Pangolin Food Review: Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Taco

Yesterday, I cracked.

I ended my long Taco Bell hiatus because I had succumbed to the siren song of it's newest terrifying creation: the Doritos Locos taco. This unholy marriage of the least healthy fast food with the least healthy snack food had crazy written all over it, much like the marriages of many famous American celebrities, but without the pre-nups and paparazzi.

I know what you're thinking: why even do a food review if you have these kind of presuppositions about the thing you are reviewing? Well, since I have had both Doritos and Taco Bell tacos before, I am biased regarding the component parts of the taco, but I have never before had them combined into some kind of gross fast-food Voltron, and I wanted to see what it was like.

First of all, the Taco Bell I got the taco from wasn't even a real fucking Taco Bell. It was a damn mall Taco Bell.

Taco Bell wants to have a party IN YOUR MOUTH MOTHERFUCKER.

 Yay! Balloons! Everybody likes balloons! Especially young moms who have even younger little meatbag children who will see them and start wailing like a corpulent feline for MOAR SALTY TACO GOODNESS, WAAAAHHH!

So I went and stood in line (NOT ME PICTURED, although I do have a shirt that is just as painfully orange). The line was all of 1 person long, and after that I went up to the counter and ordered 1 Doritos Locos taco in my preferred style: just the fucking meat and cheese. Lettuce? That shit's for PUSSIES and HEALTHY PEOPLE.

I also got 1 whole packet of fire sauce (the hottest they have), which is just barely hot enough to register on the scorched hellscape of my deadened taste buds.

 

Pictured: My mouth after years of hot sauce abuse.

Being such a simple creation to make and being that there was basically nobody ahead of me, I had my Doritos Locos taco in hand after all of 1 minute had elapsed. I took my to-go bag and sat down for an experience. Of what, I did not know.

The taco itself came in its own hard paper holster. This is actually kind of ingenious because it lets you consume your fatty, grease-laden taco without getting any Doritos dust on your fingers. Because as we all know, health and well being are SO IMPORTANT to the average Taco Bell customer. I'm living proof!

  

 That's so cute! They printed the paper with the same texture as the taco shell. It's like inception for tacos. TACOCEPTION.

Inside the paper is the taco itself. Note the neon orange hue from the copious amounts of flavor dust adhering to the "corn" in the taco shell. It's basically the same eye-melting color as the shirt of the dude in the 1st picture of the article. This should end well.

The first bite. The interior tastes just like any other Taco Bell taco on the planet: greasy, kind of meaty, the tang of processed cheese. The taste of the Doritos shell is actually pretty underwhelming. I was really expecting more out of this taco, although in retrospect I don't know why I bothered. Expecting anything from Taco Bell other than mediocrity is always a recipe for failure. 

I kind of detected the flavor of your run-of-the-mill nacho cheese Doritos, but it was pretty minor. I am guessing all they do is dust the standard taco shells with Doritos flavor dust (isn't that appetizing?) instead of purpose-baking an actual Doritos chip shaped like a taco shell. This robs the shell of all those little textures and ridges that make regular Doritos so good after you've gotten really blasted and have the munchies real bad.

FINAL VERDICT:

The Doritos Locos taco is a product that had great marketing and great internet buzz, but ultimately left me disappointed. I wanted to at least feel like my mouth had been assaulted by Doritos while I consumed my processed garbage food, but I couldn't even really get much of that action going. The Doritos Locos taco is at least 30 cents more than a standard taco, and for my money it just isn't worth it. Even if you have a craving for Taco Bell, don't get the Doritos Locos taco. It just isn't crazy enough to be worth your money.

2 out of 5 - Underwhelming like missing a car wreck after a traffic jam

 

Pangolin Game Review: Dear Esther

I meant to write this review earlier. Much earlier, in fact. But life happens, and I'm the laziest person on the internet. So here's my review, 1 and 1/2 months after my initial playthrough of Dear Esther.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: this game is art.

Not in the sense of "all games are art and this is no exception" but in the most literal of senses, the game itself is an artistic experience. "Playing the game" is a phrase that doesn't adequately describe the experience I had.

Click on all these screenshots to see them in their original size. The detail in this game is astonishing.



Lush vegetation sprawls across the landscape.



Although I did interact with the game, there was not a health bar, ammo counter, magic gauge, enemy, NPC, or HUD to be found at all. There were no online leaderboards, no time trials, and no high scores. In fact, there was nothing resembling the traditional definition of a game in Dear Esther. It isn't played so much as it is experienced. It may very well be the best indie game so far this year.

I must elaborate on this point of experience because you may be wondering, if there isn't anything to shoot, any people to talk to, any levels to gain, or any missions to complete, then why buy the game at all? Well, hypothetically inquisitive madam or sir, I'm glad you asked! The game is an experience of beauty and introspection.

Exploration is the key to unlocking the game's mysteries.

The experience tells a story. In this story, you are a body-less narrator who must traverse an island, winding your way through hills, shorelines, caves, and mountains toward a mysterious aerial beacon in the distance. Along the way, your character's voice provides narration. But unlike many games where the narration has to do with events or characters in the game, this narration deals with the protagonist's own life experiences, and the lives people never seen or heard in the game.

"Well," you may be saying at this point, "if I wanted a story I'd just read a book or watch a movie." But then you'd be missing out on the best part of the game: the absolutely insane attention to realism. All the game's environments are painstakingly detailed. I can say painstakingly because it must have been an absolute bastard and a half to cram as many environmental details into such a relatively small game space.

The most beautiful indie game I've yet played.

Everything sounds like it should. There are no out-of-place sound effects in the entire game. Poignant piano music flows over your narrative as you pass from one place to the next. The story is excellently written, with prose that flows together like the environment you walk through in the game. The protagonist is an Englishman, middle aged, who speaks in the tone of a man somehow profoundly aware of things in spite of himself. As you find out more about the island, you find out more about your character.

His voice is your only company.

The visuals are nothing short of jaw-dropping. You could be forgiven for thinking you were playing the latest AAA game from a major publisher, even though the game only cost at most a few hundred thousand dollars to make. As you wind your way through cold, sandy beaches and up crumbling stone stairways, through weed- and flower-strewn fields, into dank caves dripping with water and studded with crystals and bio-luminescent fungi, and along candle-lit paths under a semi-clouded starry sky, you will feel as though every single bit of the game could exist in real life, in some far-flung part of the North Sea or the archipelago islands of Cape Horn.

No buttons to push. No switches to find. Nothing to kill. Only the story remains.

The final effect of this radical attention to detail is somehow ethereal and concrete. I felt as though the location could be visited if I just took the time to find it. Yet the narrative and, for a game, unsettling lack of interaction combined to produce a dream-like quality to things. It is beautiful and unreal, yet as accessible and tangible as the keyboard I'm typing on now.

The best way I can describe it is if the folks at Cyan (makers of the Myst games) decided to make an indie game. You feel very alone, yet through the protagonist's descriptions, very aware of other people unseen in the game. This solitude is even stronger than that in the Myst games, which was passive and had other characters doing the speaking and writing while you said nothing. The solitude in Dear Esther is active, and self-realized.

Dear Esther is currently on Steam for $9.99. It is a bargain, in my opinion, because I would have paid double that for the new game experience I received in return. It runs on Valve's Source engine, so pretty much any machine will handle it well, and for an indie game it is possibly the most impressive I've ever seen. Once you finish this review, go fire up Steam and buy this game. Shut your door, turn down your lights, and turn up your speakers. You'll get sucked into an ephemeral landscape and into an equally ephemeral story.

And you'll love every minute.

Youtube: Cesspool of Crazy People

I have a love/hate relationship with Youtube. I love the fact that so many people can share videos that make me laugh, cringe, or stare in awe. I love that it is a platform that gives voices to people whose governments would rather silence them. I love that it was the first major service to drag internet video out of the dark ages and shove it into the homes of everybody who has an internet connection. It has let me see more insane, beautiful, twisted, and amusing videos than I have seen in the entirety of my previous life up until Youtube was invented.

But holy shit on a stick, I HATE the idiots that lurk there.

You know the ones I mean. The people who post a million videos of compression artifacts in Google Earth images and claim they found Atlantis, or a UFO, or Bigfoot fucking Elvis Presley while zombie JFK picks his own brains out of the gunshot wound in his skull and eats them (his brains, not Bigfoot fucking Elvis Presley). I hate the people who comment (this constitutes basically everybody, by the way) on things in a manner that would be judged as incredibly retarded, even by autistic basement-dwelling 40 year olds with a proclivity towards videos of girls crushing small animals for sexual gratification.

Most of all, I hate the fact that the worst videos of all may have been viewed by millions, even tens of millions, of hapless people. These folks, intentionally or accidentally, end up subjecting themselves to a grainy, 240p, 8-second portrait-mode cell phone clip of a dreadlocked homeless person mumbling under a freeway in a vaguely threatening manner towards the videographer. It's not funny at all, and yet somehow it has been seen by millions of people due to misleading video titles ("OMG HOBO TOTALLY GOES APESHIT") or a single decent preview frame out of thousands that suck.

I want to make the people who put up misleading preview pictures and titles watch their own videos, on loop, with their eyes held open Clockwork Orange-style, until they end their own lives by filing their brain stem off with a rusty cheese grater.

If you stumble into the crazy section of Youtube, you'll know it. It's like walking into a bad part of town, and you don't know exactly where you crossed the line but you definitely know that some heroin addict could jump out of a dark alleyway at any moment and threaten to stab you with an HIV-infected needle unless you give him all your money so he can mainline for the next few hours. It sucks.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Youtube makes me want to throw large portions of humanity into a giant dumpster, then shove said dumpster into the marianas trench until the whole thing is crushed down to the size of a coffee cup. So not that different of a feeling from most other human activity, really.

ISN'T THE INTERNET FUN?!!?!!

H.R. 3261 and S. 968: The Great Firewall of the USA

WARNING: SHITLOADS OF TEXT AHEAD

I have 2 rules for writing my blog that I try to adhere to: no articles about politics, and no articles about religion. Well, today I'm going to break one of my rules and talk about the 2 current largest threats to the internet as we know it, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.

What are these bills currently winding their way through the US House of Representatives and Senate? They are legislation crafted by congressional numbskulls who have been sucking the giant money-jizzing dick of Old Media and Hollywood. The bills are designed to bring internet users under the controlling, dominatrix-like stiletto heels of major media conglomerates and content providers by essentially censoring the internet. OM&H are absolutely scared shitless of the internet, as it is merely the latest iteration in the thing they have traditionally been scared shitless by: technology itself.

OM&H were founded on media that was nearly completely and totally under their control. Back in the day, if you wanted news or entertainment, you either had to be at the place the news happened and see it firsthand, read about it later in a newspaper, or go to a live performance of a play, opera, or ragtime hootenanny.

Then somebody invented the radio, and holy dick, you could listen to that shit at home! Predictably, newspapers, theaters and operas freaked the fuck out, because they were afraid people would just stay home and never go anywhere to get their news or entertainment. Of course, this didn't happen and the economy trundled along its merry way. 

Then came moving pictures, and if you wanted to experience all the aforementioned stuff, you could do all the previous things AND you had the option of seeing them when local theaters ran the daily news shorts before screenings of those brand new Charlie Chaplin films. Again, the old media at the time went absolutely berserk because they were afraid nobody would buy newspapers or go to see plays anymore. This, of course, didn't happen.

The same general reaction happened with the advent of widespread TV broadcasts, 8mm home movie projectors, 8-tracks, cassettes, floppy disks, VHS players, CDs, and DVDs. Each iteration allowed people to have more freedom to choose when they wanted to see or hear something, and even though there were always doomsayers in old media trying to stamp out the latest thing to protect their vested interests, in the end, common sense prevailed, either in congress or (usually) in the general public and OM&H actually made more money than they did before due to more people having access to their stuff.

Now, things are different. In the past, OM&H could move along with new technology, begrudgingly, because they still had some kind of control over the physical media it was distributed on. Want to watch a movie in your car? Buy a clunky in-car monitor and video player. Want to listen to Madonna's new hit single? Buy a Walkman cassette player. But now people can just take a rip of a movie they own, stick it on their phone or tablet, and watch it whenever they want without having to buy extra hardware. Only OM&H don't like the idea of transferring media among devices because it fucks with their entire "we control when you can do something with our stuff" business model.

The major Hollywood movie studios, the RIAA and MPAA, major labor unions, major game distributors, and major media conglomerates want you to have to buy a new copy of the same thing, whether it is a song or movie or whatever, for each type of viewing/listening/gaming experience you want to have. Want to watch a movie at home? Buy a DVD. Want to see that same movie in high-def? Buy a Blu-ray disc. How about watching it on your computer? Subscribe to a proprietary content service that only has stuff owned by that company available for viewing. Maybe you want to see it while you're waiting for a flight? Buy it from your phone or tablet's content stores.

At the end of the day, nobody wants to buy 5 copies of the same thing. It's a patently stupid idea. Of course outright copying of something you don't own in ANY format is frowned upon by generally everybody, but not many people do that. In fact, the majority of people, given the chance, will eventually choose to support the media they are consuming by purchasing it in some format. Just look at iTunes, or Netflix, or even videos on YouTube that have targeted ads on them. The media isn't expensive, but customers are still supporting it.

Most people want to buy stuff. But OM&H would have you believe that anybody who just wants viewing and listening flexibility is a dirty thief who is no better than a bank robber or burglar. You have to buy multiple copies of the same thing! If you don't, you're a pirate and deserve to be chemically castrated, beaten, stripped of your belongings, then locked up in a dungeon for the rest of your days.

The real issue with piracy isn't theft, it's an issue of OM&H not listening to what their customers want. Customers want to see movies as fast as possible now, and with digital technology there is no reason not to allow them to do so. People want to hear music on all their devices, not just the ones that have licenses attached to them. But OM&H are still desperately clinging to the idea that they can totally control where and when people watch and listen to things.

In a digital world, when it takes a half-second to access information across the world, this business model no longer makes senses. Instead of fighting consumers and looking over their shoulder, telling them "nope, you can't watch that movie now, the streaming license expired yesterday," OM&H should be saying "OK, you want to watch this movie, right? How can we make that happen for you so that you will have a good experience and give us some money in return?"

But they don't want to do that. They still want to own the digital experience, down to the last bit of information. They want to lock up all content behind paywalls, and keep it there indefinitely. If the company goes bankrupt or the service no longer exists, tough shit, consumer. At least they got your money. The one consolation about the days when physical media dominated was that when something went out of print, you could still find it on the secondhand marketplace. With digital stuff, even if you pay for it, unless you can back it up you are shit out of luck if the company decides to take it from you.

That isn't right, and it's why many people make their own fully-usable copies of stuff they already own, or download copies from the web. OM&H would sooner have these people shot than lose the extra cash they would make if people had to buy a new copy of Transformers: Michael Bay Blows Everything Up every time they wanted to see it on a new device.

Getting back to SOPA and PIPA, these pieces of legislation would basically allow any media conglomerate or content maker to accuse any website of posting links to infringing content, even if they didn't have any proof, and the US government would step in and put the banhammer down on the whole site. Potentially any site that re-posts content available elsewhere on the web would be within the crosshairs of this legislation. It's like trying to swat the piracy flies with a tactical nuclear bomb. Everything gets fucked because of a few bad actors.

The worst thing is that the legislation would reduce security on websites and break the entire concept of DNS, or domain name service, by forcing re-directs away from accused websites. That's right, the government would be able to force ISPs to prevent people from getting to any website the MPAA or RIAA doesn't like, and the only people who could get around it are the same people the legislation would ostensibly stop: pirates and hackers.

So the legislation is open to abuse, is technically unsound, and wouldn't stop piracy in the long run at all. But it WOULD cripple the openness of the internet and create a "Great Firewall of the USA" that OM&H could attempt to prop themselves up on, like a dictator clinging desperately to power to the bitter end.

This is why so many people are freaking out about SOPA and PIPA. It's an example of OM&H colluding with big government to keep their business models on life support at the expense of freedom of expression.

It's bad legislation, a bad idea, and bad for the global internet.

Go HERE to automatically find your state's senators and your area's House representatives. Scroll down the page a bit and you should see a list on the left side that has auto-located you and provided you with contact info for them.

Call your representatives and tell them to kill these bills. We've almost broken the back of this monster, and with just a little more force we can kill it for good.

Friday the 13th Spooktacular Horror Show of Terror!

It's that time of year again, folks. The time of year when a chill runs up your spine when you step out into the cold air. When the wind rustling through the trees may or may not be the result of witches flying through the air on broomsticks powered by heathen black magicks and the blood of delicious, tender unborn fetuses. The time of year that causes spooks, frights, heebie-jeebies, willies, scares, and heart palpitations.

That's right, I'm talking about Friday the 13th! Ooooohhh! Booga booga! Nevermind that Friday the 13th falls on a different month every year. If Hollywood and old American hillbilly supersitions have taught me anything, it's that Friday the 13th is ALWAYS scary, no matter what month it is!

For example, this morning, when I went out to my car, the air was... wait for it... REALLY COLD. Yikes! I nearly ran back inside and cowered under my bed in the fetal position, but since I do that most every day regardless of the reason, my reaction of getting into my car and going to work must have meant I was EXTRA terrified.

Friday the 13th began in the year 120 BCE in ancient Rome as a way to celebrate the invention of numbers. People especially liked the numbers 1 and 3, and since there was only 1 Friday that fell on the 13th every year, people thought it was super special, like a two-headed goat or a wine cask free from dead rodent carcasses. So, in traditional Roman fashion, people would put on their best loincloths, tunics, and other old shit, and go out and drink until they vomited. Then they drank some more, then had an orgy, then drank some more, then vomited, then had ANOTHER orgy (people had wicked stamina back then), and then finally stumbled off to their yurts, or huts, or whatever the fuck they lived in back then. Probably teepees.

The dreams they had those nights were typically horrifying, as the draining of everyone's libido, coupled with vast quantities of rodent-tainted alcohol coursing through everyone's veins, caused near-hallucinatory states to occur in the minds of the populace. This wasn't that different from regular evenings, but they partied really, really hard on Friday the 13th, so the dreams were extra vivid.

Over the years, people began to dread the post-celebration ball-tripping and the harsh hangovers that followed, and within a few decades, Friday the 13th became an event marked not by partying, but by seeing who could come up with the most insane hallucinatory combo. Some people drank until they nearly blacked out, then ate fresh cow dung and huffed animal oil fumes. Others were lucky and discovered mushrooms in the local hills that would make them think gladiators with snake-heads were holding swords made of fire and spiders and were trying to kill them. Most people spun around really fast in a circle, then smoked the nearest plant they could find. Most of the time this did nothing but cause profuse vomiting, but sometimes they would find a semi-psychoactive plant and begin proclaiming that they could fly "as the gods did" from the rooftops of their filthy yurt hovels. This was always awesome.

At first, the citizens who could come up with the most horrifying hallucinatory combo were usually labeled as sorcerers and promptly split in twain by the bare hands of the burlier revelers, but over time people realized that they would run out of some really awesome story material, so the mob executions eventually stopped. People were so bored in those days that anything, no matter how ball-shrivellingly terrifying it might be, was deemed good enough to be used in local legends.

Eventually, time wore on, and people's view of Friday the 13th mutated into that of a time when only bad things could happen. And so, some 22-odd centuries later, we come to today. People still view Friday the 13th as an unlucky day, and some superstitious folks go out of their way to plan major life events around the date so that nothing big happens on that inauspicious 24-hour period. I have arranged all the mirrors in my house to face the street, and have set ladders hanging upside down from the ceiling so that when I walk through them I will get reverse-bad luck, which I think might be good luck. Also, I put salt on my Yak's horns and made sure to dip my toothbrush in Vaseline, so I should be good.

Anyway, hopefully your Friday the13th will be full of fun scares, like finding out you have a freakish disease or nearly running over a busload of kittens! Don't let any machete-wielding madmen hack you to pieces in the middle of the night!

Holy Shit, I Read a Book!

I just did something I haven't done in years. No, not "finally bathe" or "eat something not guaranteed to give me explosive diarrhea 12 hours later."

Ladies and Gentlemen, I read a book.

No, not a comic or manga volume, and actual, "look ma, no pictures" book with text and pages and everything! And I read through it quickly as well (for me), finishing it in no more than 3 days.

The book I read was World War Z, by Max Brooks. Sure, it came out 5 years ago, but look at me, I'm writing a fucking blog for the first time this year and those haven't been trendy since about the same time, so I figure at least I've got my cultural lag all synced up.

I'd write a review, but I haven't reviewed a book in even longer than I've read one, probably since high school, so I'll just write a few brief impressions. It's a great read, for one. Not dense, very thoughtfully laid-out, and accessible even to book-averse troglodytes like myself. It's also well-written. The scenarios for the entire world being assaulted by hordes of the undead are presented in a surprisingly logical fashion, and I found myself not having to suspend my disbelief for anything other than the fact that there were zombies in the book. That is, admittedly, a pretty big part of the story, but hell, everything else seemed pretty realistic.

It's not insanely gory or violent, mainly because the entire book is comprised of vignettes, "oral histories," as the subtitle of the book puts it, of various people telling of their experiences throughout the war. So even if you aren't a horror fan, you don't have to worry about some kind of American Psycho-esque grotesque descriptions that will haunt your sleep for days on end. It is very action-filled, and the fact that the book shifts from personal account to personal account keeps the perspectives and locales fresh.

I highly recommend this book because it isn't a ponderous tome, it's relatively cheap, and it's just plain good reading. I'm no Yomiko Readman, but if I find more stories like World War Z, I just might turn into one.

As LeVar Burton used to say, "you don't have to take my word for it." Check it out!

NEWS FLASH: BIGFOOT DEAD

After months of searching through the hills and valleys of its native habitat, the Libyan National Transitional Council announced today that they have finally killed the Sasquatch known by most people as "Bigfoot". National media outlets showed a picture today of a bloodied bigfoot, slain after a fierce hand-to-hand fight with Mann Co.'s own Saxton Hale, who was hired by the LNTC to take the beast down.

Said Hale of the encounter: 

"Well, the beastie put up a good show. Took me almost 5 minutes to bring him down once I found the bugger hiding inside a transvestite strip joint. Looked like he was rubbin' one out inside a broom closet from all the gruntin' and fappin' noises I heard as we were sneakin' up on 'im. Ol' Biggie took off running once he got wind of me, but he didn't get too far before I took out me crossbow and shot 'im in the leg. 

After that all I had to do was run 'im down and pummel him into a heap. Ripped off Biggie's arrow-shot leg and beat him over the head with it, I did. Bugger managed to claw out a good chunk o' me left arm, but I shrugged it off and pulled out one of his eyeballs. Sassy got pretty bloomin' angry after that, spinning 'round like some kinda hairy ballerina until I punched a hole in his chest and ripped out his spleen. 

Big fella didn't stand up for more than a few seconds after that before collapsin' in a heap. After the fight I took out me ceremonial goblet and drank some of me vanquished foe's blood. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to resurrect a mammoth through DNA cloning and then beat it to death with me bare hands." 

Hale then jumped out of his chair and dived out the 8th story window of the building where this interview was taking place, landed on top of a busload of elderly tourists, and ran off in a bee-line through the facades of several office buildings before we lost sight of him.

Saxton Hale. CEO of Mann Co. Australian. Badass.

The LNTC issued a statement today on the death of one of the world's most elusive beasts: "Today is a great day for the people of this proud land. The menace that has stalked our streets and caused us to fear for our very lives has been vanquished. No more do we have to look over our shoulders at night as we are taking out our garbage. No more do we have to worry about our supply of delicious Jack Link's beef jerky going missing. Ladies and Gentlemen, Bigfoot is dead."

Celebratory gunfire was heard in the streets of Tripoli. "He's dead! That hairy bastard is finally gone! Where's my AK-47?" said one resident as she rushed into her kitchen and grabbed her assault rifle, firing an entire clip into her living room ceiling while chanting and dancing with her children.

No doubt the people of Libya, and indeed the people of all North Africa, will finally be able to sleep soundly tonight.