RavenBlog - Covered in Scorpions

Thursday 1 May 2008

I recommend the PC indie-developer game Mount & Blade. I recommended it just over three years ago as a work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, but the progress, though slow, is pleasing. Graphically it used to be "good for an indie game" and is now "mediocre for a full-price game". At the core mechanics level not much has changed, but it now has quests and something vaguely plot-like (generated plot, so not really story-telling sort of plot). Things are a lot more polished and balanced. The player-character face (generated to your own preferences with slider-bars) looks pretty human unless you do something deliberately daft with the bars. Unlike, say, Oblivion's, which looked like crap unless you worked the bars for about ten minutes trying to make a face, any face, that doesn't look more like a sausage.

The price change is about right too - back in 2005 it was $11 for essentially "all beta versions and early purchase of the full version". Now it is $25. The price when finished is expected to be $39, so, er, if the price is increasing parallel to development then the final version can be expected in May 2011. But I imagine that's not the case, it feels pretty close to a full version now, to me.

And there's a free trial version, which is limited in a lovely unobtrusive way - you can play as much as you like until you reach level 7. There's plenty there to give you a taste of the game, and if you like it enough to buy it, you can carry on from your trial save file. However! The current trial version at the website is of version 0.903, whereas the version I got a couple of days ago is 0.950, and the save files aren't compatible across versions, so that may not actually be true. [18:04] [1 comment]

Saturday 12 April 2008

And now, a stimulating post on the subject of flour!

Today I used white spelt flour for a pizza dough (full recipe; 180ml water, teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar, tablespoon olive oil, teaspoon yeast, flour kneaded in until it's not tacky to the touch). It made a pizza dough better than I've ever had before. It wasn't a matter of working it differently - I put the ingredients in a bread-machine, so they got the same treatment they always would. So it must be the flour. If you've ever tried to make proper pizza dough, you may have been tempted to try spinning it like you see pizza chefs do on TV. If you tried it, or even thought about it while poking the dough, you'll have decided it won't work and probably written it off as you aren't skilful enough. You may be right, but that's not what's wrong. You may know how the second-choice dough-shaping method is "stretch the dough, don't squash it into shape or you'll push the air out". And if you've tried to do that, there's a good chance that didn't work either. It's not your fault! It's the dough. This dough, from white spelt flour, I picked it up out of the machine and it stretched. I held it by its upper corners, and it stretched. I got it most of the way into the rectangular shape I wanted by just holding it up and waiting for it to stretch itself. Just a little squishing required to get the corners shaped. It behaved in every way perfectly for the making of pizza, right up to "not sticking to the tray at all", and as an added bonus was relatively delicious. Not as tasty as wholemeal spelt, but the texture was definitely a win.

Apparently the gluten in spelt flour is not the same as normal wheat gluten, so that perhaps explains the difference in behaviour there. (Also, some coeliacs are not harmed by spelt, though some are.)

In other flour-related things, did you know that buckwheat is not in fact a wheat, nor even closely related? It's not even a grass. It's apparently more like sunflower seeds. Buckwheat flour is also very good; it makes a lovely nutty-flavoured pastry or crumble or pancakes or gingerbread or unleavened biscuits. It doesn't have any gluten though, so won't work for bread or dough (though mixing a bit in for the flavour can work).

Both of these flours are supposedly (and I believe it) nutritionally superior to wheat. I certainly prefer them. The downside is they're also more expensive and harder to get hold of. I recommend making the effort. [20:06] [1 comment]

Tuesday 25 March 2008

My mailserver exploded at some point recently, and I had to delete the undelivered queue of more than 220000 messages. If you've sent me email in the last few days, there's a good chance I didn't get it. It is now working. [12:20] [0 comments]

Thursday 13 March 2008

Today, asked about the new Bionic Woman of which I have recently seen the first episode, I realised what it is that all these new sci-fi shows are doing that annoys me, which I have up until now been mentally referring to as "Battlestar Galacticking". It's the plot model in which there is just one plot being dragged out slowly (in the same way as a lot of anime, actually) - every episode promises that something interesting is about to happen as soon as the next episode starts, and then doesn't pay out.

I'm quite happy for shows to have an underlying plot that does that, but I like there to be a single episode plot as well. The A-Team did it that better way, Xena, Hercules, Jake 2.0, Eureka, Buffy, Angel (mostly), Firefly after the first couple of episodes, the original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, they all did it this way. And in non-sci-fi, House is the same way.

But primarily in new things, the episode plots have been removed and we're left with just the perpetual foiled promise of jam tomorrow. New BSG, Lost, some amount of Heroes, probably Bionic Woman judging by the first episode, Alias. And all soap operas ever. Not saying there's something intrinsically wrong with this model, it's evidently quite popular which is why it's being adopted so much recently, but I find it annoying and don't like to watch any of the shows that use it. I suspect what's happening is that these are really the soap-operas for a new generation, the people who don't actually have anything to empathise with in soap-operas with a real-world setting. And I've always disliked soap-operas. [16:31] [4 comments]