Weekend of August 22nd, 2014

Weekend of August 22nd, 2014

I was very skeptical about about this "spaghetti squash" thing.  You see, I hate pumpkin.  Anything that smells like a candle heating a rotting pumpkin is going to churn my stomach.  This also means that I can't stand butternut squash.  Still, looking for good, new foods, I decided to try my hand at one.  It started out... bad, because you have to open it up and scoop out the seeds, which look and smell a lot like the "guts" in a pumpkin.  After it was roasted and scooped into a bowl though, the pumpkin smell was gone and what was left was delicious.  Its a slightly sweet, but still nutty flavor, and it does surprisingly well with savory ingredients.  In this case I used butter, black pepper, and Parmesan cheese, which was really really good.  I could see this stuff doing great with saffron or Rice-a-roni seasonings.

I was very disappointed in what I finally saw presented as "Thornwatch" from Penny Arcade.  I understand that the artist's first RPG was Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed, and I know he's not very happy about the change to 5th(you're not a D&D fan until you are pissed over an edition change), but I was hoping his concept would somehow end up something I would care to play.  His concept was that your character was a deck of cards, built and played like that of a Magic: The Gathering deck, and that you would play a role playing game using card draws to decide how you fight and do things.  Sounds great.  Well unfortunately the main people helping him with his game are hardcore tactical wargaming people, people that see RPG's as "winning or losing" and so combine that with his love of 4th D&D, and you basically get a board game, complete with strict "square by square" movement, and preset challenges and obstacles.  I suddenly don't care that it has taken him almost half a decade to really get down and work on it.  The lore is certainly great though, and the artwork is good too, I may get the main game just so I can play in the world with a different system.  Maybe, just maybe I can get past my disappointment and find the game itself enjoyable... but if I want a collectible card game adventure I have Lord of the Rings and Pathfinder Card Adventures to choose from already.

I love the Windows Phone UI.  I have an android phone and I wouldn't trade the Android app store for anything, but I love the user interface of Windows Phone, so I have a UI skin.  The problems with Windows Phone is the lack of apps made for it, because no one buys apps, so no one makes them.  Well, some genius at Microsoft decided that the amount of apps they can advertise is more important than the actual apps.  To drive up those numbers they can advertise, they now give anyone $100 for any app, whatsoever, that is put in the Microsoft store, up to $2000.  This has caused there to be a glut of apps with misleading names that are literally links to other apps or websites.  You download Swiftkey for Windows Phone, and all the app is, is a link to Swiftkey's website.  Someone made $100 dollars doing that.  There are thousands of wallpapers that auto-install to the background that cost $1.  So for a few hours of work, you make $2000, unmoderated, from Microsoft just so they can inflate their numbers.  Microsoft has yet to show any initiative to clear apps from their store that are scams, people track this stuff, if 20,000 apps were removed from the store because they are $1 wallpapers or link-scams, people would know.  That would deflate their app number advertisement campaigns though.