Show up at work like hi boss sorry I’m late my I was helping my mother track down one specific 90s dungeon crawler for the purposes of obtaining a muffin recipe the developer hid in the files
Anyway shoutout to Stonekeep (1995)
I’M MAKING THE MUFFINS
Burnt my hand picking it up to show. Gonna wait to taste.
Taste review: Make the video game muffins oh my GOD.
These are DELICIOUS! I substituted chocolate chips for pecans because its what i had on hand.
It tastes like a pumpkin gingerbread cake! Great treat for fall and winter!
Definitely make these!
Text from recipe
Tim Cain’s Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Muffins – They’re the shadow king’s favorite!
1 and 2/3 cup flour
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp cloves
¼ tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup sugar
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1 cup pumpkin (half of a 16 oz can)
½ cup (one stick) butter, melted
preheat oven to 350. grease muffin tins (one dozen regular size) or use baking cups. mix flour, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Break eggs into another bowl. add pumpkin and butter and whisk until blended. stir in chocolate chips. pour over dry ingredients and stir until just blended. do NOT overstir! scoop batter into tins and bake 20-25 minutes. after cooling, keep muffins wrapped in plastic to avoid drying.
Good news, everyone. Tim Cain himself has made a video on this very subject! His YouTube channel is a treasure trove of game design and game history.
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting
and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm,
a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
In the absolute funniest turn of events, apparently the Facebook outage is also affecting THE DOORS IN THEIR HEADQUARTERS so nobody can actually get in. Friends, this is why IoT is BAD.
One of my theories about Star Wars is that the reason why so few things are automated, and why so many critical systems require human (or other sentient biological being) manipulation, is due to this sort of shit. At some point (probably several points) in the GFFA history, they tried high automation/IoT and every time it introduced vulnerabilities no one wanted.
So it’s not that they don’t have the technology to, say, launch drone ships at each other in war, but rather that they’ve done that and had their ships hacked and turned around on them, or neutralized in various ways that don’t stop piloted craft. So it’s something people might try here and there (see the Separatists), but by and large it doesn’t work.
I learned the disadvantage of automatic doors 4 years ago during the earthquake. I learned it the hard way and it was traumatizing but a lot of people experience with that was even harder. For many things, manual is the way to go or always is necessary to have a manual backup.
