Tea Leaves

30 second exposure at f/5, ISO400 equivalent. The sky was nearly completely dark, so most of the illumination came from the sodium vapor lights at the nearby dock.

My favorite thing about the picture is how the long exposure smoothed out the waves on the water, making it look like a sheet of textured glass.

Click the image to see a full-size version (warning: large).

Here’s a 16 second exposure at f/8, taken a bit earlier. I like the invisible boat effect, and I like how the dock looks like it’s on fire.

In summary: a good tripod is worth its weight in gold.

While I remain hidebound here in Pittsburgh, co-author psu is taking a few weeks in Paris. But I’m not jealous: I have Travelogue 360 Paris, just released for Windows and Mac. And my Paris has a rhinoceros wandering around the base of the Eiffel Tower.

Travelogue 360 Paris is a bit of a strange beast. I went into the game not knowing anything of its provenance, and was expecting a sort of dreary “virtual room” tour of the French capital. I was pleasantly surprised to find a much simpler and quite addictive game: it’s sort of a videogame version of “Where’s Waldo”, or more accurately the perhaps less well known “I Spy” childrens’ books.

That the game takes place in Paris is somewhat incidental, a framework on which the game designers could hang a riot of color and a map around which to roam. In each location, you are given a list of objects to find. You scroll and zoom around the panoramic photo of your location and try to find the named objects before the timer runs out. After every few locations, you’re given a different minigame (most in the nature of jigsaw puzzles) to solve.

This is the sort of puzzle game that any veteran of Fool’s Errand would feel comfortable playing.

Paris with Junk

One supposes that Paris was chosen as an exotic and interesting location. This works both for an against the game. It’s a bit disarming (and somewhat giggle inducing) to be standing in the nave of St. Sulpice and start looking around for a boat, a violin, a pretzel, a cherry, a footprint, a book, a dinner fork, and a protractor. It’s made all the more surreal by all of the other objects that litter the landscape as red herrings. I found myself engaging in an ongoing interior dialogue. “Let’s see, where’s that protractor? It’s not near that orangutan next to the altar, or the piece of raw meat on the ceiling. Maybe it’s above the confessional?”

The objects in the game suffuse and infest the panoramic photos that make up each level. Some of them are in plain sight, while others are cleverly melded into the backdrop (for example, a bunch of grapes might be simply sitting on the floor, or they might be in the form of a decorative marble-colored frieze on a pillar.) After a time, I began to think of the game not as Travelogue 360 but as “Paris With Junk.” Everywhere you turn, there is random garbage filling the streets. So, in other words, it’s just like the real place.

The game re-uses locations many times, giving you a different inventory of things to find on each visit. Since the actual images (and objects hidden) don’t change from visit to visit, there’s a tendency to complete subsequent visits faster. If you get stuck there’s a clever hint function which gives you “cold, warm, hot” sort of clues via visual and audio indicators. In the standard game you can use the hint function as much as you want but there’s a fairly long “recharge time” between uses, which in practice helps you not feel too guilty about resorting to it when you’re completely stuck. Levels of the game are times, but the time limits are extremely generous. I never felt like I was in danger of losing due to running out of time. There is also an untimed “tourist mode”, which is appropriate for younger kids.

Travelogue 360 Paris is the sort of game that I often talk myself out of liking. It is, at heart, a one-trick pony. But the thing is it’s a really fun trick, and it’s performed with great polish. Sometimes the simplest pleasures are worth enjoying.

Travelogue 360 Paris, published by Big Fish Games, $19.95. Available for Macintosh or Windows.

Disclosure statement: the publishers graciously provided us with a review copy of the game.

I’m basing this minireview on three game sessions.

Step 1: Insert Crackdown disc.
Step 2: Choose “Play Halo 3 Beta”
Step 3: Watch pretty opening screen. Enter multiplayer lobby.
Step 4: Start matchmaking process.
Step 5: Wait 15 minutes while the game tries, and fails, to find a match.
Step 6: Give up and go do something interesting.

Color me unimpressed.

Fish is not hard to cook. We are just trained to think it is. Early on in my cooking “career” (graduate school) we picked up a large cookbook about fish that meticulously broke down multiple techniques with several examples of each and hints about which kind of fish which technique was suited for. I remember bringing the odd piece of fish home, thumbing through the book to try and figure out what to do and then throwing up my hands when I couldn’t find the right set of instructions out of the right list. Then I’d make the fish and it would come out overcooked and tasteless.

My fish epiphany came during my first trip to Paris. I sat down in a semi-upscale bistro run by a famous chef and ordered a simple piece of white fish in a white wine and butter sauce. It was like no fish I’d ever had before. The fish that I was used to encountering came in one of two states: a sort of seared medium-rare almost sushi texture in the middle, which really doesn’t work with anything but tuna or salmon, or horrendously overdone, flakey, and dried out, the standard configuration for the thin mild fish in the U.S. This was different. It was soft and not overdone, and yet it flaked apart easily. It was tender but firm. And most of all, it was perfectly infused with the moisture and taste of the sauce. A true wonder.

I have not, in fact, learned to make fish like that, although I come close once in a while. What I have learned is that in the home kitchen there are three high probabilty schemes for making fish come out well without too much work.

1. Pan fried. Do this with a nice snapper filet if you can get it. Salt and pepper the filet and then bread it lightly with flour, egg wash and bread crumbs. Then toss it into a frying pan with enough oil and cook on both sides for two or three minutes each, depending on how thick the fish is. You want the fish to start to flake apart but you do not want it to dry out. This general scheme will work well with any thin filet as long as the fish is firm enough to hold up in the pan.

2. Pan roasted. Lightly flour the fish on both sides. Season with salt and pepper. Then sear it in the pan with some hot oil on both sides. Maybe a minute on each side. Then throw the pan in the oven to finish it off. You want to do this with thicker pieces of fish like salmon, halibut, and so on. Thicker pieces work better in the oven because everything cooks more evenly and at a slower rate, giving you more latitude. Keep and eye on things every three or four minutes depending on how thick the fish is. After a while you will develop a feel for when the fish is done. It will call to you from the oven: “Hey! Time to let me out now!” A nice side effect of the pan roasting is that sometimes get cool burnt bits to make a simple sauce with. Deglaze the pan with white wine and add sauteed shallots and butter. Yum.

3. Semi-poached. I’ve written this up before. The idea here is to cook the fish in a pan, either on the stove or in the oven, in a small amount of liquid to keep things moist and yummy. I like to do this with small whole fish (trout, bass) that is very fresh. It cooks the fish gently and you can check on it a lot to make sure you don’t kill it. Standard liquid mixes include:

1. White wine, butter and some water. Salt and pepper.

2. Wine, soy sauce, green onions, ginger. Salt and pepper.

3. Onion, carrots, celery sauted in olive oil, etc, along with some water and white wine. Salt and pepper.

You get the idea. For the oven, put the fish in a shallow pan, pour the liquid mix around it and then just bake it. You can cover the fish or not, do whatever you like.

Sticklers for detail will now complain that I have left out their favorite method. I left out grilling because it never works for me. I left out steaming because I am too lazy to pull the steamer out of storage every time I happen to find a fresh bass at the store, and the wet oven scheme above works almost as well. Finally, I have not mentioned seared tuna, partly because everyone and their mother is doing “seared ahi tuna” with frozen tuna steaks from Costco and I’m tired of it, and partly because whenever I try to make seared tuna I end up with either an overdone tasteless mess or an underdone tasteless mess. Also, everyone knows tuna is best as sushi anyway, so what’s the point of cooking it.

With these three main techniques in mind, here are a few other tips that I find useful:

- Season the fish. It is fashionable to look upon fish as some kind of healthy alternative to meat as part of a low fat, low salt, low taste diet. Resist this tempation. Fish tastes a lot better when you put enough seasoning on it. I’m not saying you should cake it with salt and brine it in salt water. I’m saying that if bland fish is getting you down, maybe you aren’t seasoning it quite enough.

- Butter makes everything taste good. Especially when used in a simple white whine sauce for your sea bass.

- When practical, whole fish are yummier.

- Fresh is better. This is an obvious rule, but hard to apply. If you live in Pittsburgh, go down to the Penn Avenue Fish Market and look at what they have. Their stuff is the freshest I’ve seen in Pittsburgh recently. When they clean and cut up a whole fish for you, it bleeds, which is a good thing. Lotus also has nice fish. Whole Foods is good, but not as good as the other places and usually more expensive. They are also insufferably smug about some of their humanitarian “policies” towards animals that have a central nervous system the size of a small set of legos.

That’s all I know about fish. Go buy some cheap stuff and practice. Then get some halibut from Alaska and go nuts.

And so with the release of Episode 6: Bright Side of the Moon, Season 1 of Sam and Max has come to an end.

So, how did they do? Pretty damn good. Let’s talk about what this means for the future of adventure games.

Sam and Max

I don’t want to turn this into a blow by blow review of the games in the series. There were high points, a few puzzles that were really clever, a few others that were really stupid. In other words, the series as a whole was about par for the course for a long, fairly well written adventure game.

What Telltale has done that is really impressive, I think, is that they have (apparently) come up with a sustainable way to write and sell adventure games. Profitably selling adventure games in today’s marketplace is an activity that some respected commentators have said is so hard as to be impossible. So how did Telltale pull this off?

Screw Retail

To the best of my knowledge, the new Sam and Max series is a digital download only. No boxes, no discs, no fighting for shelf space at Best Buy. One can only imagine that this let them focus on selling to the small pond that makes up their core market (because, let’s face it, only someone who already likes adventure games is going to download and pay for one) rather than just jumping into the ocean and drowning.

They are going to ship a box set in August. I’ll be curious to hear whether they sell more boxes or bits. I’m betting a good bottle of Belgian beer on the digital downloads. Anyone at Telltale want to take me up on that wager?

Have A Partner With Deep Pockets

Sam and Max was co-sponsored by Gametap as a way of promoting their service — the games are included in a Gametap subscription. This clearly gave them some breathing room. Having a partner can be a mixed blessing, but it certainly seems to have helped them out in this case, especially in terms of marketing.

Leverage Existing Content

The episodes take place over a long period of time, both in-game and in real life. This means that you can rely on players’ distance from the previous games to let you get away with more asset reuse than you could in one “in the box” game. Throughout the series we see the same incidental characters show up and get pressed into service for different roles.

I’m not just talking about the supporting cast. Consider TV show hostess Myra Stump from Situation: Comedy who shows up in Reality 2.0 as the avatar of an anti-virus program. If Sam and Max had been one 12 hour game instead of 6 2-hour games, the designers would probably have felt obligated to design, draw, render, and find a voice for an entirely new character. But in little doses each month, the reuse is not just effective, it’s actually charming.

This applies not just to characters, but to locations, many of which are reused throughout the series. All of this reuse probably reduced the cost of creating art assets, and also probably helped the design team meet their deadlines.

To Hell With Hardcore

Sam and Max was designed with the casual player in mind. The game autosaves generously. You can save whenever you want. The game is forgiving — there’s no way to “lose”. There’s a well integrated (and non-spoilerish) hint system built in to the game. Lastly, the episodic form lends itself well to enjoyment by gamers with jobs.

Let me tell you a story. Every so often, my co-author psu lends me some weird PS2 Japanese role-playing game involving gay porn and pouty boys with a lot of product in their hair. Some of them I’ve even sort of enjoyed (particularly Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne). I will typically play these games for, say, four to five hours over the course of two weeks or so.

Then, something happens. I’ll have a deadline at work, or I go on vacation, or some similar interruption. I ignore the game for a couple of weeks. Then, I come back, put the disk in the drive, and have no idea what the hell is going on. Where am I? Why is the earth turned inside out? Who is that guy? Why is he naked? How did all that product get in his hair? What’s with the ostrich?

Then I realize that not only have I lost the thread of the game, but that there are still another thirty-four hours of gameplay to go, and I give up, put the game away, and never play it again.

Many people who play games today also played them when they were teenagers. As such, we remember when video games were an excruciatingly expensive investment. The thought of spending $30, $50, $60 on a game that you could only play for a few hours was outrageous. We wanted the game to be padded out. We wanted the game to last for months and months, so that we could ignore our homework for the entire school year. Presumably, this is still true for a lot of younger people who buy games today.

But here’s the thing: many of us have grown up. For myself, I’ve decided that life is too short to play bad videogames. I have more money than I have time. I would much rather pay $30 for a game that gives me 10 hours of enjoyable gameplay than $10 for a game that gives me 600 hours of repetitive and pointless button clicking.

That’s who Telltale is writing Sam and Max for. And I suspect that they are making money hand over fist. Good for them.

“Adult,” meaning “For Adults”

That the developers of the game are writing for people with real lives is also apparent in the scripts. Too often, “mature” in videogames means blood, boobs, and lots of pointless use of the word “fuck.” Sam and Max isn’t above toilet humor — we are talking about a game whose protagonists are a phlegmatic dog detective and a gleefully psychotic lagomorph, after all — but the writing in the game is generally directed towards adults. Kids will get the occasional laugh, but anyone not solidly literate is going to miss half the fun.

In what is perhaps another side effect of digital-only distribution, Sam and Max is not rated by the ESRB. I approve of this. More publishers should blow off the ESRB.

They’re will be asking the ESRB to rate the boxed version. That’s another reason why the boxed version will be inferior.

The Future

So what’s next?

The first question is whether there will be a Season 2. If there isn’t, then you know that all my pontificating about how brilliant Telltale was in picking their market was wrong. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Every single person I’ve talked to who has played the series has loved it.

I have no particular advice for Telltale in terms of game design. I think they did a fine job, and if I have quibbles about this or that puzzle, that all falls within the realm of authors’ privilege. The one thing I’d love to see is a Mac port of episodes as they are released. As their Bone series demonstrates, Telltale’s game engine runs great on the Mac, and I know that I’m not the only person who grows weary of rebooting into Windows just to play Sam and Max.

Crisp art, amusing and witty writing, a jazzy soundtrack, and a commitment to the gamer who has a life. Whatever Sam and Max games we see from Telltale in the future, I’m sure they will continue to bring these to the table.

And I’ll keep playing them.

Additional Resources

• Telltale’s blog is full of interesting and amusing tidbits. Even if they’re not linking to me in their sidebar.
• Sam and Max are the creations of artist Steve Purcell.
• Disclosure statement: Telltale graciously provided me with review copies of the Season 1 games.

I was at the library the other day and realized that I still hadn't seen The Bourne Identity. So I said to myself "Hey, I'll just pick up the book instead." Perusing the shelf of Robert Ludlum titles, I realized they all had these very stilted, cold war, nouny sort of names. The Osterman Weekend. The Holcroft Covenant, The Chancellor Manuscript.

So I wrote a little script to autogenerate Ludlum titles for me, just in case I should ever need to ghost write a book for his kid.

Here is your randomly generated Robert Ludlum title. To get another one, just reload the page. If you enjoy it a lot, consider clicking on one of our convenient ads to help sponsor the site.

Your next Ludlum book is:

When I bought my first SLR film camera, I didn’t give much thought to bags. I needed a small bag to fit the body and two lenses that I had bought, so I went to the store and picked out the smallest Domke (the F-5) which seemed to be big enough. It could fit the camera ready to shoot and the extra lens, and it wasn’t that big. I could get the camera in and out without putting the bag down. When I got a few more lenses, I bought a slightly bigger Domke bag (the F-6) that had extra room for the lenses. That was the last time I was happy with a camera bag.

Once in a while, when I’m bored, I indulge in one of my periodic surveys of the camera bag landscape just to see if anything new has come along. What I always find out is that:

1. Something new has always come along.

2. The something new always sucks.

More than any other part of the industry, the camera bag world is populated primarily by designs that completely fail in one way or another. This is especially true when considering bags for travel. In my mind, the failures are usually for the same basic reasons.

Too much Padding

Under the conditions in which most of us work, you don’t need a lot of padding to protect a camera. When I take my camera to work to take the odd snapshot, I put a towel into the main compartment of my laptop backpack and rest the camera there. That’s really about all you need if you aren’t heading out into a war zone.

People who make camera bags don’t think this is true. They think you need a thick layer of closed cell foam around the outside of the bag, and then they think you need to fill the bag with about 5 pounds of little closed call foam dividers. This exercise in keeping the foam industry in business means two things for your bag:

1. It’s huge and heavy.

2. You can’t get anything in and out. This is especially true if the foam inserts are designed to fit snugly around the lenses. If the fit is too tight you can’t get your hands in there to take the lens out. Brilliant.

The Domke bags don’t have this problem. They use thin canvas and thin foam. It’s too bad the nice little inserts are just a bit too small for my new fat zoom lenses.

Vertical Camera Placement

This seems like a good idea in principle, but in practice it never works out. The idea is to store the camera with the huge zoom lens on it in a “ready to shoot” position by jamming it into the bag vertically. I’ve never used a bag where this worked well. Here is what happens. You push the camera into the bag and it’s all going well until the body of the camera hits the mouth of the bag. Then mouth of the bag is never quite wide enough or tall enough or deep enough or something so that you can clear it, and the foam and all the zippers and get the god-damned camera back in the bag. At this point you give up and throw the bag in a river.

I realize that there are some who will argue that the whole idea of holding the camera in the bag ready to shoot is stupid. You should have the camera out and about if you think you are going to be taking pictures. I understand this point of view. But as an amateur poseur on vacation, I tend carry the camera more than I shoot with it. I need the camera around for when opportunities arise, but I simply can’t function in a mode where the camera is hanging off of one shoulder or around my neck most of the time. That makes things like chasing family members, buying drinks and snacks, and other every day activities impossible. Therefore, what I need is a bag that can store my camera with the lens on it, and make it easy for me to get the thing in and out when I want it.

Vertical bags make the in-and-out hard, and to make up for it storing the camera stuff I’m not using now (flash, short lenses, etc) is also hard because the vertical orientation tends to waste a lot of space. Avoid.

Holds only Cameras

Camera bags are designed around the idea that if you are really serious, you are willing to carry a bag that is dedicated to nothing but camera equipment. While this is a noble sentiment, in these days of limited carry-on capacity it’s not that practical. I want a carry-on bag that can hold my cameras along with all the other stuff I need on the plane (laptop, music, books, kid stuff, extra clothes). You don’t get a lot of extra space in camera bags for this sort of thing because the designers assume that if you had extra room, you’d put more camera stuff into it. So all of that extra room is filled with more closed cell foam compartments that are great for holding another lens or that third flash, or a power supply, but are completely useless for anything else.

Too small and too big

On a related note, most camera bags are both too big and too small at the same time. This is related to the padding problem. Many bags are so full of padding divider “systems” that they don’t actually have any room inside them for the equipment. The result is a bag that is (say) 14 inches long and 9 inches deep and can still only hold a single body and one extra lens in a way that is actually comfortable to use. As a result, you end up buying a huge bag in order to be able to carry all your stuff to where you are going, but once you get there the bag is too big to actually carry around.

The camera backpacks are the best example of this problem. Almost all of the camera backpacks I’ve looked at make the same basic mistake. They provide you with a single 5 or 6 inch thick layer of closed cell foam compartments in which to put your camera gear and nothing else. Therefore, you end up with a pack on your back that is a constant 7 or 8 inches thick (remember, outside foam too) and yet holds nothing but a camera body and a few lenses.

If you want to take more stuff, you have to buy a bigger pack. But then the bag is much too big to actually wear around when you get where you are going. When I travel in Europe I already have a complex about being a badly dressed fat American. Wearing an expedition-sized backpack around isn’t going to make that better.

You need two bags

I ultimately came to the conclusion that you want to carry two bags, one to get to the location and one to work out of once you are there. Unfortunately, I haven’t worked out which type of bag should fill each role, and I’m still not clear on how to avoid needing to carry both bags on the plane.

I think what I’d really like is a small camera bag that I can stuff into a larger rolling carry-on. Unfortunately, all of my small camera bags had fallen out of favor in the last year when I started to use messenger bags for both cameras and other incidentals. My beloved old Domkes were sitting on the floor of the closet holding the film cameras that I have not yet sold.

This whole exercise had its start because I needed a small bag to take on a trip and my new D200 won’t fit into the smaller Domke bag in which I carried my original one camera and two lens kit. It kind of fits, but it doesn’t really want to go in and out. I looked all over the net and could not find a bag that works as well as the Domke while being only slightly larger. Well, there is actually one. The original slightly larger Domke that I used to for my old film camera and four lenses. The larger body and the bigger zooms don’t go into the old bag quite as well, but it should be usable. And, the bag is very small and light compared to the messenger. I should even be able to stuff it into the rolling carry on bag for the trip over so I don’t have to figure out how to carry on the camera bag, the carry-on bag *and* the computer bag.

So I have come full circle, and I can end all of this by resurrecting my old rule:

If you can’t fit it into a Domke F-6 camera bag, you don’t need to bring it with you.

It has served me well until now. Hopefully it will continue to do so far into the future, now that I’ve given it a new lease on life. I never should have sold that second F-6. On the other hand, it was blue. That’s not a good color for a camera bag.

As a final note, I did find one company that seems to be designing bags that avoid some of the normal stupidity. ThinkTank photo makes a series of products aimed primarily at photojournalists and professionals that seem to be well designed and well made. They don’t seem to be too big, and they seem to be able to hold a lot of equipment. I’m going to try one of their new shoulder bags to see if it handles as well as the Domke. I want to try it because the bags appear to fix my main complaint about the Domke: the shoulder strap is replaceable and more adjustable. My hopes are high but my expectations are low.

Early this week, Tea Leaves’ industrious panel of dedicated tasters converged on Mad Mex in Oakland to try a variety of wonderful tequilas. I’ll be writing about that in detail, in the next few weeks.

In addition to discovering some new favorite tequilas, I got a peek at the best hand-held lime juicer I’ve ever seen. Half of a lemon or lime goes in, you give it a quick squeeze, and the juice just flies out in under a second. “I have to get one of those,” I said. “You like it?” said our host. “Williams-Sonoma. About $15.”

Now I own one. It’s heavy enamel-coated aluminum, is easy to clean, and works like a charm. I am in love. I thought my previous lime juicer was convenient, but I now see that I was a deluded fool.

You might ask “What’s the big deal? How good can a lime juicer possibly be?”

Worth. Every. Penny.

(In answer to some questions I’ve received: that’s half a key lime being juiced, the reason you should care is that this makes making mixed drinks with fresh lime juice infinitely easier, and they also sell a larger juicer “for lemons,” although this one worked just fine on the small lemons I tend to prefer).

I have a weakness for the NBA Street games. I like them because they do not try to simulate basketball, rather, they let you play a type of basketball that is completely ludicrous and unhealthy. I think the series peaked with NBA Street 2, which is still fun to play even today. Hoping to recapture some of that magic, I picked up a used copy of NBA Street: Homecourt at the Exchange the other day to see if it would make it through the Ebay Review System.

The first bad omen was that the Xbox would not read the disk. Luckily, after wiping it a few times with my shirt it seemed to start working again and I haven’t had any trouble since.

Homecourt does not change the nature of the game in any drastic way, but they have tweaked the gameplay and the overall balance a bit. Trick moves have migrated back to the face buttons, where they were in NBA Street 2 and the dunks have gotten even more outrageous. In addition, it’s nearly impossible to score jump shots because everyone in the game can leap 50 feet into the air and grab the ball out of the air just as it enters the hoop. This is perfectly legal, it is not goal-tending.

The two major gameplay changes are the addition of a “double dunk” mechanic and a rebalancing of the Gamebreaker system. Double dunks are fun. The idea is that when you go up for a dunk, you hold the B button down for a while, and in the easier difficulty levels, a meter shows up. If you fill the meter just right, rather than scoring one hoop your player will catch the ball after one dunk and flip up in the air and slam the ball down again, thus scoring two points. This is pretty fun to do. Don’t think about the physics.

The new Gamebreakers are also an improvement. You collect trick points by doing tricks and fancy dunks. When the your trick point meter is full, you can trigger the Gamebreaker and then do some outrageous dancing around and in the end score two or three points while knocking your opponent down by one. The improvement that the new game makes is that while the Gamebreaker is active, the defensive team can still steal the ball and thus collect Gamebreaker points for itself. In the past this was not possible, a GB was basically guaranteed points for the offense. The new system feels more balanced and fun to me.

With the new dunks and the rebalanced Gamebreaker system, I was ready to really enjoy this game. Unfortunately,the game’s difficulty curve is a square wave. On Easy and Medium you can win by 10 points every game just by continually stealing the ball and scoring back on your own side. This is fun for about three days, but then you’d like the game to be just a bit more challenging. Not much, just a bit. Unfortunately, on Hard and Expert, the game is cheap and impossible. All trick moves result in steals for the defense and all dunks are blocked except when the player is completely alone. The harder difficulties also remind you that the controls are actually kind of sloppy and sluggish, which didn’t really matter on Easy, because you barely needed to use them to win. Finally, starting on Hard, the double dunk meter goes away, so you don’t get as many of those moves. This makes the game less fun.

The result of all of this is that after making my custom player and pushing his R up for a few days on the easier levels, I got bored and tried Hard. Then I felt abused and punished. Therefore, the game gets an Ebay rating of 4.5. I’m on the fence about whether to send it into Ebay-land. I want to like the harder difficulties, but I don’t know if I want to spend the time to figure them out.

I guess I should go play more Shivering Isles. At least there I can collect some giant orange mushrooms. Mmmm, mushrooms.

Wine is a funny business. There are plenty of tangible resources that go into producing the bottle of wine that lands on your kitchen table: land, grapes, yeast, glass, and so on. And there are plenty of intangibles that go into making a good wine: knowledge, patience, and most importantly, process. But many people (or at least, many Americans) who buy wine are really trying to buy something else: romance.

This puts the industry in the odd position of trying to protect the public from finding out what really makes great wine. Yes, there are still artesianal wine makers (and home-vintners) for whom the process is messy, uncontrolled, and in the hands of lady luck. But by and large anyone who has managed to get a bottle on a retail shelf (much less get a bottle on a retail shelf on another continent) has done so through, first and foremost, good business practices. That means a devotion to market research and sales, and it means a devotion to careful, scientific, controlled processes in the creation of the product.

At the end of the process, if you have a truly great wine, you put it in a bottle, and then — because you are selling romance, not wine — you screw up your product by sticking a piece of wood in the neck of the bottle. You then ship the wine around the world. Eventually, I buy the wine, by which point the piece of wood you used as a stopper has rotted, and I have paid $30 for an undrinkable bottle of corked wine.

Cork industry advocates claim that only about 1% of all wines sold with natural corks are “corked”. Anyone who buys a lot of wine knows that this is a damnable lie. A study by the Wine Spectator found a much higher rate of 7%, which is more in line with my experience. Of course, your experiences will depend on how much wine you buy, where from, how it is stored, and what vintage. But the paradoxical end of this is: the more expensive the wine you buy is, the greater the likelihood that it is already ruined by the time you purchase it. When I am in the store holding an expensive wine that I’ve never tried before, in the back of my mind is the thought “What happens if I spend $70 on this, and it’s corked?”

People more organized than I might say “Just bring it back to the store!” Fat chance. That might work well enough if you grab the offending bottle on your way out the door to dinner, but if you have even a modest wine cellar, or buy things mail order, the chances that you can do this reliably are slim, and the psychic transaction cost is high.

There is no technical roadblock to reducing the amount of fine wine that is ruined. The solution is clear: stop sticking stupid, rot-prone pieces of wood in the bottle. There are any number of reasonable ways to address the problem. Crown caps or screw caps are the best solution: cheap, easy to use, and they do the job perfectly. The silly synthetic corks work well, too, although I’m not convinced they’re worth the trouble.

I’m well aware that the use of natural corks is not going to stop any time soon. Despite that, I have to point out that by choosing to put a natural cork in your wine, you’re making a clear statement about what you think about your wine, and about the people who drink it: you think they deserve mediocrity.

Maybe if enough people realize that, the natural cork will stop seeming romantic, and will simply be seen for what it is: a shabby artifice.

Having buried myself in the Strobist for the last couple of weeks, I came up for air over the weekend and reflected on what I had learned. First, I learned that buying a lightstand and umbrella can be a bit stressful and complicated. But that’s not important or interesting. What is interesting to me is to compare the techniques at the Strobist with those in the excellent Bob Krist lighting book I read a few years ago. The differences can be summed up in just a few words: digital lets you see the flash.

I don’t know why it took me this long to realize this extremely important and also extremely obvious fact. It’s probably because I spent too much time writing off flash as too hard to previsualize when using film. I never felt like losing frames to my own inability to visualize the effect of flash on a picture, or the TTL flash system getting fooled by some bright reflection.

Metering for flash is different than metering for ambient light. To set exposure for ambient light, you just point the meter at the important part of the picture and twiddle the knobs until the meter says the right thing. With flash, all the light is dumped out into the world in a short, well, flash. You never actually get to look at it. Moreoever, the actual affect of the flash on the picture is primarily determined by four things:

1. The aperture setting on your camera.

2. The power output of the flash.

3. The distance from the flash to the subject being lit.

4. The ISO setting on your camera.

Note that shutter speed means nothing as far as the flash is concerned. The flash turns on and off again long before longer shutter speeds are over. Again, this is more complicated ambient exposure, where all you need to set is aperture and shutter speed (and more recently, the ISO “speed” of the digital sensor). Moreover, ambient light is observable. You can spend all day looking at it and thinking about how it will affect your pictures. Flash is over in a fleeting moment, and in the old days, you wouldn’t find out what you did wrong until the film came back.

The Krist lighting book has a few workarounds for this issue. He carries a flash meter, which perhaps helps a bit with practice. He uses polaroid backs, which seems like a lot of trouble to an enthusiastic amateur. Finally, he’s learned how the light works through years of practice, so he doesn’t have my level of flash anxiety. Krist also describes lighting setups that require huge studio heads, 1500 watt-second power-packs, all packed into multiple heavy rolling cases. It wasn’t hard to decide this was all too much work.

But, as I said above, digital has changed all this. The obvious change is that now you can see the flash. TTL flash giving you fits? Say you are in your living room with that nice 8 or 9 foot ceiling. Set your camera on manual at 1/125th and (say) F5.6 at ISO 100. Set the flash on any old power setting, point it at the ceiling and pop a picture. Look at the screen. Overexposed? Dial the flash down or close the aperture. Underexposed? Open the aperture up. Already wide open? Crank up the ISO. Presto. You have now set the perfect flash exposure for everything in the room in front of you. If you want to change the ratio of ambient to flash, you can do so by manipulating the flash power and the shutter speed. Longer shutter speeds will bring in more of the ambient. More flash power will bring in more flash. Turn the dials, pop a test, look at the screen.

In the old pre-digital days, you could do this kind of thing with a flash meter and polaroids, but it would be too time consuming and tedious for the average user. Thus, the major camera makers put more and more automatic exposure schemes into their flash systems. For me, the be-all and end-all of this evolution is the Nikon i-TTL and CLS system which combines smart metering with wireless triggering that lets me easily hold the flash off the camera. What the Strobist helped me realize is that with my magic digital box, all I really care about is the wireless trigger. I spent the whole weekend at a friend’s house with my fancy TTL flash set on manual at 1/8th power, happily flashing the room over and over again, every picture exposed perfectly. For relatively static setups and subjects that never get too far away from the lights, you just can’t beat this way of working.

The other change that digital has brought upon the world is more subtle. With a modern digital camera and a good exposure, you can take a picture at ISO 800 and print it big. Hell, even my ancient D100 could make a stunning 12×18 print at ISO 640. This simply was not possible back when slide film ruled the book and magazine industries. If you look at the pictures in Krist’s book, almost all of them are on ISO 64 or iSO 100 film. The few exceptions are the ones where he used Velvia, at ISO 50. If you look at a lot of the examples at the Strobist, he’s working at a minimum of ISO 400, and more often than not he’s up around 640 or 800. That’s two or three stops more speed, which means you can get by with four or eight times less light. This is a big deal.

My buddy’s living room from this weekend was about 20 feet long by 15 feet wide. With my camera set at ISO 400 or 800, my dinky SB-600 flash can light most of the room bounced off the ceiling or a wall with power to spare. At ISO 50 or 100, I’d drain the flash for every shot and the back of the room would be dark. In other words, the high ISO performance of the camera allows me to get good flash shots in a pretty big space. It worked well enough that what it made me want to do is get a second light so I could play around with different angles and fill the shadows a bit.

So, of course, I went out and bought a light stand and some other stuff. It’s always good when your hobbies lead to commerce.

Anyway, here’s what to remember: your digital camera lets you see the flash, giving you ultimate control. Your digital camera also lets you use small lights where you used to need big lights. This purely technical advance probably has more potential than any other for getting you better pictures. But you don’t need me to tell you that. The success of the Strobist speaks for itself.

are wine reviewers. Imagine if game reviewers wrote game reviews the way that thesaurus addled hack Robert Parker reviews wine:

Shadow of the Colossus has a certain je ne sais quoi in its coding, a whiff of east-coast style that reveals that this Japanese game’s native terroir is really Bell Labs. The structure is simple, yet baroque, not unlike the original sed, or awk. Redolent of Gosling Emacs and perhaps even a note of Crowther Adventure, the color palette is subdued, yet puckish. There are simply gobs of Mario lurking in the jumping parts of the game, with a subtle undertone of Zelda and a rich base of Devil May Cry pathos underlying it, which anticipates its heady, yet stolid conclusion. 87 points.

Of course, the flip side of this coin is: what if wine reviewers reviewed wine the way game reviewers review games.

Domain De Villeneuve 2007: OH. MY. GOD. Everything about this wine is improved from last year; it makes the previous 32 outings look like complete garbage. Everything from the fine graphical detail on the label to the quality of the cork has improved. The wine itself was OK, and suffered from a few minor tannin glitches, but the producer indicates that this is because we had a “pre-release” bottle, and those glitches will be ironed out by release time. With those problems fixed, this is the best wine we’ve ever tasted. Better pre-order your bottle now, because this is going to fly off the shelves! An instant classic! Wine of the Year! FIVE STARS.

…

Hmmm.

OK, so maybe the wine reviewers aren’t actually all that much worse.

Never mind.

Dear NPR:

It’s 18 months before the election. Only a true mental cripple would actually have more than a microscopic level of interest in what is going on in the Presidential “race”. And yet you find it necessary to waste literally hours of your expensive broadcast time “covering” this story which does not exist yet, analyzing events that have not happened, and “predicting” results that, given your complete lack of meaningful data, have no possible link to any future reality.

Please stop it. I’m begging you.

Pete

I mentioned it as a one-off joke in an earlier article: “Oh, yes, there’s this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas — you really should go, dahling…”

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t kidding. That bar really exists. You should go there and drink sweet vermouth. But if you can’t go there, you should drink sweet vermouth anyway.

Vermouth, at least here in the States, is the black sheep of the bar. Everyone has had it at one point or another, typically in a Martini. Incidentally, can I say how irritated I am by the euphemism “very dry Martini”? If you’ve gotten to the point where you just want to drink a big glass of gin, then just order a big glass of gin and spare us the jargon (footnote 1). I would be willing to bet that 95% of the vermouth bought in the US is used solely in Martinis and Manhattans. And so, relegated by thuggish snobs to the ignoble role of “just a mixer,” I daresay that most people would never think of drinking it on its own. Which really is a shame, because it’s a wonderful drink.

For drinking straight up, I prefer the sweet variety. I usually drink it neat, but occasionally will cut it with a little soda water, which opens it up nicely and makes it a great aperitif. It has a spicy, sharp aroma, but the taste itself is quite round and woody. It’s closer to wine than to a spirit. Some people favor other wine-like or wine-based aperitifs (such as Lillet, which to me has never been anything other than vermouth tarted up in a frock), but for my money, it’s hard to beat a good vermouth.

And it goes great with green olives and anchovies. Mmmmmmmm.

Random link: because I love robots, I also love The Mixilator. It has yet to give me a cocktail that I can actually make — by sheer coincidence, I’m all out of loganberry juice, mandarin liqueur, pastis, and peach bitters, can you believe it? — but I still love the idea.

Footnote 1: Let me be perfectly clear: there’s nothing wrong with wanting to drink a big glass of gin. I just don’t want to have to listen to you try and be all cutesy about it.