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Review - The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

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“The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom” is the most recently released Zelda game and the very first game in the nearly four decade old series to feature Princess Zelda herself as the main playable protagonist. With 38 years of releases to build on, does this latest game refine a nearly perfect formula or do the unexpected changes ruin the experience? I’ve been watching Echoes of Wisdom since it was first announced. Any new Zelda game is worth paying attention to, and 2D (ish) Zelda games tend to be my favorite. Couple that with the revolutionary decision to make Zelda the main protagonist instead of Link, and you have a very large number of gamers on the edge of their seats. This could be huge. I expressed concern with the first gameplay trailer that it looked gimmicky. Zelda games have traditionally focused very heavily on Link’s swordplay. Removing that as the main method of engaging with enemies was a very bold decision, and one that would force this game to be notably different fr...
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Thirsty Thursday Eve - Coquito

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To celebrate Thursday Thursday Eve falling on Christmas Day, I wanted to feature a drink that really felt like Christmas in a cup. After some digging, I found the Coquito . A lot of times, when people think of Christmas, they picture that Hallmark movie set with snow everywhere and people bundled up. Problem is, this is South Carolina. Most years, Christmas is sunny with a high of 65. It ain’t cold. It ain’t even really cool. I usually end up wearing shorts and a t-shirt and it’s comfortable. If we lived somewhere cold, spiced buttered rum would be perfect. Instead, I wanted something cold, ideally something I could share with my cousins while we fry the turkey out back. That normally looks like a bottle of some whiskey that we stick in the back of my truck and mix with whatever soda is available. Surely I could find something a little more celebratory. I skimmed through a few lists of Christmas cocktail ideas, but none of them really seemed to fit what I wanted. Either they had a lau...
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Plex Day 2024

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It’s that time of year. Not Christmas, it’s Plex Day. We’re now four years in since I  started using Plex in 2020, and my use case has certainly evolved in that time. It’s still my main music platform, and I’ve started using it more for video as well. We still have some streaming services (namely YouTube TV and Netflix), but I’ve gradually started shifting from Prime Video and Hulu after we canceled those subscriptions. Netflix has enough exclusives that the kids like, and until Plex gets college football, I’m going to need some sort of cable TV source. Hardware Last year , I was still up in the air about DVD piracy. The Surface Pro 6 I was using for the server didn’t have a disc drive, so I was considering buying a USB Blu-ray drive. I had also brought my old desktop out of storage, which I was considering migrating the whole server to, but I hadn’t yet booted it back up. My hand was eventually forced when the kids asked to watch something that wasn’t on any streaming services we...
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Book Report - The Legend of Zelda Goddess Trilogy by Dark Horse Comics

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The crown jewels of literature on The Legend of Zelda include “Hyrule Historia,” “Art & Artifacts,” and “Encyclopedia.” The “Goddess Trilogy” as they are called together, these three books are dense packages of lore, artwork, interviews, and nearly anything you could want to see about everyone’s favorite Hylian Link and his entourage. I picked up a copy of Hyrule Historia for my cousin as a Christmas present the year it came out. As much as I like Zelda, he has a tattoo of Link holding the triforce, so I can’t really compete with that. Soon after, I got a copy for myself. Just because he gets the first copy doesn’t mean I’m leaving myself out. As a Zelda fan, I would be remiss if I DIDN’T own a copy. The biggest draw of Hyrule Historia when it first came out was the official timeline. Zelda games are notorious for being tentatively related to each other, but not exactly sequels. There were numerous fan discussions about what order the games came in, but nothing from Nintendo to con...
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Neopets

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A lot of people remember Neopets from their youth, but it’s still a thing and I have a wild story about how I have lost and regained my account MULTIPLE times. My first Neopets account was made some time before 2005. We didn’t have internet access at home, but I went to the library every day after school to do homework and I could get online for a few minutes there before we went home. A friend had an account and showed me the games you could play. I was really interested, but I didn’t have my own email account, nor did I know how to make an account. I used my parents’ email account (a Juno account if memory serves) and made up a random birthday since I was too young to officially have an account at the time. After a few weeks or months of playing fairly regularly, I got bored. I stopped playing as much and eventually forgot the login information for that account. Some years later, I decided I wanted to play Neopets again. I tried to recover the account, but I had no way to prove I was...
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Thirsty Thursday Eve - Pepper Vodka

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I’ve recently started experimenting with vodka infused with different types of peppers. The flavors have been all over the place, but it’s a really interesting way to spice up (pun intended) a boring spirit. Spicy drinks are very divisive. My first spicy beer was at an Independence Day party many moons ago. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t know if I liked it, either. Over the years, I tried a few other spicy beers, as well as the novel idea of putting hot sauce in a regular beer, and I’ve grown to like them occasionally. I’m not drinking spicy beer all the time, but I’ll drink one every now and then just for something different. After trying a few spicy beers, it occurred to me that I could infuse a distilled spirit with spicy flavor on my own. I had made Jolly Rancher vodka before, how different could spicy vodka be? I sliced up a jalapeno, threw it in a pint mason jar, and filled it up with Kirkland Signature American vodka . I let the jar sit for a few days undisturbed. I didn’t ...
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