Great British Baking Show (/GBBO) this week and had some thoughts. In aggregate, the show isn’t remarkably different this season than others. The same tropes apply – the cohort all likes each other and thinks of themselves as a “family”, there’s an outro detailing post-show hangouts, etc.

After watching all the seasons on Netflix, I’ve become adept at picking up a couple of archetypes that appear each time. A combination of gender, age, and general appearance can get you far in guessing how far someone will make it throughout the show (though adding data from the first episode vastly increases accuracy). There are older folks who are just too tired, too shaky in the hands, too stuck in their ways to compete. The younger bakers that get too emotional or aggressive (in terms of ambition) fall by the wayside.

There was light CW fodder. The new host was a black woman, and a deaf participant required the use of a sign language interpreter during their tenure. We’ve discussed GBBO and the CW before – I have to say that I’m still satisfied that it hasn’t succumbed to the obvious cruft that you can see all the time in most shows. I quite enjoyed the new host, and the disabled competitor was, in fact, competitive.

My preferred method of watching these shows is light binging. I build up a queue before hopping on the train, timing my watching volume and cadence to where I watch ~4 shows per week and get to have the benefits of continuity without monotony. While I’m sure it’s been present in previous seasons, the tonal shift across episodes was obvious and welcome. Light, airy music to introduce the cast. A little bit of drama in the middle episodes. And by the last 3, darker and tenser background audio, the volume lowered to hear the bakers detailing exactly what they’re doing and why. More close-up shots of the delicate piping and frosting for each piece.

Interestingly, the finalists: were all white men who play sports. Their grimaces and focus during the last rounds of the competition were a contrast to what I'd seen before. I assume it's not what the show wanted to happen, but that's how the cookie crumbled. The winner ended up bucking my own bias and assumptions. Matty fits perfectly into the mold of "cheery young guy who doesn't take this seriously enough to deliver". But he did!

I was left with frustration that I haven't developed this skill. I consider myself an above-average cook, but still haven't been able to master the basics of consistency with waffles and biscuits. Learning baking is hard for many reasons, one of which is that what you're producing is so calorie dense and crammed with sugar you can't truly test your work or exercise it multiple times per week.

Anyone here successfully become a great baker? What did it take?

Baking feels more finicky to me than a lot of cooking. Ratios have to be perfect, eggs have to be beaten just right, etc or else the result is mediocre. Cooking to me seems a lot more forgiving. I can easily make a really tasty dinner just looking at what ingredients are left over from the week's meals. I can cook while only half paying attention as I listen to an audiobook or have a conversation.

It's probably just a practice thing. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can cook multiple times a day if you like and stay healthy, while most (delicious) baked goods are not foods you should be eating every day. I'm sure that if you worked at a baker for a month your skill would improve dramatically.

So, my insane baking hot take that drives people nuts, is that the phrase cooking is an art, baking is a science, is dead wrong. I can tell you exactly what a adding or removing a little of any ingredient will do to a given cookie dough by eye alone. It's just practice, reading up on the chemistry of food, and experimentation. Really getting skilled at cooking and baking takes 10-20 years. You can't really grind it unless you're running your own restaraunt or something and can feed your food to people, you just have to slowly learn over time. But if you keep at it, apply a critical eye to your own work, consume good food related content that expands your understanding of things like the maillard effect and how gluten effects dough, you will eventually get good at baking.

No, you right as hell.

You start with following the recipe exactly, measuring hydration, etc and so forth to get your eye in; then once you know what good feels and looks like you do that shit by eye.

Optimal results can never be achieved by measurement and recipe, because that recipe was written for 800 ft. of elevation at 30% humidity and 68 degrees; and you are at sea level 40% and 78 degrees, and that shit matters.

I'm so happy to encounter someone else who gets this! I don't know why so many people are afraid of baking, and act like it's an entirely different pursuit from cooking on the stovetop. The truth is that the popular perception is wrong twice: baking doesn't need to be as precise as people think, and other cooking benefits from more precision than people think.

For example: cakes. People are all intimidated by cake, acting like you need to be some kind of wizard to get it right, and that the best us mere mortals can hope for is to use a box mix. And while there are complicated cakes, the truth is that a basic cake is dead easy and takes no more time or effort than a box mix. You don't need to faff about with creaming butter, measuring by weight, sifting flour, folding the batter, or anything like that. Just measure all the ingredients into a bowl, grab an electric mixer (or by hand I guess but I'm lazy), and mix until the batter is fully combined. Pour into cake pans and bake. It's basically foolproof.

While I'm on the subject, I would like to say that I have seen few products that are a ripoff like box cake mixes. People buy them because they think it's easier or faster, but in truth it's neither of those things. Basic cakes are already easy (see previous paragraph), and the only time you save is the 30 seconds it takes to measure out flour/sugar/salt/baking powder, versus having everything measured for you. You can get an equally good, and often better cake by following a recipe from Betty Crocker or whatever. Yet the companies that make these mixes have somehow fooled people into thinking that they actually provide value, even though they don't provide any value at all. It's mind blowing.

People buy them because they think it's easier or faster, but in truth it's neither of those things. Basic cakes are already easy (see previous paragraph), and the only time you save is the 30 seconds it takes to measure out flour/sugar/salt/baking powder, versus having everything measured for you. You can get an equally good, and often better cake by following a recipe from Betty Crocker or whatever. Yet the companies that make these mixes have somehow fooled people into thinking that they actually provide value, even though they don't provide any value at all.

It depends on whether they bake in general or not.

If they keep flour, sugar, baking powder, butter, vanilla, a flavoring of choice, measuring cups and spoons, and an electric mixer on hand, then they probably already enjoy baking, and so, sure, bake a cake from scratch. If their toddler has stolen half their measuring tools, they do not have a flavoring they want, their flour has attracted rodents and been thrown out, they're mixing with a fork, and they're going to pour the concoction into a square pan because they bake cakes about once a year, then, yes, the cake mix is likely the difference between baking a cake and not baking anything at all. I think you underestimate how disorganized people's kitchens, lives, and minds are. I might buy a scone mix one of these days, mostly to remind myself that, yes, I like scones and am able to bake them. otherwise I buy cream for them and let it sit in the back of the refrigerator going bad for a month.

Yet the companies that make these mixes have somehow fooled people into thinking that they actually provide value, even though they don't provide any value at all.

I believe it might be self-sustaining at this point as people develop a taste for that specific brand (and ingredient source) of cake, much like how people continue to buy the same brand of beer in the face of alternatives (sours, etc.) that taste far better provided you're willing to suffer a mediocre experience once in a while.

What are you best at baking, would you say?

It's just practice, reading up on the chemistry of food, and experimentation.

This does more to justify it being considered a science than the vast majority of social science.

the phrase cooking is an art, baking is a science, is dead wrong…It's just practice, reading up on the chemistry of food, and experimentation.

Literature reviews, chemistry and experimentation certainly sound like science to me!

The phrase is usually used to mean that cooking is much more forgiving than a lot of baking, where a few extra minutes in the oven or too much mixing or not enough or not rolling things out exactly to the right thickness or not getting the flour butter ratio exactly correct etc etc can very quickly and easily ruin a recipe.

A lot of cooking, by contrast, allows for some experimentation and variation, and a little too much oil or butter or a couple minutes too long on the tomato sauce or the casserole isn’t usually as ruinous. You can decide that you feel like sauce that’s a little thicker or a batter with more pepper or add a little garlic and some tinned sardines into a tomato sauce where you also slightly increase the amount of oregano you use and all those changes are mostly immediately obvious and easy and predictable.

Most pro bakers use scales in their work even when making the same pastries every day, whereas even in professional kitchens in many cases chefs just eyeball things because minor fluctuations are irrelevant or can be fixed during cooking.

Most pro bakers use scales in their work even when making the same pastries every day, whereas even in professional kitchens in many cases chefs just eyeball things because minor fluctuations are irrelevant

This is just as true of baking. Minor fluctuations don't actually matter that much for most recipes. For example, when baking I always eyeball the shortening because I can't be arsed to clean out a measuring cup after measuring it. It's always fine. Similarly, there's no actual need to measure flour or sugar by weight. Even if your measuring cup isn't always the exact same amount because you don't perfectly level it, it's not going to matter. Lots of people even in the baking world feel like you have to be super precise, but you really don't.

Anyone here successfully become a great baker? What did it take?

My father is a good baker (but not much of an artist, so he can't necessarily do the fondant stuff from contemporary confectionary). He worked nights at a 5 star restaurant and then resort when he was younger. Also I think he took culinary classes and got some sort of certificate in it. He has multiple James Beard books and follows the instructions properly.

I think baking is something that benefits from apprenticeship, whether working with a professional baker, or learning from a family member who's unusually good at baking.

Sometimes I don't really read the recipe and mix at the wrong temperature or the wrong order or something, which matters in baking. People who are learning to bake well don't do that -- they read the text at the beginning of the cookbook and don't innovate until they understand the reasoning behind various processes. Also, my ovens have never been well calibrated (I've had two in the past 5 years, and the first always burned things, while the second is unable to bake a potato); I think people who bake either get a better oven or put their own sensor in and keep track of the temperature pretty exactly. Some baking requires specific oven set ups like steam injection for French bread.

Anyone here successfully become a great baker? What did it take?

I'm really good at making sourdough bread. It took an embarrassingly large amount of practice.

The issue is that reading recipes doesn't really help and watching videos is also of limited value.

Also, you can't really adjust things as you go, unlike with much cooking.

Also, you can't really adjust things as you go, unlike with much cooking.

This is another huge thing that makes it hard for me. Part of "regular" cooking is creativity and doing things on the fly, putting together what's in the pantry, saving a bad chili before you serve it.

With baking that ability becomes much more limited. Shit, I made some sugar cookies last week (to finish off GBBO, actually) and after creaming the butter/sugar I put in the dry mix. I KNEW I'd hit the correct dough consistency but still had some flour left.... so I added it and they came out as too-dry 7/10 on taste. Goddamnit.

Cooking is as much an art as a skill. I follow a hobby Youtube chef and while he's perfected pasta and, indeed, pastry making, cakes continue to be his downfall.

I know people who can do many recipes wonderfully, but have an Achilles heel when it comes to a particular set of skills. Baking is hard! It depends on so many variables, particularly your oven and how fast/slow it heats, how consistent it is in temperature and so forth.

I've given up, after producing one too many attempts at a sponge cake which come out more like pancakes no matter how diligently I follow the recipes or how hard I try to incorporate enough air, etc.

Anyone here successfully become a great baker? What did it take?

I've literally been making the same scone recipe for 2 years now, and they still don't always come out the way I want. Way better than they were, but not quite what I'm aiming for. I've been experimenting with shortbread to mixed results.

I think you just need like, a dozen kids, to eat all this shit and immediately burn the calories off playing outside. Everyone I know who is even a remotely competent baker is either obese and/or has a large immediate or extended family to bake for regularly. Or they've been making the same holiday treats for 40 years, which they learned how to make from their parents who also made them for 40 years.

I think you just need like, a dozen kids, to eat all this shit and immediately burn the calories off playing outside.

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this. I don't have a dozen (yet) but this sounds like a great excuse to bake more.

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