There are a lot of people sharing their clothing and art designs for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but one thing I haven’t seen is this:

Existing editors for previous games in the franchise are compatible, but I just grabbed a sample of an old bitmap font (Verite 8x16) and used the limited in-game editor. They’re definitely doing something to smooth the rendering of the low-resolution imagery; those characters are 7x10 without any manual anti-aliasing.

I’ll be interested to find out if the subject matter triggers some community-standards moderator at Nintendo and gets pulled.

And don’t feel bad, Gulliver; everyone needs a wake-up call now and again…

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I’m thinking that the protagonist of the book/movie/series/series/movie Sailor Suit and Machine Gun has a solution to harassment more effective than just singing Don’t tear off my sailor suit. For schoolgirls less puissant, making it through the day with both their uniform and dignity intact can be quite a challenge.

Unrelated, I made about a million bells on the stalk market, but it wasn’t worth the hassle or the risk. I’d rather just pick foreign fruit; per inventory slot, it’s equivalent to a 50-bell-per-turnip profit.

It appears the most reliable way to make the turnip trade worth the effort is to have a second player time-travel until they see a high price, then let you visit their island. If you can guarantee a 400-bell profit, then a full inventory is worth 1.6 million bells.

(apparently if you time-travel, forward or back, your turnips immediately spoil, but it doesn’t matter what the date is when you visit someone else’s island to buy or sell; think of it as plausible chrono-deniability)

(on the gripping hand, if your time-traveling friend’s island was covered in fruit trees, you could just pick it clean ten times a day; anyone playing this game is in no position to complain about a little grinding)

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Seriously, dude, just admit that you’ve never known the touch of a woman.

Update

I hadn’t even noticed that he was (past tense) a New Hampshire state representative, and (likely past tense) a Biden delegate. Apparently he has (or likely had) a long history of failing to sound profound on Twitter…

Found in my mailbox last night. Given that they used my full legal name, this isn’t from any of the usual mailing lists purchased from anyone I’ve done business with. My guess is that they’re going off the property records, and figuring anyone in the same house for 20 years must have relatives to burn.

Every week that college campuses are closed, another gender identity goes extinct. Oh, the hyxmoniti!

Chika has finally persuaded me to play the stalk market:

King Arthur Flour is finally shipping the yeast I ordered on the 12th. It will arrive May 9th 12th 9th (FedEx’s tracking site has gone non-deterministic recently; wonder why…).

(and they claim that both Red and Gold are in stock again; also AP and bread flour, the first time I’ve seen those for a while…)

The first three episodes of the second season of Good Eats: Reloaded have covered eggs, coffee, and steak. Nothing ground-breaking in any of them, but entertaining updates. I look forward to Alton’s new post-Corona-chan episodes where he comes up with uses for all the crap everyone’s been pointlessly hoarding. What can you do with a 50-pound sack of beans, ten gallons of canola oil, sixty packets of yeast, three cases of toilet paper, and 12 cake mixes?

I’m about to head out to Costco and Safeway to celebrate my last day without a maskface-covering. The county order actually says not to wear real masks, because those must be reserved for medical professionals. Except, we’ve been told to buy them for more than a month now, so should we be “donating” our non-sterile stock of N95 and Chinese-made surgical masks to anyone we see in a lab coat, and wearing dirty bandanas and hoodies instead?

The order also says that these additional restrictions are because Monterey County’s efforts to contain the zombies have been more effective than the rest of the state. It was not accompanied by an order to allow more businesses to open, or for existing businesses to loosen any other restrictions. Got a real deep thinker on our hands, here.

In other news, the walls are finally closing in… on the other guy.

Update

I was curious about a number that’s not being reported as aggressively as deaths and diagnoses: hospitalizations. The authoritative source for California says that Monterey County currently has 2 people hospitalized for Corona-chan out of 191 total (not currently-active) cases. The graphing software they’re using is actually quite nice, since it allows them to cleanly show the breakdowns by what percentage of the state population they are (cf. 77.3% of deaths statewide were 65 or older, which is 15.6% of the population). The raw data is elsewhere, and reveals that the largest number of CC-positive people hospitalized to date in Monterey County was 26, and the largest number in the ICU was 5.

Meanwhile, CA Governor Benito “Gavin” Newsom announced that it will be months before you can get a haircut. Or attend a religious service in person.

Possibly-Related Pro Tip

Hemp is now fully legal and has traditionally been used to make excellent rope suitable for suspending heavy weights. Like for bondage, I mean, not anything, y’know, sinister.

Unrelated Pro Tip

When a supposed food-safety site contains the phrase “lard, also known as schmaltz”, leave and never come back. Lard is rendered pork fat, schmaltz is rendered chicken fat.

Update To The Updated Update

This is a new order in New York City. Today. Not two weeks ago. Not a month ago. Today:

Cuomo orders NYC subway trains sanitized every night

My new Chinese bookcase is a shoddy knockoff of my other Chinese bookcase. Seriously. Instead of solid bamboo plywood and countersunk screws, it’s a single-ply top with edging to make it look solid in pictures, and easily-stripped screws that stick out enough to snag something. I’d have made one myself, like I did for the kitchen storage, but I really like the look of the natural-finish bamboo plywood; maybe I’ll just buy a box of tongue-and-groove bamboo flooring and use that next time.

Unrelated, the bakery department at my local Safeway is now repackaging their bread flour and selling it in 5-pound bags. Still can’t buy yeast anywhere, and not only is King Arthur Flour out again, they still haven’t shipped the order I placed 15 days ago, despite yeast going in and out of stock on their site twice since then. Fortunately I still have plenty, and the grocery stores are all fully restocked with baked goods.

I don’t need to bake bread today, but I’m doing it anyway, because I’m adapting an old family recipe for the bread machine. My mother reported that the first conversion was better than the original on the first day, but didn’t keep as well. Since the original was for 2 ~1.5-pound loaves, I could have just cut it in half, but the machine we both have can make a 2-pound loaf, and scaling to that size left me with 1.2 eggs and 4.7 tablespoons of butter, so I rounded them both down.

Version 2 converts it to tangzhong to make it stay fresh longer, and adds back the missing fat by replacing some of the milk with half-and-half.

Oh, and Safeway even had toilet paper in stock, in two Brand X varieties they’ve never carried before. Still low on most cleaning supplies, but flour and yeast are the only things selling out as fast as they show up (assuming they do; I hadn’t left the house in four days).

Related, the canned fruit Amazon had as “arriving today” yesterday was revised to “delayed, not yet shipped”. The other canned fruit, which was supposed to ship later this week, has an actual tracking number that promises a Thursday delivery. The Gevalia Mocha Latte k-cups are still just “temporarily unavailable”, but I don’t actually need more until the end of May, since I found 12-packs at Walmart to supplement my remaining supply. (they also often carry that particular brand of Splenda-sweetened canned fruit, but I’m not out of that yet, either)

My house is getting disturbingly clean. If this goes on, I’ll be out in the garage opening boxes that have been taped shut for over twenty years. I wonder what’s inside.

Anyone have apple and cherry trees on their island? I’ve got peaches, oranges, and pears.

Update

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Monterey County will require masks starting Thursday. Because standing in line without them outside of the most-sanitized stores in modern history is sure to increase the body count, which currently stands at 4 in a population of 434 thousand, with none in the past eight days, and only 144 active cases left.

On the bright side, the obviously-unconstitutional law that made it virtually impossible to buy ammunition in California was struck down, and the state’s attempt to delay the injunction was also struck down. It’s headed for the 9th circuit, but by doing his job for the past several years, Trump has made that less of a problem than it used to be for civil rights cases.

Nanci Griffith’s Trouble In The Fields sounds charmingly naive now, when tons of food are being destroyed by farmers because governments have shut down most of their customers, many of which will never reopen. Just sayin’.

The version I like best is Maura O’Connell’s studio recording for A Woman’s Heart 2, but this performance with her and Nanci Griffith is good, too:

(embedding disabled; thanks, youtubes!)

My baker’s percentage script has reached the point of being quite useful, but the code is currently a mess because I was exploring the problem space as I went (“code-doodling”). The grams-to-volume conversion has shaped up nicely, after the initial hurdle of dealing with the limitations of floating-point numbers; I’d input “2 pounds”, convert it to grams, and then convert it back to “1 pound 16 ounces”. After a few failed fudge factors, I decided to simply multiply the weight by 1.0001, which is just enough to flip the right bits without skewing the results.

My solution to the excessive-precision problem (“1/3 cup + 1 tbsp + 1/2 tsp + 1/16 tsp”) was to cut it off when the residue is less than 1/16 of the total weight. That is, if you need a full cup of something, you don’t care about adding something smaller than a tablespoon. I’ve considered adding “scant”, “rounded”, and “heaping” modifiers, but then I’d have to track which ingredients are liquid, because a heaping tablespoon of olive oil is… “messy”. I also decided that 1/16 tsp is so tiny that it’s not worth printing unless it’s the only measure (which means it usually only shows up for strong powdered ingredients or scaled-down recipes).

Why convert back to volume measurements in the first place? Because they’re a lot faster, and at home bread-baking sizes, only the flour really has to be weighed for consistent results. Bulky ingredients like seeds, nuts, raisins, or chocolate chips should be weighed, but won’t break the recipe if they’re off a bit. Water and milk are fine if you actually have decent measuring cups (I replaced my hit-or-miss glass ones with OXO’s squeezable silicone cups, which are accurate and pour better).

The three remaining features I want to add are conversion to/from tangzhong/yudane, scaling to preset sizes like “six large hamburger buns”, and slightly tweaking relative proportions while keeping the total weight constant, so you don’t end up with something like 1.2 eggs. The last one is the hardest, because it breaks the currently linear flow of the script, so I’ll have to create some objects and methods to encapsulate everything.

Then comes the web version, which will initially just be a standard POSTed form with pulldown menus for ingredients. Kind of messy, since I’m up to 100 distinct ingredients, and I’ll need an option for custom ingredients. I could go all AJAX-y on it, but I’m getting better at recognizing epicycles before I start working on them.

Here’s sample output for King Arthur Flour’s Japanese Milk Bread, that uses a tangzhong starter for softness and improved shelf life. They’re definitely soft, although I’ve never had a batch last long enough to test shelf life…

Ingredients
  15.0g bread flour (2 tbsp) -- tangzhong
  44.4g water (3 tbsp) -- tangzhong
  45.0g whole milk (3 tbsp) -- tangzhong
 120.0g whole milk (1/2 cup)
  56.7g unsalted butter, melted (4 tbsp)
  50.0g large egg (1)
  17.5g baker's dried milk (2 tbsp)
  49.5g sugar (1/4 cup)
   6.0g salt (1 tsp)
 300.0g bread flour (2 1/2 cup)
   9.3g instant yeast (1 tbsp)

Type         Grams  Baker's Percentage
----         -----  ------------------
TOTAL        713.5  226.5%  1 pound 9 ounces
flour        315.0  100.0%
water        236.6   75.1%
salt           6.0    1.9%
yeast          9.3    3.0%  (>1.5% too much?)
fat           55.4   17.6%
sugar         49.5   15.7%  sweet (use sugar-tolerant yeast)
egg           50.0   15.9%
tangzhong    104.4   33.1%  4.8% of flour, 1:5.6 ratio

You can see from the comments that they significantly increased the yeast to compensate for the high sugar content. Also, despite the high hydration, this isn’t a sticky dough, nor does it produce the sort of airy, irregular crumb that you’d expect, because much of the extra liquid is captured in the tangzhong (which is the whole point).