The Salesman's Tale

As far as stories about one’s life go, everyone has a few that all their friends and acquaintances have heard ad nauseum, and a few that they love to tell and may or may not be a hit, and, if they’re very lucky, a few that they only tell occasionally, but are always entertaining when they do.  This is one of those for me.

Now, I’ve alluded to this story before, most particularly in my discussion of fate (or whatever you wish to call it).  In that story, I talked about how it was I came to work in a restaurant, even though I had been a professional programmer for several years at that point.  That restaurant was a small joint about a mile off the campus of George Mason University called the Mason Jar Pub.  We served sodas in Mason jars (get it?), but also beers and pizza and all the stuff that college students require.  This place was run by a snotty punk named Brian whose dad was in “construction” (air quotes used very advisedly) and had obviously been gifted the pub as baby’s first business.  He ran it with his girlfriend and a friend of theirs named Dana.  They ran it very poorly, and eventually the business ran out of money and Brian and friends ran out of town and none of us got to cash our final paychecks, which led to a number of uncomfortable days in court as we tried to get paid by the father.  Lessons were learned all around.  But, in the run-up to this inevitable debacle, the following thing happened which ended up changing the course of my life far more than my one missed paycheck.

Now, because I had gone to college previously, then dropped out (during which time I did the aforementioned professional programming), and was now back for a second tour, I was a bit older than most of my peers.  I was, in fact, just a wee bit older than Brian himself, and this was the point in my life when I learned that most people really can’t handle managing employees who have more age and experience than they themselves do.  The prime example of this was the reaction I got when I pointed out to Brian that I had some experience with computers, and I could give him a hand if he ever needed any help.  Said reaction was basically just a sneer.  I was one of the dumb college kids he had hired; obviously I was not to be allowed in the club with him and his girlfriend and Dana, who was the only one trusted with “the books.” I shrugged and went back to making calzones: no skin off my nose if he wanted to struggle with his new computer.

You see, there was this fellow named Tom Cooney was working for Sharp and had sold the Mason Jar Pub its first cash register.  He then sold them a computer to which you could download all the data from the cash register and then load that all into QuickBooks.  Provided you knew what you were doing, of course—this type of process was still a bit fiddly back in the early 90s.  And Brian and company most certainly did not know what they were doing.  They struggled with that damn computer constantly, and Dana was constantly calling Tom asking for help.¹  So I knew they could use my expertise.  But, if they were too proud to accept it, it was none of my concern.  I had been hired to sling pizzas and clean up the joint, and I was perfectly willing to do just that.

Now, the three twitbags couldn’t be around all the time.  Especially on the night shifts, there were often times when none of the three of them were available (or just didn’t want to be bothered).  For these occasions, there were two “assistant managers,” who happened to be senior ROTC students, as well as roommates and very good friends.  One was a pale, freckled redhead whose name I think was Lou; the other was a confident black man with glasses named Wayne.²  These were both big, burly men who were training to be Marines, older than most of my coworkers (still a bit younger than I was, of course).  I think that Brian thought that they were going to be “on his side” in the imaginary divide in his mind that existed between “management” and the rank-and-file.  But, the thing about middle managers is, if you treat them (and pay them) as badly as you do the low-level employees, they tend to side with the majority rather than the upper echelon.

So, one slow night I was working with Wayne and a couple of other people, and Wayne was bitching about how badly all us employees were being treated and how little we got paid compared to Brian and his coterie, who seemed to be pocketing all the money.  At some point, the discussion turned to sneaking a peek at the books.  After all, it was all on the computer, and the computer was right there in the office.  The office was locked from us paeons, of course, but Wayne, as the manager-in-charge, had the keys.  For emergency use only, theoretically, but ... perhaps finding out what was going on was an emergency, dammit!  (Had we known what was coming, we would have felt even more justified.)  The problem was, only Dana had the password to QuickBooks.  So Wayne turned to me.  “You know computers, right?” he asked me.  “You could hack in!”

I was not surprised at this misconception: that all us programmers know how to hack things.  I was a bit surprised to hear this future Marine lieutenant suggest something so morally ambiguous.  But, then again, Wayne himself often told us that his Marine instructors taught them to make a decision and stand by it: making a poor decision in the heat of battle can be bad, but hesitating and making no decisiono at all is often disastrous.³  So, after my initial shock, I set about explaining that I was never much of a hacker—in fact, the only thing I had ever successfully hacked was a copy-protected videogame on my Commodore 64, which tried to tell me it couldn’t run after X times because my trial period had ended.  I did in fact show that snarky videogame message who was the boss, but breaking a QuickBooks password was a whole different animal.  Computer security had advanced by about a decade at that point and I had spent zero of that intervening time keeping up with it.  “Well, take a look,” Wayne encouraged.  So I said I would.

And, perhaps 15 minutes later, I was ready to admit that there was literally no chance that I was smart enough to break into a password-protected QuickBooks account.  “Sorry,” I said, not all that sorry.  But Wayne was not deterred.

“Okay, but there’s got to be something you can do to fuck with them, right?” he suggested.  Well, okay, I was not bothered by being unable to hack, but this now felt like a challenge.  Surely any programmer worth their salt could do something to fuck with people, given free access to the physical machine.  I had certainly engaged in a few juvenile pranks with coworkers—both as the fucker and the fuckee—but a lot of those things were only effective against other programmers.  What I needed was something that would get under the skin of a normie.  So I started poking around to see what tools I had available to me.

And what I found was a hex editor.  Now, if you’re not a technogeek like myself, you might not know what this is.  It’s a program that will let you edit anything on the computer: data, commands, even the operating system itself.  It was exactly the thing I had used in my one and only successful hack.  You see, a videogame that keeps track of how many times it’s been played and then refuses to run necessarily has to store that count somewhere, and that means you can find that place and edit it, and change it to zero.  But there are two problems with this approach: first of all, you’d have to constantly change it back to zero every time the count got too high again, and secondly the people who programmed the videogame have obviously thought of this.  They don’t store the count as a raw value; it’s encoded somehow, so that even if you could find it and change the value to zero, that wouldn’t be read as “zero” by the program itself.  So I quickly realized that my “brilliant” plan could never work.  But I realized that, in my attempt to find where the data for the count was stored, I had stumbled across something even better: the place where the code to compare the count and show the snarky message was stored.

You see, on the one hand, figuring out exactly how a given piece of software works should be easy: it’s all just numbers, and the software authors can’t keep you from being able to read those numbers without also making it impossible for the computer to read them.  So, theoretically, you can just look at all the numbers in the software and see what it’s doing.  But, the tricky part is, the same number can be interpreted differently depending on context.  For instance, say you look at one byte in a piece of software and it happens to be hex 49.  Now, that might represent the number 73, which is just the hexadecimal number converted to decimal.  Then again, it might be a capital “I,” because that’s what hex 49 is on the ASCII chart.  Or it might be the lower byte of a two-byte number, or the upper byte, or the middle byte of a four-byte number.  Or it might actually represent an instruction: say, an immediate exclusive-or of the next byte with the “accumulator,” which is assembly-speak for “the current number we’re working with.”⁴  Which of those many things it actually is depends entirely on context: the only number that you’re 100% sure of is the very first one, and, after that, you have to deciper every number, in order, to figure out what the next one means.  If you lose your place, or if you miscount how long something is, then all of a sudden you’re interpeting number as letters and letters as instructions and instructions as numbers and you’re just fucked.  So, while it should be simple, in practice it’s very much not.

In the case of my videogame, the code which checked how many times it had been run and then conditionally displayed the annoying message was not near the beginning of the code, but it was jumped to near the beginning of the code, because that check was one of the very first things it did.  So I was able to find it and trace through it and eventually I found the “branch” instruction: the part that said, if the value is no good, jump to the code which displays the message and terminates the program.  And I replaced the “branch” instruction with hex EA, which is what we technogeeks call a “NOP”: a no-op.  So then, instead of branching when the number was too big, it just ... did nothing.  And, after the nothing, it proceeded with the regular videogame code.

And I could do all that because I had a hex editor, and that allowed me to search for certain byte sequences, identify them, and replace them with different sequences.  And then save the file, overwriting the old program with a new version which was almost identical to the old, but with one slight tweak.  Once you know how to do this type of thing, it’s pretty easy to extend that to other changes.  And one of the simplest edits of all is to replace one string with another.

See, your hex editor knows perfectly well that sometimes numbers represent letters, so you can tell it to search for a string, and it can do that fairly easily.  The longer the string, the more likely it is that a given set of sequential numbers will represent those letters and not just be a stunning coincidence.  And, once you find the string, you can easily overwrite it with a different string, as long as the new string is exactly the same length as the old one.  Now, if you happen to know something about the way the program was written, you can pretty easily replace a longer string with a shorter one: anything written in C, or a language that derives from C, will use a zero byte as a marker to mean “the string ends here.” So a 10-character string will actually be eleven bytes long: one byte per character and the zero byte at the end.  You could easily replace that with a 5-character string and just fill in the last 5 bytes with zeroes and Bob’s yer uncle.  What you can’t do (or can’t do safely at any rate) is replace a 10-character string with a 20-character one, because those last 10 bytes are going to overwrite something entirely different: if it’s another string, the program will end up displaying the latter half of your replacement string intead, which is maybe not too bad, but if it’s code, then the program will likely do very bad things as it starts interpreting your characters as instructions.  But, as long as the string is equal or shorter, you’re golden.

And, the thing is, it’s very rare to find a hex editor on a random computer.  The vast majority of users have no need for one.  Finding a hex editor on the accounting PC for a small college-town restaurant was just weird ... surreal, even.  I would eventually discover that our salesman friend Tom needed the services of an engineer-type, and the one he was using at that point was a bit sloppy.  He had been using the hex editor when he set up the computer, and just never bothered to delete it.  But, at the time, it felt almost like destiny: there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to this computer, but the presence of a hex editor opened up my possibilities quite a bit.

Now, back in those days, we didn’t have Windows.  Well, technically speaking we did, but its use wasn’t prevalent yet.  Most programs, including QuickBooks, just ran on the primitive system underlying Windows: DOS.  When you booted up a DOS computer, you were faced with what we called a “C prompt”: C:\> .  And you just typed the name of whatever program you wanted to run—perhaps qb for QuickBooks—and it ran.  Now, if you mistyped something (say, you accidentally fat-fingered a key and typed wb or qv instead of qb) you would get an error message.  Specifically, it would say “Bad command or filename.” Not that you’d be likely to mistype a two-letter command, but something longer, you might.  And the thing is, “Bad command or filename” is a really excellent string to search for in a piece of software, if you happen to know which piece of software is responsible for printing that “C prompt” and running whatever commands you enter.  Which I did.  So it was fairly trivial, given the hex editor, to find “Bad command or filename” and just replace it with a shorter string.  Like, say, “What the fuck?!?” Which is exactly what I did.

Needless to say, Wayne was tickled pink at the thought of poor Dana mistyping something and getting cursed out by her own computer.  I was a bit proud of myself: it was basically trivial for me, but it could seem like magic to the uninitiated.  And I thought nothing more about it.

Until ...

You see, what happened was that, sometime in the next few days, Dana was having some troubles with getting data downloaded from the cash register system and, naturally, she called Tom for tech support.  Not that tech support was really Tom’s thing—he was the salesman, recall—but the whole computer thing was, strictly speaking, on the side from his job at Sharp.  So he was tech support that day.  And, when you do tech support over the phone, you get into a sort of rhythm: “Okay, type this.  And what does it say?  Okay, then, type this next.  Now what does it say?” And so on and so forth, back and forth, until eventually poor Dana flubbed whatever she was supposed to have typed.

“Okay, type this command; now what does it say?”

“Ummm ...”

“Just tell me what it says on the screen.”

“Well ... it says ...”

“Yes? what does it say?”

“Well, it says ... ‘what the fuck’.”

Without missing a beat, Tom responded: “Somebody there knows computers.”

Or at least that’s the way he recounted the story when he told me about it later.  Because he started dropping by the Mason Jar Pub quite regularly after that, hoping to ferret out which employee had the secret computer knowledge.  And, eventually, he stumbled onto me.  And that’s how Tom Cooney became my first business partner: I became his new, not so sloppy, engineer, and I was introduced into the weird world of running your own business.  It’s part accountant, part movie producer, part one-man-band (even when you have partners or employees), part having the weight of the world on your shoulders, and part ultimate freedom from being told what to do by idiots with no vision.  I owe Tom a lot, but I think maybe I owe Wayne even more.  Without that juvenile prank, my life would have turned out very differently.  And maybe not better.

__________

1 This led to Tom and Dana actually dating briefly, if I recall correctly.

2 I mentioned Wayne—and this very story—in passing when discussing how much I owe to Bernice Pierce.

3 I stress this is all second-hand information from a single source, diluted by decades of intervening time and degrading memory.  I apologize to any of my readers with military experience if I’m misrepresenting the advice.

4 Note: I’m not stating categorically that 0x49 is an immediate XOR for a 6502 CPU; I’m about 4 decades out from even being able to follow the reference docs for that particular flavor of assembly, much less actually remembering it.  But I did look it up, and I’m pretty sure that’s right.

Another trip around the sun ...

I really thought I was going to be able to do a full blog post this time, despite it being my birthday weekend.  But, apparently, I’ve relaxed too hard, and the time has just slipped away.  I would love to tell you I’m sorry, but ... I too relaxed to feel all that sorry about it.  Sorry for not being sorry.  Sort of.

Next week: the thing you should have gotten this week.  See how it all works out?

Post-Halloween recap

Another Halloween put to bed, another birthday weekend upcoming.  Nothing overly exciting to report so far: the smallies went out for what is likely their last trick-or-treating ever, while I stayed home to pass out candy to any children who knocked on our door, of which, it turns out, there were exactly zero.  Then we all met back at the television for our annual viewing of Trick ‘r Treat, which is surely the greatest Halloween movie of all time (even counting the actual Halloween).  Our youngest managed to stay awake until the last 5 minutes of the movie, then we all went to bed and, presumably, had lovely dreams.

Until next year!

Plutonian Velvet I

"Ministers of Night"

[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.]

As we approach the pinnacle of spooky season, I thought it appropriate to present one of my spooky mixes.  And I have several of those, many of which we’ve already encountered.  As a connoisseur of all things creepy and crawly—as an aspiring author whose pentagram of literary idols include Stephen King and Clive Barker—I distinguish among many different flavors of spooky.  We’ve seen Phantasma Chorale, for instance, which is lightly creepy, with a bit of child-like thrown in for good measure.  We’ve seen Darkling Embrace, which is creepy but pretty, and Dreamscape Perturbation, which is creepy and dream-like.  Darktime was all about dark music, and Penumbral Phosphorescence was full on goth.  But how about some music which is downright spooky?  Well, you’ve finally come to the right place.

For this mix, we’ll be concentrating on music which sounds a bit scary or unsettling.  If it has some creepy lyrics, that’s a bonus, but it’s not the focus.  Mainly these are songs from artists which usually are perfectly normal-sounding bands, putting out perfectly normal-sounding albums, except for that one track that makes the fine hairs on your arm stand on end.  The name of the mix is drawn from a few lines from The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, the patron saint of Hallowe’en if there ever was one.  The ends of two different stanzas of that excellent poem are:

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

So, as we sit here, on the violet-velvet cushion of Night’s Plutonian shore, let’s see what dark and festering cobwebby corners of alternative music we can find to chill our bones.

When I first discovered Falling You, back in the early days of the Internet,¹ I immediately fell in love with them² and started trying to download every single thing I could find by them.  Which is how I stumbled on this “remix” of “Hush” by Abney Park.  The original is pretty good—listen to it if you like—but it’s not significantly creepy.  What Falling You did was to entirely mute Robert Brown’s lead vocals, kick up Abney Park keyboardist Kristina Erickson’s almost whispered backing vocals, cut out nearly all the instruments except for the synths (which are perhaps even enhanced a bit), and add some creepy sound effects.  The result is something entirely different from the original ... and insanely dark and excellent.  For years I had it paired with “Mad Alice Lane” as the opening to Darktime, but honestly it transcends just being about darkness.  It’s a wonderfully creepy tune that serves as a wondeful intro.

And it’s followed by my other great find from those early Internet days: “Mad Alice Lane” by Peter Lawlor, founder of the Scottish band Stiltskin.  It took me forever, but I finally tracked down the CD single of this excellent (and excellently spooky) song; the version I’m using here is the slightly longer “A Spooker Ghost Story” one.³  The story of the song is just as creepy as the song itself, so defnitely give that a look-see.

Once I divorced these two excellent tracks from Darktime, I decided they should form the core of their own spooky mix.  And instantly I knew the first two companion tracks that had to be added: both are by Siouxsie and the Banshees and both are off Peepshow.  “Scarecrow” is one of my favorite tunes to play at this time of year, and, while the choruses are a bit rockin’ (as much of the Siouxsie œuvre is wont to be), the verses are super eerie.  As for “Rawhead and Bloodybones” ... well, based on a disturbing British tale of child-snatching boogeymen (or a single boogeyman with a compound name; versions conflict), the song has a lot of discordancy and notes that just jangle your nerves.  It made for the perfect closer.

After that, “The Lights are Going Out,” the closer for OMD’s 1985 masterpiece Crush, was so unlike anything else on that album that I’d always had it in the back of my mind as a candidate for a spooky mix, and the Cure’s short “Subway Song” is a little two-minute gem with a little jump scare built right in.  I follow up the latter here with “Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi.  The Bolshoi were contemporaries of OMD, though not nearly so well-remembered these days.  They had a similar sort of new-wave/synthpop sound, and “Barrowlands,” the penultimate track on Lindy’s Party, is similarly conspicuous in its dissimilarity to everything else on that album.  It’s got a great graveyard feel to it, and also provides our volume title.

Rounding out the 80s contributions (though I embarrassingly didn’t think of it until quite recently) is “Sanctum Sanctorum” by the Damned.  I was looking for a replacement for another track that just didn’t seem to fit, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have anything by the Damned.  And, while the Damned may not be a proper goth band, lead singer Dave Vanian is the gothiest motherfucker on the planet: black leather and huge white streak in his jet-black hair (at least during the Phantasmagoria era), married to Patricia Morrison of the Sisters of Mercy (which is a proper goth band)—hell, he even used to be a gravedigger before becoming a rock star.  And Phantasmagoria has some goth gems on it, of which “Sanctum Sanctorum,” with its Phantom-of-the-Opera-style opening organ chords and backing thunder-and-lightning effects, is easily the spookiest.

Other obvious, if more modern, choices were “Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl (with Elysabeth Grant breathily telling us how she “met a stranger on a train” and Sam Rosenthal’s goth-soaked arrangement), “Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star (more organ, sludgy percussion, and echoey vocals by Hope Sandoval), and “Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers (a taste of New Orleans creepy accompanying a song of tragedy sung by Katharine Whalen).  Those fell naturally into a little block, starting with “Diamond” and ending with “Mary,” that closes out the first third and sets us up for the middle stretch.

A few more self-evident choices: modern goth masters Faith and the Muse, who here give us the breathy, bassy track “Kodama,” and dark ambient, strings-heavy Amber Asylum, who provide “Cupid.” The lyrics of “Kodama” are actually about the commodification of Hollywood,⁴ but the song still retains enough sinister to secure its position here.  As for “Cupid,” it’s a rare vocal outing for band founder Kris Force, and those vocals soar and swoop; it’s not always clear exactly what the words are, but the arrangement is a bit menacing and a bit tortured, so it works well here.

Tossing in a bit of early-to-mid-’aughts trip-hop, the Belgian band Hooverphonic can go dark with the best of ’em, and I always thought “L’Odeur Animale” was one of their darkest.  The whole song just feels ... off, and that creepy little tag at the end just seals the deal.  When Geike Arnaert sings “deep inside,” it makes you shiver, even if you don’t know quite why.  My other choice was Germany’s Trost, whose Trust Me is normally fairly uptempo, if a bit surreal.⁵  But the last track,⁶ “Filled with Tears,” has more of that bass-driven, echoey and breathy vocals that have popularized so many of the other tracks I chose.  Plus the one-two punch of Hooverphonic and Trost makes a fantastic wind-down to our closer from Siouxsie.

Plutonian Velvet I
[ Ministers of Night ]

“Hush [Flashback Mix]” by Abney Park [remix by Falling You] [Single]⁷
“Mad Alice Lane (A Spookier Ghost Story)” by Lawlor, off Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story) [CD Single]
“Cupid” by Amber Asylum, off The Natural Philosophy of Love
“Scarecrow” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Kodama” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“The Lights Are Going Out” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, off Crush
“Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off The Inevitable
“Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The Scavenger Bride
“Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Now, When I'm This” by the Black Queen, off Fever Daydream
“Ghost Children” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Toccata” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Waltz of the Damned” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off Swing Is Dead
“Subway Song” by the Cure, off Boys Don't Cry
“Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi, off Lindy's Party
“Sanctum Sanctorum” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“L'Odeur Animale” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Filled with Tears” by Trost, off Trust Me
“Rawhead and Bloodybones” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow

Total:  19 tracks,  79:13

And that just leaves us with the centerpiece of the volume.  We start with 3 instrumentals: a rare double-bridge leading into a hardcore synth-driven update of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” First up, the Black Queen, a dark synthwave band composed of former members of Trent Reznor’s touring band for Nine Inch Nails.  I discovered these guys while checking out the veritable cornucopia of dark synthwave that’s springing up these days (such as Urban Heat and Light Asylum), and while dark synthwave doesn’t necessarily mean creepy, there’s certainly something ominous about “Now, When I’m This,” which is the short intro to the Black Queen’s debut album, Fever Daydream.  And the transition from “Mary of Silence” straight into “Ghost Children” wasn’t working for me, so this little track made a nice bridge to the bridge, if you see what I mean.  And “Ghost Children” itself was picked to be a little bridge into “Toccata”: it’s a nice (but creepy) little track off of Bruno Coulais’ excellent soundtrack to Coraline.  I mean, all of Coraline is pretty creepy—it’s the entire raison d’être for Phantasma Chorale after all—but I tend to think that “Ghost Children” is one of the few actually spooky ones.  And it tees up the Nox Arcana take on Bach’s classic, given its uncanny bona fides by association with early silent horror films such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931 (it didn’t become associated with The Phantom of the Opera until 1962, by which point it was already cliché horror film music).  Nox Arcana does some excellent work here, keeping it lively while also providing the appropriate amount of darkness for being the anchorpoint of an album named Legion of Shadows.

And all that takes us to perhaps the only surprising choice of the volume: Lee Press-On and the Nails.  Retroswing auteurs LPON are often silly, but also occasionally gothy, and their album Swing Is Dead contains a few tracks that aren’t out of place in the Halloween season.  But only one is truly spooky: “Waltz of the Damned” sounds almost exactly like what you would hear while waiting in line to see the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  The amusement-park-style sound effects fade into some New-Orleans-style dirge before leaping into LPON’s more typical big-band sound, with Lee’s vocals heavily processed through a voice-distortion unit spewing lines like “and when the leader waves his fiery baton, the band begins to scream in three-quarter time!” It’s eerie, spooky fun.

Next time, we’ll sneak up on some sonic explosions.

__________

1 Which is when I also discovered a bunch of other crazy things I’ve shared with you, like Ensemble of the Dreamings and Zoolophone.

2 Well, him: Falling You is almost entirely composed of John Michael Zorko.

3 That single also contains the nearly-ambient “Dogs of Breakfast,” which we heard on Shadowfall Equinox III.

4 Or at least that’s my interpretation.

5 We’ve heard from Trost once before: her weird little ditty “Even Sparrows Don’t Like to Stay” was featured on Gramophonic Skullduggery.

6 These sorts of weird, creepy songs are often used as closers for their native albums.

7 This one is so damned hard to find that I just gave up and uploaded it myself.  You’re welcome.

Rumble in the Jungle

After a break of a little over a year, we’re finally back to the Family Campaign (which is what I call the D&D campaign that I’ve built around my children’s characters, who happen to be all animal-based).  Why so long?  Well, a big reason was the return of my eldest child and their partner.  You’d think that would make it easier to do a thing called “the Family Campaign,” but not so much, as it turned out.  But another reason was that this was the first really big battle that I’d planned for the campaign.  Now, if you watch actual play games like Dimension 20 or Critical Role, you might recognize that this is very light in terms of combat: D20 typically has a major (as in, episode-long) combat every other episode; CR is usually a bit less often, but not by much.  However, I’m a much more combat-light (and therefore story-heavy) GM.  While I pepper in short combats, done using theater of the mind, I save big set-piece combats utilizing fancy battle maps for special occasions that come along maybe once a level.

So, with the arrival of the party in Maztica (a jungle-dominated continent with cultures influenced by Aztec, Incan, and other Mesoamerican cultures), I figured it was time to pull out all the stops.  You can see the array of enemies I put up (with apologies for my limited Phtoshop skills); there’s a few evil cultists (always fun to battle, with no pesky moral quandaries to worry about) and then a number of creatures taken straight from Legendary Games’ Latin American Monsters, which I purchased specifically for this purpose.  There’s a jaguar in the right foreground, with a werejaguar right behind it, a couple of pumas, and a werecaiman.  That red furry thing with the horns is a timbo; the scary horse-headed woman is a sihuanaba, and the big snake with antlers is a mazacoatl.

And, yes, I built a full map for it.  Here’s some pics we took to mark our place when we had to pause this mega-combat:

As you can see, I had to use a number of proxy figures: my jaguar is here represented by the tiger (and the werejaguar is a weretiger figure), the timbo is the wrong color (but otherwise surprisingly accurate), the werecaiman is really just a lizardfolk, that “wolf” is actually supposed to be a black panther (one of the good guys), etc etc.  But the overall scene—a bar on a beach with a jungle right behind it—is actually pretty accurate for what I had in my mind.  The kids seemed to have a good time with it anyhow.  (Fun fact: the legs you can see in one of the pictures belong to my middle child, who was taking their own pictures of the battle.)

Oh, and you might wonder: what the heck is up with the Bazooka Joe wrapper?  Well, I asked my youngest to find a way to mark that space, and that’s what she came up with.  We had to mark the space because one of the powers of the timbo is called “Gravedigger”: in a single turn, it digs a grave, pushes you into it, and covers you up so you start suffocating.  So that bubble gum wrapper is actually a grave marker, and there’s someone in there buried alive.  So that’s fun.

We’ll pick it up here next week, if we can wait that long.  It’s a tough battle, but I provided a few allies to help them out, and I think they’ll prevail in the end.  I’m anxious to find out how it all comes out!

I thought Jared Kushner was going to fix this ...

When the WGA went on strike earlier this year, I was miffed for an entirely selfish reason: I get almost all of my news from places that employ writers, like The Daily Show and Steven Colbert on The Late Show.  Just as when the coronavirus first hit, I was abruptly plunged into a news-free zone.  As I noted back then:

Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

During this year’s stoppage, I found some new outlets, mostly on YouTube, where creators are not writing for the AMPTP, so the strike allowed them to continue.  Most of them, however, were not nearly amusing enough.  I’ve grown somewhat fond of Brian Tyler Cohen, for instance, but there’s no denying that he’s not only a radical liberal (which I don’t mind so much), but also a staunch Democrat (which I’m far less tolerant of).  Generally speaking, the Democrats are not nearly as liberal/progressive as I’d like, and they fuck up just as badly as the Republicans (case in point: Bob Menendez).  Then there are the “dirtbag left” and their less extreme offshoots, who will happily—even gleefully—attack Democrats, but traffic more in manufactured outrage than incisive and funny commentary.  About the only truly postive find during this long dry spell was Some More News, who are not so much current news like Colbert and whoever ends up being the next Trevor Noah, but more like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight: deep dives into an single problematic situation, trying to use humor to explore the nuances of the story that traditional news outlets (even the “fake” news ones) just don’t have time to cover.

But now the strike is over, and Colbert is back, Meyers is back, Oliver is back, and The Daily Show will be back tomorrow night.  And just in time for the most violent flare-up between Israel and Palestine in decades; by the time it’s over—and I’m being optimistic just in assuming it will eventually be over—it will almost certainly jettison the “almost” from that description.  This is the type of thing that it is very difficult to inject even a modicum of humor into, but one of the reasons I truly respect these folks is that they always find a way: you can’t make jokes about the tragedy itself, of course, but you can make jokes about the idiots talking about the tragedy, or trying to “manage” it.  You can point out hypocrisies and people being greedy and foolish.  They figured out a way to do it about 9/11 (eventually), and they figured out a way to do it about the pandemic.  And, I have to say: I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of even trying that I’m seeing from my usual outlets.  That probably sounds a bit crass, like I’m complaining that this humanitarian crisis, where thousands are being killed, isn’t funny enough for me.  But that’s not what I mean to imply.  I’m more disappointed in how this is the line that my comedic news idols are afraid to cross.  A world-wide pandemic that killed 7 million people?  Sure, we can find a way to make jokes about that.  The Middle East?  Fuck that, man: I’m not touching that.

I think the main source of the problem is, perhaps more than any other hot-button issue in the United States—perhaps more even than abortion, or gun rights—there are reflexive reactions to stating a position on either side.  If you refuse to say you stand with Israel, well then of course you’re supporting terrorists.  And, if you do say you stand with Israel, then you’re supporting apartheid at the best and genocide at the worst.  Best just not to take a side.  Except ...

Except I reject this false dichotomy.  I do not stand with Israel, nor do I stand with Hamas (or any of the other Paletinian terrorist groups-du-jour).  I stand with the innocent civilians.

Numbers are hard to pin down, but the United Nations says that “More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians, were reportedly killed ...” and that ”... at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, including older persons and 290 children ...” ABC News reports that “In Israel, at least 1,300 people have been killed ...” and that “Palestinian authorities said at least 2,329 people have been killed ...” Would it really be so controversial to posit that killing innocent civilians is bad, regardless of which side is doing it?

This conflict has been going on so long that people don’t even bother going back to its beginning in their lists any more: the United Nations lists casualties only going back as far as 2008; Wikpedia’s list of military operations headed “Gaza-Israel conflict” only goes back to 2006 (and has 21 entries in those 18 years).  But, trying to extrapolate from Wikipedia’s timeline, I think there have been more than 50 incidents just in my lifetime—the first of which started when I was 7 months old—ranging from plane hijackings to full-on wars.  And I was only trying to count incidents in which multiple innocent bystanders were killed: I skipped all the assasinations of military and political figures by both sides.  Also, once it became clear I was going to hit 50 (easily), I actually quit counting, because it was just so goddamned depressing.  The Israelis and the Palestinians have bcome the Hatfields and McCoys of our lifetimes, except if the Hatfields and McCoys were wiping out huge swaths of the West Virginia population.

And I understand the issues of conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people, but I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel.  If it were, there would quite a few antisemitc Jews these days: Jon Stewart has done some of this, not to mention there’s an entire organization of Jews for whom it is the raison d’être.  But it’s harder for non-Jewish people (such as myself) to do so.  In fact, there are, bizarrely, actual laws in 35 states (including my own) saying that you’re not allowed to boycott Israel in protest of its policies.  You know where it’s not illegal to protest Israel?  Israel.  Many Israeli newspapers have been extremely critical of Netanyahu in particular, which is only sensible: in a democracy, people are supposed to be critical of their governments.  They are supposed to hold them accountable.  There are no laws in the US about not being able to protest the US government (probably), but it’s okay to make it illegal to protest other countries’ governments?  It’s just surreal.

Meanwhile the Palestinians have the opposite problem: too often the face of their people is a group like Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Fatah, or the PLO, or ...), which everybody condemns, and rightfully so.  But condemning a terrorist group that operates in a country is not the same as condemning the people of that country, and expressing support for the people is not the same as expressing support for the terrorist group.  Netanyahu has said that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price”; does that mean that Hamas will pay this price?  Because it sure seems like it’s the Palestinian people paying it right now.  If the Israelis wanted to hunt down every single Hamas soldier who participated in this henious attack on their country, who would speak out against them?  But bombing innocent civilians back to the stone age because of the actions of some madmen who claim to speak for them?  Does that really seem “justified”?

So I would like to take the (hopefully!) uncontroversial stance that people in both Israel and Palestine have the right to live their lives without fear of being shot, kidnapped, or bombed.  I dunno ... that just seems like common sense—and common decency—to me.

Even More News, the current news discussion podcast from the Some More News folks that I mentioned way back at the beginning of this post, had an almost entirely humor-free discussion of the current situation in Israel and Palestine that you could check out for more in depth discussion.  The episode of Some More News that they reference is actually two years old at this point, but (as Cody says) it’s eerily relevant to today’s news, so you should probably watch that.  The older video does lean more towards the Palestine side, but the recent podcast is more balanced.  And all the information is good regardless.

Trying not to ruin the apology

There should be something longer here.

But there isn’t.

I should have found the time to write it ...

But I didn’t.

The vagaries of life have struck me down, the minutiæ causing me to drown, hopefully I won’t have a breakdown ...

I’m feeling insufficient.

Perhaps next week will be much better.

Then again, perhaps it won’t.

I typically strive to produce some content.

But then sometimes I don’t.

Not that you should pity me (I’m not asking you for sympathy), I’m just sayin’, that’s all I have for thee: ’cause this is all I wrote.

In a house with unlocked doors

As I sit here rewatching The Meg, which really isn’t as bad as it’s cracked up to be, in preparation for watching The Meg 2, which probably will be as bad as it’s cracked up to be (but it’ll be entertaining enough, I expect) ... as I sit here, pondering old Jason Statham will be before they stop casting him in action movies, I appreciate the fact that I took this blog to a biweekly schedule.  See ya next week.

Sirenexiv Cola II

"Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox"

[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.]

Sometimes a volume II consists of all the songs that just wouldn’t fit on volume I.  But sometimes it’s just that certain artists were so good that they had multiple candidates, and I was working very hard to restrain myself from including them all.  That latter case sums up Sirenexiv Cola pretty well: there’s yet another brilliant opener from KT Tunstall—”(Still a) Weirdo,” in fact, includes the brilliant line “Optimisitc, but never quite elegant,” which came very close to being our volume title—and the promised inclusion of alt-radio favorite “Polyester Bridge” by Liz Phair.  The Sundays and the Katydids are back; the former provide the gorgeous “Here’s Where the Story Ends,” another alt-radio favorite and quite possibly my introduction to the London band; the latter give us a slightly less folky take than last volume with “Don’t Think Twice.” And, speaking of folky, you know I had more from folks like Feist and Regina Spektor and the inimitable Tori Amos.  For Feist, the album that immediately precedes the one with her breakout hit “1234” (which was featured last volume) is Let It Die, which features her first charted single, “Mushaboom.” It’s a sweet pop gem which sweeps us into the middle stretch of this volume.  As for the Russian-born NYC-raised Spektor, “Fidelity” was her first song to chart in the US, and features some beautiful musical hijinx, such as pairing pizzicato string work with some glottal stops and stretching the word “heart” into a dozen or more syllables; it’s pretty breathtaking.  And, while I still maintain that Tori Amos’ debut Little Earthquakes is the most brilliant album of her career, “Caught a Lite Sneeze” is probably the first of her singles that I really enjoyed after that initial infatuation.  It’s somehow both dreamy and poppy, ethereal but with a strong beat.  Definitely a classic.

But that’s not the extent of our returning artists—in fact, it’s perhaps only as I’m writing this blog post that I realize how much throughline there really is in terms of the vocalists.  Bella Ruse is back with “Hold Me Close,” a spare acoustic anti-folk ballad that develops into a dreampop synth wash; its’s somehow hopeful and melancholy all at once.  We hear once again from Beth Quist; the swooping vocals of “Goodbye” show off why she’s part of Bobby McFerrin’s “Voicestra.” There’s another Meaghan Smith tune, “Poor,” which shows off her ability to start out slow and build to something beautiful.  And, on the harder side of this mix, I once again come back to Swedish powerpop star Lykke Li, with “Dance, Dance, Dance,” and P!nk, with “Stupid Girls.” The former was never a hit, but it is off Li’s first, best album (Youth Novels), and it showcases her ability to blend a lot of different instruments and styles into a coherent whole.  The latter was a fairly big hit for P!nk (#13 in the US; #4 in the UK) and contains a lot of typically smart lyrics such as “What happened to the dream of a girl president? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent” and laments “where oh where have the smart people gone?” And it still manages to be a banger, of course.

Still, we must have new blood to keep a mix fresh.  One of the things I realized when putting together volume II was that I had failed to include the incomparable Suzanne Vega.  And, while normally my go-to Vega album is 99.9F°, there’s also much to be said for her follow-up Nine Objects of Desire.  And I just felt like “No Cheap Thrill,” a little more upbeat than most of her œuvre, worked best as our penultimate track.  It’s got that slinky vibe that I featured on Slithy Toves I (speficially, “Caramel”), but a bit more of a pop vibe, with catchy lyrics that compare a relationship to playing poker.

It also felt a little weird that I hadn’t included anything off Fur and Gold.  The brilliant debut of British vocalist Bat for Lashes has provided tracks for Porchwell Firetime I, Slithy Toves I, Darkling Embrace I, and Wisty Mysteria II, but this mix was really tailor-made for her.  “The Wizard” was her first single and, though it didn’t chart, it’s really a great, dreamy track that works quite well here.  I also thought to return to the smokier voice of Chrissy Amphlett and Divinyls; “Heart Telegraph” really lets Amphlett’s pipes shine, and I think it transcends the mid-80s new wave that it also indelibly evokes.  (Last we saw Ampheltt—on Totally Different Head I—I noted that she died fairly young.  Since then, I’ve actually passed her age at the time she died, so it hits even harder for me now.)

Of course, I’ve also just plain discovered some new bands since I started this mix.  A former coworker of mine introduced me to a bunch of new music, from his favorite obscure subgenre (Italo-disco) to just stuff he knew because he was much younger than I.  And sometimes he would have tenuous personal connections to a band: I believe he knew the Dum Dum Girls (who are indeed from our native LA) because an ex-girlfriend was close friends with one of the members.  Or something like that.  But he threw up one of their songs onto our big screen that we used to play “push songs” and I was mightily impressed.  “Caught in One” is my pick for their first appearance here: while they can often be a bit shoegaze-y, this tune is more jangle-pop, with Dee Dee’s powerful vocals singing about the loss of her mother (“Death is on the telephone / I lie and say she isn’t home”).  It’s a great tune.

Another major discovery was Lucius, whose Wildewoman was nearly as exciting a discovery as Tiger Suit, which is what arguably kicked off this mix in the first place.  This indie pop four-piece from Brooklyn features two harmonic female vocalists.  Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig are not related, but they tend to dress alike and wear their hair in similar styles, so you could be forgiven for thinking they were sisters.  The title track off this amazing album is a bit of a revelation; Wolfe and Laessig do that thing they do so well where they alternative between harmonizing and singing in a round-like style, and it includes great lyrics such as our volume title, as well as the chorus:

She’s gonna find another way back home,
It’s written in her blood; oh, it’s written in her bones.
Yeah, she’s ripping out the pages in your book.
...
Yeah, she’ll only be bound by the things she chooses.

Sublime.

Sirenexiv Cola II
[ Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox ]

“(Still a) Weirdo” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“Stupid Girls” by P!nk, off I'm Not Dead
“Caught a Lite Sneeze” by Tori Amos, off Boys for Pele
“The Wizard” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“Dance, Dance, Dance” by Lykke Li, off Youth Novels
“Goodbye” by Beth Quist, off Lucidity
“Mushaboom” by Feist, off Let It Die
“Poor” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“You and Me” by Sara Watkins, off Sun Midnight Sun
“Hold Me Close” by Bella Ruse, off Bella Ruse [EP]
“Wildewoman” by Lucius, off Wildewoman
“Fidelity” by Regina Spektor, off Begin to Hope
“I Say Nothing” by Voice of the Beehive, off Let It Bee
“Caught in One” by Dum Dum Girls, off Only in Dreams
“The Gold Medal” by the Donnas, off Gold Medal
“Here's Where the Story Ends” by the Sundays, off Reading, Writing and Arithmetic
“Polyester Bride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Don't Think Twice” by Katydids, off Shangri-La
“No Cheap Thrill” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Heart Telegraph” by Divinyls, off What a Life

Total:  20 tracks,  74:45

There’s nothing too surprising here, though there are a few obscure tracks.  Voice of the Beehive was a group comprised of two sisters from California who formed a band in London that included a couple former members of Madness.  Let It Bee is fairly typical for the late 80s, though it does include a few quite clever songs such as “There’s a Barbarian in the Back of My Car” and “Sorrow Floats” (the problem with trying to drown your sorrows, of course).  But I’ve always had a soft spot for “I Say Nothing,” their second single but first to chart (in the UK and Australia only, although they reissued it the following year and it made it to #11 on the US alternative charts), which contains the brilliant line “That’s why I drink: so I’ll be who they think I am.” It’s a bit of 80s-style poppiness that’s hard not to like.

Now, the Donnas might be a little surprising: they’re typically hard rockers in the same vein as the Runaways or Sleater-Kinney, so you might them more suited for something like Distaff Attitude (and I’ve no doubt we’ll see them there eventually).  But in their calmer moments (which still aren’t all that calm), they put out some tunes that work well here.  One of which is “The Gold Medal,” which is a surprisingly non-aggressive song about leaving someone who can’t appreciate you.  Brett Anderson (a.k.a. Donna A) has the perfect, apathetic vocal take on this song, and it’s kind of perfect coming off the Dum Dum Girls and setting up the Sundays for the quieter back third.

And that just leaves me with perhaps the most unlikely artist of all—or at least unlikely that I would own an album of hers.  I first heard Sara Watkins on A Prairie Home Companion, and at first I was convinced that she was way too country for me ... I mean, she started off playing fiddle for a “progressive bluegrass” band, of all things!  But there’s just something about her voice, and I do appreciate a fiddle, especially when it’s not particularly country-fied.  Now, her album Sun Midnight Sun does contain a few tracks which are entirely too country to be tolerated, but many—and in particular “You and Me”—are just gorgeous alt-country tunes.  Powered primarily by what I suspect is a mandolin, with perhaps a few touches of steel guitar and surprisingly little (if any) actual fiddle, “You and Me” is too perfectly apt for this mix for me to ignore it just for the sin of appearing on an album with a few other songs I can’t particularly appreciate.  So here it sits, and I’m pretty happy with my decision.

Next time ... well, Hallowe’en is coming up.  Maybe we’ll find some tunes that would work well for that.

⇐ Sirenexiv Cola I

Sirenexiv Cola III ⇒

The soul of wit

No time for even a short post this week, sadly.  The Mother is coming down with something so I haven’t had the time today to do much other than help out with errands.  Still, there’s always next week.  Let’s see what happens then.

Family Dinner

When I was kid, we would often to go to my grandparents’ house for dinner on Sunday.  Since I was lucky enough to have two sets of grandparents, this could mean wildly different cuisines.  On my father’s side, his parents, raised on farms in North Carolina, favored sprawling meals with many side dishes, and often multiple kinds of meat (usually some form of pork).  My mother’s side, on the other hand, fancied themselves as having come up in the world since their humble roots, and favored fancier, more coherent meals.  We might have turkey tetrazzini, or filet mignon with shoestring fries, or pot roast with potatoes and carrots (leading to the creation of what my grandmother called “hash” the following day).  But, if we were very lucky, we would have spaghetti and meatballs.

Now, back in my day most folks thought of spaghetti and meatballs as an Italian dish, though nowadays we know that it’s exactly as Italian as chicken tikka masala is Indian, thanks to articles from places like the Smithsonian (although I personally learned about it from Alton Brown).  But, as a child, it never occurred to me to think of it as anything other than grandmother food.  Spaghetti dinner was practically an all day affair: it cooked on the stove in a giant pot all day, sending out irresistible aromas and making everyone’s mouths water, and my mother and grandmother and Bernice, my grandmother’s housekeeper, would fuss over the proper amounts of spices to add.  When it got a bit closer to dinner, we would break out the saltines and bleu cheese as a sort of appetizer (I have never discovered where exactly this strange tradition originated).  Then it was time to eat, and there was a great family divide between those of us who just wanted to chop the long spaghetti into more manageable chunks so you could eat everything together, and those who insisted on twirling it around their forks to make giant pasta balls which you then ate followed by a big spoonful of sauce.  Some of us liked grated parmesan; some couldn’t stand the smell.  And of course we fought over the meatballs.

My mother made it at home, sometimes, but it was always considered a special-occasion food.  Both my brother and I took great pains to learn how to cook it, though we (eventually) began to deviate from the recipe in small ways.  Now The Mother makes it for us, far more regularly than I ever used to have it as a child (or even as a young adult).  It’s regularly requested by my children on birthday weekends, or holidays, or pretty much any time The Mother lets them set the menu.  There is, as far as I know, no Italian in my ancestry (although there’s an eighth of my heritage that I’ve never been able to track down), but this Italian-American dish has become very symbolic of our family’s culture, to the point where we typically refer to it using my last name (which is of course a complete misnomer, as it originates with my maternal grandmother).  Let me tell you the two family myths that are attached to its origin.

My Mother’s Story

When your grandfather was in The War [my grandfather served as a lieutenant in the Navy’s Construction Battalion—or “Seabees”—in World War II], his unit had an Italian-American cook.  That worthy gentleman [yes, my mother really talks like that] wanted to make food for his unit that was better than the standard rations, so, whenever possible, he cooked large meals with the best ingredients he could come up with.  This sauce is based on his mother’s recipe, but of course using canned ingredients instead of fresh because that’s all they really had access to.  When my father—your grandfather—came home from The War, he asked this cook for the recipe and brought it home to my mother (your grandmother) and that’s what she makes today.

My Father’s Story

That’s all crap.  Your grandmother told me one night she just got the recipe out of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Which story is “true”?  Likely neither ... or possibly both.  But the point is, this is a meal of great significance to our family, and I thought it was probably worth preserving for posterity.  Let’s break it down.

The Spaghetti

For many years, I completely believed that we were eating spaghetti in our spaghetti and meatballs—I mean, after all, it’s right there in the name.  But, as it turns out, my grandmother always used vermicelli.  The pasta you pick is in one sense of utmost importance—after all, half the reason why spaghetti and meatballs is not authentically Italian is that Italians would not choose a thin pasta with no holes like spaghetti to go with their meat sauces—and, in another, completely irrelevant.  The beauty of this meal is that it pretty much tastes great with any pasta you like: I’ve had it with penne, farfalle, conchiglie (that’s the seashell shaped one), and even, when truly desperate, macaroni.  But most often we have it with some variation of spaghetti.  My (non-Italian, recall) family taught me that there were four different sizes of “spaghetti”:

• Spaghetti proper, which is the thickest.
• Spaghettini, also called thin spaghetti (just a bit thinner).
• Vermicelli (thinner still).
• Capellini, also known as “angel hair” pasta, the thinnest of all.

Now, personally, I find actual spaghetti way too thick.  My understanding from all those articles and whatnot is that we currently have a concept of spaghetti and meatballs primarily because, back in the turn of the century (not this one, the one before that), spaghetti was often the only pasta you could buy, if you didn’t want to make it yourself.  Spaghettini is all right; capellini is better; and of course vermicelli is the best, but I suppose that’s probably just because it’s what I was actually raised on.  Even in today’s choice-rich world, though, vermicelli seems hard to come by, for some reason, so I’ll admit to using capellini way more often than I’d prefer.  But, as I say, any pasta will taste good with this sauce.

The Meatballs

Perhaps surprisingly, this offers a lot of options as well.  For my grandmother, it was always the same: you go to the butcher, you get two pounds of beef and one pound of pork, and you have him grind them together.  Well, these days, you’d be hard pressed to find a butcher who will deal with pork at all (most of our remaining butchers are either kosher or halal), and even the grocery stores won’t do anything as radical as grind beef and pork together.  But, as it turns out, if you just buy ground meat and stick it in a big bowl and just sort of knead it all together, that works just fine.

Of course, you needn’t go to all the trouble of mixing two kinds of meat if you don’t want to.  Personally, I find meatballs made of all beef way too strong a flavor (but then again I have a compllicated relationship with beef).  I think my favorite these days is two-thirds turkey and one-third pork.  But you can also do 100% pork, or 100% turkey, or even—and I haven’t personally tried this, but I bet you it would work just fine—a plant based substitute such as Impossible.

As far as what to do with the meat, just form it into balls.  That’s it: no eggs, no bread crumbs, none of that fancy shit.  Maybe a little salt and pepper; occasionally some onion powder or garlic powder.  Make the balls a bit large (The Mother often uses an ice cream scoop for this purpose): they’re going to fall apart at least a little in the sauce, which will make it meat sauce, which is what you want.  But, in order to keep them from falling apart too much, you want to brown them a bit.

First, use some paper towels to pat the meatballs dry a bit (this is especially important when using ground turkey).  Dryer meatballs will brown better.  Next, in the biggest pot you’ve got, heat up some olive oil.  Then put some garlic in it: my grandmother would literally slice fresh cloves of garlic into thin slices and then brown them in the oil, fishing them out when they’d given up the ghost.  Nowadays we’re just as likely to use pre-minced garlic.  Use 4 – 6 cloves, or 1 – 2 heaping tablespoons (depending on how much you love garlic).  Also toss in a softball-sized yellow onion, diced fairly fine.  Once the garlic is starting to brown and the onions are starting to get translucent, start browning the meatballs.  You want them just browned enough to (mostly) hold together; you’re not trying to cook them all the way through.  You’ll need to turn them a few times to get them brown all over.

The Sauce

Obviously the most crucial component is the sauce.  The base of this is pretty simple:

• 4 8-oz cans of tomato sauce
• 4 6-oz cans of tomato paste
• 8 oz of water

We’ve also experimented with another 8 oz of tomato sauce and just skip the water, which makes the sauce a bit more intense—more tomato-y, if you see what I mean.  Stir all that together, trying to be careful not to break up the meatballs too much, though it’s fine if you lose a couple.  Cook it at a low simmer for a few hours: at least two, but probably no more than four.  About a half an hour before you’re ready to eat, it’s time to season.

In my grandmother’s recipe, there were actual amounts for everything.  However, nowadays we don’t measure any of the spices and seasonings at all.  Usually the the youngest and I handle the seasoning, and we have a simple system:

• Cover the surface of the sauce with a thin layer of basil.
• Sprinkle in a much smaller amount of oregano (perhaps a quarter as much).
• Stir it all in.
• Now, taste the sauce:
• If it’s not salty enough, add some salt (duh).
• If it’s not sweet enough, add more basil.
• If it’s not savory enough, add some garlic powder.
• If it’s not herby enough, add more oregano.
• If it doesn’t have enough kick, add some pepper.

That’s pretty much it.  If you want the original measurements, I typically remember them via the mnemonic that you need to use every one of your measuring spoons:

• 1 tbsp of sugar
• 1 tsp of basil
• ½ tsp of salt
• ¼ tsp of pepper

The sugar was the first to fall by the wayside: basil provides a more natural-tasing sweetness, and you require far less of it, and it’s healthier (not that I mean to imply that this is a low-calorie dish or anything).  Next, the salt and pepper got moved to being applied directly to the meat, which gives your meatballs a bit more direct seasoning.  Most recently, I added the oregano: I just think it provides a very distinctive flavor that gives food a very Italian identity.

About 15 minutes before you’re ready to eat, boil your pasta of choice.  And you’re done.

So that’s our family recipe for spaghetti and meatballs.  It’s lasted for four generations now, and it’s stood up to a good deal of tinkering over the years without ever losing its essential character.  It’s a fairly short ingredient list, and there’s nothing too fancy in the preparation.  But, despite all that, it’s probably the favorite meal for about three-quarters of my extended family.  It’s a meal that we love, and one that is quintessentially us.

A small recommendation

You know, when I first got over my rather silly belief that I couldn’t enjoy watching other people play D&D, I started looking for really entertaining examples of people streaming the game.  (I talked a bit about this in my “D&D and Me” series.)  And I found some great examples ... but a lot of not-so-great ones as well.  If I had to put my finger on what elevates the good from the meh, it would have to be this: streaming D&D can be a whole new form of media, a whole new way to tell a story ... or it can be just watching people play a game.  The latter is entertaining ... ish.  Watching people play sports, or poker, or things of that nature can be entertaining too.  But I wouldn’t call those sorts of things a new storytelling medium.  D&D, on the other hand, if done well, can really tell a story in a fresh new way that you just can’t experience in any other medium.  That’s the magic of it.

And I’ve tried a lot of D&D shows: video and podcast, edited and unedited, zero production values and over-the-top gimmicks.  A few really stand out.  But I may have found a new pinnacle.

The first chapter of World Beyond Number’s first ongoing campaign (“The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One”) just concluded, and I am really blown away.  This is the D&D streaming equivalent of a rock supergroup: Brennan Lee Mulligan, DM of Dimension 20 and guest DM on Critical Role (and veteran CollegeHumor performer); Aabria Iyengar, DM on Saving Throw and guest DM and player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Erika Ishii, voice actor, player on LA By Night, and guest player on both Crital Role and Dimension 20; Lou Wilson, actor and comedian, player on Dimension 20, guest player on Critical Role (and announcer for Jimmy Kimmel); and Taylor Moore, producer, composer and sound-designer, co-creator of Rude Tales of Magic and Fun City.  These guys have a lot of mileage under their belts, and they’ve come together to produce a podcast, with premium sound design that makes it sound like an old-style radio broadcast.  The D&D elements are still there, but they’re not the focus; primarily they just serve to remind the audience that one of the things that make streaming D&D unlike any other form of storytelling is that random chance plays a factor.  Brennan is the GM for this campaign, and he has beaucoup experience and a flair for the dramatic.  Aabria, Erika, and Lou all have a great deal of experience committing to a textured, flawed, but lovable character, and they make you fall in love with these three unlikely companions.  Together they’ve built a new fantasy world, Umora, which is every bit as fascinating as Middle Earth, Narnia, or Oz.  And the story ... is just magnificent.

You can check out their website to get started listening, or just search for “Worlds Beyond Number” in your podcast app.  If you really want an amazing experience, go give them $5 at their Patreon and listen to “The Children’s Adventure,” which is a prequel series that explains how the 3 protagonists met as children and started to develop their powers (and their personalities).  You can easily get through it in a month, but honestly you should keep giving them money even after that, because it’s worth every penny.  But you can also listen for free if you’d prefer.

I’m not usually one to plug things this hard, but, really: even if you have zero interest in D&D, I think you’ll be seduced by this show.  It’s something really unique.  Check it out.

See what's become of me ... while I looked around ...

I had a couple of ideas for a post this week, but I’m preparing to head off to Cachuma Lake for a vacation with The Mother and my youngest.  So I’ve been spending a good deal of my weekend getting ready for that.  I just haven’t had time to put together a proper post, and, next week, I’ll just be getting back from this vacation, so you’re not likely to see a full post then either.  Sorry about that.  But sometimes you jsut gotta put family first.

You know?

Don´t know why ... there´s no sun up in the sky ...

Today, we are getting a visit from Tropical Storm Hilary, which is just lovely.  I figured I’d traded all my hurricanes for earthquakes when I moved from the East Coast here to sunny Southern California.  But, if you can believe this shit, we actually had an earthquake during the tropical storm.  It was a 5.1, which is a decent-sized quake, as SoCal earthquakes go, but it was also only about 28 miles away from our house.  The house swayed like a North Carolina beach house in a tropical storm—for a few seconds I thought it actually was the tropical storm, but of course houses built on a foundation don’t really do that.

So, the earthquake was a minor bit of excitement in the midst of the ongoing torrential downpour, which is already starting to come through our garage roof.  Gotta look into getting that fixed at some point.  When you live in the desert, leaky roofs are not usually a priority.  But this year has been a bit of an exception in the rainfall department.

So the rain beats a loud tattoo on the patio outside the open window behind my head, and I continue to wait for the power to go out, though hopefully the solar battery will kick in.  And the encroaching night blankets us all.

Next week, something longer.

Perception, Investigation: a Perpetual Imbroglio

Today I want to talk about the difference between two things that are consistently mixed up in D&D 5e: Perception and Investigation.  This is ostensibly a gaming topic, of interest to people who play (or just watch) TTRPGs such as D&D, but I’m going to make an argument that it’s actually rather fascinating from a linguistic perspective as well.  This is one of those rare topics where I can explore language and give gaming advice all at the same time.

So, first of all, what actually is the problem here?  Simply put, D&D characters have skills—certain things that they’re good at, or not so good at—and, when the character attempts to do something (well, something that isn’t swinging a sword or casting a spell), it’s the GM’s job to decide which skill applies.  Sometimes there can be a bit of back and forth on this: for instance, two of the skills in 5e are Athletics and Acrobatics.  Athletics is based on Strength, and it’s what you use when you want to climb, jump, swim, or grapple.  Acrobatics, on the other hand, is based on Dexterity, and it’s what you use when you want to dodge, tumble, or flip.  You could imagine a scenario where a player says what they want to do and the GM says, “great, give me an Athletics check,” to which the player replies: “ummm, can I use Acrobatics instead?” Obviously, they ask this because they have a higher Dexterity than they do Strength, or they’re proficient in the one but not the other.  You could even imagine a scenario where either skill could be used (say, the user wants to negate damage from falling, and they could either employ their jumping skills or their tumbling skills), and the GM might change their minds.  Sometimes the GM just does this not to be a hardass—after all, we’re playing a game here, not trying to outwit each other or trick each other into rolling poorly—but sometimes the GM can see it either way, or the GM is just persuaded of the player’s point of view.  And that’s fine.

What’s less fine is if the GM doesn’t really know which one is the right answer.  As a GM, one needn’t be perfect, of course, but one should strive to understand the things that come up often.  And, if you watch any streaming D&D games (which is easy to do these days), you may see a scenario like I describe above between Athletics and Acrobatics ... but you will almost certainly see one involving Perception and Investigation.

And here’s the thing: once you have a good grasp on the difference between the two, it’s way less common to find a situation where they really are interchangeable.  I can’t count the number of times where I’ve watched GMs—really really good GMs, even—say, “ah, sure, you can use Perception here,” or even (and I shudder to even type the words) “give me a Perception check or Investigation check: your choice.” Now, I’m more of a yell-at-the-screen sort of critic than a post-snarky-corrections-in-the-comments-section one, so, if I want to publicize my opinion on this issue, this blog is where I do it.

Now, I’m hardly the first person to realize this is a problem.  A cursory Internet search will reveal article after article (after article) telling you how to distinguish between the two.  The problem is, most of them give conflicting advice, so they can’t all possibly be right.  This leads to many (many) instances of people on the Internet asking for help ... for which they receive—you guessed it—conflicting advice.  And the problem is, even if you try to find a common thread from all those, you’re probably going to find the wrong one.

See, the general concensus of the Internet is, since Perception is based on Wisdom while Investigation is based on Intelligence, Investigation should only be used to understand the things that you see (using Perception).  Investigation, this line of reasoning goes, is all about drawing conclusions and deductions based on obersvations.  But there’s a fundamental problem with that: it contradicts the actual rules.  Here’s what the rules say about Investigation:

When you look around for clues and make deductions based on those clues, you make an Intelligence (Investigation) check.

So the deducing is part of the Investigation, sure, but so is the looking.  Fine, then: what do the rules say about Perception?

Your Wisdom (Perception) check lets you spot, hear, or otherwise detect the presence of something.

Hmm ... that also seems to involving looking.  No wonder people are confused.

Now, I should first note that neither skill has to involve looking.  You can perceive things with your ears or your nose, and you can investigate things with your hands or your brain.  But those aren’t the cases that confuse us, as it turns out.  If the player says “I listen to see if I can hear anyone following us” and the GM asks for a Perception check, no one is going to try to talk them into Investgation (or at least no one I’ve ever heard of); likewise, if the player says “I want to try to decipher this code” and the GM asks for Investigation, no serious player is going to try to convince them that it should be Perception instead.  It’s only when the visual sense comes into it—and we human beings are primarily visual creatures, so it tends to come into it quite a lot—that people tend to get confused.

As I mentioned, this has been debated a lot.  I wouldn’t want to weigh in if I didn’t feel like I had something new to contribute.  So here’s where I endorse my potentially revolutionary, potentially controversial take on this dilemma: it’s all about the verbs.  And the verb at the heart of this bewildering issue is “look.”

And what’s really fascinating to me is that it reminds me of my high school Spanish.  The way I was taught (and I’m sure it was a gross oversimplification designed to be able to be grasped by teenage brains) is that if you want to say you’re looking at something, you use mirar, but if you want to say you’re looking for something, then it’s buscar.  So when a native Spanish speaker tells you “miré la playa,” you understand that they went to the beach and just enjoyed the view.  But if on the other hand they say “busqué la playa,” then you know that they were trying to find the beach in the first place.  “I looked at the beach” (or “I watched the beach”) vs “I looked for the beach” (or “I searched for the beach”).  This is only hard for us English speakers because we’re so used to having one word for both concepts.  But, when you think about it, it’s actually easier and nicer to have the two different words: avoids any ambiguity.  “What’s the deal with the beach?” “Oh, I’m still looking.” Does that mean you refused to leave the beach because the view is so awesome, or that you can’t figure out how to use the map app on your phone so you never even got there?  No way to tell in English.  But, in Spanish, it wouldn’t even be a question: “todavía miro” and “todavía busco” are two entirely different replies.

I have no way to prove this, but I feel very confident in saying that Spanish-speaking D&D players and GMs have no confusion about Perception and Investigation at all: Perception is mirar, and Investigation is buscar.  Case closed.

But us poor non-speakers of Spanish need some guidance, yes?  Very well then, here’s my advice (to both GMs and players): expunge the word “look” from your vocabulary.  That’s it.  That’s all it takes.  Don’t tell your GM “I want to look and see if I see a clue”; say instead either “I want to try to notice a clue” or “I want to try to search for a clue.” If you can replace “look” with “observe” or “notice,” that’s Perception.  If you can replace it with “search” or “examine,” that’s Investigation.  That’s really all there is to it.

Now, I do want to address another aspect that seems to flummox people: the amount of time taken by the two actions.  One of those links above contains this gem of wisdom:

Often, DMs think that the difference between perception and investigation is simply how long the player wants to take to search. But this is NOT the case.

(Emphasis in the original.)  To which I respond: well, yes ... and no.  What they say is technically true.  The amount of time taken should never be the determining factor in which skill applies.  However, as a practical matter, it really is the case that “noticing” or “observing” typically takes a very small amount of time, while “searching” or “examining” takes much longer.  We could come up with counter-examples, of course: a Perception check to see if you notice anything during your 3-hour turn on watch duty, or an Investigation check to see if you can have a flash of inspiration while examining a puzzle with the walls closing in on you.  But, in general, Perception happens in an instant and Investigation takes time.  Which brings up another thorny issue: doing these things in combat.  See, in D&D a round of combat takes (in theory) 6 seconds.  During those 6 seconds, you can move (up to 30 feet, typically), and take an action, and maybe even take a bonus action (such as hiding if you’re a rogue, or getting in one more punch to the face if you’re a monk), and take a free “object interaction” (such as drawing a weapon or opening an unlocked door).  The main action for the turn thus has to fit in a very small number of seconds, certainly no more than 3.  You are not going to be searching a room in 3 seconds.  Contrariwise, it simply doesn’t take 3 whole seconds to look around and notice something.  I would never charge my player a whole action to take a Perception check in combat, but I would also never let my player get away with an Investigation check in combat, unless perhaps they devoted all their attention to it, and even then it would probably be an astronomically high DC.  Yet making players use their action for Perception is very common in streaming D&D such as Critical Role, and allowing them to do so for Investigation is not unheard of either.  I have to say, these calls don’t make a lot of sense to me.

Of course, several of the links I listed above will tell you that I’m completely wrong about searching for clues being an Investigation check.  Here’s some examples:

... Investigation focuses on interpreting the clues found with Perception checks.

However, the way I think of it is that Perception is to spot something like a clue, and Investigation is to work out what that clue means.

... to draw conclusions from the clues you’ve used perception to gather.

There’s only one problem with this theory: it’s not what the rules say. “When you look around for clues ... you make an Intelligence (Investigation) check” seems pretty clear to me.  I respect the distinction that these authors are trying to draw: a skill based on your Wisdom means you’re using intuition and awareness, while one based on Intelligence means you’re using logic and reasoning.  Unfortunately, trying to get too detailed on things like this is always going to break down.  To return to my first example of conflicting skills, your natural dexterity absolutely impacts your ability to climb, but it’s still an Athletics check; the strength of your muscles is definitely a factor when you’re swinging on a rope like a trapeeze artist, but it’s still an Acrobatics check.  D&D is not a perfect simulation—no TTRPG can be—and sometimes you just gotta go, well, this skill is for this action and this is what ability the book says goes with it ... don’t overthink it.

So, if you play D&D (and especially if you GM it), hopefully this will help you figure out which skill to apply when it seems confusing.  And, even if you don’t, hopefully you’ve had some inspirations as to how the subtleties of language impact every part of our lives: even the most unlikely ones.

The story of this week

This week, I actually made a passable start on catching up on a few things.  Plus, it continues to be hot as hell here in Southern Cali, and The Mother and my youngest attend a “bunny faire.” Next week, a proper post.