Hmmm... cornmeal and no flour... I'm so hungry

There's a big old pot of beans on the stove. Again. Really, you can only eat so many beans before the thoughts of robbing the grocery store set in.

I started looking through the paltry pantry, which is at its bitter end, at the moment. Well, there's corn meal, I thought. I wonder how awful it would be just fried up in a pan, the way I make pan-fried bread. I had no idea.

So I threw it together in a bowl, added salt, pepper, thyme and water. I spread it out in the frying pan in pretty hot oil. After a few minutes, I used the spatula to slide under the "patty" to pry it up and keep it from sticking too bad. So far, so good.

When it came time to flip it however, the trouble started. It would not hold together. I had actually separated the burnt on crust from the softer inside, with the spatula earlier. It just kinda fell apart.

I almost gave up at that point, but I decided to take a hard wooden spatula and scrape the stuck on parts up. I then just started turning it frequently and scraping stuck pieces up again and again. After a bit it was pretty fairly "cooked" with little crunchy burnt on parts and softer inside parts. I decided to give it a go, before I tossed it.

Hmmm.... tastes just like cornbread stuffing. Actually not bad, Kenzie and Shana agreed. So, I poured beans on top of it, and dinner is served.

Damn Diablo 2!

Yes! I am playing Diablo 2 again! Dammit!

It is such stupid fun, I find myself getting re-addicted to it every year or two. It is absolutely the appeal of skill-tree building and random magic item finding that always hooks me. And then... I do nothing else. I spend every waking hour killing Baal and Mephisto.

And Cows. Yes! Hordes of cows. Moo! MOOOOO! Moo? I know my wife hates that sound with a passion. When I play other games, she's like, "Well at least there's no damn mooing." Bah, what does she know? She doesn't understand the mindless wanton slaying of multitudes of thousands of bipedal bovines! How could she?

But there it is. I'm lost again. This is why some of you haven't seen me in a while. And... oh god, Diablo 3 is coming!

"Drag Rat" Sketch

Borderlands

It seems like very few of the games I get nowadays do much for me. I don't know what's missing. It might be me, I'll admit. I don't really care much for most first person shooter style games. The content bores me in most of these games, with few exceptions.

Borderlands is one of these exceptions. I just got it yesterday. Then I played it for the next 6 hours. Wow!

One of the things that appeals to me the most about it is that it seems to be a Firefly/Serenity type setting. You're on a planet, one of those dust-bowl type worlds that they are frequently seen stopping on in the Firefly setting.

The artwork is fantastic. A blend of comic book and cartoon, tending closer to the graphic novel.

I was constantly blown away by how smooth it was. I was running it on a dual-core 1.86 mhz machine with only 2gb of ram (so... NOT a beast), and it ran like a bat out of hell.

The characters each have their own skill trees, and I was playing the girl character who can step into another dimension where she goes really fast, and can move around the battlefield quickly. When she is in that other form she can get skill builds that affect the real world, and do damage when she comes back to the real worlds, etc. etc. 

Anyhoo, a big thumbs up, Borderlands is lovely, get some on you.

Magic Mushroom Coffeehouse progresses

My partners and I met at the IHOP over coffee to finalize some details about the coffeehouse.  We are at the "going to the banks" stage now, and I think things are about to accelerate.

Magic Mushrooms, and Flickr

Business plan is basically finished, other than some formatting (by Shana the grammar format nazi).

I also just started a new portfolio of creations at Flickr.

Tim Minchin is one of my heroes and pretty much sums up how I think here:

If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.