by Kathleen Connors via DesignTaxi

Soooo... way back in Home Economics class, I was forced to wave a lighter around in the depths of a huge gas oven while hoping desperately that my paw didn't go up in a ball of nuggetty flame once the damn thing finally lit. This led to (what I am told) is an unreasonably traumatised nugget's fear of ovens of any sort. GETITAWAYFROMMEEEEE! AAAA this recipe sez 'Oven', I dun need this steenking recipe!

>.> Thus, this here tasty roasted miso-5spice duck of doooomy doom represents an impressive evolution of the nugget's cheffery skeelz. It is my very first oven-thingie ever, and I didn't even use a spice pack! Of course, this also means the recipe below will be in even more nuggetly vague measurements than usual.

Though I am juicy golden-battered chicken to the core, I must confess, I loooooooooooooooooooove duck. >.> Especially duck legs. I've really been missing cheap roasted duck legs with all their drippy slurpy fatty juices. Luckily, these turned out wonderful. They don't exactly have the traditional taste of the duck legs I've been missing, but I don't care! Nao I can haz juicy fatty drippy slurpy duck legs anytime I want, yay!

As a (semi) independent endorsement, the nuggetboy ate 3 of the 4 duck legs pictured here, and they weren't small. XD

Roasted 5-spice Miso Duck

• 4 duck legs (South Melbourne market had them labelled as 'Duck Maryland')
• 4 potatoes, quartered
• Some butter for the potatoes
• 2 heaped (and I mean really really heaped, talking 2 inches high here...) tablespoons of miso paste
• 3ish glugs of chinese cooking wine
• couple of shakes of 5 spice powder
• a few glops of honey
• 3ish glops of ginger (I use tube stuff cause I'm a lazy nugget) / 3 teaspoons of finely chopped ginger
• 2ish glops of lemongrass (see above about the ginger...)
• 2ish glops of garlic (see above about the ginger again...)
• 1 glop of oyster sauce

Glop: The amount of thick sauce that glops out of a bottle in a single squeeze or shake.

Make da stuff

1. Mix everything that isn't duck, potato, or butter together until it forms a smooth paste.
2. Give the duck a sexy massage by rubbing the paste into every nook and cranny.
3. Cover duck and stuff it in fridge.
4. Ignore duck for minimum 2 hours, but best for at least 6 hours. (Miso isn't actually meant to be a marinade, so it seems to take longer.)
5. Take marinated duck out of fridge, and arrange on some kind of baking container that won't let the tasty duck juices run off and drip into the oven. No duck juices for the oven! *selfish*
6. Preheat oven to 190C (mine has a fan).
   
7. Stuff duck in oven. Duck should sit in oven for about 1 hour.
8. Parboil potatoes.
9. Fish parboiled potatoes out of pot, slather them in butter. (The parboiling took me about 15 minutes.)
10. Pull duck outta oven, plop potatoes into baking container thing. Ideally the potatoes should sit in areas with lots of juicy fatty duck juice, but if you haven't got enough space (I didn't), just stuff them in where you can.
11. Plop duck and potatoes back in oven for 45 more minutes / until the hour is up. (Depends on how long the parboiling took.)
12. Remoof duck and potatoes. Let rest for 5ish minutes, or for as long as you can control yourself and/or other denizens, anyway.
13. NOM! NOOOOM! NOmNomNOMONOmoMONoMOOM!
14. That is all.
    

While I've picked up a rather eclectic design skillset over the course of my career, including (but not limited to), web design, copywriting, packaging, animation, and front-end development, there's a single passion that unites all these things.

Improving people's lives by giving them kinder, saner tools.

Yup. Cliched. Corny as Hell. Still true.

I'm not talking world-shaking, changing-the-course-of-history improvements.

I'm talking small, everyday improvements. Improvements that make someone's day just a little bit better, preferably over an extended period of time. An easy, concrete example? Search with autocomplete. And there are so many, many more.

I believe that the tools we use should give us feelings of delight or mastery - or at very least, not make us feel like idiots. Kinder, saner software (because software is a product and a tool, as well as a service) isn't just good for customers, it's good for software companies too.

These kinder, saner tools are the ones that

...we vote for with our wallets.

...help us do things more quickly, more easily, more painlessly, and sometimes, even more enjoyably.

...allow us to go home after a hard day's work with the satisfaction of a job well done - and not the frustration of having spent a day fighting the very software that's supposed to help us.

And if, at the end of the day, I get to make these tools look sexy - that's a bonus. ;)

It doesn't bug me at all that my slip of a girl Lancer somehow fights on foot with a lance twice her height and with a haft that is about the width of her waist.

It doesn't bug me that she has stiletto heels on her solleret, to go with her lingerie platemail.

But DAMN, it really freaking bothers me that she rides sidesaddle! LOL!

...drive-bys where someone with a semiautomatic fires all-out at a kindergarten kid.

I really like AoW, I think the justice system is one of the nicest I've ever seen (including MUDs), and they've done many, many things right. The above still holds true though. ;)

Not quite the screenshots I intended to post, but this was so silly that I had to share it. ;)

Yes, AoW is full, open-world PvP. Yes, carebear nugget likes it. It feels more like a PK MUD + sandbox than any other MMO I've played, and the world feels like a ... world!

I think one of the reasons the silliness of this dialogue works so well is that (pesky players aside), in other places almost all of AoW is totally IC (in character), and even this one is subtly done.

"I was part of the WELL almost from the very beginning. The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link was founded in the spring of 1985 - before Mark Zuckerberg's first birthday. I joined in August of that first year.

I can't remember how many WELL parties, chili cook-offs, trips to the circus, and other events - somewhat repellingy called "fleshmeets" at the time - I attended. My baby daughter and my 80-year-old mother joined me on many of those occasions. I danced at three weddings of WELLbeings, as we called ourselves, attended four funerals, brought food and companionship to the bedside of a dying WELLbeing on one occasion. WELL people babysat for my daughter, and I watched their children.

Don't tell me that "real communities" can't happen online."

What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community

A wonderful, highly illegal map of the Interwebs, and here is the full mad scientist paper, aaaand some of the awesome images generated (available via the paper too).