My typical recipe for drinking chocolate involves cocoa powder, whole milk, a pinch of salt, and some vanilla. No sugar. Chocolate is supposed to be bitter. A pinch of cayenne pepper will serve, too.
But sometimes, once in a blue moon, on a particularly bad day, you have to do something different. Here’s one way to do it.
The search for the true and authentic culinary experience occupies the mind of all of the food obsessed people of the world. Real Chinese. Real cheese. Real barbecue. Real sushi. The list goes on and on. Entire magazines and cookbooks dedicated to the objectively correct or best way to cook this or that. There is even a world-wide semi-political movement whose solitary goal is to preserve the traditional food culture of Europe and beyond against the attack of the faceless corporations.
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I just found out that like the PSP, the Nintendo DS has a delicious instant sleep feature.
Chances that either of the new next-gen home consoles have the same feature implemented in the OS and not in the stupid game: practically zero.
Chances that any of the next-gen games are really any better than Mario and Luigi: also practically zero.
My personal interest in buying a 360 to play anything but Madden 360: waning.
I, like a number of people, have a few days of unexpected leisure at my disposal in the days leading up to New Years.
So instead of me helping you, here’s your chance to help me: pick a relatively new “casual” game that you think it fun, and talk about it in the comments. Give me something new to play. Bonus points if it runs on both PC and Mac.
I’ll start the bidding by telling you that you that if you like words, you should surely go download Bonnie’s Bookstore. (I know a Mac version exists — I helped beta-test it — but it’s not available from that page for some reason. I’ve asked the author to clarify).
Wrapping presents.
I just wrapped a Christmas present, lumpily. I couldn’t find any scotch tape, so I used surgical tape. It looks exactly as bad as you might imagine.
I made two cookie discoveries in the Target today. This is a bit odd. You don’t expect to go to the Target to find out stuff about cookies.
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To make any consumer product, thousands of decisions must be made. Inevitably, no one can get all of those decisions right. Even the best-designed gadget or toy will still have some mistakes in design or execution.
Despite this, there are certain moves some companies make that go beyond bad, into the realm of the bewildering.
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Pete, as usual, has generated a lot of comment traffic with his recent rantings about whether or not it is the fault of the developer when a game on a PC is a crashy piece of crap. For the most part, the battle lines are drawn along the question of whether the PC as a platform is just too complicated and intractable to make an enjoyable and reliable vehicle for interactive entertainment.
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Current obsession: Travian, a browser-based MMOG. I am still in the honeymoon period, which means the game proper hasn’t actually started, since I have a couple of more days before the pillaging hordes can destroy my village. I’ll write a proper review then.
Travian looks like Settlers of Catan, but it isn’t.
Speaking of which, if you want to play Settlers of Catan, you should try AsoBrain’s Xplorers. Online Catan. They also have a fairly nice clones of several other games, as well.
Why, you might ask, am I going to write about movies that have been out on DVD for two years?
Well, new TV in hand, we sat down to watch some big movies. The biggest movies that we have are the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. When these were released on DVD, I originally picked up the extended versions, not so much for the extra film material, but more for the commentaries and documentaries. I’m a sucker for that stuff. I neglected, however, to buy the theatrical DVDs, except for The Fellowship of the Ring.
Having worked through the non-extended FOTR, and most of the extended TTT, I have to say that with the benefit of hindsight and time, the theatrical cuts are unquestionably the better films.
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