ORBITAL MECHANICS

My boyfriend would like to know what a Godiva chocolate bar would run on the galactic market? I wasn't sure, given what you had said about Hershey bars, since I don't have a frame of reference.

Well, obviously there’s a lot of room for subjectivity about this. Some collectors (Galactic or otherwise) will feel differently. But generally speaking, I suspect the collectors’ opinions will roughly match mine.

Ranking gets complicated because old chocolate companies and brands keep getting bought by bigger companies / conglomerates, and the brands and the quality of their chocolate tend to suffer as a result. By and large, though, the best chocolate tends to be made by companies that do so-called “bean-to-bar” production. The longer the history of this, the better. In general, artisanal chocolate, especially single estate/single bean chocolate, and organic and free-trade chocolates, will also be preferred by the discerning intergalactic collector.

Ranking chocolate from worst to best: (and yes, for those who’re wondering, I’ve eaten all of these, normally on their home turf):

North American chocolate: Almost routinely no better than poor-to-middlin’ quality: the bigger the producer, routinely, the worse, as they keep trying to do it cheaply and good chocolate can’t be done cheaply. It’s too energy-intensive, especially as regards the time and energy required in the conching process that’s absolutely key in giving merely okay chocolate a chance to become great. Hershey’s is the worst of the lot because they’re purposely catering to that spoiled-milk taste that’s become traditional for them. …The exceptions to the poor-to-meh quality rule are invariably smaller producers like Ghirardelli. Meanwhile it should probably be no surprise that when the Lexington Avenue Local worldgate was resited following the refurbishment of Grand Central Terminal, it wound up behind Li-Lac Chocolate’s satellite branch in the food hall. One might suspect Carmela’s straightforward hand in this.

European-based chocolate generally: Significantly better. …Subdividing into:

British Isles chocolate: Pretty good most of the time. Many small classic brands (Fry’s, Rowntree) were subsumed into bigger British chocolate companies over time, with only slow degradation of general quality. Cadburys is probably at the top of the heap, despite what’s happened to the Creme Egg over the years. (mutter)  …And naturally I would be remiss in not mentioning, on the Irish side, Lir, Lily O’Brien’s, and Butlers. (When we go to visit friends in Switzerland, we bring them Lir.) Additionally, there are people who are vocal about their claims that Irish Cadburys is better than British Cadburys, due to local/regional differences in the mix. Myself, I refuse to get mixed up in local chocosectarian stuff. Life’s too short.

Italian and French chocolate: Perugina, Valrhona (as in “I’d rather be in Valrhona than Valhalla”), Callebaut, Agostoni, Amedei, and Bernachon stand out. There are many more smaller makers in the region worth looking out for: check this list for some.

Belgian chocolate: Almost always really good, even at the mass-produced end (Guylian); sometimes terrific (Leonidas) or more than terrific (Neuhaus, Galler, Dumon). This is where Godiva fits in. (I first had it when its initial New York store opened in 1972: it was far better then than it is now. Then again, having been owned by Campbell’s Soup can’t have been good for them.)

Swiss chocolate: Probably the best: certainly routinely seen as such (and collectors will be aware of the implications of this). Again, the smaller the producer the better. The great/old houses like Lindt and Sprüngli are being given a run for their money by newer competitors like Teuscher and Läderach (attn @petermorwood: Stengli!!).

…I’ll complete this later as I just splashed some tea on my keyboard and I seem to have a membrane problem. (sigh)

(Resuming after prying off all the keycaps and cleaning out what could have been the start of a small tool-using civilization if it was let go much longer:)

So anyway, we were attempting to tease out how Godiva would do on the Galactic chocolate collectors’ market.

It’s all so relative. But there are a number of different factors in play, so better to take them one by one.

(a) Provenance / authenticity. Real Chocolate From Earth (SM*) still has to be specified, these days, in some parts of the Galaxy: as with any unique collectible, there are always counterfeits out there. But none of them work perfectly, not even those produced by atom-by-atom matter duplication. There’s just something about genuine Earth-grown cocoa beans that cannot be duplicated. (If we pulled Dr. McCoy into this discussion he’d simply snort and say, “It’s soul. Why d’y’think I hate that damn transporter so much?”) And the bad fakes…  (shudder) Well. You know the correlation between flavors (and everything else) of chocolate versus carob? The comparison between real chocolate and bad fake chocolate is like that. But generally worse.

(b) Reputation and/or scarcity on planet of origin. Godiva is not hard to find, but its lower-end-of-high-midrange reputation would affect the going price. Many artisanals or single-estates would bring in much, much more on the collectors’ market. But Godiva still would not be cheap.

© Freshness and state of packaging. Fresh and perfectly packaged Godiva obtained before the first of the large corporate acquisitions via timeslide would bring a way higher price than the stuff available on the high street right now.

(d) The present state of cocoa futures. Believe me when I tell you that none of Earth’s financial markets are so closely scrutinized off-planet as the cocoa futures market. A serious ripple in the world’s cocoa production figures can send shockwaves through the collectibles and personal-chemical-enhancements markets galaxy wide (in the latter case, for those species who use chocolate as an aphrodisiac, mood-altering drug or hallucinogen). If anything was going to bring on the classic aliens-arrive-from-space-to-save-Earth-from-itself scenario, it would be news that we had fucked up our climate so totally that the cocoa bean was going to die out. The intervention wouldn’t happen because of any particular altruism, oh dear me no… but because with the death of Earth’s cocoa, many extremely currency-sensitive aspects of the Galactic economy would take a hit that would make the Earth’s recent nearly-worldwide-bank meltdown look like an insolvency involving a kid’s lemonade stand. 

Anyway, the state of the market pushes the day to day price of collectible chocolate up and down in unpredictable but interesting ways, and the smart investor keeps its ears (or legs or abdomen or whatever it listens with) to the ground to stay informed about what’s going on in Earth’s so-called “soft commodities” markets.

(e) Preparation. How much actual chocolate is in the confectionery and how has it been prepared? Plain solid chocolate is always preferable for collectors’ purposes. (The two-pound solid chocolate ingots that Kron Chocolatier in Manhattan used to sell back in the day would have been seen as very choice.) Dark chocolate is always preferable to milk: the milk is seen as an adulteration, as 18K gold is seen as inferior to 24K by precious-metal collectors. Some additives, if psychoactive or otherwise seen as valuable on their own, are viewed as positive (see the chocolate business with Nita and Kit at the Crossings here.)

(f) Demand. Is the product hot right now? Has some buzz about it in the collectors’ networks kicked the price up for some reason? 

…And there are other factors, but you get the general idea. So if you were offering a Godiva bar on the open market, say one of these, depending on where you planned to do your shopping afterwards you could probably exchange it for enough currency in one of the smaller spacefaring cultures that’s chocolate-using in one of the valuable ways (meaning as a recreational chemical) to get yourself a small private island on some planet where the climate suited you. Or a nice little space yacht. (Nothing really huge. After all, you need to pay for crew services too, and berthing, and… Never mind.)

Hope this helps. :)

*Service mark is the property of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC: for more information see here.

your fave is problematic: diane duane

subsists on the tears of her fans

married to a guy who knows everything about everything

knows the ways of the force and wont share

creates delicious-looking food and uses the wrong measurement system. no one likes metric, diane. #1776

writes fanfic of her own characters

does the ff.net thing where she talks to her own characters in her fanfic of her own series

makes us wait forever for new books and has the nerve to make it worth it

has worked on all of your childhood faves. ALL OF THEM

This is literally my favorite ever. Best post. Good.

King Arthur: I actually think he was probably not a wizard. But he definitely knew about wizardry and did his best to support it.

Gawain: Definitely a wizard. DEFINITELY a wizard. Specializes in liaising with nonhuman species living on earth, go-to diplomat when aliens show up.

Kay: Nope, Kay’s...

I had to do a "home budget" project in econ during high school, and we had to "buy a car" as part of our budget planning and so I used a listing for one of these as my "purchase" because I am nothing if not a massive nerd. It still delights me to think about. ^__^

I'm desperately trying to look for the specific model of Lotus that you referenced in the first of the Young Wizard series. I've been wanting to draw a storyboard for a long while for it and for some reason Google is useless.

It's this one: the Lotus Turbo Esprit. Lovely, lovely thing that it was...

(Sorry, the YouTube video seems to have failed to insert correctly. But check it out:  https://youtu.be/CQnOusKNDKs)

...Later in the eighties they softened its lines down. But this is the one that made me stop and stare when I passed by the Lotus showroom in Manhattan in ‘81...

guys

guys

less than three months til the games wizard play release

White dwarfs polluted with planetary debris

The Hubble Space Telescope has found chemical evidence for the building blocks for rocky planets in an extremely unusual place: the atmospheres of two burned-out stars. Called white dwarfs, these stars are small, dim shadows of stars that would have once been like our sun, and they reside 150 light-years from Earth in the young star cluster of Hyades. Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon and low levels of carbon, both of which are strong indicators of a rocky material similar to that which makes up Earth. “When these stars were born, they built planets,” said Jay Farihi, lead author of the study, “and there’s a good chance they currently retain some of them… Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like.” The material is thought to have ended up in the atmosphere of these stars after they collapsed into white dwarfs, and the larger planets in their solar system nudged asteroids into star-grazing orbits. The stars’ gravitational pull tore the asteroids apart, and the pulverised debris fell into a ring around the white dwarfs and were eventually funnelled inwards to pollute the stars themselves. The discovery suggests that rocky planets may commonly assemble around stars, and may help us to understand what will happen to our solar system in five billion years, when our own sun burns out.

I know you guys want me to draw different characters, but I love Nita so much :’)

[GWP said something about her wearing a floofy flowery dress so I had to] 

WHY ARE PEOPLE NOT MORE EXCITED ABOUT SPACE. THERE IS A PLANET MADE COMPLETELY OUT OF DIAMONDS AND A HUGE ASS RAIN CLOUD FLOATING AROUND IN SPACE THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL.

When the last living thing dies, death dies too.