Category: Chatter

Can I offer you an egg substitute in these trying times?

By Eggware.XYZ

As you surely may have heard, a dozen eggs is currently worth $5 (five big ones) in many places in America. This may be the very thing tearing the fabric of our nation apart, as eggs form the basis of most breakfast foods, the most important meal of the day. It’s also testing our patience, since we have Egg in our goddamn name, for God’s sake.

But, since we have Egg in our goddamn name, you can trust us when we say that we’re Egg experts (eggsperts? huh that’s unfortunate – ed). We’ve assembled a top five list of quick, easy and fun substitutes for eggs in your day-to-day cooking, whether you’re baking, frying, or eating five dozen of them raw.

The Laundromat and the Single Red Die

By brilokuloj

There are a few known universal pains of being an adult: going to work, washing the dishes, and doing the laundry.

I am nearly 30 and yet, to this day, I have still managed to somehow avoid ever stepping foot inside a laundromat. I have always had access to a washing machine, whether it was in the basement or in a nearby room in the complex. Well, I guess people might consider that last thing a laundromat (especially because you have to pay for it) but at least I don’t need a car to get to it.

But recently, our apartment complex’s laundry room has been shut down, on account of the Big Plumbing Project that has been ruining my sleep recently. So, no washing machine. I have to go to… THE LAUNDROMAT.

WE ARE BACK!

By Eggware.XYZ

The year is 2023. You haven’t heard from our humble little blog in (double-checks) a year and a half (looks again) or uh, two years if you weren’t subscribed to us on Patreon. You can probably guess why, since you’ve been through it too: our world caught on fire, and just as unceremoniously decided it was no longer on fire, which was somehow even harder to deal with than the first half.

Times have been hard. Masks were worn, coughs were coughed. We experienced one glorious month of living-wage YouTube revenue and then watched it evaporate into dust. Chicken sandwiches are no longer funny. Eggs are $4.89. But we’re still here.

I (Will) am still in the progress of dusting the shelves. I think all the Patreon posts are no longer Patreon-locked, so you can go through those if you haven’t seen them yet.

At some point the nice-looking blog theme I worked so hard on suddenly turned out to be automatically generating a robots.txt file (blocking it from Google searches), and I couldn’t figure out how the hell to get it to stop doing that, so I panicked and swapped it out for some godawful unreadable theme with flowers in the header. Today I’ve swapped it out for… this one — which is honestly pretty sucky for my tastes, I don’t like how much it looks like Modern Blogs, and I realized mid-post that you can’t even see the author, which is a big problem for this blog. So I’m gonna have to swap it out again soon and pray that EggwareXYZ gets a coherent theme one day.

But now you can read the posts. That’s good enough for me.

One year of COVID-19!

By Eggware.XYZ

Happy one year anniversary! It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year, huh? I know, it feels like it was just yesterday. Oh, you don’t know what it’s the anniversary of? Well, it’s been one year since Will and Paula contracted COVID-19! That’s right! We’ve been long-haulers for a full year now! Man, how time flies. Remember when we thought all of this would be over by July? Ha ha!

Man, having COVID sucks. It was one of the worst experiences of our life. But we were the first people we knew to contract COVID-19, and to this day, we still don’t know anybody else who has gotten it. And we caught a very mild case, mind you. We didn’t even have to go to a hospital about it. But in a way, it’s our little piece of history, just for ourselves. In our lungs. And in our immune systems. Though our antibodies have definitely worn off by now and we still need to get our vaccinations.

Remember movies?

By Eggware.XYZ

Remember movies?

You don’t. Nobody does. And if you do remember movies, shame on you! There’s still a pandemic going on, don’t you know! You need to be staying inside! You can’t go to movies anymore. Nobody can. We watch all our movies on subscription services on the internet, we have to pay through the nose monthly, and we don’t even have Sno-Caps to eat.

But there was a time once, many moons ago, where you could go see a movie. And we would see them in theaters. They were these… closed, dark boxes where you could cough on other people and eat secret food loudly. And we loved them. We would go there all the time, and we would cough, and sneeze, and breathe all over the place, and we wouldn’t wear a mask, and we’d sit next to strangers.

We remember. And we want to share our movie theater experiences with you. Which are seven experiences, all from 2012. We don’t see movies much.

Oopsie! Burger King did a misogyny!

By brilokuloj

For the sake of my fragile mental health during quarantine, I’ve started exclusively reading Twitter through their Tweetdeck app, which allows me to customize my experience to my enjoyment. I can choose not to see retweets, for one thing, and Tweetdeck doesn’t push people’s ‘likes’ onto my feed. I only use it to network with artists I enjoy, and occasionally retweet the stray meme. My exposure to the woes of the cursed blue website is mercifully minimal. If you want to live like me, I strongly recommend this plan of action: log into Tweetdeck, uninstall the app from your phone, read Ed Zitron’s article on how to enjoy Twitter, and follow all your Twitter mutuals on non-Twitter sites.

It’s because of my strict no-Twitter-angst diet that I managed to miss out on the website’s latest stunningly atrocious fast food PR scandal until just today. So you guys are probably rolling your eyes – gee, look at this chump writing an article 3 days late! But my tardiness is because I take care of myself first, and you should too. If I were to expose myself to every horrible thing going on in the world right now, I would almost certainly instantly take 20d6 poison damage and die.

It’s for these reasons that I sincerely advise not reading this article unless you’re in a good enough place mentally and you really want to see my take on it. I don’t have anything to gain from stressing you out pointlessly, and neither do you, and also I really don’t want to be giving Burger King any more free advertising than they’re already getting right now.

If you feel like you have to know, you don’t. It’s not that funny and it’s absolutely not worth it. Here, I’ll sum it up for you: Burger King said a stupid out-of-context thing about women while they were trying to say something positive, and it was probably on purpose to stir up social media drama. There you go! Now go do something else. Go play some Wobbledogs or whatever the hell it is you like to do these days.

Wayback: Tomba!

By brilokuloj

Tomba! is a rare case of a ‘cult favorite’ game that I sincerely feel like had no good reason to not be popular.

It was produced and directed by Tokuro Fujiwara, already known for producing and directing games like Mega Man, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and even creating the survival horror genre with his NES game Sweet Home which was later adapted into the goddamn Resident Evil franchise. Tomba! is built wholly from the same good game design concepts, with RPG elements that innovated the platformer genre without taking up too much space. It’s funny and cute, while still having a sizeable spooky side. As far as 2D platformers go, it’s the total package.

Despite all this, Tomba! never sold enough to qualify for a Greatest Hits reprint, and copies now regularly go for over $100 on eBay. I just really don’t know why, even trying my best to approach this from an objective perspective. Games with less production value have successfully been spun off into entire TV franchises, while Tomba! languished with a single sequel and some very obscure merchandise.

Even with my history in the video game industry, the whims of the market are completely opaque to me. I don’t really feel like it’s my place to speculate on if the game was marketed well enough or what-have-you. Still, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the official promotional material was like.

Today we’re using the Wayback Machine to look at a whole 4 sites: Tomba! on the US PlayStation website, the independently hosted Tombi! site, the official Whoopee Camp site, and the very first official Tomba! site. I can’t give precise timestamps, but most of these are around the year 2000.

Wayback: Crystal Dynamics – Gex

By brilokuloj

When’s the last time you’ve played a mascot platformer that wasn’t a Mario or a Sonic? It was probably a Crash or a Spyro if it was anything at all. The genre is dead, and I miss it very much.

Gex, at least to me personally, is the iconic failed mascot platformer. He’s everything bad about the genre: he talks way too much and thinks he’s clever, his world is made of cookie-cutter tropey levels that don’t fit together, he has way too many gameplay gimmicks, and in the grand scheme of things he’s been completely forgotten. These are all the reasons that I find Gex oddly enjoyable, as a game trilogy that just doesn’t really work and isn’t very fun.

Unlike most platformer mascots, Gex was not aiming to be the face of a single console: he was the catchphrase-spitting gecko mascot of Crystal Dynamics, a video game company founded by women in 1992. Crystal Dynamics had a broad ‘a little bit of anything’ approach to making games: they had many platformer games, an action-adventure franchise, a point-and-click, a fighting game, a racing game … you get the idea. I guess they also worked on some series named Tomb Raider.

But Gex was Crystal Dynamics’ thing. He was funny, he was memorable, and he was the face of the company, especially once the substantially more popular sequel Gex 2: Enter the Gecko was released in 1998. In that way, Gex was a fixture of the late 90s, a reminder of what things were like.

And what’s more ‘late 90s’ than a terrible website for a terrible video game?

Today I’m going to the Wayback Machine to see the Gex pages on the Crystal Dynamics website from 1998 to 1999. It’s tail time, as one might say.

The Colors of Wishbone

By palabomeno

The colors were so beautiful.

They promised me so much. Whenever I felt sad, or lonely, or worried, all I would do is listen to the colors, and they would promise me that all things would be okay. They did things no other colors could do. Have you ever smelled a color? Tasted a color? No, not in the way somebody with synesthesia would, either. Really tasted a color, tasted it in the same way that you could taste a piece of chocolate, savoring its flavor and swallowing it and feeling it inside you, warm and pleasant. I hadn’t either, until the colors of Wishbone were revealed to me.

Nobody else can understand. The Wishbone colors speak, and they sing, and they dance, and they do so, so much for me. I cannot live without them. I will not live without them. They are everything to me. No family, no friends, nobody can compare. How could they? They cannot show me delights the way Wishbone can. They call me mad when I try to even gently describe, to convince them to look at the colors.

Maybe I am mad. But if madness is the price for happiness, I do not care. The colors are worth any price. The colors are everything.

Cuckoo for Blue’s Clues Blue Foods

By brilokuloj

I really loved Blue’s Clues. Did you ever watch that one? The kids show with the blue cartoon dog?

I loved Blue’s Clues well past the point where most children would have moved on to other shows. I loved Blue’s Clues to the point of accidentally isolating myself from my peers. I was still watching it when I was 8, and even once I lost interest when they kicked Steve off for Joe, I kept watching it with my sibling well into my preteen years.

I had a Blue stuffed toy. I had the Handy Dandy Notebook, with the giant crayons. I wanted the Thinking Chair very badly, and would randomly declare any particularly comfortable chair or even sofa to be the Thinking Chair. I had a Mailbox I would put random crap in. I had several figurines that would regularly get lost and stepped on. I had the Humongous Entertainment PC games, which were very good. My dog was named Blue.

Above anything else, I loved the Blue’s Clues food. I already loved neon-colored food, something that I know many 90s kids can sympathize with, and in my case I especially loved neon Blue Food. I can’t say for certain if my love of the Blue’s Clues Blue Food was because of the show itself, or if I started to love the show more because it was a consistent source of serotonin-inducing Blue Food. I think solving that mystery might be even harder than the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.

Would you like to see my collection of favorite Blue’s Clues Blue Foods? Come on into my article! Blue skidoo, you can too.