Things I did today

James Hoffmann partnered with Cometeer again to create a Discovery Box. Cometeer has a proprietary method of brewing and freezing coffee at a strength ~10 times a normal coffee, so they can be shipped as little frozen pucks. To 'brew' the coffee, you pour hot water on it. If you want a cold coffee, you just let it melt in its capsule in the fridge overnight, and pour it over water and ice. I'd have a third picture, but you know what black coffee looks like. The Discovery Box had 8 coffees with 2 pucks each. Each day, Cometeer included a short video from James explaining each coffee and the accompanying flavor profile. I was encouraged to rate the coffee "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" but what I didn't know was if thumbs up meant "I loved the coffee" and thumbs down meant "I merely liked it, or worse", or "I liked it and would drink it again" vs "I didn't like it and would not drink it again". I ended up going...

 This month's surge is a little housekeeping-ish. For a while, I've been trying new recipes, but I've not been putting them on my website and I really ought to! It's been helpful as a reference and to send to friends who are looking for something new to cook, especially if they like their Instant Pot. So Surge 10 is all about adding more recipes to my site. Hopefully I can get another 10 or more up there as it only has 14 currently. No more weekend work in October, which means I'll have time for it!

I only played one new video game between 9/15 and 9/30 because I was working overtime at work. Normally, I work about 90 hours for half a month. This time, I worked over 120 hours. Often, I needed to be in meetings that started at 5am, so even when the day ended around 4 or 5pm, I was exhausted and no mood to figure out a new game.  I was going to try to catch up on weeks 7 and 8 and pretend I was just slow on publishing. But I realized that I had fewer genres to try out. I've already done a few before starting this surge - RPG, puzzle games, deckbuilders and platformers. I also know I had no desire to play any sports games or first person shooters. Instead, I decided to end it early and write up the final review for 20 games I did play since the beginning of September. First, a quick writeup about Vampire Survivors. What a weird game. You wander around, attempting to kill waves of monsters while your weapon autofires, meaning you have to time when you get close to enemies to kill ...