Because I was originally planning on just having the plate of cheese until I discovered there were a couple of leftover tortillas which would make the "meal" marginally less miserable.

Though I think that melting it on the tortilla wouldn't have worked as well: the melted cheese had a wee layer of oil which I poured off onto a paper towel; also, to melt the cheese, I had to do it in a few short blasts, rearranging/"stirring" the cheese each time. I think that had I done this on the tortilla, it would have become a soggy mess.

Your question is a good one though, and I hadn't considered it until I read your comment.

I think one of the really neat things about games as a medium is that "the experience" is inherently a super malleable concept. Gaming blows my mind when I think about how adaptive you need to be to run a tabletop roleplaying game, like Dungeons and Dragons — no matter how elaborate your plans are, players will always find a way to throw a spanner in the works. Video games have the same unpredictability of how players engage with the world you've made, but a much smaller ability to respond and adapt to ensure that they're getting the correct "intended experience".

In some respects, I agree with you, because when I play games, I care a lot about the intended experience. However, the reality is that I bring too much of myself to any game that I play to be able to think of my experience in that way, and I think that's probably one of my favourite aspects of games as a medium — a dialogue between gamer and game developers. Especially because sometimes, the intended experience of a game isn't well executed; there are plenty of times I have gotten lost or confused in games because the game didn't sufficiently communicate to me (or other players with similar experiences) what it expected us to do. Part of the role of the game designer/developers role is to be guide the players so they get something resembling the intended experience.

Honestly, part of why I am on the pro-accessibility side of this issue is because I'm a bit of a snob — I think that being able to adapt a message or experience to a diverse audience shows a singularity of vision that's more powerful than experiences that target a much smaller audience.

For example, let's say that the subjective difficulty level of a game (the "experience") equals the "objective difficulty level" of a game (the difficulty setting) minus the player's skill level. For the sake of this example, let's imagine that 10 arbitrary units is the correct level of the subjective difficulty level, and above/below that, the experience is degraded; also, let's say that player skill ranges from 1-10, with most people clustering in the 4-6 range. In that world, if a game could only have one difficulty mode, 15 ish would probably be best, because 15 (objective difficulty) - 5 (average player skill level) = 10 (intended subjective difficulty level). I don't begrudge game Devs for targeting limited audiences if that's what they feel capable of, but I do massively respect the craftsmanship of being able to build a game that can serve a subjective 10 to a wide range of people, by having a range of difficulty settings.

I have an experience relating to game difficulty and accessibility that you would probably appreciate.

I was playing Rimworld for the first time, and because I was aware of how huge disasters that wipe out most of your work (that you can sometimes build back from) is a part of the game, I felt bad about playing the game on the mode that allows you to load earlier saves; I would find losing progress in this way more stressful than fun, so I wanted the ability to reverse poor fortune or choices, even if it felt like I was "dishonouring the intended experience".

However, a friend (who was the reason I had bought Rimworld in the first place, and who enjoyed the chaos of no-save mode) pointed out that whilst the no-save mode may be presented as the default, the mode with saves enabled is presented as a perfectly valid way to enjoy the game. This made me feel immensely better about it, and I was able to dispel the silly guilt I was feeling. It highlighted to me the power of how we label difficulty settings and other accessibility settings.

Games are a funny medium.

I enjoyed using phyphox while on a plane recently. I found it fun to track the pressure and to see how it loosely corresponded to my own subjective experience of ascending vs descending.

I can't recall any "useful" things I've used the app for, but I really enjoy having it — it makes me feel powerful. Like, it's nice to think that if I did have some ideas of experiments to run, I could. It feels fitting to be able to access the sensors, because there are many ways in which our electronic devices nowadays aren't (or don't feel like) our own, so this feels like a small amount of clawing back power, even if I'm not using it for much.

Yesterday for dinner, I microwaved some red Leicester cheese on a plate, and then I scooped it onto a tortilla. I feel this image

I made a few Romanian friends in university. Granted you're going to get some skewed perspectives when talking to expats, but each one of them said that Romania was a shit hole that they were glad to have escaped. Decree 770 (and other policies that were enacted by the same regime, that have left a scar on the country) was a large part of why.

I used to know someone who worked on Assassin's Creed 3 (and probably other games, but idk). They told me about how surreal and disheartening it was to work somewhere so bafflingly huge. The part of the game they worked on was small and insignificant, but they were the kind of person to take pride in small things done well, and as such, they were pleased with what they had made. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this was something that they had made, and they didn't mind being a small cog.

That is, until the game released and they got to see the rest of the game. They were immensely disappointed to see that clearly many components of the game didn't have nearly the same amount of care put into them, and furthermore, coordination between different teams/systems was poorly executed. The game wasn't bad (imo), but it was fairly meh, and it certainly felt undeserving of the effort my friend put into it.

They ended up checking out somewhat from their work after that, because they became disillusioned with the idea of being a small cog in a big machine — part of what allowed them to do such good work was that they immersed themselves in what they and their immediate team were working on, but that approach only works if you can trust that the rest of the project is well managed and resourced.

I fell out of contact with that friend, but I often think about them, and how effectively they captured the dismay they felt to realise that in a big machine like Ubisoft, it's probably naive to care about your work. One of their colleagues had the thing they made not even feature in the game — it was cut, fairly last minute (and they didn't even find out until release). This story was striking because it highlights how, even in soulless AAA games, churned out by corporate behemoths, there are people who do genuinely care about their work (until the company grinds that care into dust as they wring their workers dry). It's quite tragic, actually.

This might be helpful, or it might be unrelated.

Recently, I made mozzarella from scratch. In order to do that, I needed some milk that wasn't homogenised. Homogenisation is the process of breaking up the fat globules within milk into smaller droplets so they're more evenly dispersed throughout the liquid, meaning there won't be a fatty layer that separates out when you leave the milk to stand.

Most milk that you buy at the supermarket would be both homogenised and pasteurised. I learned that pasteurised milk could work for cheese, depending on the specific temperature the milk was heated to during pasteurisation (because the required minimum temperature for pasteurization is below the temperature that causes issues for mozzarella, but some brands pasteurise at a higher temperature. Unfortunately most brands don't say what temperature they pasteurise at, but I got lucky with the first one I tried). That part's not especially relevant to you and is mostly cheese related

The thing I wanted to suggest, out of scientific curiosity more than helpfulness, is that I wonder how your son would do with pasteurised, non-homogenised milk — perhaps it's the homogenisation that's causing the problem, rather than the pasteurisation. If you do try this, I'd be interested to hear back how things go; I haven't heard of anyone having issues like this before

It's a lazy joke, but with the net left wide open to it, it'd be rude not to

It's very difficult to say "All Souls College" without sounding like you're saying "Arsehole's College"

This isn't a problem of being pregnant while in law school. This is a problem of someone's Title IX protections being violated. Your comment implies that you think that Brittany Lovely was unwise to continue at law school while pregnant, but it's fairly reasonable to expect a law school to be following the law.

When I first switched to Linux, I was nonplussed at why many videos didn't work. It ended up being a positive learning experience, but it certainly would be nice if the codecs could be shipped directly, as you say.

Oh man, now I want to read this textbook.

It's not quite the same thing, but the other week I was complaining about good Vs bad maths textbooks and I said "I don't want to learn maths from a textbook that doesn't reference beauty at least once"

This is unrelated to the article you're sharing now, but I read that (I agree thoroughly that the GDPR needs to be a start, but that it's inconsistently followed/enforced) and then I saw and read your article about apathetic cis people who might be agender. That's a neat perspective that I hadn't considered before — I'm cis and very much not apathetic about my gender (and I sometimes experience dysphoria if I am not treated as my gender). However, I have a bunch of other friends who have described their attachment to their gender as being far more "meh", and I am looking forward to getting a chance to discuss your article with them.

It strikes me that most of my friends are some flavour of LGBTQIA+, but I don't know anyone who is agender. However, 10 years ago, many of my friends who now are non-binary didn't know a term for their experience of gender, so identified as the closest they could find (such as lesbian). I wonder how many people I know who might find that "agender" feels like a fitting identity, if it were more prevalent in discourse etc.

This isn't quite the same thing, but a friend wasn't allowed on an airplane because their surname was double barrelled with a hyphen in the middle (I.e. Smith-Jones). The airline seemed to strip the hyphen, so their boarding pass said SmithJones, but their passport said Smith-Jones. They missed their flight and they weren't able to get a refund or compensation like you would usually be able to, because the airline refused to acknowledge that they had fucked up. My friend ended up having to take it to small claims court, where they won by default.

"This is almost pure coconut."

That makes me think drainage/aeration is a problem. (Disclaimer: I have never grown cannabis; my input here comes from many houseplants). I tend to use perlite to improve drainage - I think I use 1:1 ratio of cococoir and perlite as a baseline, but I'm not 100% sure on that

This sounds really frustrating.

I used to live similarly close to a bell tower (it was a big, old university). I don't remember how long it took me to get used to it, but it did end up being that I barely noticed the sound. It was weird to visit a friend for a few nights in the same area after having moved away — the bells were so loud and annoying that I could barely sleep or focus on things.

My intention with this comment is to try to reassure you that it is possible to become acclimatised to the sound such that it doesn't cause significant issues. Adjusting to things like this can be extra difficult if you're already experiencing mental health stress, so you might find that you're not able to acclimatise, but there are definitely people who would be fine with buying property near a church, if it comes to that (people like me who have always lived somewhere loud)

That actually akes a lot of sense to me, and it makes me appreciate Wesley more for being someone for kids could relate to. I only started watching Trek when I was cynical adult, so that might explain why I've only seen him in that light

This quote is very funny. "Hypothetically, one might expect..."

The Cult of the Red Circle teaches that if you circle irrelevant things, people will be desensitized to aberrations.

Ever wonder why some pictures have useless red circles, highlighting something obvious? This is why.