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I’d be a homemade salt and vinegar waffle cut chip. With heaps tartar sauce and bbq sauce and fiery hot sauce to dip. Oh, it makes me hungry to contemplate it. I’d be so frightfully yummy!
On Birdsite. Seriously, a passed-on friend I miss often. I’m starting a new project for hereabouts for his memory.
Online is perhaps the absolutely worst place to make a friend. This fact bears out most sadly in web2.0 social media. Fame culture shreds authenticity; parasocial posturing undercuts trust. Social media is only really about the tawdry and superficial, and no where more pathetically so than in those of us who play online advocate or philosopher. But the cruelties of anomie and atomism can be breached still, with a good kick from Serendip above. A bit of Courage within helps, too. Something should be at stake.
Oh, ye gods, save foolish humanity from our folly!
Generally, the best stories have no facile bad guy / good guy dichotomy. And I prefer tales with such nuance. Off the cuff: I mostly abhor latter day superhero films as fascist art, but must admit to sympathizing with Magneto. (And who cannot adore Ian McClellan.) Shakespeare goes deeper, natch, slyly exposing the dark tides which float the groupthink of “good regular folks” through the figures of Malvolio, Shylock, and inversely, Othello.
On the whole, it’s best not to “identify” with a protagonist nor antagonist neither. Sympathy of some kind, or at least empathy, can bridge any gap, and should. I recently saw an awful bit of alternate-historical miniseries in which the antagonists were literally Adolf and Eva Hitler. But the protagonists were muddled up in such egregiously cruel 2010’s torture porn backed by merest vengeance that I hazard even the morally densest could excuse their blithe zealotry altogether. That doesn’t make the Nazis any better, natch. But it does underline that there are truly no monsters amongst humanity … unless we dare to deem humanity monstrous entirely. And I’ll leave that hook, not take this line too far here, haha.
I reckon all this is to say, mulling this a bit: I seldom have a default preference for a protagonist nor antagonist. There is no inherent link between them, morally. Or at least the link is one of properly understood liquid karma, not a rigid balance of righteousness. It’s a normative cipher I don’t think everyone has. It’s just not how I approach tales, anyway. A tale’s protagonist must earn my concern.
Sympathize with decisions and situations and fallible hearts, not the facetious posturing of absolute justice.
Oh, hon, I dunno. If we on smolnet cared much about “gussied up”, we wouldn’t be on smolnet. You’re fab as you are, doing what you do with what you can spare.
Your 5Q have become a smolnet tradition. An institution. I appreciate your efforts at least. If you really want to touch up the lime wash, I’d just say make a standard single introductory passage for 5Q, referring a directory of prior months’ queries. A new 5Q page each month installed therein, and just leave the cataloging to the gopher / Gemini directory logics. Just link to the directory from your main page(s) and then let it roll. People could then just subscribe to the directory. I think it would mean less fussing with things for you, to drop a new txt/gmi into a folder and not touch old page text. “KISS” is helpful here. To reappropriate a web-ism: your content is Queen.
If you really want gussy, drop some ascii art in. Everyone likes cute ascii art, I hazard even the grumpies who claim they don’t!
It sounds absurd to mine eyes to boast about my cooking skills, but… pizza? No one does pizza like I do it. Not even close. I use the 3D’s: Deep dish, Delectable, Daringly huge.
…my pizzas are made from scratch. I first pound out a hearty dough of rough stone ground wheat flour and flax. I mean rough. Gluten like sinew, but with a gnawsome gravel. It must have grit to raise the massive mounds of cheese, sauce, and veggies I pile on top. And I pile in that order intentionally. The cheese should seal the top of the bread, which is undergirded on bottom and sides by a bubbling Oceanus of good quality olive oil. The sauce then doesn’t soggy the dough. And the veggies get crisped on top while not drying out. If a pizza isn’t 1 full English inch thick, it is a sin against world gastronomy. So the crust must be a mighty Atlas.
…I layer the herbs and spices, and always put the barbecue on last. Broccoli. Great gobs of it above onion and bell pepper, roasted on top with the bbq sauce. A bit of soy sauce. Garlic, emphatically! And fresh rosemary and oregano, refreshed when the pizza is almost done. The pizza should have zest, above a well-integrated tomato and mushroom medley. To that end, it must be cooked slowly in a hardy cast iron pan. None of this chintzy store aluminum. The pan needs memories, a heavy rudder guided by ghosts of kitchens past. It must be forged in love, or the pizza will fail.
…I have such a pan, a vast prairie platter which needs two hands to lift even without a pizza in it. The thing is veritably Jovian, anime-esque in dimensions, a real husband’s head smasher. The handle is removable, a 2 inch thick wagon axle shaft which requires a twist bolt to secure to the pan on each use. It is as glittering black as the first midnight of the month, a rich ebony of proto-diamond. The lore I received from the large Mormon family from whom I bought it was that it served them eggs around the camp fire for many years. They assured me no one had dared to wash it. My pizza must needs avail of such a platter, for when done right, it comes out of an oven after an hour more like a baked casserole, crispy all over but juicy inside, atop a stout Scandinavian salt cake.
With such a weighty tradition, so to speak, I am betimes left morose and unsatisfied by any flaccid, insulting, pretty Princess chain store pizza. Believe my macha braggadocio on this point, I beg. Not long ago, a “pizza” was properly called a “pizza *pie*”. And by the good gods of Chicago, it had better be one!
Virtually no friend eats my pizza pies without a fork. Children cannot help but clean their plates of the greasy veggies. And absolutely all my pizza suppers leave heaps leftovers. When I serve pizza, it is an event, and I toil my jolly darnedest to see no one walks away with less than 5 lbs more on their ribs than with which they sat down. No middle-class Anglo-American daintiness here, thank you. No, ma’am. I don’t entertain often. But when Aunty Shufei serves pizza, you wear your big plastic babby bib and come ready to play.
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