RE-OPEN FOR BUSINESS!I am re-opening my blog! I will now use this as a platform to talk about whatever it is I'm into at the moment, and my journey to become a Photojournalist, including school. After the unfortunate seperation of myself and my ex-fiancee I figure it's time to start blogging again.Warhammer post coming soon!
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Oh Captain Lou, My Captain Lou!

Captain Lou Albano died today at age 76. I'm pretty sad about this. I don't usually care about celeb deaths, but I liked the Cap'n when he was a wrestler when I was growing up, and I watched the Super Mario Bros. Super Show religiously when it was on. I watched a few episodes of Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling when I was a kid too, and he was there as well.



Unfortunately I can't find an embeddable version of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" video, because he played Cyndi Lauper's Dad in that video.

This is a tribute to Captain Lou Albano, one kickass dude! We'll miss you!

Videos below the break.

















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Men Working!

I'm busy cookin something up!






Bwahahahaha!

Remember, if something in the kitchen either smells AWESOME or BURNT, it's probably a man doing all the work. wink wink nudge nudge

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Cajun-Orange Tilapia and Greens! Decadent! DELICIOUS! Healthy??!

This was posted over at my fiancee's blog. Keep in mind that she wasn't in the kitchen for this recipe, so on her blog, she has some mild inaccuracies. :)

She didn't post the actual recipe though, just what she knew of it.

I will provide prices for each ingredient, but they're guesstimates. Your prices may vary!

Cajun-Orange Tilapia and Greens

Ingredients:

1 bag frozen boneless, skinless tilapia fillets (should be 8 or 9 fillets): approx $5
1 bag frozen mustard greens: $2
2 stalks of celery: 30 cents?
half a handful of pre-shredded carrots: another 30 cents
1 naval orange: $? (I buy them in 10 lb. bags.)
4 tbsp olive oil: $?
Tony Cacherie's cajun seasoning: 1-2 cents

So this is approximately a 10 dollar meal that can make 8 or 9 servings for those that aren't as hungry, or it can make 3-4 servings for those that are very hungry like me. I ended up eating 3 pieces of this fish and the greens that go with each piece. It was just that delicious.

Cooking Implements

1 9x13 dark cake pan lined with aluminum foil and another sheet of aluminum foil
1 serving spoon
1 mandolin slicer
1 bowl
Something to toss greens with (a second spoon will do usually)

Prep:

Thaw the fish if you want a shorter cooking time. Overnight in the fridge the day before works just fine, as does about 40 minutes in a sink of cold water. You can leave them in the bag they came in for this step.

Only prep two items and preheat the oven.

Preheat your oven to 375 if it's gas or 400 if it's electric.

Cut the white end of the celery stalks off.
Take a mandolin slicer (on thin setting), MAKE SURE YOU ARE CAREFUL FOR GOD'S SAKE!
Hold the celery by the leafy bits, one stalk at a time.
Slice the celery with the mandolin slicer, you should not even come near your fingers or hands and it only takes a few seconds to get 40 slices off a piece of celery (thin setting). I cannot stress enough to pay attention. Mandolin slicers are dangerous. VERY dangerous. Do not let your kids do this step. You cannot use the guard with celery, that's why we're grasping by the leafy bit of the celery. you want to stop slicing before you get to the leaves (you don't want them in the meal, they're too bitter). If you cut yourself on the slicer, I'm not responsible. I'm just telling you it makes nice, even, and thin slices of celery.
Do this to both celery stalks.

Slice one end off of your orange and do this over a bowl:
Use the mandolin slicer and it's guard (so you don't cut yourself) and slice off 1 slice of orange for each fillet you have. Some juice will collect in the bowl with the slices. Put what's left of the orange in the bowl too with the slices, you'll be using it in a bit.

Process (cooks everything at once):

Line the cake pan with some foil so that it raises up the sides. This will keep your pan clean as long as you don't break the foil. Make sure you put the dull sides of the foil on the outsides. so you want the shiny side facing up out of the pan and facing down from the foil "lid". This will help everything cook faster.

Brush or roll olive oil on the bottom only of the foil, use about 1 tbsp

Line the bottom of the pan with a solid layer of mustard greens, I just put them in frozen to help steam cook the rest of the food.
Sprinkle about a handful of your pre-shredded carrot on the mustard greens.
Dump the celery on top of the greens too.

Drizzle the remaining 3 tbsp of olive oil on top of the greens.

Set aside the orange slices and squeeze the juice from the end of the orange into the bowl. Take out any seeds, you don't want them in the meal. pour the orange juice over the veggies in the pan.

Sprinkle some of the cajun seasoning over the greens. Use a decent amount but don't over-do it. You don't want it super spicy, you just want the seasonings to blend with the orange.
Toss the veggies with the oil and orange and spices. Just get a light coat on everything and get all the veggies mixed together. Be careful not to tear the foil.

Place the tilapia fillets on top of the greens mixture. do not let them overlap if you can avoid it, but if you do have to overlap, overlap the thinner side of the fillets. They'll cook up fine, we just want room for the orange slices.

Dust the tilapia fillets with some cajun seasoning.
Place an orange slice on top of each fillet, even if you have to overlap them.

Now just take your other piece of foil and lay it over the cake pan. Make sure you SEAL IT TIGHT. we don't want any steam escaping.

Now just place it in the oven for about 30-40 minutes. I would say if it's electric try 30-35 and if it's gas go for 40. This is for thawed fish. If you put the fish in frozen then up the time by 10 minutes for electric and 15 for gas. (time difference is due to the temperature difference)

Be careful when you open it after you get it out of the oven. There's a hellacious amount of steam in the pan.

Because the fish is steamed mostly and not really baked, it shouldn't get all fishy tasting. Steaming fish in the oven tends to leave the meat perfectly cooked, even if you leave it in for a long time. That's provided you don't let the fish touch either the foil or the pan, that's why it's layered between greens and an orange slice.

Throw away all the orange slices, they're ruined now anyway. 1 portion for a not-so-hungry person would be 1 piece of fish and the veggies it's directly sitting on. This would be good if you have anything else that you're feeding a party or something. Otherwise, if you're hungry or just love the taste of this meal, take 2 or 3 pieces of fish. Go ahead, I won't tell. :)

Drizzle some of the juice left in the pan over the fish and greens. This will make everything taste even better. :) It's really a low-fat, high vitamin and mineral content is in the "sauce", so it's VERY healthy and puts back some of the vitamins and minerals that cooking drew out of the veggies. That and the orange/cajun spicyness of the "sauce" is simply to die for. Oh man, I'm droolin'. I say sauce in quotes because it's way too thin to be a real sauce.

Throw away the foil and your pan should still be clean if you didn't rip the foil at all. :)



Cook's Notes:

It took me a total of 10 minutes to prep everything and get it all together in the pan. So your total cook time is around an hour.

Since there's very little fat in this meal, it doesn't hurt to eat more. Plus it's full of delicious veggies (thanks to the orange juice) and the mustard greens have tons of vitamins and fiber in them. Also the "sauce" will have good amounts of the omega type amino acids from the fish and lots of vitamin C since it's based around orange juice.

This dish was old-school french-cajun inspired. I thought up this recipe myself. I will make this again soon and take pictures of the process. Then I will add them to this post and make a new post saying it's been changed. :)

This dish is amazing over a thin layer of white rice, especially if you drizzle the "sauce" over everything and it seeps into the rice.

Edit:
Oh yeah, rinse your celery before you slice it. The carrots in a bag are pre-rinsed luckily.
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To all my mac using homies out there:

Hey everyone!

I'm a PC user, but I also love Macs. I will always love both Macs and PCs but I will always USE PCs. So this is not an attacking article. I want my Mac using/loving friends out there to be safe.

I know that all my mac using friends out there are not really aware of the security flaws in their operating system. I've always known that macs were particularly vulnerable, which is why when I worked tech support for a college that will remain nameless, I insisted that they put their mac machines on a seperate network that had no real internet access. Viruses and malware for macs were nearly non-existant in those days, but there were a few legacy viruses still accessible, and they did have a couple of older macs in the lab.

Unfortunately, especially thanks to those insipid Mac vs. PC ads, Mac users think that their computers are perfectly safe and thus won't download anti-virus software designed for the Mac. This is a horrible idea based on a fallacy, and I say shame on Apple. Shame on you Apple!

I'm not the only one that knows these things though. Please go to this article at ChannelWeb, it really impresses the absolute gravity of the situation. Read the top 10 myths about Mac security and please, please take whatever steps are available to you to protect yourself. Don't let your false sense of security lead to your system and personal information being compromised.



It's time to start thinking like a PC user. Viruses and malware for the Mac are on an exponential rise. Get with a PC friend and ask them what THEY do to protect themselves. Or ask me. I'm something of a security expert (self-proclaimed of course, it's why I own a BlackBerry Storm and not an iPhone).

I really just want you all to be safe, and you aren't.

Here are some relevant links: Keep in mind that Mac's anti-virus solutions are not as robust as PC ones and typically aren't supported as prolifically and rapidly (yet). If there are changes in the Mac virus world, as there will undoubtedly be, you won't have as quick a response as a PC user does. Just be extra careful about where you go and what you open.

I am LOATHE to suggest a Symantec product. They're buggy, supremely SUPREMELY invasive and they tend to take most of the control of your PC away from you while providing sub-par virus protection. But they're one of the few with a decent Mac AV software. They're better than McAfee by far, but nowhere near as good as some of the giants like Kaspersky. Kaspersky, as far as I can tell, doesn't have a Mac anti-virus yet. OR I just can't find it.

Norton for Macs

Here's a free one, but from what i've read, it doesn't do cross-platform viruses. Yes, you can catch certain viruses from your PC friends. They're nasty little buggers that adapt to the OS they're on.

PC Tools' iAntiVirus



Here's the most important truth about Mac malware/viruses. You don't have many because you were never the target before. As someone who knows the virus creator culture, there was never a point because there were so few Macs out there, why waste the time.

Macs have double digit market share for the first time since the 1980's. NOW there's a reason. NOW they're coming to get you. And they're doing it faster than Mac can keep up. Just please keep that in mind. It's not that you were ever immune. Mac has more security holes than there are pixels in the sky. It's just that they've never been exploited.
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The Retro side of Pengo

I adore a lot of retro games. My very first "game system" was our Tandy 1000 computer (I missed out on the C64 sadly). On this I played a sort of side-scrolling shooter (I haven't re-found this one yet, but it had a top down view and a side view at the same time and you blew up trucks and planes and stuff) and a couple of games that my grandfather programmed straight in assembly code. He was an engineer and could write directly in assembly, so they ran very fast, even back then, but that's a story for a different time.

Some time after that I received a NES from my dad for one of my birthdays or christmas or something. I think I had just turned 8 and they were still relatively new. I played the hell out of my Mario/Duck Hunt cartridge and I wore out my Legend of Zelda cart (the shiny gold one, I wore the gold right off of it in places). Around this time I had a mini-tape recorder and me and a friend of mine would record game music off our tv's and take it to school with us.

This started my addiction to video game music. At my lowest point, I borrowed my friend's copy of Taboo: The Sixth Sense, a tarot based NES game (which was HORRID) and recorded music from it because frankly, while the music, the graphics, and the game were all horrible, the music COULD be a little catchy and I had tons of tapes. Mostly my friend and I laughed and laughed and laughed at the horrible, horrible grammar in the game.

So eventually I moved on to a Sega Genesis that I bought half of, my dad bought the other half, just because I wanted it so badly. This is where I really started playing games and letting the character sit there just to hear the music. Sonic the Hedgehog, that came with the Genesis, had very good music at the time. Genesis had a much better music chip than the NES did, being 16 bit and all, but the real kicker was when one of my friends let me borrow his SNES in exchange for my Genesis (which we ended up doing a lot after that). At this point I got to play Final Fantasy II, which as we all know is really FF 4 but named 2 because of the transfer over to us poor RPG-less Americans.

All in all, I've been a real freak for old school chip-based music, or chiptunes if you would rather.

My blog-buddy EV over at The Forgotten Gamer has posted a couple of things about game music, go read his posts. But I have something he doesn't! HAH! Take that EV! In yo' face... or something.

I have the Videogame Music Preservation Foundation in my speed-dial... I mean favorites list.

So today I was playing the new Bionic Commando game again, just for the nostalgic feeling that the music gives me, since Bionic Commando's music is awesome... and I got SO nostalgic that I went over to the VGMPF and loaded up Bionic Commando. You can also listen along here. Just click on track 6 and let it play. It's arguably one of the best chiptunes on any NES game. Fun Fact about Bionic Commando. In Japan it's called Top Secret: Hitler's Revival and has swastikas and nazis and you get to blow up zombie-Hitler's head.

So then I started reminiscing about all the games I used to play, and one stuck out in my mind. It was a little known game for the PC, dos-based of course, called Master of Magic. This was a strategy title in the vein of Civilization and it was amazing, if mostly unheard-of at the time.

It was a swords and sorcery type of strategy game. You are a wizard who knows different amounts of the 5 types of magic (you got to customize if you wanted) and you are leader of one of like 10 races of people, all with their own unit types and strengths/weaknesses. It was an incredibly deep game with many different strategies and a couple of different ways to win. There were some game-breakingly unbalanced racial units (paladins with flight/invisibility cast on them) and some horrendously powerful magical units you could summon (Great Drakes) that let you stomp all over everyone else. All in all though, it was terribly fun and definitely worth all of the trouble it took me to configure my autoexec.bat and config.sys in just such a way as to open up 600ish kilobytes of memory out of 640 and still have my soundblaster working. And I did it too. I was a DOS God, lol.

If I remember correctly it was nearly 20 1.44MB floppies to install. It took forever. I didn't get my hands on the CD version sadly. Be careful, there is a tiny bit of nudity in this game. The witch-doctor looking female wizard is topless. I don't know how they got away with that back in the day.

You can play this game for free now. It's Abandonware, which means the company has given up the rights to it to the public domain. You can find it here on Abandonia along with a solid review of it, and it plays on DOSbox, which is a DOS emulator for windows which you can find here in 16 different languages if you are into that sort of thing. Remember kiddies, SoundBlaster has better sound effects and AdLib has better music (though not much better). But the music in this game was pretty good. At this point I had stopped recording music on my tape player because I used it into oblivion. That's right, I used my little Radioshack mini-tape player so much it died.

So I ended up thinking about what other nostalgic games had good music. I remembered a little game called Flashback (also on Abandonia), by the same company that made a little gem called Out of This World. I remember the intro music to this day, and it's really a very interesting little intro if you take into account the era the game was in:



Oddly enough, this game doesn't have much music in it. Only during the animated cutscenes is there any music. The game just has ambient sound in it. It's punishingly difficult, but masterable, just like Out of This World before it.

For fairness' sake:



Out of This World, called Another World everywhere but the U.S., had a sequel on the Sega CD (and other platforms if I remember right) and was just as brutal, but more action oriented than platform oriented, again if memory serves. They have re-released Another World in glorious high resolution here.

I ended up acquiring a Sega CD from a friend of mine after staying the night at his place. His parents had bought it for him, not realizing it wouldn't hook up to his new style Sega Genesis. It hooked up to mine though, so he just let me have it. The Sega CD was my video game platform for years later, through great games like Shining Force CD and one of the penultimate games of the system, Lunar: The Silver Star Story. Lunar was remade on the Playstation in a much better version, but the one on Sega CD was the one that I played over and over and over. It was a lot more difficult too. I also played one of the best rail-shooters of all time, Silpheed.



An interesting little piece of info on this next one. There's a dude that goes "They got the carrier!", but in the sound test you can hear the full voice file and he says "Shit! They got the carrier!" but they edited it in the game by cropping the audio file instead of removing the file completely from the cd.



(Really I think it's just an awesome all around SHMUP [Shoot-em Up] that got less credit than it deserved. It had cool music too, sorta...) Silpheed is BLISTERINGLY difficult.

Note that I played PC games just as much, if not more, than my console games.

So that's just a few of my Retro Credentials for ya. I've got more than I can even list really without taking up hours and hours of your reading time, so I'm going to leave it there. Go check out DOSBox and Abandonia and get your retro-fix like I'm about to do. :)

Edit: I almost forgot. One of the greatest space-simulation games ever is one I played a lot. Frontier: Elite II. Sadly this one is not abandonware yet. It's sequel, Frontier: First Encounters IS however, so go grab that one. It's even bigger and has some of the best graphics of it's day, considering it's target PC's were 386 models. Make sure you find the patch for it though, it's INFESTED with bugs.

Edit:

Frontier: First Encounters is not abandonware, it's shareware put out by the original designer.
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Get to da Choppah!!!!!!!

Blogging is hard for me.

"But Pengo, Why Is Blogging Hard For You?!"

I'm glad you asked dear reader.

I have a little dysfunction called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Don't get me wrong, I try to never use it as a crutch or an excuse. I was not even diagnosed with it until I was in the US Navy at 19 years old. It prevented me from actually finishing Nuclear Power School. (yeah, I'm pretty samrt... heh)

It is also the reason I was discharged from the Navy. You can't be ADHD in the Navy without being medicated, but you cannot take the medications for it without violating their drug abuse policies since it's a controlled substance. So I was caught in a Catch-22 and had to be dismissed from duty.

Anyway! I have done a lot of research on the subject because it is very interesting to me and I like self-introspection anyway. It turns out I have a subset of ADHD (of which there are 6 different ones) called Hyperfocus.

Sorry, I need to say this: ADHD and ADD are not diseases. They are chemical imbalances in the brain that lead to attention problems. These manifest themselves in lots of different ways, but it is not a learning disability nor is it just a static problem like a ton of people seem to think it is. The brain is constantly changing and through that, a single person's ADHD can change as well. This is all based on new research that I've read up on, as is everything I'm going to say in this post.

Ok, back to Hyperfocus. I am part of the subset of ADHD that causes a lack of dopamine to be received in the front part of the brain. This causes me to be unable to rapidly switch my focus from one thing to another. This also causes me to be unable to do things that need to be done if they're not fun, because my brain will become absorbed in something fun and not be able to shift gears as it were. All because of a little missing dopamine.

The other problem with this is that when I am FORCED to shift gears, my brain gets very very angry and aggressive. This is a serious problem, but I literally have no control over it. Unfortunately, My Fiancee is typically the recipient of this outburst. It's not like I want to get mad. It's that my brain is trying to not shift. Think of a manual transmission in a car. You push on the clutch to make the gears shift nice and smoothly. Well, my brain shifts without the clutch. There's a grinding of gears and a horrid noise and the car can lose power or the transmission can go out. All of this leads to HULK SMASH levels of rage, just from being pulled out of whatever I am doing at the time.

God love her, she puts up with me and I'll never know why. I can get seriously mean, but really I don't even know I'm doing it until after it's over.

So I'm faced with a conundrum now. My best friend at work, J, has ADHD too. He recently started taking medication for it. His problems are nearly all gone now, just from some speed. So it sounds intriguing to me.

But there's a problem with this scenario. I will not EVER take that kind of drug for my brain. Here's why: All medicines, including speed, which are proven to increase the receptiveness of dopamine in the front lobes, have been proven to build up toxicity every time you take them. They literally end up poisoning your brain. Studies are showing that Ritalin, the most common ADHD medication, is causing children to lose touch with reality and become paranoid, delusional, Schizo, etc. All because of the toxicity levels that slowly build up. They can literally become different people, and since the toxins never leave the brain, they can become permanently Effed Up.

Today, I was emailing my mother as I do quite often, and she revealed that she now knows she's a Hyperfocuser as well. So we're going to support each other through this. But she found something interesting. VERY interesting.

A new study has shown that limiting the food intake of pre-down's syndrome rats (This is important because it's a lack of dopamine in the frontal lobes, just like ADHD) is allowing their brains to actually absorb more dopamine. So now I'm going to have to figure out how to limit my calorie intake. She's going to be doing this as well. It seems this either will or won't work, but maybe I'll lose some of this weight I've been meaning to lose anyway.

Luckily this can coincide with my gradual shift to a more vegetarian style of eating. I just wish meat wasn't so delicious. Oh wait, no I don't.

So back to the topic at hand:

I'm willing to help any of my readers or anyone who just happens across my blog learn more about ADHD, especially if they're suffering from it. I will also start posting my calorie limitation plan as soon as i can figure out how to do it. I think i'm going to have to start by getting a food scale. That should be fun. sigh.

Anyway, I want to formally tell the little woman in my life that I love her and I'm sorry for the grinding gears when I need to stop and do something else, and that I hope she tries to take it less personally.

Thanks for sitting through my randomness. This is actually quite firm control over the tangents my brain tries to go on. So you can imagine what it's like when I don't control it. YIKES!

Pengo Out!

EDIT: OMG! I totally spaced out and forgot to say why blogging really is hard. I tend to focus on other stuff, so when my brain gets a blog-post-worthy thought, it's usually crumpled up and tossed aside. So I have a pile of wadded-paper blog post ideas in my brain, but I'm not gonna sort through 'em. So it's hard for me to stop and sit down and write out my thoughts. Thanks a LOT ADHD. Jeez.

EDIT 2: Holy crap! Wall of text anyone?! HEY! WAKE UP!
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