I love thai iced tea. if you've ever had it, you probably love it too. I want it all the time in the summer. "what if I could make it myself at home?" I thought, when I was young and unafraid and dreams were made and used and wasted.
what I made, dear reader, was not thai tea, but something that should probably be sold at gas stations as a party drug.
the first step of my quest was to look up recipes for thai iced tea; most called for a combination of cheap black tea, a bunch of whole spices that seemed tricky and uneconomical for me to get my hands on, and red food coloring, plus the sweetened condensed milk and half-and-half that are standard add-ins when serving. but I found a tea blend that promised it all in one (except the milk), and a recipe that, when I skimmed it, seemed to call for such a tea blend—they even mentioned the same brand as one of the teas they'd recommend if their top choice is unavailable.
I ordered the goods. they arrived. today was the day to make my tea dreams come true.
I followed the instructions as written: boil 4 cups of water, add 1 cup of thai tea mix and 3/4 cup of sugar, simmer for 3 minutes, then remove from heat and allow to steep for half an hour before you strain it. I waited. I ran out to buy coffee filters because I forgot how straining works. I came back. the house smelled amazing. it probably took a little longer than 30 minutes in all, but that was no big deal—after all, the recipe said the more concentrated the tea was, the better it would be!
straining it took a weirdly long time. I went through 4 or 5 coffee filters! and at the end I only had like, maybe 2 cups of a near-opaque, viscous black fluid that seemed to absorb all the light in the room. here it is held directly in front of a lamp:
but hey, it smelled exactly like thai tea! I'd nailed it! and as the recipe author herself said:
I poured up the requisite one cup or so in a glass, added ice and half-and-half, and took the first sip. and it was thai tea! except, for some reason, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck and triggered a faint ringing in my ears? but all the sugar and milk really mellows out the flavor, so I still had about four sips total before my body fully caught up and began to respond as though I'd just downed the same number of shots of espresso.
it was at this moment that I, as someone who is more sensitive to caffeine than the average bear, began to suspect maybe, just maybe, I had fucked up.
the recipe called for "1 cup of thai tea." the tea I ordered online came in individual tea sachets, so I tore them open one by one and dumped the contents out until I had enough to fill a standard measuring cup. the recipe did not mention that step and at no point in that process did it occur to me that maybe, just maybe, there's a difference in the brew strength of bagged tea vs. loose leaf, and by "1 cup of thai tea," they were referring to the latter. by my count, I tore open like, 12 tea bags?
the instructions on the back of the tea tin say to brew 1 bag in 300ml of water. in yankee measurements, 300ml is 1.5 cups.
expected: 1 bag in 1.5 cups water = 2/3 bag per cup for 3-5 minutes
actual: 12 bags in 4 cups water = 3 bags per cup for 30+ minutes
so, even if we ignore the fact that a tea which has the consistency of coffee grounds has a lot more surface area than loose leaf (and thus will produce a much stronger brew), I used almost 3 times as much tea as I was supposed to, and brewed it for about ten times as long. in conclusion,
status update: good news is I'm still alive and the heart palpitations have mostly stopped! bad news is it's nearly 9PM and I am still w i r e d. it's drizzling but I might go for a walk to try and burn some of it off. time is moving incorrectly. I somehow still have not put away the laundry
here's a better picture of the demon tea from directly underneath the light fixture so you can more easily see the nothing through it:
it looks like the west coast sunsets I used to get
a few final updates, now that it's the following day and I didn't die:
I originally estimated that I used 12 tea bags, but since I didn't actually count as I was tearing them open, I couldn't be sure. I figured maybe I'd exaggerated the number in my head. so I decided to count how many tea bags are left. 28 of them remain. assuming the good folks at Cha Tra Mue didn't rip me off and there were actually 50 in there when I opened it yesterday, that means I tore open 22 of them. I underestimated how much tea I used.
so the REAL numbers are:
expected: 1 bag in 1.5 cups water = 2/3 bag per cup for 3-5 minutes
actual: 22 bags in 4 cups water = 5 1/2 bags per cup for 30+ minutes
also, many lovely and well-meaning people have chimed in with some variation of, "duh! this was a recipe for thai tea concentrate, silly! you were supposed to dilute it with water before serving!"
my rebuttal is that with the exception of tearing open the tea bags to obtain the "1 cup of thai tea" and straining it using paper coffee filters instead of a reusable cloth one, I followed the recipe linked in the original post to the goddamn letter.
there is NO step where you dilute it with water—per the author, once it's strained, it's "finished Thai tea." the only additional thing that gets added is the half-and-half, and she says to use just 2-3 tablespoons per 8oz glass!!! that's LESS than I used for mine!!!
HOWEVER, someone did comment about the volume of the output being less than they expected, and the recipe author replied:
so if 2.5 cups is intended to serve 6, then each serving is...less than half a cup of tea, plus 2 tablespoons of half-and-half, and I guess just a lot of ice to fill up the remaining empty space in the 8oz glass??? but each of those not-quite-half cups is packing like 4 teabags' worth of a caffeine punch. this recipe is wild
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.
I love thai iced tea. if you've ever had it, you probably love it too. I want it all the time in the summer. "what if I could make it myself at home?" I thought, when I was young and unafraid and dreams were made and used and wasted.
what I made, dear reader, was not thai tea, but something that should probably be sold at gas stations as a party drug.
the first step of my quest was to look up recipes for thai iced tea; most called for a combination of cheap black tea, a bunch of whole spices that seemed tricky and uneconomical for me to get my hands on, and red food coloring, plus the sweetened condensed milk and half-and-half that are standard add-ins when serving. but I found a tea blend that promised it all in one (except the milk), and a recipe that, when I skimmed it, seemed to call for such a tea blend—they even mentioned the same brand as one of the teas they'd recommend if their top choice is unavailable.
I ordered the goods. they arrived. today was the day to make my tea dreams come true.
I followed the instructions as written: boil 4 cups of water, add 1 cup of thai tea mix and 3/4 cup of sugar, simmer for 3 minutes, then remove from heat and allow to steep for half an hour before you strain it. I waited. I ran out to buy coffee filters because I forgot how straining works. I came back. the house smelled amazing. it probably took a little longer than 30 minutes in all, but that was no big deal—after all, the recipe said the more concentrated the tea was, the better it would be!
straining it took a weirdly long time. I went through 4 or 5 coffee filters! and at the end I only had like, maybe 2 cups of a near-opaque, viscous black fluid that seemed to absorb all the light in the room. here it is held directly in front of a lamp:
but hey, it smelled exactly like thai tea! I'd nailed it! and as the recipe author herself said:
I poured up the requisite one cup or so in a glass, added ice and half-and-half, and took the first sip. and it was thai tea! except, for some reason, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck and triggered a faint ringing in my ears? but all the sugar and milk really mellows out the flavor, so I still had about four sips total before my body fully caught up and began to respond as though I'd just downed the same number of shots of espresso.
it was at this moment that I, as someone who is more sensitive to caffeine than the average bear, began to suspect maybe, just maybe, I had fucked up.
the recipe called for "1 cup of thai tea." the tea I ordered online came in individual tea sachets, so I tore them open one by one and dumped the contents out until I had enough to fill a standard measuring cup. the recipe did not mention that step and at no point in that process did it occur to me that maybe, just maybe, there's a difference in the brew strength of bagged tea vs. loose leaf, and by "1 cup of thai tea," they were referring to the latter. by my count, I tore open like, 12 tea bags?
the instructions on the back of the tea tin say to brew 1 bag in 300ml of water. in yankee measurements, 300ml is 1.5 cups.
expected: 1 bag in 1.5 cups water = 2/3 bag per cup for 3-5 minutes
actual: 12 bags in 4 cups water = 3 bags per cup for 30+ minutes
so, even if we ignore the fact that a tea which has the consistency of coffee grounds has a lot more surface area than loose leaf (and thus will produce a much stronger brew), I used almost 3 times as much tea as I was supposed to, and brewed it for about ten times as long. in conclusion,
status update: good news is I'm still alive and the heart palpitations have mostly stopped! bad news is it's nearly 9PM and I am still w i r e d. it's drizzling but I might go for a walk to try and burn some of it off. time is moving incorrectly. I somehow still have not put away the laundry
here's a better picture of the demon tea from directly underneath the light fixture so you can more easily see the nothing through it:
it looks like the west coast sunsets I used to get
You made a concentrate! Just add cold water to the correct ratio (like, 3 to 1 or something). Honestly, the difference between bagged tea and loose leaf isn’t that big, so I’m thinking the recipe you followed was also intended to be extremely concentrated and then dilute to taste.
People are misunderstanding my sentiment so let me rephrase. There should be a single button I can press that obliterates every x reader, x self insert, x OC, x y/n fic from all my searches and it should be permanent.
truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
Are YOU gonna let THE GOVERNMENT tell YOU what YOUR GENDER is? That doesn't sound like Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to me! PROTECT your individual FREEDOMS and call your senator: we want the GOVERNMENT to stay OUT OF OUR PANTS! GENDER FREEDOM NOW!
Two men in your neighborhood are married... to EACH OTHER? Congratulate them for exercising their AMERICAN RIGHT to follow the footsteps of our FOUNDING FATHERS! They've got a fully AMERICAN spirit of FREEDOM and REBELLION! GOD BLESS THE USA.
Your coworker has a different RELIGION from yours? Well, that's just INTERESTING and you should talk about it on your UNION-APPROVED LUNCH BREAK. The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was FOUNDED on Freedom of Religion and ANYONE should be allowed to seek the AMERICAN DREAM!
You think someone might be in this GREAT country ILLEGALLY? NO YOU DON'T! No one is in this country illegally! The minute anyone steps on our SOVEREIGN SOIL they're your FELLOW AMERICAN and where they come from is NO ONES BUSINESS.
The other thing that straight up baffles me about the prison abolition discussion is they’ll say “what is a prison”
And I’ll say “an institution intended specifically to hold people who have (according to the processes of the legal system at least, which sometimes does get things wrong) committed what our society has deemed crimes”
And they’ll go “that might be what a prison is to you but that’s not what a prison is” and then not elaborate
And I’m just… do they disagree with the institution part? Or something else?
Because like, my last job was case worker at a homeless shelter, and one of the questions we’d ask people (which they could refuse to answer, to be clear!) was, “have you ever resided in an institutional setting?”
And if people asked what that was, we’d say, “a group home, a nursing home, a psychiatric hospital, or prison.”
But when I say “I wish I could look at prisons the same way the disability community looks at other institutions and join you in calling for full abolition, but I’m honestly not there yet. Can you help me see how you got there?”
People look at me like I’ve said something profoundly idiosyncratic that I came up with on my own.
Am I making some odd leap here? Google isn’t trustworthy like it once was but its answer to “is a prison an institution” is “yes.”
???????????
It honestly seems like wild intersectionality failure. “There’s a deinstitutionalizatipn movement?!?!?”
I have no idea who you’re talking, to but based on prior context I think it’s not that your definition is wrong or that they don’t think its an institution but that they use a way more specific definition. For example, one that includes the concept that a prison is a dedicated secure facility that has the sole purpose of confining people for punishment.
They did define it though. They said, “the idea of prisons is a punishment for actions someone has done, so they can learn to be better citizens. it is explicitly a disciplinary measure and not a protective measure.”
Or, to put it more succinctly, they define a prison by its purpose, which is punishment.
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