General Nerdery Retrospective

Ah, what an experience it has been, writing for this blog.

While not my first rodeo, this blog has been my most prolific one to date and the most fun.

Sure, not every article has been a gem and the half-hearted introduction post as well as the late-night navel-gazing on the nature of Undertale were cringe inducing in particular, but by and large I had a lot of fun.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have articles that I was proud of, in particular the ones on Nerdy Noms and Geeky Libations.

  Writing these helped teach me that sometimes, you just gotta have fun with writing, and that not every article needs to be an attempt serious, world-shattering or helpful and that if you can channel that feeling of fun, you'll get some good results and enjoy the process better.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn much in the way of keeping up with a weekly blog, other than that sometimes, you just have to do it. Blogging is a commitment, at least if you want an audience and/or a good grade in class and sometimes it clashes with other commitments like work or other classes or finally beating Resident Evil to prove that you're still not traumatized from when your dad made you play it as a child.

...

That being said, this was an overall good experience and I did learn a little about myself and the craft of writing from blogging. I'd definitely blog again and will probably do so soon, maybe even under the same name. Till then, seeya.

Also, here's the T-Rex I promised.

Hi!

A Toast to the Drunken Moogle

Drinking and nerdery, is there a better combination? What's better than arguing about Yoshi's status in Mario (friend? servant? domesticated animal?) while having yourself a Yoshi cocktail or discussing why Aerith needed to die in Final Fantasy VII over a glass of Phoenix Down?

While there are many places on the web to find yourself a recipe or ten, none can even get close to the amount of concentrated alcohol and awesome that is...

Established in 2009, this Tumblr-based blog of alcoholic recipes has since become a veritable compendium of geeky libations.

Despite the name, The Drunken Moogle has more than gaming-based drinks, with cocktails inspired by a variety of titles ranging from "Avatar: The Last Airbender" to "The Hunger Games".

The site has taken a bit of a break lately, with the newest cocktail posted being April 1, 2015- understandable since they have been working on a book since then.

Even with the almost year-long hiatus, the archive has more than enough recipes to keep even the most intrepid (and nerdy) mixologist busy.

Here are a few of my favorite cocktails from The Drunken Moogle:

Yoko Kanno

Rye Whiskey, Sake, Cointreau with just a dash of Peychaud's brings this smoky, complex cocktail to life, based on the legendary composer Yoko Kanno, more specifically, the "Cowboy Bebop" soundtrack. So turn the lights down low, put on "Adieu," and sip this one slow. Cigarettes and bitter memories are optional and highly recommended. 

Subspace Speed Pass

If you want a hard drink but want to skip on the pathos, the Subspace Speed Pass is the way to go. This "Scott Pilgrim" themed shot is based on Ramona Flowers and much like its inspiration, it is quirky, adorable and will hit you over the head like a gigantic mallet. Parfait Amour, Midori, Blue Curacao and vodka give this tall shot a deceptively girly look and a kick that will knock you on your ass if you're not careful. Just like Ramona Flowers!

Bloody Alice

Based on "American McGee's Alice," this cocktail is a modified Bloody Mary that substitutes blackberry brandy for the vodka and omits the worcestershire sauce. Also, substitutes the standard celery stalk with a stainless steel knife. After all, we're all mad (and drunk) here.

Stardust Reverie

Borderline diabetes inducing and endearing, this is the perfect cocktail for people who like drinking and hate the taste of alcohol. This combination of Pop Rocks, Japanese Star Candy, Soda, Vodka make for a visually striking drink that is also incredibly tasty. Just remember that it's an alcoholic drink though, and take it easy on these, lest you wake up to a barrage of rainbow colored stars.

Nerdy Noms

From Lembas Bread to Nuka cola, we've all wondered just how some of the more interesting foods in fiction tastes like, but with the following websites, you don't have to.

Below are sites that provide  recipes for some our favorite fictional foods, allowing you to finally try it for yourself, as well as my favorite recipe from each one.

Gourmet Gaming

Though this Tumblr-based blog hasn't been updated in a year, it has quite the archive of foods based off of or taken directly from various video games. What sets this blog apart is that it has a suggested difficulty rating for each recipe, denoted by 16-bit hearts rating from a half-heart (the easiest recipes) to five hearts (the hardest).

The site has a gamut of recipes across all skill levels, so weather you want to start out with the "Sims Autumn Salad" or advanced enough to handle the ubiquitous Cake from Portal, Gourmet Gaming has something for you.

As a bonus, Gourmet Gaming has some alcoholic libations for some of the mature gaming set.

My Favorite:

Beyond Two Souls - Asian Beef

Mmmmmm...non-specifically Asian...

 While "Beyond Two Souls" is an average game at best, this dish, inspired by a scene in which the main character has to make dinner for a prospective boyfriend, is quite tasty and at one and a half hearts, is quite simple to make.

The Geeky Chef

Branching out from gaming-based edibles, we have the Geeky Chef. There are recipes from Star Trek, Harry Potter, My Little Pony and more. Though the recipes are mostly desserts and drinks, there is the odd entree or hors d'oeuvres. If you like what you see, the site also has an associated cookbook with additional recipes. Also, the site takes the odd submission now and then, so if you have an idea yourself, you might be able to see it on the site.

My Favorite:

Lembas Bread

Perfect for fueling the Fellowship.

 

 You can't beat the classics and it's hard to get more classical than "The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien. In the book (and movie), the Elves of Lothlorien gave this filling bread to the Fellowship of the Ring, to help them on their journey.

Feast of Fiction

The most prolific fictional food resource, the Feast of Fiction is a Youtube channel that features weekly videos of the hosts Jimmy Wong and Ashley Adams making nerdy noms in true cooking show fashion, with the help of the occasional guest or two. If you have trouble following along with the action on the screen (like a normal person), fear not, the recipe and instructions are right in the video description. Has a blog that is now mostly defunct, with entries from 2012 and older here.

My Favorite: 

Toriel's Butterscotch-Cinnamon Pie

Ahh, the signature dish of everyone's favorite goat mom from the surprise 2015 hit "Undertale". It might not recover all your HP, but is sure to be good for your SOUL. 

So, with several world's signature foods at your fingertips, you can add some geeky variety to your cooking repertoire or maybe even get together your own Feast of Fiction, either way, happy nomming!

Top 5: Tips For Your First Nerf Outing

So, my birthday happened recently and to celebrate, I got some buddies together and we had ourselves a Nerf War!

That's right, we hit the park and turned it into a flurry of flying foam darts, running, hiding, dodging and shooting like a real-life game of Call of Duty with less weed and jerks.

While I did have a kickass time with my friends, I did notice that we made some rookie mistakes that took a little bit of the enjoyment out of the game. Here's a few tips so you can avoid some of the pitfalls we encountered.

1. Stay Hydrated! - Common sense dictates that if you're gonna do a physical activity for an extended period of time, you wanna drink plenty of water and this is especially true when you're out in the hot sun! Bring a cooler with ice cold drinks and call it neutral ground! Also, while not necessary, maybe finagle a water-bottle holster or so you can drink and mow down chumps and drink water, staying Tacticool all the while.

2. Do some research - While you don't need to obsessively look up various Nerf guns and compare them all (though you can!), you want to at least look up any blasters you're interested in to see any issues it may have. Showing up with anything that looks interesting could backfire as jams, misfires and general lack of performance can abound if you pick the wrong weapon.

3. Test your gear - Looking up your stuff isn't always good enough! Don't buy your guns and hour before the event and hope it will all turn out alright. There's a distinct chance that you're setting yourself up to be pelted by a foam firing squad when you find out about a quirk in your Nerf gun in the worst time. In a particularly bad case, two players (both on my team!) had issues with their blaster, a highly recommended one at that, jammed throughout the day. They eventually found how to deal with it, but it was too little too late.

4. Know your limits - If you plan on going to the nines and dressing like a Nerf operator, with all the Tacticool slings, holsters, vests, pouches and many blasters, try to keep in mind how much all that stuff weighs. I'm personally at fault for finding this one, thinking I could keep my mobility with three blasters, a spare clip as well as some pouches and clips. The stuff seems light going on and even walking around in, but I was not prepared to do full sprints while holding the flag and it cost us. As a corollary to the above, try putting on the gear you're gonna have the night before, maybe jog around a little. Better to learn the night before than the day of.

5. Plan a break - If its your event, make sure to plan a break! Even if you have boundless energy, everyone else might not. You're doing a lot of running, shooting and dodging, after all. Breaks between rounds are ideal, since one side can ride the high as they get ready for the next round and the losing side can regroup and figure out what to do next. If it's not your event, well, hope that they have breaks planned. If they do not, then you need to take care of yourself and just try to find ideal times to take a break. They might lose you for a few minutes, but it beats losing you for the whole game due to exhaustion.

Bonus tip!

Bring a lot of darts - Seriously, you go through them quick, even indoors. You can recover your darts from the ground, to be sure, but it's much easier to have a pouch of ammo ready. Outdoors, extra darts become even more important, since you'll be losing darts left and right.

Suggestions: Black Lagoon

For anyone who likes the works of Quentin Tarantino, old-school Chinese crime dramas or kickass gunfights, I cannot recommend Black Lagoon hard enough.

From the title, one might guess that this anime is about swamp-dwelling creatures, but in reality, it is about Lagoon Company, the main characters of Black Lagoon.

Lagoon Company, a group of pirate mercenaries consisting of Revy, a kill-crazy berserker with two pistols, their captain Dutch, the cool-headed captain and Benny, the smarmy hacker/electronics guy along with their newest addition, the Japanese salaryman in the wrong place/wrong time who joins them Rokuro "Rock" Okajima

From the first episode to the last (currently) as well as the five episode OVA, the show is a fun-filled romp of gun-fights, swearing, and general kickassery that doesn't sacrifice a good plot or insult the viewers intelligence.

The show wears its influences on its sleeves, from the staring-down-the-barrel shots on the first episode mimicking Jules and Vega from Pulp Fiction, to the creepy season two premier that just screams Stephen King, to a character who is basically The Terminator in a dress, as well as a ton of other sly nods to its various film roots.

If you haven't already seen Black Lagoon and its OVA: Roberta's Blood trail, you are doing yourself a disservice by not going to do so immediately.

Even if anime isn't your thing, Black Lagoon carries on the fine tradition of anime that bridge that particular genre gap in the way that Cowboy Bebop and Trigun did before it.

In fact, it's also one of the rare gems that is way better in English than it is in its original language.

Left to Right: Benny, Rock, Revy and Dutch. Picture provided by Wikipedia.

Lunar New Year Steam Sale!!!

The Lunar New Year sale is going on over at Steam, and in fine tradition, they have many fantastic deals that paradoxically leave your wallet even lighter than if there weren't a sale.

Instead of buying in bulk and getting many games you probably wont even play, here's a few standouts in the bunch:

Undertale - $7.99 (-20%) - Yes, it's only two dollars off, but it was a fairly cheap game that you should have bought a long time ago, anyway! This ode to old-school JRPGs brilliantly turns the genres tropes on its head with the ability to not kill anyone. Its short playtime belies a heavy game, you can play it between AAA titles and its replayability means that its well worth the original cost, nevermind the discount.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - $29.99 (-50%) - Chances are, you've already bought this, but if not, now's the time to buy it. This critically acclaimed title puts you in the shoes of Geralt, a monster slayer in an open-world action-RPG. If you're willing to shell out a little more, you can get the game and the Expansion Pack, which features two adventures with over 30 hours of extra adventuring for $55.23 (-35%). There's also a mod that turns the whole thing into Yu-Gi-Oh.

The Walking Dead / Season 2 - $6.24 (-75%) - At $6.24 a pop, it's quite the deal to get both seasons of The Walking Dead. A brilliant point-and-click adventure that's somehow more intense than most AAA shooters and yet still playable by almost anyone (who can stomach the grief, anyways), you can really beat 75% off for such a series. The Walking Dead is episodic in nature, with your decisions carrying over to later episodes and later, Season 2. You can also grab The Walking Dead: 400 days for the low, low price of $1.24 (-75%), which essentially functions as DLC for Season 1 and a bridge between seasons.

Left 4 Dead 2 - $3.99 (-80%) - Ah, Left 4 Dead 2, the figurative soundtrack of my teenage years. The co-op zombie-slaying survival race shooter formula never gets old. While the game is getting on in years, robust modding support adding maps, campaigns, weapons, skins and all other sorts of goodies means that there's still a lot to see and do. Just make sure to bring some friends along, or you're going to have a bad time.

Life is Strange (Complete Season) - $11.99 (-40%) - One of my favorite games of 2015, I really can't recommend this enough. That it's almost half off is just the icing on the cake. It's a a point-and-click game, in a similar vein to The Walking Dead, but with teenagers, hipsters and time travel instead of zombies. About the same amount of despair, though. It lacks The Walking Dead's polish, but it has a lot of heart with a well-thought out cast that explores the various bits of high-school melodrama we may have all experienced at some point.

These are just a few gems that are on sale right now. Anything else at a particularly good value right now? In any case, better grab the sales while you can, 'cause it ends at 2/12 at 10 AM.

Fallout 4: Adventure Alone or with a Buddy?

Fallout 4 is a game about choice. Whether you're a smooth talker or a trigger-happy psycho, a stab-happy serial killer or a 22nd-century cowboy, a ninja or a walking weapons platform and everything in between, you can do it all.

One of the more important choices you can make is whether you're really a Lone Survivor or whether you have another gun (or spiked bat, or chainsaw sword, or nuclear rocket launcher) watching your back.

Both have their advantages: having a buddy means double the firepower, having a pack mule and a friend with a particular set of skills that you may not, as well as full use of the Inspirational perk, which buffs companions. Also, a +5% Exp. gain isn't too shabby, either.

Being alone means that you don't have to worry about having an ally blow your cover while in Stealth (lookin' at you, Strong) or walking into your shot and getting hurt, as well as full use of the Lone Wanderer perk, which requires you to be alone.

A lot of the benefits come from the related perks, Inspirational (for companions) and Lone Wanderer (duh).
 Roughly, the benefits are as follows:

(We'll assume you're at level 50)

Lone Wanderer:

- Take 45% less damage
- Carrying Capacity + 150
- Deal 25% more damage

Inspirational:

- Companions deal 20% more Dmg.
- Companions +25 Carrying Capacity
- Companions immune to friendly fire, +20 Resistance/+20 Energy Res.

On one hand, going it alone means a host of powerful buffs for you.

You take almost half damage and can carry a lot of stuff. The 25% damage boost is also nice, since it stacks with the boosts you gain from Sneak Attacks and perks like Mister Sandman, Cloak and Dagger, and Ninja.

However, if the buffs that Inspirational gives seems trivial in comparison, keep in mind that the impact of having a companion is not.

Having an ally deal 20% more damage might seem smaller than the 25% more damage you deal with Lone Wanderer, but keep in mind that arming your ally with a similar or better weapon than you have effectively doubles your damage output.

25 more carry capacity is certainly smaller than than 150, but keep in mind that 150 is the smallest carrying capacity that a companion can have. The range of carrying capacity among the companions is 175-275 (Paladin Danse is 210 unmodified), with all the relevant magazines and armor modifications.

So, do you tackle the wasteland alone or with a friend? I recommend a buddy, of course! Practical reasons aside, the Commonwealth is huge! While this means many things to see, fight, and discover, not every square inch of it is adventure. It helps to have a buddy along to break up the silence of travel or exploration when you've had enough of the same few tracks from Diamond City Radio. They can also open up new avenues of adventure, as some of them have personal quests that you can complete.

On the practical side of things, they also function wonderfully as pack-mules, with their huge carrying capacities to enable your hoarding and while they might occasionally blow your cover, they also work as meat shields or distractions. Not to mention that companions have a magazine almost dedicated to them, the Live & Love series, which buffs them even further.

However, if that's not the story you want to tell or just find their (sometimes repetitive) dialogue annoying, then you can have the best of both worlds.

Want to be a one-man army AND have a buddy watch your back? Then bring along your faithful canine companion, Dogmeat!

He doesn't count as a companion, so you get all the powerful buffs that Lone Wanderer gives you, but you still get someone to carry your stuff and attack your enemies. He also has a perk dedicated to him (Attack Dog) that allows him to grapple with enemies and make them easier to hit in VATS.

Sadly, other than the immunity to friendly fire that Inspiration (Rank 2) gives him, Inspiration has no effect on Dogmeat.

But hey, he wont judge you for murdering everyone in Diamond City in your underwear.