Huh… coulda sworn I did another public post recently. Oh well. Oddly enough, this is yet ANOTHER Domino’s post.

Boy, I knew they were going to screw up eventually, but not like this! So, I had epic craving for chicken parmesan sammiches and everyone was out for the day (appointments and errands). So, time to ring up Domino’s! Well, ping them, actually.

I kinda had a bad feeling about ordering out while home alone… sometimes what happens is that mother brings home dinner without telling me and… uh, yeah, that’s awkward. Instead, it’s Domino’s that screws up: they got the pizza right (sliced sausage is, in fact, quite nomtasty), but… well, look!

What is wrong with this picture? Well, there is no sauce for one thing. (I don’t mind sauce! Really! It’s supposed to be here, as is standard for chicken parmesan-anything.) Also… ham/bacon pieces. WTF? That’s not even an option in the sandwich builder– there’s only options about sauce, chicken and cheese load. Nothing REMOTELY suggesting bacon and/or ham. Um… yeah. Sorry to say, Dominos, but this gets you Boo of the Day, and BECAUSE this is the day before Yoshi Day, you get Double Penalty.

Partial boo on me because I shoulda checked while I was accepting the delivery, but it was soooo hot out and the driver looked like he didn’t want to stand in the heat that long either. Nonetheless, I’ve filed a complaint via Dominos’ Cares (corporate support) and if you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll see I’ve made a scene up in there, too. Whether or not they refund me or give me free pizza credit, I don’t care… I can salvage the sandwiches to make them edible (it’s just a matter of plucking off the ham/bacon pieces and I’ve extra marinara modules from Jack in the Box), but that this happened at all is very much boo. I really hope this was just some weird server bug, and not, say, some employee who thought it would be funny to pull an early April Fools prank on me. >:(

This is, of course, not a Boo of the Day without the appropriate BOO THIS MAN, so without further ado…

BUT!

There is a happy, albeit totally unrelated end. As far as I knew, this Yoshi Day was going to be just epic cake and me being lazy… but I’ve gotten 3 loot notices, and one of them is supposed to hit TODAY. (Slow UPS truck is slow. I’m assuming, therefore, it is NOT a cookie bomb, since those are usually classified as time-sensitive/perishable, no?) Hardcore yay points to neophoenixte, brendala and a_cha. :D Seriously, out of left field (and after today’s boo moment, much-needed) and awesomesauce! I promised a Skype-based unboxing for Neo’s loot as soon as he gets off work (unless I can get a Justin.TV stream going since it auto-archives…), but I’ll try to get YouTubes of the other unboxings as they come in. :D

So some time back, I gave Domino’s another chance after a hella-long hiatus and decided that they hadn’t changed all that much from how I remember to justify that they had indeed overhauled themselves to become as awesome as their ad campaign claimed.

And it would have ended there, but then I happened upon their chicken parmesan sandwiches, and holy freaking crap those are redonkulously tasty, so much that I would forgive their otherwise “meh” pizza. I could just… only order the sandwiches but I still need a pizza fix too, so I’m trying to fine-tune their pizza into something I could actually look forward to eating. (As it stands, Costco and Papa Johns are the only ones that send me into a “DO WANT, GIVE, NOW” nom-fury at the mere thought. Especially Costco. I would give them all my pizza money forever if they had online ordering.)

Pretty much, my chief issue is with the sauce, and even there it largely depends on what crust type is used with it. (as far as toppings go, assume sausage and pepperoni, normal cheese) Hand-tossed with normal sauce is barely tolerable, so this time I tried Brooklyn w/ light sauce… which behaves like there’s no sauce at all (which is not bad but, you know, it’s okay to have SOME sauce!). Maybe next time… Brooklyn w/ normal sauce. Or I could go in a completely different direction and go Deep Dish, like I did for much of my childhood. :P

In a perfect world, I could loot the actual pizza from Costco (or Papa Johns if I had to have sausage + garlic dip), sides from Pizza Hut and chicken parmesan sandwiches from Domino’s every time I wanted this kind of feast. Doable, yes… practical in execution? Not really!

In other news: Holy crap, February’s almost over already? That means March… which means COUNTDOWN TO YOSHI DAY EPISODE 27. If we follow the rules of anime, this would mean this is the first episode of the second season. Hm…

Domino’s Pizza. A name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I remember it was the de facto pizza store here for much of my childhood, since I don’t think Papa Johns had started building stores around here until about… 12 years ago? Anyway, it used to be that we’d get deep dish sausage+pepperoni on mondays, ’cause that’s when Father was off work.

After I moved in with mother in ’98, Domino’s kinda fell off the map. It was mostly Papa Johns and Pizza Hut. A couple years ago, Evil Stepfather used to buy up Domino’s when they did their 5-5-5 deal but that didn’t last long.

It’s not that I don’t like Domino’s– I’ve never gotten a bad pizza from them, I just found their sauce a bit much for my liking. Papa Johns got it juuuuust right in that department. SO! After quite a long hiatus, and having heard about their “overhaul,” I figured I’d give them a go, see what’s happened. Robert still stands by it, therefore…

Tonight’s experiment: X-large Brooklyn-style w/ Pepperoni, Chicken Parmesan sandwich and cheese bread.
Took a bit for the driver to get here, I’ll give him a pass since I don’t think they’ve delivered here before. :P Oddly enough, he didn’t come to the door with the goods in a sleeve… huh. Did the dood have one but took the stuff out while he was in the car? But everything was still reasonably warm, so I guess it’s okay.

Domino’s runs the Show Us Your Pizza campaign, and while it looks like they won’t show the disasters, they do… they just get posted on Facebook</a> instead. ;P They’re not currently accepting submissions but I snapped pictures all the same. (side note: oh god I can’t wait until I can get an iPhone, waaaay better picture quality than this thing)

I should have taken this out of the box. It looked a little odd. Thankfully, any fears were assuaged when I ate it. Protip: Don’t try to eat it like a sandwich, even if you cut it in half… the chicken pieces and cheese are so heavy that they fall out. XD Well, I suppose if you wrap it up in the paper it could work, but the bread is a little floppy. It is quite nomtasty, like eating a cheese+chicken pizza on french bread.

Cheese bread. Again, looks a little odd, and NOTHING like as advertised on the website (where they look like actual breadsticks) but not a dealbreaker. Taste-wise, it resembles the cheese bread that Pizza hut makes. It’s good, though I prefer the Papa Johns version.

…this is Brooklyn-style? Looks more like ordinary hand-tossed. Oh well, pizza is pizza. Omnomnom~
…
I like to think I remember what the original Domino’s pizzas tasted like. And… if they indeed changed the recipe, I can’t tell. They’re still as sauce-happy as ever, I see. Not bad, but not the “OMG WE CHANGED AND NOW WE’RE AWESOME” as their overhaul campaign is pushing.

Overall, I give these doods a B+, the + for the sandwich being very good despite being awkward to pick up and looking strange. I’ll be sticking to Papa Johns and Pizza Hut for the foreseeable future, barring sudden craving for chicken parmesan sandwiches.

—

I think, doods, I can finally answer the long-standing question as to which pizza store I prefer. While there are many local pizza providers… they don’t offer online ordering that I know of (deal-breaker, given my issues with using phones as actual phones) and often cost much more than the major chains.

Papa Johns would have to take the gold. I’ve never had a bad order from them, and their pizzas are just that solid– just the right amount of cheese and toppings, and they play well even if cold or reheated. They also get win points for bundling in the garlic cups, though I wish they’d let you choose to drop the pepperonicini (sp?) in favor of a second garlic cup. Also? Best cheese bread EVAR. Omnomnom~

Costco and Pizza Hut tie for silver, for different but equal reasons. Costco’s pizza is extreme awesomeness on par with Papa Johns, the catch being that you don’t get much selection as far as toppings goes (either cheese or pepperoni), and don’t expect to find sides there at all. Pizza Hut is awesome if you want novelty/experimental crust types (stuffed crust, cheesy bites, etc.) and they have an insane selection of side items. Also, OMG WINGS. Garlic Parmesan? Yes please!

Dominos takes the bronze. They occupied a significant portion of my youth. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just… everyone else is better. If you like sauce, they certainly don’t disappoint! And their chicken parmesan sandwiches are quite nice. But otherwise, they’re just outmatched by the above three.

—

And now, I finally log into WoW. Holy crap I’m late. XD

My iPod Touch is mostly for Twitter and some light browsing, but it’s a pretty potent little gamer, too. But I’m rather stingy about what I spend on at the App Store– if I have to pay, it’d better be something I’ll play more than once, even if it’s only a buck.

Enter Angry Birds.

Often plugged to high hell and given plenty of free advertising on TWiT, Angry Birds is pretty much as it looks– a bunch of pissed-off birds getting revenge on evil pigs who looted their eggs. You fling birds off a giant slingshot (new bird types are unlocked as you progress and yes, one of them is pretty much a Prinny/Bob-Omb). If you’ve ever played Yoshi Touch & Go, the concept is not THAT different– still pretty reliant on trajectories and a bit of back-yard physics.

All that for $1. Ya rly. There’s a Halloween-themed “expansion” out (it’s as much as an expansion as City of Villains was to City of Heroes, e.g. it’s NOT), which is also $1… and you get craploads of levels regardless of which version you pick.

If you’re not packing an iOS-based device (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) or an Android-based phone, you aren’t entirely out of luck. There’s a PC version of some sort in the works; whether it’s flash-based or otherwise is unknown. I would totally love to play it on Yggdrasil and his sexy HDTV monitor.
It’s also in the pipeline for the Playstation Store (and thus usable on either the PS3 or PSP). I heard there may be a Wii/DS version– and really, it would be PERFECT for those– but nothing’s been officially announced on that side yet.

You know what would be fun, though? Rovio needs to license the Angry Birds format out and see what happens. I’d definitely like to see what NIS would do with it. “Angry Prinnies,” anyone? Take it a step further and replace the slingshot with Etna holding a Prinny-sized grenade launcher. >:D

—

Pizza Wednesday, as usual! Only firing for one because everyone else is out for the day, so party hard! Bwahahahaha.
I have a free pizza credit at Papa Johns since I’ve piled up enough points, but I prefer to save those for when I order for the house. Therefore, Pizza Hut gets my money today.

Awesome kitty Kestine likes to rub his face on freaking EVERYTHING. Doorways, table legs, MY legs, box corners, and ninja laptop Dinah’s wifi parts.

In the case of the wireless-N card, it was just one facerub too many, because the fat purple end of the card snapped off and the card shut down. Thankfully Dinah didn’t freak and go all Blue Screen of Death, but her wireless-N card is now officially dead.

Oops.
I don’t blame Kestine enirely, though… old card is quite old (I think I got it a few months after I originally got Dinah) and it was starting to flake out. I’ve ordered a D-Link* Wireless-N card off Amazon (yay having enough rewards points to slash off half the price!) and also a Logitech lapdesk (combo cooler fan/speakers) because ninja laptop has been running VERY hot as of late.

For now I’ve fallen back on using the original onboard wireless-G… and remembered WHY I boosted Dinah to N in the first place. Wireless-G sucks! :P Actually, wireless sucks as a whole– mind you, this is coming from someone who loots podcasts left and right and at any given time is either running YouTube, Slingbox, Netflix, South Park or the TWiT Live stream– and I moved as much as my crap as I could over to wired mode earlier this year. Wireless-N is the closest to wired mode as I can get, and is the only form of wifi I’ll stick on a machine on this network ’cause I’m spoiled on my awesome gigabit ethernet that I use to pass things around inside the house network.

As for Kestine… well, he’s a bit frustrated that he can’t rub his face on Dinah for now. XD It’s funny that he goes specifically for her wifi stuff– the card and the corners of her monitor lid, which are supposedly where the wifi receiver bits are. I wonder if they emit some low-level EM wave that cats find interesting enough to facerub?

* = old router and wireless-N card were Linksys (obtained at the same time), new router is D-Link, which has been AWESOME thus far, so may as well go D-Link for the card too.

Bigger is still better: Pizza Wednesday, doods. The weekly tossup between Pizza Hut and Papa Johns is complicated a little more this time around; the former rolled out a new event pizza type (the Big Italy, yet another attempt at an extra large… dude, why can’t they bring back the Big New Yorker? THAT was awesome!), yet with the latter I’ve piled up enough rewards points to get a free pizza. Ordinarily free pizza would trump everything (because seriously, what’s better than free?), but when it comes to new/event rollouts, I gotta try it. It doesn’t help that I’m a wing addict. >_>;;;

Live from Azeroth: Yoshi now has as much of the t10 Mage armor (“Bloodmage’s Regalia”) as she’s going to get, and there’s nothing more I can pile up Frost emblems for… so any future emblems I’ll just convert into Primordial Saronites so I don’t need to kill my gold buying ‘em up to make the ICC craftables for my alts or guildies. :P Any future gear upgrades Yoshi will have to get through ICC, most likely in 25-man mode. (That said… while inferior to the Frozen Bonespike that Yoshi’s packing now, I want Halion, Staff of Forgotten Love since its essentially the WoW version of Planet’s Burden, Yoshi’s signature weapon everywhere else).

I will slug that Lich King in his noobish, ice cream-hoarding face, yes I will. >:D

While old man Phil would be next on the gear supply chain, I need to throw in Rei stat, to unlock the craftable leather/mail pants. I’ve, uh… lots of rogues/druids/hunters/shammies in the guild who could use those things and I’ve kept them waiting for quite awhile (with Robert on break, I’m the only in-house ICC crafter-dood, after all). And, of course, Rei can use ‘em too.

No Kon Do: BOOOOO. :( I liked Paranoia Agent (or, “what happens when Japan turns Law and Order into headmessy anime”) and Paprika (which I definitely need to revisit for the dub, hehehe I’m terrible). If you’ve no idea as to who this awesome dood was, do yourself a favor and watch either of the above. :O