Choice inflection points in gamebooks/interactive fiction/CYOA come in many varieties. There a few standard storyline options in "finite-state" interactive fiction, where you don't keep track of changing statistics, or otherwise do anything other than make choices. Branches and bottlenecks are fundamental to choice paths in these things. Note that spin-off interactive fictions are sometimes belabored with extraneous factors that influence the work's structure. Aspects of making interactive fiction have appeared on the site before (green, greener; blue; bluer).

"It is possible, thanks to the magic of the internet. In 1960, five years before her death, Shirley Jackson recorded readings of "The Lottery" and "The Daemon Lover" for an outfit called Folkways Records—the only time we know of that she ever recorded performances of her own work."

The history of gelato is long. There's also a timeline over at a Gelato-Inspired Resource. Gelato can ostensibly be made at home. Yelp has you covered with 10 Best Gelato Near Philadelphia, but for finding the good stuff in Italy, ask over at National Geographic, Rick Steves, or chronacedigusto. Note that gelato is not ice cream. Hit up Gelato Festival for world rankings. You can eat your gelato like the Romans do it, or you can adorn it with seasonal fruit or other accompaniment.

"AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User Appeals" and "Controlled, In Control, and Out of Control: The Effects of Different Forms of Vocabulary Control on the Subject Indexing and Subject Tagging Processes" have appeared in the last year or so. The 2009 "Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter" is not recent, but it has been cited in many past works in the Metafilterological Sciences. Previously.

Atreja, S., Im, J., Resnick, P., & Hemphill, L. (2023). AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User Appeals. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.07163. Holstrom, C. (2023). Controlled, In Control, and Out of Control: The Effects of Different Forms of Vocabulary Control on the Subject Indexing and Subject Tagging Processes (Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington). Silva, L., Goel, L., & Mousavidin, E. (2009). Exploring the dynamics of blog communities: the case of MetaFilter. Information Systems Journal, 19(1), 55-81.

"The Environmental Defense Fund will finance research into technologies that could artificially cool the planet, an idea that until recently was viewed as radical but is quickly gaining attention as global temperatures rise at alarming rates." [Archive]

The BEST Pound Cake Recipe in the South is one way to go, and another is How pound cake became a Southern classic. You can dip back into history, or you can go the encyclopedic route. Perhaps you prefer Old-Fashioned Pound Cake, or The Best Pound Cake? The Vintage Recipe Project has you covered with the Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme Pound Cake. Note, also, that important pound cake research is happening in the 2020s.

Orange is one flavor that is not infrequently incorporated into pound cakes, as witness the Orange Creamsicle Pound Cake, the Orange Pound Cake, the Orange Cream Cheese Pound Cake, or Giada De Laurentiis' Toasted Pound Cake with Citrus Cream. [This post brought to you by an unanticipated and intense longing for pound cake on a day that will probably feature no baked goods whatsoever. .]

Earlier Tuesday, Chomsky was trending on X as false reports of his death abounded.

"Dismantle All of This Stuff: A Conversation with Noam Chomsky," from back in 2021, when he was also still alive. " One Planet, One Language: How Realistic Is Science Fiction Linguistics?" is from 2014, when Chomsky was still alive, prior to 2021.

"When Ms. Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren't taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language." [Archive]