Richard Dansky's Blog, page 24

Sorbet Update, Because I Can't Write About Anything Else I'm Doing

 There was going to be sorbet this week, except there isn't enough counter space in the kitchen to muck about with that sort of thing. The floor installation has forced a mass migration of stuff onto whatever flat surfaces are available. Imagine the death march of the dinosaurs from Fantasia and replace the dinos with stuff from our curio cabinet, and you get the general idea.

I did make one batch just before leaving on my two week bounce around, making two adjustments to the strawberry-grape recipe. I dialed down the sugar by 25%, going from a cup to 3/4 of one, and I switched from white grapes to red ones. The former was an attempt to tweak the flavor to let more of the fruit's natural sweetness come through. The latter was because those were the grapes I had at hand, and the day I actually make a run to the store for specific sorbet ingredients when I have perfectly good ones in front of me is the day I check myself into Tasty Frozen Treat Rehab, because at that point I will officially Have A Problem.

I think this formulation came out a little better, largely because the red grapes were more flavorful than the white ones and thus didn't get so thoroughly overpowered by the strawberries. Texture was good, too - better than the original strawberry-grape, which had settled down into something akin to a tasty glacier, and which aided and abetted the destruction of the Tupperware it was in as a result.

My brother-in-law, the mighy Chef Ian, has promised me a recipe for pineapple-champagne sorbet, which sounds superb. As soon as the kitchen is uncovered - roughly a week from now, according to the gent at Lumber Liquidators who's facilitating the leisurely journey of the remainder of our flooring from warehouse to, well, floor. In the meantime, the dining room table can stay in the garage, the lonely Lladro can remain on my dresser, and the random accouterments of the dining room can remain perched on the kitchen counters. But, Ian warned me, there may be a problem. The recipe, it seems, is in grams.

I don't think the fact that the recipe is in grams will be a problem. I think the fact that I now have to follow a recipe is going to be the problem. Pray for the champagne. It's going to need it.

The Sound Of An Empty House

 There are a lot of things that make a house home. There's the look of the place. There's our stuff, in its familiar arrangement. There are familiar smells, the ones you keep coming back to - even the ones that are suspiciously like "oh God, the cat's protesting the oppressive nature of the litterbox again" - that come together to make the mental picture that instantly, irrevocably says "home". 

Sound's a big part of that, too. An area that we're familiar with makes familiar sounds. We know how long a sound takes to echo and die there, how loud you have to yell to call someone in the next room, how long a single sound is supposed to live down to the nanosecond. 

Of course, changing things changes how long sound bounces around even a medium-sized living room. Move a piece of furniture, add a bookshelf there - even tiny changes are changes, and our gut recognizes them even if our brain doesn't. It takes a while to settle back down when the acoustic map of a long-familiar place changes while we wait for our hindbrains to decide that yes, this is still the safe zone it used to be before the curio cabinet went four feet to the left and the dining room table lost a leaf. No doubt this knack was of tremendous use to our ancestors, who could use it to notice that a large short-faced bear had moved into the cave and react accordingly. 

All of which would have remained entirely academic (except possibly for my interest in short-faced bears) if we weren't getting our carpet replaced. Which meant moving all the furniture out of the big living room/dining room. While Melinda was out of town for work. Which meant that I came home to a house that looked different - the carpets had been taken up but the new floors not yet put down, that smelled different (like I said, the, uh, carpets had been taken up), where none of the pieces were in their familiar places, and that most of all, sounded different. Carpet gone, furniture moved, and the first floor was suddenly an echo chamber. The clatter of ice cubes into a glass rattled around and around; a closed door was thunderous. The cats wandered counterclockwise and yowled confusion - why was the floor hard? Where had their favorite perches gone? What was happening?

And every sound on the first floor of the house was just wrong, and my lizard brain screamed "Predator! Watch out!" every time I made a noise. I found myself tiptoeing around, gently moving dishes, dealing in hush and quiet to keep from involuntarily jumping out of my skin.

All of which is academic, of course. In a couple of days the furniture will be back. I'll have gotten the new arrangement wired in as "home". And the cats, walnut-brained adorable monsters that they are, will forget.

But the reminder that even small changes can take a place that's known intimately and make it uncanny and strange, well, that's worth remembering. And not just because a family of short-faced cave bears might be moving in down the block. 

A Few Thoughts From Visby

So.

Visby.

I fly in on a Fokker 500, a 50-seat twin engine prop job from Stockholm. There are thirteen rows of seats on the plane, numbered 1-14. On my flight back, the back couple of rows are filled with a large traveling party who are clearly and hugely enjoying each others’ company. They laugh the whole flight, and when turbulence bumps the plane up or down (or both, or left and right), they laugh uproariously.

There’s a recreated Viking croft across the street from Visby airport. It’s about all the Viking I see all week, apart from being conversationally pillaged by a guy named Ragnar at the conference after-party. Very enthusiastic, very nice guy, Ragnar, and very concerned for his friends on one of the project teams. I think I just need to learn a few additional phrases of Swedish, like “I’m sorry, but I’m freezing my ass off out here and need t go inside because like an idiot, I forgot how far north Sweden was and packed mainly t-shirts like the one I’m wearing now and did I mention I’m freezing my sweet bippie off?”

I’m fairly sure that one doesn’t translate.

#

When I get in to my hotel – complete with long corridors, occasional stone walls, a model of the Vasa, a sauna, and what appears to be a second floor garden – there’s a message waiting: dinner for the guests who are in town at the restaurant that serves the best bouliiabaise in Visby. The restaurant is on Stora Torget, which is a couple of blocks from the hotel, but it takes me roughly fifteen minutes to dope this out by way of some printed maps and confusion over whether they’re actually saying “Here’s where the Target store is.”

There’s no Target there; “Torg” means “Square” (as I should have remembered from Malmo), and on the square is a titanic ruined church. It’s just walls and the ribs of the ceiling now, and it’s titanic and magnificent and looming up over the parking lot like an unearthed dinosaur skeleton picked clean by ravens. As the days progress, I discover that Visby – old Visby, anyway – is positively chockablock with ancient, crumbling churches. Develop a good eye for 13th century church architecture and you can orient yourself instantly, depending on which lapsed apse or arrant nave is peeking over the local red-tile rooftops.

#


Visby is a World Heritage Site, which I did not know until I got there, and which is posted on all of the signs at all of the gates into and out of the old walled city. And it is walled, make no mistake about that – five meters high all the way around, with 23 towers and various gates and what appears to be a retired but still functional trebuchet plopped out in front of one stretch of wall facing the sea. Some of the towers are crumbling, some have stairs so you can ascend and gaze out, watching for longboats or cruise ships (take your pick), and some are right up on top of houses. My friend Mirjam’s place has a tower – supposedly a haunted one – right in her backyard. She’s let the bushes grow up to obscure the window facing it; no sense letting the tourists peek in, after all. And the spirits under the tree in her back yard keep the ghosts – the tower was apparently the local gaol once, and lots of folks died there, badly – at bay.

At least, so the story goes. And who am I to argue?

#


My last day in Visby, Mirjam and I take a walk. She’s a professor at Gotland University, the school putting on the conference, and one of the most astonishingly nice people I’ve ever met. Her nickname in the cutthroat games of Family Business that pop up at game conferences is “Mittens”; a stark contrast to names like “Mickey da Fitch” and “The Frenchman” and “Purple Face Bang” that are more common.

As we’re strolling through the Arboretum, Mirjam borrowing my camera every so often to take pictures of flowers (hers is in possession of a seriously dead battery), she mentions something about the trilobites in her garden.

“Trilobites?” I say. I love trilobites. Love love love them. First fossil I ever got, in the days when all I read was dinosaur books and I was convinced I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up, was a trilobite roughly an inch and a half long, pressed into a gray slate matrix. Intellectually, I understand that when alive they almost certainly looked like giant pillbugs and probably would have been unpleasantly horrific critters to have around, but that doesn’t matter. Trilobites!

“Yes, trilobites,” Mirjam says. “You just go down to the beach and pick them up.”

Several noises exit my mouth at this point. I’m fairly certain they all came together to mean “It would be absolutely smashing, if you’re feeling amenable, if we were to go down to the strand and perhaps take a speculative gander at some of the local sedimentary material in case there’s a hint of evidence of Paleozoic invertebrates, which is to say, fossils.” Mijram later tells me I just said, “Trilobites? Whee!” a lot. But she likes picking through rocks for fossils, too, and so we stump down to the rocky beach and start rummaging through pebbles.

She’s got the better eye, and finds more, especially of the smaller stuff, at first. I’ve got a little more background knowledge and can identify worm tracks and crinoids and coral and so forth. Gradually a small pyramid of fossiliferous stuff piles up, as we bash rocks apart looking for particularly juicy fossils or just the fun of bashing rocks.

No trilobites emerge. But that’s OK. And when we determine we have enough – me to bring back spoils for my nephew and my goddaughter, both of whom have been bitten by the science bug , her to fix some gaps in her garden – we wander off to the Yellow House café for what I am told is a very Visby dessert of saffron pancakes with elderberries.

#

This is the first time I’ve been asked to judge a student competition. I’ve done student critique before, but  nothing like this – a convention center filled up with booths a la E3, arcade cabinets for the first year students’ projects and larger showcases for the second and third years’ work. There’s two sessions of project presentations to watch, followed by Q&A sessions – I find myself being particularly energetic in grilling the students – and then time for us to walk around and play the games and do our best Jury-esque duty in rating the games and providing useful feedback.

There are eight or so folks on the jury panel I’m part of, chaired by Mirjam. Bonnie Ruberg, a PhD student in new media who gives the opening talk of the conference, is on there. So’s Eric Jacopin, from the Academy of St. Cyr, and Swedish game journalist Oskar Skog, and a few other cool folks from various nooks and corners of the industry. Later, Bonnie and I will figure out that not only are we both from Philly, but we’re actually both from the same suburb, and that we grew up roughly four blocks (and more than a decade) apart.  Also, she’d written the “Top 20 Game Writers” article I was mentioned in a few years back, and our paths had crossed unknowingly once or twice on top of that.

Small world indeed.

The projects we saw ranged from the polished and playable to the “great idea, now consider making an actual game” to “the members of this team should not be allowed to work together again or there may be bloodshed”. And there was good stuff, there and on the show floor, inventive games that didn’t necessarily restrict themselves to typical genres or control schemes or conceptions. The students, to their credit, weren’t there to be told they were pretty snowflakes of game development. Again and again, after playing something, I’d hear, “So what did you think? What can we do better?” and then would follow discussion, and suggestion, and other various good stuff.

#

The illustrious Ernest Adams was there. He’s got a partial professorship at Gotland, and he’d been tapped as the Master of Ceremonies at the awards presentation, and he’d  managed to completely forget where we’d met before (various GDC type things and a dinner for the RIT Advisory Board, among others). After a while the conference scene tends to blur; there’s so many and such cross-pollination between them, and the social set you develop at conferences takes on a life of its own. I’m fairly certain there’s a conference somewhere every week of the year; it would be entirely possible to go from show to show (if you could get someone to pay for it; then again, go to enough shows and you may become enough of a presence that you get invited to speak, which means you get invited to more shows, which means…the mind, it boggles) and never stop to actually make a game.

Lots of kids at the show are wearing top hats, and not just the ones working on the Burton-esque evil circus game. Ernest and I run into each other on the stairs at one point, and I tell him that the kids are stealing his shtick.

He laughs.

#

The third night I’m there, I walk around at midnight and take pictures. It doesn’t get quite dark, at least not while I’m still wandering the streets. Stars are out and the sky has deepened, but down to the south and west there’s a lighter band on the horizon. And I have a new camera that does all sorts of marvelously spooky things with low light, and the city is awash in the skeletons of old churches, and off I go.

I end up lurking mainly around St. Maria’s, the one big, spiffy church in town. When the Hanseatic League pulled out of Gotland, the resultant population drop and economic crash meant there was only enough resource-wise to support one big church on the island. The beached whale in Stora Torget was one of the losers of that fight; St. Maria’s was the winner. The wife of Steven BAtchelor, one of the professors at Gotland, preaches there; there are ancient stone slabs propped up outside against the churchyard wall with weathered inscriptions in Latin. But the church is beautiful, and its bells ring out at all the proper times, and the bits of the interior I see – there was a funeral in progress when I wandered in, so I stayed clear of the sanctuary – are impressive.

But I like it better at midnight.

#

There’s a reception for the conference at the Governor’s Mansion. The invitation says “elegantly casual”, and absolutely nobody knows what that means. I suffer a panic attack before leaving town over this, and run home to adjust the contents of my suitcase to add slacks, braces, shoes, a nice shirt, and a tie. Ernest dolls himself up into a suit; others range the gamut from cleaning up real nice to wearing t-shirts and jeans, and our host and hostess clearly aren’t used to having mobs like this in the place.

Ulf, one of the conference organizers, and I wander around the place at the insistence of said host, who is clearly quite proud of the residence. Ulf’s what you’d call a natural kind of guy, enthusiastic and unrestrained and not necessarily always tuned in to social airs and graces because, well, they’re really not important to what he’s doing. We wander around for a bit, discussing furniture and paintings and the fact that the place was built in 1647 and thus is older than the US – when he spots a bowl of walnuts.

“Watch this,” he says, and crushes a couple of them in his hands. Ulf, in case you were wondering, works out. He wears shorts every day of the show, and later he’ll be described as “the man with no pants but a plan.”

“You think these are good?”

I shake my head, “No telling how old they are.”

“Still.” He pops one in his mouth and chews speculatively for a minute, then starts to look unpleasantly surprised. “I think you’re right,” he says, and tries to hide the broken shells in another dish of ancient, but not fossilized, walnuts.


#


The flag of Gotland shows a long-legged sheep holding a flag. Sheep are big here. So’s lamb. The local crafts gift shop is full of sheepy things – sheepskin vests, slippers, pouches, yarn, unspun wool, you name it. There’s glass there, too. But mostly sheep in its various crafty permutations.

 I never do figure out how it manages to hold the flag.

#

The Yellow House, according to Mirjam, is the best café in Visby. It is, indeed, a house, and it is yellow. The hours are erratic, as the owner runs it as a hobby, because he likes making pastry. The kitchen is literally a kitchen, and you can accidentally wander into it while perusing the randomly assorted cakes.

Mirjam insists, when we arrive, that I get the most Gotlandy thing on the menu, which is a saffron pancake with elderberries. 

It is delicious. And there are no hamsters to be seen anywhere.

#


Bonnie’s husband, Scott, is not part of the Cheltenham Mafia, but he’s from Yardley, which is close enough for jazz. He’s also a very sharp game designer and a great guy in general, and he and I coined the term “Frite Bro” to describe what happened to us over a shared bowl of French fries at a restaurant Wednesday night. (Don’t ask)

Sunday night, over dinner, he asks if anyone at the table – a motley mix of guests and Gotland folk – if they’ve ever played Ninja. None of us have. He asks if we want to, and since it’s, well, a game, we all do, and then the next thing you know we’re in the library of the university doing our best to make “single fluid motions”  and keep a feather aloft and make paper airplanes and… (Note: feathers and paper airplanes are not, strictly, part of the rules of Ninja) while onlookers gaze in though the big glass windows and wonder what the bloody hell is going on.

And I realize, right around the time my second paper airplane nearly does a Capt. Sully in the sedate fountain along the outside windows, that we have in fact fallen into a montage from The Breakfast Club, and that there are maybe two of us in the room, myself included, old enough to remember what that means.

#


Thursday, I mostly just walked. Stuck a book in my jacket pocket – yes, I needed a jacket, it’s still the Baltic, people – and wandered through the town and along the coast. Outside of Visby to the north, past the trebuchet and the last of the walls and the medical helicopter landing pad with a name that just didn’t translate to English (Note: the ice cream was worse for that sort of thing. One was called “Plopp”. Another was “Bris”. I realize it is not the responsibility of anyone to make sure anything sounds correct in every language out there, but I don’t think I’m a bad person for being amused by the incongruity there), I found a bench. It faced the water. So I sat on it, and pulled out my book, and read “In the Halls of the Martian Kings”, by John Varley. I did this because I could, and because I could not conceive of anything possibly better I could have done at that moment.

Later, I climbed one of the tourist-accessible sections of the wall and perched precariously and read another story from the same collection. Bliss.

#


Bonnie and Scott and Anneke and Mirjam and I trooped back to Mirjam’s place while we were waiting for our dinner reservation to open up one night. It’s lovely, tucked up against the wall as noted above, and we all tumbled into her living room to talk about ideas for games with a romance-based mechanic. (sorry, folks, no spoilers). Eventually, we looked at the time and tumbled back out again, and along the way we told ghost stories because, well, that’s my thing. Mirjam mentioned a place in town that has three floors, but can only use one for events because the other two are…supposedly supernaturally problematic.

And that was that. We got back to the restaurant, rejoined the rest of the merry band, and had dinner. Once again, there was Frite Bro-ing.

Sunday. Mirjam and I had brunch at a restaurant called The Russian Garden. The proprietor was very solicitous, making sure I had a proper Visby meal (potato “body cakes” stuffed with bacon and onion and served with ligonberry jam, and a local beverage that tasted faintly of apples), the interior was done entirely in large pieces of wood, and it was a grand meal.

After we paid up and left, Mirjam said, “And that’s the floor they can use.”

#

Wandering abandoned 13th century churches is fun. Wandering abandoned 13th century churches that are theoretically tourist attractions and thus are occasionally open to the public is lots of fun. Wandering abandoned 13th century churches that have discreetly tucked away stairwells that let you climb up a level and make your way around the periphery at a dizzying height of twenty or so feet with the sunlight streaming in through the gap in the roof and the occasional one in the wall and the windows that are actually supposed to be there, along with the narrow, dark bits of passage that’s more appropriately medieval, and of course ravens everywhere the eye can see, and…

Well.

You had to be there.
#


When I first got my schedule, I checked it twice. After all, I had presentations to observe on one day of the conference, and that was it. I’m used to being overscheduled, running ragged, yea verily running amuck, with meetings and informal get-togethers and round tables and Stuff That Has To Get Done crammed into every single moment. One day of watching pitches? Piece of cake, right?

Then again, maybe not. A day of pitches, two sessions’ worth. And a couple of talks I wanted to see. And all of those games to play. And notes to compare with the other jurors. And the games to play again. And time to sit down and talk with the teams about what I think they might want to try. And then playing them again, and writing up the feedback, and agonizing over it, and rewriting it, and generally being juror-ish.

I played all the games in my category. I played most of the games in the others. I didn’t get to see any of the animation entrants – no time. Thank God they weren’t on my docket.

And I will never pre-judge a schedule again.

Live From Visby, It's Storytellers Unplugged

More or less - check the new essay out here.

I Should Be Posting About Visby

Instead, because I read it on the flight over, I'm going to note that, in my opinion, Under the Banner of Heaven is by far the most readable and interesting thing Jon Krakauer has written. I also believe, in all seriousness, that this is due to the fact that he has banished the first person singular pronoun from the bulk of the narrative. The story moves. The interviewees and historical figures are allowed to speak for themselves. Yes, it's history and true crime through an auctorial lens, but at least we're not getting auctorial lens flare on top of it - and it reads well. It reads really well.

For the record, he allows himself to re-enter the narrative only in the last chapter, the Author's Note. I counted 11 uses of the word "I" or "my" in the first paragraph. I read no further.

The third movie is always the worst

The last movie on the flight overtoStockholm was The Karate Kid remake,which is as horrible a piece of moviemaking as I have seen in recent memory. I watched most of it with the sound off, which, surprisingly, did not improve it much. Apparently, the story of the film is that Jaden Smith's mom moves him to the Chinese exhibit at EPCOT, where he goes to middle school with bunch of graduate students who know kung fu, and a cute girl who plays violin. The grad students beat him up after they all do some parkour and then he learns every Kung Fu move ever from Jackie Chan's kindly handyman in the space of about two montages. Jackie also rubs Jaden's shirtless chest while his hands are on fire at one point, but Mom thinks it's great they're hanging out. Then there is a tournament, which is one long sequence of large crowds cheering slo-mo replays of kids getting beaten up, and thenJaden's mom cheers wildly when becomes out tonight in the finals on a leg tha's been pummeled into linguini.

Let's repeat that: she cheers wildly as her kid goes out to fight another kid twice his size ON A BROKEN LEG.

The bad guys cheat but the hero wins and suddenly there is the equivalent of a slow clap and everyone is friends, because, hey, just because a guy tried to pulverize your femur doesn't mean he's a bad dude. Or something.

And no, there was no karate. But you knew that already.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

Upon Further Experimentation...

 Many of the sorbets I make come from a basis of "OK, what have I got in the kitchen?" Some of them come out very well. Some of them come out more along the lines of "Sweet galloping Moses, what were you thinking?" And some of them just don't come out at all, which is probably for the best for all concerned. Don't ask, for example, about the disastrous first attempt at a pumpkin sorbet, the result of which was to turn a statistically significant portion of the kitchen orange.

Strawberry-white grape sorbet, on the other hand, works. It works a lot. And it works even better if you use seedless grapes and don't filter the skins out. 

Texture, you know. Very important stuff.

Important Things Learned About Absinthe Cocktails

Absinthe goes well with citrus. Absinthe does not go well with cream. If a drink recipe tells you this, it is lying. Absinthe mixed with cream tastes like Greek yogurt by way of a compost pile.Absinthe cocktails are not intended to be made with the stuff you just happen to have hanging around the house. Unless it involves at least one highly unusual brand name variant of a specific alcohol that isn't sold in the state of North Carolina for love or money, and which probably wouldn't have looked out of place either at Rivendell or in Hunter S. Thompson's living room, it's not a real absinthe cocktail recipe.Absinthe "spoons" aren't really spoons at all. They're flat. And they have holes in them. Seriously, you try eating cereal with one of those things and you're screwed.Grain alcohol that someone waved some wormwood at is not absinthe. Sorry, North Carolina ABC stores. Stop tormenting yourself with the memory of the absinthe cocktail you had in Paris, mixed by a guy who's been a bartender in a world-renowned cocktail bar for roughly seventy years. You're not going to do it as well as he does. You're just not.Straws are right out.So are little paper umbrellas. Maraschino cherries are on probation, but they'd better watch themselves.Layering absinthe cocktails is really just a meta sobriety test.You'll run out of absinthe before you run out of mixers. But only if you're doing it right."Rinsing" a glass with absinthe does not involve a sponge. Don't ask me how I know this. It will just make you cry.Serving an absinthe cocktail in a champagne glass inscribed with the old Clan Lasombra logo does not in fact make it any classier. Shocking, I know.I forgot. There was a lot of absinthe.

Reviews: Two Up, One Down

Over at Sleeping Hedgehog, there's this one on Charles De Lint's Promises To Keep , now available in handy-dandy trade paperback. You'll note a small correction in the comments; I don't know about you guys, but I had absolutely no idea Newford was supposed to be in the US. Seriously. Did any of you?
And at the Green Man Review mothership, there's one for the latest Remy Chandler adventure from Thomas Sniegoski, A Hundred Words For Hate , to go with an anthology edited by Justin Gustainis, Those Who Fight Monster s . I wasn't a big fan of the Gustainis, largely because there was very little occult detecting in a book ostensibly about occult detectives, but if you like paranormal romance, your mileage may vary.

Things You Just Can't Argue With

Melinda: You smell...unusual.
Me: It's probably mulch. (Note: had spent much of the afternoon purchasing, schlepping, opening, laying down and spreading large amounts of cypress mulch to cover over last year's thoroughly eroded cypress mulch. I don't spend a helluva lot of time on the lawn, but I have enough pride to cover up the worst spots. Barely.)
Melinda: OK, that makes sense. You don't normally smell like swamp trees.
Me: I have absolutely nothing to say to that.