Robot Claw – Page 194 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Mozzarella Time!

January 17, 2022

KLS got a cheese-making kit for Christmas, and already used it to make some halloumi cheese. She did that so quickly I didn’t have time to take photos, so you can bet when it was time for the next cheese I did. Today she made ‘fast mozzarella’!

That’s most of the contents of the kit. It also came with a lengthy manual (you can make over a dozen types of cheese), a thermometer and a cheesecloth. You can also make butter using the kit!

The mozzarella began with a gallon of milk which was heated and then (tiny amounts of) most of the ingredients from the above photo were added periodically.

It started solidifying after the first few items were added, but once the rennet and calcium chloride was put in the process sped up considerably:

All told it was only about an hour on the stove before it was removed for the next step, at which point it looked like this:

If this had been a traditional mozzarella recipe the cheese would now be pressed for about an hour to remove the whey, but the fast version utilized the microwave to do this. In three steps it was microwaved for a minute and each time more of the liquid came out:

It’s almost done! The remaining addition was to stir in a bit of salt, after which it looked like and had the consistency of bread dough:

The penultimate step was to form balls and brine the cheese for 10 minutes. During this step the cheese cooled and solidified:

And then it was done! The three mozzarella balls are now wrapped and in the fridge, waiting to be eaten (by KLS only since I’m not a fan of this type of cheese):

She’s already tried some and says the consistency and taste are both good and she’s looking forward to using it in a recipe! That’s two out of two cheese successes from this kit 🙂

Chris Achilleos

January 12, 2022

Somehow I missed that fantasy artist Chris Achilleos passed away about a month ago. He was an artist that helped shape my image of fantasy worlds via the many properties that he created art for in the 1980s.

He painted the cover art for many Fighting Fantasy books, to the extent his style became ubiquitous with the world in my mind. Ever since I first saw it, I’ve been a big fan of the piece he did for the Titan book:

He was also a prolific artist for fantasy novel covers, including many ‘sword and sorcery’ examples that I devoured in my youth (and still do today in fact):

And while I don’t think I actually knew it at the time, he was also the cover artist for a lot of Target Doctor Who novelizations. This range of work would bring him renown in later years, and I was happy and surprised when we stumbled upon an exhibit of his original Doctor Who paintings when we visited Wales years ago.

Achilleos was the man who painted the iconic Heavy Metal poster (and the designer of the character Taarna):

And who did the cover art for the first edition of the popular Talisman game:

When I was a youth, I had an Achilleos poster on my wall, taken from either an old White Dwarf magazine or an issue of Warlock magazine. I also attempted to copy his art myself in my juvenile scribblings, and even used to sign it using his trademark A in C.

And still today I have two prints of his work framed and hanging on the wall of my home office. When I bought these from a dealer at NYCC many years ago he told me a few nice anecdotes about the man himself, and how (at that time, when Achilleos was in his late 60s) he was eternally delighted that work he had done in the 1980s was still appreciated. There are many great fantasy artists, but Achilleos has always been one of my very favourites. He’ll never know how important his work has been to me, but I thank him for it nonetheless.

Shellfish Mermaid and Suicide Gudetama

January 11, 2022

We recently obtained three examples of toys that expand in water. Have you ever had one of these? Do they work as advertised? Let’s see…

First was this shell that contained a cute anime mermaid! Here’s the instructions, handily translated by google:

Couldn’t be easier: submerge the shell in water and wait a few days. So we did, and here’s what happened:

That’s about 72 hours in those photos (and the weird lighting is because our kitchen light broke in the middle). As you can see it worked exactly as advertised, however the… creature that birthed from the shell is quite different from the packaging!

Oh well, maybe this one will be better:

What’s this? A Gudetama comes out of the shell and there’s a chance for a gold one?!! What do the instructions say:

Oh my god there seems to be a clause that requires the user to kill themselves – by hand no less – if something unexpected happens! It also seems to suggest we’d need 81 containers of water and there was something about mold collapsing! It was with no small trepidation therefore that we submerged the egg and waited a few days:

And out popped Gudetama! This one also worked exactly as advertised and the reward was much better than the weird mermaid. He was bigger than the egg as well, so he definitely grew.

If you’ve had one of these you know the instructions say if you dry them out they’ll return to their shrunken size and can be grown over and over. While it’s true they shrink, it’s never to the original size. After a week out of water for instance the (cute anime) mermaid would never fit back into her shell:

We even had a third one, which came as a Christmas gift:

Up to four times his size you say? I’ll spare the montage of growing photos, since it’s hard to appreciate the difference, and instead present this pair of photos:

On the left is immediately before the water, and on the right is after about five days of soaking. Four times the size? I’ll let you be the judge 🙂