In trade, I’m gonna lay on you my favorite recipe. its for pork belly. it takes a really long time. You can do anything with it.

Step 1: buy a pork belly. these are often tricky to get a hold of. I believe in you. if you want one, you will get one.

Step 2: marinate (or cure) your pork belly for 24 hours. the 3 (or 4) essential ingredients here are salt, sugar, and spice (and acid if you are following the 4). I am currently using salt, sugar, sage, garlic and wine. i put them all together in a blender. I dont even peel the garlic, i just blend them all into oblivion.

step 3: preheat your oven and put your belly, the entire belly, in a roasting pan that is deep enough to hold a belly and 2 gallons of oil.

step 4: cover the belly in 2 gallons of oil and preheat your oven to 275.

step 5: cook for as long as possible. 8 hours is usually good. 12 is awesome.

step 6: cool, cut, and keep submerged in oil for as long as you want. I’ve kept bellies under oil for months.

when you want to eat your pork bellies, heat up a pan on medium low heat and put the belly skin side down in the pan. be sure to remove as much of the cure/marinade that is on the skin as possible. leave it in the pan for 10-15 minutes skin side down with out moving or touching or anything. lower the heat to low if it sounds like its making to much noise. the skin will turn to cracklin. the belly will turn all wiggly. Its great on top of soup, salad, along side pasta, with mashed potatoes, on a sandwich, with your eggs and toast for breakfast (best green eggs and ham you can make). dont be afraid to go all asian with it, use fish sauce and palm sugar and 5 spice or sechuan pepper and lime juice in your marinade. don’t tell david chang I said any of this, pork belly is his life’s work and he never wants you to make it at home.

Though I do love this shutdown by ‘n’ to one particular whinger: http://emshort.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/hadean-lands/#comment-9765

This year I’ve enjoyed some short bursts of Minecraft, and I’ve been playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii with my wife all year, and Storage Inc. with my weekly gaming group while we wait for the last player to arrive for our boardgames… but beyond these, 2010 has been a vast videogame wasteland for me. I’m not hopeful that next year will be any better.

Best wishes!

I agree about the 3 page split of the article. I only finished reading it because I wanted context before finishing this post.

Also, have you tried playing Minecraft? A starter course on what it’s about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bh4EexJO4I

From the Escapist’s 3 page review there is only a single paragraph mentioning the bugginess.
“It’s disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant and polished game suffer from years-old bugs, and unfortunately our review score for the game has to reflect that. Reviewing 2008′s Fallout, I felt inclined to give a certain amount of visual glitchiness a pass because that game covered so much ground, from a development point of view, and was simply awe-inspiring in many respects. Seeing the exact same bugs in a new game, two years later, is harder to excuse. Truth be told, I enjoyed New Vegas a lot more than Fallout 3, but I can’t give it a full score on the basis of the bugs alone. ”

They still gave it 4 out of 5. Doesn’t sound like much of a reason to spend time fixing bugs if there is no criticial cost to doing so. I’m assuming that the 2K game which is unplayable is Civ V, if so there is no mention of bugs in the Escapist’s review (they gave it 5 out of 5). I don’t know what Microsoft published game is the one he considers unplayable.

As the amount of time and money the developer will get publisher is often dependent on what score the publisher believes the game would get on release, if they know they are going to get near perfect marks, there is zero reason for a publisher to fund bug fixing.

Game journalists don’t do their job as consumer advocates.

Or to put it more plainly: Apparently it’s not even enough to be Blizzard or Valve any more.