Monthly Archive: October 2016
Niall
31st October 2016
The ingredients from my ingredient shopping arrived really quickly – I placed the order on Thursday at 17:30 and they arrived on Saturday. Impressive work from The Homebrew Company! I put together the workflow below and printed it out so I’d have something to follow along with on brew day. It really helped pinpoint things to focus on and times when I’d be able to prepare the next step while waiting for target temperatures. I had a setback in preparing for brew day, however, as I managed to drop my hydrometer and sample tube – the only two glass pieces of brewing paraphenalia! Needless to say, both of them shattered. Thankfully, I was able to borrow a hydrometer off my friend Diarmaid. I used a tall pint glass as a sample tube, but ended up having a lot of wasted liquid while doing so, I’ll have to be conservative about checking my specific gravity until I source a new one. I tweaked the recipe slightly according to the style guidance from Brewer’s Friend, which should hopefully compensate for my extra dark barley. Other than that, the brew went off without a hitch! Looking forward to the taste test already! Brew Workflow:…
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Niall
27th October 2016
Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now – time for a change! I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…). Having never followed a beer recipe before, I struggled a bit parsing the ingredient list. The °L notation in the recipe after some of the grains was particularly confusing. A quick search of the index informed me that this is “degrees Lovibond”, a scale for measuring the colour of the beer. In the EU, EBC (European Brewing Convention) is used instead, which is 1.97 times the °L value. I did all of my shopping on The Homebrew Company‘s website – they have a big selection and I’ve ordered from them before when doing my extract brew. The grain bill called for an English pale malt extract,…
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Niall
23rd October 2016
Since the last entry on the backlog, I’ve sunk a few more hours into Sheltered. It grew on me after a while, with the slog of getting resources being quite gripping. I accidentally overcrowded my shelter and killed half the posse through suffocation though – didn’t realise the oxygen filtration system wouldn’t keep up! An enjoyable game, but think I’ve had my fill of it. Onto the next game… Deponia Doomsday Apparently this is part of a series. Humorous point and click adventure game. Except the humour is horrible. Really cringily bad. The pace of the game is ridiculously slow too – I gave it 29 minutes and couldn’t handle a minute more. Complete waste of time. The Humble Monthly Bundle is letting me down. Tower of Guns Okay, this is more like it – randomly-generated challenging FPS about navigating through a tower filled with robot guns. Very similar mindset to Binding of Isaac with randomised powerup drops throughout and very quick to pick up and play. Just the right amount of humour in the form of ridiculous “backstory” for your character each run – e.g. you’re the grocery delivery boy for an elderly lady who lives on the top…
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Niall
16th October 2016
Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group. In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing – e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too – there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total. The Settlers of Catan was my first “proper” boardgame and I had good fun with it for a…
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Niall
15th October 2016
I settled in for a wet Friday evening at home alone and cleared a few games from the list…with mixed results. Some miscellaneous items were on the list that I had actually played, but missed with my inital categorisation – an easy few points gained! Action Henk This was surprisingly fun. I honestly thought it would be awful, going by first impressions from the store page. It’s a pleasantly challenging racing game involving a corpulent action figure who can slide on his bum. You see what I mean about the first impressions now, I hope. The online multiplayer didn’t work so well – I think it has a limited player base – but the single player mode was engaging enough that my 67 minutes in game went by without me noticing it. I didn’t finish the single-player mode, but enjoyed what I played of it. If you like games with a bit of challenge, this might be for you. I won’t be picking it up again in a hurry, but it might be worth trying for the local multiplayer at some point. Train Valley Conversely, I expected to enjoy this, as I usually enjoy management games, but it just didn’t…
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Niall
14th October 2016
I have quite a large Steam game collection. 231 games. A ludicrous amount of games. As well as the games I’ve anticipated and obsessed over, I have random one-offs that were on sale, games that were included in various bundles, and freebies. Some of the ones I got on sale have been played less than the ones I got for free. I’d go so far as to say that most of the games in my Steam library are unplayed (I then went and checked – not the majority, but a pretty hefty sum: 92 out of 231). This really only hit home recently, as I decided to reorganise the categories in the game library and found myself completely at a loss about certain games. So, I have made a resolution – play them all. Rather than going for my usual standards (Dota 2, Binding of Isaac) and rather than buying anything that’s on my wishlist (Dishonored 2 is coming soon and looks great), I’m going to try out something from the backlog. I’m going to be unforgiving – there’s a lot of them and I know a lot of it is crap filler from bundles. So if an hour of…
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