majestic

Well that one's certainly a drag... uhm...

Fixed that for you.

Oh, we have something like that too. It's called Schöberl and is, essentially, biscuit without sugar and it comes in many variants. Mostly used with vegetable or beef broth.

It sure isn't here, but good to know other people of fine taste exist as well. Gotta ask what kind of dumplings though. I have a hard time coming up with any that wouldn't be better in a more savory beef broth. Heh.

Nah. Everything that I cook looks suspiciously like take out or instant noodles/ramen. My mother made that.

Time for more pictures. Chicken soup: And yes, that actually is rice in the soup. Might seem strange at first, but try it before you knock it. Beats noodles, egg puffs or anything else in chicken soup any day of the week. Rice must be boiled in the soup (obviously) until nice and soft for maximum flavor. You really need to pay attention that you don't accidentially make risotto, the rice is going absorb on a lot of soup. Put too much in and you might as well end with soupy rice insteady of ricey soup. And... some Chicken paprikash. Oh, yes, the colour is off because we do not add sour cream. Makes it look a lot more like goulash with chicken (which it isn't). You don't make goulash with chicken stock and usually with a lot more onions. Heh.

Come guys, support Romancelvania, I know you want it. Who doesn't want a Metroidvania romance game? Bruce, this is just for you I guess.

Ugh. As if the dub alone wouldn't be terrible enough they've really mangled the episodes. But it's hilarious to see the season one ending that originally was a two parter being just one episode. Heh. They are a lot less, uhm, let's say childish than the first season, you won't be getting super silly episodes about Usagi trying to lose weight and the bad guys draining energy from teenage girls with an unhealthy body image. It will even take the occasional dip into darker territory once Sailor Saturn shows up. It does stay very Sailor Moon at its core, but the later seasons are noticably different from the first. Like Harry Potter films when looking at the first two and then the third. Plus I really want to know if you hate Chibiusa or not. That's all I can say without spoiling too much. Or, well, at the very least that is what I remember. It's been a while since I've watched the show but I started with season two and was really surprised at just how different the first season was when I caught a rerun. Ah, the joys of regular TV. Heh.

I'm really curious what you will think of the later seasons.

That scene managed something very impressive. It took a joke that always makes me smile because I usually enjoy old, worn out jokes no matter how cliché they have become and made me facepalm. So Stamets is in the Jeffries tube, lying on the floor bleeding out while trying to fix the ship and Dr. Culber comes to them and he's supportive of his husband and says something like: "You need to fix this so I can get you out of there and kill you." Ha ha. Nah, that situation is way too dumb for that Hugh. Sorry. Oh, and cleaning blood. Jesus. Engineering Lady talks about someone cleaning the floor and he says "I'm called Dean by the way" and she looks at him and goes "I already forgot that" and I figured... yeah, I already forgot your name or that you even were on the Discovery. I'll probably remember Dean. Eh, I hope his name is Dean. Otherwise that would make my point fall on its nose a little bit.

Rich brings up a good point when talking about The Next Phase there. You could tear that episode apart with nitpicks... just like the Discovery episodes. But it's in service of a good, fun story and a nice episode in a setting that usually makes sense and isn't stupid as hell and therefore the occasional conceptual problem gets a pass. That Ro or La Forge should not be able to breathe or could potentially just fall through the floor is true. Does it really matter? No. Is it distracting? No... Is it distracting that Michael Burnham can fight an opponent twice her size in hand to hand combat being injured and win without breaking much of a sweat? Oh, why, it is. As is having a walking to the trading outpost montage when Book has personal transporters. Bah.

Are the Anthem servers still up and running?

Discovery S03E02. Well that was... hum. The entire episode was so forgettable I have nothing much to say about the plot, but there are some points that drove me nuts - again. I am however willing to concede that I can no longer be objective about this and that no matter what this show would do I'd start nitpicking and not liking it. So take the griping with a grain of salt. Also, unmarked spoilers ahead. Not that it makes much of a difference. Some parts of the alpha quadrant have apparently devolved into a wild west style setting with extremely inefficient energy weapons (Georgiou takes multiple phaser blasts and can still literally kick ass afterwards). More talk about how dilithium is necessary for warp drives and that there's no warp without dilithium. I mean it's pointless to point out that dilithium in 'Trek is used as the matter/antimatter reaction equivalent of nuclear reaction control rods, not directly for the warp drive, because who cares at this point. They also keep talking about warp drives even though Courier Book blabbed something about the quantum slipstream drive in the first episode. But whatever, really. Oh, and a thousand years into the future nature has provided the 'Trek universe with an entirely new periodic table because Tilly scans for metals necessary to complete repairs and find many that she doesn't even know. It's also pointless to point out that 'Trek had at least in part a tradition of sticking with accepted real life scientific principles beyond what was necessary to make the setting work (i.e. FTL, artificial gravity and polarity Treknobabble). Who cares at this point that the only way you'd get really new and astonishing stable elements on the periodic table is to entirely rearrange the laws of physics. Well maybe that's what happened to the dilithium. Bet the hippies didn't expect the Age of Aquarius to look like that, ey? Honestly how hard is it to say that you've found compound materials or alloys you had no clue existed? Your high school physics so bad that the only thing you remember is the periodic table? Had a fun reaction to seeing the Discovery bridge crew as well. "Oh, yeah... huh, who's that? Oh, right. Oh, look, it's Lt. Barclay's really terrible replacement. Cyborg lady with the artificial brain. Who the hell is that guy, was he here before? Oh right and there's the weirdo engineer lady from the crashed ship from last time. Whatever her name is." In contrast I've been rewatching DS9 lately and I just saw Crossfire, which is an episode that's largely about Odo and Kira and Odo's feelings for her and how he gets friendzoned really bad. Nothing much happens in the epsiode (other than an attempt at the First Minister of Bajor's life) but it was still better than every episode of Picard and Discovery combined. It's 99% character interaction and 1% action, not the other way around. "For a minute there, I thought you were talking to me as a friend." The lost art of character development in action. A single scene in a regular episode that is somewhat unspectacular otherwise with heartfelt delivery between two actors that are mimically limited by their make up is so much better than anything nu Trek has come up with so far. Since this is a wild west episode it had to end with a traditional standoff when the bad guy shows up and tries to shake down the poor miners because they were trying to help the Discovery crew. They kill one of the miners with their super weird inefficient laser guns and want to rob Discovery's dilithium supply. Zareh is clearly attempting to impress Tilly with his aged Billy the Kid spiel. Saru immediately cows to Zareh (great name by the way), the assigned courier to this trade route and negotiates for... well their repaired communications thingie and maybe a hostage release. But there's no plan, no idea how to stop them, nothing. He's just really negotiating in earnest with a character he should by all means know will never stick to their deal. Then Georgiou shows up and kicks everyone's ass (after getting shot repeatedly with the really bad weapons). They then proceed to execute Zareh by exposure to the elements. I mean Saru doesn't kill him immediately like Georgiou wants to but then they kind of agree to let him leave during night time on foot on a planet where the ice comes alive at night and destroys everything on the surface. Sure, why not. They're even nice enogh to give him some supplies. Finally when the Discovery repairs kind of fail and the living ice threatens to crush everyone on board Michael shows up and tells them she's been waiting for them for a year. Uh, okay. Also the cyborg navigator keeps hearing telepathic interference after she's hit her head. Oh, right, you only know it is supposed to be telepathic interference when you turn on the closed captions, because they really say [Telepathic interference] in front of the subdued Audio the cyborg navigator (oh right, they got names last season, hers is Detmer) hears. Oh, right, lest I forget, there's this wonderful scene where Doctor Culbert makes wakes up Stamets and puts him in a regeneration thingy. Then Stamets leaves to help with repairs. He and weird crash engineering lady with spinal disc herniation sit next to a Jeffries tube. Engineering lady tells Stamets how to repair a broken whatever in the tube. Stamets argues that she should crawl in the tube and she says nah, back's damaged she can't move. They then talk about getting some help from someone else and Stamets flies into a testosterone filled stupidity where he can't have asking for help in front of a woman (or whatever) and crawls up the tube himself. What the hell guys. This is a repair job that's crucial to Discovery escaping the parasitic living ice that wants to cover everything at night (except for the mining outposts apparently), both people there are in no physical condition to do it and yet they don't call for help that is clearly available and able? This isn't Spock fixing the warp drive of the Enterprise and sacrificing himself to save the ship and the people on it. This is just unbelievable stupid. Unbelievably stupid like the entire show. Gah.

Of course they are, and it doesn't work. That was my entire point.

I tried the first Europa Universalis way back when it came out and found it not to my liking, and over the years dabbling in the odd Paradox grand strategy game or two the only one that I enjoyed playing was Stellaris - and that really is more of a traditional 4X game in grand strategy clothing. The one thing that turns me off games even more than being open world with a lack of focus is being a sandbox with no win condition. Not saying that makes EU a bad game. Just not for me. My brain just doesn't work that way, if something has no set win condition in needs to be competitive (i.e. PVP) for me to like it. And yes, that means... I never played Minecraft, or The Sims, or really enjoyed Sim City beyond the szenarios with win conditions. *shrug*

Well that one flew right by you, ey? Sigh. Of course being morbidly obese is bad for your health. Smoking is bad for your health, as is excessive consumation of alcohol or any other recreative drug. But here's the real point: You can't shame people into changing what they're doing. Not when we're talking about beliefs and especially not when you're shaming behaviour that is based on addiction or hundreds of thousand of years of evolution. Plain outlawing won't help either (otherwise there would be no drugs and prohibition would have worked instead of being a complete disaster). You could help by education, support and guidance. Telling the lardass you see on the street that he's a disgusting fat slob and should be ashamed of himself will just make him grab a burger at McD's, eat it to feel better and then go home to hide, causing them to become even more sedentary. Good job, you just made things worse. It will certainly not cause the guy to sign up at the nearest gym. There's also this entire thing where you need to realize that being fit doesn't automatically cause obesity to go away. Sign up at the gym, excercise all you want, if you keep eating unhealthy high calorie food you're not going to lose weight. You'll be a lot healthier, yes, but none the slimmer for it. You can observe that easily by looking at studies made with Sumo wrestlers. By all accounts as long as they're active and training they're as obese as, well, other obese people but they have none of the issues usually associated with being overweight (except wear and tear for all the extra weight you carry around). Obesity starts and stops with what you eat, not what you do - what you do only fortifies the issue or helps alleviating it, it will never solve it. For years doctors have argued to introduce color coding on food. Green for healthy, yellow for bad and red for terrible. Recently another idea joined the fold: Replacing (or simply adding to) the calorie values on the food with the amount of excercise you need to to do burn it off. So while stuffing that Big Mac in your face you could ready "You really need to run for an hour at a high pace to burn off all that fat you just ate" and maybe think twice about it the next time. But all those ideas are usually shot down immediately. People should be allowed to freedom to make their own choices, as the usual argument goes. In reality, people can only make choices when they are educated enough about something to make that decision properly. A table that shows the content of the food and a nice number in calories or joules doesn't help apparently. The actual reason why color coding or information about how much exercise you would need to burn something off again isn't happening? Yeah. That's because it would hurt profits of the very people who design unhealthy food to be as attractive* as possible. Can't have that. But that's the fun about the internet, instead of seeing conspiracies where they really are people believe high ranking Democrats drink the blood of abused children to increase their life span (why is Joe Biden such a doddering old fool in that case?) or that Bill Gates wants to implant microchips through innoculations. *That actually means addictive. Because that's what it is. Ever opened a bag of chips and could not put it down until it was empty? Right. That's because chips were designed to be that way. Lots of salt, fat and carbohydrates. You literally can't stop eating because your body tells you to gobble it all up - you'll never know when you get your hands on food that rich the next time. Except we're of course living in a time when the next time you can get your hands on food that rich... is simply the two steps to the cupboard away.

Grabbed it. Will most likely never play it, but free's free and all that.

Heh, silly Democrats trying to convince people to vote for them. They should just shame people into stopping to be conservatives. Be better. Stop being a disgusting conversative. It's for your own good. So did that work? Did I properly shame you into being progressive? Yes? Great. Who wants to be next?

The ancient Egyptians knew cats had a deep connection to the Gods, maybe Bastet brought them here. Mainstream acheaology would claim that cats were worshipped in Egypt because they protected their granaries and temples from vermin but them showing up as a geoglyph in Nazca clearly suggests that cats were a gift of the aliens.

Well, it looks like the leftist fasco-socialist corporation Twitter locked another account in their fight against Freedom™.

Well if those covers count...

Killed the Soldier's Past. Two down, two more to go in the quest to unlock the final level. Managed to unlock the Paradox too. I'm getting better I guess.

Fake News err Faux News eeeerrrrr Fox News is calling Trump a fascist. Good, good. He'll probably be removed from Sharp_One's signature now, right?

Plus Netflix used to be a lot more inclined to experiment a little in the past, a sign of the times, and massively increased market pressure. I generally don't mind slower plot pacing, I very much liked e.g. the BSG remake until it became clear the writers had no idea what to do with the show somewhere in the middle of season 3. Not everything needs to have the break neck pace of Dark Matter or Agents of SHIELD. But the first season of The Man in the High Castle really just... drags on. You'll see soon enough. Once you're done admiring the impressive production values, the aesthetics and the generally good acting you'll probably notice that the first season is simply a few episodes too long. Things happen at a snails pace, sometimes nothing happens at all. There's this whole subplot with Karl Tanner (I'm sure he has a real name but he's just Mr. Drinks From A Skull from GoT ) as bounty hunter that goes nowhere, for instance - and he shows up in three episodes. In a way this is the inverse of what happened in Game of Thrones where characters teleported themselves over vast distances because the show didn't have enough episodes to show their travels. Here Juliana needs way, way longer to go to the place she needs to be for the final episode because the showrunners had to get to ten episodes per season. Heh. Well at least that's my impression.

The Man in the High Castle is a special case. The first season is, let's say "mixed", the middle parts really drag on. It pays off to keep watching. If only to experience the strangeness of rooting for SS Obergruppenführer John Smith (played magnificently by Josh E. Sawyer Rufus Sewell) as he uncovers - and tries to foil - a conspiracy with the goal of assassinating Hitler. Makes more sense in context. edit: And John Smith's Japanese secret police counterpart Kido (played by Lt. Wang from Space Above and Beyond) is pretty good as well. They're terrible people doing terrible things, yet you can't help hoping they'll succeed. The show's pretty good at painting the alternative as even worse. Well at least that was my impression. There's also the rebel movement but they're all boring in addition to being terrible people.