claycle

It constantly makes me smile, whether it’s being smart, the actors are giving perfectly calibrated performances, or the action suddenly goes wham-bam VATS over the top.

3 eps in. Happy.

Perhaps, but middle-schoolers genuinely stink to high heaven, especially after P/E. I think one can imagine more obvious/less conspiratorial reasons for showers being mandatory.

If I have to pick one drink to take to a desert island, it’s the classic Sazerac.

That is what I will want most of the time when I want a cocktail. However, I will allow a few others to enter rotation, depending on mood, time/temperature, and place:

1. Margarita.
2. Vesper.
3. Pastis.

And, finally, my embarrassing guilty pleasure (which I never order except when I am in company I know well or I am on a Caribbean island): piña colada.

Every single day, when I am out walking my dog, a jogger comes by smelling of like a shit-ton of soap/perfume/deodorant/body spray - I nearly gag. These guys (and sometimes girls) are so terrified they might smell sweaty when doing something, you know, sweaty, like jogging a couple of miles…it boggles my mind.

Who taught people we have to smell like artificial bouquets of flowers all the time, even when exercising, ffs?

We swap between two movies each year.

Even years it is A LION IN WINTER, an amazing film with insanely quotable dialogue. (EDIT: Why? On “star power” alone, this movie is outrageously cast.)

Odd years it is A CHRISTMAS STORY, which is equally quotable (perhaps more so). (EDIT: Why? Because so many things in this film ring true to my own childhood - having to have last-minute dinner at a Chinese restaurant because of a disaster, for example, or begging for a b-b-gun…)

Soap: a bar of unscented oatmeal-based soap

For deodorant: I have had very good experience with “Thai stone” style salt-based deodorants. These work simply by making your skin inhospitable to odor-causing bacteria while not causing you irritations. You need to apply it liberally (after slightly wetting the stone, I just count out 8 strokes under each arm), but a single stone will last you … a very long time … and it does really work for a whole day. It has no scent, per se, so you will just smell like you smell without the sulfurous bad smells caused by BO bacteria.

Or so I gather…

I have been, up until very recently, a “Thanksgiving Traditionalist”, in that I loudly proclaimed that one should muck around with the traditional basics.

But last year, I changed my tune. We had a dinner based around Stanley Tucci’s timpano instead of turkey (yes, the famous timpano from the movie BIG NIGHT). That was a big success.

This year, because I have some very dear friends who are vegetarians and who kind of slink away when anyone discusses Thanksgiving traditional dishes, I wanted to make dinner with their needs/desires squarely in mind, so I am doing a completely vegetarian menu. I generally despise “meat analogues”, so no, we’re not having tofurkey. So, here’s the menu:

• velouté de châitagnes (chestnut soup)
• Spanish tortilla (the potato dish, not the Mexican flatbread)
• my grandmother’s green bean casserole (very unique, not-what-you-expect, nod to tradition)
• roasted root vegetables (catch-all, probably rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, etc…)
• Jacque Pepin’s “easy” corn soufflé
• a massive onion-mushroom tarte tatin as the centerpiece (onions, mushrooms, gorgonzola, walnuts, butter, pastry crust)
• fresh homemade pickles (various)
• fresh homemade bread (baguettes, sourdough boules, etc)
• risalamande (Scandinavian rice pudding)

I am probably forgetting something. Guests are bring desserts and wine (one is a L3 sommelier, never disappoints).

Steel-cut oatmeal is super-easy, set-and-forget (1 cup water, 1/4 steel-cut oats, pinch of salt, Bring water to boil, stir in oats, salt, lower to bare simmer, uncovered 30 minutes, flavor as desired, eat).

But that can get boring. For something a little more exciting, super-nutritious, and almost zero-prep, do a sort of Norwegian-style open-face cracker (no, you don’t need “the tubes”, but if you can find them, knock yourself out). For this I take a tin of fish (usually smoked salmon or trout, but sardines, mackerel, or even tuna would work fine), a piece of cracking toast or a Scandy flatbread cracker (Wasa, knekkebrod), and some kind of “schmear” (a thin spread of cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, or - my favorite - Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Yogurt Dip/Spread). I can get all these ingredients both cheaply and well-made at Trader Joe’s (TJ Smoked Salmon in a tin, TJ Norwegian seeded flatbread, and the aforementioned dip). For a little additional oomph toss on tomato or cucumber slices.

I just finished my CP2077 (first) play-thru. I had no fore-knowledge of game or outcomes. When I play RPGs, I abide by a strict “choices matter - there are no mulligans”, in that I won’t fish reloaded saves for “better” outcomes. If I make a bad choice, I live with it.

About a week before I finished, I was having dinner with some friends who had played it already and they were probing me to see how I think the game would end. I said, matter of factly, “Oh, I think my V is doomed, like Arthur [RDR2] was doomed.”

And if there was a magic happy ending in Phantom Liberty, as there seemed there might be because Sol pointedly asked V twice “Are you sure you don’t want it?”, my V had given it to Songbird.

When I came to the pinch at climax where Jonny presents you with your options and you have to pick what to do, I probably sat on that dialog wheel for 15 minutes. I’d vacillate between the options presented and listen and watch carefully how Jonny reacted and think things through. I had played a V who was never comfortable with the loss of his autonomy and desired, more than anything, to live his own life his own way. This V was also sort of a mensch, too, inclined to empathy and sympathy. He had pity for Jonny’s situation. After much contemplation, V reached out to Panam - I would say almost desperately as it seemed the only path that really gave V any hope - and events ensued and they arrived at what I called “The Sunset Ending” (which I considered a great success).

I felt I had arrived at a very satisfactory conclusion for this V and I really have no desire (in a good way!) to play CP more - the story was over, if bittersweet.

The feeling of completeness matched reaching the Sunrise Ending in RDR2, which kinda devastated me.

Yes. We just had a scoop of homemade coconut sorbet tonight, super simple to make:

• 1 cup of water
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 can of unsweetened coconut cream
• 1 can of unsweetened coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Bring the water and sugar to a boil, lower the heat to medium, and let it simmer for 10 minutes to make a simple syrup. Let the syrup cool to room temperature, then mix all the ingredients together in a blender briefly, then pour into your ice cream maker and freeze. Set the sorbet into the freezer for at least 2 hours to finish the freezing.

If you can’t find coconut cream, you can just use 2 cans of full fat coconut milk, but it will be icier.

#1.

Don’t you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like “Can’t we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?” FFS. I’ll be like “Sure, we can. What’s your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That’ll cost you.”

I’ll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap… I mean, sure, it’s less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.

People have no idea…

To be fair, Wheel of Time may be one of those garbage in, garbage out scenarios.

Panzanella comes immediately to mind, as does gazpacho and Thai stuffed cucumber soup.

While the oats (steel cut) are cooking, a take a cup of frozen mixed berries out of the freezer, put them in a small pot, add 1 tablespoon sugar and 1 tablespoon of water, bring to a boil, and make a quick compote (or very slack jam). This goes on top of the oatmeal (2 people).

Though I only speak a minuscule smatter of Italian - and none is necessary to enjoy these videos - I really like anything with Giorgione in it, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q5i5C35ISE

OR even better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WLMm08P-u8&t=9s

Just dive down this wonderful rabbit hole.

deleted by creator

Don’t you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.

I am surprised no one yet has posted the infuriatingly worthless expression of affectless sympathy:

thoughts and prayers

All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.

Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn’t go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).

EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn’t even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.

UUCP