I remember being nine years old and unable to ride a bike, and it seemed like all the kids on my block wanted to do was ride. We'd be playing something--freeze tag, hide and seek, visiting chemical horror on fire-ant mounds--and someone would say "let's ride bikes!" and off they'd go, leaving me behind. Once I was so frustrated after they rode off, I methodically smashed all of one friend's BBs with a sledgehammer, leaving tiny silver coins on the garage floor where ammunition used to be.

It wasn't really anyone's fault that I couldn't ride with them. My parents had bought me a bicycle for Christmas when I was six, but I was not tall enough to ride it then. Even at nine, my legs were not long enough. I was a short kid and my few attempts to learn to ride had ended in lacerations from the concrete sidewalks and the bike's rat-trap pedals. My friends tried to teach me to ride on several occasions--multiple hands steadying my bicycle seat as I struggled to remain upright--but they ultimately gave up. They wanted me to share their fun, but I couldn't join in. It made me lonely and I hated it.

I feel like I'm back in that lonely place, and I have been there for a while. I don't share the enthusiasm for television and video games that my local friends have. And local friends are the only ones I see with any regularity. When we get together, we often struggle for topics of conversation because I don't share most of their interests. To steal a phrase from Pat Rothfuss, sometimes trying to initiate a conversation with them is like playing catch with a well.

I read comics, and quite a few of them, but not the typical superhero stuff. I read stuff that is often cancelled after only twenty or twelve or six issues due to lack of sales. The stories are amazing, but the spandex fanboys control the comics market, so the stuff I read gets the axe. My local friends who read comics only read typical superhero stuff. And the ones who don't usually read comics only read the stuff I lend them. If I thought they'd actually read them, I'd send them all home with staggering armloads of comics every week after our game nights, just so my experience of these stories wasn't so solitary. In fact, I used to lend out a bunch of comics, but half the time they weren't read (or at least weren't read for six months) and so I was discouraged.

I listen to podcasts about roleplaying and science. I hear about intriguing roleplaying sessions and amazing things I could see in the night sky if only I had a telescope or lived somewhere dark enough. Sometimes, it feels like the same kind of torture I visited upon myself as a kid when I'd stand in front of the window at the Babbage's at the mall for a while, watching game demos for computer systems my parents couldn't afford. Living vicariously isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds.

I read books and blogs and webcomics. The number of people with whom I can carry on meaningful conversations about what I read is very small. And most of those people live nowhere near me.

I practice tai chi. I'm an AFOL (adult fan of Lego). I love Euro-style board games, but I don't take them as seriously as genuine enthusiasts. I can talk about any one of these hobbies for about two minutes with my local friends before I see most of their eyes glaze over, feel their longing to talk about something more familiar.

I know that there are online communities for discussing all of my interests, but I really miss being able to talk about stuff with people in person. My wife is a patient person and a geek, and she even shares some of the interests I've listed. She'll listen to just about anything I feel like blathering about, and I'm lucky to have her as an audience. But she's only one person, and I know she can't possibly want to hear about some innovative new game mechanic, or how there's a run on certain Lego sets because they contain bricks in previously-unreleased colors.

I listen to my friends' conversations like I'm watching double-dutch ropes swing past, hoping that I can occasionally jump in and participate. The situation has reached the point where I just don't try communicating about my own interests much. I attended Brick Fiesta down in Austin a few weekends ago, but I said nothing about it on Twitter and I was hesitant to say anything to anyone in person. I feel like I'm falling out of the habit of basic communication. It sucks to keep quiet, so I'm considering posting about my interests on this LiveJournal again, if only to have a record of what I'm reading and experiencing.

Every avid reader I know has a Stack. The Stack is a collection of unread books in the reader's possession that he or she plans to read in the near future. When DVRs became popular, we readers already knew the flavor of anxiety of those who view their Tivo queues as to-do lists that keep filling up, because we'd already been feeling the same thing for decades with our Stacks.

( Putting my own list behind a cut, to spare, well, everyone.Collapse )

Since blissitate has not yet posted about the dinner I made on Sunday, I'll do it myself. I'll admit that I like it when she heaps praise upon me for my mad culinary skills, but I'm proud enough of my recent endeavor that I don't feel like waiting for her to do so.

Dinner was grilled chicken with cilantro cream sauce on a bed of quinoa and roasted corn. I also grilled some mushrooms and a couple of quesadillas, but--tasty as they were--I wasn't concerned that they'd come out properly.

When I grabbed the package of chicken breasts from the store, the size of the package led me to believe I'd be getting four breasts. Turns out there were only two--they must have come from a fabulously endowed chicken, and I'm sure she was popular with all the roosters at the farm from whence she came. I rubbed a garlicky mesquite rub into the chicken before dropping it on the grill. Not as good as grilling with real mesquite, I'm sure, but much easier since I use a gas grill.

The cilantro cream sauce was based on a simple pesto recipe I have. I dumped a bunch of cilantro, a few cloves of garlic, a fresh jalapeno, salt, and about a cup of cooking oil in the food processor to make cilantro paste. Then I mixed the paste with an equal amount of mayo to get something that was worthy of being dolloped onto the chicken. And I still have a ton of cilantro paste to use for other purposes.

The quinoa with roasted corn recipe came from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I heard about quinoa (pronounced keen-wa, which cracks blissitate up every time say it) from a page-a-day cooking calendar I had last year, and I was intrigued by the idea that there was a sweet, nutty grain I had never heard of. I was reminded of the grain while I was looking for dinner ideas in Bittman's book last week. The recipe is fairly simple: cut the kernels off of a corn cob and stir fry them in olive oil. Add the quinoa and toast it a little. Add broth, stir, cover, reduce the heat, and leave it alone for 20 minutes. The result is like risotto, but lighter and sweeter.

Everything came out excellent, and now I have two new Things I Know How To Make: cilantro cream sauce and quinoa.

It must be noted (because if I don't note it, my wife will say something in the comments) that I messed up initially when frying the corn. I added raw, juicy corn to overheated olive oil and splattered the stove and my hands with hot oil, and then had to cover the resulting mess to cool--charring the crap out of the corn kernels in the process. Fortunately, I had only added a few kernels when this happened and not the whole batch. Lesson learned: "medium-high heat" in a recipe means 3 or 4 out of 10 (not 7 or 8) on the electric stoves around here, using good cookware. Good cookware, for the uninitiated, is heavy enough for you to consider using it to stop a burglar.

mood: pleased music: MGMT - "The Youth" tags: cooking

Before I start in on my peanut-gallery comments again, I'd like to make a couple of clarifications. I don't think Thundercats was a bad show. It certainly aged better than lots of other cartoons I enjoyed as a child. Its animation, character designs, and writing were solid, for the most part. While there wasn't one big continuous storyline, every episode was not entirely stand alone; something that changed in one episode would remain changed for subsequent episodes. It was a good kids show.

It's not my fault that it's more fun to make comments than it is to passively absorb this stuff. I didn't even intend to write more of these comments down--it just sort of happened when I pressed play on the DVD player.
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Viriconium

I am always reading something, but I don't often talk about what I'm reading and even more rarely do I write anything about it. I'd like to remedy that situation.

I picked up Viriconium for three reasons. First, I read and enjoyed Light, one of his more recent novels. I had read just enough other SF (like Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and Stross's Singularity Sky) to understand what ideas and not-yet-tropes Harrison was playing off of in Light. Second, the cover describes the book as a collection of stories about a once-great city in its twilight. It's not a new premise, but it's still a compelling one for me. Third, Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction to the collection. When it comes to books, where Gaiman leads I will follow. Everything I've read on his recommendation has been a winner.

Viriconium is Moorcock's Meliboné all grown up. Where Moorcock's crumbling fantastical society is sketched out hastily in a pulp tradition, Harrison's Viriconium is painted, slowly and deliberately, in such a way that you can smell the distinct odors of its decay. The protagonists in Viriconium are not heroes, though some might have been considered so in their younger days. The scenes of strangeness and horror they confront are every bit as unsettling to the reader as they are to the protagonists. Lovecraft managed this same trick, but Lovecraft only brought his readers along for short visits--Harrison takes us into the nightmare and allows a good, long time for the weird and tainted atmosphere to soak in. There are ideas and images in Viriconium that leave stains in your mind.

M. John Harrison is modern fantasy's answer to Nathaniel Hawthorne. His descriptions are wordy and lengthy, but if you try skimming past them, you'll miss half the story. (And believe me, the temptation to skip ahead to the next block of dialogue is nearly overwhelming, at times.) Just as Hawthorne with his novels and short stories laid much groundwork for the fantasy and SF genres that emerged later, Harrison with Viriconium provides a similar foundation for the current New Weird movement. I can see in this book the seeds of the ideas that eventually became China Miéville's Perdido Street Station and Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen.

Would I recommend it to you? That depends. You have to be a dedicated reader to make it through Viriconium. There is nothing easy about reading this book--This collection makes you eat your vegetables. It is, and I do not mean this unkindly, a slog. It's gorgeous and lush and sensual, and if you are the least bit tired when you pick it up, it will put you to sleep. I am used to completing a book of this size in two weeks. This book took me two months to get through. For me, it was worth the effort. There are moments and scenes in Viriconium that will remain with me for years.

music: "Grammarye" - Remy Zero

Unlike my adult rewatching of Voltron, I do not have high expectations of Thundercats. While I found it entertaining as a kid, it was never my favorite. That being said, this entry may still be a solid argument for not looking too closely at the media from your childhood.

It might also be a solid argument for not allowing me to watch stuff like this by myself. With no one to join me in playing Peanut Gallery, I instead took notes and am now inflicting my observations on you. If you're not familiar with the Thundercats, you should probably skip this journal entry entirely.

( Sword of Omens, give me sight beyond sight!Collapse )

mood: dorky

rebeccafetch tagged me with this one. It's been a while since I've been tagged, and even longer since I responded. However... I will tag no one with this list. So there. Nya-nya-nyah.
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When I get an earworm, the only way for me to shake it loose is for me to hear the song frequently enough to memorize most or all of the words. When I was a freshman in college, Comedy Central ran a Schoolhouse Rock parody about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. It was cute. It was clever. It was catchy (largely because it borrowed the tune of Schoolhouse Rock's "Nouns")... catchy enough to become an earworm for me. And it was mostly absent from the world since it aired on Comedy Central fifteen years ago.

I just found out (thank you Jason Scott!) that I can finally get the damn thing out of my head.

If you couldn't tell from my near-monthly posting schedule, I'm fairly lazy these days when it comes to blogging.

Fuzzyshot seems to be made for people like me--that is, lazy bloggers with iPhones. You sign up for an account, which creates a blog page for you. Then you download the app, and start taking pictures. The app posts the photos straight to your Fuzzyshot blog. Super easy.

Here's mine. I can't promise that the photos will be high quality, or even interesting. But c'mon... what were you expecting from something called Fuzzyshot?

mood: lazy