Tea Leaves

or: why the best restaurants in London are all ethnic food.

You’ve been learning to actually cook food, with recipes that don’t start with “remove foil wrapper from cup”. Phrases like “gently braise” suddenly and inexplicably combine with a shocking lack of calls to Domino’s Pizza. Yet half your cooking seems to come out like some demented cardboard pudding. I’m here today to explain the problem. The problem is the British empire.

230 years ago this Tuesday the founding fathers set out to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

They fought for their own government.

They fought for the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta.

They fought for remotely phonetic spelling.

And despite this we are stuck today with cooking practice descended from a barbaric Victorian era practice of cooking all your food for four weeks. And then an extra two just in case one of your dinner guests forgot his or her dentures.

This has to stop.

So here we present some baby steps: pasta and spinach.

Pasta

Pasta these days seems to always come with a note as to how long the pasta takes to cook. The time often doesn’t correspond to how long the pasta actually takes to cook, so it’s important to recognize and adjust for a key fact about the people who write these notes:

They are lying to you.

They are lying to you because they know every stove is different. They are lying to you because they know that “medium-high heat” means different things depending on what pot you’re using. They are lying to you because they have no idea how long you let the pasta sit in your cupboard before cooking it. Most of all, they are lying to you because they’re sadistic maniacs: the psychic screams of overcooked pasta feed not your palatte, but instead their dark desires for gustatory stupidity.

So, you ask, “when do I stop cooking the pasta?”

To paraphrase Paul Sedaris, I’m guessing you stop when it’s finished.

For those of you who aren’t Italian even in spirit, I will translate: The pasta is done 45 seconds before you think it is finished.

There is only one way to do this: about 3 minutes after you put the pasta in the water (2 if it’s fresh) get a spoon and try a piece every 30-60 seconds. When it’s still slightly uncooked you probably have 30 seconds or so left. Practice this and you’ll get the hang off it.

Spinach

Spinach, the food of Popeye, has been the victim of more indignities at our hands than your average American Idol contestant. Coming to American homes full of goodness, spinach is promptly turned into a disgusting mush devoid of flavor, nutritional value, flavor, mouth feel, flavor, and also flavor.

The good news is: spinach is easy.

1. Cut the stems off the spinach.
2. Bring a potfull of water to a roiling boil.
3. Throw the spinach in.
4. Recite the Lord’s Prayer (the half-Kaddish, Fatiha, two Hail Marys or three recitations of the 1st ammendment will also serve).
5. Take the spinach out, drain and serve it.

Some people have pointed out that this is a fairly short time. They’re right. If you have time to do something else you have time to bludgeon the spinach to the point that it can’t even be identified via dental records because you’ll be sucking it through a straw.

If you’re wondering why these two examples matter, consider the case of ramen cups. They can afford the saturation bombing recipe (”remove cover of cup. pour boiling water into cup. let sit for 4 minutes. enjoy. do not complain about the use of ‘enjoy’ as an intransitive verb.”) because they start with no flavor to eliminate. Apply this to real food and you’ll have spent 20 times more to end up with no flavor. You might as well boil cardboard: at least that has some fiber.

Notes:

• If you’re in Pittsburgh you owe it to yourself to get the fresh pasta at PennMac.
• The Declaration of Independence could really have used a culinary section.

As those of you who care may have surmised, I, along with psu, picked up a Nintendo DS Lite the other week.

The original DS was, unfortunately, not actually worth owning. It had some clever games and nice ideas, but was wrapped up in a package about as appealing as a Radio Shack employee’s cash register. It was clunky, and too big, and the screen was too dim.

The DS Lite looks like something that was made by Apple. It’s all rounded corners and smooth lines, and it’s just (barely) small enough to carry around.

If you think I’m focusing on the design rather than the games, that’s because the games are, without exception, nothing too special. I mean, some of them are good — I wouldn’t trade Advance Wars or Ouendan (thanks, Claire!) for anything — but frankly the second screen and stylus are just curiosities rather than anything truly compelling. At least to me. The design of the machine, however, means that I want to carry it with me, which in terms of a portable gaming machine is really the beginning and end of the issue. A portable you carry with you is (or at least can be) great; a portable you don’t carry with you always sucks.

One side effect of the excellence of the design in terms of playing DS games is that it neutralizes the “plays Gameboy Advance games” feature completely. When you plug in a GBA game, it sticks out of the bottom of the case like a wart on a witch’s nose. This, unhappily, makes me not want to play any of the GBA games. It makes my nice pretty white box bulky and ugly. I’ll probably end up going out and getting an actual GBA to play GBA games just to avoid ugliness-induced psychic distress. There’s also the issue that you can’t instant suspend GBA games — it’s not fair to call that a negative of the DS, but going from playing a game that supports instant suspend to playing one that doesn’t is like leaving a sane world for one populated solely by madmen.

In other news, neither the Xbox 360, nor the PS3, nor your desktop gaming PC support or will support instant suspend. That’s really all you need to understand to know that the Nintendo DS Lite is better than all of them combined.

Next week: I review the imported “vibrator stylus” that just arrived from Lik-Sang.

I had pretty much decided to get a DS when the Lite hit earlier this summer. One of my co-workers had imported one a few months ago, and the new form of the device is pretty irresistible. Of course, I also had to keep up with Pete.

Where the original DS was fat, clunky, and full of sharp edges, the new DS is like an iPod that plays games. Soft lines, a shiny white exterior, and a new screen which is wonderfully bright indoors (although useless outdoors) round out the brilliant industrial design. The device finally competes with the PSP on the pure shiny level. However, unlike all the other “next-gen”-ish hardware I have, the DS has one cool advantage: it has games.

Don’t let anyone lie to you, the PSP and the Xbox 360 are one game boxes. For the PSP and me, that one game is Madden. Your one game might be Lumines or some other sports franchise. But there is really nothing else. Daxter and Syphon Filter have a lot of potential, but both suffer from the same basic flaw, which is that by the time you manage to play a single level of the game, your hands have cramped up from the abuse of the tiny little analog stick and face buttons. Why there are not 15,000 little ports of Japanese RPGs for this thing I’ll never know. But there are not.

The Xbox 360 has Oblivion and that’s about it. Nothing else is actually any good. Even Madden fails to please, it actually plays better on the PSP.

By comparison, the DS has a dozen or so titles that are actually worth picking up. And, if you throw in all the GBA titles, there are dozens more.

Here are a few short impressions of what I have played:

Animal Crossing

A wage slave game about being a wage slave. In this game you play an opressed member of the proletariat, painfully scratching out an existence by doing odd jobs for the members of your “town”, and also harvesting and selling the native flora of the area. As you obtain more material wealth, the game does nothing but drive you to obtain even more material wealth. It’s like a recruiting video for unfettered consumerism.

You can also exchange fruit over wi-fi. That’s really the main point of it. I’m still looking for a shovel.

Mario and Luigi

It was great on the GBA, and it’s great on the DS too. I am concerned though, because the DS game uses the second screen to provide a map that greatly eases navigation through the various areas. This is a slippery slope towards seriously dumbing down the game for the noobs. Pretty soon it will be no better than a 2-d side scrolling hack and slash.

Advance Wars Dual Strike

It’s Advance Wars but there are some new modes, tag teaming and the stylus makes picking units much easier. This means it is the best strategy title on the face of the Earth, only better. This is all you need to know. Buy it.

Trauma Center

My token entry in the gimmicky game play sweepstakes. This game makes you use the stylus to perform “surgery.” There is an anime soap opera narrative going on too in between “missions.” The game is hard, but the surgery mechanic is strangely mesmerizing and addictive. Recommended if you can find it.

Other notes

So there are four easy winners for you to look at. There are many more I have not covered. I started Phoenix Wright which is actually more of a novel where you stop the story to yell “OBJECTION” once in a while. I borrowed the Kirby game, and it seemed fun but too fast. Meteos is too hard.

I haven’t even mentioned Mario Kart or both Super Mario games.

Finally, I can’t stress this enough: the instant sleep when you close the machine is simply awesome, and all the games support it transparently.

It’s too bad the thing doesn’t really have a proper verison of Madden. Otherwise I could sell my PSP.

I took a few books with me on vacation. One of them was an Italian novel called La strega innamorata, (”The witch in love”). It’s funny, and quirky, and easy to read, even for someone whose language skills are as rusty as mine. And every time I picked up the book, it did me the favor of reminding me that I should pour myself a glass of what might be my favorite digestivo, Liquore Strega.

La strega…innamorata

Strega is a bold liqueur. It has a bright electric saffron yellow color, and a typically Italian label full of busy little curliques, medals, and flourishes. It’s 80 proof, but feels stronger. The aroma of Strega is that of atomized pepper, mace, and salty air. To taste, it starts cloyingly sweet, but this is quickly clobbered by a strong anise and cassia mixture. A pine and wintergreen taste scratches you lovingly on the way down your throat. Strega is not an amaro. It manages to suggest bitterness to the back of your tongue without actually being bitter.

When the liquor finally reaches your stomach, you will feel warm.

There are substitutes for Strega. Liquore Galliano is often shelved nearby, but it’s not as good and the bottle (twice the height of any shelf you have available) is painfully stupid and inconvenient. The closest substitution would be Chartreuse. Secretly, I think that yellow Chartreuse tastes just a little better than Strega — it’s less sweet, and has a bit more of a burn. But it’s French, and named after monks, which means that it doesn’t have as much romance as its Calabrian cousin. So I always drink Strega instead.

It may not seem totally rational to prefer something that I know, intellectually, doesn’t taste quite as good as its alternative. But that’s how I feel about it.

I guess you could say I’m bewitched.

One curious constant in the American food tradition dating back at least as far back as I can remember is the neighborhood ice cream truck. These small white vans are similar in shape to a mail truck, but much more festive. They play a happy song as they move down the street, and the colorful pictures on their bodies promise an irresistable selection of sweet confection. As far as I can tell, these trucks are the same everywhere. And, as far as I can tell, they’ve sold basically the same products for the last thirty or forty years.

Everyone has their personal favorites. I was always partial to the “strawberry shortcake” on a stick. It has a sublime combination of vanilla ice cream, and artificially red center with a generic sort of “berry” flavor, and a sweet crusty coating on the outside that I guess represents “cake”. The brilliance of the thing is that it’s just big enough so you get a range of interesting textures as the ice cream center melts, but it’s never so big that you lose any of the bar in liquid form.

For me, the other iconic item carried in these trucks, and convenience stores everywhere, is the ice cream sandwich. I still get cravings for these chocolate cookies filled with a slice of vanilla ice cream. The proper ice cream sandwich has a variety of peculiar characteristics. Just as the bread around your barbecue can’t be too good, there is no room in the world for a “premium” ice cream sandwich. Fancy chocolate chip cookies with nuts will not do. Thick bars of ultra-dense organic fair trade french vanilla bean ice cream are pointless. On the other hand, the cookie does have to have a pleasing softness, and the ice cream needs to at least reach the quality of a Breyer’s or Hagan-Das vanilla. A bit rich, creamy, not too sweet.

The Klondike version of the ice cream sandwich fails on all levels. My wife picked these up by mistake when I sent her off to satisfy one of my cravings. They have a cookie that is too crunchy and ice cream that is all ice and sugar, and no noticeable dairy product. Whole foods, constantly fighting down market, has organic ice cream sandwiches that are almost right, but not really. They get the cookie part right. Unfortunately, the ice cream part is too dense and too sweet. It does not melt enough while you eat it, and it is too sugary.

Happily, the food store attached to my local gas station and Starbucks plaza sells the perfect product. The cookies are soft, but with a nice texture. The ice cream is vanilla, but not too vanilla. Most importantly, they don’t get too hard or too soft in the freezer, so as you consume the item, the ice cream transitions from a firm, but soft texture to a sort of half-melted on the outside and almost liquid on the inside perfection. As you take the last bite, you think maybe you’ll lose a bit of the product out the sides of the cookie, but like the sun coming up in the morning, the ice cream gods intervene, and it never happens.

Can’t write — too busy playing Advance Wars DS.

Recently, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback, both privately and on the site about the state of the local coffee scene. I am always happy to get this kind of information, since it never hurts to have new places to try. But, one aspect of these messages has been puzzling. Over and over again, the advocate of the new place will say “you have to go to Café XYZ, they use these special Moon Beans from the Outer Rings of Venus, which Rule.”

With all due respect, this is nonsense.

I’ll only say this once, because I’ve said it before in an article from couple of years go. Assuming a certain level of quality in handling and roasting, your enjoyment of the cappuccino that you have in your hand is determined by two things:

First, how good is the person making the coffee.

I’ve been going to my favorite coffee joint almost every weekend for more than 10 years. Over this time, I assume that the quality of their beans has stayed mostly the same. I have not noticed much variability in the coffee that I get at home when I buy these beans, for example. But, I have noticed that until this winter, there had been a drop in the quality of my weekend shot over the last three or four years. I never pondered why this should be. The answer was obvious.

Three or four years ago, all of the weekend staff slowly left for one reason or another. As each one disappeared, my chances of a good cappuccino diminished. If you observed the lines in the place during this period, you’d notice people jostling to try and make sure Elio or Dom made the coffee, because they know what they are doing and the new people did not. This, my friends, is much more important than which beans are going through the burr grinder. Always fight to get Elio.

The good news is that since then, La Prima has slowly hired new staff and this staff has slowly gotten better and better at pulling a proper shot of coffee. The result? In the last six months, I have not gotten a bad weekend cappuccino. I expect the situation to be stable until the current crew moves on.

Second, how fresh are the beans.

La Prima roasts its beans basically across the street from the caf�. In various communications, I have been told to obtain coffee from places that get their “fairer than fair trade” beans from various locales, all of which are further than 500 feet from the caf�. All things being equal, I claim that La Prima’s beans are at least a day fresher, and therefore better. If you don’t think a day in the truck makes a difference in how the coffee comes out, then I’m not really going to listen to you about where to go for coffee anyway.

So, the upshot is, if you are happy with your coffee, more power to you. I am happy with mine too, and I don’t really see any reason to go chasing after a different shot, made by people I don’t know using beans that came from some company way outside the city.

Besides, I’m pretty sure they’ll just make the damn coffee too hot.

I read The Soul of a New Machine for the first time when I was in high school. It is the best book I have ever read about computers. It is one reason I ended up working in software engineering. If you have not read this book, you should go and buy it now, and read it, and then come back here. Ready? OK.

Since you have now read the book, I don’t have to tell you that it chronicles the development of a mini-computer by a company called Data General at the end of the 1970s. This machine was built to compete with a machine called the VAX, which was also developed the last years of the 1970s. It happens that I used both of these types of machines when I was in high school in the early 80s and so the story of the development of one of them seemed interesting on the surface. I picked it up in paperback, and read it in bed in two or three sittings while trying to finish my applications to college.

Back then, the stories about engineers on the project, and the technical aspects of the machine they were working on really pulled me in. The company politics and the maneuverings of business seemed to me to be the filler between the high points of watching this machine actually come to life. I soaked up the stories of late night microcoding, the architectural design, and the months spent debugging the machine.

To this day I am still amazed that a journalist, presumably with a limited technical background, could have such an obvious understanding of the layers of abstraction and complexity in the system that he was describing. One early section of the book walks the reader down through the machine from a single line of BASIC that divides two numbers into the CPU to a divide instruction and further down into the micro-architecture, where there is another software layer to tell the hardware how to actually divide two floating point numbers. Another section of the book contains the single best description of how a machine that uses a virtual address space fetches and executes its next instruction that I have ever read. It’s all there, the address translation, the instruction cache, the page fault handler, instruction decode, the microcode sequencer, all the way down to the bare hardware. He even talks about what might happen if the machine recursively page faults forever. No computer architecture book ever explained this basic pipeline in a way that is more understandable. Every new student of computer or software engineering should be required to read the book just for this reason.

I also love The Case of the Missing Nand Gate. I have often wondered how to teach people to debug complicated systems, be they hardware or software. I still don’t have an answer to that question, but this chapter of the book would be part of the formula. After yet another beautiful tutorial on how the instruction and data caches of the machine are specified to work, the chapter launches into a case study in finding, isolating, and finally fixing an intermittent bug of the worst kind. Finally, in the end, when the engineers have figured out how to make the machine fail, they capture a picture of the error in one of their logic analyzers, and immediately the fix is clear. What I found amazing about this section in high school was the detective story aspect of the narrative. What I find amazing about the chapter now is how clearly it captures the process of observing a system that is failing and how you trick the machine into failing while you collect the proof. Twenty five years after the book was written, this process remains unchanged.

What has changed in that time is what the book means to me. Having worked in software engineering, both academically and commercially for many of the twenty or so years since I read this book, I now realize how much more there is to the story of this machine. It wasn’t apparent to my high school self, who saw the engineers as the heroes and the company above them as an often malevolent force, working to crush their spirit and creativity and take credit for their hard work. I think this is the way young, naive, and/or inexperienced engineers see the world.

I’ve come to see the book as more concerned with how the project was managed than anything else. My younger self never really realized that Tom West is the hero of the book. Not even the engineers on the team seem to realize this until the very end. In a coda to the main story, one of the engineers finds a specification for a trivial piece of hardware that allows the machine to interface to some kind of third party peripheral. He realizes that no one on the core engineering team could have possibly designed the plug or written the specification. There are hundreds of details like this in the final machine and the book credits West with collecting the support needed from the rest of the company to make sure all of these little problems were found and solved. The book accurately observes that while the central act of creation is in the hands of the engineers, this act would be wasted without the coordinated efforts of dozens of other people working on behalf of the project in other parts of the company. In other words, the romantic myth of the lone engineer taking over the world in his basement is, for the most part, just a romantic myth. Products that ship are built by teams of people led from a shared vision, not a single genius working alone.

Through all of my re-readings of the book, Kidder’s writing remains wonderful. He manages to package up all these layers of narrative and psychology while keeping the story moving forward. He captures exactly what I find fascinating about working on computers. Moreover, the book perfectly expresses the pain and torture of managing engineers: needing to trust the team, needing to shield the team from anything that is external to their core task, and, perhaps most importantly, needing to convince the team that the task they have been given is important and groundbreaking in some concrete way, so that they will “sign up” for the job.

I don’t really have anything left to say that Kidder doesn’t say better. You should go and buy it now, and read it. And then read it again.

Every so often I mean to write an article about how Chris Crawford doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s pretty impressive, in some ways: his book on game design, for example, is practically a manual on how to write a sucky game. And Crawford keeps inspiring me to write this article because every time he opens his mouth (or uncaps his pen) he says stupid things.

Lots of people have weighed in on the meat of Crawford’s latest musings on how the game industry is moribund and uncreative, and I’m not particularly interested in tackling them. Instead, I just want to say something that needs to be said:

Chris Crawford wrote games that weren’t any fun.

I think that Crawford gets a pass on this from so many commentators because he developed games in an era when there simply wasn’t as much competition. So anyone of a certain age who writes about games has played his games. Therefore, when people talk about 1985’s Balance of Power, they’re not actually talking about that game, but about their memory of playing the game as a 13 year old.

To take Balance of Power as an example: it wasn’t “innovative”; it was basically a rehash of Bruce Ketchledge’s 1984 game Geopolitique 1990, published by SSI. The main difference between the two games is that Crawford made some changes to suck all of the fun out of it. Specifically, in Ketchledge’s game, making too many significant mistakes could result in a war, which the player then had to resolve. In Crawford’s game, making a single mistake resulted in the game immediately ending with a snotty little lecture from the programmer ending with “We do not reward failure.”

What. A sanctimonious. Prick.

Who can point me to a single game that Crawford did that had any real influence beyond handwaving? We are talking, after all, about the man who developed Scram, a “nuclear plant simulator,” which has the distinction of being the first game to be so boring that it was literally more fun to go outside and watch grass grow. The only game Crawford has published that even deserves to be on the same page as the word “fun” would be his 1981 wargame Eastern Front. It’s a good game. But not enough to justify his reputation.

Some have pointed out — correctly — that Crawford need not have developed excellent games (or indeed, any games at all) to proffer opinions on the gaming industry. Certainly, none of us opining here at Tea Leaves have a resume that includes professionally published games, and that doesn’t stop us. But the argument is made, and made often in wanky, uncritical hagiographies, that Crawford’s opinion is important because of his “seminal” games and his “genius.” This is false. Crawford’s ouevre is average at best and mediocre at worst, and anyone familiar with the game developers writing and publishing games in the 1980s knows this to be true.

Crawford is good at something, but it isn’t game development. It is self promotion.

Additional Resources

• If you think I’m lying about Balance of Power being Geopolitique 1990 only without the fun, obtain an Apple ][ emulator and try Geopolitique 1990 for yourself.

I’ve spent the last month dabbling with Planescape from time to time on the laptop. I’m not quite all the way through, but I think I’ve played enough to say a bit more. My overall opinion of the game has not changed since writing my first impressions. I think it’s clearly the best of the classic “western” RPGs that I’ve played from the 1990s.

I’ve toyed around with these games ever since I finished KOTOR. I’m not really interested in investing heavily in PC games, but the fans of these particular games, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, and now Planescape tend to be so vocal in their support that I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was about.

I gave up on Fallout first, having only played for four or five hours. I enjoyed the atmosphere, but I couldn’t find a great reason to put up with the tedious gameplay and the annoying combat system. After spending a night repeatedly getting killed by giant rats, I threw in the towel and went back to playing Mario and Luigi.

Baldur’s Gate 2 lasted a bit longer. At a technical level, the game seems more playable to me than Fallout. Control over the party is smooth and intuitive, and there are no “action points” to keep track of. I really like the “real time, but round-based under the hood” control engine which is no surprise, since it’s basically the same scheme used in all the Bioware games up to KOTOR. I also liked the narrative threads and character development in the opening parts of the game. There were only a few archaic mechanics that annoyed me. The constant shuffling of inventory got on my nerves. In addition, the need to obsessively rest the party so that the spell casters could refresh their memory grated. The game didn’t lose me for good until I escaped the first area and got into the town. At that point, I completely lost the thread of what I was supposed to be doing. What had been a well paced plot was replaced with a huge area completely devoid of clues as to where I should go next. I tried to do a few of the quests in town, but I ultimately ended up bored and confused and put the game down.

Planescape improves on Baldur’s Gate by emphasizing its strengths while pushing the annoyances more into the background. Although the game employs the ultimate RPG cliché of employing a main character with amnesia trying to puzzle out his true nature, the narrative is interesting enough and the pacing is good enough to keep you going anyway. The quests and the plot are intertwined and support each other in a pleasing way. Finally, the game has some of the best writing that I have experienced in a computer game. The text in the game is evocative and full of clever turns of phrase. Who could not like the idea of a “brothel” for the mind?

From a gameplay perspective, the best thing about Planescape is how it de-emphasizes combat. While it maintains the same smooth Bioware combat engine, the game does not force you to constantly worry about buffing your party and making sure you have all the protection spells case and magic armor equipped before every fight. Since the main character is immortal, if the fight goes badly you can just try again immediately. This brilliant gambit, along with the fact that you can score huge amounts of experience points just by talking to people make the game less of a kill and loot grind. It’s refreshing to play an RPG actually just play the character rather than trying to navigate the optimal path through the character progression and loot procurement systems. It’s odd that an eight year old game should be refreshing in this way. I find myself surprised that such a compelling system is not an overused cliché by now.

From the chapter titles on various walkthroughs, I would guess that I’m somewhat more than half-way through Planescape. I had to stop playing for a while because the license on the emulator that I am running on my Mac to run Windows expired, and I don’t want to buy the software just yet. But, never fear. I won’t be able to avoid getting an Intel Mac for home use forever, so when I do, I can dual boot it and finish the game. It’s good to have something to look forward to.