FOR FOUR CRUSTS
Ingredients
440g all purpose flour
½ tbsp salt (actually a little less: 0.44 of a tbsp)
151g lard cold and cubed
151g butter cold and cubed
2 tsp vinegar
1 egg lightly beaten (technically we want 2/3 of an egg, but 1 is close enough)
Ice Water

reducing the recipe "for four crusts" was not necessary or desirable for us, it made too little pastry dough: the full recipe would likely make four appropriately-sized crusts for our pie pans.

made for Chicken Pot Pie Filling ("IX"). turned out great!

Found a recipe that has startlingly similar proportions but is more 'modern,' instructions are more detailed, and it uses ice water.

Recipe: https://www.theartofdoingstuff.com/the-pie-dough-recipe-a-crust-of-butter-lard/

MAKES SIX CRUSTS (size unspecified)

Ingredients
5½ cups all purpose flour (660g)
2 teaspoon salt
½ pound lard cold and cubed
½ pound butter cold and cubed
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 egg lightly beaten
Ice Water

Instructions

1. Whisk together flour and salt* then cut in butter and lard with a food processor or pastry blender. Cut dough until it's crumbly but fat pieces are still pea sized or so. (If your food processor is small, you'll have to do this recipe in 2 batches because it'll be too much for your machine)

2. Add your egg and vinegar to a measuring cup and then top it up with ice water until you have 1 cup of liquid.

3. Add liquid to the dry ingredients in a slow stream just until dough comes together. You may not need all the liquid.

4. Dump the contents onto a large piece of plastic wrap then fold the plastic in towards the dough repeatedly until a ball forms. Try not to touch the dough with your warm hands.

5. Divide the dough into 6 balls. (if you made a half recipe, then divide into 3 balls)

6. Wrap dough in plastic and flatten them into discs. Refrigerate for at least half an hour before rolling out. This is also the point that you can put the dough directly in the freezer for using later.

7. When you're ready to make PIE! roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface with a lightly floured rolling pin. Drop it into your aluminum pie pan, flute the edges and bake however your recipe requires.

*You can add ¼ teaspoon of spice per dough ball.  For instance if you're making the full recipe for 6 balls of dough, you'd add 1.5 tsps of spice to the dough.  Just add it to the dry mixture of flour and salt. Cinnamon, nutmeg and pumpkin spice are good choices for apple or pumpkin pie.  Thyme or celery seed are good choices for savoury pies.  Work within the herbs/spice combinations used in your filling recipe.

Quote from: Ezra. . . I've been reading a book called The Characteristics of Games . . . They have this discussion of "climbing the heuristic tree" meaning discovering increasingly subtle heuristics to guide your play of a game. They break them into "state heuristics" AKA how you evaluate how "well" you're doing in a game. Assigning points to pieces in chess is one such heuristic. Then there are strategic heuristics which are about how to play well.

. . . state heuristics are kind of required before you can come up with strategic heuristics

Ezra wrote this to a small group and it sat in mind for... wow, was it really just nine days? Well, it settled in mind and it felt like something from a very long time ago. Seriously, one or two months at least!

Well, I guess I have been going through a lot of life changes. A full, dense time has that kind of effect: every day feels long.

Anyway, I wanted to quote this because I realized how connected this idea of "state heuristics" was to breaking the horizon -- it is the horizon specifically! What I write earlier in this thread, "live with an explanation of the game-world as if it is the truth," is just as well or better understood as a "having a state heuristic."

as a child i think i thought that the idea of my toys belonged to me, and at some point i began to understand 'how the world works' and they became entities projected into my life from afar, rather than something from my life. i don't know who's right.

When did you realize
that Pikachu belonged to an inhuman entity
and not you?

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium white onion, peeled and diced
2 medium carrots, diced
5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
6 cups vegetable stock (or chicken stock)
1 1/2 cups red lentils, rinsed and picked over
2/3 cup whole-kernel corn
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon curry powder
(optional) pinch each of saffron and cayenne
zest and juice of 1 small lemon
fine sea salt and freshly-cracked black pepper

I found this emailed to myself. I hope it works as a recipe. It may be the same as a recipe I've already made, just from a different source? Not sure. Will not expend brain cycles figuring that out.

Oops, I missed taking notes on two of them! Here they are:

Milk Choco Galaxy

Rocher

The Best Form Is No Form

I don't actually believe this, but... well... I'll be back after processing these thoughts.

Some of what Ellis Hamburger discusses in the Foreword is very immediately relevant to my thoughts on 'transcending form'...

QuoteThe point isn't to remove the ring, or to make photos disappear after they've been seen. The point is to understand how we use communication products . . .

. . . The key is forgetting what we've learned about interfaces, and using our instincts (instead of hot trends like "ephemerality") as guides.

I'm going to read this book a second time!

Chapter Three, Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real

Dreyfus now enters the realm of telepresence; if indeed human interaction is necessary, and the state of telepresence is now, as he puts it, infra-human, what might telepresence offer us in the future...?

End of chapter review

What are skills? Dreyfus dedicates most of this chapter to answering that question. It reminds me of Mastery, but more concise. Skills are rules that become intuitions... memories and experiences balled up into a fuzzy cloud of responses.

His argument is, roughly, that human interaction is a necessary or at least very common form of investment, reward, pressure, and that these things — not necessarily human interaction — are requirements for developing skills past basic competence. You have to get emotionally invested to get past basic competence.


Also other humans are useful because you can learn a lot from them through observation of them applying their skills.

I first encountered Dreyfus, a process which lead to my reading of this book, via this interview (todo: link) recommended to me by jack.

He speaks about emotional involvement/investment there, but also here in this book.

paraphrasing for now: TO LEARN, ONE MUST BE EMOTIONALLY INVESTED IN SUCCESS/FAILURE. (Benner (nurse)'s anecdote, p32) WITHOUT RELATIONSHIPS, WHERE IS THE EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT? "there is still no class before which the student can shine and also risk making a fool of himself" (p33)

brain sparks; parasocial relationships a result of filling some vacuum, wanting a person to pay attention, seeking success/failure feedback; money +/- a similar result of filling some vacuum, rules, wanting to know concretely, was that good or was that bad? feedback, feedback, feedback.

Oh, wonderful. He poses exactly these questions/problems himself.

- "neither side gives us any reason to accept their pronouncements. . . . does learning really require face-to-face engagement, and, if so, why?" (27) -- regarding whether human interaction is or is not necessary to education

- "First, we need to get clear about what skill are and how they are acquired."

Dreyfus, I am so glad we're on the same wavelength.