Farmer Gadda's Famous Buttercream

Cupcakes that I definitely didn't make, but I could have if I wanted to - Pixabay

 Howdy, Farmhands.

    I have had to explain to literally everyone who has ever eaten my cakes that no, they don't hate buttercream, they've just only eaten the store brand "frosting" that is 90% hydrogenated oil. Don't make me repeat myself for the nth time.

Please just consider the following;

Ingredients

    2 Sticks Unsalted Butter, Softened at Room Temperature (discerning tongues can add a dash of salt to taste if you're that picky)

    1 tsp Vanilla Extract

    2 Tbsp Milk (Almond works fine)

    4 cups Unsifted Powdered Sugar (Once measured, you can sift if you prefer)

Recipe

1. Place both sticks Butter in a large bowl, beat until creamy
2. Add 1 Tsp Vanilla and 1 Tbsp Milk, beat again
3. Add Powdered Sugar, half a cup at a time. Combine completely before adding another cup. Use all 4 cups of Powdered Sugar. Do not add more than a half cup before you turn on the mixer. Trust me on this.
4. If at any point the mixture becomes too thick to mix, add the remaining Tbsp Milk to moisten the mixture, then continue adding the Powdered Sugar.

For chocolate, replace 1/4th cup Powdered Sugar with 1/4th cup Cocoa Powder, mixing the dry ingredients together fully before adding them as in steps 3 and 4.

Replace the Vanilla Extract for the relevant flavored Extract when making Fruit Flavored frosting.

Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

The Art of Fucking Up Your Branding

that's not my url anymore

  Howdy, Farmhands.

    I was supposed to be a Vtuber.

    Once upon a time, I would log onto social media with a single goal in mind. I had a Brand, you see. I had an Image. I had this concept lodged into my brain that the only person who would be able to successfully promote the Idea Of Farmer Gadda in a marketable and appealing way would be Me. This was back in the early days of Vtubing, the year 2020, when all the bells and whistles of Japan's Idol Culture were being lifted and repeated wholesale with no critical analysis of whether that mentality was at all healthy for the entertainers trapped in its systems. I was just a lone Farmer with a dream, and a step-by-step plan to make those dreams come true. 

• No Stories about my personal life. (even though I'd been a 'Fleshtuber' for two years, with a ton of personal information shared during those early baking streams)
• No Content outside my limited range of acceptable tones. (Farming Games were only fun for so long, and I was too much of a sonic autist to not immediately desire the hog)
• And no matter how much I believed in something and held it dear, absolutely No Hot Takes.

    This lasted about as long as you're imagining, by which I mean, not terribly long at all. Unlike ACTUAL Idols, I did not have a team of PR specialists and legal contracts to keep me from acting outside the parameters that would ensure only the best and consistent activity of my mind was blasted into the eyeballs of my prospective audience. No matter how strong I thought I was, I was just a man. A weak, fallible, opinionated little man. I was doomed to failure, really.

    From the minute I read the phrase, 'System Matters', I became embroiled in the Discourse of the day with a religious fervor. I had thoughts! I had distastes! I had OPINIONS. So many opinions! I had to start using third party software to contain my opinions, limit posting them to once daily to make sure my ACTUAL branded posts and messages got the air needed to be seen! My existing audience was confused and frightened, wondering where their sweet and loveable cake baking blorbo had gone, replaced by this passionate acolyte of the church of Math Rocks, evangelizing on the merits of Imaginary Elf Games. To anyone just finding me, primarily through said evangelizing, it was nothing more than a funny oddity that the Good-Take-Haver they'd found on Twitter also moonlit as a cartoon farmer-man who played a bit too much Minecraft in his spare time. And once I became privy to that portion of my followers having that opinion of me, I knew I'd fucked up. Farmer Gadda wasn't a brand associated with having a good time with cowbells and plants anymore. It was still that, but with something louder and utterly unrelated, inextricably tied into it's core identity.

    The problem with first impressions is that you only really get them once. Even if I had then and there cut down on TTRPG Poasting, reverted to the squeaky clean marketable image I'd arrived intending to push, the Poastings had been Poasted. I bemoaned this for a minute before something really weird started happening.

    As it turns out, Human beings are messy and multi-faceted. We're not MEANT to have our personalities put into little boxes to be experienced piecemeal. The Sonic Autist in me railing against the constraints of only making Farmy-Cottage Core experiences for my viewers? The passionate flames of Righteousness that burned in my soul whenever someone was wrong on the internet? Those were just as much a part of me as the positive facets I had tried to isolate and exaggerate as part of the Farmer Gadda Caricature. It wasn't for everyone, sure, but it was Me. And people somehow liked Me, warts and all. Even existing followers who didn't care one lick about Dice Math followed along. Some even took to the new style of Poasts with interest of their own, turning my personal journey into unmarketability into a GROUP journey into TTRPG Brainrot. Along the way my audience went from Just Minecraft Enjoyers and Just Cake Lovers to both of those things but also Sonic Fans, and Game Designers, fellow Vtubers and yes, Math Rock Opinion Havers.

    The Art to Fucking Up Your Branding is an ART, not a Science. There isn't a step by step process to replicate doing so smoothly, because the only step is to Be Messy. Be Human. Be everything of yourself at once, screaming your passions and desires into the void and listening to the people who heard you and decided to scream back. 

    I was supposed to be a Vtuber. But I think I'm much happier being an Experience.

Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

Sporpsball

A Child Playing Sportsball, Probably. Idk I'm not his mom. - Pixabay

Howdy, Farmhands.

    Early 2021 was probably the most productive time for me as a Game Designer. Everything was new and shiny, and I hadn't yet learned what Not To Do in the spaces I was discovering for people interested in my newfound hobby. This meant that I was willing and able to yeet myself bodily into whatever struck my fancy, without the lived experience to understand the possibility of sending myself off a cliff.

    It was during this time period that I came up with the rules for Sporpsball.

    Heavily inspired by a moment in the og Interstitial: Our Hearts Entertwined Podcast campaign wherein a player used the fuckery that is the English Language to re-interpret the wording of a PBTA Move, I wanted a system agnostic experience where fucking with the language in the rules was The Point, and the following is what I came up with.

    SPORPSBALL, a Supplement for Whatever Game You're Playing. Yes, even That One.

1.  Every person at the table gets to write down a single sentence describing what they remember of an existing Sports game. The GM has to include a specific way to score in theirs. These sentences are collectively referred to as "The Rules."
   
   
2. A game of Sporpsball includes a number of additional participants on the field equal to the number of Player Characters participating in the Sport. If it's a team game, they're on the Other Team. There is also always a Large Audience cheering them teams on.
   
   
3. Unless explicitly prohibited by The Rules of Sporpsball, any stats, skills, feats, or other game mechanics the Player Characters normally have access to may be used to attempt to win the game.
   
   
4. Whenever a Player rolls the highest possible face value of a die, no matter what the roll was for in mechanics or fiction, they may adjust one of The Rules in one of the ways listed below. These adjustments must not result in a Rule being an incomplete sentence.
   
   • Replace 1 Letter of a word in the Rule
   • Add a word to the Rule
   • Swap the placement of two words within the Rule
   • Invert one word to a word of it's Opposite meaning
     
     
5. Should any one of The Rules ever have every word in it's sentence changed completely from it's initial form, that rule is sealed and cannot be altered further. The Player who created the rule must then create an additional rule.
   
   
6. Any Character who breaks one the rules, willingly or not, recieves a Foul. 3 Fouls, and they're ejected from the game.
   
   
7. At no point should ANY rule imply, infer, or otherwise suggest the inclusion or exclusion of a dog. There shall never be any rule that determines whether or not a Dog should be allowed to play Sporpsball. Attempting to do so will result in immediate forfeiture of the Sporp by the offending Player or Team.

Until Next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

I made a blog.

 

You, probably, after reading how good my Thinks are.

Howdy, Farmhands.

    My name is Gadda. I'm a man who wears a bunch of different hats depending on the hour, but the roles you may or may not be familiar with are as follows: He/They, Vtuber, TTRPG Designer, Cake Decorator, Chicken Tender, Wife Guy. And this here is my blog, in which I intend to POAST about these things.

    I don't consider myself to be any sort of expert on any subject; frankly, I'm too frequently wrong to lie to myself about that. But I do have the unfortunate habit of regurgitating the things I Think I Know with the confidence of a man who's won awards for his opinions, which leads to people assuming I'm an expert. I would like to apologize in advance for that. 

    I'm still getting the hang of this platform, as well as learning the process of turning my shorter form thoughts and too-long ramblings into a more readable form. You can get updates via email somehow. Maybe get an RSS Feed and slap my url into it. (Google it, they're great actually.) And who knows, maybe some nugget of wisdom will be worth something to you.

Until Next Time,

            Farmer Gadda