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December 3rd, 2009
10:04 pm
This year was the first year I actually cooked my own Thanksgiving dinner! Usually we go home to Texas over Thanksgiving and feed at the family trough, so to speak, but that wasn't happening this year (hint: airport radiation detectors can detect the leftover radiation from radioiodine treatments long after the actual treatment is over and the patient is declared safe for human interaction).
Therefore, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chibaraki and I got together and made FOOD (the associated boythings contributed wine, conversation, and videogame-playing). We had
- a nice local/organic roasted turkey breast with roasted onions and carrots
- gratin dauphinois according to Jeffrey Steingarten's recipe
- spinach salad with gorgonzola and cashews
- honey rolls
- deeeelicious apple pie with local vanilla-bean ice cream
- ... and the stuffing.
Despite my never having cooked any of these things before, the turkey was moist and delicious, the roasted vegetables were surprisingly tasty, and the potatoes au gratin were killer. (Heavy creeeeeeam.) The stuffing, though... well, my bad. I tried to adapt a breadcrumb recipe to use cubed bread, instead, and therefore there wasn't enough butter to coat everything, so the bread burnt to a crisp (except for a little round spot in the middle, which was like really good herb-butter croutons).
This made me mad! So mad, in fact, that tonight I roasted a chicken for dinner (which really, really pissed off my smoke alarm) and made another batch of stuffing! It did not burn this time! However, cooked in a separate pan, it was decidedly crunchy stuff. Ergo, if I make homemade stuffing again, I'll cook it inside the bird. Problem solved.
And now I have a big bag of meaty chicken and turkey bones in the freezer. Stock will ensue. Perhaps I'll buy and roast a duck next week, just so that I can make turducken stock.
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December 2nd, 2009
01:19 am
In order to get the last part of my mother's Christmas present, I tromped down to University Village yesterday (in the misting rain). Walking to University Village is no big. It's a longish walk, but it's all downhill--you'll note I say nothing about walking back--and I've made the walk before. Even in the rain. Stupid rain. Fortunately, I'm washable.
Apparently, all of a sudden, this was a bad idea! Today my right leg aches like a bitch, all the way from the hip on down. Just my right leg, mind you. My left leg is fine. (Also, today was a clear, cloudless, sunny day, even if it got dark at 4:30, like it does. Someone out there is laughing at me.)
Still, I got the last thing for my mother, and I got myself a new pair of earbuds--I'd suspected that my old earbuds were slowly dying, and the new pair have amply confirmed this suspicion. As if to reward me for the replacement, my iPod pulled the Ode To Joy on the second or third song. The universe is forgiven.
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November 20th, 2009
12:17 am
Since Boyfriend finished playing Demon's Souls, it's my turn to use the television again! I've started playing Afrika, which is by ♥NATSUME♥ and has been getting unilaterally terrible reviews from those few portions of the internet that have even heard of it! I love it, of course.
I can totally see why it's getting all those terrible reviews, though. You see, Afrika is a game that attempts to realistically simulate what it is like to be a National Geographic wildlife photographer in Africa! It is so realistic, in fact, that your jeep frightens animals away and then you have to crouch uncomfortably in the undergrowth for most of the day (multiple minutes, in gametime) until they calm down and come back. That's right, you sit there on the couch without touching your controller for minutes at a time. I could easily be playing Nostalgia on the DS while I waited for something to happen in Afrika on the PS3.
The level and depth of realism in damned near every aspect of the game is astonishing, though. The graphics are jawdropping, the animal simulations are spot-on--National Geographic actually helped produce this game--and the photography element requires some actual skill and understanding of how cameras work. (Of course, the only cameras you can buy to use in the game are Sony cameras. Fancy that.) The problem, of course, is that the game heavily favors strict, utter realism over things like playability. If you are not a total, hardcore Discovery Channel geek, you will not like this game (and it helps if you loved Pokemon Snap as much as I did WHAT SHUT UP).
(Also, while loading times are pretty transparent, saving and loading the game from save generally takes over a minute. Yeesh.)
I am playing as the scruffy French photographer dude! He is totally hot. (The American zoologist girl is also hot, in her redheaded-Natalie-Portman way.) I almost got attacked by an angry zebra, which would have been an embarrassing way to go, and if I keep pestering the hippos in the watering hole, I'm going to get stomped into bloody muck. Unfortunately, one of my customers needs a picture of a hippo yawning for his magazine! And I need money, because my starting camera sucks balls. My kingdom for a zoom lens.
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November 15th, 2009
03:53 am
I have this DS game, which I bought on a whim after seeing a demo of it at PAX. It is called Nostalgia. As far as I can tell, it is called that because someone at Tecmo wanted to make Skies of Arcadia, only they wanted to make it in 1997.
Seriously. Everyone gives Final Fantasy 9 shit because of its enforced EAT NOSTALGIA, PUNK attitude, but it's got nothing on this game--Nostalgia has gone miles out of its way to replicate the feel of playing a mid-90s RPG. Everything from the graphics to the music to the art design to the controls to the combat system to the crappy, predictable dialogue to the utterly cliched characters to the copious spelling errors to the world's most inevitable plot. I can only thank my lucky stars that there's no voice acting.
Only two things really set it apart: firstly, it has airships and airship combat--which is what sold me on the game--and secondly, it is set on Ye Olde-Timey Earthe Onlye With Airshippes. I started out in London! I'm guessing it's set in the alternate-20s at some point, because there are Model-T-like automobiles in addition to, well, airships. After some incredibly hackneyed, choppy plot and predictable dungeon-crawling (oh, I need to go into the sewers to fight rats? you don't say), I am off to Cairo! Nostalgia's is definitely not a steampunk world, despite, well, airships; it's got that Ye Olde feel, though, which I do enjoy in my video games, cough cough Shadow Hearts cough.
In short, it manages to be endearingly lame without actually being terrible. I am kind of enjoying it, despite myself.
Enjoying it despite the fact that it doesn't use the stylus. WHAT. SERIOUSLY. WHAT.
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November 4th, 2009
02:30 pm
Flaargh, winter. Enter hibernation mode. It's not even really the fault of Daylight Savings (although I am not fond of that, either--dark at 4:30 in the afternoon? Hate!).
Anyway, I am spending a lot of my time either asleep or mindburned, so have some funny-type recs instead:
- Do you remember Xenogears? Were you fondly exasperated by Xenogears? Did you love to hate Xenogears? Then you should be reading hebiserpens' Xenogears replay recaps.
- Do you like Persona 4? Did you think certain bits of Persona 4 were goofy? Then you should be reading hiimdaisy's Persona 4 recap comic.
- Are you generally freewheeling? Do you like comedy in your porn? For that matter, do you like porn? Do you like webcomics? Are you safely unobserved and not at work? Then you should be reading OGLAF.
- Do you like cats? Do you like animation? Do you recognize that cats can be real self-centered bastards sometimes? Then you should watch the Simon's Cat shorts--there are five of them now, plus an ASPCA spot!
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October 28th, 2009
03:53 am
And there we go! Ten out of ten parts of wanky overwrought SO2 fic in which not much actually happens, although something's off about that numbering system, hm hm.
(Also, for the record, I edited the hell out of part 9 here, added a new facet to the conversation, and reuploaded it. So you might want to go look at that bit first, if you care.)
Warnings: uhhh. None? Well, okay, spoilerific like whoa, I'll grant you that one, but there's no real violence or skeezy overtones or anything (yeah, I know, more's the pity). I think there's maybe a curse word or two. Also, I am still happily banging two disparate canons together, getting fanon all over everything, and I am perhaps not as kind to Claude or Rena as I could be.
1 and 2
3 and 4
5
6
7
8
9
( One )
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October 25th, 2009
October 23rd, 2009
12:10 am
Aaaand then I actually finally got my hands on Ashton's secret fighting technique 'tri-Ace'. And then I used it. And thus, I saw it for the first time.
Ha haaaa holy shit I think I'll be keeping that.
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October 21st, 2009
October 18th, 2009
October 17th, 2009
03:36 am
While playing SO2 yesterday I had the following train of thought:
- According to the game, cloned, tame Psynards are just how Nedians get around.
- But I never see any Psynards in the sky except my own.
- It'd be neat if I saw other Psynards wandering around.
- ... actually, what would be neat is Psynard vs. Psynard aerial combat.
- ... which Noel would completely and totally excel at.
- DO A BARREL ROLL!
- (sixty pages of script for absolutely rockin' (and completely fucking undrawable) shounen action manga ensue)
( In between bouts of making myself cry with manga that can never be, I'm also replaying the game! )
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October 16th, 2009
01:58 am
Nine parts down! One to go! However, I can't write the last chapter-bit until I win the game again and confirm a few things about the ending segments. As I still have most of Fienal/Phynal and all of the Cave of Trials to go, that may be a little while. Don't worry, I won't forget.
Again, parts of this are based on something that actually happened during this playthrough. Admittedly, I was looking for it this time, but boy howdy did I ever find it. Stupid spider-robots!
Enormous generalized debt to chaobell, as usual, including a bit of pointed namecalling which I lifted directly from her brain of seven years ago. That's the best thing about the internet: I can do that with a couple of clicks.
Warnings: ... heh. Some violence, grotesquerie, and general bad-things-happening, mostly in reflected light, but not all; a bunch of growly alpha-male threat-posturing which has been a long time in coming and therefore may or may not be sorta hot; mild-to-middling bad language; AMBIGUITY IS GO. Mashed canons, more fanon, etc. Not really so much on the spoilers this time, actually.
1 and 2
3 and 4
5
6
7
8
( 9 )
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October 14th, 2009
11:36 pm
And then the next part nearly wrote its own damn self and insisted on being short and to the point. There was going to be more to it, but then I realized that I had finished saying all the important stuff. If that bothers you, feel free to append AND THEN THERE WAS A FIGHT AND IT WAS AWESOME.
I owe chaobell a pretty tremendous general debt for helping me create immense amounts of fanon for the original game, a lot of which I am still using, albeit after chopping it into little screaming pieces and pitching out anything that was starting to smell funny due to its being ohhh seven years past its use-by date. I mention it now specifically because a lot of 8 comes directly from a conversation we had once upon a time--even more directly than usual--and also because I should probably have said something a while ago, but I suck.
Warnings: spoilers all the way through to the end of the Fun City/Armlock shenanigans, merged canons, etc. etc. Also, I have occasional flashes of being So Very Goddamned Clever again.
1 and 2
3 and 4
5
6
7
( 8 )
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12:08 am
Funny how the production rate of all this wanky overwrought SO2 fanfiction plummeted once I got back on my thyroid pills. I'm starting to wonder if my current dosage doesn't give me a bit of an attention-deficit problem. Something to ask the doctor about, that's for sure.
That being said, boy, does this bit get wanky and overwrought. I even succumbed to the urge to write several paragraphs of talking-headdish 'And Then He Realized' bullshit. That's a habit I don't need to fall back into. But (she said, assembling the blast shields) it's only fanfiction and I can get away with that here.
Warnings: spoilery through the events in Fun City, high levels of writerly bullshit detected, seriously, take cover. Dias-land continues to be an uncomfortable place in which to live. Suggestive in spots. Angsty-woeful in others. Ambiguous ending HA HA HA.
Merged canons, fanon that gets weirder by the second, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
1 and 2
3 and 4
5
6
( 7 )
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October 12th, 2009
10:05 pm
Today in the wine aisles at the grocery store I found a cheap pinot noir boxed wine. The box had an image of the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys on it.
The wine's name? Pinot Evil.
It took me a few seconds to get it and then I cracked right the fuck up in the middle of the grocery store.
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02:37 pm
Next up in SO2: a bit more leveling aaaaand those Private Actions which open up between the first crack at Phynal and the second!
( Including the ever-entertaining 'Aphrodisiac' Fun City PA and the infamous 'BARREL barrel' chant! )
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October 10th, 2009
02:29 am
A week or so after General Iodine stormed his way through and my taste buds are a ravaged wasteland. Things were semi-okay for a couple of days and then just... faded out. It's not just a simple inability to taste salt, like last time; salt and sweet are both almost entirely gone (save for vague aftertastes where my tongue goes oh hai did you just eat a pretzel a minute ago), sour/acidic tastes are still pretty much present, bitter is hanging in there for all the good it does me, and umami is... discernible, although not as complex a flavor without the aid of salt.
I stopped dead in the grocery store on Monday, agog with fascination over the realization that I was standing in the coffee aisle and I could not smell the coffee. I can still taste it--lattes taste largely the same as ever and thus have become even more important to my whiny little Seattle life--but I can't smell it right now, and that's... downright cool, really, as long as it's temporary, I hope, I hope.
Water all tastes flat and distilled. Yogurt has literally no taste at all. Orange juice is extra sour and not sweet. Sharp cheese has a taste, but the salty notes are missing. At dinner tonight I ravaged the stir-fry and ate every snow pea, broccoli stalk, and mushroom half that I could find, because they all tasted close to normal. I need to try sushi again. Sushi was generally a safe bet the first time around since sushi is a saltless presentation.
And yet, I'm pretty happy just to be able to go around and eat familiar things, even if they taste all wrong or taste of nothing at all. Memory helps. Texture helps. Carbonation and caffeination help. Not having to eat that fucking awful low-iodine diet... that really helps.
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October 9th, 2009
01:40 pm
To sum up: (orchestra) alchemy alchemy alchemy customize customize customize (orchestra) alchemy alchemy alchemy blacksmith (orchestra) blacksmith blacksmith etc. etc. ad nauseum.
( blither (orchestra) blither )
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October 8th, 2009
02:17 am
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuun CITY! Where you'll have fun or literally die trying!
( DOO doo-doo, di-di-di-doo-DOO, di-di-di-doo-DOO di-di-KILL-ME )
A brief note: since I failed to even meet Welch, let alone recruit her, the ugly, ugly SO3-related retcon is pretty much completely invisible to me. In retrospect, I have only seen it once, and I only just now figured out the true meaning of that particular event. I am not complaining. Had I had enough information to make an informed choice, I would have failed to meet Welch on purpose. I'll take my SO2 at ninety-five percent of the game it's supposed to be, thank you. (Creepy and Weepy, my big fat pasty-white ass.)
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October 5th, 2009
04:00 am
Had to stop playing SO2 while I was radioactive--nowhere comfortable to sit and put my feet up in the isolation chamber, i.e. the downstairs bedroom--but I'm ready to roll again!
( So I did! )
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