Types of homemade ice

There's regular small cubes of ice. They're not too interesting. The ice that you get from ice-makers inside freezer compartments of modern freezers make either large chunks of ice you could definitely murder someone with, or small bits of stinky smelly mess of frozen puddle that you should avoid putting directly into your drink because belch! It's bad, smells like frozen vegetables that expired four months ago. The expiration part is not objectionable, it's the fact that it's supporting three different colonies of microorganisms that make one consider the viability of the ice freezing next to it.

I've seen bear-shaped ice cubes. They're cute and easier to take out than regular pans of ice but their ratios are weird and the composition doesn't feel right. The pesky frozen creatures hollow out far too fast warm up from inside out and can be easily compromised structurally. This is how you have a large number of sharp ice cubes and they will just hurt you so bad.

The storebought packs of ice in bluebags you can buy in any grocery store or gas station in the U.S I don't have any problems with. Roommate B tells me he searched for them up and down through France and couldn't find a single pack. They're likely a regional thing, interestingly I've found people looking for them occasionally in Kathmandu. It's possible my dad has become too American by visiting me twice for a total of two months hardly. Maybe it's becoming more popular in Kathmandu though.

Whiskey stones and whiskey steels are not ice they're frozen bits of...things...with presumably high specific heat capacity. The other alternative I've seen is those ice-shaped rubber thingies that are hollow in the inside filled with water. You put them into your drink to cool it down without diluting the drink. The problem with them I'm told is they start smelling and you need to be very strict with cleaning them and degrossing them regularly. So much work for so little. Possibly why whiskey stones and steel are more popular despite water having the highest specific heat capacity.

In some cool bars in Thamel I've seen cylindrical bits of ice with holes in the center. I never thought about how they were made until just now but that's besides the point. They're cool, I'd go back to whatever place that was if only for the experience of an interestingly-shaped ice.

Friend N, whose place I'm currently crashing in Philly before I head to Boston has two kinds of ice molds I'm amazed and fascinated by. The first once's a large silicone mold with space for four huge chunks of ice. Each one is large enough to almost not fit into a whiskey glass and heavy enough that you can't carelessly drop into a wineglass for fear of breaking it. The second one, which he recently bought is a mold for two pieces of ice, large and spherical. The top cover has a small hole to let the excess water come out. It looks cool and was apparently designed to create clear ice, though I have not found the ice it produces to be as clear as expected. And the spherical ice is a little underwhelming once you get around to actually using it since you're not using ice or looking at it constantly. Still, nifty little gadgets for the freezer!