Tea Leaves

We were in Toronto for the weekend a couple of weeks ago. For those who don’t know, Toronto is a great food town only 4 or 5 hours drive from Pittsburgh. In particular, we have found Chinese and Japanese food in Toronto that is as good or better than anything I’ve had in North America. One of these most excellent establishments is Hiro Sushi. I have never personally had better sushi than at Hiro Sushi.

To give you an idea what Hiro is like, I’ll run down the events of our last dinner there. The place is a relatively compact space on King St. East in downtown Toronto. There are maybe a dozen tables and another eight or ten seats at the bar. Hiro-san and one or two assistants handle all the sushi for the place, and Hiro also runs out to the kitchen for the odd dish. We sit down at the bar and tell Hiro-san to just give us whatever is good. We will get an assortment of sushi, sashimi, hand rolls, and other rolls over the course of the night.

Soon after we sit down, Hiro pulls a small whole fish out of the cooler where he stores the fish at the bar. He cuts the fish 2 or 3 times with his enormous knife and quickly pulls two fillets off of the skeleton. This takes about ten seconds. He then makes two small cuts and pulls the skin off the fillets with two pulls. The skeleton is still in one piece. He bends it up and puts it in a large bowl with a skewer stuck through it to keep it vertical. Then the fillets are chopped into a small dice and mixed with fresh ginger, scallion and oil. This mixture is added to the bowl along with a soy sauce based dressing and slices of many other kinds of fish. Presto. Sashimi salad.

What gives you an indication that you are in a different kind of spot is the speed and fludiity with which Hiro-san slices the fish and makes the sushi pieces. Sushi is always the perfect size, with the perfect amount of rice formed into a perfect elongated ball. The rice is never pasty. The soy sauce is never stale. And, the sushi always has little touches on it (extra ginger here, a tiny bit of scallion there) that bring out the taste of the fish without hiding it under in a wad of wasabi or a river of soy. It’s simply perfect.

Hiro gives us each two pieces of white tuna. This tastes like normal tuna sushi, but has a richer, fattier texture like toro.

Then he makes dishes for the house and the other patrons on the bar. The guy sitting next to us is the son of the owner of The Indian Rice Factory, a place that we’ve been meaning to go. He gets some special dishes over the course of the night.

Hiro is busy, and one of his assistants makes us California rolls. These are the only real disappointment of the evening. But, what can you do. What you notice about the assistant is that he never makes sushi, only rolls and hand rolls and other dishes. You also notice that he is not nearly as good with the knife as Hiro. It takes him almost a minute to fillet the whole same whole fish for the salad, and he can’t keep the skeleton in one piece.

It turns out the whole fish that Hiro-san has been slicing are Spanish Mackerel. We each get two pieces off one of the fillets. They are topped with a bit of ginger and scallion. Sublime.

Next, squid. Tender but not chewy.

Next, two kinds of shrimp. One cooked and one sweet raw shrimp. Unlike most places, the cooked shrimp is actually decent.

Hiro-san pulls out an enormous side of tuna that has been marinated or roasted or something. It turns out that this is a huge piece of Bonito. He makes the Indian Rice factory guy a bonito salad in a black ceramic bowl that is the size of my head. Indian Rice factory guy grins.

Next, two kinds of tuna. Marinated toro (which is belly meat) and also marinated plain tuna. This is the best tuna I have ever had.

Now the assistant makes us each a spicy scallop hand roll. It is sweet and spicy at the same time. Yum.

While we munch the hand rolls, the waitress whispers something in Hiro-san’s ear about a special order. He gets a pained look and starts pulling out pieces of fish to slice. Soon, he has slices of every sort of fish and roe in his case along with pickles and the cooked egg. He stuff all of this into a rice roll that turns into a log. He starts taking slices off of this log and puts two on a plate and then hands them out to the folks at the bar. It’s like a freaky mutated futo-maki, but with everything imaginable in it. It’s great. Mostly it tastes like roe and pickles.

Karen asks for fluke. Hiro has not given us any tonight, even though we’ve had it here before. It turns out not to be so great. Which is why he didn’t give it to us.

Hiro runs out into the kitchen and brings back a small pot. He turns to the Indian Rice Factory guy and says, “Look, I have made curry”. He ladles out a brown curry dish from the pot. Apparently it was some sort of seafood stew. Indian Rice factory guy grins.

Next, eel sushi. This is pretty standard stuff, but as usual, he does it better.

We also ask for toro, and we get some. It is good toro.

Hiro does another everything roll. He slices it up and there is a huge end piece left over. He hands it to the Indian Rice Factory guy.

Next, we get little sushi pieces covered with a vegetable that is similar to asparagus spears or chinese broccoli or something. It’s been marinated and has a very fresh spring-like flavor.

Karen is now full. I ask for salmon. I get a smoked salmon and a fresh salmon. It’s like the best lox you’ve ever had, except sweeter and more tender, and each piece on top of one of those perfect little nuggets of rice. Incredible.

I’ve probably missed some things that actually came by our plates. But I think this is a pretty good summary.

We were there for two and a half hours. We walked out stuffed. Hiro-san charged us a relatively paltry amount of $45US each.

If you don’t want to get in your car and drive there right now, you are just a fool.

For too many years i’ve been forced to take road trips to Washington, DC, Toronto, or Cleveland when I had the desire for Ethiopian food. A new restaurant, Abay, has opened up in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh (on Highland Avenue). To say I’m pleased would be an understatement.

The space is warmly lit, unassuming, and uncluttered; it seats about 50 to 60 comfortably. The menu is still under development, but has a decent variety of vegetarian, beef, and chicken options (I did not see any lamb on the menu, which makes me a bit sad). The injera, a sponge like bread that is both figuratively and literally the centerpiece of the meal, was fantastic. Sour, springy, and leaving just a dusting of unidentifiable chaff on the fingertips, I could eat it for weeks and not get tired of it. EntrÈes are spread in mounds on the flatbread, and are shared by all at the table. Some of the people I dined with felt the dishes weren’t adequately spicy, but I found them to my taste; rather than being spiced for pain, they were spiced for depth.

I generally enjoyed the vegatarian offerings more than the meat dishes. In particular, I found the ye’ abesha gomen, a savory mixture of kale, chillis, garlic, and onion to be particularly good, the metallic tang of the kale melding with the hint of sweetness from the onion. The tikil gomen — cabbage and carrots — is the very definition of homestyle food, and is as good as any I’ve had in other cities.

The one weakness of the menu is the drinks; you can get Ethiopian coffee or tea, spiced with cardamom, but there’s no hint of the relaxing and enjoyable Ethiopian coffee ceremony here — you’ll still need to go elsewhere for your black clay coffee pot and incense fix. There’s also no sign of Tej, the amazingly vile Ethiopian honey wine, so perhaps it’s a fair trade. Prices are very reasonable — averaging $8 / entrÈe at lunch, and $11 at dinner — and decrease if you order dishes in sets, as you undoubtedly will.

Abay is a great addition to the growing stable of interesting and unique cuisine you can find in Pittsburgh. On behalf of…well, I guess just on behalf of myself, let me say to those running the new restaurant: Welcome!

Additional Resources

• Abay has a web site which includes their full menu.

Having to deal with yet another bad designer’s stupid implementation of “save points” is the worst part of being a console gamer. Almost everyone gets it at least a little bit wrong. Many designers get it very wrong. A few game designers get it so wrong that you want them to be put into suspended animation and then revived only when the Earth has been conquered by a race of technologically advanced yet horribly malicious alien beings who will transport them into a whirling nightmarish dimension of transinfinite pain.

For those of you who are not gamers, allow me to explain the idea of “save points.” Back in the 1980s, game consoles had extremely limited memory profiles and storage space. To allow larger games to be played in several sittings, designers introduced the concept of save points — when you reach a specific point in the game, the player can save their progress to some stable or semi-stable storage. This allows the game designer to merely have to store a bit meaning “I have reached point 4″ rather than keeping track of all the state in the game world.

The existence of save points caused a number of conventions to be placed on the narrative of the game worlds: the idea that enemies come back whenever you play the game, even if you’ve “cleared” that section, the idea that, since all gamers are 12 years old, they won’t have to stop playing at a moment’s notice, and the idea that if you die halfway between save points, you have to play the last segment of the game over again. And over. And over. And over. And over.

Here’s what other types of media and life experiences would be like if they were implemented the same way some game designers implement their games:

• If you’re reading a book, and you put it down in the middle of a chapter, you have to start reading from the start of that chapter. Over and over.
• While watching a DVD, during certain critical, dramatic portions of the movie (called “cut scenes,” by directors) your pause button will no longer work.
• In the newest version of Microsoft Word, you can only save a document after you write a certain amount of text.
• You’re beating the tar out of a moronic game designer, but if you forget to break all his bones in exactly the right order, you’re forced to start beating him up again.

The worst part about this, to me, is that people make up stupid reasons why this braindamaged behavior is good. Among the dumber reasons I’ve heard offered are: “Allowing the user to pause so they can take their bleeding child to the hospital will ruin the dramatic flow of the game,” “But, if we let the player save at an arbitrary time, they might save after every combat and ruin the ‘challenge’ of the game!” and — I swear I’m not making this last one up, this is a paraphase of a certain idiot reviewer on a not-to-be-named game review site — “If you can’t spend a solid hour playing a game, you’re not hardcore enough and you shouldn’t be playing video games.”

There’s a kernel of truth in some of these. Yes, it’s true that a player can ruin the fun of his game by saving immediately after every hard challenge is passed. So what? The bottom line is that the player can better manage their happiness than you, the game designer, can. Based on my own experience and the conversations I’ve had with fellow gamers, the single most common reason a player puts an otherwise good game down and never comes back to it is because of the inadequate placement of save points. No one wants to replay a segment that they already played through just because they made a mistake 90% of the way through.

In today’s videogame world, the common case is that the design of the game sucks. The common case is not that I am sitting there, unable to save, saying to myself “Gosh, I sure am excited by the dramatic tension introduced by the fact that if I die here, I’ll have to spend 20 minutes trudging through the castle and fighting the same monsters I just defeated to get back to this point all over again.” The common case, rather, is that most people, most of the time, say “I just died because of the stupid camera, and now I have to do the whole stupid lava level all over again from the stupid beginning, because the stupid designers were too stupidly arrogant to put in enough stupid save points.” You know what most of us do when confronted with that sort of game?

We stop playing the stupid game.

I have a friend who never finished Shenmue, because the climactic battle was a horrific 40 minute deathmarch. With no save points, and with plenty of unpausable cutscenes. He had started playing it early one evening, not realizing what he was getting himself in to. And he was about to go out on a date, and had to stop. Was he going to play the entire 30 minutes he lost again? No. He decided — correctly, in my opinion — that the annoyingness of the game exceeded whatever pleasure he might get out of seeing the end.

Listen. I know it’s hard to accept. But the odds are, simply, that your game is not that good. Really. It isn’t. We want to play your game because we want to see what comes next, not because we want to see the stuff we’ve already seen 6 times because some boss keeps defeating us. If the player wants to ruin your big dramatic moment, too bad. I can pause Scorsese’s movies any time I want, and I should be able to leave your game, and come back to it, any time I want. If Scorsese can get over it, so can you.

The other objection I hear is that to get the sort of “instant save and restore” functionality I want, I can just pause the game and turn off the TV. This is a morally disordered argument: someone else might want to use the console to play a different game, immediately. Some games — those would be “poorly designed games” — don’t let you pause any time you want. And, frankly, I grew up in the 1970s with the “Energy Blues” playing on Schoolhouse Rock. I don’t want to leave my console on when I’m not using it. I want to turn it off. Lastly, I guarantee that if I turn the TV off but leave the console on, someone (such as myself) will turn the console off accidentally.

There are basically two ways to fix the brokenness of save points: the somewhat wrong way, and the right way. I’ll describe them, and then I’ll describe an alternative solution that, I think, will eventually become the norm.

The somewhat wrong way to fix the problem — which is still better than nothing — is to put a metric ton of save points around your game, so that the player has the opportunity to save “frequently enough” that they’re not bothered by them. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance went this route. As I say, this is at least better than nothing, since it will likely allow the player to not have to play for a solid hour to get back to where they were when they died. The risks here are twofold: first, you might underestimate what “often enough” means, and second, if you provide a save point the player will feel obligated to use it, so a larger percentage of the game is taken up with the mechanics of saving. Halo tries to fix this latter problem by frequently “checkpointing” the player’s progress — just silently saving it when the player crosses certain boundaries — but I’ve never met anyone who felt that it actually worked right, since it only works within a given session, not across sessions.

The correct solution is to allow the player to manage their own save points. Let them get access to a menu anytime, anywhere, and save the game immediately. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic does this, and it is a pleasure to use.

The software developers — particular the user interface geeks — among you may have noticed a systemic problem in what I’m describing. It relies on the game developer doing the right thing. As game developers are apparently intent on proving, over and over again, that they don’t know or care about proper user interface design, I will suggest a different idea. The issue I’m most concerned with is not “saving” for purposes of time travel, but the ability to stop playing at a moment’s notice and to pick up exactly where I left off later. That service could, and I argue should, be implemented by the console itself, not by the software developer. When I want to suspend or hibernate my laptop, I don’t have to go around to each application asking for permission: I just suspend the damn thing. On a system with a hard drive (hello, Microsoft!) doing this sort of hibernation is a solved problem.

In summary, this is not a game-specific issue. This is a user-interface issue. You’d dismiss as unacceptable a word processor that refused to allow you to save your work unless you finished the paragraph you were writing. We should not hold games to a lower standard.

Additional Resources

• Brian Hook wrote a very well-reasoned article on save points that I more or less agree with.

All the URLs are the same, but starting today we are “Tea Leaves,” since the related project with that name is going dark.

If any of the participants in the tleaves project want to have a place to hang their hat here, just let me know.

It’s the year 2004, and I am helping my parents configure their brand new Thinkpad to talk a completely standard wireless access point, and it is so painful that it is beyond the power of language to express.

Click to enlarge

After September 11th, the sign board became a way for suburban America to express solidarity. All down any given highway you could see hundreds of small storefronts asking us to pray for the victims, to support our troops, and in some cases crying out for vengeance. For some reason, I was transfixed by this. Something about the grass-roots nature of it moved me. I’m kicking myself for not taking more photos of them at the time.

Several years later, this has mostly died down, but occasionally there’s someone who still uses this medium in a particularly attention grabbing way; here’s one of them. I meant to take a picture of this sign a few weeks ago, when it had a provocative rant about Iraq and gas prices. But before I remembered to bring my camera when passing it, it had changed to something less interesting. Fortunately, this week’s return of the phrase “camel jockey” makes it worth sharing.

It’s an interesting sentiment, and I think it is representative of the fundamental split between our leadership and their base. Unlike the justified and measured retribution the US engaged in in Afghanistan, the Iraq war is unquestionably an imperial adventure. By this I mean that it is an enterprise that is of no demonstrable present value to the United States (it may give some benefit to the Iraqis themselves, or to the Kurds, or to history, or give some unquantified future value to the US), although it certainly has involved incredible cost in both blood and treasure. Patriotic Americans, by and large, understood exactly the trade off involved in the Afghanistan war, and understood the motivation. No one — at least, no one unwilling to use the word “empire” — has provided sufficient justification for the Iraq war that is both reasonable and truthful.

Imperial ambitions, of the very sort that George Washington warned us about, are destructive to a Republic. By its very nature the act of taking and holding territory incurs expenses that are unimagined otherwise. Furthermore, the more territory that one has to defend, the more thinly spread one’s resources become. The British didn’t just abandon their empire out of niceness, but out of necessity: it was bankrupting them. I don’t see any particular reason that the same fate won’t befall this latest American flirtation with imperialism.

Rage is mounting

I found the sign that originally struck me on the restaurant’s web site, so I have reproduced it here. While it’s easy to focus on the hate and rage being projected at the Iraqis, there is a subtext of confusion and anger at our own government here: Why are we there? What are we gaining? What’s the point?

The Bush administration has so far steadfastly ignored these sorts of commonsense questions from the public. I hope that the electorate responds appropriately to that disrespect in November.

The restaurant where these signs stand has proudly posted pictures of previous messages on their web site, here.

Jack in the Box

Idlewild is an amusement park about 40 minutes east of Pittsburgh, near the historic town of Ligonier. It’s positioned as a “family” amusement park, and definitely caters to kids, particularly younger kids. There are a few thrill rides here, but apart from a small (though worthy) old wooden coaster, you won’t find rides here that you wouldn’t find at a local fair. The permanent attractions are a bit more interesting.

The oddest part of the park, for me, is called “Storybook Forest.” Storybook Forest is simply a long, winding path past a number of set-piece sculpted panoramas and the occasional costumed teenager. Each panorama is based on a children’s story, fairy tale, or nursery rhyme. Apart from the voices of children and their parents, it’s quiet — the wooded locale helps instill some tranquility — and fairly meditative.

There are some unhappy and depressed looking farm animals in pens scattered throughout to provide additional color. Bo Peep’s sheep. The three little pigs.

Snow White

The toddlers we passed were enchanted by it, but much to my surprise some of the older kids (”older” in this context meaning around 8 or 9 years old) seemed to enjoy it as well. I walked past one 8 year old saying to his mother “I thought this would be stupid, but I’m really having fun!”

This is the innocence gap; this is the chasm. All through Storybook Forest I’m confronted with the urge to mock, to denigrate, to poke fun at. I can see the scuffed paint and the decrepit shingles, and I can see that Snow White really can’t wait for her cigarette break, and I can see that the animals just want to be left alone, and the whole thing just seems sad and depressing to me. But the children love it. They’re seeing something I can’t see, and I’m seeing something they can’t see.

Come back, come back

The grinning Jack in the Box reminded me of Tillie. In Coney Island, on Surf Avenue, I would ride my bike past the ruins of Steeplechase Park, the place that defined America’s very notion of “amusement park.” My older relatives would get a faraway look in their eyes when they talked about it. To me, it was like looking at a dinosaur’s bones; the parachute jump in particular, skeletal and immense, beckoning from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, showing me the way to my family and a place to play punchball. And always the smiling clown, Tillie, shouting “come back…come back…” to the deserted lot he presided over. When I was very young, I thought he was talking to me, making a promise. As I grew, I decided his face was disturbing, and his cry was a threat. Now, with time and distance, I pity poor Tillie, and I figure that he was simply begging someone, anyone, to come back and not leave him alone in his dark empty lot. He is the spirit of Coney Island, weeping for the vanished masses.

This is, after all, why we hate clowns: they are the makers of broken promises. To grow old is to be battered by the fine print of life, to learn that a promise is only as good as the one making it. In the tattered decadence of the Three Little Bears’ house I see every lie told to me as a child. The group of first graders behind me, who haven’t yet had to start keeping track of that, see only a good story made real.

Old King Cole

You can’t stop time from moving forward, and you can’t stop children from discovering their own truths about the world. But you can treat a child’s innocence with respect. And so I present these pictures from Idlewild without the mocking captions I originally wrote for them, without the knowing wink and the wry smile. I’ve left out the digression about overpriced amusement park food, and the complaints about screaming toddlers and grumpy parents. And if the pictures themselves are framed to mock, or to accentuate the grotesque — as the Jack in the Box photo above certainly is — then I apologize, and ask you to look again from another angle, where perhaps a less cynical vision can prevail.

Perhaps Tillie’s shout of “Come back” is, after all, just an invitation.

Ripening berries

I’ve been talking for the past few weeks about how proud I am of my wild blackberries, how I have great plans to protect them and hug them and love them and call them George. But something has been gnawing at my subconscious, and yesterday it dawned on me.

Blackberries are supposed to have their cores intact. Are these really blackberries? Maybe they’re not. Maybe they are black raspberries.

The realization came while picking them. Take a look at the photo to the right (click to enlarge it). Note in the cluster in the center where you can still see the ’stub’ from the center of the berry, still on the branch. This is in large part how we classify raspberries versus blackberries: with blackberries, that stub (usually) stays in the berry; in raspberries it stays on the plant. This is why blackberries are cheaper — that stub lends them structural integrity and makes them easier to transport without getting crushed.

Discussions with friends and neighbors ensued. Everyone told me I was mistaken — “I’ve been eating those since I was a kid. They’re clearly blackberries. Black raspberries are something completely different.” I think, however, that it is these folks who are mistaken. These are black raspberries.

Closeup of berry

Here is a closeup of one of the berries from these brambles. Note the core is completely gone, and the druplet’s distinctive raspberry shape, and especially note the hairy nature of the berry — that’s more of a raspberry characteristic. The most common variety of raspberry around these parts, in fact, goes by the name “Rubus Pensylvanicus,” vulgarly referred to as the “Pennsylvania blackberry” (which explains why my neighbors call them “blackberries” — that’s their name, even though they’re not the same as the blackberries you get in the store). Making the matter more complex is the fact that all members of the rubus family vigorously interbreed, making a specific identification difficult.

The other aspect that makes me lean towards the black raspberry identification is the growth pattern of the stem — the primocanes get very long, and then arc towards the ground, which is not how (I’m told) trailing blackberries grow. In fact, where the tip of the primocane hits the ground, it roots — this is not an easily trellissed plant.

Are there any budding botanists out there that can suggest ways I can identify the actual variety I’ve got here with confidence?

The highlight of the Indianapolis Formula 1 Grand Prix qualifying session for me was seeing some enterprising fans holding up a hand-made sign which read:

“Team McLaren:
New Tech Center - $300 million
Drivers - $17 million
3 Points behind Sauber - Priceless”

Quinta do Noval

Every so often some bureaucrat at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board screws up when filling out the computerized order form and ends up accidentally ordering 300 cases of some wine when he meant to order 30. When this happens, good wines go on sale. This has apparently happened with the Quinta do Noval LB Porto. Typically, this unpedigreed port would sell for between $15 - $18 a bottle. It’s been on sale at state stores for $10, and I’m stocking up.

It’s not cloyingly sweet, and strangely this makes it go less well with food than some other ports of similar distinction. It has a noticeably alcoholic nose and a strong blackcurrant jam foretaste. The tail is somewhat bitter, but not unpleasantly so — more like a sour apple with a hint of sour cherry (oh, how I wish I could get sour cherries here. I miss them.)

Is it a great port? No. But it’s a good port, and at $10 it’s a steal. In a world where one has to pay $75 (!) for a bottle of Fonseca vintage 2000, there’s something to be said for economizing on the stuff you drink when you’re not celebrating a special event.