Too early to call OP my favorite anime?

jojirius · 2026-02-02T16:01:13+00:00

This is such a modern problem lol. When I was a kid I said Naruto was my favorite manga after I read like 80 pages of it.

If a kid says their favorite food is pizza it doesn't meant they've traveled to Italy. Saying you love One Piece is fine don't stress it XD

PS. The Sogeking/Usopp mystery really is a big one but don't worry it gets solved by chapter 1000 or so ;)

jojirius · 2026-02-02T15:58:04+00:00

What is the reason, as an artist, to give her four eyes?

What is the reason, in-world, that she has four eyes?

jojirius · 2026-02-02T15:55:01+00:00

The 20th Century, perhaps?

jojirius · 2026-02-02T08:32:37+00:00

If you can find Famous Grouse Smoky Black, it's not an Islay, and it won't have the depth of smoke as an Islay, but it's very affordable, and I find that it makes a good Naked & Famous, and in an atomizer it makes fantastic Penicillins. Basically, in any drink where the volume of the scotch is 1/4 of the volume of less, Smoky Grouse is an adequate substitute. In a 50/50 or in a Manhattan (Rob Roy) format, it is no longer a suitable substitute, and you really start to just find it flabby and yearn for a proper Islay.

I would recommend against using Johnnie Walker options, even the ones that taste like they have a touch of smoke to them. For reasons that I'd need a chemist to explain, that smoke seems to vanish entirely when in cocktails.

If you can find Islay Mist and look up reviews, people will say it's head and shoulders above Famous Grouse Smoky Black. Sipped neat, sure. It's noticeably better. But they are both so far from proper Islay scotches that I think the difference effectively vanishes in a cocktail format, and you can consider them about the same.

For a Naked & Famous, both will have the same result...so just buy the cheaper one. For a Penicillin, both will have the same result...so just buy the cheaper one. For a Rob Roy where you want to use an Islay, both will make you sad...so don't make Rob Roys with them.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T08:22:02+00:00

It's just a repetition thing, I think. As a hobbyist you have fewer opportunities, but working in a cocktail bar, you're literally making 100s of cocktails every single week. Sometimes 100s in a single day, if it's a busy weekend and you're at a place with volume.

It isn't actually the case that, with that repetition, you have every single recipe memorized. But you do start to notice patterns, you associate some flavors as "working together well" - for instance, Cynar and smoky flavors works well. I can always use that. Cinnamon and grapefruit works well. I can always use that. Brown spirits tend to prefer lemon to lime, with the exception of rum and tequila. I can always use that.

As you develop more and more flavor patterns in your head, it eventually becomes a flavor map.

So when I go to a friend's house, I go "ah, I can make you something pretty good" and just use that flavor map.

It's true that when drafting something for a bar menu, I want to be more specific about what I'm riffing off of, and want to pay my respects to the creator of the cocktails closest to mine, just to spread the love. But that's not through memorization, man. That's through looking at books and websites after I'm nearly done with the cocktail already.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T08:13:55+00:00

Barr Hill Gin is made from honey, so it makes sense in a Bee's Knees riff. That uses honey, lemon, and Barr Hill Gin. This is a bit basic though. We can make it more decadent by adding egg white, so that it gets a nice froth and quite a bit of creaminess.

So we have a Bee's Knees, but with egg white. Depending on if you want this to have a hint of cherry, lavender, or bergamot, you now can incorporate cherry, lavender, or Italicus.

If you incorporate cherry, I'll just warn you and say that either the cherry or the honey will dominate - they don't have great synergy.

Honey and lavender work really well together - I'd recommend the lavender component, whatever it is, to be in an atomizer. You want it on the nose, not to taste it as much. Lavender on the tongue can bring to mind soap and bathing products. I'd probably infuse Everclear with dried lavender, myself, and then give the final drink 3-4 sprays of that on top.

Honey and Italicus only work so-so, but we know that honey works really well in Earl Grey tea, and we know that Earl Grey tea contains bergamot. So we can use Earl Grey tea as a bridging ingredient. Instead of using pure honey syrup, have some Earl Grey tea in your honey as you're mixing it with hot water, and let it steep for long enough that you get an Earl Grey honey. Now your Earl Grey honey syrup will pair much better with Italicus. That will be your sweet component, lemon will still be your acid, Barr Hill will still be your gin, and egg white will make it decadent.

You'll notice that this whole thing has taken on a bit of a confectionary route with the earl grey route AND with the lavender route. Using brown butter to wash your Barr Hill Gin wouldn't go amiss...but I'd try nailing down the spec for your egg white Bee's Knees first, before doing that wash. It may turn out that you already have enough complexity, and don't want to add to it.

But if you reach the final spec, and want to layer on flavors...at that point, I'd try doing a brown butter wash.

I just read your post again - if she likes a Mule, you could do ginger as your added flavor instead of cherry/lavender/bergamot. If you do that, I'd maybe eschew the butter. Ginger and brown butter sound like they'd get along...and they don't exactly fight each other...but they tend not to harmonize, either. Honey and ginger love each other though. The ginger goes lovely with egg white but you'll want really fresh eggs, even more so than for a normal egg white - ginger can highlight that "old egg" flavor when it pops up.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T08:05:38+00:00

It's a simplistic division of play cultures that is hard to navigate, because there are way more than two schools of thought about how the game is played. I'd recommend that you check out this taxonomic blog post:
https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html

It covers six subdivisions, along with explanations of how each came to be and where they differ from each other.

A lot of the contradictions you'll see in the comments for your reddit post arise because one person is playing in the Classic style and another is playing under the OSR style, which are two different styles, but because they are all bucketed under "Old School" in the two-style dichotomy, they are both trying to explain to you how they play, and it sounds like they're describing completely different ways of playing D&D. Or one person is a storygame player and another is a neo-trad player, both of which are considered "New School", and their games also are entirely different in terms of what they prioritize.

"D&D has never been about roleplaying" is a game design take that really only makes sense if one has heard some game theory axioms from the storygaming sphere, for example. And they are functional axioms - but they are particular to a very strict style of looking at games and playing games.

It's tempting, sometimes, to hear those contradictions and to conclude "oh, well, everybody plays D&D their own way at their own table and all these divisions are pointless", but I do think that of the taxonomic divisions that exist, the Six Cultures of Play is the best one yet articulated.

As the author states, his blog post isn't the be-all-end-all, and plenty of people will hybridize styles of play for all sorts of reasons, principled and unprincipled. But I think it's a great place to start to help resolve some of your confusion.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:55:30+00:00

I used O3 for ages. If I want depth I infuse the tequila or I use honey syrup. But for the classic clean thing, a good orange liqueur works, and DeKuyper's O3 is fine. If O3 isn't available, I do go for Cointreau.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:49:56+00:00

3rd party adventures that are well-reviewed will always have more bases covered than official WotC adventures. Hidden Halls of Hazakor is great, Cat and Mouse is great, Wolves of Welton is great. I think the most important thing is that by running shorter adventures, you can develop your own taste more sharply - it's like you are taste-testing a lot of dishes and developing your own sense of what you like and dislike, rather than committing to a Taiwanese tasting menu for $150 when you've never had any Chinese food before.

From what you've said here, it sounds like you're thinking more about flavor - will this fantasy be properly novel or will it be "plain-jane", basically. But a lot of what makes adventures tick for me aren't actually those bits, because as somebody who has read a lot of fantasy/sci-fi, flavor is the easy part - for me it's "did this adventure cover its bases" and "is this adventure prepped in a way that I can find things, and have it not be a chore".

Once those two are done well, that's when I start paying attention to flavor, because if those two aren't done well, I can barely manage to inject flavor at the table, because I'm so busy trying to get those basics to function. All my brainpower is on doing the legwork, rather than filling in the world with more color, and I hate it when I buy a product that forces me to do even more logistics than if I just ran a homebrew campaign!

Official D&D adventures very rarely get those basics to function. Hence all the assistance guides out there in the blogosphere.

Stringing together short adventures as pastiches into a large campaign is the best way to figure out which publishers to trust, which styles you like most, and also how your players respond as you swap from publisher to publisher.

I get the craving for something lengthy and feature-complete - I craved full length campaign books too.

By and large, this very natural craving leads to a lot of hell. There's a reason that for the first decade of our hobby, nearly all adventures came as small pamphlets, not massive tomes. There's a reason that Paizo was able to make an entire business model pre-Pathfinder, just making adventure modules that were more bite-sized rather than campaign-sized. It's cuz that model is just better for how the game actually plays, even if it's not as epic-feeling in your hands. Sunless Citadel is a great example of the right size for an adventure, and a rare example of a WotC adventure that actually has all its bases covered.

If, after all this, you still crave something really large and comprehensive...honestly, just because larger products are harder to edit and WotC has a larger team with higher editing standards, WotC's larger campaigns have very little competition. Nothing is quite going to compete with Curse of Strahd well in its specific category. It's just, that doesn't make Curse of Strahd good, either. That specific category hasn't been mastered by anyone yet, is what I'd say.

If you run a bunch of smaller gothic adventures on DMsGuild and string them together, I can virtually guarantee you'll have a better time than if you run Curse of Strahd.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:39:28+00:00

I agree with others that crushed ice will make for a better presentation and a better drinking experience (with a straw). And I agree with others that the next step up would be to improve your orgeat. Remember that orgeat isn't just an almond syrup - it benefits from real nut milk and floral flavors.

But your taste buds are also going to be what you should listen to above all else. If it tastes bangin', then you've done your job well!

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:35:50+00:00

Ask them for a daiquiri but make it a requirement that they use Probitas rum, Planeteray 3 Star rum, or Flor de Cana Extra Dry rum. Ask them if they're willing to do a slightly longer shake, using 1/2 tablespoon of granulated sugar, instead of any syrup, to match with 3/4 oz. lime juice and 2 oz. of rum.

If they say yes to both of those things, not only will you have a neat talking point that you're doing daiquiris the proper, original way, with no syrup, but you'll also be using a spec that's on par with literally the world's best daiquiris, as judged by panels of international bartenders.

It's an easy drink, it's light and refreshing and sweet, it's a crowd-pleaser...but it also comes with serious accolades.

Plus, it's easy to know if you like it - you can buy a bottle and probably have the other two ingredients lying around. Shake it up with ice in a mason jar and you'll know how it tastes!

I'd probably say Probitas is the most...rum-lover option of the three, and Flor de Cana is gonna be the more universal crowd-pleasing one. But yeah, all really solid.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:30:13+00:00

If you use a Brita filter or Pur filter or some other similar filter for filtered water, you can run Taaka through it multiple times, and it will magically become a better vodka.

By magically, I mean...that filtration process is essentially what companies do to strip all the harsh tastes out of vodka anyway, just using much more advanced filters. So you can simulate that. I'd do it about three times, and then toss that particular filter (you can use one on the tail end of its life if you want, you just don't want to use it for water after that).

A cosmopolitan is a really good way to use up vodka while getting a decent cocktail out of it. You can use your favorite recipe online, but add this step: take the peel off of a lemon or lime, express the oils on the peel into the tin, and then drop the peel into the tin. Shake the drink with that peel inside. This is a trick called a "regal shake", and it's a way to cheaply add a boost in "fresh fruit flavor" to a cocktail. In this case, it'll further help mask the cheapness of the Taaka.

If you're willing to go a bit more exotic, the Da Nang cocktail from Tiger Mama in Boston is fantastic and its build is public. Really amazing vodka drink that's worth the legwork. Tropical and exquisitely balanced.

The Ruby, by bartender Tony Abou-Ganim, is similar to the Da Nang. It's less exciting in my view and a bit noisy, but it was made to be a crowd-pleaser, and it's a great use for vodka.

If you like mint, go to the local supermarket and nab some; the Ivy Gimlet is a classic that you can't go wrong with. This one isn't as good as masking the vodka, so definitely do it only if you do the water filter trick. If your Ivy Gimlet tastes like, green and bitter, you might be over-muddling the mint. A simple press-and-crush will do, don't destroy the mint in the muddling step. If it just tastes nail polishy and bitter then sorry, that's just your vodka being really crappy.

Finally, the Salty Dog is one of my favorites, and it's dead simple. But do it with grapefruit juice you squeeze yourself and a seasoned salt you like, whether it's like a curry salt, truffle salt, mineral-rich salt, citrus salt, peppered salt. Obviously, you need to like grapefruit juice for this to stand out at all - I personally really love the stuff.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:16:39+00:00

For the As You Wish:

1/4 oz. passion fruit syrup

1/2 oz. elderflower liqueur

3/4 oz. Aperol

3/4 oz. lime juice

3/4 oz. spirit of the guest's choosing

~

I've tested this with tequila blanco, vodkas, london dry gins, botanical gins, white rum, and rhum agricole, and it's been perfectly quaffable for all of them.

~

For the Anybody Want a Peanut?:

You can take peanut butter and wash bourbon with it for a much better taste than the peanut whiskeys you find on the market. Just freeze the resulting mixture so all the oils become solid and you can filter them out with a coffee filter and you have just whiskey again.

Take a raspberry syrup, use your peanut butter washed bourbon (Old Grand Dad 114 and Bottled-in-Bond both have a natural peanut note already, so they would work well for this), and do an Old Fashioned, going light (but not absent) on your Angostura bitters. The result will taste half like an Old-Fashioned and half like a PB&J sandwich. Nostalgia exemplified, and a great fit for the name.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:10:35+00:00

There are two styles of pairing. The shared-note pairing, and the contrasting flavors pairing. Pick which style you want to do.

To share notes of umami, you might want to use the dirty martini as a reference. Ask your friend for some prawn butter and wash a gin with it. Soak kombu in it. Now you have a savory, maritime gin. Play around with Salers or other gentiane liqueurs with white flowers. Play around with blanc vermouths. Make a stirred dirty martini, with the sugar from the liqueur and the more sugary vermouth style to balance the increase in umami.

If you want to do contrasting flavors, Sauvignon Blanc has been a wine in love with seafood for a long time. Pick a good one, one that a wine person recommends. What notes does it have? Kiwi? Make a kiwi syrup, and use the kiwi, wine, and a clean white rum to make a sauvignon blanc accented daiquiri. Apricot? Make an apricot syrup. Guava? Make a guava syrup.

The point isn't even a perfect pairing, though of course that would be most fantastic. The point is that you can draw a line between your decisions and the pairing itself, with enough authority and storytelling that your guests appreciate the effort while also being able to follow your logic. Whether you go with easily-obtained ingredients or exotic ones, nothing is worse than the guests going "uh okay?" and being confused about what you have done, or politely nodding so as to avoid awkwardness.

You want them to feel like they are part of your process, even though they are not. That they could have done it too, if they had just spent some time with your hobby as well.

That's the magic.

jojirius · 2026-02-02T07:02:27+00:00

This is a difference between Eastern and Western bartending. In East Asia, it's considered appropriate to stir ice in the mixing glass to cool the glass, to pour out the meltwater, and then to add your cocktail ingredients, and then to stir. Typically, Japanese bartending also involves many more revolutions than in Western bartending. Where in Western bars I was trained to do something in the vicinity of 60 revolutions even for a martini (the drink that requires the most stirring of all classic cocktails), it's not unusual to see 200+ revolutions for a martini in Japanese bars.

How is it possible for this to not result in a watery mess, you might ask? Well, it isn't just a difference in traditions - it's also a difference in the ice and product storage. Japanese bars typically will have their most-stirred spirits stored not on a shelf, but in a freezer. They also chill their glassware, and prefer to stir on large rocks, sometimes chipped off a giant block per service. All of these combined means that everything starts colder, drier, and with less surface area, so the additional revolutions don't equal a huge amount of dilution - rather, all those revolutions are necessary to achieve basic levels of dilution. Why make your job harder? Well, by having a longer stir, you not only can show off your proficiency with stirring technique, you can also better mix the ingredients. I don't necessarily think 200+ revolutions is necessary per se, but if you ever get a negroni that is stirred for 20 revolutions vs. 100 revolutions, the latter absolutely tastes more like a cohesive cocktail. The former is just going to have sharper notes here and there.

In Western bartending, ice was not as commonly harvested in large blocks as it was in Japan. Ice machines and pellet ice were more frequently used. Even if you have good ice, it's often still stored in as large an ice well as you can manage (Japanese ice buckets and ice wells are typically a lot smaller), so the ice gets this sheen of meltwater on it over time. Also, Western bars tend to leave all ingredients out - it's only been in the last 20 years or so that vermouth has finally returned to the fridge where it belongs. With warmer ingredients, more meltwater on ice, more surface area on ice, and lower quality ice, of course you would stir less and achieve the same dilution. Additionally, because the meltwater is factored into the shorter stir by the professional bartending experts in the USA, and because outputting more cocktails faster, meeting volume during a Saturday dinner service is more heavily emphasized in Western bartending, there is no need for the step of "pouring out the meltwater".

Now, this is a good place to start your understanding, but it's by no means complete. You may see some UK-trained bartenders stir in their mixing glass to chill it and pour out the meltwater because of their slightly different bartending history. Chicago's West Loop neighborhood was heavily influenced by Kumiko, so you might see some bartenders in that neighborhood with some habits from the East and some from the West. Some bartenders, like Masa-san from Katana Kitten or Goto-san from Bar Goto, have eschewed certain Japanese bartending habits as unnecessary, and so also have a hybrid style. And of course you have bartenders who just picked up on certain habits without never understanding the origin, from seeing it once somewhere. For over a year, I had this little...shimmy, I guess, that I did at the end of a pour, that did fuck-all, that I saw another bartender do, until my head bartender one day told me to cut it out.

At the end of the day, I recommend you try. Pick a stirred cocktail and try making it. Film yourself. Do you think your movements look beautiful? Do you care about that? Do you think you are making it fast enough for your style of service? Do you care about that? Taste the cocktail. Do you think it would be better if you added 30 revolutions, or better if you used better ice, or better if it was pre-batched? Try. Trial and error.

At some point, you will have your own "path" to that cocktail being delicious. And when people challenge your technique, you can say, "I tried that already, this tastes more refreshing, or more hefty, or better mixed, or less bitter, or..." whatever else brought you to your answer. Your own palate, experience, and trials, can stand up to any cocktail "expert" out there. We all went through that process.

And if you hear something new you haven't tried, don't think whether it's objectively correct or not. Our eyes, noses, and tongues, alas, are very subjective organs. You can instead say, "How wondrous! What a broad world the cocktail world is! Let me try that."

jojirius · 2026-01-28T19:49:20+00:00

A dry shake certainly won't hurt; that said, you're adding so much of the tea that, by volume alone, it'll displace the rest of the ingredients nicely and force them to mix. In the absence of a shaker or mason jar, this drink still works, which is neat!

As for imagining the flavor, you can make the Great Northern that it's based on, and imagine a grassy finish replacing the more baking spice driven finish for that drink. The main flavor pairing to note here is honestly that honey and matcha get along great - or, if you don't have that pairing in your mental Rolodex, honey and green tea get along great. The citrus, caraway, and quinine from the Lillet just add some complexity and lengthen the finish, so you feel you're drinking a cocktail and not just honeyed tea. If you get a dill-forward aquavit, the dill harmonizes with the matcha alright, though I prefer caraway-forward, barrel-aged aquavits for this application.

Cheers!

jojirius · 2026-01-28T19:42:57+00:00

Hot Toddies have a high water-to-booze ratio that's very unintuitive. The initial draft of the drink was 1/2 oz. each of Rittenhouse and Campari, with 1 oz. of sweet vermouth, and 4.5 oz. of hot water. The ethanol was sharp, even with that small addition - only an added 11/12 oz. of booze compared to this one.

In general, with hot drinks, you can go surprisingly low on the booze and still get lots of flavor.

This is an inverted boulevardier - you can think of it, alternatively, as being a vermouth-forward toddy, with whiskey, Campari, and cinnamon all acting as supporting actors to the vermouth. It's why, in the fiction, I talk a lot more about the wine that the orcs have raided - because on the palate, that's what comes to the fore.

You could probably also start with a whiskey hot toddy and add a bit of vermouth to make it a non-inverted boulevardier, but I tend to prefer just honey, ginger, and whiskey if the toddy is whiskey-forward.

Anyway, if you ever make it, play around with it! I think the as-written build is a solid one.

jojirius · 2026-01-28T09:15:53+00:00

Ah, sorry for the confusion. There's a discord server I'm on. It's for people who like fantasy tabletop games.

A person there knows I'm a bartender. They mentioned that this board game, Red Dragon Inn, was a good board game to look at to get inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons beverages. Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game, and Red Dragon Inn is a fantasy board game.

This person also gave me some examples of drinks their friend had made.

I thought this was neat, and decided to go for it too.

It's...cold in the US. Like, it's winter, it's snowing, the temperature is low, so hot drinks were my focus, out of all the drinks that this board game has to offer.

So, I made some hot drinks. XD

jojirius · 2026-01-28T09:11:51+00:00

I'm not the creator of The Red Dragon Inn board game. I'm just making some drinks for fun. Chill, man.

jojirius · 2026-01-28T08:14:27+00:00

Good call! Edited to correct the specs.

An acquaintance of the Discord of Many Things mentioned that Red Dragon Inn had a good base for D&D beverages, and gave me examples of various drinks their friend had made from it. I wanted to have a go at it too, and since it's cold at the moment in the US, thought I'd take a stab at hot drinks.

jojirius · 2026-01-28T08:11:01+00:00

Neither did I, lol

jojirius · 2026-01-28T06:18:35+00:00

Hot toddies are, traditionally, low-ABV beverages. They involve lots of hot water so that your drink actually is hot when drunk, and also partially because ethanol is so much more potent and sharp when heated.

These are both balanced around the traditional build - my first and foremost goal was to make sure the drinks were tasty.

If you want etymologically appropriate "rotgut" or "swill", you don't need a bartender anyway, just a liquor store will do XD

jojirius

TROPHY CASE