A New Endeavor Under Black Skies

       Alright, so I've been cooking up ideas for electronic guitar effects recently and have been mustering up enough courage to start building my own pedals under the name "BlackSkyCraft".  First and foremost, I'd like to thank BeavisAudioResearch, while the site hasn't been updated in a long time, it has been a huge resource for me.  In addition to his website, I'd like to thank Glass Hero Amplification for his help in understanding just how pedal's work.
      With that having been said, I'd like to create an outline of what this endeavor entails.  My hopes are that anyone who is interested in the process of building guitar effects will gain something from this.  So just like I did with papercraft projects, I'm planning on posting:
(1) Projects that I'm interested in attempting
(2) How I plan on tackling them
(3) Things I've learned along the way
      This is a pretty big undertaking and I hope you all enjoy what you read herein.  In other news, I have not totally abandoned my papercraft projects.  For those of you who have been paying attention you'll notice that I have some loose ends that I need to tie up.  Over the past 2 years I've been rather busy with my work, but have also been slowly learning more and more about 3D modeling.  At some point I'd like to try and make my own models to papercraft, but we'll have to see. As far as I can recall, here are the papercraft projects that I have started and would like to finish up:
(A) Gabranth from Dissidia (Progress is coming along slow, I need to figure out where all my files are...)
and
(B) Bat from FFIII (I started this one in October for Halloween...more than half a year later and I'm still not finished. its a pretty low poly model, but I've been taking it slow.  I purchased a bottle of glue tonight though, so hopefully I can make some progress this weekend)

     Well that's all for now, I'll try and put together more information about the pedals I'm working on later.  I've already started one, but I think I was a bit too ambitious and need to go back to something a bit simpler to begin with...
       

Reaper or Souls challenge

    Alright, pardon the wait, I've been slow at putting this information up, but I wanted to put up some information on the first food competition that Mary and I have entered. I'm a big fan of the Diablo franchise, so of course when I heard about a cooking competition I thought I'd go for it.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/13942445/take-the-eat-game-live-reaper-of-recipes-challenge-4-29-2014

   My approach for this competition was a little backwards, I wanted to come up with a dish that would be representative of the Diablo franchise.  Hindsight is 20/20 and I think I might have fared better if I had chosen a dish and made it more Diablo-esque.
  So in the end I went for a Mapo-Tofu dish and called it "The Arreat Crater". Herein I'll detail the process involved in making my contest creation.

Core of Arreat:

Vegetarian mapo tofu with volcano rice

Ingredients

1 cup of Volcano rice

1 pack of silken extra soft tofu

1 tablespoon of Mapo Tofu sauce (Super lucky brand works)

1 tsp of Szechuan peppercorns

2 scallions

3 large cloves of garlic

½ Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

Yields 4 servings

Preparation and Time to cook ~30 minutes

Directions

Preparation:

   1.)    Start cooking the volcano rice, the directions suggest that for 1 cup of rice, you boil 1 ¾ cup of water with a pinch of salt with the 1 cup of rice.  Once it comes to a boil, reduce to simmer and cover for 30 minutes.

   2.)    While the rice is simmering, we can begin the preparation of the other part. Slice the scallions and chop up the garlic cloves. 

   3.)    Slice the tofu into cubes as best as possible.

Cooking the Molten Core:

   4.)    Put olive oil into a non-stick pan and turn the stove onto medium heat.  

   5.)    Add in the scallions and garlic cloves and Szechuan peppercorns, let them cook for a little bit.

   6.)    Once they have browned a little bit, add in the chopped tofu and mix in the Mapo Tofu Sauce. I find it best to slice in the tofu.  The tofu will break up due to its extra soft nature.

   7.)    Let the contents simmer until the contents reach a gentle boil, and then keep on low heat while further preparing the rice.

Preparing the Arreat Crater:

   8.)    By now the rice should be complete.  Pack rice into a small bowl and press it in there firmly to make sure the rice will make a dome shape when flipped over. 

   9.)    Flip the rice over onto the center of a plate.  The easiest way to do this is to put the plate on top of the bowl of rice, and then flip it over, to avoid an awkward rice throwing matter.

  10.) Take the bottom of a glass and press in the middle of the dome of rice to create a dimple or the “Arreat Crater” if you will.

   11.)  Pour the cooked tofu mixture into the center of the dimple and if all is well and done, then congratulations are in order since you’ve just completed the Arreat Crater.

At present, I'm awaiting to hear from EatGameLive as to whether my entry has placed in the contest, but in the meantime if you're interested in checking out other Blizzard related food items check out her blog at the following link....

http://eatgamelive.com/

A Sleeper Awake

It's been a while, Wow! Not a single post from me last year huh?

I've been pretty busy for the past 2 years with some contract work, but hopefully I'll be able to learn to relax and get back to some papercraft.

I think I'll probably post other things that I'm doing up here as well.  I just changed the Blog Name to Lubdar's Craft Blog so we'll see how well that goes....
I've become interested in some various things that I'll post shortly, mostly arts and crafts and a little electronics that I'm trying out.  I'll keep everyone and anyone posted out there...