Weekend of June 27th

Last week this blog surpassed my old Minecraft blog as the most posts of any of my blogs.  It did that pretty quickly, I actually kept my Minecraft blog for a couple of years.  This is also most consistent I've done a blog, generally I would only post when I had something to say.  It started when I was doing my Rocksmith challenge and I just kind of kept the frequent posting and keeping the challenge of finding new things to talk about each time.  Page views are nothing compared to my Minecraft blog, though it hasn't seen traffic since the whole Minecraft boom started fading, and also I stopped keeping a game journal.  Still, this isn't about pageviews, and generally I do this one as a challenge to myself to do at least 3 things I can blog about each day.  Anyway, I've done pretty good so far and so I'm going to keep it going.  One day I might even blog interesting stuff.  I'm crossing my fingers.

Watched a documentary called "Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey, and its about how Arnel Pineda was discovered through Youtube and became the lead singer of Journey.  It is a pretty good documentary, though  the crowd were coached in a few scenes.  Aside from that, it shows that Arnel really is pretty amazing.  He's this guy that can hardly speak english, and yet he can sing these songs and sound like they did on the albums, which even Steve Perry(the original singer) had/has trouble doing.  The most amazing thing is that Arnel was in a cover band and he could mimic SO MANY distinct voices.  They show him singing Bon Jovi, which is pretty impressive, but then he starts singing some throaty "never mistake him for anyone else" Steven Tyler Aerosmith that I would have thought no one would be able to do.  The unfortunate reality is that even though the band is making good money on their tours with him, their original albums with Arnel are not.  Still, the tours are pulling in over $30 million a year, so it is a really awesome success story.  A side note: it is HILARIOUS to see the pre-Steve Perry Journey footage of all the white guys with afros.

If you grew up in the 1990's, you know there was a large amount of Mortal Kombat alternatives.  They were all violent and none of them really had better combat than Mortal Kombat(which is saying something), but they all had their gimmicks... and they all looked better in magazines than in actual site.  One of the most successful was Primal Rage.  It was a game built around using claymation of dinosaurs and prehistoric inspired beasts to make a fighting game with lots of blood, guts, et all.  The little known fact is that there were a few test arcade machines made for part 2.  One of maybe 2 or 3 has surfaced at an arcade in the US that you can go to and play.  The game kind of looks horrible, which is I'm sure why it was canned.  In it, instead of dinosaurs you play humanoid characters that can morph into the dinosaur characters for attacks and finishing moves.  I was a video game magazine junky and a fighting game fanatic in the years this was the top thing(equal to the FPS frenzy we had in the Xbox360 era), so seeing this is actually kind of cool.  You can take a look at it: here

One of the things that I dislike about cooking healthier is substitution.  I don't like the word substitution, it brings to mind a compromise that no one is happy with.  I am notorious for wanting what I want and changing it means I'm having something else.  This is why I have enjoyed experimenting with cauliflower.  Look, I'm not going to tell you that cauliflower will fit right in with every rice dish and that you should do it because its healthier or some such like that.  I love rice.  If treated with respect, it is absolutely a health food.   But these experiments my girl has been doing with cauliflower as rice has lead to some really good dishes.  First she did stir fried rice, but with cauliflower.  Over the weekend she made spanish rice to go with shredded chicken done in a mexican style.  Now I want her to try dirty rice with sausage.  Again, I'm not saying "they this is a good rice substitute".  I'm saying that asian fried cauliflower, and Spanish style cauliflower are damn good food.  Consider chopping cauliflower down into rice sized bits and experimenting.

I'm close to finishing out my current media block and also I'm done with my last music journey, so I'm looking at some options.  My music choice I will leave for a later post, but my movie/show list is starting to get some potential choices.  I am thinking about watching all the James Bond movies as I've seen maybe 75% of them but only remember about half(the Connery, Brosnin, and Daniel Craig ones).  I am also thinking I might go through all the Godzilla movies, which I've tried before... but when you get to bad Godzilla movies... they are REAL bad.  Another set of posts I have thought about doing is that of pricing out and listing a home arcade.  I have this strange need to occupy my mind with research, organizing and presenting data; its one of the reasons I do the top posts in my daily blog.  This leads me to pricing stuff I'll never buy or own, but I have fun doing it and it serves a need of mine.  The games are kind of the easy part for a home arcade, the hard part is getting the look and feel of what is an "arcade" to you.