majestic

Wow, episode 5 of The Mandalorian really cranked up the fanservice. Which is good because it made me immediately go back to the intro of the Rogue One Half in the Bag:

While not direclty video game news related @jph_anderson managed to finish his Witcher analysis video and has troubles posting it on YouTube. Anyone else excited for a full analysis with a runtime of over nine hours? I sure am. Here's a smaller one:

Double post if your wife is abusing you.

I spent a good while of the day reminiscing. Which is something that I do somewhat frequently but it seldomly affects my mood this negatively. Usually it's just a bit of nostalgia mixed in with an increasingly intense notion that maybe the old farts actually had it right and things really were better in the past. So I'm going to tell you guys a story. You can stop reading here if you don't like stories about, well, "the one that got away" but if you stick around you'll get to call me a stupid moron at the end. Well, possibly. And no, it's not going to be a friend zone story. At least... not a traditional one. I'm also not looking for any validation or a pat on the back or anything, I'm trying forum posting as a sort of coping mechanism (now that I type that out this sounds ridiculous). Since that got a lot longer in writing than I thought it would I'll just put it in spoiler tags.

Since we're kind of doing Rammstein covers:

Wow, I should really stay away from this thread when I'm not in the brightest of moods.

I see I failed to mention that I used my November's free Prime E-Book on The Goblet of Fire and am now reading The Order of the Phoenix. And dear god, Harry (w)angsts even more in the book than he does in the film, which was already annoying enough.

Well Kevin Sorbo disagrees: Not that I would know anything about bourbon. I only drink beer and very occasionally fruit brandy, and the latter two only in very small amounts. I I've had only a handful of shots in the past 10 years. The last time I got drunk doing shots was... well, let's say, not very pleasant. Not even sure it was fun while it lastet, my recollection of the night is a bit spotty and it involved at least one bottle of extremely disgusting 60% ABV raspberry schnapps.

Well the quality is terrible, but it's the best one on YT.

Time for a new picture, today's lunch:

Would you like to buy some bootstraps?

I don't know, I thought the episode was half an hour of nothing much and The Beskar forging scene bothered me a bit (much like GoT's reforging of Ice). Cast iron has a higher carbon content (that's what makes it, uhm, castable) and while becoming exceptionally hard won't be able to withstand impacts all that well and simply shatter, not something you want in an armor or a melee weapon. That can be seen in how a cast iron skillet can't even stop a .22 caliber round. Okay, I get it, it's Mandalorian iron and not real life iron and can have any number of properties that still make it viable armor after melting it down and casting it, but that doesn't explain why you would need to cast and forge it into shape. That's just... weird.

What's up with people not knowing how to use the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives corretcly? Nothing can be worst than anything else. Literally! Heh. Literally... Anyway, dear lord, what the hell did I just watch?

Well technically peanuts aren't nuts and real beer doesn't contain wheat so you should be good. Kidding, kind of. Always sucks when you learn you're not supposed to consume something you enjoy.

Finally had a chance to watch Dolemite Is My Name. Eddi Murphy does a hell of a Rudy Ray Moore impression, but there's really only one original. Great film and a superb cast. Great work even from Wesley Snipes, but I'm presuming he just played himself, considering how much of an entitled diva he's supposed to be on set.

The title's wrong, that line isn't from Disco Godfather, but anyway...

You'll most likely be bored unless you're into technical stuff and watching textoutput.

Oi, I stirred up a veritable hornet's nest of suggestions. Thanks guys, I'll keep a few things in mind, however I do feel the need to expand on my point a bit, lest I'll be called worse than classicmalcontentous (and I really promise I'm not stating this just to be contrarian to great books list, I only do that for overrated video games. You know, like Halo. ). During my school time I've had teachers that really wanted to make sure we're somewhat literate in classics in the sense of books that are considered literary achievements - milestones of writing, if you will, particularily German and English speaking authors. As such I'm familiar and in some cases well acquainted with the works of Hemmingway, Kafka, Hesse, Bernhard, Schiller, Goethe, Twain, Salinger, Golding and a bunch of others that would probably only end up in a biblical counting. While it would be preposterous to say that I didn't enjoy or appreciated some of them - Orwell's 1984 comes to mind - reading them more often than not felt more like a chore, especially Bernhard and Kafka. The former is a study in the terror German grammar is truly capable of. I don't mind inaccessible or difficult reading and I certainly don't need everything I read to be a thrilling page turner. I've read textbooks and manuals for fun when I was a lot younger (and I still do for work these days, but that's what you get for having a job in IT) and I do appreciate interesting language as such, also e.g. as lyrics or poems, even though I never liked having to learn them by heart. Ach, da kommt der Meister! Herr, die Not ist groß! Die ich rief, die Geister werd ich nun nicht los. Could be that I'm doing this wrong. Perhaps I shouldn't start with what critics consider an author's best work. That didn't work for me for a some - Joyce, Fitzgerald now and McCarthy. That reminds me, Guard Dog, did you read Blood Meridian and if yes, did you actually like it? Because that killed my interest in exploring his other works fairly quickly. Sigh.

phpBB is an open source forum software that was - probably still is so as long as they still have forums - used by a lot of companies to implement their internet forum presence. SubSilver is a theme, one with black text on silver background and blue links and headers. Well you can find an example by googling phpBB SubSilver. Of course this board has neither a bright theme nor does it run on phpBB, so that's the joke. The "light" went out when we lost a bright forum theme of a different forum software with Interplay's demise. Well, what do they say, a joke explained is a joke ruined. Sorry Avatar.

I'm done with the Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm not entirely sure why people told me the movies begin to deviate more from the books starting with the third one. Dumbledore was a bit different, I must however, confess ignorance whether the difference in his portrayal was his idea or the directors, but apart from that, well, the book and the film are really close. The movie has a lot less Quidditch, which I really, really don't give a f... erm, care about and only one visit to Hogsmeade. Both changes that the pacing of the book could benefit from as well. Well, here's to hoping for the next one, although I suppose the true differences will come starting with The Order of the Pheonix, because that was the point in the films started to have larger swathes of plot that make no sense to me as someone who hasn't read the books. And I'm also reading The Great Gatsby, which is yet another attempt of mine to finally find a classic that I like. Alas, it appears that I was unsuccessful again - although it really is a well written novel and commentary on the 1920ies in the US I don't care for any of the characters, or what is happening to them. It's a bit like hearing music that you can regonize as expertly crafted and well performed but is utterly uninteresting on the very subjective level at which we enjoy works of art. In contrast, The Forever War, which was also a commentary on social change, the Viet Nam war and the disconnectedness that veterans feel upon returning home, was also quite entertaining and made me care about what was happening and to whom, and I'm pretty sure that isn't just because it has space battles and laser guns. Wait, does The Forever War count as classic? Humm...

Simple but tasty way to deal with leftover bread dumplings: Fry in a pan until decently hot, then add eggs and stir until the eggs are just the way you like them (although if you like your eggs fried to oblivion I might question your sanity... or taste ).

We made some cream of pumpkin soup: And afterwards had a nice Hungarian cold smoked sausage with mustard, horeradish and some bread with walnuts:

What's with the TOS era Romulan Warbird? Well, granted, the show will have a Romulan or possibly Vulcan samurai and Jeri Ryan dual wielding pulse phasers so an anachronism is the least of my worries. I'm half expecting John Woo to direct and some serious wire-fu when the samurai starts deflecting energy blasts with his high tech sword.

But that was VOY, not TNG...