Chili Chatter

Update 11/16/2020: My opinions on the various pepper flake blends have changed some, but I'm not gonna go back over all of them except to say that Asian Reds is now my all-purpose go-to and Sweet Heat is really good when you grind it up.

 

I love hot peppers. To the right, there's a picture of some habanero bits that I dried in a toaster oven with sugar and salt. Habanero is about the limit of my heat tolerance. Despite their deliciousness, I usually only eat habanero peppers straight up when I want to shock myself out of a funk. 

Okay, here's where I start sounding like a shill because mostly I'm blathering on about some stuff I bought from this one place, Flatiron Pepper Company.

There were several that looked good, so I ordered a bunch: Four Pepper Blend, Sweet Heat, Hatch Valley Green, Asian Reds, and Smoke Show. The Four Pepper Blend (Arbol, Ghost, Habanero, Jalapeno) is probably the one I'd buy if I had to pick one. It's got a nice heat level and plenty of flavor. I could see using this in place of any of the others. That's not to say they're all the same, just that this one would do even when one of the others would be a better fit.

 

I was really pleased with Smoke Show (Chipotle, Smoked Ghost, Carolina Reaper) as well. As the name suggests, it's made with smoked peppers and the flavor definitely comes through. It's also the hottest of the ones I got. I think it's the hottest one they have except for "I Can't Feel My Face."

Yes, there's one called I Can't Feel My Face (Carolina Reaper, Ghost, Scorpion, Habanero). I keep looking at it and thinking I should order this and try it but, remember what I said about habaneros? That's the mildest pepper in this mix. The Scoville ranking is over 750k. I'm willing to admit that I have limits.

I was a little disappointed with Sweet Heat (Scotch Bonnet, Ancho, Red Bell). I mean, I knew it would be mild, but it's really too mild. The heat gets completely lost in anything I add it to. That might be okay, but the flavor does too. It has a nice flavor. Sweet, in case you hadn't guessed. It tastes good when I just chew it up by itself. Gnawing on a spoonful of pepper flakes isn't really what I'm looking for in a dining experience, though. Maybe someone with a more, whatchacallit, discerning palette would be better able to appreciate this.

Likewise Hatch Valley Green (Big Jim, Sandia, Jalapeno, Habanero), although in some ways I have the reverse complaint. It's got about the heat level I expected for Sweet Heat, but I'm not wowed by the flavor. I dunno. I'm still experimenting with all of these, so maybe I'll find some other uses that make it shine. Right now I'm mostly mixing it with one of the others, which is also what I'm doing with Sweet Heat.

 

I use Asian Reds (Gochugaru, Thai Chile, Ghost, Tien Tsin) for pretty much the stuff I imagined I'd use Sweet Heat for. It's not as sweet, but it goes with the same kind of things and has a respectable burn. I even put it on otherwise plain buttered toast for breakfast. Or, you know, whenever. And of course I put it on Chinese food. Restaurants around here have to worry about pasty mid-westerners (as opposed to pasty southerners like me) going all Karen because their Kung Pao has more bite than a poblano, so they tend to go extremely light on the spices. This stuff is the cure.

I guess that wasn't too shill-ish. I did have a few criticisms, after all. BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! I've got this coupon link they gave me. You can use it to get $5 off an order, and then I get a coupon if you use it.

Try Nihilism

Last weekend would have been Gen Con if not for the plague. I wasn't going this year anyway, so I didn't care, but most of my friends were bummed. Tom even resolved to come up with a "hoot" to fill the void. Once everybody agreed to have it in Point Pleasant, West Virginia (home of the Mothman) I was on board too.

My original plan was to do a Mothman-inspired adventure I had run at Gen Con a few years back, but a request for D&D inspired me to finally try out the 5e Adventures in Middle Earth rules. This was a last minute switch, so I went with one of the adventures in the Bree-Land Region Guide instead of making up my own. That area has always been one of my favorites.

Tom and I got to Point Pleasant on Wednesday, snapped a picture of the statue, confirmed that the Lowe Hotel (right across the street) really was closed, and proceeded to turn our room at the Quality Inn into a walk-in fridge. Tom did Tom stuff while I read through the adventure and crammed as many of the Middle Earth rules back into my brain as I could.

Whatever

I'm just not feeling the bloggery lately, so here's some random social media bits from sort of recently.

That's my fuzzy man. Some call him Captain Scrappy:

Speckle sizing up a potential adversary:

There's a house somewhere under all that:

Couple o' Things

"There are two things in life you should always binge on: horror flicks and Wild Turkey."
--Joe Bob Briggs

It's been a while since I did a blog and I don't feel like writing up anything serious, so here's a bunch of random updates.

I've been working at home since everything shut down for the plague and I love it. I can be in my own little space with my cats and all the stuff I like to have around me. I don't even goof off much. If anything, I'm a little more productive than usual. Maybe it's because I don't feel guilty about it if I've gone to the trouble to get polished up and slog my way out there, but I do if I'm at home and not getting stuff done. And "social distancing" is my default setting anyway. I'm gonna be sad when I have to go back. That doesn't mean I want people to keep getting sick, of course. Well, except maybe these dumbass quarantine protesters. Those assholes can go anytime.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of like the company I work for, now. I'm really impressed by the way the way they're handling all this plague stuff and, I don't know, it's just something I'm glad to be a part of, I guess. 

Funny thing, though: I'm getting less done on The Nameless Way. I think I had adapted myself to doing my little writing-breaks at work, which would then bump it up to the surface in my head so I'd work from home. I guess I need to work out a new way to keep myself on schedule. I did fill out the playlist and change a few things, which might not have been the best use of my time, but it was fun. Similarly, I've been collecting and scanning old bits that I still had from the game on which the book is based. This isn't exactly the highest priority thing right now, but it will have an eventual use because I'm planning to have "digital extras" section for stuff like old maps and character sheets and things.

I've done a lot of video-chat gaming. The Defenders campaign is still running, although I've just been writing up some notes instead of posting detailed session logs. I've played in some of Tom & Curt's Scrap Pile follow-up and some Spacers and Charlie even ran a Birds of Prey adventure. Well, the Birds of Prey setup, anyway. The field team consisted of Artemis (my character, based on the cartoon version) and Black Cat (yes, from Marvel -- we know).

Back when I first started drinking, I tried gin and didn't like it. More recently, I tried it again and loved it. I guess back in the day I wasn't enough of a boozehound to notice anything beyond the sting of alcohol. I've been picking it up more often now. I'm still way into bourbon, though. It's just a mood thing. White Claw is pretty nice when I don't want to risk getting drunk, too.

Tweets (Most Recent to Oldest):

• I hate ghosts that make people do shit like find the body or solve the murder or whatever. Deal with your own issues, ghost; it's not like you have anything better to do.
• None of the people I've seen tweet-calling for revolution would be of any use if it really happened.
• I just read that "OK" is just as correct as "okay," maybe more correct because it came first, so I guess nothing really matters to me anymore.
• I decided I wanted to see what's up with those Friday the 13th movies tonight. I never realized that you don't even see the iconic hockey mask on Jason until more than halfway into the third movie.
• I wonder who's gonna be the first to release a horror movie called "Shelter in Place."

Child of Fire

Remember me talking about the Blackridge setting and the series of short novels I had in mind for it? No? That's okay. I was thinking about it the other day and rattled this out. If you want to find out a little more, click that link and scroll down past this post.

Prologue

Lyssa checked the clock for the first time since‭… ‬okay,‭ ‬thirty seconds ago.‭ ‬The storm was almost here.‭ ‬She adjusted Professor Gathright's expensive lens array and looked at the sky.‭ ‬Glowing green and red wisps were already sliding across the horizon.‭ ‬In the grooves of the carved circle and its inscribed triangle,‭ ‬orange salt flickered with more than reflected light.

The crystal lenses lit up as the solar flare illuminated more and more of the sky. The electric lights around her surged with the induced current. One of them popped but the others, chosen with this phenomenon in mind, held up. Lyssa made some adjustments to the array and watched the triangle.

She gasped as a pale blue, almost invisible, flame sprang up from the concrete floor inside the triangle, rising to a height of six feet before thickening to a foot or so in diameter. Much as she wanted to see this, much as she trusted the work she and Professor Gathright had done, she had never really expected it to work. The fire shifted to a deeper blue and tightened into a human-like shape.

Electricity arced from surface to surface. Lyssa could feel the charge tingling in her skin and lifting her hair. The lights flared and faded, but they were unnecessary now. The fiery figure in the triangle grew unbearably bright. Before she had to avert her eyes, Lyssa saw its head tilt back, as if it were looking up through the lenses.

Something grabbed her head and turned her face irresistibly back to the shape of fire. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to raise her hands to cover them, but her arms wouldn't move. The light burned through her lids, first red, then white. She begged. She sobbed. She screamed.

When the phantom hands released her, Lyssa collapsed into darkness.

BASHCon 2020

Had a great time at BASHCon this year. We missed out on gaming with Jerry because he put his Friday game in the system and a ton of people signed up for it. Tom and I would have been late anyway, so maybe it was for the best. The rest of us just arranged to get together for private games because convention registration was a mess.

Chili's was good, met Liam's friend Max, conversation, all that. Tom canceled his Saturday morning game on Saturday morning, which made his upcoming award ceremony even better.

All the usual stuff: vendors, auction, the always-awesome Phoenica restaurant, the cool student center. I got some loot and Tom surprised me with a t-shirt.

 

Cory ran Feast of Legends, an RPG designed by Wendy's as some sort of bizarre marketing scheme. The menu puns are hilariously corny. We had fun being all stupid and corporate the whole time. Cory hammed it up just right.

My Gangbusters game started off normal enough, with a gang of whiskey runners trying to find out how a rival gang was suddenly getting so much cheap, high-quality booze. Then it started getting weird, with a whole town coming out at night to search for bits of something in the grass, then screaming like pod people upon seeing an outsider spying on them. Then it was all monsters and slime and a meteor and a creepy old lady talking to metal box which she called, "mother." Tom has a bit more about it in his blog.

I always wanted to do a surprise session like this, because there's one thing about horror games that always gets lost because the players know they're in a horror game. If people were really exposed to freaky supernatural stuff, they would keep looking for another explanation. Part of the horror is the inability to accept it. And it worked, which is good because now they'll always see it coming, even when it's not, so this was my only shot.

At the El Vaquero after-party, Jerry and I presented Tom with his Quitters' Club award.

Fury

I've been trying to make the second season (Session 5 on) of the Defenders campaign a little more "ramped up" and it seems to be going well. We've got more dangerous opponents, more mystery, and more guest stars. We even picked up a new player last time. The gang continues to surprise me as well.

Another thing we've done is to switch to an alternative dice-rolling method. Instead of both the player and GM rolling one die and adding the modifiers, it's almost all on the players. They roll two dice, one designated as positive and one negative. The total is then added to the same stuff and compared with a target number, usually the appropriate ability score of an NPC. In player vs. player rolls, we use the old method. Mathematically, it's the same, but it helps me focus more on what's going on if I let the players do all the rolling.

Session 7 Recap (02/22/20)

Over the course of the morning, they all eventually saw the latest Daily Bugle headline, Dazzler Lights up WITHOUT Props which showed a picture of Alison dazzle-blasting Pandora. The article, credited to "E. Brock" went on to describe the fight and continued to make the point that Dazzler had powers and was not just using stage lights and technological tricks.

There was also a short article about Moon Knight fighting a werewolf. This seemed odd to Ali, who had seen Moon Knight die, way back in the prologue. Don't worry about that, though; it's just one of those random unrelated plot threads I like to drop.

Eventually the three got together on a rickshaw because Jessica was using a Malaysian burner phone and the only ride-share app was "TurtleRabbit." Seeing the crowd of reporters, Jess pulled up her hood. One reporter asked if Jessica and Pam were Dazzler's "superhero gal pals" and Ali said the team was "Dazzler and Her Amazing Friends."

Alison wanted to talk to her manager, Harry Osgood, about her newspaper appearance and wanted Jess to interrogate Cassie, whose name was on the list, while they were there. Jessica actually bonded with Cassie about their shared issues with Alison while Ali and Pam talked to Harry.

Harry said he was disappointed that Ali had kept her secret, but he had been swamped with job offers since the news broke, and had several for Ali to choose from just for this coming weekend. She chose a concert at Stage 48 in Hell's Kitchen. Asked if this was really a good thing after all, Harry said Ali should be careful, but it was certainly a big opportunity.

Outside, Ali found out that, while Jessica had made friends with Cassie, she hadn't asked her anything about Hydra. At Ali's insistence, Jessica went back in and said, "By the way, are you a Hydra?" Cassie said she didn't know what that was about so Jessica followed up with a question about being sick after the incident with Kilgrave. She said she hadn't.

The plan after that was to split up, each one taking part of the list.

Alison started with Jackson Day, the closest one to where she already was. He was a dock worker and a first glibly denied suffering any illness after the incident. Then he got a pained look and adopted a completely different manner, saying that yes, he had been sick, and had suffered blackouts occasionally since. He had still never heard anything about a hydra, though. She thanked him and texted the others that they should look into him further.

Pam started with Dontay Jackson, a lawyer at Hogarth & Associates, but couldn't get in to see him until next week, so she moved on to Corwin Manson. Manson was a copy editor at the Bugle, and he hadn't been sick or heard anything about a hydra, but he did remember a chunk of a story that had never been printed. The reporter had interviewed and done background research on everyone present and noted that several of them were sick shortly after. Pam verified that Madelyne Pryor had been one of them and moved on.

Jessica went to see Madelyne Pryor, who was now an agent at the Perez Travel Agency. She found Madelyne in her office with a uniformed policeman who she introduced as Officer Macone. The conversation didn't last long before their eyes flashed and someone tried to telekinetically suck the air out of her lungs. Jessica grabbed Madelyne and jumped out the window, jumping to a nearby rooftop. Jessica kept trying to talk to her, but Madelyne, who was much stronger than she looked, broke free, took a swing at Jessica, and jumped away.

Jessica, enjoying the fight, followed and tried to foot-sweep her, but botched it. Eventually she got Madelyne to listen to her. She told Jessica about the bond of the Hydra units and their goddess, Fury, who promised them a wonderful new world of order and justice. Jessica convinced Madelyne to introduce her to Fury. Madelyne said she needed to arrange it because she couldn't reach Fury on her own. They exchanged contact information.

The information came a bit later. The next night, Jessica was to go to the for-pay parking lot where Midland Circle used to be. Jessica, Alison, and Pam got back together to do some more planning. The other two would hide nearby while Jessica went to her meeting. Before they left, Alison called Danny to fill him in on everything in case something went wrong.

There was nobody in the parking lot, but Jessica kept going and met a transparent, vaguely feminine figure. When asked if it was Fury, the shape said, "Yes, inevitably." Fury invited Jessica to join "my children" in bringing its vision of a utopia governed by superhumans to life and extended its hand.

Jessica accepted.