Category: Foodstuffs

Chocolate boos

There isn’t nearly enough Halloween going on here, so have this: a fun picture of spooky chocolate bars. Also pictured: 7-11’s most demanding slogan.

Really, outside of the punny names, they’re nothing special. Even then it’s a 50/50 split. Kit Kat didn’t change at all, it just has a picture of a cat on it. And Scaries doesn’t sound enough like Smarties to constitue as even somewhat clever. Coffin Crisp and scAero are pretty damn great though. I wish they were called that all year long.

I didn’t actually buy any of these, hence the picture taken in 7-11. I don’t really care for Nestle chocolate bars, and I think the only one that’s changed at all are Scaries, which are coloured orange and brown insted of rainbow.

Seriously, how great is scAero? There are very few words that allow you to put a capital letter in the middle of them, and that’s something I really respect. And no, products with a lowercase “i” or “e” tacked on the front of their names do not count.

On Pop-Tarts and sock puppets

I was going to start this post with an “if you’ve been reading this blog for a while” intro, but I feel like I do that a lot. Maybe even too much? Or maybe I don’t and just think that I do? I have no idea!

Anyway, there’s no doubt in my mind that as a person who has spend much of his life being perceived by others as “creative,” I am not nearly creative enough. Oh sure, now and then a spark will ignite and I’ll pop out something that shows a little thought, but mostly I just coast on doing the same thing that the people I see as inspirations do, but with my own half-assed twist.

I thought my Pop-Tarts Review videos were pretty creative, even if there are a dearth of people with the same idea on YouTube. The whole project started because I just needed an outlet for my silliness (God help you if you take those videos seriously), because I find it hard to express directly to other people. I don’t even really like talking to people about the Pop-Tarts videos, because it makes me feel embarassed and weird.

Of course, as time dragged on, I got kind of bored with the whole idea, and felt like it needed a shot in the arm. That’s when I developed Sockstopher.

 
Sockstopher is… not the grand slam I was hoping he’d be. Oh, people like him alright, and that was always the goal, but his video is one of the less popular in the series, as far as the view counter goes. Whether this is because I’m a bad puppeteer or because people are just getting tired of the whole Pop-Tarts Review schtick, I don’t know.

I really like Sockstopher though. I think he’s a fun character to have around, and I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to work him into more stuff. I just haven’t been able to find a good fit for him yet. I do have one plan for him, but it requires a box of Pop-Tarts that I don’t have.

On the whole, the production side of the Pop-Tarts Review series has come to a stall because I have run out of flavours and so far the few people who have claimed that they’d bring me some when they take a trip down to the States have flaked. I’m not offended or anything because I’m asking for handouts here, but I’d be eternally grateful if someone actually followed through.

I do have a few more episodes that just need to be uploaded, if you’re into that sort of thing. Problem is, my internet speed has been unfairly chopped down to a fraction of what it once was, and those 5ish-minute videos now take like two hours each to upload. It’s pretty ridiculous. Hooray for capitalism!

Something about momentum

Last weekend was delicious Thanksgiving long weekend for us Canadians, but the awesome dinners I got three days in a row are actually the least incredible things that happened over the weekend.

Not to downplay those dinners, of course. Many people worked hard to prepare them, and I appreciate all that effort. In fact, you might even say that I give them my thanks for stuffing me so full that I literally rolled out of bed on Tuesday morning.

The big news, as you might be aware, was that Pokémon X and Y launched on Saturday. I was so damn excited about them, in fact, that my youngest brother and I decided to attend the midnight launch at our local used games store. Wifey tagged along for the ride too, but I was not able to convince her to start her own journey with Pokémon. Some day…

We figured it’d be a pretty low-key thing, because I guess neither of us know many Pokémon players in the city. Also, like I said, it’s a little local place. But the turnout was pretty amazing! I’d say that there were at least 60 or 70 people there. Which is low-key compared to the official Nintendo launch event in Toronto, but still way more than we’d expected. There wasn’t much more to the evening than waiting in line for half an hour and then merrily skipping out of the store with games in hand, but it was still a pretty fun experience.

And so that’s what I did all weekend when I wasn’t out Thanksgiving binging.

Except for Monday night, which was just wonderful enough to outshine a new Pokémon game as the best part of my long weekend. Yes, you read that right. And that totally awesome thing was the opportunity to go see Joe Satriani.

I first heard that he would be playing here back in the summer, but there was no way that I could justify dropping enough cash for tickets. I so desperately wanted to go, as I’ve been a Satch fan since the very first time I heard “Surfing With the Alien” and he was easily on my top 5 list of concerts to see. (The rest: Matt Good again, Tom Petty, Tonight Alive, and Go Radio)

A miracle happened though, and my in-laws bought me tickets for my birthday. It was way more than they should have spent, but it is quite possibly the best birthday gift I’ve ever received. At the very least it’s neck-and-neck with Life and an NES.

It doesn’t really need saying, but the concert was fantastic. I didn’t recognise a lot of the songs because I don’t have the new record (Unstoppable Momentum), but maybe that’s even better, as I got to experience a bunch of material for the first time live. “Satch Boogie” and “Surfing With the Alien” were in the set, and that’s all I could really ask for. And the encore… oh, the encore. Let’s just say that even my wedding day may not have been as emotional a day as the day I was actually in the damn crowd for “Crowd Chant.”

I don’t go to very many concerts, but the ones I go to are so damn good. And now that that’s all said, I have to get back to work. And by “work”, I mean “Pokémon.” Because I totally don’t type these things out at work.

4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

I guess it’s a Canadian thing, so if you’re a foreign reader you may not have heard of it, but Lay’s currently has a contest running. It is, unsurprisingly, a contest to create a new flavour of chips for them to produce. At current, we’re about a month away from the end of the contest, and the four finalist flavours have been in stores for a while now. Since July, I guess?

Fact of the matter is that since I shun any social media that doesn’t involve me and I don’t spend any time in the chips aisle anymore, I didn’t notice these new flavours until a couple weeks ago. I just happened to randomly stumble upon one of them while out with the wife getting faux Slurpees. I used to be really crazy about trying each and every new potato chip flavour, and since that compulsion still exists deep inside of me, I went absolutely nuts just seeing the first one sitting there by its lonesome.

Now after all that embellishment, try to imagine how I felt when I looked at the back of the bag and saw that there were three more new flavours to hunt down. Suffice to say, I needed a change of pants. It’s not often that I get to enjoy the thrill of the junk food hunt like I used to, and knowing that those flavours were out there somewhere made me feel like my life had a real purpose  At the very least, it took me back to a time when hunting down article fodder was half the fun.

So I guess you’re all writhing in your seat there, wondering which of the new flavours I found first. You don’t care for the anecdotes; you just want the cold, hard, facts. Well tough. The anecdotes are important to my process and to the total word count. They’re never going to go away, so you might as well just learn to enjoy them.

Continue reading 4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

Pop-Time (S’mores)

So as it turns out, my Pop-Tarts review videos are pretty popular! Not like, a million views popular, but a bunch of them have gotten over 100 views, and that’s more than I expect anything I put on YouTube to accomplish. I mean sure, a bunch of that can be web-bots, but a bunch of actual blood-and-guts people who I know are fans and have let me know that they eagerly await every new entry, so good for me. I have all the happys.

This is coming at the perfect time too, because I’ve been slipping into the Why-Do-I-Even-Bothers a lot lately re: producing web content, and getting first-hand praise for a thing I create really makes it all worth it. Hell, if even only one person told me that they dig the Pop-Tarts vids, I’d be delighted to no end. Now I just need to find an audience for this blog crap and my LP videos and I’m set. Unfortunately, interest in one of my ventures does not seem to spill over into the others. Oh well!

Anyway, to celebrate, here’s the most popular episode Ryan’s Pop-Tarts Review to date, embedded right in the page for your not-leaving-this-tab pleasure!

Oh, and if you like ’em too, follow me on Twitter (@TheRyanDS) to make sure you catch each episode ASAP.

The Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg

I’m going to start on a tangent and hope that it decreases how many more crop up later on in this article. Holy crap, it has been forever since I did any actual work in MS Paint. That banner up there? No Photoshop involved. Not that it’s hard to tell. I think it turned out pretty nice though, in an ironic lo-fi sort of way. It took me like half an hour to put that border around the blue text. I miss my “stroke” layer style.

There. Now that that’s out of my system, let’s move on the actual intro.

You may remember that in the spring of last year, I wrote an article about a Star Wars Mega Egg. If you don’t, maybe go check that one out first, and then come back and read this one. We’ll wait for you. I don’t know if it’s really compulsory reading, but I’m considering this article a sequel to it, so you might as well bone up on the TE canon. Or something. I totally forgot what I was trying to get at with this paragraph.

Oh, right. I was initialy trying to lead into something about how the SWME (I pronounce it “swum-ee”) brang about an article renaissance here on TE. How it heralded a new age of me sometimes writing articles about things that are not video games. But that’s boring and not really relevant, so maybe I’ll just start trying to get to the point.

Back in July, when I was in Lac du Bonnet for the annual Canada Day celebrations, I made the yearly pit stop into The Bargain Shop to check out their wares, procure a buttload of candy to eat while waiting for the fireworks to start, and maybe find something interesting enough to write about. Of course, this might sound like a somewhat familiar story to you. If you’ve been reading TE for a while, it really should. I do this every year, and I write about it almost every year, whether or not I actually find anything.

Continue reading The Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg

2013 Surprise Bag Article

You may not know this, but it is a real challenge to find a surprise bag interesting enough to warrant review. I’ve long considered the surprise bag review to be one of TE’s Things, but lately it seems all my efforts to find a half-decent one are coming up dry. Did you know that I haven’t posted a surprise bag article since 2006? Yeah, seems like I probably should have staggered them out a little better. But how was I to know I’d still be doing this seven years later?

I have picked up a few surprise bags over the last few years, even made special trips out of the city just to hunt for the things. But alas, I haven’t found one that’s even been worth a blog post, nevermind a full-fledged article. It’s killing me too, because for the last year or so I’ve really wanted to do one up proper. It just seems like all the surprise bags out there are filled with garbage so bland that I can’t make up reasons to make fun of, or they’re licensed and actually a pretty decent way to spend a dollar. I suppose that in hard times I could write up something about a good surprise bag, but what’s the fun in that? I don’t think anything will ever live up to that one that was like 20 years old. I’m beginning to worry that I’ll never see Dubu gum or Baby trading cards again.

My search endures, however, because I refuse to give up on the idea that surprise bags can be truly surprising and contain more than a couple generic suckers and maybe a Dubble Bubble. Also, nostalgia. The thought of a certain nearby city is inexorably linked with a certain notorious surprise bag in my mind, and I cannot think about one without the other crossing my mind. The memories of the fun I had opening and reviewing those other surprise bags lingers as well, even though I know that it likely won’t ever be as exciting as it was back when I was truly devoted to this craft.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is… wait… what?… What is that?

Continue reading 2013 Surprise Bag Article

Canada Day 2013

Canada Day is a pretty important day for me. Not because I’m some sort of super-patriot or anything, but rather just because I thrive on traditions and nostalgia. Seriously, I’m fairly dependent on doing the same things over and over forever because they’re safe and comfortable. I’m fully aware of this, and I wouldn’t ever want to change it about me. Who needs excitement and variety when you can just enjoy the things you already know that you love?

That said, anyone who knows me will have a pretty good idea of where I am and what I’m doing at any given time during the Canada Day weekend. Or, at least one day of the Canada Day weekend. It rolls out a little differently each year, but all the pieces are usually the same. That said, I still feel compelled to write about my Canada Day adventure because it’s one of my favourite days of the year. It even beats out my birthday now that I’m old and don’t get presents any more.

This year was the biggest Canada Day change-up in, oh, probably the last six years or so. The obvious change, of course, being 2008 when my wife and I started dating. That was also the year that my grandparents sold their cottage and moved to the city, which may have changed Canada Day more than anything. Important because that was the year my family stopped doing the usual Canada Day stuff, but luckily the tradition lives on because my wife’s family has always attended the same festivities that mine used to.

Oh, and the images are clickable if you want to see bigger versions. Though why you’d want to see a super-sized version of the crack through my windshield or crappy pictures of fireworks is beyond me.

Continue reading Canada Day 2013