FOOD: Surviving Burger Jones

WARNING: The following article, unusually for us, is very NSFW. Please do not read this if you are under the age of 18, or if you are somebody who works for Parasole Restaurant Holdings.

Burger Jones. The name fills me with fear. How can I possibly explain why? What words will describe the imagined world of Burger Jones, otherwise a small Minnesotan chain of hamburger restaurants? What will atone for what we have invented? Is it simply too late?

Burger Jones was opened in 2009 by Parasole Restaurant Holdings, a small restaurateur business that owns several other restaurants across the Twin Cities. Like what must now be 80% of restaurants in the United States, it is a hamburger restaurant. It serves hamburgers. Its named “Burger Jones”. This isn’t hard math. 

But there is a darker side to Burger Jones, a dripping, turgid mess, that is a complete and utter fantasy invented by us here at Eggware.XYZ as one of the stupidest running jokes ever devised. We’d like to apologize to any members of Parasole Restaurant Holdings, or any other employee of the Burger Jones who might stumble upon this article, but our tale must be told. We’ve lived with this for too long, and now that we have finally dined at Burger Jones, you must all share our pain.

We are so, so sorry.

NEWS: Eggware.XYZ Coronavirus Statement

We here at Eggware.XYZ value the safety and security of our visitors foremost. With the spread of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 in recent weeks, we have been doing jack shit behind the scenes because we are just some random dipshits who have no significant way to alter the path this pandemic will take in the upcoming future. I mean, I’m just an egg with legs who’s the mascot for a blog. I’m not at risk of catching COVID-19 because I’m totally fictional. I don’t even have hands. Should I be washing my feet, or something? I’m not even wearing the right kind of mask in the header. And you shouldn’t be wearing those masks unless you’re at risk of spreading the virus, so it’s just a waste. Warden and Paula didn’t go out much in the first place before all this anyway.

Regardless of that, we have decided to take measures for the greater security of visitors to Eggware.XYZ. In the following weeks, you may notice a few changes to the Eggware.XYZ that you are used to:

  • We will be offering touchless delivery on all of our posts. When a post is delivered to your web page, our web servers will place the post on your browser and immediately back away a minimum of six feet to allow you to enjoy your content safely.
  • We will be closing the main page to new visitors. Visitors who wish to enjoy our incredible reviews and humor will have to access each page individually, in order to minimize the amount of people surfing a single page at a time.
  • We have cancelled the giveaway where Warden and Paula cough into a plastic bag and send it directly to you.
  • We have locked King St. Bee in her bank vault and have pumped that bad boy full of bleach in order to keep her safe and clean. We understand King St. Bee is of the highest priority to our visitors, and her safety is paramount. Although she has no respiratory system and common viruses cannot survive on the surface of her body, we feel taking an aggressive measure is the best path of action.   

We apologize for any inconvenience that these new measures may cause, but the safety of our visitors is paramount. The tens and tens of daily visitors our website receives are of the utmost importance to us. Although there is no known way to transmit the novel coronavirus through a web page, we feel that it is better safe than sorry in these troubling times.

Also, wash your fucking hands, please.

FOOD: Wendy’s – Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant

Oh for the love of god not more chicken sandwiches

Okay, okay, we can do this. Yes, chicken is everywhere, and we’ve drilled that concept into your heads for long enough. Wendy’s, not one to be left out of a trend, has added a number of chicken sandwiches to its new breakfast menu – the most interesting one, to us, being the Maple Bacon Chicken Croissant.

On its surface, this sounds like a serious slam dunk. Fried chicken, bacon, AND a croissant bun? The only other place that does croissant buns in its breakfast is Burger King, and they’re definitely the least classy of the Big Three burger joints. Could Wendy’s deliver to us a real croissant, rich, buttery and flaky?

I mean, we doubt it. But there’s always hope, so hit the jump and find out.

TUTORIAL: Blender 2.8 – Vertex Colors

It would be a shorter list to say the things that Blender 2.8 didn’t change. All of these changes have been great for professional users, but they’ve certainly alienated Blender’s long-term hobbyist userbase. As an amateur professional, I’m hoping to help bridge that gap.

So I talked about how to make a shadeless material. But how do you apply vertex colors to that material?

Vertex colors, as the name implies, are RGB data that is stored in individual vertices. These days, vertex colors are treated as irrelevant, but they have a ton of uses if you’re willing to play with it. You can use them to make completely textureless models with basic flat colors, which is great if you don’t care much for mucking with UVs. Another thing you can do is use them for shading your textured model, which is a great way to keep the file size down on low-resolution textures.

Vertex colors are great for all kinds of retro and minimalist styles, and the data in them can easily be ported to game engines like Godot. Also, it’s just plain fun to mess with and will teach you more about the Shader Editor. So let’s go!

TUTORIALS: Blender 2.8 – Shadeless Material

It would be a shorter list to say the things that Blender 2.8 didn’t change. All of these changes have been great for professional users, but they’ve certainly alienated Blender’s long-term hobbyist userbase. As an amateur professional, I’m hoping to help bridge that gap.

It’s a surprisingly popular question with a surprisingly complicated answer: how do you get a Shadeless material in Blender 2.8?

Shadeless materials accept no lighting information, meaning they will always be the same color in any lighting environment. They have tons of uses, especially for low-poly art and toon shaders. And they used to be so, so easy: as recently as Blender 2.79, you could achieve it with a single button press.

Obviously this wouldn’t even be an article if that button was still around. So how do you do it now?

MINECRAFT: Wizard Tower

Ello Yewchewb and welcome back to my Minecraft build series!

Quite recently (as of the time of me writing this) Mojang has released their ‘snapshot’ preview builds for the upcoming 1.16 Nether Update, which is quite exciting, as they’re finally adding new biomes to the Nether! And boy, does it come with a lot of new blocks!

To keep things simple for you but challenging for me, I’m sticking to ‘one-chunk’ builds, which means they have to fit in a 16×16 square.

Today I’m making a wizard tower!

FOOD: Wendy’s – Breakfast Baconator

I’ve had enough chicken! It’s breakfast time, boys! Wendy’s recently debuted an all-new breakfast menu, hoping to keep up with the rising trend of fast food breakfasts. Wendy’s for a long time has been the only member of the Big Three burger chains to not serve breakfast. While McDonald’s and Burger King have been slinging sausage for years, Wendy’s has only had Breakfast on and off through the decades. They tried in 2005, but pulled it in 2006 after bad reception. They tried in 2012, but stopped in 2013 after concerns that the breakfast menu was distracting from their main menu. They couldn’t seem to find the right balance that the other chains could.

Now they’re giving it another crack, with an all-new menu. This time it seems like Wendy’s knows what the people like, because the headliner attraction is a little concoction known as the Breakfast Baconator. Oh yes, that legendary mountain of meat gets a breakfast counterpart.  

Hit the jump to find out if Wendy can finally get this breakfast thing right.

FOOD: KFC – Chicken & Donuts Sandwich

Are you tired of chicken yet? Chicken sandwiches have truly taken over fast food. I mean, how many of the most recent reviews we’ve done have been chicken sandwiches? 2019 was the Year of the Chicken Sandwich and 2020 is the first year truly affected by this paradigm shift. Naturally, those benefiting from this change in America’s tastes are the classic chicken joints. But where has that most classic of chicken chains gone off to? If you know anything about eating fast food, you’ll know KFC has undergone some serious rebranding in the past few years in an attempt to shed its filthy, greasy image. A greater focus on the Colonel as their mascot, a revamp of the recipe, a complete overhaul of their visual image – the works.

But KFC is still Kentucky Fried Chicken, and this is the restaurant that invented the Double Down. KFC wants to clad itself in a new image of cleaner, better food, but still market the occasional high-caloric nightmare to clog up America’s valves. The Chicken & Donuts sandwich is yet another attempt to keep heart disease as the number one killer of people across the country.

Is it even good, or is it just another tacky gimmick? Hit the jump to find out.