Words On Wednesday

I've covered a lot of branded beer and spirits lately, but I wanted to try something new. I want to feature one cocktail per month; something seasonal or somehow themed around that month. For September, it had to be apple. Apple picking is a regular thing for my family. We go up to Sky Top Orchard each year to pick far more apples than we will eat, gorge on apple cider donuts, and pick up a jug of apple cider to take home with us. I've even discussed their  hard apple cider  before, and it's fine, but the non-alcoholic fresh apple cider is just amazing. When the idea for monthly cocktails occurred to me, September was an easy one because I knew it HAD to include apple cider somehow. Problem is, most of the cocktails I make are admittedly very low effort. A craft ice sphere in a mason jar, a shot or two of liquor, fill it the rest of the way up with some sort of mixer. Apple cider and liquor is great, don't get me wrong, but it's rather underwhelming. What could I do...

I've often heard "there's no free lunch" referring to the idea that free things often come with an unexpected cost elsewhere and I think the same theory applies with video games. Especially with my recent shift to more PC gaming, I'm seeing how "no free games" looks different between consoles and PC. Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post detailing the advantages and disadvantages of console gaming vs PC gaming. One of my biggest points was the availability of free games from the public library, as well as the ability to share games with friends. Now that I have more experience with PC gaming, and especially with the recent industry trend away from physical games in the form of key cards and consoles without disc drives , I wanted to revisit that idea. Specifically, how "free" games work on both PC and console. My original point on the free availability of library games still stands, but I do want to hedge that a bit for the sake of transparency...

After a sequence of self-improvement and management books, I wanted a breather book; something that didn't take a lot of thought or attention to process, and ESPECIALLY something that didn't require input or response from me. I didn't really want to jump into a new series that would require me to continue with another few books for the full picture. In fact, I didn't want fiction at all. I looked into my library's catalogue of audiobooks for titles related to video games, just as a starting point. "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" came up, and it seemed to fit all those conditions. The general formula of the book is that each chapter picks a video game, most of which are extremely well known and had significant market presence, and talk through some of the struggles the team went through during the planning and development process. On the tail end of the process, it's easy to think that creators KNEW what a success their game would be from beginning to end. H...

The best selling video game of all time got another sale: me. I mostly avoided the first wave of Minecraft popularity after it came out. I played a bit of some online hosted version around 2011-2012. After that, I played the PS4 version that I checked out from the public library around November 2016. Beyond that? Minecraft was basically just that game that everyone else plays. It seemed fine, but it never pulled me in. That changed when my kids watched A Minecraft Movie (2025). They watched it first at a friend's house, then again when our local library hosted a showing of the audience participation version. They were throwing popcorn and screaming when the chicken jockey popped up, but I just dismissed it as kids being kids. On the way home after the movie, my oldest asked if we could get Minecraft. My youngest had already played it some from our family library on Android . I figured we could pick up the PC release and play it together. In particular, I wanted to see if I could ...