Weekend of August 8th 2014

Special weekend for my girl <3 We have been trying to eat much better for the past couple of years, and so rarely do we take time to just indulge ourselves.  Birthday cakes(and dinners) are one of those indulgences.  This year my girl picked a "Terry's Orange" cake.  A chocolate cake with orange cream icing.  My mother had the great idea to put orange chocolate sixlets on it, and also a Lindt dark chocolate intense orange bar, cut into squares, to decorate the cake.  It was awesome.  We also had great pretzel bun hamburgers and pretzel bun hotdogs.  I hadn't thought of pretzel dogs before, they worked great with slaw.

Watched the Fisher King.  I was aware of a few of Terry Gilliam's works before I saw the Fisher King for the first time.  This time though, I am well versed in Gilliam's works.  Brazil, 12 Monkies, Baron Munchausen, Time Bandits.  I've seen all those and several since I saw Fisher King last, and now I can't imagine how I didn't see "Terry Gilliam" so much in Fisher King before.  In fact, I must've been blind.  Its kind of like finding out some famous was in a movie you've seen several times before they were famous.  Like Once Bitten and Jim Carrey.  Now its like "how did I realize it was him?".  Same with Fisher King and Gilliam's distinct style.  The man hates stable camera shots with a passion.

I start getting a little fuzzy on RPG knowledge after 2001, at least not to the amount of knowledge I have of before that.  Now, there's a lot of remakes and stuff, and I've kept up with the most popular things, but I know I have gaps, so I was mapping these gaps by making a list of the 5 essential RPG's every 2 years since 1990.  I realized how hard it is to fit Suikoden in there.  The best of the series is Suikoden 2 and its one of the best RPG's of all time, seriously up there with Chrono Trigger.  So the parts of Suikoden 2 that involve 1 are not that important to its story, so at first it seems its easy to "skip part 1 for more important RPG's of its time period". But then you come to Suikoden 3, which is one of the few turn based semi-classic JRPG's of its era.  The "punch in the gut" realization of 3 just isn't as profound if you haven't played Suikoden 1.  THEN in case you want Suikoden 4 to make sense, you need to know the start of Suikoden 1 also.  Though that's a bit of a moot point since 4 is rather weak for its era and for RPG's in general.

I am not much of a "flavored" pipe smoker.  I do like aromatics from time to time, but its the smokey english stuff with latakia that I like the best.  Even though aromatics have flavors applied to them, they are not on the same level as "flavored" pipe tobacco.  When I say flavored, i'm referring to vanilla, peach, cherry, apple, and stuff in between and all around.  Usually this stuff is applied with a syrup, and burnt sugar is hell on your tongue, even if you don't realize the damage till the morning after.  Anyway, I for some reason am craving the goopiest of cherry tobacco or the sweetest of vanilla flavored smoke.  I have no idea why.  I at least satisfy a bit of the cherry craving with the beer I had recently, of which I'll review tomorrow.

I compiled a list of JRPG's, Tactical RPG's, Action RPG's and important Western Developed RPG's going by every 2 years as an "era".  Holy crap.  I stopped doing the Japan only releases because it was ridiculous in the 90's how many there were.  When I got to 2005 and the PS2 development slowed... I got sad because we went to "how can I just pick 5 best of each?" to "wow, I hope there are 5 I'd even consider good enough to type".  Its sad enough that we're losing Studio Ghibli, but is the video game industry losing their Japanese masters too?  Are we doomed to be stuck with Team Ninja just as we're doomed to be stuck with Triarch and EA?  I really miss Square in its heyday.  Its not just old fanboyism fueling that, recently ex-Eidos employees have been quoted as saying "where the hell is the management in this company?".  I'm glad American Indie devs are picking up some slack, but there's no reason why Japan shouldn't be making great ones again.

I had a Samuel Smith's Organic Chocolate Stout late Sunday night.  It was pretty good, I can't say I disliked it, but I think I'm just not a stout/porter drinker.  It is true that over the years I've gotten used to the hops bitter and appreciated it much more(especially on a hot day), but the bitter in a stout is due to how the grains are roasted like coffee before its made.  Its a different kind of bitter that I haven't gotten a taste quite for yet.  I still have to be in the mood for a stout to like a stout.