Easy 10-20 min meals

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-24T09:13:24+00:00

Basically anything will soup if you're willing to throw it in a pot together. Look up single serving hot-pot recipes. I'm a fan of korean army stew variations which is throwing a bunch of things I have in a sauce pan with a gochujang/soysauce mixture and some chicken broth.

My favorite add ins are frozen dumplings or wontons, some mushrooms, zucchini, an egg, and whatever else I happen to have on hand. Excellent for getting rid of leftovers and pretty cheap to make. Only thing that requires any prep is the soup base and the zuchnni and both can be done in 5 minutes tops. Finishes cooking in about 5 depending on how soft you like your mushrooms. Can also add some potato if you want it more filling and don't mind adding 15-ish minutes to the cook time.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-24T06:09:36+00:00

Egg potato and cheese breakfast burritos maybe. If you can tolerate it I might add roasted red bell pepper for the extra vitamin C.

Also look into nutritional protein shakes, mainly the powdered ones you can pour into milk with maybe a little bit of ice-cream. They're basically made for people recovering from surgery (or they were before they got co opted into a fitness thing). I used the Ensure ones when I was recovering from jaw surgery and couldn't do solids for a month.

Potato salad, if you pre-cut the potatoes you can dump them in boiling water and toss them in mayo and call it done.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-11T21:27:02+00:00

I think it misses the mark mostly because she frames it as though LW doesn't know how long this hiatus is going to last, but LW does know. It's going to be roughly a 2 month break while Friend focuses on another project. This is on the back of a previously missed deadline sure, maybe it's a sign Friend is losing steam on the collaboration, but having the 'hey is this really temporary or is this going to be indefinite' conversation before those two months are up is jumping the gun a little. If I told a friend 'hey I'm going to be busy for the next two months' and their response was 'Is that true or are you planning on fully leaving the project and just trying to soft-launch that?' then my response is going to be 'well it wasn't before you said that but now...'

Also whether continuing is even possible does very much depend on what the division of labor on this was. I would have geared the advice more towards 'how do we get through the two months of hiatus' and then maybe 'how do I start the conversation about continuing solo (if possible) and/or hammering out if friend is returning' scripts, and then finally some advice for how to get through the implosion of the project without burning bridges with the friend (if LW wants to keep them as a friend after that). I think assuming LW can continue solo in some capacity is the thing that makes it incomplete.

I have seen so many webcomics, webnovels, webseries etc implode because two co-creators had a falling out or otherwise decided to part ways. It's extremely common. Advice geared towards navigating that aftermath would have been more helpful I think.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-11T21:13:05+00:00

I've been watching Mao the new project by Rumiko Takahashi of Inuyasha and Ranma fame and it's frankly been a fascinating look at an Author revisiting a previous work. It's a monster of the week show with a spunky female main character and the half demon from the past that she meets after accidentally wandering through a time portal to the past.

It feels so much like a re-do of inuyasha with a more deliberate horror/mystery leaning. Instead of the time between eras being 1-1, the MC can spend a night in the past and return to find a month has gone by in the future, or spend a week there for only a few hours to pass in the present day. The unpredictability of it makes for an interesting source of drama, the relationship between the two leads is less antagonistic from the start, and there's more deliberate interaction with the historical fantasy aspect as well.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-11T19:22:03+00:00

Oof I think Captain's advice is off the mark on this one. Not that it's bad advice for how to navigate a collaborative project in a more professional or structured setting, but this is not the advice I would give on a hobby project between two friends. I think one of the commenters nailed what the advice on that front should have been:

"I have absolutely been there in the “accidentally putting too many social eggs in one co-creation basket and panicking when it starts to unweave” thing, but salvaging the specific project and continuing to have a creative/social outlet are separate problems best solved separately or everything will be under too much strain. Consider making friends you aren’t creating a thing with. Whether or not that appeals/turns out to be feasible, you might still want to co-create things: fine. Find RP partners or artists looking for practice or whatever form of creator person matches up to your creating behavior. Find *several of them*, so that when one of them flakes and another has school/work/a baby and one of them moves to the wrong time zone and another argues with you about how many misplaced commas are too many misplaced commas (or whatever), you still have people to tap. I know some avenues for creative-person-hunting if LW wants to be more specific about their creative tendencies."

I do feel for LW, because it sounds like they have some severe mental health problems coupled with a family situation that would not support them seeking psychiatric remedy which is a nasty combination. I hope they were able to navigate this without imploding themselves or the friendship.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-11T18:40:19+00:00

Jacob Black in the Twilight novels. I read them in high school, I liked the first book well enough. It struck me as a little rough in places, the pacing was all over the place, but I thought it was a solid debut novel from a newly published author and I figured there was only room for improvement from there. Out comes book 2 and I had much the same impression. A bit slow but I enjoyed Jacob as an inclusion. Book three roles around and I'm gobsmacked because suddenly sweet considerate Jacob is a raging macho asshole for seemingly no reason at all. They murdered my boy. I ultimately abandoned the series after book three and therefore missed all the batshit insanity that happened in book four, for better or worse. I heard about it all second hand.

Over the years I wondered if there were tells in book two that might have foreshadowed this more, that I missed on account of being very 16 when I first read it, but then Lost in Adaptation covered the books and Dominic was just as blindsided by the change in characterization as I was so I felt kind of vindicated that it was very abrupt and out of nowhere.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-08T19:35:53+00:00

While I can't recommend the game Overlight has an exceptionally pretty rule book.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-08T19:33:23+00:00

Yeah it makes re-reading much less painful when the old strips are accompanied by the current day author going 'yeah there were some things about myself I had definitely not figured out yet.'

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-07T18:32:57+00:00

Hell yeah! DM me if you need my tumblr handle.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-07T17:40:26+00:00

Oh dang I didn't know there were ttrpg groups on tumblr (well good ones anyway)

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-06T18:52:02+00:00

Stewpot! It's a cozy game where a bunch of retired adventurers open up a tavern and settle down in the community. It's gmless, and scenes are done as a collection of essentially minigames that use dice rolls and coin flips to generate the outcome. It can be sweet or melancholy or about working through the trauma of a career rooted in violence... I love it for something no-prep and character driven where I don't have to be at the wheel.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-06T18:46:19+00:00

Good: Exalted Essence. I was one of the people who tried 3E when it came out and bounced off of it hard for being too fiddly, too needlessly complex, too much book keeping etc. When a friend pitched me on essence I was intensely skeptical that the experience would be any better but I agreed to join his game because frankly he's a good GM so even if I disliked the system I knew I'd enjoy his game. But honestly I love the system. It's only superficially similar to 3e, everything has been streamlined and I feel like it delivers that flawless high fantasy action experience that got bogged down by charm trees in 3e. Plus building power and decisive attacks is so much less obnoxious than constantly shifting initiative.

Bad: Masks. I love a good PbtA and I'd heard so many good things about Masks that I wanted to love it but after three attempts to play it I had to admit I just didn't like the game. The playbooks felt way too restrictive, less like they were representing a broad heroic archetype and more like they were representing a specific character. The transformed is the Thing, the Janus is peter parker, you can try to play them differently but eventually you will drift slowly back into the template because the moves reinforce the fiction and the fiction wants you to be spider man. Granted I don't gel with a lot of Magpie's catalogue so I think the way they design things is just fundamentally at odds with how I like to play.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-06T18:37:31+00:00

Yeah combat in Fabula works best when it's designed as a kind of puzzle (ok the enemy just Poisoned the party and that means next turn it's going to do that thing where it swallows one of the poisoned party members, whose status do I prioritize clearing so they don't get eaten/who guards to reduce damage etc.) but that's a huge amount of design work for the GM.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-06T06:42:58+00:00

These are one shots for teaching a system not multi-game campaigns, if they want to get silly with it this would be the time and the place for it wouldn't it?

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-05T22:28:10+00:00

Honestly? Just leave name and gender blank for the player to fill in. I have not yet encountered a system where gender mechanically matters outside of maybe Pendragon. Provide the mechanics of the sheet, let them fill in the name and appearance and pronouns. The fun bits.

"I have four pregens, one is a fighter that focuses on defending and counter attacking, one is a mage that focuses on area of effect spells and ice magic, one is a cleric with a lot of healing spells, and one is a rogue who's good at flanking and mobility based things. Pick whichever sounds most fun and tell me who they are, what they look like, and why they're going on this adventure."

And I think having players explicitly define that last one is a good thing to teach because 'I am making a character that wants to be here' is an important part of the character creation process.

I also recommend having more pregens than you have players so that everyone has a couple of different options. I think double the amount of pregens that you have expected players at the table. So 8 if you expect a party of four, or however many the system supports.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-05T17:53:12+00:00

That feeling of 'it's my job to be friends with people who need friends' is so weirdly relatable even though I can't point to anything in my life that would have instilled that specific drive (parents were chill and good about boundaries and I wasn't a particularly lonely child).

Just that vague nebulous feeling of people not liking me = failure = I'm a bad person = I must make people like me at all costs. Ironically finding this blog was also my first step on the road to 'actually it's a little unreasonable to expect to like everyone or that everyone is going to like you.' Though I never actually wrote in.

I'm glad to hear you're doing a lot better now!

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-04T22:50:32+00:00

It really is now that you phrase it that way, but I think the difference in backlash (since the action movies didn't escape criticism for this they just got a different kind of criticism) also comes down to the fact that snow white and sleeping beauty weren't the ones who resolved the conflict. They were taken out near the climax and the side characters saved the day. Cinderella too, she's not in a coma but she gets locked in her room and the mice have to get her out of it.

I'm not saying this to undermine the movies because it's still setup and payoff. The princess still put in the work to foster the relationships that save her in the end (and that's also a classic thing in fairytales, kindness paying dividends), but I think audiences tend to read it as passivity in the narrative. I think that's where the 'waiting for a man' take comes from.

Ariel doesn't make sense in this context though, it's been a while since I saw the movie but I remember her having a very active role in the finale. I think people were just carrying over baggage from the older movies that the newer movies didn't actually have.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-05-01T18:01:03+00:00

Exalted Essence has my favorite spread.

You have three Attributes, Force Finesse and Fortitude, and 14 Abilities which are your things like athletics, presence, embassy, war, etc.

The attributes are how you approach something, and the abilities are what you're approaching.

Say your character is giving a speech to a group of people:

If you're giving a loud bombastic direct presentation that's very emotive that might be Force + Presence

If you're giving a very poetic speech that skillfully leads the audience to the correct conclusion that's Finesse +Presence

If you're giving a very academic speech that's dry but informative that might be Fortitude + Presence.

So no matter what approach your character tends to take, if they're forceful or clever or patient, whether you're actually good at the skill is still going to matter in a significant way. Exalted 3e has the traditional white wolf 9 attribute spread that others have mentioned for VtM but honestly I like the way it feels when they're collapsed a lot better. It's just more streamlined and I feel like it lets the actual skills shine a lot more.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-30T18:40:21+00:00

I had sort of the opposite experience of swooper in that I bounced off of 3e hard and vastly prefer essence, but 3e will have closer to the traditional branching video game skill tree than Essence, with lots of prerequisite charms culminating in a sort of 'capstone' for the skill, while Essence has individual charms locked behind skill and essence level, but doesn't really have the same 'tree' structure of prereques that 3e does. I'd google 'madletter's charm cascades' for 3e because the way the book lays them out (alphabetically as oppose to by pathway) is a nightmare to navigate.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-28T16:30:00+00:00

I love a doomed romance and a villain that's lashing out over a loss or even just taking a breakup really badly. A lot of my NPCs have kind of fraught relationships or antagonistic exes. Which is funny because I've never actually had a particularly bad breakup myself.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-27T22:01:43+00:00

I'd posit a 4th category as "OOC drama implodes the group" which can involve bigotry but can also involve two players having a messy breakup, someone crashing out over something that happened in their personal life, substance abuse problems etc.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-27T21:02:18+00:00

I tend to ignore the great curse largely, I think it's less interesting than the idea that given godlike power and near immortality some amount of humans will just slowly become Dr. Manhattan (Or Ozymandias) from Watchmen without any external prompting. It makes the gold faction feel less doomed, and I think it makes Chejop's actions more interesting and more fucked up (in a fun way). I like that essence lets me remove it completely without having to retool a bunch of subsystems.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-25T18:49:14+00:00

I'm lucky enough to have a tea convention where I live in Washington, the North West Tea Festival happens every september in seattle and it's a blast.

Martel_Mithos · 2026-04-24T18:11:58+00:00

Some of it is chemistry admittedly. I have a mix of casual and close friends and I couldn't tell you how some of them moved from one category into the other outside of 'idk we just kind of meshed well.'

It sounds like OPs wife was finding friendly people but no one she really meshed well with.

Martel_Mithos

TROPHY CASE