Intro
Thanks for tuning in for the first instance of my take generator. This is inspired by Veronica’s [thoughts by v], thank you for pushing me to write as well. I’m not aiming to create anything that is structured or really all that parsable, rather I want to give an Instagram reels-style rapid fire opinion wall of text for whatever comes to mind in a given month. A pretty large focus will be on the media that I consumed, the things that I learned (especially in the kitchen), and the opinions that I had that I thought were interesting. All opinions are my own. I try to cite my sources. I am not an expert in anything I talk about. Without further ado.
Nonlinear Stories; Obra Dinn and Attack on Titan: This month I (re)worked through two rather different pieces of media, Return of The Obra Dinn, a puzzle/mystery game by Lucas Pope, by the creator of Papers, Please; and Attack on Titan, our beloved. I won’t explain the latter, but the former warrants some entourage. Return of The Obra Dinn is a game in which you investigate and discover the fates of the hundred-or-so members of an old merchant ship by inspecting their times of death in reverse-ish order. Instead of presenting the story to you all at once, it is told through a series of vignettes and dialogues, each a freeze-frame snapshot that you can walk through and explore, highlighting the death of one or so passenger. The end goal of the game is to match the names, faces, and roles of all passengers. It was a challenging game, requiring a lot of investigation and deductive thinking (like, noticing a tattoo on someones arm and linking it with their bed number, or realizing that two people that were friends were likely the same role, or something like that). I bring this game up in the context of AoT because it’s been a while since I’ve interacted with a story that felt like it was conceived all at once, instead of from beginning to end. Both stories play with cause and effect through time, and jump forward and backward when filling out the canon, which leads to a very different kind of experience. With AoT, which I recently revisited with my partner Kate, I get this feeling of “no threads left untied” that the investigation of The Obra Dinn also invoked. I like it when media doesn’t treat me like I’m stupid, and lets me think about and discover more of it the more I think about it.
Music-Driven Hype; K-Pop Demon Hunters, Anime Openings: I don’t have anything unique to say about K-Pop Demon Hunters other than to reiterate that the songs are gas. It reminded me that while most media has compelling, unique, and identifiable soundtracks, most Western media doesn’t have soundtracks that I’ll listen to apart from the work itself (honorable mentions: Succession theme, Themes that become memes like Better Call Saul, Any orchestral score by John Williams or Hans Zimmer). But anime has long had the tradition of making an opening and closing song for every season published, with the characters dancing around or whatever, and until recently a lot of the songs were slop. But now, especially for top-rate Shounen anime, the songs are very listenable apart from the media. Critically anything by Vaundy, Creepy Nuts, Natori, Yoasobi (i guess), AiNA THE END, Kenshi Yonezu, King Gnu, or MAISONdes (the group/collective?) (and I’m sure I’m missing some) is great; these artists represent for me this shift in trash→gas. I often discover a song, then discover the show, and my interest in both multiply. Recently been loving 革命道中（On The Way) by AiNA THE END. Though, DanDaDan is just whatever.
Holy shit I saw Kenji Lopez but I was a little confused: His event Tasting Notes, where otherwise-silent cooking demonstrations are accompanied by classical music, was quite interesting, least of all for the MOTO Pizza we got at the end. I didn’t care for the music, honestly, and the discussion attempting to tie music and cooking together was cute at best and generic at worst, as it was clear that while they had aimed for synthesis, they really achieved segmentation. But I got to watch a pig butchering, two renditions of mapo tofu, chocolate tempering, and some various baking, so I’ll call this a win.
Other Media: Some quick shots.
The Apothecary Diaries: Great, but I didn’t like how “Sherlocks figured this shit out so you don’t have to”-coded the show was. They give some hints that something is the case, present the conspiracy in it’s entirety, and move on to another. There isn’t a huge opportunity to discover things yourself, like in other media (above). Perhaps there is a long story building up, but unsure at the moment. I am continuing to read their light novel, which has a ton of Japanese that I do not understand.
The Quintessential Quintuplets: Been a while since I enjoyed a harem anime, this one is actually pretty well done. The mc is not insufferable, his no-nonsense attitude fits well in this genre. The characters develop very nicely and never feel monolithic or generic. The ending is unsatisfying for me personally, but the fact that everyone I know disagrees with me and each other shows that it was a pretty close race for best girl. If you must know, Nino forever.
Kaguya-sama: Love is War: Ugh, so good. No notes. Crushed the anime and manga in like, four days when I was sick. The writing was quite funny, and I learned a ton of Japanese slang through this, which was great.
Bibi Concert: I’ve never been to a K-Pop concert that felt this much like standup. The performances were of course quite dynamic, as varied as her music itself. It also featured a cinematic that Bibi wrote, which was a first for me.
Ado Concert: I’ve never been to a J-Pop concert that felt this much like a rave. While I didn’t leave liking Ado’s music any more than before, I did leave with an insatiable lust for adrenaline that only the next concert will fulfill, and tinnitus.
MSI: Gaming events are always so hype, but holy smokes the venue was stinky. Unwashed gamer swamp ass is a real epidemic.
In other news, I finally updated my MyAnimeList; I am absolutely crushing some old shows that I missed, along with new shows.
Progress in the Bar: This month (okay fine, late June) I hosted a cocktail party, menu in the Appendix. I also tried out some new stuff afterwards for smaller groups. There were a lot of new techniques that I hadn’t tried before, and I wanted to document some of them.
Batching: Surprisingly, I have never batched a cocktail before, at least not at this scale. It is as easy as it sounds, but I need to be careful which ones I can store in the freezer (there is some math that I can do to figure this out quite easily), and to make sure I pre-dilute them to simulate what stirring/shaking would do (about 30%). Don’t batch shaken cocktails.
Syrups: I’ve made syrups by macerating, blending, cooking, mashing, and extraction before. This was the first time I relied solely on a flavor extract (for durian flavor), and honestly I’m not going to look back. Though I’m sure that I would get a fresher flavor had I used the real fruit, when I made mango syrup the texture was much thicker and tough to work with in a shaker. Extracts made this problem go away entirely, and allowed me to control the texture without relying on low-yield techniques like clarification, or annoying enzymatic processing with pectinex or amylase.
Clarification: Speaking of, I tried a few methods of clarification this month, including milk washing, agar-agar, and pectinex (technically not clarification, but it made it easier to filter my melon juices). I don’t have anything interesting to say about these, other than that I think all milk punches taste the same, and I will not be doing it again any time soon.
Foams: Surprisingly easy to make an interesting garnish by way of a cocktail foam. I made a calpico-lemon foam for a lychee cocktail, which I believe was a hit, and now have a formula for making these foams, which pretty much just requires an iSi whipper. I’m interested in trying to make nitrogenated / carbonated drinks using the same whipper, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Tinctures: For the uninitiated, a tincture is a concentrated solution of one ingredient, extracted using a high-proof liquor. While I actually made my batch of tinctures ages ago over the course of about 2 months (Basil, Mint, Sage, Thyme, Rosemary, Black pepper, Sichuan Peppercorn, Clove, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Cardamom, Star Anise) I finally got around to really using them recently. Wow, just one or two drops can completely blast a cocktail with the flavor of a spice, this is a must-do for anyone looking to up their own pantry. I even used one of the tinctures when making a soup when I was unable to mortar-and-pestle a spice sufficiently fine.
Shrubs: I bought raw apple cider vinegar and plum vinegar, and made my first shrubs. This is an absolute game-changer for N/A drinks (though I have yet to figure out how really to use these in alcoholic drinks). My first and so far favorite shrub was equal parts by weight apple cider vinegar, tart cherry juice, and sugar. Then, after letting it sit and develop character (the mother in the raw vinegar will eat a bit of the sugar in the other two ingredients), mixing about an ounce with soda water was fantastic.
On the horizon: I want to experiment with spherification, gels, infusions, carbonation, and bottling/canning my drinks. Hopefully, in the next month or two I’ll get to some of these.
Fermentation: A friend Bethany got me into making kombucha, and I picked up a copy of the Noma Guide to Fermentation, a beautiful and comprehensive look at all things fermentation (that do not include meat/dairy). With these, I made my first kombucha, and my first ginger beer. My partner Kate helped me bake my first sourdough, which looked and tasted... fine. The process is mostly relaxing, and not that much effort, just a ton of waiting. I hope to continue down this path of making fermented goods, though my fear of botulism holds me back.
Quick Food Reviews: Highlights were Taurus Ox (only the burger, which had taro stalk), Bar Bravo (insanely good drinks and seafood), Crab Hot Lau (delicate flavors, perfectly executed), Foreign National (surprisingly complex and well balanced drinks), Stampede Cocktail Bar (insanely long menu with only hits), and Nue (fun pan-asia fare). Lowlights were cowdog (please don’t make my drinks this sweet), Hattie’s Hat Restaurant (brunch is brunch, but some brunch is better), So Tasty (made me ill), Shibuya Hi-Fi (boring drinks), and Bite of Seattle (ignoring all the trash on the ground, the trash I ingested was very fatty and sterotypically american, like a deep-fried deep-fried fry).
Traffic in Seattle: It’s been pretty rough lately, especially with the i-5 closing down for half of the month. I think a lot about how most of the traffic in Seattle is due to two reasons: shit planning by old white men, and Amazon (did I repeat myself?). While we can’t do anything about the former really, the latter brings up something interesting. There is kind of a limit to how much we can train/bus/bike our way through the traffic problem. Looking at the bottlenecks, they are almost entirely crunched around highway entrances/exits (and Denny Way), which are largely due to commuters needing to go to/from the east side. With the scale that Seattle already exists at, people are going to live on the east side or beyond, and it’s unreasonable to assume that everyone can/would/should bike an hour or more to get to work. I could propose any number of solutions, but I will focus on just one: building new Downtowns (thanks Uytae Lee, for consistently generating the greatest takes on urban design). The upshot is that instead of making it easier for people to get further, just make it so that they don’t need to go that far in the first place. A multi-center city like Tokyo (re: Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ginza, Marunouchi, Ikebukuro) works better because people don’t need to go too far to get to the workplace or funplace; contrast this with a model with intense sprawl like LA, where many souls congregate in the single center for their 9-5, then battle it out on their 10 lanes of freedom to get home. Seattle is already moving in this direction with Bellevue, Northgate, and Tacoma developing quite rapidly, but not fast enough. I’d love to see legislation like, all companies >n employees must have an office in each city center, or companies can only enforce/require in-person participation in any office, not a particular office. I’m excited to see where this goes, and I’m bullish on Seattle (for this and many other reasons!)
A Plague on our Cities; Electric Scooters: Let me be crystal clear: I fucking hate electric scooters. Forget about the fact that people leave them in the perfect place for me to trip or knock my car door. When a 150-250lb hunk of meat is whizzing down the Denny Way i-5 bridge on a 50lb hunk of metal at mach-billion and eats shit on my shit-eater, as my cheek greets the pavement and my knee makes a craiglist posting for new ligaments, I think to myself: at least someone was able to get to their destination marginally faster at the risk of every pedestrian on their warpath. Okay, this is probably an issue with bike lanes at its root, since pedestrian Nick wouldn’t have this fear if the scooters just stayed on the damn road (I don’t see bikers on the sidewalk nearly as often, though it happens). But honestly, I get it; the roads in Seattle are a warzone (thanks xQc for the barely intelligible rendition of a typical North American road); I don’t even want to drive through some of these streets. But until we figure out a way to prevent urban silver surfers from decimating pedestrians, I wish we didn’t have them at all.
Support for the Arts; Sponsored by Bloomberg: It’s really upsetting that many good things are supported by the money from billionaires, like the arts. When I worked at Bloomberg, a pretty big and impressive focus of the kool-aid was on the philanthropy that the company does for the city, donating oodles of money to support and subsidize local museums and theaters. While getting funding is essential, this introduces power structures in the arts. A conversation with my playwright friend Brandon confirmed that the rich upper brass that control the funding also control the direction and vision of the industry, and artists must consistently grapple between money being a necessity and a vice when trying to justify the place of art in society, or the place of an artist in the food chain of virtuous professions (I have a lot to say about those in academia/arts shaming those in industry, somehow with the idea that getting paid must mean selling out. I’ll only repeat quote from my dear friend Desmond, “academia does not have a monopoly on interesting work”). I don’t have the expertise to dive into this topic, but I think the unfortunate truth is that the arts will continue to be something that nobody but the rich can do full-time, just like it has been for centuries. It will be challenging to create a profitable arts medium that isn’t broadcast-able, and until then we’ll probably have to rely on generosity of those in power, namely governments and billionaires to ensure that our cultural industries and sites of preservation don’t bleed out.
What the hell is a stock? My journey in figuring out what exactly the stock market does: Obviously I know what the stock market does. Kind of. I think. This is a big topic, and I never know how to address it, but let me try this month (and I will try, every month) by posing a specific question and giving my specific answer. Question: What does it mean when a company is more valuable, and who benefits from this? Answer: “Value” is a kind of weird thing to unpack, but I like to think of the stock market as a pretty loose indicator of the “value” that each company represents. Value is not the same as money, because it is not necessarily realized; however it is often measured in money, which is a shame, because money cannot measure value that will not realize itself as money (for example, value to a community or to the environment is hard to price in; i.e. externalities). Value is not a tangible thing, but rather an emergent property of the systems that are built to achieve some (economic) end. When I go into my room and organize my clothes the right way, such that I can get dressed faster, I have created value. This idea that value can indeed be created and not only stolen or transferred was obvious for every other domain to me but the stock market. It took me a long time to reconcile the truth that when a company does something right, they become more valuable, and everyone benefits; and the truth that the market (the way most people play it) is pretty much a zero-sum game, where one persons loss is another persons profit. But while individual trades are finite, zero-sum games, the market as a whole is an infinite, positive-sum game, and trading is simply the arteries that route this value transfer to the smartest actors (read: hedge fund with the best IMO medalists). This helped me overcome the moral hurdle of investing in the stock market, as I realized I was not participating in some grand societal delusion of a bubble bound to burst (though, we might be a tad overfinancialized…).
Leverage, Inequality, and Value Transfer: Okay, another enormous topic, but I want to focus on what fundamentally differentiates software from every other business: leverage. Work pretty much exists on a spectrum of how leveraged it is, from a single cup of coffee that will always be a single cup of coffee that will create value exactly once when it is drunk, to a single line of code that can run infinitely many times, and continue generating value long after the creator is dead. As technology gets better, each working-hour of a software engineer generates vastly more “value” than that of other professions. And by extension, tech companies become more valuable at a rate and scale that other companies cannot match. This is leverage. I see two central problems with this on a societal level. First is that this is an accelerator for inequality. Obviously for companies, but for individuals too, taking this model to the extreme, wealth simply concentrates in leveraged hands. We already see some of the fallout here; AI taking people’s jobs is essentially the leverage of tech reaching over to other industries to try and capture that value. We’ve lost pretty much all highschool-level intro jobs, and the jobs of the middle class are probably going to be next (think: clerk-level paper pushing). Arguably many of these are Bullshit Jobs (tm), but without a mechanism like labor to transfer value from companies to people, inequality may intensify. Second is that while more value might be created, value, unlike capital, is not fluid. Capitalism will always bet on the fastest horse, but where that horse is running is hardly important; sure, we may have instant AI-generated doohickeys and systems that link burritos to my home in record speed, but plenty of other parts of my life are left with less value as a result. Like, why aren’t there enough houses, or why are there scooters threatening me in my dreams, or why didn’t I learn about the stock market, or why don’t we have free museum access forever? Technology cannot solve all problems, but unfortunately problems solvable by technology will outbid any other problems to be solved in the market.
Outro: I hope I tied this up well. If you read this far, I appreciate you. I hope to do this every month, so please leave words of feedback or encouragement. Or debate me, that’s fun too.
Appendix