Lundi Gras

Why does eating with chopsticks make food tastier?

I suspect that eating with chopsticks forces one to slow down during eating, bringing mere consumption of mass quantities closer to dining and therefore closer to savoring. As the man says, the best spice is hunger; Cervantes called hunger the best sauce in the world- La mejor salsa del mundo. Some real live scientific research even proves it.

That doesn't matter to me. Leftover General Tso's Chicken, full of spice and garlic and sweet and hidden deadly nuclear peppers over steamed white rice, eaten with gusto and the good lacquered wooden chopsticks made my meal tonight. If it was good enough for the General, it's good enough for me.

Today is Lundi Gras, Fat Monday, the day before Mardi Gras, the traditional culmination of Carnival, the celebration of excess before the Catholic season of Lent. Back home, I'm accustomed to seeing almost every restaurant advertise their Lenten specials- no small feat in a city known for its seafood. Even though I just went to a Mardi Gras party not two days ago, it's not the same. King Cake, muffelettas, jambalaya, red beans and rice and watching strangers drink did help contribute to the proper atmosphere. I don't drink and I'm not really the party-hardy type. I simply resonate with people relaxing, letting loose, and celebrating life.

As far as I can remember, this will mark my second Mardi Gras not spent in Louisiana, ever. It's a (often paid) state holiday for us, you see. Many many years back, we took a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida over Mardi Gras, since we had off and the rest of the nation didn't. Somewhere (maybe), we still have a book of E tickets.

But tomorrow is going to be just a regular Tuesday for Austinites. I plan to at least wear purple, green, and gold. What will you do?

Playtesting and Parties

By "parties" I of course mean large social gatherings with food and libations and old stories told many times over and now refined and deployed to impress the largest number of potential mates and vocational opportunities by showing ourselves in the best possible light, not just the notion of an adventuring rag-tag group of misfits off to slay the dragon and protect the small local village from the wrath of the evil creature after a thousand years of terror, but of course the double meaning when coupled with playtesting also has a certain charm to it that I simply can't deny.

Playtesting the second session of 1984 Prime went well. I had some new mechanics that I wanted to try and I think they went over rather well. I took a page from the Mountain Witch, trying to get a sense of partial and mixed successes. I definitely feel that the game is improving, though I know it's far from complete. I can't stop watching how the game evolves under my eyes- I've experienced characters in stories running away from me the author, but I've never had an RPG behave the same way.

Here's an analogy that may make sense. (I can't claim it as my own; thank this guy.) Imagine that I wanted to write a game about Christopher Columbus exploring the New World. While designing the game, I found out that Portugal is really a lot neater than that pesky New World. While playing it, I've discovered that not only is the New World not all that, but the political intrigue and machinations between the royal factions back in Europe made a lot better story, with the other hemisphere acting as little more than a huge McGuffin. Once I get notes together, I'll discuss this in depth. Also expect to see an Actual Play post over on the Forge.

As for the party... life is good. Cat finally met John, Bryan, and Juli, old friends from LSU who I haven't seen in nearly a decade. We caught up, talked about old times, showed off embarrassing photos from the past, and took new ones. I need to transfer the pix from my camera, so be patient. In the near future, I expect to see John more often, bringing him into the various gaming circles and sharing restaurants, and driving down to see Bryan and Juli in Hell- er, I mean Houston. Tomorrow is Lundi Gras, then Mardi Gras. It's not too late to order a King Cake from Randazzo's or Haydel's, though you may have to wait after the Carnival season. I see that KingCake.com is shipping Next Day Air orders tomorrow early, so you'll have to hurry if you need your fix.

I nearly forgot to mention- I met an internet celebrity last night at the party. Surely you've heard about the Delta flight attendant who got fired for posting semi-provocative pictures on her blog? (Hi, Ellen!) PS: She's got a book coming out soon.

Have I mentioned lately that I am not a spokesperson for Dell and that all of my words and opinions are mine, mine, mine?

Agave, epoxy, and me

It's still a standstill on the didj making thus far. The weather has yet to cooperate this weekend, being either (or both) too cold and too wet. According to my weather widget, it should be warmer during the week. I can readily pour the epoxy, but I need to work out how to hang the stalks so they can dry overnight. With luck, I won't have to resort to building scaffolding.

If I only had a garage.

Weekend linky clicky

In a sign of serendipitous coincidence, I heard about a new alternate history mockumentary presuming if the South had won the Civil War. It's called CSA: The Confederate States of America. Kevin Willmott, a professor out of the University of Kansas, got this satire/commentary/comedy/candid look at racism/mockumentary/alternate history experiment produced with the help of Spike Lee. (I find this information even moreso interesting because of yesterday's playtest- 1984 Prime is a game of alternate history, presuming nuclear apocalypse as the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. More on the playtest later- notes and scheming machinations are happening even as we speak.) You can hear the NPR story for yourself or catch the full trailer at the official site. It's coming nowhere near me, but I suspect I'll snag it once it hits DVD.

If you like mashups, check out the movie trailer contest over at Fark. Notably, I saw Toy Story: Requiem (for a Dream). This is a little unnerving, to say the least. Be advised- I also don't think it's entirely work-safe, so use headphones.

My brother sent me a link to Flixster, a social movie site. Basically you rate movies and see how other people rated them, then you get to see how compatible you are. To join this phenomenon, and see your movie compatibility with me, click here and look for the "Movie Compatibility Test." Shameless, I know, but none of you want to be my Netflix friend, so I resort to other methods.

I've been working with implementing Getting Things Done by capturing into a specialized and lighter-weight TiddlyWiki called, imaginatively enough, GTDTiddlyWiki. It's definitely something worth looking at, at least to realize the power of the web as a platform.

And now I gotta run- we're going to a Mardi Gras party tonight, hosted by an old college buddy I haven't seen in almost a decade. I've been looking forward to this all week.

1984 Prime playtest part 2

About to run off to a second playtest session of my award-winning roleplaying game, 1984 Prime. Also to eat homemade pizza.

We should finish out the adventure tonight, then I can geek out and bore a large percentage of my readers.

Saturday night, we're going to a Mardi Gras party with some old college friends, so look for excitement and adventure in the near future!

Survey says...

Cat is now licensed to drive by the state of Texas! Thanks to everyone who crossed their fingers.

While yall're at it, I may buy a lottery ticket.

Civil service

Some call it the OMV, Texas calls it the DPS, I know it as the DMV. No matter what you call it, chances are that you've needed to make use of their services one way or another, even if only as getting ID issued by the State. In other words, I can't make this episode of the NWLB as action-packed as usual. All I can really do is ask you to imagine the thrills and chills on your own- but please don't think of any spills. Wish Cat luck on her driving test!

Agave didgeridoo work

I had a grand old time Sunday. Yes, that's a power saw. Yes, that's my hand. No, nobody got injured- or involved with the law.

I spent about five hours working with Steve from the Oztin Didjgroup on the agave stalk that I previously recovered. He's got an actual house with a garage and power tools, and he very graciously allowed me to make use of the gear. Not to mention the experience in doing this sort of thing before. We wound up basically just cutting it in half-ish and removing the pith from the center of both stalks. Because the original stalk had laid out for so long, it had nearly dried completely, making for relatively easy going.

Agave smells very much like sugarcane with a hint of something spicy, or maybe cedar or sandalwood.

If you think of an agave stalk as a carrot standing on its thick end, imagine cutting it just south of middle. I wound up with one longer and thinner proto-didj and one shorter and fatter proto-didj. The longer one measures about 82 inches long with a two-and-a-quarter-inch mouthpiece and a three-inch bell, whereas the shorter measures 70 inches long with two-and-three-quarter-inch mouthpiece and a four-and-a-half-inch bell. Roughly, of course- look at my timestamp. Steve thinks that the longer one will sound deeper than the shorter one. Honestly, the physics of the didgeridoo are insane, and I'm not one to question.

Termites or grubs or something had gotten to the end of the stalk, eating out the center. This is how real traditional eucalyptus didgeridoos are made and is extremely unusual for an agave didj to be hollowed out this way, even partially. Once I seal the stalk, I expect the irregular surface will make for some extremely interesting sound.


The next step is for me to obtain the requisite Bondo Marine epoxy resin, wait for warmer weather, and seal these babies. Home Despot alleges they've never heard of the stuff. The quest continues!





Some extra pictures:
The thinner of the two stalks (right) next to the drill (left) used to clean it out. That's four feet of extensions plus a wire brush attachment, incidentally.


Keeping splits in check with some pipe clamps.


Brushes, tools, bits, and bobs. Start with a paddle bit to do most of the grunt work, then move to using the wire brushes to abrade the pith away, leaving the hardwood intact. The walls of the agave are very light and relatively strong- sort of like aluminum of the desert plant world.


This picture shows the LED flashlight bringing the termite grooves into relief. I think this looks really cool. Some of the other shots turned out much blurrier- I'm still working on grokking basic light writing- er, photography.

Status Check, medium geekery

I caught some grief the other day at work for being a Mac user. This riled me a little, but not much. I continue to maintain that I am platform-agnostic. Every platform has a web browser, an email client, a text editor, a way to view images and PDFs. This agnosticism extends even to IM networks: I'm on ICQ, AOLIM, Yahoo!'s IM, MSN Messenger, and Jabber (Gtalk runs over this). For some, it's all about the applications: people learn a way of doing things and they stick with it. Look at Adobe's products, look at Lotus 1-2-3, look at all the Mac high-end editing software. Me, I transcend the application. I worry about my data. I've worried about the problem of electronic data in various uncooperative formats since at least high school. We had a Smith Corona word processor that only could save to its own proprietary discs- nothing else could read 'em. I knew about WordStar not playing nicely with WordPerfect. Now I know (and this is a few years back)that we're losing telemetry data from the space age because the tapes are physically deteriorating.

Lost data is a problem, people. We're making more of it every year. Here's a data point for you to help put things in perspective. According to a Berkeley study, we produced five exabytes of information (print, film, magnetic, and optical media) in 2002. What the hell is an exabyte? Kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes. Then there's zettabytes and yottabytes. I'm not making this up. Five exabytes is about five billion hours of television, or some 37,000 Libraries of Congress, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. And we're typically putting all of this on hard drives with one-year warranties.

An email from a friend led me to find my first ever Usenet post. Yes, that date is correct. November 1994. For those of you who know what Usenet is, I'm always reminded of the 1992 quote by Gene Spafford: "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." For those of you who don't know about Usenet and the previous quote sheds no light, start with the Wikipedia. Yes, I realize that I'm part of the September that never ended.

Rant off. Thanks for playing.

Back in the real world, we filled up Lita the Ford today with her lead substitute additive, I replaced my wiper blades on Blueberry the Saturn, I had a Boca meatless burger for the first time as far as I know, I recieved my "Got wood for sheep?" shirt, and tomorrow is a day of agave didj crafting! (Thanks, Steve!) Pictures and posting to follow!

Parlor Narration

Thursday night, I got a chance to get some gaming in. We had an impromptu night of time-limited one-shots, playing two sessions of Greg Stolze's Executive Decision (zipfile) and one of Ferry Bazelmans' Soap. A good time was had by all, but I'm not sure we were really roleplaying. I feel this is more accurate with the debate-centric Executive Decision, where PCs play members of the President's cabinet. Soap had more character-driven story and felt more like traditional roleplaying, but the narrative structure of "one sentence per turn" felt too forced for play.

Executive Decision plays like this: Decide who gets which cabinet positions and who plays the role of the President, write down default and optional agendas (pro-military or anti-centrism, say), then pick one of about a dozen scenarios. Each scenario presents a time-sensitive crisis. At certain points in the scenario (every twenty minutes in the ones we played) more information is revealed, including the options for the President to decide upon and further developments. Once time is up, the Prez makes the decision and everyone gets points based on their agenda(s). The only game mechanic is really the players' ability to sway others' opinions.

So yes, you have the one-player-one-character requirement. There's someone ostensibly running the game, but the role of the President is more of host than of presentation; true, the Prez gets to read the scenario, and every players get points based on final decision, but it's not entirely in accordance with the normal roles that one expects a GM to have. The manual suggests the President encourages arguing, in-fighting, playing devil's advocate, and generally to "pour gasoline on any
smoldering disagreements." This is not the same as regular game mastering duties- though in some circles, it's par for the course.

Soap, on the other hand, is entirely sentence-based and plays without a GM whatsoever. You have your turn, you state your sentence. You can't die as long as nobody guesses your secret. There's a bidding mechanic for resolving contested statements, such as entering someone's scene without permission, or modifying a stated sentence and so forth. With Soap, we created characters and decided on a genre/venue, so it felt more like a real roleplaying session.

Both games are inherently time-limited. Soap requires a half-hour and must end on a cliffhanger. The Executive Decision scenarios run about an hour.

Both are undoubtedly games; Executive Decision has agendas and points for determining a winner and Soap has character goals. Both have characters, one per player- in Executive Decision, players definitely have roles to play whereas Soap very specifically has characters.

Can it really be a roleplaying game if one only has a role, but no character?