Mark L. Van Name's Blog, page 99

Oh, yeah, I need to see this

Johnny Depp with thinning, slicked-back hair and light blue eyes is creepy as hell.  The story is interesting.  The rest of the cast looks great--and includes Benedict Cumberbatch, who barely appears in the trailer.



Yeah, I'll be there.

The Hillsborough BBQ Company

is for my money the new local barbecue champion.  This relatively new restaurant, nestled in a row of shops well off the main road in Hillsborough, features a real wood-fired pit and a team dedicated to creating great barbecue.  For the most part, they succeed.

Their chopped pork barbecue was so moist and delicious that I never even tried their sauces.  No other local barbecue place comes close to their chopped pork.  Their pork ribs were also the best I've had from a local barbecue joint.

The one meat on which they fell short was brisket.  Too dry by far, it just wasn't up to what even a low-end place in Austin would send out.  I am going to hope they keep trying to improve the brisket.

All the sides I sampled were very good, with the mac-and-cheese and baked beans particular favorites of mine.  Their hush puppies were also perfect.

You do have to allow time to wait.  The place was packed and apparently stays that way much of the time.

The only bad news is that I now will have more reasons to make the long drive to Hillsborough.

If you love pork barbecue, go eat at the Hillsborough BBQ Company.  The food is worth the drive.

Scott, the Great Pirate Neckbeard

Earlier tonight, Scott and other seniors put on a fascinating and fun show, Posters and Pies, about their senior projects.  After brief presentations on all the projects, we then got to see them up close--and eat pizza and pie.  I am very proud of Scott and his teammates and the very cool augmented reality project they did.

After the event finished, however, Scott decided he was done with most--but not all--of the beard he had been growing.  This decision led to a neckbeard...

Click an image to see a larger version.
...which in turn led to Scott's debut as The Great Pirate Neckbeard in the upcoming romance, Pirate.


The adoring fan in the background is his roommate, George.

Despite his cover model status on this soon-to-be-a-bestseller novel, Scott was not done.  Oh, no.

First, he posed in several different shots for neckbeard fans everywhere.




This one, the view from below, also known as "what the hell is on his neck?", is particularly striking.


"What," Scott says, "you don't like the neckbeard?"


"Are you sure?"


"Well, okay then, how do you feel about the reduced neckbeard?"


"Or perhaps you would prefer the checkerboard?"


Oh, yes, he is most definitely my son!

Well played, Scott.  Well played.



Yes, of course I asked Scott's permission before posting these photos.

Ex Machina is a pleasure to watch

I'm a sucker for AI films, and I've been a student of the topic for most of my adult life.  I loved writer/director Alex Garland's 28 Days Later.  So, it's no surprise that, as I mentioned in
To my happy surprise, I loved it.  The film is a tight little package that tightens slowly as it progresses, until you can feel the almost crushing pressure from it.  The plot is reasonable, and the outcome inevitable but not overblown.

The three main actors--Domhnall Gleeson, Corey Johnson, and Alicia Vikander--are all marvelous in different ways.  Gleeson plays the visiting programmer with an innocence and awkwardness that fits his character.  Johnson's billionaire software developer and company owner shows perfectly the effects of living too long in his own money-protected bubble.  Vikander is the best of the three, her expressions small but perfect, each small change in her face hitting just the right note.

I could say more, but I really don't want to tread into spoilers.

Do not miss this one.

Dashi is delightful

After the
I'm happy to report that the entire experience was delightful.  I'd read about long waits, but we were late enough that we were able to get a couple of tables right away.  Everyone on staff was smiling and helpful and incredibly pleasant.

The true stars, though, were, as they should be, the ramen bowls.  We sampled a few different broths, and most of us also customized our bowls with some of the available add-ons.  If you go there, I particularly recommend the local pork meatballs, which were simply delicious.  With a range of broths to choose from and 14 different items you can add, you could eat there a great many times and still come nowhere near to experiencing all the available variations.

My only complaint is that the add-ons arrived a bit cooler than the rest of the bowl.  It was easy enough to fix that problem by stirring them into the broth and waiting a minute or two, but the chefs should have done that for us.

I consider that a small thing, however, in the face of how delicious the bowls were.

The dessert menu proved to be a small selection of ice creams from Parlour, which frequent readers (and ice cream fans) will know is the best (by far) local ice cream shop.  None of these flavors were available at the Parlour store, so we shared them all among our group.

I definitely recommend Dashi and look forward to going back.

SFWA Reads Southeast a fun time

Earlier tonight, a group of writers gathered for a panel discussion at a very nifty space, The Edge, in Duke's Bostock library.



A surprisingly large audience, 28 folks, turned out on a lovely spring Friday night to hear us read for a few minutes and then discuss a wide range of topics related to gaming, technology, and science fiction.  We talked about AI, graphics, game design, epidemics, self-driving cars, your inability as a writer (or any artist) to control what people take from your work, and many other things.

The folks in the audience seemed involved, asked good questions, and stayed for an amazing 90 minutes.

My thanks to all who came.

The new movie I most want to see this weekend is...

...Ex Machina.  I love the odd vibe from the trailers, and the topic is certainly one from the (tech) news.



I can't wait!

A tip for restaurant servers

If you're serving people in their fifties and older, and you really want to piss them off, then by all means refer to them as "young lady" and "young man."  This works particularly well when you're ten to thirty years younger than they are, so that your very presence helps make the point that even as you're faking sincerity the whole comment is patently fake.

Really, there's nothing older people want more than for you to remind them that they're old.

Okay, maybe somewhere someone enjoys this sort of fake compliment, but the people I've eaten with most certainly do not.

Doing it to me is a surefire way to start the tip meter on a fast track downward--and I am in general a very good tipper.

Yes, this happened to a group of us recently, and, no, none of us enjoyed it.

Come on out this Friday night, April 24

and catch a bunch of SF/F writers, including me, yakking about all kinds of stuff at the launch of the SFWA Southeast Reads series.  More details are available in
We'll be discussing gaming, technology, science fiction, and pretty much anything else you'd like to hear about; SF/F writers tend to have opinions on every damn thing.

Afterward, we might campaign for world peace, or we might just grab a drink, a burger, and some ice cream.

I'm betting on the ice cream.

Hurrah for air conditioning

I grew up in Florida in a house with no air conditioning and no ceiling fans.  I remember stretching out on my bed and praying for enough of a cool breeze that the sweat would stop pooling on my stomach.  At the same time, I disdained those who required AC, thought them wimps.

Today, I am one of those wimps.  I love air conditioning.  I consider it vital to survival in the south--and anywhere else it gets hot.  So when the heat pump that serves my bedroom stopped putting out cool air, I had several bad nights of sleep until a repairman could come today.  I'm now happy to report that the problem was a dead capacitor--not a cheap thing to replace, but nothing like having to buy a new heat pump, either.

The incident reminded me of how easy it is to become accustomed to luxury, how quickly what we perceive as problems reflect what we come to expect.  Part of me would like to report that as a result of this reminder I am sleeping with the window open and returning to the toughness of my youth, but I'd be lying.

Instead, I've cranked the temperature down and will be enjoying a lovely sleep in a cool, dark room, happy to have my air conditioning and certain that the younger me would have appreciated it, too.