Reek havoc

Last night we went to a new-ish crawfish restaurant in the neighborhood. A shop that sells nothing but bags of steamed, New Orleans-style crustaceans is a really strange fit in this Chinese-dominated area — everyone else along the streets sells Asian cuisine and nothin’ but. Yet the girlfriend loves food with a high investment of effort for little reward, and few things fit this definition better than crawfish. Me, I’m obsessively fastidious and hate eating food with my bare hands, so ripping apart what amount to giant, dead, ocean-borne insects to get at the tiny amount of edible flesh inside doesn’t have much appeal for me. But I endured, because sometimes being a good companion requires greasy savagery.

Unfortunately, I didn’t count on the lingering smell. I have terrible eyesight and lousy hearing, but my nose is a refined and highly-sensitive organ. And the smell of the crawfish and the spicy fluids in which they were boiled to dead won’t go away. I feel like Lady Macbeth, scrubbing at my hands until they stop reeking of garlic and the gulf. Unfortunately, there’s no sympathy on the home front; the girlfriend is convinced the lingering odors are just in my imagination, and when I complained of being “wreathed in a nimbus of crawfish-stench” her response was to make fun of me for saying “wreathed in a nimbus of crawfish-stench.” Yeah, great. Helpful.

I guess the lesson here is: always engage in your feral primality with the aid of a fork, or chopsticks.


Since I’ve been playing a certain upcoming game recently, I dredged up some old thing I wrote about one of its predecessors and gave it the spit-and-polish GameSpite treatment. Which is to say minor formatting tweaks, but no content adjustments… mainly because my opinion on this topic has matured rather a lot in the past seven years (holy crap seven years) and I’d have to completely rewrite the stupid thing to reflect my current point of view, which involves Super Circuit being awfully tepid. Man, all those first-year GBA games seemed a lot better at the time. (Except Wario Land 4. It’s still awesome, in fact.) So, please regard it as a relic of my young, ignorant self… whose writing was filled with far more cleverness than my current, miserable verbal vomit. Seriously, phrases like “head-mounted eggplant” make me miss my former wit and intelligence.

Also, with regard to the last post: Apparently every method of monetizing a site is either unfeasible or unpalatable, but I may try adding a donation button to the site soon — something which would also allow the site’s contributor’s to reap some benefits as well. We shall see! Also, I managed to dig up a fairly cheap copy of Dragon Crystal for Master System on eBay, so that is one down. And someone offered up a copy of Time Stalkers, so that is two. I shall save up for the rest, and someday we shall have a grand and glorious roguelikes gallery.

Huh, “roguelikes gallery.” That’s actually… kind of clever, maybe. Eh, probably just a fluke.

18 thoughts on “Reek havoc

  1. The wife introduced me to crawfish this season. They were a yard nuisance back home in Kentucky, but here in Louisiana they’re damn near a religious food.

    It turns out that I love them dearly, but I’ll agree on the lingering smell. Did they sell corn and potatoes with the crawfish? There’s something wrong about eating potatoes that are that spicy.

  2. I concur with the Rub Away. Those things are pure magic. I’m not sure exactly what it is or how it works, but I don’t care; they un-smell stuff.

  3. I wish I smelled like fish. Then I would have a belly full of tasty ocean critters, instead of a belly full of diet coke and baked ruffles. I guess I really am a blogger now, since I’ve apparently adopted the bloggers diet. Emphasis on die. http://twurl.nl/fc5kia

  4. I had a soft shell crab for the first time ever just a couple of days ago. Shellfish is tasty and all, but I can’t quite get my appetite up over something that looks like it will, at any second, crawl off of my plate.

  5. I was actually just recently thinking of that Mario Kart vs. Konami Krazy Racers article the other day, since I was playing KKR and quite enjoying it. Seriously, you can race as Vic Viper, that’s about as good as mascot racing gets. I guess 7 years really ISN’T that long of a time…

  6. Red Rescue Team is still as valid an example as it was the last time I mentioned it.

  7. Just offer to do a new thumbnail theatre when a certain amount has been donated, and watch the cash come rolling in.

  8. I actually have two copies of Fatal Labyrinth due to some rather large Ebay purchases, so I’ll be happy to send one of those.

  9. The Thumbnail Theatre enticement is actually a pretty good one, except that I vowed never to do another. Hmm, integrity or money…

  10. “except that I vowed never to do another”

    You have an out: you could say you were an idiot when you said that.

    I think Super Circuit was fine for what it was – a portable Mario Kart back in the days when portable games were able to be pale shadows of their console brethren. Mario Kart DS pretty much put paid to that.

  11. ToastyDude, I’ve been leeching off of your mind/harassing you for free content to entertain my boredom for years. I think you probably actually lost money on sending me out the toastyfrog Zine, least I can do is send you a rather poor rogue-copy so you can be tortured and entertain me some more.

    More then willing to give up a beat-up old working old copy of Azure Dreams PS1 or a cart-only(which is quite possibly pirated, yeah for ebay!) if you still need them.

  12. Wow, I wish there was an edit button: I was referring to the Azure Dreams GBC cart I was giving up as being torture to play. There’s no plans in the work of coming down and doling out the torture myself.

  13. That was some good Nintendo boardroom fan-fic! I especially liked the dig at THQ… I always imagined THQ HQ being nothing but a broom closet in a huge corporate office where they negotiated huge licensing deals, and in this broom closet they had a scanner which they used to dress up their horrible, horrible licensed games with top-notch likenesses of Mike Meyers and Macauley Culkin.

    Also, I for one used to LOVE Legend of the Mystical Ninja. It helps if you pretend it’s an unofficial sequel to River City Ransom. I guess they’re not really all that similar in retrospect, except for the vast variety of pointless little shops you can visit. I don’t know why, but in-game retail experiences are pretty thrilling.

  14. “The Thumbnail Theatre enticement is actually a pretty good one, except that I vowed never to do another. Hmm, integrity or money…” I think that’s an easy question to answer if you re-phrase it as “Will integrity pay my rent?”

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