Sep 28, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Culture
Bags are a problem.
The modern dork has a lot of crap to carry around and protect on a daily basis. You have your laptop, cell phone, big camera, small camera, maybe a lens, a flash, Gameboy, PSP, sunglasses, various papers, wallet and lots of small things that you don’t really want in your pockets, but which you don’t really want to leave at home either.
The ideal bag does not exist.
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Sep 27, 2005 · psu · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
They had tomatillos at the farmer’s market this weekend.
Tomatillos means salsa. So here you go.
Start with:
4-6 medium-sized tomatoes, cut up. It’s also fun to use 2 or 3 regular tomatoes and 2 or 3 roma.
However many tomatoes you used, use the same number of tomatillos, or however many you like.
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded. 2 if you like it hotter,3 if you like it hotter than that
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Sep 24, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
If only all my problems tasted this good.
[](/weblog/images/articles/taleggio.j pg)
Taleggio
I love Taleggio cheese, but here’s my problem.
You want your Taleggio to be good and stinky, which means the paper on it should be soaked through and impossible to remove. But if the paper is impossible to remove, then you don’t get to eat the rind. And I like eating the rind.
It’s a conundrum. Am I the only person with this problem?
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Sep 23, 2005 · peterb · 2 minute read
Web
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.
I didn’t dislike Super Mario Sunshine because it was “childish.” I disliked it because it was “hideously boring.”
No one, anywhere in the entire world wants to buy a TabletPC with their own money. Get over it. (Yes, Robert Scoble, I’m talking to you.
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Sep 22, 2005 · psu · 1 minute read
Games
I have a birthday coming up (no, I will not tell you when). And, I thought I had perfect timing. It’s been a good nine months to a year since both the DS and the PSP launched, surely by now there would be something shiny enough to warrant a purchase. And yet it is not the case.
The PSP has the advantage coming in of matching my iPod Nano. The DS has the advantage of having a few more decent games.
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Sep 21, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
I have a sort of a hate/hate relationship with my local supermarket. The Giant Eagle closest to my house has this annoying habit: they figure out the products that I am buying, and then stop carrying them. This wouldn’t be half as annoying if they never had the products at all. But instead, they carry them for a while, I spend hundreds of dollars on them over the course of a few months, and then they take them away from me.
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Sep 20, 2005 · psu · 9 minute read
Games
One of the banes of the modern “information age” is that one can easily find oneself reading someone else’s misguided and obviously illogical view of important matters. When this happens to me, I don’t think too hard about it. If they disagree with me, they must be stupid.
This is especially true in the area of gaming. I have only recently become morbidly obsessed with games, and as such I represent what the long term gamer hates most: the guy who likes mostly Halo and Madden.
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Sep 19, 2005 · peterb · 5 minute read
Games
Here’s another entry in the “I play games that are 3 years old because I’m a cheapskate” series.
I’ve tried to describe my experiences playing Silent Hill 3 a few times now. Each time, I sort of trail off and fail. This is, interestingly, not unlike my experiences trying to get into the game. Somehow, it fails to grab me in the way the first two games in the series did.
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Sep 16, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
Today’s entry is brought to you courtesy of Nintendo, who has [given us all a first look](http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?articleid=TfyOgnUc7zB- ZlzdQvMhKJOgS5LsR2nK) at the controller for their upcoming home game console, the Revolution.
It’s a pretty simple contest: caption this picture! If, in so captioning, you should happen to let slip what you think of the device, so much the better. My entry:
From the company that brought you Virtual Boy.
(Really, once you see it “in action” it’s not quite as bad as all that.
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Sep 15, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Culture
In every long running Science Fiction franchise, there is the notion of a tiny device that carries within it the capacity to store a ludicrously large amount of data by present day standards. Normally, you’ll see some character pull one of these out of his pocket, holding it up to shine in the light on the set, and then someone will pop it into a reader and the complete schematics for an entire planet will appear on the holographic screen.
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Sep 14, 2005 · peterb · 3 minute read
Culture
It’s part of my philosophy on this site to avoid the use of profanity. I’m making an exception today, as I relate an absolutely true verbal exchange I had driving in to work today.
Driving through Schenley Park, I passed a guy on a bicycle. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that in my country, people sometimes ride bikes, and often they ride them in parks. The guy was riding in the right hand lane, with traffic, fairly close to the curb.
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Sep 13, 2005 · psu · 5 minute read
Computers
I was generating a new movie for a friend of mine this weekend, and got reacquainted with Final Cut Pro. When I started using FInal Cut, I always found the clip logging interface to be baffling. It seemed to me that Final Cut should emulate iMovie, and find the shots itself rather than make me do it. Having now made a few short movies with the software, I see that there is an inner logic to the logging system, and it turns out to be a net win in the long run.
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Sep 12, 2005 · peterb · 2 minute read
Games
Periodically I publish a little feature I call “Ask the Game Geek”, where I’ll take a vague description of a game that someone provided, and come up with the name. For example, I did this with the old Apple II games Sabotage and AWACS. And the Game Geek Quiz was one of our more popular articles here. I have faith in this sort of process, because “stump the librarian” web sites have solved my problems before: for example, from the description “gothic- seeming story about a girl living in Britain who has some sisters and there’s this evil doll”, a clever internet-based librarian was able to correctly identify Ruth Arthur’s [A Candle In Her Room](http://www.
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Sep 9, 2005 · psu · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
The signs of late summer and early fall are everywhere. The weather is cooling off, if only marginally. The CMU and Pitt students are back in Oakland, turning the empty campuses into a sea of book bags, flip flops, t-shirts, shorts and sweat pants. And, in the food bin, the tomatoes are overflowing. Late summer always means tomatoes, and what better dish to make with a tomato than the BLT.
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Sep 8, 2005 · peterb · 5 minute read
Photo
Here’s a little theory called peterb’s postulate of preoccupation: “For every possible topic on which one may wank, there will exist a community of wankers that wanks upon it in the most obsessive and self-absorbed way possible.” And yes, I am well aware that this very weblog is, in fact, perhaps the paradigmatic example of obsessive and self-absorbed wanking over videogames. Believe me when I say that it hurts me more than it hurts you.
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Sep 7, 2005 · psu · 6 minute read
Games
My addiction to Madden is well known to long time readers. It was one of the first games I bought for the new Xbox, and I always manage to find a reason to buy it again. Now, being an average dork, I am by no means a rabid football fan. I can’t really name more than a few players on the rosters of my home team growing up (Patriots) or of my current locale (Steelers).
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Sep 6, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Web
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.
Sep 2, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Games
There was a lot of general drooling over this game, especially among the game designer worship crowd. Most original design in years, they said. A constantly creative tour de force, they said. So I picked up the game at nearly full price to offset how I had given in to the man to buy Madden. After a couple of hours of play, here is my microreview: I’d rather be playing Madden.
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Sep 1, 2005 · psu · 6 minute read
Photo
I like to think that in my time on Earth I have occasionally taken a good photograph. Once in a while I get a really nice one and show it to people, and if that person is Pete then he taunts me with that phrase hated by all photographers: Wow, you must have a really good camera.
Now, it’s true that most photography dorks are also equipment nerds. Spend any time talking to most photographers, and the conversation will inevitably turn to gadgets, lenses, tripods and other miscellaneous items.
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Aug 31, 2005 · peterb · 4 minute read
Games
I feel that since I mentioned that I recently picked up Myst III, among other games, for the Xbox, I should post a brief follow-up: I have finished the game.
I enjoyed it a lot; it was definitely worth the $9 I paid for it, and a bit more besides. Let me see if I can quickly outline what I liked and didn’t like about the game. I won’t spoil any of the puzzles, and I’ll try not to reveal too much of the plot, beyond what you’ll find out in the first few minutes of the game.
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Aug 30, 2005 · psu · 4 minute read
Places
As promised, here is a second list of things that I like about PIttsburgh. Also as promised, no food places.
The PSO
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the Jansons era was among the best in the country IMHO. We haven’t been to Heinz Hall that much in the last few years, but I haven’t heard anything to indicate that things are much different now that Jansons is gone. The only thing that keeps this band down is an apparent requirement for unimaginative repertoire.
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Aug 29, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
The “Gamer’s Bill of Rights” article referred to in today’s Joystiq entry is here
Aug 26, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Games
I feel somewhat self-concious about writing about games. I feel OK writing about my impressions of specific games. After all, those are just my observations. I feel like I am on shakier ground when writing about more general issues in games, gaming, or game design, if for no other reason than I only have my experience to go by and it seems like others have a lot more experience than me.
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Aug 25, 2005 · peterb · 9 minute read
Games
The camera in Neverwinter Nights sucks. This article is about why. I’m telling you what the article is about up front, because I’m about to take a leisurely detour through many seemingly unrelated topics before circling back around to the actual point.
Jungian archetypes “Я” Us
As I think I’ve mentioned before, my mother didn’t like Dungeons & Dragons very much. When I would hang out at Junot Diaz’s house and play all day, she’d always call me after a few hours and harangue me into coming home.
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Aug 24, 2005 · psu · 4 minute read
Games
The Xbox 360 pricing and various bundles have been in the news a lot over the last week. The general mood among the fanboys appears to be a mixture of anger and betrayal. As usual, my feeling is that most of the traffic on this subject shows a startling lack of intelligence.
Whining about the 360 system pricing seems to take one of three attack vectors.
1. Microsoft promised a hard disk based console for $300.
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Aug 23, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
I have a reputation for not liking anything. I don’t think I deserve this, because I rant at least as vociferously about things I like as things I do not. But, for some reason people still have a distorted view of my inner pysche, leading them to comment on my articles and ask questions like: “Is there anything in Pittsburgh that you like?”
Of course there is. In fact, there are probably too many to list in one article.
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Aug 22, 2005 · peterb · 4 minute read
Food and Drink
There are certain items that I run out of on a regular basis, but am too stupid to pick up ahead of time.
I don’t have this problem with some things, such as milk, or bread, or fruit. But some items I seem to be wired to run completely out of before going to get more. Cat litter, for example. Coffee, for another. Wine. I’ll watch the stocks of whatever-it-is getting lower and lower.
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Aug 19, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
We did the drive from PA to Eastern New England again to visit the parents. Found a few more places to eat along I-90.
Charlie The Butcher, Buffalo NY
Another Beef on Weck place, but with a different style. The meat here is more roasted than the other places I’ve been. In addition, they actually have some interesting sides, and other types of meat worth eating. The roast turkey, for example, was excellent.
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Aug 18, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
Currently eating away at my brain (in the good way) is Michael Penn’s song “Walter Reed” from his new album, [Mr. Hollywood Junior, 1947](http://www.am azon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009WFFRM/theusualsuspepat). An MP3 of this song is downloadable, for free, as part of the press kit for the album. Go forth and suffer as I have suffered.
If you have iTunes (and who doesn’t?) you can also [watch the video](http://ph obos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewVideo?b=a&videoId=78326431).
Michael Penn is married to Aimee Mann, and has done a lot of the production on her albums.
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Aug 17, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
We all know the way to cook rice is with a rice cooker. For most of my life, I had used simple one button rice cookers. I had seen these “fuzzy logic” cookers, but never figured it was worth shelling out for one. On the other hand, I had also noticed that whenever you are served the really excellent Japanese rice, it comes out of one of these cookers. So last week, under the pretense of obtaining a non-stick bowl, we bought a ten cup Zojirushi.
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Aug 16, 2005 · peterb · 19 minute read
Games
When I had the opportunity to interview David Mullich, designer of some of the most unusual and quirky Apple II games I played in my youth, I was a bit anxious. Mullich, after all, has been working in the industry for 25 years. What are the chances he’d want to talk about his earliest works? Imagine you are, say, a writer. You’ve been writing for decades. Every year you put out a new book.
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Aug 15, 2005 · psu · 4 minute read
Computers
Back in the day, I served two useful purposes in the car: pick the next tape to play, and keep track of the navigational information on the road map. The iPod has long taken over the first of these duties, leaving me with nothing to do but dictate the next turn. Except for the occasional tendency to reverse right from left, I believe that i have always done a credible job.
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Aug 12, 2005 · peterb · 4 minute read
Food and Drink
I have a superb Japanese cookbook, [Japanese Homestyle Cooking](http://www.ama zon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/4889960368/theusualsuspepat) by Suzuki Tokiko- san. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. Love, because it’s a great book with many delicious and interesting recipes. Hate, because most of those recipes require what seems like days of effort to make properly, and Suzuki-san is very insistent on proper procedure. “The rice must be washed eighty-seven times, until the rinse-water is absolutely clear.
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Aug 11, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Games
Another August, another copy of Madden NFL. I can’t help it. People will mock me. The general public’s evaluation of my intelligence will plummet. What little cred I had as a “cool” or independent-minded personality will go down the toilet. But that’s OK, because nothing changes the fact that the game is fun.
With the exclusive license and other press around EA in the past year, it has become fashionable to decry Madden as a symbol of everything wrong in the modern game industry.
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Aug 10, 2005 · psu · 5 minute read
Photo
I had a feeling of nostalgia come over me a few weeks ago and got out the old manual film camera to shoot a roll of black and white and send it to a lab I found that does process-and-scan.
Aside from the Leicas, there is no current production camera that is as old school as the Nikon FM3a. It has manual focus, manual wind, and that signature manual camera snick noise when you take a shot.
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Aug 9, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Games
When I got a PS2 last Christmas, the one nearly unanimous game recommendation that I received from the crack dealers friends I know who play games was Ico. Over and over I heard “You gotta get Ico”. So I bought Ico. That was six months ago, and I finally got around to finishing it this weekend. For most of the this time, I’ve had a mixed relationship with Ico. As much as I wanted to love the game as a truly transformative experience, my brain would always get in the way, as illustrated by this inner dialog.
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Aug 8, 2005 · peterb · 3 minute read
Games
There’s no real point behind this, and we weren’t very strict about the theme, but sometimes you just have to make a list of videogame titles crossed with famous works from other media. This is one of those times. 52. Planescape: Yenta [peterb]
51. The Chain-Gunning of Lot 49 [nlanza]
50. Atlas Quaked [peterb]
49. City of Lost Koopas [peterb]
48. The BFG 9000 [fpereira]
47. The Satanic Versus Mode [nlanza]
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Aug 4, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
Lately, some friends and I have been playing a web-based massively multiplayer online game called Urban Dead. The basic concept behind the game is that you are in a town that is infested by zombies. You either play a survivor (one of various different “classes” – policeman, soldier, fireman, scientist – or you play a recently animated corpse.
The thing about this game is: it isn’t any fun. Not even a little.
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Aug 3, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
The later part of the summer means there are no more fresh crabs to be had. Therefore, to make you suffer, here are my two favorite recipes for crabs and crabmeat, both of which I made up accidentally.
Pan-fried Soft-shell Crabs
When we lived in North Carolina one of our great pleasures in the summer was going to Tom’s seafood shack and picking up the soft-shell crabs that he had just brought back from the east coast of the state.
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Aug 2, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
Allume, the publisher of facehuggerware product Stuffit has been acquir ed, for $11 million in cash and $2 million in stock. To put those numbers into context, realize that it is less than half of what Microsoft books in earnings, on average, every day.
Maybe there is some justice in the world, after all.
Aug 1, 2005 · psu · 7 minute read
Games
These days, the average large scale action game is clocking in at between ten and fifteen hours of gameplay. This brings howls of complaints from the hard core gaming set and the gaming press. Over and over again, you hear people complain about the main failing of an otherwise excellent game: “It was too short”. This is nonsense. Ten hours is, if anything, usually too long.
First, there are my own physical constraints:
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Jul 29, 2005 · peterb · 4 minute read
Games
Regular readers may recall an article from last summer where I mentioned some PC games I picked up from the bargain bin. At the time I wrote that article, I had started playing through one of them (Myst III: Exile) and was enjoying it.
Shortly thereafter, I stopped playing it. This week, I bought Myst III: Exile for Xbox at The Exchange. I had also bought Silent Hill 3 for the PS2, another game I already owned for the PC.
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Jul 28, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Photo
Yesterday’s article by psu about the importance of only showing your best photos really struck a note with me. That’s why I have added a Tea Leaves™ Decisive Moments™ photostream to the sidebar. This will let us subject you to unedited garbageshare the immediacy of our vision with you.
First up: three weeks of cat pictures. Tally-ho! For now, I’m using Flickr to host the pictures, until I find enough free time to write a proper template hosted at tleaves.
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Jul 27, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Photo
Henri Cartier-Bresson has a lot to answer for. Renowned for a photographic style that brilliantly balances meticulous composition with apparently split second timing, Bresson brought hundreds of iconic images into the photographic literature. Unfortunately, his style and artistic rhetoric (The Decisive Moment) became so influentional that it inspired legions of would be photojournalists to march into the streets on a desperate and largely futile search for their own decisive moments. Sadly, these armies of would-be auteurs do not understand two fundamental principles: most of your pictures are crap, and you have to know how to edit.
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Jul 26, 2005 · peterb · 5 minute read
Games
Random notes, from about 4 years ago, on peterb’s theory of computer role playing games and why designing fun CRPGs is so hard.
“I don’t consider anything the Japanese do to be RPGs. Those are movies with extra special boring parts put in the middle for obsessive-compulsives.”
Why do most RPGs suck? There are basically 3(*) elements that go into making a computer RPG.
Plot.
Conversations with non-player characters.
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Jul 25, 2005 · psu · 3 minute read
Culture
As anyone who isn’t living on Mars probably knows, Lance Armstrong bowed out of bike racing this weekend with his unprecedented seventh straight in the Tour de France.
Back in 1995, in the Indurain period, the long time cycling journalist Samuel Abt wrote a book about the transition in U.S. cycling as Greg Lemond was getting ready to retire. At the time, Lance was quoted as saying that he was tired of being called “the next Lemond”, and would rather be called “the first Lance.
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Jul 22, 2005 · peterb · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
…mulberry tree.
I always thought it was a mulberry bush, but apparently I was mistaken. I parked underneath one of these trees outside one of my favorite bars – The Sharp Edge – the other day, with hundreds of perfectly ripe (and overripe) berries of a kind I’d never seen before. They looked like blackberries. They looked really good. Risking instant poisonous death, I gingerly tried one. They tasted good.
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Jul 21, 2005 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
Those who can, write code.
Those who can’t, wank about Open Source Licenses.
Jul 20, 2005 · peterb · 3 minute read
Places
Tonight, in a pensive mood, I did something I haven’t done in a while: I picked a direction, started driving, and got myself good and lost. I ended up in Clairton. Clairton is a burned-out husk of a steel-town along the Monongahela river, 8300 residents and dropping fast. If you approach it as I did, on route 837 from the north, you enter one of those curious areas created by Pittsburgh’s hilly, riparian geography: a two-lane road with almost no turn-offs, a retaining wall on one side, and the river on the other.
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Jul 19, 2005 · psu · 2 minute read
Games
A recent feature at The Armchair Empire takes the gaming world to task for accusing Nintendo of being “only for kids.” I think the piece makes a series of good points, not the least of which is that the current crop of so-called “mature” games are really nothing more than juvenile power fantasies for the 17 year old set. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the odd juvenile power trip, I did, after all finish both Resident Evil and God of War.
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