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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.

That’s The Rush of Geek Feet

March 21, 2011
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Hey, it’s time for a new Neal Stephenson novel. This one is going to be called Reamde, which is probably a gloss on README, which is funny. Particularly to me. This was announced like a year ago but I wasn’t paying attention. It’s about gold farmers in MMORPGs, and it will be nearly 1,000 pages long, and it will come out in September. That’s also funny to me, although I imagine it isn’t a reference to the Eternal September. I happily anticipate being grumpy about MMO inaccuracies.

Aztec Chocolate

March 13, 2011
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So this is your basic chocolate ice cream recipe, Philadelphia-style (no eggs), but you also add a bit of brandy and some cinnamon and a bunch of chile powder. The recipe calls for either ancho or chipotle chile powder; we went for ancho. My initial reaction on tasting the mix was that it was a bit wussy, but I’m more hardcore about heat than is reasonable. It is super-rich and chocolatey, so all’s well! And when I have a chance to make this with Chris T., we’ll fiddle around with a hotter batch. You could do this with a small amount of naga jolokia and get something really interesting.

YAPKDM

March 6, 2011
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The Adjustment Bureau is carried a long way by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, with an assist from Terence Stamp, but the directing was indifferent and the script wussed out in the end. And at a crucial point in the middle; watch for the library scene, where we find out that much of the central philosophical dilemma is completely irrelevant.

It’s a Philip K. Dick movie, so you kind of have to know the odds aren’t that good going in; you expect to get an interesting mindtwist of a premise executed without total commitment on the part of the director/screenwriter. Check on all counts. I put this one a bit higher than most, just because Damon and Blunt were so good. Awesome chemistry, great acting. But this is George Nolfi’s first movie, and man, even the experienced directors tend to hit the reefs on Dick adapatations. He also wrote the screenplay, so I can confidently blame him for everything I disliked.

Which is to say that the ending fails to take risks. It’s comforting rather than dangerous. You can read the original story, which is quite short. In the end of that one, our protagonist willingly compromises to save his own skin. In the movie, it’s not surprising that Matt Damon gets a happy ending, but it is disappointing. There’s a reading in which he sacrifices a great deal to get that happy ending, which is in fact the surface reading, but I’d point out that certain parties spend the whole movie lying to Damon and he knows it. I’m not sure he’s made any real sacrifice at all.

Also, someone better could have turned the hat chase scene into something really special. So lost opportunity all around. It’s still totally worth a matinee, because of the acting, but not more than that.