(Ice Cream) Sandwiches for Dinner!
Jan. 6th, 2005 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tirinianSo I was wandering past Tower Records on the way back to the T from the comic book store, wondering what I should have for dinner. This lady, standing in the rain with an umbrella and a plate of ice cream sandwiches, said "Hey, want to try our taste test? Free Ice Cream Sandwiches and a Five Dollar Gift Certificate to Tower!" I was going to say no, I was on my way to dinner, but then she added "You won't need to have dinner!" and what could I say? So in I went, and tried them. They weren't "classic" ice cream sandwiches, with the chocolate cookie, they had chocolate chip cookies, instead. The M&M one was pretty good, and the Nestle one was decent. I didn't actually like the Ben and Jerry's one much, although it was edible, and there was a really nasty one that I've blocked from my mind already, but might have been Klondike, unless it wasn't. But having spent fifteen minutes eating them and filling out surveys, I now have a five dollar gift certificate (anyone need anything from Tower?) and figure it's time to do those other reviews I've been promising for a while.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: This is a readable book, but I found it repetative at times. The basic premise is "cultures with food production beat out cultures without, and food production is not equally easy in different places." Boiled down that far, it's not really that profound, and he says it a lot, but he does make some other interesting points here and there. Things I realized/learned: Just how crucial the domestication of the horse was; That it's harder to transmit agriculture North/South than East/West (faster climate changes eit crops), screwing the Americas and partly Africa; That germs killed far more natives than anything else the Europeans brought with them to the Americas. I'm glad I read it, but I do feel like it could have been shorter. He also acknowledges in the last chapter or so that while his theory explains Eurasia's dominance over Africa, the Americas, and Australia, it doesn't do nearly so good a job at explaining Europe's dominance over the Middle East or India or China. He makes a brief attempt to do so, but part of the problem is that 4-500 years just isn't all that long on the scale he's talking about, so it's hard to say that the effects he's looking at really have so much to do with it. Lives 8.5 of the ten days of game, before succumbing to smallpox.
The Golden Compass: This is a decent kids book. It's clearly a kids book, though, if that's not your thing. I picked it up based on comparisons to the Harry Potter books I'd seen, but having read it, that's not the right comparision at all, except that it's a British kids book with a fantasy theme. It's much closer to Narnia, far more literary than the Potter books, and noticeably more alien. The whole thing takes place in an alternate universe, with weird physics/magic that take a while to figure out/get explained. I'll pick up the next two in the series at some point, but am not running right out to read them (and I hear they're not as good). Lives 8 days of game, before vanishing into the Dust.
The Way Things Weren't: A collection of four short stories/novellas (I'm not sure on the technical length distinction) about alternate histories. Two of them are much easier to get into, because they're set at the point of departure (Athens triumphing over Sicily and Sparta, and putting together a pan-Hellenic alliance to invade Persia about 75 years pre-Alexander, and Nietzche at the gunfight in the O.K. Coral), so you don't have to do nearly as much work to figure out what's going on. The other two were harder to read at the time (a story set in the 21st century of a world where meteor strikes caused a mini-ice age in the 1870's or so, and a story set in the crusades-equivalents of a world whose point of departure I didn't figure out, but which had a weird split in the christian church and a "muslim" culture that worshiped a female, child eating god), but stick with me more in retrospect, and may get me to search other the books whose universe they're set in. Call it two one nights and two three-days, all decent.
Lemony Snickett, the Movie: I saw this on Christmas day with my folks, and quite enjoyed it. The pattern becomes clear midway through, as it apparently combines three of the books, and the general arc of each segment is fairly obvious, but if you ignore that and just go with the ride, it has a nice set of gloomy, neo-gothic settings and mysterious happenings. And one really does wonder if the parents are actually dead. The kids have a nice set of super-powers to go up against the villian with, although I thought that they cheated by having Klaus steal Violet's at the end. The kids were good, Jim Carey was himself, but decent, and Meryl Streep was quite entertaining. Lives 9 days of game, before meeting with an unfortunate event.
The Lion King: I can't really call this a musical. It's more like a ballet/puppet show. Given that caveat, it's quite impressive. The costumes/puppets are really amazing, particularly the lions' heads, the cheetah, and Zazu. But while it is all very *impressive*, the story is downright dumb, and I just don't like the main character at all. Survives ten days on style, but gets none of it's goals accomplished, and its team all dies.
Ticket to Ride: Nearly a crayon rail game, but slightly better. You have to build tracks between cities, and it's mostly about you, rather than what you do to other people, but the tracks are harder to build than in a crayon rail game, so it takes longer, and the number of possible buildable tracks is much smaller, so there's a lot more competition for them. Playable, and I won, so that got it extra points, but still not something I'd be likely to play a lot, I think. Survives 5.5 days of game before someone ties it to the tracks in front of the oncoming train.
Liberte: The French Revolution game. I'll have to try this a couple more times to see what I really think of it, but my first reaction is that you don't have quite enough control over what you can do to be able to develop interesting strategies. Basically, what you can do in a turn is controlled by what cards you have in your hand, and you really have to have a fair number of similar cards to be able to do anything strategic, instead of purely tactical. Our response in the two games I played was to spend a lot of time drawing cards, trying to put together similar cards, but that made the game longer and more boring than I feel like it's supposed to be. Still, I managed to win the first one, so I can't send it to the Guillotine before day 6.
Fearsome Floors: My Christmas present from the algorithmancer, and a really fun game, the two games we played. You've got a set of four guys, trying to get through a dungeon to the exit, while the monster roams around trying to kill you. First person to get three out wins, or the person who got the most guys out first. Simple mechanics, fun premise, and enough skill-based to make it worth spending the time thinking about your movies. Repeat after me, though "![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dataghost is bad." Lives ten days of game, in a bloody field littered with the monster's victims.
Minado: A japanese (mostly sushi) buffet, that I went to last Sunday instead of the Dim Sum plan. While it is heavily sushi, which I (mostly) don't eat, it had sufficient stuff for me to find a decent meal (chicken and steak tempura, a few other non-sushi dishes, egg-sushi, which I quite like (mini-omelets on rice, not raw egg) and a couple of other types of sushi that I found sufficiently acceptable to have a piece or two of). It also has an entire dessert aisle to it's menu, but it's less impressive than it sounds, because while there were multiple kinds of cake, they were really mostly the same cake with different flavors painted on top of them, and kinda disappointing. The melon was fresh and yummy, though. And it was cheaper than I expected (~$20), which was a plus. Takes a car to get to, though. All in all, I'd go back, which I wasn't sure beforehand I was going to be willing to do, and I probably even enjoyed it more than Dim Sum (which I'm not really fond of), but I won't be in a hurry to do so. Lives 6 days of game before the chef gets it with a hatchet.
Ok, that's all the reviews for now. There might be another post soon-ish with other things I've been doing, or there might not. The weekend's looking kinda busy, so I'm guessing not, but we'll see.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: This is a readable book, but I found it repetative at times. The basic premise is "cultures with food production beat out cultures without, and food production is not equally easy in different places." Boiled down that far, it's not really that profound, and he says it a lot, but he does make some other interesting points here and there. Things I realized/learned: Just how crucial the domestication of the horse was; That it's harder to transmit agriculture North/South than East/West (faster climate changes eit crops), screwing the Americas and partly Africa; That germs killed far more natives than anything else the Europeans brought with them to the Americas. I'm glad I read it, but I do feel like it could have been shorter. He also acknowledges in the last chapter or so that while his theory explains Eurasia's dominance over Africa, the Americas, and Australia, it doesn't do nearly so good a job at explaining Europe's dominance over the Middle East or India or China. He makes a brief attempt to do so, but part of the problem is that 4-500 years just isn't all that long on the scale he's talking about, so it's hard to say that the effects he's looking at really have so much to do with it. Lives 8.5 of the ten days of game, before succumbing to smallpox.
The Golden Compass: This is a decent kids book. It's clearly a kids book, though, if that's not your thing. I picked it up based on comparisons to the Harry Potter books I'd seen, but having read it, that's not the right comparision at all, except that it's a British kids book with a fantasy theme. It's much closer to Narnia, far more literary than the Potter books, and noticeably more alien. The whole thing takes place in an alternate universe, with weird physics/magic that take a while to figure out/get explained. I'll pick up the next two in the series at some point, but am not running right out to read them (and I hear they're not as good). Lives 8 days of game, before vanishing into the Dust.
The Way Things Weren't: A collection of four short stories/novellas (I'm not sure on the technical length distinction) about alternate histories. Two of them are much easier to get into, because they're set at the point of departure (Athens triumphing over Sicily and Sparta, and putting together a pan-Hellenic alliance to invade Persia about 75 years pre-Alexander, and Nietzche at the gunfight in the O.K. Coral), so you don't have to do nearly as much work to figure out what's going on. The other two were harder to read at the time (a story set in the 21st century of a world where meteor strikes caused a mini-ice age in the 1870's or so, and a story set in the crusades-equivalents of a world whose point of departure I didn't figure out, but which had a weird split in the christian church and a "muslim" culture that worshiped a female, child eating god), but stick with me more in retrospect, and may get me to search other the books whose universe they're set in. Call it two one nights and two three-days, all decent.
Lemony Snickett, the Movie: I saw this on Christmas day with my folks, and quite enjoyed it. The pattern becomes clear midway through, as it apparently combines three of the books, and the general arc of each segment is fairly obvious, but if you ignore that and just go with the ride, it has a nice set of gloomy, neo-gothic settings and mysterious happenings. And one really does wonder if the parents are actually dead. The kids have a nice set of super-powers to go up against the villian with, although I thought that they cheated by having Klaus steal Violet's at the end. The kids were good, Jim Carey was himself, but decent, and Meryl Streep was quite entertaining. Lives 9 days of game, before meeting with an unfortunate event.
The Lion King: I can't really call this a musical. It's more like a ballet/puppet show. Given that caveat, it's quite impressive. The costumes/puppets are really amazing, particularly the lions' heads, the cheetah, and Zazu. But while it is all very *impressive*, the story is downright dumb, and I just don't like the main character at all. Survives ten days on style, but gets none of it's goals accomplished, and its team all dies.
Ticket to Ride: Nearly a crayon rail game, but slightly better. You have to build tracks between cities, and it's mostly about you, rather than what you do to other people, but the tracks are harder to build than in a crayon rail game, so it takes longer, and the number of possible buildable tracks is much smaller, so there's a lot more competition for them. Playable, and I won, so that got it extra points, but still not something I'd be likely to play a lot, I think. Survives 5.5 days of game before someone ties it to the tracks in front of the oncoming train.
Liberte: The French Revolution game. I'll have to try this a couple more times to see what I really think of it, but my first reaction is that you don't have quite enough control over what you can do to be able to develop interesting strategies. Basically, what you can do in a turn is controlled by what cards you have in your hand, and you really have to have a fair number of similar cards to be able to do anything strategic, instead of purely tactical. Our response in the two games I played was to spend a lot of time drawing cards, trying to put together similar cards, but that made the game longer and more boring than I feel like it's supposed to be. Still, I managed to win the first one, so I can't send it to the Guillotine before day 6.
Fearsome Floors: My Christmas present from the algorithmancer, and a really fun game, the two games we played. You've got a set of four guys, trying to get through a dungeon to the exit, while the monster roams around trying to kill you. First person to get three out wins, or the person who got the most guys out first. Simple mechanics, fun premise, and enough skill-based to make it worth spending the time thinking about your movies. Repeat after me, though "
dataghost is bad." Lives ten days of game, in a bloody field littered with the monster's victims.Minado: A japanese (mostly sushi) buffet, that I went to last Sunday instead of the Dim Sum plan. While it is heavily sushi, which I (mostly) don't eat, it had sufficient stuff for me to find a decent meal (chicken and steak tempura, a few other non-sushi dishes, egg-sushi, which I quite like (mini-omelets on rice, not raw egg) and a couple of other types of sushi that I found sufficiently acceptable to have a piece or two of). It also has an entire dessert aisle to it's menu, but it's less impressive than it sounds, because while there were multiple kinds of cake, they were really mostly the same cake with different flavors painted on top of them, and kinda disappointing. The melon was fresh and yummy, though. And it was cheaper than I expected (~$20), which was a plus. Takes a car to get to, though. All in all, I'd go back, which I wasn't sure beforehand I was going to be willing to do, and I probably even enjoyed it more than Dim Sum (which I'm not really fond of), but I won't be in a hurry to do so. Lives 6 days of game before the chef gets it with a hatchet.
Ok, that's all the reviews for now. There might be another post soon-ish with other things I've been doing, or there might not. The weekend's looking kinda busy, so I'm guessing not, but we'll see.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 05:52 am (UTC)You need new music from Tower.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 07:42 am (UTC)ratings
Date: 2005-01-07 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 11:50 am (UTC)I recall the M&M being good, the Ben & Jerry's having good ice cream but a dry cookie, another (Good Humor? Breyers?) being okay, and the last one (Nestle?) being salty and terrible. And I got to show off my capacity to eat an endless quantity of ice cream. (Well, we found the end of that capacity a year later while eating a Vermonster at the Ben & Jerry's factory.)
no subject
Date: 2005-01-07 03:29 pm (UTC)The Lion King: I totally agree. Simba is the least interesting character there, and I didn't care about him nearly as much as just watching the nifty puppetry.
The Golden Compass: The problem is that the second two books don't really continue in the same vein. The Narnia comparison is a good one, since later books get even more religious. And the roll of the main character changed a lot, in a way I didn't care for. I'd be interested in hearing what you thought of the second book, when you get to it.
Minado
Date: 2005-01-07 05:41 pm (UTC)Re: Minado
Date: 2005-01-07 06:44 pm (UTC)Re: Minado
Date: 2005-01-13 04:00 pm (UTC)