Vampire, Flower War and Pickled Mushrooms
On Saturday evening we played in another Vampire: the Eternal Struggle tournament at Outer Limits. I won with my Malkavian sneak-bleed deck. (I ween, I ween, I am teh weener!) If you haven’t heard of this game before (if you know me, what are the odds), it is a collectible card game, like Magic: the Gathering, except that unlike Magic it never became wildly popular, so there are fewer expansions and all the cards still stick to a sensible metaphor, and you can play with mostly cheap cards from ten years ago and not suck. I really like it, and I don’t really like any other CCGs. So if you see someone flogging off an old deck in your local classifieds, go for it! It’s really fun.
On Saturday evening we played in the first session of Tim & David’s Flower War campaign LARP. I had some complaints, but I’ve been talking to people and planning revisions of my character, and I reserve further judgement until the second session. It’s only a baby campaign now.
And finally, pickled mushrooms! This is my first effort at pickling something by myself. A few days from now I’ll tell you if they were nice or horrible.
Pickled Mushrooms I
Equipment:
500ml glass jar with lid
Pot
Ingredients:
500g medium-sized brown mushrooms
3 semi-dried long chillies which started off green and went red and yellow
1 medium red onion – thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic – halved
2 bay leaves
pickling spice mixture (peppercorns, coriander, cloves, bay leaves, cinnamon, nutmeg, mustard seed, ginger)
Pickling liquid:
1/2 water, 1/2 vinegar (white wine, red wine and balsamic mixed, all 6%), some salt, some sugar; approx. 300ml
Procedure:
I briefly boiled the mushrooms in salted water until they had just gone soft, and layered them in the jar with the onion, garlic and chillies, and added the pickling spice and bay leaves. Then I brought the pickling liquid to the boil and poured it into the jar. Then I put the lid on and turned the jar upside down (this creates a vacuum seal as the jar cools). Later I put it in the fridge.
Review: Constantine
I went to see this movie without knowing anything about the comic book canon other than that the main character was supposed to be blond and British, so I won't be ranting for two pages about how it was a terrible adaptation. After I've read the comics, I'll watch it again, and then we'll see.
I expected the movie to be mediocre, and was worried that it would suck beyond belief (after Van Helsing I have developed serious trust issues with regards to going to see random shiny genre movies at the cinema. I'm scarred for life, man). I was pleasantly surprised. I greatly enjoyed it, in spite of Keanu's numerous jarring “uh, I've never seen this line before in my life and I've forgotten how to act” moments. He was OK for the most part, the one facial expression wasn't that bad since he's supposed to be playing a stoic character, and at least he's nice to look at.
Bits of the plot seemed to have been lifted wholesale from other movies about conflicts between supernatural factions in Christian mythology (*cough*theprophecy*cough*), but it all kind of hung together and made reasonable sense. I didn't notice any holes big enough to drive a truck through.
It has very good performances from supporting cast members, most notably Tilda Swinton (Gabriel) and Peter Stormare (Lucifer). The special effects were effective – no stupid CGI overusage, and the monsters were cool.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty good effort at making a movie based on dark, supernatural comic book themes, and I wouldn't mind re-watching it – if only because nobody told me about the extra scene after the credits.
On the sleeping habits of cats
Ever since Simon got his new desktop computer, there is no longer room on Simon's desk for Mercedes to sleep. This has not deterred Mercedes from trying to sleep on Simon's desk anyway, while Simon is trying to use the computer.
She was sprawled very comfortably over the numeric keypad, the mouse and Simon's hand just now, but she bit him and stalked off in a huff after he had the audacity to move.
Cobweb is sleeping on the table on a pile of freshly dried washing.
Noether is sleeping on the couch, like a normal cat.
Wiki changes
I have changed the wiki skin. Please let me know if anything looks horrible on IE so that I can make fun of you for using IE and tell you to get a proper browser try to fix it.
I also rearranged the structure of the Sigil pages a bit and added licence information. Coming soon: actual setting writeups.
Possibly TMI
Urgh. Today was not a nice day. I got food poisoning from something, and left work early in order to throw up, repeatedly and spectacularly, and crawl into bed.
Apart from Simon, who was mildly ill this morning, nobody else I have fed recently seems to be affected, so it seems that I haven't horribly poisoned everyone, which would have been terribly embarrassing.
On the bright side, I got chocolate for my nameday from my mom and dad (namedays are a really brilliant Polish custom. It's like having an extra birthday every year). I hope I'll be able to eat it soon.
The Weekend of Little Sleep
After getting up horribly early on Friday to take care of some house-buying-related bureaucracy, we got up horribly early on Saturday to go to the Hillstar Traffic Department with Philip and Jo. I applied for a learner's test, P and J applied for driver's tests, and Simon got his licence renewed because he had nothing better to do while we were there.
So I have finally begun the long and tedious process of learning how to operate a motor vehicle.
I had little opportunity to sleep when we got home, because the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which I had ordered had arrived at Outer Limits, and of course I had to read it straight away.
In the evening we visited Neil in Strand, and played Hacker.
And now I really need to work on my Flower War character…
Argharghargh…
More teething troubles with the blog. Hopefully the file permissions are now *just right* for it to be able to create all the new directories it wants; I will have to check tomorrow.
If you've tried to post something and had an error pop up, this is why. It should be fine now.
Things
Yesterday I went to the Community Chest Carnival with Simon, and pillaged the book stall shortly before anyone else got there (ahaha).
Notable finds: Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, Nightside the Long Sun, Sister Alice
Possibly Duplicates, But I Still Haven't Checked Yet: Dandelion Wine, The Forever War
On Monday, we went to look at a flat in Bellville (South of the N1! Oh, no!). It was super-dodgy, in almost every possible way. To erase the mental scarring, we stopped at Canal Walk on the way back. We had calamari for dinner, and then went to the Paperweight, where I tripped and accidentally bought five Starbursts, the official Hellboy movie magazine, a rather dodgy Star Trek graphic novel and a less dodgy Batman graphic novel. I have finally had time to read everything.
I keep reading about really cool shows that were never aired here. I am bitter. I will conspire to acquire and watch all of them at some point.
We are possibly going to buy a house with Lucas (Like Bognor! Except without the renting!), on the grounds that one large house usually costs less than two houses half its size. We'll see how our current attempt works out. It has been a very educational experience so far.
I am supposed to be researching various Scandinavian resources and making my character for the Flower War campaign LARP right now. Bad me. Get back to work.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
