What's Cookin': Apple Pie

 Well, it's only been, what, a decade or so since I've done one of these posts... but frankly, I haven't exactly done a lot of exploratory cooking in that time, and this is the first thing I've made in a long while that I've said "I need to hold on to this recipe for later."  That said, my initial attempt's results were less than ideal (due to massive pie crust containment failure), so consider this a starting point for your own experiments.

For pie crust, I'll leave that to you, since you likely already have a favorite double-crust recipe to use.  Again, if I wasn't clear, you probably don't want to try this as your first pie, since you can practice on pies that take less work, like blueberry pie.  That all said, to the recipe!

Ingredients

• 4 lb. (about 6 large) "pie apples" (Granny Smith is the go-to here, but any firm, tart apple works)
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/2 c granulated sugar
• 1/2 c brown sugar
  
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/4 t ginger
• 1/4 t cardamom
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• 2 T cornstarch
• 1 T butter

Equipment

• Large ("bigger than you think you need") bowl for mixing ingredients
• Knives and/or other tools to prepare the apples
  
• Glass pie plate
• Baking sheet
• Parchment paper

Procedure

•  Peel, core, and thinly slice the apples (I used a mandoline slicer for 1/16" slices, but anything up to 1/4" would probably be fine), and put the slices in the bowl.
• Sprinkle the salt, sugars, and spices over the top of the apple slices, then use your hands to mix everything together, coating the slices as thoroughly as possible in the process.
• Let the apple mixture rest at room temperature for one hour.
• While waiting on the apple mixture, prepare the lower half of your pie crust in the pie plate.
• After the hour wait time has passed, add the cornstarch to the bowl and mix again.  You will notice that the apples have shrunk, and there is a large amount of liquid (about 3/4 c) in the bottom of the bowl - this is normal.
• Pack the lower pie crust with the apple slices that will fit, level to the brim of the crust.  Unused slices can be discarded (or, pan-cooked and used as a topping for, say, ice-cream).
• Pour what you can of the collected liquid in the bottom of the bowl over the top of the apples in the pie crust.
• Cover the pie with your upper crust.  In my case, I tried doing this with a standard "full cover with vents cut after" method, which failed fairly spectacularly.  I would suggest doing a lattice crust with plenty of vent room for this pie.
• Line your baking sheet with parchment paper (cooking spray is handy to make it behave), then place the assembled pie on the sheet, to capture any spill-over.
• Bake the pie in a 400F oven for 75 minutes... is what the original recipe called for.  I'm going to say you should start checking on the pie at least 10 minutes beforehand.  The goal is to see filling bubbling up through the vents (or, if you prefer the scientific method, an internal temperature of 195F).  With the long cook time, over-browning is a valid concern, so you may want to employ aluminum foil to help with that.

After a few hours of cool-down time, you should have a very tasty apple pie (as in, even in its imperfect form, the one I cooked is easily top 10 of any apple pie I've had, ever).  It's a shame that prepping the apples is such a chore, otherwise I would strive to make this my go-to pie.

Games and mixed feelings

 Having a backlog of games is less than ideal for a number of reasons, but one of the top reasons has to be that time marches on.  Sometimes, that just means that advancements in technology have rendered elements of any given game stale by the time you get around to playing it (assuming you ever do).  Sometimes, it's a bit darker than that.

In this case, I was looking for something to scratch my itch for exploration, and none of the current crop of Game Pass games was quite what I was looking for.  Looking at my backlog of XBox One games, next up in the queue was Grow Up, a little low-poly affair where you, as a humanoid but not-too-bright little robot, get to roam around a planet-scape, acquiring different abilities while you pursue your goals.  Importantly, you start with the ability to grab things with your hands, with independent controls for each hand, which allows you to climb... basically, whatever you can get your hands on.  Perfect for what I was looking for, I went ahead and installed it and fired it up.

Which is, of course, when I saw that the game was produced by Ubisoft.  Historically, I've generally liked Ubisoft games, some more than others, but they're one of a few game industry companies in the midst of a very public round of employee abuse allegations, where their response has been, basically, to throw a couple of people under the bus, make noises about needing to change, then do little in the way of visibly pursuing the change they need to make, almost as if they're hoping that the news cycle will move on, and they can just get back to business as usual.  Here's a recent Kotaku article, if you want to start digging into details on your own.

So, yeah, I played the game over the course of a couple of days.  It's no masterpiece, but it's a fine little game for what it is.  I wish I could recommend you track down a copy and buy it on the cheap, but I can't, in good conscience, say you should give any money to Ubisoft, or even support the used market for their games, as things stand.  But, if it's in your backlog already, maybe dust it off and give it a go.  I polished off the main thrust of the game over 2 days, had my fun, and now that's one less landmine sitting in my backlog.

Starting the long goodbye with Woot

 Being a creature of habit, I find it good to stop, review, and reflect on some facet of the everyday in my life every so often.  Little could be more everyday than my daily web-surfing routine, and, during this particular holiday weekend (which sees a ritual feast in celebration of who and what we have that we are thankful for, followed by a frenzy by many to get more stuff they can't live without), considering my shopping choices has to be high on the list.  Those two considerations meet squarely at Woot.com.

Ah, Woot.  Once upon a time, it was a fun, quirky little site (founded in 2004, per Wikipedia).  One deal a day, generally on something tech/geek related.  You never knew what you would find there, and much of what was presented there was actually good deals on things you might want, if you fit their niche.  I did, and I found it glorious.  Not that I bought more than a fraction of what they offered, but I came to understand the popularity of things like QVC among other segments of the population.

Well, if success breeds one thing, it's a desire for growth.  They started offering wine deals in 2006, which I figured would fall by the wayside with the various state laws involving alcohol, but it persevered for over a decade.  Next came daily T-shirt deals in 2007, and that brought me in all the closer, as the shirts were similarly tech/geek niche oriented.  It's no exaggeration to say that Woot t-shirts were a major part of my wardrobe for well over a decade.

Of course, growth not only calls for more growth, but it also attracts a certain sort of business professional with a certain mindset.  You know the type, "appealing to a broader market will increase revenue", "reducing costs will increase our profit", and of course, my favorite, "you're leaving money on the table if you don't do X".  More sub-sites, starting with kids in 2009, were launched, and Amazon acquired Woot in 2010.  While at the time I feared there would be a sudden shift to turning Woot into Amazon's surplus site, those changes happened much more slowly.  More noticeable were things like t-shirt quality taking a dive (which was of course spun as providing customer choice, once the option of paying more for a quality shirt was added).

But, fast or slow, things progressed to where they are today.  You have several daily deals, but they seem to be just highlights of select items in vast seas of dreck that Amazon wasn't able to push through their regular website.  Plus, those highlighted deals seem to come back fairly often... whether that's "due to popular demand, we sourced another batch for you to have a go at" or "we're going to keep putting these up until we manage to get rid of them", I'm in no position to say, but, from what I've seen, I would bet the latter.  Even the t-shirts have taken a dive, not in physical quality this time, but just in composition - the vast majority seem to be nothing more than pop-culture mash-ups these days.

Suffice it to say, Woot has changed, and not for the better, in my opinion.  Looking at my order history, I haven't ordered anything from them in the past year, and for quite some time before then it was only shirts that kept me coming back.  So, yeah, Woot is now out of my daily visit routine.  I'm on their email lists, so I'll still get offers for a while, but it won't be that long before I get the urge to reduce my marketing email load, and, barring something unexpected happening between now and then, Woot will be part of the "I don't need your emails any longer" group.  So, goodbye Woot, it was fun while it lasted.

Forza!

 A full two months since I last posted?  Really?  Well, let's do something about that.

Forza Horizon 5 just came out, and I'm having a blast.

Historically, I haven't much cared for racing games, just because of their limited scope.  Which is to say, it's hard to get into racing the same small bunch of cars on the same small batch of tracks and not get bored of it all, if you're not a hard-core racing fan.  The Forza Horizon series fixes that by giving you access to a huge selection of cars, from the all-but-useless to the seriously overpowered, an open world with a wide variety of races and challenges to pursue, some light guidance if you want to follow it, and things like seasonal variations (season changes once a week), so that even the exact same spot is likely to be different from one visit to the next.

This time around, the playground is Mexico, or rather a cobbled-together map of greatest hits of Mexican terrain and environments.  Desert, beach, jungle, volcano, city, town, ruins, agave farms, that sort of thing.  It's a very nice Mexican-themed park to play around in... well, as other reviewers have pointed out, it's fairly saturated with British-sounding sorts, so it's no cultural touchstone, but neither is it populated with egregious stereotypes, It's a nice place to drive through, but I wouldn't go relying on what you see here as being the real Mexico.

As for the driving itself, each car has its own feel, and can be modified to a fair degree, so those who want to spend time fine-tuning their performance (or, for that matter, spend hours modifying the look of their cars) can certainly do so.  Me, I take advantage of the auto-upgrade features built in, because I'm more of an "arcade" racer, enough so that I sometimes resort to taking advantage of the indestructibility of the cars to win a race by "driving by Braille", taking advantage of barriers to make turns at higher speed than anybody in the real world would even attempt.

Of course, the game has its weaknesses as well, but they tend to be small things that can either be overlooked or compensated for.  For example, there's a car radio feature that lets you select different stations to listen to, segregated by type of music.  In my case, I tend to leave it on Radio Eterna, which is classical music... and I understand, licensing costs for music is a thing, but classical should be on the low end of that spectrum, and the small number of tracks on that station is not a good thing.  It's not at the point yet where I need to turn off the in-game radio and pipe in music from some other source, but it's close.

All in all, it's a nice game that will likely keep me occupied for months, and it's part of Game Pass, so the price works for me as well.  If you're part of that ecosystem already, you should really give it a go.

What's that?  My other games?  Well, Destiny 2 is in a lull at the moment, so I may poke my head in on occasion, but I'm pretty sure it's on hiatus until the next major update comes next year.  Psychonauts 2, I really want to play more, but playing these collectathon games isn't leaving me enough time.  One of these days, I'll get back to that, I hope.

Video games update

 Again with the "over a month since posting anything" thing... well, nothing like a little update on the video games I'm playing to fix that little issue.

First, on the XBox Series S side, have I mentioned lately what a lovely thing Game Pass has become?  I normally only pony up for it when there's some specific game I want to play (or at least try out) that has hit the system, but, in recent months, there have been enough quality games hitting the service that I haven't found cause to drop my subscription at all.  Case in point, I just played a bit of Psychonauts 2 yesterday, and I would heartily recommend it to just about anyone.  It has the same "cartoonishly disturbing" look as the original, updated for modern hardware, along with a fair degree of wit and humor.  To say more than that, I would have to use descriptive phrases that make no sense outside of the game, like "the maternity ward in the hospital/casino with the rigged wheel of fortune", so I'll just leave it at that.

Of course, finding gems like that make you re-evaluate the other games you're looking to play.  In the case of Fallout 4, I realized that I had switched from "I want to play more of that" to "I should play more of that", and, if I'm not mistaken, at just about the same point I dropped the game on my initial play-through.  So, barring a sudden urge to wander the wastelands and shoot more raiders and super mutants, I think I'm done with that game... and if not, I've got a save file with a good starting point for next time, now.

On the PC side... well, most of the games I like playing all but require a significant time commitment for even a single play session, so I'm always on the lookout for games that I can play in much shorter bursts (and better still if I can still play those games for extended periods without burning out on them).  Recently, I've dusted off my Steam copy of "Mahjong Pretty Girls Battle", which is much tamer than the title suggests.  This isn't "puzzle" Mahjong solitaire like many of you might think when you hear Mahjong, but 4-player Riichi-style Mahjong, you against three CPU players.  The "pretty girls" in question are the avatars for the various players, reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of those players, and, as you win games, you unlock more characters.  I find a single game takes about 10 minutes, which is just about perfect for filler, yet, if the mood strikes me, I can spend an entire evening playing.  I would obviously recommend it, but the game has no tutorial mode or anything like that, so you need to learn how to play the game elsewhere first (I found and printed online rules).  It's not a terribly hard game to learn, though... it's mostly Gin/Rummy with a few tweaks.  Scoring is the real bear, but that's handled by the game in this version.

That's where I am at the moment, games-wise.  What new things are coming down the pipe that will grab my attention?  Will I ever drop out of Destiny 2 again?  I'll doubtless let you know, when the time comes.

It's Olympics time again...

 Usually, I rather enjoy the Olympics.  For example, here's my 2008 post about the opening ceremonies there (which I still haven't seen anything surpass to date).  This time around is quite different, courtesy of our favorite modern plague, COVID.

Naturally, the story starts last year, which is when the Olympics were supposed to take place, but COVID was still new enough for everyone to give it a degree of respect, if not fear, and those in charge decided to postpone it to this year, a reasonable and prudent decision.  Fast forward to this year, and it seems prudence and reason have dropped out of the running.  We've gone from "we'll be good to go as normal this year" to "we'll have to ask foreign fans to stay in their home countries" to "not even the locals cane come and watch, and we're going to aggressively test and sequester everyone involved to limit the spread of the disease."  I was fine with the earlier restrictions put in place, but the current setup says to me that the Olympics should have been canceled or postponed one more year.

Which of course brings up the question, why are they so hell-bent on pushing forward, when the global average of vaccinations is only about 25% (and in the low single-digit percent range in several countries)?  Some of it is going to be the athletes themselves of course, the once-every-four-years nature of the event meaning some of them get exactly one shot at attending, and for some of those this is it.  However, the various countries involved haven't had any compunctions about restricting non-essential activities and travel, which handily describes this entire event, so there must be more to it than that.  Sadly, all I can see as a driving force beyond the zeal of the athletes is a mix of profit drives for the various sponsors involved and the varied goals of the nations involved, be that "proving" their people superior to their neighbors or showing their own people that things are going back to normal.  Honestly, it turns my stomach, and I'm not alone in that - when significant numbers of the locals protest the opening ceremonies of the event that's supposed to be inherently non-offensive and a point of pride for your country, that's a pretty good sign that you should stop and re-evaluate.

Of course, any re-evaluation should include the ever-popular question "what's the worst that could happen?"  Here's an article that lays out some of the possibilities.  International super-spreader event and breakout to the local populace are possibilities I had already considered as "bad enough", but the idea of the very mix of variants and states of vaccinations that the Olympics involves could result in a new variant that evades vaccine protections and gets brought back home by those involved is impressively bad.

So, yeah, it's Olympics time.  If we're lucky, only a few athletes will have adverse effects from this whole mess, and nobody will die.  If we're lucky, anything that happens at the Olympics will stay at the Olympics.  Personally, I'm not reassured, and seeing anything Olympics-related is going to feel like stumbling across a sleazy infomercial.  I guess, enjoy it if you can, but I'm not feeling it this year.

Just a quick catch-up post

 Just noticed that I hadn't updated the blog for nearly two months, so I figured I'd better at least poke my head in for a quick catch-up post.

Long story short, I've been busy.  My job-search strategy finally paid off (if not in the way I originally intended), and I'm now working for the state of Washington.  I'm not going to go into great detail there, but suffice it to say I'm doing work I consider worthwhile, that serves to do something more than line some executive's pockets, while getting paid similarly to my last job, especially once you include benefits like good healthcare and an actual pension plan.

Speaking of healthcare, I'm free of all casts, braces, and the like on my wrist now.  I'm still going in for orthopedics visits and occupational therapy (mainly range-of-motion stuff at this point), but I'm at the stage of "whatever the wrist will tolerate" function-wise.  That currently includes typing (in brief bursts, at least), so this is the first update in a while I've been able to do two-handed.

I'm also capable of properly handling a game controller now (although I find I need to take a break more often as my wrist/fingers stiffen up), which alters my game time choices a bit.  First, I did drop Octopath Traveler finally... I still like the game structure in general, but I found boss fights to be increasingly bullshit-filled, in part because they can tune them based on which character the know is guaranteed to be present for the fight.  You could still level your way past them, but that involves grinding for the sake of grinding, which I don't find particularly fun.

So, what am I playing now?  Well, speaking of grinding for the sake of it, mostly Destiny 2.  I skipped the last season, but the current season has a storyline I took interest in, as well as a new activity that I could check out as a mostly-solo player, so I ponied up for that.  I still intend to get back to Fallout 4, but that will come when I either unexpectedly get more time on my hands again, or there's another soft patch in the XBox Game Pass offerings (and I'm not active mid-season in Destiny 2).

Oh, and I guess it's worth noting, I did snag an XBox Series S as well.  I like the upgrades to prettiness well enough, but the big winner is the quick startup and load times.  If you don't have the eyesight to fully appreciate the native 4k output of the XBox Series X, the Series S up-convert from 1440p is very nice.  I'm well pleased with it, so far.