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:

Got a LootCrate

LootCrate is a company that will send you a monthly box of stuff for a little less than $20 a month.  The boxes contain nerd tchochkes revolving around some central theme.  It's either a way to get a care package that you'll probably like for nerds who don't have people to send them stuff, or it's the 21st century's answer to the death of the magazine.

Let me expound a bit on that latter idea.

I buy a subscription for $19/month that I can cancel anytime, or I play less for a 3-month or 6-month plan.  At a certain point in the month the theme is announced, for instance, October's theme was "Survive" which very clearly was going to be zombie-related stuff.  They DON'T tell you exactly what's in the box, that's a surprise.  Around the 20th of the month the box is "locked" which means they charge you and you are officially getting that stuff.  Then your box arrives around the end of the month and you are encouraged to post an "unboxing" either in pictures or as a Youtube video.

You get:

1. Something to look forward to every month.
2. No pesky reading material that you might, y'know, have to read.
3. Toys with which to decorate a geek cubicle.
4. A sense of community where you see how happy everyone is to get their stuff.
5. A chance to win a Mega LootCrate full of expensive stuff.

The best part of getting magazines was finding them in the mailbox and flipping through them while all the stupid subscription cards fell out and littered your front porch.  Then you actually had to read the magazine.  Currently I'm about three months behind on reading my Smithsonians.  I suppose when I had a subscription to Maxim (long story, but I got shunted there after two or three different gaming magazines went belly-up) I could plow through one of  those in about 15 minutes, but generally I like to actually read articles to feel as though I'm getting my money's worth.

LootCrate gives you all the happy feelings of getting something in the mail without any of the actual work of reading stuff.  There are other services like this, for instance Graze will send you natural snacks, Spicy Subscriptions will send you sex toys, and Cannabox will send you marijuana-themed stuff every month.  I can only imagine that after a year of monthly sex toys you might get a bit tired.  There seem to be a lot of panty and sock subscriptions (do young women go through that many panties?  Socks?)  All of them seemed geared towards twenty-somethings.

I was told about LootCrate by one of my former students.  Okay, I like geek toys.  I like getting stuff in the mail.  I looked through their last seven LootCrates and figured I'd have liked about four of them, and liked the other three somewhat less.  So, for instance, a box centered around fighting games wouldn't appeal to me so much.

What the hell, I'm in for a month.

So I guess this is an unboxing, but probably not one that #LootCrate is going to like.  Did I mention that they give away prizes for the best unboxing videos/pictures?  Yes, they do.  So if you're super excited they'll give you something.  I do not think they will be giving me something.

And if you get other people to subscribe they'll give you four dollars off your next LootCrate.  Every five people you get means a free LootCrate.  Welcome to the Ponzi scheme section of our business model.

It arrived yesterday.  See?

They even give you handy instructions on how to record an unboxing.

They're printed on the inside of the box.

The box starts with a pamphlet/magazine which contains exactly one short article (an interview with Max Brooks) that can be read in about two minutes, a top five zombie movies list that doesn't include anything by George Romero thus invalidating its own existence, a description of this month's Mega Crate, pictures of happy looters from last month, an invitation to send in pictures of yourself with this month's stuff, a page to say they've updated their Minecraft Servers (?), and a page each to describe the entire contents of this month's crate, which, presumably, you have in front of you anyway.

I really don't get the point of the pamphlet/magazine at all.  Use the money you spent printing that up to put something else in the box.  Or maybe this is their idea of a magazine?

So let's get to the stuff.  First, a "zombie hunter's membership card."

What am I, ten?  A membership card that I'm supposed to carry around in my wallet?  Really?  I've got enough "membership" cards from every store who wants customer loyalty jamming my wallet, I don't need some fake zombie hunter card in there.  And what's the stupid l33tspeak serial number doing in there?  You couldn't come up with something better, like 5318008?  Hint: turn it upside down on your TI-30 calculator, but of course you're too young to even know what a TI-30 was, let alone the vastly superior TI-55, but we were poor and my parents could only afford a TI-30.  

Oh shit, I'm veering into "Get off my lawn!" territory.

Moving on.  Next up, a zombie greeting card.

But no envelope to put it in and send it to someone.  So basically I've got to go steal one from the card aisle, or, more likely, my wife's card box.  What's a card box, you ask?  Well, when women reach a certain age (and I have no idea what that age is, it could be 15 for all I know), they start a box where they put cards that they liked enough to buy, but don't have any reason to send to someone.  They apparently browse Hallmark stores, see funny or sweet or sad cards, and buy them.  Then they put them in a box and when it's somebody's birthday or someone dies or whatever, they get out their box and go through the cards there and pick something out to send.  My mother had a card box, my sister has a card box, and my wife has a card box.  

Here's how I do it: "Oh shit, I'm on my way to a birthday party/wedding/funeral!  I better stop at CVS and buy a card so I have something to put the money/my sympathies in."

Eventually I got married and then it changed to: "Honey!  Do you have a card for this present?  Where's your card box?"

Or even better, my wife comes along while I'm putting my shoes on to go to the thing and says, "Here, sign this card."

I digress.

A zombie greeting card with no envelope.

 Next is a set of temporary tattoos, one a bite mark, one a bar code (and again with the 1337 bullshit).  These are really photo ops so you can dress up as a zombie (or "sexy zombie" if you're feeling frisky) and send them a picture of yourself with their tattoos for marketing purposes.  I might actually apply one on Halloween and call it a costume.  So okay, it's a $0.30 item, but whatever.

This brings us to the first big item, a t-shirt.

Okay.  Cool.  Zombie Ewoks.  It's got that Star Wars thing going crossed with Walking Dead.  I like it.  Except for one thing-- it's too goddamned small.  They ask you for your size and your sex.  I told them I was male and I wanted an XXL (and I just double checked my account, and yes, it still says that).  I am large.  Okay, I'm fat.  2XL usually covers my bulk.  Just for reference, I put this shirt next to a Penny Arcade 2XL that I own:

Do you see that?  This ewok shirt is maybe a large, but the label says XXL.  Where, in Munchkin Land?  Also, it seems to be tapered and cut like a woman's t-shirt.  So this shirt is good for nothing but a giveaway in my class.

Next there was a bloodshot eyeball candy thing.  This was a marshmallow inside a package with an eyeball printed on it.  I have no picture because I ate it.  It was a perfectly fine marshmallow.  I have no complaints.

Some buttons:

A zombie hand, a crossbow (kind of Zelda-ish there, guys), and a health pack.  8-bit is the new black.  Seems fine.

And here's the final big thing in the box.

Wow!  The Zombie Survival Guide!  Cool!  

Wait, where have I seen that before?  Oh, I remember:

On my bookshelf, where it's been for the last ten years since it was published!  Right there between Master and Commander and A Man on the Moon being guarded by the goddamned Batman and Rick from The Walking Dead.

I suppose if you're twenty now and you were ten when the book came out, then you might have missed it, but if you're into zombies at all you probably already have a copy.

So they put all their eggs one basket by giving me a book that they think I'll like, but like many friends who want to give me presents they fell into the trap of giving me a book that I already have.  Honestly, if they'd have just filled the box with zombie action figures and bobbleheads it would have been fine.  Even if I already have the action figure, you can never have too many.  How else are you going to stage a zombie horde?

So what have I learned?

The LootCrate is Not For Me.  It's for skinny twenty-somethings who don't have shelves and shelves of books, action figures, and tchochkes already.  I would have been better off taking my $20 and buying an action figure I picked out myself.

Update:  If you want to subscribe even after this not great review, here's the link that gives me credit for it:

http://mbsy.co/lootcrate/388888

I am much more likely to get another LootCrate if it's free.

UPDATE 11/18/2013: I sent the picture of the LootCrate t-shirt next to an actual 2X shirt to the LootCrate people and they sent me a mailing label to return the shirt for one that fits.  I've now gotten the new t-shirt, and it now fits.  Odd that it has the exact same labeling as the tiny one.  I blame whatever sweatshop in Indonesia made the shirt.

So LootCrate is okay in my book.  Good customer service.  And thanks to however many of you clicked the link, it looks like I will give them another month and see what I get.  Stay tuned for next month's review.