Crockpot Lasagna is sooo good.

Supper on Sunday was another round of Crockpot Lasagna after having found the simple recipe I had stashed away. And then finding I still had the No Pre-cooking Required Barilla lasagna I bought so long ago...

I used a frozen 1 pound roll of Ground Turkey. I made sure to season it while browning it & made sure to break it up. Seasonings included basil, oregano, thyme, maybe a little cumin, & a heaping teaspoon of diced garlic. I didn't measure the rest but got a nice dusting over the whole skillet.

The lasagna noodles were as I said... but what I didn't mention is they were at least 15 years old according to the date on the box. I think there was 3 packages obtained for a recipe Mom had in mind & I didn't know what it would use up. Probably bought at Marc's. I inherited 2 boxes which now finally got used up.

Next time I make this, I'm going to put the Ricotta in a storage bag & cut a corner off so I can pipe out a consistent cover over the meat mixture. Dropping spoonfuls just doesn't work with me.

For shredded cheese, I had Jalapeño & Habanero Monterey Jack because Walmart was out of Pepperjack. Maybe I'll use this & hot Italian Sausage next time for heat.

The Tomato Sauce worked like this: 8 ounce no salt can used in the bottom of the crock per recipe directions as the 1 cup sauce in the bottom. The 15 ounce can before adding to the browned ground turkey was taste tested & had a little sugar added to offset the sourness. If it was too sweet, I'd have added vinegar. I prefer a neutral tomato taste.

4 hours on low & it was done. Tastes better cold.

Spanish Rice finally done right

Made Spanish Rice.

It exploded.

2 CUPS RICE, 4 CUPS WATER...

I usually don't like Spanish Rice because it tastes funny. But I tried a recipe I found & this may be The One.

It calls for Coriander / Cilantro. I used a dash of Curry Powder instead. I sauteed minced garlic in oil before adding the rice to brown. I used a cube for Beef Bouillon instead of Chicken or no salt added chicken broth. And instead of Garlic Pepper I used Black Pepper since garlic was already in there. The 8 ounces no salt tomato sauce was from Amazon.

Initial taste tests indicate a decent flavor & no sourness. Let's try again after cooling in the fridge

I'm doing it today because it won't get done if I don't...

Yesterday was 1 Huge Do. I got out relatively early to get my monies & then over to Didney Drug Mart for payments & pills. Finally secured a 9 volt battery for my voltmeter. I had cleaned it out months ago after discovering the decimal point wasn't showing up & opening it up showed an impossible bug invasion of you know what. Thankfully a thorough cleaning was possible but that decimal point was stubborn. It was only last week I found the battery had exhausted itself. I don't recall ever changing it! A new alkaline battery has the display working crisp & decimal point as well. I had DDM points to get it for free. Free milk will have to wait.

Grabbed some clearance Valentine's candy at 75 cents each. Small little 3 piece chocolates. It's worth the price of admission. And they still had Voortman's Egg Nog Wafers??

My past entries at this time of year mention the return of those cheap freezer pops but I didn't see any. They're usually on the end display.

My other Huge Do was seeing Dr. Snuffleupagus. I fail to see the point of a guy who talks to me for maybe 10 minutes & lets me go. Maybe my ability to appear tells him plenty?? I do it for the refills. I need to call Dr. Joni for Xarelto though...

I paid dearly for my transgressions as my right leg has sore joints & today is Recovery Mode... & tomorrow...

But hey at least I didn't get the runs from my picked-over slightly moldy thick crusted bread loaves! I bought 2 on Wednesday & mostly forgot about them until Monday. Craving peekza, I picked off the moldy spots, microwaved for 90 seconds, topped them with sauce & Queso, then baked at 350° F for 15 minutes. Came out cripsy & yum! Had some for breakfast. So there's that.

A.I. Generated Art is Not Theft

 Twittiots have been spouting off on the issue of A.I. generated art complaining that it's theft of art because of the way it's trained.

This is NOTHING NEW. It's the computer equivalent of Tracing or Lightbox Abuse. Human Artists have been copying each other for decades. Masamune Shirow is the most often art-thefted artist. His stuff has been "stolen" more than any other.

A.I. generated art is DERIVATIVE. There is No Way to figure out whose styles are in the images it produces. I challenge anyone spouting negatively about A.I. art to find a specific style being used from a specific artist. And then I'll respond with "Are you sure you're not simply seeing something there just because you Want to see it?"

Another way they claim it's theft is from Loss of Income. Your Paid Artists worry about losing income because nobody wants to pay for fan art of their favorite anime characters doing things the official stuff never had them do. LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING - these A.I. art generators are good but there's still some concepts they still don't get. Sure you can make them churn out 100 images of pretty blonde girls but forget about specific cultural items from some place in the Asian Sub Continent. You want a depiction of a magic illusion trick on stage nobody has seen before and only you know what it is? A.I. can't do it. But beautiful white China style wedding dress with a cleavage window? It can suggest designs for hours. And each one is pretty good even if sometimes unfeasable.

And sometimes you get missing body parts, extra body parts, distorted perspective lines, messed up hands... It still makes mistakes. However, describe a scene well enough in generic terms it should understand, and maybe just maybe you'll get a good starting point of concept art. Still derivative from its massive data set which it draws from BUT DOES NOT DIRECTLY COPY. Get over it & find a thing you artists can make money at which A.I. can't do. You're supposed to be creative - so create already!

My Fungus is My Enemy

Around this time of year with increased heat & humidity I am beset with a nasty case of what I call Body Fungus. My experience in the hospital 5 years ago taught me that odd red rash I would get at times was caused by a fungus. I don't know the genus but I do know my past attempts at ridding myself of it with soap, water, and hefty burning splashes of isopropyl alcohol, while they worked, required more time. I realized it was a fungus only when I was given antifungal powder while at Cleveland Clinic Hillcrest. I managed to connect the dots.

I have struggled to find that same Miconazole powder, but instead have to settle for Clotrimazole; it could be the same thing. I'm used to Disney Drug Mart's $1 per 1 ounce tube store brand and for the most part, it works. Mom would say any product with Lotrimin on the box regardless of intended marketed use would work on what Lotrimin does. So imagine me with the displeasure of not finding $1 tubes of anything from Wal-Mart and having to settle for a $4 half-ounce tube of Athletes' Foot Fungus cream instead of jock itch sprays which ran over that tube's cost. I was desperate and begged for relief.

4 days later with usages of that expensive product and it has nearly cleared up. Imagine me surprised. I have washed everything I need to stick in where it need stuck so no fungus gets a 2nd chance to do that again. I think old but apparently unlaundered and long unworn underwear harbored my enemy. That will get a dosage of bleach or at least Oxygen Cleaner in addition to detergent. My other hygiene habits couldn't stop this from happening either. Harumph!

One thing I don't understand

There are a few things I don't get. One of them is dancing. I know people do it and it involves music, but I don't understand how or why people choose the moves they do for bits of music in a composition. What causes them to move an arm or a leg in a certain way or rhythmically or repeatedly. Why that move at that moment?

I do understand there is something like interpretive dance but even then I don't get it. Ballet is interpretive a lot of the time. Then there's square dancing - not sure why the name but I think it involves groups of 4. Line dancing should be outlawed. Disco is actually interpreted jazz for all I know. There are names for stuff and procedures and all that but I still don't understand the Why.

I see videos on YouTube and oh nice there's dancing but I have no opinion on the moves. I get one on the dancer like "Ooh, she's pretty," and maybe one about her costume. But as for the moves... A form of exercise? Non repetitive aerobics for all I know. At least aerobics has a goal in mind.

I really hope nobody asks for my opinion on a dance routine. Some girl will go off and do it in front of me, and then ask me what I thought and I'll be horribly stumped.

I think dancing must be a very confusing and complicated form of marital courtship like birds do. Girls are better at dancing. Not being fat helps anyone wanting to dance. Good shoes apparently is a must. Don't ask me to do it because not much will happen.

Downloading video from FC2 the hard way

In this age of streaming video, some websites make it easy to grab clips off the website. Bless those websites who make it easy. However, a curse of pox to those who go out of their way to make it difficult.

FC2 is one of those make it difficult websites. There is no download option. And online webpage utilities are mostly useless. They do have their uses.

First off, all websites claiming to offer tools for grabbing FC2 video LIE. None of the ones I tried were able to grab anything. 1 however DID grab something which ultimately proved useful. A Playlist. And not just any playlist. FC2 makes it difficult to download videos by breaking them up into smaller segments. The playlist I got for the video I wanted was 148 smaller ".ts" files. .ts stands for Transport Stream. When I looked at it, it's essentially an MP4 h264 encoded file without an index.

Looking at the play list, it was a list of URLs for all the smaller parts. I grabbed the 1st 3 and used DOS' Binary Concatenate Copy feature to test them. And as hopefully expected, it played in VLC where it was able to confirm the compressor and resolution.

About an hour and 148 segments later and a couple batch files run, I had my video file! Though one more thing was necessary. I used an older version of Media Coder which I like and copied the raw streams directly into an MP4 container file which displayed the duration and let me seek around without issues.

There's an opportunity for someone to make a program for either Desktop or Android which opens a target file, finds that segment play list, and then sequentially access and download each piece and saves it as 1 file. Can anyone do that without f^cking things up? No viruses or malware??

First time making Miso soup

I have never made miso soup before from a recipe. I have made it from instant soup packets loaded with sodium but for some reason, I decided I would try making it from a recipe to hopefully make it as low sodium as possible.

I have 4 different books with 4 different but ultimately similar recipes. Only 1 required the use of instant dashi granules. I really don't have the patience (or other means) to boil several cups of water, add Bonito flakes for Hondashi, drain and strain, soak dried wakame for 30 minutes, boil and strain again... No, this will take too long. I'm going to starve from that.

This ultimately started with me finding Aldi's sold Extra Firm tofu and I ordered it via InstaFart. Then after I got it, I'm asking myself, "What do I do now?" Salads, cookies? I had the last of the baggie of scallions in the fridge so Miso soup it is! I just needed miso paste. I got some sort of 5 ounce "Sweet" Light Miso packet off Amazon and after paying $6 in shipping and pulling the product out of the bag did I realize I should have bought 2 squeeze packets. But how often do I think I'll make miso soup anyway? Are those few remaining scallions in the fridge still good?

Extra firm tofu, 4 cups of water, scallions, mushrooms, mirin - all that is sodium free or naturally low sodium. The real question was the sodium in the dashi granules and the Miso paste. I don't have the package for the Hondashi and I didn't examine the konbu dashi package closely yet, but their uses were 1 teaspoon per 2 cups of water with 1 teaspoon for the konbu. I used 4 tablespoons (60 g) of miso paste, 1 tablespoon per cup of water. That had 450mg of sodium per tablespoon but remember, it is diluted in water. I could have reduced it to 3 tablespoons.

The recipe I ended up following is in Step by Step Asian. Very easy.

Boil water, add dashi granules. Reduce heat, add mushrooms and cubed tofu. Simmer 3 minutes. Add miso (and mirin), simmer another 3 minutes and stir to dissolve it throughout. Shut off heat, add sliced / chopped scallions. Serve hot / heated. Serves up to 4.

How did it taste? I don't have any comparison but I liked it. The other recipes claim the drain and strain Dashi is better, but why would the instant non drain versions exist then? I got it made quickly, tasted fine, and was edible.

I didn't have any wakame, so I took a sheet of nori and cut it up into pieces and added that instead. I think it helped the experience and flavor. I have some unopened hijiki, but it needs a 30 minute cold water soak as well.

I put the extra soup in containers and in the fridge. I'll try this stuff cold later in the week.

I really did own a Defender coin op upright game

Story time if you'll indulge me.

A lot of people don't believe me when I say I used to own a Defender upright cabinet. Then I show them this.

Background : While I tried to go to DeVry Institute of Technology in the mid 1980s in Columbus Ohio, there was this company called The Game Exchange across the street. Somehow one of my roommates learned they dealt with coin up arcade games and in late 1986 was having a warehouse sale. And we all thought "Oh Boy!" But being poor college students, we couldn't afford much. I wanted a working Qbert upright. One roommate scored a complete Star Trek vectorscan game which needed work (he later got it fully working) and I... bought this incomplete Defender (no monitor and parts pilfered power supply but had complete documents) for $50.

We managed to get the things back to the apartment, quickly determined what we needed just to get things to turn on, and next week returned to the business to see if I could at least buy 2 parts - a rectifying bridge and a huge pop can capacitor. Cost was $21. That got the power supply working and verified the board at least worked because of the self test sound from the speaker. No display. We tried going back again but the owner was a jerk and chased us out and refused to let us buy anything more because we were "bothering his employees." I'm not sorry to know that business is long gone.

Being DeVry students, we tried rigging up a circuit to convert the signals to be usable through an RF modulator and it almost worked. Never quite finished that doohickey.

It was a huge load to lug back home via Uhaul truck when my attempt at a college education ultimately failed. The cabinet lived in the dining room until it was moved to the basement after which I got a rubber mallot and gently coerced the cabinet apart. The game computer was stored in my bedroom. That is until 1997.

WebTV happened. Sailor Moon happened. Anime North was about to happen. I needed money. Could I sell my Defender? There was a Usenet newsgroup for doing that and I posted a message. A fellow from Pittsburgh drove to my house and picked it up in person. Handed me $80 (I was asking $75 for it) and he got everything. Had a great time in Toronto a month or so later.

I redeemed that decision by buying Defender 2000 for my Atari Jaguar. 

The tokens I used to have...?

At one point in my life, I had a decent coin and game token collection. I guess I can say that now, because it got stolen out of my storage unit during 2018. I made the mistake of handing something so important to me to another only to never see it again.

I amassed the token collection from my 18 months at Showbiz Pizza Place in Columbus. I loved doing game pull and going through the coins. I collected a lot of Other tokens during that time. What I forgot I did at one point was write down a list of the unique tokens I had. To wit:

• Abra Kadabra Pizza Magic
• Gallatin Bank parking token
• Aladdin's Castle (picture)
• Putt Putt Plus
• The Palace
• American Amusement
• Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theatre
• Showbiz Pizza Place
• Gladieux Corporation
• Buckeye Game Room
• The Wizard Family Arcade
• Malibu Castle & Showboat
• Fun n Games
• Capt. Darrell's Oyster Bar & Game Room on the Boardwalk Daytona Beach, Florida
• Amusement Wampum
• Jupiter and Beyond
• Crazy C.A.T.S.
• Fair Play Pizza Theater
• Big City Game Room
• Station Break Family Amusement Centers
• Lincoln Lane Brunswick 2000
• Funway Freeway Officer Mohair
• Games People Play
• Show Rental
• Olds Pizza Connection
• Silverball Game Room
• Ellwest-Jolar Amusement Centers
• Electric Animal & Screen Door Co.
• Video Vibes
• Rocky's Gamerooms Russell, KY
• Circus Playhouse Food Emporium
• Fun Factory
• Burger King
• Lunar Landing
• Red Roof Inns
• Kings Video Columbus Square Bowling Palace
• Funtasia Family Amusement Centers
• Cedar Point Arcades
• Game Trek
• Arcade City
• Jim's Jukebox Junction
• Smorga Bob's Family Restaurant
• Twilight Zone Family Videogame Centers
• New Tech Amusements
• Kmart  RND Video Game Specialist
• Razz ma Tazz Pizza Palace
• Future Games Inc
• Play Palace Family Amusement Centers
• Fancie Annie's
• Paradise Books (ahem)
• Fantasia Family Electronic Game Centers
• The Game Room
• Six Flags Log Ride
• Major Magic's All Star Pizza Revue
• Red Baron Family Fun Center
• Coca Cola (?)
• Regina's Movies
• Old Town America's Good Time Family Entertainment Center
• Bally's Le Mans Family Fun Centers
• 1984 World's Fair Video Expo which had different designs such as Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Ms. Pac-Man