I’m happy to say that for whatever reason I’m able to stream on Steam again! I tested it while playing AMID EVIL the other day and it worked perfectly. I think I might do some private-ish streams for quick goof off sessions and one shots, or streaming Audiosurf 2 without the worry of copyright bullshit. :trollface:
Something for a more comfortable atmosphere.
One of my Christmas Presents last year from my best princess friend was a box of taro mochi. I’ve had green tea mochi before, but never tried it with taro, which is a root vegetable. I’ve had taro chips before but I’ve never had it in mochi form. I saved opening these up for a special day, and last Saturday was that day. Nothing like starting your weekend with something sweet after all.
Like most mochi, it was nice, delicious and soft. It wasn’t quite as purple as it was shown on the box. Not a big deal or anything, it already looks good enough to eat.
If I were to describe the flavor I’d say it kind of tastes like a pale sweet potato with caramel. I still think I prefer the matcha ones, but this does have a nice caramel like after taste. It would be funny to make thanksgiving mochi! Perhaps take the recipe for this and use pumpkin spice, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it exists.
I pretty much have breakfast mapped out for the week. I made some eggs and sausage today with a spicy tomato three pepper sauce, sadly I was too hungry to take a picture. Then later on in the day I made some raspberry and cherry sauces to mix with the parfaits. I have two of them dressed with nutella, a thick, sweet and kind of tart cherry sauce and a crunchy mix of cocoa granola and caramel cashews, the other nutella one has a tangy raspberry sauce, cocoa granola and a three nut mix of praline pecans, honey roasted peanuts and caramel cashews. The parfait in the middle is probably the most innocent. It has a mix of matcha (sweetened with monkfruit), honey, pineapple, mango, strawberries, freshly grated ginger and a mix of honey and fruit granola with my three nut mix leftover from the other parfait.
On the left I made a homemade cherry sauce with frozen cherries, sugar, lime juice, cornstarch and vanilla extract. While the raspberry sauce is runnier and mainly consists of raspberry, sugar and lime juice. These also go nice on ice cream, or if you want to strain the seeds out you could serve the raspberry sauce in some soda, tea or a cocktail. I think the raspberry sauce might even be good for milkshakes or smoothies.
It’s 2020 now. Most of us are recooperating from the hectic holidays, trying to lose all of that festive food we’ve packed on over the last couple months. Obviously it makes sense to make a chocolate shake for breakfast. :trollface:
Of course, at first glance it doesn’t look very healthy. But this actually has greek vanilla yogurt, pulverized oats and caramel cashews, one banana, a couple tablespoons of nutella spread, a tablespoon of cocoa powder and almond milk. It did a good job of keeping me full till the afternoon once pizza o clock hit. It was a good way of starting the morning, especially since cleaning was involved. Had to sweeten the morning in some way, and I’ve heard cocoa can help relieve depression symptoms, so I might as well enjoy some cocoa while doing something depressing. :v:
I’ve been reading all kinds of recipes for homemade meal shakes, and wanted to do something different for my special weekend breakfast instead of the usual bacon and eggs combo. I’m also thinking of replacing my lunch shakes with homemade ones. The same chocolate shake mix becomes quite dull after awhile.
I haven’t decided if I’ll have another breakfast shake tomorrow, or if I’ll do something with bacon involved.
No, I’m not making a bacon smoothie. Anyone who suggests that has to go eat a bag of salted dicks.
I don’t have much to write. Work has been keeping me busy, even at home with various projects. This weekend I’m planning to do some dusting, go through my closet and see if I can purge anything, or at the very least find a garment to repair. I already know one of my Hawaiian shirts is missing a button, and lately I’ve been getting an itch to do something creative with some of my clothes. I just need the right inspiration to hit me. I just finished formulating a plan for a possible yogurt parfait next week, something healthy with a touch of devilish delights.
If possible I might livestream tomorrow. I’ll sleep on what game I want to do, waaaaay past my bedtimeu.
Anyways, feel free to contribute to the first Open Thread of the year!
Ladies and Gentlemen I now have a reason to preorder Death Stranding! :zorak:
If you play Death Stranding online and approach the Cosplayer’s shelter, you’ll likely find large mushroom patches littering its entryway. This means that other players have recently piloted their Normans Reedus (correct plural) to that region and given them the command to whip out their own tiny Reeduses to fire defiant blasts of urine onto Conan O’Brien’s doorstep. This has been a tradition since shortly after Death Stranding came out in November, based on Reddit posts on the subject. Impressively, it persists to this day.
Such strange rituals always seem to happen under the House Of Kojima.:rick: As for Conan there has been no response yet, though I have a feeling if there is it will probably be hilarious. Perhaps once Death Stranding arrives on PC someone will make a mod to replace Conan with The Flaming C. :morty:
Sunset Overdrive is a stylish third person shooter set in a world where the zombie apocalypse was caused by a new energy drink, so it basically predicted the development process for Death Stranding in much the same way the Metal Gear universe predicted how our government currently functions. It’s a blast, though it takes some getting used to. I’ve been mainly playing it with a controller, and have had to tweak a few things to my liking, but so far it’s quite the stitch.
The overall attitude the game presents you with is very reminiscent of the Borderlands, or the newer Saint’s Row games in terms of how it presents itself. The gameplay is vastly different, but the overall tone from the characters to the art style seems to take some inspiration from Borderlands, not fearing to tell you how the world is.
The objective of the game is to kill ODers (Over Drivers, energy drink zombies) with your arsenal of weapons while grinding around on telephone poles and railings as well as jumping from car to car while performing style moves that you unlock after awhile. I’m kinda bummed they didn’t include a multiplayer mode like the one that came with the original XBox One release, as it would have been to play with or against other players, though at the time when they released it on PC they did discount it a but to make up for the lack of multiplayer… then again the game also had been out for quite awhile before Microsoft got desperate to get PC Gamers to pay attention to them again and ported half the game to PC, so all in all I’m glad I waited for a sale. :v:
As you progress through the game you’ll find more weaponry. My first present was a musket with testicles, and I recently purchased a gun that shoots records.
All in all it isn’t a bad game, for what I’ve played of it anyway. It’s kind of funny to think this was one of the exclusives that Microsoft used to try and get people to play on XBox, and I knew a lot of XBox gamers at work, and not one of them really said much about Sunset Overdrive… Then again they mainly fixated on anything Halo or Destiny related.
Happy New Year! I’ve been too busy to write, lots of work and real world related stuff. I wasn’t feeling too particularly well yesterday either. I ended up mostly making comfort foods like Breakfast Curry and Pad Thai, played a couple games to relax, enjoy a breakfast in bed for a change, etc. I didn’t feel as bad today; I even tidied things up a bit, moved my Christmas stuff to the pantry. I got a lot of teas, sauce mixes and soup mixes among a bunch of other stuff that I haven’t even touched yet, but when I do I’ll be sure to write about it. So far all the Asian stuff I’ve made has been from scratch. I also want to go over the packaging details, as I’ve found a few things of the Engrish variety on certain products that are quite amusing.
I updated The Phantom Pain recently, both the game and the mod manager. I’ve installed some mods that will make for fun future gameplay. I just felt the call to go back and Cardboard Box sled again and invite Russian soldiers to my slumber party in the middle east. I’m very close to inviting Huey to my party, and I have a special place set aside for him.
Revisited SOTR for a little too. A bunch of my friends bought it during the steam sale, or have waited for the Definitive Edition update to roll out before playing it and I started to get a bit of the itch to go back again and play. I finished a challenge tomb, but now I’m stumped on how to get to the next waypoint. I’ll have to ponder at it awhile and return to it later.
While I wasn’t well enough to stream last night; Yutram and I did spend some time together playing in Doom SnapMap. There were both great and terrible maps to play from “This isn’t half bad” to “Did they even try?” to “What were they snorting when they made this?”.
I decided to try Sunset Overdrive today. I bought it a couple sales ago but never had a chance to try it. I remember watching one of my co-workers play a demo of it at work while stress testing a TV, and it looked fun enough for me to try. I think I’ll save this one for a thread of its own, but for now if you’re on my Steam friends list you’ll see I took some porntography of the game.
I’ve also been entertaining the idea of upgrading my CPU to a 3rd gen Ryzen and my monitors to FreeSync. I got a surprise bonus check last month from work, and the extra holiday pay and overtime are going to help pay for it. The 3950x looks pretty slick, and it would bump up my current setup by 50%. Livestreaming, gaming and video rendering would load much faster, especially now that I’ve found that I can increase the amount of threads to use when exporting in Source Filmmaker. Such an upgrade would be quite beneficial, and I can sell my Dad the old processor, and they can finally get off of x58 and live happily ever after. :melon:
I normally like ending the year with games that I’ve finished; But this year is a little different because we’re not just going into a new year. I wanted to recollect moments that made gaming even cooler for me over the last decade.
When I first caught wind of Left 4 Dead 2 being able to run under Linux I thought it was pretty cool. I’ve grown up playing with Linux since I was a kid, and at the time I was running (and still am) dedicated servers. The very idea of being able to install a free open source alternative to Windows seemed like a good direction. I was invited to the beta second wave, and I remember installing Ubuntu, figuring out how to install the proprietary AMD drivers and wanting to strangle someone whenever I borked the OS. But I got it all figured out and got Steam to run. The library was really small back then. Only a few GoldSrc titles like Half Life and Counter Strike were available to play. But eventually Left 4 Dead 2 was released to everyone in the beta, and eventually more games were ported over, Wine started improving, OBS became available outside Windows, and now thanks the birth of the Vulkan API and Steam’s version of Wine called “Proton” the gaming library under Linux is much more vast than it was earlier in the decade. I definately use Linux much more than I used to, and I’m happy to say at the end of the decade I’m using Linux more than I use Windows. I earned my TF2 Tux fair and square!
There are rare occasions where I will preorder a game, and in one particular case this controller. I remember reading early announcements about it and looking at prototype models they would tease, and the idea of having a fully programmable controller tickled my brain, and the built in gyroscope immediately sold me on the idea. Like with most of my preorder purchases I made a good gamble. See, when I was growing up I wanted the comfort of playing full PC games on the couch, and not just platformers and sidescrollers, but FPS’s and anything that felt more comfortable with a manual aim that I could never achieve with a Dualshock or XBox type controller. The Steam Controller enabled me to basically use an air mouse with the additional buttons and layout of a controller. It’s unfortunate that Steam is no longer making these versatile controllers, it seems too many people couldn’t grasp the concept of fully modifying their controller. They just wanted the plug and play console experience with a game working perfectly out of the box… sorry but if tweaking a config a bit is too much then you really need to re-evaluate why you bought the controller; You’re probably better suited for a console. I haven’t had any issues with mine, and even ordered another three during their last call to purchase them. I hope we see even cooler controllers in the future, and that possibly Steam will release their 2nd revision of the Steam Controller that was leaked awhile back. One can dream anyway.
I’ve always liked making and editing videos of one kind or another. I first played with Premiere Pro CS2 during my early years of YouTubing, and later on moved onto CS4, then eventually CS6. When Adobe announced that their newer version would be subscription based I pretty much signed off CS5 as my final Adobe Suite. I wasn’t going to pay a monthly fee for something I don’t have the time to do everyday. One day I ran into an audio issue that couldn’t be taken care of in CS6. After trying a few alternatives I finally settled on Shotcut; an Open Source free alternative that has a lot of cool editing features and is always being updated, and can also run under Linux (meaning all of my video creation can be done under there from start to finish). I’ve been editing with Shotcut for a couple of years now, and now my Adobe suites have collected cobwebs.
In the beginning there was only FRAPS for recording your desktop, but over the years there were other pay softwares that cropped up, and eventually NVidia and AMD made their own recording and streaming software for their GPU’s, and then eventually we had OBS and later on OBS Studio. OBS was once recommended to me by a friend on Steam when I was having issues with FRAPS after upgrading to an R9 290. I didn’t use it too much in the beginning other than for recordings. Later on when OBS Studio came out and they added a plugin to record directly from your GPU and stream using the CPU simultaneously I was quite happy with the results. Unlike FRAPS there are a bunch of optional plugins you can install, and if some of them become popular enough they will eventually be introduced into a newer version. I’ve tried AMD’s recorder, and I played a bit with PlayClaw and Shadowplay, and OBS Studio is always there for me. Now if they could add Vulkan support I can die happy.
I always liked the idea of making my own videos, and have always been interested in animation since an early age. When I heard that Valve was officially releasing their tool, which has been used for every Valve title like Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2, the Left 4 Deads etc I was pretty stoked to finally get my hands on professional free software. I’ve dicked with it on and off over the years and finally was inspired to change up my video format a bit and create these abominations, as referenced in the most recent video:
Before Source Filmmaker was officially released back in 2012 I used Garry’s Mod for animating, and while that was fun I wanted something that could produce something semi-serious with a cartoonish edge and better animation tools for a better story telling experience, after all this software was designed by people who used to work at Pixar. I’m still finding surprises in this old software. In the future I can use it to render in 4K plus I found out recently that I can use a command line function to render using more than one thread on my CPU; Meaning I can export even faster. More on that another time though.
This was a more recent feature to pop up over the decade and I imagine it will get better and better assuming broadband companies don’t gauge people to the point of online gaming being impossible. Sometimes you want to play a game with a friend, but it doesn’t have an online option, or they don’t own the game. Now as long as its supported you can invite a friend from anywhere in the world to play with you, as if they have their controller plugged into your system!
I would list games over the last decade but I think the list is long and wordy to the point that only two or three people may read it before venturing off to the next shiny thing. If anyone would like to share memories of the last decade, be it tech, games or whatever I’d like to see it below.
Happy New Year, and many decades and melons to come. :melon:
I had that song stuck in my head, and I remembered that there was still some leftover tri-tip in the fridge. So I made a white sauce, then turned it into a brown sauce with a bouillon cube. I sauteed some onions in another pan with the tri-tip to warm that up, and I added that into the brown sauce. Then I scrambled up some eggs and toasted some leftover homemade dinner rolls for a breakfast biscuits and gravy. On the side is more watermelon tea, but this time with white peony swapped out with the Russian Herbal blend. It has a nice light taste to it. Aside from the typical daily pepsi my weekend has pretty much been on decaf, which has been nice. I’ll be taking a firey black tea blend to work tomorrow though, probably going to need it. I also have some more leftover breakfast to enjoy it with.