then i fell into here

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God, I love How To Drink.

I don't know of anyone who is exactly like him in terms of level of nerdiness about coffee plus nerdiness about pop culture, with an interest in recreating historical drinks, etc., partly because the history of froufrou coffee drinks is shorter and less complex, and partly because people who like putting banana syrup or whatever in their coffee and people who like high-end coffee beans and the science behind the coffee part overlap only somewhat.

However, I can think of two obvious channels that cover a lot of the same ground between them.

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First, for peak coffee nerdery, including chemistry (a key feature of HTD), there's James Hoffman. He's the coffee guy on youtube, so described by other food and drink channels.

His most pop culture geek video is probably:

He gets sciencey when he talks about decaf, bean fermentation, etc.

Overall, most of his reviews are of machines rather than brands of coffee, which makes sense since most high-level coffee nerds are drinking extremely limited supply beans, possibly from a local roaster. There's just no point in reviewing those the way one can review liqueurs.

As a coffee snob supreme, he mostly covers black coffee and the most basic traditional drinks with milk.

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The other channel that springs to mind covers coffee shop fad drinks heavily. Morgan Eckroth is a champion barista and exudes an air that I can only describe as #fashion goals for half the people reading here. (I googled her pronouns just now out of curiosity and was extremely unsurprised to find a speaking engagement listing them as she/they.)

A quintessential video is this one that covers how to make an oleo saccharum—a thing HTD is also obsessed with:

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For coffee history, like old history beyond how Starbucks was inspired by Greek frappes, I don't see that much of it on food channels. Aside from OTR, most food channels don't really want to get into "And then they did a colonialism and murdered everyone".

Though now that I say that... Does OTR have a coffee episode?

Huh! Apparently, yes, though with more abbreviated history compared to recent videos.

The Great Smudge - Table Cat

So I'll do the rant again, and he'll listen to it like it's his first time hearing it, and he'll ask the best questions because he's been hearing this rant for 19 years, you can bet your ass he knows the best questions, and it's... beautiful. The words are almost adjacent to the dance.

If you want examples, some I've heard punted around are things like sabertooth tigers vs. megafauna and some weird ass newts in Yellowstone. The sabertooth theory is that they got locked in a race to eat megafauna that protected themselves with really thick skin, so their fangs get longer to counter the skin, then the skin got thicker to counter the fangs, repeat, and eventually, the skin became so thick that the megafauna couldn't cool themselves properly. Then humans figured out that they could just skip the giant fangs thing and just chase the megafauna until they had heat strokes. Badaboom, now the megafauna and saberteeth are both extinct. The newt example is that there are some newts in Yellowstone that have absurdly high level of tetrodotoxin in their skin. Like, hundreds of times the lethal dose for a human. But! They're preyed upon by birds that have evolved limited immunity to tetrodotoxin. So the newts are stuck always trying to become more toxic, and the birds are stuck always trying to become more immune, and they sit at this uneasy level where the birds can't gorge themselves entirely on newts because then they'll die, but they can eat enough newts that it keeps the newt population down, and neither really has enough evolutionary wiggle room to adapt to their environment in any new ways besides becoming more poisonous and more poison immune. So it's almost like they're not really evolving to adapt to their environment, they're mostly just evolving to adapt to each other, and that means that one day the environment will kill them.

To make an analogy of it, imagine that you live in the bronze age. And you know what? Some stuff is actually just better when it's made out of bronze. Like, a bronze knife isn't great because it'll be soft, quick to dull and easy to bend, but bronze works really well in nautical environments. I think we still commonly make boat props out of bronze. So if you're a boat guy, maybe you used to just go to your local smith and ask for a prop and he'd hand you one. But then iron becomes a thing and now your local smith is an iron only guy, and the one the next town over is an iron only guy, and it turns out that the only guy within a week's journey of you that knows how to make bronze is some old as dirt crabby bastard from the old bronze days. And you can get on his wait list, but you're very acutely aware that he's not gonna live forever, and there's not exactly a bunch of young students clamoring to learn this guy's craft, so you're not sure exactly what's gonna happen when he dies. Maybe someone else will pick up his niche, but there's a world of difference between a knowledge handoff and reinventing the field. Experts almost never write down all that they know. They often don't even know that they know it themselves. They just do things in a very particular, almost superstitious way.

And even if, if, that old guy does a real handoff, gets an apprentice and everything, the apprentice is never going to have the same kind of environment the old timer did for learning. They're not going to get the kind of general practice that existed in a world where everything was made of bronze. They won't be made into an expert, they'll be born one. And it will make them worse.

In electronics, we've basically moved through the bronze age, to the iron age, to the steel age, to the diamond age, all in the last 60 years. It's like living through three consecutive Tower of Babel's. There is no system for doing handoffs. There is a terrible struggle for each generation to understand even the one previous, least of all the ones before that. We have to keep running because behind us, the past is going up in flames, and we are afraid of what will happen when all that fire catches up to us.

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It’s important to have characters that people can look at and see that they’ve made a decision to be right. Now we have a lot of antiheroes, and I’ve played a lot of them, but there’s something to be said for the pure, unadulterated good guy.”

— Samuel L. Jackson on his character Mace Windu

I haven’t seen a comprehensive list of differences between the Modao Zushi novel and Chengqingling/The Untamed. Someone in one of my Discord’s asked earlier today, and in reply, myself, Joythea, @floofz, HeadphonesGal, and mustache apologist compiled this list, based on what we remembered. I’ve reproduced that list here with permission of the people involved in the conversation. I’ve tried to include what happens in both the novel AND CQL for each item, but in general, the list was more written as, “here are things that happened in CQL that didn’t happen or happened differently in the novel,” with an eye toward explaining it to someone familiar with the novel but not with the live action adaptation. 

Note that this contains…like…all the spoilers. Also, I am not an expert on either the novel or the live action, though I’m better acquainted with the second. As a group we did our best to make sure this was accurate, but I’ve transcribed and expanded it for posting and I can’t promise I haven’t made mistakes. PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG and I will amend it (that’s why I used a read more - so I can make changes without it getting all messed up by reblogs of different versions)!