January 2009 Archives

A selfish item to start out this week’s DSTW: Read my MacUser post. It’s fun (I promise), it was more time-consuming than my usual slothful output, yet right after posting it, I bumped it down from the top slot with two more posts. Humbly, as always, I submit that you might enjoy it.

Geek Out

Go cart. With its perilously high hipster quotient, I debated whether to include the Sixth Annual Idiotarod NYC in today’s roundup. But this event gets the GONY seal of approval because A) they admit they are idiots and B) any event that includes a scavenger hunt cannot be bad.¹ If you haven’t encountered the billions of wacky human-interest stories published about the Idiotarod, it’s a shopping-cart race for costumed morons. This year’s race takes place in Astoria, and it will be frigid, so try to design a get-up that strikes the right balance between wacky and warm.

Geek In

GONY’s very first flatulence-related endorsement. There are a few small games I’ve played recently that will eat up your time whether you like it or not. They’re too small to merit their own review, but too much fun to ignore, so here we are.

Achievement Unlocked: So you like Xbox achievements, eh? Well, have ALL THE ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE WORLD!

Puzzle Farter: You’re a farting goldfish. Either you already hate this game, or you love it. Your opinion is unlikely to change by playing it.

Lemonade Stand for iPhone/iPod Touch: I spent many a rainy grade-school recess calculating optimal pricing strategies in this game. And a bunch of sunny ones, too. Go classic graphics mode or go home.

The atrocious Lord of the Rings: Conquest was the subject of my latest review for the A.V. Club. (The review was posted Monday, but I forgot to throw up a link until now.) What a slapdash game. It was a fun review to write, though.

I realized yesterday that there is a “The” at the beginning of this game’s title—i.e., it’s The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. I left out the “The” in my review. That’s gonna bug me.

Over the holidays, I was rooting around in some old storage boxes and came across the May 1996 issue of MacUser, a now-defunct enthusiast magazine (whose target audience is, hopefully, obvious). Flipping through the pages of this magazine evoked an era of my life full of technological experimentation. At the time, it was understood that Windows was the platform of choice for hobbyists, but I always loved the Mac. I tinkered and created and explored on my Macs until I wore them out. By then, my dad was usually ready to upgrade and would graciously let me have his hand-me-downs.

Getting the latest issues of MacUser and its stodgier (and still extant) counterpart, Macworld, were highlights of the month. I liked MacUser a little better: It had a more personal style and a sense of community. I would pore over the pages, starting with the fun stuff like Q&A and Andy Ihnatko, and eventually perusing drier fare like scanner reviews because hey, it was there. At the age of 11, I was so excited to read that my letter to the editor had been published in the latest MacUser that I ran into my parents' bedroom to wake my mom up. She felt the news could have waited until morning. I honestly had no conception of why she was not beside herself with joy at my great success. (And FAME!)

This May ’96 issue is a fascinating picture of technology—and the technology press—in that moment. The Mac platform was undergoing a thorny transition from 680x0 processors to PowerPC. Mac users were parroting "Windows 95 = Macintosh ’89" to pretend we were not afraid of the unstoppable Microsoft juggernaut. And Gil Amelio had just taken the helm at Apple, succeeding Michael Spindler as CEO. It was a seamless transition: Spindler's handprints hadn't even disappeared from Apple's throat before Amelio started strangling the baby again.

Steve Jobs, chief of a boutique software company called NeXT, is not mentioned anywhere in the issue.

My favorite article in this edition, looking back 13 years later, is "Net Success." "MAKE THE NET WORK FOR YOU," blares the front cover, promising dozens of ways to get actual work done on the Internet. I wanted to see whether any of these resources were still around—in other words, how many of MacUser's tips still work in 2009? For each of the article's sections (except the last one about mailing list software, "E-Mail to the Max," because it was so terribly boring), I typed in each ofMacUser's supplied URLs to see what happened. I've outlined the results in convenient tabular format below.

1. Phone Home for Less

The MacUser piece is full of surprises, not least of which is the revelation that VoIP was already attracting interest in 1996. MacUser makes it the first order of business in this article. The three end-user internet telephony applications plugged in this section were all abandoned long ago, but one of the companies mentioned, VocalTec, is still around and doing quite well.

Quote that says it all: "Sound quality and voice delay vary, depending on the speed of your local connection, but even with a standard 14.4- or 28.8 kbps dial-up connection, what you get generally resembles CB-radio sound."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Cornell University's freeware CU-SeeMe	No	Server not found
VocalTec Internet Phone application	Kinda	Corporate "solutions" only
Electric Magic NetPhone application	No	URL goes to eMagic, a mortgage back-end software company

2. Stay Tuned to the News

This section is insane. First, MacUser invites readers to "spend $10 to $30 per month for newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News." That's funny, sign of the times, etc. But then the next enticing option is The Hotline, an email newsletter available for $3,950 a year. Four grand a year! For an email newsletter! Sweet lord. But here, we do get the first URLs that still work in 2009, with the Mercury News and Yahoo.

Quote that says it all: "Many publications are still experimenting with pricing policies."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
San Jose Mercury News	Yes	Now free of charge
The Hotline newsletter	No	404
Yahoo News	Yes
"The Daily News—Just the Links" news aggregator	No	404

3. Launch a Full-Scale Job Hunt

I expected to see names like Monster and HotJobs on this list, but apparently they weren't around yet.¹ Instead, the article directs readers to sites like JobHunt, which has a Stanford URL (http://rescomp.stanford.edu/jobs). The proliferation of .edu addresses throughout this article is a charming indication that in 1996, the Internet was still largely a product of the academic institutions where it blossomed into a global network. In fact, this article captures a Web that's on the cusp before dot-com became the standard.

Quote that says it all: "You don't always know who you're sending all this personal info to."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
The Internet Mall job agency directory	No	Redirects to domain squatter page
JobHunt	No	404
CareerPath	Yes	Now a subsidiary of CareerBuilder
CareerMosaic	Kinda	Redirects to CareerBuilder

4. Get Your Facts Straight

This is the only section that approached a 100 percent score on the modern-day web. Only InfoSeek gets a yellow square, because it doesn't technically exist anymore. But the URL does redirect to a search engine, so it's pretty close to a win. Speaking of redirects, props to the SEC web team for maintaining theirs 13 years later. I expected a 404 for sure on that one.

An exercise for the reader: Do you notice which search engine is conspicuously missing from the 1996 landscape? Take your time!

Quote that says it all: "For more personalized attention, post to one of the many Usenet groups corresponding to your interest, ask a question, and wait for the tide of responses."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Yahoo	Yes	Duh
Lycos	Yes
InfoSeek	Kinda	Redirects to go.com, which no longer uses InfoSeek search technology (uses Yahoo instead)
Library of Congress	Yes	URL returns a 404 but gets you to the LoC site; I'll call it a win
SEC EDGAR Database of Corporate Information	Yes	Redirect
Quote.com	Yes	Financial info site

5. Spin Your Own Web Page

Remember when puns on the word "web" were in vogue?

Quote that says it all: "Usually your service provider will let you publish a home page at its site at no extra charge, unless you're using the home page to promote a business. … For example, America Online's lowest fee for business owners is $750 per month, which entitles you to 24-hour-a-day server access, an e-mail link, and your own logo or photo."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Jon Wiederspan's Macintosh WWW Resources page	No	Domain squatter
"Guides to Writing HTML Documents"	No	Server not found

6. Take Your Database Public

What a strange section. I have no idea why this would make the top 100 things someone would want to do on the internet, let alone the top ten. I remember hating when the Mac magazines would write articles about FileMaker Pro and whatnot. It seemed like the most boring thing in the world. Because it was.

Quote that says it all: "Once you've started publishing information on the Web, one of the first things you'll want to do is unleash your databases and share that product catalog or Star Trek episode guide with like-minded people."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
XTML Excel to HTML plug-in	No	Redirects to AOL notice that personal homepages have been shut down, complete with enraged comments
WEB FM CGI software	No	404
ROFM AppleScript-based CGI software	Kinda	Developer's personal site still exists; software doesn't

7. Play Games

At this point, MacUser abandons the entire premise of the article, which is that you need to stop dicking around on the internet and get something done. They barely make it through six items—that "UNLEASH your databases!" crap was a squeaker—before they throw up their hands and include a slew of gaming links. I'm surprised they don't go whole-hog and make section #8 all about where to find free pornography. Publishers had standards back then.

The Outland URL is my favorite broken link of them all. It redirects to a page that not only glosses the history of Outland but also tells you what the Outland founders are up to now. Brilliant.

Quote that says it all: "If you've been killing yourself over games such as Marathon or Doom, you can take a shot at other players by logging onto such online gaming services as Sim-Net for Macintosh!"

Runner-up quote that says even more of it all: "Seemingly 'free' games can be expensive when you add up your connection time. It's also harder to cheat."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Sim-Net for Macintosh! gaming network	No	Domain squatter
GameNet gaming network	No	404; domain now hosts lame Flash games
Outland gaming network	No	URL helpfully redirects to "History of Outland" page
The MUD Resource Collection	No	404
Universal Access Blackjack Server	No	404, essentially
Games Domain	Kinda	Redirects to Yahoo Games UK
Happy Puppy Games You Play on the WWW	No	Defunct
The Action Games Menu	No	404

8. Seek Technical Help

I expected all of these URLs to work, but only one did. Really, Microsoft, you can't maintain a redirect for "http://www.microsoft.com/kb"? That's just lazy.

Quote that says it all: "Many companies are still struggling … to iron out the bugs in their tech-support Web pages."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Apple Tech Info Library	No	Server not found
Apple product information	No	404
Microsoft Knowledge Base	No	404
Microsoft support	Yes	Redirect

9. Take a Vacation

It's clear that MacUser shelled out a lot of cash for an old-timey photo library before publishing this piece, as it's absolutely riddled with stock photography of scenes from the 1940s/50s era. They are crammed into every nook and cranny of the page, even when the page layout doesn't accommodate them. I guess the original notion was that they're writing about the Internet, so all the pictures of people from the olden days would look ironic. Thirteen years later, it just looks stupid. The photo that accompanies the travel section is definitely the weirdest:

Photography aside, this eclectic grab-bag of travel links would be disappointing even if all the links worked. The Paris Beer Guide? "Mark Kantrowitz's Travel Periodicals page"? By the way, Kantrowitz's page has the most convoluted URL in an article full of ridiculously bad URLs. It's too long to reproduce here without breaking my page layout, so you'll have to click on the link below to witness its glory.

Quote that says it all: "Until there's more widespread use of the secure transmission features incorporated into new browsers such as Netscape Navigator 2.0, you may be forced to settle the fees via fax or phone."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Internet Solutions' rec.travel Library	No	Server not found
The Hotel Anywhere! On-Line Travel Magazines Search Page	No	404
Mark Kantrowitz's Travel Periodicals page	No	404, essentially
The Paris Beer Guide	No	A fine guide to beer in New York, though
Hotel Reservation Center	No	404
Hawaii visitors bureau	Yes	Tourist information
Internet Travel Mall	No	Server not found
Joe Witherspoon's Industrial Strength Travel	No	Joe's ISP apparently not as industrial-strength as his travel page
GNN Whole Internet Catalog Travel Page	No	Server not found

Conclusions

The final tally: Ten links worked, five kinda worked, and a resounding 28 links didn't work at all. Even that exaggerates the success rate. Take out the search engine winners, and only four links worked. I was hoping for a better result, but this isn't a huge surprise. Even in 1996, it was frustratingly clear that the Web's most interesting resources were built on shifting sands—fly-by-night pages furtively posted on university servers, corporate websites set up on a lark by a guy in the accounting department who taught himself HTML, etc.

Still, it was fun to go through this quaint old article. The Web hasn't ceased to amaze—in fact, it seems to have more untapped potential today than it did 13 years ago—but the ’96 vintage awe has the thrill of newness about it. We'll never get that back.

Notice there is no question mark at the end of that headline. I’m not asking you, “Do something?” and twisting my face up like, “Arroo?” No, see, the way this works is that I command you to do something. And then I give you a couple options. I start with one that involves going outside. Then I give you a lazy one. You pick the lazy one 90 percent of the time, I know. But I’ve got to try.

Geek Out

A capital idea. The New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West) is cashing in on this Obama craze that’s sweeping the nation, recently unveiling a new exhibit, “Taking the Oath: The First Presidential Inauguration.” The NYHS’s artifacts tell the story of George Washington’s 1789 swearing-in ceremony, which took place in New York while our fair city was the nation’s capital. That’s right, people used to complain about “those fatcats down in New York” and boast of being “New York outsiders” until 1790, when Washington, D.C., won a pumpkin-seed-spitting contest and earned the right to become capital of the United States.

The priceless mementos on display include Washington’s inaugural chair and the balustrade from Federal Hall, where the inauguration was held. No joke here, that’s just very cool. (“Balustrade” is a funny enough word on its own, anyway.)

Geek In

Play with power. The Instructables people have assembled one of their most inspired features yet: Stuff to make with an old NES. It’s a great idea, not just because of Gen-Y nostalgia, but also because most of those finicky old Nintendo boxes are borderline useless for games by now—no matter how hard you blow on the cartridge. So why not chop up your NES into something practical, like an emulator-playing PC, or something less so, like a lunchbox? Yum.

Thankfully, I didn’t experience stomach trouble while under the weather recently, but I didn’t want to push it, so I made sure not to eat any Banana Nut Cheerios. My small intestine rebels at the thought. (Don’t even get me started on the large.) I had one bowl of these orangish-tan circles of artificial flavoring back in December, and that will probably be it. I don’t plan to finish the box. Why is Banana Nut Cheerios a failure? Let’s look back at Cheerios history first.

Cheerios was introduced in 1941, and it immediately became the choice of frazzled airport mothers digging into a grubby Zip-Loc bag for a bland snack that will shut up their crying, mucusy infant. General Mills rode the lucrative gross-baby-who-you-know-will-end-up-sitting-next-to-you-on-the-plane market for four decades before the introduction of Honey Nut Cheerios in 1979.

The product ignited a controversy, not for its content but for its mascot, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee. At that time, news reports stoked fears of killer-bee swarms approaching the United States. These swarms were widely rumored to be trained by special-ops divisions of left-wing South American governments, and thus the Honey Nut Cheerios bee was viewed as tacit encouragement of a new world order. “Honey Nut Cheerios?” said West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph on the Senate floor. “More like Honey Nut Cheery Communists, if you ask me!” But this was not a very catchy slogan at all, so the imbroglio quickly subsided.

Petty red-baiting distracted from the fact that General Mills had blessed our nation with one of the greatest cereals of all time. Honey Nut Cheerios is so, so good to this day. It has even survived a formula change: They don’t use full-fledged nuts anymore but rather almond extract. No matter. This is probably the closest you can get to a “sugar cereal” without passing irrevocably into the tooth-rotting zone, and Honey Nut Cheerios is better than a lot of sugar cereals, anyway.

The reason it’s great is because it works with the milk. A lot of cereals make the mistake of trying to be great on their own. They taste fine straight out of the box. But then they hit the milk and it all goes to hell. Maybe they become too soggy, or maybe they taint their medium with colors or granola mush. Honey Nut Cheerios, though, recognizes that it is one part of a team in the land of milk and honey. So while Honey Nut Cheerios tastes fine dry, when you make a bowl, the milk gives the cereal a magical glaze that brings out another layer of nuttiness. It’s awesome.

Banana Nut Cheerios has the glaze effect, but not much else. The cereal industry has been experimenting with fruit lately, specifically by putting freeze-dried fruit bits in the mix (cf. Honey Bunches of Oats with Strawberries). I don’t like these chunks of astronaut food in my bowl, but the fruity bits have proven very popular, so the cereal makers are taking a new look at what they can do with fruit. Hence Banana Nut Cheerios.

“Banana flavoring” probably raises alarm bells for most of us. It’s a tough flavor to describe, and also a tough flavor to replicate in the lab. Banana flavoring evokes awful banana simulations like the yellow pieces in Runts candy, which taste nothing like banana. Yet General Mills boasts that Banana Nut Cheerios is flavored with nothing artificial. Instead, they use “real bananas and natural banana flavors.”

I don’t know what the difference between those two things is, but the fact that they list both tells you that the following conversation took place at General Mills HQ:

General Mills henchman: Here you are, sir, it’s the Banana Nut Cheerios prototype. It’s flavored exclusively with real bananas.
General Mills middle henchmanager: This tastes terrible. Add some of that fakey “natural” banana crap.
General Mills henchman: Yessir!

The result of the process is a cereal that doesn’t taste like the familiar Runts fake-banana flavor, but still doesn’t taste too much like bananas, either. It tastes like stale bread from a recipe that included ingredients which don’t belong in bread. You know, like when your aunt says, “Here, I got this recipe for boysenberry bread from the health-food store! Try it!” And of course, it tastes wrong because health-food stores are always baking inappropriate crap into bread. (Ironically, banana bread is delicious, but that goes to show how irascible the banana is.

So that’s it. Three new cereals. To recap:

• Honey Kix: Pretty good!
• Cinnamon Chex: Mediocre!
• Banana Nut Cheerios: Bad!

As always, there’s no accounting for taste. Your opinions may differ from mine, in which case you are wrong.

No weekend post or new cereal review this week; I’m ill. See you next week.

You know that problem where the new year comes and you’re still writing the old year on paperwork? I never did that until this year, except instead of “2008,” I started writing “2007.” I think I subconsciously lump all the odd years together, in a bag labeled “strange, unpredictable, maybe a little boring.” Conversely, an even-numbered year seems new and exciting on its face. It’s not a tangible thing, just the way numbers “feel” in the recesses of my brain. Last year, 2008, was an awesome year for me, and it had nothing but even digits in it. For the next 11 years, though, we’re stuck with an odd digit in there somewhere. Try to persevere.

Geek Out

Hurricanes and matchsticks. The central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza) an exhibit of Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a graphic-novel retelling of six personal stories from Hurricane Katrina. Based in Brooklyn, Neufeld published A.D. on the web in 2007; it’s expected to hit print later this year. Tomorrow is the exhibit’s last day, so get a closer look at the work of a talented independent illustrator while you can.

Scratching an entirely different geek itch at the same library is an exhibit of match memorabilia. That’s all I know; the description on the library’s site reads, in full, “Got a Light? From the collections of Larry Cole and Joe DeGennaro: A collection of matches and match memorabilia dating from the turn of the century right up to the present.” I like to see collections of things most people would never think to collect. I mean, what is “match memorabilia”? Is that a fancy name for matchboxes, or do people commemorate matches?

Geek In

Go w young man. Recently, after reviewing award-winning text adventures Violet and Everybody Dies (pictured above), my A.V. Club colleague said he’d like to create his own interactive-fiction game in 2009. Sounds like a good project to start on a cold, windy weekend. You can download the games that won 2008’s Interactive Fiction Competition from the contest site (which also has info on the interpreters you’ll need to play them). Most of them are a quick play. Then, if you’d like to author your own adventure, Dennis Jerz has a bunch of resources to get you going.

Chex has been coasting on this nation’s goodwill for too long. There, I said it. Nobody ever wants to call Chex out because we fear the wrath of General Mills—so named because when you criticize them, in “general,” they will put you through a “mill,” if you know what I mean. (I mean they will murder you by processing your body in one of their many industrial mills.) But it’s truth time. Each member of the vaunted Chex Godhead—Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex—stinks its own way.

Rice Chex is passable, better than its reprehensible grain-brother Rice Krispies, but it gets soggy too fast. If you try to eat anything more than a small bowl of Rice Chex, the bottom layers turn to mush long before your spoon can reach them. Revolting.

It doesn’t even take a taste, just a glance, to observe that snuff-colored Wheat Chex is not meant to be. Birthed by a mad General Mills cereal scientist who was later indicted for war crimes, Wheat Chex limped into life with those wimpy squares, those tiny pores struggling against milk-induced suffocation—nature abhors this cereal. And so does anybody who eats it, unless you sprinkle a generous layer of sugar on top every minute or two. Then, it’s not half bad.

As for Corn Chex, it tastes less like corn and more like CornNuts®. It is an atrocious breakfast, and I’ll say no more about it. I will say more about CornNuts, though, because I just visited their website. There’s a picture of some cute monsters eating corn nuts, and this caption:

You’ve found the lost tribe of Stun Nroc. A curious bunch with but one obsession: CornNuts.

There’s a lot to take apart in that sentence. First, at some point, the name of Corn Nuts was officially changed to CornNuts. Think about that for a moment. Someone decided that Corn Nuts needed a “branding” edge over its competitors, and the edge was to get rid of that fuddy-duddy space. This means that on a laptop somewhere, there’s a PowerPoint slide charting sales before and after the name change. The slide is captioned “No-Space Initiative = TWO PERCENT GROWTH!”

Second, “Stun Nroc”? I’m guessing that wasn’t the longest brainstorming session in the world. This is the same marketing team that came up with the brilliant get-rid-of-the-space campaign, and they follow that up with “Stun Nroc”? What a bunch of one-hit wonders. Even I could come up with a better tribe name than that. In fact, I just did: StunNroc.

Back to Chex. The only reason we’ve put up with Chex for so long is because of Chex Mix. And what a mix it is. I’m not talking about the pre-packaged stuff, but the original homemade mix that you bake in the oven. Even here, there are problems. General Mills has quietly updated the “original” recipe to match their commercially packaged dreck, adding mixed nuts and bagel chips to the sacred brew. Go with the true original recipe, where butter and worcestershire sauce somehow combine to make three mediocre cereals taste absolutely freaking delicious.

At long last, this brings us to Cinnamon Chex. With a new cinnamon cereal, General Mills is treading on the hallowed ground of their own Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a cereal so potently scrumptious that it should not be sold to minors. Cinnamon Chex wisely does not try to imitate “CTC,” as they call it on the street. Cinnamon Chex is a unique cereal, where some of the rice Chex squares are dusted with cinnamon and sugar, and some are not. This makes it look strange in the bowl, but it’s an admirably restrained approach.

Cinnamon Chex does have more of a real cinnamon flavor than any cereal I’ve had, but I’m not sure that’s a plus. Literally, I’m not sure. This cereal has me on the fence. It has none of the flaws holding back the original Chex line, so you’d think I would love it. Yet it’s still saddled with that essential Chex boringness. Maybe Chex and milk will never be a winning combination. The cinnamon in this incarnation of Chex doesn’t stick to the squares very well, so the milk develops a layer of tiny red cinnamon flakes, like the cereal is rebelling against its liquid medium. Weird.

In the end, Cinnamon Chex is a solid C, like its brethren, and I doubt there will be a tasty snack-mix recipe to save it. If you want to try this cereal, I’d recommend grabbing it while you can. I’ll be surprised if it survives the year.

I did not expect, of all the posts I’ve written, that my pessimistic timeline of cereal innovation (or lack thereof) would become a hit. But it was the second most popular item last year (next to the crossword-tourney writeup). Within a couple of weeks, even the Financial Times was linking to it, a gracious gesture as they not-so-subtly lifted my idea.

This is not to boast—not entirely, at least—but rather to explain why, in December, a well-connected friend presented me with three new cereals from General Mills. “I’ll write them up on my website!” I said. “No,” he replied. “You must wait until January, when these secret recipes will be made available to the masses.” Wow! It was Geek Out New York’s very first embargo. After that, every spoonful of these confidential cereals was laced with intrigue.

With great seriousness, I set to testing these new breakfast options. Honey Kix topped the docket. I buy Kix pretty often, but it’s not quite part of my regular rotation. If you sprinkle sugar on Kix, it’s a litle too sweet. If you don’t, it’s a little too bland. I hoped Honey Kix would be Baby Bear’s porridge, upping the sweetness a notch or two to that ideal midrange.

Honey Kix hit the mark. I was surprised how good it was, in fact. The honey taste wasn’t overbearing, and thanks to the slightly harder coating compared to regular Kix, the corn puffs take longer to get soggy. (This is true, too, of Berry Berry Kix, which has an even more durable sugar coating.) Honey taste is tough. Honey Nut Cheerios, one of my favorite cereals, is superb, but plenty of other cereals have tried and failed. Golden Grahams, for instance, are disgusting. So hats off to Honey Kix for not falling on it face here.

That said, after my third bowl in a week, the flavoring did start to taste artificial. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to my next box. Some sliced banana might make it a little more palatable—I ate all of the new cereals unadulterated aside from 1-percent milk, for the sake of fairness.

In short, I’d buy it again, and while a welcome break from the enigma of regular Kix, the “honey” doesn’t wear well on repeated eatings. Pace yourself.

Whether it’s good or not, Honey Kix does, sadly, exemplify the problem I bemoaned in my original cereal post: There are no real new ideas in cereal anymore. The big cereal companies are re-tweaking their old formulas again and again. In fact, Kix might be the most successful and prolific cereal to be reinvented. Since its introduction, it has been transformed into (among others) Trix, Cocoa Puffs, and Berry Berry Kix. These are all great cereals. Honey Kix may not measure up to that lineage, but it’s still pretty good. There’s always a Kix to fit your mood, which is impressive.