Tea Leaves

Being something of a tea snob, I’ve always been fascinated by the over the counter supermarket tea market, where companies like Celestial Seasonings can sell exactly the same junk product as Lipton but, through the power of a nice box design and some flavor text, command a huge premium in price.

Today it struck me: this is how I will get rich. I will market low quality teas in fine packaging. They will all have names that are sort of vaguely sexually suggestive without being actually crude. The mad cash will roll in.

I mentioned this scheme to some friends of mine, and one thing led to another and, well — I bet you know what’s coming next.

TOP FIFTEEN VAGUELY SEXUALLY SUGGESTIVE TEA NAMES

15. Morning Afterglow (peterb)

14. Afternoon Delight (peterb)

13. Hot and Bothered (rlink)

12. Rooibush (fpereira)

11. Keemun-a-my-house (peterb)

10. Sweet Caress (clamen)

9. Evening Repose (peterb)

8. Carpe Noctem (peterb)

7. Assam (sdavis)

6. Pearl Gray (fpereira)

5. Sensual-cha (psu)

4. Rose Hips (bhudson)

3. You-n-ann (bhudson)

2. Ginger Honey (bhudson)

1. Monk’s Blend (bhudson)

…or “Good software is worth paying full price for.”

Around this time last year a package of products was marketed and sold to the Mac community under the name “MacHeist.” From a purely consumer-centric point of view, the package represented good value for money: a number of excellent apps for a bargain-basement price. What was a little bit irritating to me (and to others, such as John Gruber) was that the package was marketed as being half a celebration of indie mac development and half a charitable enterprise, when in reality the promoters raked in the mad cash for themselves, to the tune of (according to Gruber) around a half-million bucks.

Fast forward to this year. MacHeist 2 is being planned, and a number of notable Mac sites have seemingly been “hacked” by someone allegedly calling themselves “malcor”. In actuality, it was a publicity stunt pulled by the MacHeist impresarios and their cronies. In the course of the stunt they maligned, explicitly or implicitly, a number of hosting companies as well as a number of software packages (perhaps most notably WordPress). The reaction from the community has been fairly negative, but the attitude of some of those participating in the hoax seems to be that they’re really, really sorry that they got caught. From a purely personal standpoint, I suppose I should be glad about this: there are simply too many mac-focused news sites to read them all. Now I know which ones to avoid.

I don’t seem to be alone in reaching this conclusion, either. I think it’s nice to have a demonstration so stark that it goes beyond “stop reading some websites, but that others are realizing that MacHeist is something they don’t want to be associated with either.

I’m against MacHeist philosophically. Not simply because the people who organize it arranged such a sophomoric publicity stunt, but because it’s bad business and bad for the Mac community.

TextMate is worth 39 euros. I don’t have to purchase it as part of a bundle; I don’t want to purchase it as part of a bundle. I want Allen Odgaard to get the cash, not some somewhat tawdry web 1.5 promoter preying on the naivete of independent software developers.

If you’re a developer, and you’re thinking of participating in this year’s Heist, I urge you to stop and think twice. It’s (of course) your right to sign any contract you want to, but consider two issues. First, what are you saying about the value of your product by giving the revenue to someone else? If the issue is that you’re having trouble marketing the product, pay a marketing guy to help you out. Second, there’s more than revenue to consider, but your own name and goodwill, which in the long term is worth more than any one product. Do you want to associate that name with people whose judgment is this poor? There’s an old but wise saying:

Lay down with dogs, and you’ll wake up with fleas.

You can make your bed wherever you like, but from this user’s pesrpective, MacHeist is a kennel.

My experiments with homemade grenadine have paid off. First, let’s talk about how I did it, then let’s talk about what to do with it.

With this batch, I started with a fresh pomegranate, because I happened to have one. Having tasted it side by side with the POM brand juice, I feel confident in saying: there’s absolutely no difference, just use the bottled juice. It’s less work, and it will taste exactly the same. (Sometime last year I bought a bottle of R.W. Knudsen “Just Pomegranate” juice, and it tasted like iron filings and moldy socks, utterly vile and unforgivably rancid. I suppose it’s possible that I just got a bad bottle, but I’m not inclined to repeat the experiment. If there are any R.W. Knudsen advocates out there willing to do a side-by-side taste test with POM, I’d love to hear your results.)

In a saucepan, over medium heat, mix one cup of pomegranate juice with one cup sugar. Stir. Heat until your trusty probe thermometer reads 230 degrees F. Remove from heat and cool, then transfer to a clean bottle for storage.

The taste is incomparably better than the “mix fresh juice with sugar and shake” version that some recommend — deeper, richer, and more interesting. Heated to 230 you will end up with a syrup a bit thicker than Rose’s, so some stirring will be required to incorporate it in whatever drinks you make.

I found that once I made it, it turned into a useful general kitchen adjunct. It matches pork and chicken very well, and I have plans afoot to make Chinese-style spare ribs using grenadine as part of the marinade. It’s fruity, yet not immediately identifiable.

But the primary reason one has grenadine is for drinks. So let’s review two possibilities.

The first thing I tried, straight out of the Stomping through the Savoy thread, was the Belmont Cocktail: 1/3 grenadine, 2/3 dry gin, 1 teaspoon of cream, shaken vigorously with ice. I expected this to be utterly vile, and to my surprise it was not. Neither, however, was it awesome: the gin just doesn’t mesh with the grenadine (and, truth to tell, I don’t love gin). So instead, I will present to you the Belmont’s Cuban cousin:

Bonitamonte Cocktail

2/3 gold rum
1/3 homemade grenadine
1 teaspoon cream

Shake over ice, serve in a jelly jar.

It’s a complete girly drink, but it’s quite nice.

This grenadine works well in almost any drink that calls for sugar or simple syrup. With that in mind, let me present another alternative, perhaps a bit less girly:

Persephone’s Old Fashioned

4 cl Rye whiskey
1 cl homemade grenadine (or less, to taste)
2 dashes angostura bitters
1 dash Fee’s orange bitters

Serve on the rocks.

Enjoy!

Today I installed Leopard on my home laptop. As usual, installing a new version of the OS broke the Xemacs build I keep around for the one thing I do with Emacs. Normally I have the fortitude to get it working again, but not tonight. In a final step away from the brain damage of Emacs as a tool to use every day, I deleted the install and will not bring it back. It turns out that for what I needed to do, I don’t really need to carry Emacs around with me anyway. So it’s gone.

Note: yes I know that there is a built-in version of GNU Emacs in Leopard. For reasons that are too painful and stupid to go into, it really isn’t usable for this particular application.

I originally planned to pick up The Orange Box on the strength of the Team Fortress 2 trailer videos. Here was a multiplayer game with some character, I thought. I was excited about it. The people who play games for me played a lot of the beta and seemed to love it, but then they all ended up playing the multiplayer on Steam instead of the Xbox, and then my Xbox melted. No Team Fortress for me.

Then a surprise happened. They all told me to play Portal. So when my Xbox came back I picked up the whole Orange Box to see what the fuss was about.

Note: Spoilers ahead. There are spoilers ahead, so if you have not played the game, go do that first then come back. It won’t take long.

For those who don’t know, The Orange Box is a collection of five games. I will now unfairly review each of the games, even though I have not played all of them yet:

1. Half-Life 2. Played this on the Xbox 1. In retrospect, it had a great opening but my memories of the middle and late acts are now tainted with boredom. Too many physics puzzles, not enough shooting. The new version is just like the old one, right down to where all the level loads happen, but with higher resolution textures.

2. Half-Life 2, episode 1. In Valve’s crack-baby lingo, this is the first part of a sequence of sequels to Half-Life 2, not the first part of a remake or a prequel or something. I don’t think anyone understands it. So far it’s more of the same: too many physics puzzles, not enough good shooting. Here’s a hint to all future game developers: those levels where all you can see is what the flashlight shows you and you need to shoot a lot of zombies are not fun, they suck. Stop it.

3. Half-Life 2, episode 2. The second part of the not-prequel. Haven’t started it yet. I assume it’s just like episode 1, only more so.

4. Team Fortress. I played a few games with randoms. And they sucked. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a group together soon. The whole problem with multiplayer games is you need multiple players who are not douchebags to make them good. This seems to me to be a major design flaw.

Which brings me to Portal.

Everything Pete said about Portal is correct and I agree with it all. It is one of the few games I’ve played that wins on every dimension. The core mechanic is fun. The level design is stellar. The pacing is perfect. But my favorite part of the game is none of these things. The best part of the game is how the writing and the game actually work together instead of against each other. The game helps the writing by being short. Because the game is short, the narrative can actually fill the whole game rather than only about twenty percent of it. There are no long tedious slogs through endless collection quests to get to the next clichéd plot point.

Let me repeat for emphasis: short games are good for narrative. They allow you to actually tell an interesting story and get to the end of it before I grow tired of your repetitive combat, your boring A.I., your tedious quest structure and your frustrating bosses. Portal is one of the few games whose story elements are not completely crippled by the archaic notion that the only way to measure gaming “value” is in the wall-clock time required to finish the game.

Predictably the main complaint that the “gaming press” has levelled against Portal is that it is too short. These people are stupid. Don’t listen to them. Portal is the perfect length, unlike this article, which is too long.

The writing in Portal helps the game in several ways. First, it is not about you. Second, it is not about the larger world around you. Third, it is absolutely fantastic, and fantastically presented. Like the length of the game, the writing is tightly constrained. It is also primarily focussed on one character: your tormentor, GLaDOS. She is the computer that controls the “training facility” that you are trapped in. As you play through the levels, a brilliant series of voice-only interludes and a few subtle visual clues make it clear that GLaDOS is insane.

Focusing the main story arc on GLaDOS instead of the player frees the gameplay from having to fit the narrative. That is, it allows the narrative and the gameplay to be independent while still progressing at the same rate. With the exception of a few events that happen on timers the game allows you to work through the levels at whatever speed you see fit. But your pace does not effect the pacing of the story. The little snippets of dialog in each level slowly flesh out psychosis of the main character as you finish each of the challenges. Instead of feeling awkward and strange, it feels just right. Thus, the player to figures out the game and the game’s main character at the same time. It is rare that a video game manages to integrate narrative with gameplay progression this smoothly.

By the end of the game, it’s clear that your task is not to escape each of the puzzle levels, but to escape, period. Even the final boss sequence (which was a nice boss fight, by the way) adds a few more humorous touches to the development of the main character. Frosting on the cake, if you will.

All of this combined together turns Portal into the best five or six hours of gaming awesome that I have experienced since the first five or six hours of Bioshock. And the best part about it was that it was not followed by 14 hours of relative tedium.

Out of the five experiences available in the Orange Box, Portal is clearly the one carrying the show. I hope developers all over the earth study the lessons of Portal well and learn to give us more of these tight, concentrated experiences. That will be a great reason to have a party. With some cake.

I don’t have a lot of time for games.

This may seem strange, given how much I write about them, but the fact is that I work a day job, and have a social life, and games basically fit a slim slice of time between the time I’m done with everything else – usually around 10:30 or 11 pm – and the time I go to bed.

That has some interesting consequences. First, it means I tend to dream about whatever game I was last playing (perhaps this is why I was so hard on Persona 3). Second, it means that to a fairly good approximation, I can estimate how good a game is by how late I stay up.

An average game will keep me up until around midnight. A game that is particularly well executed, such as Bioshock, can stretch that until 12:30 or 12:45. If a game is well executed and it’s a type of game I’m obsessed with, such as Fire Emblem, I might push that until 1 am or so.

On Friday night, I played Portal until 4:30 in the morning, and dreamed of blue and orange holes in space until morning.

Portal

Portal is a game for the PC or Xbox 360, most easily purchased as part of a package deal in the so-called “Orange Box”. To be frank, I haven’t the slightest bit of interest in playing Half-Life 2 at this point, and I only fired up Team Fortress 2, the other game in the Orange Box once. Portal is worth more than all of the other games in the package combined. I played the Xbox 360 version, because it lets me play from the couch.

At first glance Portal looks like a first person shooter, but in reality it is a puzzle game. It’s nothing like Halo or Half Life. Instead, it’s more similar to Sokoban or Chromatron, or perhaps even Ico.

I won’t go into painful detail on the mechanics, but a brief summary is appropriate. The objective of Portal is to escape each level, as part of an experiment (think “rat” and “maze”). To accomplish this, you are given a gun that can shoot two types of holes onto walls, ceilings, and floors: orange and blue. When an orange and a blue hole are placed, they are connected. If you shoot an orange hole in the ceiling, and then shoot a blue hole into the wall, and then walk through the blue hole, you will fall out of the orange hole in the ceiling. The game’s trailer does a good job of demonstrating how the mechanic works.

When Portal is at its best, which is always, it keeps you engaged by simultaneously leading you by the hand and silently stroking your ego. It accomplishes this through what can only be described as inspired and thoughtful industrial design. The game always gives you subtle visual cues that help you figure out the puzzles in a natural, organic way. They are so subtle, you may not even notice them consciously if you’re not focusing on them. The result is that after you solve a particularly tough puzzle, you experience not just the thrill of victory, but also the feeling that you are a genius, and probably the first person to ever figure out this brilliant solution.

That’s the magic of thoughtful design. Forget about the mechanic of placing portals; I can think of a thousand ways to design a game using that mechanic that would be unplayably bad. What makes Portal work isn’t the core game mechanic, but the time and effort that went into crafting and balancing the game.

Design is one element of Portal’s success. The other element is pacing. The game draws you in so gradually and steadily that there is hardly ever a moment that you wish something else would happen (compare this to the dreadful post-Ryan slog in Bioshock, where I was mostly wishing that the game would just end already).

There are some who complain that the game is too short, and that if only it had offered, say, 10 hours of “gameplay” instead of 4, it would be “better”. There are a couple of problems with this argument. First, it implicitly assumes that players play games like game reviewers do. I easily spent 6 hours on the main Portal game, because I was lingering and trying different strategies. It also ignores the copious bonus content in the game – fascinating developer commentaries, bonus challenges, and advanced levels.

But let’s factor all of that out. Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that Portal only offers 4 hours of gameplay. The analogous culinary argument would be “I didn’t enjoy eating this piece of $10 cake because I could have eaten $10 worth of twinkies instead, which would have had more biomass and been more filling.” Even though the twinkies wouldn’t have been as good. And would have made you feel sick. Portal’s pacing is, in my opinion, just about perfect: had they tried to stretch the main game any further, it would have been at the price of making the midgame either more boring, or less carefully balanced. The developer commentaries make clear exactly how much tuning, based on user feedback, was needed to make the game as polished as it is. I would not trade away any of that polish for even an extra 5 minutes of gameplay. The polish is the game.

If I haven’t talked about the plot of Portal proper, including the absolutely stunning voiceover work, it’s because there is nothing to say other than it is a triumph. But you’ll discover that for yourself within 5 minutes of starting the game. The writers clearly had fun creating the script, and you’ll have fun hearing it.

Portal is interesting, fun for both sophisticated and naive players, and superbly polished. It is, at the moment, the best reason to own an Xbox 360 or gaming PC, or to have a Boot Camp partition on your Mac. I can only presume that the team that created such a well crafted game is going to do great things in the future.

I can’t wait.

I recently played the first eleven missions of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Nintendo Wii.

This breaks something of a tradition for me. I recently played the first ten missions of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Gamecube. Last year I played ten missions (each) of Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the Gameboy Advance. I abandoned all of those games after ten missions.

Why only ten missions?

Because – with the exception of the new Radiant Dawn game – the Fire Emblem games are a great example of games written by small-minded people who hate humanity, because they have completely punishing and broken save point systems. After 10 missions, the games got hard enough that I had to interact with the broken save system. So I stopped playing.

The Fire Emblem games are turn-based strategy wargames. They’re developed by the same house that creates the superb (and life affirming) Advance Wars series, and shares some similarities in that franchise. There’s a central difference, however. In Advance Wars the loss of a unit is not game-killing. It’s expected that units will suffer some attrition, and that you will build replacements. In Fire Emblem the members of your army have some individuality and character. That’s good. And in Fire Emblem, death is permanent. If one of your favorite characters dies, you will have to finish the game without him. At least, that’s how the system is usually described. I prefer to describe it a bit more accurately:

“If a character in Fire Emblem is killed, the player is forced to reset their console and replay the entire mission from scratch until she or he can complete it without getting a character killed.”

Reggie Fils-Aime

There are some people who will insist that I am overstating the case, that no one is forcing players to reset their games, and perhaps there are some players in various halfway houses, mental institutions, and bondage clubs that like to continue playing after their favorite Myrmidon has been slaughtered. These people are lying. I recently spoke to Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime, and he confirmed for me that Nintendo research shows that no one, anywhere on the entire planet, has ever continued a game of Fire Emblem after losing a favored character. (See footnote 1)

Since Fire Emblem missions tend to have bosses, and since the bosses are inevitably at the end of a map, the common failure mode for the older game is that you have been playing a mission for an entire hour, and lose a character in the last 2 minutes of a battle. So if you want to keep playing, you have to go back and replay the entire hour-long battle.

This mechanic is game-breaking because it harshly punishes the player for even the most modest experimentation. For me, the interesting part of a wargame is trying out different strategies. Previous Fire Emblem games made that so painful to bear. How painful? So painful that, after buying the Fire Emblem GBA game on eBay, I put it on my shelf and instead played the game on an emulator so that I could use the instant save/restore features in the emulator to work around the game’s pointless cruelty.

Which brings us to Radiant Dawn, which improves the situation substantially by allowing you to save the game at any time during a battle. There are still some restrictions placed on this. While you have a number of save game slots, you only have a single “quicksave” slot that can be used during a battle. You can save after every move, if you like, but you can’t keep a whole library of saves going back to the first turn. In other words, you can still hose yourself, but the situation is much improved: experimenting is at least possible

At this point it would be traditional to talk about how much improved the graphics in Radiant Dawn are, but let’s face it: this is the exact same game that they’ve been making for 20 years, and if you’re playing it it’s because you enjoy solving tactical puzzles, not because you want to admire lighting effects. So let’s just take all that as read and cut to the chase: finally, Intelligent Systems has made a Fire Emblem game that I can play more than 10 missions of. Maybe this will let psu play more than 10 turns too

It’s about damn time.

Footnote 1: I didn’t actually speak to Reggie Fils-Aime. I completely made that up. But it turns out it’s still true.

Spend any time on the Interwebs these days and you will inevitably end up reading one kind of forum or another. These days there seems to be one of these for every normal human interest and probably the interests that aren’t all that normal. I have two observations to make about these forums, one short and one long.

First, for some reason, they all use the same sort of shitty PHP forum software. What’s up with this software anyway? Readers old enough to remember the original USENET will also remember a terminal-based message reader called “trn” which, while primitive did three basic things that all of these shitty forums do not:

(a) Keep track of what I have read and only show me new messages.
(2) Organize the messages into a nice threaded tree of messages and replies.
(c) Let me edit my own messages in an interface that does not blow.

Almost 20 years of web forums and almost none of them do even one of these things correctly. Let’s hear it for the march of technology.

Second, for the most part, they are populated by the same types of people.

Here then is my humble and no doubt incomplete taxonomy.

Smugly Superior

This guy is smarter than you, better read than you, knows more about food than you, and in general is just better than you in every way. Most importantly, he has better taste than you. Just ask him. He will pontificate in the most pompous and self-important way about any subject while at the same time steering the subject of the conversation to why his sense of taste is refined and erudite while your preferences are no better than the drunk homeless guy lying near that sewer grate across the street.

Douchebag

Very common in the forums, but is really native to the Xbox Live service. Never has anything interesting to say, but does have a large catalog of racial slurs, sexist attacks and generally just mean things to say. Would call his own mother a gay useless n00b without a clue about life if it would make him feel more like a man on the Internet.

Mr. Can’t Let Go

Here is the conversation that you will regularly have with this guy:

You: I like marbles.
MCLG: No way man, oranges!
You: What do oranges have to do with marbles?
MCLG: No way man! ORANGES
You: Ok. You win.
MCLG: NO WAY MAN, ORANGES!!

You get the idea. This guy is so on message that he can’t tell when people have given up listening to him anymore.

Too Much Information Guy

Posts to Internet forums for dating advice, or legal advice involving his divorce, or to rail against his idiot co-workers, or to come out as a moonlighting prostitute. You get the idea.

Knows it All

This person’s entire self-worth is tied up in a single activity: correcting factual errors, no matter how small, in any forum post on the entire planet. You used to need a fantastically huge library and a good memory to be able to do this, but these days all you really need is google.

Reflexive Contrarian

Constructs all of his opinions by simply reversing whatever the current consensus is. If the majority of people decided that the sun comes up every day, this guy would decide to be against that position just so he could avoid being lumped into the “mass market” bucket of dweebs and morons.

The Persecuted Idiot

Finally, the true inspiration for this catalog and the probably the single most common driving personality in your average active forum. Everyone is against this person. No matter what the subject, any discussion with him will eventually turn into an argument over how many times he has been abused, attacked, mischaracterized, patronized, misunderstood and in general, well, just persecuted.

The problem is that the guy will consistently make indefensible statements and then dig himself into a trench and defend them against all comers until the heat death of the universe. Of course, this just adds to his persecution complex.

Usually this person mixes parts of all the other personalities in the list into his overall “forum persona”. God help you if you get two of these guys at once talking to each other. I’m fairly sure that the known physical laws cannot yet model what would happen to the Internet if this happened.

Hopefully this guide will help you in your interactions with the various personalities in the Internet forums. It can get ugly, so be careful out there.

So I have been following, with a mixture of horror and admiration, a thread on a certain internet forum called Stomping Through the Savoy. The Savoy in question is The Savoy Cocktail Book, a fascinating manual full of cocktails from the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London. The most interesting aspect of these drinks is that they are all, without exception, utterly undrinkable garbage.

OK, OK, I am exaggerating. There are a few good drinks in there, but many of them are perfectly horrid. The interesting part, for me, is reading the thread’s protagonist explain how he makes the cocktails, many of which have outdated or hard to get ingredients. One of the items that keeps coming up is “homemade grenadine.”

I’d picked up a bottle of Rose’s grenadine recently, and made the mistake of not looking at it closely until I got home, at which point I realized I had paid for a mixer made with corn syrup, which I won’t serve to people I like. So the idea of homemade grenadine appealed to me.

Grenadine is named after the French word for pomegranate, which is “grenade” (the explosive, needless to say, was named after the fruit, not vice-versa). Paleolithic grenadines were simply pomegranate juice and sugar, made into a syrup.

There are, essentially, two schools of thought in making grenadine at home. The first school recommends combining pomegranate juice and sugar, and then reducing on the stove until it is a syrup. The second school thinks that the first school has a little too much time on their hands, and instead recommends just mixing pomegranate juice with sugar, shaking really hard, and then calling it a day, preferably with a stiff drink. Some recipes call for a touch of lemon juice, as well. There are tradeoffs, allegedly, to each version: the cooked version has a deeper color and a more complex flavor, while the cold version tastes fresher and more fruity.

So of course, I tried to make both.

Now, I say “tried” because I have this problem. I fancy myself a pretty good cook and an adequate baker. I can make great bread from scratch. I understand eggs, and can make an awesome custard without breaking a sweat. I know how to not overcook fish, and meat. But I’ve never, never, never been able to get the hang of sugar. Sugar eludes me.

Which is why when I tried to cook down the grenadine into a nice syrup, I overshot and ended up with soft ball pomegranate candy.

The taste is actually pretty fabulous: my co-conspirator and I sat there tasting and retasting it, trying to pin down why exactly we were both convinced we had tasted this precise flavor before. We eventually decided that the taste evoked the old Smith Brothers soft cherry cough drop. Deep, almost musty, and not at all cloying.

It was pretty good. Not usable in mixing drinks, mind you, but I do still have the “cold” grenadine for that, which seems to serve nicely (and, between you and me, was a lot less trouble).

Now I have a bottle of soft-ball pomegranate candy in my refrigerator. Which brings up the question: what interesting things can I do with it?

After better than ten years of happily avoiding the home espresso problem I finally gave in last week and bought a fancy home espresso maker. Unsurprisingly, I did not go into this with a great deal of enthusiasm, and I have to say that I am surprised at the general quality of the shots that the new device is providing even at my relatively novice level of practice. As usual, many lessons were learned in the process.

The first lesson is about long term risk in the International Currency Markets. It turns out I should have bought this machine four years ago before the U.S. Dollar was completely in the toilet. The machine would have sat in my closet, but I’d have paid $200 less for it. This was actually the main reason I did not get the ISO Standard technical dork home espresso machine: the Silvia. At $400 or $500, the Silvia is a nice machine and, depending on how you feel about these things, not too extravagant. But $600 or more is a bit much.

After doing a bit of geek research, I decided on the Gaggia Classic instead. It’s a bit cheaper, will not steam as much milk, and is reputed to be more forgiving of marginal coffee than the Silvia. Right after ordering it, my wife committed the single unforgivable consumer sin: she asked about other equipment after the purchase had been made. This lead to the second lesson: you can always be higher ended.

The good and knowledgeable friend that Karen asked gave us contact information to a local merchant that sold Silvia machines and other fancier equipment. We called them up and had a nice conversation that proved to be very educational. Apparently, a $500 espresso machine is good “for what it is”, but eventually they break and then people go to this local dealer and buy $1500 machines. Well, some people do. The one fact that remains constant in all dork-driven consumerism is that there is always someone more willing than you to part with cash for perceived quality. This is not, of course, to say that spending $500 on a coffee machine is particularly rational. It’s just to say that in my current state of mind, $1500 is definitely outside the bounds of possibility, for now.

That being said, certain things about the Gaggia could eventually push me over that mental ledge into terminal stupidity. As I said before, the machine seems to take just about anything I give it, within reason, and turn out great shots of espresso. It’s everything else about the machine that is a bit marginal.

Mainly, it seems like you are always waiting for the machine to either heat up or cool down. Turn the machine on, wait for it to warm up. Pull a shot, turn the machine to steam, wait for it to heat up more. Turn it back to brew, now wait for it to cool off. Thankfully, the boiler on the thing is small so I don’t wait as long as I might have to on other machines. The smaller boiler limits how much milk to can froth, but I don’t like or need a lot of milk in my cappuccinos, so this doesn’t bug me. The steaming wand on the machine does bug me though. It’s too short, hard to work with, and has this stupid plastic super-frotho-helpo device that is ugly and cheap looking on a machine that costs this much money. At this price level, looks count for a lot. I’m living with it for now, but this is the only misfeature on this machine that makes me look longingly at the Silvia for “only” $100 more.

Anyway, the constant waiting also bugs me. Which is lesson three. For good coffee, you have to be patient. It takes time to figure out how fine to grind the coffee and how hard to tamp it. It takes time for the machine to get itself into the right state. And it takes time to learn how to steam milk, of all things. Luckily, when it all comes together you get a nice cup of coffee and you get to hear that cool milk steaming whine in your own house from time to time.

In any case, except for the retarded steaming attachment, I can happily recommend the Gaggia for someone who has decided that they want the $500 home espresso experience. Be careful with the frother though. If you put it on wrong, it can blow off the arm and throw hot milk everywhere. That’s lesson four. Also, there are two water intake tubes, and if you misplace one, you get mysterious cold water all over your counter. That’s lesson five.

I’m gonna go have a coffee now.

TellTale has released the demo for the first game in Season 2 of their Sam and Max adventure games: Ice Station Santa. A full review will be forthcoming, but let me just say this: if you own a PC that you play games on you must buy Sam and Max. It is more than just a good idea. It is a moral imperative.

Finally, one of the videos we’ve been planning for a while is put to bed. Please enjoy our demonstration of why martini glasses are stupid (video after the break).

As always, higher-quality versions of the video can be found here at .mac. I showed this to bbum and his first entirely correct comment was “You didn’t break the glass!” I actually had that in the script, but due to the location that proved infeasible. Maybe I’ll do a sequel.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out, with the exception of the sound quality. I have mentally budgeted for the necessary equipment to make our soundtracks much better, but it’s hard to bring myself to pull the trigger. Therefore, this might be a good time to remind everyone who enjoys these videos that if you want to support them and help us improve the quality, please visit our sponsors. It’s a lot easier to drop $400 on audio equipment if I know it won’t have to be paid for entirely out of my own pocket.

Enjoy!

Tonight we begin with a couple of different links. First, I have to give a shout out to Yahtzee, that writer of flash-based animated video game reviews who brings a heretofore almost unheard of level of bitterness to the game. The target of his ire this week is close to my heart since he takes Zelda and literally skewers the game headfirst on a pike.

As Mr. Yahtzee says, if any other developer (except perhaps Valve) spent their days repackaging their “IP” the way Nintendo does they’d be taken to task by an almost uncountable number of interweb forum dorks for being no better for “the industry” than that decrepit punch toy of the gaming forum bully: EA. And yet it doesn’t happen. Every new Zelda game is hailed as the next in a series of nearly orgasmic experience of sheer pure Nintendo gaming bliss. A while back, Gamespot tried to call the most recent Wii Zelda a little bit stale and the site was nearly destroyed by the fanboy backlash. I have no love for Gamespot, but surely everyone can see that they were right about this one.

Anyway, as the subject of repackaged classic games rolled around in my head, I remembered that it came up on the latest Gamers with Jobs podcast. Here they read an email about how frustrating it can be to play older PC games on a modern PC with a modern version of Windows. As these things go, they were soon talking about whether old games should be remade or repackaged to be more playable on the new hardware. As usual, the GWJ people, like most gamers, I think, would rather developers concentrate on the new. We are often taught to think that variety and novelty are the engines that drive the video game development industry. But I disagree. There is evidence all around us that while the work may not be the most glorious, there are genuine opportunities to be had in concentrating on the old.

Consider that the current darling of the gaming industry, Nintendo, aside from a few clever hardware hacks and novel control schemes has basically weathered two console cycles and is looking to kick unholy ass in a third while basically coasting on a nearly unchanged set of core franchises that allow them to build games just by pouring new content into existing templates.

Consider that even those novelty-loving scamps at Gamers With Jobs who themselves admit to being high falutin’ gaming snobs are all completely in love with GameTap, a service that allows them to play old games without hassle.

Consider how much money Square has made by remaking every Final Fantasy game 12 times. Because they did this I get to play the first ten missions of Final Fantasy Tactics on my PSP on the road. How great is that?

I think people like playing their favorite games over and over again. They get attached to the mechanics and the little rushes of satisfaction that the familiar brings. After all, why would you play WoW if you didn’t like repetition? Also, while the history of video games is short, not everyone has been in on the whole timeline. Therefore, there is a lot of utility in bringing older classic games up to the modern platforms where they can be enjoyed again by literally thousands of new addicts, er, fans, who missed out the first time and don’t want to go digging up a lot of hardware by buying it from peterb’s basement.

Therefore, I have to say that I am fine with people making old games again. After all, one of the best games of this year, Bioshock, is arguably a remake. If the work is done with the love of the original as a first priority and it is done by people who are talented and competent enough to do a good job, I see no problem with it at all. After all, there is no difference to me between a new game and an old game I never played before. As long as they are both good.

The problem with having (and writing about) diverse interests is that it’s too easy to get behind the 8-ball and build up a pile of article concepts but not actually have the time to execute them. This is where I find myself today. To buy myself time, let me share what I’m currently planning on getting written and/or filmed this month.

• Why I Hate Martini Glasses (video)
• Why You Should Make Your Own Goddamned Maraschino Cherries Instead Of Eating Those Disgusting Things Comma You idiot
• My Manhattan (video)
• Liquor Producers Who Make Bottles Bigger Than My Shelf Should Be Beaten With Sticks
• Bloody Mary
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn review, a.k.a. “Why I Only Ever Play The First Ten Missions in Every Fire Emblem Game”
• Casual games: Wedding Dash and Amazing Adventures: The Lost Tomb

Let’s see how many of those I can get out in the next two weeks.

…And on the other side of the block is one of the better Halloween displays, complete with tombstone lit in that particular color that cannot be captured.

Everything you need to know about America’s relationship with its food, its children, its culture, and itself is encapsulated in this photo, taken on Halloween night.