🥚 Cooking, Fire Emblem ⚔️

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is RICO RICO, by Ms. Nina. 🎵

Posted some cooking a few days ago, here's some more. I find cooking during the quarantine to be a good release: it's a process that's not my job, feels "productive" but away from the computer, uses my hands, and often smells/tastes good as a reward. There's just enough creativity involved ("what's rotting next? what do we have a lot of?") while not feeling super high-stakes.

One of the bigger losses I'm feeling is the lack of baked goods. It's indulgent, but one of my previous habits was going to a coffee shop and getting a coffee and scone (or croissant or muffin or what-have-you). In terms of unit economics, it's expensive, but in a penny-wise/pound-foolish way, it's not a major expense for me. Something something self-care.

So, locked up, Karen and I don't bake much, and didn't include ingredients for it in our grocery-buying. But lo! I found an old bag of flour that I didn't know we had. We had exactly four eggs left. And a can of pumpkin! So I made pumpkin "muffins," wrapped in foil since I didn't have parchment paper:

They came out pretty well, all things considered. Hard to go wrong with sugar, flour, spices, and pumpkin. Not much to look at, but I've had 6 of them 😋

Meanwhile, we had a lot of backed-up rice from old takeout orders (back when that was a thing) that we were never going to eat. I'm not eating meat, but Karen still does, and she had some pork that was going bad soon, so I whipped up some pork-fried rice:

When you don't own a spatula or have ingredients for a proper garnish, "plating" is just the same for all of these things: drizzle that Sriracha.

As I said about national politics recently, there is no going back to normal here. With record unemployment claims and a looming Depression, I never use the phrase "when things go back to normal." But! When some things re-emerge (getting to leave the house more freely… God, am I having a hard time without the gym) I hope I can keep the energy + focus to keep cooking. It's been such a net good all-around.

Blogging

Karen doesn't proactively read this blog, but sometimes I'll tell her I've written posts, and she gives them a look. I told her about the last week or so.

"I like them! It's very wide-ranging… some of the topics I don't feel like I'm quite as into."

"The OCaml ones?"

"Exactly what I was thinking about!"

"lmao I'm pretty sure nobody cares about those."

😝

Fire Emblem, Vidya Games

I describe Pablo's Law at the bottom, but there's also Pablo's Tenth Law: if you have a tea minigame, I won't like it. See: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.

I'm playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses, since I got a Switch recently, mostly for Animal Crossing with Karen and That Horrible Cooking Game with Saurya. It's… a really funny game. It's my first Fire Emblem, and there's a lot that I love about it.

I often joke that Hollow Knight is really three games in one: you've got one of the better Metroidvania epics of the last decade, but with the White Palace and Path of Pain, you get a few hours of Celeste-like, and with the boss rushes of the Godhome expansion you've got something like Cuphead.

I only mention this because Fire Emblem is also, like, 3 games in one. You've got the turn-based tactical battle game, sure, but it's also a dating sim and SimCity or Project Hospital for running a school. I'd love to say more about what I think about its combat vs. Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions or XCOM, but in the 7 hours I've played in the last two weeks, I think I've fought, like, 4 battles? There is so much exposition, menus, and tweaking in this game.

One of the games inside Fire Emblem: a tea-drinking minigame that is literally the Simpsons joke of a My Dinner With Andre arcade game:

When consoles got 3D games, Super Mario 64 really left a dent in the culture about what platforming could look like (part of why it's so damn studied, and the king of speedrunning popularity for most of either's history). That said, Rare somehow took "open world, collect Stars!" and made it:

• open world, collect golden bananas, colored bananas, medals, blueprints, fairies, crowns, keys, coins! (Donkey Kong 64)
• open world, collect jigsaw pieces, treble clefs, note nests, feather nests, jinjos, globos, cheato pages, honeycombs (3 kinds), and game paks! (Banjo-Tooie)

so when they finally released Star Fox Adventures and tell you what a Bafomdad is part of me just broke and wondered "good lord, why am I wasting my life collecting imaginary objects?"

Anyways, playing Fire Emblem, I feel like we've gotten very, very close to peak Something, just like Rare made Peak Collectable in the N64 era. The wax on the wings isn't melting yet, but it feels close, and I might feel differently if, after 40 hours, I'm only 15% through the game and had 4 more fights.

Two last things:

• Like when I first played Skyrim, I'm flabbergasted by how much damn content there is.

• Pablo's Law still applies: if there is a fishing minigame, I fucking love it. 🎣