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juushikaDevon and I made these brownies* for Valentine's Day! & there is nothing quite so much "oh, so that's what goes into a brownie" as making a double batch. But we only have a 9x13 pan, so we were already planning on a doubled recipe and lots of frozen leftovers, so it was a perfect fit. And the purity of gently, slowly melting lots of chocolate into all the butter is incredibly satisfying. It was great recipe to do in tandem, a lot of pre-mixing steps that could be split between us and then two pairs of hands for the process of combining ingredients into a thick, almost-unspreadable batter.
We used bittersweet rather than semisweet chocolate and skimped on the white sugar, and next time may also replace some of the chocolate with unsweetened. But they turned out great, rich and dense but not greasy, a more approachable cousin to a flourless chocolate torte, my one true dessert. Very Valentines! (There were 3+ other people buying chocolate-related baking supplies at the same time as us; great minds, but ours, I warrant, came out the best.)
* Did I search for a Bon Appetit recipe in hopes of finding one by Claire Saffitz specifically because I watch too much Gourmet Makes? yes! Also was the recent Butterfinger episode not the most satisfying thing? I agree with criticisms that "gourmet chef attempts things only possible in industrial kitchen" isn't really what I want from the show, despite the charming ingenuity and foibles. Breaking down the how of the unique texture of a Butterfinger was fascinating because I also had never put a name to what the thing really is or how they achieve it. And, or once! it was achievable, and the premise of the show was fully realized: quality ingredients + non-industrial preparation to create a similar-but-better product. I was a ounce of motivation and a lot of fear of working with hot sugar away from trying her recipe at home.
⁂
As I've mentioned, I've been borrowing video games from the library. The holds are long and the checkouts are 7-days, so only certain titles work and it creates a unique gameplay experience. It's perforce a title I'm not hugely invested in, something with a limited length, something not worth owning—but then I play the whole ~35 hour game in a week, with more focus and therefore immersion than I might give to a title I purchase and play for longer. I played Let's Go Eevee that way, which tbh is the only way to play the game. Most PKMN games are for me 200+ hours because I'm big into breeding and shiny hunting, but the central gimmick of Let's Go leans heavily towards overpowered single-Pokemon team and the shiny hunting mechanic is cute but the endgame is otherwise shallow; it's very much a 35 hour game.
And I just finished Super Mario Odyssey, which is my first Mario title! and which I only played because it has assist mode! which mitigates health management and largely does away with dying to void-outs. I love Nintendo's gentle/exploratory platforms but hate actual platforming because I can't spacial reasoning or operate under pressure, that's just not fun. So bless assist modes & may this be a thing in all future titles—it's never the wrong time to increase accessibility. 7 days were just enough time to do 500 stars worth of exploring with that satisfied feeling of every curiosity and corner offering a reward, and the due date came when I was hitting hard, unfun content I didn't want to play anyway.
I still contend that core franchise Mario titles are ugly AF with bad world aesthetics and (non-musical) sound design, and that the way gender issues are handled in the endgame cinematic is the worst of Nintendo's too little, too late methodology: something about the high-rez art style makes the forced marriage & objectification of Peach even more glaring, and you can't do that—play it straight, play it at length—for the entire game and then critique it in endgame and expect a cookie for your progressive vision. (The high-rez style also makes the cap-control mechanic feel weird, like ... it's an innately ridiculous game, I shouldn't be considering issues of consent and autonomy, and yet here we are.)
Petition that the next Mario title pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2, opening with Mario in the tutorial levels and then staring Peach for the entire rest of the game with no option to switch characters. Maybe she even rescues him, tbh I don't care. I hope the fanboys will be as mad about it as they were about MGS2.
⁂
The pattern of playing a lot of condensed game leads naturally to not playing almost anything afterward, to recover from burnout and rest my wrists. I've been reading a lot! Some very good books! But I'm fatally behind on reviews and honestly should be writing those right now, not this.
It's funny that after reading so much last year, I'm not burned out on books—just on writing about them. My reading distinctly hasn't been a passive thing, lately, in no small part because discovering OpenLibrary/the Internet Archive has made accessible some of those obscure feminist SFNal works which have been on my TBR for years and years. It's active, sometimes even combative reading, but that means I exhaust my reading-energy both in that engagement and at the mere thought of trying to write all of it down. Not writing reviews isn't an option for me, but as well as relearning the art of longer, messier reviews when a condensed one is impossible, I should also embrace the adage that anything worth doing is worth half-assing (rather than not doing at all) and just ... not write book reports, maybe even of things that deserve them.
⁂
Incredible and borderline-unmanageable spike in back pain over the last ~2 weeks. This flare is remarkable in part for its duration, which is generally a sign that it's not a flare but a new plateau in my fun experience with a degenerative condition. Also remarkable because it's been interfering with sleep, particularly waking me up after ~4 hours & sometimes making it impossible to go back to sleep. That combo is utterly terrifying. I already do seven million things manage pain for sleep, so there's nothing I can do to improve things; sleep is already hard because of my brainweird; poor sleep is a trigger for ... more pain.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These plateaus are always worse when I'm still adjusting to them. In a few months, it'll be background noise, just ... noisier noise than the old noise. But when I frequently don't feel pain, only symptoms of pain—when the bar of "distressing" and "disabling" is constantly shifting upward to hover at whatever level of pain I've grown used to—it makes me wonder: what is a pain scale, objectively (is there such a thing as "objective"); where do I fall on it; when will I tip over to an un-adjustable level. I hope this isn't it.
We used bittersweet rather than semisweet chocolate and skimped on the white sugar, and next time may also replace some of the chocolate with unsweetened. But they turned out great, rich and dense but not greasy, a more approachable cousin to a flourless chocolate torte, my one true dessert. Very Valentines! (There were 3+ other people buying chocolate-related baking supplies at the same time as us; great minds, but ours, I warrant, came out the best.)
* Did I search for a Bon Appetit recipe in hopes of finding one by Claire Saffitz specifically because I watch too much Gourmet Makes? yes! Also was the recent Butterfinger episode not the most satisfying thing? I agree with criticisms that "gourmet chef attempts things only possible in industrial kitchen" isn't really what I want from the show, despite the charming ingenuity and foibles. Breaking down the how of the unique texture of a Butterfinger was fascinating because I also had never put a name to what the thing really is or how they achieve it. And, or once! it was achievable, and the premise of the show was fully realized: quality ingredients + non-industrial preparation to create a similar-but-better product. I was a ounce of motivation and a lot of fear of working with hot sugar away from trying her recipe at home.
⁂
As I've mentioned, I've been borrowing video games from the library. The holds are long and the checkouts are 7-days, so only certain titles work and it creates a unique gameplay experience. It's perforce a title I'm not hugely invested in, something with a limited length, something not worth owning—but then I play the whole ~35 hour game in a week, with more focus and therefore immersion than I might give to a title I purchase and play for longer. I played Let's Go Eevee that way, which tbh is the only way to play the game. Most PKMN games are for me 200+ hours because I'm big into breeding and shiny hunting, but the central gimmick of Let's Go leans heavily towards overpowered single-Pokemon team and the shiny hunting mechanic is cute but the endgame is otherwise shallow; it's very much a 35 hour game.
And I just finished Super Mario Odyssey, which is my first Mario title! and which I only played because it has assist mode! which mitigates health management and largely does away with dying to void-outs. I love Nintendo's gentle/exploratory platforms but hate actual platforming because I can't spacial reasoning or operate under pressure, that's just not fun. So bless assist modes & may this be a thing in all future titles—it's never the wrong time to increase accessibility. 7 days were just enough time to do 500 stars worth of exploring with that satisfied feeling of every curiosity and corner offering a reward, and the due date came when I was hitting hard, unfun content I didn't want to play anyway.
I still contend that core franchise Mario titles are ugly AF with bad world aesthetics and (non-musical) sound design, and that the way gender issues are handled in the endgame cinematic is the worst of Nintendo's too little, too late methodology: something about the high-rez art style makes the forced marriage & objectification of Peach even more glaring, and you can't do that—play it straight, play it at length—for the entire game and then critique it in endgame and expect a cookie for your progressive vision. (The high-rez style also makes the cap-control mechanic feel weird, like ... it's an innately ridiculous game, I shouldn't be considering issues of consent and autonomy, and yet here we are.)
Petition that the next Mario title pulls a Metal Gear Solid 2, opening with Mario in the tutorial levels and then staring Peach for the entire rest of the game with no option to switch characters. Maybe she even rescues him, tbh I don't care. I hope the fanboys will be as mad about it as they were about MGS2.
⁂
The pattern of playing a lot of condensed game leads naturally to not playing almost anything afterward, to recover from burnout and rest my wrists. I've been reading a lot! Some very good books! But I'm fatally behind on reviews and honestly should be writing those right now, not this.
It's funny that after reading so much last year, I'm not burned out on books—just on writing about them. My reading distinctly hasn't been a passive thing, lately, in no small part because discovering OpenLibrary/the Internet Archive has made accessible some of those obscure feminist SFNal works which have been on my TBR for years and years. It's active, sometimes even combative reading, but that means I exhaust my reading-energy both in that engagement and at the mere thought of trying to write all of it down. Not writing reviews isn't an option for me, but as well as relearning the art of longer, messier reviews when a condensed one is impossible, I should also embrace the adage that anything worth doing is worth half-assing (rather than not doing at all) and just ... not write book reports, maybe even of things that deserve them.
⁂
Incredible and borderline-unmanageable spike in back pain over the last ~2 weeks. This flare is remarkable in part for its duration, which is generally a sign that it's not a flare but a new plateau in my fun experience with a degenerative condition. Also remarkable because it's been interfering with sleep, particularly waking me up after ~4 hours & sometimes making it impossible to go back to sleep. That combo is utterly terrifying. I already do seven million things manage pain for sleep, so there's nothing I can do to improve things; sleep is already hard because of my brainweird; poor sleep is a trigger for ... more pain.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These plateaus are always worse when I'm still adjusting to them. In a few months, it'll be background noise, just ... noisier noise than the old noise. But when I frequently don't feel pain, only symptoms of pain—when the bar of "distressing" and "disabling" is constantly shifting upward to hover at whatever level of pain I've grown used to—it makes me wonder: what is a pain scale, objectively (is there such a thing as "objective"); where do I fall on it; when will I tip over to an un-adjustable level. I hope this isn't it.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-15 07:29 pm (UTC)I don't play video games, but I LOVE Eevee from the cards and anime, so the idea of an Eevee centric game is very appealing to me!
Those brownies look amazing! I love having frozen brownies and defrosting them in the microwave so they're all warm and fudgey :)
no subject
Date: 2020-02-16 11:05 pm (UTC)The brownies were so much better the second day! They were a beast to transfer to the freezer, but now that they're finally there I look forward to an indefinite future of brownie-accessiblity.