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.