I had it as a textbook in culinary school, as do many people, and it’s the one I still routinely use. The recipes are rock solid. I use it mostly for very basic things, but I routinely get requests for those recipes, sometimes even from other chefs.
I also have a copy of an old King Arthur’s cookbook from the 80s that I find similarly useful and robust. Very seldom do I need a staple baking recipe that I can’t find from those two.
Older Star Trek, as Roddenberry saw it, more closely followed your desired formula. I mirror your sentiment, I love that Trek at its best is about culture, society, people, etc. Unfortunately war is a comfortable crutch for shows like Star Trek, I’d be surprised if anyone could make a sci-fi TV show entirely without it. Personally I’ll take entire seasons of filler about things like fungus people or Law In Space.
Up to a certain point Trek managed to keep military conflict at bay, to a degree. There were episodes about the Neutral Zone, or a Klingon raid, or what have you, but the plot eventually would cycle back to other matters. It’s DS9 where the show runners intentionally dove into those elements, and to their credit the show found good conflict there. How do you feel about Voyager? I prefer it to DS9, despite thinking DS9 is a stronger show and preferring the cast, because it focuses more on the things I like in Trek while DS9 at its root is about war.
I’m glad I don’t have to pick! I’m a sucker for variety. I always have natural and washed coffee on hand and I try to have a honey processed coffee whenever possible.
If I had to blindly pick a coffee and it needed to be great, I would pick a washed coffee, probably a “medium” roast. The flavor profile is fairly narrow at that point, but it can still be great coffee. I do (barely) prefer a delicate cup so most of the best cups of coffee I’ve had have been lighter roasted washed coffees.
But my most delightfully surprising cups of coffee, by a mile, have been natural process coffees. It probably wouldn’t be good if a light roasted washed coffee surprised me at this point. Natural processed coffees continue to surprise me in good ways.
For a consumer, if their preferences are equal, I think consistently good coffee is mostly about finding a good roaster. I’ve had plenty of mediocre to bad coffee from each fermentation process, many varieties, and all roast levels. I’ve seldom had a bad bag of coffee from roasters I trust.
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I’ve recently been tutoring a friend to use a Hario Switch. They are uniquely suited to pick pourover up quickly, excellent manual dexterity and related transferable skills, and they’ve still had some struggles. I’d definitely forgotten the learning curve and I think it’s very reasonable to look at brewers like the Hoop to open coffee up to more people.
I’ve tried other flow rate controlled pourover brewers before and not liked the results. I suspect James’ standards are high enough I would find this the best of the bunch. I’d love to try one.
I would modify the skirt on this brewer by melting and reshaping (or just cutting out) a notch. I also often like to brew over a carafe.
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“Our hands are like the hands of the living.”
Phew. Strong line.
How do you find the poetry you post? I enjoy so many of the things I see from you, I need to connect with the same periodicals or events you do.
50-60% of my coffee intake is decaf. If I could only drink decaf I would drink pretty much exactly as much coffee as I do now.
I will have a cup tonight with you.
Once in a blue moon, an impossible check can impress a scale of difficulty on the players.
D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is.
I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players would viscerally know they need to try a different approach.
And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. An interactive skill check is more substantial in the player’s mind than a monologue on the task being impossible, particularly if it stands out because they fail that check despite a super high result.
It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.
Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail.
Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we want to feel good. We’re also rewriting several rules at this point.
Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed.
I actually don’t mind pass/fail skill rolls in D&D or other games. Rolling a 20 is inherently satisfying to me. But I adore the DC+10 critical threshold for making a good build feel like it was time well spent, in or out of game. And since the natural 20/1 and critical rules are connected at the hip, I’ll gladly take them both.
I think this is great advice, not least of all for opening up espresso drinks. Also lowers the risk someone will start off with “bad” coffee. The best places for this around me would be some of the good local roasters.
I’d also consider finding a place to try Vietnamese and Cuban coffee. Maybe Turkish coffee, too.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.
Philosophically debatable, but a reasonable perspective. More germane to TTRPGs, I think it’s a legitimately interesting way to frame orcs, both more in line with the original source material (which as you say is nebulous to their origin) and interesting for players and GMs to deal with.
To me it’s so important that different ancestries/creatures be legitimately alien. If I can find a facsimile of an ancestry in real life Earth, it’s not foreign enough that I want an ancestry. I don’t need orcs that are tribal warriors or Mexican, we have Mexico and tribes on Earth. This is one area where Pathfinder and D&D both miss the mark for me… but not Warhammer, where they’re a psychic fungus, or LotR, where they’re test tube mooks.
I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.
Definitely a good way to make a villain. But I’m not convinced any one trait makes a good villain! There are a lot of villains who have empathy, across media. Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, Roy Batty in Bladerunner, Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. All heroes are alike; each great villain is evil in their own way.
I ran Ravenloft in 3.5 and adored playing Strahd, it’s so fun to twirl the figurative moustache. To me a huge strength of tabletop is that we get to savor things more emotionally vs intellectually compared to other entertainment, since we’re acting it out, and with simple characters you can flat out bathe in it. I don’t play 5e but I would run Ravenloft if it meant getting to run rampant with Strahd again.
Anyone who has never GMed before, believe me, I’ve never found anything like Snidley Whiplashing it up, 22 ounces of fresh cut ham on rye. All the joy of being despicable, none of the culpability.
The root of orcs as we think of them is Lord of the Rings, where they’re corrupted elves (or something like that). Literarily, they represent the evils of war. Tolkien orcs are evil.
Orcs have seen the furthest drift from those roots of anything from LotR. Dwarves, elves, orcs, and halflings saw some drift to generalize them for other tabletop settings. But the traits settled on for orcs in the 90s and 00s (strong, nomadic, clan society, warlike, brutal, noble savage stuff) can now feel insulting, because those traits are so often used in racist contexts, so orcs have seen a second drift away from those, too.
I don’t see much of a point to orcs anymore and don’t use them. Regarding 5e, I haven’t read its finished modern take on orcs but if I want Fantasy Mexico I’m just going to use human Fantasy Mexico.
I do disagree that fantasy villains need motivations beyond existing. Conscience and free will are required for protagonists, optional for antagonists. Illithids, vampires, and early Pathfinder goblins come to mind from fantasy. Strahd’s reason for being a villain is that he’s mopey. Everything in Cthulhu, likewise, lacks comprehensible motivation.
It’s hard to make an inherently evil villain that is a foil to the PC, but not every villain needs to be a foil. As a GM it can be really fun to wallow in a villain being unrepentantly, unthinkingly horrible.
I’ve worn glasses about sixteen hours a day my entire adult life. Got my first pair around 10. Acclimating took maybe four or five days of minor discomfort. The improved vision was incredible and as a child I had child durability, so I didn’t mind the discomfort. I vividly remember how strange it felt for air to hit my face with glasses on while walking or running.
Every time I get a major prescription update it takes two or three days to feel “right”. Until then I have some disorientation. I would expect an adult who hasn’t consistently worn glasses to feel that more keenly.
If I had continued eye strain after three days of constant and consistent wear, I would call the optometrist. If it lasted a week and the optometrist was blowing me off I’d consider my options. Some prescriptions are better than others. I could tell you exactly when I got my best prescription, it was life changing. I didn’t know people could see like that. I’ve never had a “bad” prescription to the best of my knowledge, every time I’ve updated it has been an improvement.
I don’t have a brand I would recommend, but I can say making your own extracts is extremely easy. Roughly chopping hazelnuts, toasting them, and adding them to a neutral vodka or glycerin would take maybe ten minutes and no special equipment. I went through an extract phase a while back and still have several, including a truly kickass coffee vodka.
Making it yourself isn’t fast, but I share your dislike of how hard it is to find unsweetened, reasonably priced extracts. I don’t want syrups, I like being able to control sugar content separate from additional flavors.
I do wonder how it would taste in comparison. I’ve never tasted hazelnut extract vs flavored coffee, creamer, or syrup, only ever in baked goods.
I suspect it’s just one of those weird cultural foibles. The US isn’t too exceptional among Western countries regarding moderate or binge drinking. It consumes meaningfully less alcohol per capita than Germany, France, Ireland, and the UK among others, on par with Sweden, Finland, and Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita. US alcoholism rates are about on par with Sweden, France, and Germany, some 25% lower than Ireland or the UK: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholism-by-country
I didn’t thoroughly research those numbers, but they square with my anecdotal experience. Soda is where the serving size really fucks us up.
There is a trend in high end spirit sales in the US to sell 1 or 1.25oz pours, 30 and 38ml respectively. It’s more a cost saving measure, but I do like it. 30ml is enough to try something.
I always knew James Hoffman is the same kind of weird goblin thing as me, but now I have video evidence.
I’m finishing off my bag of Counter Culture Field Trip, which I will miss. It was Aeropress today, I’m out of V60 papers. I have about 20 grams left, great for a lazy morning at home, but maybe I’ll have someone over and share it.
Knife stuff is pretty niche. A lot of what people do is based on experience and conjecture rather than a complete understanding of what they’re doing.
Your pocket knife, while cool and sentimental to you, is only a little more complicated than your dinner knives. You wouldn’t want to wipe down your dinner knives with a dirty shop towel and risk a chunk of sandpaper grit scratching them, or risk leaving behind a gross residue. But a disposable shop towel, paper towel, or clean cloth is fine for cleaning them. Maybe a q-tip for smaller spaces.
Polishing cloths have (minimal imo) value in handling heavily polished knives, those that have been taken to a very fine aesthetic polish. Not a typical concern.
I’m also worried about online recipes. Decent cookbooks routinely have recipes that benefit from adjustments or lack good instructions. Online recipes are already worse than that and AI is going to make them much worse. Sometimes you want a known good recipe.
In my experience the recipes in these seven books are particularly trustworthy. They deliver what they say on the tin, the listed quantities are good, and they’re well written.
I wish I could add Mexican and maybe regional Indian cookbooks of this caliber, but I haven’t read any I liked this much. All the classic French books are also excellent and very reliable (Larousse, Bocuse, etc.), that’s kind of their thing. Joy of Cooking does cover similar ground.
I recommend two plant focused books, both deeper cuts.
I cooked through Vedge with a few skips during COVID and it’s haymaker after haymaker, I can’t heap enough praise on it. From the Earth is pretty dated, and sometimes that shows in the ingredients, but also shockingly solid.
To learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. The books work, but video simply conveys more information. And as lists of recipes I don’t find those books particularly useful.
Ruhlman’s Ratios is an extremely versatile cookbook for soups, sauces, batters, and doughs that walks through a mindset that will let someone easily overhaul recipes to fit their vision or what’s on hand. You can find it very cheap and I think it can help most okay to even amazing cooks improve.
I recommend looking for many of these used, online or in person, or skimming them in a library. The Joy of Cooking in particular is practically falling out of trees they’ve printed so many of them.