I got this recipe from a tech industry friend as a JPG labelled “Twitter congee”. I don’t know if that means “seen on Twitter” or “served in the Twitter cafeteria”, either is possible. It’s very simple. Garnish with whatever: I usually use some chili crisp, some pickled mustard greens, or some sauteed vegetable like bok choy.
Ingredients
1/2 pound ground chicken
4 ounces sliced shiitake mushrooms
1 tbsp minced ginger
1/2 tbsp minced garlic
1 tsp shaoxing wine
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp oyster sauce
1 tsp fish sauce
2 tsp sesame oil
pinch of ground white pepper
6 cup water
1/2 cup jasmine rice
Directions
In a bowl, combine chicken, mushroom, ginger, garlic, shaoxing wine, salt, oyster sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil and let it marinate over night in the refrigerator.
In a large pot, add water and the rice and bring it to a boil. when the water stars boiling, turn down the heat to simmer and cover the pot. 15 minutes later, stir the rice making sure it’s not sticking to the bottom. cover the pot again and stir the rice one more time 15 minutes after the first sit. cover the pot one last time and simmer 30 minutes. When the jook is done (1 hour total), it should look creamy and silky. (Nelson: that’s a long cook for the jook!)
Add the ground chicken mixture to the jook, breaking down the meat (a whisk works well). Simmer with the lid off until the chicken is cooked, about 10 to 15 minutes. Add a pinch of white pepper and enjoy!
I collected social media posts for 41 different trips I’ve taken in
the last fifteen years. I think of each post as a postcard: a little
thought in the moment, hopefully an image. When collected each thread
becomes a diary of a trip and the collection as a whole is a summary of
much of the travel Ken and I have done. It’s a lot, some 1900
photographs!
I started tweeting travelogues back in 2009 or so but only got
intentional about these as a sort of diary a few years ago. So the newer
ones are better written.
I’ve got technical notes on
how I built this using AI coding. It’s pretty straightforward with the
recent Mastodon threads, it’s basically just a thread unroller. But for
older posts I had to do some heroics with heuristics to identify travel
tweets. And lots of image recovery involving using the Wayback machine
and Flickr and Google Photos archives to find my originals. I might have
managed the basic unroller on my own but I never would have done all the
archive retrieval without an AI’s help.
In 1983 Steve
Dyer created the Usenet group soc.motss, possibly the
first-ever online LGBT community. It was an important part of my life in
the early 1990s. There’s a couple of good retrospective histories of motss:
Avery
Dame-Griff and David
Auberach.
Net.motss is a forum for the discussion of gay-related issues of interest
to all members of USENET. Its name is an acronym for “members of the same
sex”, coined by contributors to net.singles as an analogue to MOTOS–“member
of the opposite sex.” It is therefore, unfortunately, a euphemism of
sorts–an alternative to the preferred ‘net.gay’. Nevertheless, the
proponents of the group have gladly passed on this minor issue so that the
group should be swiftly formed.
It is designed to foster discussion on a wide variety of topics, such as
health problems, parenting, relationships, clearances, job security and many
others. Gay members of USENET will find this a supportive environment for
the discussion of issues which have immediate impact on their everyday
lives. Those who aren’t gay have an opportunity to be informed by the
discussion, and are encouraged to read the news items and contribute their
own questions and opinions.
Net.motss is emphatically NOT a newsgroup for the discussion of whether
homosexuality is good or bad, natural or unnatural. Not is it a place where
conduct unsuitable for the net will be allowed or condoned. Rather, like
every USENET news group, it is an opportunity for people all across the
world to express their opinions, exchange ideas, and come to appreciate the
diversity within the USENET membership.
I like a few things about this. The statement this was a safe space for
LGBT people, not a forum for debate about our existence. That it was a
world-wide community. The inclusion of health as a topic, this at the start
of the AIDS crisis. And the fact that the name was a below-the-radar
euphemism. The phase members
of the same sex has a history going back to Kinsey and the 1970 US
Census!
Cheese enchiladas are some of my favorite old school Tex-Mex food.
Corn tortillas, orange cheese, smothered in a beefy thick gravy. The
gravy is not like a typical Mexican enchilada sauce: no tomatoes or
tomatillos. Instead it’s more of a Southern gravy like you’d put on
biscuits or serve with turkey, but spiced with chile, cumin, oregano,
and garlic powder. The key thing is it’s made with a roux. And a lot of
roux, it really is a thick gravy. You never see this sauce in California
or New Mexico and I suspect not in Mexico itself except maybe at the
border. But it’s everywhere in Texas. it’s a defining element of Tex-Mex
cuisine.
There’s an early recipe for the Tex-Mex gravy in the 1908
Gebhardt Chili Powder Company cookbook. This cookbook was written
for Americans for whom Mexican food was exotic. It was written mostly to
sell their chili powder, a spice
blend of mild chiles (probably ancho), cumin, oregano, and garlic
powder. (I made a
PDF of the book from these
scans.)
Salsa de Chili—Chili Gravy This may be made of any
brown or meat gravy by adding to each one-half pint of gravy, one
teaspoonful of Gebhardt Eagle Chili Powder, stirring thoroughly and
cooking for ten minutes. This makes a very rich sauce for fried eggs,
cooked rice, baked beans, etc.
Note it doesn’t mention enchiladas. There’s no enchilada recipe in
the copy of the book I have. But this is our Tex-Mex gravy! Although
it’s awfully light on the spice.
Robb
Walsh’s Tex-Mex Cooking has a modern version of the same gravy, see
the NYT
version. It’s a 4:1 mixture of chicken broth to roux with Tex-Mex
spices added. Walsh’s recipe says
The lifeblood of old-fashioned Tex-Mex, chili gravy is a cross
between Anglo-brown gravy and Mexican chile sauce. It was invented in
Anglo-owned Mexican restaurants like The Original.
One of the best things on our
trip to Cambodia in March was a street food tour in Phnom Penh led
by Urban
Forage. They provided a
great guide and a tuktuk and driver. It was an amazing chance to try
all sorts of casual snacks and meals, the kind of stuff that always
looks so interesting but too intimidating to try on my own. Places were
vetted for food safety for delicate Western stomachs and our guide did a
great job teaching us about the food.
It was so fun and delicious! There’s some photos here and here. Cambodian
food is roughly similar to Thai and Vietnamese food, but is its own
thing.
First up was the “famous grandma noodle
shop”, a home cooking restaurant with the kind of fish noodle
soups I loved in Cambodia. This place was a restaurant with a choice
of items but also very casual. We had both a chicken noodle soup and the
fish noodle soup, both “curry” flavored but clearly Cambodian, not Thai.
The rice noodles are super fresh, made that morning, kind of gelatinous
and stuck together. The soup had such deep delicious flavor. And lots of
fresh ingredients to liven it up: limes, basil, a bunch of unfamiliar
herbs like fishwort.
The second place was a sidewalk stand near Wat Botum Park. Rice
crepe with turmeric, stuffed with chicken and sprouts, dipped in
fish sauce / lime juice. Also a rice flour ball with chives in it,
fried, dipped in coconut cream. it reminded me a lot of dosas and idlis.
Very yummy and seemed like solid daily food.
Our third stop was for a baguette with crispy pork belly inside, some
herbs, also a fresh carrot pickle. Similar to banh mi. We enjoyed it,
all nice and fresh, but at this point we started to realize we were in
for a long haul of lots of food.
The fourth place was in the Russian market and served barbeque.
Various kinds of pork cuts, we had spare ribs. Very crispy fried and
quite fat. Was too full to enjoy it all but it tasted great.
Fifth was 54ល្ងាចស្រស់ (on Facebook)
a restaurant with general Khmer foods, lots of beer, and a live band.
Food was a mix of things, all pretty good. My favorite was a squid
salad-like dish. This was where we had the stunt food, insects. One big
tarantula was OK but silly: legs were delicious like soft-shelled crab.
The spicy crickets were pretty good beer snacks. The place was a bit
touristy but honest, a place I could imagine going even without a
guide.
Absolutely full of food and beer, sixth the guide took us to a
roadside stall selling a sweet dish. A rice crepe stuffed with fresh
coconut meat and a rice candy, some sweetened condensed milk. Quite
tasty in its simple freshness. It was a little like this
video labelled num lon ong chek.
Our final stop was a return to Western familiarity. The wild cocktail bar, a
French-run place with coffee, drinks, and spring rolls. Good cocktails,
nice outdoor seating.
Street food tours may be my favorite new tourist activity! We also
did one in Saigon that was fun but not quite as good as this one in
Phnom Penh. But in Saigon we also did a cocktail tour
from this company, that
was terrific.
Edmund White
died June 3, after a long and much-loved life as one of America’s great
gay writers. His 1982 autofiction novel A
Boy’s Own Story is his best known, a frank and honest story of
growing up gay in the 1950s. Many gay men (including myself) found
themselves in that book and the
ensuing trilogy. He published 36 books including memoirs,
autofiction, novels, historical treatments, and the 1977 Joy of
Gay Sex. He is a foundation stone of gay English writing.
He always saw himself as a gay writer for gay readers, the
distinction he drew between his generation of queer writers and those
who came earlier, like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. They might write
gay characters, but they never seemed to be writing for gay readers. Ed
was.
… Edmund White had no use for shame, and in both life and work, he
refused to sand down the edges of queer existence to make it palatable.
Acceptance was never the point. Truth was.
I’ve been mourning his passing these past few days. I didn’t know him
personally but his writing and presence have been meaningful to me,
particularly as I evaluate my middle-aged gay life. Some suggested
reading:
I took an amazing
trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time
finding
good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part
because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I
found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in
particular:
Ancient
Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a
coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical
information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good.
Angkor
and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended
history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too
detailed, but I did learn from it.
My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is:
go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of
touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is
absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)
I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was
something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening.
Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with
lunch. I found some good options.
Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia
is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness
(gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle
and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra
flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great.
Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks,
they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my
favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun
flavors. Culture Pop is also
good.
A friend gave me the Zero
book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book
is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of
labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas.
The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers
extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the
right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it.
An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic
Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with
salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity
and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits.
Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few
years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA
Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically
all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise.
One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not
cheap. They’ve become a big
high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one
with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.
I just finished an extraordinary late-70s TV show, The
Sandbaggers. It’s British spy TV. While the show name-checks
James Bond frequently the soul of it is more of a Le
Carré thing. Intelligence as a series of dismal political battles
between underpaid civil servants at the home office. Occasional forays
into the field where everything is squalid or ambiguous and nothing
grand is ever achieved.
The show hangs on Roy Marsden’s
performance as Burnside, the Director of Operations at a British
intelligence agency. The titular Sandbaggers are field agents, vaguely
like the Bond 00 agents, but there’s never any swashbuckling action or
romance. Occasional gritty affairs and some grim minor violence, all
done on a low budget and with precious few location shots. If you ever
enjoyed Blake’s 7 or early Doctor Who the low production values will be
familiar. So will the excellent quality of the writing and characters,
there’s a lot of complexity and subtlety and more than a few
surprises.
Mostly the show has aged well. It’s firmly set in late Cold War,
there’s no hint of the extraordinary transition that happens in the 80s
as the Soviet Union fell apart. Unfortunately the show is
unimaginatively sexist with a lot of “men hitting on women in the
workplace” nonsense. There’s one good female character in part of the
show and Burnside’s secretaries are both good actresses with some sharp
writing. But it feels dated even for its time.
I appreciated watching something at a slower and more thoughtful
pace. I think the show is ripe for a reboot. Keep it set in the Cold War
with roughly the same stories. But update the show: write better women
and modernize the production. Then branch out and tell some new stories
in Asia or South America or Africa.
We recently took the Transcantábrico, a week
long luxury train trip across Northern Spain. It was great! Like a
cruise but on a train. We did something similar in India in
2015 and it’s an interesting way to travel. Some photos here.
The Transcantábrico goes across a part of Spain a little off the
usual tourist track. From Santiago de Compostela through the mountains
south of the coast to Donostia / San Sebastián. Along the way we saw
towns I never would have gone to on my own: Gijón,
Potes,
and Santillana
del Mar were particularly memorable. Also some beautiful nature
including Cathedral
beach in Gallegos and Hermida
Gorge in the Picos de Europa. The excursions from the train were
well organized with a very nice bus and guides.
The hospitality on the train was terrific. Our “cruise director”
Cristina was particularly amazing, friendly and knowledgeable. All the
staff were great and very accommodating. Maybe 12 people helping 25
guests. Meals on the train were excellent and comfortable. Most days
breakfast and dinner were on the train, lunch was out. The restaurants
were all high quality but variable and honestly just too much food. The
highlight was El Corral del
Indianu.
Living on a train has its limitations. The private shower was very
nice with lots of hot water but you’re still washing in a telephone
booth. The queen size bed was comfortable but in a very tight space, we
wished we’d booked two single beds. And getting around the train was
difficult (you have to move sideways in the corridor), particularly when
the train was moving. After a week I was ready to be back in a normal
hotel. OTOH it was beautifully furnished and it was great being unpacked and taken care of so well.
I’d definitely do another luxury train. But maybe fewer days. The key
thing is the itinerary, the places to go. That was amazing in India, a
week long trip from Delhi to Mumbai. Spain was beautiful and I
appreciated going slowly through a place off the beaten track with
knowledgeable local guidance. Rewarding trip!
Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs. If a company
like Reddit or Twitter derives most of its value from content that users
write for free then it must provide APIs for anyone to download and
manipulate that content. While an interactive API that enables third
party applications is desirable, a simple static dump is the bare
minimum to fulfill the social contract (see StackOverflow or Metafilter for
examples.)
Unfortunately Twitter and Reddit don’t agree. They are both rent
seeking with their APIs. Their main intent is to destroy third party
apps that no longer aid the company’s business goals. But they’re also
trying to make a few million bucks a year licensing access to data,
particularly on the back of AI training. It’s wrong.
The key thing here is social media sites don’t produce content. They
merely host it. Millions of users create the content expecting it will
be widely available. Locking down an API breaks that social
contract.
Honestly I don’t care as much about full fledged third party clients like
Apollo or Tweetbot; I like them but I understand why the companies want to kill them.
What I care about more are analytics sites, things that provide
interesting alternative views like a
Reddit user profile or Emoji
tracking. I also think it is the greater good to let AIs train for
free.
*I don’t mind a site charging a nominal fee for API access. Either to
cover the cost of API service itself, or more importantly to encourage
API developers to be efficient when making API requests. But that’s
hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, not millions.
The short sighted thing about these API fees is they will harm the
company in the long term. If it becomes difficult to use a proper API to
get at content folks will simply screen scrape it instead. That’s bad
for everyone.
I’ve been listening to the same music every night when I go to sleep
10+ years now. Weird endorsement; I’ve listened to it with more
attention plenty of times too. But it’s particularly good for going to
sleep; calm, interesting, and comfortably familiar.
Ambient music is pretty hit or miss. For every brilliant work like Music for
Airports or Aphex Twin’s early
music there’s a zillion gormless electronica and “earth fart”
recordings that fail to inspire. Furniture music
is supposed to be in the background, sure. But still high enough quality
to be appreciated.
GAS succeeds. It has just enough of a beat (sometimes) to make time
flow without being overwhelming like regular techno or something
rhythmically complex like Autechre. The sounds are richly textured with
a bit of fuzz and noise to make it organic. And I like the slightly
broody or sinister tone. Not scary, but they make me happy I’m snug in
my home under the blankets.
Ken and I just got back from a 23 day trip exploring most of Austria. We
had a lovely time although we did get a little worn out and ready for home
after a couple of weeks. Along the way we stayed in Vienna, Graz, the
Wörthersee, Zell am See, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Hallstatt, Linz, and
Dürnstein. A nice mix of cities and countryside. I tweeted a
bunch of postcards, easily viewed here
and here.
My favorite places were the town of Graz and the countryside in the south
from the Wörthersee through Zell am See to Innsbruck. The drive over
the Grossglockner Alpine
Road was a particular highlight and the lush green alpine valleys of
Styria, Carinthia, and Tyrol were just a delight. Salzburg was also a very
good visit. Linz was an industrial disappointment and Hallstatt was tourist
hell; skip it unless you are very interested in the archaeological
story.
We ate very well on this trip; Austrian cuisine is more interesting than
the schnitzel-and-boiled-beef that was my stereotypical view. Lots of
fresh fall ingredients. The pumpkin
cream soup was particularly good. Enhanced with Kürbiskernöl,
pumpkin seed oil that's deliciously nutty and green tasting. And of
course plenty of fantastic sweets; the French call pastry
viennoiserie for a reason. The single best meal we ate was at Pfefferschiff in Salzburg.
Drama in #PlotterTwitter
this week: someone
cloned Lingdong Huang’s generative art project to sell
as an NFT, without permission. (Website
screenshot here). The code had an MIT license so this was
technically allowed but there’s something obviously wrong in selling
an artist’s work without their agreement. The
artist denounced the NFT as a sham. The community alsocondemned
the appropriation. Fortunately the NFT creator cancelled
the project with a thoughtful explanation. So the crisis is over
but it’s left behind some complex questions about open source
licenses, commercialization, and computer generated art.
Generative art code is different from other programs. With art the
output of the code often has more value than the code itself.
Run the program and get an art piece: it’s the art piece that is the
focus. Art code is often one-off and specific, not a reusable
component like a database or math library. But the source code can be
valuable as a teaching aid or as a basis for someone to remix and make
their own art.
The generative art world is also full of library components that
artists share. Perlin noise is
a great example, a random number function so famous it won its creator
an Oscar. The Perlin noise algorithm was published for free reuse and
there are many open source implementations. I believe
no one thinks artists should pay Ken Perlin royalties or even
explicitly credit him in their artworks. But we are all grateful to
have access to his tool. Same goes for more technical libraries like
font renderers, shape drawers, or code that renders SVG or
drives a plotter. They are useful tools for making art but they do not make art by themselves.
Open source licenses handle this kind of utility
code pretty well. The problem is for code that itself creates art.
Of course releasing code at all is the artist’s choice: what’s
the goal of an open source release? I think many artists do it mostly
out of a sense of it being a public good to share methods. There was
an interesting discussion about how this
does not necessarily require full code: "People are forced to
learn by re-implementing, and discovering their own style, rather than
copying mine." I feel that strongly myself when I look at other
people’s art code. There’s little joy in just reproducing someone
else’s art, the creativity is in making your own. But it can help to
have working code to run and modify, borrow ideas from.
Unfortunately there’s money in appropriating someone else’s art
code. The NFT market has greatly accelerated the commercialization of
generative art. And while that can be good
for artists it also attracts cryptohucksters with divergent
ethics. I’m still hoping the whole idea of NFTs (and
cryptocurrencies) blows up and disappears but until it does artists
should be thinking about how to protect themselves from unwanted
and aggressive exploitation.
So where do we go from here? My problem-solving nature wants to
create a new software license that lets artists feel safe releasing
their code. Existing open source licenses don’t protect against
exploitation, the open source world has firmly rejected the
idea of non-commercial licenses. The CC-NC license
family is good for artistic works like photographs and written
works but they are not
recommended for software. I think we’d need a new license. Even
if the code license works it’s not clear you
can copyright the output of code. So that’s a problem.
One easy thing to do now is have more discussion about how the
generative art community thinks about others reusing their work.
There’s a nice
essay about open source hardware community norms, I’d like to
see something similar for art code. I know enough about open source
licenses and art to participate but the conversation needs to be
driven by working artists.
I think there’s some value in exploring more of how generative
art code is unique in that it creates art, but is not just a
tool nor is it the art itself. Generative art has always been full of
unresolved tension about authorship, now doubled down with complex
algorithms like VQGAN
and CLIP. Commercialization is an aspect of the authorship
question.
Thanks to the Drawing
Bot Discord for thoughtful discussion that informed this blog
post.
Subnautica is
one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. It marries a good
narrative with excellent gameplay and a rare balance of complex game
systems. It’s beautiful too and a nice mix of the pleasure of a well
scripted game embedded in what looks like a complex naturally
generated world. The rest of this post has lots of
spoilers. It’s been five years since the game came out but
if you haven’t played it yet I urge you to consider stop reading
this post and play it instead.
My first comparison for Subnautica is Firewatch. Yeah, it’s a
weird comparison, but it’s more than just a similar rendering style.
Both games have a very strong narrative arc, a beginning to an end.
Both games plop you alone in the middle of an unknown world with
mysteries to explore. And both rely on a sense of wonder, occasional
fear, and beauty. But while Firewatch is a great story it’s barely a
video game, it’s the quintessential walking simulator. Subnautica
manages to deliver both an excellent scripted story and have
great gameplay.
The primary gameplay loop in Subnautica is survival crafting games.
It’s often compared to Minecraft, Don’t Starve, No Man’s Sky.
It’s a fair comparison, a lot of your time in Subnautica is spent
finding resources and using them to progress along a tech tree so you
can explore more dangerous and rewarding parts of the game. But those
other games often end up becoming very resource heavy, rewarding
collecting enormous amounts of materials for mass production.
Subnautica’s crafting game is much tighter. You only need a few
items of each type to build something and you typically only build one
thing of that type: one weapon, one upgraded oxygen tank, one Seamoth.
You do end up making a lot of food and water but even that is nicely
constrained; about a third of the way through once you get one planter
full of Marblemelons you’re basically set for life.
I love the subtlety of the tech upgrade tree, how awkward
the advanced items are. Most games give the player a power fantasy, by
the time you get all the best gear in Minecraft you’re god-tier
power. But in Subnautica you never get anything very powerful. You
basically never get weapons or armor that let you feel safe from the
sea monsters, you are always running or hiding from them. The big
crafting achievement in the game is the Cyclops, the big submarine.
But it’s fantastically clumsy to manoeuvre and strangely vulnerable
to attack. You end up spending the second half living in the Cyclops
but it always feels like such an escape to jump back out and just swim
free or use the Seamoth.
Exploration in the game is greatly improved by the balance between
generated and scripted world. When the game first came out a lot of
people thought the game was procedurally generated; that was the hot
topic (thanks to Minecraft and No Man’s Sky) and the world is so
beautifully detailed. But no, in fact the whole world is static, it
plays the same for everyone. Not great for replayability but excellent
for game design. The orderly progression through biomes and depths
gives them a game a lot of story telling structure. You never quite
feel led by the nose but you work your way through signposted
encounters: the Aurora, the Degassi bases, the Lost River, the very
deeps at the endgame.
That exploration is also where I had a little trouble. The game
deliberately is disorienting; you’re never given a map and the
mini-map like sonar images are not useful for navigating. All you get
are beacon landmarks you place yourself. And the game is a 3d
underwater maze, with the second half of the game entirely in cave
systems! I finally gave up and used a fan-made map of the Lost River
because I’d gotten a little stuck and confused. That was a big help
to me. Getting lost is a big part of the game, I don’t mind that
being a gameplay element. But video games are such a limited medium we
don’t get to use our real-world navigation skills much. That’s why
games always have HUDs and minimaps, they replace your innate sense of
direction. I felt that lack a little here.
Being lost in the depths of the ocean is part of the fun of the
game, the occasional fear. But what really accentuates that is the
sound design. The creature noises are fantastic; you’ll be cruising
along picking up quartz crystals and thinking you’re safe when you
hear the most terrifying moan off in the distance. Stereolocated, and
you can hear it’s getting closer. Such terror! Being in the Cyclops
and hearing all the creaks of the hull, the thumps as fish smack into
your ship. It’s a trick as old as Das Boot but it works
remarkably well in the game.
Last note of appreciation for me, the end of the game. Most games
like this by the time you reach the end both the player and the game
designers are worn out. They’ve shown you all they have and you’re
grateful just to read the final boss fight and end screen. Not
Subnautica. First there’s no boss fight, that’d be totally wrong
for a game with basically no fighting. Instead you have a boss…
communion? Final crafting challenge? It’s great. And then, at least
the way I played it, there’s a wonderful anticlimax. You’ve solved
all the mysteries of the planet and are finally ready to escape but
you still have to craft the rocket and take off. Which means one last
trip to the surface, one last crafting challenge. I really enjoyed the
feeling of scavenging my existing base and submarine for materials to
use. That shield generator was hard earned and essential to my
submarine survival but now I wouldn’t need it on the planet any
more, time to reuse it for the rocket ship to escape. And even that
rocket ship had a lot of grace notes; an elaborate launch sequence and
the ability to create a
time capsule. A very thoughtful farewell in a place most games
would just have a single "you win" button to press.
Subnautica really is a masterfully crafted game from start to end.
Depth, complexity, beauty. A good story and great gameplay systems to
support it. Quite an achievement.
I continue to be obsessed with Orville Peck. The new pleasure is his video of "Jackson" with drag queen Trixie Mattel. Compared to other Peck numbers this one is way more upbeat and light. They also play perfect homage to a classic pop and Western song while gaying it up in a fun, non-overt way. It fits right in with Peck’s career of playing classic country with love and respect but making it his own.
The song is from the 60s. Written and first performed by Billy Edd Wheeler as a straight up, fairly slow country song. The Jerry Leiber lyrics are great, too, a puffed up rooster bragging about how he’s gonna cheat on his wife and her just being completely unimpressed by his strutting.
We got married in a fever / Hotter than a pepper sprout
The lyrics get modified a bit and the song gets spunkier in the best known version by June Carter and Johnny Cash. Still a country song but now played with a lot of uptempo spark. But my favorite version might be Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood looking like recently deprogrammed cult members. It’s not the best arrangement but there’s something just so authentically late 60s about it. Also it’s the B-Side for Nancy Sinatra’s Bond title song and how weird is that?
Anyway, Mattel and Peck do an excellent version of Jackson. The costuming for Orville Peck in particular is fascinating; I can’t stop staring at his ankles twisting in those amazing gold boots. In the Behind the Scenes video they say "We just really look like if neither the North or the South won. The gays won." I’m not very familiar with Trixie Mattel but I’ve come to appreciate her outlandish makeup and look. She’s perfect performing the wife in this video, just the right touch of mocking and sass.
I’m back to playing World of Warcraft.
I picked it up back in March starting with the Covid lockdown. (I’m
far from the only one!) Partly for something to do, partly to play
with a family member. It’s been great!
I quit playing WoW in 2009. Coming back the main feeling is it’s
very much the same game. Compelling mix of basic MMO RPG power growth,
lots of fun side activities, social raiding, PvP. It’s all there and
all just about the same. It’s a credit to Blizzard that they’ve
kept the game more or less on an even keel all along and it’s
comforting and familiar.
The big improvement is the game is way more
casual-friendly. In the old days you’d level up to max level and
then all that was really available to you was raiding, big serious
events with 25 or 40 people. You really had to be in a raiding guild.
Over time they added more activities; PvP seasons, reputation grinds,
etc. But the real game (and real gear) required raiding.
2020 WoW has all sorts of progression paths. Raiding is still
there, but a heavy emphasis on social tools means PUGs (pick up
groups) are more viable. There’s even an automated "Looking for
Raid" tool that will let you see a simplified version of the raid
content very easily. There’s a path for 5 person dungeons in the
Mythic dungeons, with ever-increasing difficulty levels. There’s
even a solo progression in the Visions of N’Zoth. PvP also has
significant progression and gear attached to it. All of which means
they’ve made the high end content way more accessible to everyone.
It’s a great change. (And lest you miss the old hard stuff, Mythic
Raids still basically require a guild and serious dedication.)
Some things haven’t improved. Crafting is still dumb and mostly
pointless. A lot of the top end gameplay is grindy, do the same thing
every day for 3 weeks to increment a progress bar. The graphics are
incredibly dated; partly to keep system requirements low, but also
because they don’t want to re-do all the old graphics for modern
systems and it’d look weird to have a mix. Which is a shame; the
dress-up doll game in WoW suffers significantly compared to FFXIV.
The hidden strength of WoW in 2020 is all the depth of
content. They’ve got 16 years of content in the theme park now and
it’s almost all accessible. You can still go back and do Molten Core
if you want. It won’t be a gameplay challenge, but it’s still fun
to see and there’s rewards like rare mounts to encourage you. I’ve
really enjoyed exploring all the content I missed in the intervening
years, including some really great systems like the Garrison. (Why did
they abandon that?!) There’s no other MMO that can boast this much
content and it’s great fun to discover some old neat toy to surprise
your friends with.
And that’s the other reason WoW is still compelling; friends and
guildies. The cooperative social aspect of MMOs is nearly unique in
online gaming and Blizzard has done a good job reinforcing it. My new
guild isn’t the most hardcore or accomplished but we have some
strong players, it’s mostly nice people, and we have a code of
conduct that keeps the jerks out. I continue to be concerned about the
shallowness of online game friendships just like when I quit in
the first place, but it’s a fun way to wile away a few hours.
I’ve been greatly enjoying gay country & western
musician Orville Peck’s new cover of the
song Fancy. No video yet, but give it a
listen, maybe before or while you read this post.
Fancy was written and first performed by Bobbie Gentry in
1969. But the song is best known as the Reba McEntire 1991
cover. Both performances are pretty similar, upbeat and with
doowop backup singers. It’s a great song, but it feels a bit dated
and strange.
Peck’s album version is quite
different. He plays it spare and tragic. The song comes off a lot
more dark and sad this way and to me, more meaningful. Worth noting this
variant is unique to the EP; Peck’s live versions from last year I
can find online (1, 2, 3) are more
upbeat and read a lot like the Reba version.
But the real change Peck makes is in a single lyric.
Staring back from the looking glass
There stood a woman where a half grown boy had stood
The original lyric is "half grown kid"; it’s remarkable
Peck chose to bend it to gender-specific. It instantly recasts the
whole song as a transgender tragedy. Which then gives so many of the
other lyrics more powerful meaning. "To thine own self be
true", "Said I was gonna be a lady someday though I don’t
know when or how". "I couldn’t see spending the rest of my
life with my head hung down in shame." It even gives the unlikely
name "Fancy" a new entrendre as a chosen name, maybe a drag
name.
A gay man singing a woman’s song in a baritone is always going to
queer it up a little bit. But as the
Esquire article notes Sam Hunt covered
the song last year and it just sounded like a man singing a
woman’s song, nothing too unusual. I give Peck’s LGBT stage
persona plus his smart choice of changing that single word to infuse
the song with something new. I sure hope he does a video for it; both
Gentry and McEntire have elaborate story-telling videos for the song
and I’d like to see him take a swing at that.
Peck’s still out on the fringes of country and western but
happily C&W is pretty broad and welcoming. His big breakthrough
might yet be Legends Never
Die, his new duet with Shania Twain. The song’s not particularly
queer but it’s great and must sound terrific on the radio. The video
is fantastic and pretty gay.
Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down
Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down
I’ve been obsessed lately with Blixa Bargeld,
the front man for Einstüzende Neubauten (and formerly with
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds). He’s aged remarkably well! The middle
picture is early 80s Blixa doing his more-heroin-chic-than-Peter-Murphy
look. The other two images are from his latest videos where he looks
like your cool degenerate uncle. Looks much healthier with a little
meat on his bones.
Looks aside the new album
Alles in Allem
is excellent. Taken as a whole it’s a love letter to Berlin, with four
songs explicitly about various neighborhoods and the whole thing having
a Berlin cabaret feel. The two videos are a good place to start:
Ten Grand Goldie
and Alles in Allem.
But the whole album is great and very listenable. If like me you mostly
think of Einstüzende as the
arty machine noise
group from the 80s, you missed their turn to more lyricism. Still plenty
of unusual percussion sources though, not to mention Blixa’s trademark
shriek. May they have another forty years as productive.
(CW: rape, racism). Ken and I watched Gone With the Wind this week.
As if it were prestige TV, in one hour segments over four nights.
It’s imminently watchable that way. And for a movie as early as 1939
it still feels very modern. It’s completely enjoyable by modern
standards, no early film awkwardness of plotting or direction. Well
written characters, amazing sets and costumes, there’s a lot to
enjoy in the film.
It’s also a racist piece of shit of a film. And deeply steeped in
rape culture. And these sins don’t just mar the surface; you can’t
watch the movie and just sort of ignore them. The entire intent of the
film is racist, the racism is woven throughout the whole story. It’s
a Lost Cause fiction about a Gallant South, about how Georgia suffered
unjustly under the evil invading Union forces. I was prepared for the
racism part; the film is notorious for it. I was less prepared for the
rape culture.
The center of the film is the relationship between Scarlett
O’Hara and Rhett Butler. It’s excellently written and both actors
are amazing, so the performance is exhilirating. It’s also
absolutely awful. The first time they kiss, it’s as
they’re fleeing the burning of Atlanta and the destruction of
Scarett’s world. Scarlett keeps saying "no" and pushing
Rhett away, hitting him, pleading him to stop. And he literally forces
a kiss on her against a blood red sky. To the film’s credit she
holds her ground, pushes him away and slaps him, but Rhett doesn’t
even look surprised.
It gets worse with the
actual rape on the staircase, a drunk Rhett violently attacking
his wife, grabbing her and carrying her up the stairs. To impregnate
her, after she’d already told him she didn’t want a second child
and implied she wanted no sexual relations of any kind. The hideous
thing is in the morning she’s shown waking as from a dream, with a
smile, a happy smile, because apparently… I can’t explain it,
it’s simply rape culture and it’s awful. Particularly for
Scarlett. In many ways she’s a great character, a strong woman who
survives no matter the circumstances, uses men and sexuality for her
own purposes. To have her so violated and then shown to enjoy it is
deeply offensive.
There’s nothing I can say about the racism in the film that’s
not been said better elsewhere. Happy slaves, noble Klansman (barely
disguised), the whole mythology of plantation life… it’s all awful
propaganda. What I didn’t know before reading about the movie this
week is how
there were protests about the film both during
its making and in its premiere in 1939. It was a hugely successful
film but its hatefulness did not go unnoticed. Just most white
Americans didn’t care. The Jim Crow South in particular was eager
for a film that justified its continuing racism.
I don’t know what to say about the stereotype character Mammy.
When I was a little kid I had a nanny like Mammy, a big caring middle
aged Black woman who loved children. So this Mammy stereotype is
deeply wired into me. And Hattie
McDaniel’s performance is excellent. I particularly like how
much latitude she has in the household, how she can speak the truth
and be sassy and be respected. OTOH Mammy is only written as a
character to support the white people in the movie. Nothing at all is
said about her own life, or what the transition of emancipation might
have meant to her, or whether she had her own children or life outside
of being Scarlett’s minder. None of the other Black characters get
any better treatment, the film is entirely blind to the reality of
life in that place.
My mother loved Gone With the Wind. She loved the fantasy of the
antebellum South, the costumes, the performances. She might have
acknowledged the fantasy depiction of plantation life but would have
found it unobjectionable. But I think what she really liked is
Scarlett, a strong woman, a woman who survives very difficult times
through grit and shrewdness and clever use of her feminine wiles. I
don’t know what she would have thought about the rape culture, I
think she bought into it as much as most people her age. That it was
romantic for a man to ravish a woman. What an awful thing.
I joined the Instant Pot religion. I mostly use it as a pressure
cooker, but the fact you can also saute and brown things in it, simmer
them, etc makes it really versatile. The cooking modes are confusing
though and the pressure cooker is lower pressure than typical American
electric pressure cookers.
Here’s a cheat sheet to temperatures for the Instant Pot. I
believe these come from the
official manual. There’s also great detail in
this review.
Pressure Cooker
Low 5.8–7.2 PSI
High 10.2–11.6 PSI
Slow Cook
Low 82-88°C (180-190°F)
Medium 88-93°C (190-200°F)
High 93-99°C (200-210°F)
Custom choose 40°C-98°C (104°F–208°F)
Sauté
Low 135-150°C (275-320°F)
Medium 160-176°C (320-349°F)
High 175-210°C (347-410°F)
Custom choose 40°C-170°C (104-338°F)
Keep Warm
63-78°C (145-172°F)
Custom choose 40°C–90°C (104°F–194°F)
Note that simmering means to keep the pot just below 100°C. It’s
not quite boiling, but there’s still a little steam nucleation which
makes the tiny bubbles. In an Instant Pot that means Slow Cook on
Medium or High, probably with the lid off.
A favorite indulgent potato chip dip. It’s the mild egg flavor with a
bit of smoke makes this special. We generally have it as a holiday
treat but there’s nothing particularly Christmassy about it. Ken says
he got the recipe from someone who worked with his Mom around 1960.
1 8oz pkg regular cream cheese (room temperature)
3 hard-boiled eggs
1/3 cup regular mayonnaise
1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp hickory smoked salt
1/2 tsp liquid smoke
1 tsp dried marjoram (or basil)
1/2 tsp granulated onion
1/2 tsp granulated garlic
1/4 tsp fenugreek (optional)
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Chop the eggs in a food processor fairly fine. Put the cream
cheese into a wide, shallow bowl. Add the eggs and mayonnaise and mix
well with a fork. Add the remaining seasonings and mix again. Enjoy
with your favorite chips. This is a mild dip so plain or mild flavored
chips are a better choice.
I posted this recipe three
years ago but that was me trying to reconstruct it; this better
version is from Ken’s own hand.
One of my mother’s favorite Christmas recipes dating back to at
least the 1970s were her cheese balls. Nothing unique about the cheese
ball or cheese log for Christmas. But ours were specifically
Texan. I have a photograph of her recipe card, here’s the
ingredients. I think things in parentheses were variants.
Cheese ball (3 fist size balls)
1 lb cheddar (+Swiss)
(3 oz blue cheese)
6 oz cream cheese
6 dashes Liquid Smoke
1/2 t. salt
garlic - dried onion - 2 or 3 pinches cayenne
1 1/2 Tb prepared mustard
Red wine or sherry 2 or 3 Tb
Her recipe didn’t include any notes on actually making it, but
it’s basically "put it all in a bowl and mash it
together". Grate the cheddar first (she used a sharp cheddar) and
don’t be afraid to use your hands to mush it all together. To finish
she would roll the balls in bright red mild paprika, mostly for the
color. Sometimes in pecans but I never much cared for that.
What makes this Texan? The sharp cheddar, the liquid smoke, and the
garlic/onion/cayenne that are chili seasonings. All it’s missing is
cumin! (Don’t use cumin.) The prepared mustard is a bit of a
curveball for a Texas dish but it’s good. And the touch of wine adds
a sophistication.
I was reminded of this because Homesick Texan just posted her
Aunt Betty’s cheese ball recipe. That recipe is similar to my
mom’s but there are some interesting differences. I like Fain’s
Worcestershire and the idea of rolling in chili powder (itself a spice
blend, including cumin). Wouldn’t be my Mom’s though without the
liquid smoke and I suspect the prepared mustard is doing some magic
not in Fain’s recipe.
I wonder at the history that gives us these two similar Texas
cheese ball recipes. Knowing my mom I’m guessing it was Helen Corbitt.
Indeed Corbitt has a cheese
ball recipe involving mustard and smoked cheese. And horseradish
and pickled beets?! Maybe not.
Update: just made this and it’s as good as I remember. Mix the
(scant) non-cheese ingredients first, then mash that into the cream
cheese, and only at the end add the cheddar. The finer grated the cheddar
is the better, but don’t use pre-grated; the grocery store stuff is coated
with anti-caking powder. I mixed with my bare hand, the warmth helping
melt the cream cheese, then froze it for half an hour to shape.
Update 2024: still good! The shaping is tricky. Roll the cheese into a
ball with a water-wet hand on a counter to get it smooth. Then use your wet
hand to roll half the ball in paprika on a cutting board. Then use your dry
hand to handle the paprika-coated side and finish rolling to fully
cover.
I went to DC a few weeks ago and visited the National Museum of African American
History and Culture. It is an excellent pair of museums, I
strongly recommend anyone visiting DC make it a priority. It’s still
free and still a hot ticket but easier to get in to than before. If
you’re going in summer reserve tickets three months
in advance for your best experience. But you can also get same-day
tickets and walkups, particularly outside of peak season.
The museum is clearly designed as two separate sections. Downstairs
is history, upstairs is culture. The bottom half of the museum is a
fantastic history of African Americans from the earliest days of
slavery, through slave uprisings, emancipation, Jim Crow, and the
Civil Rights era. It’s ambitious. It will leave you exhausted at the
end with no energy for the other half of the museum, the cultural
museum. Which is also fantastic, a celebration of African American
cultures. Food, textiles, sports, music, TV. I mean, they have the
goddamn P-Funk
mothership! It’s a lot of fun. Definitely also worth a visit,
but plan a break for lunch or
something in the middle.
I approached this museum from the
background of having visited a lot of German museums about Nazi
history. I was wondering how the Smithsonian would deal with
America’s enormous crime against humanity. Thoroughly and honestly,
but very differently from the German museums. The Nazi memorials tend
to a direct documentation of how the genocide and other crimes were
conducted. They are focussed on a recent history in living memory, and
one that is meticulously documented in precise bureaucratic detail. By
contrast formal American slavery is 150+ years old and there’s
precious few direct records of, say, individual slaveholders and their
daily abuses. The historical distance demands a different telling.
Also the Smithsonian has made a decision to tell as uplifting a
history as possible; in every room details of African American
resistance, strength, and heroism are highlighted. I think that’s
admirable but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for documenting the
horrible abuses. Those are documented, but only as one facet of the
whole museum.
So I was a little conflicted. Honestly I think America needs a
fully uncomfortable museum about slavery where the abuses are the
focus. How American people and government worked to subjugate other
Americans, to keep them and their children in slavery. Far too many
people still think that slavery wasn’t really that bad, or
wasn’t really Americans’ faults, or that slavery is over so
what’s the big deal now? The German museums exist to ensure that no
German can be at all confused about what happened in the Nazi regime
and could never consider even slightly lionizing that era. Plenty of
Americans still celebrate Confederate "heroes" and do not
admit to the horrible abuses of slavery, not just in its time but the
echoes of it today. I fear in softening the message the Smithsonian does not
do enough to communicate how horrible American slavery was.
There are a couple of museums that are more
focussed on the mechanisms of abuse which I need to visit; the
Whitney Plantation near New Orleans and the Lynching
Memorial in Montgomery.
One other thing I can’t let go… Nazi memorials in Germany are
in no way museums of Jewish culture. They are museums of German
history. The Smithsonian has chosen to put museums of both Culture and
History together in one place. I think they’ve done an excellent job
of it. The separation of floors makes for a separation of concerns.
And I like the uplifting message in the history section, the story of
how African Americans shall overcome. So the combination works, but it
still makes me uneasy.
I’ve learned to make a simple Korean stew that’s delicious and
foolproof. Doenjang Jjigae (된장찌개) is a homey stew made with a
flavor of fermented soybean paste, something like miso only more
rustic and spicy. Serve it over rice with some banchan (side-dishes)
and you have a simple reliable meal. There’s a zillion different
recipes online. Maangchi’s
recipe is good or see
here for a second opinion.
The core flavor comes from the broth made from doenjang
paste dissolved in water. The broth is easy since the flavor comes
from a pre-prepared product. You can find doenjang in Asian groceries
or at a markup on Amazon.
Garlic and chile is added to the broth for heat and flavor. Korean
ground red chile is best (Amazon) or you
can use most anything; red pepper flakes, cayenne, maybe some hot
paprika for a bit of smoke. The broth can also be upgraded by starting
with anchovy stock instead of plain water.
Once you have the
broth you add the rest. Common vegetables include zucchini, daikon or
mu,
onion, fresh chiles, potato. Proteins include tofu, shrimp, clams, or
my favorite: fatty pork. You can pretty much just boil everything
together, although if you’re using pork you should render the fat
first in the pot before making the broth.
I serve it in a bowl over short grain rice with whatever side dishes I
can muster. A full banchan spread is a ridiculous amount of work. But
I almost always have a jar of kimchi on hand. These marinated
mushrooms are also super easy to make and delicious.
