The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

IN OTHER NEWS my sister is fantastic - I finally stopped dragging my feet and posted a message about why I don't use the Book of Face much a few days ago (tl;dr: it sucks and I have ethical problems with the management), and she happened to be online at the time so we got to chat a bit and she up and offered to send me a pair of my favorite sneakers and whatever candy I might be missing, and told me not to fuss about shipping costs. I totally didn't expect that but it really made my day, especially since those sneakers are almost twice as expensive here as they are in the States.

She's the main reason I even still have an account there. It's funny - she's 13 years younger than me but she's someone that, if we weren't related, I'd very much consider a friend. She's really smart and funny and cool, and it kind of blows me away that she looked up to me for so long and still kind of does because she's had a pretty successful Navy career and is now going to school on their dime, co-owns a house with her husband, races motorcycles for fun, and I'm kind of a disaster person. XD

 

Got... kind of enough sleep? Went to bed more or less on time, but kept waking up from J’s snoring. Feel better at least.

Now I’m properly awake enough to make sense of the part of the course I’m on, except... nope, it wasn’t just me being tired, it’s explaining wtf interfaces are even for REALLY poorly.

 

Ofc it’s possible I’m just a dumbass since I thought I got it in theory, but in practice... not so much. >_>;

 

Is this programming interfaces? I could probably answer questions/explain the thing if you need.

 

I ended up figuring it out after lunch that day - I got the syntax for implementing the method wrong, so my compiler/helper program (NetBeans, a name which makes me sigh every time I see it) kept underlining it as an error, but the helper text for why didn't actually help. Once I realized what went wrong it was an easy couple of renames and the program ran as expected.

I'm still not entirely clear on when to use syntax like object.method() versus method(). I'm not sure if it's because I'm only working on this two (soon to be three) days a week and I've just forgotten when the course explained it or if it really did just assume it was something that doesn't even need explained.

(This is the course I'm using - the last exercise I did was 11.)

 

would you like me to write up an explanation and see if that might help?

 

That would be lovely, if you have the time/spoons!

 

Need to think up bento boxable things to bring for lunch. I don't want to do salad every week until it's too hot to reasonably do any baking, and last week's cold rice basmati rice + stuff was edible but depressing. I have the two-tiered box-shaped box as well as the bowl, and I feel like the box-shaped box would be better for bringing a variety of nibbles, whereas the bowl is good for a one-dish meal. Rice or soba noodles might be good for the one-dish thing. The variety... something like a slice of spinach-feta tart, sliced fruit, hummus and something to dip into it (which is hard, I don't like most vegetables suitable for dipping raw) ........? idk, food is hard.

I've started making muffins in flavors both J and I like because he has a hard time finding things that are sufficiently Food for breakfast and his current staple of vanilla yogurt and a banana is not enough for a meal, and I discovered something I should have already known - the same muffin flavor for two to three weeks straight makes me disinclined to eat them at all halfway through the batch. It means I'm strictly limited in terms of add-ins but in trade off I'm getting a new flavor before any particular one can hit Not Food status. At least, until it gets too hot to bake...

 

For dipping, you could try chunky sliced chicken breast or mild cheese cut into fingers. Crispy bacon rashers? Sliced salami? Idk man I'm just throwing out ideas here. If you can get gram flour you could prep bhaji or pakoras in advance - even keep them in the freezer, they don't take much hurt from that - or socca pancakes. Dressed beans are damn good for gussying up a salad but not everyone loves legumes like I do.

 

Today's mood: INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

I'm an endgame omnicrafter in ffxiv and I have so, so, so many materials in my bags that my inventory is nearly at capacity at all times. I'm trying to be hardheaded and cull as much as possible - like stuff only used for weapons and armor a tier or two ago that I don't like the appearances of, stuff that's relatively easy to re-acquire, stuff that only makes old crafting gear, stuff that only makes a few things I'm unlikely to ever want to make or that only makes another tier of material that I may as well make and free up an inventory slot... but it's difficult because sometimes older mats suddenly become relevant again when new recipes come out. Usually it's pre-lvl 50 stuff, but sometimes it's something higher leveled and a pain in the ass to make... but there's no telling if that's going to happen to any given mat.

At least with some of them, in new expansions they make some older mats outright purchasable for one of the two common deprecated content tokens, and at the new cap the old rare gatherables are easier to gather in quantity.

 

geez they should really put up crates/boxes/chests as an option if that's not already a thing, like didn#t FFXIV have the whole 'you can have your own house' thing anyways? inventory management in video games is the bane of my existence and if there's no overflow options for my hoarding ass i suffer

 

Id kill for GW2's inventory system, theres a bank specifically for crafting mats iirc. My crafters are all around lvl 55 but is been really difficult to keep levelling them for the same reason x.x every time i go to do it, no inv space! I wish you luck with your de-cluttering...

 

We have retainers, which are basically npc banks with a certain number of slots, and each retainer can sell a certain amount of things on the marketboard (which is FFXIV's auction house, but since there's no auctioning going on - you buy for the listed price plus tax if you aren't in the same city as where the listing was posted). There's actually a lot of room with the two free ones we're given (350 slots total, and most stackable items stack to 999 now)... except between all crafting mats, dyes, fashion items, and other sundry junk it's easy for me to run out of space. :') People who don't need 50 million outfits/don't play more than a few jobs/don't seriously craft don't tend to have space issues.

Housing is mostly for being able to decorate and do the limited gardening available. Houses and apartments get some storage space but that's only for housing items.

It doesn't help that the HW stretch of leveling is AWFUL. Every craft in the 51-60 range is an enormous pain in the ass because of all of the mats, and the mats to make the mats... I totally understand why some people level purely through moogle quests. 61-70 eases up on the pain in the ass factor (especially since the class quests give you the mats!!), although endgame crafting is still kind of annoying.

 

Managed to cull personal inventory from 130/140 to 90/140, free up a couple of spots in my chocobo saddlebag, and free up some spots on my retainers! I'll eventually be able to clear out a little more, but right now their selling slots are completely full so it'll have to wait a bit.

I also spent a lot of time rearranging stuff in my (in-game) house to... very little effect. :') And somehow all this ate up my entire day! Whee.

 

Made peanut sauce to put on a rice noodle salad for tomorrow. I found this recipe and made quite a few changes (why does it have added salt when it already has soy sauce???):

Spoiler: Peanut sauce recipe

3 slices of ginger, chopped fine
1 clove of garlic, chopped fine
1/3 c of peanut butter
1/4 orange juice
juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp soy sauce or equivalent
2 tbsp of honey
2 tbsp of sesame oil
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Mix it up as well as it can be mixed, then micro it on half power for about 15 seconds. Whisk it well, micro it again for another 15 seconds, whisk, and it's ready to go.

Would prefer it a little thicker than it ends up, but I didn't want to use up all of my peanut butter.

Add-ins will be sprouted mung beans, chickpeas, and bagged shredded cabbage.

I need to make a spinach tart and maybe??? some cookies, but I got done with the sauce and was flattened my a wave of exhaustion. Bluh.

 

What do you use as soy sauce alternative? One site suggests Worcester sauce and water, but they also incorrectly identify soy as the main ingredient in Worcester sauce (it's not, or shouldn't be; traditionally it's malt barley and tamarind), so I'm disinclined to trust that.

 

?!?!?! That's... sure a thing that site is claiming... And Worcester sauce and water wouldn't be much like soy sauce at all! D:

I'm being incautious and using regular old soy sauce, which is not the smartest thing to do from a contains-wheat standpoint but *knocks on wood* isn't too problematic as far as I can tell. Yet. And the soy isn't actually problem for me when it comes to soy sauce - whatever it is about soy that makes my digestive system riot, fermenting it wipes that problem right out. Which means I should probably get tamari instead, when I can find it.

I just did a bit of googling and apparently there's a thing called coconut aminos that people use as a soy sauce substitute. Might be worth a try?

 

Tart is IN THE OVEN. Cookies are DELAYED UNTIL TOMORROW because it's almost 9 pm and I still have to fold laundry and make the bed; if I try to fit making cookies in there I won't have any downtime before I have to go to sleep and cookies won't soothe the resulting upset.

Tart is crustless because I fucking haaaate making pie crusts. I kinda wanted to bake them as minitarts but my muffin tin is nonstick and I don't like cooking anything directly against a nonstick surface, so: actual baking dish.

Here's what I did:

~300 g frozen spinach, thawed and water all squeezed out
1.5dl whole milk
4 eggs
150 g goat cheese
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 garlic clove
1/4 tsp salt

Minced the garlic, crumbled the cheese, whisked it together best I could, then put it in a buttered round baking dish and stuck it in the oven at 175C. Giving it 30 min to start.

 

Tart ended up being kind of puffy and eggy on the bottom - not bad, but more quiche-like than I'd intended, so I think I need one less egg, and probably a wider dish. The size it slices up at on that dish is about perfect for fitting into my bento box, though, so idk.

It tastes pretty good! Next time I'll add more pepper and less nutmeg and a bit less salt. I love nutmeg but it's a bit overpowering in this.

 

Lunch was really good! It took an exhausting (for me) amount of effort to make all of the made things so I'm glad it turned out so well.

Pictures as soon as I feel like getting them off my phone.