is a blog by Brendan
My dear friend Joe Mcdaldno–writer, game designer, and fascinating Renaissance human–was kind enough to interview me about Anacrusis for his nascent radio show/podcast, The Stories We Tell. This marks the third podcast to feature me, and my second time on Canadian radio. Soon, listening to my nasal drone trail off in the middle of half-baked jokes will be completely unavoidable!
Incidentally, the term I can’t think of at around 16:45 is syllepsis (and more generally zeugma).
Hey, remember Journey to the End of the Night, a game I played with the London crew and subsequently wrote an enormous blog post that I just linked to about? (It’s okay if you didn’t parse that.) Anyway, Newsweek did an article on urban exploration that includes it. Thanks to Mink for the tip!
I have these two recipes in text files on my desktop, which is dumb because I can’t see my desktop when I need to use them and I am separated from my desktop by three hours and a mountain range. Both are extremely healthy and require a sophisticated palate to appreciate.
Dirty Chicken
(so named by Kara & co on True Blood night; brought to us from Kentucky by Monica)
1 cup shredded or cubed mozzarella
1/2 cup cheap ranch dressing
1/2 cup hot wing sauce (yes, you can buy this in bottles at Safeway)
8 oz cream cheese
1 10-12 oz can chicken (like canned tuna, only… it’s chicken)
Mash up in a glass or ceramic bowl. Microwave for three or four minutes, stirring every minute. Eat with chips. Serves party.
This next one is what I made for months when I wanted potatoes until I discovered an amazing secret recipe for perfect french fries, which I am not going to link to because it is too awesome. MY THIRD-BEST POTATO RECIPE: I HEREBY BEQUEATH IT.
Boiled Fried Potatoes
About 8-10 new potatoes, either Yukon gold or red
3 Tbsp butter
Kosher salt
1 Tbsp thyme
1/2 tsp white pepper
Water
You need a seasoned cast-iron skillet for this because otherwise they’ll stick like demons.
Mash up a tablespoon of the salt and the thyme with a mortar and pestle. Scrub the potatoes and chop them into 2-3 little discs per potato, cutting off the ends so both sides have an exposed surface. Place the potatoes in a single layer on the skillet, add just enough water to cover them, turn the burner to medium-high and add the mixed salt and thyme and the butter. Then wait for the water to all boil off.
When it’s gone–you will know because the tenor of the hissing sound has changed and the bubbles look different–turn the heat down to medium. Continue to fry the potatoes, flipping once and moving the interior potatoes to the sides of the pan once the first side is golden and crusty. When both sides are golden and crusty, add more salt and pepper, then eat. This serves about two hungry people.
NOTE: You can substitute olive oil for the butter but it’s not as bad for you.
This is pretty spectacular.
“I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.“
That’s an excerpt from Erica Goldson’s valedictory address, which she wrote and issued earlier this year. Read the whole thing: it’s brief but convincing.
I wasn’t first in my class, but I was close, and I was aware of many of the issues Goldson raises even then–though less concerned, at a more self-centered time in my life, and mostly just happy that they were working in my favor. (Another thing we had in common: the textbook inspirational English teacher.) I’m less complacent these days, less willing to accept the cruel theater of fear and shame that we expect smart young people to suffer with piety. Our schools are bad, and their splash damage is everywhere.
I’m not sure what use I can be to education reform right now. It’s one of those issues that is never urgent but always important, and I need to figure out a path to involving myself in the cause. Erica Goldson’s example seems like a good start.
And he’s doing a Kickstarter thing to fund the print run. It’s a game called Perfect, and it’s one of the best, most effective story games I’ve ever played: a Clockwork Orange-meets-Fahrenheit 451-meets-actual Victorian evil premise that the mechanics support to a startling degree. Playing it, you find yourself alternately drawn toward becoming a violent enemy of the state, and seduced by power like a guard in the Stanford prison experiment. It’s a nasty game, and I really, really like it. Joe talks more about it here.
If you’re interested by this kind of thing, you should chip in $5! If Joe meets his goal, you get a PDF of the game, and if he doesn’t, you get your money back (well, technically, it never even leaves your account).
Super powers and Tits Akimbo! Oh, I do like seeing my microfiction RSS feeds wake in the foggy dawn and cast about, noses into the rising wind, mad and bright as raptors.
Monica and Sumana came to visit! In the same week! It was a very full week, but I am still very fortunate to have had both my pretend big sisters come see me. I got to meet a nontrivial fraction of the Geek Feminism crew and attend the Beard Team USA National Beard and Mustache Championships, of which, yes, pictures will forthcome. Now: to sleep until August.
I did a hundred pushups! In a row! I had done lots more in a session, just not in a single set. Also some of those reps at the end would have been pretty hilariously sloppy to anyone watching. But it still counts!
I’ve been following this workout plan since, uh, the beginning of March. It’s a six-week plan, and you will note that it has taken me three months to complete! In retrospect, that progression gets a bit suspicious at the end; even on the best-case track, you’re supposed to go from around 60 to 100 in a single week. I had to repeat week six several times, and then repeat week six/day one for a couple more weeks, adding five to ten more reps each time.
I’ve talked before about my complete lack of upper-body strength and how ashamed of it I’ve always been. I know how to maintain cardiovascular shape and build leg muscle–go running–and I have done so, because running is the only exercise that doesn’t bore and frustrate me. It’s also got a pretty low barrier to entry, whereas I perceived upper-body workouts to be fraught with torn tendons and requiring of huge weight sets. And if I want to actually build muscle in any serious way I probably will have to get some kind of free weights someday. I should probably learn to do the Ab Ripper first.
But meanwhile I’m just going to keep doing a hundred pushups every night and see how far I can take it! I hear there’s this fancy kind you can do with one arm.
From across the political spectrum (that is, from my liberal girlfriend and my conservative cousin) I have heard rumblings of disappointment about Obama’s supposed plan to end manned space exploration.
If you go read that article you’ll actually see that it’s not the case at all: they’re scrapping the rickety Space Shuttle program, which has been slated for retirement for years and basically only goes to the International Space Station, because they want to concentrate on the mission to build a Mars base–a mission proposed by Bush. Resupply missions to the ISS are being contracted out to an increasingly healthy private spaceflight industry (which development I’d think would please free marketeers). NASA’s budget is actually increasing by $2 billion next year.
But this also seems like a good time to re-link Leonard’s article from 2008 about the relative awesomeness of manned vs. unmanned space exploration. It did a lot to persuade me that, while manned spaceflight does a lot for a very small group–a few hundred people worldwide, all more genetically perfect than supermodels, mostly white, mostly male–unmanned exploration delivers a great deal more, dollar for dollar, for the rest of us.