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Texas Sheet Cake and Dusty Trails
Aug. 9th, 2020 10:30 pmCelebrated my friend Molly's birthday via a Zoom party, which probably would have happened even without a pandemic because she moved to Florida last year, and most of her family is in Massachusetts. (Her mom set up the party.) I made a Texas sheet cake to eat a piece of during the call, because that cake is what you make for parties if you are Texan (that or tres leches), but in honor of Florida, I improved a chocolate orange frosting instead of chocolate pecan. Still used toasted pecans to write out "Molly," though. Pecans were going to get in there somehow.
The weirdest thing is that the cookbook I was using, which is a great cake book, The United States of Cake, had a measurement error on the amount of flour, where it gave the amount in cups and the conversion to ounces, but those were two different amounts; somebody did math wrong. So I was like, hmm, which one is right and which one is the typo? And then I was like "wait a minute, neither of those are right, they're both differently wrong, that's the wrong amount of flour both ways."
But then every recipe I pulled up online to confirm what I remembered (correctly) about the flour had a conversion error in another of its measurements. Not the same other measurement; it wasn't one wrong recipe or one wrong conversion copied across multiple websites. They were each separately wrong in the same way about different items.
It's a mess. I appreciate the (new) impulse to present recipes bilingually (bi-mathily?) but it seems like it's being done with false confidence by people who have only actively used one or the other system.
Otherwise I did a lot of sweeping and dusting and shaking out of rugs. The cleanliness situation in the house is still not great. It's old and a lot of people live there, so dust is a constant. I was striped gray afterword in the places where dust stuck to my sweat, and I smelled like desolation and had to shower off. This is why I do not usually venture into those rooms and stick to my bases and beachheads. But sometimes I like to be able to look through a doorway and see a floor, which requires these occasional feints.
Played and won Waterworks on normal difficulty, which is a free browser game about a Polish medieval town's water distribution system. Simple and charming.
Suspect the RPG group I meet with on Monday nights is about to fall apart because the original host has gotten cranky about not wanting to share GM duties and not wanting to play dice-based systems anymore, which I'm fine with (I did used to do improv theatre professionally, and am a writer/director) but which several of the other players don't enjoy. Any time they bring it up, the GM re-explains why it's purer to game without dice or a system, as if the problem is they don't understand what's happening. It's exhausting to watch such a predictable and cliche failure from someone of his age/gender/income/ethnicity/orientation/profession. I am not interested in stepping in and rescuing him, partly because I doubt he'd listen to me either.
The difficulty of "pure" roleplaying (or what I'd call table-read larping) is that the person running it has to be an excellent director who is able to constantly draw the shyer people back into the game, and create clear objectives and forward movement and endpoints. It takes a lot of social skills that are compensated for when you have initiative systems and hit points. There's been some hubristic flying without a net in a situation where there is already the barrier of Zoom and the lack of social lubricants like shared snack food.
It seems like we're reaching the point where I'm either going to need to intervene or let it crash, and I'm probably going to go with crash (and possibly resurrect later). I could step in with my own campaign, which for whatever reason everybody would be willing to compromise on, but which I suspended because I have more important projects right now. Part of why I'm fine with plodding along in somebody else's fumble is because I'm grateful to not have to do it myself at the moment. I don't know. I'll have to think about whether there are systems I could bring in that lend themselves more to web conferences. (Really, I'll have to ask my indie RPG creator buddies what they're seeing.)
The weirdest thing is that the cookbook I was using, which is a great cake book, The United States of Cake, had a measurement error on the amount of flour, where it gave the amount in cups and the conversion to ounces, but those were two different amounts; somebody did math wrong. So I was like, hmm, which one is right and which one is the typo? And then I was like "wait a minute, neither of those are right, they're both differently wrong, that's the wrong amount of flour both ways."
But then every recipe I pulled up online to confirm what I remembered (correctly) about the flour had a conversion error in another of its measurements. Not the same other measurement; it wasn't one wrong recipe or one wrong conversion copied across multiple websites. They were each separately wrong in the same way about different items.
It's a mess. I appreciate the (new) impulse to present recipes bilingually (bi-mathily?) but it seems like it's being done with false confidence by people who have only actively used one or the other system.
Otherwise I did a lot of sweeping and dusting and shaking out of rugs. The cleanliness situation in the house is still not great. It's old and a lot of people live there, so dust is a constant. I was striped gray afterword in the places where dust stuck to my sweat, and I smelled like desolation and had to shower off. This is why I do not usually venture into those rooms and stick to my bases and beachheads. But sometimes I like to be able to look through a doorway and see a floor, which requires these occasional feints.
Played and won Waterworks on normal difficulty, which is a free browser game about a Polish medieval town's water distribution system. Simple and charming.
Suspect the RPG group I meet with on Monday nights is about to fall apart because the original host has gotten cranky about not wanting to share GM duties and not wanting to play dice-based systems anymore, which I'm fine with (I did used to do improv theatre professionally, and am a writer/director) but which several of the other players don't enjoy. Any time they bring it up, the GM re-explains why it's purer to game without dice or a system, as if the problem is they don't understand what's happening. It's exhausting to watch such a predictable and cliche failure from someone of his age/gender/income/ethnicity/orientation/profession. I am not interested in stepping in and rescuing him, partly because I doubt he'd listen to me either.
The difficulty of "pure" roleplaying (or what I'd call table-read larping) is that the person running it has to be an excellent director who is able to constantly draw the shyer people back into the game, and create clear objectives and forward movement and endpoints. It takes a lot of social skills that are compensated for when you have initiative systems and hit points. There's been some hubristic flying without a net in a situation where there is already the barrier of Zoom and the lack of social lubricants like shared snack food.
It seems like we're reaching the point where I'm either going to need to intervene or let it crash, and I'm probably going to go with crash (and possibly resurrect later). I could step in with my own campaign, which for whatever reason everybody would be willing to compromise on, but which I suspended because I have more important projects right now. Part of why I'm fine with plodding along in somebody else's fumble is because I'm grateful to not have to do it myself at the moment. I don't know. I'll have to think about whether there are systems I could bring in that lend themselves more to web conferences. (Really, I'll have to ask my indie RPG creator buddies what they're seeing.)
