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It starts with a story.

Until you turn it into a vision.

And you make a world.

That you bring to reality.

Bring friends along.

To change the real world a bit.

IMGD students make amazing things every day.  They tell stories, make worlds, give us new things to do, and new ways to talk to each other.  You can be one of them.  The only limit is your imagination.

Another Box Subscription

Those of you who read this infrequently updated blog may remember my adventure with LootCrate, a monthly box subscription of nerd toys.  Despite every month saying, "Should I cancel that?" I continue to get it, I just don't post it every month because... well, Lootcrate can do their own damn marketing.

I'm here to talk about food.  A friend of mine (hi, Jean!) sent me a free Blue Apron box for my birthday.  The only thing is, in order to get your gift, you have to sign up for the service.  So interesting that in order to get a gift from a friend, I have to input a credit card number.  Nice going there, Blue Apron.

Blue Apron sends you recipes for meals, and exactly the amount of food you need to cook those meals.  There will be no leftovers.  This wasn't quite true, because in one recipe I needed about half as much shallot as given to me, but a shallot is a shallot, and sometimes it's big and sometimes it's not so big.

Set up was simple enough, I told them what kinds of food I didn't eat, in this case red meat because of Elizabeth, and they told me they would send me six meals the following week!  Because of when I did it, it actually took a week an a half for my box to arrive.

You have a choice for your box to arrive on Fridays or Saturdays, that's it.  I chose Saturdays because we're usually around then.  

Here's what it looked like when I opened it:



It's kind of like your mother packed you a lunch, which you have to cook, and your mother thinks you don't know a damn thing about cooking. Just about everything is labeled. My favorite part:



What could be inside?



Yes. A tomato. Strangely enough, there was a second tomato in the box that didn't come with its own Big Mac box and label. I think this box was because this was a pretty ripe tomato and they were worried it get squished in transit.

When finally unpacked, it was a decent amount of stuff.



Note the olive oil and paper towels were not included in the box.

So first I made Seared Salmon and Tomato Chutney, which was pretty easy to make, and took about 40 minutes. Probably the best part of this is the fact they give you exactly how much you need. So instead of buying a bunch of cilantro just so you can use about three stalks for garnish and then you either have to make recipes with cilantro all week to use up the rest or come back to rotten cilantro in your veg bucket, they just give you three stalks of cilantro.

The bummer about this was that the promised "6 meals a week" wasn't actually 6 meals for 2 people, it was 3 meals for 2 people. 3 x 2 =6, get it? On the other hand, only three meals means I have more flexibility with my meal planning. Bottom line, this is for people who hate to grocery shop, and don't want to plan meals, but still want to cook.

Here's the salmon dish assembled:



The salmon was really good. The chutney was okay, and the stew was okay. I'd like my Indian food a bit spicier, but my wife was really happy.

At $60 for 6 servings it's expensive compared to buying groceries yourself, but it's not expensive compared to eating out.  All of the recipes are available on the Blue Apron website, so if you're inclined you can go to their website right now, buy the ingredients yourself, and make that meal, probably for much less than $20.  The way I normally cook, I would have made a much bigger pot of the stew, bought and cooked up more of the salmon, and had it a second night later in the week.

The packaging is what costs the lion's share, as there were three big ice packs to ship it here. Which also makes me wonder where this food is coming from. The box came from Brooklyn, so I guess we're paying twice-- whatever built in price of the produce and such available in Brooklyn, then to have it shipped up here to MA. 

I could have gotten everything locally grown that's in the box.

Next was BLT's and Cucumber, Avocado, and Tomato salad.  There always seems to be one "sandwich" meal in the box.  I cheated, because I had used the very ripe tomato from the Big Mac box in the chutney, the second tomato wasn't nearly as ripe and would have made for so-so BLTs.  That day we went to a farm stand and I bought some beautiful, fresh, ripe tomatoes.  I used one of these and let the Blue Apron box tomato ripen on my windowsill.  I used it later in the week for tomato eggs (Mom's recipe, tell you later) and it still wasn't nearly as good as the local tomatoes that I was also using.



Definitely the cheap meal. Perfectly fine, though.  Elizabeth thought there was too much vinegar in the salad, I thought grilling the bread in bacon fat made for soggy bread and I should have just toasted it in the toaster first.

Oh yeah, it looks like every single recipe only needs one pot and one pan, so this is definitely aiming at the young professional who wants to get started in the kitchen but doesn't know how to start.

The third one was the hardest recipe of the three: Chicken and Snow Pea Radish Saute.

I fucked up a little. First, I missed that I should have chopped the pistachios, so when it came time to add them to the caramel, I threw in what was in the bag and then said, "Hey, that doesn't look right."
Also, I couldn't find the sugar bag to make the caramel, so I got a tablespoon of sugar out of the pantry. I could spare it. I was supposed to monitor the caramel closely because it's easy to overcook. I was supposed to remove it from the heat when it was light, golden brown, except my pots are a light purple pyrex, so judging color in them is totally fucked. It said 2-3 minutes of boiling the sugar water would be about right. I went to 6 minutes, got scared, dumped in the pistachios, spread the mix on parchment paper, chopped up the pistachios there, and said, "Good enough." Instead of a pistachio brittle on top of the chicken, I just got sugar frosted pistachios.

My mistakes may have been because I had gotten cocky after the last two meals, or because I was sipping scotch while cooking. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.



And a better picture of a single plate:



This was still pretty tasty, but that was mostly because it was a really nice piece of chicken that I cooked well. Basic cooking there.

What I have learned: I am not a candy maker.

My second box arrived today, and I've got to say that I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. Instead of feeling like it's freed me from shopping, I feel like it has committed me to cooking. Instead of one longer shopping trip for the week last week, I ended up going to the store three times to pick up single ingredients for what I was making that night. 

 
I canceled it today. Hopefully. They don't exactly make it easy for you to cancel. I had to google it, that got me to an email address, the reply from that email address sent me to a link, which made me fill out a little form telling them why I was cancelling, and now hopefully I've cancelled.

House of Leaves

Yes, this is what some of the pages look like.  By the time you get there, it makes sense.  Kind of.

Last week I devoured House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I finished it on Friday and was sad that it was over. Given the nature of the book, and how difficult some of the reading is, getting through it in a week means there was a lot of time just sitting reading (or code breaking, or what have you.) My continued reaction was, "How did this book come out 13 years ago and I never knew it existed until now?"

Then I started suspecting that it hadn't come out 13 years ago, that the copyright date was a lie, and that the fact that it was set in the 90's was just another clue to the true nature of the house. Then I looked it up online and figured that was wrong, but I couldn't shake the niggling doubt that everything on the internet was a vast conspiracy to convince me that the book hadn't just come out this year.

House of Leaves is the story of a slacker named Johnny Truant (maybe his real name, probably not) who finds a manuscript written by an old, blind guy named Zampano (who was a character in La Strada). The manuscript is a scholarly treatise about a movie called The Navidson Record which Zampano couldn't have seen (since he's blind) which is a found footage (although we're told the footage was taken and edited by Navidson, so it's not so much found as a more traditional documentary with lots of found footage within it) about a family who moves into a house that turns out to be... a gateway to somewhere else, with a minotaur.

Navidson is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist and he's got a grant to record and follow his family as they move into and get settled in a new house in Virginia. His wife, Karen Green is a former supermodel, and they have two kids, Daisy and Chad. The first thing Navidson (or Navy, as in blue) notices is that the dimensions of the house don't match up. It's 1/4-inch bigger on the inside than on the outside. They go to visit relatives and come back to find a new hallway in their living room. It is ash gray, and featureless, and goes about ten feet in a direction that's impossible, because it's on an outside wall, and you can clearly see that there's not ten feet of house there from the outside.

Thus begins an exploration of a giant maze of featureless, lightless hallways that lead to a giant room with a giant stairway in the middle leading down. Navidson first contacts an engineering professor at the local university to help him measure his house, and eventually gets explorers (guys who climb Everest and such) to mount an expedition into the house and find whatever is inside.

Oh, and Johnny Truant goes through his own journey as he reads the manuscript, edits it to both restore parts that Zampano has tried to delete, and tells us about his own life. It's possible that Zampano never existed, and the whole thing is written by Johnny, or possibly Johnny doesn't exist and the whole thing is written by his mother, Pelafina (although if he doesn't exist, then she's not really his mother, is she?) All this is found in footnotes, appendices, and exhibits which take you on a merry chase through the book itself.

So there are layers within layers here. Oh, and the author's sister is a pop star named Poe who put out an album called Haunted, which includes tracks related to the book. In fact, in the first, hardcover edition (which is actually the Second Edition because the First Edition was distributed via the internet) there are characters on the endpapers which, when combined, put into a hex editor, and turned into an AIFF file plays a 2 second clip from one of the tracks on her album.

Yes, it's that kind of book.

What was amazing to me was that we see here a description of a found-footage movie in 2000, the year after Blair Witch came out, but before the spate of them started. Even so, the work that went into this book means it must have been started before Blair Witch, so he's describing a cinematic genre which doesn't really exist yet. If anything, House of Leaves reminds me more of Lake Mungo than, say the Paranormal Activitiy movies.

For some reason (which Danielewski will only say is "cinematic") every time the word house appears in the book, it is in blue print.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. I wished I was reading it concurrently with someone, because I wanted to talk about it as I went through it. It really is quite a journey.

LootCrate #2: The Lootening

Before I get to the contents of this month's LootCrate-- oh, yes, I stuck with it-- I have a request.  Remember how part of LootCrate's business strategy is to get all their customers to sell the subscription through blog posts like this one, unboxing videos, and social media?  Remember how I put a link at the bottom of my last LootCrate review so I would get $5 off my next LootCrate, and if I got four people then my LootCrate would be free?

Well, two people told me they subscribed to LootCrate despite my tepid review, and used my link.  So I figured, "$10 LootCrate?  Okay, I'm in."

Then the charge went through and it was still $19 and change.

So I need to send another email to LootCrate to ask them where my discount is for being a good little viral marketer.  In order to do that, I'd like more than hearsay.  If you subscribed to LootCrate via the link at the bottom of my last blog post, could you drop me a line?

The theme this month was "Celebrate," which made me a little wary, but the video had lots of videogame references and drinking, and I like both those things.

First, the obligatory box shot:

Yeah, it's the same box.

First off, they wanted to celebrate Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary.  We went a little crazy over this ourselves, and attended a showing of the special at our local cinema to watch it in 3D.  If only the LootCrate had gotten here in time, I could've brought a TARDIS balloon and sticker with me.  Alas, these must now live in my living room.

The sticker says it's reusable, but I'm a cynical bastard and will place it where I want it to be for all eternity just in case that isn't quite true.  Good stuff, LootCrate.

Next up is an official Batman wallet:

This is made from Tyvek, a wonder paper that is indestructible.  I used to have a little sleeve for my bank card made out of this stuff, and it was pretty hardy.  I am an aficionado of Batman wallets, since my very first wallet was one (and I still have it).  Back in the late sixties, this is what passed for a Batman wallet:

It was plastic, and bright yellow, and has one of those cellophane over black wax pads and a stylus so you could write secret messages to yourself.  Note that this wallet IS NOT included in the LootCrate.

This one is:

I kind of need a new wallet.  The real question is: am I nerdy enough to use this one?  I think I am, but it will come down to whether or not there's room in the wallet for all my stupid cards.  I will try to transfer everything over.  Also, apparently the tyvek looks better with more wear and tear, so I can probably provide that.  Thumbs up, LootCrate.

Next is a set of playing cards with robots on them:

I'm fine with that.  My wife will probably use them, as she's the one who plays solitaire.

Then a "First Person Shooter" which is kind of stretching it on the clever, clever for this:

Yeah, it's a shotglass with crosshairs.  I don't do many shots (I prefer to sip my scotch), but okay.

Then they gave me a scary drink thing that's supposed to be breakfast.  You just drink it and that's breakfast.  I suppose I will try it someday when I'm in a rush.  I think they were going for hangover cure, but it makes no claims to anything but breakfast.

And finally, the big thing-- a South Park character that is also a speaker for your phone, so you can blast the tunes with toons (get it?  Ha!).  I got Kenny:

My favorite thing about this so far is that the headphone jack plugs into Kenny's ass, and the charging LED is his heart.  I can't say how it sounds yet, because it's still charging.  I'm going to leave this in the office so I can listen to podcasts and music from my phone.  I expect it will be better than the speaker on my phone, but not all that much better.

All told, this is what I expected from LootCrate.  Some fun stuff, some clever stuff, and enough of both that it put a smile on my face while I was opening it, and again now that I'm writing this up.  Notice that I didn't even crack the pamphlet that came with it, because I think it would've made me snarky.  Oh, and the MegaLootCrate this month is both an Xbox One and a PS4.  Fingers crossed, but I never win anything.

My original survey of previous LootCrates showed that I would've liked 4 out of 7 of them, so I guess I started badly and this is one of the ones I liked.

Worth the $20, but totally worth the $10 if I can figure out what the hell happened to my discount.

Thumbs up, would do it again.

Oh, and here's the link to (maybe) get me a discount on the next LootCrate:

http://mbsy.co/lootcrate/388888

NaNoWriMo 2013

I've been meaning to post about doing NaNoWriMo all month, but I've been busy writing my novel instead.

For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month.  The challenge is to write 50,000 words in one month, specifically, November.  50,000 words in 30 days works out to be 1667 words per day.  Theoretically those words should go together to tell a coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end within those 50,000 words.

Last year I did it for the first time.  I thought, "Hey, I'm a professional writer.  I've been published.  I've been produced.  Things have been made with my writing in them.  I can do this standing on my head.  I will finally write my Great American Novel."

My problem was, I wasn't sure how much story would fit into 50,000 words.  It turns out that 50,000 is a short novel, like The Great Gatsby, or Old Man and the Sea.  You know, the ones you read off the required reading list in high school based on their page count.  It's a little over 100 paperback pages.  I outlined my story and I still didn't know if I would have too much or two little.  I decided to divide it into two acts, and if I got through my first act with only 20k words, I'd write my second act.  If, on the other hand, I got to 50,000 words and was at the end of my first act, then I'd end the story there.

So I gave myself a daily goal of 2000 words per day.  That way if I missed  a day or so, I would have a nice buffer zone of words banked, and I'd still get my 50,000 words.  I only missed one day; when we woke up at 5am and flew back from Florida and I got home and was totally exhausted.  So in one month last year I wrote a little over 58,000 words.

But something happened in the writing.  I was setting up all this stuff that had to pay off in Act II.  I got to the end of Act I somewhere in the low 60's, but the story wasn't done.  I kept writing.

In the 11 months since NaNoWriMo ended last year, I have written another 30,000 words, and I was still nowhere near the end of the story.

Here we are, halfway through this year's NaNoWriMo, I've got another 33,000 words and I can just see the end in sight.  Technically that makes me a "rebel" this year, since the rules state you have to start the novel on November 1, and I continued a piece of writing I had previously started.  It doesn't much matter.  The point of NaNoWriMo is that when you win, you've the prize is that you've written a novel.  So if it took me two consecutive years to win, then so be it.  My novel is longer than a standard NaNo novel.

So here's my status tracking widget: