Posts

Diabetes-Friendly Orange Julius Clone!

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  One of the things I've missed the most after being diagnosed with the 'beetus is a good old-fashioned Orange Julius! I used to love these things - Orange Julius, Strawberry Julius, of course with a banana in it. For years I've wondered how I could get one without spiking my blood sugar, and that, of course, led me to develop a sugar-free recipe. I'm 99% sure this is accurate in terms of flavor and texture.  Note that this recipe contains a raw egg. If you are concerned about consuming raw eggs, you can substitute  pasteurized egg whites or egg beaters  instead. Also, it does contain milk so it's not completely sugar-free (a cup of 2% milk has about 12g of sugar from the lactose).  I expect substituting 2 packets of  strawberry drink mix  would work to create a functional strawberry Julius, but it might taste more "artificial" than actual strawberry puree would. Likewise, you can add a half banana to it if you like but that will certainly up the carb coun

Star Wars and Me: Re-Watching The Force Awakens

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 Let me preface this by saying if you hated the Prequels or Sequels I don't care and I don't want to hear from you about it. Kindly scroll on past. If your comments are anti-prequel or anti-sequel, I WILL delete your comments without responding. They won't even be approved to show up on the blog. Now, that being said... I will NEVER forget how excited I was when the fanfare kicked up on December 18, 2015, at around 7:30 PM as I sat in the theater with my good friend Erika after a 24-hour marathon of all 6 prior Star Wars films, and that title: "EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS" scrolled up the screen.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that moment was one of the greatest, most exciting times in my life. Now, my wedding day notwithstanding (which naturally stands head and shoulders above all others) the only other time I felt anything matching that level of anticipation was when the lights went down for  The Rise of Skywalker. But we'll get to that in a moment.

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN - 5 Days Left on the Night Companion Kickstarter!

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  Happy Monday, everyone! I considered posting a link to the video for that song, but I decided not to. You're welcome for that, by the way. But in all seriousness, here we go, folks! 5 days left to go on the Kickstarter so we're in the final push! We've had that odd back-and-forth you get in the middle of every campaign where we gain, then we lose. Let's see if we can actually push this sucker over the top and unlock a couple more stretch goals. We had a great start; now let's roar across the finish line for a fantastic end! We didn't quite hit that last backer challenge, BUT I am leaving the raffle of a LEATHER copy of the Night Shift: VSW core rules on the table--if we make $6,500 by the end of the campaign, one lucky poster who is in at the $60 and higher level, will win one of the very last leatherbound copies. To see what it looks like, check out the "a few words from Jason" video on the front page. In short, it's blood-red leather wi

The Night Companion is LIVE ON KICKSTARTER!

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  We Are LIVE! Well, folks, we launched this morning and are ROCKETING towards funding on day one! If we can make it, that would be an amazing birthday present for me. I'm thrilled to see it doing so well, and hope we can keep the momentum going. As a reminder, here's what you can expect from the book... They Walk Beside You in the Night... The Night Companion  is the first sourcebook for the Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Role Playing Game, the old-school RPG of Chosen Ones, Witches, Survivors, Psychics, and Something Weird. Within its pages, you will find: Four new character classes: the Divine Warrior, the Mystic Martial Artist, the Psychic Gunslinger, and the Spirit Rider Rules for playing supernatural species including Celestials, Driven, Ghouls, Infernals, Lycanthropes, and Vampires, expanding upon the "Supernatural Race" option in the core rulebook New options for generating ability scores for normal, gritty, and cinematic games Rules to convert

Coming Soon: The Night Companion for Night Shift: VSW

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   They Walk Beside You in the Night... The Night Companion  is the first sourcebook for the Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars Role Playing Game, the old-school RPG of Chosen Ones, Witches, Survivors, Psychics, and Something Weird. Within its pages, you will find: Four new character classes: the Divine Warrior, the Mystic Martial Artist, the Psychic Gunslinger, and the Spirit Rider Rules for playing supernatural species including Celestials, Driven, Ghouls, Infernals, Lycanthropes, and Vampires, expanding upon the "Supernatural Race" option in the core rulebook New options for generating ability scores for normal, gritty, and cinematic games Rules to convert your game from class-and-level to entirely point-buy An alternate Alignment system focused on good, evil, light, and dark Guidelines to convert your game to a unified mechanic: both d20-based and percentile-based options are covered Enhanced combat rules: variable weapon damage, range increments, weapon class

Elf Lair Games at Gary Con

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 Elf Lair Games is at Gary Con! Hey, folks, Elf Lair Games is at Ethereal Gary Con XIII , and yours truly is a convention special guest. Of course, I'm also still a Troll Lord Games guy so I'm involved with their stuff as well. Check the graphic below to see all of our events (you may need to click the image, then right click and "open image in new tab" to see it full sized). I am involved with running 2 of our events and will be a guest on the following panels: GM Tricks of the Trade - Thursday at 4 PM CST Greyhawk DM's Round Table - Thursday at 7 PM CST TLG Selling Games, Now and Then - Friday at noon CST We're also happy to announce that all of our PDF items on DriveThruRPG and both print and PDF in our online store are now available at 50% off throughout the weekend in celebration of the con! Grab your copy of Spellcraft & Swordplay, Chutzpah!, The Witch, or our urban fantasy/horror old school hit Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars!  Visi

iiRcade: Classic Arcade Gaming with an app store!

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Like many people in Gen-X, I've always wanted a real life video arcade cabinet of my very own. Something to play the classics like Ms. Pac Man, Commando, Double Dragon, Contra, Dig Dug, Q-Bert, Frogger, and of course, the ever popular Dragon's Lair. Certainly over the past 20 years or so this has become possible with MAME cabinets available on eBay and these days, even on Amazon, but here's the problem, and it's several fold:  Most of these cabinets cost upwards of a grand or more (before shipping) to get them the way you want them, unless you've got the technical know-how to build one yourself.  Quite frankly, half the ROMs you get on these things are illegal. Others exist in the gray area of, "They probably won't come after us for it, so screw it," and I am, generally speaking, against piracy.  See #1. With a MAME cabinet, even (and especially) one built with a Raspberry Pi, you need a degree of technical aptitude to upload and add new ROMs to your m