The PNW Tabletop Market goes live in 30 minutes! www.alwaysawake.games/pnw-tabletop...

Starter packs and randomized booster packs are done! All that’s left now is to fill out some missing content on the website and design some signs for the table. Saturday’s looming, but everything’s moving apace!

When the Expo Hall closes, the indies come out to play. Head down to Summit Level 0 on Saturday night during PAX West for that small-batch, limited-run, bespoke artisanal cardboard. west.paxsite.com/en-us/schedu...

Put in requests for a BoardGameGeek page for CTF and a temporary WA tax ID so I can legally sell it. The game feels increasingly real by the day!

Had a small collation party last night, putting together my starter packs. Each one has two preconstructed decks with no randomization, so on its own it’s a complete 2-player experience. Later this week I’ll be assembling small randomized booster packs that can be used to customize the decks.

My small card game, CTF, now exists! I just received the print run that I’ll be selling at PAX West. If you’ll be there on the 30th (Saturday) stop by the PNW Tabletop Game Market to see it in person and check out 16 other games by amazing local designers! More photos once it’s unpacked and sorted!

Realized that I forgot to take a photo of the must when I mixed it yesterday, so I made sure to grab one just now when I added the yeast!

Progress made on two mead projects today: 1. I took a 1-gallon batch of plain honey mead, racked it off the lees and added some brewed earl gray tea in which I’d dissolved a bunch of lactose, plus a split vanilla bean.

Seattle friends (and honorary-Seattle friends who will be in town for PAX West): I’ll be here! I’m selling copies of a game I’ve been working on for a few months and thinking about for much longer. And on top of that, there’s also a ton of other amazing designers in this group

First playable prototype of “DAGnabbit!”, a game about drawing—or failing to draw!—directed acyclic graphs. As a solo game, it’s a puzzle of trying to put as many directed edges into the 7-graph as you can. As a 2-player game, it’s an exercise in boxing your opponent in so they can’t add an edge.

Whoops, I meant to do some editing work yesterday on the rules for the card game I’m developing (and which has a deadline), but instead I knocked out some quick designs for two more games. Guess I may as well make some prototypes for those.

My little yeasty friends metabolizing some sugars like the champs they are

It finally happened (and I finally wrote up a thing about it)! A couple friends and I had a blast drafting this cube. Wrote up a report for the first draft of the Pauper Constructed Cube: cubes.sconeforgemystic.com/posts/2025-0...

Okay, Magic the Gathering nerd time: I’ve just finished getting all the cards together for my most ambitious cube project yet. Weighing in at 1440 cards plus lands and tokens, I present the Pauper Constructed Cube: cubecobra.com/cube/overvie...

Made a little website for my mead brewing: brewlog.hollis.computer

Being enrolled in a monthly pie club from a local bakery has been a fantastic gift from my past self. A month is just long enough to forget that I’m subscribed, and then on a random Thursday someone knocks on my door and I find a delightful pie! This month it’s a bittersweet chocolate chess pie

my feeling about AGI is that i suppose it's possible to random walk into discovering intelligence but my benchmark for how long that takes is three point five billion years, which is how long it took the last time

🍳Eggs: almost any way you can imagine. Eggs fuckin rock 🥩 Steak: rare, and rarely (not much of a steak guy, but I sometimes partake) 🥛 Milk: whole 🍸Alcohol: gin for mixing, whiskey for drinking straight ☕️ Warm Drink: tea 🥔 Waffle House Hash Browns: smothered covered capped

Mostly successful shopping trip. The only thing I couldn’t find at my main store were cranberries, but I’ve got a few more days to try other stores. My own fault though; probably shouldn’t have let this errand linger so long.

Decided to once again go overboard on a menu for Christmas dinner. I’m excited for this one because I put some real thought into day-of oven sequencing to make this work.

The big meal is done. We’re all just a little uncomfortably full and are negotiating leftovers. We served around 20 people. My mom’s and my contribution to the dinner was: * turkey thigh confit with chimichurri * pork, leek, and beer stuffing * garlic buttermilk parsnip purée * cucumber salad

@breetz.zone Thankvember update: I’m two Friendsgivings in. The first one featured more guests than I’ve ever had in my house before. The second is ongoing, and I’ve eaten enough that I’m not sure if I’ll ever be hungry again. Going for a thankfulness PB this year.

Update! Everyone seems to share my apprehension about bottling with that much sugar, so it seems the bottling plan is on hold while I see if I can wake up some yeast and have them do a little more work.

Racked my second batch of mead into two containers, one to be oaked and one to (hopefully) be bottled soon. The challenge is there’s a ton of unfermented sugar, so it’s hard to say whether the fermentation has actually stopped, and it’s definitely not safe to bottle if it’s still fermenting.

It’s almost November, so it’s time to start planning my annual Birthday // Friendsgiving dinner. This is the second year, so I think that makes it a Tradition now. I drew up a menu this morning.

Mead batch #2! This one’s just a classic honey mead, made with ~16lbs of Shipwreck Honey’s blackberry blossom honey (they’re local for me, and their honey is excellent!)

The fig mead has been bottled! Only got 8x 375ml bottles. I’d expected 10, so all the inexpertly racking back and forth ended up losing roughly a whole wine bottle’s worth, but this was a learning experience! I’m going to age it for ~6 months before opening one of the bottles to taste it.

Finally replaced my windshield wipers after thinking for, uh, a while that I ought to. WOW was I the frog being boiled in this situation. Hard to get a sense of how bad it had gotten until after I saw how it should’ve been.

Mead has been progressing! The short version of the story: * it's very alcoholic (~16% ABV) * it's very dry, so I'm going to sweeten it with honey this week * once it's been stabilized, sweetened, and clarified, it'll be ready to bottle * I've already got Plans™ for the next two batches

A foamy layer developed on top of the must. No off smells coming through the airlock, so it seems like this is probably just krausen, which at this stage is a sign of healthy and vigorous yeast activity and is harmless as long as it stays clear of the airlock.

The fig mead must has been mixed in a 1G carboy, but I was wrong earlier when I said primary fermentation would begin today. Today I’m sanitizing the must with a campden tablet to kill off any wild bacteria and halt the growth of any wild yeast that may have been present in the figs.

I’ve cleaned out the back hallway (best dark place in the house) to make room for a fermentation station. Honey and figs are acquired, so primary fermentation starts tomorrow!

With everything I’ve got going on right now, it’s probably not the time to start a new hobby or side proj—oh god dammit, how did that happen

Just sat down in front of a computer and actually made a prototype of a game that I’ve been designing for way too long. Feels good. It’s months past the point where thinking about it any more would be useful, and I’m excited to actually _play_ it on Wednesday.

Wrote up some brief thoughts about some of the games I played at Gen Con this past weekend: hollis.computer/posts/2024-0...

tfw you park in front of your house, but you can’t get out of the car yet because Breaking Out by The Protomen is playing.

Brining ~10lbs of pork shoulder! The brine is salt, water, and date syrup. Why date syrup? Well, the last time I went to make my normal molasses brine (a la Alton Brown), I was out of molasses but happened to have date syrup on hand, and that ended up being some of the best pork I’ve ever made.

🚨 THE MEMORIAL DAY COOKING THREAD HAS BEGUN 🚨 
Today was the Big Shop, and the first draft of the master plan document. It never quite survives unaltered, but this sort of thing has enough moving parts that it’s important to have some kind of plan. 
Actual food posts begin tomorrow!

Kicking off BBQ season. Today’s going to be quick and simple: some smoked bratwurst to make sure all the equipment is in working order.

Cauliflower is an extremely underrated roasting vegetable. This is based on a method from Cook’s Illustrated that I’ve been using for years involving cutting a head of cauliflower into wedges (more contact surface on the cut sides for better browning) and roasting in a 475°F oven.

Running low on kimchi, so it’s time for another batch! Cabbage is salted and resting.

I’ve invented something beautiful and dangerous. A couple nights ago, I made some cheese buldak. Well, tonight, I took some of the leftovers and made cheeseSTEAK buldak: a Philly cheesesteak-style sandwich, but with spicy Korean braised chicken.

Having a truly enviable relaxing evening featuring some cheese buldak and Deep Space Nine

Had some king oyster mushrooms that I needed to use up, so I decided to get a little more fancy than I do on a normal night. Roasted them in schmaltz and made a rice bowl with a garlic soy sauce, raw egg yolk, and a sprinkle of pepper flakes.

I just bought some 21-grain-and-seed sandwich bread, and I can now confidently say I still haven’t found the upper bound for the number of kinds of grains and seeds in my bread. Like, if I found a 22-grain bread next time I went shopping, I’d buy it.

I deep fried a bunch of chicken wings for the Superb Owl, mostly because I love chicken wings, but also partially as an excuse to try out some of that fry oil solidifying powder to see if it makes cleanup easier. I’m happy to report that **it absolutely does**.

Just finished working my way through _Crafting Interpreters_, and I’m pretty proud of where I wound up. I now have:
* a bytecode compiler and VM for a toy scripting language
* a CLI that can run scripts, dump a human-readable representation of the bytecode, and run a REPL

Posted a thread over on mastodon about making candied citron, and I’m proud of how it turned out! This is only my second time trying to candy citrus. The first time was a bit of a disaster, so this is encouraging! kind.social/@SconeforgeM...

Made a small New Year’s feast this afternoon. - cornbread - collard greens (seasoned with trotters!) - lentils and rice with fried onions - cheese grits - sausage

Morning thoughts: I should make garlic confit No, wait. I should make garlic confit with DUCK FAT.