Apple Cider

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Posts posted by Apple Cider

  4. Posted

    Hello again folks!

    Due to the success of Readerwatch 2017, the best Overwatch tourney in the known universe, the gang is coming back harder and more aggressive with a 3v3 round robin single elimination Overwatch tournament. 

     

    If you'd like to sign up here, we will get people into teams of their choosing shortly: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_PPLIy2mh7imapUjP4f0lMCT7pWq5pQUroKEXLpmcwk/edit

    Team signups: https://goo.gl/forms/db7faTge5SQrnOfE2

     

    Also join our Slack and the #overwatch channel for more awesome info. 

  6. Posted

    Hi folks:

    I'm organizing an Overwatch tournament for the Slack chat crew and was told to post this on the forums. We're hosting a tiny Overwatch tourney for fun and maybe a prize or two, mostly for fun. It will be teams competing in the custom match format (to be determined how teams are picked and rules) and if you'd like to be a part, get in early and sign up using our awesome registration form:

     

    https://goo.gl/forms/uK7oJRauQm7ZdecA2

     

    We're up to 4 admins right now so I think we're good on those, and this will be streamed (hopefully) but if you have any expertise with running tournaments, streaming or other logistical stuff for this sort of thing, please let me know. I am very new to this. 

     

    Thanks! 

  11. Posted

    So I inadvertently fulfilled the cooking club challenge so I am posting here and will be keeping up on the thread more now!

     

    This is one-wok beef stir fry, definitely not according to any recipe and definitely not authentic in the slightest but still very tasty. 

     

    Ingredients: cheap chuck steak cut into strips, zucchini, carrots, onions, broccoli. I marinated the chuck steak over night in teriyaki marinade with soy sauce, sri racha, ginger, garlic and granulated onion. I made sure to fry the aromatics (garlic/onions) first, then in went the meat, added additional sri racha, soy, ginger. Then carrots/zucchini, then broccoli at the end since it was a frozen bag and I had steamed it in the microwave. Then I added some flour to thicken the sauce a bit in the final product. Poured this over fluffy rice from the rice maker. 

     

    2016-06-27-18-16-52_720.jpg

     

    2016-06-27-18-17-04_720.jpg

  14. Posted

    I think one thing we should do in this thread is explicitly state whether a given drink has been actually constructed and consumed by a human, and whether it's basically palatable or not. That way there's still room for people to just make jokes, but also room to use this as a legitimate cocktail jam, so we can drink them on a stream some time—and so other readers can make them too! (I don't mind drinking some total disasters also but I think it would be tough to sustain after a few super-gross concoctions.)

     

    Yeah, this is why mine doesn't precisely have a working set of instructions yet - this is getting mixed and tested this weekend on my very own guinea pig. For science! 

  15. Posted

    I'm hyped and ready for this!

    Quote

    The Serious Ma'am

    Inspired by a few cocktails including the The Sour Lady but with the flavor profile shifted a bit, some preparations due to change.

    • .25 oz. hibiscus absinthe (key because it provides the pink/red color)
    • 1 oz. vodka
    • 2-3 oz rose champagne
    • few drops of peynaud's bitters
    • 1 oz basil infused simple syrup
    Muddle 1 strawberry with .5 oz of the basil infused simple syrup until well mixed. Dump into glass unceremoniously. In clean shaker, pour .25 oz of the hibiscus absinthe,

    1 oz vodka, .5 oz basil syrup, and then 2-3 oz of the rose, whatever your preference. Shake well with ice until very cold. Pour over strawberry syrup muddle. Add 4-5 drops of

    bitters. Garnish with 2 strawberry slices.

    Edit: So right now the recipe has been modified and we're looking to sample some different methods of preparation. Basically we've decided on muddling the strawberries

    as well as going to try what the final drink looks like shaken vs. stirred. I'm thinking stirred, my friend thinks shaken.

    Edit 2: FINAL FORM POSTED.

    This is seriously a very fruity but slightly herby cocktail that is refreshing and not too heavy on the tongue. Be careful though, this goes down quick and gets you drunker'n fuck.

  18. Posted

    Yeah, I've been moving in that direction myself. I have repeatedly told her (and the other two) that her "reminders" don't do anything besides make me feel bad, but she's got this stock speech about how she believes in "honesty and remembering things how they happened" and I tend to give ground in the face of that because she's not wrong, per se.

     

    Tonight was the first night in a while that I really caught her out, bringing up our former relationship out of nowhere when I was talking about something entirely unrelated and then not backing down when I pointed out how it had nothing to do with anything we'd been saying. If she's not going to apologize for making digs like that when she's cut-and-dried in the wrong, it's probably appropriate for me to get up from the computer or get away from the phone. It's just too bad, I really do want to be friends, but it does seem like she's still mad about me breaking up with her four years ago, even though the relationship was supposedly terrible and all she wants is that part of her life back.

     

    Anyway, thanks for the ear and the sympathy!

     

    Can I ask what's so important about being friends with exes? If it's a principle thing, I ask why it's crucial especially since these exes seem to not be good friends in general, would you tolerate this sort of behavior from non-ex pals? There's no reason to keep shitty people who harp on things that are long and gone all because you dated once. For me, once I started having really close, good friends who treat me really respectfully, I started noticing friends who didn't do that and wondered why I was keeping them around. Friends are not in such short supply that you don't deserve ones that treat you the best! Exes might feel like friends because they know you but it's fairly obvious at least one of them only knows you in a very limited way that is used to hurt you repeatedly and keeps going against your wishes. That's not friend-behavior. That's just rude as fuck. 

     

    Dump the ex!

  19. Posted

    I've been consistently on HTC or Samsung Galaxys (On Galaxy 4 right now) and they have been alright. But yeah, I hate pre-installed apps you can't get rid of. Also, if you get a phone, please get an Otterbox. I know they are kinda huge and clunky but I cannot tell you how many times I have dropped my phone and nothing has happened to it. 

  21. Posted

    I brought it up merely as an example.

     

    Basically, in general, unions won't solve everything, a shift towards better labor practises would be a good step in the gaming industry. As others have said, Nintendo should have ideally shielded their employees better re: harassment, but it sounds like, if Alison is to be believed, that they've been quietly been moving her away from the public for a number of reasons. Which is something a company is allowed to do and I'm not sure if it's a fair thing. The firing due to moonlighting reason seems to point more towards something they found culturally (as in corporate culture) repulsive, which is also weird, but also might not have been something they found out due to the harassment. 

     

    However, none of this seems to be happening to men in general so it feels like the two problems with both Nintendo's corporate culture and game companies not protecting employees. 

     

    Do I wish huge swarms of people were not posting Miitomo pics? Yeah, maybe? On the other hand, I don't go to Chick-fil-A and they seem to still have millions of restaurants. The downside to why I think boycotting is overall sort of useless is because a) the system is rigged for it to not hurt the right people B) individual actions amount to very little in the face of large corporations 

     

    Is it really frustrating to see this sort of thing play out? Absolutely and that's something I get. But we need a lot of people to be on the same page here in order to get Nintendo or any gaming company to actually care about all of their employees in that way. Same with getting companies to protect their employees regarding big harassment groups. 

  22. Posted

    I generally push for talking about and sharing/raising consciousness about unionization and labor practises. Because this was a shitty thing for an employer to do to anyone, let alone Nintendo. The game industry has a horrific history and legacy of treating employees like shit. 

     

    Generally I don't observe or promote boycotts just for that reason - it often hurts people at the bottom line rather than the top and there's very little ethical consumption under capitalism. So I opt to try and put more of my money, voice and time into positive actions like labor reform (I went to big union rallies in Wisconsin when Walker was trying to bust those up in our state.) It's something very needed for gaming. 

     

    Alison's story was up on CNN tonight, actually, which is kinda mindblowing. 

  23. Posted

    I wasn't making a point about what the worst thing was, only talking about that in relation to how I have complicated feelings about all this. I am not even sure why I feel upset about it because this post literally went up on Gamasutra an hour and fifteen ago and I'm sure it will be applauded for being fair despite being a larger summation of precisely the same things I said: 

     

    http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BrandonSheffield/20160331/269430/Why_I_canceled_my_Wii_U_game.php

     

    See? That's how you do it, I guess! Weird. 

  24. Posted

    No, it's not an open invitation. But that varnish gets carried out indefinitely, mostly by male allies. It's an intracommunity thing that just never gets talked about really, but unlike a lot of random dudes online, a lot of feminists I know have way more decorum. What harassment campaigns have effectively done is flattened the ability to have a normal amount of public disagreement down to nothing. 

  25. Posted

    I get the discomfort, but I think it's resolvable to feel 'i disagree with this person' and 'the conversation about whether this person is agreeable or not is not appropriate to this discussion of whether the way nintendo treated her is okay.' at the same time.

     

    It's a weird situation though. I think the upshot here is that, while her views are debatable and maybe questionable (I don't really know), the discussion on those views has to be taken outside of the venue her harassers have defined -- of course, once you do that, and the stakes no longer include nintendo or her job, it quickly becomes apparent that there's no real reason to talk about what some random lady thinks about the sexualization of minors with no outside context.

     

    Well, I mean, I'm an adult and I know how to conduct myself politely, I was just explaining my thoughts on it. 

     

    But this is an interesting point about social justice and how it plays out online: a lot of people are quite alright turning a blind eye to someone's sketchier politics if their overall points seem sound. Alison is known around the "circle" for being a pretty outspoken feminist in games, that's how I came across her vs. being a Nintendo person. A lot of men, in particular, like pedastalling women as feminists and getting angry when feminists disagree with eachother because there's always the good/bad woman narrative. It makes no one "random" in that way. A lot of the major targets of harassment have become so galvanized because of the harassment campaigns that it becomes nigh impossible for anyone to tackle what they say genuinely about any topic. So in this way, this is doubly why I hate GG: not only are they putting people through hell, they have effectively shut down needed discourse about publicly-held views on things.