So yeah, I voiced the issues that we had encountered trying to switch from a plastic flatware to a "green" flatware. They're commonly made of potato starch or corn starch, and honestly, have not been well received by our focus groups. The reply comment that I got was along the lines that I hate people and was actively trying to kill them with the neurotoxins released when hot food hits Styrofoam. While I will admit to seriously disliking some people; I think I've avoided actively trying to kill them thus far in life :P

I receive somewhere between 5-10 emails a day in regards to the peanut recall due to potential salmonella contamination.

I have never wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so much in my entire life :P

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First try at Pork Spare Ribs braised in Vietnamese Caramel turned out pretty well. Original recipe snagged from Chubby Hubby's blog, which is a great read if you like professionally shot food pr0n and some really interesting recipes and restaurants.

The ribs were good, not amazing & must make more to serve to other people so they can marvel at my culinary ability, but decent. Nice deep flavor since I took my time with it, I added a dry rub for 3 hours and braised for an additional 2 hours, then let it hang out for a few days in the braising liquid. Unfortunately, the ribs didn't have as much fat as I hoped and I let them hit a high heat too much, so it's not as tender as I would have liked. Still soft and quite edible, but I was expecting more of myself.

Notes for later - I wound up needing a ton more liquid for braising; maybe the ribs were of a different size? I had to double the amount of caramel that I made and then needed to add additional fish sauce and water.

Miscellaneous stuff - I have a really nasty habit of shifting tenses within sentences that I should probably work on.

Question to consider - where's the line between posting about every single little thing in life like a goddamn emo teenager and posting so infrequently that people think you died. Also, I'm reluctant to post about everything since the few people who read this have rather varied interests :P

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 - Grimoire of the Rift came out last week. Opening impressions are very good. There's just something about it that keep drawing me in. Like playing until 4 am on Saturday night after a full day of raiding :P

Graphically, it's very similar to FFTA as the character sprites seem to have been ripped straight from there. They did redo the facial portraits for the generic classes and the new characters of course, but very similar. Spells and abilities got revamped to be shinier though.

Music - meh, I usually play with it off. More of the same from what I've heard.

Storyline - meh, kid falls into book, adventure in Ivalice to get back home, meet strange people and have whacky hijinx, etc.

Job Classes - They copied the job system from FFTA where you need to learn x number of abilities to gain access to another class, with some classes being unlocked by quests. As you learn abilities from gear, this flows into the next part.

Items - instead of getting access to better gear as you progress through the game and limiting classes that why, they revamped it with a loot and bazaar system. As you defeat enemies or finish quests, you get loot. When you get to a town, you offer up specific loot items at the bazaar menu to open up new items for sale. The game guides you with little rankings and highlights, so it is not like you have to throw three random items in and see what comes out, but it's more exciting than just going, "Well, I need 4 thief abilities to get ninja, but the shops only have 2 daggers with thief abilities, I guess I'm screwed until I get to the next town."

Auction House - this is a fun minigame that has some value to the main part without being essential as far as I can tell, which makes it a winner in my book. You get issued a number of tokens with different values, and bid for control of areas and items later according to gamefaqs. Each area will have a certain number of times that you can put a token in, and whoever has bid the most tokens wins. What makes this fun is that it is run in real time and the other bidders have tells that can help you decide what to bid. So you get a few seconds to look at your stack, everyone else's stacks, do some mental math, calculate how much you want to bid and whether you can be in the lead at the end. It's a lot of fun ^_^

In terms of material value, having control of an area allows you to get tribute and cheaper prices on gear and quests, so it's valuable but never necessary. Apparently, having control of all areas available at an auction house allows you to get a title and switch the auction house to items so you can get things far earlier than you should or something.

Beyond that, gameplay is much what you would expect from a strategy game, you move on tiled battlefields, kill stuff, loot corpses and level up. Apparently some things were nerfed for balance, but I haven't seen that yet. My biggest problem was doing quests wrong. I was dispatching, failing, and moving on. Apparently, most of these can be done via battle as well, so I was missing out on exp a lot. I'm looking at 5+ level differences right now :\

One change that is slightly worrying is the MP change. Instead of starting with a full MP bar, you regain 10 mp on a character when their turn comes up. On one hand, it allows casters to hit their first level spell pretty much every single turn so they're never reduced to hitting things with staves. On the other hand, buffing before bosses can be difficult and battles tend to go very long because you can almost always heal. The other team has to put out more damage than you heal or it never goes anywhere. I whittled down a level 22 mob with a level 12 group doing 10-15 damage at a time because he could not do more damage than my 2 casters could heal out.

Again, still fun and I'm looking forward to more. Still got that massive stack of RPGs to finish after all ^_^

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Yeah, so it only took me a month to stop writing in this thing. Lazy, apathetic, whatever.

Still playing WoW, restarted account on CoX, watching anime, working, more of the same.

Things to do this summer:

Catch up on a little bit of anime and burn off the stuff that I've got sitting on the hard drive. I've been pretty decent about keeping up with recent anime and Kamen Rider, but I've got some backlog to work on. Toki no Kakeru Shoujo is the big one, and I'd kinda like to watch Toushokan Sensou when it finishes up. Soul Eater is pretty damn awesome if anyone is looking for some lushly animated shounen stuff. The burning of stuff can wait if its been licensed. I guess I should check on that <_<

Terenas mage to 70. Shouldn't be too hard but takes some time.

City of Villains character to 50, wtb more character slots and Soldier of Arachnos options. Those Crab Spider backpacks are pretty badass :P

Work on the PS2 stack of RPGs. Damn thing keeps multiplying. Current list for posterity and/or laughter for being way the hell behind:

Phantom Brave
Grim Grimore
Ar Tonelico
FFXII
Kingdom Hearts
Kingdom Hearts II
Oden Sphere
Valkyrie Profile II

Yes, I'm a terrible person T.T

Beyond that - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is sometime this summer and then Warhammer Online in the fall.

Randomness - DK over at fanfiction.net has written some interesting stuff in Final Fantasy universes. I can only assume that aspects have been inspired by other horror writers (greatest fear is what is within, madness caused by things we are not meant to know), but I somehow find it more palletable and disturbing when set in an universe that I'm familiar with. "Dismissed" and "That Which Devours" are probably my favorites from been posted. Of course, reading them puts me in a dark mood that I proceed to wash out of my brain with some light fluffy stuff, but anything that can cause emotional swings is art of some kind or another and I really shouldn't ask for anything more :P

Random thought that got stuck in my head, spawned by an errant comment from my boss -

Nothing ever makes me feel quite as poor as going to bed with an empty stomach.

So yeah, need to get this out or I'm not going to be able to concentrate at work.

Last night, a manager managed to blow up a butane tank inside on of the dining halls during a theme night. Middle of dinner rush, massive fireball , people got hurt and were sent to the hospital. Needless to say, management is not having a good day today.

I was seriously thinking about going there for dinner because of the theme night, but I decided not to because I had a raid last night. "But for the grace of God" and all that.

So I think I'll hyperventilate for a few more minutes and then get back to work.

So yeah, if you've been reading video game blogs or websites or Penny Arcade lately, you've probably seen the article proclaiming Mass Effect as a terrible game marketed towards young children that allows them to customize a sex scenario between a custom avatar and an alien. That's a pretty silly sentence in and of itself :p

Who knows if any actual research was done, but Penny Arcade ripped him apart and gave him a comic based on his stupidity.

Then today, Lum the Mad links a clip from Fox News where they basically ripped off the guys article, errors and all, proclaiming it as the gospel truth. You've got the enraged researcher, the video game expert from Spike TV, of all places, trying to calm people down, and a whole panel of clueless people saying the obvious in tremendously stupid ways. Parents need to pay attention to their kids and parent! Ratings should be enforced! And then this gem:

"Who can argue, possibly, that, y'know, Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas is a good thing? It's not. It's just not good. And I'm not going to let Mass Effect into my house ..."

EA then fires off a letter to Fox News detailing the many ways that they were wrong.

Nothing new or insightful from me, but the quote just cracks me up.