Ficedula: News Page

As requested by Jasper.

Quantities are necessarily Quite Vague as it depends on the size of your pizzay tray

Ingredients - for the base

Self-raising flour
Yeast
Olive oil or sugar or both (perhaps 1tbsp)
Warm water
Pinch of salt

Place the flour into a mixing bowl. Estimate how much you will need for a base to fill your pizza tray and then add 50% more as you'll have underestimated. Add the yeast and oil/sugar and mix. Start adding the warm water while mixing it in until it has formed into a single semi-sticky ball.

Begin kneading the dough (in the bowl at first if necessary), dusting more flour on as necessary if it becomes too sticky. Once it's workable dust a worksurface with flour and knead for 10 minutes or until you become bored, dusting with flour as required.

Roll out with a rolling pin and place on a pizza tray. The tray may need greasing, even if it's non-stick. Leave in a warm place to rise; if it's (for once) Winter then put it in an oven at 50C. Leave for 10-15 minutes.

To make the sauce, mix a small amount of passata (probably less than you think) in a pan with some beef stock, herbs, and diced onion. Heat for a few minutes, stirring. Take it off the heat if it starts to boil.

Take the now risen base and spread the sauce over it. Add toppings including chilli, pepperoni, red onion and olives. Grate enough cheese to cover the pizza. Depending on taste preferences, you can use mild cheddar, medium cheddar, or strong cheddar. Cover the toppings with the cheese and add more herbs.

Place in an oven and cook at ~150C for 15-20 minutes. Consume with cider.

Woo!

Clearly a different font needed on such a low-res screen, but still. Progress!

So, another year passed, another kitchen fitted, and lessons have been learned by all involved!

This year's celebration brought to you with special guest stars:

Colin!

Eniko!

Chunderbunny!

So, onto the serious business of reviewing series. First of all, Yasuko to Kenji;

Yasuko to Kenji

No, wait.

Yasuko to Kenji

Yasuko to Kenji is surprisingly about two characters; Yasuko (a schoolgirl) and Kenji (her older brother), who of course live together with no parents. Fundamentally, YtK is about the classical story of what happens when a girl falls in love with a boy unaware of her emotions, set to a backdrop of ex-bikers, warehouses, and extreme facial expressions, with occasional table flipping. Also shoujo manga.

The plot itself is fairly by-the-books; coincidental meetings, blackmail, misunderstandings, characters who are totally unable to confess their feelings, and so on. The features that really carry the episodes are the humour, although while Kenji has the largest role to play here, it's worth noting that the interactions between the characters work well in general. Other than Jun, who is apparently unable to convey any emotions whatsoever. Because of this, and because most of the characters are actually doing a decent job, the episodes move along at a fair clip, so it doesn't drag. Although it should be borne in mind that we were drinking. Which leads us onto:

The Yasuko to Kenji drinking game

1 drink when:

-Yasuko falls over and manages to fly many yards (so, every time she falls over)
-Kenji goes into Biker Gang Leader mode and engages mobile facial contortions
-Anybody is kidnapped or tricked into going into a Warehouse
-A table is flipped over

2 drinks when:

-A table is successfully flipped so well it lands back down the right way up
-One of the non-biker-gang characters starts beating people up. Particularly by somersaulting.

Down the hatch when:

-Jun expresses an emotion.

Anyway, since More Voting means More Democracy, we voted and selected to watch more YtK, rather than any more of the other series proposed, which were...

Mei-chan no Shitsuji

Mei-chan is even more like an anime than YtK: a girl's high school reserved for the richest students, each of whom has to have a specially trained butler-ninja-bodyguard to do, well, everything for her. The lead character, Mei, obviously doesn't want to be there but is tricked/blackmailed/forced into attending thus leading to Hijinks.

I personally like Mei-chan ... possibly precisely because it's basically a live-action anime ... but the other attendees decided against it due to it being slower paced than YtK. Which is not incorrect.

The third potential contender was...

Hanazakari no kimi tachi e

Another classic could-have-been-anime story about an all-boys school this time, with the main character being a suspiciously feminine transfer student with a Mysterious Past, or at least a past history with one of the students. And, well, hijinks ensue.

Much like Mei-chan the consensus was that it didn't really move fast enough, which is probably a fair criticism, although realistically I suspect it's that YtK just moves faster than most series, whereas Mei-chan and Hanazakari are both attempting to focus in more on one or two main characters and tell a story. YtK just steams in with the humour and (until episode 8 or so) lets the story bubble in the background. Watching all of YtK also led to an important scientific development:

The Eniko

-50% champagne
-50% mead
-Stir with an olive on a stick
-Drink while watching anime

Or, should you not be constructing cocktails during New Year ... or had exhausted the supplies ...

The Poor Man's Eniko

-60-70% white wine
-30-40% mead
-Stir with an olive on a stick
-Drink while watching anime

Surprisingly palatable!

On the food front, we did also consume much Curry. Including, from the redoubtable Colin, CurryCAKE. Which was interesting. With more tuning the CurryCAKE could become extremely desirable. Theoretically.

Anyway, during the last day of KitchenCon, we sampled other series, including...

K.O.3an Guo

This is a tricky series.

On the one hand, the intro has supernatural martial artists summoning their mystic powers and kicking ass while going to school. And playing rock music on awesome guitars. The series also has girls just falling from the ceiling occasionally, and formalised literal war between schools, including some apparent students from another dimension. The Gold Dimension, apparently.

However, while Japanese series sometimes seem to do without a director, this (Taiwanese it seems!) series clearly did without an editor. The extended (one hour) first episode absolutely could have been a minimum of 40% shorter, perhaps 50%+, without losing anything. And in fact being substantially better. We are NOT watching this series to see random background characters talk ... and talk ... and talk ... about what just DID happen or what's just ABOUT to happen. We want to see it HAPPEN! Perhaps it's a noted style in Taiwan, in which case they need to get it over pronto and start using editors. Or perhaps it's their equivalent of the Garth Merenghi filler technique. Whichever, I'd be watching more episodes right now if they were half the length.

ja! for now...

Me and Jake are crazy. Also: we entered NaNoRenO. Behold the results.

After years of doing sod all, finally stirred myself to go and finish hacking the FF7 world map format, with mostly successful results. Next step, use this as incentive to write an RPG world-map-style module for the DS.

Also (last week) finally went and bought a PS2 (now that, you know, they're selling for approximately nothing ... or around that) along with We Love Katamari and Ico. Games are required to keep me entertained until the Wii launches (now on Dec 8th, it would seem). Ico is unfeasibly beautiful; I didn't think the PS2 could produce anything that looked so good. Certainly the other games out for it fail to demonstrate any particular impressive visual things.

I just know I'm going to have to buy Shadow of the Colossus, but since that's somewhat newer, I have to try and postpone that until it falls in price...

Oddities:

-Version 0.04 of SylphAMP is out
-The Cutie Honey live action movie is hideously, hideously bad. And also hilarious.
-Magners is truly the thing to be drinking in hot weather.
-I hate my car. Or at least its old exhaust. The one that fell off. And, more annoyingly, required replacing the catalytic converter as well...
-I do not hate Range Murata's Robot; I do however mildly loath Amazon for being unable to send me volume one.

I have not fallen off the face of the planet. I will, however, be spending essentially every day this coming week away on business, and I was away all of last weekend, too, so progress beyond this point will be slow. Until next weekend.

Vague, unspecific hint about my next release: More 2D, less wifi.

Preliminary research results from the weekend;

Highest concentration of pure l33t : Sh15uya

Best sort-of-horror-although-not-entirely show : Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

Most inaccurate shooting : The South Korean military

Most absolutely standard mecha anime : Zegapain

Best tedious-speech-shortcutting : Firefly

Best coming-of-age melodrama also being a metaphor for the atomic bomb : X2

Best war scene involving lovers killing each other over whether or not the girl should dress as a maid in a cafe : School Rumble Nigakki

Most bacon cooked : A filthy gatecrasher

Most belongings left behind : bucko [1]

The messiah delivereth unto us a bountiful blessing of beer...

1) Here, have an IRC client for the DS. More or less.

2) Here, have a ratbastard of a Stepmania track. No charge.

As you can see, my bank holiday weekend was spent productively. Or at least spent.

So ... ebooks.

While Slashdot were coincidentally running an article on ebooks just this Friday, I was already looking at buying an ebook at that point. Not because I like to carry hundreds of books around on a portable device (although I would, if I had a good enough portable device), but because I'd just finished book 2 in a trilogy and I wanted to read book 3 now.

However, it seems that most publishers do not, unsurprisingly, appear to "get it". Specifically, I can buy most new paperbacks (usually from Amazon) for ~£5-6. This is not a lot. However, if I'm going to buy an ebook, I'm not going to pay that much. It's arguable which is more convenient (a book is a "nicer" item to have, but ebooks are rather more obviously transportable), but I'm well aware how much money (should have been) saved by not actually producing anything physical whatsoever.

Net result: £3 is about the absolute maximum I'd pay for an ebook and I'd want something good at that price. By something good I mean not DRMed. (I would, incidentally, be open to buying a DRMed ebook, but I'm getting less so I'd want to pay less. This seems obvious to me, but evidently not to the publishers.)

If I could have logged on to, say, Fictionwide (who do appear to mostly "get it") and bought a HTML copy of this book I wanted for $5 (~£3), I would have. As it is, we're talking $8.50 for a DRM copy and I'm just going to wait until next week and pick up a physical copy.

(One publisher who does appear to actually apply some intelligence to the whole ebook thing is Baen, who let you buy ~4 books being published this month for $15, and/or buy back issues of older books fairly cheaply. In a variety of formats including HTML. The only criticisms I have of Baen are;

a) Their web pages are hideously ugly, and
b) Their "Free Library" is a good (great?) idea, I do want to sample authors before I buy their works, but it helps if you put up good examples of an authors work. Rather than less impressive, put-you-off-buying examples. I'm looking at you, Holly Lisle. )

As it happens, if I wanted an ebook-reading device, I'd probably go for something along the lines of an MP3 video-playing device. The sort of thing Archos produces. I can and occasionally do read books on my DS, but it's hardly optimised for it. Realistically, though, the major selling point of ebooks to me is the instant delivery time, Amazon is cheap but has lead times ranging from "days" to literally "years", depending. If someone could sell ebooks to me for a few pounds in those "I want the sequel NOW" situations, then ... that person would be making money off me.