Flying Dutchman Macaroni Recipe

Flying Dutchman macaroni recipe

I'm not gonna lie, this is a bad one. It is cursed, it is massive, it will leave you sweating, gasping and hoping for it to never happen again, but still being drawn to its mysterious aura. Behold, my creation and my forbidden love.

It's as bad as it looks. This is the shit to make if you need a quick fill that will last you a whole day - you can make this as a breakfast, unload a truck of bricks, have a break for tea and biscuits, unload a second truck, and be a bit peckish in the evening. Here's a breakdown of this thing's nutritional value:

1. carbs - yes

2. fats - you can make it drip or dry

3. protein - hELLA

If you're like meatstuffs - this is for you. So here's a recipe for

Flying Dutchman macaroni

(because pirates are gay)

(good for them)

This requires some time to prepare, but you can prepare ingredients in bulk for use later. There are three parts to this dish: the macaroni, the meat and the curse.

The macaroni is simple - anything fits, boil in salted water for as long as the packaging says. Can be enjoyed separately, some freaks even dip them in honey or nutella. I'm not joking.

The meat is where the interesting stuff hides. The simple way is the best - oil the pan, dump and mix some minced meat, chopped onion and tomato sauce, fry and stir until just standing near the pan makes you cry. Salt and season with whatever tickles your pickle. Choose a meat to your preference, I have no opportunity to check any vegan meats unfortunately. You can also add vegetables per your own taste - tomatoes, sweet peppers, carrots all work well.

The curse is in the making - oil or butter the pan, dump a small serving of macaroni, add the meat (2 parts meat to 3 parts macaroni works best for me, but depends on added vegetables and personal taste), add two fresh eggs, mix and stir until done. The eggs are the gamemaker that makes it all work and can be customized to taste. If you want it juicy and soft - wait until egg has coated the whole thing and becomes slightly opaque. Otherwise - fry until it's nice and chunky. You can enhance the curse by adding whatever comes to your mind - soft cheese before the egg, more tomato sauce after egg is done, parmesan on the prepared dish. The more the merrier. The whole thing goes down smooth with sour milk. Enjoy and may the sea have mercy on our soul.

A comic about the different types of attraction one might feel. I saw these descriptions floating around on tumblr and felt compelled to add visuals. They are from a website about asexuality. Although, I think people who are not asexual feel these regularly too. There’s all kinds of attractions for all kinds of people. Enjoy.

Homie. Darling. Muchaco. Please help me. You're an animator. You've worked in the video game industry. When you get to That One Memory in TOTK (you know which one I mean and if you don't, you will),

Please help me figure out what the fuck is going on with Ganondorf's face rigging

Man, I didn't even need to look anything up: I knew EXACTLY what you were talking about as soon as you said it.

Short Answer: Need more polys.

Long Answer: It's simultaneously a case of limited model structure and potentially some degree of intentional design choice specific to Ganondorf's presentation in this particular game.

Discussion below the jump, just for the sake of not stretching out people's dashboards. No worries about spoilers: none of this is story-relevant.

So! To give a very broad strokes bit of coverage on the wide and varied nonsense that is 3D modeling, this is a case of Topology. The basic thrust is that topology is the overall structure and layout of the mesh that makes up the 3D model's various shapes. The lower the polygon count on that mesh, the more angular its structure and the less capacity for deformation it has. The higher the polygon count, the smoother its structure and the greater its capacity for deformation. The trade-off, however, is that low-poly models are easier for a game engine to render. High-poly models are a massive drain on processing power, to say nothing if they're built inefficiently with a bunch of wasted geometry bogging things down.

Here's an example of a low-poly model on the left and a high-poly model on the right.

So when you want to make a character emote, you're basically grabbing a bunch of those polygons around the face and moving them around to shape the face into the desired expression. If you don't have a lot of polys to play with, it causes folding and tearing issues where the model and its textures do some pretty wonky shit.

Something both BoTW and ToTK have going for them is that they're actually very low-poly games, which is extremely helpful in making the games run as smoothly as they do given the world size and seamless loading. The lighting and texture work do A TON of heavy lifting to make the game look as good as it does. Really look at these models closely and you can see how angular they are. Look at Zelda's outstretched hand or how sharply light falls across the character's features. In the bottom right, notice how you can see the sharp points that make up Zelda's shoulders? They're not rounded; they're angled just enough to give the general illusion of a curve at a glance. Same goes for her eyes; you can count the angles that make up the shape of her eye but, at a distance and at a glance, they look big, round, and doleful.

Something you can also notice is when characters talk, a lot of them have little to no facial deformation. Mineru, for example, basically has a one-hinge Muppet mouth outside of pre-rendered cutscenes. A lot of characters' eyes are basically painted onto their faces and switch between static texture shapes as opposed to being fully rendered and animated orbs modeled into their heads.

Ganondorf actually has a fairly complex character model, especially compared to Link or Zelda, but he doesn't have a lot of model deformation. Basically the only parts of his head that move are his eyes/brows and mouth/jaw. If you look closely around his eyes you can see they're rendered basically as triangles. There's only two or three points along their shape the model can deform at. Further, since the rest of his face doesn't really deform when he emotes, it means the only thing that really moves are those small key elements. Which yields moments like this:

The animators are basically pushing his expression as much as they are actually capable of with this model's limited structure. See the hard fold in the lower eyelid, or the fact that his teeth aren't attached to anything inside his jaw? It does the job though; it overall looks good and, in the moment this scene happens, really adds something to the unsettling nature of what's going down.

I mentioned before that there may be a certain intent as well. Something specific to Ganondorf in this iteration is that, more than ever, he's become an Oni. Ganondorf's character design has slowly been leaning toward more Japanese-specific visual concepts over the past few appearances but he's gone full yokai for ToTK. Not just in his build, but in his clothing and weaponry. Dude is swinging around a kanabo for the first time ever in the franchise.

In Japanese mythology and Noh theater, a Red Oni basically functions as the embodiment of all the worst parts of mankind. They're greedy, brutal, cruel monsters who revel in causing destruction. If you want to look at their good aspects, it's traits like passion, ambition, and a wild spirit. But, overall, they're the bad guys. Ganondorf is 100% depicted as a Red Oni in ToTK. So when you keep that in mind, add in the implications of what Ganondorf just did in that scene, and consider the traditional appearances of a Red Oni...

...then that face-breaking grin makes a lot more sense.

Can I get a yeehaw?

It was always easy for me to recall the events and circumstances of my life. Not the everyday that's ground down into dust by the passing of time, but the oddities, the once-a-never formative experiences or the intense wish-it-happened-less-often struggles, that you don't really have a say in when you're a kid or a teen. The game of tag that we played during the school break, memorizing the timetable of my bully, that one time I thought I could sit on a bike and it fell over on my leg.

As time goes on, more and more things become known, familiar. I find myself asking "why engage with this new thing if it's entirely too similar to this other thing I already experienced, if I can just get back to that other thing?" Boring, boring, boring, everything around me is, and so am I. I hate the way it makes sense - there is internal logic to it and it makes sense. It is, in fact, very energy efficient to keep lying on a warm rock and do nothing.

It cannot continue like this. Spontaneity appears from wonder and intrigue, and new memories come only from the new experiences. I now have to deliberately deny myself the know-it-all attitude, trying to learn and experience things as they come. I need to, because looking back - there are years that I aged, but didn't live.

It's a scary feeling, like I hit a skip button. It pulls on the edges of memories around it too, and now I manically remind myself of the names, the events, thoughts, ideas, characters - everything and everyone that moved me and made me feel, reminding myself what even makes me feel, and I can't be just stuck in the past - the names must pile on, the faces take on new, unknowable shapes, as I try to mold my life into at least something that isn't the amalgamation of the everyday.

I am lonely and I'm bored, and the worst sin I can commit to myself is to be boring. I scour my memory for threads, bits and pieces just to always have something to pull on, to keep talking, to not descend into yet another loop of echoes repeating echoes repeating echoes. I am here, I am listening to you, I love you, please talk to me, or kiss me if you want me to shut up.

It is a fear in retrospect. It's about looking back and seeing nothing and understanding that this time nothing will not look back. It is a weird motivation to live, but apparently it's enough for me. Is it selfish? No - I want to live and have the right to both live and desire it. I only worry how far it can carry me.