Monthly Archives: March 2015

I miss this oh so delicious food

Doesn't it look delicious? Picture from Yummy.ph online

Doesn’t it look delicious? Picture from Yummy.ph online

 

Crispy Pata is one of those recipes where you chuck your diet out the window and just enjoy, especially if you have freshly steamed fluffy white rice, seasoned vinegar-and-soy-sauce dip, and is, well, for me anyway, one of those meals that is best enjoyed nagkakamay – eaten with one’s (freshly washed and clean) hands. Might be a Pinoy thing, but some meals are somehow more pleasurable to eat that way. Anyway, Crispy Pata is deep fried whole pork hock, and there’s an awesome recipe over at the Yummy.ph website. You can also use the recipe and method to do crispy fried pork belly. Or deep fried pork ribs. I like eating these delightful meaty dishes with balsamic vinegar as a dip, with rice. Or if you want, use spicy, seasoned vinegar. Here’s a wonderful recipe for it, or if you want it really hot, here’s another.

Or have some spicy bbq pork ribs.

If it’s something that’s a source of homesickness for me, it’s Filipino food. Lately I’ve been missing the barbecues and street food like fishballs and battered quail eggs, with that sweet brown sauce. That’s the right recipe by the way, because the person writing it studied at UP Diliman and that’s where I used to get the best fishballs and eggs.

I miss those simple comforts, and nothing is more comforting to me than comfort foods.

You wanted a recruitment post so here you go!

I play Star Trek Online, and by play, I mean I will log in, give my duty officers assignments to carry out over a few hours, be distracted by baby, forget the game is on and get logged out. On the rare occasion that I DO get to play, I’m busy running away from Borg Elite Tactical Drones, because my weapons are crap and they adapt too quickly. Somehow, I survived to become Admiral. I’m not sure how that happened.

Pick up a Tribble or three dozen...

Pick up a Tribble or three dozen…

I’m in a tiny fleet called Apathy Squadron, because we just don’t care. Surprisingly, this has netted us a number of high level / long time players who just wanna play and not be constantly told ‘Use teamspeak’ or that they HAVE to participate in Fleet actions. I’m also the kind of player who likes to read what’s going on, and that might annoy other players.

Kinda annoyed

Kinda annoyed

At any rate, one of our members, a Chinese-American player called Sinaman (yes, and that name tells you immediately how many fucks he gives. Zero, for the totally clueless…) told Aff that we needed a recruitment post. No, he didn’t want to write it. Aff should totally get on that. Because we needed one.

Aff obliged him. The post, I am informed, meets with his approval. 100%.

For those who don’t want to click on that link, here’s the recruitment post.

 

Our motto is “if you care enough to join, you don’t qualify for membership” – but that’s not really true any more, so the fleet that doesn’t care is making a post looking for like minded people.

Known for nothing, we’re not famous at all – except for being horribly uncoordinated and generally unreliable as team mates. We have a firm belief that the average STO player cares way too much about everything.

Why worry about your damage per second, what sector you are in, or the hull integrity of your starship when you can simply not worry about those things.

As a fleet, Apathy Squadron offers absolutely nothing. We also require nothing, and will probably do nothing. Some of the benefits you will get out of joining us include:

– Trying to figure out how we manage to feed ourselves unassisted;
– Other fleets will be unable to spam invite you whenever you are unfortunate enough to beam down to a Federation Starbase;
– No matter how bad you are we probably contain someone worse – and we don’t care;
– We have a Mumble server – that none of us use, and it isn’t required;

Our fleet has strict entry requirements, they are as follows:

– You must play STO*

*Our definition of playing includes being able to log in. Whether or not you explode in every single space mission, or are sold into slavery and forced to do unspeakable things to Gorn captains during away missions is none of our concern.

Some bonus things:

– On occasion, one of our members rises above the minimum standard (which is zero) and will probably help if you need it for a mission or something;

Pros:

– No secrets in the fleet. You’ll all know what everyone is doing.

Cons:

– No secrets in the fleet. You may need therapy.

Other:

If you still want to join this fleet, you are probably an idiot and/or a masochist. This is excellent, feel free to contact Seda@affirmative or Shadowdancer@kagemaiko today, or anyone else wearing the Apathy Squadron flag.

Remember, if you’re going to be terrible – be terrible in a group.

( This is what happens when people want a recruitment post, but they don’t want to do it – so they told me to get on that. Well, here it is. I hope you’re happy people. )

 

So, if you, for some inexplicable reason, want to join us on our lazy exploration of this fictional universe and the one right next door being invaded by Borg, Star Trek Online is free to play; there’s a cash store but Cryptic made it so that nearly everything in the game can be obtained if you farm enough dilithium so you can sell them for Zen, to buy things from the cash store. Hmm. I guess that means everything can be farmed for. The game is friendly for those people who Just Don’t Have Time to level, like myself. Yay for Duty Officer assignments. Work, slaves! brave explorers!

Ignoble, dishonorable death may be followed by being buried in tribbles.

Ignoble, dishonorable death may be followed by being buried in tribbles.

Be advised that Aff’s Andorian tactical officer is overly fond of explosives, and blew up a moon during a mission. I’m still not sure how that happened.

 

*Screenshots are from a mission called The Tribble With Klingons, and yes it is as cracking hilarious as it sounds. Also, in true Trek format, if you are arsed to do so, players may create their own fanfic missions and submit them to the Foundry, which can be played by everyone in game. Some are incredible in-depth missions which delve deeply into the Trekverse. On the other hand, you may be contacted by Lt. Buffy Summers of the USS Josh Whedon, for help…

 

Getting back in the chair

if it’s something that I’m noticing these days, is that time flies waaaay too damn fast.

I turned 35 recently (and yeah, I am not fussed about my age. Such a silly thing to worry about, in my opinion); Brandon’ll be 10 weeks old in 3 days, and he weighs just a touch over 8 pounds now. If he’d been born on his due date he’d be 3 weeks old.

Which means I’d still be struggling with the sleep and constant occupation of my arms.

He’s starting to be big enough to be carried around for short periods of time in the carrier that McKavian sent me as a baby pressie (Thanks, McKavian!) and he’s just at the right size to keep in my lap, nursing while I type.

I keep him on top of a breakfast pillow, the little baby pillow I made out of one of his dad’s old shirts giving him just enough elevation to stay comfy.

This is good. This means I can get back in the chair and get back to work.Goodness knows I’ve been wanting to.It’s not all smooth sailing yet; we’re hoping that Brandon’s sleeping schedule will smooth out so Rhys can move back into the bedroom (having to constantly climb over his legs to get to the bathroom was hard to do with a baby needing a nappy changed NOW) and hopefully Bran will condescend to sleeping in his cot and not just in the Baby Box he’s so fond of (which is why there’s no space for poor Rhys, but he’s a good Daddy and doesn’t mind sleeping on the couch that much) but Brandon’s starting to sleep through most of the night, which is awesome.But I can reach the keyboard and draw on the Cintiq with Brandon in my lap. And he continues the tradition of my working at the computer with a baby/toddler in my lap.Which is good because I have a crapload of work that needs to happen.

Aff’s Diary: Blessed Hope is going to be finished since I now know how to fully resolve the story in a way that doesn’t blow up the story’s antagonist entirely – I want that character to return later – and move it forward to the next book. Seda’s Diary book 2 is in planning stages while the second book in United Fleet is being written in first draft by David, and I’m looking forward to not being as horribly rushed for it the way I was with the first book.Sparrowind novel version, which will be the first part of a series, with the idea that it’ll be a light novel that keeps the ‘read-out-loud-ability’ of the novelette.

Sparrowind is being expanded from the original novelette because I got so much feedback from readers saying they wanted to see more of the characters and world. I have at least five or six books roughly thought of in the series. I’m planning it as a series that you can read to children, but even those in the YA bracket and grownups can enjoy, in keeping with the original way the book was told. It has a different focus character per book but Sparrowind is planned to show up in every one, connecting them.Set in the same world but not aimed at children is another series which I’ve also started writing. The working title of the first book, Fool’s Errand, is the first of what I was envisioning as at least 12 novels. It’s set some centuries after Sparrowind, and is considerably different in outlook. I also know how it will end.

There’s also a bunch of F.M.L. strips that are noted down, and I’m hoping to perhaps also include that on this site somehow, but if I can’t, there’s nothing wrong with having it on DeviantArt.

It’ll be April soon. Time sure flies.

She says what I am too sleep deprived to.

(Hi, if you’re linked to here by my longtime stalker who wants to paint me as a bigot, take a look at the history first and see if you want to be used by a misogynist, body-image-shaming racist who threatens my children again and again over the years. This is not the first time he’s attempted to get people to come after me because he doesn’t like that I exist. Be aware that he edits quotes to suit how he wants to be seen and is an untrustworthy source because of pathalogical lying. He also has admitted to doxxing me, to people who are probably, given his bent of hatred, are likely to be hostile.)

On to the rambly blogpost.

 

When I saw Overwatch‘s trailer from Blizzard, I thought for a wistful few moments “AWWW YIIIISSSS BLIZZARD MAKING CG MOVIES AT LAST!!!!!!!” (Yes, that was crushed shortly after, but I was consoled by the pure cracky fun that is Heroes of the Storm. C’mon. Nuking Diablo ftw, and I’ve seen the beta, I hope there’s a singleplayer mode so I can listen to the snark to snark combat. Also, the ‘wtf just happened?!’ of watching Nova fall into a sudden pitfall, and Diablo strolling over and covering her with dirt, then strolling away. Jim Raynor on a horse, I Want to play this game!)

Then I ran across this awesome responsive essay to some changes being made. On Tumblr no less. Has she been dogpiled on by Tumblr ‘feminists’? I hope not. She expressed a lot of the problems I have about people complaining about portrayal of the female sex in games/media/whatever. She’s quite right about the body-image shaming that SJWs engage in (I’m victim of this myself, as seen in the evidence of this post being done by my misogynistic stalker.) I’m just a bit sad that there seems to be a weird conflation of big woman = overweight looking. What about muscular? Muscular yet female women are even rarer in portrayal.

Namely, the “I want to pretend and play in a fantasy” POV is just as valid as the “BUT THERE IS NOBODY THERE WHO LOOKS LIKE ME” complaint. Y’know, I’d like to see more Pinoys Portrayed Positively … but it’s not the industry’s fault that there aren’t as many ports of visual novels to the English speaking world. (If there is a English port of Sampaguita please let me know, because from what I read, the story is awesome, the Filipina heroine has very typical Filipina traits while also NOT being totally locked into the mode, and it’s got actually gorgeously rendered character designs by Masamune Shirow.)

Classic Shirow Style too! Yay!

Classic Shirow Style too! Yay!

Am I disappointed that there ‘aren’t more Filipinos in Fiction?’ No, not really. I spot them now and again. Dr. Park in House MD is a Filipino-Korean Mezstiza and oh, I found her quite a familiar series of tropes. Her dad is a sweetheart, and while it’s never made clear which side of the pair is the Philippine connection, I think it’s somewhat implied to be the mother. And Dr. Park implies the whole Overbearing Female Ancestors parcel. (Poor Chase.) I’m not going to whine about ‘cultural appropriation’ because it’s quite a real trope, thank you very much. Watch Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. Good movie. One of my all time favorites. It’s a Taiwanese movie by Ang Lee and if you recognize the name it’s because of Brokeback Mountain. (I also recommend The Wedding Banquet. Also thanks Wikipedia, I’m going to go look for Pushing Hands, because it’s one of the series I haven’t seen, which deals with the classic Confuscian family and its rubbing up to, and against modern values. Be warned, they’re very ‘Asian’ movies.)

But I’m also not ‘offended’ or ‘upset’ because, well, honestly, ‘we don’t need to compete‘ with international superstars. I agree with everything this writer (who is a Chinese-Filipino mezstiza, or Chinay,) says in the post. She rocks. I’m sure there will be the inevitable SJW troll (like Clamps / Yamamanama /superstalkerofwomenAndrewPMarston) who will dismiss her because she writes romance novels, but I figure, SJWs as a whole like to ignore romance writers as a whole when it comes to their whinging about ‘not enough female authors’ falsehood, much in the same way they like to ignore that romance as a genre is Freaking Huge and Profitable, because it doesn’t play nice with the militant tumblrfeminist-misandrist worldview. They’re not ‘real writers’, like they like to pretend that they’re not raging hypocrites.

But hey, I have no intention of telling them to stop or shut up. I’m in fact, happy to let them talk/type what they think. They have the right, much in the same way I do – and that right does not exempt anyone from valid criticism.