majestic

Woha, it's like Manowar and Dream Evil had a superhero love child. Awesome.

I'm pretty sure they find it... puzzling enough. *snicker*

All that talk about growing vegetables made me remember a fun little tidbit that happened to my partents last year. They're renting a patch of land near my grandmother's former home, roughly 20,000 square feet wedged between the street and a small river. Anyhow, last year mom planted some corn which was growing fine until they went on vacation. When they came back her uncle called and said that all of it was gone. You know, usually when people steal corn they only take a few ears. This time, well, everything was gone - neatly cut off right above the ground. All the corn. Vanished - quite literally over night. Some days later he called and said he found the missing corn while fishing. In... yeah, right. A beaver dam. Cheeky little bastards.

Got around to finishing Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 6. All in all maybe the weakest season since the first, but still pretty entertaining all in all, but it sure was weird... even for a show set in the MCU (or not, any more, what with Endgame and all).

Small cucumbers are by far and large the most popular choice for salt brining here. Everything else gets pickled in (spiced) vinegar. Most of our home grown vegetables are used fresh. Mom makes jam from whatever berries or fruits are currently available: apricots, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, sometimes gooseberries and most of all red and white currant. Red currant jam in particular makes for a wonderful ingredient in sweets. It retains a slightly sour flavour and works to create a fine balance. Great, now I'm hungry.

Salt brine and hot peppers sounds like something that doesn't mesh very well. Have you tried making pepper infused honey? That's easy to do and gives great results - works best with honeydew honey. There's two ways you can go about this, either simmer the peppers in honey for a bit and then strain through a sieve or just chop up the peppers and pour the honey over them. The latter can't be stored for extended periods of time and should be consumed within a few months. Adding water to the honey makes it perishable, however you still get the actual peppers with a bit of honey instead of just honey that's hot and sweet, and you don't feel dirty afterwards, I mean... boiling honey should be a criminal offense.

Eh, honestly, we're talking about a comic adapation that has assassins killing targets because of errors in the fabric of the Loom of Fate(tm) who can curve bullets. With that as frame of reference Acid Burn picking up Professor X like that makes perfect sense.

Watched the final season of Orange Is The New Black. There are times I wish my mind would compel me to keep watching shows that clearly spent their creativity and quality after the first (or second) season. I'm not entirely sure what this last season was supposed to be. An attempt to outdo A Song Of Ice And Fire in terms of terrible things happened to people without understanding the difference between a meaningful and a pointless character death*? Trying to cram in all the social commentary the show lost in the past four seasons? Making Piper even more insufferable than she already was? I'm glad it is over. *

Once you unlock the Ancient Weapon and Leech glyphs (best combo ever, really) you won't have to worry about not being able to kill anything. Top that off with the Splitter glyph and load up those ARC 9000s for some fireworks. There are two downsides to the setup, first it locks you into playing one particular way and two it makes the game easy, and I mean "win almost every hard mode run" easy. Especially if you combine it with a Time Extender and a Teleport. The only dangerous situations come from bumbling into some environmental danger (accidtentially hitting a gray goo or eating some solar discharge) and them pesky little Swarm fighters.

Hey that's something I backed, so be worried. It'll turn Epic exclusive before long.

Venetica on GOG. It's only three bucks at the moment. One of the games in my "lost decade" going from 2004 to... well, not quite 2014 (more like 2015), but otherwise it wouldn't be a lost decade. 2004 is when I started playing Everquest 2, then World of Warcraft, then an easily overheating computer paired with a new job meant I wasn't playing much. Once my computer was fixed I got back into World of Warcraft which kept me glued to the screen until SWTOR came out, and that infatuation ended in guild drama in 2015. Sure I played some of the big releases like the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age and Resident Evil (mostly 4, 0 and the Game Cube re-releases) but I've missed a lot. No, wait, I played the second Call of Duty and the first Gears of War at work, because back then my work actually involved maintaining and testing XBox Demo units. Heh. Ah, good times.

No home delivery service around?

Bloodlust was added in 2.0.1.

Soulstones aren't out of combat resurrections, but yes, Blizz patched out the only job PVE Shamans had in classic pretty quickly. I know, I know, it's 1.12 and Shamans are actually decent at healing and buffing their group at that point, assuming they manage to not run out of mana.

Well that's possible. Forgot that the in-fight resurrection limit wasn't always around.

No, it wasn't. It was the last regular classic patch. The preperation patches always begin with the version numbers of their expansions. For all their faults, Daybreak does a really interesting thing with Everquest 2 that allows players to progress through game expansions on an accelerated pace. They call that time-locked server. When a new one opens it is base EQ2 and every 16 weeks the next expansion is applied to it. You can watch the game unfold as it did, with some differences. There are no game update patches, the expansions are released and in the middle of the cycle they apply all the smaller patches that happened after an expansion came out. Every time I think about rejoining but there's a steep time requirement to playing Everquest 2 in its classic state that I just can't fulfill any more. I do miss it though, my time in EQ2 was some of the best time I spent playing MMOs.

With today being annoyingly hot I went out and had a cold one:

Poor Robert Picard.

Is STO canon? I tried to play it but... uh, didn't even finish the tutorial. Can't get into it.

Would have been fun starting with the original skill trees though. Ah, to hear paladins winging about their only role being a blessing of kings buff bot auto-attacking bosses for proccs wearing a combination of leather and cloth because plate didn't come with healer stats. It'll take a while to clear the raids though, even with the trivial mechanics. You'd still need to craft cloaks to kill Nefarian, go through the Onyxia attunement and several lockouts to get the materials, clear Scholomance to craft flasks and all that. Not to mention getting resist gear for AQ40 and the Four Horseman in Naxx needing four well geared tanks to get through reliably.

To be honest I don't like the concept very much. The ideas are sound in terms of sci-fi and examining the human condition by providing refugees that nobody wants to take in, but it just doesn't fit into the universe. Especially not since it makes no sense for the Vulcans to refuse to take in Romulans after all the overtures towards peace and/or reunification in TNG and the alliance in DS9. Or resettling them anywhere in the Federation. Or resettling them someplace outside the Federation. The proposed Data/Picard conflict also seems somewhat contrived. Ugh. I'm deliberately ignoring the fact that what is (almost) a Type III civilisation on the Kardashev scale would be able to figure out that they need to evacuate their home long, long before their sun goes supernova. It's not like that happens in a week or two, and... uhm, the evacuation would have to be long before it goes boom, changes in the star happening and all that. But hey, it's a concept based on a Jar Jar Abrams idea.

Ah, a trip down memory lane. There are a few. The first game that I can remember playing: Pitfall, and I was like three or four years old at the time. The first NES game I ever played, and still one of the best games ever made: Mega Man 2 (I think I mentioned this before, I never had a NES, only a Sega Master System 2, the one that came with Alexx Kid in Miracle World pre-installed). The first time I sat in stunned silence in front of my PC: Tengoku de omachishi te imasu! The ending of Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy was a major bummer. I still wish I hadn't stumbled upon the solution to the figure eight and palms riddle. Finishing Loom(tm) with barely any grasp of English. Still feels like an accomplishment. Not so much by me, but by Lucas Arts. It takes some doing to create a graphic adventure where you can figure out what to do without understanding any of the dialogue. The way one learns the necessary spells is masterfully done. Managing a 100% completion run of Gargoyle's Quest on the Game Boy all by my own. Playing Eye of the Beholder 2 on the PC, again without having any idea what the words mean. That one was a lot tougher to figure out than Loom(tm). Well... and playing Ocarina of Time and Planescape: Torment, my absolute highlights in terms of atmosphere and immersion, for different reasons.

The insurance people called today, they'll finally be assessing the damage next week, and Amazon finally seems to have quietly cancelled the second charge on my credit card. Still leaves me with a bit o of a bitter taste in my mouth because they essentially converted 50 real bucks into an Amazon gift card without me wanting that but at the end of the day... I guess it doesn't matter that much.

The roommate, presumably. Account sharing is techincally against Netflix' terms of use but as a lot of people can probably tell you they're not doing anything against it (at least for now) when you violate that by sharing your account and costs with friends and family not living in the same household*. I also suspect that they full well know that people use the premium plan and the four simultaneous streams in such a manner. It's pretty much content mafia modus operandi to assume one download is a lost sale and therefore every shared account a lost subscription but that doesn't work that way, at all, and I'm pretty certain Netflix knows that, much like HBO knows that GoT benefitted a lot from being the most pirated show on the planet. *This doesn't mean these illegal sites where you can rent obviously hacked streaming services logins for a pittance. Use those at your own peril.