Temporary Hiatus

Whenever I read that term on other stuff it usually translates to "gone forever" but I hope that's not the case here.

I am in the process of moving upstate and haven't had time to write any posts unfortunately. I hope to be back onto a regular schedule by August.

Sooner, if I eat my fiber,

Cinco de Kittens!

This blog post was five days late on purpose.

Exactly one year ago I ended up with a bunch of kittens. Not just your average age kittens like someone is trying to give away, these were dependent orphans.  A stray cat had some kittens and, unfortunately, got hit by a car. A coworker of a coworker is how I ended up with them. I did lots of research before taking them on. Still, there was lots I didn't expect.

Like the fact that they had all watched The Ring.

The lives of five little kittens were suddenly my responsibility. They were two weeks old (the picture above is from the day we got them, I do believe). I went in not expecting a single one to live. When the first one latched on and sucked part of the bottle down I had a good feeling. I felt even better when I got them to pee and, later, poop (I was always relieved to see them poop, which is probably the weird.)

Did you know Walmart carries tiny bottles and kitten milk replacer? I didn't either. Soon, I had making bottles of formula down to a science, feeding them every 4-6 hours. This went on for days, then weeks.

Four boys and one girl. Usually our kittens have a theme to their names, their theme was the letter X: Max, Drexel, Xero, Hex, and Pixel.

I still remember when they first began to play. It started as half-hearted bapping at each other, then wrestling.

"What do you mean you're not my real mom?"

They they got mobile enough that we had to start building fortifications. The baby gate we bought didn't last long before they began climbing it. Walls of Rubbermaid tubs and cardboard were built higher and more complex as they bested the previous versions.

No surface was sacred.

They had the run of an unfinished studio apartment.

Their claws grew sharp, and they became aggressive about eating. Soon, I had to wear a leather glove just to feed them, like a falconer of kittens.

The first night I didn't check on them once I sat in my house, listening to the quiet, wondering what to do with all of this time I suddenly had.

Occasionally I would watch movies with them. B-Grade movies à la Rifftrax was my culturing for them.

Which is probably why they chitter at the voice of Mike Nelson.

Soon, like all my kitties, they graduated to the outdoors.

I may be crazy and have lots of cats, but I ain't no lady.

This was the last photo of all of them together.

No, one did not die.

I had known a long time, from litters previous, that suckling for kittens is more than a food response, it is also a comfort one, like a pacifier to a human baby. What happens when you provide food, but not a pacifier? They turn to the only other thing that reminds them of their mother: Each other.

I learned the hard way that, apparently, male kitten anatomy tends to get, erm, suckled on. It was funny initially and I expected them to grow out of it, or at least the victim kitten would get old enough to knock some sense into the suckler. Out of the two of them, only one grew out of it. Unfortunately, the other one didn't. He was relocated to my parents house where he terrorizes their clowder to this day.

Even after subtracting one they got too big to all fit in my lap at once.

Despite not having a mother to teach them to hunt they managed very well. All of them were spayed and neutered because, after that much commitment, they sure as heck better not be going anywhere. The only weirdness different than other cats is the Pavlovian response to leather now.

Of course, with the spring comes a higher mortality rate. I still have two of them with me, and I gave them more time to experience life than they would have had otherwise.

That, and I have gained the most photogenic cat ever:

SO

GORRAM

PHOTOGENIC

So I Ordered a Bunch of Japanese Snacks: Part 2

After surviving the first half, which mainly consisted of fried salted everything, I decided to try the candy side of things. Starting with...

The Fruit Bowl

The bowl came broken.

First, I don't understand why my fixed pictures end up back to their original rotation. Oh well, just crane your head 90 degrees and keep reading.


Oddly, in this package was a toothpick (you can see it on the left side of the bag). I have weird luck with items so I honestly thought it was some kind of mistake, like finding a hair in your food, but another item also contained a toothpick, so it must have been on purpose. If US candy ever contained a toothpick in it, someone resembling Honey BooBoo's mom would have already sued the company for having swallowed it.

Ah maede elebendy billyun dullurs.

The smell of the candy made my stomach turn a little, but I decided to give it a try anyway. To my surprise they were fruit gummies (which explains the nasty smell. Although my favorite candy, gummies smell like ass.) Japan also has a kind of edible containers, like rice paper wrappers. In this case the fruit "bowl" was a very stale plain wafer that read "ICE CREAM" on the bottom. I still don't get the toothpick. Is there some sort of faux pas about picking up tiny pieces of candy with your fingers in Japan?

I decided to further my cavities with...

Cherry Squares, Mini Cola, and Terrifying Egg Thing

Is this what it's like to be illiterate?

The Cherry Squares were the other thing that came with a toothpick. They were gummy just like the fruit bowl.

The Mini Cola were tiny little crunchy bits that were actually pretty good! They have kind of a sour candy/cola taste that I would actually expect to find in the US.

Please don't sue us Coca Cola.

The Terrifying Egg Thing was the thing I was most hesitant to try (at least until I found the Strip of Skin, which I'll get to later.) I looked and felt like a marshmallow but I knew, just knew, that it would have something inside that would probably be a garish yellow.

I was right in that it contained something, but it was just chocolate. Crisis averted.

Looming on the horizon was...

Cola Balls

That "hairdoo" on the talking one should have been a warning.

Initially I expected these to be chocolaty until I looked at the package closer and saw a glass of soda on the right. At that point I assumed the things talking and smiling (and, in the far right one's case, looking constipated) were soda bubbles.
 

The balls were much paler than the package suggested (durr hurr). Instead of being soft, like the egg thing. When I bit into one though it was chewy, and had an oozing, bright yellow core like a cyst. One Amazon reviewer mentioned one of the items was gum, and that she had already eaten several pieces before realizing. With the gummies I was careful to be sure the first one completely dissolved before eating more. In this case I realized it was gum. It had no specific flavor I could pinpoint, but if it really was trying to be cola flavored, who wants cola-fresh breath? (A cola flavor did linger in my mouth afterwards.)

I don't like it when my candy oozes.

I have since renamed them Gum Cysts.

My stomach began churning after all the sweets, so I decided to change it up a bit with

Corn Potage

The more excited the mascot is the more cautious I am.

What is potage? Apparently a thick soup, and what can get thicker than solid, crispy form?

The sweetness hit me like a fist. I often forget people like their corn incredibly sweet since my family is more of a salty corn type. Once I got past that they weren't half bad and had more of a savory taste and smelled absolutely delicious.

It was enough to get me back on the sweets track with...


Candy Cigarettes, Vermin Discs, and Grape Box

Well what else was I supposed to call the Vermin Discs?

Along with candy birth control pills Japanese children also get to smoke candy cigarettes. I know the US used to sell them as such before redressing them as "candy sticks" with pictures of superheroes on them. I have, however, ran across candy cigarettes in rare places in the US.

Having been disappointed with my saccharine cigs I decided to dress things up a little.

I also drink black candy coffee and write dark poetry about candy.

They taste better than their US counterpart. Where the US ones are chalky and flaky, these ones are a sweet mint and solid.

The Vermin Discs were sour and powdery, leaving a grainy, floury paste behind, like the dusty sweepings of a Sour Patch Kids factory.

The Grape Box was filled with four or five very fake grape flavored gum balls.

The strangely mundane continued with...

 Crackers

Cracker

 They were crackers.

Mini Chow Mein Noodles

I wonder what the littler guy is worried about. Probably global warming.

These were completely plain and expected as well. Of course, I was stalling, stalling the inevitable, but now I was down to the last two. The finale, the creepy, the weird the...

Squirrel Balls and Strip of Skin

Hurr durr

The Squirrel Balls were poofier and much, much sweeter than I was expecting, especially after the crackers of noodles. I suspect they were made from rice flour.

Finally, there was the Strip of Skin. The picture made it look much better than the tiny little window they had on the package. Inside I could see a yellowish flat thing that had a texture of an old person's skin. When I had first started this venture I took one look at it and said to my brother "I'm really not looking forward to trying that" but here it is friends. That time is now.

I opened the package and took it out or, at least, I tried. Instead part of it broke off. I fished it out and set it on the plate.

It's more horrifying out of the package.

"Maybe it wouldn't be so intimidating if I smelled it?" I thought to myself.

Oh God.

A gross, saucy garbage smell reached up and gripped my nostril hairs so hard it made the pineapple worm in the back of my brain stir from its slumber. I didn't want to taste it, but maybe it would be okay, like a soy sauce flavor. I peeled it off from the plate, which it had immediately stuck to, and licked it.

No.

This thing was shat out from Satan himself before being pounded flat by a billion tortured souls. I tried to eat it again, this time biting down until a piece was almost loosed. I almost gagged. I couldn't do it. It went in the trash, which was then set on fire and prayed over.

This package didn't have a cutesy mascot on it because the mascot would have been Cthulhu.

Or her.

So I Ordered a Bunch of Japanese Snacks Part 1

Cracked is one of my favorite websites and is a huge basis on the layout of my blog posts. Some of the best articles are ones that involve food (like this and this and let's not forget this one) but it all started for me with a blog called The Sneeze under a section called Steve Don't Eat It. While looking for some bento tools on Amazon they recommended a big bag of Japanese snacks so I decided why not?

First was Amazon Prime's shipping. For it to get here in two days meant there was no possible way it could have come directly from Japan. Amazon probably gets a couple of them in advance and keeps them in a warehouse.

Actual photo of Amazon warehouse.

It took me a few days to gain the courage to actually open and start eating them. First was...

The Crispy Tube and Naked Pocky

I have no idea what's going on.

I got three crispy tubes, although I originally thought they were stacks of crackers, like Ritz. Just before work my brother convinced me to pick a snack and try one. I chose this one because the mascot is familiar to me for some reason, although I can't place him.

Inside was a tube of crisp with a hollow inside about the circumference of a pen. The smell was spot on as I thought to myself "This isn't going to taste very good."

It also made me vaguely uncomfortable for some reason...

It was salt with a bit of spice (if "spice" also includes Satan's stank farts). I had a rule to myself that I would finish off every snack and I broke my rule after the very first one.

You can actually see when my soul dies.

The taste not only lingers, but gets worse over time. My brother was hesitant to try it after I did, and he was right to do so. I'm pretty sure he ate an alcohol pad to get the taste out of his mouth.

Twinkie the Kid lost weight.

Pocky are chocolate covered biscuit sticks you will find in nearly every grocery store in the Asian food aisle. I've tried them and they're unimpressive, naked pocky is is even more so. They were crunchy with a little salt, like pretzels.

Next was...

Meat Pencil, Birth Control, and Gel Tube

Japan seems to have a thing for junk food in tubes.

The Meat Pencil actually had some English on it: Pencil Calpas. After some reading apparently Calpas originate from Russia and apparently contain the meats of chicken, pork, and horse. I already ate at McDonald's today so none of that should be new to me.

It had a texture like a Slim Jim but with none of the spice, more like one of those sausages mall kiosks sell at Christmas. It was actually much more preferable to a Slim Jim (and probably contains much less horse meat.)

The Birth Control was simplest but also the most amusing. It was milk chocolate in a candy shell, but I liked the packaging, you had to pop them out of the foil backing, like sudafed. Children are known to eat medications, mistaking them for candy, so let's make candy look like medication!

The Gel Tube had one ominous English word on it: Jelly. It had a zip strip down one side so that you didn't just eat it from the top, you had to expose it in all its oozy glory. That, of course, didn't work, so instead I cut one end off and squeezed it out, which is a horror that can only be described via the magic of video:

(Play in background for full effect.)

The texture was like those fake bait packages in the fishing section of a sporting goods store. It was unpleasant to both my fingers and my mouth. The taste was fake pineapple, which was uninviting, but the texture will likely haunt me for the rest of my days. It was only after another forced bite that I realized where it really belonged.

The pineapple has since laid eggs in my cerebellum.

After such a spread I was less brave to try...

The Wheat

Panda fresh!

I was expecting roasted, salted sunflower seeds in these, but instead I was treated to slightly sweet puffed wheat like what you would expect in American breakfast cereal.

I forgot to rotate the picture.

Next was pretty much the same thing, except one was covered in chocolate and the other was covered in strawberry flavoring, like strawberry milk. Both of these I actually enjoyed.

With a renewed sense of bravery I followed up with...

 Frog Balls and Samurai Snacks

 

The Frog Balls were bigger than I expected (hurr durr), about the size of a tater tot. Immediately there is a burst of dill pickle flavor, which eventually gives way to that fried crisp flavor. They are oddly addictive.

The Samurai Snacks have the words "Aji Curry" on them. I know what curry is, but looking up aji Wikipedia says "Ají is a spicy sauce that often contains tomatoes, cilantro, ají pepper, onions, and water."

No horses? Oh well.

The Samurai Snacks tasted like chicken broth on a cheeseless Cheeto. Not unpleasant. To my surprise, my brother actually enjoyed them.

This, logically, led to...

Fried Extras

These tasted like an unflavored version of the fried everything else I had been trying. The most entertaining thing about them were the bags themselves.

What I especially loved was the random sad tiger/monkey thing on the back of one of them. He's seen things man...

He's seen things...

Life is Strange Review

Okay so I'm going to say right off the bat, Life is Strange did manage to redeem itself for the most part. Do I think it was better than Tales From the Borderlands? Heck no. I actually wanted to play Tales again after LiS for various reasons. Would I recommend the game to someone? Only a very specific few, not like Tales from the Borderlands, which I've recommended to people who don't even play videogames. I was going to buy LiS for my dad, but it hinged on the answer to "How well do you tolerate highschool drama crap?" which you should ask yourself before you consider the game.

Also not recommended if hipsters piss you off (no seriously.)

Anyway, I'm going to get into the details here.

A big part is that I was playing it a bit wrong. I was playing it like a Telltale game (The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Tales From The Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft: Story Mode) Every one of them plays a specific way which I eventually caught on to. A lot of their heaviest choices involve choosing to save the life of Person 1 or Person 2. You can't save both, and the choice haunts you endlessly through further choices and dialogue with the rest of the group. What I eventually discovered is that, no matter which person you save, that person now seems to be Marked For Death, Final Destination style.

1924194125 sequels later and it's a parody of itself.

Let's say you save Person 1. I give that dude about an hour and a half game time before he bites the dust in some other way instead. That's how Telltale works. It removed a bit of the magic for me, but I still enjoy it.

Anyway, that's how I treated LiS, along with my dad saying "Because of the ending, none of the choices actually matter." This made some haunting choices easier to bear, but I still found myself reversing time to make a few changes and that, in itself, is exactly what the game should be doing: Making choices heavy.

Yes, Max is a bit of a boring hipster, nothing about the game changed my opinion of her, but that's okay because it's really Chloe who makes the entire story. Life is Strange really comes down to one thing: Chloe. Or rather, Max and Chloe's friendship. This game is the literal definition of passing the Bechdel Test.

Dawwww....

Oh sure, there's a lot more: Corruption of power, murder, and a massive town-destroying storm that Max sees in a repeating vision, but it's all about two girls.

Although nothing ruins Girl's Night faster than a natural disaster, amirite?

With the exception of the end, Episode 2 was complete filler. It's dead weight, padding. It wasn't until the beginning of Episode 3 that I really started to enjoy myself. After breaking into the school and riffling through the Principal's office the girls decide to go for a swim in the school, that was the exact moment it hooked me.

Using the quote "An otter in my water" is now on my list of things to do.

It's also when Max starts to experiment with her powers more, and begins to go back further back in time. She tinkers with events years in the past in the hopes of making things better.

Episode 4 is when all the pieces come together. This is, of course, after Max learns that the past should remain in the past and they find Rachel Amber. Just as I was reaching the end of the episode I thought to myself "Wow they could end right about here."

On to Episode 5. After figuring everything out, and ending up in a bad situation, it's all about Max trying to fix things. I didn't try to keep up with the branching timelines as Max goes forward and back over the course of minutes or days to try and make everything right that went so wrong.

The thing that bugged me about Episode 5 was the bullcrap trippy stuff that I swear took up 50% of the episode. It's like the creators thought to themselves "There's not enough story left to make up an entire episode, let's just take some LSD and mash our faces on the keyboard until something comes out."

The episode gets back on track right at the end for you to make the hardest choice. I do mean the hardest choice, I've played Telltale games that had easier choices than this, ones that got people killed. Neither one is entirely satisfying, nor is either one "right."

So far I've been pretty spoiler free, but I'm going to go ahead and break it here for the sake of review.

So, hey, spoilers.







Despite solving the murder and fixing everything there's still the issue of the storm.

Now, I already had a feeling that Chloe was somehow Marked for Death. She dies so many times.

1. Gunshot (which is how Max discovers her powers in the first place.)
2. Gunshot ricochet during Chloe target practicing with a gun in a junkyard.
3. Hit by train after her foot gets stuck in the track.

Splat.

4. Assisted death in the alternate timeline.
5. I'm also pretty sure she gets stabbed to death at one point, but I talked my way out of that situation.
6. Killed in the storm during a very forked timeline.
7. Gunshot again.

The girl's a lead magnet.

Chloe herself even mentions it, that her continued existence is the reason for the storm. She owns up to it, giving Max one last chance to go back and fix it by letting her die that very first time. That's when you get the choice to sacrifice Chloe and keep the storm from destroying the town, or else sacrifice the town for Chloe's continued existence.

Heavy, yo.

I saw both endings, the first one I choose I always consider my playthrough canon though, and in this case it was to sacrifice the town and keep Chloe alive. At first I wasn't so sure, it was only after giving it extensive thought that I knew I'd made the right choice. I put myself in Max's shoes and someone I loved in Chloe's shoes, and there was no question what I could choose. Second, there was kind of small background information about the spirits of Native Americans being upset about a new housing development being built, along with a rich family based on corruption. Max's powers and the town's destruction are easily seen as their retribution. Max was simply the conduit, and Chloe was the spark. Third, messing with time caused the storm in the first place, wouldn't it be better not to mess with it again? Finally, as I said, the entire story revolves about Chloe. Everything Max does, she does for Chloe. For her to die in the end means, in a lot of ways, it was all for nothing.

A lot of people felt like the end was bullcrap, but it could have only ended one of the two ways.

Okay guys, end spoilers.











I do feel like I wasted my time on a lot of things. There is a metric crapton of characters, all with longwinded dialogue. 90% of it is a waste of time. One in particular was a goth girl in the school who talked like her teeth were stuck together. Her name is Alyssa, I literally had to look up her name because I never even bothered to remember it. I rewound every single time, I babied that girl, and for what? So she can quote a Robert Frost poem at me at the end.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh. / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I... / took the one less traveled by. / And that has made all the difference."

There, I just saved you a ton of effort in the game (although apparently if you don't do all of that stuff she dies at the end.)

Samuel, the school groundskeeper, was another character I expected to play a much larger role, so I interacted with him a lot. In the end there was nothing significant about him in the story, but he's good for more of the background fluff if you want to devour every last bit of the game's background goings on and lore. The game is just loaded with all kinds of symbolism, a ton of which I missed. Colors, animals (the only one I caught was the whole doe motif with Max), and pictures.

SO MUCH SYMBOLISM YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

There is also a lot of fine details, character's faces are subtle, this is the only game I've seen where you can see it in someone's eyes when they're crying or about to cry. I don't mean obvious tears, I mean how their eyes get puffy and red, ugly. Real life stuff.


I was wrong to have compared Life is Strange to Tales from the Borderlands previously, they're apples and oranges. It's like comparing Minecraft to Battlefield just because they both have the same first person shooter perspective, or a comedy to a drama just because they're both movies. Both games are fantastic, but if I were stranded on a tropical island with only one game, I'd choose Tales from the Borderlands.

Life is Strange is definitely up there though, maybe Top Ten, but I'd have to really give it some thought. Top Twenty at least though.