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Frankfurt to Amsterdam

August 19, 2011
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I was in Frankfurt less than 24 hours so I don’t have a lot to say about that. Le Meridian Park is conveniently close to the central train station and my corporate hosts took me to a very nice Italian restaurant.

Frankfurt Airport is a pit of hell. In retrospect I should have figured out how to get to Amsterdam by train. Perhaps other gate areas are better, but D is an endless corridor with no waiting areas or shops; these things have been replaced by glassed up smoking areas that smell, even from the outside, like stale ashtrays. Bleak as anything.

I am currently relaxing in the lobby of the Schiphol CitizenM. It’s like an upscale youth hostel with relentlessly cheery staff, a canteen, and several doses of hipster. I like it a lot. Also free movies which will come in handy if I feel too sick to bop around Amsterdam tomorrow.

Goodbye, Cologne

August 17, 2011
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Some people blog from planes, some people blog from trains. I feel awfully civilized.

Cologne was great. The Excelsior Hotel Ernst, not a great business hotel, although possessed of quality service — but the location was unbeatable. Great food. Very nice beer. GDC was also quite useful; lots of vendor meetings, a few really good talks, and so on.

Gamescom really is that enormous. To put it into the context of my tribe, take the Gencon dealers room and fill it up with computer game booths outfitted by companies with money to spend instead of printing debts. Keep the 30 foot ceiling; you need it to fit the booth displays. Yes, that is a 120″ HDTV. Now turn up really loud techno from every booth. With me so far? Make the room a bit bigger. Good.

OK. Now make three more copies of that room and put them across the hall from each other. Also add five or six slightly smaller halls with less egregious booths for B2B stuff. That’s Gamescom.

Yeah, it’s my first computer game trade show. I reserve the right to be staggered. And I didn’t even see it tomorrow, when it opens to the public.

Hello, Cologne

August 14, 2011
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It’s the sweet taste of jet lag! I had plans to sleep as soon as I got on the evening plane out of Dulles, but with a lean-all-the-way-back traveler in front of me, that became untenable. So I watched Thor instead, which wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. Not a super-bright movie, but man, it’s got science fantasy vision in spades.

Schiphol Airport was huge. This is not an original observation, I know. But it’s worse than O’Hare! So that was interesting and new, even though the half an hour walk between gates was lengthy. But if you gotta do it, might as well do it at 4 AM body time, right?

In a fit of thriftiness I took the S 13 from the Cologne/Bonn Airport to Cologne proper, since my hotel’s right off the Hauptbanhof. The cathedral bells were ringing as the train pulled in, and they’re ringing right now. It’s a tremendous chunk of architecture.

Now I’m kind of killing time till 1 or so, at which point I’m going to wander out to a touristy biergarden and get some sausages, and then go pick up my conference badge. Then I’m going to try and stay awake more. There’s a sauna in the hotel but that sounds like a really bad idea in my current state.

Jeni’s At Home

July 12, 2011
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Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home is a pretty interesting contrast to my current ice cream bible, the David Lebovitz book. They’re both really good ice cream books. The latter is a slow foodie’s dream: all natural ingredients, slow preparation, real egg custard bases, and so on. The former is not molecular gastronomy or anything, but it’s definitely on the cooking as science side of the fence.

I did my first recipe from the Jeni’s book tonight; just a plain vanilla ice cream. The generic base uses cream cheese to get the richness that normally comes from egg yolks. It also incorporates cornstarch, which works to provide better texture by impeding crystal formation. And I guess the corn syrup helps with texture as well? So in general, more processed ingredients for the sake of better texture.

It came out pretty well. The flavor was right on target. The texture was awesome, and I assume it’ll freeze up nicely. On the whole I sort of prefer the traditional custard method cause I was indoctrinated in the ways of earthy-crunchy granola from a very early age, but I like this stuff too.

American: The Bill Hicks Hagiography

July 12, 2011
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There I go giving away my conclusion. Ah well. Anyways: American: The Bill Hicks Story is on Netflix streaming, and if you don’t know Bill Hicks you oughta watch it. If you do know who he is, you can watch it to get all pissed off all over again, or you could watch it because there’s some really cool footage of his teenage comedy act.

The problem I had is that the movie shows Hicks as a saint. Even when he’s going through his alcoholism, it’s not really his fault. He hung around with a dangerous crowd, right? And he got off alcohol soon enough, after which it’s smooth sailing until he dies of cancer in the most polite, family-oriented, sane way possible. The movie was authorized and supported by his family, who come across as really decent people. His parents didn’t object to his comedy, which is saying something. But I still suspect the seal of approval might have gotten in the way of any real examination of the man.

I’m still glad I saw it. There’s a 60 second clip of his infamous heckler routine — the bit in Chicago where he gets heckled early on and decides to turn the evening into a brutal, stop and go, stutter-step deconstruction of the relationship between audience and comedian. I’ve seen the whole thing, cause it’s on YouTube, and the brief clip in the movie is worthwhile all by itself. I just wish the movie spent more time thinking about the alchemy that transmutes anger like that into comedy like that.

Sleeper

June 16, 2011
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I’m calling it: John Carter of Mars is gonna be the sleeper hit of 2012. Andrew Stanton of Pixar is directing and he has a pretty good track record. Taylor Kitsch is about perfect for the role of John Carter. And the rest of the cast! Mark Strong, James Purefoy, Willem Dafoe, Bryan Cranston, Dominic West, Samantha Morton, Ciarán Hinds, etc.

I mean, not that it won’t fall prey to the geek movie trap and all. But man, that’s set up to be a huge hit. Disney’s pretty good at marketing, too, I hear.

Cheated By Success

May 19, 2011
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I played a roleplaying game recently in which the GM softened up the opposition in order to make sure the PCs would win, and boy, was I ever pissed off.

Not rationally so or anything. The guy was doing it for the best of reasons, and I strongly suspect that he made the majority of the table happy. There’s an elitist, angry part of me that thinks the majority of the table is wrong, but that’s total bullshit. If you are happy with roleplaying style X, that’s fine. At the most I can get kind of peevish with people who don’t recognize that there’s any other way to swing the story stick, but rest assured that I’ll get a bit peevish at myself when I do that. Cause I do it too.

But man, I was pissed off. If my character had failed to accomplish his goals at that point in time, it would have been one of the most interesting things that had ever happened to him. (Watch me being selfish here. Me me me. I dunno what would have been good for everyone else.) My goal at the table is always to find out how my characters react to adversity. Big adversity, that’s big fun. Having a Big Bad to fight is adversity. Failing to beat the Big Bad is a whole new class of fun.

And, you know, I don’t need to have ego invested in success of my character. I have ego invested in how well I play him, both in a tactical sense and in a roleplay sense. But success or failure on the tactical scale is not determined solely by how well I choose my moves. The GM is all-powerful. If he plops down ten beholders and a suit of powered armor from a grimdark future, my PC will die no matter how smart my decisions are. Likewise, if the GM tones things down, how can I feel that my skill or lack thereof made a difference?

Without the ego sting associated with loss, I am free to decide that I want to play a character who is suffering. Or, of course, one who is a success all the time. In my experience it’s easiest to decide I want to play a character who reacts to whatever happens: if I limit myself to wanting one or the other, or even if I specify a point in between, I’m likely to be disappointed. In a pure home game, maybe less so, since you can find people who share your sweet spots and a GM who will work towards it. Public play, I gotta be more open.

Which brings me back to being pissed off. That wasn’t all that open of me, huh?

I think correct behavior is to recognize the difference in approaches and act accordingly.

Chocolate Raspberry Ice Cream

May 8, 2011
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I took David Lebovitz’s custard-based chocolate ice cream and cut the cream down by half a cup to 1.5 cups and the chocolate down to 4 ounces from 5 ounces. The first change was in the interests of making sure we have room for raspberry swirl in the ice cream container, and the second was because it seemed like a waste to open an extra bar of semisweet Ghiardelli’s chocoate to get one extra ounce. The mix is sitting in the fridge right now, and by pre-frozen taste test it’ll work out just fine.

He likes to conserve saucepans, so I made the custard in the same saucepan I used for the initial chocolate plus heavy cream blending. This resulted in a somewhat odd-looking brown egg custard. This was definitely my second good custard in a row, although I’ve gotta be careful if I use the hot burner. I should swap back to the cooler burner next time even if it’s a pain to get it lit.

Oh, the raspberry part is just raspberries fork-crushed with sugar and a bit of vodka to prevent too much freezing. You layer it into the quart container with the ice cream after you’ve made the ice cream. So good. We did the vanilla raspberry swirl last time and it was amazing. This is a test run for some future visitors who requested this flavor.

The A.I. War

March 28, 2011
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There’s a time when I would have been overwhelmed with the news that The A.I. War was out.. In 1994, it was almost done. I barely remember who I was back then. 1994? I was still working at Netcom. Wow. In those days, The A.I. War was the next stage in a 33 book masterpiece of future history. That was exciting.

We read the first three chapters in 1998. Still excited. Well, I’m still excited now. Just differently so.

Stuff happened between 1994 and now. I don’t blame DKM for taking fifteen years to get this sucker out. My impatience pales in comparison to the pain that some of that stuff caused those involved. I still had to dull the edge of my excitement somewhere along that timeline. Plus Terminal Freedom, oof. Charitably, I don’t like Jodi Moran’s writing as much as I like Daniel Keys Moran’s writing. Uncharitably, they needed an editor. There’s way too much self-insertion and there are way too many authorial darlings in there. All in all, I wasn’t sitting around waiting for The A.I. War. Blame it on false starts and trepidation.

Now? I’m not overwhelmed. But I find I’m pleased, and yeah, excited. I think I’m excited for potential. A couple of days from now, when I’ve read it, maybe I’ll believe in the Continuing Time again. I’m glad that there’s a chance I might.