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JonBanes

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hubskier for: 4052 days

recent comments, posts, and shares:
JonBanes  ·  4033 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Recently in my increasingly vegetarian kitchen: vegetable soup

Well, to make this a bit thicker (which usually tricks me into thinking it's more filling) you could make a roux. All you need is a couple tbs of flour in between sweating the veggies and pouring in the broth. Mix in and brown up the flour a bit, this helps give a nutty flavor the more you brown but thickens less the more you brown.

If you're not on a diet this then makes a pretty good pot pie filling, too (or just put in a ceramic oven safe bowl and put a square of puff pastry on top at 400 F, perhaps a bit of egg wash for color).

If it's too soupy you can also experiment with adding noodles or rice to suck up excess moisture and give the whole thing a bit more structure.

I'd also probably add celery in the sweat (because France) and mushrooms (both because I love mushrooms and the earthy/savory flavor helps it not be so leafy/veggie/unsatisfying).

JonBanes  ·  4037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is your city on this list? Should it be? ---Top 100 Best Places to Live | Livability

It is a great school, shitton of people/opportunities if you grab them too. Of course, it doesn't matter where you are if you feel like you're there alone.

JonBanes  ·  4037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is your city on this list? Should it be? ---Top 100 Best Places to Live | Livability

I can see how anyone that doesn't meet the majority demo here wouldn't like it, essentially educated upper/middle class white people.

I'm curious where you came from before. Are you at CU?

JonBanes  ·  4037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is your city on this list? Should it be? ---Top 100 Best Places to Live | Livability

Boulder! #2 Not a surprise really. Also not a surprise that 'demographics' is its lowest stat.

This place is seriously lovely, f'real.

JonBanes  ·  4038 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you reading now? Is it any good?

Yeah, he is easily becoming my favorite, especially after Mort. I do miss a good Luggage/Rincewind story though.

Zach Weinersmith also comes to mind, he's done everything, youtube skits, two comics, science podcast, interactive book.

The point was really that web comic people diversified. Look at penny-arcade, Scott Kurtz, randal Monroe, Ryan west (I mean North), the oatmeal, kris straub. Questionable content is almost traditional by their standards, making one product, one way and selling it. All the other talent in comics have branched out, using that art to make more diverse things than a formula driven 3-panel comic.

EDIT: Also, all those people do make a good living, heck, penny-arcade has a staff of like 7 people, a multi-million dollar charity and an international expo, they are doing pretty good. I can name more people living off web-comics than I ever could for syndication.

EDIT: Ryan North, Ha!

JonBanes  ·  4040 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you reading now? Is it any good?

I'm working my way through the Discworld series (currently Reaper Man). Some are a bit of a miss, but they are quite often some of the funniest books I've read.

JonBanes  ·  4040 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you reading now? Is it any good?

I'd say start with Foundation if you want a gigantic space epic spanning hundreds of thousands of years and light years but start with I, Robot if you want a series of short stories about his famous 3 laws of robotics. They sort of go in opposite directions, one out into space, the other into the logic or a purely logical being, both good, but very different feeling.

Lack of imagination about new revenue streams by aging musicians is hardly going to result in a lack of creative content. Look at how much more diversity and creativity there is on the music scene now than 30 years ago, this is largely due to the democratizing effect the internet can have on such industries.

I think there is an interesting parallel with comic strips (think funny pages, not spiderman). Pre-internet, you made a comic strip and then sold it, selling to just one person or newspaper was not profitable so you would sell it to an organization that could distribute it for you, a syndicate. The rise of the internet brought us some of the first web-comics, syndicated by the internet. But how do you make money off of that? Well, they had to do a lot of trial and error, but there are now a growing number of people capable of maintaining a living (and doing it better than traditional syndication ever did) and they are doing it in a gigantic diversity of ways, not just by creating product X (the comic strip itself) and selling it.

Music still feels like it's stuck in the pre-internet era. Musicians create a 2-3 minute song and try and sell it. That seems like a really inflexible model, there is no technical reason music needs to be packaged this way and I'm guessing that the people capable of finding a new way to package their talents could start a revolution.

I don't have answers, but all this fatalism about how music is dying is silly and short-sighted.

JonBanes  ·  4043 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New Zelda: Link Between Worlds Trailer

For some reason the video isn't showing up here for me, I'm not sure where the problem lies there.

This actually looks great. I've always liked the 2D zeldas better anyway, so I might be biased. It's got a real Link to the Past vibe to it but with some interesting paper mario-esque mechanics that could be interesting, depending on how it's implemented (I thought paper mario could have been way better, the central mechanic seemed like a great idea but it was kind of abandoned in favor of endless fetch quests and boring dialog). This one brings back all that vertical 2D stuff from the gameboy ones I liked so much (think dungeon 7 in Awakening) but it looks like it might actually be more navigable.

Man I really want to play this.

JonBanes  ·  4044 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Lil's Book of Questions: What Should I Believe? (Part 4)

This is the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" reply essentially, correct me if I'm wrong. The problem with this is that statement is not complete, what is should read is "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence unless we would expect there to be evidence".

For instance, if I say that a nuclear bomb went off in downtown Denver and you look at downtown Denver and see absolutely zero radiation or destruction, that is an absence of evidence. This does not mean that a nuclear bomb did in fact go off there. We would expect there to be evidence in such an event, and the complete lack of evidence for such a thing is clear evidence that it did not in fact happen.

Supernatural claims are, by necessity, claims about the world. If there is evidence that we would expect to see from those claims that is absent then that is, in fact, evidence pointing toward them not existing.

It is not really the coin flip you present it as.

JonBanes  ·  4048 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: QUIZ: Can You Tell The Difference Between Modern Art And Paintings By Toddlers?

Well art isn't just the artifact but is also the context that artifact is in. Certainly King Tut's sarcophagus is a great work of art (in a sort of ceremonial, religious way) and a perfect replica would also be very impressive, but would not mean the same thing as the actual place where Tut's body was actually placed.

The Mona Lisa is an example of this, one of the reasons for it's incredible fame is that it was stolen from the Louve, supposedly by Picasso. Certainly there are other works by De Vinci that are greater works of art but the fact that it was stolen from the most famous art museum in the world adds to it's significance and it's lore.

This is why people want originals and not perfect forgeries. They want the context that comes with the art and not just a perfect visual representation of the thing.

That being said there is something to gain from both a famous artists abstract renderings and a child's playtime. What those thing are is very different and that is why it matters, because art is more than the artifact.

JonBanes  ·  4050 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What kind of instrument do you play, and why?

I haven't played much music since high school (tuba) but I bought a couple harmonicas a couple months ago just to do something musical and they have got to be the easiest instrument to pick up. I'm not great at them yet but I'm a sight better than I was at tuba in three months.

JonBanes  ·  4050 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Instructor is anti plate tectonics.

Well god sure did a good job of making it look like there is plate tectonics. I'm super curious where or what kind of school you go to. I'm guess it's US and not a public school?

JonBanes  ·  4051 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I just stumbled across a dirty little secret of Hubski...

I actually ran into this trying to find the FAQ here and played for a while thinking the FAQ was inside a gaddamn text based adventure.

I don't know how it happened, I gave up after far too long a time.

JonBanes  ·  4051 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is this happening to anyone else?

Break into books man, that will get you addicted and salivating for more. You can get some kinda e-reader and it all synchs up. Some times the same format of reddit, couple hundred page article, google search, wikipedia rabbit-hole needs to change and the longer format of a book helps me stay sane.

JonBanes  ·  4051 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Have You Been Playing Lately?

Dragon's Dogma. The setting and story are kinda dumb and generic fantasy but the combat mechanic and overall game feel/design is interesting enough to keep me playing. It's worth the 5-10 bucks you can probably get it for nowadays, i'd say.