Yes we could!
Category: Landmarks
White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith
I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”
If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.
The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.
I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”
I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)
The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.
Jude: Child of the Oughts
Jon and Amanda are having their baby, and Jon is blogging it live! I’ve been following along as the due date came and went with mounting anticipation (like, surely more than THEY have been), so I’m really glad they’re keeping us updated so closely. The child I can ruin is almost here!
Book news!
Item! After a last-minute sprint, I have now scribbled in and shipped out all the remaining personalized books that were ordered in May. This means that, despite a surprise spate of orders this week, I can finally announce that
Item! The Ommatidia Author Edition book is back in stock! Not that it seems to have stopped people from ordering anyway; I should have been resupplied weeks ago, but I’m not exactly getting them in bulk and the trickle of orders was consistently just enough to eat them up before I could edit the store page. Don’t think I am ungrateful, order-tricklers! I have invested your beautiful money by purchasing other people’s Lulu books, thus continuing the endless Circle of Paypal™. But this whole thing coincides neatly with
Item! The last Cosette story, which goes up online tomorrow morning and marks more than one sort of closure; I wrote it for the book two years ago, so it’s been languishing in the drafts folder for a very long time. Fans of the storyline might wish to reopen the wound today in preparation for its salting.
Oh, I almost forgot! Item! Don’t forget that the newest Hour of Knowledge went up yesterday, and that new ones will continue going up on all Wednesdays, forever. I won’t keep reminding you here every week, since the CHK has all kinds of its own feeds, including iTunes and LJ. But I will give you one last disclaimer: none of them are ever going to last an hour.
In which all my pent-up ideas for Modern Humor Authority are finally unleashed… ON YOU
Stephen and I have a new podcast! It’s called The Children’s Hour of Knowledge and as you might expect from that title, it a) is not for children and b) contains almost no knowledge. But it is getting better every week! The first two episodes are up now, and the third will go up Wednesday, after which there will be a new one every Wednesday from now until forever.
We really hope you like it! It has a funny beep-beep sound!
My neighborhood is named after a vampire slayer
After nearly two months in one sort of transition or another, I have achieved something like a temporary stability: I even bought a flat hard bed, manufactured (I am given to understand) by svirfneblin. All of which is to say my name is on a lease, my belongings no longer fit in the Fit and I like it here very much. I live with the very droll Kara, at least until she discovers I used to play Warcraft and kicks me out, and I’m slowly coming around to the idea of a bike.
I promise I’ll get the rest of the Hugner pictures up soon.
It’s Tuesday
Which means all my lovely readers in the UK are back from taking off St. Crispin’s Day or whatever, and all my lovely other readers are yawning and clicking idly on Digg as the work week slowly grinds into gear, and so it is the perfect time, my friends, to tell you that Ommatidia is for sale.
A couple sharp-eyed readers (from the old school of “actually checking the front page”) have already noticed that it was up over the weekend while I poked at it for bugs, but so far everything seems fine. Some things have changed since I made the original tentative announcement–most notably that the limited edition is now signed and numbered and includes a story written just for you, but is also the same softcover binding as the now-less-cheap viral edition (it is actually insane to bind a book this size in hardcover). And yes, it took me over two years to assemble a 133-page book. Turns out autodidactic self-publishing is sort of hard!
But I’m really proud of the result and I hope you’ll be satisfied. You can check out a preview at Lulu and see one of the fourteen all-new illustrations, and if you order soon you’ll be able to get your copy and read the last Cosette story before it goes up online next month. Finally, if you get your book, take a picture! If you send it to me or put it on Flickr and tag it “ommatidia book,” it’ll get pulled into the little badge I’m putting together now for the Ommatidia front page, and I’ll send you a copy of the “Welch” toon I hastily drew for buyers at my Stumptown booth.
Finally, some of you have probably already noticed that I’m linking to ommatidia.org in this post, rather than xorph.com/anacrusis–either URL scheme works almost exactly the same, because if there’s one poor web practice in which I want to engage, it’s duplicated content and split Pagerank. Seriously, think of Ommatidia as a web site for the book that happens to display a feed from Anacrusis. Both sites now include the other new toy I built this weekend: the “all names” page, which is not perfectly accurate, but is pretty close to an ongoing list of every name I’ve scrounged up for a story title. See why I have to steal from Leonard all the time?
Day Whatever: Portland
I keep the Moleskine and the Micron next to my bed so I can write down story ideas I have while falling asleep, and on mornings after they usually turn out about half useful and half dumb. But even in their hastiness and abbreviation, I can almost always follow the signifying notes back to the image or twist that precipitated them.
I had two last night. One was a Chosen Ones story that I’ll probably do up for next week. The other?
“Six big diapers.”
I offer this to the world.
I live in Portland now. I had some exceedingly mild adventures in San Francisco, and took a lot of pictures that you will see sometime around 2018. Maria came to visit and that was really nice. Hugner is fine.
I’ve been in a self-imposed sweatshop lockbox all this week, trying to prepare for the big show: Stumptown Comics Fest, where I will be exhibiting with free microcomics and a six-word story completion marathon and, yes, Ommatidia, the first Anacrusis book. No, you can’t buy it online yet, not until I finish setting up the storefront. I am planning to have that up by my birthday (a week from tomorrow).
I realize that I have announced this far too late for anyone who wasn’t already planning to come to Stumptown to show up; trust me, that is all part of a strategy. Eventually I may even figure out what the strategy is. But on the off chance that there are any Anacrusis fans in the PDX, show up! There are a lot more reasons to do so than just me and my tablemates (“Cinema Sewer”).
Day 6: California
In San Francisco! Fourteen-hour drive! Exhausted! No pictures! But here and safe. Time to go get plantar warts.
Self-passenging
OKAY KIDS. On the last day of March I’m leaving my suspiciously generous hosts here in NorCar and driving across the country, with stops in Louisville, Birmingham and eventually Berkeley. After two weeks (I hope) in the latter, I’m moving up to Portland to stay from somewhere between four and nine months. Looks like the trap got me after all.
So! Are you in a southwestern state or the Bay area? Would you like to hang out? Would you like to damage local hotel revenues by letting me spend a night on your couch? These can be arranged. Other things that can be arranged: me renting a room or subletting an apartment from people you know because MAN it is hard to get people on Portland Craigslist to get back to you when you don’t live in the same city. I don’t know why!
I promise to take pictures on the trip but I can’t promise you will see them in the living future. Oh, hey, if you want to ride out with me and fly back, as I once did with Leonard, let’s talk. I should warn you that due unwise purchasing decisions on my part, you will have to ride in the glove compartment.