Asparagus Bacon

Posted on January 30, 2009 by baudattitude

Let me preface this by saying that I am not part of the recent Cult of Bacon that seems to have taken over the world.  Honestly, if there’s a meme I’d like to see die faster, I can’t think of it offhand.

Still, our local supermarket had a rather nice sale on bacon a couple of weeks ago, so I stocked up, only to find – with 3 days left on the “sell by date” – that I still had one and a half packages left unconsumed.

I was at a bit of a loss for how to use it all up.  Sure, I COULD make a lot of pancakes, eggs, and bacon over the next couple of days, but, while “breakfast for dinner” is a nice change of pace once in a while, I don’t think I’d like to do it too many meals in a row.

Thankfully, my wife had a suggestion.

We occasionally go to a local-ish Izakaya that features, as one of its dishes, “Asparagus Bacon”, which is just what you’d expect, a mix of asparagus and bacon.

It’s really good.  Well, pretty much everything they make is good, but this is a favorite of ours.

I set out to make something similar.

What worked out well was to fry a bunch of bacon – about half a package – put that on a plate, stir-fry a bunch of asparagus until it got soft, add the bacon back in, then add a sauce made from mirin, shoyu, (3tbsp of each) and powdered ginger, stir-fry the whole mess for a minute or two, and put it on plates next to steamed rice.

I found the result to be extremely yummy, but it was a little sweet for my wife’s taste, so next time I’ll make the sauce with 4tbsp shoyu 2tbsp mirin and see how that goes.

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Spaces, Invaded

Posted on January 29, 2009 by baudattitude

I am officially old enough that things I remember from my youth are starting to have “30th Anniversary Editions”, which isn’t really THAT bad and I promise not to get all depressed about it until stuff starts having “50th Anniversary Editions”

Anyway, 30 years ago… well, a bit more than 30 years, because I didn’t actually buy Space Invaders Extreme when it was released, I waited until the PSP version dropped to $10… 30 PLUS years ago, I remember playing Space Invaders and doing very poorly at it.  I specialized in shooting through my own shields, which I think we can all agree is a somewhat flawed strategy.

Space Invaders got supplanted by Pac-Man and Omega Race and Joust and Robotron 2084 before I stopped going to arcades, and honestly I didn’t feel a whole lot of nostalgia for it.  Picking up a 30th Anniversary Edition, cheap though it was, is something I can’t really explain.

It’s Space Invaders, for crying out loud.  Taito puts out a new version every five years or so, and people who actually HAVE nostalgia for the game buy it, and everyone’s happy.

As inexplicable as my purchase was, it turns out that it was a pretty decent choice.

Space Invaders Extreme is one part shooter, one part puzzle game, and about four parts Jeff Minter, though I don’t think he was actually involved with the handheld versions.  (He is doing visualizations for the upcoming Xbox Live version, though.)

If he wasn’t, it’s a hell of an homage to his style of taking a classic shooty type game, pumping up the gameplay with some over-the-top powerups, adding trance/technoesque music, and shovelling in a couple of wheelbarrow loads of particle effects.  Oh, and taking out the shields.

It doesn’t, however, have the soul-crushing difficulty curve of a genuine Minter game.  I say this because I was actually able to finish it, albeit on the easiest difficulty path and with LOTS of retries.

I have no shame when it comes to taking the coward’s way out.

Difficulty is handled in interesting fashion; a mix of adaptive difficulty and player choice.  Starting at the end of the second level, you’re given the choice of which of a couple of third levels you want to play, with varying difficulty levels, and you repeat the process after the third and fourth levels.  If I can believe everything I read, there are two possible third levels, three possible fourth levels, and four possible fifth levels, making a five level game into a total of eleven levels and mandating multiple playthroughs if one wishes to see everything.

To complicate matters, you can’t just pick the higher difficulty levels to see what they’re like; you have to earn them based on your performance.  If I were a completionist, I would be playing this game for a good long time.

I think we both know what the odds of that are.

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Boys Choir, here I come.

Posted on January 28, 2009 by baudattitude

Wow, that’s possibly the creepiest article title I’ve come up with yet.  I will explain.

Well, first, some backstory.

Some of the earliest anime titles licensed for the American market were titles that had been produced by Studio Gainax.  They tended to have very high quality animation, music that ranged from “catchy” to “addicting”, stories that mixed action and humor, occasionally veering into the realm of the tearjerkingly dramatic, and, oh yes, an awful lot of jiggle.

This entered the vernacular as the “Gainax Bounce”.

They did do the occasional show with less fan service – (see also: Karekano) – and also they made some robot show that got a lot of attention.

A few years after the giant robot show ended, the maid fetish hit anime like a 2×4 to the face.  This was some time after the “giant robots with deep government conspiracy theories” and the “semi-noir anime with jazz music” trends ended, I think, though I really don’t follow these things too closely and as a result I couldn’t tell you whether Gainax’s particular take on the maid-themed anime, Mahoromatic, was the trendsetter or just another knockoff of some primordial Ur-Maid.

I can tell you the reaction I had, the first time I saw Mahoromatic in a store, and that reaction was “Oh, PLEASE” followed by me putting the box back on the shelf and a shaking of the head in general disbelief at the state of the world.

Yes, I was convinced that the studio that had given us the “Gainax Bounce” had finally reached its nadir, and also that I wasn’t willing to follow them down to that level.

Some seven years later, as stage6 was going through its dying throes, I started frantically trying to download AMVs and OP/ED animations and, well, anything that had a halfway interesting-looking thumbnail image, and that’s how I wound up with an AMV done to Kotoko’s Change My Style, which I will not embed here because, well, it’s got enough jiggle in to make it not exactly safe for work, and if you do work anywhere where that sort of thing is safe for work, let me have the address of your HR people.

Anyway, putting aside the bounce factor, it has an awful lot of footage from Mahoromatic in it, and it looked, if still kind of facepalm-worthy, actually kind of fun.

Note, my tastes have changed somewhat in the last several years.  Granted, I think pretty much anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time would consider these changes for the worse.

But I digress.

Anyway, to get back to the original title of this post, I purchased (and have half-watched so far) the new budget-price release of Mahoromatic, and I will now quote – without permission, unattributed, and out of context – the Amazon review of the show:

“The adolescent high jinks of Mahoromatic will offend many American females–and bore any male whose voice has changed.”

I guess, if you know any choir looking for a soprano, I’m available.

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More from the Hive Mind

Posted on January 26, 2009 by baudattitude

So, having a portable media pl… oh, all right, I’ll just come out and say it… an iPod that can hold all of our music collection has lead to some interesting revelations.

First revelation:  We have a lot of music; right around 11500 audio tracks, and most of that represents actual physical CDs or iTunes/Amazon purchases; we’re pretty law-abiding folks.

The second revelation came when I synced the entire library to the iPod and set the thing to randomly play from the entire songs list.

I wound up skipping, I’d guess, two out of every three songs.  Some of that was based on mood, sure, and didn’t represent actual dislike of the song, but an awful lot of it was because it chose to play a song at me that I didn’t like, or that was a karaoke version, or that was some weird 20 second sample of BGM from a soundtrack.

So, I copied the entire library off the server onto my local PC, threw it into iTunes, and started doing a little pruning, and this has lead to some more revelations, some of them rather embarrassing.

For example:

Cardigans: First Band on the Moon.  I bought this album solely on the basis of hearing “Lovefool” on the radio, and it was also the first – and last – domestic CD I ever purchased that was $19.99, or $21.60 with CA state tax added.  I don’t think the recording companies even try to pull off that kind of pricing any more; this was back in 1996.

In retrospect, I’m thinking they deserved some of the pain that was coming in the form of Napster, etc.

“Lovefool” is the only track from the album that got kept and that actually made it on to my iPod.  So, yeah, poor CD purchase there, but not quite as bad as Dreams Come True’s “Magic”, which I bought unheard based solely on having really liked their “The Swinging Star” album.  I didn’t actually keep anything from “Magic”, and that was – by virtue of being an import – about 30 bucks.

I won’t go in to a whole, you know, list of albums that got dropped entirely or cut down to just one or two tracks, but the end result was an iPod with 8100 tracks on it, and I’m skipping a LOT less.

Of course, now I’m back to maintaining a local music library AND a music library on the server, but, eh, I’ll deal.  It’s better than allowing iTunes to have its way with the master library.

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Gadget related ranting.

Posted on January 24, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I had to put together a three-page paper on “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, due tomorrow, and hadn’t actually done any work on it.

Which is to say, I had a page written on “I Have a Dream”, but it wasn’t going anywhere, so I scrapped it and started over with “Letter”

And since it’s due tomorrow, I turned off my desktop machine, which is full of distractions, and booted up my School Laptop, which does NOT have distractions on it.

And I wanted music, so I had my shiny new iPod sitting on the desk in front of me and I was trying to listen to it with the earbuds, which wasn’t working well because the cord’s really too short to sit back from.  My Grado headphones don’t actually fit in the iPod with its case on, so I can’t use them with it.

Then, I realized that, when buying the Apple Universal Dock, I had bought something that fit my iPod and had a Line Out jack, and I could run that, through a switchbox, into my normal PC speakers – Logitech X-540s, if you care – and then plug the Grados into the speaker pod and listen to them through that while controlling the whole mess with the remote control that came with the dock.

It was a total convergence-gasm.

Then I finished my paper, printed it, shut down the laptop, booted my desktop, and the iPod stopped playing and the remote control stopped working.

It turns out that, if I want to have the computer on, yet be using the iPod, docked, to play music, I need to eject it through iTunes and THEN I can use the remote control, which is dumb.

Also:

One of the things I got for Christmas was a Kingston DataTraveler 16GB flash drive, which is just stunningly tiny for something that holds that much data.

It’s turning out to be TOO tiny.  Too tiny as in, I think I probably left it at work, but if I didn’t leave it at work and DID bring it home, it’s sitting somewhere, USB plug retracted, being an unassuming 1.5″ by .5″ piece of black plastic in an apartment FULL of black surfaces.

This is, approximately, the third time in the last month that I’ve lost the thing.  I need to figure out some way to make it stand out a little more.

Also: Christ, could I have any more company-and-product names in one freaking post?

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In the Ecosystem

Posted on January 22, 2009 by baudattitude

OK, so we’ve all heard the cautionary tales about self-replicating machines; the idea being that once our electronic servants reach a certain level of complexity they will be able to build more machines, and it’s pretty much a slippery slope from there to Robotron:2084.

I think that Apple may have gotten us there a bit early.

Since purchasing a 120GB iPod classic, I’ve bought:

1) Belkin Clear Acrylia “remix” case.  I usually don’t buy Belkin products, ever since getting burned by a couple of their Flip KVMs, but this takes “protective” to a new level of paranoia; it completely encloses the iPod and protects the clickwheel, with openings only at the dock connector, headphone jack, and hold switch.

2) Sennheiser CX-300B earbuds, because the bundled iPod earbuds just don’t have enough bass and these were on sale at Amazon for a hair over 20 bucks, which I thought was a crazy good deal for something with the Sennheiser name on it.

3) An Apple Universal Dock with remote, etc.  I don’t want to think about the margin that Apple must make on these things; they are the most blatant example of the “Apple tax” that I have yet run in to.

4) A Griffin “PowerDuo” kit that came with a car charger, a wall charger, and a charge/sync cable.  The rather nice thing about this is that, since it’s actually a USB charger kit with an iPod cable bundled, I can use it to charge any USB device in the car or off the wall current.  I can stop leaving my Xbox 360 on to charge the controllers. 🙂

I did run in to the problem that, with the case on the iPod, it doesn’t fit in its dock adapter – or, for that matter, any of the six dock adapters bundled with the universal dock. The iPod fits in the dock just fine if I leave the dock adapter out, but the connector looks startlingly flimsy.

Fortunately, I found a solution, I thought, and then I had my hopes dashed, and then all was made right again.

See, Agent18 makes iPod cases that come with dock adapters.  Now, Agent18 cases don’t protect the click wheel, and I’d already bought a very decent case and didn’t want to replace it, BUT:

Agent18 will happily sell you two of their dock adapters for $5 shipped, which seemed a fair deal for something to relieve the stress on the dock connector.

That makes iPod-related purchase number 5), by the way.

I ordered them, and they arrived today, and I was gleeful to see that the iPod, in case, did fit in the Agent18 dock adapter, and then I tried plugging the iPod into the dock with the dock adapter installed and, well, it didn’t work.

See, the bottom of the dock adapter is thick enough that it prevents the dock connector on the iPod from mating with the dock.

After I realized this, I said an impolite thing, and then I got ready to stick the dock adapters in the closet and forget about them, and then I had a thought.

“Self,” I said, “you have two of these things, and they were cheap, and you’re about to stick them away and go back to using your iPod on the dock with no dock adapter so you’ll be eternally stressed about it until the day the dock actually DOES break and then you’ll be all like ‘well, I knew that was going to happen’ and stuff”.

And then I got out a box knife and – in a remarkable display of dexterity – managed to cut the bottom out of one of the dock adapters without actually injuring myself.

So now my iPod fits in its dock with the case on AND has a bit of extra support where it needs it, and all is good.

But seriously, looking at all the doohickies that I’ve wound up buying as a result of this single iPod purchase, I think that self-replication is already here, and it comes in a tasteful white box.

Oh, and I’m seriously considering 6), which is a self-installable iPod connector kit for our Mazda3 so I can route the signal through the internal stereo and do stuff like change tracks and playlists and volume from the steering wheel, which seems much safer than the alternatives.

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Building a Better Basket

Posted on January 18, 2009 by baudattitude

So if you’ve read the last couple weeks of posts, you know just how proud I am of the Windows Server 2008 box I put together, put all our media on, and then… most importantly… actually backed up.

I’ve been feeling pretty smug, actually, which is what the Greeks used to call hubris, which means that the gods were pretty much guaranteed to take a personal interest in de-hubrising me.

See, I learned something from English 105.  That whole Greeks-and-hubris thing, there, that’s pretty much straight from a lecture on Oedipus.

So the gods, as it were, decided to take a personal interest on Friday night when I was sitting at my PC, which gave me a front-row seat when the power cut out.  The sound of every fan and hard drive in the room suddenly spinning down was, well, it was not a good sound.

Mind you, there was no harm done because I wasn’t actually reading from or writing to the server at the time, but it made me go out and buy a 450W UPS, which actually wasn’t TOO expensive, and then I had the quite enjoyable experience of setting it up, plugging in the server, installing the software, letting the batteries charge a bit, and then pulling the cord right out of the wall.

5 minutes later, the server shut itself down safely and sanely, so all should be well in future.

Got to watch the old hubris, though.

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Japanophilia; reasons why

Posted on January 16, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I occasionally buy a Japanese gadget magazine called Digimono Station.  This would be a terribly, terribly bad idea if I knew of any Japanese electronic retailers that ship to the US, because it’s a couple hundred pages of nothing but incredibly keen electronic toys.

Granted, most of them are cell phones, so they wouldn’t work in this country, but what the hell, I still have gadget lust that can be slaked by pawing photos of shiny things.

This magazine also has a monthly feature called “BijyoMegane”, where they devote 3 or 4 pages to glamour-style photos of a – clothed, mind you – model.  Having a few pin-up-style pages is pretty common in Japanese magazines, actually, it’s sort of like Page 3 girls but a little more tasteful.  The name of the feature may clue you in to the particular spin Digimono Station puts on the topic.

In my defense, I DO buy the magazine for the gadgets.  It wasn’t until I’d purchased a couple of issues that I realized, hey, there’s a pattern here.

Anyway, it’d been a while since I’d bought an issue so I thought I’d see if they had a web site, and they do, and it’s actually really light on articles because, presumably, they want you to go and buy the magazine.  It was a little disappointing because I was hoping to get my gadget fix.

So I’m poking around what little content they DO have and I wind up in the “store” section of their site, with the featured product being gravure-style photobooks of their BijyoMegane features.

bijyomegane

Now, I’m not actually going to drop Y1700 per to OWN these, mind you, it just warms my perverted little heart to know that I could, if I want to, buy books – three volumes, in fact – full of nothing but pictures of cute girls wearing glasses.

Posted in meganekko | 2 Comments

My sickness has a name

Posted on January 15, 2009 by baudattitude

So, over the last few trips to Japan, with occasional orders from cdjapan and amazon.co.jp, I’ve picked up:

Four MOSAIC.WAV albums, one single,

four Kotoko albums, one single, and the Please Teacher! Music DVD,

two Perfume albums, and a Perfume concert DVD,

one Under17 Album,

the Studio Ghibli shorts DVD with two Capsule tracks,

two games, Hachukano and Itadaki Jan-Gari-An-R, because they had theme songs from the aforementioned MOSAIC.WAV,

trance remix albums from Code Speed, Exit Trance,

and an album composed solely of remixes of the Lucky Star opening,

but I didn’t realize that my personal sickness had a name AND a blog devoted to it.

It’s good to know that I’m not the only crazy person out there.

Posted in anime | 2 Comments

It’s Educational. Honest.

Posted on January 14, 2009 by baudattitude

Get out the leg-warmers and crack open a New Coke, Martha, because you need to be in an 80s mind to understand this next line:

If Alex P. Keaton was a) Japanese, b) a little too interested in little girls and c) wrote advancing-block-style puzzle games, he might have written a game like Money Idol Exchanger.

Despite the raised eyebrow you have just given the screen, it’s not actually an adult title.

Like most of these games, your character, of which you have a choice of 8 covering most of the popular stereotypes – with a special nod given to an effeminate lad in a plushie dog outfit, who has added another face to the cast of my worst nightmares – you have your cute girls, your butch girls, your sharply-dressed woman in glasses, your… actually, I stopped enumerating the cast members at that point, your character stands alone at the bottom of the screen trying her – ok, in theory, HIS or her – best to hold back the eventually-unstoppable onslaught of steadily advancing objects.

Of all the run on sentences I’ve ever perpetrated upon unsuspecting readers, that was probably the worst.  I feel like I should be marking up my monitor with a red pen.

I digress.

The objects – which, as mentioned, will eventually and inevitably reach the bottom of the screen, ending your game and casting you into pits of despair – are coins, from whence the game of the game derives and upon which my pathetic attempts to justify it as educational are built.

You have your standard denominations – Y1, Y5, Y10, Y50, Y100, and Y500 – with a couple of wild-card style special coins, and your goal is to stack 5 Y1 coins to make a Y5 coin, 2 Y5 coins to make a Y10, 5 Y10s to make a 50, so on and so forth until you’re combining 2 or more Y500 coins, at which point they disappear.

Doesn’t that sound educational?

Oh, making chains is of course possible and essential to high scoring.  It’s rather like Puyo Puyo in that regard, and of course it has the same thing going on where you place one piece and it kicks off a massive chain that you had no idea was coming and yet you smile smugly as if it were your plan all along.

I haven’t tried the story mode yet, because I’m still practicing the single player mode, but I assume that it will pit me against the other seven characters, possibly against a doppleganger of myself, tie it all together with some sort of tenuous plot, and eventually throw me at a boss character who will humilate me.

For now, I play the 1 player game, which gives you a ranking every time you die.

At my current level of skill, I usually score a “futsuu desu” (“Average”), but I have on one occasion managed a “yoku dekimashita!” (“Well done!”).

I have great hopes for my future money changing career.

Money Idol Exchanger – man, I can’t get over that name – apparently did see a US release under the title of Money Puzzle Exchanger with some localization done.

I’ve only played the Japanese Playstation game, which can be had – if you can get ahold of a Japanese PSN points card – for a mere Y600 from the PSN store.

Can’t recommend it enough.

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