Nuggetty Goodness

Recipes act as a guide at best. There are so many variables so that you can't duplicate the dish exactly. At best, you approximate. Learn instead, to be guided by your own sense of taste and experiment with flavour combination. This often requires some imagination. This is not going to come to you immediately. Patiently, build up your experience and palate. As always, this will come more naturally or easily to some. Some will have a longer learning curve. But if you are always relying on recipes, you will not be able to break out of that. Your learning curve has not even begun.

Recipes are like GPS. There are often helpful to get you to your destination. But over-rely on it, and you will cease to think or map out your own sense of direction. After a while, without GPS, you become a stranger in your own city.

That is the same problem with cooking entirely from recipes. We use the ingredients without asking why and we never seek to understand the essence of the dish. The experience with the dish remains contained within itself, locked in its own recipe, and you will never try to do something else from it.    

- Cooking without a recipe, The Food Canon

Today we are told we can rest assured that visual design is no longer so vacuous and superficial, due to the advent of flat design.

I take a different stance. 'Pure veneer' is not an insult in my book. Quite the opposite, it is the very definition of visual design. Thinking visual design is anything but superficial not only requires a profound level of ignorance, but it indicates an incredibly limited view of what visual communication can accomplish.

These rationalizations by newly turned modern minimalists are incredibly telling. If prominent practitioners are being honest with us in claiming that visual design was plagued by harmful decoration only up until the advent of flat design, then they are admitting that for years, for the history of the GUI, and perhaps even the entire history of design itself, designers have been putting on a sham project in order to dupe corporations.

Worse still, claims of visual design's insignificance tell us that design leaders never took their craft seriously. It truly undermines their credibility that it took the arrival of flat design for them to treat the entire spectrum of roles in product design with respect. Of course, as soon as that happened, they graduated from respecting traditional interface design principles.

This so-called 'maturation' in the vast majority of the design industry is in this way a major indictment of the professional history of these practitioners. If anyone should be condemned, it should not be those accused of the crime of visual design, but those practitioners who treat their job as frivolous.

Perhaps the design world breeds a form of narcissism due to its nature as a winner-take-all economy. That would explain the logic of this race to the bottom in which designers feel compelled to attack their craft before others assume they are 'bullshitters' too. In the words of Dr. Sam Vaknin:

By pre-empting society’s punitive measures and by self-flagellating, the narcissist is actually saying: 'If I am to suffer unjustly, it will be only by my own hand and no one else's.'

It is this masochistic status-striving that I find so ugly in this industry. That he who discredits his own craft is the most pious. That the most respected designer is the one who disowns beauty. This perpetual need to be the first to assign irrelevancy to one's own professional practice is the true impetus behind much of the puritanism of modern minimalist avant gardism.

I got a wok!

And I didn't set my apartment on fire! (My last personal encounter with a wok resulted in a fire - just a tiiiiny one - in the middle of my wok, and failed Home Economics exam.)

AND I managed to make *proper* Cantonese sweet and sour pork omg! I was so surprised that it all got eaten without any documentation. :P

Not sure I would make it again though... so much *work*! I guess it depends on how desperate I get to find real sweet and sour pork done right in Melbourne. I found only one place, that did it right ONE time, and then they changed the darn cook! Hrmph.

>.> Now, about that sauce... I hate tomatoes, so I had to find some other way to get a nice, authentic-tasting sauce... (I don't care about authentic ingredients, I just care about authentic taste.)

Behold - my cheaty non-tomato sweet and sour sauce!

As usual, I didn't actually measure anything, so this is me thinking of what I madly shook into the bowl and approximating. :P

Crafting materials
2 large oranges (juice and zest)
4 tbsp caster sugar
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
4 tsp cornstarch
3 drops red food colouring, 1 drop yellow (totally optional, it doesn't look traditionally 'red' enuff without the colouring, cause no evil tomatoes)
Tiny bit of salt (optional - only needed if you think the stuff you're putting it on may not be savoury enuff.)

Crafting method

1. Zest oranges
2. Squeeze tiny bit of juice into some kind of microwave-safe container
3. Add cornstarch and stir until you get a slurry
4. Add rest of orange juice, orange zest, sugar, balsamic vinegar, and food colouring + salt if using
5. Stir stir stir until sort of homogenous
6. Nuke for 3m to 5m
7. Check on the sauce in 30s intervals. You want it to turn sticky and drippy, but still liquid. Sort of like... wimpy glue in the sponge-topped bottles that they give to kids to do paper art or school crafts (...not sure if they even still make that lol)
   Wait no nevermind, better description! You want it to turn sticky and drippy, but still liquid, like warm honey! Woot! :P
   You can make the sauce on the stove as well if you don't have a microwave... But in that case, I have no idea how long it takes, just what it should be like (see above).
   

That's it really... >.>

From C.J. Cherryh's Ealdwood series. Ha, it's very similar to the Whelan cover! Oh well! XD

Lilith Saintcrow's Jill Kismet.

Alas! I couldn't fit the whip in there nicely somehow. XD

While I don't like the hero much, Eric van Lustbader's Nicholas Linnear series of books are great fun! He writes the most wonderful Bad Girls. ;)

And so we have Shisei Omuke, from White Ninja (no, no, it doesn't mean Caucasian ninja - though lol... that was the initial conclusion I jumped to)!

Funny post by Khoi Vinh! The post itself isn't particularly good (though funny), but the comments section is very long, and has some real gems.

Since I'm now working on enterprise software, it's suddenly really, really easy to tell from the comments, who's actually been there and done that, too.

The dynamics of power when it comes to the users vs purchasers of enterprise software was one of the hardest things for me to adjust to initially, when coming from B2C agencyland, as it were.

These two comments really stood out for me, but if you bother to trawl through the whole lot, there are a couple more good ones. :)

If you've worked on enterprise software at all, your head will be nodding and nodding like one of those bobbly dogs...

After years of resisting PWE's blandishments, and never, ever using real money to buy fashion, I have been seduced by Tera instead.

Behold, the first digital fashion thingie I have *ever* used my Real Moneh for. And out of a loot box to boot lol.

Undone by cats. =O.o=

Mew!