Holidays – Page 4

24 Days of Desire (6): Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide

I like a lot of things. I like Mega Man, reading, and video game lore, to name a few. And it just so happens that today’s entry is an items that checks all three of those boxes.

Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide is, as I understand it, something of a character bible for the Mega Man X series. Contained within are complete bios for (probably) each and every character that has ever appeared in one of the games. And that’s a lot, because it includes all of the boss robots, of which there are at least eight new ones in each sequel.

24 Days of Desire (5): The Always Pan

I’m not much of a cook. I try sometimes, but for the most part I’m just too lazy to be making anything that requires more effort than turning the oven/microwave/air fryer on. That said, my frying pan is more or less my best friend in the kitchen, and I use it all the damn time.

I’m a sentimental fool, so the idea of parting with my frying pan after nearly a decade together seems unthinkable. But the old girl is getting on in age; she’s developed a pretty severe tilt which ensures that oil and eggs always pool over to one side, and more than a few permanent battle scars. It’s time to move onward and upward, and the solution to my problems came to me in an unexpectedly helpful YouTube ads.

I say that because YouTube ads are typically for trash products that I would never even consider buying into. (Especially YouTube Premium.)

24 Days of Desire (4): Rock Jocks

So there’s this board game café downtown that I went to a couple weekends ago, and they have so many board games. Like, walls and walls and walls just crammed with board games. I would suggest that they have all the board games, but I know that is not the truth of the matter.

There are at least two board games absent from their collection. One is It From the Pit, which I have written about at length before. The other is Rock Jocks. Behold!

24 Days of Desire (3): Star Wars sequels box set

I have a really nice box set of the first six Star Wars movies on Blu-ray.

Sorry, I have to stop here to make an aside about how I very much dislike the fact that Blu-ray is a proper name and requires capitalization.

*ahem* It would be nice if I could slide in another little box that housed the sequel trilogy right next to it. Alas, there is currently no such thing! And probably never will be! The proliferation of digital media has absolutely crushed the market for movies printed on physical media. And also Disney is absolutely not going to sell you three movies in a box when they can make you buy all three separately.

24 Days of Desire (2): A better GPU

Last December I got a lot of extra money from sources I will not mention, and since I was planning to start creating more video content for my YouTube channel, I decided to spend a bunch of said money on a new computer. In this sense, it was a complete success! The new machine was more than capable of taking on the heavy video processing load that was making my old PC wheeze worse than me after 20 seconds of light jogging.

However! When I selected my new computer, I did not put any consideration into VR capabilities. Any why would I? I bought an Oculus Quest 2 specifically for the fact that it doesn’t need to be tethered to a PC. Fast forward to summer 2021 when I bought an (off-brand) Oculus link cable for reasons I can’t remember, and through some sequence of events ended up trying to play some PC VR games. It did not go well.

24 Days of Desire (1): Television

If you’ve been following this website for a while, you probably know that sometimes I will do an advent calendar-like daily feature from December 1st to 20-somethingth. It started as the 23 Days of Materialism, in which I highlighted something that I thought was cool each day. It was both a way to show off things I liked and also sort of a stealthy way to give people gift ideas for the holidays. In later years, I would try to spice up the formula with different themes.

This year, I’ve decided to turn the feature on its ear, and so I introduce to you the 24 Days of Desire. This time around I’ll be listing a bunch of things that I would like to have, as opposed to things I already own. It’s… not really that much of a difference, but I feel like it’ll allow me a little more space for creativity. That, and it guarantees I don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of things to write about. Woop woop!

Now that the stage is set, I’d like to start off with something fairly easy:

Television.

The Most/Least Memorable Xmas

So 2020 was bad. And the worst part of it, bar none, were the people who would deny that COVID-19 exists, and the people who just couldn’t give a damn and totally defied any efforts to suppress the virus. It’s because of those people that I’m expected to spend Xmas day completely alone.

On a merrier note, I have a “gift” of sorts for you, dear reader. You may have (but probably didn’t) noticed that I didn’t post a Top Ten Video Games of 2019 list at all this year. The truth of the matter is that I wrote it all out, and then decided that I didn’t like what I wrote, and instead of re-writing it all, I just left it to die in Google Docs.

But I’ve changed my mind! Having gone back and re-read it, it’s actually not so bad. Still not good, but not materially worse than anything else that I write. So I’ve gone and stealth-posted it back in January, when it should have originally gone live. Go have a look-see.

I know that’s not a very good gift, but it’s 2020. You should be very much used to disappointment by now.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 24: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer

It’s here. Finally, this stupid thing is over. Every year that I do this, I always come to regret it by like, Day 11, but I always push on through because it’s too late to stop at that point. Sunk cost fallacy and all.

So I’m sick of writing blog entries, all stressed out by having to think up 24 things (it’s a lot, right?) and then write something passably thoughtful about them. What’s the best way to forget your troubles? A severe head injury!

That’s probably not an avenue that you want to pursue, though. I don’t particularly fancy the idea. I do have an alternative suggestion, though: alcohol! Yeah, that’s much more plausible. You probably won’t actually forget your troubles, but if you drink enough, they’ll be replaced with a whole new set of troubles. And that’s… something.

Specifically, I want to mention a concoction that my mom has been making on Xmas day for the past couple years now: Rudolph’s Tipsy Spritzer. I’m not sure where she got the idea -probably Pinterest- but a quick Googling reveals that there are dozens of recipes with that name, so I’m just not going to credit anyone. How about that?

I’ve never watched it all come together, but my understanding of the ingredients is this: Vodka, 7-Up, vodka, orange juice, vodka, and maraschino cherries. It goes great with breakfast, and is the only cocktail that I’ve ever really grown attached to. Probably because it’s a once-a-year thing and is attached to happy memories of spending Xmas day with my family. Also, it’s the one time a year I have an excuse to be wasted by breakfast time.

I don’t really know how Xmas is going to pan out this year, but the plan was for my (immediate) family to get together and just hang out and spend the entire day drinking, eating, and napping. It sounded like a perfect Xmas to me, but the current public health orders restricting people from entering a house that is not their home are kind of spoiling that. Whoops! Looks like I’ll just have to spend the Xmas long weekend all alone in my condo!

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 23: I Hate Everything

Not me. I don’t hate everything. In fact, I quite like the YouTube channel called I Hate Everything. They’ve got a lot of fun videos, typically about why all sorts of things are terrible. I particularly enjoy the series on bad movies called The Search For The Worst.

Within that playlist (that I have watched front-to-back twice now), are a few entries on holiday movies. Specifically, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, and The Gummy Bear Movie. These aren’t necessarily the most entertaining TSFTW entries, but they’re still absolutely worth watching. Even the worst of IHE’s videos are pretty good. Honest critiques of terrible films are right up at the top of things that I want to be watching on YouTube. And also I find IHE’s sense of humour aligns very well with my own.

If I were to recommend only one of the above? The Gummi Bear Movie, hands down. From the shoddy editing to the insane plot to the mind-bending fact that it even exists, this is a fascinating film. Well, at least from the perspective of someone who is pointing out everything that’s wrong with it. I would never actually want to watch the movie itself, but I’m more than happy to watch an English fellow tear it a new one over and over again. I’ve embedded it below for convenience, but I absolutely recommend that you check out the channel and at the very least, watch some more entries in the Search For The Worst series.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 22: Pop-Tarts House

We’ve already had one gingerbread construction project disaster. How about adding another edible construction project to the list of my Epic Holiday Failures? Sound good? Rest assured, it is not.

…

Okay, I wanted to just let it breathe, but I have to talk about this.

My video content, admittedly, does not have a high bar to clear. It’s mostly been just raw footage with a little cutting to smooth out the rough(est) spots. Lately I’ve been adding a little more love – taking close-up shots, adding music, splicing in images and end cards, so on and so forth.

The beast embedded above is, at this point in time, my pièce de résistance. I’m actually rather proud of what I’ve put together here. I was going to add “despite the ridiculousness of it all” to the end of that last sentence, but that ridiculousness was kind of the point all along. I did a thing that was gleefully silly, and put in an awful lot of time spit-shining it in an effort to make it more presentable.

Normally I don’t much care about how the general public sees my content -I do all of this for my own enjoyment- but I actually hope that people like this one. I think I might actually be a little sad when nobody watches it.