Condiments: A Stocking Stuffer Review (Plus, Zootopia Watch Zoo Year Celebration)

   Yo Santa, I feel he know me, what put he in my stocking Christmas morn but condiments. Hot and/or spicy condiments, which, well yes, I'm thoroughly enjoying so far. Maybe it's Freudian; I was a sickly child, and my nose was always running (seriously you should see my first grade yearbook photo; tiny little toothbrush mustache of scab there on my upper lip caused by improper Kleenex technique. I'm an arbitrarily high percentage point certain, Puffs had yet to be invented.)

   Where was I. Condiments, that's right. Three varieties. Seen here smothered onto cheese puffs; gets you a real feel for the difference in weight and color and texture. Three varieties. Which I will analyze case-by-case now.

   HEINZ 57 VARIETIES JALAPEÑO TOMATO KETCHUP with actual jalapeño:

   I just realized that Heinz is also Doofenshmirtz's first name. Huh.

   Ketchup is amazing. Anything that goes well with ketchup is amazing. Ketchup actually on those things that go well with ketchup, not necessarily amazing (a lot of regional variations on traditional classic foods are just plain dumb but Chicago with their hot dogs ain't one of those,) but ketchup is still itself super legit. And Heinz is the king of ketchups, which is verified to independent third party ketchup experts and I'm totally not making it up, so I expected much from this.

   And... it's, surprisingly, ketchup. It's amazing. The jalapeño taste in no way smothers the ketchupiness of the ketchup, and, darn it it really looked for a second there like the spell check was accepting that word. The ketchup is still as tangy and creamy as you'd expect from any other Heinz product, and, brilliantly, they've somehow managed to engineer the jalapeño taste only to bloom after the initial ketchup oomf. Wizardry, is what it is.

   As great as ketchup is, and as great as jalapeños are, both of these things are my least favorite of condiments and hot-or-spicy flavors offered in my stocking; it's a real tribute, then, that this isn't my least favorite bottle from my stocking. It's amazing, and I'd recommend it anywhere where, you know, ketchup would go.

   Not cheese puffs, though. Heavens no.

EMERIL'S® KICKED UP HORSERADISH MUSTARD:

   Fun fact according to the copyright info on the back of the bottle: Emeril Lagasse's name is trademarked by Martha Stewart!? or at least Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO.)

   Alright, let's get through this one. This is good mustard, truly, pungent and creamy and with a mouthfeel that I can't even describe in front of mixed company it's just that amazing. I say, "let's get through this one," though, because as great of mustard this is, the truth is, it's... not... horseradish-y. Like, at all.

   At all at all.

   Maybe I just got a bad batch, or something? After all, Emeril® is that "Bam!" guy, right? He's got the word Bam literally tattooed on his hand/written there with MagicMarker. Author of 19 cookbooks, chef/proprietor of, I'm counting 12, restaurants? No, no. I trust you, Mr Chef Lagasse, sir. Maybe a bottle of your, like, Really Actually Quite Good But Not At All At All Horseradishy Mustard BAM got mislabeled. I think is what it is.

   Looking at the label here, the ingredients list horseradish powder as the, let's see fifth, out of six ingredients? Which is, nice, staying away from any artificial preservatives or anything, very well done. But I can't help get the feeling that, maybe the bottle isn't mislabeled, maybe the horseradish mustard really isn't all that horseradishy.

   Still an awesome mustard, though. It's great on... also not cheese puffs. Pretzels, try it on pretzels.

KIKKOMAN WASABI SAUCE FOR SANDIWICHES AND DIPPING TRUSTED NAME, GREAT FLAVOR A VERSATILE CONDIMENT WITH A VELVETY ZING featuring a "root blend" of horseradish and actual Wasabi, which is rare stateside:

   By far my favorite of the three, plus it actually goes great with cheese puffs. Taste-wise, as well as appearance. Check out that photo on top one more time; it really glows a nuclear green against that foxy fiery artificial orange, doesn't it?

   Downside to this one, seriously, is it's in the littlest bottle of the three. Stiiinks. It happens, though.

   It's... it's wasabi sauce. I... I don't know what else I can say about this. I've had more pungent stuff, but it's not like this shirks at all at clearing your sinuses once you swallow (it's true; it may seem kind of strange how the bottle describes the "zing" as "velvety," but it's actually very smooth and creamy... providing you keep the stuff in your mouth and not let it hit further back on the palate.)

   Well... that's it, I suppose. I did take all the photographs myself, especially the ones of the bottles though I also did crap out that photo on top with the cheese puffs (there have been, more forgiving, photography subjects, than plates of cheese puffs.) Just thought I'd, say that... Dad came in and was amazed, wanted to know where I got the photos... I took them. Took me an hour or so, but, they was a beaut to work with, that's for sure...

ZOOTOPIA WATCH: HAPPY ZOO YEAR

   Holycrapholycrapholycrapholycrapholycraaaap

   There's a whole post's worth of material to go over from this 2 3/4-minute long snippet alone; even if there is a full 35 seconds of rehashed material (including all that poster at the end.) But, first impressions?

   First of all, obviously, (as far as I can tell) this is the first public release of any-at-all of Shakira's "Try Everything;" I mentioned earlier (in a Zootopia watch for a post that, I actually don't think I've posted up yet, hmm...) how vague a message that that title alone conveys, but now we know where that's coming from, and the message is... actually super beautiful.

   Second of all: entirely new bits of plot information; random animals suddenly going feral...? A city-wide mystery, quite possibly underlying a larger conspiracy...? At first I thought no way, my theory yesterday was cute but there'd been no mention in anything up to this point, any plot bits that could justify some major twist such as the existence of humans... but freak, man. Just freak.

   Third off: man, there's still way more here than I've got any chance of getting to by the new year. I'll think I'll continue running these, up to frame-by-frame analysis where it calls for it, throughout the coming week.

BARSK: I Come Not to Praise Rüsul But to Bury Him (Plus Zootopia Watch)

   A good night of fervid sleep has allowed me to get a little more distance on Barsk, and realize how, just, totally trippy everything is. The entire last half of the novel is one, what I refer to as a singularity, after another-- basically a climax, but something undefinable beyond that: everything has been leading up to this moment, and you've got a decision to make, and, what happens the moment after the moment everything's been leading up to? It's impossible to say. These on their own are powerful; one after another, in climaxing succession, I don't have the words for.

   I mentioned in a footnote to yesterday's post the plot, the twistiness, the characterization that fit into that. Barsk certainly has heartbreaking decisions made, sometimes as backstory, sometimes climactically. It's got characters who act decisively, but sometimes wrongly, and either have to deal with consequences or else ignore them. The characterization actually can't be told separately from the setting: the characters are all animals, of course, and no matter how anthropomorphic they're not just aliens but alien.

   Which is another surreal, haunting factor.

   It's on, like, a memetic scale (memes=genes for ideas.) It's memetic. Which is what makes it haunting-- the ideas are infectious for one reason or another, and any time alone with your own thoughts, your mind drifts to dwell on these things. I say memetically infectious for one reason or another-- the scars and sacrifices that people go through, and/or are forced to witness, the ways people can be broken, the plot points that seem significant in the moment but turn out not to matter as much in hindsight.

   There's more of this line of thought below, during the spoiler-marked section; all the thoughts that occurred at the beginning of the night, drifting off in the evening. Meanwhile from the end of the night, waking up in the morning, these thoughts: Back to the Future, 1955 Marty and Doc and 1985 Marty and Doc team up with each other, and get "present" (1985) Marty a really nice comb to tame that mid-80s 'do, and thus tame-haired 2015 Marty now shows up with, 2015 Doc who's not "our" Doc because the future's been changed! That doesn't make sense, but it's not supposed to: it's all a metaphor for how little sense the fictional (possibly time-travel) science in something else entirely makes.

   Anyway.

SPOILERS START HERE
(Or, more accurately, a discussion of the constitution of spoilers, starts here.)

Source: Howard Tayler

   I mentioned plot points that seem significant at first but turn out not to matter-- Barsk has so many of these, from misunderstandings of prophecy experienced by characters, to specific actions taken by them, to odd encounters between them, to the entirety of Chapter 31, that actually I think I've said all that I needed to in my own musings of memetically haunting material. I guess all of that's, just part of that.

   What we're talking about mostly is Mild Spoilers- if you've read the blurb or seen the trailers, it's something that gets spoiled for you anyway. Like how Edward being a vampire in Twilight is technically a twist within the book, but one that gets discussed on the back cover. According to the blurb you're going to read already anyway, the characters are all animals, but justified because they're the scientific creations of humans, who are now extinct. Here's where more trippiness kicks in, as I realized last night in that whole thought process about how Barsk is so haunting and surreal: taking all that setting as a given, even though it occurs as something of a major twist in the novel (though I'm still holding back a lot of it,) we've figured all this out and now we must embark on this subplot entirely tangential to the plot of saving Barsk-as-we-know-it, but in the end they decide to keep the secret covered up anyway as part of the deal to hey-lay-off-my-planet. That whole plot, that whole setting, it was all rendered moot in the end, literally moot like they held a council meeting about it and everything.

   On some level, thinking about it now, the decision to reveal this crucial setting detail makes sense, as the whole thing could come off very much fantasy (as per the genre-bend-blend which is tangential to this post so I'm including it as part of an update to yesterday's, things I'd meant to include in my initial review but lacked the time to write if I wanted to get the post up on time.)

So maybe it is justified. I wouldn't mind it so much (as, really, it wouldn't be much of a twist if it weren't treated so profoundly) if this were the first time I've seen this kind of thing, but it's not. Such a twist (to one degree of profundity or another,) that there are these anthropomorphic animals were put here by humans, has been spoiled-on-the-cover a couple of times already in a couple of other different settings (to one degree of spoilage to another.) Like Solatorobo, how box cover art sometimes shows Red as a human boy? Like, thanks, guys, I would have hated for that to have taken me by full dramatic surprise.

Not that spoilers are pure evil or anything of course; some people mind them more than others... If you have to rely solely upon shock value for your story to work, you're doing it wrong, but sometimes of course nothing rivals going entirely naked into an entirely novel world. Both suspense and irony have a part to play, and so I can't say to what degree the blurbists for Barsk were in the right in dropping the origin of these space-faring furries so casually.

I can think of a couple of webcomics, but other than that, yeah. On the mainstream side, there's still a basic need to justify up front why we're looking at a buncha funny animals. It really could be, the ultimate plot twist, if one of these days instead of telling us the human origins of these critters, something that told us straight, flat-out that humans, like I don't know, never happened in this world...

...holy craaaap.

ZOOTOPIA WATCH:
   It says, explicitly, on the world of Zootopia, humans never happened, right? That doesn't mean that humans couldn't have happened off-world. So, Barsk scenario, where RMs have supplanted humanity, gone starfaring, and proceeded to have had their true origins either forgotten or outright covered up? I've long pondered the paw pads on the hands that realistically would never have been used for walking if evolution had happened as the teaser trailer implies; how sociology would have evolved differently as well. This is either on the money or dead wrong, but if this theory is right, this could be the biggest spoiler for the whole film, far beyond whodunnit or not.

BARSK

   BARSK: THE ELEPHANTS' GRAVEYARD, by Lawrence M Schoen, came out today, and though I'm decidedly unimportant enough to have received an advanced copy for review, I did preorder it for my Kindle where it insta-downloaded the moment it became available, which was actually yesterday instead of today, so... Maybe that's got to do with timezones or something, but that's advanced copy enough for me. Downside of that is, it's still only one or two hours early, and I still had to read it PDQ in order to get a same-day release-date review. Because it's IMPORTANT goshdarn it.

   And so I've read it already. And... wow. Dang wow.

   The full title, according to the copyright page, is Barsk: the elephants' graveyard: an anthropomorphic novel, which, yes, yes, book in the shape of a man and all that, but... I don't know what it is; I've always preferred my anthropomorphism in visual terms. Novels never really did it for me. Liked this one. Loved this one. Though I didn't survive 80 pages into Watership Down, or get a sixteenth of the way through any Redwalls, or an eighth of the way through... that one book that's like Redwall 'cept written by Avi, which book's name slips my mind though I vaguely recall it may have had something to do with pots and/or pans?* Didn't get through those, but I blasted through this one, and it's not a short book.

   It... I'm not sure how long it is. I mean, I read it in a day, obviously, but it took all day. It felt short, not in the bad way, but in the way like how every scene knows what it's doing and is important to the plot? To me, that's the greatest thing that a plot can be. I'm not sure how much I can say without spoilers, but, guess what, that's also a big turn-on for me in terms of plot.** More spoilery review tomorrow? If they even are those, I mean, it, like, gives away some pretty major humdingers as part of the book description on Amazon...

   Yeah, yeah, I can't talk much right now, as most of what I have to say touches on those themes. Also, freak it's midnight, I gotta get this thing up. For now, though? ... yeah I'll tell you tomorrow.

   UPDATE!: There are things I'd meant to get to but didn't have time to, and which don't fit into my spoilery discussion, so I'm fitting them here in the original post; though there's a full post's worth of content here, no wonder I didn't have enough time to write this up.

   We're at kind of a unique place in science fiction right now. Even the hardest of SFs is finding justifications for all the wide-eyed bizarrity that you saw from the formative period in science fiction: why not bat people on the moon; the science at the time certainly still allowed for it. Barsk certainly takes place in a "sufficiently advanced" setting, where we can deftly blend science fiction and fantasy and not even need to handwave anything away anymore.

   Niche markets occasionally sending a lungfish-like bold evolutionary step crossing over into the mainstream, sometimes-- usually especially popular in the original-niche-anyway market, with the mainstream reaction between indifference and dislike. The niche solely pointing to it and saying, "see? we're in the mainstream! our little subculture has been ratified!" Like how every good little Mormon boy and girl enjoyed "Meet the Mormons," with its zero percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (I may still be the last holdout to actually see the thing in the first place, and I've yet to read any reviews, but I've seen the kind of phenomenon before and all the earmarks are present.)

   That's fandom-looking-outward; things do spring up also in the mainstream, like litfic writers writing what certainly appears to be speculative fiction-- and of course there's never any danger of fresh "furry" content ceasing to pour in from the mainstream, usually from juvenilia but who knows.

Barsk, much like its own bend-blend of science fiction and fantasy, like the bend-blend of beast and man within, straddles and takes place in both mainstream SF and niche "furry" fiction. I... get... the... feeling, that this is one of those products, those certain shining gems that can only be produced at one certain point in human history, products which had exactly one window to get into the world and which managed to squeeze in against all odds. The kind of thing that wins awards, and maybe even spoken of in hushed reverence by fans. The kind of thing that goes on to influence later generations. Whether Barsk actually is going to go on to become all of those things, just, <<shrug>>, but, it's one of those things with that potential.

Square Root of Plus Christmas Plus... Plus, More Pony Card Stuff

   And, oh, right, this may technically count as a New Year's gift (though who gives those, really, other than mooning couples,) but also on my list of belated presents? (which I have not yet received but have also been alerted of?)

   A 2016 At-a-Glance.

   BOOOM, for the win, right there; love the stuffing out of those things. I know I'm not hipster very often, but I'm hipster where it counts.

   And, unrelated, but I also need a cell phone for school? Guess the whole, pager, thing didn't pan out...

   Onto the meat of this post then. I'd meant to write up more about the MLP CCG, but didn't have time to get to, and so, [sucks teeth,] I guess I'm going to do that. (And just to be clear, I did not actually suck my teeth just there; just thought it'd be a dramatically appropriate bit of nonverbal communication.)

   Kids like pics, yeah. Pics, see, pics get clicks. Don't you find posts much more compelling when there's something to look at besides words? It's like, oooh, a picture, see, they do care. Here's a pic for you.

Random epiphany of the day: I am a full-grown man.

   Didn't have any particular card to be proud of, seeing how I didn't score any foils or anything, but like I said there were two or three foals and, those are basically the same thing, right? Ask Alex, that's what he misread at first. Not even joking. Not even joking...

   So yeah that's what I chose to take my picture with.

   Like how MTG cards have differing colors of their expansion line symbols determining how much you could hock that crap for on eBay, Alex, looking over these cards, asked if there were some kind of symbol or way of determining the "rarity" of any given card. Rarity is a perfectly valid word for rarity, in fact the accepted word, for itself, but it's also the word for Rarity, so that made me hmm. I'm not sure whether it would have been better to actually have gotten a Rarity card in any of the three boosters, whether I'd be able to derive more snark or not from that... I think she's the only one of the Mane Six I didn't snag a card of, Friend card or Mane Character card or otherwise.

   But in answer to the question, turns out there's, I found in the lower right-hand corner, either a C or a U or an R to mark that, as part of the card's collector number (and Enterplay's website is telling me there are also URs and, on top of the Fs and fs and Pfs from each line, in the Equestrian Odysseys and High Magic lines, Super Rares and even "Royal Rares," exactly two in EO and three in HM. (The website, if you didn't click on the link provided yesterday for the pic source, is a wonderful resource, and, look, you're not only allowed but encouraged to print the rulebook out with its sample cards and play a sample game at home. Come and get your love.)

   What else is there, what else is there... I just love the Friend cards in this game. You really get a feel for every pony, even the ones you only see in the background. They've got names. They've got lives. And they'd still be willing to lend you a helping hoof if you just asked. Everything's just so loving and sweet, and everyone tries their very best, and it's okay to have differences in personality and opinion, we're still all friends and there's room for that in a perfect world and that's even part of what makes the world perfect, and, and, I am not kidding absolute sincerity mode I AM TEARING UP A LITTLE RIGHT NOW. 

   I just... I just need to step away from the computer for a bit.

Plus Christmas Plus

   More gifts received, in a less-official Christmas capacity: there'd been a rolling suitcase for me out in the car, for college, while all the other gifts got opened, a special we-didn't-bother-wrapping-this gift the existence of which I was made aware though the nature of which being kept mum (though I guess only at my insistence... hey! Turns out it's a suitcase? Heck, gift, not under the tree, still out in the car, only alerted of after most-to-all of what few betreed gifts had already been gifted me, maybe it was something nice, like, not a suitcase or something, no, don't tell me what it is, I want to find out the Christmassy way.) (So yeah I guess that worked; it was a surprise... Though it's still a pretty swell suitcase I must say. Rull handsome.)

   (Spell check here: betreed is indeed a word apparently! Shakespeare would be proud. Also accepted: Christmassy, though pretty much everyone knows that that is a real word, and... rull? Which I've always taken to mean, "real," but now realize, it could be like a garden instrument for all I know.)

   Also belated Christmas gift: backstory time, Christmas in the evening we fed the elders and also stuffed their stockings I guess?, and so, last-minute shopping for the, whateverth day in a row (it was some really humorously high number) seeing if there was anything we could stocking stuff, we didn't go through with it because things cost money, but freaking Wal-Mart's got a trading card shelf which is amazing though really inconveniently located right where there are a couple of check-out counters, and they didn't have the big tins or anything like they did last year, just these collections of three packs each, but for a pack each like I said things cost money and it wouldn't be worth it, but: My Little Pony Collectible Card Game trading cards, AND, dang this paragraph has been one long run-on, moving on.

   But, returning to the store yesterday to swap out pants for a pair that wasn't so long in the legs, Ryan... picked me up a pack as a gift, I guess? So, SECOND CHRISTMAS BONUS GIFT, most excellent. The three-pack also comes with an exclusive pin... They chose to give me Applejack, of all pin characters... Singlehoofedly changed my mind about apples, so there's that... (Spell check watch: yep, she's a-balkin'. She's a-balkin' all over. Applejack is a real word though of course.)

   I'm not going to waste my time and however much space it'd take up on the SD card to take a photo, when there's already a reasonably serviceable pic of what I mean on the game manufacturer's website...:

(source: http://www.enter-play.com/)

   There were, in the 3-pack given me, no foil cards; I know that photo makes it look like a foil comes specially packaged but that must be a different run I guess? The packs at the store all have one pack of each of the following expansions: Equestrian Odyssey, Crystal Games, and Canterlot Nights (and, oh, sure, we accept the word "Canterlot" here, but can't show any charity for "whateverth...")

   No foils in any of the packs, anyway. There were, foals, of course... Important not to mix that up; you're just rearing for disappointment now.

Christmas Card 2015, Plus, Plus More Christmas Stuff (Plus Zootopia Watch)

   The Christmas card coloration is WIP (values, 100% always comes down to values... colorimetrically speaking.) Which I'm surprised at; I guess I didn't think I was honestly going through with it?

   In the spirit of getting something up to show you, though, I figured I'd get some draft art for the card up for you as I did last year. It's far better than it has any right to be going without references for any of it, and I'm hey! kinda proud of this stuff too (though not so proud as to post up the full page of sketches I did for it.)
And here, way G-er rated than I made the concept sound yesterday, she blows.

Though, yeah, actually pretty PG (THINK UPON INNOCENT THINGS.)

   Speaking of reference sketches, I also drew many of those, regarding lagomorph anatomy and Moon... physiognomy?, which I only now, after all this scanning, realize there is also there potentially to look at-- but what the heck, you know what rabbits look like already; it was only important in the process (they're a lot tougher to draw than they look, and it was a  special (and delightful) challenge to conform an at-least-quasi-realistic and plausibly viable bunny anatomy mapped onto the lunar surface. I fudged it with the ears, but you've got to sacrifice something.)

   Meanwhile, a dang review of Christmas! I'm feeling generous I suppose?? 'Cept, these things are always so awkward 'cos you feel like a jerk describing only what you got instead of what you gave... and the only gifts I gave this year went to someone spending their Christmas a state away in Arizona, (which I've only ever set foot into as far as the Hoover Dam, and which reliable HUMINT relays doesn't even celebrate Daylight Savings.)

   Most of my parents' money for me was spent getting me a laptop for college (yes, my parents. If it weren't for the stockings I'd say Santa appears to have skipped our house this year... conspiring with the Easter Bunny on the visitation lists, no doubt.)

   (An obvious joke; Easter Bunny is non-canon.)

   My brother did handle SQUIRREL YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE, and that's, just, more than enough. Do you want to know how enjoyable it is? THIS IS HOW ENJOYABLE IT IS.

The more I look at this photo, the more Asian I think I look.

   Friggin', I had no idea I was being photographed here till I saw it on my mom's blog; that smile is totally unstaged (which is weird, as I'm still only on the first page here which isn't even that great compared with the rest of it.)

ZOOTOPIA WATCH

   Shoehorned in just to get the word "plus" into this post title a third time, because I can. I had to look up to see if there was any news?

   Closest thing I can come up with is from the Zoo Year countdown Tumblr, this post, where... it seems like each species gets their own Vanity Fair equiv? And Vanity Fur is the, trans-species edition? (Trans-species here meaning, across all species, the notion of theria having their own therians can be dealt with later.) And Gazelle is the pop culture star to unite us all? A star we can all gather under? A... Christmas star?

   .Well, alright!

Christmas Card 2015

   Had a hard time coming up with this year's annual Christmas card... I made a bunch of sketches at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning today mostly dealing with this idea, that bunnies are basically elves, right? With the ears and all-- so I had an idea for, a rabbit elf? Who was also a, um, pole dancer? Yep, scraping the bottom of the barrel with that one; it didn't get very far.

   (Also as an idea: bearded lady Santa, with the beard doubling as clothing? Not a bad idea, but continuing to steer clear of implied nudity...)

   The bunny thing still had potential, and it wasn't until just a couple of hours ago, spotting the moon and realizing, oh yeah, first full-moon Christmas since '77, that everything clicked. There is a rabbit in the moon, and it's not every year that you get this opportunity to do a full-moon-themed Christmas card. (and in fact I'm not sure I caught when the next time this is happening, is...)

   There you go. It's black and white, kind of bland; I'm still proud of it, but I also figure I could do a paint job for that later on. Good for now.