Sudden Short Story 30

His name had long been forgotten, as it was only of niche interest, and so was very low in terms of backup priority.  It was supposed that he knew it, as that was how these things usually worked, but it was something of a moot point, as most of those who would ask would lose interest by the time that he got around to responding.  Whether he was even still alive was sometimes left uncertain, until someone thought to look up primatology, track him down, and verify his breathing and pulse.  He was easy enough to find, of course, since he only ever inhabited one vessel, though he did move it on rare occasion.
He had a strange collection.  It was made of enormous, biodegradable objects that stored information linguistically, and not at all compactly at that.  He made a habit of storing, preserving, ordering, and reading these things, and it is for this that he was known as The Librarian.  It was known that he had been offered the chance to join them at some point in the past, though he had rejected it, citing the books and his reading them as his motive.
Once, a node got disconnected, and so the Librarian had to explain to it what minutes were so that he could explain what hours were, so that he could specify how many of those to wait before asking again.  While it had been very patient, asking only once per second, the Librarian apparently found it annoying.  He had indicated that he was trying to reread a tale of two cities, though he hadn't specified which one.

My Chex Mix Recipe

Because I can, I'm posting the recipe that I've recently come to use to make Chex mix.  I basically combined the common elements of recipes that I found online and tweaked it to fit my own needs, as one does.
Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups corn Chex
• 1.5 cups rice Chex
• 1.5 cups wheat Chex
• 1 cup pretzel sticks
• 1 cup peanuts
• 0.5 sticks butter (regular (salted) table butter)
• 1.5 to 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce (vary to suit taste)
• 0.5 teaspoon Lawry's Seasoned Salt
• 2 cloves (or 1 big clove) garlic, finely chopped
• 0.125* teaspoon onion powder

The actual making is pretty standard stuff.  Mix cereals, pretzels, and peanuts.  Melt the remaining ingredients in the microwave, stirring often to get things evenly mixed and make sure that everything's wet for most of it.  Drizzle that over the dry stuff, stirring extensively to get the sauce on everything.  Nuke for 6 minutes, in 1.5 minute increments, stirring between each increment for even heating and even sauce distribution.  Let cool on paper towels before containing, though it might not last that long.  It really is good stuff.

So, I have a rather traditional** Chex mix recipe that my coworkers, my family, and I find delicious.  What should I do now?  EXPERIMENT!  MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Now that my creativity has been unleashed, no one will be safe!  Or something.  If I find the time (not this weekend, but perhaps the next one), then I'll mess with things.  I've already got a few ideas in mind.
Maybe don't hold your breath, though, as a precautionary measure.

*That's 1/8.
**peanuts, none of that filler (bread stick pieces, bagel chips, rye chips), and, to some extent, the use of pretzel sticks instead of pretzel-shaped pretzels

Ye Olde Star Trekke

For those who don't know, I've lately been watching the original Star Trek series.  It's actually not that bad.  I expected it to be pretty not-good given the time period in which it was made, the budget, and the time period in which it was made.  Here are the things that have stood out to me so far:

• Red shirts don't get thrown away (i.e., written to death) nearly as often as I'd been led to believe.  
• Computers had a lot of exposed circuits back then.  
• For being 300 years in the future, it still takes a long time to get data from an on-board computer.  
• Everyone's a human except Spock, who's half-human.  
• Spellcheck didn't try to correct "Spock" there.  
• About half of all aliens are absurdly powerful cosmic beings.  
• Even back then, there was a really bad habit of sending way too many senior officers down with a landing party.  
• Uhura is pretty well-rounded for a secondary character.  
• I mean, really, it's basically about Kirk, Spock, & Bones.  
• Spellcheck doesn't know who Uhura is.  
• I checked my own spelling via Google, so I know that it's right.  
• Inexplicably, security personnel and engineers both wear red.  In the future, this is corrected by dressing security personnel in yellow and engineers in yellow.  Wait a minute....  

So, I'm finding the series quite palatable, though I hear that the 3rd season is kind of bad.  We shall see!

Pokémon: the Breeding Dilemma

So, I've been playing Pokémon a bit lately.  In my White version, I've gotten to the point where I can breed Pokémon, which is something that I always used to enjoy in the games.  Getting certain move sets could prove an interesting challenge, and I always felt that it could make desirable Pokémon for trading, though that never really came up much in the past, due to a lack of trading partners.
Part of this came from the fact that, in addition to the special egg moves, newly hatched Pokémon start with any TM that they can learn that their fathers knew when breeding.  Most especially, this is of interest for TMs that only appear once in a given game.  Breeding would allow me to make a Pokémon that knew that move - and really any number of them - which could be desirable to someone else who has used or has plans for that TM.  Give a Pokémon 2 inherited TMs and an egg move, and it can become quite interesting.
That portion of the point seems to have been removed in the Generation V games, as TMs are now infinite-use, rendering the distinction between the two basically academic, as the only real difference is that HMs must be deleted at the move deleter's house (I assume).  While there's nothing preventing me from TM-breeding as before, it seems kind of pointless, especially as I couldn't even say that I'm saving myself the cost of purchasable TMs!
This also means that TMs can be used with impunity, so there's no challenge to deciding when to use which one.  :-\