Angry Marsupial Symposium

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats, toasted and divided

1/4 cup toasted powdered milk (the instant stuff is fine)

2 cups whole milk

1/4 cup brown sugar

3 T honey, corn syrup, or golden syrup

1/2 tsp cinnamon (can add more if you want)

No cream, no eggs, no exotic stabilizers. 100% ingredients I already had on hand.

1/4 cup butter

1/3 cup dry yellow cake mix

2 T homemade "golden syrup"

1/4 cup granulated sugar

2 T powdered milk (I used about half toasted powdered milk because I had some left over from a previous project, and the rest out of the package)

2 cups whole milk

Make a roux with the butter and cake mix, cook until it bubbles and starts to smell good. Mix the powdered milk with the whole milk. Gradually add the milk mixture to the roux, stirring all the way (like you're making white sauce). When the milk's warmed up, add the sugar and syrup. Keep stirring. Cook and stir until the mixture thickens up. Let it cool, chill in the fridge as long as you can stand it. When you run out of patience, freeze as usual in ice cream freezer. Then put it in the freezer to firm up for at least a few hours.

(This part is where I am now, so I don't know how it turns out yet.)

Shiny New Australia: Mad Max in the Palapagos. I'm torn between having everyone ride around on Pals like they do in the game, or introducing original vehicle worldbuilding because it's not really Mad Max without tricked out cars&c. (Petroleum does canonically exist in Palworld, so people could continue to fuel any surviving gasoline-powered cars from the Old World, but all the large-scale oil rigs are under control of the islands' big crime syndicate which would make fuelling a fleet of vehicles problematic. I'm wondering, given the existence of small fire and electricity-generating creatures in the game, if either steampunk steam-buggies with a Foxsparks in the back running the boiler, or rechargeable Jolthog-powered electric cars might be more practical under the circumstances.) Or split the difference and go with tricked-out war chariots. Also there is a wasteland warlord called the Plant Pimp whose special resource is vegetable gardening. He has a bodyguard harem of flower ladies. Lily murders him with extreme prejudice.

Fuddler On The Roof: After being evicted from their hometown, a group of Jewish villagers from Imperial Russia get help finding new homes from a philanthropic group devoted to helping persecuted Jews relocate to areas with more economic opportunity and less antisemitism. (This was a thing in real life in the late 19th/very early 20th centuries.) However, instead of the US or Argentina, these folks got sent to the Palapagos. How do you maintain your sense of identity and cultural continuity when all the old eternal verities, including simple things like "sheep have hooves," are in flux? When the Psalms talked about singing the Lord's song in a strange land, did they know how strange lands could get?