Pancake Tuesday!

Pancake Tuesday, boys and girls. A magical time of year. You can eat as much as you want, but because they’re only pancakes, you don’t look like such a savage. In school, we used to brag about how many we ate. Since I didn’t get any pancakes last year, I’m going to make up for it this year by gorging myself until I’ve got pancake batter coming out my ears.

Pancakes

100g flour
2 Eggs
200ml milk, mixed with 75ml water

Sift flour into a mixing bowl.
Make a well in the centre of the flour and break the eggs into it
Whisk well
Slowly add the milk and water, whisking as you go
Cook in a pan over a medium heat

Toppings

Sugar and lemon juice. It is vitally important that the juice be from a plastic lemon. Otherwise it may as well be any other day of the week because it’s just not Pancake Tuesday with plastic lemon.
Nutella. Nothing else. Okay, maybe ice cream. You’ll be bouncing off the walls for days.
Bacon and maple syrup. Friend in work gave me a bottle of maple syrup from Canada, since all I seem to be able to find in Dublin is maple-flavoured Golden Syrup.
Blueberries. Awesome when they’re dropped into the batter as it cooks in the pan.

So what’s your favourite filling?

Colours of the Matrix

Well, it was only a matter of time before I did something about the Matrix, wasn’t it? Quintessential nerd movie that has already been endlessly picked apart. Well, what’s one more?

Colour plays an important role in the Matrix movies. The tinting is as much a part of the mise-en-scene^* as the set and props, giving the viewer subtle clues as to the nature of the setting. Scenes taking place within the matrix are tinted green, scenes taking place on board the ships in the ‘real world’ are tinted blue and Scenes taking place within ‘zion’ are tinted brown. he truly hardcore Matrix nerds have used these ‘clues’ as part of some obsessively detailed theories regarding the underlying meaning of the Matrix movies.

But we’ll do no such thing here.

^* Holy shit. Did I really just say “mise-en-scene”? Shoot me now.
Continue reading Colours of the Matrix

Stew Station

Finally got around to checking out Stew Station, which opened up next to the Namaste Indian on North King Street, right around the corner from where I live. Like the sign on the door says, they specialise in stews and other soup-based dishes, and the menu seems to change regularly. The restaurant seems to be chasing the Gruel dollar - a very relaxed, homey atmosphere with straightforward, uncomplicated food. But it seems a little out-of-place on North King Street, like it should be closer to the Epicurean Food Hall. But no matter! With development in Smithfield finally starting to bear some fruit (a Thomas Read that has yet to be even half-full, the opening of the Light House Cinema soon), maybe Stew Station is just a little early to the party.

Anyway, since we live so close, I got the food to take away. I got the tomato soup with meatball for myself and a beef and vegetable for H. Reasonable value too: EUR7 for a hearty meal (EUR7.50 if you eat in). The stews were tasty. Comforting, but didn’t feel entirely healthy. But then again, that could have been the massive dollop of carby, starchy, delicious, creamy mash that came with the meal.

Now all they need to do is change their opening times (7pm weekdays, 6pm weekends) to handle the post-pub crowd and serve Coddle, and Zaytoon will be displaced as my favourite drunk meal.

I’m moving to Rome

(x-posted to Livejournal because this is big)

So, after months of agonising over where H. would be posted for work, the big news finally arrived yesterday.

They’re sending her to Rome.

Well, me and H… I think we’ve got something special. Something I don’t want to give up, y’know? So I’m going with her. I’m leaving my job, my apartment, my friends and family, and going to live in Rome for the next three years.

Now, let me make it clear, I’m fully committed to this and I’m delighted she got Holy See and not Vilnius (or, God forbid, Addis fucking Abbaba), but my brain is still reeling from the shock of it all and I’m having trouble trying to understand exactly what this means. I tried to get my head around it yesterday but instead ended up staring at a wall and muttering “fuck… fuck…” for twenty minutes instead.

What am I going to do there? No idea. The pessimist in me is looking on this as my life being turned upside down for a few years and panicing at the enormity of it all. The optimist, however, is seeing this as the great etch-a-sketch of my life being given a good shaking. Erase, start again. So I’m completely open to suggestions for what I could do with my new life. I’m roughly halfway between “Ride around on a Vespa saying ‘ciao’ for a living” and “Do a TEFL course and teach English”. But you’re a bright, creative bunch. Any other suggestions?

When are we going? Again, no idea. A few people got posted yesterday, so HR was understandably swamped and managed to duck out before H. could grill them for details. Hopefully it won’t be too soon. We need to sort out a going-away party.

Playing on my DVD player this weekend:

Godfather I-III
A load of Fellini
The Italian Job
Suspiria
Season 1 of Rome

Sam Adams unveils ultimate beer glass
Because Sam Adams is muck and needs all the help it can get. #

JUST SAY NO… er, I mean… I Love You?

Someone was having a bad day in the Love Hearts factory. They also had a couple of ‘modern’ messages, “TEXT ME” and “EMAIL ME” (not pictured, eaten).

Learn how to Ska
The animated gifs on this page reaffirm my faith in humanity #

RIP Anna Nicole Smith

Goodnight sweet crazy, crazy princess.

New Mac Ad - Security

Miaow. Coming barely a week after Bill Gates went off on one about Mac security? Saucer of milk for Steve Jobs.

A Sober look at the Nintendo Wii

Now that I’ve had my Wii for almost two months and the shock of the new has worn off, I think it’s time to step back and take a good, hard look at the system and see what needs to change before it can become… *ahem*… “the most successful console of all time.”

“Hey, what’s your friend code?”

True story: I was listening to someone I know on the radio today talking about the Vista launch - the presenter mentioned that he was crazy about the Xbox 360 and said that they should swap gamer tags. “Sure,” my friend said, “I’m $foo.” Now, I can guarantee he’ll have a few extra friends on Xbox 360 tonight. People he could play games with in the space of a few minutes. Leaving aside all other parts of their latest console offering, Microsoft nailed the online aspect. They made it ridiculously simple for people to find each other and play online.

Nintendo’s online strategy has been built around the idea of protecting children from sexual predators. The idea being that if you make the system ridiculously cumbersome, the sexual predator will lose interest and go back to stalking teenage girls on myspace. So we’re left with the following: If I want to add you as a friend, I have to give you my 16-digit code, you put this into your Wii, and then you have to give me your 16-digit code and I have to put this into my Wii. Except we can’t actually exchange codes over the Wii, so we have to find some other way of getting our friends codes to each other. But once we have independently added each other, that’s when the fun begins! We will be able to… well, we can’t play any games together yet, because there aren’t any games to play online yet. We can send each other messages, I guess. And send each other Miis (those cute characters that are popping up everywhere). Apart from that, uh…

The exchange (and entry) of these 16-digit codes is so awkward that I have actually traded Wii friends codes using Xbox Live. If that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing in Nintendo HQ, there’s something very wrong here.

And to top this all off, Pokemon Battle Revolution — the first online-enabled Wii game — will require an entirely new, completely separate code for friends to play with each other. I mean, good grief! Iwata-san, protecting children from online predators is commendable and all, but surely the rest of us shouldn’t be punished as well?

And now even big developers are telling Nintendo that the Wii “Friend code” system is broken and dumb. So there’s hope yet.

Post-launch Game Drought

Zelda aside, there hasn’t been a single truly compelling purchase for the Wii since it launched. Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is a fun diversion, but the system already has a bunch of games based around mini-games, so it’s hard to get excited about a bunch more. The upcoming release pipeline is pretty bleak, with no real excitement until Mario Galaxy in June. Until then, we get a bunch of lackluster third-party titles and ports from other systems (Price of Persia being a port of the PSP version(!) of the game).

Come on Nintendo, people knew there was going to be a bit of a drought while you found your feet. People still went and bought the system on the promise of something remarkable. How’s about you live up to that with more than just mini-games?

Features Removed From Virtual Console Games

When I first spoke about the Wii’s Virtual Console in December, I said

But the games that you play on the Virtual Console will be pixel-perfect versions of the games you played on your NES, SNES, N64, Megadrive or PC Engine. As the man says: Nothing added, nothing taken away.

Turns out this isn’t quite true - Nintendo removed expansion port functionality from Nintendo 64 games on the Virtual Console, which means that you can’t save data on some games (such as ghost data on Mario Kart 64), but more importantly means that there will be no rumble in VC games, despite the presence of a rumble motor in the Gamecube controller. These may be relatively minor issues, but all the same, as someone who is being asked to pay unreasonable prices to play these games, the least I can expect is the same experience. I mean, it’s only right. Right?

Misc issues

Wireless out of the box! Always-on technology! Why can’t these two things come together and give me an experience where my Wii doesn’t have to do a 15-second connection test each time I connect to the Wii shop?
We’re no longer dealing with bricks-and-mortar distributors and export laws, so why can’t I buy games from the US Virtual Console shop? Why are Nintendo only going to allow me to buy games that were originally released in Europe? Playing games that were never released here is half the reason I love emulators so much.
I was going to make a joke about straps here, but then I figured, nah…

Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Advertising in videogames isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In games set in a ‘realistic’ universe, it can add an extra element of realism. Except when there’s just one product being advertised. For example, Rainbow Six Vegas - are you trying to tell me that only ads on the main strip in Las Vegas are for Axe Deoderant?

Well, that’s what it’s like in Dublin this morning. Overnight, virtually every advertising space seems to have been taken over by ads for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which ‘launched’ last night.

There’s a complete list of the movies on their website. Here’s the ones I’d be interested in seeing:

This is England

Shane Meadow’s previous film, Dead Man’s Shoes absolutely blew my socks off. Can’t wait to see what he does with this story of a gang of skinheads in the 80s.

Half Nelson

Y’know… I might take some shit for this, but I really enjoyed The Notebook. It was cheesy and soppy but it had James Garner bawling his eyes out, so I figure it’s okay. And Ryan Gosling was pretty good as the lead. And with an oscar nod for his performance in this, I’d say it’s worth checking out.

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Hello! lowbrowculture is the personal blog of John Kelly. Find out more.