I'm not saying I have ADHD, but I will say I have accidentally made a second cup of coffee because I forgot I made the first one before.
A Thing In my Possession: Home Made Hamburger Buns I'm not turning this into a cooking blog, but I'm also not *not* turning it into a cooking blog. Yesterday, we spent a portion of the day making hamburger buns. The recipe was fairly straight forward, using an adaptation of the hot dog bun recipe from Claire Saffitz, the most intimidating part of which was making the tangzhong. Tangzhong is a cooked milk, water and flower mixture that you prepare and mix into the rest of your bread ingredients. It allows the bread to hold more moisture and makes the final product much softer and gives it a real pillowy delicate texture. I have seen recipes that use them before, but it always seems like a scary extra step, but it turns out not to be much harder and wow did it make a difference. I'm not exactly going to be making buns with any regularity, but when I do make them again, I won't be skipping that step.
Poorly Organized Thoughts On: Internet Quizzes You know what you don’t see enough of anymore? Silly internet quizzes. I read a lot of magazines as a kid, and one of the ubiquitous things in the magazines I read was the quiz. 10-20 questions on a topic like “how messy is your bedroom” or “how to tell if someone like likes you.” You would circle you answers then check the key at the end to find out “your bedroom is very messy” or “they only think of you as a friend” or whatever. I loved these quizzes, not necessarily because of the deeper truths they revealed about the universe or the person who was taking them, but because of how they were constructed.
Each question had four possible answers, A, B, C, or D, and it was obvious from the very beginning that each letter was one of the eventual categories at the end. They were so blatant. Question one would be “how much dirty laundry do you have in your bedroom?” And the answers would be something like A) None, I do my laundry every day. B) Some, but it’s all in the hamper. C) There’s a few pieces scattered around. D) My bedroom is a wasteland of scattered clothing, there's no where to exist without touching some of it. Archeologists would weep with joy as they discover a lifetime's worth of work in digging everything up in here.
This would repeat over and over again and the answer key would be Mostly A: Get checked out by a professional for OCD Mostly B: Clean and tidy, I bet you make your parents proud Mostly C: You could be trying harder, but at least you're trying Mostly D: A total slob, but at least you're happy. You are happy, right?
And the trend would continue. So when I took these quizzes, I wasn't trying to find out anything about myself, but rather I would try to figure out which category each answer belonged to. You (meaning, I) could tell how much work went into creating the quiz by how long it took to figure out the categories and trends. The lowest effort ones had the four categories on a spectrum getting progressively more intense from A to D. Not unlike my bedroom question above. But if they wanted to be clever, they would mix the categories up, so cleanest would be D, messiest would be C and the two middle options would be B and A. But even then most of the time you would have the answers lined up so that all the As fit one category, the Bs one category and so on. This is because you can still take the answer key and have the Mostly A, Mostly B format.
If they really wanted to impress me, they would truly mix up the answers from question to question. This took a lot more work, both for the writer and the quiz taker. The writer would assign each answer a point value (usually one to four) and the answer key would describe how much answer each one was worth. this made it so you had to guess the category solely on vibes instead of the ordering, and was a lot more fun (for me, the person taking these wrong). At the end you would add up the point values for you answers and that number would then be mapped to another group of categories. It was a lot of fun.
Then then internet came along and made this whole process much easier. Both the writing and the taking. It became so ubiquitous that society renamed them buzzfeed quizzes instead of magazine quizzes. People were churning these out constantly and they were the lowest of low effort. One would hope that by making the scoring something that could be automated, it would allow the quiz writers to put more nuance and complication into the quizzes, but now, they got evermore shallow. "Which ninja turtle are you?" Would have questions like
What is your favorite color? A)Blue B)Purple C)Red D)Orange
Which best describes you? A)Leader B)Nerd C)Cool, but sometimes rude D)Party Animal
you get the picture. It became a real wasteland of garbage quizzes, not unlike the messy room in category D from the earlier quiz. Every no and then you might find one that was worth taking, but you never knew when you started, and most of the time it wasn't even worth the 2 minutes to take and find out.
But! There were exceptions, and parodies. The format became a place for humor to thrive, and did allow for the greatest internet quiz to ever exist. So I present to you: Which One of My Garbage Sons are you? Please enjoy.
Stuff I'm Playing I re-installed No Man's Sky again, because there was another recent update that made it even better. It's a space exploration game with an absolutely gigantic procedurally generated galaxy. You start out with a tiny little ship without any fuel or even a hyperdrive. You gather resources and repair the ship and then begin exploring the galaxy. The scale and scope of the game is realy impressive and you can fly from planet to planet and system to system learning more about the universe as you go. You even have to learn the languages of the aliens you encounter, word by word. This is really a game that has been a true labor of love by the developers. It had a pretty disastrous launch back in 2016, where it was completely unable to live up to the hype that had been generated about it, but in the intervening years, they have just kept working on it, releasing regular updates to address the problems it had and make the game even more fun. I'm only a few hours into my current playthrough, but already there are some real quality of life changes, that make it into a game I could see myself playing a lot more of.
Speaking of games that I have played a lot of, I got back into Rimworld for a while. Rimworld is a colony buoilding game where you start on planet at the rim of the galactic sivilization and try to create a society and survive. It's a lot of fun, but I think I might have hit my limit with this recent playthgough. I feel like I have exhausted all the available systems, and I think I'll have to pick up one or two of the expansions that exist before diving back in next time I've been playing only on vanilla mode, no mods or expansions, and I still managed to get nearly 300 hours into the game. Not bad.
