Skiriki's Chaotic Pad

Our 19 cases of Against the Giants set arrived today; I cut my workday short to go home and receive the shipment of stuff.

Out of 2 cases I had bought for myself, I received a nearly complete spread of what I wanted to have. This is good!

Another good thing was that the gallery of the set showed less well-painted miniatures: some of these look much, much better as live versions. The Elder Red Dragon and Elder White Dragon need some repainting touches, though. *mutter*

Current Mood: giddy

YAY MIDSUMMER!

Today, yours truly, SO and her friend packed themselves to the car and went to see my in-laws; we had tons of meats with us, and we were ready to party.

And a party we got!

We sacrificed plenty of pork and chicken under the brightly-shining daystar, basking in the smoke of the burnt offerings and thus warded the attacks of the Mosquitos, the Most Foul That Fly Upon Earth.

The entire day was pretty much full of OMNOMNOMNOM, while my SO embraced his inner Finnishness and went to sauna, accompanied by a birch whisk required for the occasion.

Right now I'm happy to be conscious. I couldn't possibly move away from my chair, except I must, as I don't plan to head off to bed smelling of delicious meats.

Current Mood: content

...who decided that calling 1:23 am about some webpage or another you may have disagreed and which is on my server is entirely appropriate.

Because lord knows that I can fall asleep oh so easily once woken up from deep slumber. Except, not.

Fuck you. Fuck you with a rusty chainsaw lubed with chili oil; I hope your fucking pecker rots off and gets eaten by maggots.

Feel free to call, but by gods, do it during normal hours of the daytime, and you don't even have an excuse of timezone ignorance as you were sharing it with me.

Current Mood: angry

Today's recommendations from Amazon made me crack up; behold, witness the nerd power!

Current Mood: amused

Yesterday was made of suck. About 9 pm, I had a sudden attack of kidney stones, and spent the next ten or fifteen minutes in a writhing, near-vomitous bundle of whimpering and quivering human flesh.

The only relief was afterwards, the blissful feeling of non-agony once the offending fragment had, er, passed on.

I skipped work today, fearing that it would strike again and I had stayed up until 5:30 am as well.

Now, a weekend of cranberry juice awaits!

Current Mood: cranky

Today, I was shopping with two of my friends; we were purchasing goods for our friend's going-away party (he's leaving the country for five months or so for an internship in Spain), and so we decided to have a bit of communal cooking and general celebration.

I had announced that my plans are 1) nacho plate my style (this has been tested to provoke Pavlovian reactions in my group of friends) and 2) Mascarpone ice cream (because I wanted ice cream and for some reason Mascarpone has haunted my brain, so whattaheck, I knew those two can be combined), and everyone said "great". So! There we stood, in front of various things needed in baking, wondering how to flavor the ice cream.

"I could, I dunno, put in something for ripples and then we could top it with chocolate sauce and caramel sauce." I suggested. The overall response to that was kind of "mmmkay" -- which didn't suggest great enthusiasm. I agree, the overall goods available on that row of shelves were rather less than inspiring.

"I need hankies." said one of my co-conspirators and ambulated away, "I'll be back."

So, the two of us loitered there, waiting for her to return. It was at this point, when my other friend briefly became a Prophet for Her divinity.

"Hey, look at that... isn't that your normal response to everything?" she asked, and I turned to look at what she was pointing at.

Rows and rows of Nutella, on a stand, right behind us.

"Hmmm... HMMMMYEAAAAAAAAAH. Let's wait for her to return and ask."

So we did.

"What about Nutella?" I asked as my hanky-deprived friend returned.

"Nutella? Oh... well, that's always good with everything."

A jar of Nutella, then, if you please.

Back at home, I ate some dindin before I started cooking; I had to make ice cream first, as it needed regular stirring during the first hours of freezing and it was awfully late already.

And then... then it HAPPENED. A touch of divinity, no doubt given to me by the Goddess of Chocolate Spreads, and I started to cook, turned into Her divine Exarch for a moment, and channeled the glory of Nutella into the world, the sacred manna from Her heaven.

Here it is, the sacred litany of Her divine will; read, and weep with joy, for She has manifested to me and demanded me to spread Her word.

Mascarpone-Nutella Ice Cream

300 grams (or so) of Mascarpone
5 desilitres (1 pint or thereabouts) of double cream (38% fat or so)
2 desilitres (1 cup or so) of sugar
4 egg yolks
vanilla sugar/vanilla extract to taste; sugar-form is better than liquid
Nutella (to taste, but generally about third or half of the jar)

Whisk cream into fairly hard foam (so you can make little cream mountains and they don't collapse right away). Add vanilla sugar.

Put the egg yolks and normal sugar into a bowl that can be turned into a bain marie. Whisk furiously until the mix turns foamy and expands and you can no longer feel sugar as grains when you do a taste test.

Pour the egg-sugar mix into whipped cream. Mix in Mascarpone, smooth it out, don't leave chunks.

Stir Nutella well in jar -- you want it to be as loose as possible before you scoop it up and toss into the rest of the mix. Use a fork to stir it in -- it has to form kind of stripes rather than mix completely smoothly in.

Pour into a bowl that can handle freezing, cover it with a lid or plastic wrap and put into freezer.

For the first three hours, stir well every hour and then let it settle.

Tip: when you do this, make sure that the bowl where you freeze the stuff is slightly smaller than the amount you made. This way, you can enjoy your good stuff before the dessert is served...

Now -- go forth and be anointed with the sacred goods of Mascarpone-Nutella Ice Cream!

Current Mood: accomplished

I've now managed to more or less put together my new desktop; there's still lots of software I haven't installed yet, but I'll get to that point little by little.

To my surprise -- or, rather not so surprisingly, Windows XP SP3 went in without a hitch; the reason why MS stopped distributing it (their own point of sale software went into tizzy and they had to fix it) did not affect me one whit, it seems. It saved me the hassle of "download gazillion updates and boot at least five times".

Unfortunately, transferring my profile wasn't that easy, and so I had to reconstruct some stuff from scratch. Still, it looks like major hurdles are now behind. My old desktop has moved to the glorious task of being a remote desktop/download center for my digibox system, and I'm now doing some testing on it.

I still need to install printer drivers and set up shares and all that jazz. Phooh.

Oh! I nearly forgot to "gloat what I got (quite modest, but then again, I'm chronically broke due to my plastic crack habit, aka DDM and miniatures).

AMD ATHLON 64 X2 5000+
M2N-VM DVI AM2
2 GB 667MHz RAM
500GB BARRACUDA 7200.11 SATA2

It is the most silent computer I have owned so far. I can't hear a whisper. I think I'll have to congratulate the guys who really took to heart my request "and only the most silent fans to it, mmmkay?"...

Current Mood: thoughtful

That is, it is time to put my old desktop -- my relatively-faithful servant and minion since 2002 -- into other uses (such as downloading recorded TV shows from my digibox and converting them/storing them), and install a new desktop.

It'd better to last until 2014, I tell you...

So I'll be absent for a day or two, maybe. Depending on how fast I can get my stuff moved etc.

Current Mood: chipper

Now, I have to give credit to my SO who spotted the inconsistency in this particular nugget of Elvis-lore in the first place:

The Elvis Diet:
Dinner (10 pm) - 84,000 calories
Two "Fool's Gold" sandwiches [a jar of peanut butter, a jar of strawberry jam, one pound of crisp-fried bacon on a baguette x2]

You can find the rest of it by googling for "Elvis Diet".

It made me curious enough to check on the values he had sought out and THEN see how on earth such monstrous number could be achieved. Fire up that spreadsheet program!

First of all, Wikipedia has information about this Fool's Gold sandwich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool's_Gold_Loaf

A pound of bacon, a jar of grape jelly, a jar of peanut butter plus a well-buttered loaf of bread, hollowed out.

We'll use the following nutritional values gathered from a US-based food database:

Bacon: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21ue.html -- 533 calories per 100 grams.
Grape jelly: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21p5.html -- 286 calories per 100 grams.
Peanut butter: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21yF.html -- 632 calories per 100 grams.
Bread: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21Gd.html -- 266 calories per 100 grams.
Butter: http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21Gd.html -- 717 calories per 100 grams.

A single bread was supposed to yield to 42,000 calories alone; now, we all know that the King sure liked to wash these things down with good quality stuff, so we'll give him 2 litres of champagne, so the bread won't get stuck in his throat (1300 Kcal). We'll assume that the ingredients (against the spirit of the bread -- see the recipe above) are the fattiest fat that fat could dream up and sugariest sugar you can squeeze out of Sugar-Plum Fairy. We assume about equal balance between bread-grape jelly-peanut butter so we can keep this damn monster together, especially when the bacon gets crammed in the middle of it.

While this number is somewhat more believable (for achieving that close to 84,000 Kcal per meal number), it still means that the bright star of rock'n'roll gobbled down 3,231 grams per bread, or 7,13 pounds of calorie-laden goodness. Still, the size of the entire meal would be 19,386 grams, or 42,8 pounds.

It says in the legend that the meal was regularly served at 10 pm; at 4 am, he would feel peckish and gorge on 5 burgers plus other yummies. If we assume that he spent the entire time just chewing on that, like a cow chews on her cud, watching TV, vegetating, eating, eating, eating...

6 hours, 360 minutes; he would consume roughly 53,85 grams of food per minute.

The numbers just don't make it possible, but apparently it is good for shocking people with such humongous values, especially when coupled with a note "The article highlights that an adult Asian elephant (many tons in weight) has a normal diet of 50,000 calories per day." Even if he ate nothing but pure bacon fat (898 Kcal per 100 grams), it'd take 9 kilos and 354 grams of it to get that much energy out of a single meal. It is possible that someone has gotten the notations mixed up (considering how energy values are expressed around the world when it comes to nutritional labeling -- from kilojoules to calories to kilocalories), but even so, it'd make very little sense.

Considering that by the time of his death, Elvis Aaron Presley weighed only 159 kilos (less than many tons in weight, and less than a great deal of humans who can achieve even greater poundage with less eating)... I think it is safe to say...

BUSTED.

Nonetheless, I advice not eating too many of those per day, or even per year. Consider this -- this is a "reasonably" sized bread, made according to the recipe, with an attempt to maximize greasy and sugary goodness of it:
 

Current Mood: amused

I've been working on some Dungeons of Dread miniatures. For those who still haven't seen them, they are, unfortunately, the worst lot so far; approximately 28% of the miniatures of the set are painted under my usual standards of laziness, and so I've been giving them acetone baths.

We finished our Queen of the Demonweb Pits campaign, after solidly delivering smack on Her Spideryness ass, though we escaped mostly sans loot. Well hey, boost spells were running out so we didn't have time to loot the spiderbot's goods...

Finally, on Monday, my head was once again about to split due to migraine and I had to cut my workday short. Argh.

Current Mood: okay

I've been up for 60 hours, and I've slept 3 hours in total; for some reason my body refuses to let me fall asleep. I can't even take a nap -- it turns into some kind of semi-comatose slouch in bed, fully awake and aware of my surroundings, no sleep.

If I can't sleep tonight, then I'll be off to doc in the morn'.

Right now I'm tired and exhausted, but I'm not sleepy, and it freaks the hell out of me.

Current Mood: exhausted

I just finished stripping paint off huge gold dragon.

It took six hours and about 200 wood-shafted q-tips to scrub all that gunk called "paint" off that dragon, but it was worth it. Underneath there's an attractive sculpt which deserves a better paintjob than the original.

But man. I do feel pretty floaty after that bout of huffing acetone fumes.

Current Mood: accomplished

One: birthday party for a friend.
Two: another birthday party for another friend.
Three: a going-away party for third friend.
Fourth: a memorial party for Gary Gygax.

So -- what's the solution for this?

Answer lies behind the cut!

( Read more... )

Current Mood: amused

It seems that I've gotten some interesting side effects from the pain meds I got prescribed.

Such as elevated heart rate and insomnia.

Current Mood: groggy

I took today off work, and had a doc's appointment. She prescribed some heavy-duty painkillers after inspecting my shoulder and said that it is an infected tendon somewhere in it. Man. This stuff works fast and well, I'm already floating on a pink hazy cloud of non-pain.

Also, I got some miniatures today; I finally got Huge Gold Dragon and some other things to fill my DDM collection. Yay.

Now, I'm gonna rest. Tired.

Current Mood: groggy

...a red-hot spear of pain pushed through my right shoulder. I woke up previous night at 3:30 am, after meds wore off, and then struggled through the day with an energy drink; I managed to have some level of coherence in game. Except instead of lasting six to eight hours, I had to grab more every four hours to keep pain on tolerable levels.

Now, I woke up 2 am, got up at 2:50 am to pop some meds, and I thought that they kicked in about 4 am, except now it turns out they haven't. It looks like my 400 milligrams of ibuprofein no longer have any kind of effect on this agony.

And I have to work today. And it is almost 5 am, and I should wake up at 7 am and head off to work at 8 am.

And I can't sleep.

Can't sleep, agony will eat me...

Current Mood: sore

My right shoulder feels like it is attempting to fall off completely. It hurts so much that it isn't funny.

Current Mood: aggravated

So... pretty much the entire LJ is abuzz by now -- Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons RPG, died today.

I don't know what to say, other than "well, we're running a Queen of Demonweb Pits game this weekend, and we're now off to the realm of Lolth herself" and "damn, those aging penalties really bite".

And here's a toast to a great guy who helped to kickstart the hobby; wherever you go, keep those polyhedrals rolling.

Current Mood: sad

Today, my main server threw a fit -- thanks to a miscreant capacitator and regulator having gone kablooey on the MB. (Photos will follow once I've gotten the system up again.)

It wouldn't have been that bad, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a software RAID on my server, and thus the bastard threw a fit when I implanted the HDs into another computer; I spent 12 hours with a friend of mine, trying to hack the POS into shape.

Well, it is in a SOME kind of shape right now, but I'm bloody furious; most services are still down, and I'm running in updates like a maniac.

Current Mood: angry

...with caffeine and forbidden sugar after four hours of sleep, and I have a task of DM'ing a game for my group, and I hover somewhere on borderlines of madness and incoherency and I just finished writing up the game fifteen minutes ago (though I had planned it for a longer time), with twenty minutes left for players to arrive.

Either this will kick much ass, or it will suck it. Only this evening can tell.

And I still can't decide whether or not call this session a temporary stop or full stop for this campaign. I think I'll have to ask the players once the session is over; however, the sad fact is that my work is really draining me and I no longer have the time to write up shit when I come back from work as I tend to crash the bed dead tired. And I have no idea what kind of schedules players are entertaining as well; who will be where and when.

Current Mood: ditzy