A Visit from BoingDragon: Food and Movies

[tuftears]

Another in my "it is obviously Tufty's mission in life to make people hungry" set of posts! This time, let's cover a couple of outing when boingdragon was out in this part of the woods.

First of all, you might recall that I mentioned wanting to try the Stone Bowl Curry from the Curry House in a previous entry. Well, when boingdragon came out and expressed interest in the cheeseburger curry after I showed him pictures, it seemed like a good opportunity to do so. So, behold!



It was served with some green tea soda. Interesting, but I don't think I'll try that stuff again.



You're supposed to pour the gravy liberally into the bowl. I decided to hold off for a bit; based on some of the reviews I'd seen, the idea is that the very, very hot stone bowl cooks the rice into crispiness, then you stir it in and you get nice little crackly nuggets in the rice.

...

Well, maybe that works if you use white rice. With brown rice, the results weren't that great. Still, it was a worthwhile experiment! Also, I'd probably get hamburger or some other 'moist meat' rather than a chicken tonkatsu; I fear that the high heat of the stone bowl dries out tonkatsu. This is ameliorated by pouring the sauce on liberally, but I feel it should be tasty without the gravy.

We got to see the new and improved theater lounger seating at the Century Cinemas on Shoreline! Behold the Comfy:



What's weird is that you have to reserve seats now when you buy tickets online... The reserved areas are way in front. So if you want 'middle' seats as I'm accustomed to, you need to pick seats in the back of the available area. The above areas were presumably for people who bought their tickets at the counter.

We saw two movies while boingdragon was out here:

Inside Out. The Pixar movie where feelings have feelings. Yeah. It was pretty solid. Pixar knows how to work those emotions while not feeling trite. Good balance of humor and seriousness.

Mad Max: Fury Road. Hooo boy. I don't really remember the previous movie, but no previous knowledge is required to appreciate this post-apocalyptic movie that plays as if someone had brought all those old 80s rock album covers to life in a no-holds-barred deathmatch.

Comments

[moonscream.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking about how skanky those things are probably already getting, with all those crevices that need to be cleaned between showings...

[rowyn]

We have one of those comfy-seating theaters near us, and I like it much better than the normal ones. :) At a standard theatre I prefer to sit in the middle, but the reclining seats lean back far enough that I find even the front row comfortable to watch from.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Oh. I am suddenly very hungry for tonkatsu (chicken or pork, I'm not picky) after seeing those pictures. Alas, it's not like I have a "Curry House" within walking distance. (JEALLLLLOUSY! ;) )

Fury Road: I really enjoyed the movie. We saw it in 3D, but I'm pretty sure just seeing it on the big screen has more of an impact than the added bells and whistles of "3D." (It was the only showing we could get into, though.) It's the sort of thing that makes me want to break out my Thunder Road game pieces and customized Micro Machines and stage some sort of a "road war" scenario, but it's a tall order to capture the feel by moving minis around, engaging in over-the-top narrative, and rolling dice, compared to a movie. ;)

Inside Out: I guess I've got to see that eventually, simply because it's Pixar. Usually that's enough to justify a trip to the theater, but somehow schedules just haven't worked out this summer so far for anything more than "Fury Road" (and that's largely just because a friend insisted enough upon it ;) ).

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

You could probably do a pretty good tonkatsu at home, it's basically breaded chicken/pork, just needs the tonkatsu sauce and there are recipes for that. ;)

I dunno, I could picture a Fury Road-based Savage Worlds campaign being a lot of fun. Your players in the Zombiepocalypse already got a lot of mileage out of pushing one truck around, after all.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've floated the idea a few times of doing a post-apoc game focusing more on a Mad Max take than yet-more-zombies, but I think the player group got burned out on my "War of the Dead / Zombie Run" campaign.

I've toyed with the idea of doing a Fallout-themed campaign. Alas, in order to do it "right," that would actually rule out some of my Micro Machines and such, since they wouldn't fit the retro-futuristic theme. I'd probably make some custom papercraft (there's a wealth of resource material for me to make tiny Fallout-themed posters and billboards and such for the table) rather than going overboard on trying to customize in-theme wreckage for the table. For vehicular combat, I'd likely switch to a different scale than the minis, so we can have the tabletop represent a larger area. I'm pretty sure I have a few Micro Machines (and knock-offs) that look like something from the 1950s/1960s, that I could 'tech-and-wreck to pass for some atomic-powered "Cars ... of the ... FUUUU-TURE!" (disclaimer voice: as envisioned sometime in the 1950s-1960s).

I'd likely use the Deadlands "Hell on Earth Reloaded" rules, since I already have them, but for any "road wars," I'm tempted to co-opt some sort of card game (surely there's a road-war themed card game out there where "maneuvers" are handled via cards?) for any action-packed road encounters, rather than trying to use the "generic" vehicle rules from Savage Worlds. (Must resist temptation to tangent into a big long discussion about how I'd do it, repeating a lot of my prior musings on the topic in the process. I can write about that later on my own LJ. ;) )

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Totally understandable, re: leaving rules-thinking to a separate LJ post. ;) Or maybe think about writing a Savage Worlds supplement. What about the original Car Wars? (not card-based but it IS the first auto warfare game I know of)

Did you see the Full Frontal Nerdity comic series riffing off of Fury Road? Starts here: http://ffn.nodwick.com/?p=1393

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

My memories of Car Wars (from wayyyyyyy back in college) make me disinclined to delve into it for RPG purposes, as things tended to go in super-slow-motion in part due to the breakdown into "phases." I can see WHY the game called for such things, in order to break down the herky-jerky weirdness of typical miniatures games (where instead of a chase, you have a couple of cars leapfrogging down the interstate as they take turns moving large distances), but with any more than, say, three cars involved, it tended to get pretty cumbersome.

Now, it could be that my memory is unfair on this count. That was way back when, after all.

Re: Nodwick: Cute and weird. :D