| lulz... that looks like fun!

You guys have HL2, TF2 or Portal2 installed, you should be able to play this free mod. Looks silly and lots of fun to play on teamspeak with each other, screaming like little girls haha.

| Let's Play - The Hidden

| MOAR MINECRUD

So I followed Elzar's road, wondering whose house it would wind up at... only to find out it winds up in the BAD GUY'S PLACE, lol. That place is a crazy labrynth! And I'm pretty sure I haven't explored more than 5% of it. Madness! I had to run for my life, getting chased by a pair of creepers.

Has anyone ever made it all the way to the dragon at The End?

| MOAR BREAD PORN (and chikn pot pie porn)

Poor man's chicken pot pie!

Made a cheater sauce for poor man's chicken pot pie. Started with a quick Roux (1/2 cup butter, 3/4 cup flour, whisk together... then whisked in milk until it was a very thick paste but not dough-like)... then, cracked open a can of roasted chicken & wild rice soup and whisked it all together, needed some salt, pepper, onion and garlic powder.

Baked a fresh loaf of french bread to pour the sauce over.

Fucking noms, and only about 300-350 calories a serving.

Fresh baked bread, sauce

Slice of fresh bread, sauce ladled on top. Weeeee!

Yeah, you gotta watch the Witness:Libya episode because they talk about Tim Herington getting killed there and have some footage of him with the guy they're following around. Tim was the co-director/photographer from Restrepo.

| Minecraft related:

So I read up on The End and it sounds like there's no chance in hell of anyone surviving against the dragon alone... maybe we can all agree on a time to get in the server together (even the part-timers / done with it crowd?) so we can beat that sumbitch!?

What say you!? :D

| Interesting, will check those out

You ever catch that documentary-style film on Afghanistan? Restrepo. Not an easy watch. But really, really good.

| bonus cup (of death)

Also been into these really good HBO short documentaries on war photographers called Witness: and then some place's name like Libya, Rio, Juarez, etc. REALLY good and pretty fucking heavy.

| Chimney Sweep

I've had to force myself to stay awake this morning because I had to wait through those long time frames for a refrigerator repair man and a chimney sweep to show up. Caught some cool Netflix movies that were pretty interesting. First I saw "Six Days to Air" which is a documentary on South Park. They create each episode from idea to it coming out on tv in six days! It's crazy to see it go down even though I never really watch the show. I'm definitely going to watch this week though to see if it feels like something that gets popped out so fast.

The other doc I just got finished watching is "Indie Game The Movie" which just talks about the current indie video game scene. Well, it's probably like a year or two old, but its current to the last time I was playing a lot of games on Steam and xbla. Neat to see the people behind a lot of games. Talk about all walks of life.

| Screenies

Here's the Rocket Ship.. the island on the bottom will need to be removed before everything is all said and done. The column going up the middle is where the ladder resides. The ladder is fully enclosed in falling lava, which kind of adds to the illusion. You can see what's left of the lava stream still sloooowly receding at the bottom, lol.

This was the view of the first platform I built at the top of the sky, lol.

Meanwhile, underground... this was a fun water feature to build. It's rather portal-like, yes? (Shhh, don't tell anyone, it's the secret entrance to the great hall, bat-cave and mines) ;)

A view from one of the recessed-seating areas in the great hall:

Seemed appropriate to add a throne fixture, lol:

| Minecraft Update

Been working on stuff with my two little helpers. Haylee loves to organize flowers and do agriculture stuff, Bennett is definitely the "LET'S GET TO THE BAT CAVE AND KILL ALL THE BAD GUYS!" ...guy. lol

So the Rocket Ship is more or less structurally finished. There are some aesthetic changes I'd like to make but overall it's complete. The top of the ship is 1 block short of the absolute build-limit (top of the sky). I'm not even quite sure how many blocks it took.. but it was a lot. The interesting phenomena I ran into with the cloud layers bisecting the project was that it made it nearly impossible to check my progress from the ground unless I traveled across the valley to my neighbor's house (whoever has that nifty house with the giant spiral on top of it). From THAT vantage point, I could see the entirety of the rocket because the topmost portion of his spiral stairs poked above the cloud layer.

Anyhow. The Rocket has an engine room, engineering control, two boosters, a huge storage bay (or whatever it might be turned into), a middle section good for observation, and then the topmost portion which is split into several decks. I started with the topmost portion, then realized it wasn't visible from the ground and then made plans to extend the whole body of the thing down A LOT.

The engineering control is setup such that you place lava "cores" into their assigned places and they go through the engine room and spit out of the bottom of the rocket, looking like, well, flames or something. lol.

The problem I ran into was that my previous gravity-drop to the surface was no longer effective because the water wasn't wide / deep enough at the point of impact. I tried to turn off the lava flow at that point to allow myself room to fix it... not realizing that it would take FOREVER for the lava to disappear. Tried to stomp it out by building "down" with blocks... but man.. that's a RISKY proposition, lol. Nearly flooded my underground complex more than once. So I've kind of resigned myself to just hanging out in-game and paying attention to the glacial-rate of recession.

At least all this waiting has given me some free time to work on the underground complex / castle. Even has a secret Bat Cave! lol

Now that it's more or less done, I guess I can go google "The End" and see what we need to do. Maybe Elzar or Aaaaaaaron can tell me what the objectives are (and what we've already accomplished?)

| Rivals

Random stuffs:

Haven't played Minecraft in forever! Still like hearing about it and remembering the thrill of the first night in the game, rushing to build shelter and hiding out till the sun came back out.

Rivals of Catan! What an awesome 2 player game. Picked it up the other week and we've played it a ton already. You guys have probably played it already in some form, but basically it's the reprint/remix of Catan the Card game which came out in 96. Each player has their little principality set up in front of them with the different reasons having a d6 number on it, and whenever that number comes up you get that resource. You use the resources to upgrade your town and the first person to X points is the winner. It's that perfect light-euro mix that I really enjoy.

I've been back on my desktop a little to play some Steam games. Working my way through The Walking Dead adventure game, loving it. They really knocked it out of the park. Can't wait to see how it plays out. Each episode they make you make agonizing decisions, it's bananas.

Also picked up some shooters n stuff that were on sale or from those Humble Bundles. I'll put in 20-30 mins every few days - nothing hardcore, but it's nice to have these casual distractions.

Been making a lot of music lately too! Super fun!

| I'm just gonna go ahead and blog the shit out of this place

So the kiddos decide they wanted to lobby for a 'camping out on the couch' night with the fireplace on, movies and popcorn, all that jazz... ok, sure, let's do it.

Everything was going awesome until this morning, when we discover that Bennett has had his first night-time accident in months... on the fucking couch. And even though he was wearing a night-time pull up as insurance, he decided to sleep on his stomach, which had the unfortunate effect of aiming his wang straight up and out of it... ugh.

So now the couch smells like piss, despite several attempts to take it out with resolve pet-odor foam, febreeze, etc.

Sigh.