10.30.09
Posted in nanowrimo tagged NaNoWriMo 2009 at 1:46 pm by kyrias
Yup.
National Novel Writing Month.
To be honest, I’m feeling sketchy about doing it again. Part of me feels that doing it once was quite enough, thank you very much. After all, now I know that I can churn out 50k+ words in a month if I have to. Now, the hard part — the editing so that it actually forms something resembling art — that I’m pretty sure I’ve semi-failed at. After all, I’ve left Estyria curled up in a fetal position for what now, a little over 10 months at least?
Thene says that some people have committed to editing their previous novels so that they’re reader-ready if not publish-ready for NaNoWriMo, but somehow editing some hundred K of words over the course of a month just doesn’t carry the same sort of cachet for me.
Oh well. This month I think I’m going to make an effort to go to the write-ins, just to meet new people if nothing else. It’s a pity I can’t make the official write-ins because the first falls on a Sunday and the second falls on a Thursday and I’m otherwise pre-booked for those days but I think I’ll find a satellite write-in to poke about in. Preferably somewhere with food.
So, anyone want to make a date of it? The calendar of write-ins is here for those who are interested.
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Posted in Recipes tagged banana bread, Joy of Cooking at 12:35 am by kyrias
Passable — as opposed to the Bestest Banana Bread recipes that you can find by randomly Googling. You know the ones.
I started out with the Joy of Cooking recipe, but I thought that version was a bit dry and so I upped the amount of bananas and made it a full 6 tablespoons of butter. I tried it once with nuts and thought that detracted from the pure banana bread experience and so I’m not doing it again. I might try banana bread with additives in the future, but this really is just how I like it — with no apologies for sheer banana taste and no distractions.
Banana Bread
as adapted from the Joy of Cooking
- 1⅓ cups whole white wheat flour
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon baking powder
- 6 tablespoons melted butter
- ½ cup succanat
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- 1½ cups mashed banana (about 3)
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Sift the dry ingredients together. Add the melted butter, then the eggs, then the bananas. Blend it just enough to incorporate the banana and so there are no clumps of dry ingredients. Dump into a buttered standard sized loaf pan and bake for 50-60 minutes — or until a knife comes out clean. This pretty much can be a two bowl process, which I really like, and it’s a lot of bang for the time bucks.
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10.28.09
Posted in life at 3:14 pm by kyrias
Warning: The following is potentially triggering.
A 15 year old girl was brutalized and gang raped for over two hours, just outside a homecoming dance. It is suspected that as many as 20 people stood by and either watched this happen without coming to her aid or actively participated.
After being brutalized for hours, she was only saved by a tip off to the police. According to stories I’ve read, the tip off was from a girl whose boyfriend had walked in, talking about this incident, mentioning that other males was inviting others to participate.
The horror is inconcievable.
That people stood by and watched a girl brutalized to the point of losing consciousness without attempting to help her.
That more than one person was involved in brutalizing her, that they actually reminisced about it and actively invited others to join in their crime.
That the site supervisors were sent home before the dance ended.
Just no. No.
Some part of me wants more details, something, anything to frame this entire thing in a way that my mind can process it.
But there is nothing that can make it ok. Nothing. I don’t care if you say that the young men involved were all brainwashed or high on drugs or anything. I don’t care if she was the biggest bitch on the planet and walking naked through the night. I don’t care if she killed their relatives, their friends, their puppies and laughed while doing it.
Nothing makes this right. Nothing can even come close to justifying this.
And to speak of her as just some sort of inflatable doll that you’re offering the world because you’re done and you want other males to just have their bit of tail too?
No. No. NO.
I cannot even come close to understanding how this could happen. Some part of me wants to kill the world that suffers such evil to walk its surface. How far departed are we from the ideal of humanity that this could happen and people can still engage in the blame-the-victim game. That people can even think of trying to justify it.
I feel broken.
Once again, I am reminded of why I’m reluctant to bring life into this world. I cannot imagine have a daughter and wondering if someday someone will choose to do this to her. I cannot imagine bringing a child into a world where s/he might be victimized this way, cannot imagine raising a child in a world where such things happen in a first world country, in a supposedly liberal state, in a country that speaks of justice and freedom for all.
I feel so very, very unsafe. I am so far from my safe place now that I cannot even imagine uncurling from where I am now to walk out into the streets, to face what might be monsters who wear the faces of men.
Love and light to the victim and may the gods watch over her.
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10.22.09
Posted in I.T tagged Internet monetization, YouTube at 4:15 pm by kyrias
‘ware, this is a rambly post:
I realized a while ago that my YouTube Downloader wasn’t working. It would pop up with a “flash video not found” whenever I would try to download something. I’ve been a bit distracted lately, and so I didn’t really bother to look into it. Today, however, I wanted to download Basshunter’s “Dota” song and I wanted to procrastinate from my literature review badly enough that I decided to solve the problem.
Apparently I’m really behind on the news: YouTube disabled 3rd party programs that allowed the videos to be downloaded.
Of course, the programmers promptly tried to find go-arounds. The last I heard via Googling was that Google bought On2 Technologies: the company that holds the rights to the code that drives Flash — which drives the entire caboodle from the videos themselves to the programs that download them.
Couple of things I’m thinking about:
Read a comment here that said:
Ari - February 12th, 2009 at 4:02 pm PST
Download? download? Isn’t the whole point of YouTube that you don’t need to download videos anymore? Why would you want to store videos on your PC when you can just leave them in the cloud and watch them?
Somebody is still living in 1990.
To a certain extent that’s true. Those funny videos that are good for a laugh but which no one is ever likely to want to download? Who would want to download those when you can just watch it, get your dose of laughter, and then click away? Much less pay for it.
Then again, there’s the songs that I downloaded off of YouTube because they were just too damn catchy/funny not to. Dota and Boten Anna, for example. Or Big Blue Dress. Or Hard like Heroic. Or The Craft of War: Blind — which is just too awesome, albeit not a song but machimation.
Yes, I wanted to download them so I could play them offline and put them in my mp3 player. Yes, I would have been willing to pay $0.99 for them.
The Question is: If YouTube goes for the full monetization route, how is YouTube going to change? The thing is, YouTube probably made it possible for Cranius of Big Blue Dress fame to release an album. Basshunter acknowledges that YouTube success is partially what placed him where he is now. So if YouTube starts charging people to upload videos like someone suggested, in order to keep YouTube from being a massive bleeding financial wound — what does that mean in terms of potential loss of creativity?
About the comparison to Hulu though — I don’t think the two serve the same function at all, which makes it interesting that the author would compare Hulu and YouTube to Ebay and Amazon — mostly because I don’t see Ebay serving the same function as Amazon either. Both ways, one is primarily business driven and the other consumer driven.
The other hand is, there’s so much chaff on YouTube that it’s damn difficult at any given time to find something worth keeping. So much that perhaps it makes sense to charge a small fee for uploading anything so that perhaps people will quit uploading useless videos that have little to no interest for anyone other than the uploader’s immediate family — if that. 15 hours of video uploaded every minute? That’s a lot of data and a lot of money just hemorrhaging away.
Total tangent: I really like Dota and Boten Anna, but I don’t think the re-makes are as good as the original and I don’t think the new songs are half as catchy as those two. One of the main things about the new songs is that I don’t think the lyrics flow as well and the English sounds a bit choppy. I don’t blame him for “selling-out” because much as people whine about YouTube wonders who go on to *gasp* actually make money, I think people deserve to be recompensed for their art. I can and do blame him for his newer songs which I think are not all that. :P
What I think YouTube could do is to make the BUY FROM AMAZON/ITUNES NAO! buttons more prominent/bigger/ less like an afterthought.
Another tangent: I really don’t understand why the backlash against people wanting to charge for services. I can understand not wanting to pay exorbitant fees for music or whatnot, but I really cannot understand the amount of vitriol that occurs when someone wants to monetize a service that is widely enjoyed that was free. I love the comment left by someone who called Cranius a damn sellout because his album is up for sale at ITunes and Amazon. It’s not even as though he pulled the video from YouTube. Sheesh.
Perhaps the real problem lies not only within the fact that Google doesn’t seem to have found a good business model for what they’re doing on the Internet but lies within the greed of the common user who is unwilling to pay for anything on the Internet. It’s almost as if they were Communists thrust into a capitalist country, the outcry is so great and devout.
I’ve seen it before on blogs where they have so many visitors that they put up ads to cover the hosting costs and suddenly all their followers suddenly hate their guts. Not only do they refuse to ever click to help out the host, but the amount of bitching and slamming is ludicrous and amazing.
Meh. I guess all that I can do is to sit back and watch the fireworks. Hopefully YouTube won’t crash and burn — but then who knows? It might go the way of DeviantArt and that would be interesting.
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10.20.09
Posted in Cooking, Recipes tagged scones at 2:07 pm by kyrias
I made these for a potluck the other day and they were very good — but then how is anything with bacon and cheddar ever nasty?
No. I take that back. Don’t tell me just how someone can screw up that combo. Especially if it involves moldy bread.
They are very rich, and Caesura doesn’t like them that much as a result. I just eat a small 1×1 square and call it good.
Bacon Cheddar and Chive Scones
as adapted from the King Arthur Flour blog
- 2 cups white whole wheat flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 tsp black pepper
- 1 tbsp baking powder
- 4 tbsp cold butter
- 1 cup cheddar cheese in small dice
- 1 cup minced chives
- ½ pound maple bacon
- 1 cup buttermilk
Preheat oven to 425°F.
Cut up the bacon, spread it on a baking sheet and throw that in the oven. I used the same baking sheet I was going to bake my scone on so I could skip the greasing bit. Whilst the bacon is cooking, about five minutes or so, whisk the dry ingredients together. Blend the butter into the flour, either with knives or a pastry blender. I used butter from the freezer because I didn’t want the butter melting or getting overly soft in the hot kitchen. Remove pan from oven and drain the bacon. Leave the pan to cool. I kept the grease for cooking, but I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with bacon grease that tastes faintly of maple syrup. Mix in the cheese, chives, and bacon. I added much more chives than the original recipe called for, partially because I love chives, and partially because I was trying to salvage what was otherwise a heart attach on a plate. The additional chives don’t add that much moisture and they don’t really overwhelm the scones in my opinion. Keeping in mind that I come from a culture where we stir-fry chives and eat that as a vegetable course. 
I paused here to allow my baking pan to cool off because I didn’t exactly want the dough sizzling on the hot pan. Note: stoneware cooking pans retain heat really, really well.
Drizzle the buttermilk onto the flour mixture and mix just until it forms a dough. Pat into shape on the baking pan, cut into pieces if you desire, and pop it into the oven. I skipped the egg/cream wash because I didn’t want to bother and it still turned out great. Bake for 25 minutes or until the top is nicely browned.
This was a pretty light and fluffy scone, even with the white whole wheat flour. I might try it with normal whole wheat — but since that doesn’t really have a nutritional edge on the white, I might not bother. I’m thinking about cutting down on the cheddar to see if that will make acceptable for Caesura as a breakfast food.
I’d love to add more pepper to give it a bit of a kick, or use peppery bacon next time. Perhaps adding pepper jack as opposed to cheddar? The possibilities are endless. I’m also thinking caramelized onions, gruyere, and perhaps ham or bacon.
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10.06.09
Posted in Cooking, Recipes tagged brownies at 10:40 pm by kyrias
Nevko called suddenly last Saturday, inviting us over to his sister’s house. Well, perhaps not so suddenly, but as we had already given up hope that he would call at that point, we were in no way prepared. Leena said that she’d pick us up from Alewife station in about 1.5 hours and she’d be supplying supper.
Absolutely thrown into a panic by the short notice, I rushed to find something that I could bring as a houseguest-gift. I pulled out the box of Duncan Hines, thought about it, and tossed it back into the cupboard. If Leena was going to be cooking for us, I felt bad bringing cake from a mix. Besides, Mr. P doesn’t usually eat cake.
Then I remembered that Leena made brownies the last time we visited…
I ran a quick Google for brownies and came up with this post for the Silver Palate brownies. Since I never think that the usual recipe is chocolatey enough, I did some modifications.
Brownies in a hurry
–adapted from the Silver Palate brownies recipe
- 2 sticks of butter
- 8 oz chocolate (I used one bar 100% cocoa from Ghiradelli and a semisweet bar from the same)
- 4 eggs
- 1 and 1/4 cups succanat
- 1/2 cup flour
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 2 tbsp espresso powder
First I preheated the oven to 350 degrees, then I melted the butter over a low flame in a small saucepot. Once the butter was melted and bubbling, I broke up the chocolate bars and just tossed them in, turning the flame to the absolute lowest it would go.
I’ve never really seen the point of using a double boiler or the microwave since I’ve never had this burn on me. If you’re not pressed for time, the chocolate will melt just fine even without additional heat once the butter is bubbly.
Whisk the succanat and eggs and then mix in the espresso powder and vanilla extract. After stirring the chocolate to make sure it wasn’t that hot anymore, I then poured it into the egg mixture, folded in the flour, and tossed it into the oven for 25 minutes.
The original recipe called for greasing and flouring the pan, but since I really didn’t have the time and I was feeling lazy anyways — I didn’t. I used this pan, Chantal Pure 2-Quart Square Baking Pan, Clear Light Vanilla
that I got from King Arthur, and it was fine. The brownies didn’t really stick and it was a cinch to clean up afterwards. Some steel wool and it came right off.
Disclaimer: If you click on that link and buy the pan from Amazon, I get a commission fee. If you want to buy from King Arthur, they still have it for sale also.
Speaking of the pan — I really, really like it. I bought it because Azora made lemon bars in our old 9×13 pan and because lemon bars don’t really come out of the pan unless there’s judicious use of parchment paper, it kind of got scratched up a bit when we were serving the lemon bars. This one is stoneware, so there’s no fear of damaging the non-stick finish or anything. I’ll want to get another one, this time probably from Amazon, unless King Arthur (KAF) is offering free shipping. I love KAF and really want to support them — but that shipping cost is a killer.
Back to the brownies. It was very good — it was just the right texture, not too cake-like, not too fudge-like and not that crumbley. It was very chocolatey without being overwhelming, in my opinion. Mr. P said that it needed milk but Anila’s friend Lex said he usually uses 16 ounces of chocolate for half the size of the pan I used — I might have to try that some time. Caesura wasn’t in favor of it though, so I might just have to do it sometime and scarf the entire pan myself. The horror and pain, right? 
I think I’ll keep this recipe, but I kind of want to make brownies with less egg and butter in them. A poster on the original site said something very disparaging about the amount of eggs and butter and whereas I feel that one should be able to indulge once in a while, there’s no harm in trying to make it a bit healthier if it doesn’t affect the taste/texture that much. Perhaps keep 2 eggs and use flaxseed in place of the other two? We shall see.
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10.03.09
Posted in Books, Reviews tagged Lev Grossman at 12:01 am by kyrias
First off, this will be rife with spoilers. I don’t like vague general book reviews and I tend to not want to write them unless it’s for NOR in which case it’s different because then I have to have some modicum of professionalism.
Secondly, I haven’t actually finished the book. I might at some later point, in which case this review should be updated, but I really wouldn’t hold my breath.
What worked:
Brilliant, incisive glances into the psyche of a character. Lev Grossman does quite a lot of telling, which could be irritating except that he often carries it off because the entire story is somewhat reminiscent of being very British and the writing style reflects that. The narrative voice, as such, also reflects that. So I suppose it could even be seen as stylistic rather than a writing flaw in some cases — if I were to wish to be generous.
Engaging, utterly out-of-the-blue concepts. That period up with Mayakovsky? Brilliant. I also liked the portrayal of learning magic as hard work — it’s been getting fluffy and it’s nice to revert back to where it’s not just waving a wand around and babbling bad rhymes.
Believable, flawed, albeit quite unsympathetic characters. I didn’t really like most of anything in the book except Alice. Quentin, who I shall dub the quintessential hero-in-need-of-being-saved worked to a certain extent, but I felt that his flaws might have been carried just slightly too far. I’ll admit that Alice’s end was perhaps the most fitting and it would have been masturbation to have allowed Quentin to have saved her — but still depressing and I wished it didn’t need to happen. I suppose I’m a bad person that way — I can forgive Sue-ish elements for the sake of a relatively happy ending.
What didn’t work:
None of the characters were that likable except Alice and I felt that could have been remedied with a little more fleshing out of the characters, but as it was, I just couldn’t identify with them that much.
I thought that the punishment far exceeded the crime in terms of a lot of what happened in Fillory. Towards the end it was just depressing and I honestly couldn’t really get through it. Quentin never really learns his lesson although multiple times it seems like he does except then he goes off and does something even more spectacularly horrible. Regarding that bit with Janet? I just never saw the attraction or the sexual tension or anything that intimated at that.
I thought the book should really have been extended. I usually argue that authors should know where to stop and when to stop but in this case the story probably would have benefited a lot more from being fleshed out more.
Conclusion: 4 stars
I think I’ll pick up the sequel when it comes out, just to see if Quentin improves with further acquaintance. I might or might not re-read the first “book” to pick up the stray bits that I missed the first time in my hurry to see what would happen next, but I don’t know if I’ll end up finishing it.
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10.02.09
Posted in life at 3:31 pm by kyrias
I apologize to the non-Bostonites who probably will have little to no clue of what I’m speaking of. However, if you reference the MBTA map, it might clarify things a bit.
When you move from merely being lazy and procrastinating to elevating it into some incredible absurdity, the following results:
For reference: I live about 3 bus stops from Sullivan Square on the Orange line. It’s about 8 blocks, give or take, and it takes about 10 minutes to traverse at normal speed.
My usual morning routine:
I walk the two or three blocks to where the street meets Broadway and wait for the bus. The 89, 90, and 101 will pick me up and deposit me at Sullivan Square. I’ll get on the train towards Forest Hills, get off two stops later at North station, cross the platform and get on a Green line train going into Park street because I usually can’t be arsed to walk from Downtown Crossing on the Orange line to the connected Park Street station on the Green line.
This walk involves walking down a tunnel, going down a flight of stairs and then going down a flight of stairs. It will take about 10 minutes at normal walking speed, if that.
I’ll hop off the Green line train at Park Street, unless I’ve been exceptionally lucky and got on the train that goes to Boston College and then get on the Boston College train, which usually stops right across the platform. This will take me to within a block of the building I have classes in.
On the way home I’ll take the Green line train into Park Street, where by virtue of the way the tracks align, I don’t have to navigate the stairs to get back to Downtown Crossing. If I could hop on a train that took me to North Station, I’d probably do it, but as it is that method also involves stairs. However, in order to get to the platform to board the train back towards Oak Grove, I have to walk down a flight of stairs and then walk up another two flights of stairs. Today I was feeling sufficiently lazy enough to want to take the train going towards Forest Hills, which I can board at the end of the tunnel, until I hit Back Bay Station so I could just hop off onto the platform, cross that, and get on the train going back towards Oak Hills.
The frightening thing is that if I hadn’t gotten bored waiting for the Forest Hills train, I probably would have done it.
Then I usually wait for the 12:40 101 bus to take me from Sullivan Square two stops down Broadway so I can walk the three blocks home.
I swear, part of me is appalled at myself.
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