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. )

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.
( Read more... )

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! )

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.
( Read more... )

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

We just took a trip out to Addison to visit CD World to find that it's closed. Gone. Checked online, and the Dallas Observer says that both locations are closed.

Damn it.

I've been visiting CD World ever since I moved up here in 1993. It was a genuine independent music store, selling new and used stuff, with friendly staff and tons of recommendations. I've found dozens of artists in my visits there. blissitate and I have gone there every month or so for years, almost never leaving with fewer than five CDs.

I get it. I know that all the cool kids buy their music online these days. Places like Best Buy don't care about the great migration to online sales, because they'll sell the same fifty CDs to the same hundred thousand customers, and their "music" section will survive as it always has. But I like walking into a store that sells mostly music, that has people who can make intelligent recommendations, that increases the chances I'll stumble into something new.

With CD World gone, the only independent record store left in Dallas is Good Records, which is down in Lower Greenville. I can't get excited about driving twenty miles to visit a tiny music store with horrible parking options. So this is the day I start buying all my music online--on CD Baby if I can, on Amazon if I can't.

mood: sad music: "Pot Kettle Black" - Tilly and the Wall

"And when the going gets tough for the press in America, the press fudges, the press jellies. That's what we're doing now. We are retreating to a fine old American press cop-out we like to call objectivity. Russel Baker once described it: 'In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk. Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment. To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince. A man says rockets won't work? We give you another who says they will.

"'The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity. In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is.'

"The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty.

"This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject. Thus we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don't know jack-shit about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the peapatch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by com-symps. They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight; they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are themselves replete with bias and resistant to fact. The justification for putting them on the air is that, 'they represent a point of view.'

"The odd thing about these television discussions designed to 'get all sides of the issue' is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely. In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasy-land."

--Molly Ivins, March 1987

It seems like many bloggers who attended GenCon this year are posting their lists of what they picked up. Since it's easier to post a list than to try to sum up the experience of the convention itself, I'll do the same.

( It really is just a list of games. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to read what's after the cut. )

mood: geeky music: "Beautiful Enemy" by Dar Williams tags: conventions, gaming

I received this spam just a few minutes ago:

We are pleased to inform you of the release of the long awaited results of
Sweepstakes promotion organized by Microsoft, in conjunction with the
foundation for the promotion of software products, (F.P.S..) held this AUGUST
2008,in The Netherlands. Where-in your email address emerged as one of the
online Winning emails in the 2nd category and therefore attracted a cash
award of 250,000.00 (Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Euros Only) and a Dell laptop.

I love seeing scams like these. There's just something so charming about the thought process that led someone to the conclusion that their "prize" of 250,000 Euros wasn't quite enough to convince someone to fork over their financial details, and so decided to add a cheap laptop to the winnings.

Keep in mind, this is only second prize. If I had been so fortunate as to have won first prize, I might look forward to winning a mansion and a microwave. Of course, if I had been a little less lucky, I may have ended up with third prize: a Porsche Carrera with some really nice floormats.

mood: amused

I am a geek. My life is filled with boredom and awkwardness and frustration. But for four days last week...

• People saw my t-shirts and asked where I got them instead of asking me to explain them.


• No one asked what was in my Crown Royal bag.


• Just about everyone around me knew who H.P. Lovecraft and Gary Gygax were.


• I could strike up a conversation with anyone. And they'd get my jokes.


• I played games I had never seen with people I had never met.


• I wasn't bored at all.

I really need to find a way to make my life more like it was last week.

mood: blah

The absolute biggest drawback to the iPhone: encapsulating your phone, camera, and MP3 player into the same device as a computer means that when the computer part goes insane, you have effectively lost access to your phone, camera, and MP3 player.

Currently, my iPhone is in the process of rebooting itself every 15-20 seconds. There is nothing I have been able to do to stop it. Nothing, nada, nihil, nuh-uh. I wiped the phone and did a restore. I cannot turn it off. I'm going to take the demented little thing to an Apple Store at lunch time to see if a Genius can make the hurting stop.

mood: aggravated tags: frustration, iphone

My wife IM-ed me with this question this afternoon: "so, do you think all this flooding in the Midwest is a direct result of global warming?"

( I guess I was just in a ranting mood, because I gave her everything after the cut as an answer. )

mood: loquacious, apparently music: "The Mesopotamians" by TMBG

I have friends that don't listen to music anymore. Instead they listen to memories.

Let me explain. They've stopped looking for new music. Their music collections expand by three or four CDs per year, and those are almost never from artists they don't already know and love. And even though I know that taste is a subjective thing, it makes me angry and sad to see someone declare that there is no good music being made these days. When someone says that, what they're really saying is, "My tastes have calcified. I have decided only to listen to what I know."

Fortunately, there is a way to crack the thick crunchy shell off of someone's stagnant sensibilities: mixtapes. Mixtapes are beautiful mental minefields. You put them together, choosing each mine and its location carefully. And then you invite your friend to walk through that field. It's too much to hope that every single one of those songs will explode for them when your friend encounters them, but even if only one or two really connect, you've helped your friend stave off stagnation for another year.

Television is too easy and doesn't ask enough of its audience, and books require more attention that most people are willing to give, but you can ask for three minutes of someone's time. And three minutes of music and lyrics can change your whole week, if you let it.

I've been listening to nothing but podcasts and audiobooks for a while now. I think I'm ready for some new music. If you send me one, I'll send you one. Or if you just want to make some recommendations, that's fine, too.

tags: music

I just found out that E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died today. I feel like I should say something, even though it's strange to find out that someone whose contributions have shaped my life significantly, and whom I've never thought much about, has died.

But still.

The simple snowball that Gygax and Arneson rolled downhill back in 1973 is miles across now. If those two hadn't created Dungeons and Dragons, there would probably not be many roleplaying games. There would probably be no console or computer RPGs, no MMOs. Magic: the Gathering would not have existed, either. There are a lot of things that I enjoy as a geek that have Gygax as an ancestor. Hell, there are a lot of geeks who wouldn't be geeks if there never was such a thing as D&D.

I'm sad today to find out Gygax is gone, and I'm grateful for the ways my life is better because of him.

mood: sad

If you're not interested in game mechanics, you might want to avert your eyes for this journal entry.

Savage Worlds reminds me so much of my Ghostbusters-running days because it uses a similarly reduced set of traits and skills. Characters have five traits--Strength, Smarts, Agility, Spirit, and Vigor--that are rated by the type of die you get to roll for them. A d4 if the character is crappy in that department, up to a d12 if that character is awesome in it. Skills are the same way, and the skills are general, like Driving, Shooting, and Fighting. You're trying to roll a 4 or better, and what you roll can be modified based on the circumstances. Rolls are open-ended (i.e., if you roll an 8 on a d8, you get to roll it again and add the result). All Wild Cards (that is, all PCs and a few special NPCs) get to roll and additional die (usually a d6) when ever making a trait or skill check, and take the better of their two rolls. Wild Cards also get bennies--tokens that you can spend to reroll a skill or trait check or to help you when you're hurt. You get three bennies at the start of each session, and the game master can distribute additional bennies as rewards during a session for clever or entertaining play.

Each time a character receives a wound, they takes a -1 penalty to all rolls until they're healed. Two wounds means a -2, and so on. The fourth wound leaves them incapacitated, but Wild Cards tend to be more difficult to hurt than an average character.

There are Edges and Hindrances to give characters special abilities or special difficulties. When you're making a character, you can take on Hindrances to help you buy more Edges. A character might receive more Hindrances as a result of damage. They'll acquire more Edges as they become more experienced.

And that's probably 90% of what you need to know to play a Savage Worlds game. There are simple rules for things like magic and superpowers and vehicle combat, should you need those things. And there's a little more to the combat system that just rolling your Fighting skill, but it's a pretty short list of things to learn.

This is the first RPG I've run since Ghostbusters that I think would be a great introduction to roleplaying for complete newbies. The rules are set up to work for just about any setting, and you can make characters and finish a short adventure in one evening.

mood: chipper music: "Wanderlust King" by Gogol Bordello tags: gaming, savage worlds

Please ignore the two months of dust in here. We're having a service come by to clean it up.

I ran my first full session of Savage Worlds with my regular gaming group last night, using the Zombie Run mini-campaign from the publisher's website. The Savage Worlds system really is everything I hoped it would be.

Maybe I should back up for the people who have no idea what I'm talking about. Based on my friends list, that'd be everyone except my wife, I think.

Savage Worlds is a roleplaying game system dedicated to making fast-paced games that allow everyone to do crazy stuff with their characters while keeping things easy for the game master to run. Unlike most RPGs (like Dungeons and Dragons or World of Darkness), Savage Worlds itself is just a system. There is no setting in the basic book. In concept, people compare it to GURPS. In execution, it's the near polar opposite of GURPS, which has a tendency to bore players to death even in its most interesting settings. The great thing about Savage Worlds is you can easily run just about any type of game with it. Do you enjoy an RPG but can't stand its rules? Map it to Savage Worlds. Do you have some favorite movie or television show, and you'd like to roleplay in its world? Spend two or three hours figuring out what to omit and what to add from the Savage Worlds book, and you've got your game. Feeling lazy about it? Poke around online, and odds are you'll find someone who has already done the work for you.

My group enjoys (or has at least seen several) zombie movies, and Zombie Run is basically two or three zombie movies mushed together to make a short campaign. Everyone knows the how these movies go, so there's no learning curve. The group got into their characters quickly, and they're already talking about how the game they're playing would make a convincing zombie movie. I've even got one member whose brain is positively fizzing with all the possibilities for the Savage Worlds system in general.

Why am I blogging about this? Because I missed running this kind of game. I ran a Ghostbusters game back in high school, and it was full of opportunities for improvised craziness for myself and for my players. It shaped my idea of an entertaining roleplaying game. Dungeons and Dragons has a lot of interesting concepts, and I was pleased with what I could do with the D20-system Star Wars, but neither holds a candle to the sheer crazy fun of Savage Worlds.

mood: geeky tags: gaming, savage worlds

"My dad hates umbrellas," said Deeba, swinging her own. "When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.'"

--China Miéville, Un Lun Dun