Pinterest forgot again: Snickerdoodles

Hi y'all,

Here's an amazing snickerdoodle recipe that can be made without dairy:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/food-and-friends/snickerdoodles/

While the recipe as written calls for butter, I have had great success with shortening. I typically use butter-flavored Crisco. The advice that works well for me is to replace each 1/4 cup of butter with 1.5 tsp water and 1/4 cup shortening. In this case, I add the water and shortening both when creaming the fat and sugar.

P.s. Yes, this is another post on my blog because Pinterest keeps forgetting it.

The Walks

I walked along the catwalk, occasionally pausing to gaze, awestruck, into what had been empty space only yesterday. A spindly web of similar walks surrounded a volume of space in which a city-state like Singapore would have been comfortable. Underneath was a carpet of the fluffy, rolling white clouds that were a permanent fixture in this region. Above stretched a mixed azure-black expanse typical of my present altitude.

The Walks were quite amazing, but they were merely a backdrop for the repairs being attempted within their confines.

A Plethora-class starship was oscillating in and out of existence, alternately replaced by a view into the sun it was powered by and by a horrific crushing vignette of the black hole that had destabilized it.

The vessel wasn't what the old timers had imagined before the advent of gravitic delamination propulsion. A narrow metal pod maybe 100m in length was nestled in a kilometer-deep network of glowing plasmidic struts. These, in turn, tended towards a certain shape chosen by the architect; this example was a sort of large feline. The pilots all say there's a personality that comes with it, and, watching this one fight, I believe it.

The ship--creature?--relied on a kind of dimensional rift between it and a given star as a power source. It's fairly reliable, but when it goes strange it goes very strange.

In this case, the rift had impinged on the subspace corona of a gravitic singularity and the resulting relativistic geometry threatened to permanently relink the ship to the black hole instead of the sun. It was terrifying to watch: the ship's plasma scaffold would seem fine for a while, but then the rift would destabilize and the entire beautiful structure would sag inwards. A midnight-black point would appear near the center and the creature would struggle against the imploding darkness.

Over time, as the engineers and technicians reinforced one more linkage, the shape would stabilize, the black maw would diminish and fade, and then all would seem peaceful again.

Sadly, it was not peaceful. Every crew member onboard knew the risks. Each cycle was another chance for annihilation with guaranteed wear on the superstructure, so they strove for redemption. Protected by the aethereal confines of the Walks, the outside world carried on obliviously while reality itself threatened to implode for this little ship...

Pilings

Nothing happened.

Confused, I stepped back from the spray-chalk surveyor's mark I had just made, indicating where the to-bedrock piling was to be driven in. I looked down at my radio, then looked up at the cabin of the foundation-laying machine. I waved. The operator waved. I waved at the piling mark. The operator waved vaguely back.

A sure sign of insanity is trying the same thing over and over...

I glanced at the piling four marks back. That time it had worked, albeit with some careful preparation. The machine had pounded the durasteel column clear to bedrock in two strokes, complete with a four-foot-diameter head run through with connection points for the building's superstructure. I had gone over it--it was perfectly aligned with the survey, well within the generous 1/4" tolerance the architect had allowed us.

I looked at the six piling-free marks behind it.

...expecting different results.

I looked down at my blueprint, paced off the approximate location of the next piling, and set down the surveyor's rig. With a few chirps and some button pressing, it sidled its way to the location of the next piling. As it made little adjusting motions I sighed, reflecting on the combination of orbital positioning bases, local sounding array, and signal processing the little robot relied on to do its work. I looked around carefully and, satisfied with its position, pressed the red button right in the center of the top of the device. It obediently popped into the air and started sweeping a laser across the ground in the shape of a surveryor's mark. I grunted, pulled the spray can off my belt, and deftly copied the bright red light pattern into bright white chalk. It was simple enough to then pluck the hovering bot out of the air and take several steps back.

"Alright, drop it in!" I declaimed into the radio.

Silence from the speaker; the machine remained motionless. Again.

When I looked up to wave despondently at the cabin, the operator was down from it and walking towards me.

"Well, sorry we didn't get much done. My shift's over; same time tomorrow?"

My thoughts swirled, and I attempted to find some order in the chaos. What had the op been doing up there? Why was dropping a piling so hard that one of seven attempts was flat ignored? WHERE WERE YOU??

I nodded dumbly.

The op looked at the empty marks, back at me, said, "We'll do better tomorrow. This is hard."

I nodded dumbly. Again.

The highly trained specialist walked away.

Turning, I ran my eyes across the seventy-three piling marks made on the job site in the weeks prior. There was neither rhyme nor reason to which ones had been missed and which ones had been placed with that same, unerring precision.

The boss had made it clear that the op was just as important to the project as I was. There was no rank to pull to get things done (as if that would actually work anyhow), and conversations with the op--when they actually happened--tended to resemble the one that had just taken place.

You know, I'm pretty bad at communicating with the op. This is my fault, I thought to myself. I hardly even know what's wrong, let alone how to fix it. I'll ask tomorrow, and we'll get this sussed out, and this'll work marvellously and the structure will be beautiful, if only I can remember what it's supposed to be...

Mammoths, feminism, and "masculism"

I've been digging through my college notes recently, culling some things. One of the gems I thought I'd lost was a curious essay.

It's titled "The Other End of the Mammoth: Qualification Rituals for Male Bonding in and out of Literature" and it's by John S. Harris. Probably not the politician one, but I really don't know.

The Internet doesn't seem to know that it exists, which is quite surprising to me. I would love to know where to find it legitimately so that I can freely share it; as it is, I probably won't scan my copy. It's quite worth the read, especially in contrast to modern vehement rhetoric.

Spoilers lie below... You've been warned.