Tea Leaves

I’ve been making real progress in the past year, giving away and donating books and DVDs, even finally getting rid of some of my most ancient and decrepit computers (somewhere, in a Goodwill building, are an IBM RT and a Decstation 3100. Good riddance.)

Tonight, I opened the door to The Room I Don’t Go Into for the purposes of throwing away a few things.

The Room I Don’t Go Into is worse than I remember. Apparently, in the course of cleaning up the house I might have, er, made it worse.

So, this weekend will require another Goodwill run. If I don’t update for a while, it probably means I’ve fallen in to The Room I Don’t Go Into and can’t find my way out.

Coming soon: I interviewed Mike Nelson from RiffTrax. As soon as I have it transcribed, I’ll post it here.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The two Petes collaborated on this article. If you can guess who it is written in the style of, you win nothing, but may feel either proud or ashamed, at your discretion.

It was in a karaoke bar in Saitama that I first met Kobayashi Hikaru-san. This was not your high-end bar, like you’d find in Shibuya, or Harajuku, or any of the other hip spots. This was a thoroughly middle-class establishment. That didn’t stop us from proceeding to get very, very drunk along with a couple of his friends. I spent most of the night ignoring the interview and getting hit on by two very cute girls who gave me their keitei numbers.
Read the rest of this entry »

Both of the Peters are out of town this week, so updates will likely be slow for a while. Our apologies.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, updates will be slow this week.

Coming soon: The Great Tequila Tasting. 4X: Reach for the Stars! And more. See you soon.

Because I have the plague.

I blame psu.

Due to some aggressive spamming, we’ve tightened up our filtering on comments recently. If you’re a regular commenter, you might want to consider registering an account and posting as a logged in user. It’s free, and we won’t give out any information about you to anyone.

We’ll continue to approve legit comments as we notice them, even if you’re not logged in, it just may take longer for them to appear if our robot overlords don’t trust you.

I got this working today in the Atom, RDF, and RSS 2.0 feeds. It’s not working in the RSS 1 feed, but WordPress’s RSS 1 feed sucks anyway, and if you’re using that feed you should change to a different one.

Using the RDF feed as an example, all I did was change this line:

to this:

Hope that helps those of you who were looking to do something similar.

Today I got tons of stuff done at work, finished editing three articles for Played To Death, did the Christmas shopping, and began work on a gift I’m making for someone.

But I didn’t write a real article for the weblog. My apologies. Anyone have a time machine?

We’ve cut over DNS, and so you are viewing the new site. Our old articles are still available at their original URLs, so any direct links you had to them previously should still work.

For the time being, we are requiring logins to leave comments, until we better understand our spam-fighting options. But don’t think of it as yet another annoying password to remember: think of it as a chance to join our community (by remembering yet another annoying password). (psu informs me that we’ve turned off requiring logins, but I encourage regular posters, particularly those who might want to write for Tea Leaves, to go ahead and register anyway.

While you’re here, please enjoy Corey Kosak’s article Computer Scientists and Cruciverbalism”.

It’s good to be back.

Over the next week or so, updates may be sparse and you may notice problems reaching the site as we prepare to move to a new content management system. Things should be back to normal relatively quickly.

We are, however, having a small contest to go along with this. Because looking at CSS makes our eyes bleed, we will reward the first person who designs a set of WordPress templates and stylesheets for us with a DVD or video game.

Our prejudice is that we want something where the main body view looks exactly, in every detail, like what we have now. But if you think you can do better, feel free to show us. Our only strict requirement is that the icons for categories have to stay in use. We love ‘em. We are, however, less attached to the details of our sidebar.

For your fabulous rewards you may choose from the following DVDs:

-The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine, or
-Nude For Satan

or, if those are too sophisticated for you, we have a number of games on offer:

-Counterstrike (Xbox)
-Indigo Prophecy (Xbox)
-Kessen (PS2)

If you want to participate, send mail to tleavesweblog - a t - gmail (dot) com.

My dad used to tell a groaner of a bad joke about a guy he knew opening a cheese shop in Israel. The name? Cheeses of Nazareth.

I thought of that joke today, and on a lark typed “cheesesofnazareth.com” into my browser…and then name is owned by a domain name squatter, offering to sell it.

The Internet is full.

Some weeks are made for long and thoughtful articles. And some are just made for top 10 lists.

In the queue: Nintendo Wii, ¡Viva Piñata!, and an assortment of other games. But for tonight, we have monkeys.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we have become aware that some readers of the blog have difficulty telling the two Petes, peterb and psu, apart. Here’s a handy reference guide for when you have trouble.
Read the rest of this entry »

Note: Because of the formatting used in this article, it likely won’t look quite right in an RSS reader. I suggest reading the entry in your web browser.

When I first invited psu to be a co-blogger, the thing he was most leery of was the fact that Tea Leaves had support for comments. His previous blog didn’t. Pete claimed that he didn’t like comments because he didn’t want to read what people had to say, because most people on the internet were crazy anyway.

But really, the true reason that psu’s old blog didn’t have comments is that he is a gay lamer who doesn’t know how to program and is stupid and gay and lame and probably uses a Mac.

Read the rest of this entry »

Updates have been slow lately because I played racquetball on Friday, forgetting that men in my family have about as much athletic ability as the average brine shrimp. While playing, immediately after thinking “Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this,” I took a dive and landed on my wrist and elbow. Hard.
Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, Tea Leaves is proud to be one of the few sites on the web that doesn’t have a stupid and irritating April Fools’ joke.

I say “Bah, humbug!” and I’m proud to do so.

“With an iSight, some chlorine bleach, and two pairs of latex surgical gloves, nothing is impossible.”

More context would just ruin it, I think.

Just a quick note to say happy birthday to Robert Scoble who is 41 today, and whom I met tonight at the Pittsburgh Blogfest. A splendid time was had by all. Drinks were drunk, cake was eaten, and Cindy from My Brilliant Mistakes and I have an evil plan for holding a panel tasting of bourbon. Stay tuned.

I am in San Francisco this week, so Tea Leaves may be updated less frequently than usual. We will return to our regularly scheduled kvetching on Monday.

A quick poll for those of you who read Tea Leaves via a newsreader or bloglines. Please comment on advertisements in RSS feeds. Do you hate them? Are some types of ads OK and others not OK? Or do you not care at all?

My personal feeling is that I can easily accept (and ignore) a text ad that is a couple of lines, but if you make me follow a link to read the full text of your article, I hate you.

What do you think?

For Friday, it’s a miscellaneous grab bag of opinions that will get you in trouble if you say them out loud in the wrong crowds.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some of the articles currently in the works:

ï†Why Gladius is a superb game, and why it flopped.
ï A Crazy Little Thing Called Beer
ï “Biomass per penny”
ï Measurebators
ï End of the Summer: Indie Game Rundown
* Game demos that convinced me to not buy a game I was completely intent on purchasing.

Look for them in the coming weeks, and thanks for reading.

If you find a URL that you think would be of interest to Tea Leaves, one way to bring it to our attention is to use del.icio.us, which I have written about in the past. Simply tag a link with for:peterb or for:psu, and we’ll look at it when we get a chance.

I particularly encourage and ask for people to tag exciting indie games that they think we should be reviewing.

Our Internet provider suffered a significant outage today, just in time for our Carnival of Gamers entry. Sorry for any inconvenience.

More musings on unanswerable questions that aren’t actually significant enough to warrant their own long article:

- Am I the only person who thinks that aspirin, chewed, tastes kinda good? I want aspirin-flavored soda.

- Who are all these people that are still buying $2500 gaming PC rigs, and what is wrong with them?

- What happened to my copy of the Tank Girl soundtrack, along with maybe 5% of all the CDs I’ve ever owned? Is there some sort of collective of shame I can join where I can reacquire mp3s of songs I paid for, but lost?
Read the rest of this entry »

No, I haven’t forgotten — the amari roundup is just taking a little longer to write up than I expected. Look for it in the next week or so.

Thanks to the alert readers who pointed out that the Captcha/security code text box was misnumbered, which made tabbing between the comment fields painful. It’s fixed now.

I really like a class of alcohol that many people don’t: Italian bitter aperitivs and digestifs, known in Italian as amari. Campari, Strega, Averna — I find they settle my stomach and soothe my soul.

Often, I find that it’s almost impossible to describe the taste of these drinks to those that haven’t tried them. And, even with my travels, there are still many that I haven’t tried yet.

So: I would like to call for volunteers to participate in a tasting panel whose purpose will be to taste, rate, and describe in detail a large number of these amari.
Read the rest of this entry »

Many of my articles have small captioned images that show up, when you visit the site, offset next to a paragraph, nicely formatted. I just realized, however, that since the RSS feeds don’t really support stylesheets, these look completely wrong to anyone who is reading the site via a newsreader. So I’m fixing them, which may make a number of old posts appear to be marked as new. Sorry.

Also, although I’ve got I format that seems to work well in most RSS aggregators, the images still look wrong on bloglines. If you’ve got a bright idea about the right way to fix this, please send email to blog -at- tleaves.com

I started this weblog last January. Originally, it was just meant to be a place for me to keep my notes on my Final Cut Pro projects. My “real writing” was meant to go on the (now defunct) Tea Leaves project of the Danampersanderic art collective. But that project somehow didn’t take off, and I found myself putting more and more content here. Before I knew it there were actually readers.

It was a month later that I published a document meant to summarize my philosophy of writing for this space. It’s still on the sidebar today. The quick summary is: longer, in-depth articles. No “hey, look at this neat link!” items. Keep confessional, overly intimate, or personal details about myself to a minimum, or better yet eliminate them completely. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, no “blogging about blogging.” If you want to find a weblog where the authors incessantly talk about Movable Type vs. WordPress, or how great or stupid RSS is, or how blogging is going to change the world, you can go practically anywhere else. I find these topics intensely boring. I want to write about stuff. I don’t want to write about writing stuff.

All rules are made to be broken, on occasion. Since it is the end of 2004, this is a good point to suspend the “no blogging about blogging” rule, for one day. I’d like to take a moment to look back at how this space has grown in the past year, and how it will develop in 2005.
Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you taking off for the holiday, have a great time doing whatever it is you’ll be doing. I plan on continuing to try to update regularly through to the New Year. If you’re travelling, drive safely, and please remember to drink only homemade egg nog, never the store-bought stuff. You have my permission to use pasteurized eggs, if you worry about that sort of thing.

Next week will be Independent Game Week here at Tea Leaves. Ron at Grumpy Gamer is having his own micro-protest wherein he is not playing the blockbusters. In solidarity, all next week I will be highlighting and showcasing Windows and Macintosh games produced by small teams for not a lot of money. Games will be featured because I think they’re fun; I’ll be focusing on games that are comparatively new (however much I might want to evangelize System’s Twilight to you, the goal here is to showcase games that were developed recently, not “old classics”.)

If you have a game you think is worthy of consideration, feel free to drop a line to blog @ tleaves.com.

Time at which I deployed the new, custom designed category icons for Tea Leaves yesterday: 7:38 pm.

Time at which the first reader complained that I took away their favorite icon: 7:49 pm.

I love the little fruit-lover as much as the rest of you, but he’s not mine. I always felt a little guilty about my icons; they’re grabbed from all sorts of random places. I wanted something that would give the site a little more consistent feel. I commissioned Elise to design some replacements, and I’m really happy with the results.

However, for nostalgia’s sake, I have left the FF2000 as the miniature icon that should show up in bookmark lists, browser tabs, and the like.

Due to a power outage at our ISP, followed by a hard drive crash, Tea Leaves was unavailable for most of the day. But, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the folks at Telerama Internet, we’re back online without even having lost any data (other than perhaps a few comments.)

Here’s a big plusplus going out to the team at Telerama. Thanks, guys!

Back from Toronto, with new tales to tell. This week, expect to see some or all of the following items:

• The best baguette on Queen Street
• Why is coffee in Toronto so uniformly bad?
• A proposal for Canadian banking reform.
• Retsina: the other white wine

…and, when they’re done, book reviews of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, In the Shadow of No Towers, and the most recent of Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” books, Something Rotten.

Om mani padme hum

Here’s a short movie — not by me — on how to fold a shirt to such a perfect, crisp shape that its very existence provides nearly irrefutable evidence of the presence of a pantheon of benevolent and all-knowing Clothing Gods. I find it compelling. I find it hypnotic. I can’t stop watching it, over and over again, hoping to absorb how to perform such household magic. I have taken my shirt off in the kitchen. I have sat, and emulated the master. And I am here to tell you it is not a trick of the light; it is not a special effect; it is not clever editing. It really works.
Read the rest of this entry »

All the URLs are the same, but starting today we are “Tea Leaves,” since the related project with that name is going dark.

If any of the participants in the tleaves project want to have a place to hang their hat here, just let me know.

It’s the year 2004, and I am helping my parents configure their brand new Thinkpad to talk a completely standard wireless access point, and it is so painful that it is beyond the power of language to express.

The “recent bookmarks” on the sidebar come from one of Joshua Schachter’s projects, del.icio.us. Amusingly, I think I might have set this off when complaining on zephyr a few years ago about bookmark management — I use too many computers for local bookmark lists to be of any use at all. I kept whining and whining about how I wanted a way to not just access the same bookmarks from different computers, but easily, trivially add them from anywhere, too. Editing an HTML page was too much work; it violated my delicate sensibilities and disturbed the flow of internet chi.

Joshua whipped up a solution involving bookmarklets, but I was too lazy at the time to really investigate it, so I settled on a hacked up solution using unison (an rsync-like utility). Eventually, I just stopped using that and let my bookmarks fall into disrepair. I looked at del.icio.us a few times and didn’t really ‘get it’ because I think the front page design isn’t really sensible — it doesn’t adequately explain what it is. There’s documentation, but it’s fairly dry. The best way to understand it is to register an account and start adding your own bookmarks. Then it will become apparent.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve invited psu to join me in this little writing adventure, which means the name — Tea and Peterb — will no longer be appropriate.

Besides, secretly I hated that name anyway. Suggestions are welcome.

Last night I read The Da Vinci Code (detailed review forthcoming). Tonight while idly wanting to see some of the paintings the author describes, I stumbled on this kook’s site:

(Click to enlarge)

The best part is that that diagram is the sanest thing on the page. The text is a hundred times worse.

I always assumed that Robert Anton Wilson was joking or exaggerating about conspiracy theorists’ ability to see echoes of their delusions in anything and everything. Bad assumption.

Even in an article ostensibly about Sun and Microsoft, Andrew Orlowski can’t help throwing in some foaming-at-the-mouth about how Google is evil. Someone asked “Geez, what did Google ever do to Orlowski that he’s such a nutbar where Google is concerned?” and this of course led to:

Top (Fictional) Reasons Orlowski Hates Google

Read the rest of this entry »

As my special gift to all of you, I am providing this small, modest space — perhaps the only one on the entire Internet — where there will be no stupid April Fools’ jokes. Enjoy.

I’ll be in Toronto this weekend, eating good food and visiting good bookstores; probably no updates until Monday.

The answer is:

“Three Guys and a Router”

No one guessed it, but, well, I’ve got these prizes and, so, congratulations! The “Tried To Think About it Analytically” prize goes to Kristen. The “Obsessive-Compulsive” prize goes to Francisco. The “Reminded Me about how wonderful Rome is” prize goes to Simone. The “I wish I had thought of that as a name for this site instead of the mega-stupid ‘Tea and Peterb’” prize goes to monty. Lucky winners, please email your mailing addresses to “namecontest@tleaves.com” and you will receive your fabulous prizes in the mail shortly.

The old URL will continue to work just fine, but I’ve moved this site to the following address:

http://www.tleaves.com/weblog

You might want to update your bookmarks and links.

As a special contest, I will ship a copy of (your choice) a CD of Charlie Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady or a paperback of David Wingrove’s book The Broken Wheel (tip: pick the Mingus CD) to the first person who can guess, in the comments, what “tgr” stands for.

Your two hints are: each letter stands for a word (i.e., it’s not “tiger”) and the “t” is not for “tea”. No fair entering if you’ve already heard what it is from me personally.

Good luck!

It’s time to make what, I hope, will be the only self-referential post on this site. It’s time to specify the rules of what I’m going to be writing about here

I probably shouldn’t do this at all, since it intrinsically violates some of the very rules I’m going to lay down, but I feel like I have a few things to get out of my system. If I can get those things out on paper now, once and for all, I will have a document that I can refer to later when I have the urge to publish something stupid. I will read that document — this document — and say “No. Don’t do that. That violates the rules.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I knew about hinnies and mules, of course, but in the “everyone else probably already knew this but I just found out” department, today I learned that it is possible to crossbreed lions and tigers, creating ligers and tigons.
Read the rest of this entry »

This article at the Wall Street Journal suggests that if MGM and New Line can’t work out the details of distributing The Hobbit, perhaps Jackson could invent a new story that takes place in the Lord of the Rings universe.

We have a few suggestions.

While hanging out on CMU Zephyr tonight discussing election results, someone painfully pointed a link to the very strange Cousin Couples web site, which is where you go if, apparently, you’re screwing your cousin and want to find a group of idiots who’ll say “You go, girl!” While looking, we quickly discovered the Poetry Forum where people could write awful poems about how humpable their cousins are. This gave me some bad ideas, and of course it was just a few minutes before it all spun out of control. Normally we’d have preserved these in the topbot, but the formatting issues made it ugly. So I present to you, without further ado: Zephyr’s Best Cousin’-Lovin’ poems!

Read the rest of this entry »