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Friday, July 14th, 2017
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1:07a |
| 1:29a |
Eating from the Earth: Hank Shaw's Hunter Angler Gardener Cook blog http://www.metafilter.com/168202/Eating-from-the-Earth-Hank-Shaws-Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook-blog "Grain, or more accurately dependence on grain, is what separated farmers from foragers, Jacob from Esau. Grains underpin civilization: portable, easily renewable, nutritionally dense foods that can be grown in surplus and stored or kept from those the holder deems unworthy...So how did grain fall from sacred to commonplace? To become something tossed about without thought, wasted, even scorned?" Hank Shaw, proprietor of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, considers the miracle of seeds from grasses in "A Grain of Wheat." Shaw's blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, is a treasure trove for readers wondering what to do with their freshly-killed wild game ( on hanging pheasants; beer can pheasant), freshly-caught fish and seafood ( classic fish and chips), or freshly-foraged finds ( wild greens).
His writing on what it takes to get from a grain to a loaf of bread is one of a number of essays on topics such as:
* Enough: Thrift, Equilibrium and a Full Freezer
* Mortality: A Garden(er's) Middle Age
* Work: The Hands of a Gatherer
* The Hunter's Paradox: Loving What You Kill
Shaw's writing is thoughtful and instructive, and his sitenamed Best Food Blog by the James Beard Foundation in 2013is worth exploring, whether you're interested in learning more about charcuterie, or just reading a few fish stories. (Hank Shaw, previously and previously.) | 2:00a |
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Why are we so Unwilling to take Sylvia Plath at her word? http://www.metafilter.com/168207/Why-are-we-so-Unwilling-to-take-Sylvia-Plath-at-her-word I want to point out the cultural bias against women's voices and the domestic truths of women's lives and the deep role this has played in painting Plath as both a pathetic victim and a Cassandra-like, genius freak. It is only in a culture where these two things be claimed simultaneously that Hughes, a known philanderer and violent partner, can spend forty years botching the editing of, or outright destroying, his estranged, now dead wife's work, then win every conceivable literary prize and be knighted by the Queen. It is only in this culture that Plath can tell of his abuse, in print, for the better part of the same 40 years, only to have the same reports in a handful of letters recognized as "shocking." | 7:12a |
| 11:43a |
"Countless unfair deaths, mostly caused by a horribly haphazard jump." http://www.metafilter.com/168209/Countless-unfair-deaths-mostly-caused-by-a-horribly-haphazard-jump Crash Bandicoot: An Oral History [Polygon] "Naughty Dog released Crash Bandicoot [YouTube] for Sony's original PlayStation in September 1996. In it, the team took an old idea and changed its point of view, redesigning the idea of a 2D sidescroller and planting the camera behind its protagonist's back for the majority of the game. To learn more about what happened along the way, we recently spoke to the entire development team, contractors, musicians, marketers and others, hearing a story of long nights, groundbreaking technology, unbearable crunches and expensive parties. However, not every story lines up the same way, with some feeling that Naughty Dog discredited their contributions by burying who actually created the flagship character. One thing rings true throughout: The tales culminate in the creation of a game that redefined the platformer genre and laid some of the early cornerstones for making Naughty Dog the juggernaut development studio it is today." " Crash Bandicoot is gaming's ultimate nostalgia act, and that's okay [AV Club] "We so often get hung up on assigning importance to innovation and influence that we forget that cultural context is just as, if not more, relevant to a work's legacy. From reading all the jubilant appraisals of the N. Sane Trilogy and talking to our own William Hughes, the closest thing to a Crash fan on our staff, one of the big reasons these games are so fondly remembered is that they filled a huge Mario/Sonic-shaped void in the lives of young PlayStation owners. The console's early years were flooded with iconic games, but Crash was the first real kid-friendly mascot it ever had. His games were more goofy and vibrant than any of his polygonal contemporaries, and when you throw in the fact that they were difficult and secret-filled enough to require tons of replaying, you get a series that resonated with a lot of people at a very specific time and asked them to invest so much of themselves in it."
" The (re)making of 'Crash Bandicoot' [Endgadget] "In trying to understand what Naughty Dog was going for, and how it achieved so much with so little back in 1996, the team found itself constantly referencing a wealth of original concept art, audio files, level geometry and the legacy games themselves. With two decades' worth of advancements at its disposal, a simple touch-up didn't excite the team. "We felt the standard remaster approach, of moving geometry over and raising the resolution of textures, would not be the right course for such an iconic character," said Dustin King, the game's lead artist. "We're fans. We've spent a significant amount of time -- the previous six months before joining the Crash project -- working on the franchise, working on what makes Crash Crash," said lead level designer Leo Zuniga. "When we joined [this] team, we had plenty of lessons learned but were still thinking, 'How are we going to emulate [the originals] and do Naughty Dog justice?'""
" Crash Bandicoot: The Game That Loves to Rub Your Face in Failure [Kotaku] "Punishing stages that stretch on and on, grinding down your enthusiasm with cheesy padding and crummy tricks. Terribly explained one-off mechanics that briefly surface, bemuse, infuriate, then slink back underground just as your blood is reaching boiling point. (I'm looking at you and your frustratingly random blackouts, Light Outs level). It's not that Crash is always necessarily super difficult the first set of stages on N. Sanity Island serve up a fairly gentle introduction to the pit-jumping, crate-smashing action. The problem is, even when you're succeeding, there's a sense the game forever wants to take you down a peg or two. Example? Every level ends with a completion screen that literally brings Crash to his knees unless you break 100% of the crates lying around a stage. Considering how taxing the core meat-and-potatoes platforming is, you'll often miss a bunch of hard-to-reach crates in favour of pushing onto the next checkpoint. In most levels, I was lucky if I even smashed half of these apple-filled boxes cue a 10 second stage-closing segment where Crash is pelted with every single crate he missed. Joy."
" Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy Review [Slant Magazine] "What, then, does Crash Bandicoot have to offer audiences in 2017, on a platform that currently plays host to no shortage of creative miracles as far as platformers go? Yes, the video-game compilation Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy does breathe new visual life into Crash Bandicoot, Cortex Strikes Back, and Warped. The slipshod, ancient polygons of these games have been given a top-to-bottom overhaul for the 21st century. Jungles are lush, vibrant places, and the textures and movements of every enemy live and breathe with realistic textures, while maintaining their trademark cartoonish animations. Water is crystal clear and inviting. But the gameplay throughout remains nothing short of bafflingly difficult. That fact is in sharp contrast with the actual mechanics of these games. The playing field is a limited-view corridor, with no way to get lost, and the controls are one small step above those of Super Mario Bros.: one button to jump, another to do a spin attack against enemies, and, starting with the second game, a third that let's you slide and crawl. A younger player wouldn't be wrong comparing Crash Bandicoot to Temple Run."
| 12:57p |
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| 4:15p |
Coal Miners Are 0.019% Of All Workers http://www.metafilter.com/168216/Coal-Miners-Are-0019-Of-All-Workers "The working class that actually exists bears little resemblance to the fantasies of the affluent, highly educated hacks who are paid to vomit their thoughts into newspaper columns. The new American working class is far more likely to be bussing tables at Applebee's than wolfing down reheated appetizers until their Dockers rip. But many columnists put outsize focus on the most traditionally masculine blue-collar professions, many of which make up a negligible percentage of the total workforce." Stop Patronizing The Working Class, Alex Nichols for eThe Outline. | 4:15p |
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Parliamentary fights! http://www.metafilter.com/168222/Parliamentary-fights Taiwan's feisty parliament, the Legislative Yuan, descended into fistfights, water balloon launches, and chair throwing again this week over a massive infrastructure spending plan. Members of the opposition Kuomintang clad in blue swarmed the podium. against the green-wearing Democratic Progressive Party, the latest in decades of dust-ups between the two camps. After the end of one-party rule, Taiwanese politics was locked in struggle between, simplified, the largely pro-indepedence DPP and the pro-reunification KMT., with fights most often started by the opposition party when other avenues have been exhausted. Fights have broke out over a fourth nuclear power plant, trade deals with mainland China, featuring slapping speakers, eating legislation, and food fights. The Legislative Yuan was awarded an Ig Nobel "demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations."
Elsewhere around the world, South Koreans have barricaded doors to prevent quorums and launched tear gas ( previously) into the chamber. Fights have also happened in Ukraine, Georgia, Turkey, and Russia.
Other nations have also had legislative violence, which was more common in America's younger days. In 1856, South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks savagely beat Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner with a cane. One Alabama state representative punched another. More recently, scuffles broke out at the Texas state house when one legislator called Immigration and Customs Enforcement on protesters. | 6:29p |
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