I've got tons of tabs open in Firefox, so it's time to clear away some of 'em with another fun linkage post! I certainly don't expect you to go clicking them all, but here's some of the stuff I've been reading about recently.

Wikipedia pages open:

Shockwave (Transformers) -- Natch, in keeping with the recent Transformers obsession, I've been reading a lot about the characters. Shockwave is bloody awesome. Figure versions of him are also bloody expensive (especially when they're badass customs), so I currently lack a representation of him among my TF legions. 🙁 (more...)

Remind me to write about the horrible TV segments that I saw tonight at some point (ABC's "Just For Laughs" is far more disturbing than funny), but in the meantime here is a humorous excerpt from tonight's #db chat:

[01:04] <Junta> Ku: so how did your dihydrogen monoxide testing go? ;P
[01:04] <Wes> oh yeah
[01:04] <Wes> CHEMISTRY
[01:05] <Junta> We must know whether or not you were successful in banning the use of dihydrogen monoxide
[01:05] <Wes> wait why would we ban that
[01:05] <Wes> we need that
[01:05] <Wes> otherwise drunk assholes who fall into rivers would live 🙁
[01:06] <Junta> Wes: Easy, we shove 'em off a bridge as an alternative
[01:06] <Wes> Junta: I thought we were talking about chemistry
[01:06] <Wes> that is PHYSICS!

Yes.

In other news, "The IT Crowd" is flipping brilliant.

So there is the cake, which mostly followed the template of a rum cake but included some notable recipe changes (insofar as I was following a recipe, anyway) -- namely the replacement of coconut rum with dark rum and coconut cream pudding with vanilla pudding. I also put about 1/4 cup of beer into the batter. Aside from the cake sticking to the pan a bit -- likely because I didn't grease the pan well enough (the icky feel of the Crisco made me want to vomit, so I got that part over with as quickly as possible; also note that I broke the cake in three places when trying to get it out) -- it turned out smashingly. I think in the future I'll modify my recipe to include more rum and sugar and forego the glaze since the coconut rum isn't exceedingly rummy and the glaze kind of limits the extra sugary goodness to the outer edges, but I'm still proud of my first cake-baking experiment.

I'm a little disappointed with my mother's reaction, though. I mean, I wasn't expecting her to be super enthusiastic or dance a little jig because I baked her a cake -- she bakes cakes all the time, so it's not like I expected her to regard it as a super amazing feat -- but the way she practically scoffed at it irks me. She'll grant that it tastes pretty good and that I did a pretty good job for a first-timer -- because it does, and I did, damnit! -- but she still sort of implied that my cake is inferior because I didn't follow a recipe to the letter (heaven forbid someone try to do something different!) and because it doesn't taste exactly like a cake she would make. In short, her response pretty much exemplified everything that I despise about her. So while I actually kind of enjoyed making the cake and will probably make another (or a pie, or cookies!) sometime in the near future -- and this is a ways off, but perhaps I will even send folks baked goods during the winter holidays! -- I doubt I'd ever go out of my way to make a cake for her again.

But maybe I should bake one for my own birthday next week! I wonder if triple sec would work well in a cake...

Towards the end of last week, I received a book -- Nightmare Academy by Dean Lorey -- in the mail! That in itself isn't terribly odd, what with my birthday being next week and all, but what is odd is that the name of the sender doesn't ring a bell. It was apparently sent from a public relations firm, so it's entirely possible that someone I know in the publishing and/or communications biz had the book sent to me as a gift through someone else, but I dunno. Or perhaps someone I don't know visited Scary-Crayon and sent the book to me for the purposes of a print review! It looks like it's in the vein of the Harry Potter series, so maybe someone wanted to see if I like it more than its hated cousins in the children's fantasy genre.

At any rate, please drop me a line if you had anything to do with the sending of the book so that I can thank you properly and stop pondering the manifold possible chains of events that led to the arrival of this book at my residence. 🙂

In other news, because today is my mother's birthday, I am currently in the process of baking my first cake! It should be ready to come out of the oven in ten minutes or so -- I'll be sure to take pictures and let you know how it turns out. If it tastes anything like the batter, it should be fantastic.

All for now, then!

Somebody stop me before I bankrupt myself!