Mistakes Can Be Fixed Through Improvisation

Sometimes It's Food For Fun #4 by -G.umi-

It happens to all of us and most of the time, you would just straight up start over. But.. Not this time :3 One day I was experimenting with brownies. I wanted to see what would happen if I added some white chocolate chips to the batter. What ended up happening was a very bad unevenly cooked looking brownie. I was kind of distressed with the result because even though it was an experiment, I was eventually going to bring it to a family party. Seeing that I didn't have enough time or materials to start over, I began to contemplate my options. . . .

Look at those SAD SAD SAD SAD SAD cracks in my finished brownie....

Eventually I thought, "What if I just crush this entire brownie into bits and serve it like that?" This is my attempt to mask the fact that I made a mistake. XD. But then it got me thinking, just crushed brownies is kind of boring. I needed to do something more to make this dish seem presentable and desirable. With that, my background in works with strawberries hit me. I'll make this into a triple layer chocolate x strawberries x chocolate dessert. So I got right to work.

strawberries layer over a layer of crushed brownies with chocolate syrup on top.

Then more crumbles of brownies layered on top and on the tray the dish sits on as decoration. Success!!!

In the end, it turned out just fine and my family loved it.

This is me.. Barely making it in time before we left the house to go to the party... I have such a big chromium..

SAFE -FUU-

Lazy Cat...Blue on the inside, Pusheen on the outside

Sometimes It's Food For Fun #3 by -G.umi-

So one of our friends is coming back from a trip to her hometown. She likes Pusheen the cat, so we decided to make a Pusheen cake for her return party. Unfortunately, a lot of the pictures of the cake-making process were lost. So here is the start and the finish.

For some reason I wanted to add a twist to the cake, so I chose blue cake batter. 

And the completed Cake..

It was perfect :3

One of the biggest difficulties we found was making the grey frosting with food dye. The amount of food coloring mixed in was scary. Later on we would learn that you can actually buy black frosting from specialty shops... That would have saved us like 2 hours...

If It Can Have Chocolate On It... Then It Will!

Sometimes It's Food For Fun #2 by -G.umi-

Another Throw Back! Hopefully these simple finger foods give you some sort of inspiration! In this recap, I'm covering some desserts I made for a cousin's party. I used strawberries and a variety of snacks from the 99 Cents Store and covered them in milk chocolate and crushed biscuits. 

1. Prepare The Army

2. Position Units

3. Presention

Enjoy <3

When Advertisements Are Ok

I have been playing Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed. This is that weird game where you rip off the clothes of people to fight in the game. Don’t ask. It’s Japanese. That should be enough explanation. But the weird thing is that the load screens are advertisements. Unlike the other games with ads on your phone, these ads I really enjoyed since they were really fun to see. I realized three things that made it more enjoyable compared to other games with ads.

1. Advertisements to the World

Akiba’s Trip takes place in Akihabara, the consumer-rich shopping district. So the ads actually made it feel like I was in the real world. Sadly, this also comes with the problem of dating the ads too, since eventually products go extinct. However, this problem can easily be solved with modern “Updates”.

Example of an ad used during one of the load screens. I cannot read Japanese, but I believe this is for a book store. To be more specific, a manga store.

2. Variety

Did you ever go to a supermarket for milk and walk all the way to the back to get it? On the way there, you look around the aisles thinking, “Oh! This thing is cool!” or “Hey, I needed these!” Seeing stuff you were not looking for made it feel like browsing.

Another example of an ad for meat. Occasionally losing track of time while playing this game, you might have a craving for it.

3. It's Not What You Want

This might sound a little counter productive, but hear me out. If you search online for PC parts via Google, you will find more Newegg and BestBuy ads on Facebook afterwards. But when you see them, you already closed your tabs for your PC search. You are done searching and you had your fill of PC parts. You already have the information you wanted, but with the ads popping up afterwards, it feels like they are nagging you to come back. The advertisements in Akiba's Trip however, made me want to explore the city to see if the products still existed in real life.

The takeaway here is that if ads are implemented in a nonintrusive manner, and in a way that piques curiosity without taking away from the main gaming experience, there are some instances when in-game ads are acceptable. Additionally, with Akiba's Trip, the placement of in-city ads were relative to the setting, and actually added to some of the believability of the busy shopping center. Games often need the supplementary funding that comes to them in the form of in-game advertisements, and in the case of Akiba's Trip, I respect them for being clever and considerate.

Have you noticed this kind of clever and non-intrusive ad usage in games? What is your opinion on in-game advertisments? Let us know in the comments below!

The Sugar Never Ends!

Sometimes It's Food For Fun #1 by -G.umi-

Time for a Food Porn Friday!
This is the start of a series I am starting for things that I have personally prepared. If it gets enough attention, I will certainly be willing to post recipes and step-by-step process posts!

Here is a birthday present I designed a long time ago for a friend who really has a sugar problem. It Includes: strawberries, bananas, marshmallows, and a lot of white chocolate. Rest assured, no one has received diabetes in the process of consuming this tasty dessert. They were a lot of fun to make.

Leave a comment if you would like me to go more in depth into recipes and process in the future!

Rainmeter Crafting

So I’ve been messing with a nifty little free tool called Rainmeter recently! 
For those who don’t know, Rainmeter is a tool designed for desktop customization. Basically, it is a means of showing information on your desktop in the form of adding widgets, doo-dads, levers, switches, and customizable skins. Typically, people use it to display their CPU usage, net activity, and temperatures on your desktop. It's a wonderful tool for keeping track of resource usage on you

I believe these screenshots of themes can speak for themselves.

Example of a rainmeter skin with a Steampunk Alice in Wonderland theme. By: Mordasius

Example of a rainmeter skin with a Vocaloid Miku theme. By: DS-Productions

Ok so instead, I made something that would save my screen space, useful if you have only one screen. It’s an anime voice-activated assistant. I'll have another post about the voice-activated part later, as it came with an interesting problem that I'd like to mention.

Don’t ask where I got the character images from, but since this is a common question of infinite curiosity, I’ll just say they are from Japanese dating sims.

In this example skin, the character is from "Love Duction" but once again, know that the game is NSFW. However, this example skin has none of the questionable content.

If you want to have a copy or see some of the other character skins, feel free to comment. If there is enough interest, I might make a more distribution-friendly version of my anime voice-activated assistants!