AwkwardTurtle

joined 1 year ago
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6
CLOUD CRAWL my CBR+PNK Binary Tree Depth Crawl is out! (awkwardturtle.itch.io)
 

I wrote this as part of the CBR+PNK Jam, and if people aren't familiar CBR+PNK is a super condensed Forged in the Dark one shot system where you play a group of cyberpunk operatives on their last run.

Cloud Crawl was sort of an experiment to see if I could capture the sort of procedural generation depth crawl games (as epitomized in Stygian Library) in a small sized single pamphlet package. I'm pretty pleased with how it turns out, and I'm also pretty sure no one has ever done a depth crawl in a binary tree before (happy to be proven wrong here if someone can find an example!).

The game is half off this weekend for its launch, but I'm also keeping it fully stocked up with community copies for the time being so feel free to grab one for free if you want to take a look!

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Three Meads Bottled and Labeled! (beehaw.org)
 

We semi-recently got a corker which has let us move a bunch of our meads out of carboys and into bottles (and then boxes). It's extremely fun to be able to pull out a corked, labled bottle of mead at a gathering, just an extra bit of pizazz.

Details of the labels.

Burnt Honey: A bochet that's absolutely delicious, but a bit too sweet to drink a lot of. The yeast simply gave up partway through the fermentation (I assume due to the hilariously high SG) and rather than restart it we decided to lave it as is.

The Hard Way: Elderberry + Blueberry mead, nicely aged, lightly backsweetened, balanced with a bit of acid. Tastes shockingly similar to cranberry juice. Hence the name, a bunch of effort and a year of time to create something that you could get a similar end point to with cranberry juice and vodka. Still super nice to drink.

Summer Lovin': Fast turnaround mead made with fermenting juiced strawberries with the honey, then filtering immediately after primary, and backsweetening/flavoring with "oleo saccharum" and some citric acid. Extremely tasty, excellent summer drink, we liked it so much we've made two batches of it. Best part is that total time from start to bottle is under a month.

All of these were filtered using plate filters down to the "semi-filtration" level, which appears to be enough to stabilize them for back sweetening! My theory is that although the "semi-filtration" of about half a micron can't promise it removes all bacteria, yeast tends to be significantly larger and is removed without issue. At the very least we've had no bottle bombs yet.

To explain why there's a bee in a garbage can, "Garbo" was a combined last name me and my wife were throwing around as a possibility when we were getting married. The name was veto'ed, but we kept it as our "meadery" name, and since it brought to mind a little Garbage Bee that's what I doodled as our logo. It stuck as a theme after that.

Wingspan publisher Stonemaier Games’ next board game is full of bees in c/boardgames@feddit.de
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.

I'd far more believe that they couldn't keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.

Fresh batch of limoncello and lemon peel powder. in c/food@beehaw.org
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Ooo, fantastic. I've been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.

For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.

Seasoning suggestions for popcorn? in c/food@beehaw.org
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Pepcorn is actually and unironically very good.

Making Bacon! in c/food@beehaw.org
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

That looks great! We actually don't add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what's out there though.

We also usually smoke with "neighbor maple". Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor's lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.

Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don't have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I'm sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you're using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.

Making Bacon! in c/food@beehaw.org
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That sounds fantastic. I have some relatives that hunt, and I have not taken enough advantage of that.

Gotta set up a deal where they give me meat and I return half of it in the form of bacon or sausage.

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Making Bacon! (beehaw.org)
 

Me and my wife originally tried smoking our own bacon out of sheer novelty after finding out we could buy whole pork bellies at costco. It then turned out so good we've kept up with making a new batch anytime we run out.

Not pictured: trimming the pork belly small enough to fit in a vacuum bag, coating it with a curing mix (borrowed from this Kenji video on pancetta), vacuum sealing, and keeping under weights in the fridge for a week.

On the smoker:

Sliced:

Packed up:

The off cuts on a "whatever's in the fridge" sandwich:

Recap Monday: What did you play this week? in c/boardgames@feddit.de
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.

It's a really interesting game, but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.

I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.

Pros:

  • Simultaneous/shared turns a la Race for the Galaxy work super well in a wingspan-like game. Getting to run your engine on other people's turns is so much nicer than sitting and waiting for them to deliberate over choices.
  • The flexibility of getting to build your own tableau with almost no limitations is a lot of fun, as opposed to building off of an existing engine framework.
  • The shared turns have made it (so far) such that I never felt like I was truly pinched for resources. I wasn't taking actions out of desperation to catch up, I was picking what I felt would get me closer to my actual goals.
  • Despite the singleton deck, it never felt like I was unable to find cards with the synergies or qualities I needed.
  • There were a good number of high payoff "build around" cards that came up, which is something I always enjoy in a board game.

Cons:

  • The iconography could use some work, especially considering how heavily the game relies on it. I mean, the "cold climate" symbol is a five pointed snowflake?! The object that is famously six sided?! I understand having a learning curve, but having a player ask, "what the hell does this symbol mean?" and hour into a game isn't great.
  • Flavor is tenuous, in Wingspan I get that predators hunt smaller birds, that birds which lay lots of eggs and store lots of eggs, etc. In Earth, I have no idea why a given plant has 5 sprouts but only 2 growth, or another one has 2 sprouts and 4 growth. The event cards are even more incomprehensible.
  • It's got a bit of the "egg rush" end game from Wingspan (sprout rush here) but it's mitigated by shared actions, and having more flexibility in how you build things up (this could have also been placed in Pros, tbh).
  • I would never ever want to play this in person. So many fiddly bits interacting that I'm happy to allow BGA to handle for me. Especially considering the scoring, which (again) mirrors Wingspan but has significantly higher totals and would presumably take proportionally longer to count up.
  • I understand why a game like this uses photos as card art, but I do really wish they had nice Wingspan-like illustrations instead.

Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I'm looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.

It's garlic harvesting day! in c/greenspace@beehaw.org
[–] AwkwardTurtle@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

It's fantastic, as simple as just chucking some garlic into a jar with honey. Wait long enough and you get a really nice almost balsamic-y garlicy liquid to drizzle on stuff (I love it on pizza). I've also done it with some chopped up habanero included to make it spicy.

Insert usual caveats about being careful with fermenting food at home and doing your own research, and there being a small risk of botulism.

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It's garlic harvesting day! (beehaw.org)
 

Got them out of the ground to make room for the peppers to go in. Looking forward to making a bunch of toum, garlic fermented honey, and whatever else we can think of to try and use them all this year.

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Pesto and Pepperoni Pizza (beehaw.org)
 

My wife and I recently got a charcoal smoker/grill after our old bullet smoker finally rusted through. It came with a pizza oven attachment and we've been slowly perfecting our dough and cooking techniques.

The combo of sourdough and high temperature baking produces the exact sort of crispy, chewy, slightly charred pizza experience I crave. We're constantly rotating through different topping combos (and begging friends to come over so we can make more pizza without having to gorge ourselves).

Favorite so far is probably the spicy honey aged garlic pizza, but it's all been fantastic. Any got any good pizza topping suggestions? Unusual options especially appreciated.