I was going to do a review of a nonograms game (it's an art game) this week, but the game is still unfolding and there's a shockingly deep story, so instead, I'll be telling you about a gem of a game called Little Idle Monsters from developer Junjo, who you may recall from earlier reviews I did of their Farm Rush and Farm Idle games!
A simple concept, yet still lots of fun!
So the basic story of Little Idle Monsters is that you're the bad guy and you're summoning hordes of critters with your magic deck of cards to terrorize the townsfolk around you. You draw cards from your deck, building fear in the hearts of your enemies. Fear is your currency, here, and you use it for everything from building up your creature arsenal to building up the dread you cause to conning the deck into letting you pull multiple cards at once to training your monsters to cause mayhem and slaughter the uppity peasants.
All against an adorable SNES/Sega-style background!
The game is pretty simple to play - click on the deck to deal cards faster, click on highlighted buttons to purchase upgrades, click on the town button to raze the villages and outposts.
Which is really quite fun!
If you're looking for a way to release some frustration without causing real-world harm, definitely give this game a play on Kongregate or mobile, since it's available on the app store now!
In Which He's Bad. So Bad. But his movie is very fun!
So I saw Dolemite Is My Name, and it got me thinking about blaxploitation movies and how studios basically forgot they existed after the 1970s. It also got me thinking about
Because I had to know
Dolemite, the 1975 film whose mad genius creator, Rudy Ray Moore, was the source for Dolemite Is My Name, is everything I'd hoped it would be. My god, Dolemite...
Did I understand everything that was happening at every second? Heck no. Did I have to understand every word spoken or every action taken to understand Dolemite and what it stood for? Not in the slightest. Dolemite is a celebration of a film and it's impossible to watch it and be bored. Confused, certainly, but not ever bored.
How can you be bored when there's a very strange yet very cool man surrounded by beautiful women who know Kung Fu?
How can you be bored when there's a preacher who is also a mob boss?
How can you be bored when Rudy Ray Moore is... hold on, I'm looking up at that poster and what is even happening there?! Where is the lady in pink kneeling? Where are her legs? The lady in green is holding onto the barrel of Rudy's pistol, which looks like a shrunk-down sniper rifle! Where is that thing firing? Were the Hardy Boys in the 2000s copying Rudy's shoes on this poster? What is happening? WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
Awesomeness. That's what's happening.
Dolemite is awesome.
But what's the story?
Well... this is a lot of inference on my part here, but from what I could tell, Dolemite is a folk hero tale where a man who is kind of a pimp (?) is released from prison because his madame found evidence that he was set up by the cops to take the fall on drug charges. He comes out to a world much changed from when he went in, including having had his own club stolen by the villainous Willie Green (D'Urville Martin). The movie follows his quest to get his club back and seek revenge on the crooked cops and Willie Green.
There are Kung Fu hookers, slightly terrifying sex scenes, the aforementioned mob boss preacher, and car chases galore. There are squibs (the blood-filled explosive caps used to simulate someone being shot) going off left and right, seemingly missing footage which might be the result of the camera running out of film at inopportune moments, and absolutely atrocious lip syncing (in the club), and above all...
There is Dolemite.
Rudy Ray Moore is not a good actor, but you love Dolemite nonetheless because everyone in the movie believes in him. It's hilarious, it's fun, and it's absolutely a movie you should see at least once in your life, and once you see Dolemite, you begin to wonder what its sequel, The Human Tornado, is like. You wonder what the blaxploitation Saturday Night Fever film Disco Godfather is like. You wonder if you can get hold of Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son In Law so you can show your friends...
It's an addiction.
A really, really fun addiction.
An addiction with some very attractive women involved...
As a final note, I'd like to point out that the intestine-pulling scene in Dolemite Is My Name is apparently a running joke where, since that moment abruptly ends without the intestine-pulling or anything else in the movie. Rudy is doing... something? to D'Urville, grunting and gripping, and then suddenly, we cut over to Jerry Jones who gives his iconic "God damn, Dolemite," and fires his pistol into D'Urville to take the heat off of Dolemite.
Also, I just realized that his hat is very clearly crocheted... Future Fiber Monday project?
So in conclusion, GO WATCH DOLEMITE!
You will not regret it!
I first wish to say: I am not abandoning the bubbles. Today's experiment was due to the music moving me, and bubbles aren't a very cyberpunk style. Besides, I'm thinking of playing around with some of the more modern art movements anyway, and I might even delve into total abstractism or impressionism! Ooh... I'd love to paint an impressionist scene...
I should paint next week!
Anyway, here's my base sketch:
For the swirly designs, I just basically randomly moved my pencil around the page in continuous figure-8s. Then I drew on the bird and the tree!
From here, I had some decisions to make. Did I want this to be bold or not-so-bold? Light or dark? Full color coverage or let some of the paper breathe?
I settled on a combination of crayons and colored pencils!
I maybe should have kept my swirly patterns down, because I ended up coloring until quarter past three. The base sketch was done by ten this morning, so... yeah. Five hours of coloring.
That right there is why art costs money, my dudes.
I also kept a directed pallet: browns go on the tree. Orange on the beak/feet/leaves. Yellow and orange on leaves. Blue and violet on the background (and the eyelids). Green on the outer bird. Pink on the hat. Pale colors on the face.
It's hard to photograph this image, but I'm pretty darn proud of how it came out!
Look at his lil face!
Okay, that'll about do it for me today - I'm ravenous, and I haven't had coffee since this morning...
In Which I Talk About Wrestling's Inability to Behave on Occasion...
By now the world has become fairly aware of the unfortunate taint of racism in the wrestling world. From ACH (Jordan Myles) and his T-Shirt Controversy to the uncouth comments from Jim Cornette or the blatant racism of 1990s D-Generation X, it's very, very frustrating sometimes to enjoy wrestling.
First, I'd like to say something about the ACH Controversy. The shirt was racist. It's blatantly a minstrel-show kind of design and anyone who "doesn't see it" either doesn't know what a minstrel show was or they're in denial. ACH has announced that he has left WWE and I wish him the best of luck in finding a more sane/sensible platform to get himself out there in the world. ACH is a brilliant wrestler. Yes, airing his grievances against Jay Lethal did more harm than good to himself (Jay, of course, works for ROH, not WWE), but when you are being targeted by a racist image used to promote you (and therefore denigrate your good name) your emotions tend to be running high.
So ACH has left WWE. And rightfully so. No one should be expected to just... deal with the kind of racism that environment has historically had.
On the topic of the WWE, let me transition into stating this: D-Generation X, and HHH especially, have a history of being disgustingly racist. From the infamous blackface segment to HHH using the Iron Cross (Nazi symbolism!) as his most recognizable symbol and straight up telling Booker T, a far better wrestler, that "Guys who look like (Booker) don't win championships" (and then proceeding to beat him!), it's just undeniable. You can cry "it was a different time" all you want, but I was there in the 1990s and early 2000s and guess what - we knew racism was wrong. We knew Blackface was not ok. We knew that saying crap like HHH said wasn't okay. We knew better. He knows better.
So the environment maybe isn't exactly the best for people who aren't white in WWE...
There are other places to go, but after what Jim Cornette said on NWA Powerrryesterday, I don't think that ACH will be entertaining the NWA as a new home anytime soon...
And... as soon as I looked that up, I now have some breaking news.
Jim Cornette has left NWA.
Whether this was under his own power or because he was asked to leave by Billy Corgan or Dave Legana is unkown right now, but yeah.
No more Jim Cornette.
I feel slightly bad about this, because while Jim said something inescapably racist, he has had one of the best minds in the business. Unfortunately, his personality is such that he's quite like the dwarves at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia. Jim Cornette is for Jim Cornette, and that's all he's there for. Which sucks.
I hope that whoever they get to fill the recently vacated announcer's chair, they're as cool as pretty much everyone else on NWA Powerrr.
Well... that's a bit of a mistruth - I still have a slight sniffle, but I'm no longer flush-faced and miserable, so that counts as a win in my book!
It's another gross, gray day here in the Blanket Fort. It's around 35℉ (~1.5℃) and vaguely wet outside - it can't decide whether it's just cloudy or raining or... snowing.
Yeah. It's trying to be winter. Already.
Anyway, here are my plans for the week:
Tomorrow I'll talk about wrestling!
Thursday will be a glorious day of doodles
Friday I'll talk about Dolemite and how it differs from Dolemite Is My Name
Saturday I'll talk about a cute mobile game I'm playing
Sunday I'll talk about some kind of tasty food
Monday I'll talk about what I'm making and how I learned to crochet
Next Tuesday I'll blather about life, the weather, etc
So, that's been my week - a day with a crummy cold followed by a day with, at worst, a slightly runny nose and itchy eyelids. I actually crocheted quite a bit yesterday, but I was in no mood to show it off.
Also the cat accidentally released a poop on the stovetop when no one was looking (poor thing), so that was gross. Don't worry, I cleaned and sanitized.
I'm kinda bummed that I missed out on Parasite and hanging out with my partner and friends yesterday.
That's life, though. I would've felt awful if I'd made them sick!
I'm sorry, guys, I woke up at noon today and I feel like I got hit by a snotty truck, so there will be no Fiber Monday this week. I'll show off what I've worked on next week, okay?
I know I've baked white bread on here before, but I did a video this week to go along with it!!! The video is embedded at the end, so if you need to skip the blog, feel free to just watch the nearly 8 minute long video at the end!
As ever, it's is wise to assemble your ingredients ahead of time - this recipe called for: Flour, sugar, yeast, salt, butter, and milk!
This is what you might call a "fortified" bread because it has milk and butter in it. Unfortified breads use water. So this bread had some calcium in addition to any vitamins from the flour :)
The first step was to take about 2.5 cups of the flour and mix it with the yeast.
Once my yeast was mixed into the flour, I measured out my milk, a tablespoon of butter, some sugar, some salt, and plopped them into a saucepan on the stove to heat. The optimal range for my yeast was 120-135℉ (48.9-54.5℃), so I took out my mother's cooking thermometer and kept an eye on the temperature!
Remember to keep your flame/heat low when heating milk on the stovetop. Burned milk smells nasty as heck.
We're not quite there yet in this shot...
By the time the heat was right,the butter was melting nicely!
Now came the messy part: I had to mix the milk mixture into my flour/yeast mixture! Time to feed them bread bugs!
And here we see my slurry coming together.
After the initial mix, I added more flour until the dough would accept no more.
As seen here.
At this stage, I had to knead, which is my least favorite part because I can never tell if I'm doing it right and no one was around to ask :| I'll say I did alright, since, spoilers, the bread was pretty good!
Basically, you sprinkle down some flour on a surface and flour up your hands, then you flatten your dough slightly, fold it, flatten it, turn it a bit, repeat folding, flattening, and turning your dough until it... feels like dough, I guess? Sometimes it takes longer than others.
Then you grab some cooking spray - I learned the hard way not to trust myself with oil - and grease the inside of a bowl, deposit your dough lump, and cover it. Leave that puppy in a warm area of your house (like next to the stove or heater). It's best to use a damp towel to cover the dough if you're in a dry house. Otherwise, stick with plastic wrap or whatever you use in its place.
Once you've waited a while and your dough looks twice as big as it did before, deflate it by putting your fist in the middle and pressing down. It will fart on you a bit. That's fine. then you just... gently shape it back into a ball. At this point, you can divide your dough if you're making multiple loaves. How you do this is up to you, but if you have a big knife and some flour on your counter, that's probably the best way. I don't recommend clutching the dough ball with one hand and eyeballing what "half" is while gently slicing away at it with a dull paring knife...
Which is what I did. Which is why they're uneven...
Let your new twin blobs rise again. I like to leave them on the stovetop while I preheat the oven to 350℉(175℃), but here's a word from the wise: don't leave plastic wrap near the vent at the back of your stove, because it will melt from the heat. Thankfully I caught it early, but I still had to switch it out for some damp paper towel!
Also, grease yourself some loaf pans while you're waiting.
Once your balls have expanded - and yes, I've got the sense of humor of a crass child - you can shape them into loaf-like shapes. My mother's cookbook recommends gently patting and pinching your dough into the shape you like or rolling it out into a puffy sheet before rolling it up. I may do that one day just to make cinnamon roll or cinnamon raisin bread... mmmmmmm.
Anyway, once your loaves are assembled, let them rise again. Another ten minutes or so. Then it's time to bake bake bake! Slide those pans into your oven and bake them for anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes! They may take longer or shorter depending on their size, moisture content, and the weather. You'll know they're done if they make slightly hollow thunking sounds when rapped with a wooden spoon.
Remember to toss them out of their pans when you get them out of the oven and cool them on wire racks so they don't keep baking in the pan! Also so that the bottoms don't get soggy...
Behold! White Bread!
Now, the reason these loaves have an odd marbled effect on their tops is because I spilled probably 4 Tablespoons of canola oil into the initial bowl and had to dump it out, blot it, blot the dough, and generally just made a mess. It did not change the flavor of the bread, so I must've done just well enough that it didn't botch everything lol!
Regardless, these loaves were gorgeous, and when eaten, they were firmer than your average storebought loaf (which I really like, especially for eating warm with butter!).
Have some Glamour Shots!
If you want to know how I did that, I just basically carefully slashed the top of the loaf as it rose. I used the same dull paring knife I'd used to separate the loaves.
The final slice of bread nestled in its sandwich bag. I miss it already...
Would I recommend white bread as a beginner's bread? Absolutely. Am I spectacular at baking it? Nope, but it sure tasted alright! You'll probably have just as much luck as I've had, so go for it! Find a recipe online and bake away, brother!
Remember: Start your baking experiments with as few ingredients as possible, work your way up, and don't get too frustrated if you mess up. Timers are your friends, so are thermometers, and you don't need too many appliances to make good food. You've got this.
