Na consumes media
I don't like the idea of defining myself by the products I consume, but I want to share stuff that bring me joy, so here you go; stuff I've been reading and watching which has left a mark.
Hound 2024
I didn't expect much from the comic book publisher Mad Cave, but this story caught me by surprise. Written by Sam Freeman and Sam Romesburg and illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez, Hound is a war story set during WWI exploring the ways war makes beasts of men. The plot is unexpected, and the rough artwork grew on me after a while (kind of like Moore's From Hell). I generally dislike war comics - this was an exception.
Delicious in Dungeon
This is an anime made by Studio Trigger based on the popular manga by Ryoko Kui. It concerns a group of D&D adventurers delving into a magical dungeon to rescue their friend. To move quickly they decide not to bring any food and to cook and eat the monsters they kill along the way.
This is a good story with humor and nice art, but it could have been shorter. The plot reaches a natural conclusion and then kind of drifts for a while until Ryoko contrives to keep it going. It's entertaining, I just think it would have been better if they resolved one plot line and continued with a sequel. A lot of manga series do this when they start to get popular. It's a curse of the genre.
Mickey and Donald Mickey's Craziest Adventures 2024
This is a Fantagraphics publication! Written by Lewis Trondheim and illustrated by Nicolas Keramidas, it's just a collection of one-page Mickey Mouse comics. I generally dislike saccharin Disney comics, but this collection was entertaining. Mainly I'm impressed that Fantagraphics would publish a Disney cartoon. Who approached who? How did they work out the licensing?
After looking into it, I discovered there are a bunch of Disney comics published by Fantagraphics. Apparently they started reprinting famous artists in 2011. This particular comic is contemporary, so I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe Disney doesn't realize they own Marvel?
Twin Peaks season 3
We decided to re-watch Twin Peaks. This is my second viewing and I like it better and better. Knowing how the third season ends makes it easier to stomach the meandering path Lynch takes to get there. The humor is surprising. I laugh at this series more than most comedies.
Twin Peaks isn't niche, but there are people who haven't seen it. I couldn't ask someone to spend fifty hours watching a television series, but if you're curious, I think it's worth it. My only reservation is with the latter half of season 2 where Lynch stops directing, and the people brought in to replace him don't understand his humor.
Also, I should mention, though it's not strictly necessary to watch all the episodes before season 3, it's recommended. Part of the enjoyment is watching the characters and actors mature and develop.
Here's an example; Bobby, the high-school prick from the first season is now a sheriff in Twin Peaks. Seeing his bafflement at the insanity and idiocy around him is hilarious.
Batman the Animated Series
The 1992 series by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini is considered a classic, but I avoided it for a long time because there was just too much. This was a mistake, it's great. The quality has declined from the first few episodes, and it's getting campy, but it's still great.
Because batman operates at night, the series was painted (and often airbrushed) on black cells which hurts my brain when I think about how the artists animated illuminated geometry. I captured a few frames from the video to illustrate the artwork, and I'm surprised and impressed by how clean the lines are.
Her Forbidden Knight 1998
This is a novel by Rex Stout of Nero Wolfe fame. I found it at the local library, read a few pages standing in the aisle, and then took it home. The origins of this book are mysterious. The copyright is 1998 but if you look into his bibliography it was his first published novel, serialized in 1913. Apparently this is the first time it's been pulled together into a book.
I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Even for his first novel, Stout has a strangely cozy writing style and puts together a reasonable plot. It's about a group of friends who hang out in a New York hotel lobby playing pool. Mistakenly dubbed the 'erring knights', they adopt the roles of Arthurian legend. The story revolves around their efforts to win the affection of the fair maiden working at the teletype booth. A product of 1913, there is some crazy slang and outdated modes of thought, but to Stout's credit, they are barely problematic.
This book is so old it's out of copyright and you can read it online, though I'd still suggest starting with the Nero Wolfe stories (The League of Frightened Men is a good starting point.). Incidentally, I did an image search to find the cover of the book I had. The image I found has the same white semi-circular mark in the upper left hand corner of the cover which tells me it's not a printing error as I assumed. I don't know what it is.
Earthborne Rangers
Earthborne Rangers is a cooperative card-based board game. You can see an enthusiastic review here.
Joe, our board gaming friend has been teasing us with this for a while. I think he delayed introducing the game because he wanted to buy more expansions, but he made a tactical mistake when he brought it over to show off. I convinced him to start the campaign.
I've only played three sessions so can't recommend it unconditionally except to say that we played and enjoyed two campaigns of the Arkham Horror card game. So far I'm enjoying it so much if Joe was unavailable I'd get my own copy and play it solo.
In Earthborne Rangers you play as a group of wandering rangers solving problems and helping people within a large open world map. The game is card based; you put cards down for the location, the terrain, the weather, and various obstacles like overgrown thickets or forest predators, and play cards to overcome these obstacles, either through force or understanding.
The cards are classified by a system of traits. A prowling Wolhund is a Being/Predator/Mammal and a Sitka Buck is a Being/Prey/Mammal. In this image you can see how the cards interact during play. If the wolhund is triggered it might draw in more predators or bite you if you're tired. When the Sitka Buck is triggered, they might be attacked by a predator, butt head with another Buck or attack you if there's a doe. The cards in your hand hook into these traits and the game unfolds as you interact with these puzzles and a story emerges from the interaction of these simple rules.
Stardeus
Stardeus is a worker management simulator ala Dwarf Fortress set in space. You start the game as a super intelligent computer in charge of a spacecraft that has just exploded. Using your robots and the people inadvertently woken from hypersleep, you rebuild the ship, research a large tech tree, and continue your mission to find a habitable planet to colonize.
The game is still in early access and there aren't many unique events, but the framework is solid, and I hope he continues to expand it.
Music
I usually collect music for a few months and then listen through them all at once, filtering out the uninteresting songs and adding the good ones to my collection. I'm currently in-between music batches, so I don't have much to share.
Taxi
Taxi (2015) is a weird pseudo-documentary where the director Jafar Panahi, after having been banned from making traditional movies by the Iranian government, poses as a taxi driver and records a film using dash cams about social challenges in Iran. It's interesting to get a driving tour of an alien country and Jafar has enough directing chops to keep things moving along and interesting.
Helix
I now use this text editor so much I have difficulty interacting with vim. Helix is fast, featureful, and a joy to use. I'll be happy when it gets a few more integrated tools, but don't let this deter you.
This image is what came up when I searched for 'helix editor'
Tam o'Shanter
Just go read this poem here.
Rust
Though this post has been about reading, gaming, and watching video, most of my time is being spent reading and writing rust. I've been rewriting my various home projects in the new language, using the opportunity to clarify functionality and fix bugs. The result have been surprisingly fast and easy to maintain.
The language is deep and somehow seems more transparent than other languages I've used. I'm still trying to default to approaching problems with types and traits. At the moment I'm overwhelmed with examples. I wish someone would pay me to work with this language. I despair of going back to c when I find a new job.
Advertiser tracking in firefox
Be aware there is a new feature added to firefox v128 that is turned on by default. You probably want to turn it off.
Chrome the browser is owned by an advertising company and recently made changes to prevent users from blocking ads. Despite this, most people continue to use it.
My personal policy on web browsers is the same as my as policy on operating systems and web services; as long as I'm not forced to use chrome, microsoft, 'the cloud' or facebook, I don't care - I can use a sane alternative. I get pretty grumpy when essential services require these technologies. This weekend we tried to discover whether Arroyo Seco, a local (90-minute drive away) state park was open. Websites for national and state parks have always been bad, but it's extra depressing that they only post updates on park closures on facebook-owned instagram.
Today the only browser alternative is Firefox. Firefox can still block ads with plugins like ublock origin and umatrix but the overpaid CEO recently bought an ad company and has been working with facebook to integrate ad tracking into the browser.
There are efforts to develop a new open source browser called ladybird but browsers are incredibly complex and this won't be a viable alternative for several years.
So if you're using firefox (you should) with adblocking extensions (if you aren't, what is wrong with you?!), please revisit your security and privacy settings and disable the option I highlighted above.
Dinosaur Egg salt
In the Philippines, Boholano asín tibuók can only be produced from December to May due to fluctuations in seawater salinity. It's made by soaking coconut husks for several months in oceanside pits continually filled with seawater during the tides.
The husks are cut into small pieces, dried, and burned to ash over the course of a week. The ashes are collected into a funnel shaped bamboo filter and seawater is poured through this to leach out the salt. The brine is collected into a hollowed out coconut trunk.
Then, the brine is boiled in clay pots hung from the walls of a furnace and topped up fresh brine as the water evaporates. Eventually the pots crack revealing a solid mass of hot salt. This salt is sold along with the broken clay pot.
To use the salt, grate a bit over your food. It has a smoky flavor.
Strawberry Tree Jam
In my perambulations I keep a sharp eye out for fruit and berries growing in public spaces. It's fun to collect blackberries, cherries, lemons, figs, and other fruit that are generally ignored by everyone else. I always veer towards the plants that have provided a pleasant snack in the past. The peninsula fruit currently hanging in ripe clusters of bright red are the fruit of the strawberry tree.
Also known as Arbutus Unedo, the name is attributed to Pliny the Elder who apparently claimed "unum tantum edo" ("I only eat one"). It's unclear if he meant the fruit was so good he only needed to eat one or so bad that he only ate one.
The fruit of the strawberry tree is sweet, but you never see them in the supermarket because fruit production is variable, the ripest fruit is soft, the surface is spiky, and the flesh is full of seeds.
The Portuguese ferment the fruit into a spirit called Aguardente de Medronhos and the Albanians use it when they make their Rakia fruit spirits. I'm not setup to make wine, but I can certainly make some Unedo jam.
After a test where I made sure pushing the flesh through mesh screen would filter out the tiny seeds, I biked down to a pair of trees near the aquarium and picked everything I could I could reach, jumping to get the higher fruits, but I was tormented by the perfectly ripe fruit still out of reach.
The Pacific Grove Library lends out infrequently used kitchen equipment. I biked down and borrowed a food processor. The holes in the mesh plates were too large for the tiny seeds, but I knew it would help turn the fruit into pulp.
As soon as I borrowed the food processor I knew I had two weeks to collect enough strawberry tree fruit to make this experiment work. It wouldn't do to spend my time jumping up and down like an ape.
This tomato can fruit collector is designed to screw onto the end of my extendible Crappy 300 lizard stick. Strawberry trees aren't very tall, but it's nice to be able to just extend the pole and reach the higher fruit. The tabs hold the fruit in, so I can hold the can over my collection bag and twist it to pour the fruit out.
With this tool in hand I made another foray out to a line of strawberry trees growing beside the golf course and community center near lovers point. The trees were laden with fruit, but I misjudged how many elderly pacific grove residents would be out and about that morning. Still I came home with another bag full of fruit and decided to get started on the jam immediately.
I immediately ran into several issues. In case you want to follow my reckless example, here's what I'm going to do differently next time.
Cut the firmer fruits into slices first. I had too many fruit rolling around in the food processor. They were too firm to get caught under the sweeping blade.
The holes in the food processor will give you a seed filled mash. Add water and blend this to make something you can put through the processor again. I think I wasted quite a bit of my fruit because everything was too dry.
The seeds don't feel good in your mouth and they have a bitter flavor. After running the fruit through the food processor, add more water until it resembles pea soup and push the mash through a fine mesh. I got the mash wet enough it would pour through the mesh and I used a scraper to stir the seeds until they had separated from the flesh. I still had a few seeds in the final mash, but it wasn't enough to spoil the taste.
Before boiling the mash I added very little sugar, less than a third of a cup. You might be able to get away with not adding any sugar at all. I wanted to make sure the result would turn into a jam and not burned fruit leather.
Whisk the mash as you boil it down. The mash seemed to foam up instead of clarifying like actual strawberries. When it started boiling it had the tendency to leap out of the pot and I have a few burns on my hand.
I followed the standard canning process of boiling my mason jars and sealing the lids. I'll probably still keep the jars in the fridge.
The final result is surprisingly good! The jam is creamy, like apple butter or whipped honey, and the taste is much better than I expected. It's kind of like a creamy mango strawberry mix.
Although the collection and preparation was a pain, I think I will start collecting fruit and freezing them for a future batch. The jam is delicious!
The infrequently updated blog.