Leftovers for ever!

[elfs]

Despite the fact that it was just going to be the three of us, Omaha decided that we would eat a full Thanksgiving dinner. We cooked a twelve pound bird stuffed with bread and dried apricots and cranberries, green beans, mashed potatoes, biscuits, home-made pumpkin pie, gravy, spinach and pear salad, the works. The only thing store-bought was the canned cranberry sauce with the meal. I made blackberry Italian sodas for Omaha and Kouryou-chan. It was astoundingly good.

I spent four hours this morning, boiling the carcass with the contents of our kitchen vegetable leftover bin (onions, celery, bean tailings) and produced a gallon and a half of turkey stock. After chilling the pot in an ice bath and skimming off the fat, it all went into the deep freezer.

Yamaraashi-chan came over around 10:00am this morning. For lunch I had a turkey sandwich with cranberry, stuffing, and spinach leaves. The girls think I'm gross.

I've been trying to get Freespace 2 up and running on my desktop, without much success. There are two Freespace 2 open-source projects. The icculus.org project, which is slower and older but the joystick works, and the indiegames.com project, which is fully ported to OpenGL, is very fast, very beautiful, with lots and lots of bells and whistles, but the joystick only somewhat works. The "hat" doesn't work, meaning I can't look out my side windows, or see who's coming up behind me-- very inconvenient in a space sim!

I also got Marathon up and running on my desktop. I'm afraid I'm having trouble getting into it. I mean, it looks like a clone of Doom 1 with the graphic sensibilities of the original Castle Wolfenstein. What was the big deal really about?

Comments

[bolindbergh]

The appeal of the Marathon series was never the technical side but rather the story, and especially the ridiculous amount of backstory available through terminals scattered across the levels. If you found 343 Guilty Spark's rambling in the Library in Halo annoying rather than fascinating, you'll probably never get into Marathon.

[foshka.livejournal.com]

I remember making a freespace joystick modification to an open source port years ago, when I was still fiddling with linux, so that my usb joystick would work. I'm not sure what I did with it.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Does your turkey stock congeal when refrigerated? Mine tends to do that, must be all the dissolved proteins.

I suppose I'm going to have to practice that new-fangled Aspic Oriented cooking.

[(Anonymous)]

Make sure to get the texture enhancement packs from here to improve the quality of the textures significantly:

http://orbitalarm.bungie.org/downloads/textures.html

The big deal, as I recall it, was the much greater depth of story vs. Doom (what story?) and similar shooters, as well as the greater quality of gameplay, thanks to the far more intricate maps, as well as greater weapon, monster, mission-type and texture variety.

The concept of AIs and 'Rampancy' in the Marathon storyline might be of interest to you as a SF writer who uses AIs frequently.

The open-source engine has been enhanced to allow transparency, fog, and other graphical effects, which sadly are not well-utilized by the original bungie scenarios. More recent, 3rd party scenarios, utilize them far better, such as Marathon: Rubicon, which has me obsessed with its three branching plotlines and huge, sprawling, intricately designed maps.

http://www.marathonrubicon.com/

I'm not associated with any of these projects but I am a Marafan from way back in my mac-using high school days.