Cooking SEAfood? (FFXI, RL)

[thistlechaser]

Yay Sea! CoP static waltzed through Tenzen fight and landed in Sea. Funny, but Sea isn't a bad place at all. I hated Sky (and the hellhole you have to pass through to get to there, Ro'Maeve) from the moment I set foot into them, but Sea? I kind of like it. Hard not to like it! Music's peaceful, colors are soothing... sharks and UFOs want to kill you...

Happily playing in first person doesn't mean instant death there, either. Woo woo.

Almost as soon as we stepped foot in: Shark to the face! Ha ha. My pose amuses me, but why in the world do we have purple blood?

We failed to get the map (we were running around randomly), so we'll go back another time.

Other than disliking every single character in the mission storyline, I'm having a hard time continuing to hate CoP. The mission fights are So Damned Easy and Sea's kind of nice. I just spam-click through the CSs though. The characters are all so annoying. zzz

RL: I got that Nintendo DS "game" Personal Trainer: Cooking. Oh my god, it looks amazing! I can't wait to *gasp* cook something! It's very different than a cook book. You pick what you want to make, it gives you an exact checklist of what to buy, then it talks you through doing every step! I had no idea my DS could talk, it's always only beeped/booped/played music at me! (Only thing I don't like is in some places it tells you to "cook until done" on some meats. How am I supposed to know that? :/ )

There are so many things I want to try to cook. No time tomorrow, but Wednesday night I'll have to shop and test it out! I hope the supermarket has odd things like sak... um, sake? the Japanese drink. And... um... murin... something like that. Lots of odd things that I never used before! There are something like 500 dishes programmed in that you can make. It's amazing. :D

Not only does it have a voice, but it can hear your voice, too. You can turn the pages (so to speak) by voice. It's very very cool. :D

Comments

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

Sea (Jesus land) is a really nice place. That is until you go inside. Oh god it's ugly in there unless you are using windower's ambient lighting stuff. Without: Green and fugly. With: White and nice.

I would say I don't like any of the characters in CoP but I've always been partial to Bahamut's stance on destroying everything. That's a cause I can get behind. I also like Louverance A and B. Their whole thing they have going on was probably the coolest thing when I figured out what was happening.

[calandra.livejournal.com]

It's always been white and nice for me. Driver issue maybe?

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

Really? Weird. Cause even when I was on PS2 it was all green for me. Oh well, sometimes I don't even bother trying to figure out why things don't work right for me XD

[draymor.livejournal.com]

It's more like white and GAH-would-someone-turn-that-5000W-bulb-off! for me >.>
I actually have to turn down the gamma on my monitor to avoid headaches inside lol.

[calandra.livejournal.com]

I think that's what they were trying for. It does set a nice mood (abandoned test facility of the ancients). Valkrum is also painful sometimes.

[iniadelphinae.livejournal.com]

Always been white for me, and I've never used Windower. I'd actually prefer a touch of green in there because it's so very, very white.

[almontffxi.livejournal.com]

Indeed. White for me as well. I do recall everything being significantly darker & different shades when I first tried using Windower though, way back.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

but I've always been partial to Bahamut's stance on destroying everything. That's a cause I can get behind.

Ha!

I also like Louverance A and B. Their whole thing they have going on was probably the coolest thing when I figured out what was happening.

I got a hint that something like that was happening, but I don;t read the CSs anymore, I just spam click, so I've missed a *cough* bit...

[quistie.livejournal.com]

I'm probably biased because I completely overlooked the Louverance thing when I was doing CoP, but I've always thought that particular plot twist was so unnecessary. CoP is full of plot twists as it is, and adding another one seems a bit much. To me, that has always been one of my chief complaints about the CoP storyline, right next to "I have no idea what's going on!"

Then again, if I had caught that purple/red headband thing earlier, maybe I would've enjoyed the Louverance arc a lot more.

(Red...purple, isn't that the same color anyway?)

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

I loved the whole 2 Louverance thing! It was just one of those things that made me feel so awesome about myself when I noticed the different coloured headbands and then we figured out what was going on. It was a great time.

It was much more interesting then some of the plot twists that are incredibly obvious even if you aren't paying attention...OMG!? Nagmolada was evil?! NO WAI! *rolls eyes*

I always liked the CoP storyline since it opened itself to a good amount of discussion in the linkshell when we were doing it and we were hammering out plot points as a group so it helped a bit I suppose.

The only thing I never really "got" about CoP was the Sin Hunter Mithra's because you couldn't really know their full mean unless you learn about the RNG AF quests. I didn't find out that info until like a year later when Achi was doing his RNG stuff and was explaining what was going on.

Although ToAU is still my favourite since it's more like you just get thrown into this epic tail from humble beginnings and end up savior of the land and it had great pacing. Unlike CoP which was like: "WE WILL SAVE THE WORLD!" right from the beginning and didn't seem to have much pacing to me...

[quistie.livejournal.com]

You're definitely right about the pacing of ToAU. The ToAU storyline has great pacing. At the beginning of the storyline it's basically a mystery without a great deal of urgency, then everything comes together and suddenly you're saving the world, or at least trying to.

CoP, on the other hand, has all those sudden lulls. Almost as if the writers themselves didn't quite know what to do next and they were only making it up as they go along.

(Well, I guess the Louverance thing is planned because his headband changes color. >.>)

[iniadelphinae.livejournal.com]

Once you can get the Crystal Warrior title, get the Sky warp as soon as you can. Soooo much easier than making that long ass run through Ro'Maeve to Sky, and the chips don't break so often any more. I've only lost one, out of many, many trips up there.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I'm planning that. Soon! :D

[wanderingscribe.livejournal.com]

Murin? Oh, mirin! Yeah, they should have it in your local supermarket. If they don't, look for rice wine vinegar; that's just mirin under another name.

As for the sake, I don't know about CA liquor laws, so I don't know if you can pick up booze in supermarkets. You should be able to find it in a liquor store though. Good luck.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

As for the sake, I don't know about CA liquor laws, so I don't know if you can pick up booze in supermarkets. You should be able to find it in a liquor store though. Good luck.

CA was such a shock when I first got here. Grocery stores, drug stores, any store would have a whole big section of liquor! Apparently laws are different here than they were in NY...

Thanks for the info!

liquor laws

[evilpaul.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Did you ever suffer the misfortune of trying to buy alcohol in PA? I think they got the FFXI devs to get high and go back in time and write the things. You can only buy six packs at bars, and only two per trip to the bar. So if you want three six packs, you buy two, put them in your car, buy one more, and then are ready to go. You can't buy a six pack at beer distributors, just cases. Liquor and wine can only be sold at the state-owned, overpriced, monopoly stores.

As for how to tell when meat is cooked, you can tell by the firmness of it. It takes some trial and error. Beef, depending on cut, you can tell the doneness by how it feels when you push on it compared to parts of your hand. (Rare is like the meaty part of where your thumb meets your palm.) Most fish will become flaky and opaque when it's cooked to well done. Of course most fish can be eaten raw or rare too, and it's better that way, imho. Cook chicken throughly (it's easy to see pink and transulcent versus white) though.

I'm done rambling, ttfn!

Re: liquor laws

[draymor.livejournal.com]

Why would you go back a second time to get ONE six-pack instead of two? ;D

Re: liquor laws

[evilpaul.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

cuz that's all the highschool kids gave me money for! (I'm kidding.)

[firebyrd.livejournal.com]

That's a ray, not a shark! :)

I saw an ad for that game on my Wii. It's intriguing. And I can see it being so much nicer than a cookbook since you don't have to keep going back and looking at it. It's tempting for that alone since my short-term memory is so bad these days, I have to look at recipes after every step, sometimes even more frequently.

But hey, does it really matter if it says 'cook until done' with meat? It's not like you eat it anyway! ;)

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

That's a ray, not a shark! :)

*laughs* Yeah, it's more of a ray than a shark. However, when it's under the "water" (we're standing on the water in that pic), there's a shark fin that sticks out the top. I guess that's how they got the name.

Sea is the craziest place in all of FFXI. I'm 100% sure the designers all got high before designing it. You walk on water (deep water, that screenshot is a shallow area), giant "goldfish" come above the surface to "aggro" you... but they just follow you around, watching you, never attack. Trees are purple puffballs, "UFO"s can drop from the sky to attack you... it's just so amazingly insane. :D

[draymor.livejournal.com]

They're not "UFOs" - you know precisely what they are (tentacle rape monsters). :D

My ex-limbus shell called them "WTFs"

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Heehee! :D

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

But hey, does it really matter if it says 'cook until done' with meat? It's not like you eat it anyway! ;)

Oops, I missed part of your comment! I didn't make a general LJ post about it (to avoid the "lol we new ud go bak" comments), but almost exactly eight years after I stopped, I went back to eating meat. I decided a life without bacon just wasn't worth living!

Health-wise, I think going back to meat was a bad decision for me personally. I have zero willpower, I can now eat fastfood endlessly or sit down to a full meal of nothing but bacon. But pleasure/enjoyment-wise? Yay bacon! And hamburgers!

[draymor.livejournal.com]

Grats on getting Sea :D
I'm glad you're hating CoP less (albeit for different reasons then I'd hoped :P).

Technology is wonderful isn't it? I just discovered voice recognition on my laptop so I’m dictating everything now >.> Sadly it doesn't seem to work too well with FireFox...

[quistie.livejournal.com]

Congrats on getting Sea!

It's probably natural that you don't hate CoP quite as much as before. You're nearing the end of the missions, after all. Sea is pretty nice, and Limbus is kinda fun. It's just that some of the stuff you do to get to Sea in the first place (and I am mostly thinking of three battles before the Tenzen fight here) are on the tedious side.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

It's probably natural that you don't hate CoP quite as much as before.

After I had made the post, I thought that as well. All the capped BCs are long in the past. All the fricking hours of running around for pointless CSs are way behind me. How could my feelings on CoP not improve?