Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

“When you have their full attention in your grasp, their hearts and minds will follow.” – Small Gods, Terry Pratchett

The last few days the interwebz seemed to be abuzz with the SOPA & PIPA acts.  Sites voluntarily blacked themselves out.  Petitions were signed.  Profile pictures were updated to reflect on the occasion.

In the middle of all this, a friend of mine was kind enough to point me to http://maddox.xmission.com/  A blog that brings up a very interesting point.  Grab them by their full attention.

 - Make sure the people who introduced the legislation don’t get elected.
 - Boycott the companies pushing the bill.

Further explanation, and fairly complete lists are given in the post.  And really, if you feel that strongly about the matter, go there and read the blog already, will ya?

Yes sir!

 
Ever feel like life’s trying to tell you something?

A few days back my … er … homie… @starmanjones posted about cooking with lentils, and inquired about my expertise (or the lack there of) regarding the matter.  As luck would have it I am somewhat familiar with lentils, or Daal, as they’re known around here.  However, my approach to cooking is to apply underlying guidelines, rather than specific wossname.

I see it as something like making a cake.  There’s the base, i.e. the parts without which it would stop being a cake.  Then there are the add-ons, the vanilla essence, the baking cocoa, the bits of fruit, the chips of chocolate, the frosting, the occasional chopped up octopus.

Now, a lot of traditional Bangladeshi cooking is built on a very simple base.  Boil something with a bit of chili powder, garlic, onion, salt and a pinch of turmeric for an extended period of time.  The amount varies, depending on the nature of what’s being cooked, and tastes & preferences of people cooking them but the overall rules remain the same.  (A piece or two of Bay leaf is an optional ingredient to the base, if you’re feeling like it.)  If you’re cooking something for the first time, it makes sense to progress slowly, regularly tasting the work in progress to make sure things stay within acceptable limits.  It also helps to err on the side of less.  For example, if you have less salt than you want you can always add a little more, but if you have more salt than you see fit… well it’s a little more difficult.

Orange lentils, locally referred to as Masoor Daal, is cooked as a “soup” of sorts.  (It’s generally consumed with boiled rice and other cooked dishes consisting of meat & vegetable.)  It’s fairly simple to make.  You boil orange lentils with chili powder, garlic, onion, salt and a pinch of turmeric, over medium heat for roughly a half an hour.  The amount of water used determines the thickness of the concoction.

If you want to go all fancy, you can garnish the whole thing with a bit of ground cumin, deep fried minced onions & garlic, and a green chili or three.

If you want to be fancier still, you can cook the rice and lentils together, which is locally referred to as Khichuri.  Stir fry the aforementioned chili powder, garlic, onion, salt and a pinch of turmeric for a bit over low heat in a cooking oil of your choice, add in the lentil & rice in a 1:1 ratio, stir the whole thing for a few more minutes and then add water in a 2:1 ratio.  (i.e. two cups of water for every single cup of lentil & rice.)  Keep stirring until the water’s gone.  Adjust the amount of water according to preference for a mushier or less mushier mix.

If you want to go all fancy, again, you can garnish the whole thing with a bit of ground cumin, deep fried minced onions & garlic, and a green chili or three.

Last but not least, if you’re feeling like cooking a meal at a single go, it’s not unusual to add meat & vegetables to the mix.  As usual, you start off with the stir fried chili powder, garlic, onion, salt and a pinch of turmeric for a bit over low heat in a cooking oil, add the meat and/or poultry first (since they take more time to cook), stir fry until they smell about half-done, add the vegetables (traditionally this involves things like potato & cauliflower), stir fry until they smell about half done, add the lentils & rice, stir fry for a few more minutes, add the water and… well that’s about it.

As far as options & add-ons go… some folks like to throw tomatoes and/or green mangoes into the mix.  Others like to use different types of lentils.  As far as cooking oils go, tradition requires clarified butter, a.k.a. Ghee.  And there’s always the occasional chopped up octopus.

- you find it easier to explain things, no matter how complicated, using food and/or cooking as metaphor.
- you’ve pondered, and discussed, whether or not all living things possess “souls” to various extent that cross over into the afterlife primarily out of your love of fried chicken.
- you’ve found yourself gazing up at the stars on a clear night, and wondered if there’s any edible form life out there.
- you’re disgusted by tentacle porn because it’s a tragic waste of good calamari.
- you don’t so much “taste” food as, converse with it regarding ingredients & processes involved, and charm the chef’s secrets out of it.
- you’d rather go hungry than “settle for artificially flavored machine excrement, like the rest of the sheep”.
- you really, really like chocolate.  (Or, for that matter of fact, ice cream.)
- you believe coffee comes in one flavor.  Black.  Everything else is a diluent.
- you have beheld the power of cheese in a form & intensity few dare imagine.
- your counter argument to “Blood is thicker than water” is “Prune juice is thicker than blood”.
- you’ve spent more time thinking about the blue milk in Star Wars than most people spend thinking about Star Wars.  (Or if Wookiees ever invented biscuits.)
- your favorite part about parties is the kitchen duty.
- your cooking oils outnumber your footwear.
- you stopped categorizing food into complicated categories such as origin, ingredients and flavor long ago.  Good food is good food.  Bad food isn’t.
- you’re watching a movie about zombies, they’ve grabbed their first victim and the first thought to come to your mind is – I wonder if they can taste what they’re eating?
- your home didn’t come with a kitchen… rather, your kitchen came with a couple of “extras”.
- you’ve used a packet of ready-to-use seasoning/spices as an impromptu list for buying individual ingredients.

Err… that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

(Source: kotaku.com)

Methinks the video is self explanatory.  Though what it doesn’t quite explain is how the contraption works.  One partner (the woman in the video) wears a headset that works as a sensor.  The other partner (the man in the video) has a piece of magnet stuck to the tip of his tongue with Fixodent.  That works as the joystick, or sorts.  The sensor tracks the movements of the magnet, and the game determines an output based on that.

Romantic.  I know.  Nothing says “I love you” like sticking one’s tongue in the SO’s mouth and playing a bowling videogame.

Upon discovery, one would expect a response along the lines of “WTF!?”  And that just may have been my response, a decade or so ago.  But if there’s anything I’ve learned from the internet (and Japan), it’s that there is nothing too shocking or bizarre for the Internet (and by extension, Japan).

Dating simulations of all kinds & varieties, have been a popular genre since back when “in Color” was a selling point for home computers.

And the Japanese arcades do have a history of featuring games with some pretty unique (for their time, anyway) interfaces.

Arcade games like Beatmania features a turntable as controller.  Dance Dance Revolution has players dancing (sort of) on a gigantic dance pad.  Samba de Amigo has you shaking controllers with an uncanny resemblance to maracas.  Silent Scope features an accurately model sniper rifle with a working “scope”.  Para Para Paradise perfects DDR’s attempt to make beginners look like complete idiots by incorporating hand movements into the sceme of things.  Fighting Mania: Fist of the North Star literally has the player punching bits that pops out of the machine.  Boon-Ga Boon-Ga offers “players” an accurately crafted jeans clad derriere to slap & poke to their hearts content.  And from SEGA, the makers of the likes of Sonic The Hedgehog & Shinobi comes Toylets… because Nintendo had already registered “Wii” as a brand name, I guess.  (And yes, the games are listed in chronological order.)

And that’s not even taking into consideration Japan’s love affair with robots.  Surprisingly-human-looking-but-not-quite-out-of-the-uncanny-valley-robots.

So… Dating simulation.  Check.  Fembot.  Check.  *AHEM*”Innovative” methods of “interaction”.  Check.  A culture with little disapproval of any and every possible combination of all three.  Check.

…

Am I shocked about the er… things to come?  Only about as much (or little) as the mighty coyote when he realizes his rocket powered skates have left him hanging over a steep drop.

It might not be pleasant to think about, but eh. :

Many, many moons ago, when I was but a young lad, I had favorite comicbooks.  Superman.  Batman.  Spider-Man.  X-Men.  You get the idea.  I was, what one might say a fanatic.  Meticulously collecting the exploits of my favorite fictional heroes.  Things were simple.  Something featuring my favorite character came out.  I bought it.

Somewhere between then, and roughly fifteen years ago, things took a sharp ninety degree turn.

Part of it was, unfortunately, due to the market being saturated with cross-overs and collectors editions, and specials, until you had Spider-Man somehow having four different adventures at once, and Wolverine appearing in any and every book published by Marvel Comics.

Superman, died for a while.  Batman got a bad back, again, for a while.

There were continuity reboots, and universe-changing-events that, after months of hype (and expensive, hard-to-track-down hologram stamped limited edition multiple covers,) fizzled back to status quo.  Enough was enough.  I wasn’t a fan of the multiple covers and fancy editions.

I figured it was the end of my interest in comicbooks.  I mean really, what’s the point of spending money on something with a net return of zero.  Then something unexpectedly nice happened.

I stumbled onto the works of writers & artists I really liked.

Sergio Aragonés & Mark Evanier worked, and still works, on a creator owned series called Groo The Wanderer.  (Which, at one point, featured a minor character called Lakakalo.)  And their non-Groo projects are not too shabby either.  (IMHO, they have one of the best takes on Batman’s origin story ever.  Ever.)

Frank Miller, back in his prime, was a force to be reckoned with.  His work on Daredevil, and Batman set standards folks still try to meet today.  (Dark Knight returns, in particular, changed Batman’s family friendly image to a dark & gritty one still prevalent in comics & movies today.)

Alan Moore… is Alan Moore. ’nuff said.

Garth Ennis has an uncanny ability to look at a typical “comicbook superhero”, like the aforementioned Superman, or Batman, or Wolverine, and put them in situations not specifically set to highlight their unique strengths.  Superman having do deal with death and the idea that not even Superman can save everyone, having looked into the face of a man he forgot to rescue, as the unfortunate man died in a reactor explosion.  Or Wolverine having to to deal with the negative sides of an unbreakable skeleton and super-human regenerative factors.  Or Batman being vomited on.

And the works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby…  younger fans of comics are more likely to laugh at the sillier incarnation of their favorite heroes, but those books were unapologetically fun.

It was like a comic-nerd version of leveling up.

An individual series suddenly ceased to be an individual series and became a set of collection, separated by teams of artists & writers that worked on them over time.  Some teams are preferable to others, though, admittedly it’s purely a matter of taste.  But still.

If a favorite artist or writer inevitably switched comics, it made sense to do so at the comicbook store as well.  Plus it beats buying a buttload of mediocre comics for the sake of a complete collection.

** NOTE – Um… yeah… I know I forgot a lot of talented folks.  Inevitably, just about the only thing that comes to mind is “that guy that worked on that series… you know the one… no, no… that other one”  Feel free to point out anyone you can think of. **

From SMBC-Comics.com
By Zach Weiner

Came across this on youtube purely by chance, but man is this guy skilled.  I’m posting two of my favorites, but if you’re interested, you can check out more of his work at http://www.youtube.com/user/Philmacrakken

Enjoy. m/