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I Am A Lazy Asshole With No Motivation Because the World is Broken Potato Soup

This is a great, comforting, extremely low effort soup. Who among us has any motivation right now? I like to serve it with a buffet of toppings, by which I mean go ahead and dig around in your fridge for anything to put on top of it. I’ll give you some ideas! 

3-4 pounds of potatoes, cubed into about 1-2 inch cubes. Not to go full Cooking 101 with Holligay, but there are two major types of potatoes, starchy and waxy, and you want waxy type for this or the texture will be off! Easy to find waxy types are Yukon Gold and Red. 

1 medium onion, chopped

6 cloves of garlic, chopped lazily. 

2 tbsp of dried thyme or dill or basil or whatever your herb of choice generally is

2 tsp (or more) smoked paprika

4 cups chicken or veg broth. 

A heaping spoonful of whole grain mustard

Salt and pepper (Or Alpine, which is the greatest choice. I use alpine and pepper) 

1.5 cups heavy cream. 

Toppings! Anything you like, but ideas: chopped green onion, bacon, cheese, sour cream, sauteed mushrooms, go nuts. 

Toss everything but the cream and toppings into a slow cooker. Cook on low eight hours or high for four hours if you MUST but it tastes better on low for eight. 

Bofuri is pretty typical of a game-within-a-show that was designed for a particular narrative story and would actually be pretty awful played as a game (or, at the very least, players would play it in a completely different way). If the game were real, the first thing the players would do is theorycraft out the best skills and how to obtain them, share them online, and the result would be mostly cookie-cutter super strong builds in general. Furthermore, there would be massive complaints about granting super strong unique gear to the first player to defeat a boss, and the natural player response would be to try to gank or kill steal somebody else in order to steal the first boss kill for those rewards. 

The whole idea of “unique skills” in any kind of MMOG with persistent characters is terrible because of how many players play a game and how many developers work on a game. It takes us time to create, build, and test each ability. Why would we give this ability to one single player among thousands? That’s a terrible waste of development resources spent! In order to make unique skills a thing, we’d have to build thousands of them - a nightmare to try to find any semblance of balance to. Unique skills are also a fantastic narrative device to tell a story - the only characters the audience cares about are this small group, not the theoretical thousands of players in the game, and the unique skills make those characters feel special. You don’t have to care about the faceless masses who get dunked on by OP behavior like Maple’s who would probably be quitting in droves because it isn’t real. New World Online doesn’t actually have to be fun for anybody but those watching the show. 

Bofuri joins a list of similar games-within-a-story designed by people who probably play games but are not game designers themselves. Sword Art Online is probably the most famous of these, but Yu-Gi-Oh’s anime and manga game Duel Monsters is also terrible. For a non-anime example, you can look at Quidditch (Harry Potter) and the Oasis (Ready Player One) as terribly designed games. The purpose of these games isn’t to be a fun game to play, but to provide a narrative setting where tension rises and things get interesting for a select group of characters. The Dual Wielding skill randomly appearing on a small number of players would make a game like Sword Art Online absolutely awful for anybody who doesn’t have it because it’s a random permanent skill that doubles your DPS with no penalties. Quidditch is awful because catching the Golden Snitch is worth 15 times the points of a regular goal. There’s no incentive to spend any time scoring regular goals when you could have a team of five seekers all trying to catch the Golden Snitch from the start of the match. This is why most games-within-a-story that get brought to real life (like Yu-Gi-Oh and Quidditch) make major rules changes in order to turn them into playable games. 

It’s actually ok for games-within-a-story to be awful games to play in reality, because these games don’t actually need to be fun. They just need to be fun for an audience to watch or read about once. The Golden Snitch being worth 150 points makes for some drama and obstacles that the hero we’re supposed to cheer for can overcome and win against a team with the odds stacked against them. That’s the difference here - a real game is a situation where players want to win and will spend their time optimizing their means of doing so. A game-within-a-show is a narrative vehicle for tension and storytelling, where winning is less important than watching the characters overcome the challenges presented to them. They serve different roles and have different purposes.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

I’m not a scientist either, but I took the time to research my answer.

Water can be considered polarized in two ways. The first way is molecular polarization, which is literally just how it conducts electricity. The second is light polarization, which is how some light reflects off a surface in a predictable way while the rest goes through.

A few joking D&D achievements. 

Water smells the same. What’s happening when water is hot is you’re smelling more of it and what is in it. 

Noses/smell (and taste, really) works by particles of matter landing on exposed nerve endings inside the nasal passageway. These nerve endings react to the chemical makeup of the particles and make a mix of signals that go to your brain and make smells. 

Cold water has fairly slow molecules bouncing around in it. At the surface, sometimes the bounce at an odd angle and leave the body of water at a nano-scale as water vapor. If you were to sniff, you would detect a tiny amount of mostly-pure water (mixed with the normal air your brain has learned to ignore).  If you heat the water up, the molecules will move faster, more will escape (often visibly becoming steam). This will result in a stronger “water” smell... and the application you were looking for.

A “wavy” of “flamberge” (”flame-blade”) edge can improves slicing motions. To understand this, you have to understand the different kinds of cuts.

When cleaving, you interact a blade edge with a medium at speed from a straight angle, driving it apart and cutting into it. Think like an axe splitting a log or when you just drive your knife down onto a carrot.

When slicing, by reducing the angle that the cutting surface interacts with the medium you effectively decrease the rate at which the blade thickens, and thus how much force you need to separate the medium. Think how much easier it is to cut a tomato if you start at the base of the knife and then pull the knife through so you finish with the tip, or how easy it is to cut yourself sliding a razor sideways when shaving. This is why curved swords exist: to make slicing easier.

A regular serrated edge is more like a saw: the force is focused on a small point (the tip of each serration) and thus each point can exert more pressure on a point in the material and make it give, gouging it out. This is good for tough materials like wood or heck, bread. It is also likely to catch or get stuck in many materials, which is why serrated fantasy weapons are stupid. 

A flamberge edge is basically an array of curved slicing edges in succession. If pulled through a medium in a slice, each edge is much better at getting the shallowest angle to slice the medium while allowing the blade to have an overall straight alignment (instead of being so curved it doubles back on itself). This makes them very good against soft materials: fruit, meat, tough fabric and so on, as it basically makes a sharp edge sharper when used right.

the biconditional works like this; both points have to be correct, even when reversed. like this:

samus aran looks like this if and only if she is seventeen.

samus aran is seventeen if and only if she looks like this.

I’ll also consider the horrifying likelihood that her Metroid DNA as of Fusion also allows her to absorb life energy to restore her own cell functionality, from basically anything that enters her body (eg. both X parasites and various environmental microbes), which renders her functionally immortal. 

None of this actually makes sense but hey, sci-fi writers don’t do sense.

The cheesecake that filled my house with the aroma of Chai.

Recipe for my Low carb, refined-sugar free, high protein Chai Cheesecake.

Crust:

120g Almond meal

20g extra virgin coconut oil

1tsp masala mix spice

Mixed together, press into cake/pie tin and bake at 180°C for 5 minutes

Cheesecake Filling:

500g Light creamcheese

100g Stevia

3 Eggs

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp masala chai mix

1 tsp ginger powder

1/2 tsp nutmeg

Whip creamcheese and dry ingredients together and whisk in eggs 1 at a time until glossy and smooth.

Could y’all answer my life long question of

What if the sea and land on earth switched

The human eye is made to see things with clarity and have accurate depth perception for objects at arm’s-length to about 20 feet/6 meters. Objects at extreme distances are nigh-impossible to have the accuracy our brains want, so it gets constructed as a 2D unless we have something to provide perspective, such as a moving object of a known size. At extreme ranges, the atmosphere itself interferes, scattering the light to make things appear blurry.

The “sky” is not really a thing (it’s really a concept), you are simply looking at the Earth’s atmosphere from inside. There is usually no point of reference, and when there is (from an observable object like a cloud or plane) it is usually extremely far away. Again, depth perception and detail are not really feasible here. Clouds, too, are floating water vapor and droplets. By their nature they are diffuse, lacking detail to the human eye unless you are very close, at which point they look like fog. 

Art, on the other hand, generally lacks the detail of reality. Even photography lacks the ability to recreate the exact exposure that the human eye has and has zero depth perception, merely simulating this through depth of field. Most human brains can recognise any given form of art as an artificial reproduction eventually, and understand that we’re not looking at the real thing.