Making a cider that doesn’t taste like stale apple juice is hard. Making a low-alcohol cider like that is even harder. Hogan’s does a great job at that. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find in anything but x12 packs, which doesn’t correlate with how much we love cider.
Got a bit tired of my SanDisk flash drive drops writes to 0 after a couple of minutes, and got myself Kingston DataTraveler Max this time.
It’s huge, 3 times bigger than any other flash drive. But I hope that it means that there’s more cooling for the chips.
Writes are nowhere near 900MB/s, of course. Closer to 100MB/s, though, starting with 300MB/s, then dropping.
For the good of me, I can’t remember where I’ve got this beer from.
This trappist beer is interesting, because it’s has an almost umami taste. It’s what’s called a “quad”, so 10.5%, pretty strong by any standard. And comes from Austria, which is a rare place for trappist beers.
Recently I discovered HARDKISS. Better late than never, I guess.
The interesting part about that book is, it’s very much down-to-earth. I’m not sure if it’s the later books that made James Bond “jump the shark”, or if those were the movies. This isn’t even so much as a spy thriller, and more of a noir, to be honest.
Funny, the book was written when Beria was still alive.
One bit that is hard to get used to is the outright misogyny of Bond. And those that know me also know that I don’t use that term lightly.
I’ll just put here the quotes:
“Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.”
“These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job had come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get herself snatched and probably held to ransom like some bloody heroine in a strip cartoon. The silly bitch.”
Such a hero:
“He gazed for a moment into the mirror and wondered about Vesper’s morals. He wanted her cold and arrogant body. He wanted to see tears and desire in her remote blue eyes and to take the ropes of her black hair in his hands and bend her long body back under his.”
I find it interesting that through the book, James Bond doesn’t actually kill anyone.
The two Bulgarians blow themselves, thinking that a real bomb is the smoke bomb. Le Chifre and his henchmen are killed by Smersh/KGB. Vespa overdoses on sleeping pills, unable to bear the guild of being a Soviet spy.
Also, I thought that Bond’s obsession with food and drink is related to the fact that rationing in Britain ended only in ’54. The novel was written in ’53.
If Skyfall was Dark Knight, then Spectre is John Wick. All the aesthethics of a secret assassin club are there:
Then in the second half it goes full 70s on you. With supervillain’s base set in a crater, supervillain torturing Bond with drills and Bond escaping using his watch, shooting from AK47 from one hand.
When Cristopher Waltz told Bond that he captures his girl and now there’s 3 minutes to save her, I thought it’s a clever nod. But no, he actually captured her in 15 minutes she was away, and put a 3 minute bomb on her!
With all that, the part I didn’t like was Bond shooting supervillain’s helicopter from a pistol. It was just lazy.
One great feature is that there’s a “roam” command for your units, that allows them to hunt zombies without micromanagement.
I don’t enjoy the fact that there are no saves in this game, as the missions get very long very quickly, and it’s easy to loose an hour or two of progress, because the last wave of zombies spawned where you didn’t expect it to. Same goes for not having the ability to speed up the game. I had to wait for 20 minutes for the last wave. Of course there are tons of fans telling people that if they need to speed up, “they’re playing it wrong”. I’d tell that those people need to get a life.
Thought it to be a tower-defence game, but it’s more of a standard RTS with some interesting mechanics. You’re fighting against hordes of zombies. If any of your buildings are destroyed, they spawn more zombies. And since most of the buildings are very fragile, this can quickly create a snowball effect. There are also no saves during mission, and the number of retries it takes you until you manage to complete your mission affects your score.
One mechanic I didn’t understand at first is that you can place your hunter cabins that produce food anywhere. Doesn’t have to be close to forest.
Some missions are just dungeon crawling with your hero. Those are easy and bring great rewards, but are boring as hell.
Finished listening to Slaughterhouse Five. Kurt’s writing has all the appeal of an old man yelling at a cloud. It ends quite abruptly. Maybe author got tired of the constant repetition. I felt that he was trying to make a point about the stolen kettle, but forgot what it was.
Only after visiting Ghent I discovered that one of my favorite beers, Gulden Draak, also comes as an Imperial Stout.
It’s fantastic, as can be expected from Gulden Draak. Makes you lightheaded and slightly sleepy, but that passes quickly.
The taste is smooth, but not as heavy as some of the Imperial Stouts made in the UK.
First episode was rather weak. Hermetic sci-fi can be rather dull, “we don’t know what’s outside”, “the government is lying to us”, all that stuff.
But with Rebecca Ferguson appearance, it becomes much better. Despite her rather “woman in pants” role, she does have that subtle mimics that makes everything better.
Also, it’s funny that everyone is using Python in the Silo.
And we watched another TV series, completely unrealated, called “Anne with an E” recetly, and a lot of cast came straight from there.
The only reason I was thinking about trying this game is that as a kid I saw it in “От Винта!”, and remembered it as a “shooter with sad pair of eyes”.
It’s a game from Capstone. Which says a lot. It uses Wolfenstein 3D engine. But that’s only part of the problem. Instead of key system, it uses a system where you need to find the correct monitor to unlock the colored doors. I didn’t notice that, so I thought that you have to make enemies open doors for you. And it actually worked!
Anyway, if Blake Stone had some nice ideas, this game has none. Absolute garbage.
Completed Beautiful Desolation.
You do get to switch to your companions once or twice, but only for the sake of a single puzzle. Otherwise, they are here to provide different perspectives on the choices you have. And turns out, there are a few choices in this game.
At one point, you meet a tribe of flying human carcasses, unable to fully die, carried by their drones. You may decide to “free” them or leave them be. On another occasion, you’re given a choice between a more technologically advanced tribe that has virtually enslaved another tribe by providing them with free drugs. And on another occasion, you make a choice between a nanotech civilisation and what is basically a sentient moss.
One of the common themes is that a lower civilisation assumes that the communication of a higher level civilization is actually a “voice of God”. This happens at least twice throughout the game. First, the flying carcasses think that the drug dealers are “gods”, because they received their transmission. Then the drugdealers themselves happen to do the same, receiving transmission from the nanomachines. Who themselves were a failed experiment.
Despite this being an adventure game, there’s a minigame inside it that is basically a 3×3 JRPG-style battle. But collecting characters for it turned out to be a huge hassle.
The ending is not entirely what I expected. I thought it would be completely cyclic, where it turns out you cause the incident yourself, or that you change the past and safe your fiance. But no, you return to where you left, and continue living “happily ever after”.
I’m not very good in adventure games. But I managed to complete this one without looking in a guide once. Maybe because some of the situations have alternative solutions, unlike most other adventures, where you have to get into the heads of the developers.
The most trouble I had was with prerendered backgrounds, it’s often hard to understand where you can and can’t walk, so I would sometimes miss crucial items, such as the drone.
Another interesting quirk is that his game has a rudimentary credit system. Sometimes you’ll find or get gold items. And their sole surpose is to be converted into credits. Ship upgrades are bought with credits, and while some are just cosmetic or quality of life improvements like the travel speed, others are necessary to complete the game.
I thought it to be another Fallout. Turns out it’s more of a Sanitarium. Luckily, there’s no pixel hunting, most active objects can be seen from afar.
We travel an apocalyptic world together with our fat brother and a robot dog. The main purpose of companions is to provide stories, and they do it pretty well.
The brother, who the hero despises at the beginning of the story, turns out to be a war veteran than became homeless due to his PTSD. And the robot dog was a prototype for a robot that feel emotions. It was a success, but she killed her creator in the process, and lied about feeling anything, so she was deemed a failure.
And the beginning of the game, we accidentally travel to the future. And the whole game is focused around our attempts to build a time travel machine to journey back. In order to do that, we try to help, or sometimes to pass rituals of what appears to be different South African tribes. All of them cybernetic or outright robotic.
Ok, I’m done with this game. The first episode or two were fun. But the arenas at the end of each episode became tedious and lazy, to be frank. I just end up running out of ammo, remembering enemies appearance patterns and fighting them with the infinite-ammo-rifle. Not fun.
Decided to watch it simply because YouTube threw the Adelle’s “Skyfall” song at me.
Main themes: getting old. A steamship dragging an old Napoleonic-times warship. “Old dog, new tricks”.
There are a few jibes at the series origins: “What were you expecting, an exploding pen?” coming from the New Q is rich.
But do they really tried to step away from the roots? The villain is certainly a cartoonish one.
The scenes in London were fun to watch. The other scenes – not so much.
The one good character is the Vice PM, because he actually shows some development. At first everyone expects him to be a bureaucrat that is “unused to field work”. Then we’re told that he was a colonel held by IRA for 5 months. Then there’s the shooting scene, where he actually proves himself. It’s all a buildup for Judi Dench getting tired of playing M.
This again has very little to do with science fiction. It’s a fictitious account of Battle of the Bulge aftermath and the Bombing of Dresden. Of course America is to blame for everything, and only if it would stop producing weapons all the wars in the world would go away.
A monumental work, hours of footage on evolution of King of Fighter series.
This series always was one of my less-favorite on Neo Geo, since I never liked the tag-battle 3×3 format.
But the retrospective is still brilliant. For one, little did I know that the storyline didn’t make much sense to me, because SNK were creating their own universe. So a lot of the critical plotlines were told only in manga, for example. Even if you finished the game and managed to get through terrible English translation, you still wouldn’t understand a thing, and this is the way it was intended.
Next surprise: KoF ’99 has a different style, because the lead designer worked on another postapocalyptic fighting game… Fallen Angels. Yes, the unfinished fighting game I wrote about some time ago. And a lot of new characters, including K’ (hate that name) are straight from Fallen Angels.
And KoF 2001 had the artist from Real Bout Fatal Fury. That’s why the character portraits are much more anime-like than in any other game in the series.
Today I tried the second pack of jjajang noodles, this time from Samyang.
I’m not sure if they are better than Nongshim, or I just learned to “cook” them (you need to simmer them with sauce until all the water evaporates.
But they were nice, umami, I’d say.
Managed to beat Hades for the second time, with a combination of Zeus and Dionisius, including their duo-boon. And expended just a single life in the process!
The principle that I follow is that if there’s a fated choice, I always take the fated choice.
Unlocked the first hidden aspect, the Spear.
I wish I could say that my 3rd escape was with the Shield, but in fact it was 90% combination of Artemis’ cast, Artemis’ Exit Wounds and Hermes’ Epic Quick Reload.
4th escape: didn’t expect it would go well at all. But Chiron Bow, Zeus cast and Dead Defiance reload from Athena surprisingly did the job.
5th escape. Again, didn’t expect to make it. But I randomly traded for Rocket Bomb and Tripple Bomb, so I fired 3 rockets. Then I went for Demeter cast topped with Arctic Blast. I think in this run I also collected the most Duo boons ever, three of them, including Stubborn Roots that regenerates HP if you don’t have lives left. That carried me through the entire Labirynth.