FIRST:  patpahootie is going through some rough shit right now; Go over and give your support. That's not a suggestion, DO IT.
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And now, your scheduled broadcast:

God. Damn. I just finished getting punished for the weekend's Invasion Of Awesome at Dorian's place. I seriously didn't expect the sleep patterns to get so thoroughly wanked up. Rambling hours of win plus surprise (<buttsex>) daylight savings switchover, and I took in nearly 11-hour sleep periods for the next three days. All fixed now, in time for a recap.

Dudes. Seriously. Awesome. The projector hookup for the movies worked super-well, especially for Naked Lunch. I think the next vidya night should involve bowls of pasta and pudding while watching Sick Girl. I honestly didn't think we'd get through that much pizza, how foolish I was.

Dorian, your house is gorgeous and rightly fills me with shame. Thank you for the whole damn thing, and especially for the squishy sofa made of sedatives, the giant sack of jerky, and the delicious, delicious mindfucks of Cronenberg. Enjoying the winboat of stuff, I'll grab you moar and come back, provided your poor computer stops screaming from the 70 gig raping I helped give it. Awwwwright.
Diasis, WHY DO YOU HATE SLEEP??? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU???
Nny, very glad you liked that tie I made you; treasure it, for I am never ever EVER using that type of fabric again.
Victor, I trust my jacket met with your approval; I shall attempt to subdue my seething envy because your outfits are always somehow better than mine. I had previously thought such clothing superiority would create a time-space singularity.
Jess... I dunno. But you're awesome. Keep away from the glitter.

And Darken and Sticks, 'sup. To the latter, thanks for the bourbon I didn't drink; to the former, thanks for helping with the ordering and organising of the pizza which I consumed like a planet.

Now, for something vaguely related:

My generalised loathing for most anime, mainly for overly-common plot themes, aggressively juvenile style and characters, and suffocating cultural insularity, has been well-documented as both one of my few conscious overgeneralisations and one of my more entertaining ragebuttons outside of Twilight. However, due to (<certain smooth manipulative subversive bastards who know exactly how to push all the right buttons>) Dorian, I have to issue a new statement on the matter:

Nazi vampires. Goddammit, Japan. I submit.

Motherfucking anime. Desu.



On the western front, I've been busy as always. I've been doing assorted food related activities between 20th Century History research, meme catchup research, German language learning, organising fund intakes, making my sacrifices to the timesink that is ED and exercise regimens. With $5 left in the budget for four days of food, I managed to stretch it with the help of fantastic Asian butchers to three pounds of pork, a pork trotter and at least a week's worth of liver, liver being a traditional no-budget-time food for my house.

While experimenting with different recipes to help the liver go further without making us die of monotony, I stumbled onto the methods of how to smoke meat using an electric frypan. The idea is simple: take dry wood pieces (in my case for pork, oak, silverbirch and plum woods), tin foil, an electric frypan, a metal rack and some meat. Line the inside of the frypan with tinfoil (lid and base), put small wood pieces all over the bottom of the pan on top of the tinfoil, put the metal rack inside (making sure it's high enough from the base with wadded-up tinfoil), put meat on rack. Put lid on, turn frypan on high until smoke starts going, then turn it down to mid-or low-heat, and leave it for several hours.

The results made me explode. Easily the most delicious smoked pork I've ever had. And I used to live on hamhocks. This was something else entirely. The oak and birch smoke made the other, familiarly-used smoke flavoring seem weak as hell. And oh God, the house smelled delicious.

The next experiment will be trying to figure out a way to produce enough smoke to properly smoke a brined/salted pork belly: in other words, I'm fixing my bacon recipe. I had problems with it last time. The frypan method works fine for *hot* smoking, where the smoke goes into the meat as it's cooking, but for bacon you need *cold* smoking, where the temperature around the meat doesn't get up much higher than 30-40 degrees Celcius. I might have to build a simple two-chambered smoking box, with one box with the fire/smoking materials connected to the other box with the meat in it by a tube that cools the smoke.

HAHA DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS. Just figured it out. I need a soldering iron, a tin can, a cardboard box, some tape and to bash the twigs and wood into tiiiiiiny pieces. I will get you, elusive Baconbeast.

I see no way in which this carefully laid plan could ever fail. If all goes well, there will be what I assume to be the first-ever instance of geniune furry-produced bacon, handed out to select people at MiDfur.



On another note, vaguely related to the anime thing in a way: I find myself newly addicted to Star Trek. Yes. I know. After several years of general "meh, it's on, I might as well watch it" status, it spontaneously flared in my mind and now I adore it. I then got the newest Star Trek movie after I exhausted the original series.

Fuck. Seriously, holyshit. So much better than I was expecting. And In both the movie and the series, I'm growing more and more aware that the character I most personally empathise with is Spock. Another strange thing; but anyone who has been close enough to me/unfortunate enough to hear my discussions of my emotions as if they were almost a seperate entity, something powerful at times but nearly utterly foreign and dissociated, and the reasons for this type of subconscious dissociation, may be able to see why I would empathise so strongly with a Vulcan.

brb FBI.