Not quite CDs, but disc-based media…

I’ve been a bit busy since the last post. Trips to Manchester and Waterford, and a rather unseasonable heatwave. Oh and a change in prime minister too. A lot has happened in a relatively short period of time. But first, let’s jump back eight years…

Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR 2)

I have spent years thinking “I really should play RDR 2”. People evangelise about how rich the world is. The beauty of the landscapes. The hours of gameplay. The endless replayability.

Little did I know, I had already played it.

*Side note: For some reason pulling screenshots from the PS App from RDR 2 leads to really murky, underexposed images. I’ve tried to increase the contrast and brightness but these are still a bit flat.

Well, sort of. At some stage in the distant past I played the beginning of the game but I don’t know when or how far I got as it was on someone else’s console. I played the first game extensively and enjoyed most of it, so it followed that I would enjoy the second, too. Part of me was avoiding the second game to the immense time sink it could become. It’s truly massive with 50-80 hours for the main story alone, not to mention endless side quests and other activities. I don’t have much time for games these days, so spending it all on one time vampire is less appealing than playing a few different shorter titles.

I am a couple of hours in and already thoroughly enjoying the story. Who doesn’t love a good old train robbery by a plucky down on their luck gang? I mean, there’s a lot of murder, but it was the old West. At a time when most of the world was content to play civilised, the frontiers of North America were a different story.

Beautifully polished as it may be, it is not without flaws. To get the above pictured bear skin hat took far longer than it should have. Fighting the legendary bear presented a small challenge, but a manageable one. Tracking the trapper was a different matter. I didn’t want to spend hours wandering around trying to find him (the game is long enough as is) so instead I did what all good folks do; I consulted the search engine. Not the AI overview, but followed through to a real life link. I headed to the described location, and found a hut with a single occupant surrounded by various animal hides.

Upon walking my horse into the area, I was immediately slapped with a “Trespassing” witness message. The trapper hoofed it and I was left very confused. I ended up chasing him down and making quick use of a lasso. I thought tying him up then releasing him might endear him towards me. At that moment a passerby spotted us and suddenly I was $10 poorer with a bounty for kidnapping. This spiralled quickly. Best bet is to lasso the other witness and be done with it.

After paying my bounty and sleeping on it, I returned to the trapper. The damned fool ran away again! This happened another two or three times before I headed off to try some other activities. Eventually I returned, set up camp nearby and slept for a bit. I steeled myself. It was time to confront the flighty bastard again. I slowed my horse to a walk, jumped off, and led him the remaining short distance to the hut. The trapper was perfectly amicable, and I was able to unlock legendary bear items. What was different on this occasion? God only knows. It was a frustrating quirk but at least things are back to normal(ish).

Speaking of normal, things on games consoles may never be the same again. We are moving away from physical media to digital licenses, and all the challenges that entails. It’s not a move I welcome, but it appears to be the will of the industry. I will continue to keep hold of my discs and enjoy the ability to play things even after someone has arbitrarily decided to close a server and deny me access to ostensibly my property.

And before you come at me, yes I know a lot of discs only contain a small amount of content these days with the rest being downloaded on first play, it’s still the principle of the thing, and the denial of choice.

Hello, fresh

It’s that time of year. I have run out of energy. I mean, it’s not so much that I have run out of energy, but rather we have exceeded the melting point of my energy and it has seeped out of my mortal form into a molten pile. The heat does not appear to agree with me, and my ability to cook in a coherent fashion is tied to having some sort of energy. So what do you do when you can’t be bothered any more? Have someone else cook for you! Or the next best thing. A Hello Fresh flyer came through the post a while back. Mealkits are not new to us as we have dabbled with Gusto and Hello Fresh in the past, but they often get old (and expensive) quick. There isn’t enough variety, and inevitably every recipe descends into:

“Chop your potatoes and put them in the oven. These are your oven potatoes. Now put your chicken in the oven. This is your oven chicken.”

Occasionally there would be something that I wouldn’t have attempted before out of a lack of awareness (making my own pesto, for instance) but for the most part they end up being unchallenging and uninspired.

We were pleasantly surprised. After a few weeks, most of the recipes have been good. The buffalo chicken salad was a particular favourite of mine. Hello Fresh have definitely upped their game in recent years. There was a particularly marked dip during Covid (for obvious reasons, with shortages in a lot of ingredients) but things are better even compared to the last time we tried them. They’re getting slightly better on the amount of recyclable packaging they use too.

It’s not a replacement for being organised and planning what we want to eat, but it’s pretty good for a break when you want to get home and pick from a limited choice of options and know you’ve got the ingredients in to make them.

Cake Apprentice (not quite Boss)

We had a recent family commission for a treasure chest cake. The easiest approach (suggested by the internet, of course) was KitKats. Lots of KitKats. I bought sixteen four finger bars which worked perfectly. The cake was a standard victoria sponge baked in two square tins which I divided to make rectanges. Three sponges made the right amount of height (the fourth made a bonus tiny cake). I frosted the cakes with chocolate buttercream and attached the KitKat bars before putting the cake in the fridge. The lid was made out of four bars stuck together, and glued to the top with more chocolate.

We ended up making the coins for the interior decoration, and painting them with gold and silver edible powder. The sand was made using finely blitzed digestive biscuits. The end result was much better than I had originally mattered. I used a little too much chocolate for the lid as I didn’t really trust it to stay together, but the hall had air conditioning and the cake retained its structural integrity. It did need a few transfers on ice akin to an organ transplant. Hey, it worked.