Interesting Links for 04-03-2015

[andrewducker]

• Please, please, make sure you're registered to vote.
  (tags: voting UK politics )
• Why many restaurants don’t actually want you to order dessert
  (tags: restaurant food business )
• Home Office says Nigerian asylum-seeker can’t be a lesbian as she’s got children
  (tags: LGBT UK immigration )
• 'Fairy control' to halt tiny doors in Somerset woods
  (tags:

Comments

[a_pawson]

Why many restaurants don’t actually want you to order dessert

That article is I think only referring to fairly high-end restaurants. From my experience, the opposite is true for mid or low-end restaurants. Few employ pastry chefs, because most deserts are bought in, cut up, and sold at a high margin compared to the other courses. This is going back a few years, but when I worked as a waiter, we were always being told to push the deserts because they made more from selling those than they did from mains or starters.

[naath]

But not *very* high-end restaurants, where they charge you an arm and three legs for desert, and expect to sell you desert wine to match, and coffee afterwards...

Clearly the places trapped in the middle need to jump one way or the other - either sell really *good* desert at a high price, or really easy deserts cheaply.

[kalimac]

If you want desert, eat sand.

[naath]

Curses on English spelling.

[simont]

The Hacker News commentary on the duck thing, as I'd more or less expect, contains a lot of argument about whether the project manager was behaving badly, or whether the developers were pointlessly making the project manager's job harder, or whether the fact that the developers had to do this at all was a symptom of the project manager already having been annoying, or whether the developers had misjudged that completely and the project manager had been sensible all along and they just didn't like to get edited ...

... and nowhere, in the entire thread, does there seem to be anyone who thinks that in a game like Battle Chess, having a random duck following the queen around the board would have been fantastic, and they should have kept it!

[andrewducker]

I completely agree! More games should have superfluous ducks in them!

[apostle_of_eris]

more dinosaurs!
more sodomy!

[cartesiandaemon]

Oh, good point! Now I'm imagining how lots of other famous games came about, both good and bad.

Programmers: Anything you want to change?
Program Manager: It's awesome just as it is! Especially the weighted companion cube.
Programmers: Oh. Uh, well, um, yes, that is kind of awesome, isn't it?

Programmers: Anything you want to change?
Program Manager: It's awesome just as it is! Especially the way you removed the save functionality and have a pointlessly slow wait while it restores to checkpoint. It makes people really COMMIT! Don't touch a thing. Or else.
Programmers: Fuck.

[kalimac]

This "supervise children closely 24/7" thing has been going on long enough that some children raised this way must be adults by now. How are they handling it? As a much older person from a more relaxed era of childhood (heck, we didn't even have bicycle helmets), I perceive that my ability to handle life independently as an adult came entirely from the practice I got at beginning to handle things independently as a child and teen. So how are these people who didn't get that practice managing?

[andrewducker]

Good point. I'd love to know too!

[alextfish]

I've been randomly browsing World-Building StackExchange, a rather fun site for people working through details of their fictional settings. It includes gems such as people seeking plausible science-based explanations for dragons with ice breath, or precisely what effects happen when magical lightning strikes someone in plate mail. But the one that made me think "Andrew Ducker might find this interesting" was the discussion on Could plants spread their seed to other planets in which someone links to the fascinating NASA article The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation... which, um, bother, I see checking the NASA tag that you posted back in October.

Oh well. I guess that shows that my instincts for what you'd find interesting are accurate, at least!

[andrewducker]

:->

I love having my stuff all catalogued. Makes life sooooo much easier when I need to track things down again.

The stack exchange sounds pretty awesome though. I shall take a look later!

[ipslore]

"LARP Comes Out of the Shadows" -- and subsequently loses its +5 concealment bonus.

[andrewducker]

I hope they got their backstab in on the way...