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Showing posts from August, 2026

Classic Cocktails: Martinis

 My wife and I are on a cruise. One of my favorite parts of cruising is getting to try a whole bunch of cocktails that I'm interested in, but don't necessarily know how to make (or want to answer 15 questions for the bartender at a regular bar). I've been going in pretty hard on martinis this trip. Last time, they had the Vesper (James Bond martini-- 4 gin, 2 vodka, 1 discontinued apatrif that you sub with a different apartif and a little tonic), which I enjoyed way more than I expected to. I've been going more traditional. I've decided the following (in order of preference): Gibson: THE BEST! The pickled onion really ties it all together, and I don't have to say dry. It's a shame more people don't have cocktail onions in stock. But at least one of the bars on our ship does, so I'm good. Gin: Dry and with a twist Vodka: Olives

Call of the Machine

Call of the Machine is MachineGames' expansion for the Remaster. It reuses a bunch of expansion content (monsters more than the guns, because fuck you), a little Quake 1 content (because every id universe needs to be forced into being a linear series now), and one or two original enemies. Also one from the Playstation port (but they still left one out?) A common critique of Quake 2  is that it's sort of stuck between two generations of shooters. Quake  is a clear evolution of Doom. Weird maps that exist to be levels, piles o' monsters, blast everything.  Half-Life  and  Unreal  at least sort of try to be realistic, and bring the crazy factor down considerably.  Quake 2  kind of splits the difference, in a way that doesn't satisfy most people. Call of the Machine gives a kind of "what if..." approach, with 6 mini-episodes (your guns reset, it counts) hitting at different places on that spectrum. You start out on a not-quite-as-cool-as- Quake-1 ...