Nearly every year since we moved back from Japan, softlykarou and I have made time to go out to visit my parents in October because in addition to seeing them and getting to eat my mother's delicious food, St. Charles's Scarecrow Festival is held that month. We last went two years ago, noting that the scarecrows were better than when we went three years ago, ( Read more... )

Did you know that Metroid is a girl?!

(I used that joke on softlykarou earlier. If looks could kill ( Read more... )

Sea salt is one of my favorite dessert flavors, though I usually get it in caramel or toffee form. One of the highlights of trips to my grandparents' house in Oregon when I was a child were the bags of sea salt toffee that were in all the stores along the coast. That trip was the only time we would get it, too. It was during the summer, close to my ( Read more... )

I've always preferred having longer nails (same with hair) and I'm really not sure what the reason is. When I was a child, I remember telling people that I liked having them longer because it made it easier to turn the pages of books, which--much to my surprise nowadays--they accepted as a legitimate answer, maybe because they all knew how much I ( Read more... )

I'm sure that comes as news to none of you ( Read more... )

Okay, I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate characterization. Even if I did consider buying this suit when I found it online. That's pretty much exactly the kind of formal dress style I want and it would look great on me. I just don't wear formal clothing nearly often enough to justify it to myself.

Anyway, suits aren't the point of this post ( ( Read more... )

I tend to write pretty detailed posts about my vacations because even though they're mostly only of interest to me, I like to have a record for when I go back and reread old posts. But this time I was gone for two weeks and, taking into account how verbose my blog posts tend to be, a detailed account of everything I did would run for 10,000 words ( Read more... )

I honestly think that some of the reason I love roguelikes so much, why I mod games like Oblivion and Skyrim and Fallout 3 and XCom to be much harder, and why I'm so excited to play Dark Souls is because I grew up on Sierra adventure games. You have died isn't exactly something I'm unfamiliar with. Neither is permadeath, really--realizing that you ( Read more... )

I just finished reading and reviewing Spock's World, which I've wanted to reread for a long while but which got pushed to the front of my queue by Leonard Nimoy's death. It made me remember the influence the book had on my as a child, and I figured I'd write about it. I'd love to make this a nice, pat causal relationship, but while it's that way in ( Read more... )

I first played Doom's shareware version pretty soon after it came out. I'm pretty sure I got it from a PC Gamer disc--though it's possible my father downloaded it for me through Gopher--loaded it up and started the game, and from the moment that first guitar riff that gamers nowadays know so well started playing, I was hooked:

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This is pretty much ( Read more... )