Here is the thing about this fic…. it’s earth shattering. It is paradigm shifting. It feels like one of the Star Wars novels you’d buy at the bookstore.
The characterization of Obi-Wan Kenobi is sublime. The world building challenges George Lucas on his best day. The OC makes me cry. I think of this fic at least once a week, and I read it over a year ago.
It explains the Jedi order better than the movies do. It takes you on journeys that build towards the canon story.
Everyone should read it. If I ever find their tumblr, I will add it.
Growing up, did anyone else think that the phrase “heard it through the grapevine” was refering to a litteral grape vine?
I always imaged two people picking grapes and talking shit about a third person that was blocked from view by grapevines
I always thought it was about hearing it through a grapevine roof. Like, either you’re in the first floor of a house and people are spilling the tea under the grapevine or viceversa m
Wait, maybe those are not common knowledge everywhere?
This is far more visually appealing than the actual origins of the phrase, which because of this post, I just looked up, and apparently, the phrase originated with the telegraph, and people thought the wires looked like the strings used to train vines. Hence, they heard it through the “grapevine.”
Honestly my big concern when it comes to the redesign is the sunk cost fallacy.
Even if the majority of users would prefer a toggle or a full rollback, Tumblr will cling to the mistake they spent a lot of time and money making, and frustrate those users by trying to fix something users didn't want to begin with. A toggle would probably be best, but if Tumblr's in financial trouble I can't see them supporting two separate layouts. And as you said, people who use extensions to get their preferred layout back will be outliers.
It boggles me that researching, funding, and implementing this change was greenlit with no public input from regular users at the start; one post on changes or WIP with a *mockup* of the new layout would've given you a preview of the backlash. But now that money has been spent on it, it feels like we're all stuck. :/
that’s my fear as well, to be honest, and it’s what we spend a lot of time internally fighting against. for what it’s worth, that’s exactly why we run A/B tests and experiments: to understand if we need to roll the whole thing back. we spent over a year building group chat and we rolled that entire feature back because it wasn’t working, so that’s never off the table as an option.
and while we certainly could’ve done a preview on @wip, we kinda sorta already knew what the reaction would be. we use the site ourselves every day, too. tumblr staff itself is a mix of casual and power users. my reaction to the layout change wasn’t happy at first either, as someone who’s been using this site daily for 10+ years.
so please don’t assume we’re stuck here! we’ve already been working through the feedback and have a lot of ideas brewing on how to iterate on the design, including the option to roll it all back and instead iterate on the top-based navigation.
is there anyone out there with a nyt cooking subscription
will they send me the chamomile tea cake with strawberry icing recipe
This buttery, chamomile tea-scented loaf is a sweet pop symphony, the Abba of cakes. A pot of flowery, just-brewed chamomile isn’t required for drinking with slices of this tender loaf but is strongly recommended. In life and in food, you always need balance: A sip or two of the grassy, herbal tea between bites of this cake counters the sweetness, as do freeze-dried strawberries, which lend tartness and a naturally pink hue to the lemony glaze. This everyday loaf will keep on the counter for 3 to 4 days; be sure the cut side is always well wrapped.
Ingredients Yield: One 9-inch loaf
½ cup/115 grams unsalted butter 2 tablespoons/6 grams chamomile tea (from 4 to 6 tea bags), crushed fine if coarse 1 cup/240 milliliters whole milk Nonstick cooking spray 1 cup/200 grams granulated sugar ½ teaspoon coarse kosher salt 2 large eggs 1 large lemon 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 1½ cups/192 grams all-purpose flour 1 cup/124 grams confectioners’ sugar ½ cup/8 grams freeze-dried strawberries
Preparation
Step 1
In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon chamomile to a large mixing bowl. Pour the hot melted butter over the chamomile and stir. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour. Step 2
Use the same saucepan (without washing it out) to bring the milk to a simmer over medium-high heat, keeping watch so it doesn’t boil over. Remove from the heat, and stir the remaining 1 tablespoon chamomile into the hot milk. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour. Step 3
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with the nonstick cooking spray and line with parchment paper so the long sides of the pan have a couple of inches of overhang to make lifting the finished cake out easier. Step 4
Add the sugar and salt to the bowl with the butter, and whisk until smooth and thick, about 1 minute. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, vigorously whisking to combine after each addition. Zest the lemon into the bowl; add the baking powder and vanilla, and whisk until incorporated. Add the flour and stream in the milk mixture while whisking continuously until no streaks of flour remain. Step 5
Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake until a skewer or cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean (a few crumbs are OK, but you should see no wet batter), 40 to 45 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 30 minutes. Step 6
While the cake cools, make the icing: Into a medium bowl, squeeze 2 tablespoons juice from the zested lemon, then add the confectioners’ sugar. Place the dehydrated strawberries in a fine-mesh sieve set over the bowl and, using your fingers, crush the brittle berries and press the red-pink powder through the sieve and into the sugar. (The more you do this, the redder your icing will be.) Whisk until smooth. Step 7
If needed, run a knife along the edges of the cake to release it from the pan. Holding the 2 sides of overhanging parchment, lift the cake out and place it on a plate, cake stand or cutting board. Discard the parchment. Pour the icing over the cake, using a spoon to push the icing to the edges of the cake to encourage the icing to drip down the sides dramatically. Cool the cake completely and let the icing set.
You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there is a truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
THIS META BLESSED ME
Does anyone really use the Force? Or does the Force just use you?
The authors of the extended universe have always done a better job at developing this concept than Lucas has.
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. “It’s genuinely amazing that…these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
'The machines we have now are not conscious’, Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023
