From the Archive: No Substitute

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

I'm still on sabbatical, so some of the weekly digests will be from the Stone Soup archives! I hope you enjoy these old favorites as much as I do.

-gailey

No Substitute: Right vs Good

First published on May 5,2023 as part of the Personal Canons Cookbook.

Working with substitutions is an art form.

It’s a tricky proposition because cooking so frequently pursues a designated end result—there’s a photo in the cookbook, there’s a fragrance that should fill the house, there’s a childhood memory of a specific flavor. When we cook, we’re often reaching for something specific that will satisfy a vague notion of rightness, a notion rooted in nostalgia and sentiment, and aspiration. Being able to achieve that idea of rightness by following a recipe as it’s written is, by itself, an amazing skill. Being able to reproduce the same outcome every time you make a dish is even more impressive—it shows a mastery of technique, a degree of finesse. I always feel a rush of triumph when I execute a dish successfully for the second time because that proves that my first success wasn’t a random and unrepeatable fluke.

Being able to use substitutions is a whole other arena of skill. To better understand this, I think it’s necessary to call substitutions what they are: cooking with the wrong ingredients. The recipes we work from call for the ingredients they require for a reason—those ingredients are important, they’re correct, they’re the things that will produce the right outcome. When we make substitutions, we’re replacing the right ingredients with wrong ones. Achieving the right outcome from the wrong ingredients is a tall order, and it takes a great cook to know how to do it.

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Warframe

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

It was the nu metal that got me. I always knew it would. I’ve been casting around for a new game to play, and I’ve been circling Warframe for a while. I love a good SpaceDude Does Stuff game, and it’s certainly that. But I also wanted to change the focus of this column a little bit. 2025 is off to a remarkably dark start and the ability to escape, even if just mentally, from the never ending firestorm we’re all living through is vital. We can all help a little. One of the ways I can help is by pointing you at games that cost nothing but time. You’re going to be seeing a lot more free, indie, cheap, retro or all of the above games here this year for that exact reason. Warframe is free. It’s a SpaceDude Does Stuff game and with its’ latest expansion, Warframe 1999. It embraces ‘90s nu metal. There are swords AND spaceships. It’s a perfect place to start, especially as it’s available on Switch, Xbox, PS5, PC and IOS.

The game opens with a cinematic sequence showing your terrified character surfacing in a lake full of dead bodies. As you run for your life, you learn about the Tenno,  warriors who have slept for millennia. The Tenno used Warframes, incredibly powerful and versatile suits of armour and as you run for your life, you’re shown three of them. In flashback we see a battle where Volt, an electricity wielding Warframe, Mag, a magnetic Warframe and Exalibur, a large pointy-faced space ninja, take down a vastly superior army. It’s a great action sequence, balletic and alien and visceral.

And Exaclibur.

Has.

A dog.

A bat-faced-pitbull looking goodest boy who aids in the fight and enjoys Excalbanian scritchies. I loved him instantly.

I loved how the opening cutscene finishes even more. Take a look.

You reach the place the three Warframes fought in and won. You see them, covered in centuries of dust, waiting. You become one. You stand up.

The game starts.

As a narrative designer, this sort of faultless shift is something I love to see and aspire to do. As a player, it’s that rollercoaster moment where everything lurches forward in a way that’s scary not frightening. Either way you cut it (And Excalibur does a lot of cutting) it’s impressive.

It’s also possible to play solo and I am. I love people but I don’t tend to like them in my games. While you can play Warframe in a team, it's also doable solo. In, according to howlongtobeat.com, a mere 500 hours. I mentioned that number to friends who play and after they finished laughing they assured me that it’s much, much bigger than that and it would be hundreds of hours before I got to Warframe 1999. 

I'm ten hours in as I write this, and I'm having an excellent time. The world feels rich and deep and intimidating but from that first narrative shift on it also feels in reach. I've figured out a couple of my abilities, I'm making way through the main plot. I've helped adorable robot headed socialists on Venus fight The Man. I've stared in horror at the colossal number of resources I have and how little idea I have to use literally any of them. Every location is littered with lockers, storage bins, lumps of what I hope is meat and literal shiny rocks that I can pick up and grab and do stuff with. I have an onboard AI with a Canadian accent who reassures me I'm doing great. I have a ship that I enter and exit in the most ludicrously extra way possible through a literal revolving door into space.

SPACE.

It's a LOT. But it's also enough. This isn't (just) a SpaceDude Does Stuff game. There's a world here, a world they're trusting me to uncover and I'm enjoying doing it. I'm enjoying the tone too. The Concrete Blonde cover of Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen floats through my mind regularly when I play. Especially this line:

Everybody knows that the war is over,
Everybody knows that the good guys lost.

For now. 

Because I plan to play Warframe until I get bored or finish the main quest line. Every month, in addition to another game, I’ll let you know how I’m getting on. This pointy-faced space ninja has an alien doggo to go earn and a universe to save. Crank up the nu metal.

Warframe is available for free now.

FEATURED NEW RELEASE: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk… 

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

If you’re a paying subscriber, come say hello in the Supper Club and share the ways you’re connecting with and supporting your local community. Remember to drop your local mutual aid networks so we can put them in future issues of the Digest. 

If you want to support Stone Soup without a regular subscription, feel free to drop a one-time donation into our tip jar.

In the meantime, do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

—gailey