Food + Redditt = Delicious Hilarity

I love to cook. I also love Reddit. Fortuitous then that there are subreddits allowing me to meld these two wondrous joys into a single delicious entity, not unlike chicken and whatever chemical compound Panda Express has passed off as ‘orange sauce.’

One of the relatively newer subreddits, FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUD, attempts to combine the humor of rage comics with recipes, usually to hilarious effect.  I threw my hat into the ring ages ago with one of my favorite recipes, Ginger Ale Marinated Pork Loin (this is the actual recipe, not the comic), but then never followed up even though I had a great time making the comic.

I'm finally getting around to rectifying that oversight with a peach cake recipe, but in the interim I thought I'd share my original creation, as I'm very proud of it.  Due to the sheer size of the image (475x5920) I'm just going to link to it, instead of imbedding it into the blog. 

Daily Haiku - September 12, 2012

Board games can be fun,
But frustration not so much;
Let’s play Find the Zen.

Daily Haiku - September 11, 2012

Curse you Louisville

The bane of bar trivia

You’re not that big, town.

Long term time travel--worth the trip?

I admit my opinion may be limited by my practical nature, but it seems to me that going way back in time (i.e. years or more) would have a LOT of downside.  Say I want to go back to before Apple stock went crazy so I could cash in and become a millionaire today.

For the sake of this argument, let’s go with January 2003, where the stock was still selling for about $7.50 per share (roughly 1.14% of the current value of $660) and that you had enough money back then to make it worthwhile (in reality I would have only been able to buy about 300 shares, netting me a meager $195,750 pre-taxes).  Now I just have to wait a decade and I’ll be set for life, assuming I don’t cash out earlier.  What could possible be wrong with this scenario?  I’m glad you asked.

Having now set things in motion you merely have to relive the next ten years of your life.  Now this is great if those ten years sucked and you’re happy with anything or everything potentially changing, but if life was pretty sweet you’ve got some problems.  Namely, you’re burdened with ten years of memories that never happened.  Trying to duplicate those years to properly set up and maintain all the relationships and experiences that you accrued over that time seems really difficult.

Imagine accidently referencing some shared experience or some personal piece of information someone hadn’t told you yet.  Say you’re talking to your future girlfriend or wife, and mention some little known fact from her childhood that she told you years into the relationship.  It would be really creepy, right?  Maybe it would freak her out and ruin your chance to have that relationship.  Now it’s always possible you could excuse it as being confused or a strange coincidence.  But what if it kept happening on and off over the months or years?  That could damage or completely ruin friendships that you had come to cherish.  Just not worth the risk to me.

Short term time travel has a much smaller risk-reward ratio though and I would totally go back a few months in time (even more than once) in an effort to tweak my choices for maximum awesomeness and/or moderate financial gain. 

So in closing, if anyone has a time machine I can borrow I really appreciated it.  

Daily Haiku - September 10, 2012

Thinning out the herd
Digital files fall in droves
Sub-par memories.

A Brilliant New Idea!

Many months ago, one of my friends passed me along this link:

http://www.lambentstew.com/webblog/miniproject/steamanalysis

Basically, somebody wrote a script to analyze your Steam account information and throw lots of interesting stats in your face.  For example, I’ve logged 494.8 hours in Sid Meier’s Civilization 5; my total time played while logged into Steam is 1572.50 hours; and I’ve never played 37.7% of the games I own through Steam (43).

Now, those last two factoids are actually wildly incorrect.  According to Steam I’ve never played any of the Half-Life series, nor have I played any of the first six Grand Theft Auto Games.  In some cases this is patently false, while others are half-truths (there are a number of games I originally bought and played outside of Steam, and then later repurchased as a digital copy through Steam for convenience).  There’s also the matter of DLC (downloadable content), which merely adds to a preexisting game rather than being something completely new.

Having said that, it was surprising to manually go through and see how many games I haven’t played, or have played for less than an hour (32 in all).  To rectify this embarrassing situation, I plan on spending one hour on each of these games and then sharing my thoughts with you.  I shall call it, “One (Hour) At a Time.” 

My History of Theatre

The earliest memory I can recall of acting on stage was an abbreviated version of “The Phantom Tollbooth” which we performed in middle school.  The only line I remember having, described a punishment that involved picking away at a mountain of salt with a sewing needle. 

I recall going to an acting camp sometime later in middle school with one of my best friends at the time, but I don’t remember any details beyond not showering for the entire week because they were communal and I was embarrassed to be seen naked.

Fast forward to senior year in high school when I finally got into one of the main stage productions (I had been in one or two one-off shows at school, but I didn’t feel like those really counted).  Admittedly, my inclusion into “The Will Rogers Follies” that year probably had something to do with the majority of the senior class boycotting the show due to drama with the drama teacher (shocker, I know), but one does not look a gift horse in the mouth.

When I got into college I became a lot more prolific, having decided to major in Theatre (alongside Computer Science), and it’s at that point when I actually started my education in the craft.  While I had taken Theatre Arts for four years in high school, I discovered very early into my college education that I hadn’t actually been taught much over the last four years. 

This was made apparent when I went back to high school that first year to see some of friends perform “Little Shop of Horrors.” With only a few months of classes under my belt, I could already see all the glaring problems and shortcomings with the performance onstage.  I wanted to take everyone aside after the show and explain about subtext and motivation and tactics and all the other wonderful nuances about acting that made it so wonderful.  But I did not.  I congratulated them on a great performance and made my way back to college. 

Over the course of my college career I did about a half-dozen shows, and worked tech on about the same number.  And though I never managed to be a particularly good student I did manage to graduate with my BA and weasel my way into an internship up in the Poconos (Pennsylvania) for eight months. 

It was here that I got my first glimpse into the professional actor’s life, getting to live and work side-by-side with professional actors, whose stories of living in New York and traveling on national tours were filled with drugs, sex, humor, wonder and enough adventures to fill up a single life three-fold.  I had no desire to live job-to-job though, and was content to stick with community theatre after my internship was over and I returned to Virginia.  Perhaps it was not as crazy a lifestyle as those held by the professionals, but I’ve had my own share of stories to tell and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

I spent the next four years in and out of the community theatre scene in Northern Virginia, right up until I left for California in 2006.  My final huzzah was one of my favorite experiences, “Disney’s Beauty & the Beast,” in which I got to play Fishmonger, Wolf and Salt Shaker as part of a wonderful cast of characters.  I made a ton of friends during the run, and had I not left I’d probably still be in constant contact with all of them today.  But I did leave, and in doing so unwittingly started a six year drought from acting which was only recently ended with my performance in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” 

But that’s fodder for another post, and this one has already run on longer than I had intended, so I’ll leave things here for today.