Sakura Matsuri 2011 Edition

Timeline:

6:00 AM - woke up.
6:30 - done showering, getting dressed, etc.  Had breakfast consisting of maple & brown sugar oatmeal and a couple glasses of milk.
7:00 - Got in the car and left to go pick people up.
7:22 - Realized I forgot my cell phone, made the stupid decision to turn around and go back to get it.  I should have just met up with everyone then gone back past my house to grab it on my way out of the city.
7:45 - made it to where we were meeting, got people in car.
8-something - got $20 in gas money, tossed that into the tank.  Tank nearly full.
10-something - arrived at the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU metro station.  Noted that there were far fewer people there this year.  Normally it takes us 30-40 minutes to get our metro passes, this time it took about five.
10:45 or so - on the street, through admissions, hunting down food.
11:00 - obtained taiyaki, takoyaki, and okonomiyaki. om nom nom.  Then proceeded to walk around and look at the booths and stuff.
2:30 PM - we realized that except for the food, 90% of everything available at the booths is also available in the dealer's room at an anime con.  Got Beef Udon bowl.
3-something - we decided to go to Olive Garden.  We shuffled around rides with people since not everyone wanted to go, it ended up being just the white people going for food, and the asians/black people going straight home.  Just like last year.  I'm not trying to be racist or anything, that's just how it worked out.  Also, my car ended up being just me at this point, so no gas money for the return trip :(
4 or so - arrive at olive garden, party of 4 seated rather quickly.
5:00 - I discover through the helpful reminder of our waiter that the soups there are endless, ordered a second soup.
6:30 - we left, and I forgot to use the bathroom on the way out.  Grabbed my NOS out of my backpack though.
sometime - it couldn't wait any longer, had to find a back road where I could pull over and use a tree. lol
just before 9 - home.  NOS empty.  Gas gauge at 1/4 tank, but then again as my gas gauge goes down it gets more and more inaccurate, so I really don't know how much I have left at any given point in time.  At least it's inaccurate on the low side, meaning there's more in the tank than what it says.

Moral of the story: use the bathroom before leaving the restaurant so you don't have to use a tree.

Mrs. T's Pierogies

I've been going to a local pub lately with some friends on a regular basis, and one of their menu items is a basket of pierogies.  Eating them reminded me of how awesome they were, so I started grabbing them from the freezer section.

There is a variety of, well, varieties to choose from.  Most of which, to no surprise, Giant doesn't carry.  I've had a few of them, but generally any of them should be good as long as you like whatever's in them.

They can be cooked a bunch of different ways.  You can boil them, bake them, fry them (and "sauteé" is just a fancy word for "fry"), and even use a contact grill (like the George Foreman ones).  The way I recommend making them is frying them, but for convenience's sake, baking them is the way to go.

The directions for any method of cooking are simple and low on the bullshit I usually complain about.  The oven directions do tell you to flip them, but here it makes sense as they brown more evenly that way, for a more aesthetically pleasing snack.

A word of advice when boiling them: Adding frozen pierogies to boiling water can cause the pierogies to crack, and then you get to clean potato out of your pot.  Even though they tell you to do precisely that, I'd recommend putting them in the water before boiling it.  As an added bonus it'll knock a bit of time off of the cooking time.

The method I use for frying them is slightly different from the method listed on the box, but produces delicious results nonetheless.  Instead of using oil, I use a low-fat butter substitute (to be specific, Brummel & Brown).  The only real change, aside from continually having to add more of the butter substitute, is that you'll need to preheat the skillet with nothing in it (or with some drops of water so you can tell when it's warm).  Then it's just the rhythm of "flip pierogies, add more butter spread, wait" until they're golden brown.

They suggest frying them with sliced up onions, and indeed that's the way they're served at the pub we go to.  So if you want to go that extra mile and get an onion to slice up, there you go.  If you'd rather not bother with that, onion powder will suffice.  Add it just before flipping the first and second times, and you're good to go.

Depending on how you cook them, cleanup can be annoying just due to the number of dishes.  This is why I recommend baking them if all you're after is convenience.  That way you can just use aluminum foil and you'll only have to wash a plate.

Sakura Matsuri checklist

I don't know exactly why I'm posting this on the internet, but whatever.  The following is a list of things I don't want to forget to take with me when CAINE goes up to DC in a couple weeks.  I'll strikethrough things as I get them together.

• Backpack (will predictably contain some of the other items on this list)
• Chex Mix
• bottled water (since everything in the realm of liquid refreshments is grossly overpriced)
• energy drink (for the drive home)
• light overshirt in case it gets warm
• jacket because it's usually cold and windy
• sunscreen (I'll quote myself: "sun + weeaboos = sunburned weeaboos")
• a hat (to help repel the evil sun)
• my phone, preferably fully charged
• money:
• $10 - because I forget how much the day-long metro pass is
• $5 - admission
• $5 - 3 taiyaki
• $? - okonomiyaki
• $? - takoyaki
• $? - dinner afterwards
• $? - in case I actually see something I want to buy that isn't food or a necessity
• bug people for gas money, since I WILL have to refill before and after the trip and I'm not going to be a softie about this anymore because gas is fucking expensive these days
• make it clear that paying for gas for my car is a donation that will not be repaid
• my exact words will be: "Pay me for gas.  Or buy it at the pump.  One or the other."

Niche JavaScript Development Rant

So I sat down and decided to work on my image script some more.  I decided it was high time to add the keyboard commands, so I did that.  I went through and tested in other browsers.  Everything's fine, but when I press Spacebar to open the image list in Opera...

Opera mysteriously navigates to the next image.

What the hell?  I went into my code and made absofuckinglutely sure that there was no possible way that next() could be called erroneously.  It does appear in my keyboard handler's switch statement after the code for the spacebar, but not only did I properly slap a break; up in there, the code for the previous image is between that of the image list and the next image, with its own break;.

At this point I toss a couple alert()s around just so I can see what's happening.  Put one in the keyboard handler just before the call to next(), save, refresh the page, press the spacebar, and no alert box.  Moved it to the first line of next(),saved, refreshed the page, pressed the spacebar, and wham, an alert box.  The image in the background hadn't changed yet, and the image list also hadn't been shown yet.  Click OK, then the image changes and the image list shows up.

So essentially, Opera is phantomly calling my function.

I play around with it some more.  Renamed the existing next() to derp().  Made next() a wrapper that shows an alert box and then calls derp().  Edited my keyboard handler to call derp() in place of next().  Saved and refreshed the page, pressed the spacebar, and no alert box.

So at this point I think it's something really weird with the event handler.  Also at this point I devise a workaround.  Test to see if the dialog is displayed, and return from next() if it is.  Renamed stuff back to what it should be, deleted the wrapper, saved, refreshed, and no more phantom navigation.

I was happy that I bitchslapped Opera into working like all the other browsers do, but I was still wondering why it was calling next().  On a hunch, I renamed the function, commented out the workaround, and changed the function calls in the links to use the new function name.  Save, refresh, and...  the image changes.

So, basically, Opera erroneously acts as if the "Next" link has focus.  Which is weird because when I click any other link (like, "Previous") and then hit spacebar, it still goes to the next image.  It's also doubly weird because internet browsers for some lame-brained idiotic fucktarded reason bind Spacebar to Page Down, and Enter selects links.  If I want to hit Page Down, I'm going to fucking hit Page Down.  That still doesn't explain why it tries to navigate the "Next" link when I press the spacebar.

Is there a similar phantom function call I should know about for my "Previous" link?

Why do 90% of my browser-specific workarounds have to be for Opera, to bring it in line with all other browsers?

Sentimental Shooting

Edit (2020-09-21): I have posted a followup to this post with updated information about modern versions of Windows and the game's music.

I mentioned this game briefly on twitter, but a 140 character per message medium just isn't enough to properly explain this game.  Hence the blog post.

No screenshot of the title screen or anything because the game's built-in screenshot feature isn't active on the main menu and PrintScrn gives me a 640x480 black image.

There will, however, be a jump break right here like in all my other game review-ish posts.

Fightan Gaemz

So from time to time I may irritate, annoy, or piss off other gamers by talking shit about popular fighting games like Street Fighter.  I'm not going to go in-depth into what exactly I say, but I will go into why I talk shit about them.  Also, this isn't at all about 3D fighters, which I don't typically play.

Let me say first off: Street Fighter isn't a horrible fighting game.  It's been one of the biggest, most well known fighting games in the genre since the beginning of the genre and has seen a lot of playtime from a lot of people.  That alone proves that it deserves its place among the best fighting games.  Video games as a whole are an entertainment medium where the cream rises to the top.  If a game sucks, the first two or three people who buy it spread the word, nobody else buys it, and it fades into obscurity.  Street Fighter's been a popular enough game to have more sequels than any one person should ever care to count made of it.

I mainly talk shit about it because it's pretty much the most mainstream fighting game franchise in existence.  Talk to anyone who plays fighting games, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of it.  I always encourage branching out and expanding one's horizons.  There are so many good fighting games out there that just don't have the prestige of being named Street Fighter and having been around forever.  If you limit yourself to just that one game, sure, you're going to like it, but think of what you're missing out on.

Other popular mainstream fighters I've played include but are not limited to: Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Capcom vs. SNK 2, and the King of Fighters series.  I personally don't care for Marvel vs. Capcom's whole 3-on-3, assist attacks, etc. style of gameplay.  Sure, it leads to lots of crazy stuff happening on screen, but with that many team combinations it's impossible to achieve any sort of balance.  To me, a fighting game isn't really fun unless it's balanced.

I don't mean that all characters need to be the same.  I don't want a bland game.  What I mean is: strong attacks have downsides, projectiles have reasonable limits (such as only one on the screen at a time from a given character, only supers can ignore this), turtling is punished somehow, and infinite combos are scarce or nonexistent.

My first real branching out in fighting games was when I was introduced to Guilty Gear X.  Until then, fighting games had been slow and pixellated with choppy animation.  But here came a game with much higher resolution graphics, plenty of speed, and fluid animation.  It also helps that the engine itself is fairly technical, and with each iteration has gotten more technical.  I've played it as it's come out, and after getting used to the new ones, it's tough to go back.

I forget the exact order, but after that I found games like Garou: Mark of the Wolves, The Rumble Fish, and Melty Blood.  Garou is actually a more standard fighter, but it does contain the "Just Defend" mechanic that I was already aware of thanks to playing the Guilty Gear series, wherein you are rewarded for properly timing your blocks to more precisely coincide with your opponent's attacks.

The Rumble Fish has, aside from the strange name, a gauge system to which I've never seen anything remotely similar anywhere else.  You have two gauges essentially, one is your offense gauge and goes up as you perform offensive actions, and the other is the defense gauge and goes up when you perform defensive actions.  Maxing out either gauge opens up a super specific to that gauge.  Maxing both of them causes them to merge, and open up a special super.

Melty Blood is quite a fun franchise.  All sorts of off-the-top things happen like dropping molotov cocktails on your opponent while you ride a broom through the air.  You can build gauge easily, and start with enough for a super.  Supers in this series are simply powered up versions of your character's regular moves, and almost all moves have a super version.  However, you can hold out and max your gauge to access the more powerful Arc Drives.

Another I just found out about recently is Fate/Unlimited Codes.  It's based off of Fate/Stay Night.  While the graphics are 3D and characters can sidestep into the foreground/background, it uses entirely 2D-style move lists, and is actually pretty fun.  The 3D graphics get put to good use for cinematic effect during supers and at the end of some combos.

I'll throw a curveball here and mention Blood Storm and Time Killers.  Both were made by the same company and have similar gameplay.  You have attack buttons that correspond to your character's limbs, and everyone has a weapon.  Properly timed and placed attacks can cut off your opponent's arms, rendering that button useless.  Matches are typically very short.  Overall, it's an interesting idea that I've never seen anywhere else.

Essentially, my opinion of popular mainstream fighting games as a whole is similar to my opinion about yellow mustard.  "...it's just that dijon mustard is so much better."  This strange analogy requires a slight change: Mainstream fighting games are good, but there's so much else out there to play that will give a completely different gameplay experience.  If you're fine with the gameplay experience you get, so be it, but when you get tired of it, there's plenty of other material to work with.

So, yeah.  Branch out, find good stuff you overlooked or never knew about, and live a richer and more enjoyment-filled life.

More Food?

There's some food posts that I could make, but I don't really know if I want to.  The stuff I've been having lately is a little less on the convenience side, and that's generally the point of view I write from.

I mean, it's still easy to make this stuff.  All it really involves is boiling some water.  However, one factor to consider for convenience is how much shit you have to wash when you're done, and when you have to boil stuff and then drain the water, the number of things you need to wash generally goes up.  It's almost at the point where I'm saying to myself, "you know, I really like these things, but eating them means having to wash the pot, the strainer, the long-handled spoon I stirred it with, the spoon rest, the plate, and the dish I use to hold dipping sauce..."

Which is a shame in a way because if you limit yourself to just the things you can put into an oven, set the timer, and take out when it beeps, you end up limiting yourself to a very small number of products with a very small amount of variety to them.  The stuff I'm considering posting about now technically has microwave directions, but they turn out horribly that way.  So horribly that it's not worth having the directions on the package.

So, I dunno.  I might post about them, I might not.  This is either a really bad teaser post, or the most justified post ever in the history of the internet.