Tea Leaves

I feel that since I mentioned that I recently picked up Myst III, among other games, for the Xbox, I should post a brief follow-up: I have finished the game.

I enjoyed it a lot; it was definitely worth the $9 I paid for it, and a bit more besides. Let me see if I can quickly outline what I liked and didn’t like about the game. I won’t spoil any of the puzzles, and I’ll try not to reveal too much of the plot, beyond what you’ll find out in the first few minutes of the game.

Likes:

• The plot, in rough outline. Some of Atrus’ chickens come home to roost, in the form of one of the inhabitants of the Ages ravaged by his sons, Sirrus and Achenar, seeking revenge. This is an angle I’ve always wanted to see developed a bit more in the games. Atrus is so precious, with his cream-coloured paper and his quill pen and his deep meditations on nature and reality, but always in the back of my mind, I’m wondering: if you’re such a sensitive new-Age guy, how did you manage to raise two twisted little monsters? The writers of Myst III: Exile don’t really pursue this line of questioning to its logical conclusion, but they at least raise the issue.
• The puzzles. Nearly every puzzle in the game seemed impossible to me, and then I’d stare at it for a long time, slowly put the pieces together, generate hypotheses, and use them to solve the puzzle. At which point I felt like the smartest man in the world, which is exactly how a properly-designed puzzle game should make you feel. There was only one puzzle in the game (fairly early on, unfortunately) where I had to resort to a walkthrough; it was one of those “analog controls, and you are off by one millimeter” situations. Other than that, the puzzles were perfect.
• The concepts underlying the ages were well thought out and well-executed. Lots of breathtaking scenery and clever spatial design. I enjoyed looking at the game.
• The music was the best of the three Myst games I’ve played so far. It’s a little detail, but one that helped keep me immersed.

Dislikes:

• The acting. But I expected that would hurt going in, so it’s not such a big deal.
• The user interface. If you’ll recall, Myst was essentially a glorified Hypercard stack: static pictures with a cursor, and sometimes the cursor would change into another shape. The player could then click and something would happen: he’d move forward, turn around, open a book, flip a switch, and so on. The interface in Myst III: Exile is a hybrid between that view of the world and a first-person shooter. In any given game location you can move the cursor and rotate freely, looking all around you. This would normally be an improvement, but there are some irregularities in how the game indicates that there is something interesting to do. Sometimes, your cursor will change into an “action” item indicating there’s something you can click on. Other times, it doesn’t — you need to touch some device, but the cursor is in its “default” shape. Because of the seemingly random behavior of the cursor, you’re reduced at times to the most basic of strategies: start moving the cursor around the screen and press the mouse or joystick button wildly in order to “locate” the hotspots. This one interface glitch was my least favorite thing about the game. It added no actual intellectual challenge for me to find the hotspots. It just aggravated my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
• A side effect of the “free look” is that there are a few places in the game where I had exhausted everything I could find, and wandered around for a long time looking for “the next puzzle.” I was unable to find the next puzzle easily because it involved going somewhere and then turning around to see the barely visible little alleyway that I had walked past 30 times without noticing. I guess one could claim the same thing happened in the original Myst, but it seemed less egregious there. Perhaps I’m just getting hypersensitive in my old age.

This game is on bargain racks all around the country, for a variety of platforms. If you like puzzle games it’s an easy choice that will provide hours of thoughtful stimulation. Go down to your local non-chain game store and buy a copy tomorrow.

As promised, here is a second list of things that I like about PIttsburgh. Also as promised, no food places.

The PSO

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the Jansons era was among the best in the country IMHO. We haven’t been to Heinz Hall that much in the last few years, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate that things are much different now that Jansons is gone. The only thing that keeps this band down is an apparent requirement for unimaginative repertoire. If you have any interest in Classical music at all, you owe it to yourself to go.

The Y Music Society

An excellent series of chamber music concerts at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. This is the other major place to see and hear great music.

North Park

North Park is a mile from my house and when I ride my bike at all, two out of three rides start out through the park. While not really a perfect place to ride, it does lead to what IMHO is the best road riding area in the Pittsburgh area. The park itself also makes for a great loop that mixes flat roads with some good climbs.

The Neighborhoods

As a city, Pittsburgh is not so much a sprawling urban metropolis as a loosely organized group of small neighborhoods, each of which has its own character. I like this about the place because each area of the city is somewhat self-contained with respect to activities, food, services, and shopping. You hear the joke about people who live in the area and never leave their neighborhoods, and such stories have a ring of truth to them.

Carnegie Library

A fabulous public library. You should go.

Filmmakers

Filmmakers runs three of the local independent movie theaters in town and in addition it also provides film, photography and related classes for the local universities and colleges. When I got back into photography as an adult, I took the three basic black and white classes that they teach here, and they were well produced in addition to being really fun.

Frick Park

A huge sprawling green-space right in the middle of the city near CMU. Apparently there is a huge cult of people who do nothing but train their dogs here. There is nothing quite like this in other cities I’ve been to. Other cities have parks, but they look like parks. Frick looks like the woods. A particular place of honor goes to “The Blue Slide” playground, with its huge blue slide built into a hill.

Downtown Light

I was working Downtown when I took those black and white photography classes, and I used the area as the subject for the the last portfolio that I did for that class. The city has a great quality of light, especially on cold winter afternoons. This makes for great urban landscape and architectural shots.

One of my favorite pictures is a shot I took just off of Grant Street for the class project. The picture captures the late afternoon light shining down on the side of a building, creating wonderful specular highlights on just the edges of the windows. I had seen light like this in Paris all the time, but could never get it on film. It took an afternoon in Pittsburgh for things to work out. Sorry, I don’t have a scan of the print, so you’ll just have to imagine it.

My House

My house has a huge floorplan and a huge lot and I can ride 100 miles on my bike from my driveway. What more could you ask for? One of the major reasons I will never move to California is because my house in California would cost seven to eight figures, and that’s just stupid.

The Strip on Saturday Morning

Really, this isn’t for the food. It’s just a great place to sit and watch the world go by. Probably the most interesting area of Pittsburgh to just stand in on any given day.

The “Gamer’s Bill of Rights” article referred to in today’s Joystiq entry is here

I feel somewhat self-concious about writing about games. I feel OK writing about my impressions of specific games. After all, those are just my observations. I feel like I am on shakier ground when writing about more general issues in games, gaming, or game design, if for no other reason than I only have my experience to go by and it seems like others have a lot more experience than me. But, since this site is mostly a place to experiment with writing, I have tried to write about some larger issues, and have had some success and some failure.

During this period, I had the following experience a couple of times. I would start writing a fabulous article with some witty insight about the nature of games or game design. Then, halfway through, I would look up the phrases in google and find that Ernest Adams had already written much the same article years ago in his game design column at Gamasutra. I found this to be frustrating, but would post my piece anyway, reasoning that I had taken a slightly different angle on the subject, even if this reasoning was usually wrong.

Mr. Adams did this to me when discussing immersion in games. He did it too me again when discussing game length and replayability. He even beat me to the idea that Madden Football is really more of a strategy sim than a sports game. He’s also published most of my pet peeves against evil game designers in his classic set of twinkie denial articles. Of course, none of this should be surprising. He has spent more time building games than I’ve spent playing them.

Luckily, Pete is smarter than me. I am happy to report that for once Tea Leaves got the jump on Mr. Adams. In his most recent column at Gamastura, Mr. Adams lists a set of “Gamer’s Rights”, and lo and behold they overlap with Pete’s Gamer’s Bill of Rights from a while back while taking a somewhat different point of view.

It’s pretty cool for the web space I share to get a mention like this, even if, again, it’s a smarter guy than me doing the writing. As usual, Adams is completely right in every point that he makes, from the ability to control cut scenes, to the fact that games should tell you quickly if you have failed. But, what really warms my heart is the section in the piece on saving games: “The player’s right to save the game is absolute”. Amen brother and testify again. Truly this must mean that we are on the side of light and goodness here.

The only thing I see missing from the article is a heading that reads: The right not to have to fight a stupid Boss. On the other hand, I think the other items in the list point to the general truth that bosses are stupid.

Resources

The Game Designer’s Notebook is absolutely required reading. Twice. The No Twinkie series is particularly enjoyable.

The camera in Neverwinter Nights sucks. This article is about why. I’m telling you what the article is about up front, because I’m about to take a leisurely detour through many seemingly unrelated topics before circling back around to the actual point.

Jungian archetypes "Я" Us

As I think I’ve mentioned before, my mother didn’t like Dungeons & Dragons very much. When I would hang out at Junot Diaz’s house and play all day, she’d always call me after a few hours and harangue me into coming home. This made me bitter, because everyone else got to stay there all day and most of the night playing, and I only got a taste of it. At the time, I was convinced that my mother didn’t understand how cool D&D was, and how creative and fun it was, and she just hated me and didn’t want me to have any friends at all.

Now, with the perspective of many years, I’ve finally come to understand that my mom didn’t hate D&D. She didn’t think it was satanic, or evil, or unbalancing, or immoral. In fact, she probably didn’t know anything about it whatsoever. My mom applied a very simple and sensible test: anything a 14 year old boy is willing to spend 20 hours in a basement doing can’t possibly be a good idea. I can’t really argue with that. Mom was right.

There was at least one unintentional side-effect of this, though. By constraining my D&D experiences, Mom turned the game into one of my semi-permanent latent objects of desire. Even though I personally have never had all that much fun playing D&D, either in person or on a computer, I’m convinced that somewhere within the maze of rules, tables, and Erol Otus drawings lies the joyous heart of all ludic pleasure. So, years later, the 14 year old in my head still wants me to purchase Dungeons & Dragons-based computer games.

Mom did let me spend 20 hours a day playing computer games, presumably because of a misbegotten belief that computers would somehow make me smarter.

Eye of the Beholder

One of the games I spent hours and hours playing was SSI’s classic dungeon crawl Eye of the Beholder. This game still holds up well (under emulation) even today. The rules were simple, the puzzles were surprisingly sophisticated given the limitations of its user interface, and it moved at just the right pace. Eye of the Beholder took everything good about Wizardry and imported it wholesale into a Dungeons & Dragons universe. The first two Eye of the Beholder games are the best computer-based dungeon crawls that have ever been made.

Recently, I heard about a mod for Neverwinter Nights that basically reimplements Eye of the Beholder in the NWN engine. So of course, I have to have it. It doesn’t matter that it won’t be as good as the original. It doesn’t matter that I own the original and can still play it on just about any machine, under emulation.

It’s shinier. I have to have it. The only problem is that in order to play it, I would have to buy the latest add-on pack for Neverwinter Nights, which I didn’t yet own (and suddenly, the reason this module is being touted on Bioware’s site becomes clear: now that’s good marketing).

Since I have a job and the add-on pack isn’t that much money, I bought it.

Before purchasing the add-on pack, I fired up Neverwinter just to refresh my memory. And that’s when the trouble began. Now, I’m going to compare Neverwinter Nights to its console nephews, Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. I’m well aware that those are later games, and that they were able to learn from the mistakes made by Neverwinter. But it needs to be said: the single biggest misfeature of Neverwinter Nights as a product is that the camera is terrible.

I don’t work for Bioware. Despite the fact that they liked my little Jade Empire-inspired toy, The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory, I’ve never hung out with them, drunk beer with them, or gone on press junkets with them (memo to Bioware: have your people call my people. Let’s do lunch). Despite that, due to my amazing psychic powers, I can tell you exactly how Neverwinter Nights ended up with its lousy camera.

Early in the development cycle, one of the engine programmers produced an internal-use-only demo of the 3D engine. The demo had various 3D objects arrayed around a landscape. To show how cool and truly-3D everything was, he provided some simple controls to drive the camera around via the keyboard. At the same as time the engine was being developed, work on other parts of the product was advancing: 3D models were being created, scripts were being written, and levels were being designed.

Neverwinter zoomed in: dramatic and unplayable

At some point, a year before the game was released, in mid-February — these things always happen in February, no one knows why — a meeting was held to determine what camera angle should be used in the actual game. The modelers and artists wanted a low, tight camera so that the beauty and detail of their work would be apparent. The programmers wanted a god’s-eye view so that the player could plan their strategy. The producer wanted a view between those two extremes because that seemed the least likely to cause a mutiny in his ranks. The level designers were insistent that if the angle of the camera was too low, the player would never figure out where to go and their game would be ruined, ruined! The graphic designers pointed out that if the camera was zoomed out too far, the game looked like a much less attractive version of Diablo. Harsh words were said. Snarky emails were exchanged. Finally one of the engine programmers, figuring he has already spent the time making the flyaround functionality work, says “Let’s just leave the demo controls in. Then the player can figure out the best view for himself.”

The result, of course, is that despite its advanced graphics engine and nice shiny modeling, Neverwinter Nights looks terrible compared to Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. It plays worse, too. I probably spend about 25% of my time in Neverwinter dorking around with the camera. I’m not doing that because I want to, but because I have to. The game’s levels haven’t been designed with a single fixed camera perspective in mind. Knights of the Old Republic and Jade both allow some camera control, but much less than offered by Neverwinter. And they are stronger games for it. (The game also loses dramatic potential because it doesn’t have the over-the-shoulder medium shots during dialogue that the later games have, but that’s a separate issue.)

Neverwinter zoomed out: boring and emotionless

Worse, since Neverwinter has a three-dimensional camera, I have to worry about the zoom level. The part of me that wants pretty shiny toys wants to be zoomed in all the way. The hardcore gamer who only cares about “winning” always wants to be zoomed out all the way. Whichever one I choose, I have made a part of myself unhappy. Sure, I could try to set the wheel somewhere in the middle. But first, a UI element that requires me to hit a target “somewhere in the middle” is clumsy. Secondly, it would have been better if that view had been set for me, and then I wouldn’t be obsessing about whether I have set it wrongly.

The camera in a 3D game needs to operate without the players’ supervision. Whenever possible, it should give them a sufficiently close view of the action so that they can enjoy the pretty pictures. When a more strategic view is necessary, it should be presented to the players without their intervention. The best of all worlds is for the levels to be designed such that moving the camera around to achieve a strategic view simply isn’t necessary. Level design should conform to the realities of the in-game camera, not vice-versa. Requiring the players to move the camera to play the game well reminds them that they are above the game world, and not a part of it. In the text adventure milieu, we’d say that this breaks mimesis.

Software developers see certain patterns of screw-ups again and again. Some of them are just coding mistakes, but some are more fundamental questions of design. One of the most common mistakes you see made by software teams, especially those that don’t have the benefit of having their butts regularly kicked by competent UI designers, is what we here at Tea Leaves call “violating the axiom of choice.”

The axiom of choice comes into play when software engineers on a team disagree about some fairly trivial but user-visible behavior of the product. They will have a few meetings about it, where they will make a lot of grunting noises, but won’t be able to come to a decision. Eventually, one of the software engineers will say “Well, why don’t we just expose this as an option to the user, and let them choose which behavior they want? That’s easy.” Everyone will be relieved at not having to make a decision, and the meeting will end.

The end result of this is an inferior product.

The hard part of software development is not, it turns out, writing code. The hard part is deciding in advance how the product is going to behave.

Lest you think I’m picking on Bioware, let me reiterate that the good things about the game overcome the lousy camera (by which I mean “I am obsessed with trying to relive my childhood”). The product is good enough that after all these years and all these complaints, I’m still giving them money. And it’s not as if Bioware is the only group to ever release a software product with a lousy UI. Hell, axiom of choice violations are practically a time-honored tradition for open-source projects.

I just hope that when I line up to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 like a good little consumer drone, someone has actually made a decision and chosen a camera angle for me.

Additional Resources

• The entry for the original Eye of the Beholder at TheUnderdogs

has a download link; it runs fairly well in DOSbox on both Windows and Mac.

• The easiest legal way to play the game, if you don’t already own it, is to find a used copy of Forgotten Realms Silver Archives. I bought one of these. It’s a bargain. It comes with about eight thousand D&D games, most of them intolerable. But you’ll get all three Beholder games in one fell swoop, so it’s worth it.
• For many gamers who grew up in the ’70s, Erol Otus’ artwork is Dungeons & Dragons

The Xbox 360 pricing and various bundles have been in the news a lot over the last week. The general mood among the fanboys appears to be a mixture of anger and betrayal. As usual, my feeling is that most of the traffic on this subject shows a startling lack of intelligence.

Whining about the 360 system pricing seems to take one of three attack vectors.

1. Microsoft promised a hard disk based console for $300. Microsoft are dirty liars!

2. Having more than one “SKU” (it’s amazing how many people suddenly know what this means) will “confuse the market”. Microsoft are stupid!

3. The split tier will keep the hard disk from being well used in games. Microsoft are crippling my pony!

I think it’s easy to refute each of these attacks. The first is, pure and simple, the result of wishful thinking colliding with harsh reality. Nothing in the hype running up to the pricing announcements indicated that there was any guarantee at all that Microsoft would be selling a $300 console with a disk in it. In fact, for reasons I will get to later, it was pretty clear that Microsoft was backing away from putting the disk into the console at all.

The second argument is just FUD. The market will not be “confused” by having two choices. The market will choose the one it wants and move on. I think most people are pretty sure already which one of these bundles makes sense for them. In addition, if they have a pulse, it’s pretty clear that the $400 one is their choice. But, others have said this better than me.

The third whine, about the hard disk being underutilized, is the one that comes closest to having some justification in reality. In fact, it would be a pretty compelling argument except for one little problem. Think back into the annals of Xbox gaming history and count up the number of games that actually use the disk. Then subtract the ones that only use the disk to store game saves. Now subtract the ones that only provide custom soundtracks. Finally, subtract the ones that only use it to store content downloads that could just as well be delivered in some other way.

If my memory is correct, then there are two games left in the pile, and they are both called Halo. Pete says that Blinx also used the disk, and there may be a few others that no one remembers at all. What this says to me is that even if the disk is in every console shipped, game developers won’t use it anyway. Therefore, I think the disk is in the 360 purely for the functionality unrelated or tangentially related to games (music, downloads, etc) and to provide backward compatibility. People who opine for some candy-colored land of instant level loads or gigantic transparently cached game-worlds should keep in mind that most games on the PC don’t even do that stuff. In fact, the one game I’ve played that comes close to the transparent barely noticeable level loads that Halo and Halo 2 have was God of War on the PS2, which, as well all know, has no disk. What all this means to me is that as far as games are concerned the disk is a mostly non-issue.

I guess it’s not surprising that people should be looking for something to complain about. This, after all, is what the fanboy gamer does. The arguments don’t need to be rational or even peripherally based in fact. Almost any semi-coherent barely formed chest thumping will do if what you want to do is post on some 733t gaming forum. This leads to a general level of discourse which is probably below the median intelligence level of the average consumer. However, as misguided as all of this chest-beating is, it is nothing compared to how stupid Gamestop and EB think we are. An $800 launch day pre-order bundle? Who exactly do they think is that desperate? Just walk into Target. The hardware will be there.

Notes

Don’t let something like this happen to you. Just go to Target.

I have a reputation for not liking anything. I don’t think I deserve this, because I rant at least as vociferously about things I like as things I do not. But, for some reason people still have a distorted view of my inner pysche, leading them to comment on my articles and ask questions like: “Is there anything in Pittsburgh that you like?”

Of course there is. In fact, there are probably too many to list in one article. So here the first of a few.

Since the comment that I mentioned above was on one of my food rants, I’ll start with food places. Sitting down to list food places that I like, I find that most of them have been mentioned in these pages again, but I will mention them again.

La Prima Espresso: Simply the best coffee anywhere. I don’t think I’ve had better coffee at retail anywhere else on the continent of North America.

Il Piccolo Forno: A sublime bakery next to La Prima.

Rose Tea Cafe: Finally real Chinese food in the city.

DISH: I think this is my favorite or second favorite place in the city for a fancy dinner.

Penn Mac: A great food store with a concentration on the Italian. Best cheese counter in the city.



Lotus: A good Asian grocery. More importantly, a good source for a lot of fresh vegetables that other places don’t have. Don’t buy ginger anywhere else. Good fish too.

Whole Foods: If you can’t find it at the first two places, come here. A bit expensive, but the fact that they have a fish counter that is open past 5pm makes up for it.

Tessaro’s: Yummy burgers.

Dee’s and the O: Yummy hot dogs. I still like O dogs more, but the fries at Dee’s are better (shhh).

Vivo: The other place on my short list for fancy dinners.

Taco Loco and Taqueria Mi Mexico: Good tacos. ‘Nuff said.

Chaya: Decent sushi by any standard. The other Japanese food is also good.

Cafe Grand Canal: A great pasta place. Get the veal cannelloni.

Shenot Farm Market (Wexford): Really excellent corn. The best fresh corn in the area, that I know of. If I catch you buying “fresh” corn at Giant Eagle or even Whole Foods, I’ll cut you.

I think that’s a respectable list off the top of my head. For more food I like, look at the places listed on my restaurants page with two blue gumdrops. Any other questions?

There are certain items that I run out of on a regular basis, but am too stupid to pick up ahead of time.

I don’t have this problem with some things, such as milk, or bread, or fruit. But some items I seem to be wired to run completely out of before going to get more. Cat litter, for example. Coffee, for another. Wine. I’ll watch the stocks of whatever-it-is getting lower and lower. “Huh,” I’ll say to myself. “I really should go get some more before I run out.” And then I don’t, and I run out exactly five minutes after whatever store sells it has closed, and then I’m grumpy for the rest of the night.

I have this problem with tea.

And of course, there’s absolutely no reason to ever run out of tea. My regular source is mail order from Upton Tea Importers, as I have discussed before. They make buying tea as easy as Amazon makes purchasing books via One-Click. I could just spend 5 minutes on the web and it will show up at my door a few days later, preventing my having a caffeine crisis. But I just can’t plan ahead: I need the panic to motivate me to buy the tea, apparently.

I was in this state of utter tealessness the other day when I remembered that there was a shop in Squirrel Hill that sells tea, and coffee, and chocolate. I’d stopped in a few times just to check them out, and this seemed like a good excuse to try their tea.

Margaret of Wicks and Beans

The shop is called “Wicks and Beans”, and despite the somewhat unfortunate name has a nice and eclectic selection of tea, coffee, European chocolates and candies, and assorted tea pots, coffee mugs, and other paraphernalia. I chatted for a while with Margaret, the owner, about how she started the shop, and how she decides what to stock. She also carries several lines of apparently fancy European skin products. But I haven’t tried those, yet.

I haven’t tried her coffee yet, either, because there are so many good coffee roasters in Pittsburgh already, and I’m set in my ways. But her tea selection was interesting and wide, and she understands how to keep the product fresh (the glass jars are mostly for show; there are sealed airtight packets on the shelves underneath.) And I like her selection of saucers and teacups.

The most unfortunate thing about the store is how hard it is to find. It’s a storefront on Murray Avenue, next to Kazansky’s Deli. I must have walked past this place ten times before I actually realized it was there. I only discovered it because one day I was desperate for chocolate and, well, a man in need of chocolate can transcend his limitations.

I’m always worried that the place will disappear because it feels more like a stimulant-based five and dime than anything else. This isn’t Mon Aimee chocolat; there’s a few well-chosen chocolate bars and a variety of candies, but not an encyclopedic array. There’s a little of this. A little of that. In this age of specialize or die, I find something mulishly satisfying in a store that insists on offering a few well-chosen items in a number of categories. I love the dazzlingly array of choices that the specialist stores give me, but be honest: how many hundreds of types of single-plantation Venezuelan chocolate does one need to be satisfied?

Is Wicks and Beans’ selection as good as Upton’s? Not even close. It’s a tiny little shop, their web site is just an eBay store, and the only employee (that I know of) is the owner. Pittsburghers spend a lot of time complaining that there aren’t enough quirky local stores, and that the suburban mega-chains are constantly encroaching on our territory. Well, here’s a quirky local store in the heart of Squirrel Hill that sells quality tea at reasonable prices.

Stop in and say “hi.” Have some chocolate for me.

We did the drive from PA to Eastern New England again to visit the parents. Found a few more places to eat along I-90.

Charlie The Butcher, Buffalo NY

Another Beef on Weck place, but with a different style. The meat here is more roasted than the other places I’ve been. In addition, they actually have some interesting sides, and other types of meat worth eating. The roast turkey, for example, was excellent. They have various desserts as well, but we didn’t try any.

Dinosaur BBQ, Syracuse NY

Here is a completely unexpected pleasure. When someone comes up to you and says “Hey, there is good BBQ at this place” and “this place” is north of Chapel Hill NC, you should look upon that someone with extreme skepticism. But, here is a case where that skepticism is wrong. This is the real thing. Don’t get anything here but the pulled pork, because it is done correctly and their sauce is also excellent. You can tell it’s done correctly because the meat has texture and character (as opposed to just being a chopped mess) and it does not need the sauce to be interesting. The place has dozens of kinds of beer too, but that’s for someone else to try.

If you are driving within 2 hours of this place, it’s worth the side trip. I’m serious. Be ready to wait in line.

Antonio’s Pizza, Amherst MA

Pizza by the slice. Excellent crust. Crunchy and bready at the same time. A wide assortment of toppings, many of which feel like a Mexican restaurant fell on top of the pizza oven. Go here after spending your savings at For the Record which is across the street.

Currently eating away at my brain (in the good way) is Michael Penn’s song “Walter Reed” from his new album, Mr. Hollywood Junior, 1947. An MP3 of this song is downloadable, for free, as part of the press kit for the album. Go forth and suffer as I have suffered.

If you have iTunes (and who doesn’t?) you can also watch the video.

Michael Penn is married to Aimee Mann, and has done a lot of the production on her albums. More or less the song sounds like Aimee Mann. With a sex change.

Excuse me, now I need to go listen to Hyperballad 47 times to try to get this out of my head.