#chefclub

[laqueus]

so anyway chefclub is pure evil and this is a chefclub hate blog

[jeekoftheweek]

spongebob: I love jelly fishing

mr. krabs: spongebob, me boy, yer house is made of meat

squidward: spongebob! your house is made of meat

patrick: spongebob, you're house is made of meat

[emordnilap-fr]

who else would go on novelty websites as a kid and watch the deranged and delightful ads they would have

[starcures]

watched zach choi videos for like an hour yesterday night so now im gonna deep fry my leftover kraft dinner

[firespirited]

i think the chefclub alfredo chicken with the soundtrack from hereditary got nuked from tumblr (you know the fingering garlic and shoving cheese filmed at three different angles one)

anyone know where I could get it again?

Never mind, found i'd tagged it salmonella 😂

[greenlabcoat]

if i ever got famous i would setup a collab with chefclub as a live stream. and immediate put my dick and balls in the panini press

[dreamsicle262]

someday ill make all the chefclub recipes for you

why :<

[mtsodie]

i think if dhmis had a cooking episode itd be like whatevers going on at chefclub

[talenlee]

September 2024 Wrapup!

There’s often a joke about ‘wake me up when September ends.’ It’s a reference to a song, a good song I like a lot that’s about a meaningful emotional thing from a queer artist. Thing is, this September, nah, I didn’t want to sleep through any of it.

This September, I wanted to remember every night of it.

(Especially the 21st night of it.)

This month’s Game Pile articles were:

Apiary, a Stonemeier game of bees! in! space! that I found extremely good in all the ways that Stonemeier games tend to be good.

Infidel, and Circling to Failure, a classic infocom text adventure about how the game frames you as a crappy dude. The unreliable narrator and the failure end point has not been revolutionary for a long time.

Kentucky Route Zero and the Three Games About America, a video about finally putting to the page an incident that I think is hilariously awful and reflects the parochial vision of American centrism that defines games culture.

Pine Shallows, a really cool adventurey TTRPG!

Over in the Story Pile, we got

Girls Band Cry, a revolutionary 3d anime in that it’s not revolutionary just in that it looks really, really cool!

Manhunter, a live action movie about this ‘Hannyball Lecktor’ guy, and the way that, turns out, serial killers aren’t amazing superminds?

Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable, a tourism brochure for Hokkaido, a part of Japan defined, thanks to this series, by snow and massive tits.

Hoot, a Jimmy Buffett movie which of course I’m going to wind up watching because I am such a sap for Jimmy Buffett’s work, and the resultant movie kinda belongs in a sort of Pride Month closet key collection.

Then There Were Five, which goes up tomorrow and you’ll get to enjoy as I grapple with a classic novel from my childhood that set up a status quo and didn’t deliver on it.

If you come to this blog for worldbuilding, fantasy, and generic tabletop kinds of conversations? Well, I covered the Inevitables and Modrons from 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, the thing we call a ‘druid’ and where that fits in and out of character fantasy, and the way that convenient magic creates an everyday industry. I talked about how in Cobrin’Seil, the Ogre represents not a species but a choice, and player options for if you want to play a bird person, in the form of the Aarakocra and Harpies and how they fit into Cobrin’Seil.

In other articles, I talked about the fantastic event called ‘the miracle of the brick,’ some great anime OPs that outweigh the anime that they present, the criminality of Pokemon in the vibes they project, and some good, old fashioned complaining about a badly made ASMR video by a media mill called Chefclub. And, not related to that particular waft of internet fartings, I talked about why I am resistant to calling my own work content these days.

I also designed a set of shirts inspired by Animorphs:

a black shirt with white text reading ‘Jake & Cassie & Marco & Rachel & Tobias & Ax’

a white shirt with black text reading ‘Jake & Cassie & Marco & Rachel & Tobias & Ax’

a black shirt with white text reading ‘Jake & Cassie & Marco & & Tobias & Ax’

a white shirt with black text reading ‘Jake & Cassie & Marco & Rachel & Tobias & Ax’

a black shirt with white text reading ‘tiger & wolf & gorilla & bear & hawk & ax”

a white shirt with black text reading ‘tiger & wolf & gorilla & bear & hawk & ax’

There are more designs, which are present as a collection over on my Redbubble.

What happened in September? Work was work — fully online classes mean I spend lots of time inside and don’t have the time to get up to things between classes. That’s an interesting challenge in my day to day life that means I’m just not leaving the house a lot, something that’s bothering me a little. Walking the dog, enjoying the weather as best I can in the late hours I walk him – because the dog’s got anxiety – that’s something that puts me out in the air, in a space where I can breath cool air.

What else, what else…

Oh yeah!

When this post goes up, Cohost is two days away from being put into Read-Only mode, and it will be closed and deleted at the end of the year. If you weren’t on it, and didn’t care about it, Cohost was essentially a type of social media website that didn’t work the way any of the other ones worked.

There’s a lot of talk about Cohost that wants to compare it to platforms like Tumblr or Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon but none of them were really like it. It’s much easier, for me, to tell you what Cohost did: It let you post some pictures, it let you post text, it let you use some CSS or HTML to do things that I understand were pretty fun. To me what Cohost presented as a platform where I could draft articles in public, where there was a commentary culture, and where people would use tags and spoilers to control and present what you were writing or making.

It was also, to me, most importantly, a place where a bunch of my friends were hanging out. Not all of them — it sure seems to be a place biased towards white folks — but it was a place where what they offered was a meaningful chunk of my friend group.

Cohost was a place where the kind of people I like to show things to, the people whose input matters to me, felt okay talking about things. I could get feedback and responses and interest (even modestly) and people weren’t afraid that William Rando Hurst was going to wander into the conversation and accuse them of hating waffles. I have a very small fund of money I think of as my ‘spend on the internet’ kind of money. One of the only places I spent that money was on Cohost Plus, which gave me access to, as far as I know, nothing. I paid for Cohost because I wanted Cohost to succeed, and I wanted people who couldn’t afford to pay for Cohost to not feel they had to shoulder a burden.

And it’s going away.

I loved Cohost, and I’m going to miss Cohost. I get to do that. I’m so glad I get to miss Cohost. I’m glad I get to think about the things that Cohost taught me about how to be a person on the internet and I’m happy of that. It showed me ways the people around me are creative and how they are sad and how they are willing to be when they don’t feel like they’re in risk of being threatened for existing.

I’m gunna miss you, Cohost.

Keep on eggbugging.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[tauforged]

when i’m cranky i sit down with a yummy snack and hatewatch chefclub videos . no real reason except i find it amusing to see how bad some of these recipes are . it’s like baby sensory videos to me

[hauntedknightwalker]

Someone stuff me like chefclub stuffs a turkey- (gets shot)

[leam1983]

Torquemada

Another fun part of having SOs is that you get a free license to torture them a little.

I torture Sarah by forwarding her terrible PC builds as if I were serious, or by looking like I'm momentarily thinking like the Palpatine server needs a drinks coaster.

Walt is someone for whom I have to twist the knife just a little more, comparatively - using Chefclub recipes.

He's a big guy. He likes bacon as much as anyone else, but he likes it as a sedate complement to something else. Not as the main aspect of what you could only charitably call a dish, however.

I forward him a pancake wrapped in a bacon lattice and he replies moments later with the expected Vomit Emoji.

"Cook this," he sends me as I leave the public pool's changing room and head back for my paratransport, "and I'm putting child locks on everything after taping mittens on your hands."

[firespirited]

Tumblr flagged the chefclub butter chicken video link tagged "not safe for salmonella" with a mature tag. LMAO. This might be one of the few times the algorithm is correct. It is indeed filmed like safe for work fetish material. If my entire account is marked mature know that it is because I can't get a second review on mobile of a minute long horror video of food crimes.

Ps: see that little key up top? That's AdGuard free version. It makes tumblr ads blank, tumblr merch or highlighted artists only.

[zamalie]

I wonder if those horrible chefclub and adjacent videos are gonna be like our edition of savory jello salads and ham and bananas hollandaise eventually

[grox]

george do you have the chefclub video edit where they keep shoving the entire cheese block into the turkey over and over again while one winged angel plays in the background

I actually dont, don't have it on hand and I think the last time I reblogged it has been years ago so it might not be worth diving for. I'll forward this to my followers, then forward it back to you.

[talenlee]

Chefclub's Absurd ASMR Shittiness

Chefclub are a food channel on youtube that presents an example of what happens in a world of algorithmic content. Chefclub make videos about food that are not so much recipes as much as they are creative fiction in the storytelling medium of recipes. Before the spread of AI Generated Media, Chefclub were already doing a bunch of things for Algorithmic Purposes, with long compilation videos mixing up short sets of videos, deliberately edited videos designed to present a recipe ‘construction’ that in many cases misses steps or changes ingredients mid-video for better visual effect. Then these videos are chopped up and reconstructed into repeated versions of themselves with different components, and every new platform presented gets another ChefClub permutation, like a mould filling all the gaps.

If you’ve ever seen someone hollow out a brick of bright yellow American cheddar to wrap it in burritos, and somehow it maintains all structural integrity through this, then you have seen something that owes its connection to ChefClub.

Then a friend came to me and told me Chefclub made an ASMR video.

I suppose, given the content of this video, content warning: This ASMR video has multiple disconcerting shifts in volume levels, resulting in a relaxing audio landscape being interrupted with some prominent thonk sounds. There’s also some meat ‘squishing’ sounds that might be unpleasant, and I suppose, also, given the range of audience for ASMR, it’s just straight up a whole video about preparing a piece of meat, which means a content warning for food.

#ASMR hammer beef shank burritos in the wild 🥩🌯

Watch this video on YouTube

Also, content warning, this article isn’t going to be terribly insightful, I’m just going to complain about it.

ASMR, if you’re not familiar with it, is a media form on Youtube that works on trying to stimulate a hard-to-describe shiver/shudder effect that happens in the listener due to ranges of sensory stimulation that typically are isolated to intimate/quiet experiences, sometimes with a background of white noise. What causes or activates ASMR in an audience is pretty wildly varied, and thanks to this variety there are a host of different forms the media takes. Even when just limiting it to Youtube, there are ASMRtists who specialise in creating narratives and some who focus on just pure videos of stimuli designed for extremely long form presentations you’re meant to fall asleep for.

(Hey, uh, is there going to be a problem with a bunch of people falling asleep wearing earbuds these days? Just wondering.)

Anyway, ASMR is a media format that can include a wide variety of things. There’s almost no wrong way to do ASMR. Watching any given ASMR video you’ll probably pick up on the trends that are important to replicate the form! Which is what makes this video, made by algorithm-chasers with access to good sound equipment so baffling in its incompetence.

First of all, there’s just the way that the narrative presented in the video seems like a lie. That’s not important, not really, after all, I watch ASMR videos about a guy pretending to be the Joker running a blackjack game and neither of those things are particularly related to reality (except, I suppose, blackjack exists). But in the video it’s ostensibly about showing you a cooking process and how it’s executed, and the fact that the food preparation shown seems to be secretly hiding steps like ‘and then we continued to cook the food or swapped in other food that was already made’ feels a bit of a cheat for something that positions itself so naturally.

This isn’t making fun of the chef, by the way. That chef probably knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it that way. This is about the editing and construction of the video.

The sound mixing is dreadful for it too, with everything positioned with just a little too much gain. Ambient sound is overwhelming and varied, which means to compensate, the sounds of the actual execution of the cook are all amped up to make sure the microphone catches them. This includes a sequence where the chef drops a bundle of sticks which is a single one-off sound event with the gain turned up. There’s a relaxing calm quiet of the surrounding environment and then suddenly THONK. But that’s not even the worst abrupt noise interruption because again, with the gain turned up to make sure you hear it over the background noise, the video then centres the chef roughly scraping the bottom of the cast iron with an axe, a sound that is not particularly enjoyable or well mixed.

Following that there’s a moment where a bone gets pulled out of the meat. But it doesn’t come easily so they slip with the grip and THONK hit the board on the bone again, interrupting this turned-up sound scape with another sudden burst of volume. Then when it’s done you get the turned-up audio of the chef gasping and grunting wetly, but don’t worry, then there’s the audio of him tearing apart the meat with his hands (so it has definitely had time to cool). Making Guacamole? better make sure to keep the mic turned in way close to the inside of the skin so that when you scoop out the insides you get the sound of a knife being dragged across an abraded surface, aka ‘scratching pops and crackles.’ The poor chef through this whole process is breathing heavily with the restrained gasps of someone trying hard to not be heard on mic. Don’t worry, though we also get a mic pointed at his face while he’s gulping in huge mouthfuls of air then BLOWING straight towards the mic.

Making fun of this video, step by step, isn’t even really worth it because who cares per se, if you like this genre that it’s hashtag advertising itself to, you probably already know that you won’t like it just based on the opening seconds of loud, clattery sound. But what makes this really fascinating to me is the way that ASMR is a format which Youtube has almost perfected in terms of algorithmic content, with creators generating whole empires out of simple iterations on the generalised formula.

But it is interesting to see how that formula can be executed badly by people who understand formulas but not forms.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media