Tea Leaves

You have to give the Japanese credit for two things. They know about knives, and they know about rice. After spending more time than is actually healthy for an responsible adult lurking in the insane asylum we call the knife forums, I finally gave in and picked up the relatively pedestrian Shun Chef’s Knife. You can already tell that I am suffering from forum brain damage because I feel the need to call this knife pedestrian.

It’s true that the Shun is not the most exotic knife that you can buy. It’s shape is more Germany than Japan, but the materials and the handle hint at Japanese construction. The thing is, the dork forums have a hypnotic effect on dorks, making them obsess over the most trivial details (flat blade or more curved? Damascus finish? Western or Japanese style handle?). Most of all, the forums give you the urge to obtain something unusual, offbeat, and a bit rare. They convince you that you must rise above the mass-produced drek that joe-average would buy at William Sonoma, even if it happens to be the perfect fit.

So, while I apologize to myself that I did not end up with something even quite as edgy (if you will) as a hammer-finished carbon steel wa-handle knife, I also realized that the Shun is two things:

1. Superbly shiny.

2. Perfectly balanced and easy to handle in my hands.

It works so well it makes me sure that I’ve been abusing my poor German knife all this time, using it with an edge that is more like a mousepad than a knife. I guess it’s time to rectify that. But first I have to go slice some see-through pieces of apple or chop some more microscopic cubes of carrot.

Of course, now I’ll have to figure out how to keep the knife sharp, which is a whole separate circle of doom.

Now, about rice.

There are only two kinds of rice worth eating. Risotto is OK if you are into that kind of thing, but short grain white rice is the real stuff. If rice were cheese, the high end short grain white rice would be Stilton. While I am willing to admit that there is a brown rice-shaped food that people eat for general nutrition, don’t expect me to believe that anyone actually enjoys it. And those people making brown rice sushi rolls should be taken out in back of the Whole Foods and summarily executed.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, Julie told me I should buy some Tamaki Gold short grain rice. I looked around for it in Pittsburgh but didn’t find it at any of my normal haunts and I ended up forgetting about it. But, this weekend we were in Lotus in the strip and lo and behold there was a bag of the stuff.

To continue to extend a bad metaphor, this is truly the Colston Basset Dairy of short grain white rice. Out of the cooker it is sticky but not gluey, soft but with just enough toothy texture to make you know you aren’t eating oatmeal or something. I made fried rice the next day with it and it took on an even softer texture, almost like a dry risotto. If you like rice, and you should, you owe it to yourself to get 20 pounds of this stuff and put it through your rice cooker.

Yes I know this rice comes from California and not Japan. It’s the original thought that counts, so get off my back.

I haven’t had anything long form to write about games recently because I have not been sufficiently in tune with my own sense of self-absorption to come up with much of an extended thought. But this does not mean I haven’t spent some time with the old electronic crack.

What Your Mother Will Never Learn

My parents visited over New Years. Mostly this meant my mom cooked and we ate a lot. Having run out of available DVD movies one night, I made the mistake of firing up Call of Duty multiplayer with my parents in the room. Now, I’m not good at this game. I die a lot. The experience is sort of like this:

1. Walk out on to map.

2. Get shot in the head.

3. Walk out on the map, hide behind a wall. Get shot in the head.

4. Walk out on the map, spy someone in the distance who is both in line of sight and not moving. Line up the… get shot in the head.

You get the idea. It usually takes me five or six games just to figure out how to even see where the enemies are, much less react to them in any sort of intelligent way.

Now imagine me playing the game while simultaneously trying to parse the scene before me for my mom the spectator. Now it went like this:

1. Walk out on the map.

2. “Are those guys on your team?”… “Yes”.. get shot in the head.

3. “Why do you keep dying?” “Do you control those guys?” “Why can’t you see anything but that one gun?”

4. Well, you see, it’s an Internet game, those guys are all other… get shot in the head.

I finally had to turn it off. Don’t be fooled by the current industry infatuation with the idea that games are a mainstream experience. There are still wide conceptual chasms that we are not likely to cross.

Levels “R” Us

I’ve been playing through Disgaea on the PSP. The PSP is great because it lets me put the game down whenever I want and get back into it later. Disgaea is great because it has distilled the nature of the RPG down to its essential essence. Behind all of the tactics, crazy gameplay mechanics, and shallow anime plot, what this game is really about is leveling. In fact, the most painless way through the game is simply to level the main character by some ridiculous amount and then just plow through a few dozen story maps. When you hit a wall, go back and play some of the side games to level some more.

Not leveling fast enough? No problem. Just win one mini-game and the level of the monsters on all the maps goes up. Then you can level faster.

Need better stuff? Travel through the item world and level your stuff up. This will also generally result in more levels for your characters too.

Even the game that lets you manipulate the “politics” of the game world is really designed to be a repository of harder monsters that let you level more.

This game could live in my PSP forever. Just open it up once in a while, gain a few levels, put the machine back to sleep. I’m sure at some point I’ll finish the plot, but what’s the point?

Rez HD

Back in the day, Pete showed me this game on his PS2. I forget where he scored a PS2 copy because they were notoriously hard to find. I remember staring at the TV and thinking “waaaahhh?”.

A couple of years later, some outfit on the Internet reprinted the game for the PS2, so I picked up a copy because I was in my extreme game shopping phase. I tried to play it a few times but I could never figure out what was going on.

So of course I had to pick it up on Xbox Live. After all, if you don’t connect with a game, you should always buy it again. You never know.

The new Rez is pretty much the same as the old Rez, but the jaggies are finally gone. I still don’t know quite what is going on. I also found the third and fourth stages to be punishingly hard. They were almost throw the controller at the TV frustrating. But then, I suck. Normally, I’d have just given up, but someone had told me that I just had to hold out for level 5.

That someone was right. The fight was worth it, and playing through the fifth level was a blast. It’s like they saved all their design juice for the end of game unlockable that they knew people who sucked would never find. This is because game designers hate us all. Still, work your way through it. You’ll have a good time if you can keep yourself from throwing the controller.

The Funeral Mini-game

After the cramps in my hands caused by Rez subsided, I was in no mood for any game that required reflexes. Therefore I bought Lost Odyssey. If you are wondering what this game is about, all you need to know is that it’s Final Fantasy 10.5, but in High Def for the Xbox 360. Here’s the checklist

1. Main character with weird hair and a big sword with no memory of his past: CHECK.

2. Annoying sidekick comic relief guy who whines a lot: CHECK.

3. Chick who fights in a mini-dress: CHECK.

4. Extended cut scene remix action: CHECK.

5. A-A-A-A-A combat system with a timing gimmick: CHECK.

I like it anyway. For the most part the game hits just the right mix of goofy JRPG combat, collection OCD, nice maps, and well-produced cut scenes to keep you playing. I wish the walkthroughs were more complete though.

I do have one complaint though. In the last half of the first disk, you are treated the most horrible nexus of cut scene and mini-game pain that I have ever experienced. It made Metal Gear Solid feel well-paced. As far as I can remember, it went like this:

1. Meet two new characters. Long cut scene.

2. Big bad soldiers show up. Another long cut scene.

3. Fight soldiers. Walk back to home of the new characters.

4. 25 minute major plot point cut scene that was so badly produced it reminded me of the horrendous Taiwanese melodramas my parents used to watch on VHS when I was a kid. Suffice to say, video game characters do not do crying well. It always looks more like they have a tumor growing on their eyeballs.

5. 10 minutes of “run through the map and collect 5 of these and 10 of those”. It’s not like they were even hard to find. You just had to run there.

6. A 20 minute funeral mini-game. I kid you not. You are controlling an auxilliary character who is in control of an ancient burial ceremony. You have to do this thing where you make the kid’s torch point at things on the screen. Only the hit testing didn’t work, so I sat there for half an hour trying to figure out how to make progress. I was sure I was doomed and I’d have to turn the game off and so this entire 90 minute sequence again.

Then, in a sign that I now must finish this game, God himself intervened and fixed the hit testing code so I could escape this circle of JRPG hell. It was a miracle!

7. 10 more minutes of cut scene before you get to make your way to the next dungeon. I have never been more relieved to be back in the random encounters zone.

If you can’t stand the J in JRPG, just stay away from this game. But, if you have ever enjoyed one of these games, this is the best example of the genre I’ve played for a while. Well, except for that 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

I don’t have a lot of time tonight, because I am playing Dwarf Fortress. On my Mac. Under OS X. Without emulation. That’s right, after years of trial and travail, Dwarf Fortress, one of the most interesting games of the past few years, is finally available on my computing platform of choice. This was the single game that had me keeping a Boot Camp partition on my machine. Now I can get rid of it. I don’t kid myself that my call for porters had anything to do with it. But I can lie to other people and tell them that it did!

I had promised, publically, to donate a fairly ridiculous sum to the publishers should they do a Mac port. They have called my bluff, and I have given the gift gladly. I won’t name an exact amount, but it was certainly enough to buy at least a couple of console games at retail. I may be poor, but at least I’m morally pure. Well, at least as regards this particular issue. It feels good to support a truly independent game, good to support the Mac as a gaming platform, and good to pay for software.

Will Dwarf Fortress take the Mac community by storm? No, clearly not. Dwarf Fortress is a hard sell to anyone, and to anyone who cares about user interface issues it’s an even harder sell. The interface isn’t just bad; it’s tragic on an almost Bulwer-Lytton level. It’s a bit like finding a sweet and glorious fruit that is encased in a shell made of shards of glass and porcupine quills.

If you can make it past the UI issues — and let’s be clear about this, there’s no pride to be gained from that achievement, it’s just the price you have to pay to play — you’ll find a game that is by turns hypnotic, engaging, disturbing, and thought-provoking.

The Mac version is still in alpha, and is still fairly slow compared to the Windows version. But it’s playable, and we can expect performance to improve over time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish tunnelling under the river before the Spring thaw so I can reach that hematite vein. I’m located right near a goblin city, and going outside to mine it isn’t safe.

You can download Dwarf Fortress (for Windows or Mac) at the Bay 12 Games web site. The game is currently free, supported only by donations from players. The Dwarf Fortress Wiki can help you get started.

Back in the distant past before Tony Bourdain was a TV personality jetting all over the world eating the more questionable parts of animals, I heard an NPR interview with him discussing Kitchen Confidential, the book that turned him into a TV personality who gets to jet all over the world and eat the more questionable parts of animals. He pontificated about kitchen knives, what pans you need, when to order fish and so on. Then he gave a radio recipe for something that is easy to do and makes people think you are brilliant: demi-glace.

Demi-glace is simple. You make beef stock. I don’t really know how to make beef stock. I usually just buy some random pieces of bone at the Whole Foods or the farmers market. Then you roast them in the oven for a while (maybe an hour?). Saute the standard stock veggies… some onions, some carrots, some celerey, some peppercorns, and a tiny bit of salt. Add the bones and enough water to cover. Cook this for several hours while you play Halo.

Now comes the good part. Take the stock you just made and drain it into another pot. To this pot add some sauteed shallots, a bit of pepper, some red wine. Tony also suggested thyme and peppercorns. Knock yourself out. Cook that over a low heat uncovered. Reduce, reduce, reduce. Play more Halo, but keep an eye on the stove. It just wants to sit there and bubble and get thicker. At some point, drain out the liquid to remove the shallots and reduce it some more. You know it’s right when it sticks to the spoon like a thin chocolate sauce or maple syrup.

If you start with a few quarts of beef stock you should end up with 6 to 8 ounces of the final product. Freeze this. You have now banked four or five opportunities for people to think you are brilliant.

The next time you make a steak, take the demi-glace out of the freezer and swish it around in a pan with some more shallots, water and red wine. Reduce it back to a nice thickness and put it on top of the steak. People will wonder where you trained as a cook.

Now any time you want a nice sauce and you don’t have time, just pull out your dark brown cube of goodness and you’ll see how all the time playing Halo pays off.

We spent the weekend visiting some good friends in New Jersey. Since the route home sends us right past Philly, I figured I would take advantage of the opportunity to enrich myself with the erudite discussion of the day’s issues at that landmark NPR station WHYY.

Instead, I was assaulted with this show about Second Life run by some psychologist named Dan Gottlieb, PhD. You always know something is going to go badly when the guy makes sure to put “PhD” on the end of his name. None of the smart ones are that proud.

So after an interview with an enthusiastic consumer of Second Life the discussion on the show began in earnest. Dr. Dan first started talking to some dude from Stanford who had done an extensive survey of people who are heavy players of online games. The first question out of his mouth?

First I’m thinking about the creators in Linden Labs, where these ideas come from. I wonder how many of the creative minds in Linden Labs have Aspergers or social anxiety disorder… kind of isolated people who are more comfortable with screens than people…

Now, I have no love for MMO games in general or Second Life in particular. But I do work in software and am perhaps I take too much personal offense when the old stereotypes are trotted out. I found this to be an infuriately stupid turn of phrase, especially for someone who apparently fancies himself to be an educated and somewhat sophisticated intellectual. I felt the dork rage welling up from my dark reserves of bile. The phrase “moron shrink asshole” passed over my lips.

But, I restrained myself. Ultimately I found it impossible to dig up the angry energy necessary to come to the defense of my various identity groups. Maybe I’ve just been beat down by the man over the years, but at this point the whole exercise seems pointless. Others in the dork and gaming communities obviously do not feel the way I do. The poor oppressed gamer has become a subject of wide discussion again as Fox decided to drum up ratings by picking on Mass Effect a few weeks ago. This latest incident has lead to much hue and cry, including a two parter by our old friend N’Gai about whether games will always be thought of as infantile amusements for overgrown children.

I have two opinions on this general question. The first is that video games in fact are infantile amusements. If the video game industry wants to escape this pigeonhole they have to figure out how to assess what they do a bit more realistically.

The second is that if the current generation of moron PhD assholes and media types want to sit around and stare in wonderment at the people playing Second Life and conclude that they are all mentally ill, nothing that we do is going to change their minds. Their attitudes are pretty much set. They might not even be wrong. But, one thing is for sure. They will eventually die. At that point, video games will no longer be seen as a strange fringe element. When the next generation takes over everyone alive will have been playing them for their entire lives.

Being the lazy sort that I am, I’ll just sit and wait, rather than working up a sweat right now.

Here’s a dirty little secret: I am kind of a sucker for Bailey’s Irish Cream.

Yes, yes, I know. It’s too sweet. It’s a girly drink. It’s like an alcohol milkshake. It’s sort of gross. I know all these things, and I agree with them, but I still kinda like it. What can I say: i have my guilty pleasures.

But, truth to tell, I never drink Bailey’s anymore, because I am embarassed to be seen buying it. So my overactive superego has thwarted my own pleasure principle. Until now.

I picked up a bottle Drambuie the other day, along with (on the recommendation of an acquaintance) a bottle of Dewars White. I have strong opinions on single malt scotch, but I know next to nothing about blended scotch. The Dewars was reasonably inexpensive and works well in mixed drinks. Anyway, while drinking a Rusty Nail (2 parts scotch, 1 part Drambuie), a strange thought occurred to me: “I wonder if putting a little cream in this would make it better, or ruin it?”

It turns out that if you put a little cream in a rusty nail and shake it up, you end up with something that tastes almost exactly like Bailey’s. It lacks a hint of chocolate, but I’m sure one could fix that up with a dusting of cocoa powder.

So problem solved. I can now have my cake and drink it too.

From time to time I try to get ribs around Pittsburgh, or anywhere in the Northeast for that matter. I am usually disappointed. Now, I like ribs in many different styles. There are the Chinese ones my mom made. There are the slow cooked barbeque ribs in the South. There are the braised ribs at fancier restaurants of various types.

Tonight I got the ribs at Tessaro’s. Normally I would only get the burgers there, but you have to change up once in a while. They were tasty and satisfying, but one thing was wrong, which is the thing that always brings me disappointment. They weren’t cooked long enough.

A while back at lunch time Pete got ribs from that shop on Centre Ave called Food 4 the Soul. They had the same problem. To my mind ribs are only really right if you can eat them off the bone with the barest of utensils. You should not have have to gnaw the meat off. You should not have to cut the meat off. You should be able to get the meat off with a plastic fork, or a dessert spoon, or a pair of chopsticks. The meat should fall off on its own when you pick up the bone.

If I’m sitting there in front of my plate actually working to eat your ribs you have failed.

I find myself confused as to why people don’t understand this simple fact. You have to cook the ribs for a long long time in order for them to be right.

Mark Bittman understands. Don’t let this truth pass you by. Cook your ribs until they are done. Cook them for a good long time.

I’ve written before, disparagingly, of the use of the Magician’s Choice in games. The magician’s choice, reduced to its simplest form is: “Pick a card, any card.” And then, whatever card you pick, you’ve picked the one the magician intended you to pick.

When done poorly, this feels like a clumsy and ham-handed attempt at interaction. When done well, it’s seamless. Mass Effect is a good example of what happens when the choice is forced on you by a really good magician.

The typical branching conversation tree in an RPG works something like this:

Young lady: “Help! Help! My kitten is stuck up this tree!”
Hiro Protagonist: Choose between:

1. “Don’t worry, I’ll save your little kitten!” [You save the kitten.] (+50 cash, +200 experience, +5 alignment points.)
2. “How much will you pay me to get your kitten?” [You shake the girl down for cash, then save the kitten.] (+150 cash, +50 experience, +0 alignment points.)
3. “So, you’re all alone, eh?” [You assault and rob the young lady. Later, you kill and eat the kitten.] (+150 cash, +200 experience, -5 alignment points.)

Mass Effect has some situations like this. But it has far, far more situations like this:

Young lady: “Help! Help! My kitten is stuck up this tree!”
Hiro Protagonist: Choose between:

1. Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. You must be so upset.
2. Maybe you should have watched him more closely.
3. I think people who let their cats run outside are stupid. And I think you’re stupid, too.

[You select an option, and no matter what you choose, your character than says…]

“Don’t you think it was a bad idea to let your cat run around this space station?”

When you read this on paper, it looks pointless. But when you are playing through the game, the psychological effect is that you refer the emotional stance you took in the conversation tree into the spoken “filmed” dialogue. The filmed dialogue is exactly the same, but because you made a choice it is given more color and depth. Even though in terms of pure gameplay “nothing happened.”

I’m sure there are other games that have used this technique before Mass Effect. But I’ve never before seen it used so consistently, and to such great effect.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Mass Effect. But even while thinking about (and complaining loudly to my friends about) the things I didn’t like, I came home every night for two weeks and played nothing else, because I had to know how the narrative turned out. Given that, I’m not sure that any criticisms I might have about the game are terribly apposite.

For many years I was a fan of the cult classic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. When I say “fan”, I mean this in the most derisive and dismissive way possible: I’m an utter fanboy. My love for the show was, and is, beyond any sort of rational analysis. So as I prepare to discuss two projects that the shows’ various members have launched, Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax, the reader would do well to remember that the projects’ creators would probably have to drive to my house and literally pee in my cornflakes before I could bring myself to say anything bad about their work.

A Brief History of MST3k

The MST3k scenario was simple. A young man and his two robots sat and watched a really, really bad movie. You, the viewer, watched them watching the movie — their silhouettes were visible onscreen as the movie played. Throughout the film, the man and his robots constantly chattered at the screen, humourously riffing on what they (and you) saw. Here’s a brief sample to give you an idea:

Writers and actors came and went over the show’s history, but there were basically two “faces” of MST3k: Joel Hodgson and Mike Nelson. Joel was with the show when it aired on Comedy Central, and Mike spent most of his years on the show while it was hosted on the Sci-Fi Network. Each of them had a unique style, and both of them, I thought, were funny. Mike was hobbled a little bit because when the show transitioned to the Sci-Fi Channel, the network required that all the movies they mocked be science fiction movies. This was a huge mistake.

Part of what kept the show (and its jokes) fresh was that you never really knew what you’d get. One week, sure, it might be a potboiler about spacemen invading the Earth. Or you might end up with a biker movie, or a late ’60’s Beach Blanket Bingo extravaganza. When the genre of the targeted films was limited tightly to sci-fi, it seemed to me that a lot of the joy went out of the series.

Two New Projects

In the past several years, both Mike and Joel have started interesting new projects based on the same premise, each working with various folks from Mystery Science Theater’s original run.

Joel Hodgson has started Cinematic Titanic. In many ways, Cinematic Titanic is the more conservative of the two projects. It has a great structural similarity to MST3k. Joel and his collaborators — Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein Mary Jo Pehl, and Frank Conniff, among others — obtain the rights to a movie and then make fun of it, projecting sillhouettes of themselves onto the screen as they do so. The silhouettes allow for visual as well as spoken-word jokes. The finished product is then sold as a DVD (and, soon, as a digital download) for $15.94. The first project released by Cinematic Titanic was a terrible 1972 horror film called The Oozing Skull.

Mike Nelson’s project, called RiffTrax, is to my mind a bolder experiment. Mike and his collaborators (there are several, notably Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Weird Al Yankovic) take a movie that they don’t have the rights to, but that you probably already own, make fun of it, and sell you an mp3 audio recording of their riff. The customer watches their copy of Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or The Matrix (or whatever the riffed movie is) on DVD, and hits “play” on their MP3 player at the right moment. When all goes well, the riffs sync perfectly with the movie, and hilarity ensues. Prices for RiffTrax vary, but most are $2.99, or about the price of a typical movie rental.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

Both projects have their fans and partisans, and if you visit the forums on each company’s website you’ll no doubt find any number of forum denizens who think that their favorite project is the best thing ever, and the other one is just a bunch of lousy poseurs.

My own observation is that I’ve known about RiffTrax for nearly a year now but never really found the time to investigate it. The release of Cinematic Titanic not only inspired me to buy their DVD, but also inspired me to pick up a RiffTrax title as well. I suspect I’m not the only person who did this. There’s clearly enough room in the world for both projects, and I think the existence of each helps the other more than it hurts.

When discussing these projects, I’m not going to focus on individual jokes. You can take it as read that I think both projects are uproariously funny, the product of a number of talented writers, actors, and comedians. Rather, I’d like to focus on more fundamental, structural aspects.

Cuts Like a Knife

I sat down with the DVD of The Oozing Skull this weekend. Cinematic Titanic’s strengths, as a project, are illustrated by this: it’s a DVD. I put it in my DVD player and pressed “play”, and it worked.

It is truly a terrible movie, full of brutally gory surgery sequences early on, which nearly kept me from watching it at all. The commentary from Joel and the crew was funny, and the use of physical comedy via the silhouettes was more wide-ranging than in a typical MST3k episode. The performance seemed a little stiff, overall, but it’s only the first release. Presumably as they find their groove they’ll settle down a bit.

There are a lot of riffers on screen, surrounding the borders of the screen like a sort of human proscenium. As performers speak, they sometimes move or strike a little pose so that you have some idea which of the them is speaking.

Here’s a promo for Cinematic Titanic that should whet your appetite:

The same thing that lets Cinematic Titanic be convenient is also its drawback. Fundamentally, I don’t want to watch The Oozing Skull, even to hear it mocked. The best of the MST3K episodes leveraged the ambiguous love-hate relationship most Americans have with B movies. Sure, we might talk about how Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster was really just a Mexican wrestling movie with a guy in a rubber lizard suit, but deep inside many of us still have an inner 8 year old that’s happy, or even thrilled, at the prospect of watching Godzilla. Not all B movies have this nature, but hopefully Cinematic Titanic will be able to license some properties that are a little less hateful than this one was.

The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

Which brings us to RiffTrax, which is a project that makes fun of (mostly) A-list movies. The first RiffTrax I bought, last weekend, was of the recent remake of the Bond film Casino Royale. My logic went something like this: the Bond films lately have been tepid. They’ve been watchable, but mostly predictable. I wanted to see the movie to maintain some illusion of being culturally plugged in, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit through it if it turned out to be a stinker. So I bought the RiffTrax, rented the DVD, and watched it.

And it was great.

I don’t just mean the riffing was great (and it was; Kevin Murphy especially seems to be on my wavelength). I mean Casino Royale was great, and I still enjoyed it as a movie, even while laughing as I listened to people make fun of it. It was as if I sat through two completely different movies at the same time, and both were awesome. This wasn’t an outcome I expected. I thought that either the movie would be terrible, in which case I’d enjoy the mockery, or the movie would be good, in which case the mockery would annoy me. But that didn’t happen. The mockery just made an already good movie better:

And so, in rapid succession, I’ve picked up the riffs for Lord of the Rings, the first Harry Potter movie, all of the Star Wars prequels, and Eragon. These are movies that range from excellent to terrible, and so far, although they’ve all been funny, the good movies are more fun to watch with riffing. I think this represents something of a structural advantage in RiffTrax’s favor: they can riff movies that people actually want to watch. The bad movies work, too: I wanted to see Eragon, even though I had heard it was awful. RiffTrax gave me an excuse to rent it without turning the night into a total waste.

The other structural advantage is that of price. With an average cost of $2.99/riff, I’m finding it hard to come up with reasons not to simply buy all of them. Their focus is on first-run feature films, but they’ve also covered a number of classics (such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) and popular TV series pilots (including Lost and Heroes).

All is not wine and roses. In order for the RiffTrax experience to work, the downloaded MP3 file has to be in sync with the DVD you’re watching. RiffTrax provides a couple of mechanisms for this, but none are completely seamless (and, unless you’re going to go to the trouble of burning your own DVDs, you’re committing to the idea of watching a movie with your computer somewhere in the A/V food chain). They have provided a standalone player for Windows that handles all the syncing automatically, but it’s not quite perfect, and if you’re on MacOS it’s not an option at all. Even with the standalone player, I found myself spending a few minutes at the beginning of each film futzing around with the relative volume of the film and the riff more than I would have liked.

These are not serious complaints for someone like me who is, let’s face it, a completely irredeemable nerd. I do see it making it hard for the RiffTrax folks to penetrate deeply into the mass market; most of my non-nerd friends, for example, could never be bothered to mess with syncing an MP3 track to a DVD track just for a few laughs. But then, most of them probably wouldn’t buy The Oozing Skull, either, so perhaps this is a distinction without a difference.

And even with the minor annoyance of having to sync, there’s just something bold about RiffTrax. The fact that they’re doing this sort of thing without permission of the studios, that they’ve basically figured out a way to sell their remixing of popular culture without getting sued — yet — is exciting to me. I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone talking about The Long Tail, but this is the first business model I’ve seen where I could actually imagine it working.

In The Not Too Distant Future

Both RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic seem to have their share of strong supporters. I’m looking forward to seeing (and buying) more of their work as time goes by.

Should you shell out your own cash for these projects? Well, as I noted in the opening paragraph, I’m not an impartial judge. For me, supporting both of these projects is not only a way of consuming media I enjoy, but also something of a political statement: I want to support independent artists. But not everyone feels the same way, nor would I expect them to.

There are plenty of samples of both projects on YouTube and on each projects’ respective web sites. Watch some of the clips, see what fits your taste, and make your own decision.

And if you end up buying a RiffTrax, or a Cinematic Titanic DVD, tell them peterb sent you. They won’t have any idea what the hell you’re talking about, of course. But tell them anyway.

It’s my little way of saying “thanks.”

Legume is a new bistro-style restaurant in that increasingly glorious food corridor of Braddock avenue between the Regent Square theaters and the entrance to the Parkway East. I was suspicious of the place because the name conjures up images of a prison run by terminally smug pot-smoking NPR-listening hippy types whose mission in life is to convince me that quinoa (it’s pronounced “keen-waaah”, apparently) is a reasonable substitute for Japanese short-grain white rice. Happily this is not the case. Despite the name, the thing to get at Legume is the meat. The vegetables are OK too, but the thing is the meat.

Legume is a small place with a small menu. The menu changes every night, and every night they upload the current one to the web site. Unlike a lot of Pittsburgh places which are big and have big menus, everything here is a winner. Over the past few months, we have been back three or four times and ordered a large range of different dishes and none have registered any of my normal complaints about fancier food in Pittsburgh. Salads are not overdressed. There are no pretentious but ultimately shallow appetizers. There are no entrees that are too ambitious for the kitchen to actually prepare. Even the baguette are baguette-like with a crunchy crust and airy, but not doughy, inside.

But as I said above, my favorites here are all meat all the time. They’ve made me a perfectly medium rare hanger-steak on top of risotto that for once wasn’t undercooked. There was that cassoulet with duck confit and pork sausage. There is almost nothing better than food cooked in duck fat. They also make a pork terrine which is a rich and fatty treat that would not be out of place in your favorite Paris bistro.

But when we went this past week we had a veritable carnivorous feast. First, we had the lamb’s tongue on top of a potato salad dressed in a light vinaigrette. It was tender and yummy and again, not too much dressing. The second starter was roasted beef marrow bones. You scoop the marrow out of the bone and spread it on toast with salt. This is more a texture than taste sensation. Between the starters and the main course we had what I think is the best thing I’ve eaten in a restaurant in the past six months: a perfectly braised piece of veal cheek on top of polenta. The meat was tender, rich, and buttery smooth. I can’t remember what the sauce was, some kind of red wine and veal stock reduction I would assume. I was too busy trying to keep the stupid grin off my face every time I had another bite. It was like eating warm meat ice cream.

The main course was chicken roasted under a cast iron pan with mashed potatoes, or something much like mashed potatoes. I’m not usually much for chicken in a fancy restaurant, but what they do here is take half a bird and roast it all in one piece so you get to tear into the seasoned crispy skin before enjoying the meat underneath. Again, a winner.

By this time I was in a good enough mood that it didn’t even bother me that the chocolate truffle “cake” was a bit more like one of those stupid flourless monstrosities than real cake. I would rather have had the caramel pots de crème that we got the first time we went. But, the truffle cake had a light fluffy texture and nice whipped cream, so I could not complain.

So, in conclusion, get your veggie friends here by fooling them with the name, then make them eat meat. This place joins Point Brugge and DISH as fabulous neighborhood eateries with distinctive style and excellent execution.

My personal copy of Imbibe! arrived from Amazon today.

Posts in the coming days may contain many misspellings and seem somewhat inebriated. I apologize in advance.

And, let’s face it, if the last 8 years have taught us anything, it’s that election night is a good night to start drinking heavily.

I was really hoping that I’d be able to tell the 72 Dolphins to Suck It.

I guess I thought about that a little bit too much this past week.