Words On Wednesday

I recently tried pineapple lemonade, and I enjoyed it so much, it inspired me to make an alcoholic beverage with pineapple lemonade as the main mixing ingredient. Recipe: 16 oz lemonade 12 oz pineapple juice or nectar 6 oz white rum 6 oz coconut rum Combine ingredients in a large shaker. Serve over ice. Never had I heard of pineapple lemonade before I saw it on the menu at Q's Crackin' Crab & Seafood Kitchen . I like pineapple, and I like lemonade, so obviously I had to try the combination. I’m not really sure what I expected, but it just tasted like pineapple juice and lemonade, but they go together surprisingly well. So well, in fact, I decided I should try to make it myself. We keep pineapple juice and nectar on hand most times, and I got a case of Rockstar Energy lemonade for dirt cheap a little while ago. Those candidates seemed as good as any to reproduce the pineapple lemonade I had without the hassle of driving down to Florida again. My concoction wasn’t exactly the...

I wish I played paintball more. I’m probably not going to do anything about it, but I wish I did. I got my first paintball marker (who actually calls it a paintball marker? It’s a paintball gun) for Christmas in the early 2000s. Actually, I got 2 that year. I got a Brass Eagle Talon Ghost on the recommendation from my cousins, who had the standard grey variant Talon. In addition to the Talon, I got a Brass Eagle Blade. Both were pump actuated, both used the small CO2 cartridges, and both were apparently made by Brass Eagle. Neither of those markers were actually used to *play* paintball. I would load up a CO2 cartridge and hopper full of paintballs, and pop random things on my grandparents’ property. Old buildings, trees, and their kerosene tank all had dripping splotches of paint. Truthfully, that was fun in and of itself. I was always a little afraid of getting shot with paintballs, so I wouldn’t even consider shooting people with them. In high school, a friend’s youth group planned ...

It has occurred to me that as much as I’ve pushed Book Report posts  and Goodreads, I haven’t really elaborated on how I’ve been consuming books. I certainly don’t buy them, because that costs too much money and takes up too much space. I don’t use a subscription to audible, either. No, I use the public library and its Overdrive service: tax dollars put to good use. When I started reading pretty regularly again in late 2018, I found out that audiobooks are awesome. However, at that time I only did audiobooks on regular audio cd. I would check out a booklet of cds, rip them all, and listen to the MP3 files at my leisure. This technique worked, but it takes up a lot of space, and multiple discs of audio files can be difficult to manage. Eventually, I discovered MP3 cd audiobooks. These aren’t regular audio cds that you can pop into your car’s cd player and listen to (if you even still have one of those). Instead, you put them in to a PC disc drive, and you can view the tracks in the ...

I finally picked up a Raspberry Pi to play emulated games on, and I am tremendously satisfied with the purchase. Making the Decision The interest has been there for a while. Especially around the release of the  NES Classic Edition and  SNES Classic Edition , I really considered getting a Raspberry Pi, but I just elected not to. At the end of the day, I had other platforms that I could play emulated games on. My phone, my PSP, and my laptop could all technically do the same thing. Around December 2020, I started playing Super Mario World with my kids. To get it on my living room TV (the only logical place that you play video games as a family), I loaded it onto the laptop I use for my Plex server and ran an HDMI cable to the TV. It worked, but it was tremendously cumbersome. The laptop sits behind the TV, and the lid stays closed, so I launched the game by using Chrome Remote Desktop on my phone to control the laptop and start the emulator software. I had to do this every tim...