A Shizz friend of mine has run a Tumblr blog for almost a year now that I participate in: beercanonground.tumblr.com, or just BCOG. It is, as the name suggests, a collection of photos of beer cans atop this here Earth. Here are a couple of my submissions.
You can submit your own photos of BCOGs via this link: http://beercanonground.tumblr.com/submit
I was going up some escalators in the mall this weekend, and there I saw a USPS logo they haven’t used since I was 14.
This was the first time I’ve seen this in a long time. It was the first time I saw it as it was supposed to be.
Meet the USPS EagleMan, the mascot for the US Postal Service who delivers your mail. I never figured out why his collar was so fucked up. I figured it was a 70s disco collar or something. That was obviously his beak, so I just had to do a little mental acrobatics to make the rest of it fit.
I read an article about how Community Coffee was ranked the best-worst coffee by a champion barista. He ranked it over Chock full o’Nuts, which took second. While Community isn’t bad, it’s not as good as Chock full o’Nuts in my opinion. Community has a funky lingering after taste and isn’t all too cheap. Now the barista champ did try “Cafe Special” and I got the “Dark Roast,” so there is that. Chock full o’Nuts also has a better name. Not that I’d ever associate nuts with coffee, but seriously, it’s a better name.
Some time ago, over a year ago in fact, I wrote a post about how we were going to start playing some RPGs over teh internets. I’m happy to report that we’ve been playing pretty much every week via Roll20 since January 2013. Most of that time we’ve been playing D&D 3.5, but just recently we moved on and Mike is running a Star Frontiers campaign.
Back in that original post, I wrote:
It’s a pretty shitty adventure in many ways since there’s so little in the way
of a plot actually in the module. Unfortunately, not only due to my lack of
motivation to really make it good, my skills are a wee bit rusty.
So, yeah, that was pretty much spot on. It’s a shitty adventure. You basically hear some rumors about a cave and then you go to the cave and murder all the coexisting monsters that live there in separate cave complexes.
I think it is only a legendary adventure because it’s one of the first many people played. Probably a lot of fun campaigns were launched using the setting as well. It’s suckiness this time around is due in no small part to my shitty DMing. So it goes.
It’s a cool system, but it’s just too goddamn complicated, often for no good reason. There is a layer of realism added tactics-wise compared to ‘old school’ D&D, but I don’t really think it’s worth it. After all, most players optimize their characters and/or character play style so that they become pretty one dimensional. Who cares if there are attacks of opportunity if everyone just becomes a statue in order to avoid them. Likewise, characters with sneak attack or skirmish always do the same thing in battle to maximize their special ability. Likewise for most any other character class’s special ability.
I think I’d rather just go back to 1st or 2nd ed., keep most of the ‘options’ rules out of things, and wing it if someone wants to do a special maneuver. So, if Might & Magic ever ships, maybe we’ll play that next. Otherwise it’s vanilla 2nd ed. D&D or something like OSRIC.
I’ve been interested in new types of cooking since I read Michael Pollan’s book Cooked last year. The book divides itself into the 4 classical elements as means of transforming raw materials into “cooked” food: Fire (no explanation necessary), Water (cooking in pots), Air (making leavened bread), and Earth (fermentation).
In the Fire section, Pollan follows a few practitioners of the Carolinian whole-hog barbeque tradition, where meats are cooked over low heat overnight. I’ve dabbled with his takes on the last 3 elements, but, up until buying a house this passed fall, I haven’t had the yard space to try ambitious grilling projects. Now the time has come. Continue reading Pig Roast
I’ve talked about cast iron cookware before. I think it’s fantastic. For certain types of food (many types of food), it cooks fantastically, requires very little cleanup, and is incredibly durable and affordable.
Which leads me to my latest acquisition: the Lodge cast iron muffin pan. This is a curious item. I’m mainly writing this because there is not a lot of information about it outside of the reviews for it on Amazon. So I figured I’d put up my thoughts for others.
The short version: It’s a great pan which is incredibly easy to clean and turns out great muffins.
Briefly, the pan’s model number is L5P3. That’s what it says on the Lodge website, it’s what it says on Amazon, and it’s what it says on the info tag that came with the pan. It is not what bottom of the pan says. Cast into the bottom surface is ‘L5P2’. This was not a fluke; I bought a second one which looks exactly the same. I don’t know what the story is here—I’ve not written Lodge to get the deets.
Which leads me to the next topic. Many of the Amazon reviews claim that this is a small pan. It is. The muffin slots are pretty small. Not quite mini muffins, but not far off. I bought two because one was too small for a box of Jiffy muffins (corn or blueberry). I personally think a box of those is good for about 10 muffins of this size, so I bought a second pan and do 5 muffins in each. I’ve yet to adjust a homemade muffin recipe, not that I have one, to perfectly fit the two pans.
Between it’s weight and small size, there really isn’t a great place to grab the pan when it comes out of the oven. I’ve taken to using the empty sixth muffin slot as a place for my thumb to go when I grab it.
The pan is small and nests neatly with itself if you have multiples. It is heavy.
The first time I cooked with it, I made a mess. Then I figured out what to do. Of course you should do the normal light wash, dry, oil, and bake in the oven when you first get it.
I find I bake about 2 minutes less than what the box says in my oven. I’m sure all ovens are different, but remember the muffins get a quick start due to preheating of the pan.
With the preheating and buttering steps, the muffins literally drop out of the pan right out of the oven. Sometimes you need to nudge the top with your finger. Hardly any cleanup is required. For the buttering, I’ve dropped shavings into the hot pan and slid them around, but I prefer to just heat up a tiny bit in a mini cast iron skillet on the stovetop, and then brush it in the pans with a silicone brush. Since it’s just butter in the skillet, I just wipe it out with a paper towel and don’t really spend anytime cleaning it. The muffin pan only requires a tiny swipe with a sponge in the sink, then it’s dry, oil, and back into storage.
I’ll keep this brief. The bottom/sides of the muffins come out really nice and crispy, particularly if you brush a bit of butter in the preheated pan before you bake. Much better than standard muffins.
I also like the fact that they are smaller. It’s a good size to eat 1 or 2 and save some for later.
All in all, if you like cast iron and muffins, these are a cool purchase. A bit pricy, but not too bad. It can also double as a door stop, an implement of self defense, or anything else that a several pound weight would come in handy.
Al was getting on me for the way I pronounce the word wolf. Apparently I say it pretty similar to the way I pronounce woof. Somewhere deep inside my brain, I actually am trying to say the two words differently, and I think I actually do say wolf with a slight l sound that imperceptibly differentiates it from woof. But will grant her that it sounds pretty similar.
Joe brought up an interesting point. Wolves is not pronounced the same way. That word is more acceptable.
Somewhere around the time this conversation was going on, Taco Bell started advertising their breakfast menu a lot, along with some other new items. Al and I discussed that maybe we should check them out.
Then one night, I had a dream. I was in Taco Bell with Al, and I ordered a wolf taco. They had them on the menu. The wolf meat looked like chunks of beef. Al made fun of the way I said wolf. With that, the owner walked in.1 I asked him how you say wolf, figuring he would know, since his establishment was serving wolf meat. He said it like I said it. So there. I’m right.
Wolf tacos.
Dan “Danimal Cannon” Behrens brought the band Critical Hit to the attention of my corner of the Internet (at www.TheShizz.org). Critical Hit is a list of physically attractive musicians who play covers of game music as arranged by someone who doesn’t play in the band. This isn’t yet the part that disturbs me. The fact that their covers are plastic and only 1 member of the “band” plays at a given concert is a little but not overly unnerving. What bothers me is that Danimal’s revelation that my last decade of regularly packing myself in a small room with a bunch of sweaty nerds to listen to guitars wail to Castlevania now makes me marketable demographic.
