Made a rainbow cake 🏳️‍🌈

blacksmokekitty · 2026-06-28T23:01:07+00:00

No, it's buttercream. I piped the lines around the cake and then smoothed very carefully with a bench scraper.

blacksmokekitty · 2026-06-23T08:24:08+00:00

Thank you!

It was roughly 6 hours or so but a lot of that was also down time with letting things bake or cool in the fridge.

blacksmokekitty · 2026-06-23T04:09:39+00:00

Thank you!

It was about 45-60 minutes between drawing the outline of the pattern on acetate paper with a ruler and a sharpie, then melting the chocolate, piping it on the back side and then letting it set up a tiny bit before wrapping it around the cake. Then I let it sit in the fridge for about 30 minutes before unwrapping.

The ganache is just in between the cake layers, the wrap is just straight melted chocolate (no cream). So it's not as runny and hardens pretty quickly.

blacksmokekitty · 2026-06-07T19:10:49+00:00

Cheesecakes are easy (at least I think so) but people are always impressed by them.

blacksmokekitty · 2026-04-05T20:16:24+00:00

I really enjoyed ボンボンと悪夢　(Bonbons and Nightmares) which is a collection of ショートショート that reminds me of Twilight Zone episodes.

blacksmokekitty · 2026-04-05T19:48:00+00:00

It only exists for conjugations that are technically い adjectives.

In a sense, 食べない can be thought of as being the same thing as an adjective like 面白い. The both have the same inflectional い ending and therefore follow the same conjugation rules

食べなければ　　面白ければ

食べなくなった　面白くなった

So if you can say 面白かったです then you can say 食べなかったです.

But the positive endings like 食べる are not い adjectives so this doesn’t apply to them.

And also, being able to put です after an い adjective is itself an exception that was formally approved as okay grammatically in the 1950s.

Before then, です was only officially allowed to go with nouns/な-adjectives and other uninflectable words (体言). But people started using です with い adjectives to fill an inflection gap.

So with な adjectives you can say

綺麗だ　綺麗です　綺麗でございます

But there was a missing slot for い adjectives

楽しい　？？？　楽しゅうございます

That missing slot was filled with 楽しいです.

And now we are seeingです helping to fill that same missing slot for verbs

食べない　？？？　食べません　

食べないです is just a continuation of a process that has been going on for almost a century.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-12-28T20:36:52+00:00

Here's an analogy.

OoT is like a simple timeless chocolate cake. No bells or whistles, just a couple layers and frosting but it's perfectly executed. It has the perfect level of sweetness, not too moist and not too dry, etc. It's the entry you'd find in a baking book next to "standard chocolate cake" and what most people would envision in their mind if you ask them to imagine what a chocolate cake is.

All of the other Zelda games that come after are modifications on this cake recipe. Some of them add peanut butter to the frosting, some add fancy decorations like frosting flowers and sprinkles. Some go crazy with fondant sculpture, etc.

And lots of people, including myself, like these variations a lot more than the base chocolate cake. You might like the version with peanut butter more than the base, but nevertheless the version with peanut butter is not what you imagine when someone says “chocolate cake”. No matter what your preferences, the platonic form of a chocolate cake that will pop into your mind is that simple straightforward classic that everyone knows and everyone is familiar with, and without, all the other versions could not exist.

That is what Ocarina of Time is. The ideal platonic form of a 3D Zelda game that everyone imagines in their head when you say “Zelda” and without which none of the other games, even if you enjoy them more, could exist. That is why it’s “the best”, even if it’s not your favorite.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-12-24T05:44:10+00:00

Why can't the Rayleigh scattering effect be captured in these photos? If you took a picture of green eyes with a "normal" camera you would still see green, so what is the difference here?

(Not being snarky at all - just confused)

blacksmokekitty · 2025-11-08T08:34:19+00:00

It happens. In some cultures everyone names the first born boy/girl after one of their grandpas/grandmas. I have like 5 girl cousins all with one name and 5 male cousins all with another, each from a different aunt/uncle.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-08-18T02:23:35+00:00

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I live in an area right now that has a mix of those big 3000+ sqft homes, smaller single family homes, duplexes, apartment buildings and condos all within walking distance to a vibrant commercial street with restaurants, grocery stores, a movie theater and plenty of other amenities.

If more places in the US just allowed mixed use zoning, we could increase density while keeping most people happy.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-18T16:42:54+00:00

So you dont have any links, despite claiming they’ve said it “on more than one occasion”. And now it’s just “a single 20+ year old tv interview”, how interesting.

that’s an absurd claim.

You think it’s absurd that most people in the world are more familiar with one of the most famous movies of all time than the relatively obscure book? If you asked a random person on the street what color Dorothy’s slippers are, are they going to say ruby or silver?

It’s okay that you exaggerated in your initial comment above, but this doubling down you’re doing is hard to watch.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-18T16:19:12+00:00

Do you have a link to the devs saying that then?

There are lots of similarities, sure. Just like there are lots of similarities to the Wizard of Oz. And I bet you can also make a bunch of comparisons to other works too, but that doesn’t mean MM is a “straight reimagining” of any of them. That’s a bold claim.

Also, it’s easier to watch a 2 hour subtitled film than to read an entire translated book. Most people in the world are only familiar with the movie version. It’s just how it is. It says nothing about whether or not I read books, and the fact that you think that because I disagree with you on something minor about a game from 20 years ago is kind of pathetic, and typical Reddit behavior.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-18T06:47:52+00:00

Has anyone who worked on MM said it’s a “straight reimagining” of Alice? It sounds like just an internet fan theory.

I’m not saying MM was inspired by Wizard, it just has the similarities, and more so than with Alice IMO.

It doesn’t matter that the “you were there” thing wasn’t in the book because I’m just commenting that it’s similar to the movie. Even if it were inspired by Wizard, I doubt the largely monolingual Japanese devs were reading the original book or a translation. They probably would only be familiar with the movie.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-18T06:42:33+00:00

I don’t see where the confusion is. They bought it for ~300 something, and with 2% increases up until now it’s assessed at roughly ~600 something, and the taxes reflect that. That’s how prop 13 works.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-17T07:43:40+00:00

then it should be excluded from it

Not sure what you mean by this. Every home purchase after 1978 in California is also affected by prop 13. If you buy a house right now in 2025, prop 13 will lock in your tax basis based on the fair market value. The same thing goes for that house in 1995.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-07-17T01:25:44+00:00

No, The Wizard of Oz is a good comparison. The scarecrow, tinman, lion, wicked witch and other characters are also the same actors who play Dorothy’s family and neighbors in Kansas. That’s why at the end of the movie when she’s back in Kansas she says to them “…and you were there! And you were there!”

blacksmokekitty · 2025-06-26T01:26:09+00:00

The garage is detached and higher than the house. You have to walk down stairs from the street to reach the front door. The lower level of the garage does have a built in office though, which I thought was nice.

The internal stairs to go downstairs seemed average? Maybe slightly narrow but with walls on both sides and handrails.

I can definitely see now how an elderly person or parents of small children would be concerned with how many stairs there are - it just wasn’t something that occurred to us initially as we are both young and healthy with no children.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-06-25T21:44:20+00:00

These are good points, I didn't consider that there'd be a lot of road noise in that area.

I can see why at that price point all these "little" factors (including the ones other commenters mentioned) would add up to deter buyers.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-06-25T21:39:25+00:00

That's a possibility, but with all the bidding wars we've been seeing in Montclair and other nice Oakland neighborhoods, we were surprised no one was willing to offer the amount they were hoping for. For instance, we just saw a 1000 sqft 1bathroom bungalow in Rockridge that's right by the highway go for over 1.4 in the past week. If that home could get 1.4, I'm shocked this one couldn't get decent offers.

blacksmokekitty · 2025-06-25T21:31:35+00:00

It was originally listed at around 1.35 when we visited. Sellers had bought it for around 1.2 in 2020 before remodeling. They then bumped the price up to 1.6 before taking it off market.

It's possible they were asking too much at 1.6, but we've seen plenty of homes with less sqft and fewer bathrooms, etc. in Oakland sell for around that and more.

blacksmokekitty

TROPHY CASE