You can make a fruit syrup that’s to die for on ice cream. It works with most fruits, but berries are great. Blackberries, raspberies, blueberries. Straw berries. Some mix of all of them. Get a pot, sort out the bad berries, cover in water and simmer until it’s mush. run it through a strainer or sieve or somethingt to clean out the worst of the mush/seads and add sugar, lemon and maybe some cinnamon to taste. while you still have mostly-liquid juice, take some out to make a corn starch slurry. mabye a tablespoon of juice and a half to a quarter for the corn starch. (this helps it become glossy.) Sugar to texture/taste, and reduce to the desired thickness.

(Yes, it’ll eventually become jam.)

Also goes great on waffles, pancakes or anything like that… cheesecake, brownies. I can think of a lot of things.

You can dredge salmon or chicken in it for a nutty crust and then grill or pan fry it. Especially if it’s a coarse meal.

I do want to encourage you to try baking this, though: It’s a fairly simple recipe for a fudge crustada with a raspberry sauce. Yes, it’s pilsbury. if you can turn your oven on, you can make this (especially if you buy the crust like they want you to.) (King arthur flour tends to be better for scratch recipes, their pie crusts are near foolproof if you want to try your own pie crust.)

Use a dark-ish chocolate with the raspberry and it’s too die for.

kinda looks like my uncle. (Complete with the whiskers.)

(Chuckles in evil DM)

Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)

That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.

This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?

Because we like our unobtainium, okay?

Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)

So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.

I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)

(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)

Puffins are cuter, usually less, ahem, fragrant, too.

1. people are stupid and this is all just hypothetical
2. <you should read this one in Badge 502’s voice>NO!

with those disclaimers… I suspect they were trying to make a mold of their poopchute and didn’t think it all the way through. I’m not sure if that was then going to be directly used, or if it was going to be used as a negative for something else… but that’s my guess.

are we sure we didn’t confused for a giant piece of shit?

I guess it’s a matter of perspective.

it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with “Solarians” who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter’s orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they’d pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual’s instructions were basically “tell the AI to update the blueprints.” which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)

It’s kinda sad.

I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)

One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)

The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres

That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.

Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.

It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)

Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.

Santa knows his cookies.

Naw. Mathmaticians are frequently dyslexic.

It’s grammarians doing it backward!

it’s funny, because I always imagined them giggling about typing 8008135 into calculators.

That sounds like a fun team.

The div in our party plays like an idiot-savant. Total himbo, except occasionally useful. (It is fun, don’t get me wrong.)

Don’t tell the our divination wizard that… they already broke out their “special” d20.

looks fluffy to me. what’s the vet say? go with that.

the hollow bronze things with the studs?

probably not some for of die- divination or otherwise. They just wouldn’t roll well. There’s a few uses for those things that seem likely. Rangefinding (mount it on a staff and peep through the holes, , some sort of symbolic use, or simply just being some sort of decorative weirdness.

(I mean, really. Think about all the jangly things people have on, like backpacks or purses or keychains. People have always been people.)

I dunno. But i find it funny that even back then the divination wizards needed their special hard-to-read dice.

Like, bro. I have a chart with all your symbols on it.

… “is a tool for something much more serious… Divination.”

The Divination Wizzard:

I might have to try that one of these days.

pretty sure maple syrup makes everything better, so I don’t think anyone is going to mind.