Okay so as you all know I’m extremely cool and clever and also a published scientist, so let me tell you about my latest research.
In the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the continent of Hyrule is one of the biggest open-world maps ever created, even beating games like Skyrim and the Witcher. But, HOW BIG?
Obvs it’s very hard to get a precise size because the in-game map does not have a scale bar (terrible map skills from that cartographer). HOWEVER, if you climb the Ridgeland Tower there’s a guy up there who is a weeaboo for the Rito, who begs you to glide for him in the name of “research” (what a fucking dweeb am I right?) If you do so, he tells you how many metres you’ve flown before landing. This includes if you simply step off the tower and plummet to the ground in a straight line, and happily for my in-game ankles, the tower is surrounded by water to cushion the many landings I made to bring you this information.
Ten drops gave me a mean average height for the tower at 63.83, median 64.2, so I’m taking it as 64 for ease of Maffs.
For a flight from the tower, I picked a strip of land on the same contour line as the tower base and then flew along that. There was a slightly higher standard deviation in twelve flights because sometimes Link would step nicely over the edge and start gliding and other times he would yeet himself bodily into the sky and then start, and one time gave me an outlier because I got zapped by an electric Wizzrobe that saw me. But over all, flying the same line and hitting pretty much the same landing spot, I got an average of 250.1 metres. I took this as 250, again for ease of Maffs.
Pythagoras’ theorem hit then, so I worked out that the distance from the base of the tower to the landing spot was 242 m. Putting that into Adobe Dreamworks, I could then translate that per pixel of the map I was working with (2.42 metres per pixel.) From there, that allowed me to calculate the area of Hyrule’s land mass, roughly, in pixels and then convert it back, so having done that GUESS WHAT FOLKS
Hyrule is 25,454 km2, or 15,816 sq mi.
Wales, by contrast, is 20,735 km2, or 12,884 sq mil.
So the continent of Hyrule is, it seems, bigger than my entire country to the tune of about one and a quarter times the size.
Thank you all for listening, I will now take questions.
Wow, this is super cool!
What’s the biggest area of Hyrule in terms of pixels? (Like, counting “places the player can’t reach for whatever reason”).
Hmm, depends how you define “area”. The majority of the continent is a single landmass, so technically “everything that isn’t an island” counts? But, I’m assuming you’re after something a bit more specific.
My latest research is focusing on mapping Hyrule’s weather systems, though, which has yielded some PRETTY INTERESTING RESULTS already, and that certainly falls into areas - the largest of which covers central Hyrule (i.e. Hyrule Field and Ridgeland, the Great Plateau, Lake Hylia and the Faron Grasslands). I attach the following figure for your consideration.
Rainfall, sunlight hours and cloudiness are identical across this region, although temperature varies. I shall publish these very important results soon. Thank you for your question.
Does this mean that Hylians have a UK level grasp of distance? That Link would just die of boredom on a 6 hour car trip?
I would posit that they have something closer to a Wales level grasp of distance specifically, which probably also explains why they have perfectly easy trade routes on foot or donkey but every village Cannot Fathom actually walking over the mountain to the next one. If I am correct with this hypothesis, a six-hour car journey would be seen as not an activity for boredom, but an Undriveable Distance that one would have to tearfully kiss their relatives goodbye for in the manner of a colonist heading out to Mars.
She is nearly 70 years old, with wonderfully brown gnarled, wrinkled hands and eyes that are creased from smiling. She hand-makes all of her own clothes and sews dolls for my little sister. Abuela is very lonely… her husband already passed and her kids live far away. She misses her grandkids. Abuela comes around our place for the company almost every other day.
So this morning, my little sister and I went to visit the Abuela to return the kindness of her vegetables with some homemade soup.
It’s a funny joke we have, that if you can make a perfect posole you are wife material. I was joking around with my friend beforehand to see if I was worthy of marriage, and my little sister thinks me failing is the best thing in life, so of course she wants to ask Abuela when we arrive.
We’re wearing masks and gloves and can’t give her the big hug like we want to, but Abuela is always happy to see us. We bring the pot of soup to her table. My little sis, the little shit that she is, immediately asks, “Abuela, is Reina ready to be a wife yet?”
And Abuela immediately shifts her entire mood. Her face literally becomes this:
Abuela’s look pierces through my heart.
“Who are you trying to impress? A man or a woman?” she asks, deadly serious. We have broached the topic of marriage. It is her domain now.
And I, Rei, gay as the fourth of July, cannot believe that either Abuela clocked me instantly or that she could possibly have a fascinating past of her own.
I thought about lying, but my little sister was there and I don’t like to lie in front of her. So I was honest and said I was trying to impress a woman.
Without a response, Abuela carefully tries the posole. The room is silent.
“For a man, it’s good,” she says after a moment. “But, you’ll need to work harder to impress a woman.”
All I can do is politely nod. I have so many questions.
Now Abuela is tired. She wants to eat and relax in peace, so she waves us away. We make sure she’s settled, and then my sister and I go home.
I can’t believe my 70 year old Abuela said BI RIGHTS
this is the funniest fucking thing ever
not only did the grandma say bi rights but like
she had two separate scales of food judgement for men and women AT THE READY and there’s something inherently hilarious in “FOR MEN IT’S FINE, FOR WOMEN DO BETTER”
if you grow mushrooms over a toxic waste site, chemical spill, or other polluted growing medium, they will suck up the toxins into their fruiting bodies with such effectiveness that they are being studied for their ability to clean up tainted industrial sites. it’s called mycoremediation.
if you do this with edible mushrooms, they are no longer technically edible, but on the other hand they make a great way to poison your enemies. this is called murder and it’s usually frowned upon, but they won’t see it coming and you get bragging rights afterwards about your ability to kill people with a pizza topping.
Sorry this was not precisely most people’s idea of “nice.” Let me add that you are a glow of comforting absurdity in an ever-more-fucked-up world.
that period in the mid-20th century where the middle class suddenly had access to unprecedented food variety but no idea what to do with it and ended up inventing hundreds of doomed dishes like lime cheese jello salad or ham and banana hollandaise is thematically akin to the cambrian explosion
The end of this post punched me in the face but you’re not wrong
But that’s not really what happened!
Yes, there was sudden, unprecedented access to foodstuffs previously unavailable to all but the richest people. In fact it was a five-fold thing:
1) People had more disposable income than they’d had before. They could afford expensive food.
2) Refrigeration meant that people could keep foods longer - it was no longer “Oh, i will buy a chicken and I must cook it tonight” but rather “I will roast the chicken on Saturday, and that will also be good for dinner on Sunday, and chicken salad sandwiches on Monday and Tuesday.”
3) New kitchen appliances and conveniences meant more elaborate recipes were practical - thirty minutes of whisking by hand became five minutes with a hand mixer.
4) Refrigerated shipping made it practical to ship fruits and meats from farther away - this also marked a divorce from seasonal foods, as it became possible to ship fresh fruits and vegetables from warmer climates.
5) New processing techniques made certain foods cheaper. We tend to mostly think of this in terms of convenience foods: flash-frozen vegetables, mixes, and eventually the “TV dinner”, but gelatin is a pretty big deal. Gelatin used to be made by rendering keratin from animal sources, and making it clear and high quality was a very intensive process only available to the upper class - but it was one of the only ways to preserve certain foods before refrigeration - making many of these meat jelly foods the province of the well-to-do.
And that is what informed the middle class at this time. They weren’t just doing random food pairings. What they were doing was imitating upper-class foods of the prior decades. They were trying to pair meats and fruits, putting them in clear gelatin, and creating the kind of sauces which had previously been too labor-intensive to serve in the average household.
It took people a while to settle down and learn the unique characteristics of the newly available foodways, and create cuisine which was complementary to that, rather than aping foods which existed within different limitations. But it wasn’t random at all.
I think we’re underestimating the effect of food advertising of the period – manufacturers were coming out with all these new canned/frozen products, and because they knew a lot of people didn’t have context for these things, they put out a ton of recipe-based advertising
Now I don’t know what exactly happened in their test kitchens to produce some of the abominations I’ve seen, but undoubtedly food brands invented some of the nastiest examples of mid-century American “cuisine” in order to promote their products
I’ve seen that one before but I draw a hard line at deviled ham, man.
I will say that @hasufin absolutely has the right of it, but also that if I were going to add anything it would be what @cumaeansibyl already did – some of the recipes you see, even in communal recipe books (like the “Ladies’ Council of the Episcopalian Whatnot Fundraising Recipe Book”) are often the result of a CEO kicking back in his chair and saying “do something that will sell more canned deviled ham” to a marketing executive.
The marketing executive talks to the test kitchen, the test kitchen weeps into their saucepans but comes up with something, anything, and the recipe goes out. A magazine reader sees the recipe, it comes with a coupon so she (generally she) clips and tries it, and to her shock she and her family like it! She adapts it to her family’s tastes, strips out the marketing aspect, and two years down the line her friend on the Ladies’ Committee asks her to submit her famous Goblin Sandwich recipe.
And if you think this behavior is the province of the 1950s exclusively, let me tell you, the popularity of Food TV and FoodTube means this still happens all the time. I can’t link you guys to the essay because HuffPo took it down and I can’t find it on archive.org, but the infamous Sandra Lee Kwanzaa Cake is the result of a desperate recipe writer trying to sell a Kwanzaa recipe to a woman whose sole purpose in life is to make barely adequate food in order to sell ad space on her cooking show. A YouTube video of a horrifying recipe that goes viral? That sells beaucoup ad space for the creator.
Honestly, a person could make a couple dollars inventing fake terrible 1950s recipes and test-kitchening them on youtube.
Uh.
If you do that guys cut me in, I’ll help you write the recipes.
Also I’ve had the ham and banana hollandaise and it’s not bad. I’d put it on the menu at a hipster brunch cafe.
Honestly, a person could make a couple dollars inventing fake terrible 1950s recipes and test-kitchening them on youtube.
Sam, are you suggesting… that we could make more money with a flop than a hit?
*dramatic, visionary gesture at an unseen imaginary audience*
The Content Producers, coming to Broadway late 2021.
(Featuring the hits “Along Came GoFundMe” and “Springtime for Bezos”)
In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…
Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”
Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again.
This vote is legally binding.
Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a console– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument.
Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message.
So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
grimms’ fairy tales have actually been pleasantly surprising in many many ways
like i was expecting one of two things to happen: 1). everything to be dark and terrible and depressing or 2). everything to be really tame and happy compared to how everyone keeps telling each other that the “original” stories were so dark and terrible and depressing
guess what it is actually both of those things!!! it is like. the coolest thing. because all the grimm brothers did was collect stories from everyone everywhere and it shows; they have happy endings or sad endings or bittersweet endings or endings with horrible bloodthirsty revenge or endings with unconditional forgiveness
some are very religious, some are openly spiteful of religion, some are sanctimonious as all fuck, some make you root for the conniving bastard who sides with and then tricks the devil
some stick to predictable gender roles while others involve the princess getting fed up with this shit and saving everyone
some of them apparently were told by someone who forgot the ending? because it just kind of trails off into this rambling explanation of “I think they got married next? And there was something about. enchanted swans. I think. Anyway I’m sure everyone was very happy eventually”
also, a trope i wish we had kept around: glass mountains. trying to save your lover from inside a glass mountain. getting lost inside a glass mountain. escaping from captivity in a glass mountain. futilely trying to climb a glass mountain and sliding back down again until you trick some dudes out of their magic teleportation saddle.
“Lie down and look up at the ceiling and breathe with those curiously fragile lungs of yours and remind yourself: Don’t worry. Don’t worry. All is as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely and terrifying and unfair and heaving. Don’t worry.”
— The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, Night Vale #31.5,”Condos” (via elucipher)
