bigstupidjerkface

Death by hyperthermia

2009-03-09T23:40:00.000-07:00

The link is to a Washington Post article about the phenomenon of otherwise good parents absentmindedly leaving their small children in cars to bake to death. It's not a pleasant read, but I think it's an important one. It's maybe a little easier for me than for most because I've long since accepted that I have an necessarily imperfect knowledge of who I am and what I'm capable of. I'm okay with not being able to know that I'll never be the sort of broken human being that small minds characterize as a monster. I know that's necessarily a fight waged and won over a lifetime, moment by moment. I don't think, looking at a case like Miles Harrison's, that he's a monster. I think he's unlucky, and I hope to never really understand the horror of what he goes through.

The article's discussion of a cheap, easily produced, unmarketable safety system is a clear snapshot of the kind of moral good that only a central government can accomplish, even if it hasn't accomplished it yet. People are too scared to face their own frailty, and they put lives other than their own at risk in refusing to accept their own weakness.

The Post article remains interesting over its entire length, and all of the characters in it are worth reading about. The most scarring -- and the most heartening -- is the story of Lyn Balfour, and I don't want to spoil it.

I ran into the article because it was linked by political blogger Matt Yglesias here, although he's mostly interested in the question of whether it's a crime. I think that's a very interesting question, but it's also the least interesting part of the article.

Oh, videogames

2008-06-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

Attention whore Tomonobu Itagaki (designer of ninja action game Ninja Gaiden and breast physics simulator Dead or Alive), quoted on Kotaku:

"I think the Pacific theater of World War II is a interesting topic," he said. "I think it would be cool to work with an American developer and do a game based on the Pacific Theater.

"I think it would be cool to do something like what Clint Eastwood is doing for that time period," he added, referencing Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima which shows both sides of the war.

...

If it turned out that a Japanese developed game about World War II was "too politically charged," Itagaki said he might want to explore the same issues in a game set in space.

Serious historical commentary pushing the envelope on what is still a sensitive topic in Japan, or giant robots from Planet Japan attacking the Pearl Harbor moon base. I mean, either way that sounds awesome, but somebody so undevoted to the idea of a Flags/Letters pair of games ("if" it's politically charged?) is probably not the man for the job.

in search of good supermarket coffee

2008-05-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

It was and still is the case that my favorite coffee beans are the ones that Blue Bottle sells me. However, I cannot be bothered to go into SF on a leisurely off day just to buy coffee, and I don't remember to buy extra coffee in advance at all times. You can't conscientiously stock extra coffee like you can tea (of which Lydia maintains a full and varied drawer) because the more interesting flavors decay. At approximately a week, maybe two weeks tops after it's roasted, you can't really taste the quality you paid good money for.

So it's important to have a backup place to purchase coffee, and luckily the Whole Foods around the corner carries a selection of beans by small roasters. Most of the roasters whose beans they carry seem to think that matching Starbucks for quality but operating locally and devoting themselves to fair trade, organic beans is good enough. It isn't. Shit, most fair trade coffee is from Latin America, and while I do appreciate a good Mexican or Guatemalan bean, I really have a strong preference for African and Arabian stuff, especially from Ethiopia. Really, I do wish ethically produced coffee wasn't dead dead dull. Somebody offer fair trade Harrar and I will get on board. I will be the goddamn conductor.

But the real problem with even well-intentioned supermarket selections of coffee is that the product has to sell steadily enough to not have coffee two weeks old on the shelf. Either you give up and sell a product that is so uninteresting that two weeks on the shelf will not degrade it appreciably, or you really need enough customers to make the enterprise work. For exactly one roaster carried by Whole Foods -- Barefoot Coffee -- it pretty much does work. Barefoot makes good, interesting coffees, and although the Whole Foods can't match Blue Bottle's "roasted yesterday" approach, the Barefoot I've gotten there has reliably been less than a week old, which is good enough in a pinch.

Coffee has developed a florid, quasi-embarassing descriptive vocabulary to match wine, and it's a fine line between describing your product to Volkswagen drivers on one hand and writing bad poetry on the other. Barefoot crosses this line with impunity.

Ethiopian Ghimbi
by Barefoot Coffee

Black velvet apricot, raspberry dark chocolate truffle
Sinatra smooth sexy thick and heavy body, gush of love
bouquet of rose, orchids, blackberry and huckleberry

I mean honestly.

Cookie Monster was a real person?

2008-05-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

I wanted to know who wrote "Bein' Green" (as made famous by Kermit the Frog), and apparently it's a guy named Joe Raposo, who unsurprisingly also wrote other music, for Sesame Street, Three's Company, and Shining Time Station*. He was a peripheral member of the Rat Pack and Sinatra was a big fan.

He wrote "C is for Cookie", liked cookies so much that his widow held a cookies & milk party in his memory, and was the original puppeteer of Cookie Monster. He unfortunately is not responsible for "Breakfast Time",written by Jeff Moss, as were "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon" and "Rubber Duckie". Hooray Sesame Street music.

C is for Cookie:

Breakfast Time:

* starring Ringo Starr and** George Carlin
** in sequence

My urban pride

2008-05-18T23:16:00.000-07:00

Let me show you it.

As of this Saturday, a wall at the end of an alley at the border of SF's financial district and Chinatown became home to the world's largest lolcat mural.

San Francisco is now the world champion in a game nobody knew was being played and nobody knows the rules to.

Resident Evil and race

2008-05-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

This is a thorny issue.

Last year, around the time I posted about Resident Evil 4 (about 5 posts below this one ha ha), Capcom put out a trailer for Resident Evil 5. If you follow games at all, you might remember the localized shitstorms that popped up all over the internet when people attempted to discuss the racial elements of the trailer, which depicts a white dude shooting and kicking a lot of black dudes along with some fuzzy all-purpose justification monologuing like "I've got a job to do, and I'm gonna see it through." Here's the thing itself:

Wherever the trailer was mentioned, the discussion that appeared was angry and useless. Despite the game industry's size, it is still the redheaded stepchild of entertainment, the one that moralizing dipshit politicians are most eager to scapegoat. We've seen it with everything from Doom to GTA for violence, and Mass Effect taught us that supermild sex scenes on a TV are okay unless the TV is outputting video from an Xbox 360. These folks are sick to death of legislators who pin blame on games because they're too cowardly to blame the bad parents whose votes they need, and scared of having gaming dragged through yet another media circus, so they're disposed to shut down any conversation of this sort with meme-laced vitriol ("instant fail" "you just lost all credibility" etc).

Also these are disproportionately (though not uniformly) privileged suburban white kids who cope with the subtleties of race relations by ignoring them. So now every one of these commenters is not only telling the others to SHUT UP, but they're secretly telling themselves to SHUT UP. Not only do they not want to talk about it, they don't want to think about it.

In trying (and partially succeeding) to find some commentary on the issue more mature than accusations of reverse racism, I encountered the term "functionally racist" for the first time, and failed completely to understand it. I think I understand it now, but I also think that it is a dumb term (basically, it means things which have effects similar to racist things, or are indistinguishable from racism when intent is not considered). I understand the motivation to latch these legitimate grievances onto a word as powerful as "racism," but "racism" is defined ideologically. Racism is discrimination based on race, not discrimination that happens to correlate strongly with race, and racist people are people that discriminate based on race, not people that discriminate based on other factors.

For example, there were people that opposed the recent immigration reform because, deep down, Latinos make them uncomfortable, and there were people that opposed immigration for other, completely legitimate reasons (worries about the effects of the guest worker program on poorer Americans of all races, for example -- you can argue whether that worry is well founded, but as long as it is sincere, it doesn't matter). It's unfortunate that the racists in the first case can conceal themselves in the rhetoric of the second case, but I do not think it is right to describe all of these positions as "functionally racist" just to make sure you've snared them all. I know "racist" is a really attractive weapon in the Butter Battle Book meme wars for the American psyche. That doesn't mean you should use it.

Anyhow, I don't think the Resident Evil 5 trailer is racist, functionally or otherwise. I do understand that a widely distributed video clip of a brawny, corn-fed white dude shooting scrawny, open-mouthed black dudes in a shanty town makes people uncomfortable -- I just don't think "racist" is the word for it, because I don't think it indicates that the game or trailer's creators are racist. That there are unemployed, moonshine-chugalugging cavemen in West Virginia and Kentucky who are buying a 360 for this game because they want to simulate killing black people is, well, irrelevant to the question of whether RE5 is racist. Racially insensitive, hell yes. And that is worth talking about.

I understand why they set the game in Africa. The staleness of the early games' smalltown America was of course the motivation in moving the games abroad, first to rural Europe for RE4. And producer Jun Takeuchi has said that he wanted to explore the origins of the RE zombie virus (which does make sense given series archvillain Wesker's established goals), so a move to Africa (home to the two scariest diseases to emerge in my lifetime: innards-liquefying ebola and persistent, unstoppable HIV/AIDS) is reasonable. Casting a character from an earlier RE game in the lead is also reasonable, on its own, given that most of the RE games draw from the same tiny stable of protagonists (RE4's Leon had previously appeared in RE2, for example).

Now, given that Chris Redfield, more than any other RE character, looks like a corn-fed, bluetooth headset-wearing Superman, these two things together probably should have given Capcom pause, and I bet they did give Capcom USA pause. As Japan is the maybe the most racially homogeneous/isolated of the industrialized nations (... Iceland?), it's plausible that this shit really just did not occur to anybody involved in the process until Capcom USA's PR department took a look at it and thought "oh shit." I don't think Capcom has done anything wrong. I think they have done something stupid.

The Guy Whitey Corngood Versus the Negro Hordes aspect of the game is easy to explain and hard to justify, but I've also seen some disgust or disappointment at the decision to set the game in a shanty town, and understanding why the game is set in a shanty town was actually my motivation for writing this post in the first place, so:

What makes zombies scary is their jealousy (they want you to be dead like them), their steadfastness (you cannot negotiate with zombies because they are zombies*), and their multitudes. They cannot be stopped with anything but bullets, they outnumber your bullets, and they are everywhere you turn. The non-negotiability of enemies has been with us since Space Invaders, and RE4's ammo rationing is so perfect as to be exquisite, so the way forward is in not knowing where the next zombie threat will appear.

The earlier RE games, from what I played of RE1 and what I've seen in footage of the others, seem much more spatially confined than RE4's village environment. Confinement is unnerving at first, but RE4's open spaces are even scarier, especially with RE4's move of the camera perspective from the omnicient (overhead) to the personal (over Leon's shoulder). You can hear that chainsaw, but you can't see it. It might be behind you, or just around that bend, or really anywhere except where you're looking right now. RE4 effectively dovetails fear of the unseen with fear of the undead, without resorting to wishy-washy bullshit like ghosts, by limiting your perspective and moving you into open environments. It understands that not knowing is scary.

It also, unfortunately, means that a lot of time is spent in daylight, where zombies in front of you are plainly visible. So how do you reconcile the fear of open spaces with the fear of not being able to see? Well, with night, sure, and night falls in the second chapter of Resident Evil 4, but if daylight is not scary and night is, we have to choose between fear and variety. Instead, RE5's creators realized that extremely bright light is just as useless to the human eye as darkness, and the game's big gimmick relative to RE4 seems to be the temporary blindness associated with moving from light places to dark and vice versa. So the game has to be moved somewhere very, very bright with unlit interiors, so that the player is moving back and forth, triggering the temporary blindness and momentarily unable to see the damn zombies. A desert shanty town. It's both brilliant and necessary.

Anyhow, I look forward to more details on the game. Should be a new trailer in a couple weeks!

* ... unlike in other games where you can't negotiate because negotiation is hard to program, bro

AA Tbl 4E?

2008-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

I signed up for the beta of TinEye, an image search engine, based on this graphic explanation of what it does. There was a week and a half between signing up and being accepted into the beta, so I apologize if my enthusiasm has waned somewhat. What it seems good at is finding the un-Photoshopped versions of Photoshopped things, or finding versions of a watermarked image with the watermark removed, or finding out where a picture of or by you is being hosted without your permission.

So far I haven't accomplished much. I found the worldly owl to your left. Also found a variant with slant eyes, buck teeth, a rice paddy hat, and the caption "O RRY?" That one I decided not to post.

What I did not find when conducting my ORLY examination was the QUITE RLY owl, which is more than a little disappointing.

A belated Happy Easter, all

2008-05-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

I do not recommend ECS motherboards, by the way

2007-09-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

My computer is busted. I can't get past the first black screen of jarble. (jarble is garbled jargon) (starting now)
It's all
"press DEL to enter setup , ESC"
and then nothing! It's frustrating!

Tomorrow I am buying a new motherboard, I think.

Anyhow, all of this is being typed on an iPhone, which got a recent price drop, as you might have learned if you've seen a newspaper. The price drop was reported ABOVE THE FOLD on the front page of the Chronicle yesterday. Guys, that makes me ashamed that I even know what a newspaper is.
The iPhone is a tiny little delight, though. It had better be for $300, right? Yeah well it is.

The ultimate music video

2007-08-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not even kidding.

Plan B

2007-07-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

It is hard to imagine any combination of events that would make invading Iraq a good idea in the end, but I would like to thank the BBC for making the best of a bad situation.

BBC's got a news story about a rumor that the British military has set badgers loose in Basra to confuse insurgents. For a rumor like this to take hold requires people who believe that when things go wrong for the British military, they reach for badgers. I want nothing to do with any military, never mind the Queen's, but I wonder if I could move into a career where plan B is badgers.

Anyhow, the real hero of this story is whoever is in charge of pull quotes for the BBC (see right).

Resident Evil

2007-07-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

I bought Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, and I meant to make a post about it, but I was too busy beating it on Normal ... and then beating it on Pro ... and then beating the Separate Ways bonus game ... and then beating the Assignment Ada bonus game. And now I'm two chapters into another Pro game, after deciding that the other bonus game, Mercenaries, was perhaps not my style, and I wanted to try dicking around with the Mine Thrower and Punisher weapons besides.

Anyhow, Resident Evil 4 is exactly as good as mainstream reviews and end of year awards and word of mouth indicated -- yes, three years ago -- it's ten out of ten sweet Jesus awesome.

It does seem hard at first, because it has to. If a game is going to instill fear, it is almost certainly going to be fear of losing, fear of dying -- that is what the player spends all of time attempting to avoid, after all, in EVERY game, not just RE4. But since that's so common a threat -- I mean, even goombas from Super Mario Bros carry the implicit threat of death -- Resident Evil has to demonstrate that it means business, by having you die ten times (give or take?) in the first hour of play. Even the regular zombies threaten to kill you on a regular basis, so when you then meet a guy with a potato sack on his head and a chainsaw in his hands, you scramble for the gun, kind of panicky. It's neat, what the game accomplishes by demonstrating that it can kill you easily. It sets the tone for the whole game. It's not that hard when you get down to it, but the game feels persistently dangerous, which is a nice feeling, honestly.

The tank controls (which do not let you strafe) make you feel claustrophobic, like enemies are attacking you from all sides. In fact they often are, although that's not the point. "Just because I'm paranoid doesn't meant people aren't out to get me" and all that, except in reverse, since in a game it's the feeling which is important, not the reality.

The Wii version lets you use a Gamecube controller for "traditional" controls, but in the 50 or so hours I've played RE4 in total, I've never been tempted to even try. The Wii controls just work so well.

It's an action thriller, kind of schlocky in a likable way, and despite being unironically lowbrow it's still one of the best games I've played. Definitely recommend, highly, to anyone with a Wii. I'm sure the GC/PS2 versions are fantastic too, but the Wii controls just feel so right.

Advisory: all the cool kids are seeing LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD this weekend

2007-06-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

Be advised.

Also, the recommended abbreviation is LF/DH, not LFODH or LFoDH. More generally, if you are a person who mixes lowercase letters into acronyms, you are a tool. I'm sorry I had to be the one to tell you.

Edit: Oh man McClane totally [verb]ed a [noun] down a [place] while fighting [person].

Idle question

2007-06-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

So do you think that guy in Austin would have still been beaten to death by a mob if he wasn't Hispanic?

Ladies and dudes,

2007-06-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

Please examine this image from the February National Geographic.

Apparently from the February issue of National Geographic: a map that shows which cities have a surplus of single men and which have a surplus of single women. The best thing about the image is also the most obvious (men love 'Pac, women love Biggie). It does make you wish there was more information available, about other demographic factors. Some folks leaving comments on the blog I've linked suggest that SF and Seattle are blue because of their large percentage of homosexual residents. As one fellow put it, "There are so many single men there [because] they haven't been allowed to marry." Of course, this overlooks lesbians entirely, which just makes me curious about the frequency of homosexuality in women vs. in men. It also makes me realize that these comments assume that "single" is being used in the tax filing sense, which is not how most people use it day to day. I haven't been single for five years, though I've only been married for 3 months now.

In any case, I'm grateful to be in a position to find this fascinating rather than depressing.

Dude gave me a headache

2007-06-09T00:29:00.000-07:00

Nobody told me -- presumably because nobody knew, and quite understandably -- that Dexy's Midnight Runners are secretly awesome, beyond their lightning bolt miracle pop song "Come On Eileen." Ryan, Ryan, if nobody else, you have got to track down their third album, Don't Stand Me Down. It is simultaneously freewheeling and stately. The track that (apparently) got pulled for a (flop) lead single is twelve minutes long and feels like five. Maybe it feels like seven. Well, it is a twelve minute song, you know.

It is gorgeous.

...

Echo & the Bunnymen's Porcupine still gives me the headaches it gave me when I was a teenager. Yes, literal headaches. This one, and also Mansun's Six. You all got any music -- or whatever -- you like but which actually causes you physical pain?

...

I've tried to play a very pretty PS2 game called Odin Sphere. It's just not very good, and so I quit. It has action gameplay too dumb and slow to be anything but dull, asinine item management masquerading as stretegy, level design that just barely clears the bar set by, uh, Rad Racer? There's an experience system and an item combination system, both seemingly there to try and convince the player that there is an actual game here. Best thing about the game is that when you load up your save you get a message that says "Directed by George Kamitani." Well, that's nice. It's nice to see creative folk get credit for games in so honest a fashion. Pity about the game. In retrospect, I feel like I have insulted myself by buying it.

...

And finally:
Stevie Wonder's Cat

Admittedly the joke is oversold. Still!

I have experienced a post-punk relapse

2007-06-02T19:13:00.000-07:00

Eighties retro coverage continues here on bigstupidjerkface with my first "I bought a real CD in a real store" purchases in two years, Return of the Roughnecks by the Chameleons and Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes. The former is something I've meant to buy for at least five years now. It's a best of album, and since I already own all three studio albums and the singles/rarities disc, the only new material that came with the package is the four song EP included on the bonus disc. It was the last music they recorded before breaking up, and all the non-reunion Chameleons studio music I was missing. Guys, I like the Chameleons a lot.

Kilimanjaro was one of about six non-Chameleons albums I was looking for at Amoeba and Rasputin, and the only one I was able to find. When I was younger, Amoeba and Rasputin were able to satisfy all of my weird musical interests. Those halcyon days of my youth I will never recover. It's Amazon or nothing for what I'm after now.

On the wildly unlikely chance that anyone reading this owns albums or even individual songs by any of the following bands:

The Comsat Angels
The Sound
Wild Swans
Icicle Works

Let me know!

Memorial Day Post

2007-05-27T23:23:00.000-07:00

Normally a holiday for fallen soldiers but, if you will excuse me saying so, death is death and sorrow is sorrow and if you die pointing a gun at strangers that doesn't make the people you leave behind miss you any more or any less.

I saw a friend's band play a brief, four song show on Friday -- they were opening -- and son of a bitch, one of them was playing a melodica. That is enough to depress me in predictable ways, especially with Lydia out of town and me alone with my thoughts at midnight.

And then, listening on Saturday to "In a Big Country," which is probably my all time number one

song, and with DJ headphones on and the volume cranked, I find out that Big Country's writer/singer/guitarist hanged himself. I swear I did not paste in that image with a morbid joke in mind. Well, the point is that if the person who wrote "In A Big Country" can find himself in a position where suicide makes sense, that is scary.

A year and a half after losing Phil, suicide still does not make any fucking sense to me, and I hope it never does. I enjoy coffee too much to not get out of bed in the morning. But I also know I've lived an easy life, for which I am grateful to everyone who loves and has loved me.

The further I get from Phil, the harder it is to remember the parts I don't want to remember -- Magnolia-era Phil, loosely -- and the easier it is to remember the parts I do, like him playing piano on a rainy day at Stebbins. Which is good, because it suggests that I will never forget that he was somebody worth loving, but the more I remember the good and forget the bad, the less sense his death makes.

If I had something else to say, I would say it.

"There's a kind of pleasing paternalism to all this, isn't there?"

2007-05-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the titles of my posts conceal links to external sites, and there's no visual clue unless you roll over. In this case, I am telling you, hey, maybe click on that link.

It's a video of a discussion between a very punchable guy from the New Yorker and the slightly less punchable CEO of Platinum Blue, which makes money by mathematically analyzing songs and predicting whether they will become hits (by comparing them to the kind of songs that have been hits), or by making recommendations based on what songs an individual already likes (and then selling that service to Internet retailers, not to the individual customer directly). The idea of a computer telling you what you ought to like prompted the New Yorker fellow to utter the post title above. For personal recommendations, how this differs technologically from Pandora I don't know -- and for hit records, I don't make a living as a record industry exec so I don't actually care.

It's Flash video, so you can't tell what's happening on screen, but the Platinum Blue guy feeds the computer "A New England" by Billy Bragg (kind of a masterpiece, for what it's worth), and gets songs by these folks in return: Pete Seeger, The Clash, Woody Guthrie, Morrissey. Which really is not too bad an answer to the question, but is also not information I would in my right mind pay for.

...

On a more personal note, I just literally threw out about 8 gigs of music I've had on CD-Rs, all of which has been sitting around, unlistened to, ever since the bloom came off the Napster rose, what, eight years ago?

...

And on an only tangentially related note, the sequel to Ouendan is out, about as good as the original (and a lot better than Elite Beat Agents). Of course, for a sequel, being about as good isn't really enough to justify a purchase, since it's already at a disadvantage for being less novel. It doesn't really add anything to the formula. It's a little more challenging, with a little less sparkle. It's a sequel.

Armpit success story

2007-05-20T23:06:00.000-07:00

Okay so it worked.

Pit Stank

2007-05-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

At this point, I can't remember what deodorant I was originally using.

Whatever it was, it was functional, even if not pleasantly scented. What I do remember is using some free trial "Axe" stick which was fine, nice even, but I fear that actually purchasing Axe would reinforce the idiotic way men's hygiene products are marketed -- as the obscene love child of Slim Jims and Girls Gone Wild DVDs. So I won't be doing that. What I did do, having forgotten the deodorant I had been using before the free trial, was ask Lydia, who was going shopping, to pick me up some deodorant, any deodorant, as long as it wasn't an antiperspirant because those have aluminum and I've developed kind of a tinfoil hat thing regarding aluminum powder antiperspirant. Never mind why. Blessed girl, she bought me deodorant, and what she bought was Speed Stick.

And Speed Stick seems not to work. I realize we are dealing with individual body chemistries here, and no one product is going to be the best fit for all of the stinky dudes in the world, and not even all the stinky white dudes of mixed western European descent. I know that I can only speak for myself here. All I can say is that after I shower my pits smell like Speed Stick and four hours later they smell like BO and Speed Stick. Does not work.

This weekend I received a sudden, unprompted, sincere, and quite welcome recommendation for a deodorant by Anthony Logistics, a line of pricier (read: not 3 for $2 at Walgreen's) hygiene/grooming products which are admittedly girly, if only in that somebody who pays for them presumably has some conscious thought applied to their appearance and is therefore in danger of losing their BMBC (Bros Manly Bros Club) membership. I've somewhat gotten over that, and am at this point more thoroughly embarrassed by deodorants that have flavors like Mountain Dew. You know, Orange Alert and Mountain Blast and shit like that. For some reason, I tolerate those names in my Gatorade and nowhere else.

So I am set to buy this Anthony deodorant on the strength of a recommendation I appreciate and do not credit only because I'm not sure that's something which is socially acceptable to do, if only because I would be broadcasting the mundane but indecent news that so-and-so has functional sweat glands. And Lydia informs me that this line of Anthony products is carried by Bath & Body Works and Sephora. Sephora is a cosmetics store. Bath & Body Works isn't that bad, but it's still pretty girly. I want to say, "Isn't Anthony scaring off part of their potential customer base by only distributing via such overtly feminine stores?" Only it's pretty clear that Anthony's demographic is a pleasant mix of (1) homosexual, (2) metrosexual, and (3) folks who have gotten over it. So I get over it, and I go to Bath & Body Works, which I apparently like to call "Bed Bath & Beyond" like I call Pottery Barn "Crate & Barrel" and 7-Eleven "K-Mart."

Bath & Body Works carries Anthony but not the deodorant. Sephora carries it but they are out. Asking for deodorant help is a novel experience. Basically you are admitting that any deodorant you could find on your own is too feeble to contain your demonic pit stank. It is an absurd statement. Deodorant is an item which I feel is understood as basically all the same. You choose a deodorant based on the price and maybe the package. Certainly you don't buy a deodorant, come back the next day, and declare, "It didn't work." Yet this is what asking for a particular brand implies -- either I am a brand-loyal nincompoop, or other deodorants have been tested and have failed to contain my demonic pit stank.

Of course, all of this is not something I'd noticed before the Speed Stick, so it's quite possible that it's just Speed Stick is the problem. Certainly the thing about the Axe is just my own narrow notion of how hygiene products ought to be marketed.

Bizarro death rapture for robots

2007-05-04T16:45:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered that, in Mega Man 2 (the official Best Game Ever), if you let Flash Man collide with you and you start chucking Metal Blades straight up, Flash Man will be bounced straight up into the air, higher and higher, like some bizarro death rapture for robots.

Also it has come to my attention that you can walk off the front of the jet sled ("Item 2") and recreate the legendary "Rocket Man" scene from The Rock.

"It's you -- you're the rocket man."

In summary, Mega Man 2 remains awesome.

Sumotori Dreams

2007-04-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

The adventures of Can't Stand Man and Can't Stand Can't Stand Man Man, finally brought to life.

I recommend just watching a bit first, but my favorite sequence starts around 2:54 (if the embedded video displays a countdown, it's around "5:20").

The game's website: web.t-online.hu/archee83/sumotori/

Kororinpa

2007-04-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

I think the best indication that video games have yet to grow up is that they're still 50 hours long and that's supposed to be okay. That's supposed to be normal.

Kororinpa: Marble Mania -- this is that new "guide the marble through the maze" game for Wii -- sure as hell is not 50 hours long. I started playing Kororinpa's main game last night and finished it today. It is not a long game. Good for Kororinpa, then. Game's got 50 stages, really, some of which take 30 seconds or so. Thing is, this is a game to be replayed, and this is a well-made game, worth replaying. I think of my own favorite games, and running times are as short as, like, 3o-40 minutes title screen to end credits (Mega Man 2, Contra), so I don't see why Kororinpa's brevity is anything but an asset.

Choosing between Kororinpa, Zelda Wii, Trauma Center Wii, SSX Wii, and Wii Sports, I'd say Kororinpa's my favorite, and I don't regret picking it up in favor of Wario Ware (currently next on my list) or Super Paper Mario (which I like less and less the more impressions I read of it).

Did anybody else pick up Kororinpa?

Micro Prompt, Response

2007-04-20T00:38:00.000-07:00

Might add photos later but no promises.

Prompt

What is so awesome about your Micro? The screen and compact size? Does it actually feel good in your hands? It would purely be a fetish purchase, since we have two GBAs, a GBA SP, and a DS, all capable of playing GBA games.

Response

Screen is great -- bright as the PSP or DSL, without the PSP's ghosting problems.
Size is great -- this fits in jeans pockets, cell phone pockets, or basically anything bigger than a watch pocket. If I've got pockets, I've got a Micro.
Face buttons are great -- as good a D-pad as Nintendo's ever made, and top notch A and B buttons too. The DSL, the PSP, and the SP all lag way behind the Micro on this.
Volume control is great -- the control's not an analog slider, so there's no accidentally cranking the volume to max. If you need to, you can hold the "decrease volume" button while powering on the console to start at zero volume.
Battery life is great -- I mean jeez.
Construction is great -- the metal feel great. PSPs, DSes, Wiimotes, Dual Shocks, and most mp3 players -- it all feels cheap next to a Micro's tough metal shell.
Holding it, playing it -- that's great, too. Looking at the Micro, in photos or in person, it looks too small to be comfortable, I know, even though it's bigger side to side than a GBA SP is. But when you hold the Micro, you don't bunch your palms up around the sides like you do with a Dual Shock. Your index finger tips rest on the inner sides of the L/R buttons, where the L and R are printed. Those fingers shoot straight out to the sides, not bending until the second knuckle. Your thumbs rest in the obvious places. Your middle and ring fingers gently brace the back of the Micro. Your middle fingers might barely touch. Your pinkies cup the bottom, also gently. Gently because the Micro is light. Only the two tip-most segments of each finger ever touch the Micro, and the middle segments never completely. It's so light and comfortable that a light touch is all you need to feel in control. We are looking at a 0-5% bend at the knuckles closest to the fingertips -- basically, whatever bend you happen to have when resting. At the second knuckles, maybe 30%, and maybe 30% again where the fingers meet the palm, although the number here increases as you move from index to pinky. Did that makes sense?

As a bonus, the matte metal shell means it doesn't feel greasy after a week.

So does the Micro lack anything? Yeah, there's only one speaker, and the headphone jack isn't in the ideal spot. So the sound is the weakest link, here, but it's not bad. I mean, no worse than the PSP, which has weird volume issues and, again, the headphone jack in a really spiteful place.

That's about it. Damn it, I got a Famicom GBA Micro for Lydia, I think she played it once, and she went back to her DS. But I loved it, and now I love the Mother Micro even more. The shell is just the most gorgeous red. It is, Game Boy Player included, even with the Hori Digital controller in mind, far and away the most comfortable way to play GBA games. Love it love it love it. The whole time I was in Japan, I only used the DS when the Micro was low on batts.

TOKYO

2007-04-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

Tokyo is kind of a hideous mess of a city. Actually it was a very nice place, but being there is like being the fifth person in a four person car, every minute of the day, hotel rooms and restroom stalls excepted. How was the shopping? Well, a little better for Lydia than for me, but I did make a number of purchases I'm quite happy with, including:

a lot of new boxers and socks, prompting a drastic overhaul of my existing stock
a new sweatshirt, two button-up shirts, and a vest

All extremely basic, and all to my tastes, and all from Muji, the Japanese chain whose full name translates as “No Brand Quality Goods.”

Ah, and:

a watch.

See, that red and green watch I loved, also from Muji (purchased in France – they haven't got stores in California), I broke after the wedding. Almost immediately after. Somehow I thought that because it was rubber, it was waterproof. Really I wasn't thinking about it, but after the fact I decided that must have been my rationalization. Anyhow, I took it into the hotel pool for some horseplay, and I noticed at some point that the band broke. I actually didn't notice until later that the watch itself had also stopped. Why the band broke then I really don't know, although the horseplay was probably involved. Anyhow, the watch isn't electronic outside of the battery so I thought it might be fixable, but since there wasn't much time in between breaking the watch and flying to Japan, and since I wanted another Muji watch in the event that the old Muji watch couldn't be fixed, I was resolved to purchase a new watch in Japan.

Unfortunately, Muji seemed no longer to carry attractive, simple, $30 rubber watches, and instead had a line of senselessly spartan and uncomfortable-looking $100 leather and metal watches. Maybe it was fake leather. I don't know. I kind of whatthefuckisthisshitted my way out of the watch section when I saw the price tags. Well, I did notice, later in the shopping excursion, that there were three lonely rubber watches dangling by the register, having not yet been entirely eliminated in favor of $100 crap watches. So I asked the clerk about them, only to learn that they were out, and as my Japanese was not good enough (this will be a recurring theme throughout my travel accounts) to come to grips with and subsequently circumnavigate his inability to sell me the display model, I kept the elusive rubber watch in the back of my mind as we traveled throughout Tokyo and, later, Osaka. We went to maybe six Mujis in Japan – Lydia, who had introduced me to the chain, being eager to find what was her own elusive Muji item in stock somewhere – and I finally found the gray rubber watch in Shinjuku, the boring, crowded shopping district which was otherwise my least favorite part of Tokyo.

I might still try to fix the old Muji watch, but as Lydia pointed out to me, the new watch matches the new ring, so things worked out.

But to cut straight to what you are probably expecting to hear, I also bought:

Sengoku Basara 2* (Japanese PS2 game)
Soukyugurentai** (Japanese Saturn game)
Mother 3*** Deluxe Box (Japanese GBA game in limited edition packaging and with a limited edition GBA Micro)

These were all the games I bought for myself. Once upon a time, I would have refused to believe that I would someday go to Japan and come back with a measly three games, one of which I did not even intend to play. Truth is that in the years since I got my first import games at Game Land in Torrance (a better retro game store than I have seen in the Bay Area, by the way), the Internet has made nearly all of my boyhood Forbidden Game Dreams come true. Between eBay and Play-Asia (and Lydia up and buying me Radiant Silvergun at a now-closed import shop), I've been able to find most everything I want.

I still was really looking forward to Akihabara, the legendary electronics shopping district in Tokyo. But, look, here's the thing: here's what Tokyo does really well that gets me excited: great food, electronics, Muji, and ridiculousness.

And here's what Osaka does even better than Tokyo: great food and electronics. So in my memories of Japan, Tokyo is that silly, crowded place with lots of Muji stores, and Osaka (which still has Muji and ridiculousness by the boatloads) is the place I actually want to go back to.

Osaka is the fucking bomb. I am drawing only from three foreign countries (U.K., France, Japan) plus Tijuana when I say this, but Osaka is the raddest non-U.S. City I've ever been to.

But before I gush on Osaka, Tokyo Hot Or Not

TOKYO HOT OR NOT

Shinjuku – 3
Ikebukuro – 5
Ginza – 5
Tsukiji/Shiodome – 8
Akasaka, averaged – 6
Ninja restaurant in Akasaka - 10
rest of Akasaka - 2
Harajuku – 4
Mitaka – 6
Akihabara – 6

* Sengoku Basara 2 is linear and uninteresting. The stylistic differences between (Capcom's) Sengoku Basara and Koei's Sengoku Musou (aka “Samurai Warriors”) are welcome ... the less dynamic battlefields are not. I plan to sell this pretty soon, and hopefully not even at a loss.

** Soukyugurentai is a Sega Saturn shooter which is was expecting to be great but not quite as great as Radiant Silvergun ... and that's exactly what it is.

*** Mother 3 I don't even intend to play. I bought it for the rare, limited edition Game Boy Advance Micro that came in the same box. Man I tell you, right now I'm thinking the GBA Micro is the best game system ever.

Thoughts on the new Zelda game

2007-03-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

Finished Twilight Princess. 40 hours and I hardly touched the sidequests. It peaked at the fourth dungeon, which had great puzzle design and an uncommonly strong sense of place. Beyond that, the dungeon's item was so gloriously entertaining, and so novel, and the boss was quite seriously as good as a Zelda boss fight has ever been. I wish I could play that boss again right now.

The game lost its sparkle after the 4th dungeon. Later dungeons reverted somewhat to the unfortunate Zelda(TM) feeling of an arbitrary sequence of rooms containing arbitrary puzzles, and the game jettisoned the story interludes that had peppered the first half of the game in favor of basically four damn dungeons in a row*.

* There was a great spaghetti western goblin shootout sequence somewhere in the mix, I will gladly admit (and fondly remember)

Even as the game got less good, still it remained good, and I would definitely recommend it to any Wii (or Game Cube) owner who wasn't already got it.

I think I prefer Wind Waker on the whole, but Twilight Princess, from just before dungeon 2 to just after dungeon 4, was pretty fucking phenomenal. The game's not going to dwell in my memories as well as Wind Waker, since Twilight Princess is basically a (really well done) retread of Ocarina of Time, already the most boring Zelda. Without Aryll, Grandma, Tetra, the talking boat, and the four hundred effeminate pirates that round our Wind Waker's cast, Twilight Princess is impoverished. But the one bright spot of character design -- Midna, this weird little imp helper demon thing -- is brilliant.

Anyhow, it's very good, the game. It's not a masterpiece. It panders way too much to the established Zelda crowd. I wish Nintendo would stop doing that, grow a pair, and maybe grow the market in the process. Here is a flat admission from the game's director that this game was explicitly designed to pander to existing American Zelda fans who were threatened by the cartoon look in Wind Waker. I guess it's commendable that he admits this. I don't know.

sweet zoological fact #3

2007-02-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

I know I'm at risk of branding this blog as an Animal Planet fanpage, but I am still reading The Ancestor's Tale, and I have another sweet zoological fact to report.

DERMAL DENTICLES
As the name suggests, these are tooth-like structures on the skin of sharks and other things. You've probably heard that shark skin is smooth if you stroke it in one direction, and rough in the other. Maybe you've even gotten to touch a piece of sharkskin! That seems like the sort of thing kids get exposed to in grade school, because it's interesting and tactile. Well, regardless: shark skin is directionally rough because it's basically a bunch of tiny teeth, although my understanding is that denticles were the evolutionary precursor to teeth, rather than vice versa. Anyhow, regardless of the evolutionary history, this does basically mean that sharks, already pretty much the scariest fucking things on the planet, are literally covered all over with thousands of teeth. Shit!

I am very amused by this gif image

2007-02-25T23:07:00.000-08:00

Follow this link (work safe)

Monotreme highlights

2007-02-21T23:12:00.000-08:00

Old favorite animal: killer whale.

New favorite animal: killer whale, but platypus is really cool too. You all know the platypus as that mammal that lays eggs and has a "beaver tail" and a "duck bill." Man, those are just the 4th, 5th, and 6th coolest things about the platypus. Here's number one.

Number one coolest thing about the platypus
That bill is super-sensitive to electricity. When other animals move in the water, even their slight muscular contractions generate some electricity. You and I can't detect electricity worth crap, but the platypus can detect muscle movements of other creatures in the water (then it eats them).

Number two coolest thing about the platypus
That bill is also super-sensitive to the mechanical motion of water. Of course, animals also cause water to move when they move, so a platypus bill can detect other animals both by electricity and by moving water. And since energy moves mechanically through water slower than the electrical signals, the platypus can compute its prey's distance based on the time lapse, much like we can determine the distance of lightning by the pause before the thunder.

Number three coolest thing about the platypus
The platypus gentleman has poisonous spurs -- the only poisonous mammal! The platypus lady does not. The poison is not lethal, but it is really painful. Together, this means that platypus gentlemen probably use their poisonous spurs in duels for the affections of the platypus ladies.

Platypus!

I've been reading The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, which has tipped me off to these and other choice animal fun facts. There is a chance I will be posting about dodos or frogs or some shit tomorrow.

Belyaev's Silver Fox

2007-02-18T16:45:00.000-08:00

I don't have much to say about this before cutting straight to it: back in the 1950s, a USSR scientist named Belyaev hypothesized that, by selecting for tameness, he could produce a domesticated species from a wild one. The species he chose was the silver fox, and it only took him ten fox generations.

Okay, now the textual money shot (thanks Wikipedia):

Notably, the foxes did not only become more tame, but more dog-like as well: the new foxes lost their distinctive musky "fox smell", became more friendly with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wagged their tails when happy and began to vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs.

And the visual money shot (thanks Wikipedia):

Probably right now you are either wondering, "Where can I get one?" or "Has anyone tried coyotes?" or "Has anyone tried chimpanzees?" or "Where can I hide about thirty chimpanzees?" And that's about where I am right now, too. ... Anteaters?

I got your second opinion right here

2007-02-16T12:49:00.000-08:00

Not counting the pack-in game Wii Sports, Trauma Center: Second Opinion is the first Wii title we've purchased. I am sorry to say that it is an absolute stinker. The storyline, which the game shares with the DS version of Trauma Center, is still "hall of shame" bad. A surgical game doesn't need a story in the first place any more than a racing game does. The "story" of surgery is told with scalpels and all those other things surgeons ask for and are handed by their assistants. The stakes are obvious, the means are obvious, and nobody needs to read 30 pages of inane "what does it mean to be a real doctor" dialog before playing fake doctor -- or ever.

It is nice to get to know the patients before operating, or it would be if the patients weren't so stupid and didn't read like thinly veiled opinion papers on depression and suicide by ignorant tenth graders. I am paraphrasing from memory, but I think this is representative of the level of maturity in the dialog:

Patient: Ow.
Doctor: Looks like we need to operate!
Patient: Aw, who cares. Nobody likes me, I'm depressed, there's no reason to live.
Doctor: Turn that frown upside down!
Patient: No. :(
Doctor: But life's better when you're happy!
Patient: Okay. :)
Doctor: See? Depression is not a chemical problem, and it can be cured with smiles.
Patient: Thanks for solving my personal problems, Doct- ow. [falls unconscious]
Doctor: I will not let this patient die!

The frantic poke & drag gameplay is still basically good, like it was in the DS version, and still really difficult, also like the DS version. However, the defibrillator is stupid. You get docked precious seconds of life when the game moves in and out of defibrillator mode, which it does without warning. I was at low "life" and scrambling for the "heal potion" and the game decided to go into defib mode, and I aced the defib, but the game pads so much wasted time onto both ends of the defibbing that I was dead by the time the game returned full control to me. I don't demand realism from my games, but when successfully restarting a patient's heart results in their death, some bad design choices have been made. There are other issues which aren't worth getting into.

Also: Hey we got a Wii!

New favorite word: SKEUOMORPH

2007-01-23T23:41:00.000-08:00

Buttons that don't fasten. Fake woodgrain.

I'm looking forward to pedantically declaring thing to be skeuomorphy -- even better, cultural skeuomorphy, conversational skeuomorphy, emotional skeuomorphy. My eyes are peeled!

What's up, guys? Any skeuomorphy to speak of? Is it overly hopeful of me to use a "skeuomorphy" tag on this post?

Monokuro Boo

2007-01-02T09:58:00.000-08:00

When we were in Japantown with my family, Lydia found and bought for me a "desk calendar" which is really two small, pleather pigs joined in the Siamese style. One has a pouch in its back to hold small calendar cards (each with a 2 month calendar in tiny print), and the other has an empty pouch designed to hold the owner's cellphone. Lydia is afraid, not unreasonably, that I will leave my cell phone with the pigs at work. Image here: random web site (work safe).

I bought a PSP, and subseqently played Firmware Chutes & Ladders to make it able to run emulators. The interface is very nice, really. Both the main directory screen and the GUIs for the various emulators are more intuitive and easier to navigate than their softmod Xbox counterparts.

The system is comfortable except for the D-Pad, which is the second-worst D-Pad I've used -- only the pad on the Wonderswan is worse. The PSP's pad is the same as the PSX/PS2 pad, but the D-pad arrows are set too deep in the console, so it is unreasonably difficult to hit the diagonals. Actually, the down/right diagonal is very easy, because of the shape of the human thumb. Up/right is near impossible, again due to the shape of the thumb. DEAR PSP OWNERS: how do you cope with this? D-Pad Mod? Capcom's preorder bonus thing? Or do you just not play shooters and fighters? Gunstar Heroes and Contra are really hard with this D-Pad.

SNES emulation is better than I initially thought -- the default speed setting was 300MHz, versus a max of 333MHz, and so far Ogre Battle is the only game I've tried that runs too slow to play. Mega Man X runs perfectly, as do On the Ball, Assault Suits Valken, and Turtles in Time. Actraiser is perfect except for the spinning descent into a monster lair, which feels slow. I did not expect the "special chip" games to work (Star Fox, Mario Kart, Yoshi's Island, Star Ocean, Pilot Wings, Mega Man X2), and indeed I have not tried. U.N. Squadron is actually fine except that the "choose a stage" screen is really slow. That I can deal with, since you visit that screen rarely and briefly. Really Ogre Battle is the only surprise disappointment. I did manage to get past the Tarot reading, but the game is slow on the battle maps, and that's just not playable to me.

Aside from that, I have noticed a couple of small graphical issues. The circle that closes in on Mario upon clearing a stage in Mario World is weird looking. In Turtles in Time, the "time warp" looks weird. And most strangely, fast scrolling games cause tearing/color bleed effects. I see this running full-tilt in Mario World, and I see this in the sewer stage of Turtles in Time.

PSX emulation is perfect, except when it's not. In Parappa, the bar on top you use to know what button to press and when is messed up. Shit. And there are some graphical issues in the FFIV port, perhaps because the PSX was emulating the SNES already. Einhander on PSP is beautiful, though.

Awds & Ends

2006-12-27T00:38:00.000-08:00

These last couple days I have been seriously numberdrunk on Advance Wars DS. I hadn't touched it in ages, and I'm just replaying the normal campaign, relearning the tricks and nuances as I go. About 3/4 through the campaign. I have yet again fallen absolutely in love with (post-Soviet Russian hypercapitalist) Sasha for her CO Power to blueball all of the other COs' (Commanding Officers') CO Powers. I have yet again been reminded of how much fun (WWII paratrooper grandpa) Sensei used to be, and how he is now just as good but much less entertaining, with his buffed vehicles but nerfed soldiers. This game is, as ever, such a reckless, perfect mix of careful thought and seesaw cartoon violence. Grid-based, turn-based tactical strategy ... but the generals all have super moves like Street Fighter Alpha. Don't really know how Intelligent Systems can improve the series from here:

Okay, I really wanted a picture of the character Jugger in his casual wear outfit (he's a giant metal egg with a tie and a tweed jacket). Never mind!

==========

A couple weeks ago I heard about Final Fantasy Tactics getting remade for PSP, presumably with a cleaned-up script, which would fix pretty much the game's only shortcoming (from "I got a good feeling!" to the typo-laden help text's accidental outright lies). And I thought, of course, "Shit, now I'm gonna need a PSP." Only I thought the same when Mega Man Powered Up came out, and that never happened. Still, FFT is a pretty ideal handheld game, for the same reason as Advance Wars -- you can think about what you are going to do, turn the battlefield over in your head, make a decision, flip open the DS or whatever, and act. It is very easy to keep your turn based strategy flow going even when the system is in your pocket. This is not true of action games.

Anyhow, then last night I found out that, surprise, some dude managed to get the PSP to emulate original PlayStation games (including Final Fantasy Tactics, among others). So now I'm thinking, "Shit, now I really do need one." Einhander, Final Fantasy VII, Um Jammer Lammy, and Crash Team Racing on a handheld? That's pretty sweet.

==========

So I changed the blog template. I really like the unpolished underachiever look of this template.

==========

Like Ico, Final Fantasy XII is thwarting my attempts to describe it. Sorry!

A Lukewarm Scottish Christmas

2006-12-25T21:59:00.000-08:00

I got it into my head to make Scottish food for Christmas. Well, I got it into my head to make Scottish food and/or Korean food, and I thought Scottish seemed more Christmas-y. Although my interest had been piqued by a book (but did not purchase) I found at Stacey's in SF, I turned to the Internet. I searched the ethnically useless flyover state housewife dessert recipe hoedown that is Recipezaar.com and found a hundred recipes for shortbread, searched in vain for a relevant wiki (either through wikipedia or elsewhere), and then settled on an old-fashioned Google search, and I do say that with a straight face.

That led me here, and from this page I started picking recipes based on either (1) name recognition or (2) name silliness. Hence, a holiday menu featuring (1) Cottage Pie, (2) Tayside Tang, (2) Partan Bree, (2) Rumbled Smoked Salmon, and (2) Het Pint. The result was not particularly exciting.

Tayside Tang, a citrus/mayo salad, I never got around to making because I don't have mayonnaise. This came as a surprise, since mayo is one of my absolute favorite foodstuffs. This will be rectified.

Partan Bree is a creamy crab soup, thickened with pureed rice. The starch kind of dulls the flavor. It's a dumb soup. It's cool that they can get that much body without a gallon of cream, but, shit, if I am going to pick all of the meat out of a crab, I want the whole crab worth of flavor on display.

Rumbled Smoked Salmon is a variant on "colcannon," which I almost made, again based on name silliness, but there was smoked salmon sitting in the pantry anyhow, so it was an excuse to use it. The cabbage/onion/potato mix was promising, but I think a better recipe can and should be found. It reminded me, what with its mix of tuber and cabbage, of okonomiyaki, which means that I had high hopes. The salmon was just sort of sitting on top of the colcannon rounds, and the flavors did not work for me.

Het Pint was a disaster. It's beer and whiskey, heated, with spices and egg. My egg was not properly tempered -- my fault -- and the resulting egg drop beer had to be strained. Also, the apricot ale we used imparted a strange flavor (I WONDER WHAT).

The Cottage Pie was great fun, particularly fluffing the potato crust with a fork and then grating part of a stick of butter over the potato, like with a cheese grater. But the cottage pie recipe I used was doing double duty as a shepherd's pie recipe (cottage pie has beef, shepherd's has lamb, and that is the only difference), and my cottage (beef) pie had probably too much rosemary in it. Well, it was still good, and I imagine the rosemary can only mellow in the leftover servings.

I guess I need better recipes, basically. That's my Christmas Cooking Lesson for you.

Moles are good at smelling

2006-12-22T12:34:00.000-08:00

For the benefit of people not listening to NPR's "Science Friday" today, star nosed moles can smell underwater. They apparently do this by blowing tiny air bubbles and sucking the bubbles, which have now absorbed some detectable scents, back into their noses.

Props to Professor Kenneth Catania and his mad science skills.

Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/21/ndragon121.xml

Props also to the moles.

CHA

2006-11-27T23:21:00.000-08:00

Pop quiz -- man-made object visible from outer space? Take your Great Wall and shove it -- we speak of Colonel Sanders.

Behold, newly visible from space:

This is lovely, in concept, not execution. Still, it is lovely. What would happen if, oh, Larry Flynt, paid, say, Russia a jillion dollars to rent out a giant chunk of Siberia in the service of space-visible boobs? Is that even a step down from a fried chicken fast food mascot? Obviously not.

What would you make visible from space, if you had the scratch, the connections, and there wherewithall? Nobody say "If you can read this you're too close" because I just did. Also don't say 'an enormous space-clock' because I just said that too. It would display GMT, I guess, but imagine the New Years countdown. I guess it would probably be pretty boring, unless there was also a giant Dick Clark. More: "Crying Game it's a dude," "Don't blame me I voted for communism," "Princess Diana 1961-1997 Never Forget." Again, do not say these things.

If nobody else knows what the post title is a reference to, I am going to feel like a big dork.

Serious answer: "Measure twice, cut once."

Elite Beat Agents

2006-11-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

Elite Beat Agents. It's the totally redone, localized American version of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. The songs are American, the voices and text are English, and the scenarios are all new and feature cartoon white and black people instead of cartoon Asians. It's decent, but it's not on par with the first game.

The level designs -- the patterns of circles, lines, and swirls that you have to tap out along with the song -- are very good in Elite Beat Agents, and largely up to snuff, although the final stage really blows in comparison, and the first stage is a total waste of time, even compared to the first stage of Ouendan. Mostly, though, the patterns are excellent, and "Let's Dance" (yeah, David Bowie) in particular. The song selections include some unbearable groaners, especially "Sk8ter Boi," but I'm sure the Japanese version was the same for someone natively familiar with Japanese pop music. I think familiarity might not be an asset in this case. Given a choice between indecipherable moon language and Avril Lavigne, I'll take the gibberish, thanks.

Most of the music is not bad. In fact, the generic pop punk anthems that pad the song selection work very well. Standouts include a Queen song I had never heard called "I Was Born to Love You," "Let's Dance," "September" (Earth Wind & Fire) and "Canned Heat" (the Napoleon Dynamite song). I feel compelled to mention, however, that some of the covers are atrocious, as bad as "Linda Linda" (Blue Hearts) from Ouendan. In particular, if you are looking forward to "Rock This Town" (Stray Cats), "ABC" (Jackson Five), or "Material Girl" (Madonna), tough shit.

The new art is a little more childlike than in the original, in coloring more than in line work. But the replacements for Ouendan's weird biker gang cheer squad, the titular Elite Beat Agents, are actually really great. Although, like Ouendan, Elite Beat Agents fucks up the fourth difficulty setting by replacing the increasingly masculine agents/cheerleaders with generic anime girls. For as much as I loved Ouendan, I never beat the girl-cheerleader mode because I just couldn't give a shit.

All of this, so far, adds up to a recommendation, though not necesarily in favor of Ouendan, and Elite Beat Agents adds one new feature worth praising -- when you fail a song, you can have the game replay a video of the last 10 or so seconds, to review how exactly you screwed up.

Where Elite Beat Agents loses me is in the scenarios, and how the agents make no fucking sense in the context of these scenarios.

In Ouendan, some dude is having trouble studying for a big test, and he's ready to give up. Three burly men burst out of his closet, yell, "You can do it!" and set his heart on fire. Motivated, he succeeds. The stages in Ouendan are almost all everyday scenarios like this. Homework. Writer's block. When the stage's premise is stranger, like a crime fighting donkey, it works because it's like the game is saying, "Hey, crime fighting donkeys get tired and they need love too."

In Elite Beat Agents, these secret agents are watching people on surveillance cameras, and spring into action when people need help. For both the mundane levels and the wackier levels, this fails. For the mundane levels, like with the babysitter or the dog trying to make its way home, it's just fucking creepy that government agents are watching their every move. I don't think I can emphasize this enough. Government agents remotely watching me fail to tie my shoes aren't "funny," even if they show up at my door three seconds later with a lifetime's supply of Velcro. For the wackier levels, like the former billionaire whose wife leaves him when he runs out of money, or the millionaire car company heir who is in danger of being disowned, or the millionaire vapid Paris Hilton-style celebrities who get stranded on an island somewhere, the problems are harder to relate to. Admittedly it is less difficult to imagine government agents whose job it is to help rich people, but the stories are much harder to root for.

Basically the stories suck in Elite Beat Agents, is what I'm saying. It's not a problem with the storytelling, which is why I feel comfortable comparing it unfavorably to stories told in a language I don't read very well. The premise is ass. The few scenarios that do work -- the washed up former athlete who longs to be a role model again, or the weathercaster who lies on TV because she promised her son that it would be sunny that weekend and she can't face the truth -- really make it clear what the fuck is wrong with the rest of the game.

If you can read Japanese, get Ouendan instead. If you can't read Japanese, get Ouendan instead. If you love Ouendan and want an expansion pack, well, that's the one demographic I might recommend this game to.

A quck note on Contact (DS game)

2006-11-02T23:34:00.000-08:00

It's really cool. Be warned that it is a bit vegetables, if that is a turn off! My ardor was temporarily cooled when my DS card was accidentally ejected (MY FAULT) and I lost some hours of progress (MY FAULT). Contact is a very lonely, lonely game, which is in light of the title of course not ironic at all, since contact is meaningless without the lack thereof. It's a very cool game, but I haven't played enough to get all pretentious and stupid yet, and I am now too distracted by Final Fantasy XII.

Recommended to anyone who thinks "a very lonely, lonely game" could be construed as a thumbs up. (Ryan?)

Know your source

2006-10-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

This was a comment that has apparently spiraled out of control.

This post is, of course, about God Hand, and its pending failure to win any "best of" awards from any place with a payroll. This post is about why.

People of earth! Are your favorite games ones that average 9 or 10 on review sites? Mine aren't. Phoenix Wright averaged around 80%, and so did Jungle Beat, and Katamari only managed 85%. Katamari Damacy is number one hundred seven (#107) on Gamerankings' list of the best PS2 games, under Kingdom Hearts. Have you played Kingdom Hearts? It's pandering, vapid, awkward, and glossy, the archetypal polished turd.

By my measure, Kingdom Hearts is almost unplayably poor. In the four hours I played it, it presented no interesting choices, offered me nothing interesting to do, told me no interesting story, and gave me no world worth exploring. Production values were high. Segue. These are the opinions of a man who has played and loved other Square action-RPGs, like Final Fantasy Adventure and Brave Fencer Musashi, and who likes quite a few Disney movies. You have some sense of my tastes, and those tastes give my rather harsh opinion some context.

Any source that attempts to present an objective, disembodied view of a game's quality is useless. The problem is not in the execution, although clearly IGN botches that more spectacularly than, say, Gamespot. An opinion without the context of the person who holds that opinion has no meaning. Do you trust Chris Roper of IGN, the fellow who rated God Hand 3/10? No, because he's clearly an idiot, writing a review that reads, in essence: "I am frustrated easily and am using my bully pulpit to enact some sort of pathetic revenge on a game I am unwilling to learn to play." But forget Chris Roper. Why trust anybody who writes for IGN, Game Informer, EGM, Nintendo Power, or Gamepro, when the only thing you know about them is that they get paid for writing reviews? That doesn't say anything about them, except that they presumably like some games if they work where they do -- but what games? This is important. If a reviewer's favorite game is Kingdom Hearts, I want to know, so I can stop wasting my time with him. Does this reviewer like inane collectathons like Banjo Kazooie? Does he think Jak has good character design? Is he grading a game like a piece of meat with certain ideal color and odor characteristics? Is he writing from the heart, or is he writing what he think's the site's ideal audience wants to hear? Is he having a shitty month at work and is just happy for something pretty and unchallenging to escape into? If he doesn't say, forget him. Maybe the game's not worth his time, but he's not worth yours.

I'm not saying that you should automatically buy a game that I recommend on the grounds that you know me. Shit, maybe you ought to pass on God Hand based on what you do know about me. But at least that's an opinion wth some context.

The God Hand Awesomeness FAQ

2006-10-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

Q: What?

A: This is what.

Q: Is God Hand awesome?

A: Dude, God Hand is so awesome.

Q: What is the best game you've played this year? Is it God Hand?

A: By a mile.

Q: What is God Hand like?

A: As you can see from the trailers, it's a 3D brawler, like Final Fight or River City Ransom or Double Dragon, except it's 3D. It's very busy, and does chaotic melee brawling fisticuffs better than anything else I've seen or touched. In Final Fight (for example), fighting several enemies usually means either throwing enemies to one side and then punching them all at once, or jump kicking back and forth, keeping enemies separated. Attempts to actually get in there are mess people up at close range usually end in an admission of defeat by way of Spinning Super Kick. God Hand doesn't do this -- God Hand gets it right. In 3D, no less, which has never been done before.

The point of view is locked behind the hero, so you can always see the dude[s] you're punching. The left analog stick makes you move, and the right stick makes you dodge. Press left or right to sidestep the enemy, down to backflip away, and up to duck. It is really very easy to dodge in God hand. The sidesteps are very good for repositioning yourself, ducking both avoids high attacks and sets you up to perform leg sweeps, and you can chain backflips and end up 20 feet away if you're getting cornered. You have everything you need to never get hit, if you think quickly.

What really sets this game apart is the freedom to kick ass any way you want. You can assign different moves to different buttons, and really play around. Because there is no standard string of moves, and you can assign all sorts of moves to all sorts of button combinations, there is no such thing as a standard attack pattern. All combos are improvised. Right now my favorite move is the Mule Kick, which is when you plant both hands on the ground and kick with both feet. It launches the enemy into the air and makes them fall flat on their backs. Even better, it pisses them off. Being beaten up is not something they are fond of, but the mule kicks make them visibly and audibly upset. Anyhow, an improvised combo might go something like this:

Dash at the enemy (tap up twice to run), jump kick them in the chest (triangle). Dash to follow the enemy as they fly back 20 feet. Punch them several times (square, square, square), maybe throw in a Guard Breaker strike (down and square). Hit them with a mule kick (triangle), charge up and hit them with an axe kick (up and triangle, and hold both buttons for a bit before releasing), kick them higher when they bounce (triangle), uppercut them into the sky (down and triangle), and spinning jump kick them back about 20 feet (down and X). Dash to follow as they fall, and when you get close to the enemy, stomp them in the face fifteen or twenty times, until there's nothing left to stomp (circle, circle, over and over).

God, it's fucking awesome.

Of course, the combo can deviate at any point, and the way it plays out depends on this enemy's behavior and, of course, the behavior of other enemies. This game is all about improvising beatdowns.

Q: What kinds of attacks can I "improvise" with?

A: Axe kicks, knee strikes, shin kicks, roundhouses, low sweeping kicks, jump kicks, uppercuts, jabs, straights, elbow strikes, "drunken fist" techniques, the mule kick, and a pair of matching backhands called "Pimp Slap" and "Pay Up." If there is not a headbutt I unlock later, I will be surprised. There are more than a hundred moves total. I'm not sure, exactly, but all of the moves are numbered and I've got a couple with numbers over 100.

Q: Is this a story heavy game? I hate bullshit game stories.

A: This is straightforward like Bad Dudes. Yes, that Bad Dudes.

In God Hand, the game starts, you walk into a desert town, and the girl you're with basically says, "Okay, beat people up."

Q: Million dollar question: Can I kick people in the balls?

A: Yes. There is at least one dedicated balls-kicking move.

Q: Are there female enemies, like in Final Fight, Double Dragon, etc?

A: Yup, and the answer to the next question is, nope, if you try to kick them in the balls, they just make fun of you. However, female enemies can be hit with a special spanking attack.

Q: Is this game hard?

A: Intermittently, yes. The game makes you learn how to improvise moves, but you really improve quite quickly. You will die a lot, but you don't lose anything. You keep whatever moves you've won from demons, and whatever cash you've scrounged up. The only penalty is you start the area over again ... and areas are pretty small, really. The game definitely keeps you on your toes, though. You're never thinking "How should I budget my special move meter?" or "Which of these five guys should I attack first?" You're thinking "Hi-yaaaaaa!" or "Noooooo!"

Q: Okay, seriously, game of the year?

A: Look, for some context, here are some games I have played this year which are not as good as God Hand:

Okami
Trauma Center
Wingnuts 2
Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
Summon Night: Swordcraft Story
Orbital
Dotstream
Soundvoyager
Dialhex
Coloris
Digidrive
Boundish
Brain Age
Rhythm Tengoku
Bleach DS
New Super Mario Bros
Shadow of the Colossus
Odama
Sonic Rush

So take it as you will.

Also, another video, some guy playing on the "hard" difficulty, using only the default set of moves:

Final thoughts on Okami

2006-10-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

Final clock time on Okami was 46 hours and change, so those of you considering this game should take the reports of this game lasting 40 hours seriously.

My favorite bits of Okami were the dark purple patches of dead land, which Amaterasu can heal by making a small corner bloom and then swirling that living grass all around the dead with big, swirly, loose brushstrokes. Good shit! Also: finding like 6 dead trees and blooming them all as fast as I can, filling the screen with flower petals and praise orbs -- and probably the rising sun, too, since in a group of 6 trees I will probably miss and hit the blue sky at least once.

Also: fishing. It's fun. Why is it fun? I do not know!

The best parts of Okami are interacting with the world in a benevolent way, totally apart from the "god vs devil" story. These parts, thankfully, make up the bulk of Okami.

The worst bits are all inherited from the Zelda formula -- dungeons when I want flowers, fetch questy things to find when there should be interesting things to touch, and the annoying fairy sidekick. Amaterasu's sidekick Issun is likeable, but has a very bad habit of solving puzzles by thinking out loud (That's a STRANGE ROCK. I wonder what would happen if we HIT IT WITH SOMETHING). He is, ironicaly, the only really good part of the endgame, because the game ends with a dungeon and a boss fight, whoop de doo, with some lovable Issun bits mixed in. Dungeons and boss fights are not what I enjoyed in this game, and they are thankfully few and far between, but it sucks that the game had to end with a boss fight.

It's a very good game, but it would have been better if t hadn't mimicked Zelda so much.

I recommend it, definitely.

Also, I just started God Hand this morning. Might be game of the year! Too soon to tell!

Call of duty!

2006-10-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

First in a potentially ongoing series!

CALL OF DUTY!

Is there a joke about the Turing test being biased against black and Latino-built computers? Because there should be.

Kenny, you're on the case! You can make it about Asian ones beng better if you want.

Okay later.

(call of duty!)

Okami

2006-10-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

Okami came out. This is a game whose trailer I gushed over nearly two years ago ... and then Lydia called me unfunny and I got sad. Moving on!

Game in a nutshell: Actraiser, melted down and forged into the shape of a Zelda game.

In Okami, you play as the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu, awoken after a long sleep by a peach tree spirit named Sakuya to revive a dead world cursed by the long-sealed, newly freed demon Orochi. This is, basically, the same plot as Actraiser, except that Actraiser's vaguely misappropriated myths are Christian (God, angel, Satan) instead of Shinto (Amaterasu, tree spirit, Orochi). Still you bring life to a dead world, and still the kind thoughts of the world's people make you more powerful.

The game is structured more like Zelda, though. Smash pots for money, help villagers with their peculiar requests, collect the eight whatsits to unlock the holy doodad, and so forth. Unlike Actraiser's split between judeo-industrial people farming and holy warrior avatar ass-kicking, Okami's split just isn't there. You wander the whole world in the form of a white wolf, and you tend to individual plants and people like a quiet, patient gardener, weeding isolated patches of monsters, helping individual people to blossom, rather than engaging in bronze age civic planning. It's a different scale and a different scope, and a different conception of godhood -- as a friend, rather than a shepherd. If I am going to choose between fictions, I would rather choose the former.

It's great, not least because it's gorgeous. The rewards of the game are primarily sensory. You do favors for individual people, heal individual trees, and feed individual animals, and the primary rewards you get for these things are sensory: a flush of flower petals, a tranquil, soft-lit scene with your wolf and the grateful rabbit, tongues of blue water drowning out the black, constellations coming to life, and so forth.

But unlike Zelda, movement is fast, and in the 12 hours I've played so far, I've seen only one dungeon, and only one boss ... which is fine by me.

Wheatgrass: what the hell

2006-09-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

After years of wondering what it was like, today I bought a shot of wheatgrass at a Jamba Juice in SF. The instant my tongue made contact, I had a sudden flash of comprehension which was not natively linguistic, but if I were to render it in words it would be like so:

Oh god people buy this because of Puritan-cum-hippie strains in American culture; it is astoundingly unpleasant (and therefore must be good for me) and totally unprocessed (and therefore must be good for me); this is the most wretched thing I can remember putting in my mouth, including both the second-strain kava we had in Hawaii and that one time I took a sip of Coke with --SURPRISE-- about 40 ants in it; I want this out of my mouth; this is not edible; this is not food.

Let me tell you about geese

2006-09-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

We are still ironing out a few things, but the new place is now home.

I used to make fun of Tom for his obsession with the lake birds. Wait, maybe I didn't. But in my head, every time he said something about coots or pelicans, I was all, "Look at me, my name is Tommaso and I like to talk about birds. I bought some nice binoculars, ostensibly for my girlfriend, to support our birdwatching addictions."

I am not shopping around for binoculars yet, but DUDE IT'S BIRDS -- HOW SWEET IS THIS.

There are a lot of birds in the area. Currently, my brain sorts them into (1) Canadian goose, (2) other. I mean, I can recognize a seagull or a pelican. I just don't care. Walking down the lake path, though, and passing 5 joggers and like 30 geese, it is like the fulfillment of a childhood dream I have retroactively acquired. I think I like looking at geese even more than eating them. As delicious as their artificially fattened livers are, they tickle my other senses even more.

Ha ha just kidding geese cruelty for life, guys. But they are very pretty.

Expect more posts later

2006-08-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

We're moving to a new apartment. New place has no Internet. Old place has no furniture. I am sitting on the floor. Ideal conditions for blogging? Not really.

And that's the story.

Samsung SyncMaster 204B

2006-07-27T22:51:00.000-07:00

My baby got me an LCD flat panel monitor for my birthday. It's 20.1", and somehow it looks even bigger than it sounded in my head. It runs 1600x1200, and it can run TATE. What's Tate? It's when you turn your display on its side, so that you can play vertical shooters like Ikaruga or DoDonPachi. If you follow the Ikaruga wiki link, notice the black bars on the sides of the screenshot. That's Ikaruga running in the much-reviled "Yoko" mode, on a regular display, and it clearly wastes a lot of screen space. Now, if you follow the DoDonPachi wiki link, you'll see screenshots taken from the game running in Tate. That's what these games are going to look like on my monitor: rad.

The display is, in fact, so tall at 1600 pixels, that I can fit nearly two thirds of Kenny's Clerks II screed on the screen at once (wow!). I am still adjusting to the size and brightness of it all. And, uh, the sudden bounty of space on my literal desktop.

Some guy kind of hurt his arm, I think

2006-07-20T22:47:00.000-07:00

Waiting in Montgomery BART station for the train home, I didn't notice the cluster of people over by the elevator until they started clapping. At that point, I realized that it wasn't just a lot of people that happened to be standing near each other, but actually a crowd, and that there was music coming from the far side of it. As this bore investigation, I approached, and six or so guys were breakdancing on the BART platform.

I would try to describe what they did, but the written word is not suited to the poetry of awkward (but impressive!) breakdancing.

So, yeah. I saw breakdancing in BART and you didn't. Cool. The end.

I liked the new Pirates

2006-07-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have a hunch that everything I could possibly say about the new Pirates movie is already the intellectual property of the collective memepool of the Internet. Johnny Depp remains the high point, but he is not nearly as enjoyable as in the first -- I think he says "savvy" just four or five times in Dead Man's Chest.* Keira Knightly picks up some slack, as do the ridiculous fight scenes, particularly the menage a swashbuckle in, on, and around an errant waterwheel.

The movie felt shorter the longer it went on. The entire tribal segment was a waste.

The preview for Rocky Balboa (a.k.a. Rocky 6) stuck with me more than most of Dead Man's Chest, which is certainly not to say that it was better. Stallone himself is a sadder, more fallen has-been than Rocky Balboa, now, and I can't help but see another Rocky movie as a proxy bid by Stallone himself to be seen as legit again. I really just saw him as the poor man's Schwarzenegger (and the second player in Contra) until I saw Rocky a few years back, and it actually was awesome. That's right, I think Rocky is awesome, and the first person to name another boxing movie gets their comment deleted.

* :-(

Iraqi food is for chumps

2006-07-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

I made no Iraqi food for the 4th, and I relish disappointing everyone. Julia, known far and wide as Zack's sister, visited a weekend back and was overcome by a falafel craving. So we bought a "big as me head" can of chickpeas, and we made falafel, tahini, hummus, and pita. Pita was surprisingly easy. Actually it was all surprisingly easy. Things were put into the food processor, "pulse" buttons were leaned upon, and these vegetarian foodstuffs came quickly together. Truly this is the food of the lazy vegetarian. After having made it myself, hummus has revealed itself to be so easy and unchallenging (and ... delicious) that I cannot imagine buying it, like from a store.

The real joy was the pita, though. A simple kneaded white bread, awkwardly divided into rounds, and stretched into tiny pizza crusts, basically, then introduced to as much heat as possible. In my case, lacking an oven capable of hitting the apparently traditional 700 F, I used a cast iron skillet in a 500 F oven. No doubt a 500 F skillet cooks faster than 700 F air, anyhow. Pitas puff up like magic. I'm not used to the oven doing so much of the work for me, but there you go.

Pitas puff, with big pockets. Cream puffs, too. Does anything else puff like that? It's amazing.

Well, it was all tasty, to cut a long story short. But I did not want middle eastern food again after that.

Independence Day

2006-06-14T23:28:00.000-07:00

Whereas Tommaso and I have been regularly experimenting with cuisines neither of us know much about, such as Cuban, Ethiopian, and Hungarian, and

Whereas I seem to spend a lot of my leisure time watching Good Eats or reading recipes, and

Whereas I will be working at work on July 4, 2006, and

Whereas I have well-developed senses of melodrama, self-importance, and irony, and

Whereas my vestigial sense of justice has not yet entirely atrophied,

Therefore I declare July 4, 2006 to be Official Iraqi Food Day.

Music for one apartment and six drummers

2006-06-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. -John Adams

What I am suggesting in this post is that tootbrush/Cuisinart music is the birthright of modern man, although it might not be his destiny. Here's to all you naked flagpole swingers out there, for justifying John Adams' life posthumously.

E3 quickie

2006-05-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

Totally retarded: $600 ($500 for "core" model) for the PS3. I am not sure what Sony is thinking. Also: I don't care? That's the issue, I think. I am not thinking, "Is it worth $600 to me?" I am thinking, "Why would I even want this thing?" Probably Metal Gear Solid 4 will be brilliant, but I have not yet played even the first. I have only bought one console at launch ever (the DS), but I am extra not buying this one at launch, I promise. Jesus.

Totally bonkers: New side-scrolling Mario game! For the Game Cube! And it makes no visual sense. Is it a pixel art homage? A 2D cel cartoon concept janked from previous Paper Mario games? Playable abstract art? You tell me.

Totally fuck yes: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 2 for DS. Ouendan coming out (or maybe it's a sequel?) in the US as Elite Beat Agent. Xryz gets to experience the rhythm game he denied himself, and I get an expansion pack. Everybody wins. Also, sketch-noir detective story using the DS held open like a book: Hotel Dusk: Room 215. It could be very good as soon as they get a translator who speaks FLUENT ENGLISH.

As for the Wii? Looks great. Want one. Any number of games shown could be either exhilarating or rock stupid, depending on how they're made, and Nintendo hasn't shown much yet, so ... hard to say.

Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re

2006-04-30T23:43:00.000-07:00

It's another music post, guys.

Remember when Lydia and Kenny put together that yellowface (?) (??) Squelch back cover where they pretended to be Japanese tourists, and Babelfished themselves dizzy in an attempt to replicate Engrish? Yes?

And remember that the page was titled with some Japanese writing, katakana? Maybe?

That string of Japanese characters meant nothing. Well, no -- it meant that somebody had typed "American" into Photoshop and switched to the Japanese font, and Photoshop blithely translated "A m e r i c a n" to "za n ku ke fu tsu sa wo." Sounds vaguely Japanese, but means nothing.

"Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re" makes about as much sense to a Japanese speaker as "zankukefutsusawo." Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re is a Japanese band, though. The name is entirely arbitrary, except that the band likes it. According to their label, they are a punk avant garde free jazz ska surf funk all-girl trio. Really they are just punk, and the rest is just glitter. Well, maybe avant garde punk. I don't really know what that means. It means the sort of punk band that would name itself "Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re."

The band's most recent album is called Pregnant Fantasy.

That's pregnant awesome. Also, pregnant is now an adverb meaning, roughly, "hella." That's pregnant tight, homes.

Samples of the first three tracks on Pregnant Fantasy available here. Samples of all eight tracks available here. I have to recommend "Ebihara Shinji" (third track) and "Umeboshi Plum" (first track) at least.

I couldn't find Journey's ESC4P3 at Amoeba. It was not meant to be. Whatever. I will continue to not tuck my shirts into my jeans. :(

(Secretly I have the whole Pregnant Fantasy album on my computer.)
(It is entirely awesome.)

(What's up?)

Please continue to not stop believing

2006-04-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

Top story on the SF Chronicle website (SFGate.com) as I write this:

Fantastic Journey: What do the critics know?

In which writer Peter Hartlaub calls a critically lambasted Journey album "the musical version of a Death Row inmate who didn't commit the crime." He also compares it to the first Violent Femmes album as a work that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the artist's output.

This makes me curious. And let it be known that I have a mostly but not entirely ironic love of Def Leppard. Is Journey worth the love, even 25 years later? Aren't they one of the famously super-bad bands in rock history? Not Styx bad, maybe, but still. Journey? Former Journey fans are still Journey fans?

So my interest is piqued. But then I examine the pictures. These are pictures of Journey fans holding their precious copies of ESC4P3 to their bosoms. All dudes, all old enough to buy it on vinyl when it came out, almost all a little bit chubby, all smiling big for the camera. Five pairs of jeans, one Giants jersey, two sweaters, and two button down shirts.

Both of which are tucked into jeans.

Tuckers! Jeans tuckers cradling Journey!

I need to hear this album.

First date memories

2006-04-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

This is a post about fruit.

I don't work Fridays, and there is a farmers market near Swan's Market (~Broadway and 10th) on Fridays. So I went, with the express intent of buying nothing in particular. Oranges? Onions? These sound good, though mundane. Maybe I just wanted to take a walk. There was a stand that was selling dates and nothing else. So, yeah, if anybody was hoping that this post was secretly not about the fruit that is called a date that is a fruit, you can pack up and go home.

I had been under a long-standing impression that I hated dates. I am not really sure where I got that idea (the surprise twist is that I don't have any first date memories). It is true that I hate figs. Well, hate is a relatively strong word. But it would not be an exaggeration to say that I don't like figs. Perhaps I conflated them. Fruit plus cradle of civilization equals bleh. Something like that.

Medjool dats are pretty sweet. They are alright. I asked the vendor if he had anything less sweet, though, and he pulled out the deglet noor. The deglet noor is a fruity miracle. It tastes like fruit, nut and butter, and it feels as fibrous as it apparently is. Guys, calling it fibrous was supposed to make it sound good. I think I reached for the wrong word, although not an inaccurate one. If I was honestly interested in accurately communicating how delicious deglet noor dates are, I would have stopped with the English and started with the nurm nurm chomps. I have eaten a lot of dates over the past three days, and now I am out until Friday, and I am a little bummed.

What's up, Kenny?

2006-04-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.moviebadgirls.com/gunindex.html

X marks the box

2006-04-05T23:14:00.000-07:00

I never really wanted an Xbox. The available games, except for Ninja Gaiden and some well-polished versions of PS2/GC games, I never saw much to love about. Don't like FPS games, don't like racers, don't like sports games, don't like 3D fighters, and don't really care to play strangers online.

I did know that it could play emulators and play avi and mp3 and all sorts of other crazy codecs. Once modded. As far as I knew, the only downside to having a modded Xbox is that you can't play on Live. To me, removing the temptation to be frustrated and miserable is more of a perk, though. Anyhow, I didn't need to buy a console that didn't do much but play emulated games, when my computer could run those already. Run them on the TV, even, and let me control them with a Playstation controller via USB.

No good reason to get an Xbox.

Then, in quick succession, over the past week or two:
1. I get a severe case of male gadgetlust. Do I want an iPod? A Play-Yan [mp3/video player add-on for GBA/DS -Ed]? PSP? Maybe a GPX2 [Korean handheld -Ed.]? No, really the problem is that I wanted a fucking DS Lite, and the DS Lite is in high demand and way overpriced right now.
2a. I get severe urge to play U.N. Squadron. Like, something is going to break if I cannot play U.N. Squadron.
2b. Hey, turns out my Super Nintendo add-on that allows me to play ROMs, the Supercom, is dead.
2c. Controller-USB adapter stops working.
3. I find out, accidentally, that all it takes to "mod" an Xbox is a $5 copy of Splinter Cell and an Action Replay.

...

I would love this modded Xbox thing even if just for the emulation, which is just spot-on for all sorts of systems -- it's a little hit or miss with N64 games, and the Genesis stuff is awkward with the Xbox pad.

But this thing is also now a region free DVD player. Which is cool, but whatever. What boggled me, and won Lydia over on the whole Xbox thing, is that it can play Lyd's PAL DVDs on our NTSC TV. That is officially crazy.

PAL DVDs! NTSC TV! PAL DVDs! NTSC TV!

Word of the day day is over

2006-03-25T23:33:00.000-08:00

This is a post about movies and games, and whether I would recommend them to friends (such as you).

===

Lydia and I just watched a movie called Irma Vep, starring Maggie Cheung and a bunch of French people. Prior to Irma Vep, I had only seen Cheung in Hero (Jet Li Hero, not Geena Davis Hero), and she was a frumpy sort of noble in that. It turns out that she's pretty hot when she's not being frumpily noble. Possibly the cat suit she was wearing for half the movie had something to do with it? Also she wears jeans over her cat suit at one part? Is that good? I don't know. I think it is pretty rad? Better than just a cat suit? Yes. Jeans and a cat suit. The close-ups on her cheekbones didn't not help. Alright, they might have been close-ups on her face but Maggie Cheung has cheekbones like Jayne Mansfield has bazoongas.

The movie did not entirely make sense, which was (1) intentional, and (2) something I think I have developed a taste for. It was less delightful and less tedious than F Is For Fake, which I watched with SM earlier this year, and which tried VERY HARD to make no sense at all. Irma Vep makes just enough nonsense to be fascinating.

===

In other Letter is for Word movie news, I saw V For Vendetta last week, also with SM. It was a very good movie. It seems to be getting shit because Alan Moore hates it, because it's not like the comic, because the hero is an unapologetic terrorist, because Natalie Portman is in it and it's cool to hate Natalie Portman, and because the Matrix dudes are involved and it's cool to hate them and everything they touch.

Guys, I just wanted to say, just this once it's okay to like a Natalie Portman movie with a pro-terrorist message and a pro-Matrix director, hated by Alan Moore, alright? Because V For Vendetta is pretty rad, and I thought you should know.

===

I bought Shadow of the Colossus -- which was the critical darling "game of the year" like Katamari Damacy before it -- yesterday. It's impressive. The game takes place in some strange, ancient valley. Sixteen tremendous stone beasts move around the valley, and the hero must kill all sixteen to bring his dead girl back to life. That's it. There are no random enemies, no warp zones, no unlockable characters, no Transylvanian castle to scout every corner of, whipping the walls in hope of finding meat. It's you, sixteen peaceful but frightening giants, and the most beautiful, most overcast sky I have ever not seen.

It's by the guy who made Ico, a 2001 game that I played last year and fell in love with so hard that I didn't blog about it because I could not communicate my reaction for shit. Both are stories about a boy saving a girl against a giant overcast sky framed with high stone walls. Ico is more urgent -- the boy is left to die in a castle, and he tries to escape with the girl he finds there. There's a wordless friendship between them, conveyed with outstretched hands and leaps of faith rather than words (they can't speak the same language). So I cared about seeing both characterse saved, and I did not stop playing Ico, once I had started, until I had finished Ico.

Shadow of the Colossus is instead ... sad. Mind, I am only 1/16 through the game, but the boy brings a girl who is already dead up to an altar, is warned that he will pay a great price if he tries to save her, and then sets out to kill sixteen colossi who have done nothing wrong.

So, controlled by me, the boy jumps on his horse, follows the glint of sunlight to a first colossus, and pulls out his sword. He jumps and grab's the giant's ankle, stabs the stone flesh to make the beast stumble, and climbs stone and fur up the thing's back. Reaching the giant's head -- after being thrown off several times -- the boy stabs this gentle, innocent monster through the forehead, with all the force he can muster, three times. And that is the death of the first colossus.

It's hard to remember a game where what I was doing felt so wrong. I don't think the game will end well for the boy. If we's lucky, the girl will leave the valley alive. If he's really lucky, his horse will go with her. The boy, I fear, will be dead at best, and something black, cold, and unearthly at worst.

I have been meaning to play the game since it came out, but it wasn't until yesterday that it was overcast and rainy in just the right way.

===

I played Tales of Phantasia on the Game Boy before that. Well, most of the way through. It's a nice story, if you condense it down to an index card or two, but the story becomes banal in the telling. I don't really recommend the game, which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy most of it.

===

I bought Super Monkey Ball DS, which was kind of rash, since I hadn't read reviews before seeing it instore. The touchscreen controls felt really awkward for a couple days, after which I guess I had a breakthrough or something, because that is the smoothest controlling Marble Madness motherfucker I have ever touched. Game feels just so GOOD to control. This is true of Nintendo DS games generally, but this one especially. Like the previous two Monkey Ball games, this one is super-difficult but not frustrating. It's more fun losing at this game than winning at most.

Downside: the minigames are not all that great. Monkey Fight in particular did not benefit from the touchscreen controls. Exception: Monkey Hockey, the air hockey minigame, is delightful. The smooth gliding stylus is surprisingly close to the air-puffed sensations of an air hockey table. Well, really they're nothing alike, but the pleasure of playing is similar. There is a mode of Monkey Hockey, furthermore, in which you can draw your own striker. It's not something to buy the game for, but it is something to enjoy.

Monkey Ball has no aspirations beyond being a very good toy, but that's alright.

Word of the day

2006-03-21T22:57:00.000-08:00

Teledildonics

Discuss.

Okay, first look it up.

Then discuss.

Unofficial Official Kenny Byerly Comments Blog

2006-03-19T11:38:00.000-08:00

Want to comment on one of Kenny's posts? Frustrated by his inoperable site? No longer, friend! Don't seethe -- comment, on bigstupidjerkface!

Katamari Damacy, 2003-2006

2006-03-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

The official site is closed. The Katamari series is over. Really this is great news, because it means the creators can do something new and interesting.

New music express

2006-03-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

Several months ago, I was downloading new music from various mp3 blogs. I think I started with like 10 and I've been paring down. First, I axed the ones that mostly duplicated content from other sites but with worse-written posts. Then I dumped the one that posted torrents instead of direct mp3 links, the one that posted too much about live shows, and the ones that were a little too lenient of myspace bands. Then, the one that didn't update regularly enough. For your sake, I'm only recommending the best two, plus one honorable mention that I don't actually recommend. They're different enough that you will like at least one, I hope.

Said the Gramophone doesn't describe the songs it posts in terms of genre or demographic appeal ("if you loved X..."). Often it describes songs as though they were people, but it does it in a way that tells you something meaningful about the song while remaining vague. Sort of the opposite of Guess Who (the mystery face game, not the band). Said the Gramophone somehow makes every song sound interesting, a little mysterious, and worth getting to know. The author's tastes definitely lean toward indie rock, indie pop, and alt-country, but he's pretty open.

Aurgasm is eclectic above all else. The three most recent posts:
- dreamy five minute art-rock song that samples Heaven's Gate cultists
- smoky, languid jazz number sung by a teenager
- Swedish glam rock

Both of the above are worth checking out. The following is for your curiosity's sake, not your own:

Copy, Right? posts covers, and is therefore about 85% trash, 12% alright I guess, and 3% worthwhile. The blog author knows it, too, which is about as depressing as the thirty Smiths I've seen posted there (approx. 28 of them being covers of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out").

Servbot can you hear me

2006-03-10T14:01:00.000-08:00

If you were going to use a video game as the source material for an "opera," you could do worse than to choose Super Mario Bros and play it for easy laughs from a detached, ironically minded audience.

Unless you wanted to be serious, deadly serious. Then you might ... well, you probably wouldn't exist, you who takes video game rock operas deadly seriously.

Except that you do exist, and you live in Tennessee, where there is fuck all to do. So you've started a band called The Protomen, and you put on live shows and record a deadly serious rock opera that opens with this narration, delivered with a Devo inflection:

No one was left who could remember how it had happened, how the world had fallen under darkness. At least no one who would do anything. No one who would oppose the robots. No one who would challenge their power, or so Dr. Wily believed...

...

Half a track later, and the narrator has dumped Devo for Thom Yorke, the electric guitars have multiplied like naughty gremlins, and the death of failed messiah Protoman is being loudly lamented. Later still, Megaman arrives to rock the fuck out, declaring:

Do not say
This is how it has to be
You do no better
Than the fools
Of this burning city
And as I live
There is no evil
That I will stand
I will finish
What was started
The fight of Protoman

The album takes liberties with the Mega Man story, which is perhaps for the best. For example, Dr Light is not Dr Wily's mentor or the creator of Wily's robots, so his moral impetus is just his humanity and not personal responsibility.

The best track (in which Megaman rocks the fuck out) is available as a free download on The Protomen's website, as are the track immediately preceding (in which a heartbroken Dr Light begs Megaman not to rock the fuck out) and the opening track (in which the Devo narrator tells you that Dr Light is "a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas").

Anyhow, I sent some money to The Protomen via Paypal and I got my copy of the album two days ago. Unlike the laughable Super Mario opera, The Protomen don't just paste words onto melodies stolen from an NES. The music at times vaguely recalls various pieces of Mega Man music -- the opening music from Mega Man 2, the "Wily stage" music from Mega Man 2, Protoman's whistle from Mega Man 3, and Top Man's music from Mega Man 3 are all suggested -- but it's original stuff.

The Protomen appropriates and willfully misinterprets the music, the story, characters, and heart of the first three Mega Man games, and makes something passionate. I do not hesitate to call it the greatest deadly serious video game rock opera of all time.

If, after listening to the tracks on The Protomen's website, you are curious but have not the confidence in your self-image to order a quasi-fanfiction rock opera off the Internet, let me know and I will consider hooking you up.

Up

2006-03-07T00:18:00.000-08:00

I am not sure what happened. I ate lunch around 12:00, and immediately after felt incredbly hungry. So around 1:00 I had another full lunch, and I could feel the food bulge, but my stomach was sending me big hunger signals. After about 2 hours of not eating at all, I felt fine. At 6:00 I had dinner because it seemed like I ought to eat something, and then I got hungry again. I think I've pretty much evened out, though I got some mild hunger pangs after a late night edamame snack.

I think I accidentally set my stomach on reverse. How do I system-restore? Guys?

Bottom-

2006-03-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

Went camping with SM this weekend. Drank a lot of nice wine and liquor. Played a lot of Great Dalmuti (world's best card game, and possibly world's best game, period), and I tried to use "Dalmuti" as a word meaning a constant, pleasant state of intoxication. Like Nirvana, but attainable. Later, after going to sleep in a very bouncy, wind-addled tent, I awoke halfway and thought, "I have no idea where the zipper on the tent door is, and in about one second that is going to be a problem." Managed to unzip a large enough hole to stick my head out before I Dalmutied down the outside of the tent door. Success! After which my tentmate Garrett, himself half-asleep, muttered, "You want to maybe step outside?" So, yes. Yes, I will finish vomiting outside of our shared space. I will do you this favor.

Really what happened is somewhere in all that liquor I must have swallowed two jester cards because my stomach called a "greater revolution" on my digestive system. IT'S FUNNY IF YOU KNOW THE GAME OKAY

Posts

2006-03-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

Has "ledgerdemain" already been coined as a term for the practice of cooking the books? Fraudulent accounting? I figure I'm about two Enrons late on this one, but just in case, there you go.

These

2006-03-06T23:25:00.000-08:00

Previously on bigstupidjerkface, I became infatuated with Kanye West. Later, but also previously, I came to dislike Kanye West, mostly because of his half-assed "stance" on blood diamonds, "Diamonds of Sierra Leone (Remix)," which runs something like this:

Kanye: "Diamonds are bad, but I like diamonds. Diamonds are bad, but I like diamonds."
Jay Z: "I have lots of money and am a successful businessman. When I am dead, my son will have lots of money. Sierra Le-wha?"

It was frustrating, and I listened to it over and over, half-hoping that, this time, Kanye West would come to a fucking decision.

But I've changed my mind. The lack of a conclusion is interesting. It's like a rap haiku. He just explains the conflict in a way that is catchy as fuck, and then he turns off his mic. That Jay Z shits all over the rest of the song, well, yeah, that still sucks, on its own. But without the Jay Z part, it would seem like a stupid rap mantra. As is, it's an unfinished song. Maybe that's the point? So in the sense that Kanye West managed to translate his unease and lack of resolve into not just the song's content but its structure, well, that's pretty cool.

In that Nick Hornby book where he just talks about songs he likes, he quotes somebody -- I don't remember who -- as saying that pop songs are like little puzzles to be solved. That they get stuck in our head until we get bored with the patterns. "Diamonds of Sierra Leons (Remix)" is pretty brilliant in that light, though stil lfrustrating as fuck, and I still turn off the song halfway through.

Read

2006-03-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

Post one, in which I appropriate menstrual personification metaphors and contort them in the service of self pity.

I got a visit from my pal Hedley Throbbins today.

Post complete.

Hummmmmmmmmm

2006-02-27T23:55:00.000-08:00

There should be a word for the calm that comes with a beer and a half as the minutes tick down to midnight, when your brain plays a three note chord of silence, openness, and contentment, when your own vocalized sighs become so audible that they command all of your attention, when your undistracted, totally distractable hearing picks up on the hum of your computer, and then the hum of your refrigerator, and none of it sticks in your head long enough to interfere with the next random sound or two your brain comes across, be it the the sticky schlppp of rice porridge or the clacking of computer keys.

I realize I could have split that up into multiple sentences, but probably a word that can't be defined in a single sentence is a word not worth knowing. This might constitute a personal "principle" if I didn't just stretch it in service of my own shameful run-on ends. As it is, it is merely an excuse.

Fuller, Smith & Turner's "anniversary ale," purchased in England and opened in celebration of Lydia completing her infernal "knitting olympics" project (which kept her up until 4:30 last night), was pretty good. The Old Thumper I bought this weekend was pretty decent, too, but I really have reached a point where I long for really aggressive flavors in beers. Barleywines, American strong ales, stock ales, crazy-ass Belgian stuff, Scottish ales, and the IPAs so crazy that they're called "double IPAs" -- these are the beers I lust after. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm going camping this weekend. Alternately: I guess what I'm trying to say is that the "Australian Fancy" coffee I bought from Trader Joe's is really pretty good. Who sequiturs the non-sequiturs?

What's up, world? I got the Bleach game for DS. It is a handheld fighting game. So far it is pretty good, and the cover was very shiny. The AI was kind of dumb today, though. I used Sado Yasutora's standing uppercut move and, like, tossed several opponents like pizza dough. That's no good! It's not your fault, Sado, but still, man. Still.

The timbre of my brain's silence has changed, and it is now neutral rather than pleasant. I will go to bed.

duck, duck, goose

2006-02-18T22:29:00.000-08:00

Evolution of the world

Hands, sand, projector, world history, GO!

Streets of Lego

Audio from Genesis game Streets of Rage set to a Lego man reenactment of the same. Look, it's only like 15 seconds long. It's worth your time. This isn't 20 minutes of Jpop music videos.

I bought a pink shirt today.

Because I am confident in my masculinity.

I now wear pants

2006-02-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

I got a job in the city as a newsroom editor. The office looks out over the city. I can see the Transamerica pyramid and Coit Tower from the breakroom. From above.

Tommaso and I may -- may -- need to have a photo duel to settle who has the better view.

Hey, you there, Internets

2006-02-08T21:41:00.000-08:00

If there is one topic of conversation that has been run into the ground in online conversations, it is the relative merits of Final Fantasy games. And yet!

A month ago, I posted something about the fourth game (the second one released in America), and Xryz recently mentioned to me that it used to be that Final Fantasy VI was recognized as the best of the Final Fantasy games, and that its star had fallen recently. Well, I think there are some good reasons why FFVI's star fell.

So here, articulated, my feelings on Final Fantasy VI.

It has two heads, and I don't think they get along very well. On the one hand, there is an ahead-of-its-time parade of tragedy and ruin. The colors are muted even when they feel rich. The music is brilliant and terribly sad. Plot points include teen pregnancy and attempted suicide. This is a very rich, very bold game, and there is a lot to admire.

On the other hand, there are all these ... toys. There are blitzes to key in, and several basically equilavent tools to choose from, and lots of trinkets to steal, and characters to move in and out of your party, and 250 rages to learn, and 24 lores to worry about missing, and espers to learn spells from.

They don't match up. Final Fantasy IV's simple, brash story is well-served by its simple, brash battles. Final Fantasy VII's razzle-dazzle glorious trainwreck three ring circus of a story is well-served by gameplay that is similarly all over the place. Final Fantasy VI's story needs gameplay more like Final Fantasy IV, but Final Fantasy VI's gameplay needs a story more like Final Fantasy VII. That's the problem, for me. Instead of being a game about saving the world, it's a very videogamey videogame grafted onto a story about saving the world.

That Final Fantasy VI was awesome at the time ... well, it doesn't mean much. I reserve the right to critically reevaluate things in the future.

I'm O.K.

2006-02-07T23:29:00.000-08:00

The game is I'm O.K.. The studio that made it is Thompsonsoft, and its ranks include Derek Yu.

They're not an indie "studio" so much as a River City Ransom street gang, hellbent on hitting anything that moves with trash cans full of filthy pixels. And that's fine. This is the first game Derek has made since I discovered that he made games at all (much less a game as widely lauded as Eternal Daughter). The other Derek games I've tried are old enough that his personality as we knew it* didn't come through beyond a love of games and pixel art. It didn't come though like it did in his best Squelch art, or all of the other art that draws while he stays up late, playing chicken with the moon. In I'm O.K., it does. This game is low on cocks, considering it has art by Derek, but it's high on gore.

What I said to Derek about it--and I agree with myself enough to say it a second time--is that the game feels like a jam session. Most games feel very deliberate. I'm O.K. is loose. In that it reminds me of Vib Ribbon, the Playstation game that generates levels based on the music CD you insert. Like Vib Ribbon's sketchy, flickering lines, I'm O.K. is a somewhat noncommital ghost of a game. The whole game feels improvised, and it's better for it. It's the sort of game that's can really only be made by indie developers who just make games for fun, because anyone trying to make money would have second-guessed their work into a form less slapdash. It's a product of its time -- the accessability of programming software, the ubiquity of serviceable computers, the message board culture that allowed three alcoholics and a foreign exchange student to collaborate on a game even though one of them is indefinitely Canadian.

This game's development was a challenge given to the mainstream companies -- the E3 crowd -- but it was a challenge that only indie developers could step up to answer. It's been done a few times now -- I'm O.K. is not the first -- but Derek and his friends showed them all up.

I like this game. Well, liked it. It's only an hour long. At this poist I've probably spent more time thinking about it than playing it. And that's okay.

* "Squelch is bigger'n my dick!"

Clumsy

2006-02-06T00:08:00.000-08:00

I have been very clumsy for the past two days. I'm used to being awkward in my movements, ungainly, even, but still stable, still largely able to not drop objects for no reason, still able to not bump my head into various eye-level objects, still able to not somehow take a 400 degree metal cakepan and touch my upper lip with it.

Not so this weekend. My coordination has gone the way of my memory. I managed to knock over my soda, using my straw.

In world news, the folks pissed off at the Danish government are, at best, retards. Newspapers reporting on the issue without reprinting the cartoons are chickenshit. I don't have anything intelligent to say about it. It does remind me of our Squelch years. Just print the fucking cartoons everywhere, skywrite them, and let's all sit in a circle and talk about our feelings.

K. K. Cruisin'

2006-01-23T21:15:00.000-08:00

I do not share Lydia's fascination with Animal Crossing. The day to day drudgery of picking fruit, selling fruit, and talking to pretend animals doesn't appeal to me.*

Yet every Saturday evening between 8pm and midnight, Lydia calls me over to her DS to watch a simulated acoustic guitar performance by a make-believe traveling songwriter named K. K. Slider. K. K. Slider is a "roving" musician who hates the industry "fat cats" and laments that his music just wants to be free. Yes, K. K. Slider is a dog.

He is very articulate for a dog that doesn't exist, at least in the game's text boxes, but listening to him talk I'd swear he can only produce three words: mi, oh, & na. As spam emails in bizarro world often say, it's not the size of your vocabulary, but what you do with it. What K. K. does is set your soul oh oh na mi oh mi on fire.

When I was in college, Xryz introduced me to a film called Electric Dreams, in which a man and his computer both fall in love with the pretty cellist next door. The computer, which comes to life when the man spills wine on it, is a born romantic and plies the cellist with a monophonic synth rendition of ...

...

... Okay, who am I kidding? I don't know the names of classical music pieces except Barber's "Adagio For Strings," Mozart's "Pachabel Canon," and Beethoven's whatever the hell symphony it was. Does Nino Rota's Godfather theme count? Because that would make four.

Anyhow, a few plot twists later, we've heard a Boy George clunker called "Love Is Love," and the computer has committed e-suicide, although not before he somehow creates a mix tape for his owner and the cellist to share, which kicks off with the 80s synth-pop masterpiece "Together In Electric Dreams."

We'll always be together
However far it seems
We'll always be together
Together in electric dreams

The movie is fantastic for what a film critic might callously call "all the wrong reasons." It is not a movie that I loved at first sight, although it was consistently enjoyable (overlooking the Boy George). Instead, my memories of the movie become gradually warmer, until eventually it became a source of inner strength I could draw upon. The world is filled with people, and people are capable of making movies like Electric Dreams, I thought. Therefore, the world can't be that bad. This movie is evidence of the adult's capacity for brashness and naivete. A love story with an Apple IIe? And he woos the girl how? Well, it's preposterous. But in a world where men can believe so earnestly in the viability of such a preposterous, hopeless movie that they actually make it, there is hope in even the darkest place. If ever there is an Electric Dreams II I will no longer fear fascism.

I have gone astray, off-topic. What I mean to say is that although Electric Dreams is a modern classic, the synth-serenade scene really only works ironically. It's hard to appreciate that there is any sort of actual humanity or warmth communicated by a computer. What I me na oh oh mi naminamina mean to say was that this is not a problem shared by K. K. Slider, dog at large, howl at the moon, genius at woof.

He can whistle, too.

Here's K. K. Slider, performing his "Rockin K. K." He is a lot more touching, more wonderful when you can see mouth move and paw strum, but that's not possible, since Google Video and Youtube are apparently such Internet shitsmears that they provide footage of neither Electric Dreams nor K.K. But if you want to see a video of teenagers sliding down their house stairs, Youtube, man.

*The day to day drudgery of killing monsters, earning gold, and unlocking special skills in Tales of Symphonia certainly did appeal to me, so it's not like I feel superior. I just feel ... very little for Animal Crossing.

A rambling, simple sourdough recipe

2006-01-20T19:14:00.000-08:00

A couple final notes before the recipe begins. First, the rising occurs when the yeast eats the flour, or at least something in the flour. As you know from your starter cultivation, yeast needs a fresh supply of flour to eat. This means that the amount of fresh flour -- which is to say flour that isn't already in the starter -- is a crucial factor in how much your dough is capable of rising.

Also, I don't know what's up with your oven, really. Google couldn't tell me how it worked in detail. I gather it's basically a giant combination broiler/microwave. I think we should start with a small loaf.

Finally, and crucially, if you need help with something, or if I was unclear, you need to call me. That's okay. Just do it. Email is not going to be fast enough, once you've started the bread. I can lose some sleep for the sake of good bread.

Ingredients:

Somewhere between 1/2C and 1C starter (0.125 L - 0.25 L) [note 1]
1 C water [note 2]
~2 C flour [note 3]
2 tsp salt

[note 1] the amount of starter -- that is, yeast -- affects the speed of the rise more than anything. The reason we're not adding more starter is because your oven can only hold so much, I'd imagine, and more starter would mean less flour, which is bad. Important: DON'T USE ALL THE STARTER, or you will have to start over next time.

[note 2] Filtered water is best, but use what you have and can afford!

[note 3] This is frustrating, I know, but because the density of flour is so variable, and you probably don't have a kitchen scale, this is how we gotta do it. The exact amount of flour you'll actually be using ... we'll sort out as we go. It's an ad lib sort of thing.

...

Okay, the recipe. First, get a bowl big enough to hold all your ingredients.

To the bowl, add:

the starter
the water

Mix. You want to dissolve the starter into the water [note 4]. Set this bowl aside.

In another bowl, mix together:

ONE CUP of flour
the salt

Why? To evenly distribute the salt before combining it with the yeast [note 5].

Add the flour/salt mix to the water/starter mix, gradually. If at all possible, stir the water/starter/flour as you do this -- the goal is the keep the incoming flour from clumping. After adding all of the salted flour, move on to the plain flour.

As you mix in the flour, the dough will go from fluid, to the thickness of your starter, until it eventually gets so thick that you can pick the entire mass of dough up[note 6]. Okay, now put it back in the bowl. Let it sit there for 20 minutes, while you wash whatever else you've dirtied [note 7]. Come back 20 minutes later.

Return to the dough. You are now going to transfer the dough onto a flat surface [note 8]. First, throw some flour on the surface, and spread it around. Before you move the dough from the bowl to the surface, take a last look at it. Try to pick it up one handed again. If it needs more flour, shit, you might as well add it now, before it makes a mess of your kitchen table.

Move the dough to the flat surface.

With one hand [note 9], gently hold down the end of the dough nearest to you with your fingers. With your other hand, push the center of the dough away from you with the base of your palm. Use your weight and lean into it. Don't lean so far that you rip the dough apart. Just stretch it.

Fold the far end of the dough back towards you. You've just kneaded.

Repeat: push the far end of the dough out, and fold it back in. Note that what was the middle of the dough becomes the far end in the next iteration. In this way, you will be able to knead all of the dough.

Sometimes, turn the dough 90 degrees between iterations, so that you get at the dough from various angles.

It is perfectly natural to get messy, sticky hands. That's okay. However, if the dough is just sticking to the table like Huey Lewis, you should add a bit more flour. Be conservative here! If you add too much flour, the bread will be too dense.

Kneading can take a while! If we were making a sandwich bread, like a nice homestyle American white bread, we wouldn't be kneading very long. This recipe is for a crusty, chewy bread, though. This is a bread for dipping, for cheese, for chewing. This is not a bread for toast and sandwiches. Lots of kneading will help this bread. Ten minutes of kneading is your minimum. Twenty minutes would be just fine, but don't feel obligated. Here's a test, quoted from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For More Food, page 218 (with a few words altered for clarity in the absence of the book's pictures):

1. Pinch off a piece of dough the size of a walnut.
2. Roll dough into a ball shape.
3. Use your middle and ring fingers to shape the backside of the ball.
4. Rotate the disk in your fingers (I go clockwise) while stretching at the middle with your middle fingers (think about what your tongue does to the bubble gum when you're ready to blow a bubble). See how thin you can stretch the middle of the disk. What you want is a smooth membrane so thin that light easily passes through. If you can work the disk into a smooth membrane -- say, 1 1/2 inches across -- without it breaking, then your dough is well developed indeed.

He calls this "windowpaning," since the dough is made thin and you shine light through it.

By the time you finish kneading, the dough should still be a little bit sticky, but sticky like a Post-It, not like glue. The surface of the dough should be smooth, thanks to the gluten. You are now ready for the rising.

Put the dough into some sort of clear container, which can hold the dough after it has doubled in size. Cover the container with a clean towel or cloth (or t-shirt if you're ghetto).

Check on it periodically. Rising times for wild yeast like your starter are hard to predict. Once it has doubled, move on. Expect this to take at least a couple hours. Puttng the dough in a warm place will help. Under your, fuck, magic heating table (what are they called?) could work well. Since it's more solid now, and since you're more focused on the bread, you probably won't end up with a floury puddle on the floor. Anyhow, once it's risen, move on.

Now, for a lot of breads, you'll want to knead it a bit more and let it rise again. Fuck that. This bread don't need it. This is not a fine-grained sandwich bread. This is a rough, ragged bread.

Preheat your oven. When you put the bread into the oven, that will drop your oven's temperature, and the top of the bread will be taking in a disproportionate amount of heat from the broiler while the sides and bottom of your oven struggle to heat up. Preheating won't prevent this, but it will help. Also, let's talk about some other oven matters.

Your broiler -- that is, the electric coils on top of the oven -- will probably make the loaf too brown, too fast. If you can turn the power of the broiler element down a bit, that would be cool. If not, well, you could try giving the top of the loaf a loose foil blanket when you put it in the over. That ought to help a bit. In normal ovens, the foil is not used. Your oven, though, is not normal. Your oven is a mystery!
Steam will help you produce a nice crust, and also (I think), encourage convection. If possible, and I really have no idea if it is, put some wide, shallow, oven-safe, microwave-safe dish on the bottom of the oven, with some water in it. You should put this in before you put in the bread, but after you preheat the oven a bit. If you cannot do this, that's okay.
I have no fucking clue what the microwave component will do. Your oven is a mystery! Good luck!

Stick the bread in your preheated oven. If you have a "lower rack" position, use that. Also, if you have a baking sheet, use that. If not, aluminum foil is fine.

So, to be clear on this, from the bottom of the oven to the to

-= broiler =-
(as much space as possible)
-= loose foil hat for bread =-
-= bread =-
-= baking sheet or aluminum foil =-
(enough space for steam to escape and circulate)
-= shallow dish with water =-

(The last two items are optional)

How long will it bake for? Your oven is a mystery! However, the classic test is to rap the loaf with your knuckles. If it "sounds hollow," it's done.

How hot should it bake? Your oven is a mystery! However, cookies are usually cooked at 375 F, and bread at 400 F (or a little higher), so whatever you did for your banana chip cookies is probably okay, though not ideal, at least for the first loaf. I don't know! Your oven is a mystery!

Once your loaf sounds hollow, remove it from the oven and place it on a rack. I have a suspicion that you don't have a rack. How about ... several chopsticks? Ooh, I'm crafty! The rack is important because otherwise the bottom of the loaf will be soggy, and that shit ain't right.

Let it sit on the rack for half an hour. Then slice it and eat it. Because this bread does not have any sugar or fat added, it is going to get stale quickly. Just a warning!

[note 4] ... because otherwise, when you add the flour, it will be impossible to distribute the yeast evenly.
[note 5] Remember, salt kills yeast, so we do this, which keeps any given yeast from getting ganged up on by a gang of salty rogues. Why are we not mixing the yeast with all the flour? Because we want all the salt, but might not want all the flour.
[note 6] A loose, unsure katamari of dough, but a katamari nonetheless. You are picking it up, by the way, with one hand, from the top, like your hand is a mother cat and the dough its kitten.
[note 7] Why wait? Well, you're giving the water in your dough time to fully hydrate the flour, which will make a more consistent dough, and give you much better sense of how wet or dry the dough actually is.
[note 8] Ideally this surface will be stable (you will be applying pressure to it), and about crotch-height (for ideal leverage). I would be civilized and say waist height, but that would be inaccurate.
[note 9] I don't favor either hand for kneading. I switch back and forth, actually, to keep from getting tired.

Breadmaking, part two, the first: What the fuck is going on, and why?

2006-01-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

Let's familiarize ourselves with the breadmaking process.

The basic yeast bread recipe looks like this:

yeast
flour
water [or other liquid like milk]
salt [for taste]
sugar [optional, for taste, moisture, and yeast morale]
oil [optional, for moisture, resistance to staleness]

Starter can replace yeast, flour, and water ... to some extent. Starter can replace yeast totally, and flour and water to some extent. If you try to straight bake your starter, it won't work well for several reasons:

Without salt, the bread won't taste very good.
The yeast in a chunk of starter has access to no new food, so it won't rise very much.
Without enough flour, the dough won't be able to hold in air bubbles, keeping the dough dense and kneading impossible. Also, without kneadable dough, you won't be able to shape the loaf, which is doubly important for free-form loaves.

So ... here's what's going to happen, basically, from the BREAD's perspective:

The wet, active yeast colony [your starter] is going to be given a fresh food supply [more flour]. This will give the yeast cause and opportunity to eat and reproduce, creating bubbles of air [CO2, really], as well as amping up the flavor. Meanwhile, the flour's proteins [glutenin and gliadin] will, in the presence of water, transform, Voltron-style, into gluten. Given time, the gluten will develop and organize itself. Given physical mixing, the gluten will link up. When you knead, the nature of the dough will change *as you knead*, primarily because of the gluten.

The dough will be kneaded until "smooth and satiny" (in the words of every bread recipe in the world). The ingredients, including the crucial yeast, will be evenly distributed through the dough. Thanks also to the kneading, the gluten will be a strong, interconnected, 3D web of gum, and the dough will be able to hold its shape as a ball, more or less.

The ball of dough will be set aside, covered in a warm-ish place, and now that the gluten has done its job, the yeast will demonstrate its worth, continuing to multiply and create gas. Tiny pockets of gas will occur throughout the dough and cause it to double in volume. Thanks to the gluten and the flour-laden doughs thickness, the bubbles will stay in place.

In some cases, the bread can be baked immediately after this doubling.

In other cases, the dough will be gently kneaded a bit more. This second kneading does not need to be very long, because whatever business you had with the gluten you've already done. Instead, the sole purpose of the second kneading is to evenly distribute the gas bubbles. Therefore, knead only a little, and knead with a light touch. All the air in your dough, you want to keep in there.

At this point, your yeast still has some spunk in it, so shape your loaf, cover it again, and allow it to double.

Then you will apply heat to the bread. In applying heat, you will be doing the following:

The yeast will turn a bit more active, then get lazy, then die as its temperature increases from 70 F to 140 F
The gas in your loaf will expand, making your loaf itself expand
The water in your loaf will expand and, towards the outside of the loaf, evaporate, making your loaf expand even more
The surface of the bread will get dark and hard, duh
The inside of the bread, as it cooks and dries, will firm up and retain its shape even after cooling

Often, the outside will become hard and the gas in the bread wil continue to expand, causing the loaf to crack. Gastronomically, that's not a problem. Aesthetically, this is a problem bakers have solved by slashing patterns into the unbaked loaf with a knife, to give the bread a pattern to expand in and give the gas a little more of a chance to escape. If you do "score" the loaf (that's what this is called), don't score very deeply. Personally, I like scoring a big "Z" but I've been known to score 4 letter words like a Scrabble champ.

Squelchy memories

2006-01-18T22:52:00.000-08:00

Excerpted from those little memo pads I used to carry around in my pocket:

Written at K-Mart:

Boback has already started stealing, although I'm going to make sure one of us pays for everything before we leave ... well, everything I find out about. If he stuffs Brach's caramels in his pocket, what am I going to do? Nothing.

During a Squelch distribution, a reader said:

"Where's the rape joke in this one? I know you guys always put one in."

On the importance of first impressions:

Lydia: I think Kenny was the least scary of all of you.
Zack: What about Tommaso?
Lydia: No. Tommaso was just dumb."

Tupac DECal notes:

T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.
The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everybody

Thinking out loud about the potential editor-in-chiefhoods of Kenny and Boback:

Kenny: better writer
Kenny: less tyrannical?
Boback: more motivated
Boback: blinks less
Kenny: better kat editing [wtf?]
Kenny: leading meetings, not as charismatic
Boback: leading meetings, morose
Boback: willing to put up cash for 150 shirts
Kenny: not dumb enough to put up cash for 150 shirts
Kenny: very pro-Squelch book
Boback: very pro-Squelch TV
Boback: has a good house for parties/meetings
Kenny: 1/2 asian, 1/2 white
Boback: persian, dreamy

Phil

2006-01-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

You ought to read this post of Tom's before reading this.

...

Tom called me a few days ago to let me know what had happened to Phil. It was a short conversation. I had no idea what to say or how to process my feelings so, being a guy, I said nothing. Maybe I said, "Wow." I don't know. I might have said, "Damn," but I'd like to imagine something softer. The moment stuck, but the words didn't.

My thoughts didn't really shape until around 2 the next day, when I cried a little and found myself talking to a ghost. And I've been irritable since then, especially on Saturday, when I let simple, stupid things frustrate me until I was so tightly wound that I had to run around the block until I calmed down.

Phil is the first friend I've lost. It hurts. This will sound weird, but I'm glad it hurts this much. It is, with respect to Phil's passing, the only thing I'm glad about. I want my memories of Phil branded into my brain.

We loved you, Phil. In conclusion: onimusha, onimusha, melodica and rainy day jazz and mushrooms and the phil hentell orchestra, perfect pitch, math genius and cheese, onimusha, onimusha, oh my god you have onimusha.

An introduction to your ingredients, Ryan

2006-01-03T22:21:00.000-08:00

Water: in America, tap water is chlorinated, and chlorine kills yeast. A Brita filter fixes this. Bottled water also does, but that's pricy. It may be that your tap water is just fine! I'd guess that a mountain man probably does not have too much chlorine in his water. As for temperature, well, if the temperature is too low, the yeast will be dormant. If it's too high, however, the yeast will die. 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) is the upper limit. You don't have a thermometer you can use? That's okay. I just stuck my hand in 110 Fahrenheit water. It kind of stung. If I was acting macho, I wouldn't say that, but machismo has no place in food science, and 110 kind of stings, damn it. But 100? That's about body temperature. If 100 Fahrenheit degree water hurt, my life would be a constant, omnidirectional ow. No, the crucial ten degrees between 100 and 110 Fahrenheit is where warm stops being warm and becomes hot instead. If it's pleasant to your hand, it's fine for yeast. Since you won't be heating up water until you actually have starter, you don't have to worry about killing you struggling yeast colony.

Now ... having said that, cooler yeast can apparently (according to Alton Brown) do some more interesting things with flavor and texture. And the starter I made in the dead of winter in my heater-less apartment has been delicious, so I don't think the cool weather (and therefore cool water) is a problem. It just means things will be slower. Try not to get antsy. If Miyagawa is anything like Oakland (which is ... assuming a lot), the yeast that eventually shows up will kick ass and take names.

That's about all you need to know about water for bread. Can you replace water with milk or ever soymilk? Well, sure, but better to leave your starter neutral. We can always add other liquids, from milk to orange juice to that flat beer you forgot to finish, to the breads as you make them.

Flour: There are some different kinds of wheat flour. Whole wheat includes some of the tough bran coating mixed in, so it's more difficult to work with (but tasty). Other flours -- all purpose (AP), cake, and bread -- don't include bran. All purpose is normal. Cake flour has less protein, and bread flour has more protein.

Why is protein important? Wheat flour's proteins turn into gluten when you mix it with water, and gluten is what makes bread dough stretchy and springy. No gluten, no bread. So cake flour, if you can even find it, is no good. Bread flour and all purpose flour are both just fine, unless you're mixing the wheat flour with other grains that don't supply gluten, in which case you're gonna want the extra oomph of bread flour. Buckwheat? No gluten. Rice? No gluten.

You can find bleached flours, too, especially in AP and cake varieties. For cake-making, bleaching is good because it weakens the gluten. For bread making, bleach is bad for the same reason. Now, I just bought 16 lbs of bleached AP flour for $4 and I've been using that with no real problem, so if all you can find is bleached AP flour, don't sweat. It's just that unbleached is better, and this is why. If your flour just doesn't cut it, there is a workaround, but we'll get to that another time.

The other thing about flour is that it's really dry, more than the air is. So flour absorbs moisture from the air, and that means that measurements of flour are not entirely to be trusted. If you add too much flour, the bread will end up dense, since you'll have too much gluten to hold the bread together and not enough water to vaporize and expand during baking. Tricky! How to work around this? Guess and get lucky. I'll try to provide textural descriptions and some pictures as we go.

Yeast: Yeast from the air will settle into your flour/water mix. The water will wake it up. It will move through the water, eating flour and reproducing. This process will create bubbles of carbon dioxide, and will also make the flour/water mix somewhat stringier. Yeast will supply that delicious bready aroma and flavor, but be warned that the nature of the yeast, including the taste, the resistance to acidity, the speed at which it reproduces, and its willingness to get along with other bacteria all change from region to region. But hey, maybe you'll strike gold and start a Miyagawa baking empire.

If your local yeast hates you and wants you to cry, you can buy a package of instant yeast and work with that. It won't taste as tangy or interesting, and it won't be as resistant to acidic environments, but it will give you a living culture you can make bread with. You ought to try a wild sourdough at least a few times before settling for packaged yeast, though.

Lactobacillus: This is the friendly bacteria that tag-teams with yeast to make sourdough sour. It eats different sugars than yeast does, and they can actually strengthen each other. Without lactobacillus, a natural sourdough really isn't sour. You don't need to know much about it; it's there or it isn't. Hopefully it is.

Containers: Metal is reactive. Plastic holds on to fats and spices and other weird things and doesn't let them go. Ceramic and glass are both fine for holding your prospective starter. Glass, though, has the added benefit of being transparent. Your glass container should have a lid, or you will need plastic wrap. The cover doesn't have to be airtight. In fact, you do not want an airtight cover, or else the glass container might explode. The narrower the container is, the more difficult it will be to work with, and the shallower it is, the more likely you are to make a big, sticky mess.

Again, if you don't have glass, ceramic is also fine.

Your hands: will get messy, a lot. You will experience a lot of what Alton Brown calls "club hand." There's only one thing that dough-to-be sticks to better than your hand, and that's itself, so if you get any stuck to you (and you will), you'll get a ton stuck to you. Roll with it. Don't use metal utensils in place of your hands. You can use wooden or rubber spoons or spatulas if you like, but I should warn you that I have broken two wooden spoons in arguments with bread dough. Your hands are stronger and more sensitive, and you'll learn more about the dough if you're willing to get a little messy.

An apron: An apron is a good idea, and one I've ignored for no good reason.

Your oven: What the fuck is it, and what does it do? Does it just cook by microwave? If so, how did you make cookies? I gather that it is small. How small? How big is the inside? In inches or centimeters. Does it have a gas flame or an electric element, or what? How does it work? Do you have control over the temperatures? Do you have any way of knowing what temperatures it can generate and maintain? This will be important later.

Bread guide for Ryan, part 1

2005-12-23T21:55:00.000-08:00

I: GETTING READY

So, you can probably buy commercial yeast in Japan, but if you want to make your own Japanese sourdough (henceforth J-do), you're going to need the following ingredients:

water (good tasting, filtered if possible)
flour (all purpose ... just regular flour)

That's it. When you get down to the business of baking, you're gonna need at least some salt too, but flour and water will start you off.

And you will need the following equipment:

a ceramic or glass bowl (no metal, okay?)
some plastic wrap or something
a large flat surface that you're okay with getting floury
an oven

An oven. You don't have an oven? Well, a microwave won't do; it can't get hot enough. You need fire. If not fire, then at least hot metal or stone. Luckily for you, entertaining hack anime series Yakitate!! Japan solved this Japanese dilemma (henceforth J-lemma) with a rice cooker, the sides of which can actually get pretty hot, which you know if you've ever had to scrape burned rice of the inside of one.

So have rice cooker, will travel.

One more bit of preparation is necessary. You, Ryan, are not going to be able to make proper French or Italian or San Franciscan bread with this aparatus. You are not going to be able to make a proper sandwich loaf, because you can't fit a loaf pan into a rice cooker. You are not going to be able to produce the classic sourdough crust, because you need like 500 degrees F and a good deal of moisture to do that.

The bread you make can still be delicious, though. It will just be different than oven-made bread.

If you have the proper ingredients, cookware, and mindset, we're ready to start.

II: MAKING THE STARTER

IIa: The First Day.

My measurements are going to be in Yankee. If you have metric measures instead of yankee measures, that's okay. What's more important is the ratio, for now.

Mix 1/2 cup of flour wiht 1/4 cup of water. The amounts don't matter as much as the consistency. I'm trying to think of the best way to desribe the target thickness, and words that come to mind include "pudding," "honey," and "Nickelodeon Gak."

Why this consistency? Glad you asked. The yeast needs both water and flour. Not enough flour, and the yeast doesn't have enough to eat. Not enough water, and the yeast can't move around very well, plus the gas bubbles it releases (which cause bread to rise) can't ... go anywhere.

You don't have to stir it a lot. Just mix it until it evens out. After that, cover it with plastic, and set it aside, in a warm place. Not hot. Warm.

IIb: The Second Day.

Check on it. Probably it looks like boring watery flour-sludge. Yeah, that's normal. Okay, okay, second day, take what you have, add another 1/4 cup of water, stir tenderly it until it kind of dissolves, then add another 1/2 cup of flour and mix. Cover again, using a fresh piece of plastic if the old one is being a jerk. Now set it aside again. Warm place.

IIIc: The Third Day.

Same thing. Really. Another 1/4 cup water, and another 1/2 cup flour. If you're lucky, the yeast will have some bubbles and smell slightly tangy. Either way. Back in a warm place.

IIId: The Fourth Day.

Yeah, same thing. Exactly the same. There are, after today, two cups flour and one cup water in your bowl. You might have had to switch bowls. That's okay. Warm place.

IIIe: The Fifth Day.

Now things get interesting.

Final Fantasy IV

2005-12-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

Final Fantasy IV (FFIV) came out on Game Boy Advance (GBA) a week ago. It is ... my Back to the Future, my Love Bug. It is something from my past which has remained meaningful, which I want to keep as part of me and enjoy in different ways as I grow. It's not Final Fantasy as a series that captivates me -- just this one; most of the games I find compelling but often unrewarding. Some, like the eighth and ninth, require conscious effort not to hate. No, it's just this game, which my friend Jeremy and I played that first winter we had Super Nintendos. It was the right game at the right time, maybe.

I like Final Fantasy games and other RPGs, really, but they became strange, split-personality beasts after FFIV. Some people played FF games for the story, and some for the battle system gameplay, and after FFIV the stories and the gameplay both got superficially richer, but separate from each other. In FFIV, the battles were the story, and so a battle-driven game worked in conveying everything that the game needed to convey. It had all the nuance of four color comics, and that's fine, because that's honestly all the nuance that menu-driven, randomized monster killing simulators can muster. Later FFs, like the sixth and seventh, had psychotic heroes, an opera, and a suicide attempt, and these are some of the countless things that you just cannot adequately convey in dead monsters. So later FFs kept the battles out of tradition, because they were RPGs and that's what RPGs do, and the battles became obstacles to the story, instead of the story itself.

Instead, later FFs had a lot of minigames. In FFVII, you have to snowboard down a mountain and, since that's not something that RPG battles can convey, there is a minigame to do this. FFVII has minigames for almost everything, and it gets a lot of flak for this, from me included, but it was the series' last, mad grasp for something meaningful in video game storytelling, so it deserves some respect for that. After that, well, the eighth game had battles so awful that the virtual card game inside the game was considerably more fun.

More bothersome for me is the problem Mihaly Csikszentmihaly alludes to here:

...The inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice. Therefore freedom does not necessarily help develop meaning in life--on the contrary. If the rules of a game become too flexible, concentration flags, and it is more difficult to attain a flow experience. Commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear.

I had tried to explain this in my own words before reading the book this is from (Flow), but it came out predictably figurative and dopey: Final Fantasy IV is short on the 'chocolate or vanilla' decisions that clutter up later FF games, and has instead lots of the 'life or death' choices that are actually meaningful. Maybe that's better than Csikszy's explanation. I don't know.

To tackle it in the specific, Final Fantasy IV is a game about life or death situations, and that works because the decisions you make -- do I cast this spell, or will the monster counterattack something fierce? do I heal, or go for broke? -- really are life and death decisions for your characters. Final Fantasy VII, by contrast, is ostensibly also a life or death sort of game, but the questions the player grapples with are trivial -- do I Give Cloud the Fire materia, or do I give it to Cait Sith and give Cloud the Ice materia instead? Do I equip this three slot, triple growth weapon, or this five slot, normal growth weapon? Do I bring along Tifa, who does 3000 damage per hit, or do I bring along Yuffie, who ... also does 3000 damage per hit, but with different battle animations? The story is something you watch instad of play. It's more a game about organizing and collecting things than a game about anything fantastic.

Some folks say the richness of choices makes you feel some sort of ownership over your experience, but I don't think it's something worth owning. As some dude on the Internet harshly put it, it's sad to define yourself like that in somebody else's digital tablescraps.

...

But I didn't buy FFVII last week. I bought FFIV, and FFIV has none of those problems. It is the one Final Fantasy game that makes a convincing case for the video game RPG as a storytelling medium. The highlight is the Cecil v. Cecil fight. Earlier in the game, the dark knight Cecil is uneasy about his methods, and others warn him that although his darkness seems to give him strength, it will consume him, and he will remain unable to save those he loves. So he sets out to become a paladin, and when he does, the first thing that happens is that the paladin Cecil fights a phantom of the dark knight Cecil. Only ... to win this fight, you can't attack. Just stand still, and the darkness inside the old Cecil will destroy the phantom from the inside out. The game knows that the heart of its story is the battles, and does a lot to increase the vocabulary of the battles. It plays with the relative sizes of hero and villain, builds interdependence into the way your characters are organized into front and rear rows, introduces and immediately perfects real time console RPG battles to convey urgency, pits you against an enemy so strong that it can only be defeated by reflecting its own power back onto it, and in one critical fight even interrupts the battle with a deus ex machina plot twist, unexpectedly adding a character to your roster and turning an unwinnable 2-on-1 fight into a desperate but winnable one.

...

If there's one thing FFIV has lacked over the years, it's been ... well, one thing or another. The original American release (as Final Fantasy II) had a serviceable but hokey translation, but a lot of abilities and items from the original Japanese game had been removed for "stupid Americans." The Playstation version had a more faithful (if awkward) translation and all the items and abilities were there, but the game had noticeable load times, and I just cannot stand waiting for load times. The Wonderswan version was in Japanese, and also on the most uncomfortable system in the world. And sure, the original Super Famicom ROM has been fan-translated ... but poorly, adding something as immature as an anachronistic William Shatner reference. The untranslated ROM is the only version that got everything right, but ... yeah, it's in Japanese. So I was hoping the GBA version rectified all of this, taking the Wonderswan version and giving it an English translation and a much more comfortable system to play it on.

Unfortunately, it was a rush job. There's slowdown on the world map, significant lag in battles, and occasional and inexplicable extra turns given to random characters. In its favor, this version has two bonus dungeons tacked on, which actually do a pretty good job of striking a middle ground between unhealthy power-leveling gameplay and the old FFIV experience. I've enjoyed the bonus material in much the same way that I enjoyed dicking around with Game Genie codes when I was younger. But really, that's what I've just paid $30 for. An official Game Genie dickaround expansion on a frustratingly imperfect port.

It's almost like theater, really, to see the same story be interpreted over time by different hardware, different translators, different localizers, and to be at least a little frustrated each time, but unable to stay away whenever the game rolls through town. At least, I imagine that's what it would be like if I didn't hate theater. Hummmm.

I don't think I'll want to play the bonus dungeons again, though. They don't belong. The story is complete without them. It had already been complete without them for 15 years.

More than that, though, I don't know if I'll want to play the GBA version again, because of the lag and the extra turn weirdness. This game is all about storytelling through combat, and having the combat screwed up like that ... it seems like a minor thing, I know, but like I said, the game is all about life and death choices, and in the port those choices are made battling the menus instead of battling the monsters. Every single battle in this game is like 90% the real thing, and 10% Greedo shoots first.

In another world, with a less slapdash port, this would be my favorite handheld game. In this world, unfortunately, it's going back to the store tomorrow. That's life.

don't read this tired

2005-12-19T20:15:00.000-08:00

guys, the shift key's not working. sorry.

my friend jeremy used to use the caps lock key instead of the shift key, all the time. i never thought less of him for doing that, but it's not something i'm comfortable doing myself.

some of the posts i have intended to make recently but not managed include;

9 that was a colon 0

[those were parentheses]

1. yesterday lydia put her head on my shoulder, and i thought she was sad, but the head kept rolling around like a doped up stevie wonder, and i didn't understand what was happening until i matched her movements to memories of looking over her shoulder while she was playing animal crossing [a ds game]. she was bobbing her head like an animal crossing character. it was cute.

2. i've been listening to a lot of new music, including several albums worth of mashups. i would have hyphenated that, but this laptop's hyphen key also doesn't work. also, just to get this out of the way, i can't type the numeral which can be spelled out as s i x. here, watch. 123457890. i tried, i really did. anyhow, the green day mashup album, american edit, turns out to be really pretty good. my favorite is track two, which managed to incorporate both the doctor who theme 'song' and gary 'child raper' glitter's classic, vapid masterpiece, 'rock and roll part 2.' this paragraph would look less ridiculous if i could 11111111111

those were failed exclamation points following an invisible hyphen. i was about to complain that i couldn't distinguish between single and double quotes, but then i realized i could just hit the apostrophe key twice.

anyhow, yeah. also, still enjoying m.i.a.'s arular album a lot, along with kanye west. i also gave 50 cent a fair shake and, well, i don't understand why people listen to him. he's ... he's not very good. keep in mind that this is coming from a man who took a decal class on the life and music of tupac shakur. whether that means i have an open mind for hip hop or i can't tolerate east coast rap, i don't know. jay z i don't really care for, but i can admire the man's rhymes and phrasing [''flow'', question mark]. 50 cent just seems mediocre. what am i missing here, guys, question mark.

another post to follow within a day, i think. about, specifically, final fantasy iv and, generally, remakes, the oral tradition, hero stories, magazine dynasties, and family recipes.

Perhaps I can't explain...

2005-12-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

But humor me anyway.

The Who's best albums are so different that I have never been in the mood to listen to more than one of them. Even when I try, only one album ever makes sense.

Instead of the Beatles' slow, steady drift from tight pop to druggy experimental beauty, The Who's best records, spanning ten years, don't make sense as a whole. They're weirdly separate periods like Picasso went through. Or Madonna, if you prefer. I'm not claiming that The Who is awesome because they reinvented themselves, from fake mods to fake pirate radio station to rock opera wankers to accidental arena rock gods to the personification of neurosis. They just happened also to be awesome.

My Generation ('63), The Who Sell Out ('67), Tommy ('69), Live at Leeds ('70), Who's Next ('71), and Quadrophenia ('73) are all drastically different, and each reason enough for The Who to be somebody's favorite band. On top of that, most things written about the band will start with an obligatory paragraph or two about how irreconcilably different the four band members were from each other, and about how The Who as an entity was a weird, otherwise unimaginable, alchemical mix of Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, and Moon. Speedfreaky surf-rock drums, dizzying melodic bass, windmill power chords, and a singer who's trying to act super tough even though what he really needs is a good, long hug.

Sometimes the best hug is from the inside out -- a good meal. And two months ago I had a piece of celery topped with a scoop of avocado, tobiko (fish eggs), and wasabi, prepared by Lydia's grandmother. It was DELICIOUS. It was inexplicable. I couldn't imagine designing food like that. It's sort of the opposite of the problem faced by William Paley, the philosopher so awed by the intricacies of nature that he felt sure that it had to be designed. Well, it wasn't, and neither was The Who. At least not with the opening paragraphs of 30 years of hack rock historians in mind.

What I most like about The Who, and what has stayed constant as I've shifted my starstruck gaze from album to album, is Pete Townshend's quavering, vulnerable but certain voice, as both the songwiter and as the (secondary) singer. It's the vulnerability that makes the strength feel genuine, and it's why Led Zeppelin sounds like fantasy cock rock masturbation in comparison.

My dad (whose record collection introduced me to The Who) got all offended when I told him that some people consider The Who a proto-punk band. Dad, that's a good thing! It means that when the next generation threw out the bathwater, The early Who's lack of bullshit, and then their willingness to discard their own past, was the baby worth saving.

Well, that's my favorite band. What's yours?

Face to face with history

2005-12-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

I have been working part time in the UCB library. I get to see lots of weird or rare books. Interesting things land on my desk, I say, "Hmm," and sometimes I write down the title to look it up later. There was The Village that Died for England (nonfiction), Legends of Franklin County, Indiana (how wonderfully specific is that!), and Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, a old-ish looking book with some fading pencil scratches in its margins. Well, I don't speak German, so I probably wouldn't have thought much of it, except that the accompanying computer printout listed not only an author, but the note "Donated by: German Consulate," and then "Previous owner: Hitler, Adolf." Fast forward to Google.com, which tells me that the title translates as New Aristocracy From Blood and Soil.s

My fellow Californians should appreciate how strange it feels to touch a piece of world history.

Speaking of!

I never got around to the promised last Europe posts. Probably, I never will, but London has the best fucking museums. Last time we went to London, I spent a happy two hours gazing at Joseph Turner paintings. This time I went to the British Museum, which is filled with the fruits of colonalism. Hittite lion-hunting reliefs, strange sphinx statues, mummies accompanied by x-rays, beautiful metal Indian sculptures ... there was a Chinese exhbit, which was less impressive, and also a Korean exhibit, which was half-assed. In the west wing of the museum was the Rosetta Stone. The actual, for realz Rosetta Stone. Inside a thick glass case and surrounded by a small crowd. The real treat, though, was across the museum: a replica of the Rosetta Stone that you were allowed to touch and get all greasy with your fingerprints.

It's easy to forget that non-digital media and artifacts will degrade over time, and that nobody will ever get to manhandle the real Rosetta Stone again. It's kind of weird to think that there is only one real Rosetta Stone, or only one real The Fighting Temeraire. A book, by contrast, can be authentic in every reproduction. This meager blog post is authentic on every computer screen that can read it. But surely the replica Rosetta Stone is physically different in some ways.

That said, I think that direct contact with the replica felt closer to the real thing than did two feet and some glass away from the original.

In Soviet Russia, Squirrels Fish You

2005-12-01T18:36:00.000-08:00

Squirrels in a Russian park descended en masse without warning and killed a "big" dog which had been barking at them, then scampered away with their hard-won dog flesh.

For real.

The BBC article is accompanied by a photo of a squirrel, which I assume is a Russian squirrel, and which looks eerily like the Evil Stanford Squirrels we saw that one time we visited Stanford to pay our respects to the Chaparral. I'm not going to drag out the Stanford red/Russian red connection, but there you go. Black-furred, brooding squirrels that, on the Stanford campus, looked to be contemplating murder and, in Russia, seized the opportunity.

If you like, take this as heavy-handed political allegory. Or not.

I am talking about bread

2005-11-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

So my starter died. After some light netsleuthery, I have concluded that the recipe I used reversed a crucial couple of steps, and that my ability to make a second loaf (but not a third) was just the lucky result of not following directions properly.

This dead starter, which I have posthumously named Prince Albert for reasons that only Lydia can understand, will be missed. That second loaf was really pretty good. Oh well.

ADDED APPROXIMATELY 40 SECONDS AFTER INITIAL POST: if, after I get the second starter up and running, anybody wants be to break them off a little something, just ask. I've already had a couple requests from the folks at the library, and am only too happy to oblige.

Phoenix Wright:

2005-11-21T22:47:00.000-08:00

I cannot get this game out of my head.

Or off of my back.

Capcom released a lawyerin' game for the DS last month. The courtroom shenanigans are really just a frame for some high-octane murder mysteries, and the game plays fast and loose with the law. Your attorney character moonlights as a crime scene investigator, and wins cases with what is plainly illegal evidence. The meat of the game, though, is witness-cracking.

As Cynthia willfully misunderstood it, "It's a game about making people cry!" You don't draw tears from any witness, although you do take joy in seeing them break down. Eyes roll back into skulls, collars are tugged on, toupees are torn off and thrown, and a piercing scream of "UWAAAAARRRRGHHHHH!!!!" is uttered.

You found the body at 1:00, you say, Mr. Sahwit? OBJECTION!

Typesettng issues aside, this Flash recreation is pretty faithful to the feel of the game, except that something that sounds sort of like the "MORTAL KOMBAT!" song plays in the background Because, really, isn't it? Mortal kombat, I mean, give or take a k. False witness is as unforgivable a crime as there is, and there are (fictional) lives on the line.

Don't worry, Matt. Phoenix Wright, ace attorney though he may be, is only my second favorite lawyer. Or will be, once you get sworn in or whatever.

Still! He did cross-examine a fucking parrot for the win in the fourth trial (it was the only witness the prosecutor couldn't bribe).

Ryan, if I was ever close to convincing you to get a DS, the Japanese version of Phoenix Wright (Yomigaeru Gyakuten, or something) has an option for full English text. Unexpected!

My My Katamari box art

2005-11-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

This Katamari game (for PSP) might well suck, since the twin-stick controls aren't available. However, this box art is amazing.

jesus bread

2005-11-15T14:59:00.000-08:00

I've been making bread this week, with just flour and water, after being told by a book that "wild yeast" would turn up on its own, a sort of baker's virgin birth. When I checked on my flour sludge this morning, I got a nose-full of yeast. So all is well! Although it's really kind of messy, "kneading" this stuff. Today was day three of patiently stirring in more flour and water. Tomorrow, Lydia's birthday, I do the same. On day five, though, I bake! And I will apparently be able to keep the leftover "starter" in the fridge to make bread next week, of the same yeasty lineage.

Green: Super Food Ball (Green?)

2005-11-13T19:05:00.000-08:00

Since we didn't have a kitchen or a campfire handy, we ate out a lot. France had better food than England.

Anyhow. The rest of this post will be written in the style of the team roster screens for the NES game Super Dodge Ball. Why? Because Sarah probably hasn't played it.

BAdada DAda da DUM DUM, BAdada DAda da DUM DUM
BAdada DAdada DAdada DAda da DUM DUM DUM!

ENGLAND

| Team England  | SITRIC  | WAGAMA  | MAWSON  | SPARKS  | ROCKSO  | FORTNM
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------
| ENERGY        | 48      | 36      | 44      | 40      | 36      | 40      |
| THROW POWER   | 11      | 6       | 8       | 7       | 6       | 7       |
| THROW TECH.   | 12      | 10      | 15      | 12      | 10      | 10      |
| BALL BREAK    | 4       | 6       | 5       | 9       | 6       | 6       |
| AGILITY       | 4       | 6       | 4       | 5       | 5       | 5       |
| CATCH TECH.   | 6       | 10      | 5       | 5       | 7       | 6       |
| DAMAGE CAP.   | 4       | 5       | 4       | 4       | 9       | 4       |
| POWER SHOT    | Fusion  | Gyoza   | Poster  | No beer | Tartar? | "Poop"  |
| JUMP P.SHOT   | Irish?  | Donburi | Good    | WTF?    | Fuckers | -Lydia  |

KING SITRIC served "Irish Fusion," which is like a reimagining of California cuisine done with Irish ingredients and to Irish-ish tastes. It was interesting, and it worked. The food was all good, but fusion cuisine is where memories go to die. It all melts together in my head, and all that I can remember was that I enjoyed it. But here's a representative sample from their online menu (one which neither of us ordered): Pan fried supreme of free range chicken on a red onion, bacon & potato hash with a grain mustard jus.

WAGAMAMA is a Japanese chain that the British are apparently proud of, perhaps inappropriately so. They have ramen and yakisoba and gyoza. You know, Japanese food. It's pretty good. You can certainly find worse fare in England, but I don't say that to complement Wagamama. They are decent, though.

THE MAWSON ARMS is a pub attached to the Fuller's Brewery, and we ate there before taking the tour. The pub was rather smoky, or at least it seemed that way to my Californian lungs and eyes, but the food was actually rather tasty. Perhaps, in its own rather unassuming way, the best food we had in England. I guess part of the appeal of pub food is the low expectations. I had a shepherd's pie sort of thing, served with fries ("chips"), vegetables, and a lot of thick, meaty, Guinness-flavored gravy. I had an epiphany during that meal, that gravy and lots of it is the key to happiness, but to be honest I've had trouble applying that lesson to life beyond The Mawson Arms. Lydia had a meat and cheese plate, which isn't the sort of thing you'd expect a pub to do well, and you'd be right, in the US. What she got was very good, although it might have benefitted from low expectations. We had a bite at another pub later -- The Lounge, at the same hotel as the King Sitric -- and that was also very good, probably better than the King Sitric, even, although less grand. The lesson, then, is that pub food is the best food in England. Which is handy, since that's where the beer is.

MARKS & SPARKS, properly MARK'S & SPENCER'S, a grocery and department store, was the source of one readymade meal. I had some of the prepackaged sandwiches I'd been lusting after in secret, and I am pleased to report that the packaging was even better than I'd imagined! From the "plastic" window made out of corn starch to the pull tab that splits the cardboard shell into two triangle plates, it's a thing of beauty. The sandwiches are, well, not bad considering they'd been very cheap and sitting there for god knows how long. Lydia also had some potato salad, which was tastier but had less interesting packaging. Later we had another supermarket-derived meal, grabbing meat, cheese, and bread at a Somerfield market and eating it in our hotel room. It was pretty good. I also tried a stilton, and a lot of it, for the first time. It's cool, I guess. I really think cheddar is more to my liking.

THE ROCK & SOLE, a fish and chips place, was recommended by our travel guide book. They didn't have tartar sauce. FUCK THAT SHIT.

FORTNUM & MASON, another department store, serves afternoon and high tea. Last time we Englanded, we had a fantastic afternoon tea at the Dorchester Hotel. F&M's tea had very tiny portions, unimpressive tea, and a too-high price even before considering the exchange rate. Not recommended. By the way, and I don't mean for this to mean anything, but while we were there, like 65% of the patrons were Asian. Like "real" Asian. Not elephant-riding Asian. In that spirit, I ordered lapsang souchong tea. Lydia warned me that it would taste like "poop" or, after further consideration, "smokey poop." It was smokey.


| Team France   | CHEESE  | EGYPT   | MANKIN  | LADURE  | BREAD   | ROBIN   |
+---------------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------
| ENERGY        | 36      | 28      | 24      | 20      | 16      | 24      |
| THROW POWER   | 12      | 8       | 7       | 6       | 5       | 7       |
| THROW TECH.   | 6       | 10      | 4       | 3       | 5       | 6       |
| BALL BREAK    | 8       | 10      | 11      | 11      | 11      | 15      |
| AGILITY       | 5       | 5       | 6       | 11      | 7       | 4       |
| CATCH TECH.   | 6       | 5       | 6       | 11      | 7       | 4       |
| DAMAGE CAP.   | 7       | 7       | 6       | 8       | 13      | 7       |
| POWER SHOT    | Goat    | Pinenut | Mussels | over    | oh my   | hotel   |
| JUMP P.SHOT   | GOAT!!  | in Tea  | (a lot) | rated   | god     | pig-out |
`---------------=---------=---------=---------=---------=---------=---------'

France had a serious advantage over England, in that we had two friends to show us around, and also to eat with. So were were eating at reliably good places, and in good company. Anyhow.

CHEESE was the first and most important food item on our wishlist, so we had Caroline and Robin take us to a wine bar that served cheese and meat. And wine, but neither of us felt like wine, so we got Coke ... which, by the way, costs a lot more in France. The meat stuff, the prosciuttos and pates (there were like 3 different pates on the platter) were all excellent, but the cheese was really exceptional. Good bread and good meat are available in California; they just cost a lot and are not so readily available, when compared to France. But French cheese is often made in ways which make them ILLEGAL TO IMPORT (they're not pasteurized). So it's the cheese which tastes the most magical to an American tongue. And it's the cheese that makes itself the centerpiece of any meal where cheese is present. I had had a goat cheese gouda at Berkeley Bowl shortly before going to Europe, and it was excellent. Awesome, even. I had been thinking, "Damn, that goat cheese was really good," and then Tommaso said something like, "Man, that goat cheese was really good." It was really good. The cheese in France was better. The brie I had was much more palatable than the brie I was used to. They say that brie and camembert are most hurt by pasteurization. I can believe that. Anyhow, it was the goat cheese (which I apparently stubbornly and Americanly refuse to call "chevre") that rocked my mouth. I just rubbed that shit all over my tongue and the roof of my mouth and let it sit there. I'm kind of getting tingly thinking about it. Anyhow, it was good.

EGYPTIAN TEA was a must as soon as Robin mentioned that it had pine nuts in it. Not pine nut, but pine nuts. Floaters. I got the Egyptian coffee myself, though I tried Lydia's tea, and all this took place at a hookah bar. Do floating pine nuts taste good in sweet mint tea? Yes they do. The coffee was sweetened, but it was very strong, so I was okay with that.

MANNEKIN PIS, a name I "remembered" off a business card right now, was a mussel joint in Paris with red lighting and pictures of movie stars on the walls. Lydia and I shared a bowl of beer mussels and a bowl of cream mussels, and Robin and Caroline split a bowl of cheese and apple mussels, which I sampled. My stateside mussel experience hadn't been truly extensve, so I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm pretty sure those were the best three bowls of mussels I had ever been near in my life. The fries, also, were excellent. I ended up eating so many mussels that the waiter was a little ... confused when he came to take my plate away.

LADUREE was supposed to be really good. It's on that big street between the Napoleon arch and the Mona Lisa museum. It is pretty good, but my first pick adjective would be "overpriced." A small coffee was $4. Lyd's tea was $6. Croissant was like $3. Shouldn't the croissants be cheaper in France? Very good croissants, but the coffee was a little weak for being as small as it was. Bitch, I drink pots that taste stronger than this.

BREAD was purchased from a place down the street, recommended by Lydia's friend Caroline, who also picked a hotel for us (thanks). We bought a ham bread, an olive bread, an apple brioche, and this special sheep's milk cheese bread which had just come out of the oven. Look, the ham, olive, and apple breads were just dandy, but it's the sheep bread that is making me tingle again. We (mostly I) ate it quickly, and I miss it, although I don't regret eating it so quickly. Best enjoyed fresh, right?

ROBIN had an informal dinner with us in our hotel room, our second (of two) nights. Cheese from a cheese shop, the aforementioned ham and olive breads, and a cheap but excellent pack of meats from the nearest corner market. I do regret not getting any North African food while in Paris (excluding the pine nuts in the tea, I guess?), but I can't complain about this dinner. You can bet your sweet ass I had bought some goat cheese, and god damn it as tasty.

In summary, goat and sheep cheeses are tasty.

As a small final note, I expected France to have better coffee, really. The Egyptian stuff was good, but beyond that the best coffee I had in Paris was, uh, from a Starbucks in a mall. Shape up, France! I expect this crap from tea-drinking England, but you too? In France's defense, the beans I bought there and took home to brew in my own style (I call it "competence") made for some absolutely delicious coffee. So either I just got unlucky, or France roasts coffee way better than France brews it. Well.

That's it for food.

From the Sad Animal Department

2005-11-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

I asked for scrambled.

He's got a lot more sad animals here (scroll past the text message up top).

Red

2005-11-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

Paris, France: fashion capitol of the world ... and for the past week, the riot capitol of the world.

Or not.

On the flight to London, the in-flight entertainment opened with an unskippable news program. Lydia beat the system by not paying attention, but I watched it, sort of. The audio was fucked up, but there were pictures of fire, and the word France. Whatever. The audio was really fucked. It was something about a riot, but for some reason I didn't really grasp the severity of things. I think I just assumed that a "riot" in France involved people drinking while grimacing, smoking while grimacing, and maybe making rude gestures at the cops. Maybe the fire was just, you know, like a bonfire from an Allen Haim Beach Party? I AM NOT A CLOSE STUDENT OF 20TH CENTURY WORLD HISTORY. I didn't give the news much thought. In London, the night before taking the train to Paris, we caught an evening news program and they talked more about the riots.

Apparently two youths of North African descent thought they were being chased by cops and electrocuted themselves while trying to escape from cops that weren't chasing them. And this was something of an excuse for racial tensions to explode. The French government seems to try very hard to pretend that there are no factions or divisions in French society. Everybody's French, and that's it. Apparently (according to the BBC), France doesn't collect racial data, so the country is basically designed to not deal with problems like this.

The French Minister of the Interior is a giant fucking dickhead, a genuine French racist at best. That's at best? Yes. At best he is a horrible but genuine man. At worst he is a liar, banking on the fearful, insular racism of the French to increase his political profile. Sarkozy. That's his name. He's a media whore and a terrible person. He either does not understand or does not care about the difference between an North African immigrant and a third generation Frenchman of North African descent. You pissed off we have Schwarzenegger? You count your lucky stars we don't have this cockmongrel.

The next day we went to Paris via the Eurostar train, which goes through a tunnel under the sea. All we saw of France before arriving in Paris was green pastures, and even if we had seen the riot-afflicted suburbs, riots are kind of an after-dinner activity, and this was 11:00 in the morning.

Paris itself is in a genuine bubble. That was my limited impression, at least. Lydia has two friends in Paris, and we met them at the train station. One of them had only learned about the riots a day before, if I am remembering correctly. Things had been on fire for, like, a week at that point. They are both wonderful people, I would like to stress.

Anyhow, Paris itself was lovely. Great food.

Yellow Lion, or something

2005-11-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

I don't have it in me to post one mammoth Europe!! post all at once. You don't have it in you to read it. Instead, I am going to take a cue from my robot-addled childhood -- Voltron. Five separate posts that will, at the telling's climax, transform and combine -- in your head -- into one super-post.

The yellow lion is in-flight entertainment. We flew Virgin Atlantic. Virgin's media setup is nuts. They have 40 movies and probably 200 episodes total of various TV shows and 40 music albums, all to be selected and enjoyed by you at your leisure. When the captain interrupts and tells you that the seatbelt sign was activated because of, duhhh, turbulence, the entertainment automatically pauses. Even if it didn't, you can rewind.

So I watched Kung Fu Hustle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wedding Crashers, Batman Begins, Kingdom of Heaven, Fantastic Four, and an anthology episode of a ... weird ... Japanese show. Also listened to an album called Arular three times.

In brief:

Kung Fu Hustle's got that bracing, uncomfortably violent comedy that Shaolin Soccer does. I'm certain I like it, but I don't know if I enjoy it. The "fated lovers" were awesome. The husband's sleepy fight scene in particular.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sucked. Yeah. At least for me. I am used to Willy Wonka being a chocolate GOD, not a chocolatier with weird Burtonesque daddy issues. Willy Wonka does no wrong. Willy Wonka is all-knowing. Willy Wonka has no human weaknesses. Willy Wonka is the perfect man. Willy Wonka can snap you in half with his mind, Tim Burton, so show some respect. I can't be fair to this movie. Also, Grandpa Joe? Nobody cares that you worked in the factory. Shut up. The best part of this movie wasn't the factory, which was entirely un-magical. It was the other kids, Augustus Gloop and Violet Beauregard and the others. More charismatic and likeable than Wonka, Charlie, or the Oompa Loompa guy. I can't even remember what Charlie looked like. What the hell? Why does this movie even have his name in the title?

Wedding Crashers was, yeah, just a romantic comedy with Owen Wilson in it. I enjoyed it mostly, but the gay son was really uncomfortable-izing. Are comic relief gay guys always portrayed as hot for the leading male? Is this a straight American fear, or a fantasy?

Batman Begins was great. Everyone was great in it. Even Katie Holmes, except for those weird brain damaged smiles she was making at the end. My favorite comics character, speaking irrationally and honestly, is Iron Man, and the Bruce Wayne in this movie is more like Iron Man than I remember Bruce Wayne being, from the formative Asian prison experience to the giant, fingers-in-everything corporation with the hero's name on it, to the super-suit's nigh-impregnability, to (especially) villains running amok with technology that the hero is responsible for the existence of. It's the best ever Batman movie, better than the Keaton/Nicholson one or Mask of the Phantasm. But also, with the Iron Man undertones, I'm gonna call it the secretly best ever Marvel movie, too.

Kingdom of Heaven featured Orlando Bloom making one very stupid decision. Basically, and I guess this is a major spoiler, Bloom's character has to decide to either (A) become king, preventing a warmongering idiot from taking the throne, and getting to marry the hot princess he's in love with, or (B) let the warmongering dude become king and watch while he destroys the city and all of its people. And Bloom goes for (B), becoming consciously responsible for the death of thousands of people for the sake of his own morality-driven ego. Dickhead. Lots of swordfights. Also I guess militant religion is stupid or something? I dunno, it was kind of too subtle for me.

Fantastic Four -- look, my brain was running at like quarter strength at this point in the flight -- was as bad as I had every right to expect. The problem with making a movie of this comic is that Mr Fantastic, Invisible Girl, and Human Torch are stupid characters that nobody cares about. The Thing is one of Marvel's better characters, but he's really boring in this movie, too. Ink on paper conveys emotion much better than thick makeup on screen. Also they fucked up Dr Doom, royally. Didn't Spiderman's Green Goblin already go through this "kill my doctor, then kill the the board of directors threatening to push me out, then try to kill the hero because I'm jealous" thing? This exact same thing? Am I mistaken? Also, what is with these rhetorical "science for morons" questions that keep popping up in Marvel movies? First we have "Do you know what happens to a Toad when it gets hit by lightning?" Now it's "Do you know what happens to rubber when you make it extremely cold?" and, also, in addition, in the same movie, "Do you know what happens when you rapidly cool superheated metal?" And why does Mr Fantastic make canned "stretchy rubber" sounds? He's not made of rubber. He's made of person. Flexible person.

Why did they do Fantastic Four instead of Avengers? Marvel, fuck, just run with the Wonderman/Vision origin story, with Ultron as the main villain. Leave out Thor and Loki and it'll be fine. A lot better than this shit.

The Japanese variety show was too good to not mention, but too difficult to really explain. Sorry!

Arular, by M.I.A., I listened to three times. The plane was noisy, and the seat was uncomfortable, so I needed something loud, rhythmic, and pleasant to distract me from my physical discomfort and drown out the plane's noice while I tried to sleep. It worked. The album's pretty good. Slam, galang galang galang. Maybe you're familiar?

review digest

2005-10-31T22:43:00.000-08:00

Arrested Development is fantastic. We just watched seven episodes in a row. I love it to death. I don't have much to say about it. I love it.

The Office (UK) was fine. It was funny, but also boring. I watched half of the first episode and got really bored with it. Later I saw three more episodes worth of the show, but I couldn't care. It's funny when the manager sings that song in episode 4. It's funny when the Hitchhiker's Guide dude teases the skinny dude, but it's not that funny. Well, really it's pretty funny and I don't give a shit about any of the characters or the idea of watching the show or never watching it again. It felt disposable, like an individual, long-forgotten edisode of The Daily Show.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Famicompo

2005-10-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

So it's become kind of a thing for me, now. Chiptunes. I am listening to modern compositions for obsolete game consoles, things which sound like they came out of a NES but which were never attached to a video game in any way. How did I get here?

In 1991, I would read books in my spare time, but I would read them with a Game Boy next to me, volume all the way up, like the littlest, dorkiest, most sun-averse ghetto blaster in the world. I took the big "I'm a dork" plunge when I was 18 and became the proud owner of an imported Japanese video game soundtrack. It was for a Game Boy game. 30 tracks of a robot stepping on a cat's tail, and then 7 bonus tracks of actually orchestrated symphonic versions played with real instruments. The bonus tracks were shit. Loved the bleepity bloops, though.

For a long time this was grounded in specific games, but by now it is the sound of 8 bits itself that I love. I have an inner ear hard-on for the way every sound in a chiptune bamfs in and out instantly, shuffling melody and silence in a way physical instruments can only oafishly suggest. There's this single, simple, striking tone 9 seconds into this one track I have -- it's labeled Nullsleep - untitled (fearless flight), but I found it on DC++ so who's to say -- that just God fuck yeah~~~~~~~

Famicompo is a collection of NSF (Nintendo sound format) files submitted for a competition. Some covers, but mostly originals. NSF files are very tiny and you can download them all in about 2 seconds, but you will need a plugin or a dedicated music program to play them. If you are interested -- and I will not be hurt if you aren't -- you can get a Winamp plugin or standalone player here.

Zack & the Internet

2005-10-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

Tonic Water: Contains Quinine.

Zack: What's quinine? Will it kill me?

Internet: "Quinine has many uses and applications. Some of the more common uses include: Analgesic, Anaesthetic, Antibacterial, Anti-malarial, Anti-microbial, Anti-parasitic, Antiseptic, Astringent, Febrifuge, Muscle-relax--"

Z: What the hell is febrifuge?

I: "Acting to reduce fever. From Latin febri, fever, plus fuge.

Z: ... "fuge?"

I: "One that expels or drives away."

Z: ... same root as in centrifuge?

I: "Centrifuge ... see centrifugal ... Latin fugare, meaning "run."

Z: But why didn't that first dictionary site just say antipyretic or even fever reducer instead of febrifuge? Were they just being cocks?

I: Inconclusive.