April 12, 2025

Last night was one of those good "quiet nights at home" times. Enough happened that this will be a bullet-point focused one:

Photo of a llama by Davis Vargas (Unsplash)

• The duck breast turned out amazing despite being a first-time attempt. The key to success was making sure the skin came up crispy without being burnt. Score the skin/fat, put in cold pan, low and slow with the heat with a pan or weight on top, and give it 15-20 minutes. I used this recipe from Serious Eats to figure it. Highly recommended if you like duck.

• Watched both The Road to El Dorado and The Emperor's New Groove for the first time, even though they've both been meme'd to infinity at this point. They came out in 2000 and being 14 then meant I sort of aged out of the intended audience, so I didn't bother with them until now. Opinion: I liked Emperor's New Groove far better. I tried it before and got annoyed but sticking with it, it was far funnier and enjoyable than expected. The issues I had with Road to El Dorado was that it had potential but just felt mediocre. The music felt dashed off, the inspiration strange (the Hope-Crosby movies from the 1940s), the chemistry off. It was all right but nothing great. I'd keep it on in the background on Sundays, that kind of movie.

• Been watching Mythbusters lately as background for sleeping but one of the episodes last night was based on a pretty wild story about cheese being used as cannonballs. Was it busted? Nope - apparently it was possible.

• On Reddit this morning, I found this post in the Esperanto subreddit and it reminded me of these pamphlets I always saw at church growing up. Apparently there was a company designed to churn these out about all sorts of topics: Channing Bete, with their Scriptography system. It's not interesting enough for it's own Something Interesting post but I thought it was cool to finally figure this out all these years later.

• Spouse has been playing Big Bad Voodoo Daddy this morning while I was making breakfast, so here's their 2012 album Rattle Them Bones:

  
  

Going forward, I'm marking these kinds of posts as "Journal" instead of micro-posts, since I'm suspecting that's a better way to categorize them. Micro-posts will still exist but may be dedicated to random videos and articles I find that don't warrant larger posts. Don't know - still figuring this out... - A.B. 4/12/2025