Moe Lane

Merry Christmas to me
Merry Christmas to me
Merry This and the New GURPS Discworld killed my budget for the mon-th.
Merry Christmas to me.

[UPDATE: It tastes fine, but next time I’m making it with poppy seeds. Caraway seeds don’t taste bad, but when they show up in American dishes it’s for savory foods, not sweet ones.]

Sorry.  Phineas and Ferb are back on the kids’ rotation.  Anyway, isn’t this nice-looking?

No idea how it tastes, yet – I’m not going to try a Hobbit-style seed cake from a recipe adapted by Diane Duane without my wife being present – but it baked up easily enough. If I have a concern, it’s the caraway seeds. Apparently there is a great debate on how many caraway seeds should be put into one of these, and this was one recipe where I followed the directions for making and cooking pretty much to the letter.  And the letters said ‘lots of caraway seeds.’

Guess we’ll see!

Moe Lane

This is a really good point.  Not to mention, a somewhat glaring plot hole.  One you’d think that George Lucas would have tried to fix with twenty minutes of clunky dialog and heavy use of railroading… oh, wait, am I still bitter?

Mayyyyybeeee:

That Anakin Skywalker, always planning ahead… pic.twitter.com/lzKgvutG50

— GeekTyrant (@GeekTyrant) December 22, 2016

Christmas/ Sarajevo 12/24 [Instrumental], Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It all depends on whether it’s sufficiently easy for me to pop out the top of the flushing mechanism and replace it with a new one.  Old one had the bar that connects to the chain rot clean off.  Which is hardly the worst thing that can happen with a malfunctioning toilet – my goodness, yes – but I suspect that this may end up being an exercise in frustration, tomorrow morning.

What makes it particularly annoying is that there’s a seed-cake recipe I found that sounds pretty dang good. But I need to do shopping for it, because I don’t have cake flour or possibly even double-acting baking powder. but if I’m instead in the Lowes’ all morning, looking for the right toilet repair kit…

And that’s why it’s been a slow night.  But, hey, four days until Christmas.

For this one, blame my wife.  I think.

laser-mines-google-docs

Laser Mines (TL[7+3])

Yes, as in ‘big holes in the ground where you dig solid, raw laser light out of the walls.’  Sure, you could make laser beams by collimating light into a focused ray.  If you’re living in the 21st century AD, that is.  But if you’re a clear-eyed citizen of any number of the modern, technologically mature polities of the 23rd Century’s Solar System, you’d rather get your laser beams from a mine on one of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons. And yes, it’s real laser light, somehow.  Still usable, though! …Well, after a certain amount of refining into a crystal form, that is.

(more…)

I simply can’t imagine why they’d come up with that particular name.

Spiders on #Mars? Erosion-carved troughs may be infant versions of larger features known as Martian “spiders”. Info: https://t.co/eoirKZvepG pic.twitter.com/VwUSueL7if

— NASA (@NASA) December 20, 2016

No, wait, I can: (more…)

This seems to be burying the lede a bit, friends.  Rogue One director Gareth Edwards:

On day one, we were in Lucasfilm in San Francisco with Industrial Light and Magic and John Knowles, our supervisor, he said that they’ve got a brand new 4K restoration print of A New Hope – it had literally just been finished. He suggested we sit and watch it. Obviously, I was up for that. Me, the writer, lots of the story people and John all sat down, we all had our little notepads, we were all ready for this. I’ll add that I’ve seen A New Hope hundreds of times. So I was sat there, ready to take notes and really delve under the surface of the film. You have the Fox fanfare, then scrolling text with ‘A long time ago…’, and then the main music begins. Next thing we knew it had ended, and we looked around to one another and just thought – shit, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it without getting carried away. It’s really hard to get into an analytical filmmaker headspace with this film. It just turns you into a child.

(more…)

The schedule’s gonna be wonky because it’s a holiday coming up, so in no particular order:

• Two days left for Amazon two-day shipping by Christmas!
• Looking for that special gift for hard-working (ha!) blog-writers? Try their Patreon!
• …Or you could contribute to the American Red Cross.
• Or Toys for Tots. Hey, they have expenses.
• Or the Safe Water Network; they have a good rating from Charity Navigator and I like clean water programs. Clean water and no warlords; lock those two down, and you’ve got a good shot at achieving the rest.

…So maybe that wasn’t as crassly commercial as I thought it’d be.  Ach, well. Christmas, amirite?

I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas, Gayla Peevey

Blame the freaking United States Postal Service, honestly. That stupid ad…

To accomplish officially generic goals, but everybody’s assuming that the money’s going to go towards their new Cyberpunk 2077 project.  To put this in perspective: Witcher 3 had something like a $32 million dollar production budget (not the $15 million that was apparently reported at first).  Having that kind of backstop for a game that will probably be using the same basic engine is nothing to sneeze at.

All of which leads up to this observation: CD Projekt RED should fee free to do an update on its progress on Cyberpunk 2077 any time now.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, it ain’t my tax dollars.

Obviously putting everything under ‘Not-politics’ is no longer viable, given that the site has permanently shifted its focus and everything.  I was thinking ‘Books,’ ‘Movies,’ ‘Music,’ and ‘RPGs.’  Does anybody have any other suggestions, or do folks think that would be sufficient?

Or, heck, do I even need categories?  Wait, no, I started with categories, so I should keep them up, lest future archivists curse my name.  I went to library school; I have to cleave to the Way of the Indexer.