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What’s something you have an unusually strong fondness for?
You know, the kind of thing that most other people might say is just okay at best, but you think is absolutely splendid. Something that others might find insignificant, but you find deeply relevant.
Anything goes. It can be a food, a movie, a breed of cat, a programming language, or that one guy who always waves to you on your way to work in the morning. It doesn’t have to be noteworthy to anyone but you.
Also, don’t just name what it is, but also share your fondness. Show us why you love it so. Convince us to see the same merit in it that you do!
Rain is pretty high up there. Sometimes when it starts raining, even late at night, I put on my shoes, grab an umbrella, and take a walk.
One of my fondest memories from living in Arizona, is going out into the warm summer rain and sitting on the roof of my 1-story rental house.
In that vein, I'm fond of both the word petrichor and the smell of rain that it describes. Where I grew up there were some mimosa trees that had a wonderful lightly sweet scent after it rained.
Honey.
I freaking love honey. At last count, and it's been awhile since I've counted, I have something in the range of 30 different varietals of honey. Only a couple of the jars are flavored (gifts, as I don't seek out flavored honey), everything else is as the bees made it. Each has nuances and flavor profiles like you wouldn't believe, rivaling (and often surpassing) those in beer, wine, and liquors. Early in our relationship my wife, wanting to participate in my interests as well, said we should do a honey tasting of all that I had at the time. She had no idea what she was in for. We took pictures to show the color on white spoons in a small light box, tried each, and made tasting notes in a notebook. It was a wonderful time, but was honestly too much honey to have at once.
I have/had honey from various countries, various parts of the US, unlabeled honey given to me by strangers, honey given as gifts, honey given directly by a beekeeping patient just because he overheard me talking about honey, honey from friends that started beehives and weren't expecting the amount they got out of it, supremely overpriced Spanish honey from my ex-wife's aunt who believed the price of the gift was an indicator of how good the gift was (the honey was just okay), honey from an urban rooftop hive that tasted like Dr.Pepper (I am in Texas after all) because that's what the bees used to make it as it was next door to a bottling plant, honey clear enough that you'd think it was white wine, honey so dark that bordered on black, unforgettable honey, ruined honey, fake honey, honey I haven't even opened yet, and honey that was downright disgusting. Hell, I have another jar in the wings because one of my friends was at a farm store to pick up milk and butter direct and they had honey as well, he sent me a picture saying "You try this yet?", I said no, and he just responded with "Good, because I bought you a jar."
From my past comments I'm sure people have gathered that I'm a car guy and I love sumo, but I also have, as the subject asked, an unusually strong fondness for honey.
Oh, yeah. Speaking as a former chemist, wine nerd, and soon-to-be beekeeper, honey is the most amazing biological product out there. "Honey" is a mixture of thousands of compounds, dependent on the hive response to environmental conditions, bee genetics, available forage plants, and extraction/handling methods. It's unimaginable that there will ever be an acceptable synthetic substitute.
Pre-COVID, the local beekeeping group had a tasting, and the variety of flavors and consistencies was mind-boggling. It varied from one hive (dark, crystallized, smoky, pine, and caramel) to another (light, thin, intensely sweet, floral) on the same farm.
Unfortunately, commercial beekeeping practices and honey counterfeiting make the real thing a vanishingly rare commodity. If you can, support local smallhold beekeepers who are not shipping their hives for pollination.
Isn't it amazing‽
Taking the words right out of my mouth. The honey that I buy, and encourage others to do the same, is small, local, and stationary.
What do you do with all of it?
Took a beekeeping class in undergrad and the professor would always start each class with a sampling of honey from somewhere in the world. We got explanations of what contributes to the honey's flavor and color. I failed the class but I still enjoyed it for the free honey!
My favorite dessert for the past week has been graham cracker sticks dipped in honey. If you haven't tried it, definitely give it a shot. It's addicting. Want to go the extra mile? Slap some peanut butter on that bad boy as well.
I love honey. And I love bees. I could watch them for hours, much like ants. Bumblebees are my favourite, for sure, but more bees in general is always good. Shame there are so few around now compared to when my pants came up to my pits, just like the butterflies. Did you know that there are stingless bees? You can open up the hive, reach in with a syringe and just suck up the honey. THHHEEEYOOOOOP. Delish.
It took me until my late teens to discover that honey also came in a more solid, waxy form, and not just the translucent liquid I'd seen in all those cute squeezy bottles shaped like bears and olden tyme hives. It's a shame that farm shops tend to be quite expensive, because I'd love to visit one again to pick up some honey. Along with chutneys, jams and maybe some cheeky cheeses. Ooh, I loves cheese.
It's time for my needlessly specific and unusually specific source of joy! The output of mediocre 90s era Japanese video game studios!
It's a bit hard to explain why I find this so enjoyable. It's kind of like watching college theater productions with original stageplays. They may be great, or they may be terrible. But one thing is for certain; there's going to be a lot of passion behind them.
I'll start with a less known company: Zoom. Zoom is a very small studio that by some miracle still is in business. You might have played some of their games, but probably didn't think that they were good. The best versions of their games remain exclusive to Japan and most of the versions that you or I have played are actually conversions by other companies. The two games you might be familliar with are Lagoon and Phalanx.
For the most part, Zoom specialized on games for the Sharp X68000. Their first game was a single-plane beat-em-up called Genocide. It was pretty terrible; it was essentially the "China Fighter" of it's time; a relatively pretty game with a good soundtrack but terrible repetitive gameplay.
And then a few short years later they come up with a sequel and it's amazing! It's got platforming, combos, support units, varying enemies and stages, and a killer intro sequence that takes up an entire floppy disk! Not only does it have a rocking soundtrack that's easily twice as long as the previous game, it's got a second version for lucky MT-32 owners - one that has clealy been given lots of love. It's got all the passion that was clearly in the first game, but given a budget that let them fully explore all the concepts they wanted to do.
And the story still doesn't end there; a few years later it got bundled in with it's predecessor into an enhanced port to the FM Towns called Genocide^2. Both games got reworked art, remixed soundtracks, and upgraded gameplay. But the thing that's really incredible about this release is how much personality they added to this release in the form of added videos. They made a live-action company logo video complete with someone wearing a mascot costume. But the best part is that they made miniatures of the robots and created stop-motion animated battle cutscenes! It's so crudely done, but it's just so earnestly presented that you can't help but feel impressed by it.
And this kind of passion is visible in every single game they have ever made. Just look at Zero Divide. Listen to that announcer! Look at the love put into those character models! We only got one of these games, but Zoom actually made three of these games, and they are all chocked with these little flourishes.
Of course, they've got way more games worth exploring (we haven't even gone over Mister Mosquito yet), but it's stuff you can just dive into for yourself to experience. Even when their games are bad, they are good because they're just so much fun to explore. And the best part is that Zoom is hardly the only company like this. And heck, Japan doesn't even have a monopoly on these kinds of companies; there's a lot of interesting Korean developers as well - they're just harder to find information on.
Looking back, I got so absorbed in the games that I don't think I actually covered why I'm so fascinated with these companies. The detail work that they put into their games is part of it, certainly, but it's just a part of the whole story.
The largest reason why I like them is because the vast majority of their games are kusoge - 'shitty games'.
Zoom's games for the X68000 could be pretty decent at times, but those games are better known for their console ports which are absolutely terrible. There's a PC-Engine CD version of Genocide, for instance, which somehow manages to be worse than the original because it was put together so shoddily. The two games that came to the us on the SNES - Lagoon and Phalanx - were actually put together by a different company, Kemco, who is famous for the bad quality of their ports. Lagoon's art is bad in the X68000 version, but it's so much worse on the SNES. Have you ever heard of the absolutely horrible Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure for the Gamecube? That was Zoom's hands directly at work - and it turned out so bad that they didn't even want to put their name on it!
In other words, a big part of the fascination is how these companies managed to stay afloat in spite of how poor their quality control could be.
Perhaps a better example would be Wolfteam. They had incredibly talented people working for them - people who simply couldn't be replaced because of the quality of their work, with incredibly talented programmers, artists, game designers, and musicians. And their output was absolutely insane - they pushed so many products so fast that it put much bigger companies to shame. But the quality of those games were drastically disparate. Just look at the "El Viento Trilogy". You've got a pretty polished and fun platformer to start with. Then you get this strange adventure platformer featuring a cardboard cutout that you can just barely control. And then for the third game you've got a boring, by-the numbers beat-em-up. How on earth can you make these decisions?!
Being somewhere you usually need to be, but really early in the morning. As much as it can suck to be up early, I always appreciate how everything looks, feels, sounds, and even smells different at 5AM instead of 7 AM. One of my big regrets was when I was going to class early, I stopped by my community college's pond, and decided not to chill in the dark overlooking the water for a few minutes, figuring I'd get it next week. It was Daylight Savings that Sunday, and the pond was closed off the next year.
Hikes, my workplace, school, even just walking to the store when the sun's just rising just feels so good, even if I'm up that early with a substantial lack of sleep. The reason I think it qualifies as an "unusual fondness" is that it seems to feel best when conditions are worst, like I was up all night in a fit of insomnia and decided to take advantage of the extra day that is unfortunately available to me.
I'm familiar with this and love it too.
For me, these "unusual" moments usually happened when I was in school, on final exam days, when campus was just a little more quiet and empty, and I got up extra early to do some studying before the 8 AM exam. Back then I had a long walk from where there was free public parking to my campus, and I loved the quiet, tired walk there, seeing all the other people who get up early, and that bright flash of orange sunlight peeking over the dark blues on the horizon.
I know exactly what you mean. Sunsets are nice, but sunrises... now there's nature's art portfolio.
I quite like the taste of natural, unseasoned tofu, raw or cooked. It's very subtle, but delicious. I usually season and cook it of course, but I'll always cut off a couple chunks beforehand.
I'm curious, have you eaten it all your life, or is it a taste that you came to appreciate later? I don't have a particular fondness to it, but my wife was raised mostly vegetarian and loves it. We aren't vegetarian but she still greatly enjoys tofu.
I only tried tofu for the first time a few years ago, but I liked it pretty much immediately. Well, aside from silken tofu, that's only really good in sauces and stuff.
I used to hate tofu, and started eating it more to try to find a preparation I liked. I found myself actually enjoying the flavor of raw, unseasoned tofu after I ordered fried tofu at a tea shop. It was cooked/heated thoroughly, but it had this light, crispy outer layer and the soft, sweet inner layer. I still can't describe the flavor, it's uniquely "tofu" to me.
Something I’ve read is that tofu in Asia tends to have a beanier flavor, while that produced for the North American market is more bland.
For me, coffee. Most people seem to want it for the caffeine, and mask the horrible thing they bought or made with loads of dairy and sugar. Personally, I have a hand grinder, chemex (as well as various other brewers), and gooseneck kettle I use every day. I also tend to buy beans from local shops (or those I know and want to support) with a preference for natural and anoreobic processes. I have been getting into home espresso since I recently received an entry level machine as a gift. I have been thinking about building a custom espresso grinder once I can reasonably do so without pandemic related risks.
I am
veryextremely fond of street food. I’ll stop anywhere, anytime, to eat a nice looking burger, Brazilian hotdog, coxinha, pastel, Brazilian esfiha, acarajé...Also: fast food joints. And the Brazilian soda Guaraná Antarctica. And Italian food. And Brazilian barbecue.
No wonder I’m @mrbig :P
Right there with you. Don't care where I'm visiting, don't care what it is, I'm eating it if I see literally any other local eating something there as well. My rule is "if their food was making people sick they wouldn't be in business" and it hasn't steered me wrong yet, but has delivered unforgettable food that I largely have no idea what it was. It's amazing.
Yeah... street food can get you sick, but so does restaurant food. At least with street food the kitchen is right there for you to see.
Like you said, if there’s a line in front a vendor, it is not only an indication that the food is safe enough, but also that it is most likely delicious.
Unlike restaurants, that can attract customers with ambience and service, street food depends almost entirely on price and tastiness. There’s something very honest about it. I love that.
Purple. I can't describe precisely why, I can only expound on the possibilities. Red and blue are polarizing colors, and purple is their Switzerland. It has tons of minute subtleties in the shades (too much red and you approach magenta, too much blue and you veer toward violet.) It's the color of royalty. It's the only secondary color whose components are always a primary (in art, yellow is a primary and green a secondary... digitally, green is a primary, but blue and red are always primary colors.)
That's the tip of my purple iceberg.
So I also love purple, and I have a theory for why it's so enjoyable: it's not a real color. I mean, it is of course a real color, in the sense that it's a color that human brains can perceive as different from other colors, but there's no frequency of light that corresponds to the color purple (I think the right way to say this is that it's not a "spectral color"). Purple is how our eyes tell our brains "I'm getting just as much blue as red, here". In nature, when we see purple, we're seeing something that's both red and blue. Mixing them together doesn't change them fundamentally, but it completely changes how we see them!
Makes perfect sense to me - I'm inordinately attached to teal and other blue/green intermediates. I don't place much faith in color psychology research, but for me, these colors have the calming, tranquil echo of sky touching water.
For me it has to be small-ish, or maybe even thoroughly explorable architecture is a better way of saying it.
Buildings where roof access isn't some blocked off thing for utility use only, but openly available to get to.
Buildings that are built super close together and have little bridges between them that form an almost maze like experience of getting around. I think this is more common in asian countries.
I went to LA a while ago and visited the GNOMON school of visual effects, which is housed in what I think was an old TV production studio. That building was exactly this. Rooftop patios everywhere, accessible to me only by randomly walking over various catwalk type structures, arranged oddly, in an open air area connecting several little buildings. The old concrete rooms were empty and a little grungy, like a liminal space. I'm not the most traveled, but LA seemed to be full of these old little buildings, with random gated in cloisters, rooftop patios, and general decaying structures that were kept up. I imagine most "very logical and sensible people" would prefer modern architecture with less cracks and grunge and more sterility, but I so deeply love these sorts of places.
Here's a photo of the GNOMON place I mentioned:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/79/31/d2/7931d2a4b9d0f5fa8b739e8b5775f8c1.jpg
I want to expand more on this, but don't want to make my original comment prohibitively long.
I mean like industrial architecture that is repurposed and made more warm.
I mean old buildings that have an obvious mix of different time periods, like a low lying structure clearly from the 70's, exposed parts of walls where repair work has clearly been done in the past, old water fountains and trash cans that remind you of grade-school, and finally some random glass tables and stuff that were installed less than 10 years ago.
Maybe places that are very human and exhume their own history? I might be losing the point here... I like them though.
Oh, yea, bud... with you, here!
I’m in Downtown Los Angeles, myself... though I don’t consider this city unique in these spaces. However, being a westward city, I do think there is an interesting mixture of new and old architecture that often butts up against each other.
Anyhow, the nooks+crannies of a city are def something I greatly enjoy. I take particular joy in seeing greenery spring forth in alleyways of brick and concrete.
/u/kfwyre had to mention cats... There are a billion cat photos on the naked Internet, here are mine.
I will bore you to death about my Siamese cats. You are now forewarned.
I adopted a couple of young rescued Siamese-mix cats in September and December, respectively. And yes, COVID-19 lockdowns are leaving us all a bit unmoored, but I HAVE NO REGRETS (really).
[Ethically, I have huge problems with pet breeding. While I appreciate the ornamental qualities of colorpointed cats, there was no way in hell I'd ever encourage the gross cruelties of creating more genetically damaged commodity animals. And yet these two cats did survive in the wild, and I'm happy to provide them with a comfortable, safe, loving home, where they are indeed ornamental.]
The Girls were semi-feral, one from a cat hoarder, one from a barn colony. The younger one was so human-shy the rescue thought she'd never be adoptable. I'm pleased to say I now have a new feline appendage, who's constantly into everything I'm doing. The older cat had already been returned to the rescue from a previous adopter - I have no idea why, because she's an utter love sponge with no bad habits.
Aside from being affectionate companions, The Girls are terrifyingly clever. I'd heard stories about Siamese breed cats, but these two:
It's been fascinating, frustrating, charming, hilarious, and a source of life-affirming responsibility in a dark time. I might ignore all human duties on a day of grim depression, but a claw to the end of the nose focusses the mind wonderfully.
Absolutely adorable!! I love, love, love reading/hearing about people's pets. Those two are complete cuties and I'm happy they're in a loving home!! I will live vicariously through you lol. I love cats but I'm in an apartment and would rather wait until I have a larger home/place that doesn't have pet rent to get a kitty. I'm also allergic, so I'll have some time to figure out what to do about that lol.
Allergies are one of the reasons Siamese are a desirable cat breed - they're low-shedding and don't produce as much of the protein that troubles allergy sufferers. Spouse says they're the first cats he's had that don't make him itch.
I didn't know that! Definitely something to consider when scouting out kitties. [as an aside, I'm 100% with you when it comes to pet breeding. My SO and I will be adopting from shelters/rescues] I'm glad your spouse isn't allergic! It can be so uncomfortable when you have pets you live but can't like, live aha.
Those pictures are SO STINKIN' CUTE. I can't handle it!
You just can't see the murder mittens in these pictures. But really, they are perfect cats.
Stairs, they often have visually interesting parts, and there's some really beautiful/crazy stairs out there, especially the railing can be really decorated or just decorative in itself. But even more importantly because you don't have to walk very far to see something unexpected or new due to their twists and turns, and they also often lead to good vantage points.
When exploring new areas walking up or down a stair will almost always lead to an interesting place.
Cheese, generally the softer and milder ones. I could eat cheese all day long. Bonus points if it melts well. Otherwise, odd tanks, trains, planes, ships and guns. I also have a real sweet tooth, and I currently can't stop thinking about HK-style egg waffles.
Actually, here are some of my favourite odd vehicles and prototypes because I couldn't be bothered to make a separate thread for them:
USA:
T95 Medium
Soviet Union:
KV-1 prototype
KV-7 prototype 1
KV-7 prototype 2
T-34M
Yak-23
France:
SAu 40
Sweden:
SAAB 21
So the spouse and I play this conversational game from time to time, "Which would you rather give up, x or y?", where x and y are things like activities, favored objects, foods, etc.
When the question, "which would you rather give up, wine or cheese?" came around, my answer was "life", and I'm sticking to that. Cheese is one of the pillars of existence, though I'm partial to the sharp, crumbly, stinky ones.
I prefer the creamy + stinky ones (Brie, Blue, Camembert, etc.) over the crumbly... but you and I are on the same page here; Life without cheese is no life at all!
I've been dipping my toe into cheese making, I have what is hopefully a cheddar in the cheese fridge downstairs right now, aging in wax.
Chips and salsa. It is my forever food, and I recently got into making my own.
Language learning. I started with French at a young age, got a degree in it, and started Spanish almost a year ago.
Palms. Going to college in New England for four years really turned me off of the idea of winter. Doing a project in Paraguay for two months got me into palms and seeing them every day was comforting. Now that I’m in South Carolina (the palmetto state!), I have two: a European Fan Palm, and a small date palm (Phoenix roebelenii). Even better, I get to see palms in my neighborhood and on my commute to work.
Dogs.
I mean, a lot of people like dogs. Some people love their dogs, but I really, really love all dogs. Even the “bad” ones. My partner teases me because I squeal “puppy!” every time I see a dog of any age, even on TV. I spend hours training my dogs to do stupid tricks just to spend more time with them. If anybody asks me to hold their dog (honestly, I usually offer), I try to train them stupid tricks while their owner is gone. They’re just such lovely animals.
The scheme programming language
You would have loved my last job. The entire legacy loan origination system was written in scheme. I'm happy to have had the experience to work with such a niche language but it sure is a very different way of thinking.
People having memories from decades ago, or "I was around when that happened".
I personally realized I liked this when I watched a 32 year old video of Bernie Sanders interviewing people in a mall in the city he was mayor of. I liked it because, not being able to go back into the past and not being personally around for it myself as much more than a kid, the past is generally something you look like if from the rear wiew mirror, with all the hindsight we have now and look at for context for the present, and videos like that one generally show the past as people saw it at the time, which was as the present. I think this quote from the obscure sorrows word anemoia (nostalgia for a time you weren't around for) explains it well:
While obviously memories are limited and anecdotes are generally bad, I still like the idea quite a bit and find it one of the things I think I'll (at least want to, my memory is poor) like the most about being old.
Rice. I grew up eating rice with nearly every meal, and I do not exaggerate when I say it is my favorite food. I still eat rice at almost every meal. I can't help myself when I put the rice away from sneaking a few bites of unseasoned plain rice.
I order a particular kind of rice from a distributor in Louisiana simply because it is the best plain white rice I have come across. Wild rice and aromatic rice have their place, certainly, but in my day-to-day it is Toro long-grain white rice which is my staple. Here is a great resource about rice types for the LSU AgCenter.