Welcome to LostNet

--Following the biddings of an angel--or perhaps just the voices in my head--

Learning HTML--hoping to keep developing this site! At the moment it will just be some small blogs of my ventures in cooking, baking, video games, and books, and whatever other hobbies I might pick up along the way. :)

Next site goal: get some CSS up in here to make it more than just a blank page of text!

Lost's Regular Blog (that might have a sort of loose focus as time goes on)

6.19.24
Well, it certainly has been some time! Almost two full years I've been off, but here marks the return of Lost's little HTML site experiment. I'm not sure why I ever started a baking blog, to be perfectly honest--I don't think I ever made anything since my previous post beyond some cookies and the occasional pot pie. But that's ok, for today I am returned with yet another hobby driven ultimately by my desire for creation and niche knowledge: old electronics!

I had a conversation with my friend Paul today that truly can't be shared in its entirety anywhere on the net, but the abridged version of it is this: we both long to hold extensive knowledge of some sort of niche hobby, because it seems that everyone possesses this sort of mastery for one topic or another, but we do not. I had a good think on the things I find interesting--or, at least, interesting enough to warrant an extensive deep dive of Wikipedia articles and I guess fruitlessly delving the Duck Duck Go archives for lost articles and other tidbits--and I had come to the conclusion that I simply don't have a hobby of that sort. But then I took a look at the Game Boy Color sitting at my desk and it came to me: old tech! (This didn't actually happen, I don't know how the subject came to mind, but this seems more poetic, in like a providential sort of way.)

So... I guess we'll see! Chances are, if this turns out like any of my past ventures, this interest will fade like all the others. At present, I do enjoy that it's already coinciding with my other interest of building this site, and so the intertwining of the two may help give me motivation to move forward with both. We'll see! I'm going to start off with the original Game Boy--seems a solid place to start, Nintendo products and old gaming handhelds. I'll report back when I've learned some stuff of use.

Until then; good night, NeoCities! ;)

Lost's Baking Blog

10.16.22
This Sunday I (finally) decided to bake some cookies. Inspired by our new stand mixer, I used my tried and true recipe from Joyfoodsunshine.com, only this time I swapped out half of the chocolate chips with peanut butter chips. The new stand mixer performed admirably! It mixed everything together like a dream, even down to the chips, and did so like a champ. I also used it a bit earlier to mix up my pizza dough, which it also handled with no issue. Definitely looking forward to using this bad jackson for more stuff going forward! It beats the hell out of mixing that cookie dough by hand. By the end of that process my arms were fit to shrivel up and fall off.

Anyway, here's the ingredients for the cookies:

Like I mentioned earlier, I subbed 1 cup of the chips for a peanut butter variant. My oven is as always inconsistent with its heat output, so some of the cookies turned out a bit crispier than others, but most turned out well. I still can't quite get the consistency correct--that is, a soft and chewy center with a crispy dark outer edge. I'm gonna delve into how to get that sort of consistency in the future. Basically like an Insomnia cookie. I've seen before that it just needs more butter, but I'm still not all too familiar with how more/less of each ingredient will affect the product.

The peanut butter chips were good, but in my opinion they just can't beat plain old chocolate chip. The sweetness of the cookie is perfectly offset by the acidity of a good chocolate chunk, and that's just not something you can get with a peanut butter chunk. Maybe I can try making the cookie less sweet so that the peanut butter chips can shine through? I'll have to try some other recipes out to see what I like--but that's hard to want to do when this current recipe turns out so good every time. :')

What should I try baking next? I've been averse to pies ever since the incident (there's not much to tell about that--I just royally f***ed up shaping the crust and swore off the things for good), but maybe I'll give it another shot. It's already been almost an entire year since I've last tried it. Regardless, this is the time of year for apple pies, so maybe I'll give it a go.

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