My bird has a really bad habit of needing to be within a few feet of me 24/7.  If I leave his line of sight to brush my teeth, do the dishes, grab some laundry, play piano, etc. 90% of the time he will fly to me.  If he can’t find me, he will shoot like a rocket in circles around the apartment, screaming…until crash landing in my hair.  And begging for cuddles.

I made these the night before my ecology exam.  Procrastination owns.

Mocha Cupcakes
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup strong brewed coffee (or 3 shots of espresso), room temp
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 large egg

Beat butter and sugar together until flufffy, beat in egg, mix in dry ingredients. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes.

Ginger cream cheese frosting
4oz cream cheese, room temp
1 tsp vanilla
1 stick of butter, room temp
2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Whip butter and cream cheese together, add in everything else, spread or pipe to cupcakes.  Add more powdered sugar depending on how thick you want the frosting.  Grate some chocolate on top for extra prettiness.

The website is pretty wicked as well.  Mmmm corpses and smashing.  Release date please.

“Exciting new classes like the witch doctor bring new gameplay options to the table. Returning classes, like the barbarian, have been completely redone with new skills to give them a feel unique to Diablo III. New customization options will provide for an even greater level of character specialization than the previous Diablo games, allowing the player to create unique characters brimming with power.

Diablo III is powered by a new graphics engine that can display characters and hordes of monsters in lush, fully 3D environments. Powerful special-effects systems and Havok-powered physics allow the player to lay waste to the Hells’ minions in spectacular ways.

Also, Diablo III builds on the random environments of the previous Diablo games by introducing a host of new ways to create random scripted events throughout the game. This creates a dense and exciting world alive with quests, NPCs, dynamic encounters, and viciously challenging new monsters and bosses. Diablo III’s environments add a great deal of interactivity to the game, including destructible elements and environmental obstacles that can be turned against your enemies.

In addition, Diablo III will benefit from Battle.net upgrades that will provide some exciting new features for players. Cooperative online play remains a primary focus, with multiple enhancements being planned to make connecting with your friends easier and cooperative gameplay even more fun. We’ll have more details on all these aspects as well as other exciting new features at a later date.”

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/index.xml

MANIACAL LAUGHTER.  THIS BUILDING HAS PLAGUED ME FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

Before

After…

So, I have a major lab practical worth 10% of my grade tomorrow, which means hunkering down and studying.  Aka browse random sites on the internet until it’s 2am and your eyes are bloodshot and getting nothing done, pushing you into an all nighter.

Wordle.net is a cool little image generator.  Type in a bunch of words, out comes this artsy cloud of pretty words.  You can mess with fonts, colors, distribution.  Easily amused I know.

So I pasted whatever was on my clipboard (study materials for my Anatomy lab), hit “Create” and voila.  It’s like one of those poetry magnet sets people put on their fridge to seem all intellectual and hip.  I’m sorry mister, $7.99 at Barnes and Noble does not make you coffeehouse artsy.

Not my Matt, I know where he is.  Talking about this one…

About Matt

Matt is a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he’d saved to wander around Asia until it ran out. He made this site so he could keep his family and friends updated about where he is.

A few months into his trip, a travel buddy gave Matt an idea. They were standing around taking pictures in Hanoi, and his friend said “Hey, why don’t you stand over there and do that dance. I’ll record it.” He was referring to a particular dance Matt does. It’s actually the only dance Matt does. He does it badly. Anyway, this turned out to be a very good idea.

A couple years later, someone found the video online and passed it to someone else, who passed it to someone else, and so on. Now Matt is quasi-famous as “That guy who dances on the internet. No, not that guy. The other one. No, not him either. I’ll send you the link. It’s funny.”

The response to the first video brought Matt to the attention of the nice people at Stride gum. They asked Matt if he’d be interested in taking another trip around the world to make a new video. Matt asked if they’d be paying for it. They said yes. Matt thought this sounded like another very good idea.

In 2006, Matt took a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents. In that time, he danced a great deal.

The second video made Matt even more quasi-famous. In fact, for a brief period in July, he was semi-famous.

Things settled down again, and then in 2007 Matt went back to Stride with another idea. He realized his bad dancing wasn’t actually all that interesting, and that other people were much better at being bad at it. He showed them his inbox, which, as a result of his semi-famousness, was overflowing with emails from all over the planet. He told them he wanted to travel around the world one more time and invite the people who’d written him to come out and dance too.

The Stride people thought that sounded like yet another very good idea, so they let him do it. And he did. And now it’s done. And he hopes you like it.

JESSICA. IS. DRIPPING. WITH. JEALOUSY.

Even though I have my mock lab practical in six hours, I can’t sleep at all.  I think I’ve spent the last 2 hours messing with Wordpress and destroying all rules of valid coding and I broke my admin interface somehow.  But it looks pretty!

Also, I want this lens.    But I can’t justify paying more than $70 for it.  Stupid Amazon is watching me I swear.  They end their sale right before I look it up, and have been teasing me by lowering and raising the price on a weekly basis.  Usually only fluctuates by $5, and all the photography forum people keep telling me to find it used or wait for a sale (which they are positive will happen at one of the major retailers because of past trends).

Patience is a virtue….pffffffft.

Yes, I made more cupcakes.  Am I going to eat them all? Heck ya.  And yes, the chocolate is droopy in the pictures.  Everything melts in the Texas summer, even with the A/C dying just to keep the temperature under 85 in the apartment.

Recipe:

Vanilla Cupcake (makes 12) I only ended up with enough batter to fill 10, and my measurements are strange because I didn’t want to make 30+

3/4 stick (6 tbsp) unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup + 2tbsp sugar
1 egg
1stp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking powder No baking powder, so I substituted 1/4 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp lime juice.  FYI, baking soda is 4x as strong as baking powder and needs something acidic to react with to make the cake rise.  Baking powder is just baking soda mixed with cream of tartar.  I didn’t have any tartar, so used lime juice instead.
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mix all the ingredients together and do not overbeat or you’re going to have very dense cupcake, scoop into cupcake papers, and bake for 16-20 minutes.  Pull them out and let them cool before frosting

Cream cheese frosting

I sort of eyeballed and mixed random things together because I didn’t want an entire batch and had an “ohhhhh I should add some of this” moment, hence the almond and the cinnamon.  I was so close to grabbing the nutmeg, mint, and sprinkles, then reminded myself it would be overload and probably taste nasty.

4 oz cream cheese, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp almond extract
3 tbsp vegetable shortening ie. Crisco; Butter works fine as well, but I was out
1 cup powdered sugar I think I ended up adding about 2 cups
Dash of however much cinnamon you like, around 1 tsp

Cream the butter/shortening and cream cheese together.  Add in everything else, and keep dumping powdered sugar until you get the consistency you want.  I accidentally made it too thick and added a bit of milk to smooth it out.

Chocolate filigree

Melt about 1/4 cup of Nestle chocolate morsel things in the microwave.  Lay out wax paper on a cutting board.  Spoon the chocolate into a parchment bag, snip off the very tip, and pipe whatever decorations you want.  Let it sit in the freezer for about 15 min and they should peel right off the wax paper.

Jon Stewart is great as always…

How can someone conscientiously watch Fox news and actually SUPPORT their programming and agenda?  I swear, it’s the same subset of the population that’s completely racist, scarily ignorant, and have no sense of decency that is screwing over our country.  And the bus driver in the afternoon who has the Sean Hannity show blaring on his radio really pushes my buttons because I have to listen to it for the entire thirty minute ride home.

A Comedy Central show outperforms the mainstream media shows…and yet nothing is being done to make the news programs more accountable.

Source: http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions

All nighter almost accomplished.  I figure once every few weeks to hardcore cram for 2+ tests won’t kill me that much.  Since caffeine quit working on me ages ago, my new staple is

http://www.pixiemate.com/

It’s so amazingly delicious (mate chai is my fav because it’s all spicey with cinnamon, cardamom, etc.) and chock full of antioxidants.  Not one of those energy drinks filled with a ton of chemicals.  Just a spin off of green tea for lack of a better comparison.  You basically mix half tea half milk over ice.  The tea is organic and follows sustainable agriculture guidelines.

You can find it in the tea section of whole foods or central market for around $5 a box.  Pricey, but it’s concentrate and mixes over a gallon-ish of yumminess.  I think they sell it in tea bags as well, but I haven’t tried (too lazy to actually brew and I like drinking the stuff cold).

Off to my Ecology exam now…