Month: December 2024

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Bye-Bye, Bluesky?

UPDATE: 6 January 2025. After more than two weeks in Limbo, both accounts are visible again. I noticed @pokermutant.com was working on the weekend, but @darrelplant.bsky.social was still sending content into the void. But as of this evening, on this most auspicious of days, I’m back.

I stopped posting on Twitter two years ago, at least for anything not poker-related (I had two accounts that kept their streams uncrossed). My account wasn’t a major part of my life, but I’d been on there for 15 years, and made a fair number of contacts, including a lot of people I knew from my early blogging years (more than two decades ago, now) and newer folks like Willamette University history professor (and chronicler of 20th-century right-wing kooks) Seth Cotlar, who I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with a bit.

I tried out Mastodon for a while and built up a little network there, finding a number of old game aficionados and luminaries like Winchell Chung, who I knew as the artist for the Steve Jackson minigame Ogre from the 1970s but who’s known even more widely as the man behind Atomic Rockets, a site chock-full of science and formulae for writers and game developers (and anyone else) interested in the mechanics and physics of space travel.

But for any number of reasons, Mastodon never caught on with most of the people I’d been following, with a number of them moving over to the invitation-only startup Bluesky. Eventually, Seth had some invites and I snagged one back in October of 2023, not too long before the platform shifted to open registration.

So, for a year now, I’ve been building up a new circle of old and new acquaintances, making pithy comments here and there. More or less in the ballpark of where I was on Twitter, if not all of the same accounts.

But just before Christmas, something happened. I had a post I needed to edit, and since there’s no edit button, I was going to do my usual thing of making a new post with the edits then deleting the original post before anyone had a chance to like or repost it. When I went to look for the old post in my account’s timeline, it wasn’t there, so I couldn’t delete it. Poking into it a little more, I noticed that none of the items I’d posted or reposted since the morning of December 20th were visible in my timeline.

Last items displayed in my Bluesky timeline, showing a repost from Jon Schwarz time-stamped December 20, 2024 at 6:14 AM, the time (in Pacific Standard Time) when he originally posted it.

At first, I considered that perhaps I’d found my way onto a blocklist that I was on myself, but scrolling a little bit further back, I could still see posts before early afternoon of the 20th.

The last posts visible in my timeline, with the most recent being a reply time-stamped December 20, 2024 at 1:07 PM (Pacific).

Were my posts and replies being entirely blocked? I knew from experience that Clearsky, a tool that interfaces with Bluesky to show lists of users blocked and blocking an account, also had a timeline history

Contents of the Clearsky History tab for my account, showing the most recent post/reply as Mon Dec 30 2024 17:05:10 GMT-800 (Pacific Standard Time) and several other posts in the two days previous (all after December 20th).

So clearly, the data’s out there somewhere. But it’s not showing up on my account in MacOS browsers, on Safari on the iPad, or in the official iOS Bluesky app. Checking in with my wife (she follows me!), they’re not showing for her either (I can see her posts).

For the past dozen years, I’ve been running a Twitter account for poker stuff that I’ve kepty separate from my personal/politics account. Poker Twitter was a bit slow to move over to Bluesky, and it had a bit of a setback when Steve Albini died a few months back, but people were moving over as Twitter continued to decline, so I set up a poker Bluesky account and even went through the ‘verification’ process. After realizing that my main account wasn’t working correctly, I checked it.

Feed from the pokermutant.com Bluesky feed, showing the last post as December 20, 2024 at 10:32 AM.

So I’m not sure where I stand. I’ve contacted Bluesky’s Support email a couple of times already but it’s the holiday, they’re a small team, etc. It’s going to be a real bummer if this isn’t fixed (assuming it’s not something I’ve done that’s made it supposed to be what’s happening).

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Darrel’s Bourbon Pecan Sweet Potatoes

I’ve never really been a fan of sweet potatoes or ‘yams’ as was the custom. My mother made candied yams for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and I happily ate them because Mom made them, but I tended to stay away from at all other times. Barbara hasn’t been a fan either, so they’ve never been a regular part of our mealtimes over the past four decades.

The Christmas after Mom died a decade ago, though, my brother and sister-in-law were hosting the holiday get-together and we were asked to bring the sweet potatoes. I wasn’t about to force Barbara to cook them for a dinner on my side of the families, so I started looking for something beyond some baked yams with marshmallows on top. Something that would cover up my inadequacies as a cook (I really hadn’t done much since we married, Barbara’s a far better cook than I ever will be).

I found a couple of recipes that looked promising. One that’s not on the internet anymore, that was by author Carla Hall (it’s not the same as the one on her site and it wasn’t archived by the Internet Archive) and one from Food.com. I melded them together.

It was a hit, so I was asked to bring them the next year, but I hadn’t really saved the recipes or what I modified. Fortunately, my sister-in-law had asked for it, so I was able to look back through my email archives.

My brother and his family didn’t host every year, though, some holidays they did some traveling. We did our big holiday dinner on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and Barbara never asked me to make sweet potatoes for that. So when I had to make them, I’d just look back for that email.

Then, this year, I was asked again. And I couldn’t find the email. I looked and looked, then finally remembered that depending on which device I’m on, Apple Mail saves my mail into a Sent or Sent Messages folder. They’re both on my email account, I’ve never bothered to figure out how to combine them, but until I checked Sent Messages, I couldn’t find the recipe. And I couldn’t find anything I remembered using Google.

Once I found it, I resolved to put it on Google Docs, and copied the email text to there. The next day, I went to look for it and searched for pecan in my Docs. Turns out I’d already done the same thing in 2023 and had totally forgotten it.

So, this is it, the definitive Darrel’s Bourbon Pecan Sweet Potatoes. I’ve tried to make it as explicit as possible for inexperienced cooks like myself.

Ingredients

4 unpeeled yams

Yam Mix
3 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice (or cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger)
1/4 cup bourbon

Topping
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup melted butter

On Top of the Topping
1/2 bag mini marshmallows

Preparation

Total Preparation Time: 2 hours

Sweet Potatoes

  1. Heat the oven to 375° F (190° C). Put the sweet potatoes on the rack and bake them for 45 minutes.
  2. Remove the baked sweet potatoes from the oven and slice them in half lengthwise (or the other way, if you prefer).
  3. Over a large bowl, hold onto the outside of each section of sweet potato and squeeze the contents into the bowl. The skin should come off easily, you won’t burn your fingers (much).
  4. Mash the sweet potatoes in the bowl.

Mix

  1. In a small bowl, melt 1/2 cup of butter in the microwave or oven.
  2. Add the eggs, granulated sugar, whipping cream, and vanilla to the melted butter and mix.
  3. Stir in the spice mix and bourbon.
  4. Pour the mix into the large bowl with the sweet potatoes.
  5. Use butter to coat the inside of a large casserole dish and smooth the sweet potato mix into the dish.

Topping

  1. Heat the oven to 350° F (175° C).
  2. In a medium bowl, melt 1/2 cup butter.
  3. Add flour, brown sugar and mix.
  4. Into the resulting paste, mix the pecans.
  5. My original notes say to “slather” the topping over the top of the sweet potato mix, but it’s really not liquid enough to spread, so shake it out of the bowl on top of the sweet potatoes and gently push it around to cover the top of the mix.
  6. Add some uncrushed pecans to the top.
  7. Bake for 40 minutes (at 350° F/190° C)).

Once it’s out of the oven, spread as many mini marshmallows as you wish over the top and turn on the broiler. Set the casserole dish on a middle rack where you can keep an eye on the top of the marshmallows so they don’t burn. It can flash over from innocuous to burnt-to-a-crisp in a couple seconds, so don’t take your eyes off them.

And that’s all there is. People keep telling me it’s like having dessert at dinner, which isn’t surprising with two cups of various sugars, sweet potatoes, and bourbon.

Happy Holidays!