Hiatus

Hi non-guys and non-girls,

Since recently I've been having to force myself to post on the blog I've decided to take a break. There doesn't seem to be any point if it is becoming more of a chore than something I enjoy doing, so I'm going to take a time out and see how I feel about it.

Hopefully I'll be back, at which point hopefully my non-existant audience will return in insubstantial hordes!

Until then... au revoir!

Movies to Go

Well, I was expecting to be posting about our weekend trip to the Christmas Cave, where we were headed to buy a new Christmas Tree. But thanks to an afternoon delivery we didn't have time about it.

And then I was expecting to post a new Candy Technology, but I was so completely underwhelmed by what I had bought, that I just couldn't be bothered.

So at last I have something to post about! Behold the most bizzare vending machine I've seen in recent memory... Movie Station!

One was installed a few weeks ago outside Wentworth (yet another attempt by the Student Union to squeeze a few more dollars out of the student body, now that their most legitimate way of doing it has been revoked thanks to VSU) and today we got a flyer for it posted on our car.

Basically it is the horrible spawn of a coke machine and Blockbuster, where you put in your credit card details and it pops out a DVD for you. If you don't bring the DVD back on time, it charges late fees and eventually the full cost to your card.

It's website claims that it is "the most advanced concept in self-service technology in the world". Apparently you can use it to either rent or buy DVDs and PS2/Xbox games, watch trailers and possibly rule the world.

What the flyer didn't explain was how long you rented stuff for or how much it cost. They were $1.95 for a "limited time only", but god knows how much they are going to cost after that.

Well fear not, I shall investigate these mysteries and report back!

Seasonal Treats Ahoy!

I am delighted to announce that despite what any mere calendar might tell you, Christmas is in fact upon us! What proof do I have? Why, precious precious mince pies are once more available at our local supermarket!

Mmmm... seasonal treats... *drool*

Bloodbowl Update

Apparently I have to start this post with a quick message from Suzy. "Bloodbowl is for stupid heads". And this from someone with a Masters in English...

I headed up to Blacktown today for the latest game in the Nuffles Toxic League,
playing a human team with my now trademark Necros. I've done very well so far in the league, with five wins in a row and another today (the human coach had a shocker, 1 all at half time, 4 - 1 to me by the end of the game, with two dead humans). It has been fun, even if the Commish is a bit... inflexible. But then, in my experience they often are.

I've also just gotten the bad news that Powerfist, an upcoming Bloodbowl tournament in Melbourne, has been cancelled (I love that I've paid for entry, and the company running the event hasn't bothered to inform me that it's been cancelled, even if they haven't charged my card yet). I was really looking forward to going up, but I guess now my next tournament will be CanCon in January. Apparently a few of the guys are running a tournament at the start of December, but considering the fact that I'll be getting married just a few days before, I suspect I won't be gracing them with my presence (if I know what's good for me!)

Can I also say that I am getting pissed off with Idol this year? I've just watched the first three performances, and the first guy (hideously-ugly-bobby as I like to call him) kept singing out of tune and then gets nothing but praise from the judges. Meanwhile another one of the admittedly sub-par contestants does a pretty effort with "No More Lonely Nights" and the first thing he gets is "ooo maybe I'm not sure but I think maybe just for the first second there you were ever so slightly out of tune". It is such crap seeing them with their blatant favouritism, watching their pets go through no matter what they do while other people really giving it a crack get panned for the slightest discrepancy. Bah I say, Bah!

Speaking of seemingly intentially awful music, I saw the "single" on VideoHits this morning for BoyTown (the mature age boyband from the new aussie movie of the same name), extremely funny seeing Mick Molloy and Bob Franklin etc doing all the boyband moves! If I get a chance, must go see it, should be a window to the future when N*Sync, Five and all the rest start reforming in a last desperate cash-grab before they all go broke.

Candy Technology #3

Ah, how quickly time shoots by. It seems like just yesterday I was eating a Mars Bar for your amusement (you fiends) only to realise that nearly three weeks have shot past since my last review.

So, to make up for the non-existant impatience from my non-existant readers, I thought it was only fair to double up tonight and ofter you all two stunning reviews from two stunning new and/or unusal products. In this case, one which was nice, and one which was apparently devised by satan.

First up, a slam dunk for Kellogs! It is my pleasure to introduce Corn Flakes ChocMalt.

Of course, some would argue that cereal is a breakfast food rather "candy" per se, but frankly that is a distinction that has never been more blurred. Not that I can talk, I am a regular purchaser of cocopops, fruit loops and the like, but I always make a conscious effort to alternate between them and "healthy" cereal such as weet-bix, museli etc. You know, so I can pretend I'm not a total lost cause...

Back to our ChocMalt sensation. It is a simple concept, you take that pillar of the cereal world, Corn Flakes, and cover the shit out of it with chocolate flavouring. End result? Flat coco pops basically, right down to the whole chocolate milk thing you end up with after eating it. And that is no bad thing, assuming you're a fan of sweet cereal.

Richard's Ranking: 3 Snaps, 3 Crackles and 2 Pops out of 10.
Suzy's Reaction: I don't believe in cereal that tastes nice!

Ok, now that was just the appetizer, yet another derivative product to be consumed and forgotten. Chocolate flavoured cereal has nothing on what I have planned for the main course, something unforgettable that promises to stick with me for the foreseeable future (much in the vein of a disfiguring injury, or highly traumatic event. Or the Japanese movie Ringu, damn that was creepy).

Anyway, does anyone else get the feeling sometimes that everything in an area has already been invented, and there is no room left for new products? I do sometimes, take something like sandwich spreads... Jam, Peanut butter, Chocolate spreads, Honey, Vegemite, Potted Meats (eww)... seems like a pretty full list right? Wrong!

While this isn't technically a "new" product, it is far from commonly found in shops and has caught my eye for literally YEARS at the Coles I have been shopping at since it opened in 1998. I have always flirted with the inevitably disaterous idea of actually buying a jar of this crap, just for the sheer novelty of it. And wouldn't you know it? Candy Technology gives me the perfect excuse!

Non-ladies and Non-gentlemen, it is my great great pleasure to introduce you to FLUFF! A marshmallow-based sandwich spread, if you can seriously believe it.

I can only assume it was someone with a sense of humor who put "Fat Free" on the label of something that essentially for making sugar sandwiches. I was also rather concerned to see that there is no "best before" date to be found, which makes me wonder if the jar I saw was the same one I've been looking at with an odd sense of longing for the past eight years. After eating it, it isn't much of a stretch to my imagination.

Naturally this was made in the states, although I was oddly horrified to learn that it has indeed been imported and labelled by an Australian company, including a website (the australian version is broken, but the american version is still live and kicking, including incredibly bad jingles and TV adverts).

Needless to say, the horror that wells up deep inside you when first learning that someone has actually created a sandwich spread made of melted marshmallow is only deepened when you actually taste this foul concoction. Don't say I never do anything for my non-existant public!

As I said before, it is nothing more than sugar in a sandwich. The ability of americans to create horrible products with which to eat themselves to death never ceases to amaze me, but this is beyond any reasonable doubt the most horrible one I've ever seen. And I've eaten "cereal" made out of lumps of sugar and dried marshmallow (hmmm, a pattern emerges!)

Richard's Ranking: 1 out of 10. They get points for sinking to a new low.
Suzy's Reaction: Get that crap away from me.

Well that explains it...

HAH! After my rant today about McDonalds manipulation, I was highly amused to see that Super Size Me is premiering on Channel 10 this Sunday! Gee, what a coincidence that McDonalds kickstarts a new campaign showing how healthy they are pretending to be within a fortnight of the premier of the documentary which has been dubbed "the largest corporate PR disaster in history".

Slow week

Well, I am still around just hadn't been inspired to post on the blog recently, nothing has really caught my eye as worth ranting about until now. Normally I would have plenty of Australian Idol stuff to go on about, but I don't know... this year is just... meh. I think it has reached such a pinnicle of lameness, it isn't even worth pointing it out anymore. It exudes waves of lameness so feverishly, it is bordering on a physical sensation.

I've also been aghast at the latest attempt from McDonalds to fool idiots into thinking they sell healthy food and always have. The latest campaign, ironically called "Make Up Your Own Mind" while telling you what to think, basically aims to counter the "myths" about McDonalds. Things such as the high sugar content in their bread, or the fact that apple pies included choko.

Needless to say, the adverts themselves couldn't be more blatantly manipulative if they tried (they seriously have someone say "we were tired of our friends telling us lies about McDonalds, so we decided to find out the truth for ourselves! And now you can all check out what we found on this slick, corporate website which clearly shows us as actors and shills hired to pretend that McDonalds is made of hugs and snuggles". Ok, maybe I paraphrased the end a little).

Of course, many of these rumours aren't true... any more. After Super Size Me in 2004, a documentary where a guy did some serious damage to his health simply by eating nothing but McDonalds for a month, the company has clearly gone to a lot of effort to eliminate the most egregious of their past discretions. They started serving salads and providing nutritional information (once they eliminated some of the worst offenders such as the sugar in bread), and generally speaking gave off the air of a company actively trying to change its ways.

But now they have the gall to proudly crow about having nothing but chicken meat in their chicken nuggets, eliminating animal fat from their ice cream and putting apples into their apple pies! Like they have done us this big favour, rather than just providing the absolute bare minimum expected of "food" and actually being honest for a change about what it contains.

The website is clearly designed to give you the impression that all these "myths" and "rumors" are not true now, and never have been true in the past. They also skip over dodgy topics such as the dried powder they call "onions" (or the word "preservatives") and never actually discuss how anything USED to be done, only how they are done now. I have some pretty solid suspicions that if they were upfront about how things were before 2004, that website would not be looking quite so upbeat...

Some interesting reading can be found in forum threads like this one where people discuss the campaign and website. It is both fascinating and scary to see how some people see right through the spin, while others seem to buy right into it!

I promise another Candy Technology post tomorrow, with two reviews to make up for the lack of posts.

Game Day in Glenbrook!

Well, today I went up to Glenbrook to get together with a few mates from the SWL (online Blood Bowl league) for a few boardgames. We were at Clay's house (his Limekettles blog is linked on the right), and got in a few different games including Formula DE, a racing game, Fury of Dracula, a sort of detective game where one player controls dracula and the others have to hunt him down and Betrayal on the House on the Hill, which is a haunted house style game.

It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I was able to take part. It was also nice to meet Flo from the SWL, and Clay's family who I had heard alot about but not met until today.

I was supposed to be in blacktown playing in the toxic blood bowl league, but decided I'd rather try a few new games instead. I'm glad I did, because it wasn't until yesterday evening that I was told that my opponent couldn't make it, so it would have been very frustrating if I'd ended up not able to go to either event and instead got stuck at home!

What the...

Spy Kids 2 is on at the moment, I just can't reconcile the fact that the director of this piece of cartoony fluff is the same director of ultra-violent Sin City and Desperado...

Oh, and everyone reading this should march out right now and go try a Cookie Dough Kit Kat... so good! *drool*

An Unhealthy Obsession

A few weeks ago it was my birthday, and my wonderful fiancee got me a copy of Titan Quest to go with my shiny new computer. Fast forward two weeks, and we are now both knee-deep in an unhealthy obsession with the game, that sees us competing for computer time and generally being totally lame.

The game itself is essentially Diablo 2 but updated for modern computers. Complete with beautiful 3D graphics, physics included (when you kill a monster, rather than a scripted death animation it goes flying off based on how hard it was hit, including going over cliffs and rolling down hills etc). It also has this totally awesome loot system where the enemies actually drop the weapons and armour that they were using. If you kill a skeleton wearing a helmet, he drops that helmet, if he has a spear, he drops the spear, etc. Now that doesn't SEEM that big of a deal to a casual observer, but believe me in computer game terms that is lightyears ahead of previous products, where you could kill a small rat only for him to drop a full sized breast-plate or giant two handed warhammer.

Another big change is that rather than set classes, instead all characters start off identically and once they level up can choose from eight masteries, each of which include a host of skills. You can then choose a second mastery at level 8, which leads to a whole bunch of possible hybrid classes.

Anyway, right now it is more addictive than crack and Suzy and I are both totally consumed by it. I am already on to my second character, and she just started the third and final act of the game. Highly recommended to anyone with a love of Diablo and a beefed up computer!