FAQ

Rules of conduct

.....The basic rule is that this is a HopePunk-based site, and you should act as a person who believes that you can make the world a better place.

.....Build-up, don’t tear down. In a comment, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

.....Don’t be passive-aggressive.

.....If someone makes a mistake, comment on the mistake, not the person who made it.
.....Spoiled Ingredients:
.....Negative comments will be removed and logged as a spoiled ingredient in your kitchen.

.....Three Spoiled Ingredients:
.....If you accumulate three spoiled ingredients, you'll get an email from Neon explaining why your comments have been removed. Your kitchen privileges are revoked (no more commenting or ranking) until you respond to the email.

.....Three More Spoiled Ingredients:
.....Accumulate three more spoiled ingredients, and you'll receive a second, more strongly worded email. Your kitchen privileges are revoked (no more commenting or ranking) until you respond to the email. After your privileges are restored, your comments will be reviewed before they are seen by other people.

.....Three More Spoiled Ingredients:
.....If you gather three additional spoiled ingredients, your license is revoked, and your kitchen is shut down.

.....Severe Spoilage: If you make an obviously racist, sexist, or hateful comment, that's severe spoilage, and your kitchen is locked immediately.

General

.....In the last few years, I’ve been given (and bought more) themed cookbooks. I love cooking from the Lord of the Rings and D&D Feast cookbooks. There are cookbooks for Fallout, the Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, Street Fighter, and the list goes on. But no one had done one for my favorite game, Shadowrun.

.....So I wondered, could I make a Shadowrun cookbook? With that though in mind, I pulled up ChatGPT and started messing around. I put in some very specific (and strange) prompts and out popped some (let’s see if I can be gentle here) interesting and unique recipes. I was intrigued enough to cook one of them and it was very good.

.....With those first four successes, my course was set and I started creating lots of recipes and testing them. That leads us to the website. Somewhere along the line, I decided I want to create cooking videos as well as the book - and if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to have a website, too.
.....Shadowrun is an table top RPG (Role Playing Game) set in the near future in Seattle. There is way more to Shadowrun that I can explain here, but the important part is this. You can see more of this detail in the History section of the website.

..... in 2012 Magic came back into the world and changed everything.

.....Corporations continued to gain more power to the point they run everything.

.....Everything that is except what organized and unorganized crime runs.

.....There are now trolls, orcs, elves, dwarfs, and dragons in the world.

.....It is a very dystopian world where most of the people live in squalor.
.....Yes.

.....Without the help of AI, there is no way I could have even started this project. I know that, for many, AI is taking away their livelihood and perhaps their creativity. For me, it has been an enabled and multiple, allowing me to unleash my creativity.

.....If you are one of those hurt by AI, I feel for you and understand that you may not in good conscience support a website or project that has used AI. In that case, I bid you farewell and hope that you can find a way through the changes that are coming.

.....If you want to know more about AI and how it was used, see the AI section of the FAQ.

Regitration

.....There are four main reasons to register.

.....First, it unlocks parts of the website that you would not otherwise have access to and lets you like and rate recipes.

.....Second, it lets you opt-in to receive the Neon Knife Newsletter

.....Third, it lets us email you when the cookbook is ready to buy.

.....Fourth, it gives you advantages when you are supporting us on Patreon. Without registering, you can’t take advantage of your Patreon-level benefits.
.....Your name and email (which we will never sell to anyone else)

.....Things you have liked. (If you unlike something, we don’t keep track of that, it’s like you never liked the thing in the first place.

.....Your rating of recipes you’ve made. (we will not use your personal rating score, but may use the aggregate rating score for a recipe. We do not share your ratings with anyone else or even that you have rated things)

.....Comments you’ve made

.....Your Patreon level

.....As new features are added, this list might grow, but in any case, we don’t sell your data.
.....We track how many days you log in. This information is used to unlock new stories and recipes. Come back every day to see new content.
.....There’s a lot of content on neonknife.com. To help you find the new stuff, we’ve implemented an “I’ve Seen This” option to mark a story or recipe as something you’ve seen. By clicking the knife on the left of the menubar, you can change it from green (the default that shows you everything) to yellow (cut the old stuff). Later, if you want to see everything, click the knife twice to get back to the everything view. Clicking it once puts you in Favorite Mode.
.....Like we said, there’s a lot of content on neonknife.com. To help you find your favorite stuff, we’ve implemented a “Favorite” option to mark a story or recipe as a personal favorite. By clicking the knife on the left of the menubar, you can change it from green (the default that shows you everything) to yellow (cut the old stuff), then to yellow (favorites). If you have marked something as having been seen and as a favorite, this mode will show it to you while hiding other new and old things.

Neon Knife

.....Neon Knife, born Neal Knobs, is an ex-shadowrunner who is now a Street Chef. He runs a food cart that he takes to different parts of Seattle. He’s had a hard life, like most people in Seattle, but he’s come out the other side and see hope in the future.
..... 6’5”, 320lb, 65 year old, male Troll of Irish/Japanese decent
.....Body: 4
.....Agility: 3
.....Reaction: 3
.....Strength: 5
.....Willpower: 4
.....Logic: 2
.....Charisma: 3
.....Edge: 1
.....Essence: 6
.....Magic: 2
.....ACTIVE SKILLS
.....Perception: 4
.....Influence: 5
.....Etiquette: 10
.....Outdoors 2
.....Close combat: 5 - Blades (10)
.....Stealth: 2
.....Biotech: 2 - First aid (4)
.....Athletics: 3 - Throwing (8)
.....Con: 2 - Performance (7)
.....Electronics: 2

Languages
.....English
.....Japanese
.....Irish Galic

Knowledge SKILLS
.....Cooking
.....Street Gang of Seattle
.....Yakuza
.....Seattle pop-ups
.....Lone Star Patrols
.....Lone Star Procedures
.....Neon is a low-level physical adept.
.....Danger Sense
.....Improved Sense (smell)
.....Direction Sense
.....In music and writing, Punk signifies a rebellious and countercultural ethos that challenges the status quo.

.....Hope is the belief that the future will be good, or at least better.

.....Hopepunk is a literary and artistic movement that emphasizes optimism, resilience, and the power of kindness in the face of adversity. It stands in contrast (rebellion) to the dystopian and grimdark genres by focusing on the positive aspects of humanity and the belief that people can make a difference.

.....Shadowrun is unquestionably a dystopian world. I love the setting but wanted to focus in a different direction. As with all good science fiction, I want to cast our current world into a different one so that we can look at it detached and then maybe bring back some pearls of wisdom that we can apply to our lives.

.....If people who have it much worst than we do can have hope, then maybe we can, too.

Patreon

To help offset the cost of food.

To offer people fun bonuses

To build community
Level 1 - Street Snackers’
.....Early access to videos
.....Blooper Reels
.....5% discount on merch
.....Newsletter - opt-in

Level 2 - Neon’s Noshers
.....Everything from Street Snackers’ plus
.....Extra 5% of merch (10% total)
.....Themed playlist for cooking, curated by Neon
.....Monthly cooking tips and tricks PDF
.....Access to the Discord channel
.....A new story every week
.....Behind-the-scenes content (e.g. recipe testing, equipment demos, etc.)

Level 3 - Troll Tasting Crew
.....Everything from Neon’s Noshers plus
.....Extra 10% of merch (20% total)
.....Access to digital recipe cards
.....Voting rights on new recipe ideas
.....Monthly Recipe
.....Monthly group Q&A sessions with me/Neon

Level 4 - Chef’s table
.....Everything from Troll Tasting Crew plus
.....Extra 10% of merch (30% total)
.....Access to a digital recipe cards
.....Voting rights on new recipe ideas
.....Monthly Recipe
.....Monthly group Q&A sessions with me/Neon

Level 5 - Potlatch
.....Everything from Chef’s table plus
.....Extra 10% of merch (40% total)
.....Monthly Personalized recipe modification
.....Exclusive seasonal recipes (4 per year)
.....Quarterly virtual cooking class
.....Early access to new merchandise
.....Monthly Private video session with me/Neon

AI

.....There is a lot to unpack here. There are the philosophical questions, the ethical questions, the societal questions, the intrigue, the freedom, and the dread.

.....I’ve been doing computers since 1977 when I got my first computer, a Commodore Pet. I’ve been waiting for AI since I read “The adolescence of P1” and “I Robot.” It’s always been five years out. Well, in 2022, it showed up. It wasn’t everything I hoped for, but it was impressive. What has been amazing is how quickly it has improved since then. I’m sure it’s been getting twice as every 6 months since 1977, it's just that the doubling has been under the radar, and now it’s in my newsfeed every day.

.....Am I concerned about how it will affect jobs? Yes.

.....Am I worried that our society isn’t ready and isn’t even taking the first step to get ready? Yes.

.....Can we stop AI? I don’t think so. If it was just one country that was working on it, that country could pass laws. But it’s not and if one country stops working on it, that country will get left behind.

.....So what do we do? I think that e have to learn to use it, learn to make ourselves better because it, and (this is the hard one) learn to value ourselves for who we are not what we can produce.
.....I use ChatGPT and Claude for text. I’ve used them for several different things:

.....I used them to help me code up the website you're looking at. I have a background in computer science, but there are so many libraries and frameworks to use that I need clarification (help). This site is using Laravel and tailwindcss - they use lot of other things. With out the AI help I’d still be figuring out how to install Laravel. To be clear, I couldn’t have done it with the AI if I didn’t know a lot about programming because they both make plenty of mistakes.

.....I use them when I brainstorm ideas. It is incredible how helpful it can be to get 20 ideas on a topic and have three be great and inspire other ideas.

.....I use them when I’m writing stories. Getting ideas, writing rough drafts and check my rewrites (I also use Grammarly a lot and I’m not sure where ti lies on the AI spectrum)

.....I use them in writing my recipes. The process takes a lot of guiding and coaxing. See the recipe section for more details - it’s a big topic.
.....In a word, no. It can do amazing things and also mess things up royally. I’ve used it to help design the recipes on the website and in the cookbook I’m putting together. I’m not going to publish anything that I haven’t tried first. So far, the success rate has been pretty good - 95% of the recipes I’ve cooked I’d cook again. The 5%? Well, let’s not talk about them.

.....Do I have the AI write a story and then publish it? Again, no. The AI can write a pretty good story, but I find that it can be repetitive. It can also be formulaic. Is it a good place to start? Sure, but it definitely needs an editor (and so do I :)

Meetup

.....I have a meet-up group so I can get extras for my cooking videos. When I’ve scheduled a video shoot that I want a couple of people in, I announce it on Meet-Up. It is first come, first serve.
.....It doesn’t cost anything for the meal, and your only pay for being on the video is the food I cook. Note that this is a video shoot so there may be retakes and such.
.....I announce the future shoots on the Events page. If you are a Patreon supporter, you’ll see the announcement before it goes live and can sign up through the website. The higher your support level, the more notice you’ll get of the event.
.....Costumes are not required, at least at this point, but are highly encouraged. Coming in costume will increase your fun and make for a better video. Costumes don’t have to be elaborate; we can chat if you need help figuring out what to wear.

Events

.....Currently, I don’t have any events scheduled, but I do have some ideas (and would love suggestions).
.....Finish my food cart (see below)
.....I get a food handler's license before charging for events?
.....Private parties
.....Street fairs
.....On-location video shoots

Money

.....10% of all profits are given to local food programs, which is in keeping with Neon’s philosophy.
.....Another 10% is given to foreign food programs (outside of UCAS)

Recipes

What is the concept behind your food?
How did you come up with the recipes?
Have you tasted all the recipes?
.....No. I’m not a dietitian, just someone who likes cooking. I try to make healthy food, but I’m sure more sugar, salt, and fat sneak into my recipes that should be there.

.....One of the concepts in all these recipes is that they are trying to make staples like rice and potatoes into something you want to eat every day. While rice and potatoes can be part of a good diet, they should be 80% of your diet (which for many people in the world it is). So the recipes I present should be taken as an occasion treat and not something for every day.

Inequities

....This is a “smart” website. It uses two things to decide what you can see: How many times you have logged into the site (you only get one log-in count per day) and how many days into the future you can see based on your Patreon level.

.....If your friends have been visiting longer or more regularly than you, you can get them to take a few days off so you can catch up. You can see your current number of visits on the user status page.

.....If your friends are supporting the site at a higher level, about all you can do is join at that level, too. You could try to convince your friends to supper the site less, but that would make us sad.
.....Liking and rating require you to register (which is free) because we have to be able to track who did the liking so you can change your mind later.

.....Commenting comes in two flavors: inline comments and end-of-page comments. If you are registered, you can add end-of-page comments. The inline comments are reserved for the highest-level support, who we trust and have paid for the right.
.....The website is setup to “feed” you (pun intended) bits and pieces at a time. The thought is if we gave you a hundred recipes, 75 stories, and lots of other things all at once, you might be overwhelmed.

..... So, we have implemented two methods to throttle the amount of data that you see.

.....The first is the number of times (once per day) that you’ve visited. Each day you visit, more things will be unlocked - until you’ve caught up to when we’re posting. After that point, you’ll see new things as they are posted.

.....The second is date-related content. We post some things with a future release date. We do that for two reasons:
.....So we can keep ahead of where everyone is and can go on vacation once in a while without the site grinding to a halt.
.....So there is some content that our Patreon supports get to see first.

.....Some things have both visit and data locks.