A different kind of salad

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Needing a break from Resident Evil Requiem before going another round with the Moaning Zombie and her horde 😅, I decided to try a different idea for lunch.

First, I roasted some zucchini and carrots and then got started on some prep for quarterly cleaning while those cooked. Just oblique cuts and tossed in olive oil and my choice of seasonings (Italian / garlic / salt / pepper) and give a quick roast until the edges are cripsy-licious and much of the moisture is gone.

Waiting for those to be done, I had quarter cherry tomatoes and sliced+shredded onion. This worked out to being about 1/2 the mixture with the zucchini and carrots each being another 1/4. Tossed with some finely sliced almonds, and a bit of sunflower / dried cranberries salad topper. Then layered a healthy doze of feta cheese on top after plating out and a dollop of hummus.

For me, this is a rather different type of meal–it’s simply not the style of cooking I grew up with. That said, I found it very delicious. I’m also pretty sure that it would be easily adapted, such as swapping nuts/seeds for grilled chicken as the fatty protein or adding chickpeas for enough extra protein/carbs to turn it into a dinner helping.

Plus as a bonus, since I had a pair of good-sized zucchini and a small bag of carrots, this used those up while they’re still good. While also providing leftovers for prepping future meals :).

Seriously, don’t tell me the odds

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This Monday, I found myself both cursing and laughing at the circumstances. Walking from my car into work, my car keys slipped out of my gloved hands (grippy palms, yeah, sure 😜) and of course…went right down the parking lot storm drain.

Fortunately, someone else was arriving at work at the same time and we were able to fish it out. But I couldn’t help but wonder: what’s the probability that I would drop it right there, at just the right time, at just the right angle. I consider it a little bit of god’s blessing that it worked out the way it did. Here’s to hoping that good things are on the horizon….

For bonus points, as a kid, I always had a great discomfort about walking over storm drains. That little-itty-bitty fear in the back of one’s head that surely, someday the thing would collapse and nearly fall in or something like that. Well, I do have to admit, I’d rather the keys problem than that one.

AI Meets Gundam Wing

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On one hand, I think that YouTube has become annoyingly full of AI generated randomness in recent years. On the other hand, as a Gundam Wing fan: I can’t help but approve of this use.

Also the end is kind of priceless in its own way. Give or take how many of us have felt like slapping Heero.

Metal Gear Solid: MC Vol.2!

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Hoozah! Sounds like this one collects all the games that I never got to play.

MGS4: Guns of the Patriots was a PlayStation 3 release, making sure that I never got more than the story synopsis–so I’m definitely glad to see it hit PC. MGS: Peace Walker by contrast was a PlayStation Portable release, which is another device that I never had. Ghost Babel being released for the GameBoy Color makes it one of the few gaming portable devices I actually own, but I never came across the game back when GameBoy games were readily available.

Needless to say, short of Metal Gear Solid getting the same treatment that Snake Eater got with Delta, this is some of the best Metal Gear news I’ve had in a while :).

Simple plans and simpler stories

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Tonight’s plan was well executed. In the lead up to dinner time, I opted to start ripping my Blu-ray of My Neighbor Totoro, and then go about making some salmon, sprouts, and corn in the oven. An upside of the recent experiments with Apple Video Toolbox and the discovery that VLC for iOS-based things is the real pickle, the transcodes were largely done before the food was even in the oven.

This time, I opted for a subtle shift in storing such films. Typically, I’ve opted to keep both the English and Japanese tracks, so that I can easily switch from subtitled to dubbed when desired. Sometimes, it’s convenient, but mostly I want the defaults to be Japanese audio with English captions. Yet, this time, I tried something new. Rather than a single combined file: I opted for two separate versions. One that’s marked as subtitles, carrying only the Japanese audio and its associated English subtitles, and another that’s marked dub, carrying only the English audio and its own subtitles. That’s a twist that Totoro lends itself well to, since the Blu-ray has “angle 1” and “angle 2” tracks; each uses different segment mappings for the opening and closing credits. A fairly natural split for my little experiment.

It was also good to relax and enjoy the movie. Been quite a while since I’ve had the pleasure. My Neighbor Totoro, I think is a great film, but it’s an example of what I’d call a movie without a significant plot. Slice of Life is the only terse description that I can think of, and that is something you really don’t see a lot in western cinema. Like really, if someone tried to make a story like Totoro in Hollywood, I imagine you’d probably get laughed out of the room or forced to turn it into some kind of grand spectacle before any studio would touch the project.

Yet, I rather think we should have more stories like it. There is no real antagonist, and fairly little danger or adventure in the classical sense. Rather it’s full of quite ordinary things, a Cat Bus aside. Somehow, it manages to be such a fun and playful story. Despite its quite humble story. Because, who wouldn’t want a Totoro in the neighborhood? 😆

A metric ruler ftw

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One of those long term, never found wants, sometimes deserves a “Fuck, yes!” when you come across it. In my case, one of those is a ruler marked in centimeters and millimeters.

Rulers are a useful thing, whether for measuring small distances, drawing a straight line, or well, let’s just be honest: everyone whose ever had a yardstick has used it to retrieve something fallen in a tight space 😆. I have relatively few left, resulting in typically breaking out the tape measures; the youngest of which is my age. Thus, it’s in inches only. But there’s one thing that really irks me about tape measures: dealing with 1/16th inch as a unit size. It’s pretty great if you’re building a house, but not so much for random use. At least, not for me.

Enter the Midori multi-ruler! Given centimeters and a lack of ambiguity, it works well for my purposes, and I can appreciate that the first section includes half-millimeter marks. It’s probably the first new ruler I’ve had since grade school. The folding mechanism having 15° stepping would also have been great back when I lived in an age of paper.

Science fiction often leads to encountering a greater use of metric measures, which led me to learning the metric system as a child, because it was a bother to convert everything into our customary units. I’ve generally used metric units for distance since circa The Phantom Menace, mostly reserving inches and feet for when they are actually convenient. Which means, they’re either the relevant units or just unwieldy at that scale. E.g., a foot may be more convenient than a third of a meter (0.3m), or its irrational in yards (0.33y); you may or may not care about the difference between 30.48 (12″), 30 (11.81″), and 30.5 cm (between 12.00079″). By the time we reach the point where 1/16th inch or 0.0625″ is a unit size, we’re crossing the point to where I’d prefer millimeters as a unit of measure. I’m also not a fan of converting between fractions and decimal, which is mostly just noise.

Thus, my random splurge is a metric ruler. I am literally the only one in my entire family who has ever cared about the metric system, mostly owing to being a sci-fi nerd as a kid. Americans using metric units outside of science and engineering contexts is still rare, even decades later. But old habits die hard, and I’ve wanted one of years. Sometimes, you have to treat yourself with random shit :).

The end of mass market paperbacks

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Growing up in a world that was partly divided by hardcovers and paperbacks, I find the news that the format’s largest distributor sounded the death knell surprising. Perhaps it’s not a format many avid readers are fond of, but it’s one I’ll always remember kindly.

When I was younger, the majority of my books were the pocket sized mass market variety. Cheaply made, but that was the point. As a teenager, I personally preferred the more portable size, since these lent itself to reading on the go and shelf space was always at a strong premium. But I remember it most being driven by cost: hardcovers cost far more, and were less often available at the used bookstore. If not for novels eventually being released in the mass market paperback format, I would likely have starved for books as a kid! Exchanging books at the used book store periodically, was also a far more realistic endeavor than getting to the library, and “brand new” was rarer for us in those days.

The majority of my hardcovers were Star Wars novels and notable novels that were hand-me-downs, like my mom’s copy of the original Thrawn Trilogy or my brother’s copy of Jurassic Park. The rest were probably acquired on fire sale. Mass markets dominated my shelves for years. I don’t think I actually owned a trade paperback until The Fellowship of the Ring was headed for the big screen about 2001. At roughly the same time, the Lord of the Rings was re-released with three volumes, and being a big deal of course got the better format. My mom paid a whopping $12 for the first volume judging by the back cover, probably as a birthday or Christmas present more than a splurge. It’s been quite a while since then.

Next time that I can really remember having a trade paperback was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which I can remember specifically as a Christmas present. That was the year I was sick for Christmas, actually. I can’t remember if that was in time for the film’s 2001 release or not, but it’s from the 1999 printing. Later novels in the series actually made up the majority of my trade paperbacks well into adult hood. I can still remember receiving the Half Blood Prince in hardcover as a gift while I was waiting for the paperback release to become available, and having somewhat mixed feelings. On one hand, gratitude and the glee of continued reading; on the other, feeling like they must’ve thought us poor and that now my bookshelf wouldn’t match. Most other trade paperbacks on my shelves are either relatively new purchases over the past 10-15 years, or something over than a novel.

As a reader, I’ve never really been a fan of hardcovers so much as I recognize the necessity of them. I think most people inclined towards “physical” books today, aren’t likely to be cost bound. If cost is the predominant factor, or like me, you’ve spent your life in that situation of “Damn, if only I could knock down walls and build a library….” then digital is likely the focus.

Anyone in the same reading situation that I was as a teenager would probably be consuming their content via e-books due to the cost, or more likely OverDrive through their public library–I know I would’ve gone nuts if that was a thing when I was a youngster. That’s also a demographic that mass markets were great for IMHO, those who would simply have far fewer books if you had to pay a premium for a hardcover release. Yeah, it was enough that waiting until the paperbacks filtered into our local stores was worth it.

As an adult, I’ve rather come to threat e-books as the cookie problem. Something you just cough up for if you have any pocket money. My pastor when I was a teenager, often made quips about his penny pinching German heritage. He had a great sense of humor. But he also figured out that a major difference between him and his wife doing the grocery shopping was the fact that a random thing of cookies was going to end up in that cart, if he was the one executing their grocery list. You know, it’s like magic? Yeah. I basically refuse to consider how much money I’ve spent on books as an adult. It dwarves my access to books when I was growing up.

I’ve been fortunate that for most of my life, books haven’t been a luxury. But I will always have a soft spot for paperbacks. They might be crappily made, they might fall apart given heavy reading or a few decades on a shelf, but they formed the foundation of my teenage reading. For that, I can only smile fondly.

Passing thoughts and sharper blades

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Breaking out the magnifying glass so I can see what I was doing, not sure if this proves that I am in-fact a pain-in-the-ass, or just evidence the guide on my sharpener isn’t suitable for pocket knives. Perhaps those aren’t mutually exclusive 😆.

On the flip side, my most heavily used pocket knife is now the sharpest it’s been in years. So, at least that’s progress. Given my plan to regularly rotate blades between my EDC and my household utility knife, I’ll probably have to relearn by the time it next needs more than a little honing. But I’m still going to call this progress.

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While it’s particularly apt from the prospect of making a TV series, I think Mike’s description of the right button is a beautiful explanation of LCARS. The configurability and software defined nature is kind of the in-universe approach to 24th century man-machine interfaces, and it’s darn practical when combined with how the Okudagrams just “Flow” versus how abstractly buttons are labelled.

On one hand, I think many times people attempt to make an interface derived from LCARS, so rarely does it come out that well. Folks tend to try and capture the style rather than the intent, or any real practicality of using the thing. But on the other hand, I think that Mike and Denise’s effort to make panel designs flow like it could actually do that, often came through.

Also, not going to lie–hearing that they were involved in For All Mankind as technical advisors, really makes me want to go watch that… lol