So I'm doing NaNoWriMo again. This time around I did basically no planning. I spent some time on November 1 brainstorming some characters to write about, and just went from there. There's kind of a lack of conflict or adversity, unfortunately; I keep forgetting to bring it in.

Anyway, I've been getting kind of bogged down trying to figure out what should happen next -- my lack of planning means I have no idea. So I decided to try doing tarot readings for inspiration. I originally tried using some of the oracles off Abulafia, but I found them overly-specific for my purposes. So I went for tarot.

After trying a couple of different sites, I found this one. It has a couple of different spread types and decks to choose from. What's really nice for me is that it has the meanings right beside the cards, and it gives fairly short descriptions rather than long and flowery ones. The short descriptions are important since I'm just looking for quick inspiration, and I find the long descriptions too specific. I'm lucky because I have 3 characters, and there's a 3-card spread option. So I draw, assign the cards to the characters, and write scenes.

I know there are some people who do full-on 5- or 10-card readings to create their characters and plan out their scenes, but that all seems like too much work for me. And it's time I could be using to fill up my word quota. :)

This is one of my standbys. I often make it for brunch on weekends when I'm feeling particularly lazy, or for merienda.

Ingredients:
Enough for merienda for two. If you want brunch for two, double it. Adjust ratios to satisfaction. The amounts below will fit comfortably in a 1-quart mixing bowl. Doubled will fit in a 1.5-quart mixing bowl.

• 3/4 c instant microwaveable rice (you can use leftover rice too, I just rarely have any)
• 1 hotdog, chopped
• frozen vegetable mix (I use the corn/peas/carrot/green beans mix)
• minced garlic
• minced onion
• seasonings: pepper, soy sauce, salt, sesame oil, whatever
• oil
• (optional) broth or boullion for the rice
• (optional) 1 egg

Directions:

1. Start making the rice according to the package directions. Use broth if you feel like it.
2. Heat some oil in a pan and start frying the garlic and onion. Put as much as you like.
3. When the garlic&onion gets a bit brown, add the hotdog and fry it for a bit.
4. Add the veggies. I pour them straight from the bag and don't measure, but there's more veggie than hotdog.
5. More frying!
6. Add seasonings - pepper, soy sauce, whatever. I don't use salt and soy sauce at the same time since it seems redundant to me. Go easy on the sodium, especially if you're using broth on the rice.
7. If you're using one, break the egg into the pan and push it around for a while.
8. The rice should be done by now. Dump it into the pan and stir it.
9. Let the rice sit for a little while in the pan to get more toasty.
10. If you want, you can add a dash of sesame oil and stir it around quickly right before serving.
11. Serve!

My dad decided to send me and my fiance some mail-order steaks for Christmas. I think part of the reason was that he was curious how ordering steaks online worked. In any case, I decided to make them for Christmas dinner. I also tried to orchestrate everything to come out at about the same time, or fairly close, which was challenging.

Recipe:

Marinade:

• 1 cup soy sauce (I used 1/2 cup regular, 1/2 cup low sodium)
• About half to two-thirds of a bulb of garlic, finely chopped
• Olive oil to soak the garlic in
• Dollop of oyster sauce
• Pepper and paprika to taste
• Bay leaves

Garlic Rice:

• Cooked rice
• The rest of the bulb of garlic, sliced
  
• Chopped parsley
• Olive oil
  

I've heard that letting garlic sit in olive oil for a while before cooking makes it healthier, so I did that for both the marinade and the garlic rice. I let the meat sit in the marinade for about 3 hours in the fridge; I turned the steaks over a little over an hour in because the marinade didn't cover them fully.

After I turned the steaks over, I cooked the rice. Then I let it sit in the fridge because I'd started it a little too early. (I have no rice cooker, sadly.)

When I started getting a bit hungry, I took the rice out of the fridge to make the garlic rice. First I sauteed the garlic with a little salt and pepper, then I dumped the rice in and stirred it around for a while. Mostly I tried to get it mixed fairly evenly, and also to warm the rice from being the fridge. Then I stirred in a little parsley, dumped it all back into the pot, and set that on the stove on a really low flame.

Steak time! I took the steaks out of the fridge and made sure my frying pan was hot. Actually, it was probably a little too hot at first. I had the cooking guide that came with the steaks and tried to follow it. I put both steaks in and let them sit for maybe 8-9 minutes. I turned the heat down mid-way because they were starting to blacken on the bottom edges (as it turned out, not enough to make them inedible, but I didn't want to risk it). Then I turned the steaks over and poured the marinade in as a sauce and let them sit in that for another 7 or so minutes. I tried using a meat thermometer on the steaks but it kept saying they were below rare temperature, probably because it was a roast-sized thermometer with a really long pointy tip, most of which was left flopping around outside the steak. So I settled for prodding the steaks with my spatula. They seemed kind of springy, so I took them out. That turned out to be medium/medium-well, which was a little less cooked than I'd been aiming for, but still very tasty.

I poured the concentrated sauce over the steaks, which was the wrong thing to do. Most of the water had boiled away and left almost pure salt. Eating the steaks, we had to scrape the sauce off. Oh well. I sprinkled parsley on top to make them look nicer.

As the steaks were brought to the dinner table I realized that I'd forgotten to make any vegetables! The steaks would probably have been enough food, but I wanted a different taste to go with them and the rice. I had some frozen mixed vegetables, so I made a batch of those quickly and brought them out. The steaks were still warm by the time I was done, which is when I photographed them.

So, recently I have been making frying pan pizza kind of often. It's pretty easy and rather quick, and it's nice having freshly-made pizza. The recipe is adapted from The Ultimate Student Cookbook.

Ingredients:

• 1 heaping cup whole wheat flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt
• ~4 tbsp water
• ~2 tbsp olive oil
• Whatever toppings you like

Steps:

1. Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt together. (This is a substitute for the "self-raising flour" the recipe calls for.)
2. Make a well in the flour, and add the liquid ingredients. I might try a little less liquid, actually.
3. Mix until you get a dough. It should stick to itself reasonably well, and not much to the sides of the bowl.
4. Gather the dough into a ball and roll it flat. I roll towards me, rotating the dough about 45 degrees each time, to get a roughly circular shape.
5. Heat up a non-stick frying pan. Spray some non-stick cooking spray on it. Put the dough in the pan. (I usually use a medium to medium-high setting for the burner.)
   
6. Let the pizza sit for about 5 minutes. It will puff some, and the bottom should have some nicely browned bits.
7. Turn the pizza over and let sit for another 5 minutes.
8. During this time, you can put your toppings on (tomato sauce + grated cheese is traditional). Sometimes I cover the pan to help the cheese melt.
9. The bottom should be browned now, so tip it onto a plate and eat! (You may want to let it cool a bit.)
   

The recipe makes a pizza a bit smaller than a dinner plate, which is a little more than enough for me. It takes me a bit more than half an hour to make two pizzas, although that includes having someone else grate the cheese.

So I got up pretty late today, and should have gone in to work on my project, but I really didn't feel like going in. Then one of my teammates showed me the finished version of something I requested, and I really didn't like the result. It made me feel disproportionately angry, and I knew I'd have to tell her about my problems with it, but I also knew that doing it while angry was not the best idea.

So I tried taking a shower to help calm down, since I had to do that anyway. What happened was I partly deflected my anger from the one person to the entire institution I'm currently attending. That's not much of an improvement. After the shower, I still wasn't in any mood to be able to confront someone and not end up shouting.

Then I remembered that I was hungry, so I went to the kitchen to make food. And somewhere, between deciding on what to eat, gathering and preparing the ingredients, and actually cooking the stuff over the stove, I calmed down. By the time I had actually finished eating, I'd realized that the issue wasn't that big a deal (although it was still an issue--I hadn't been making the whole thing up).

I know that sometimes I can wind up feeling violently mad and irritable, so it's good to know what I can do to calm down.

The food was tasty. (Baked-sauteed potatoes with baconized pepperoni, cheese, and pumpkin seeds. Also a berry-banana smoothie.)

I stumbled upon some instructions for easy onigiri, and quickly tried them out. I've never actually had "authentic" Japanese onigiri before, so I have no reference for comparison. The first time, my rice was way too wet (still learning how to use my steamer), and I didn't have a good feel for salt.

A few days ago I decided to try making onigiri again. My roommate told me that I should use 3/4 cup water for 1 cup rice in the steamer, since there'll be steam (water) all around. I also added a bit of garlic powder, ginger, and curry powder to the rice to give it a hint of flavor. Then I was stumped for the filling.

The first time I made onigiri, I stuffed them with tuna that had been mixed with soy sauce and fermented black bean sauce. Those were pretty tasty, but I wanted to try something different.

I had also recently stumbled upon a recipe for falafel. I decided to combine them.

Being impulsive and lazy, I didn't go back upstairs to look up the exact ingredients for falafel, though I remembered generally what was in it.

Falafel:
1 can garbanzo beans
Paprika
Chili powder
Pepper
Salt
More salt
Minced garlic (from a jar, sorry)
Olive oil
Rice flour

1. Dump a bunch of garlic into a pot with olive oil. I used a huge, heaping tablespoon  because jar garlic is wimpy, though fast.
2. Fry the garlic for a bit until it smells really good.
3. Drain the beans and dump them into the pot
4. Put lots of paprika and pepper in. I don't know how much I used, but when I added water later it was definitely red. Add some chili powder. Also add salt. The objective here is to make something strong-tasting, because it's going to be smothered in rice later.
5. Add a bit of water (I probably used a bit too much, I think ~3/4 cup). Stir up and cook it for a bit. (I probably did not let it cook long enough for the flavors to really come together, because I'm impatient.)
6. Coarsely blend the mixture. I have a hand blender, so I used it right in the pot. It should be kind of a paste, but not as fine as puree. (i.e., coarser than hummus)
7. Strain the mixture so you have the solid stuff. Put that in a bowl somewhere.
8. Add some flour and mix it so that it's drier, but still kind of wet. I guess I put maybe 2 Tbsp?
9. Add more salt than you think you needed.
10. Heat up a non-stick frying pan. At first I used some cooking spray on it, but then it wasn't that necessary.
11. Make marble-sized balls of the garbanzo mixture and dump them in the pan. My pan fit about 12 with plenty of room to maneuver, and that was about as many as I was willing to keep an eye on at a time. Fry (toast?) on one side for a while (I didn't time this)  -- the bottom should be browned.
12. Flip the balls over and fry some more until that side is browned.
13. Find a third side (most of my "balls" had a third side) and fry that one until it's browned. At some point some of the balls might crack/pop open. Those are probably done.

The first falafels I made were tasty on their own, but it was kind of a subtle flavor. That's why I added a bunch of salt, to make sure they could stand out when surrounded by rice. The resulting falafels were too salty to eat alone, but quite tasty in the onigiri.

The way I make onigiri is slightly different than what's used in the article I linked to. The difference is in the way I put the rice in. I could never get the hang of making holes for stuff, so I put down a layer of rice, then the filling, and then a small "cap" of rice on top. I also found I could put a little more filling into my onigiri if I did it this way, although sometimes it would end up peeking out the sides.

I also can't get the hang of salting the plastic wrap -- either I end up with stuff all over outside the plastic wrap, or it's all salty on one side. So this is what I did:
1. Put out a plate with a small pile of salt and a pile of sesame seeds.
2. Make a quick ball in the plastic wrap, then remove it. (Don't bother compressing it too much, just enough that it sticks together.)
3. Tap the ball on two-three sides in the salt, then roll it in the sesame seeds.
4. Put it back in the plastic wrap and properly compress it. Shape it now if you want.

The falafel onigiri were pretty good fresh, though the salt in some places was kind of overwhelming. (I still haven't gotten the hang of salting them.) The next day, though, straight from the refrigerator, they were really good. The rice had gotten a little bit dry, but the salt wasn't overpowering, and the garlic flavor of the falafel had spread out a bit.

I wanted to take pictures of these in various stages (especially the mini falafel, they were really cute), but my digital camera is kind of on the fritz.

Today was pretty stressful for me.

So, I'm in this class called Building Virtual Worlds. Every 2 weeks or so, we get put in teams of 4 (one scripter, one modeler, one painter, and one sound designer), and are expected to make a "virtual world". We are repeatedly told that the goal is to get a world into the show at the end of the class. We're told how industry people are all excited about the show and it's a huge deal, and how in interviews they might ask if any of our worlds got into the show and the interviewers will think we suck if none of our worlds got in.

I'm unhappy with the class. I have a lot of reasons.

One is the focus on making worlds for show/performance, rather than worlds that actually contain meaningful interaction. They repeatedly show us worlds where any "meaningful" interaction was actually faked and cut out in favor of showmanship. These worlds are lauded as examples of what we should all be doing.

We are currently in the final round of the class. The worlds are due Sunday night, to be performed Monday in front of a jury who will decide what gets in the show. Today, several of the groups showed their current progress (it was voluntary).

The professor wasn't happy with the worlds shown. He started ranting about how none of the worlds seemed to have paid attention to character development, and we should have consulted some of the faculty for advice. (His tone was also suggesting "You guys are too lazy and stupid to do these things.") Then he started threatening to not hold the BVW show if the worlds remained of the same quality. You know, the show they keep telling us is the be-all, end-all of the course.

I got mad. For one, I wasn't happy with the emphasis on the show anyway. When he started his rant, when he started suggesting that we were too stupid, too lazy, too worthless to do these things, that ticked me off. I have enough trouble dealing with thoughts like that from myself, I don't need anyone else to start telling me I'm worthless. When he finally resorted to threats, as if we were so lazy that the only thing that could possibly motivate us to work harder was threat, that was the last straw.

I raised my hand, and asked, somewhat accusingly, "So if there's no show, does that mean we'll be able to demonstrate worlds that have real interaction?"

That took him by surprise. He asked me to explain what I meant, so I ranted for a bit about how it was a terrible waste to use a medium whose strength is interactivity to essentially make movies. He responded with some stuff about how we were being asked to do hard things, (there was a bit of subtext suggesting that the only reason I didn't like the situation was because it was a hard place) and how it was good for us to do hard things. I half-expected him to say that it would build character.

I don't buy his excuse. Yes, we are being put in a place where we have to choose between meaningful interactivity and showmanship. Except that the choice is already made for us. We are told to
"cheat" and cut corners on interactivity every round, with multiple examples of worlds that cut corners and made good shows. We are told repeatedly "do whatever makes the best show."

One of my friends in the class raised his hand and spoke up, agreeing with me. That was really nice. Apparently, he was surprised and kind of mad when nobody else spoke up after I did. Someone else raised his hand and spoke up, basically saying "I just want you to know that not everybody in class agrees with them."

As usually happens when I get mad, the rush wears off and I start crying. Since there was a speaker scheduled, we were given a break. I was able to mostly hold off enough to get to a more private place and let it out. I'm afraid I missed the presentation entirely. I was still pretty fragile emotionally when I got back, and people noticed that. I got a couple of "are you okays?", including one from the professor, which I brushed off.

Anyway, those were the events.

Part of what set me off was my greater awareness of what the professor was doing. Just yesterday I started reading a book about how procrastination is a way of coping with the effects of negative thinking patterns. These are patterns like "I must be perfect," "I am only as good as my work," "I am inherently lazy and must be forced to work," "Work is painful and undesirable," and "Work means no more fun." What the professor was saying today was straight out of those negative thinking patterns.

I resented that. I, and my classmates, are here because we love the work. This is something we <em>want</em> to do. But when we are repeatedly told that our best is not good enough, when we are threatened to "Do good work or else," work ceases to be a joy. It becomes pain.

Giving us praise, motivating us with rewards rather than threats--those strategies are not mollycoddling us. They make us stronger. They remind us why we came to the ETC. If you really want good work from us, let us love the work.

A short idea I came up with a while back for Shattered Veils that I kept forgetting to post.

The revolution in Virtual Reality came with the invention of the Veil. Rather than the clunky headset previously associated with virtual reality, the Veil was a lightweight mesh of sensors, optical equipment, and subtle electrodes that truly made the virtual real.

Users of early Veil prototypes complained of motion sickness while moving about the virtual worlds. This was caused by the accurate optical stimulation without accompanying stimulation of the middle ear, and was soon remedied.

One early product to accompany the Veil consisted of small headband-mounted cameras and specialized software. The product was meant to allow Veil wearers to participate in a scavenger hunt in the real world, accompanied by virtual characters and using virtual items. It was an imitation of earlier location-based mobile games. The game never caught on, but the headband cameras became a standard component of the Veil, allowing users to move around without ever removing their Veils.

So I just got back from a field trip of mysteriousness (we were not told the destination beforehand). I managed to find time to write some angsty poetry in the villanelle format, which I think is the most awesome format ever. I managed to choose words with not all that many rhymes for my couplet and verses, so some of the rhymes are pretty forced. I also wrote down whatever phrases came to mind.

So, uh, the Reverse Engineering challenge deadline is passed, and I didn't manage to finish the game. Ah well. I have a bunch of scattered ideas, so I'll put some of them down here.

I decided the setting is sort of Matrix-y. There's virtual reality technology, it's ubiquitous, and it's really good. People spend most of their lives there, they work and play there, marry there, although they still have to leave to take care of physical stuff. Players play members of a group that recognizes the world is an illusionary trap of suffering, and the VR world (which needs a catchy name) is a trap within that trap. They're out to break the VR world.

• Print out X copies/sets of Bryan Hansel's sheet, where X is the number of players. I think 4 is probably a good number. Other than the credits card and the I Am/I Am Not card, I'll call the others Aspect Cards
  


• Everybody needs to have some number of real business cards as well. Ideally they'd be harvested from real people and/or businesses. If you're really desperate, you can make them up.


• Pick out some cards and lay them out in a spread like the one below:

So this is something I keep thinking about posting, but I keep not posting it because I feel that it's too obvious. My point: Game systems are tools to achieve specific types of play experiences.

This concept has various implications, some of which are more interesting than others.

Different tools are designed for different purposes. You should use the tool best suited to your purpose. You don't use a hammer when you're trying to cut paper or screw something in. You shouldn't use a game system designed for one type of play when you want a completely different type of play. (I will go more into this later.)

Some tools are designed better than others. Better-designed tools are easier to use for their intended purpose. I've seen some badly-designed souveneir pens that hurt if you hold them for very long. Contrast the souveneir pens with those wide, comfort-grip pens. One type is definitely easier to use!

Tools can be designed so they're useful for many things, with some tradeoffs. Tools designed for a variety of uses are often less effective or efficient for a particular application than a tool designed specifically for that application. In multi-purpose tools like Leathermans, some of the component tools are not as strong or robust as stand-alone versions would be. And with the Leatherman screwdrivers, it really would be nice to have as much reach as a normal screwdriver.

Multi-purpose tools are still useful, even if they might not be as effective as special-purpose tools. All-in-one comes in handy when you don't know exactly what you'll need, but you don't want to be carrying around an arsenal of special-purpose tools. Multi-purpose ("generic") game systems are great when you might be dealing with a variety of different things.

Tools can be improvised when necessary. Sometimes, the exact right tool isn't available. The other day I needed tongs to pull my poptart out of the toaster. There weren't any, but I found a bag clip and used that. I had a GM once who adapted D&D combat rules for the game of basketball our characters were playing.

Sometimes it's not worth it to use the special-purpose tool. If you do something rarely, you might not need a special-purpose tool for it. The special-purpose tool might cost too much. The tool might take too long to learn how to use. Maybe your friends and family will hate you for life if you get the special-purpose tool. When talking about game systems, how long a system takes to learn is often a turn-off. And of course, there's the complication that you need to get other people on board with using the same tool, er, system.

You don't always need a new tool. Companies want you to think you need their new products, but that's not always true. If you're getting along happily with whatever you're using, great! But if you've been feeling tired, depressed and out of sorts lately, and you've always hated cleaning the bathroom, and your whites never come out of the laundry really white, then maybe you should try a new tool.

That's it. I have some other thoughts about multi-purpose tools and generic systems, but I think I'll save those for another post.

Edit: I'm talking about role-playing games, story games, whatever you want to call those kinds of things that started with D&D. Not game consoles.

So I'm doing this Reverse Engineer Challenge thing. I got Bryan Hansel's sheet, which is meant to be printed out on business cards.

My first thought was that it looked kind of Daoist, what with the seasons, the "everything visible is empty", and the labels for the different cards. So I was going to do some pseudo-historical thing with a bunch of Daoists seeking enlightenment or immortality or whatever.

Then I started talking to Lx on #indierpgs about his game, whose sheet had an I-Ching-ish diagram on it. He wanted a space station. That got me thinking about cyberpunk-mysticism. (Also, at some point I realized that "everything visible is empty" possibly sounds more Buddhist than Daoist, what with the whole Samsara/Nirvana thing.) So now I'm going to make a cyberpunk game with Buddhist-conspiracy businessmen. Seeking Nirvana.

One of the things I want to do is have decks of some sort, with "real" business cards as well as the ones from Bryan's sheet. Maybe some other cards as well. I might ask Bryan for his background images or something.

I need to integrate the seasons in some way. They're cyclical, so that can probably be tied in (metaphorically or otherwise) with the whole cycle-of-rebirth Samsara thing. I keep thinking about what Jon, Shreyas, and Thomas are doing with Four Nations (formerly the Avatar RPG) and the cycle of scene types with elements. But I don't want to do a total ripoff. Oh well.

And, of course, I need some way that the card labels are meaningful...

Oh yeah, another influence: I found this image while looking for things to inspire Lx. The color scheme even matches the cards!

Recently I've been playing Skyrates, a game in beta meant to have a limited interface and thus be accessible through a variety of means. (Currently, I heart the AIM bot that tells me when my flights are complete.)

Anyway, there's a note in the buy/sell interface to the effect of "we know it's awful, bear with us". So I was thinking of a better way to handle it. Right now, there's a bar on the left showing your cargo hold usage. There's a column for buying, where you use up/down arrows to change how many units of a resource you're buying, and it'll display the total next to it. There's an equivalent column for selling right next to it. One resource to a row. If you try to sell something you don't have, clicking the up and down arrows in the sell column will do nothing.

My first thought was to turn the columns into one bar per row, with left/right arrows for increasing or decreasing units held. A display on one end of the row shows the total change in funds (positive or negative) when the bar is changed. This makes the concept of buying or selling very clear. However, it does not provide a good way to tell how much will fill your cargo space. Granted, most of the time you'll want to just fill your cargo with whatever resource you're buying. This is fine for Skyrates, but I can imagine the difficulties in something like New Horizons, where you also need to make sure you have supplies for your crew...

So there's another tidbit about trading games, which I keep coming back to, briefly, before deciding they're not for me. We'll see how long Skyrates lasts. The main thing is that I quickly lose track of how much resources are worth, where to buy and where to sell, and how much I actually bought my cargo for. Skyrates solves some of these problems pretty well. There's a nifty map which shows where resources are scarce or plentiful, using miniature bar graphs. This display method works because Skyrates has only 5 resources; with more, the bar graphs would just make a mess. The other feature is Skyrates' log, which shows your most recent trade transactions. That helps me keep in mind how much I bought stuff for, at least. Still, having to look at the log feels a bit clunky to me. It would be neato if there could be a display beside every resource you have in the buy/sell interface that gives how much you bought the thing for, but I suppose that would only lead to even more clutter.

National Novel Writing Month. You know you want to.

W00t for being able to comment on other people's LiveJournals. Some day I'll get around to putting up something interesting here.