It was Mardi Gras today, right? And the lunar new year, and Anthesterion (though the Anthestheria as such, the festival proper, start at the end of our month this year), and Ramadan starts tomorrow, so busy time of various calendars. :)
So, pancakes this evening for me! Nothing fancy, though I did add a handful of frozen raspberries. And there are some left over for breakfast! (So, uh, I suppose one can guess which of the above occasions is most salient in my house. ;) )
Good heavens! Now I'm morbidly fascinated. $225? (Plucking an arbitrary obnoxiously large number for anything that isn't, I don't know, a shipment of anvils?)
I'm not entirely looking forward to when it will be time to start thinking about next year's garden. Fun seeds are annoyingly expensive for something that should be fine in an envelope. (I know, emphasis on the "handling," of "shipping and.") And bare-root is something else, and I'm a community garden sort of girl for the foreseeable, so fancy plants aren't really on my agenda.
Yes, and yes. I've seen some homebrewed ideas for how to do it here on the 'boards, and if my character makes the cut, I'm hoping we could work out something along those lines. :)
It's not so key to my character concept that I couldn't skip it and go plain wizard if the GM isn't feeling it.
From the, "Irony is a dish best served bitter" department:
The U.S. Postal Service provides a service where they'll send you photos of all your incoming mail each day so you'll know what to expect. I assume it's to check for unreliable delivery, since that's what I'm using it for. But before they can start, they want you to send them a verification code. Which, since my cell phone number isn't public so they wouldn't accept it as an authentication method...
...is supposed to be coming in the mail.
Speaking of, I tried to mail a package to my mom visiting panama today.
I want you all to guess how much they wanted to charge.
Guess.
Winner gets to...I dunno, have me do something embarrassing. For me. Note I have no real sense of embarrassment.
Alright, I'll bite, because I'm a young crone who still likes sending the occasional letter or postcard, so this is adjacent to my interests. :)
I guess I should round up? For all the desperation of the post here, at least the powers that be aren't actively hostile to it, as I understand it. Please tell me they didn't try to charge you closer to $100 than, say, $50?
(For the record, the latter is about what a medium-sized, light-ish package to Panama from a metropolitan area would be charged up here, converted into USD.)
Probably less pedantry and more just me being wrong, but this bugged me: I need to clean out my sock drawer and refresh my hosiery, so I started browsing online for something fun, only to be met with, among other things, "solid sheer" tights.
Now, I understand that what they're getting at is "unpatterned, but including more exciting colours than flesh tones and black," but given the range of skin tones, let alone the desired diaphanous effect once one puts the damn things on, *I* would think anything sheer introduces too much variation in effect for "solid" to be quite the right word.
If I wanted a solid colour, I would get opaque tights, and if I just wanted a particular hue, I would get a monochrome pair, I think? Or just "colourful" rather than "patterned." (:
In all fairness, I presume, since Aristotle complains about that sort of thing in the Poetics and how some of the writers in Athens were letting tragedy down, that it might be an age-old problem.
*Glances at title of thread.* *Looks worriedly at her roll and double-checks her Will modifier.* XD
Whispered rumours have it that that elven lady who’s made such a splash in Villegre recently must be a Nidalese agent, what with her pallor, the way shadows cling to her and her dark finery, to say nothing of the way she strolled through the Nightways Gate, her fluency in Shadowtongue, and that she isn’t much like most any other elf one might meet in Kintargo. Star Lace, as most know her, is amused by such gossip and doesn’t go out of her way to dispel it, even if it’s nonsense: it tends to mollify Thrune loyalists, and she has spent some time in Nidal doing research.
In fact, she is what she looks like and claims to be, shadows aside: a visiting noblewoman with an interest in arcane magic (as many elves have), and who just happens to be visiting Kintargo as she travels wherever her studies take her. The latter are both broad and deep enough in scope – it is to be hoped that her interlocutors are very interested in the minutiae of spellcraft – as well as open to local curiosity, that she doesn’t even much need to avoid her conviction that there’s an aiudara to be found somewhere in Ravounel, as opposed to descanting on the finer points of the branches of illusionary theory, legends of local dragons, or (with sometimes ghoulish relish) academic gossip and other cliqueish tittle-tattle.
For all that, Star Lace is decidedly too much of a strange, foreign wizard to be particularly welcome in the greatest houses of Kintargo, and the closest friend she’s made in town is Lady Docur, with whom she shares an appreciation for elven tradition, the finer things in life, and subtlety in general. She’s already had an opportunity to give a lecture or two to Docur’s girls as a visiting scholar, but she suspects that there’s more to the schoolmistress than is immediately apparent, and that Mialari is testing her before offering an introduction to some terribly exciting secret society. But who? From their conversations, Belenis is sure that Mialari knows that while she’s sympathetic to the cause of the Sacred Order of Archivists, the Irorans aren’t quite either of their styles, or weren’t – are they even still active, or have they been worn out by the devil-worshippers’ damnable, dogged persistence? It is a mystery and a challenge that the visiting aristocrat very much appreciates.
Unfortunately, shortly after Star Lace’s arrival in Kintargo, the city was disgraced by a much more prominent personage, the new Lord Mayor, Barzillai Thrune, who drastically accelerated the pernicious influence of his house on a region that had previously been spared some of the worst. Beyond the absurdity of his tyrannical proclamations and her own past experiences of being bullied as a child, which would have been enough to inspire her contumacious resistance, there was a certain feeling that noblesse oblige, not least after having caught Mialari’s eye in some measure, and with her own serene confidence that her talents might eventually prove useful for those hoping to elude a tyrant’s grasp. Accordingly, when more than one word of a protest to be held in Aria Park came to Star Lace, with a hint that someone with a connection to the Silver Ravens – one of the mysterious organizations whispered about on the fringes of Lady Docur’s circle – might be attending and feeling informative, her next course of action was, ironically, clear.
I used the tables from Ultimate Campaign, in part, and it tickled me that the dice made Belenis an heiress in line to be a countess back home, when her dad retires, so technically she outranks Barzillai, who's only a paracount, although the Lord Mayor thing presumably changes things within Kintargo proper, and there's the spiritual/churchy side of things on which she couldn't compete. I'm sure that couldn't possibly come up. ;)
In terms of possible progression, the plan is to stick with wizard through to the mid-game, when she might start taking levels in the Pathfinder Savant prestige class, but that's not really unwizardy anyway.
Hmm. Still working on the details of how the character I’m working on might end up in and fit into Kintargo around about when things get interesting with the arrival of Barzillai Thrune, but I think some of the broad strokes are coming together.
She’s decidedly an outsider, so probably swept up into things mostly by her sense that good people shouldn’t just stand by and watch or skip town. More immediately, if less creditably, as an obsessively curious person, it wouldn’t be too tricky for someone to dangle a tantalizing mystery in front of her that a certain obnoxious villain’s antics are getting in the way of solving. As a wizard, she’d bring a bunch of Knowledge skills and attention to weird details to bear, and as an illusionist, eventually get quite good at covering up subversive shenanigans, I hope. (Probably aiming for a support role within the party, generally. I love suggestions for spells the whole party would enjoy!) As a fancy elf, Lady Docur is probably who got her involved, possibly with a discreet hint that if she plays her cards right, she might introduce her to some interesting secretive folks.
So as not to spoil things for folks less familiar with the AP:
The Lacunafex, though that might only be revealed in time. At first, my character might think she’s being teased with clues about the Sacred Order of Archivists, or the Silver Ravens, only to actually run into the latter in the course of things, and the rest is history in the making. ;)
Some more fragmentary ideas for characterization/vibes and pragmatics:
Spooky librarians! (Or, what if we smooshed Willow into Giles’ role? Every Scooby Gang needs one!)
Should probably think about putting some skill points in Bluff or whatnot, but she’ll be starting out very much in her happy wizard bubble until the real world intrudes
Campaign trait: Urban Sleuth – focusing (mechanics-wise) on local dragons, but in-character chasing after all of the suggested questions, with a secondary focus on Professor Mangvhune, which feeds into various secret societies by way of “dark academia” nonsense :p
Reasons to protest: Meeting a contact – who are these Silver Ravens, anyway?
I have a pot of stir-fry (Ants Climbing Up a Tree, again) that will probably last me to Friday.
Thinking ahead, I have some potatoes that need to be dealt with, and I kind of want varenyky, but don't feel like the fuss.
Frozen minced(?) lobster is on special in my neck of the woods, which sounds like it might be intriguingly old-school to work with, but I'm not sure what I'd do with it. Find a recipe for crab/lobster cakes, I guess?
I've got a wizard in the works that I might like to try out. An elf with too many maxxed-out library cards and her nose in too many secrets. I think there's an elf gate canonically close to Kintargo that she might conceivably know about. :)
Planning ahead, might we be able to work out some sort of homebrewed variant multiclassing for the arcanist? (E.g., like this, maybe?) No rush, and no problem if that's too much trouble. I just haven't been able to figure out what I would ideally have in mind for her through stacking archetypes.
I have played in a couple of Hell's Rebels games before (up to about early into the third volume, I think), but I can keep past experience separate.
One might naively think that they would be kind enough to make sure the first bit at least works out to a common denominator, if not (gasp!) a whole number.
Limeylongears wrote:
gran rey de los mono wrote:
One of my nieces posted a thing to the family group chat today, saying "Your baseball name is your grandfather's first name, and the last thing you bought as your last name." Why baseball name? Who knows? Most of the last names were things like "snacks" or "bang" (apparently it's an energy drink" or "coffee". I replied "Well, right now my name would be '[Grandpa's name] Groceries', but if you had asked tomorrow night it would probably be '[Grandpa's name] Arby's-Roast-Beef-Combo-with-Curly-Fries-and-a-Dr-Pepper-with-No-Ice.'" Which is probably a bit long for the back of a jersey.
Anyone else care to share?
Douglas 'Root' Ginger.
With slight adjustments - translating, and because we're going to have a room league of our own - I guess that would make me Theo(dora) Apple(s).
(That strikes me as a bit more baseball-y than ladies going with their grandmum's first name, though Anne Apple would make for fun introductions with the near homophone. :) )
Hmm. My go-to for flavour tends to be curry on the spicier side of things, so that might be tricky. Maybe General [Tso's]* Chicken, if you can find a decent prepared mix/sauce and are OK with westernized Chinese ?
*Your General may vary. In my part of the world, it's Tao.
Chicken Véronique? It's on my list for soon-ish, since I have the ingredients.
Véro instructions:
For two chicken breasts:
3 tbsp butter
1 tbsp marmalade
1/4 tsp tarragon, crumbled
1/4 c dry white wine
8 med mushrooms (chopped or sliced fine)
1/4 c whipping cream
1/2 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp water
3/4 c green grapes
Melt 1 tbsp butter, cook chicken in pan 'til golden on either side. Stir in marmalade, tarragon, wine: simmer until cooked through. (~15 min.) Meanwhile, fry mushrooms in rest of butter, add cream to pan juices, quickly boil. Blend cornstarch with water, add to sauce, return to boil, add halved grapes, and (again) let it boil. Serve sauce over chicken.
Any luck? Or would we have to fall back on fanfiction and Mabel Maney’s parody? :) I think Maney does a very good job of channeling the feel of the revisions from the ‘60s through a very camp aesthetic. It’s much of a muchness, always. And affectionate, if ruthless.
My mum was so disappointed in Nancy Drew that she more or less actively discouraged me from reading those, though I ended up a bit more of a sci-fi girlie in any case, so Tom Swift more than the Hardy Boys, to a certain extent. I stopped reading the lot quite a while before I was in a position to realize that Nancy/Deirdre would have clarified things for me so much sooner. (Though I think that might only have been possible after the adventure game series, anyway?) But all this is getting wildly off-topic from taking 10 on dinner checks! Unless anyone can recommend fannish cookbooks for sapphists? :)
In much less exciting news! Three-Cup Chicken, and yes, it is Taiwanese, now that I checked my recipe. Soy sauce, black sesame oil and wine for a marinade, spiced up with a pinch of sugar, ginger, basil, and ideally Sichuan chili crisp to taste. I’m between batches of the last, and didn’t feel like faffing about with a bunch of jars, so I made do with some hot sauce powered by the more usual peppers for my part of the world. I probably should have done it properly, or been more generous with the spice (to compensate for the wine?), but it was fine, if not particularly exciting. I had it with rice and some steamed mixed veg.
Wow, didn't know I had fellow food history fans in here. I collect historic cookbooks. :)
My brother's partner has a background in social history, including of food, so I can reliably get new recipes and facts when I have a chance to pop over to their place. :)
I, on the other hand, despite hanging out here, don't actually care much about food, so when I change things up it's mostly out of Chaotic resentment towards the idea of order and stasis generally rather than a heartfelt interest in culinary experiments.
I did see a copy of the official Nancy Drew Cookbook at a secondhand bookstore here a while ago, but they were asking an absurd sum for a record of historic low expectations of young readers. I'm not sure who the books were intended for, originally, since the level of the text and the reader's assumed interest in the emotional lives of teenagers seem to be at cross-purposes. (Who is this ... Ned(?) guy? It's been a minute.) Similarly, the Cookbook's idea of when kids might want to "entertain" and what they could hope to achieve don't seem to line up: leafing through it, its suggestion for "pizza" was particularly heart-breaking.
Maybe I was just a weird kid, or it was a different time, or both.
Anyway, about to try an approximation of Taiwanese (I think?) Three-Cup Chicken tonight. Will see how it turns out!
TL;DR: We were never allowed representation because the Boomers outnumbered us, yet now we're being blamed for ruining the world because somehow we had a hand in something we were never allowed to have a hand in. All the while being completely self-reliant from an early age and then being told we weren't responsible enough for any real responsibility.
*Channels her inner Indigo (Fan)Girl.*
*Wails:*
"Did they tell you it was set in stone?
That you’d end up alone -
Use your years to psych you out:
You’re too old to care, you’re too young to count?"
>:(
The demographics are horrifying, aren't they? I'm not sure what it must be like to be a sociologist watching on, these days.
Predictably, I gather - after some quick Googling - that while the Americas are roughly representative of the global average of parliamentary (broadly speaking) demographics, that's because Central and South (and the Caribbean) compensate for North America. And compared to here in the frozen north, looks like Congress is about 12 percentage points lower, for proportion of representatives under 45.
We do both (beef stock and tomatoes, about 1:3 ratio) and of course onions!
Recently, inspired by xkcd, I have added trying out popular regionalisms from the land of my foremothers to my list of things to do eventually, speaking of horrifying the Italians, but I would need to plan a trip to the butcher's.
I'm really sorry to hear that. I hope that things get so much better for you that next time you need to refill your prescription it goes smoothly and you won't even have to remember the nonsense from this time around. :/
Dinner tonight was pizza soup. Mostly because I had suitable ingredients (including overripe tomatoes that had to be dealt with) and it's been a while, but also, sometimes chopping the heck out of a pile of vegetables is pleasantly cathartic.
Got a middling baguette to go with it at one of the supermarkets I rarely stop at because it was actually more or less on my way this evening, and of the usual places I might go A) the one was, conversely, inconvenient, and B) the other, though pleasingly more diverse/international in its stock, regrettably does not do fancier European bread. Great paranthas, though. (Oooh, maybe next time!)
I do also need 1) to get my knives sharpened and 2) to learn how to do it myself.
My wife got me 'The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation' as a gift, so I've been reading that.
As a professional (sort of? aspiring? - still a student, really), I think everyone should, but is it ever depressing. :)
Recently got through Artemidorus' Oneirocritica in translation, mostly just for gleaning some oddments of social and religious history. The broad context is accessible for anyone who's spent some time with the Second Sophistic, but there are more amusing ways of getting there than jumping into the deep end of weirdo diviners.
Just starting Barton's oldish ('90s) intro to ancient astrology; still looking for something light from my piles of things to read.
I have eaten the most important meal for black people on new years day- sweet potatoes, black eyed peas with turkey neck, mustard greens with a scotch bonnet and fatback, rice, and of course, a gigantic glazed ham.
GRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 2026
If you'd forgive my ignorance and felt inclined to generously inform a clueless white girl, could you elaborate just a teeny bit on the significance of the meal?
I'm not entirely estranged from my family's ethnic food-ways inherited from our European roots, but it's been a near thing after outlasting years of pressure to fit in where I had no interest in doing so.
(Among other things, there's probably enough vampire, uh, Transylvanian (let's go with that) in my bloodline that I have an apparently baffling and shameful aversion to garlic. ;) )
this is a tradition going back to slavery in the US when black people were given/found/grew what was seen as "lesser" foods and food-adjacent items to eat. It turned out to be unexpectedly full of nutrients. Beans/peas are full of protein, greens are especially nutritious and the liquor is full of vitamins and minerals and has the flavor of everything it cooked in(including the pepper. Mmmmmmmmmmmm spicy and great on a cold day. Feel like you're coming down with something? You aren't anymore!!!!). Smoked meats were usually available in very very modest quantity and could be used to flavor an entire meal when larger portions were unavailable. Pork was also usually available in modest quantities, and sweet potatoes- a rare link to Africa- were also usually available/grown.
It is to be eaten on new years day for luck, and to remember history.
Thanks to both you and Ambrosia Slaad! Good to know! :)
Nothing particularly traditional has been in the offing recently on my end: too isolated to feel inclined to do a full Ukrainian Christmas, in terms of both effort and quantity. Might do belated bits and pieces if I find the energy. DeathQuaker's mentioning gołąbki a few posts back offers an idea of what to do with the other half of a cabbage if I decide to make borshch.
Instead, this weekend's been a batch of Ants Climbing up a Tree, in a Taking 10, casual sort of way: some sort of packaged Sichuan stir-fry mix (close enough to the "chili crisp" that I gather was big a while back), proper doubanjiang, onion, ginger, cumin (not-a-vampire aversion to garlic), generous splash of soy, fried up with ground pork and noodles finished in a bit of broth, served over rice and with indifferent frozen mixed veg, which helps turn down the heat.
Also baked a batch of hybrid ginger snap / oatmeal raisin cookies that turned out fine, but a bit less zingy than I would have liked. Next time I'll have to use lighter molasses or add more spice, bearing in mind that the recipe is from the Prairies and a person who's probably about my age (?) but has an inexplicable fondness for the sorts of stuff that induces bemused reminiscences from my mum and her siblings and was already unfashionable in their youth.
I have eaten the most important meal for black people on new years day- sweet potatoes, black eyed peas with turkey neck, mustard greens with a scotch bonnet and fatback, rice, and of course, a gigantic glazed ham.
GRAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 2026
If you'd forgive my ignorance and felt inclined to generously inform a clueless white girl, could you elaborate just a teeny bit on the significance of the meal?
I'm not entirely estranged from my family's ethnic food-ways inherited from our European roots, but it's been a near thing after outlasting years of pressure to fit in where I had no interest in doing so.
(Among other things, there's probably enough vampire, uh, Transylvanian (let's go with that) in my bloodline that I have an apparently baffling and shameful aversion to garlic. ;) )
It is regularly pasta night in my house, as tonight, though over the weekend I had made a batch of vegetarian chili, with my favourite yuppie lentils. Dessert was Australian lumberjack cake. (Apple and dates, with a broiled brown-sugar coconut topping. Needs to be watched more carefully than I did (alas!), at least with my oven that runs hot, but will probably add it to my recipe collection.)
I also made a batch of varenyky/pierogies for the next few days. I must roll out the dough thicker than my grandmother did, because I always end up with leftover filling, but this year I left it late enough that it will go into the pot for the stargazy pie that is on the verge of becoming my solstitial tradition. Doing a full Christmas Eve thing on my own is too much, but I do try to keep it meatless, and I can work in some of the other traditional things over the twelve days.
I went for my first årsgång / year walk this morning: probably did it badly, but I gather there are some traditions (unsurprisingly) that it goes better the more one does it over the years. :)
lisamarlene wrote:
I looked it up.
(Like, seriously, I mentioned it to Eve when I texted her last night to wish her a blessed Modranecht, and she thought I was crazy.)
So, hey, let's compromise. The door to the sauna is open, just like on the old Infocom Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.
Maybe you'll shed your robe and go in.
Maybe you'll wait outside with a bundle of birch twigs ...
I'm really not a sauna person. Designated switch-girl? Well, maybe, but I'd be a bit worried about having to deal with someone too happy to be on the receiving end.
Which reminds me that a while ago I saw folks looking for volunteers to help with research for designing better hockey helmets, but they weren't looking to fill what might be my ideal role:
"Who's that girl with the stick?"
"That's Q-. She's the assistant helping us run our tests today. Try not to flinch, and don't worry. Our models for the efficacy of this design are very promising!"
"Wait, what? Is it too late..." *Whack!* XD
Anyway, the rest of my solstice is probably going to be more meditative, and most of my family celebrates Christmas instead, so I might get a start on some of what's traditional for our holiday dinner that can be prepared ahead.
Nothing fancy here for dinner tonight: pasta with a sauce of chopped tomatoes, splash of wine, pinch or two of various herbs. (Need to get more cumin, or just grind it myself, since I have an improbable amount whole, from restocking at the nearby supermarket which at least gestures to a more diverse / international clientele, and so stocks reasonable spices in larger quantities than yer typical Anglo dealers.)
I also had an absurdly small scrap of pastry dough left over from the last pie I baked, so I made myself a single butter tart using a drastically scaled-down version of the Kitchen Magpie's recipe for the filling. She suggests using maple rather than corn/golden syrup, of which I theoretically approve, but it ended up runnier than ideal. Next time I might see if another couple of minutes' baking would do the trick, but I think it's just the nature of the beast, especially if one leaves out the raisins, as I did.
Hmm. Could that (trying to find a bright side) be a somewhat heartening indication that they're not tracking absolutely everything about everyone? One would think that it would be sensible to let people, wherever they are, buy stuff for their friends in their friends' local currency, since that's what the recipient would be on the line for if they bought it themselves, but.
OK, *I* might think that would be sensible, but I'm a [*redacted*, for politics].
NobodysHome wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:
I was lost to that long ago. I try to declutter, but then I see new minis and am defeated.
Minis aren't clutter -- I have racks of them, set up in cases and displayed for use during games.
If you use it on a regular basis, even for recreation, it's not clutter.
The kids' giant case full of Nerf guns and ammo wasn't clutter 15 years ago. Now it is.
Alas, I fear I'm unlikely to ever get around to painting the miniatures I have in my collection hoard, and should probably try to find them a good home sooner rather than later. :(
Fortunately, (digital) embroidery patterns also don't take up a lot of space.
A: "My wife has kindly asked me to stop referring to the neutered male pets of the house as 'my council of eunuchs'."
B: "This is literally why you have a council of eunuchs. What do they advise?"
A: "Right now I'm eating dinner and they're just wiggling their butts. Not very helpful."
I showed this to my Pathfinder group tonight, which led to a 5 minute discussion of twerking eunuchs.
IYKYK.
... It felt like someone had to say it.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure I'm not the right girl to do so, but I'll let it stand, for the sake of the historical record. I obviously need more sleep, or coffee.
Ooof, I get that. My maternal grandmother was born just before the Depression, and the family very definitely never talked about what that was like and the effect it had on her. Almost certainly a factor in a very complicated relationship with food.
I am - certainly culinarily - a barbarian with simple tastes, though, so very plain stuff sounds fine by me. (And industrial tomato ketchup is the Queen of Sauces, no matter what the snobs say. :p )
That said, I do like the idea of cooking, and spices are tons of fun to play with (curries are great!), though indulgent baking is more my thing when I feel like putting any effort in.
Here's the immortal Alkman for any other barbarians in the thread, in Burton Raffel's loose translation:
"And a huge cauldron, hot
With your dinner, soon.
But still cold, until that thick winter soup
For gluttonous Alkman
Comes boiling up.
No fancy slop for Alkman, no.
Like ordinary people he likes real food."
;)
Extra points for the irony that he's most famous (today?) for lovely, intricate poetry written for choruses of young women, back when Sparta was still cool - before they turned into the militaristic dystopia fetishized by generations of real weirdos. :(
What amuses me the most is that this is supposedly a "traditional" Ukrainian recipe from the late 1800s, and it all sounds perfectly legit: crumble a sausage, shred 3 beets, shred 3 carrots, shred half a head of cabbage, dice some potatoes and onions...
...all solid winter root vegetables or larder items that you'd expect to find in any Slavic peasant's winter store...
...then...
..."Dice 1 cup of fresh tomatoes."
Nope. You have broken immersion. -10 points.
Apparently tomatoes were slowly becoming popular in Poland and Ukraine during later parts of 19th century, so if the recipe is from late 1800s, then it is possible, though of course more likely it was a recipe for gentry/middle class than peasants. Coincidentally gentry and bourgeoise were more likely to be writing cookbooks than actual peasants...
"Winter" recipe more likely would be using tomato paste than fresh tomatoes, of course, but it is another matter.
My family's recipe calls only for juice, not fresh tomatoes. Though "recipe" is being generous - in practice, it was a kludge from three separate ones until I insisted on finally sitting down and writing out how we actually do it instead of scrambling around the kitchen at the last minute after remembering, "Oh, right, but Baba would always add..."
My dad's side of the family has been urban for at least as long as it's been on this side of the Atlantic, but my mum's has roots homesteading in Saskatchewan, so we have some peasant cred there. The most personal layer of our recipe - that doesn't come straight out of a cookbook that we know of - does start with, "Take a bucket of beets," at least, and other quantities are similarly generous and approximate.
Making borscht for Impus Major today, and I'm convinced that the requirement to shred all the root vegetables was invented just to give the cooks something to do during those long, cold winter days. Pretty sure dicing would work just as well...
EDIT: Fortunately, I have a pre-ensh*ttification Cuisinart so the shredding is pretty darned quick.
Some of us just ... like knives, ok? ;)
But even so, borscht is a nuisance. I'm trying to plan ahead for an occasion in the next few weeks to motivate me, because it's a production and a half, as you're clearly all too aware.
I made "lazy varenyky" yesterday to use up some ingredients in the fridge yesterday, but, again, I'll have to make the real deal soon when I can find the energy.
For her additional “campaign trait” I’m thinking of Trap Finder: occultists get Disable Device natively, and Tsia’s magical enough (and been in enough scrapes! – I’m thinking gothic heroine stuff, needing to open locked caskets, escape being locked into rooms by villains, and so on) that her skills in that vein might extend beyond the mundane. As a needlewoman, precise and delicate hand movements come easily to her, and she always has various useful pins and needles and whatnot to hand. :)
For the generous starting gold, there are a few masterwork items that I’d like to think Tsia could reasonably get her hands on, as she’s gentry and a trained crafter: her thieves’ and artisans’ tools, and her (silk) armour, the benefit of which latter is glam and readiness for magical enhancement rather than anything else, since it has no armour check penalty anyway. Other than that, the weirdest thing she might start out with is a cheat sheath: she’s not a wizard, and it’s a sore spot that she mainly deals with by not dealing with/thinking about it. (It’s not great, as coping strategy. :/ )
As I noodle about thinking about courtier's outfits and suitable jewelry to match, and how my character's some sort of helper figure like a fairy godmother, running into the realization that there's a bit more of "wicked queen" Modthryth or The Thirteen Clocks' Cold Duke Duchess in her than I might have thought. Don't worry, I'm sure it's fine to admire her gloves. ;)
Like several folks' characters so far, mine will probably have some connection to the fey: given various implement powers for occultists, she'll be communing with familiar spirits that, with her background in an elven court far, far away, probably make the most sense as some sort of fairies.
I'm having fun seeing everyone spinning out their character ideas! Lots of neat stuff!
What was used traditionally for fixing dyes (alum?)? Whatever it is, it may well be horribly toxic and/or extracted painfully from an endangered species...
Traditionally? I'm not sure, since I was faffing about with modern recipes, some of which try to be gentler. For woad, I think lime and ammonia from "aged" urine might have been involved, and apparently that way of doing things takes forever, to boot. One of the recipes I saw suggested fermenting with yeast instead, but mostly these days I think it is mostly stuff that is even less recommended for use indoors.
So, faking it with some woad was a mitigated disaster. Too many variables left uncontrolled, so I only got a very pale greenish-khaki out of it, but this year was just a first try to see if I could grow it at all, so we'll wait until next season to try to do things properly.
Not least, apparently dabbling in dyeing is so very niche that even in quite a large city by Canadian standards, it would take either a road trip or an exorbitant sum in postage to acquire the materials for the simplest mordanting or whatnot. Like I said, this year was just a first stab at growing the stuff at all, so I really didn't need kilos of supplies to lay up in storage, and anything less than that tends to be more in shipping than the actual materials or more complicated than being as casual as I was this time around.
This sounds really neat! Count me among the other English majors whose attention you’ve snagged so far. :)
I really like the shared storytelling aspect you’re stressing, and the flashbacks and behind-the-scenes, er, scenes to reduce “latency,” as you put it, and let the players see some of the background to various plots that might not be as clear from their side of the GM screen in other games. That said, what sort of pacing do you have in mind in terms of posting expectations and the like? Layering on multiple scenes representing different layers of time sounds like it might exceed my current bandwidth, to be honest, but if the aim is a more or less standard pace while allowing different layers to pick up the slack when one slows, that’s less daunting, I think.
Like DeathQuaker, I’m very keen on player agency, so thanks to both of you for raising and clarifying how that’s intended to interact with the collaborative layer and narrative tokens.
A quick question about house rules: you mentioned not faffing around with AoOs, which sounds fine for the character I have in mind, but how strict a “not doing” are we talking about, for things like casting spells and whatnot? Not that there aren’t many other reasons why a mage might not want to cast a spell right next to a baddie with a huge sword, but still. :) It’s a calculation that might factor into how some classes play, I think.
In any case, I’ve had a silkworn occultist rattling around my head for a bit, whose profile is here. She ended up being a bit different, in my imagination, from an ordinary Avistani elf (among other things, my ideas for her silks tend towards something closer to Eastern European (Ukrainian) embroidery and Scythian archaeological textiles), so I thought it might be fun to imagine what it might be like if the canonical rumours about an elven court in Fangard Forest were true, and there was an offshoot of the snowcasters living there. As an elf from Iobaria, she would have another perspective on the history of Brevoy (including Choral and his line) and the Stolen Lands, and I hope her stake would be compatible with many others’. In particular, while she’d happily rebuild an elven presence in a suitable bit of forest, if one turns up, she’d also happily take a supporting role as fairy godmother / lady of the court rather than the eventual leader of the incipient kingdom or one of the more obvious movers and shakers. Sort of a Merlin, and potentially happy to return back over the mountains following her Vivien once it looks like the situation in the Stolen Lands isn’t about to blow up in ways counter to her sense of elven interests. “Celtic myth, Greek myth and dramatic tradition, Shakespearean romance and tragedy, Machiavellian court politics, faerie tales, dragon tales, Arthurian legend, and Game of Thrones?” Oooh, that sounds very much like her jam. ;)
Where does white chocolate fall in that consideration?
Do any U.S. companies actually make white chocolate? I think Hershey's produces... something... but I'm not sure what it is.
Probably fewer than one might think, I guess? In my neck of the woods, we import most of our chocolate from all y'all, and even before - *gestures vaguely at politics* - it's been surprisingly difficult to find even white chocolate chips for baking. For the past year or so most supermarkets near me have been stocking some abomination ("white creme," apparently) whose composition doesn't bear thinking about, I'm sure.
I'm hoping it won't take the collapse of the cocoa market, or a generation for whom even the worst North American chocolate is beyond the wildest dreams of the proletariat, to bring climate troubles home, but that would probably be much kinder than what it's actually going to be. :(
On a happier note, although weird supply chain nonsense still applies, I'm trying to fit running around getting materials to play with hippie witch foragings and whatnot into my schedule this week, but I've been faking it terribly, so results will probably be indifferent at best. :/
Hmm. Let's throw some dice, for the heck of it, though the newest character I have in mind is not very Core. (Changeling spirit whisperer wizard.)
[Rolls omitted.]
Yikes. I think opting for the point-buy option would be wise, though I can see my way to trying to approximate a fairly smooth distribution across the six abilities, maybe.
After thinking it over a bit, realized I probably won't have the bandwidth and would probably be pining for too many spells beyond Core to really be in the spirit of what the GM is aiming for, so I'll bow out. Good luck to everyone still working on characters, and have fun! :)
Yikes. I think opting for the point-buy option would be wise, though I can see my way to trying to approximate a fairly smooth distribution across the six abilities, maybe.
That sounds really frustrating and scuzzy. Just how much better is Linux than Windows that even borking one's system trying to load the former isn't going to drive one back into the arms of Microsoft, if one wants to be cynical about it? ;)
I really need to upgrade from my old computer soon, but when I do, the plan is to convert the ancient of days to a Linux box to play around with, until she gives up the ghost. It's been a very long time since I last had one, and maybe this time I can actually stick with it long enough to learn something and get comfortable.
Popping in to express interest! I've got a new baby character that I'd be happy to find a campaign for. :)
She's an elven silksworn occultist, aiming for a party role somewhere between support and arcane, leaning a bit towards the former: with a bit of investment, I think she could do a fair bit of healing, with the right focus powers, as well as trapfinding.
I'll post with some backstory with an alias for her in the next few days, certainly by the end of the weekend. Part of the general concept, though, is an outsider perspective and unexpected ally, in a fairy-tale sort of way: basically, having something quite close to a fairy godmother or other helper figure adventuring alongside the more prominent heroes. I've always been fascinated by the hints teased about what's going on in Iobaria, so she'll be from the northeasterly parts of there, originally.
I have been in a Kingmaker game before, but it fizzled out just after we reached 5th level or so: my character for that game somehow found herself the Baroness, and while that would be fine for the new one I'm working on, if no one else feels called to it, she'd be happier with a counselor role for now. (Long-term, she'd be hoping to use the experience to build a power-base and found a realm of her own that she could ally with the party's barony as formed under the auspices of Jamandi Aldori, but that would be well after the party finds its footing. Something along the lines of Caesar's scheme for the Triumvirate, only without the evil, hopefully.)
(Great minds think alike, it seems - the party looks like a neat mash-up of two of the potential groups I came up with when I idly imagined how I might choose, if I were in the GM's place. :) )
Have fun! Maybe we'll get a chance to game together in some other combination some other time.
This sounds interesting! It's an excuse to start fleshing out a character that's been lurking a bit in the back of my head for a while, certainly.
I'm thinking an elven silksworn occultist, an Iobarian ilverani/snowcaster interested in the Mordant Spire and Azlant, but perhaps almost incidentally, for what they would let her glean about what was going on in the world around the time of Earthfall that might have influenced doings closer to home. She wouldn't be stepping on the toes of folks working on Spiresworn characters, I hope - it would be fun to imagine quite different elven cultures meeting! :)
Details to follow as they take shape, but for now I'm thinking of a rather witchy type of occultist who looks mostly like an innocent embroiderer and crafty society lady to those who aren't paying attention, but is (perhaps unfortunately) an elf of the fairy tale sort. "You shall go to the ball!" Or, uh, maybe be cursed, if she takes great umbrage at being passed over for an invitation to your daughter's name-day. XD
