Saladosity, Part 12: Always Be Prepared

[This is the twelfth post in a long series.  You may wish to start at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

To be prepared is half the victory.

    — Miguel de Cervantes

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

    — Abraham Lincoln

Today we’re going to talk about veggie prep.  Part of my secret to saladosity (if there even is one) is this: always have a bunch of chopped veggies in the fridge.  I’m telling you from experience: if I keep chopped veggies in the fridge, I will eat salads just about every day, and never get bored doing it.  If I don’t keep chopped veggies, I will wish I could eat salad for a little while and then give up and eat something terribly unhealthy.  Look, it may be a bit of a cliché to point out in this day and age, but today’s modern life puts a shitload of demands on your time.  Whether it’s realistic or not—hell, whether it’s even real or not—we all at least feel like we never have time to do things.  If you have to chop veggies every time you want to eat a salad, you will hardly ever eat salad, simply because you don’t want to take the time.  If you set aside an hour or two once a week, you can chop enough veggies for the entire week and eat healthy every day.  If you don’t believe me, just try the experiment.  This coming weekend, chop a big bowl of veggies as I suggest below then record how often you eat salad the next week.  The following weekend, don’t.  Then see how often you eat salad.  Compare numbers, then return here.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

So we’re going to chop a big batch of veggies and we’re going to stick it in the fridge and keep it for a week.  With proper preparation, you can manage to keep almost anything for a week after it’s been chopped (and we’ll cover the major exception below).  You may be able to push it for a few days beyond that, but I wouldn’t count on it.  So the big trick is to work out how much salad you can eat in a week.  Once you get that down, the rest is pretty trivial.

So here’s my pro tips:

Prepping for the Prep

From our last post, you’ll need your chef’s knife (or Santoku knife, if you prefer that style), your vegetable peeler, your cutting board, and your salad spinner.  Also, although I didn’t specifically cover it in my equipment post, take a tip from Rachel Ray¹ and get a large bowl to hold your ends and seeds and peelings and all that.  It’s much easier to dump it all at the end.

Most of your veggies need a quick wash.  Unless you’re doing something crazy like leeks, you probably won’t need to soak.  But certain things—especially celery—need to be disassembled during the washing process to make sure you’re getting all the dirt from between the stalks or leaves.  Rub your thumb along any particularly dirty spots; that’s normally sufficient.

Scallions and onions (and other allium relatives) need special attention.  For onions, remove the outermost layer—not just the papery part!  The outer layer is usually not that great, and onions are cheap.  Scallions are similar but I dont always remove the outermost layer: just check that layer, and especially the long leafy part of it, to see if it’s wilted or bedraggled or starting to get a bit slimy.  If so, remove it.  In both cases, make sure you get the transparent membrane between the outer layer and the next layer.  Rub it hard and it should come right off.  If you know how to get the “skin” off a hard-boiled egg, this is the same principle.

Bagged Greens

You don’t have to buy greens in bags, of course.  Feel free to buy whole heads of lettuce or what-have-you and chop it or shred it by hand.  But that’s a pain.  The nice thing about buying greens in bags is that most of the work is done for you: the greens are washed, separated and/or chopped, and all the really bad leaves have already been tossed.  Plus you can typically get a lot more options when it comes to bagged, and often even blends of different greens, which can save you the hassle of buying a bunch of different ones and combining them yourself.

Which is not to say that using bagged greens is no work, of course.  You still need to pick out the really good leaves from the not-quite-as-good leaves.  You’re not looking for leaves that are so bad you wouldn’t eat them—you’re not going to find many (if any) of those.²  You’re looking for leaves that will be bad in a few days.  You know the expression “one bad apple spoils the bunch”?  Same principle, only with lettuce leaves it’s much more likely and will happen much more quickly.  Be ruthless: discolored spots? wilted consistency? brown around the edges? looked at you funny when you picked it up?  Toss ’em all.

There’s various things you can do with the rejects.  If you compost, that’s a fantastic destination for the not bad leaves.  If you’re particularly budget conscious, you can always just make a salad out of them right on the spot: remember, they’re not bad yet.  Personally, I feed them to our guinea pig.  Certain lizards, fish, or turtles/tortoises are other good choices.  Hey, your fuzzy and scaly children deserve good organic food too, right?

Do not underestimate this step.  You’ll end up with a nicer (crunchier and tastier) salad that will last significantly longer.  On the other hand, don’t stress over it either.  When you see a piece that has a bit of a spot on one side, either let it pass or just rip it in half and let the pieces go to the appropriate receptacle.  When you get to the bottom and it’s all little dinky bits, just toss those in with the guinea pig fodder: lettuce is cheap and your time is worth more than a few stray leaves.  I do this with my salad spinner on one side and my garbage bowl on the other, sorting two-handed.  With a little practice, you can do this surprisingly quickly.  But I won’t lie to you: the first couple of times, it’ll seem like a giant pain in the ass.  Perservere.  Trust me, your patience will be rewarded.³

Chopping Veggies

Now, in general, you’re better off searching YouTube, because a video can teach you chopping hints with a shorter time investment and a clearer visualization than any large quantity of words I could spew out.  But I’ll hand out a few tips:

Onions.  I like to cut the non-stem end off, then cut them in half.  This is the only time I cut the stem end, which minimizes the amount of crying.⁴  Then each half gets a radial cut, then cross cut to make a lovely dice.  One half I chop fine, which means I try to line my radial cuts with every “stripe” on the onion, and the other half I do a rougher chop, which basically just means I go with every other stripe.

Peppers.  Cut the cap off, then reach in and just yank out the guts by hand.  Tap the sides to get the remaining seeds.  Chop it in half, slice the little puckered end off each side, then flatten it as best you can and, holding your knife parallel to the pepper, slice the ribs off.  Do them one at a time at first; eventually you’ll be able to do 2 at once.

Cucumbers.  Peel them first, then chop the ends off.  Cut them the long way, once for thinner cucumbers (like most Persians), or twice for fatter models (like most Americans).  Then just chop along the length.

Celery.  You can buy pre-cut stalks, but I find those go bad more quickly.  So just buy whole hearts and cut them yourself.  At the cut end, just slice an additional sliver off to remove that unsightly part that’s starting to brown.  At the stem end, cut off the really really white part (which is also pretty tough), and maybe anything that was so dirty or streaked that it wouldn’t come clean.  Slice each rib in half the long way, then chop down the line.

Scallions.  Chop off the very tip of the bulb, where it’s “hairy.”  Now just bunch them all together and chop down the length until you get into the fully green parts.  Now begin to stop every 4 or 5 chops and look at the leaves; any that are looking sad or too woody or too flat or anything unappetizing, pull them out and toss them in the garbage bowl.  Then chop 4 or 5 more times and keep repeating that process until you don’t have any leaves left.

Other Stuff.  You’re own your own for other veggies, because that’s all the veggies I personally chop.  Fruits I always chop for the particular salad at the time I make it.

Refigerator Storage

Believe it or not, the best way to store the majority of your veggies is right in the salad spinner.  I dump them directly in there from the cutting board tray.  Spin it a few times, then stick in the back of the fridge with the lid on.  Every time you take it to make salad with, leave the lid off it for a while to let some of that moisture evaporate, then spin it a few more times and back in the fridge.  The only other consideration I’m going to give you is this: if it so happens that you go for a day or two without making a salad (and I think you’re going to be surprised how rarely that happens), take the salad spinner out anyway and let it breathe and spin it.  The trick with keeping veggies fresh in the fridge is that you have them keep them moist, or else they dry out and get gross, but you can’t let them get too moist, or else they get slimy and then they’re gross.  So keeping that moisture at the perfect level is key.

However, there are exceptions to keeping all your veggies together.  Let’s talk about the most important ones.

Onions.  I don’t actually use yellow onions in any of my main salads, but I use them all the time in cooking, and I like having them around.  And, if today is veggie chopping day anyway, why not do ’em all?  So I store the onions in separate containers.  I also like to store a few of the pepper and celery bits separately, and then I can have trinity ready at all times.⁵

Cucumbers.  People give iceberg lettuce shit for being mostly water, but honestly that will last in the fridge just fine (although certainly butter lettuce is better).  Cucumbers, however, are really all water, so they get mushy fast, and you don’t want them to take the rest of your salad down with them.  I like to cut about half as many cucumbers as I think I’m going to need (which, if you’re doing the big, fat Americans, is probably just one), and then store the pieces in a container lined with a paper towel—that helps keep the moisture level about as perfect as you’re going to get.  You may have to cut up another cucumber in the middle of the week, but it’s better than gross, mushy cucumbers, right?

Romaine.  I like romaine lettuce, but I had to give up on it, because it goes bad if you just look at it funny.  Seriously, romaine will pretty much instantly decompose and take down everything around it, which can be super-tragic.  I swore off the stuff long ago.  But, if you insist on using romaine anyway, just don’t cut it until immediately before you’re going to eat it.  I know that’s a bigger pain—and that’s exactly why I don’t eat it any more—but there just isn’t any other decent option.


Believe it or not, after 12 installments, we’re finally done getting ready.  Next time, I’m going to show you the simplest of our primary six salads.

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1 And many other chefs who know what they’re talking about, I’m sure, but I learned it from Rachel.

2 And, if you do, please consider using a different grocery store next time.

3 As Alton Brown is wont to say.

4 It is of course possible not to cut the stem at all, but I find that method more unweildy, and plus I like cutting the two halves differently, as we’ll see.

5 Trinity, by the way, is not only excellent for all forms of Cajun cuisine, but is amazing for omelettes or scrambles, Italian dishes like Italian sausage in marinara sauce, or even on pizzas.  Yes, I put celery on my pizza.  Deal with it.

Because reality is real

Tonight we watched Ready Player One.  I thought it was pretty awesome, personally, although of course it’s one of those movies that you pretty much want to turn your brain off for maximum enjoyment.  But, you know, I don’t have any problem with that myself.  It’s certainly gorgeous to look at, and it has a bangin’ 80s soundtrack that I particularly appreciated.  Worth at least a look.

That’s all I’ve got this week.  Tune in next week for a fuller post.

Dreamtime I

"We Came Out from the Deep"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

This mix is a bit unusual, for a couple of reasons.  Primarily, it’s different from other mixes that I have presented here because it’s a “transitional mix.” That is, it’s one of the three mixes I made between the “pre-modern mixes” and the “modern mixes.”¹  As such, its original version showed the strong influence of Hearts of Space, but still didn’t have the full sophistication that my current mixes have.  For instance, the themes of the transitional mixes were very loose, not very specific.  They tended towards mellow instrumentals, beacuse that’s what HoS was doing.  And, while the transitions were somewhat important, I didn’t fuss with them the way I do now, and I didn’t put much thought into openers and closers at all.

Now, the mix I’m presenting today is Dreamtime, which is pretty much what it says on the tin—dreamlike ambient, showcasing the unusual and perhaps slightly sonically surreal.  It’s slightly upgraded from its original form: songs have been shuffled around, and in some cases shuffled out entirely (mainly to bring them in line with the No Reuse Rule).  A new opener was chosen, and the mix was cut off at a track that provided a good closer, in order to make a statisfying volume.²  So it’s much closer to a modern mix now.

The transitional mixes were different in another way as well: instead of consisting of songs from my collection, for the most part they utilized various snippets I found lying around the Internet.  Some of those I’ve since purchased.  Some of them are just gone—while the Internet is often forever, even the Wayback machine doesn’t generally have copies of old WAV and MP3 files.³  So some of these tracks here only exist on the hard drives of people like me who downloaded them æons ago as curiosities.  For that reason and that reason alone, I’ve uploaded a few of the more bizarrely obscure tracks myself.  I am in no way attempting to claim ownership or in any way infringe on the copyright of any of those original authors.  I just want to see these tracks preserved in some way.

Now, I’ve already spoken about my discovery of Ensemble of the Dreamings; reread the relevant paragraph there if you need a refresher.  Back in those days, the Internet was new and jumbled and just a little bit like a huge flea market: there were treasures, if you had patience, but they were buried under a whole lot of useless junk.  Who can say how I found some of this stuff?  Linkwalks, maybe, or just aimless wandering.  Besides the two tracks here we have from the aforementioned Dreamings, there’s “Dotiki,” by Bostjan Perovsek, a Slovenian “musician, composer and soundscape artist,”⁴ who dabbles in setting electronic backgrounds to the natual sounds of animals, especially insects.  “Dotiki” is an amazingly original piece of ambient music that I’ve adored for years.  Taking that concept a step further, the aptly named Zoolophone (in reality, Randy Weddington of Arkansas) composes tracks entirely of animal sounds: frog calls for basslines, cricket chirpings for percussions, etc.  As you might imagine, this is one of those experiments that doesn’t always work, but, when it does, it’s kind of amazing.  The track here, “Clair de Loon,” is centered around a loon’s evocative call, but also features an eagle’s cry, and the buzzing of some mosquitoes or flies ... really, you have to hear it to believe it.

Continuing on the natural sounds theme, at some point during those early days of the Internet, I went looking for a nice, ambient thunderstorm recording.  But I couldn’t find one.⁵  What I did find were various snippets, each one a minute or two, of various rainstorms that were uploaded to various sound hosting services.  And then I had the brilliant idea to glue all those bits together and make one big thunderstorm out of them.  Thus was born “Washed Clean,” which I composed out of various bits in some primitive late 90s/early 2000s sound editing software.  It starts with just the thunder, then the rain comes in, gently at first, then ratcheting up to a downpour.  Finally the rain stops, the thunder rolls away gradually into the background, and you start to hear birds, and then a stream, which starts out as a trickle but soon becomes a flood.  Just for fun, I threw in some very distant wind chimes in the background, but I made it so subtle that I personally can only pick them out when I’m listening with headphones.  Listen for them at about 3 minutes in.  Anyways, it’s not my original work, since I just glued together other parts, and it’s nothing fancy (because I am only barely adequate with sound editing programs), but I’m happy I finally got an opportunity to share it with you here.

So all this is hopefully giving you the idea that, aurally, this mix is a journey through soundscapes that are just a little ... off.  Sometimes I’m almost a little too on-the-nose with this theme: one of the Ensemble of the Dreamings selections is literally titled “Here in Our Dreams.” And a bunch of songs featuring actual insect sounds apparently wasn’t enough, because I also threw in “Insect Justice” by A Produce (the nom de plume of Barry Craig, who is one of the greatest ambient artists you’ve never heard of), which features electronic noises that only sound like insect noises.  To really nail it home, I threw in a track off Iain Bellamy’s brilliant soundtrack to Mirrormask,⁶ which is exactly as surreal an experience as this mix wishes it were.

When it comes to genres of music that might have something that works here, darkwave is of course good, and I fell back on my two go-to choices there: Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You, each of whom gives us a very early track of theirs.  “Overwhelmed, Beneath Me” is one of the first BTfaBG tracks I ever actually loved;⁷ it’s from The First Pain to Linger, which compiles some of the tracks that didn’t make it onto his early albums.  ”(and the muse spoke solemnly)” is a track which floated around the Internet for many years but never ended up on any actual Falling You album that I know of.  Its quiet beauty is perfect here.  Bridging the gap between darkwave and dreampop, I added a track from Unto Ashes when I upgraded the mix; “Swarm” is another insect-evocative track with a droning sort of minimalism.  And arriving in dreamscape proper, we couldn’t of course forget about This Mortal Coil, whose mellow-but-trippy track “Barramundi” is perfect here.

But of course the epitome of dreampop is the Cocteau Twins, and the original version of this mix opened with “Lazy Calm.” But that’s also the opener for Numeric Driftwood I, and really it works much better there.  So I went hunting for a new opener, and finally settled on “Second Chapter,” which is the opener for Enigma’s overall-less-good follow-up to their excellent MCMXC a.D., The Cross of Changes.  Despite coming out the worse for comparison to Enigma’s strong debut, Cross has a few good songs, and “Second Chapter” is one.  Plus it finally gave me a title for this volume.  But then there was no Cocteaus on this volume, and that just wouldn’t do, so after long delibaration I settled on “Whales Tails,” which is also off the amazing Victorialand.  I’m not 100% sure it’s dreamier than the rest of that excellent album, but I felt like it worked well enough for this mix.

But of course the best subgenre choice for this mix is ambient, and there’s a decent chunk of it here.  Returning yet again to the insect theme, “Humito Final” is from the collaboration between well-known ambient artist Michael Stearns and lesser-known (but undeservedly so) Native American ambient artist Ron Sunsinger, Sorcerer.  This is my favorite track off that album: it’s got a spooky, ritual vibe that works very well here.  Ably representing the Magnatune influence, Claire Fitch provides a track from her album Ambiencellist.  Although much of that album is more mellow (and neoclassical, really), this track has a sort of surreality that really speaks to the theme of this mix.  And our closer is yet another track from unsung ambient genius A Produce, the live version of “The Dreaming Room,” one of his most ambitious pieces.  At over 13 minutes long, it’s one of the longest tracks I’ve ever put on a mix,⁸ but long tracks are okay for this sort of mix, where you’re just letting your mind drift away.

Dreamtime I
[ We Came Out from the Deep ]

“Second Chapter” by Enigma, off The Cross of Changes
“Swarm” by Unto Ashes, off Moon Oppose Moon
“Whales Tails” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Here in Our Dreams” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Insect Justice” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances
“Overwhelmed, Beneath Me” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Abandoned Hall” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“Humito Final” by Michael Stearns and Ron Sunsinger, off Sorcerer
“Washed Clean” by Wavmaster B [Single]
“Clair de Loon” by Zoolophone [Single]
“Monkey Road” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“(and the muse spoke solemnly)” by Falling You [Single]
“Really” by Claire Fitch, off Ambiencellist
“Barramundi” by This Mortal Coil, off It'll End in Tears
“Early Bird” by Banyan, off Anytime at All
“Secret Heat” by Jami Sieber, off Lush Mechanique
“Dotiki (Touchings)” by Bostjan Perovsek, off Bio, Industrial Acoustica
“The Dreaming Room [live]” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  18 tracks,  76:42

That only leaves us with two tracks: “Early Bird,” by Banyan, and “Secret Heat,” by Jami Sieber.  The first is an almost-bridge that features some slow, jazzy noodling around by Buckethead and Stephen Perkins backed by what seems to be a bird washing itself off.  The second is a primarily instrumental, electro-ambient piece which is quite a departure for the American cellist.  I’ve read that she sometimes plays an electric cello—who even knew there was such a thing?—so perhaps that’s what’s going on here.  The syncopated plucking of the cello combined with her background whispers make this a weird, dreamlike track indeed.

Next time, let’s get nostalgic, like we did once before.

Dreamtime II ⇒

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1 For a full set of definitions, check out the series listing.

2 No doubt the remainder of the mix will eventually show up as a volume II.

3 Trust me.  I tried.

4 According to his website, which didn’t even exist at the time I originally discovered this piece of his.

5 Remember: that was 20 years ago or so.  Nowadays, I could find hundreds.  But we had no YouTube back then.

6 Another artist we also heard from on Phantasma Chorale I.

7 I’ve said before that I admire Sam Rosenthal much more for his influence and the record label he founded than for his actual music.

8 And the only longer one I can think of ~will show up on~ was originally scheduled for volume II of this very mix, though it’s since been bumped to volume III.

The weeks just keep rolling on ...

Once again, nothing exciting to report this week.  Just all the usual work and family stuff.  As per usual, a full post next week.

Multiclassing, Part 4: History of the Multiclasses (5th edition)

Last time, I bitched and moaned about how 4e (that is, D&D’s 4th Edition) eviscerated my beloved multiclassing.  To be fair, some people were overjoyed at this move, primarily because they believed (and possibly still believe) that multiclassing is only for powergamers.  But I saw it as a crushing blow to my ability to be creative during character building.  If you don’t want to play one of the dozen or so classes we’ve predefined for you, that decision said to me, then we don’t want you to play at all.  So I didn’t.

And so Pathfinder came along, and I already talked about that in conjuction with my discussion of multiclassing in 3e, because it wasn’t significantly different from what 3e offered.  And I was perfectly happy with Pathfinder ... honestly, in many ways I still am, especially in terms of character building.  But, eventually, D&D came back to answer the upstart Pathfinder (which, many sources claimed, was outselling the game that had spawned it) with a fifth edition, which of course we call “5e.”

Now, the vast majority of what makes 5e stand out above Pathfinder is in the gameplay: faster combat resolution, simpler rules for many systems, the elimination of dozens and dozens of little bonuses all over your character sheet, saner numbers even at higher play levels, and so forth.  In terms of character creation, 5e can’t really compete with Pathfinder, and I suppose it doesn’t really aim to.  But let’s give them this: they learned from the debacle of 4e in many ways, and (for purposes of this discussion at least) one of the most important of those ways was the restoration of proper multiclassing.

Which is not to say that they put back all the crazy flexibility of 3e’s multiclassing, because they had learned from that as well.  They wanted something which gave the same amount of flexibility, but allowed for less abuse.  Again, we’re not yet talking about whether that’s a necessary thing or a good idea or any of that.  Let’s just look at the rules.

Multiclassing in 5e is a fascinating collection of rules that make it simultaneously very attractive and remarkably inconvenient.  Presumably this paradox exists so that they could both satisfy the people like me who think multiclassing is a necessary part of character customization, and the people who think that multiclassing only exists for powergamers to try to gain every power in the game.  This leads to a series of “yay!” moments which are promptly counterbalanced by “aww!” momeents.  So, for instance, you can take a level in any class when you level up, just like in 3e (yay!), but you can only multiclass if you have a 13 in the “prime ability scores” of both the class you’re coming from and the class you’re switching to (aww!).¹  Your proficiency bonus is based on your character level, and experience point penalties for multicass characters are gone (yay!), but now you don’t receive all the starting proficiencies of your second (or more) class (aww!).  Best of all, the horror of trying to be a multiclass spellcaster is utterly corrected: all spellcasting classes have a single table for spells per level, and all your spellcasting classes are added together to determine how many spells you can cast.²  On top of that, you can now cast a low-level spell in a high-level slot and have it actually be much cooler than using its original low-level slot, which completely eliminates the problem of multiclassed spellcasters only having pointless low-level spells and no way to use them on the high-level enemies they’re more likely to be facing.  Yay!  But worst of all: ability score increases are no longer tied to your character level.  They instead come as class features.  The smaller benefit of this is that some classes (fighter and rogue, specifically) can have more ability score increases than others.  The larger “benefit,” of course, is that multiclass can easily fall behind in ability score increases, unless they take at least 4 levels at a time in each class.  Aww.

(We could also note that 5e, like Pathfinder, adopts the concept of “capstones”: powerful abilities gained at 20th level in a class, making them simply unavailable to multiclassed characters.  However, as I mentioned when discussing multiclassing in 3e, nobody ever gets to 20th level anyway, so this is rarely relevant in a real-world game.  Still, it’s a carrot rather than a stick, so I generally approve of it as a practice.)

Now, some of these new rules are fine—better than fine, even.  The fact that taking your first level of fighter after already having several levels in another class doesn’t automatically make you proficient at wearing heavy armor actually makes sense, from a thematic standpoint, and it’s a perfectly reasonable mechanical restriction.³  Even missing out on the skill and saving throw proficiencies that you normally get at Fighter 1 can easily be explained by not having the extensive training that most apprentice fighters get, and it solves a lot of the issues that 3e had with dipping.⁴  As a restriction, limiting proficiencies that multiclass characters get for their first level in another class makes a lot of sense.

The fact that multiclass spellcasters are somewhat “fixed” from how badly they lagged behind in 3e is pretty awesome too.  Sure, as a sorcerer 5/bard 5 you don’t have access to 5th level spells (nor even 4th level spells), but you do have access to 5th level spell slots.  And there are plenty of 1st-through-3rd level spells (for both sorcerer and bard) that will do cool things if cast in a 5th-level slot: burning hands will do an awesome 7d6 of fire damage in a 5th-level slot, charm person will charm up to 5 people with a 5th-level investment, or just do a 5th-level healing word for 5d4 + Cha points of healing goodness for your compatriot, and you don’t even need to touch them.  And those are just your 1st level spell options; many of your 2nd and 3rd level spells have similar scaling properties.  And your cantrips?  Those now scale by character level, meaning even spellcasters multiclassing with non-spellcasting classes can get something out of them.

But the corresponding downside I have mixed feelings about.  Every class gets an ability score increase at level 4, meaning that a strict alternation of levels is not always the best way to go.  For instance, a sorcerer 1/bard 1 is fine, and a sorcerer 2/bard 2 is okay, but a sorcerer 3/bard 3 is just stupid.  And then when you get to sorcerer 4/bard 4, you get two ability score increases in a row, which is weird.  You’re really much better off going single-classed up to sorcerer 4, then sorcerer 4/bard 1 and so forth until you hit sorcerer 4/bard 4.  And, even then, there’s a weird breakpoint at 5th level, where classes change from “tier 1 play” to “tier 2 play”: martial classes get their extra attack, spellcasters hit 3rd level spells, etc.  So you can make a strong argument that even sorcerer 4/bard 4 is inferior to sorcerer 5/bard 3 (or vice versa).  And I see what they’re going for here: make it painful to jump around a lot, use the progression itself to strongly encourage sticking with one class as long as possible.  And it’s clever design, and I really respect that.  But what I don’t like is how it forces you into these artificial channels.  If you believe multiclassing is only for powergamers, this is brilliant: it’s like a carrot that weirdly turns into a stick when you try to turn up your nose at it.  On the other hand, if you believe multiclassing helps you build more interesting characters, being punished for strictly alternating between two different classes, which is as close to a smooth progression as you can come and therefore the most realistic expression of a “blended” class, just seems bizarre and unnecessary.

And then you have the ability score requirements.  This is just generally bad.  First of all, it’s a blatant stick, which I don’t care for.  Thematically, it’s on shaky ground; the Player’s Handbook says:

Without the full training that a beginning character receives, you must be a quick study in your new class, having a natural aptitude that is reflected by higher-than-average ability scores.

Which almost makes sense, if you squint just right ... but only for the second class.  Except that it also applies to the first class, which is not explained by this logic at all.  I don’t need to have a 13 wisdom to be a cleric in the first place; why do I need it to study anything other than divine magic?  But the worst problem is with something that D&D players often call “multiple attribute depedency,” or just plain “MAD.”  Certain classes are considered MAD all by themselves: monks, for instance, need strength for their attacks, dexterity for their acrobatic and defensive maneuvers, and wisdom for many of their powers.  Many multiclass combinations are inherently self-limiting because of MAD issues.  For instance, you may find people railing on the Internet about how “broken” certain combos are, like sorcerer/monk or barbarian/wizard, but the truth is, no powergamer in their right minds would build such a character, because you need to maximize 4 out of the 6 ability scores to do them right, and, if all you care about is having the best numbers on your character sheet, there are far better ways to go about it.  So being MAD is already a problem for some single-classed character concepts; forcing an artificial MAD-ness by demanding high ability scores in order to multiclass just exacerbates the problem.  And the hardest combinations to achieve by these restrictions—paladin/ranger and paladin/monk, both of which require four 13s—are generally considered to be two of the worst possible combinations by hardcore optimizers anyway.  So who exactly are we punishing here?  The only people who would even want to play a paladin/monk are going to be the players who have a crazy vision and have already said “who cares that my character will be suboptimal?”  We want to discourage those players from achieving their vision?

So 5e makes a huge amount of progress, but perhaps still doesn’t completely hit the mark that I’d like to see.  It’s one of the best expressions of the multiclassing concept that we’ve seen yet, but it still has a few warts and wrinkles that I think can be improved on.


Next time, we’ll step back from the history of what has been done, and start looking and what we want to see in the future.

__________

1 For the most part, the “prime ability score” for a class is exactly what you expect it to be: intelligence for wizards, wisdom for clerics, etc.  Fighters get to pick either strength or dexterity, making it the easiest candidate for multiclassing, which is probably sane.  The more “gonzo” classes—that is, those which are already a bit like multiclassing compacted into a single class—have two prime ability scores (those would be monk, ranger, and paladin).  Also, “prime ability score” is not what they call it in 5e, but that’s what it was traditionally called, going all the way back to first edition.

2 With the half-casters only contributing one every other level, and the spell-dipping archetypes (like eldritch knight and arcane trickster) adding only one every three levels.

3 You might still magically become proficient at medium armor, of course, but that’s okay.

4 Both single-dipping and double-dipping.  Of course, to be fair, 5e has different issues with dipping—dipping two levels of warlock or moon druid, or one level of rogues, for instance, can still make powergamers lick their lips.  But there are fewer issues overall.

Another week gone ...

It’s an off-week, and I’ve been sick all week.  So, as much as I’d love to toss out a few paragraphs about this or that, I’m just too tired.  I’ll just leave it there and see ya next week.

Perl blog post #57

This week I’ve done a full post over on my Other Blog as regards YAPC 2018.  Which I really should refer to as “The Perl Conference,” now that they’ve changed the name, but I will always think of it as YAPC.

This year was in Salt Lake City again, and we took the whole family (as I mentioned last week) and spent some time with the kids’ grandparents and one of their many uncles.  We didn’t do much as far as Utah sightseeing goes, but it was a chance to enjoy some quality family time, so it was good in that sense.  And we stayed in this wonderfully weird, creepy house which was built in 1889, and various doors kept opening by themselves and scaring the crap out of us, so that was fun.  Other than that, the only exciting thing we really did was go see The Incredibles 2, which was pretty awesome.  I think everyone enjoyed that.

So, now we’re back at home after a week away, including 4 days of 6 – 7 hours’ worth of driving, which is about all we could manage at a time.  We considered trying to make it straight through in one day (even only trying to do so one way), but, in the end, we figured that 5 humans and 2 canines in a car for 7 hours is damned plenty.  We stayed in a newish hotel in Mesquite, Nevada (right near the Arizona border).  I spent some of the driving days doing things (mostly Perl things) on my laptop while riding in the car, which I’m old enough to still think is pretty amazing.  My kids are all like, yeah, so?

Another thing we did while at the Utah rental place, in the company of grandparents, was to officially graduate my eldest child from homeschool high school.  We adopted the rough format of the Sudbury school where said child first attended school, which is that we asked for a thesis on why the student should be allowed to graduate: in order words, to what extent are they prepared to go out and be a self-sufficient adult?  And then there are some questions (occasionally even quite pointed questions, making the person defend the thesis), then there’s a vote (which is mostly pro forma) and then we proclaim them graduated.  So we did all that, and it was pretty nice.  It’s perhaps not the formal, hats-in-the-air ceremony that most get when they get out of high school, but I think it was impactful, and hopefully memorable.

But it’s nice to be back home, back in one’s own bed, with one’s one shower, one’s own recliner, one’s own TV, eating one’s own food instead of mostly bad-for-you fast food and whatnot, and so on.  As we get older, it gets harder and harder to be away from home.  I used to think that was because you just needed more crap as you get to be an old fogey: you need your medicine, and your special pillows, and all that sort of thing.  But now I think it’s more that, at my age, I’ve spent years and years working out what I need to have to be at my most relaxed and happy, and, when I leave home, I’m leaving all that behind.

Or, then again, maybe I’m just looking for excuses to avoid admitting that I’ve become the old fogey myself.  Either way, good to be back home.

The starry sky ... they are swimming happily ...

It’s a good thing this is already an “off” week for me, because I’m currently in the car driving to Salt Lake City for this year’s YAPC.  Okay, well, technically I’m not driving, because that would be totally dangerous while I’m typing this blog entry, and technically YAPC is now “The Perl Conference.”  See, “YAPC” stands for “Yet Another Perl Conference,” which was entirely appropriate when Perl conferences were a dime a dozen.  But, as my preferred computer language enters its twilight yars, it turns out that YAPC is the only Perl conference really left.  So they decided to drop the “YA” and just go with “T” (after politely asking permission of the name’s former owner, who hadn’t used it in years).  But I’ll probably always call it “YAPC” just because I’ve been calling it that for so long that I’ll never break the habit.

This is the second time (that I know of) that YAPC has been held in Salt Lake City (you can read about my experience at the last SLC YAPC over on my Other Blog).  Last time, we packed the whole family (including human and canine—but not feline or other furry/scaly—children) and drove to Utah, a four-state trip (I-15 goes through just a little corner of Arizona), where we rented a house for a week, and The Mother‘s parents and sister drove in from Colorado and stayed with us.  So this year we’re doing the whole glorious, insane thing over, except The Mother is swapping a sister for a brother, and hopefully the house will be a little nicer.  This is what one of my co-workers referred to as a “conferenscation.”  So it should be fun.  Plus, I am giving a talk at the conference (for the second time ever—well, second time at a venue this size), so that’s exciting.

Next week should, ideally, be a full post.  But the weekend after a YAPC is notoriously bad for my blog: I get home and I’m exhausted, and I generally flake out.  But we’ll see how it goes.

Slithy Toves II

"Magicians Never Tell"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Last time, we talked about how each volume of a mix has its own distinct character, despite the fact that they all share a common theme.  Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than this second volume of slinky, sinuous fare.  Usually my volume IIs are just “volume I continued,” as my initial songlist is almost always plenty for two volumes, or close enough with a few additions.  But Slithy Toves is a much more specific mood than usual, and I’ve always struggled to find tracks for it.  Volume I took me forever to fill out, so I often wondered if I was ever going to be able to complete a volume II.  Unless perhaps I found a “hook” for it ... and then I did.  See, last volume, “slinky” was most often provided by brass: Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Cat Empire, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, and the Swing soundtrack.  But there were a few deviations even so ... Jon Astley and the Primitives gave us a bit of synth, and Santana did the serptentine via guitar.  As did Mazzy Star, but the combination of Dave Roback and Hope Sandoval also provides something extra: the buzz.  Now, most often buzzing guitars are associated with punk, and metal, and grunge, and that sort of thing.¹  But the buzz can be slinky and sinuous too, and this volume has quite a bit of it.  There were three songs that really cemented this concept for me, and they’re all here in this volume.

And perhaps the buzziest of all the tracks here is the Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” While the choruses are almost thrashy (albeit in slow motion), the verses are something quite different.  The (Sheffield) England band is doing something unique with the lyrics in the verses here; the end of the lyrical line is typically in the middle of the sentence, making each line run into each other, looking at it one way, or having the rhymes fall in the middles of the lines, looking at it the other way.  Either way, this structure causes the song to roll along, twisting around like a sidewinder.  It’s a really great song, and it’s the opener here.

Secondly we have Phantogram.  Now, I’m pretty sure I discovered this band because some source tried to convince me they were witchhouse, and I was then engaged in trying to understand just what that style was.  Now that I have a (slighly) better grasp on it, I’m not sure I fully agree—witchhouse seems more firmly rooted in electronica than Phantogram exhibits.²  But it is true that Phantogram shows some of that darkness that witchhouse is famous for, while still retaining the high-energy pop.  Now, like a lot of semi-obscure alternative bands, Phantogram has a lot of good songs, a few great songs, and one ultimate shining moment that epitomizes all that they are and all that they can be in one sparkling pop gem that worms its way into your head and will not let go.  In the case of Phantogram, that moment is “You Don’t Get Me High Any More.” It’s an absolutely perfect song that is practically impossible not to sing along with, and its just chock full of slink and buzz.

In the case of MS MR, that shining moment is “Salty Sweet,” in which the New York-based duo assure us that they fear rejection, prize attention, crave affection, and dream, dream, dream of perfection.  It’s another perfect pop gem³ that also sways back and forth and sneaks in a little buzz in the underbeat.  I fell in love with it the minute I heard it.⁴

And of course you can’t do buzzy slink without talking about Muse.  When I first heard Muse, I decided that they sounded a bit like U2—late U2, where Bono’s bombast has reached nearly operatic proportions.  The second time I heard them, I decided they sounded more like Queen, who of course is also famous for their operatic tendencies.  Muse has a quiet musical brilliance that’s difficult to overlook, even when their songs aren’t quite as reach-out-and-grab-you as some of their peers’.  “Undisclosed Desires” is almost a quiet tune for them, but it definitely works well here.

As I was putting the final touches on the selection for this volume, I got a wild hair up my ass to throw in “Halo” by Depeche Mode, off yet another of their truly great albums: in this case, Violator.  It has a touch of buzz, and a touch of slinky, but not too much of either, and I’m not entirely sure I can tell you why it’s here, except that once I had it in there I couldn’t conceive of taking it out.  You’ll have to judge whether or not you think I made the right choice.

Now, just because we’re all about the buzz this time out doesn’t mean we’re neglecting our old favorites.  We do have some returning bands, including Shriekback, who I noted last time might be the only band that has an actual propensity for this mix.  “Underwaterboys” is a quieter track, almost dreamy as it flows snakily along.  And Iron & Wine are back as well; “Peace Beneath the City” is a weird, surreal little tune (as most of his are), where Sam Beam demands we give him a juggernaut heart and a Japanese car.  But it has no problem delivering on the sinuous, and it even throws in a little buzz too.

You know what else can deliver on some slinky goodness?  Remember our discussion of dreampop last time?  And remember how I said it can be quite versatile?  Yeah, that.  For this volume, I couldn’t resist throwing in some Twin Peaks, because “Dance of the Dream Man” is about as slinky as it gets.  And Goldfrapp is ostensibly dreampop too, although they range pretty far and wide.  They can even do buzz sometimes, and their buzziest album of all is Black Cherry, which is also my least favorite Goldfrapp outing, to be honest, but it does has its moments.  “Tiptoe” is definitely one of them.

Less dreampop and more downtempo, with perhaps a bit of electro-world thrown in, we have volume closer Banco de Gaia, with “B2,” and its semi-goth-industrial lead-in from Jade Leary, “Infantry.” Leary definitely brings the buzz, as usual for him,⁵ but there’s also the requisite sinuousness we need for this mix.  As for Banco de Gaia, this project by South Londoner Toby Marks is sometimes labeled “ambient dub,” and that works pretty well for our closing track here.  There’s some indistinct, vaguely Middle Eastern female vocals, quite a lot of ambient-ish synth work, and it’s all held together by a serpentine synth throughline that makes it the perfect closer this time around.

And perhaps not really dreampop at all, we have Morphine—although I don’t really know what to call it.  It’s all bass, and deep-voiced vocals: singer Mark Sandman is exactly as hypnotic as his name implies, with that talk-singing, sing-songy style reminiscent of Lou Reed.  I discovered Morphine when I decided to rewatch Wild Things after many years, and was fascinated by closing song “Murder for the Money.” I then tracked down the album and discovered that several tracks would fit here.  “Swing It Low” is a quiet track, but it works well in the dreamier portion of the volume, leading in to the Twin Peaks selection and thence to Shriekback.

Slithy Toves II
[ Magicians Never Tell ]

“Do I Wanna Know?” by Arctic Monkeys, off AM
“You Don't Get Me High Anymore” by Phantogram, off Three
“Undisclosed Desires” by Muse, off The Resistance
“Peace Beneath the City” by Iron & Wine, off The Shepherd's Dog
“Salty Sweet” by MS MR, off Secondhand Rapture
“Tiptoe” by Goldfrapp, off Black Cherry
“Shanty Pig” by Mary's Danish, off There Goes the Wondertruck ...
“The Twister” by the Lucy Show, off ... undone
“Let's Go to Bed” by the Cure [Single]
“Swing It Low” by Morphine, off Like Swimming
“Dance of the Dream Man” by Angelo Badalamenti, off Twin Peaks [Soundtrack]
“Underwaterboys” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“Rev It Up” by Jerry Harrison: Casual Gods, off Casual Gods
“Beg, Steal or Borrow” by Berlin, off Love Life
“Halo” by Depeche Mode, off Violator
“Fancy Things” by the Weepies, off Sirens
“Thieves in the Temple” by Renée Geyer [Single]
“Infantry” by Jade Leary, off The Lost Art of Human Kindness
“B2” by Banco de Gaia, off Igizeh

Total:  19 tracks,  75:13

I also went back to the 80s for a bit, because I really love it there.  No-brainers were “Shanty Pig,” by the vastly underrated Mary’s Danish,⁶ and “Twister” by the equally undeservedly unheard of Lucy Show.  The obscure American band provides the serpentine via the bassline, while the obscure English band uses synth.  Also hailing from the 80s are Berlin, synthpop gods, and Jerry Harrison, late of Talking Heads, surely one of the game-changers of the decade.  From the latter, his big hit “Rev It Up,” which has the proper serpentine bassline for this mix; from the former, non-hit (but still great song) “Beg, Steal or Borrow,” which gives us more of that sweet, snaky synth.  And of course we can’t leave the 80s without hearing from the Cure, who grace us with “Let’s Go to Bed.” I think the slink in this one is both bass and synth.  Also, it’s just a really great tune.

And, getting completely away from the buzz, perhaps the two absolutely most sinuous tunes on this volume are “Fancy Things” by the Weepies, and Renée Geyer’s remake of Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple.” For the Weepies, this is entirely out-of-character; “Fancy Things” is an absolute revelation from the normally country-tinged duo.  It’s got a slinky backbeat, some great, slinky lyrics, and it also gives us our volume title.  As for Renée Geyer, who may very well be the Australian version of Adele (except for the part where she’d already been singing professionally for over a decade by the time Adele got around to being born), this excellent version steps up Prince’s (honestly, less than stellar) original by adding a truly slinky bassline and, of course, Geyer’s sultry, smoky vocals.  I’m not a huge fan of Geyer overall, but this track is just amazing.

Next time, we’ll take our deepest dive yet into the world of dreams.

⇐ Slithy Toves I

Slithy Toves III ⇒

__________

1 And we’ve already heard that mix.

2 Or maybe I still don’t understand what witchhouse really means.

3 Or, I suppose, it’s more of a pop confession, by their own admission.

4 Weirdly, I think I also found MS MR while researching witchhouse.  I think they’re even less so than Phantogram, really.

5 We first met Leary last time, but we’ll probably have to wait for another mix to really see him shine.  In the fullness of time, of course.

6 The Danish deserves a much more full discussion, but I fear that will have to wait for another mix, which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

Some lame excuses

I really wanted to get you a longer post to you this week—honestly, I really did.  But the combination of attending a graduation party and becoming terribly ill has just made that infeasible.  I was already pretty much a day behind on my weekend chores because of attending the party (which really was a lovely affair, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world), but I’m having some sort of intermittent stomach cramps which make it very difficult to concentrate long enough to finish anything that requires actual brainpower.  So I think I’d best just give up and try again next week.

Sorry.

Crossing the streams

Some things should never be mixed.  Different sets of refrigerator poetry magnets, for instance.  We have two on our fridge—or, more accurately, the remanants of two, since the majority of both sets have been scattered to the winds.  One is Dr. Seuss themed.  The other is from ThinkGeek.  You probably see where I’m going with this already.

You know, the interesting thing about having little leftover sets of poetry magnets is that having extremely limited word choice makes you come up with constructions and combinations that are ... shall we say, unusual.  Here’s one.

Rain and eggs,
   I would conjure within.
      Like you, am
yellow, and random automagically.

And here’s another:

Would you thank Sam with ham?
Do I conjure, like rain and eggs?
Say! random yellow mouse: blow in with microsoft sand ...

I had to cheat a bit on that last one by combining a stray “s” (which is really there to help make plurals) with a leftover “and” to make the “sand.”  But I’m okay with that.  We’ll call it poetic license.

None of these actually mean anything, of course.  And yet, I feel like a properly motivated English major could easily wring a thesis or two out of ’em.  Note the curious repetition of the phrase “rain and eggs” in both works.  And why is the mouse yellow, do you suppose?  Perhaps the artist was trying to make a statement about cowardice.

Or perhaps the artist was just running low on adjectives.  Hard to say.

Next week, a longer post.

Something to Say (But No Time to Say It)

This is technically a “Nothing to Say” post, except that I don’t have nothing to say, so it’s also not really.  But, then, the “Nothing to Say” posts have always been among the most paradoxical posts in a huge sea of paradox, so no huge surprise there.  You could start with the last post in the series and work backwards from the internal links, or you could just go check out the series listing for ”the informals” and get links to them all.

The main point of the posts in this series is to do a bit of a retrospective on the Blog So Far—how many posts, how many words, that sort of thing.  Typically I do them whenever I can’t think of any other good topics, not when I just ran out of time.  However, this time I really did just run out of time: I’m attending another YAPC this year (yes, yes, technically they’ve changed the name to “The Perl Conference,” but it’ll always be “YAPC” to me), and, for the second time ever, I’m presenting a talk.  So I’m mildly stressed about it, because I radically overprepare for these sorts of things (which is amusing, as I’m terribly disorganized in nearly every other aspect of my life).  Preparation is the way I overcome stagefright: when people ask me if I’m nervous when presenting a talk, the answer always depends on how much I’ve prepared for it.  With little to no prep, I’m nervous as hell.  But my typical procedure is to write an outline, and then create slides or somesuch, and then write speaker’s notes, and then practice it over and over again (often in the shower), until I know it all cold.  And then I’m not nervous at all.  So I’m right in the midst of doing all that, and feeling like I’m running a bit behind (the talk is only about a month away, and I haven’t finished all my notes yet), and, while I do have a couple of topics worked out that I’d love to present, I just don’t have the time this weekend.  So I’m cheating a bit in calling this a “Nothing to Say” post. But it’s definitely a “Blog So Far” post, because I can do that fairly quickly and it’ll still be somewhat informative, without taking up a ton of my time.

How I usually start one of these posts is by checking the control panel of my blog.  Today it tells me that I have 423 total posts, from the first post (March 28th, 2010) through last week (May 13th, 2018), which is 425 weeks (if you count both endpoints, which you have to, because there’s a blog post at either end).  Assuming my date math is right, of course ... which, considering my upcoming talk is all about date math, it damned well better be.

(For those who are familiar with my Perl work and know of my Date::Easy module, this is the code to get that answer:

perl -MDate::Easy -le 'print( (date("5/13/2018")->epoch - date("3/28/2010")->epoch) / 86_400 / 7 + 1 )'

Which is really not as easy as it should be.  I’d like to add subtracting two dates—properly!—to the module before YAPC next month, but we’ll see how my time holds out.)

So, how many of those posts should count as actual posts is always up for debate.  The first thing we should subtract this time around are the “series listing” posts, which are categorized as “crosslinks.”  They super don’t count as weekly posts, because I did them all at once, not one per week.  So that leaves 415 posts in 425 weeks, which means I’ve missed 10 weeks in a little over 8 years.  Not awesome perhaps, but not particularly tragic either.

Then we have 55 posts on my Other Blog, but they totally count.  There are 38 interstitial posts, and they really shouldn’t count.  And there are 77 partial posts, which I last time tried to count as ⅓ of a post each (on the grounds that my normal posts average about 1,500 words and my partial posts are closer to 500).  Which is mildly odd math, but, if we roll with it, that puts us at just under 334 posts across 425 weeks, which is roughly a whole post every 9 days, so that’s still respectable, I’d say.

When it comes to words, I don’t do rough word counts any more.  I wrote a script a long time ago that I keep revising: it sucks in the whole blog post file, splits the text on three things—whitespace, pipe symbols (which I use to format links), and double-hyphens, which my posting script turns into proper em-dashes—filters out anything that doesn’t have any letters in it, throws out any formatting symbols I use that do have letters in them (e.g. “h1.” or ”{img}” or ”~~CENTER~~”), then counts the results.  And then I start removing things and recounting, so that I effectively subtract out certain kinds of words that I feel shouldn’t count towards my final word count.  The things I throw out are:

• “type” lines: These are lines at the very top of my post that tell my formatting script which blog they’re destined for, possibly the name of the post, etc.
• block quotes: If I’m quoting a long passage of text from someone else, that should hardly count towards my word count, right?
• links: Meaning the actual URLs themselves, not the words you click on (those still count).
• footnotes: This one is a bit more debatable, but I figure you can choose to skip over the footnotes if you like, and, assuming you do, then I shouldn’t count them in my total words.
• code blocks: Sure, I wrote them (usually), but code is not words in the traditional sense, and it often artifically inflates word count (e.g. ”$d” shouldn’t really count as a “word”).
• fine print: By which I mean those disclaimer-y things at the tops of my posts, like “this is part of a series” and “don’t count on the next part of the series being next week” and so on.  A lot of that is reused boilerplate, and, while I did have to write it once, I don’t feel like it’s fair to count it for every post.

So, according to this script, if I suck in every post in the “published” directory and every post in the “novel” directory, I come up with this:

total words          551189
- in links           3645
- in blockquotes     64602
- in footnotes       19457
- in code blocks     6128
- in fine print      5568
net words            451789

That’s around half a million words, even discounting as much as I do.  (I suspect there’s a few more posts somewhere that I’m not including, but I seriously doubt it could be more than 50 thousand words’ worth.)  About 20 thousand words just in footnotes (I thought it’d be higher, actually), and over 60 thousand that I’m quoting of other people’s words (of course, some of that is quoting myself, and some of it may be just for formatting purposes, like poetry or whatnot).  Still, a perfectly reasonable total, I think.  I have no complaints.

This post itself is a bit light, but not so much that I’ll mark it as “partial,” I don’t think.  I’m already over 1,100 words (final count, after editing, and adding this not-quite-a-footnote: 1,330).  And that’s good, because, despite the lack of time this weekend, I really don’t want to fail to deliver on my new blog schedule.  I already feel a bit lame for dropping back to half as many posts as I was making.  If I can’t even maintain that level, I really will feel a failure.  So this week I’m cheating a bit by doing a topic I can pound out very quickly, but I think it still qualifies as a full post ... even if mildly short on really interesting topics.  But celebrating half a million words spewed forth into the void of the Internet is not nothing, even though it may not particualrly impress you, dear reader.  But, as always, I can but point out that you really shouldn’t be reading this blog anyway.

See you next week.

Wise Men Build Bridges

We’re in the midst of watching Black Panther at the moment.  I gotta be honest with you: I really didn’t think there was any way for this film to live up to the hype—I mean, it’s so much hype.  Like, a lotta hype.  A whole lot.  And yet, somehow it kinda does.  Best superhero movie ever?  I think it’s a disinct possibility.

And, I won’t give any real spoilers, but I just gotta say one thing.  If you demand a pristine viewing experience, just jump to the next paragraph.  Because, c’mon y’all ... vibranium? armored? rhinoceroses?!?  I am positively squeeing over here!!

Anyway, that’s all we have time for this week.  Longer post next week, as usual.