... but I won't spread it.

"Starting 11 March 2024, the price of Ring Protect Basic will change from £34.99/year to £49.99/year per device. If you would like to keep your current plan, no further action is required. Your plan will renew at the new price, unless you cancel your subscription before your next renewal on or after 11 March 2024."

Arse clowns.

Editorialised headline: Man who anticipates making obscene piles of cash through deals with China sez we should do deals with China.

First job of the Ryujin questline to get coffee from TerraBrew. I picked up the order but then sat with it on a bench in the lobby of Ryujin Tower for 48 hours (70 hours UT) before I completed the quest to make sure it was cold.

Hah! In your face, corporate drones, you don't control me!

Slice or dice some good quality (not smoked) pancetta and gently fry it to release some of that delicious fat, about five minutes or so should do. If you don't have pancetta some unsmoked steaky bacon will do. I like to use an enamelled Dutch oven for this (I use a Le Creuset, other brands are available).

Finely dice a large onion, a carrot, a rib of celery, and a few fat cloves of garlic and add to the pancetta. Add a little olive oil if you feel it needs it. Very gently fry for about ten minutes.

Side note: onion, carrot, and celery make a soffritto, the cornerstone of Italian sauces and soups. This is very similar to a French mirepoix, and only a little different to a Cajun or Creole 'holy trinity' which switches out the carrot for a green bell pepper.

Meanwhile, fry 500g or so of beef mince to get some colour on it. I tend to take the block of mince and sear it hard, on both sides, in a cast iron skillet, then break it up before adding it to the soft veggies.

Add a big ol’ glass of wine. White or red. Let’s face it, no nonna ever thought “I only have white wine in the cupboard, let’s get KFC instead”.

Simmer on a medium-high heat, stirring often, until most of the wine has evaporated. About 10 minutes. You could probably just simmer on a low heat for longer but I’m a very impatient man.

Add 500 ml passata, 250 ml whole milk, 250 ml beef stock. Yup. Milk. Trust me. Whole milk, obv. And go easy with the passata. This is a meat sauce with tomato, not a tomato sauce with meat.

Bring it back to a simmer and turn the heat right down to the lowest you can. Wait three to four hours while it simmers, checking and stirring every twenty or so minutes. If it starts to dry out, add a little more stock.

Test for, and adjust, seasoning, with salt and pepper, obv.

Then cook some pasta - I much prefer tagliatelle to spaghetti for a ‘bol’. Drain the pasta and add to the pan with the sauce. Mix it up good and proper, then serve with slightly more freshly grated Parmesan than seems sensible.

Nice.

That will make enough sauce for about 8 people. I usually ladle out half of it into some Tupperware and freeze it. If I’m making a double batch to freeze for several meals, I’ll add 500g of minced pork to the beef, and double all the other ingredients.

Now then. Let’s talk real. Italian food is gate-kept (gate-keepered?) more than pretty much any other cuisine in the world. But ‘spag bol’ is now an international dish and there are more variations of it cooked around the world than there are people in Italy, and that’s absolutely okay. If you want to add mushrooms, dried herbs, chorizo, or even – and I’ve seen it recommended – peanut butter, that’s up to you and if the people you’re serving it to like it then hurrah! One piece of advice though (and this is advice for life, not just for spag bol) avoid Worcestershire Sauce if you can. Henderson’s Relish is infinitely superior.

But if you do want to try the official recipe for Ragù alla Bolognese, you can find it here.

A free-range chicken, seasoned with paprika, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, white pepper, and cayenne.

A can of a fairly mild IPA shoved up its fundament (about a third of the can decanted into me first to prevent boilover).

Cooked at about 180'C in a Kamado cooker for roughly an hour and a half. The photo was taken at about the one hour mark.

Served with a creamy mac and cheese and a sharp, homemade coleslaw.

A nice end to the summer!

From Jason Lefkowitz

"After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called "Out of the Trees," and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.

Once the Beeb gave up on "Out of the Trees," they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it. They wiped the master tapes so they could be re-used. "Out of the Trees" went into the history books as lost media.

That changed nearly 30 years later, when Chapman's partner, David Sherlock, approached Dick Fiddy, an archivist at London's National Film Theatre. Sherlock revealed that Chapman had in fact recorded a copy of "Out of the Trees" onto videotape from his home TV the one and only time it aired.

But there was a problem. That air date was in 1976, before VHS or Betamax became global videocassette standards. Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats -- Philips' "Video Cassette Recording" (VCR), which had reached the market in 1972. The rise of Beta and VHS had, however, led Philips to abandon its VCR format. The last compatible players had been made in 1979. By the mid-2000s, they were impossible to find. Sherlock had been left with an historic tape, and no machine to play it on.

Fiddy says it took two years to build a compatible player, but eventually it was done. And that is why you can watch the one and only episode of "Out of the Trees" ever produced on YouTube today.

Is it any good? Ehhh, not really. It's not Chapman or Adams' best work, that's for certain. But it's a good example of what the future will hold for lots of cultural artifacts, if we're not careful."

I quite enjoyed it and had no idea it existed before now. So, thank you, @jalefkowit@octodon.social

Smash burgers. Fantastic.

The best burger I’ve ever had was the Green Chilli Cheese burger from Meat Liquor. No matter what I do, I can’t quite match that perfection. Has anyone come close?

https://meatliquor.com/

The long-awaited print-on-demand edition of “New Pavis: City on the Edge of Forever,” volume one of Ian Thomson’s Pavis & Big Rubble Companion Director’s Cut, is now available to order from DriveThruRPG: just $35.95 for a massive 224-page colour hardcover tome.

The PDF has been available for a while, but this is for old gippers like me who don't entirely trust PDFs and is a very welcome release.

And it's just first volume in a hugely expanded re-release of the original Companion series.

This is 'old school' stuff, all updated to the new rules system (RQG), but written in the classic style of gameplay (RQ2).

Focused around independent adventurers in search of wealth and glory, who slowly but surely become more and more connected with the Cult of Pavis and its allies, and end up being Champions of the Old City!

About twenty-five chicken wings, marinaded overnight in yoghurt, lemon juice and a Tandoori spice mix.

I put these on a Kamado Joe barbecue at 120'C for about half an hour.

Then raised the temperature to 180'C for another, maybe half an hour, flipping the wings every five to ten minutes to make sure they got some char but didn't burn.

Meanwhile, I washed, soaked, and drained some basmati rice. Then I toasted some cumin and coriander seeds, then crushed them in a pestle and mortar. I added some turmeric and a pinch of kashmiri chilli powder, a couple of bruised cardamom pods, and gently fried the spices to let them bloom. I added half a chopped onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, and a little grated ginger. I continued to fry that gently for about five minutes then turned up the heat and added the rice, frying it in with the oil and spices for a couple of minutes.

Then I added 1.5 times as much vegetable stock, added a good pinch of salt, brought it to a boil, covered the pan, and turned the heat down as low as possible. I left it for just over 10 minutes until all the liquid had been absorbed, then put a piece of kitchen towel over the rice, lid back on, and let it rest for 10 minutes.

I also made some Cucumber Raita (grated cucumber, yoghurt, mint, and coriander), but the only photo I took of that makes it look horrid, so you'll just have to imagine it!

Nice.

Probably the most important publications in Runequest / Glorantha in years are the new Cults of Runequest books.

There will be 11 books in total, listed here in no particular order: Prosopaedia, Lightbringers, Earth, Mythology, Darkness, Water, Solar, Lords of Terror, Horned God, Invisible God, Lunar Way. Those in bold are already available. The Mythology book is coming in October.

The first one was the Prosopaedia, published first simply, I think, because it was ready first. On its own it's not that great a resource for players - though may be for GMs because it's effectively a summary of what was to follow in the individual pantheon books.

The Lightbringers and Earth pantheon books are a different kettle of fish. Containing, between them, 35 cults, including those most commonly used by players of Sartarite and Praxian focused games, and adding the same kind of detail as the ground-breaking Cults of Prax from all the way back in 1979.

One of the great things about the cults books though, are the cults which players don't tend to play. These are not just a bunch of cool new spells and skills for PCs to bring to bear, they're part of the monumental world-building of Glorantha. Some of these gods exist not to be be part of a party's toolset but simply because they are interwoven into the mythology of Glorantha and deserve to be present.

All available from Chaosium, of course, as print (with free PDF) and also from local game shops which are part of the Bits and Mortar initiative.

If you run a game, or play a game, based in Sartar or Prax, I'd say these books are pretty close to being essential to deepen your understanding of the cults of Glorantha.