#all the animal products originate (and are largely processed) within an hour from me

[nordfjording]

there's a new carbon footprint calculator out adjusted for the nordics and its great and all (lists me as about half of the average norwegian) but it also pinpoints how hard it is to make these accurate because the "best tips for how YOU can improve!" are very much along the lines of "take the train!" no trains in my region. "stay at your vacation destinations longer and fly less!" i don't go on vacations. "eat less meat!" i buy 1 pack of salami per month. "buy fewer eggs!" i haven't bought an egg in several years. "take the bus to activities!" i don't have regular activities.

[felassan]

Insights into DAI’s development from Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

The book is by game industry journalist Jason Schreier (it’s an interesting read and well-written, I recommend it). This is the cliff notes version of the DAI chapter. This info isn’t new as the book is from 2017 (I finally got around to buying it). Some insight into DAO, DA2 and cancelled DA projects is also given. Cut for length.

BW hoped that DA would become the LotR of video games. DAO’s development was “a hellish seven-year slog”

The DAI team are compared to a chaotic “pirate ship”, which is what they called themselves internally. “It’ll get where it needs to go, but it’s going to go all over the place. Sail over here. Drink some rum. Go over here. Do something else. That’s how Mark Darrah likes to run his team.” An alternative take from someone else who worked on the game: “It was compared to a pirate ship because it was chaotic and the loudest voice in the room usually set the direction. I think they smartly adopted the name and morphed it into something better.”

A game about the Inquisition and the large-scale political conflicts it solves across Thedas, where the PC was the Inquisitor, was originally the vision for ‘DA2′. Plans had to change when SW:TOR’s development kept stalling and slipping. Frustrated EA execs wanted a new product from BW to bolster quarterly sales targets, and decided that DA would have to fill the gap. BW agreed to deliver DA2 within 16 months. “Basically, DA2 exists to fill that hole. That was the inception. It was always intended to be a game made to fit in that”

BW wanted to call it DA: Exodus, but EA’s marketing execs insisted on DA2, no matter what that name implied

DAO’s scope (Origin stories, that amount of big areas, variables, reactivity) was just not doable in a year, even if everyone worked overtime. To solve this problem, BW shelved the Inquisition idea and made a risky call: DA2 would be set in one city over time, allowing locations to be recycled and months to be shaved off dev time. They also axed DAO features like customizing party members’ equipment. These were the best calls they were able to make on a tight line

Many at BW are still proud of DA2. Those that worked on it grew closer from all being in it together

In certain dark accounting corners of EA, despite fan response to DA2 and its lower sales compared to DAO, DA2 is considered a wild success

By summer 2011 BW decided to cancel DA2′s expansion Exalted March in favor of a totally new game. They needed to get away from the stigma of DA2, reboot the franchise and show they could make triple-A quality good games. 

DAI was going to be the most ambitious game BW had ever made and had a lot to prove (that BW could return to form, that EA wasn’t crippling the studio, that BW could make an ‘open-world’ RPG with big environments). There was a bit of a tone around the industry that there were essentially 2 tiers of BW, the ME team and then everyone else, and the DA team had a scrappy desire to fight back against that

DAI was behind schedule early on due to unfamiliar new technology; the new engine Frostbite was very technically challenging and required more work than anyone had expected. Even before finishing DA2 BW were looking for a new engine for the next game. Eclipse was creaky, obsolete, not fully-featured, graphically lacking. The ME team used Unreal, which made inter-team collab difficult. “Our tech strategy was just a mess. Every time we’d start a new game, people would say, ‘Oh, we should just pick a new engine’.”

After meeting with an EA exec BW decided on Frostbite. Nobody had ever used it to make an RPG, but EA owned FB dev studio DICE, and the engine was powerful and had good graphic capabilities & visual effects. If BW started making all its games on FB, it could share tech with sister studios and borrow tools when they learned cool new tricks. 

For a while they worked on a prototype called Blackfoot, to get a feel for FB and to make a free-to-play DA MP game. It fizzled as the team was too small, which doesn’t lend itself well to working with FB, and was cancelled

BW resurfaced the old Inquisition idea. What might a DA3 look like on FB? Their plan by 2012 was to make an open-world RPG heavily inspired by Skyrim that hit all the beats DA2 couldn’t. “My secret mission was to shock and awe the players with the massive amounts of content.” People complained there wasn’t enough in DA2. “At the end of DAI, I actually want people to go, ‘Oh god, not [another] level’.”

It was originally called Dragon Age 3: Inquisition

BW wanted to launch on next-gen consoles only but EA’s profit forecasters were caught up in the rise of iPad and iPhone gaming and were worried the next-gen consoles wouldn’t sell well. As a safeguard EA insist it also ship on current-gen. Most games at that time followed this strategy. Shipping on 5 platforms at once would be a first for BW

Ambitions were piling up. This was to be BW’s first 3D open-world game, and their first game on Frostbite, an engine that had never been used to make RPGs. It needed to be made in roughly two years, it needed to ship on 5 platforms, and, oh yeah, it needed to restore the reputation of a studio that had been beaten up pretty badly. “Basically we had to do new consoles, a new engine, new gameplay, build the hugest game that we’ve ever made, and build it to a higher standard than we ever did. With tools that don’t exist.”

FB didn’t have RPG stats, a visible PC, spells, save systems, a party of 4 people, the same kind of cutscenes etc and couldn’t create any of those things. BW had to create these on top of it. BW initially underestimated how much work this would be. BW were the FB guinea pigs. Early on in DAI’s development, even the most basic tasks were excruciating, and this impacted even fundamental aspects of game design and dev. When FB’s tools did function they were finicky and difficult. DICE’s team supported them but had limited resources and were 8 hours ahead. Since creating new content in FB was so difficult, trying to evaluate its quality became impossible. FB engine updates made things even more challenging. After every one, BW had to manually merge and test it; this was debilitating, and there were times when the build didn’t work for a month or was really unstable.

Meanwhile the art department were having a blast. FB was great for big beautiful environments. For months they made as much as possible, taking educated guesses when they didn’t know yet what the designers needed. “For a long time there was a joke on the project that we’d made a fantastic-looking screenshot generator, because you could walk around these levels with nothing to do. You could take great pictures.”

The concept of DAI as open-world was stymying the story/writers and gameplay/designers teams. What were players going to do in these big landscapes? How could BW ensure exploring remained fun after many hours? Their teams didn’t have time for system designers to envision, iterate and test a good “core gameplay loop” (quests, encounters, activities etc). FB wouldn’t allow it. Designers couldn’t test new ideas or answer questions because basic features were missing or didn’t exist yet. 

EA’s CEO told BW they should have the ability to ride dragons and that this would make DAI sell 10 million copies. BW didn’t take this idea very seriously

BW had an abstract idea that the player would roam the world solving problems and building up power or influence they could use. But how would that look/work like in-game? This could have used refinement and testing but instead they decided to build some levels and hope they could figure it out as they went.

One day in late 2012, after a year of strained development on DAI, Mark Darrah asked Mike Laidlaw to go to lunch. “We’re walking out to his car,” Laidlaw said, “and I think he might have had a bit of a script in his head. [Darrah] said, ‘All right, I don’t actually know how to approach this, so I’m just going to say it. On a scale of one to apocalyptic... how upset would you be if I said [the player] could be, I dunno, a Qunari Inquisitor?’” 

Laidlaw was baffled. They’d decided that the player could be only a human in DAI. Adding other playable races like Darrah was asking for would mean they’d need to quadruple their budget for animation, voice acting, and scripting.

“I went, ‘I think we could make that work’,” Laidlaw said, asking Darrah if he could have more budget for dialogue. 

Darrah answered that if Laidlaw could make playable races happen, he couldn’t just have more dialogue. He could have an entire year of production.

Laidlaw was thrilled. “Fuck yeah, OK,” he recalled saying.

MD had actually already realized at this point it’d be impossible to finish DAI in 2013. They needed at least a year’s delay and adding the other playable races was part of a plan/planned pitch to secure this. He was in the process of putting together a pitch to EA: let BW delay the game, and in exchange it’d be bigger and better that anyone at EA had envisioned. These new marketing points included playable races, mounts and a new tactical camera. If EA wouldn’t let them delay, they would have had to cut things. Going into that BW were confident but nervous, especially in the wake of EA’s recent turmoil where they’d just parted ways with their CEO and had recruited a new board member while they hunted for a new one. They didn’t know how the new board member would react, and the delay would affect EA’s projections for that fiscal year. Maybe it was the convincing pitch, or the exec turmoil, or the specter of DA2, or maybe EA didn’t like being called “The Worst Company in America”. Winning that award 2 years in a row had had a tangible impact on the execs and led to feisty internal meetings on how to repair EA’s image. Whatever the reasons, EA greenlit the delay.

The PAX Crestwood demo was beautiful but almost entirely fake. By fall 2013, BW had implemented many of FB’s ‘parts’, but still didn’t know what kind of ‘car’ they were making. ML and team scripted the PAX demo by hand, entirely based on what BW thought would be in the game. The level & art assets were real but the gameplay wasn’t. “Part of what we had to do is go out early and try to be transparent because of DA2. And just say, ‘Look, here, it’s the game, it’s running live, it’s at PAX.’ Because we wanted to make that statement that we’re here for fans.”

DA2 hung on the team like a shadow. There was insecurity, uncertainty, they had trouble sticking to one vision. Which DA2 things were due to the short dev time and which were bad calls? What stuff should they reinvent? There were debates over combat (DAO-style vs DA2-style) and arguments over how to populate the wilderness.

In the months after that demo, BW cut much of what they’d shown in it. Even small features went through many permutations. DAI had no proper preproduction phase (important for testing and discarding things), so leads were stretched thin and had to make impulsive decisions.

By the end of 2013, DAI had 200+ people working on it, and dozens of additional outsourced artists in Russia and China. Coordinating all the work across various departments was challenging and a full-time job for several people. At this sheer scale of game dev, there are many complexities and inter-dependencies. Work finally became significantly less tedious and more doable when BW and DICE added more features to FB. Time was running out though, and another delay was a no.

The team spent many hours in November and December piecing together a “narrative playable” version of the game to be the holiday period’s game build for BW staff to test that year. Feedback on the demo was bad. There were big complaints on story, that it didn’t make sense and was illogical. Originally the PC became Inquisitor and sealed the breach in the prologue, which removed a sense of urgency. In response the writers embarked on Operation Sledgehammer (breaking a bone to set it right), radically revising the entire first act.

The other big piece of negative feedback was that battles weren’t fun. Daniel Kading, who had recently joined BW and brought with him a rigorous new method for testing combat in games, went to BW leadership with a proposal: give him authority to open his own little lab with the other designers and call up the entire team for mandatory play sessions for test purposes. They agreed and he used this experiment to get test feedback and specifically pinpoint where problems were. Morale took a turn for the better that week, DK’s team made several tweaks, and through these sessions feedback ratings went from 1.2 to 8.8 four weeks later.

Many on the team wished they didn’t have to ship for old consoles (clunky, less powerful). BW leadership decided not to add features to the next-gen versions that wouldn’t be possible on the older ones, so that both versions of the game played the same. This limited things and meant the team had to find creative solutions. “I probably should’ve tried harder to kill [the last-gen] version of the game”, said Aaryn Flynn. In the end the next-gen consoles sold very well and only 10% of DAI sales were on last-gen.

“A lot of what we do is well-intentioned fakery,” said Patrick Weekes, pointing to a late quest called “Here Lies The Abyss”. “When you assault the fortress, you have a big cut scene that has a lot of Inquisition soldiers and a lot of Grey Wardens on the walls. And then anyone paying attention or looking for it as you’re fighting through the fortress will go, ‘Wow, I’m only actually fighting three to four guys at a time.’ Because in order for that to work [on old gen], you couldn’t have too many different character types on screen.”

Parts of DAI were still way behind schedule because it was so big and complex, and because some tools hadn’t started functioning until late on. Some basic features weren’t able to be implemented til the last minute (they were 8 months from ship before they could get all party members in the squad. At one point PW was playtesting to check if Iron Bull’s banter was firing, and realized there was no way to even recruit IB) and some flaws couldn’t be identified til the last few months. Trying to determine flow and pacing was rough.

They couldn’t disappoint fans again. They needed to take the time to revise and polish every aspect of DAI. “I think DAI is a direct response to DA2,” said Cameron Lee. “DAI was bigger than it needed to be. It had everything but the kitchen sink in it, to the point that we went too far... I think that having to deal with DA2 and the negative feedback we got on some parts of that was driving the team to want to put everything in and try to address every little problem or perceived problem.”

At this point they had 2 options: settle for an incomplete game, which would disappoint fans especially post-DA2, or crunch. They opted to crunch. It was the worst period of extended overtime in DAI’s development yet and was really rough: late nights, weekends, lost family time, 12-14 hour days, stress, mental health impacts.

During 2014′s crunch, they finally finished off features they wished they’d nailed down in year 1. They completed the Power (influence) system and added side quests, hidden treasures and puzzles. Things that weren’t working like destructible environments were promptly removed. The writers rewrote the prologue at least 6 times, but didn’t have enough time to pay such attention to the ending. Just a few months before launch pivotal features like jumping were added.

By summer BW had bumped back release by another 6 weeks for polish. DAI had about 99,000 bugs in it (qualitative and quantitative; things like “I was bored here” are a bug). “The number of bugs on an open-world game, I’ve never seen anything like it. But they’re all so easy to fix, so keep filing these bugs and we’ll keep fixing them.” For BW it was harder to discover them, and the QA team had to do creative experimentation and spend endless late nights testing things. PW would take builds home to let their 9 year old son play around. Their son was obsessed with mounting and dismounting the horse and accidentally discovered a bug where if you dismounted in the wrong place, all your companions’ gear would vanish. “It was because my son liked the horse so much more than anyone else ever had or will ever like the horse.”

MD had a knack for prioritizing which bugs should be fixed, like the one where you could get to inaccessible areas by jumping on Varric’s head. “Muscle memory is incredibly influential at this point. Through the hellfire which is game development, we’re forged into a unit, in that we know what everyone’s thinking and we understand everyone’s expectations.”

At launch they still didn’t have all their tools working, they only had their tools working enough.

DAI became the best-selling DA game, beating EA’s sales expectations in just a few weeks. If you look closely you can see the lingering remnants of its chaotic development, like the “garbage quests” in the Hinterlands. Some players didn’t realize they could leave the area and others got caught in a “weird, compulsive gratification loop”. Internet commentators rushed to blame “those damn lazy devs” but really, these were the natural consequences of DAI’s struggles. Maybe things would have been different if they’d miraculously received another year of dev time, or if they’d had years before starting development to build FB’s tools first.

“The challenge of the Hinterlands and what it represented to the opening 10 hours of DAI is exactly the struggle of learning to build open-world gameplay and mechanisms when you are a linear narrative story studio,” said Aaryn Flynn.

“DA2 was the product of a remarkable time-line challenge,” said Mike Laidlaw, “DAI was the product of a remarkable technical challenge. But it had enough time to cook, and as a result it was a much better game.”

Read the chapter for full details of course!

[bopinion]

Album of the month / 2021 / 08 August

I love listening to music - gladly, all the time, everywhere. That's why I would like to share which music (or which album, after all I'm still from the vinyl generation ;-) I enjoy, accompanies me, slides up my playlists again and again...

The Beatles & George Martin

LOVE

Rock-Remix / 2006 / Parlophone, Apple, EMI (Universal Music Group)

When you hear the term "remix," it's usually a DJ putting a danceable techno beat under a pop or rock song. And often enough, this leaves the original performer or composer turning in his grave to the same frantic beat. But there are also exceptions. And one of them this time is my album of the month.

34 years ago in Québec I visited a kind of circus performance that was new to me. There were no animals, but excellent artistry. The whole thing was embedded in an almost psychedelic production of sounds and music and light effects and projections. Although individual acts, the whole was dramaturgically staged like an opera or a musical in one piece. The name of the circus was "Cirque du Soleil". A concept that in the following years and decades went from French Canada around the world and celebrated legendary successes everywhere - including artists in residence in Las Vegas. The visionary founder Guy Laliberté also became known worldwide as an impresario and, incidentally, a billionaire.

There are bands I really regret never having seen live. For example, The Queen with Freddie Mercury, although at least I met the latter once in a club in Munich - well, we were in the same room for a few hours. But there is also the opposite, for example The Beatles. As much as I appreciate these musical titans, a concert seems rather witless to me: film footage shows four musicians on stage, initially even dressed alike, operating their instruments without notable movements or show effects and trying to permanently drown out screaming young ladies. But maybe I only comfort myself with this assessment, because I was and am simply too young to be able to experience John, Paul, George and Ringo in their active time on stage. Anyway.

Guy Laliberté and George Harrison were friends. And at some point - I imagine the two of them over a cup of yogi tea after meditative yoga, one handing the other the joint "You, I have an idea..." - the idea was born to bring together the two cultural phenomena Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles. As a composition for all senses, new and timeless, ecstatic and colorful. After all, it was Harrison who was always eager to experiment. He converted to Hinduism in the 60s, gained experience with psychedelics and transcendental meditation and introduced oriental instruments, first and foremost the sitar, into Western music and is thus considered one of the most important pioneers of world music. A development that goes hand in hand with my personal taste: the longer their hair got, the more I liked their music.

It was only after Harrison's death that Laliberté was able to close the deal with the rights holders of the music (Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), which can thus probably be considered a kind of Harrison's legacy. For the show was not to simply put together a soundtrack of the old familiar hits, nor were the compositions to be reinterpreted by other musicians. No, the original multi-track recordings were to be used to create new adaptations of the original songs. And who would be better qualified for this than George Martin, who had already produced groundbreaking albums with the Beatles themselves. In the process, he advanced from mere producer to arranger and idea generator, who also revolutionized recording technology by using overdubbing, for example. It's hardly surprising that he is often referred to as the "fifth Beatle".

In general, Sir George Henry Martin, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is a man of musical superlatives. He is recorded as the producer of 4,836 titles, but one assumes considerably more. And that includes not only The Beatles, but also a wide variety of works for Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Manfred Mann, Little River Band, Ultravox and many more. His 30th number one hit was "Candle in the Wind" by Elton John. Martin founded the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with McCartney, was one of a handful of producers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received the BRIT Award for "Best British Producer of the Past 25 Years" in 1977, among countless other honors.

So George Martin went into the studio with his son Giles Martin, who had produced INXS and Kate Bush, among others, following in his father's footsteps. And not just any studio - of course it had to be Abbey Road Studios (again). With the original recordings, the team not only created new variations of the original pieces, as they could have been created alternatively with the Beatles themselves. For example, they enriched the acoustic version of "While my Guitar gently weeps" with an orchestral accompaniment and combined the rhythm of "Tomorrow never knows" with the vocals of "Within You without You". Thus, a soundtrack project for a circus stage show ultimately became a new album by the Beatles. No wonder that Sir Paul himself described "Love" like this: "This album puts The Beatles back together again. It's kind of magical." And Ringo added "George and Giles did such a great job combining these tracks. It's really powerful for me and I even heard things I'd forgotten we'd recorded."

The documentary "All together now - A Documentary Film" by Adrian Wills (director) and Heidi Haines (screenplay), which won a Grammy in the category "Best long form Music Video", also fits the project's ambition. It tells the entire story of LOVE's creation, from the first meetings of the creative team around Martin and Laliberté to interviews with, among others, McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono, John Lennon's widow, and Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime road manager and event technician, to the first rehearsals of the stage show in Montréal.

LOVE is more than a medley of hits by the mushroom heads, but rather a kind of rock opera that is a first-class listening experience even without the accompanying show. Says George Martin: "The Beatles always looked for other ways of expressing themselves and this is another step forward for them." And father and son succeeded with remarkable creativity. The new version of "Because" is still directly harmless, since it uses the birdsong of "Across the Universe" as well as the final chord of "A Day in the Life" played backwards. "Glass Onion," on the other hand, became a grandiose collage with elements of the songs "Things We Said Today," "Hello, Goodbye" (background vocals), "I Am the Walrus" (background vocals), "Penny Lane" (flute), "A Day in the Life" (orchestra), "Magical Mystery Tour" (effects) and "Only a Northern Song" (effects). State-of-the-art technology in digitization, mixing and mastering also ensure the finest sound quality.

Speaking of sound quality: a show that relies so heavily on music must of course also rely on a perfect acoustic performance. Created by French designer Jean Rabasse, the LOVE theater at The Mirage / Las Vegas houses 2,013 seats set around a central stage. Each seat is fitted with three speakers, which sums up to a spectacular sound system with 6,351 speakers designed by Jonathan Deans. The stage includes 11 lifts, 4 traps, and 13 automated tracks and trolleys. The theater features 32 digital projectors creating very large high definition digital 100' wide panoramic images, even on four translucent screens that can be unfurled to divide the auditorium. That's what I call "being in the middle of the action".

Reportedly, the theater cost more than $100 million - which doesn't even include the development of the show. And unfortunately, it also means LOVE can never go on tour. So I won't be able to avoid traveling to Las Vegas one day for that reason alone. Which I trust will be on the event calendar for a few more years to recoup its costs. And so the circle closes: Decades later, I would once again enjoy Cirque du Soleil in North America - and thus also experience The Beatles live in a somewhat different way.

Here's a trailer for the Las Vegas Show LOVE from the Cirque du Soleil:

https://youtu.be/hIJZAfyRlD4

[depizan]

Writing process asks: All the odd numbers!

1. Do you write outlines? How closely do you find yourself sticking to them?

Not as such. Sometimes, I have no more than a vague idea/inciting incident in mind and proceed to make it all up as I go. Sometimes, I have kind of an unwritten outline of the general events of a story (these things happen, in this order), but even then, it’s not very detailed.

So, in as much as I have outlines, I stick to them. But that isn’t saying much.

3. What’s your process like for world building? Do you have a clear definition of the world before starting or do you make it up as you need things?

Aaaaages ago, when I wrote original fic, I world built from the large to small - I had pretty solid ideas of civilizations and such, then invented places within them. Now that I write fanfic, my worldbuilding is mostly worldpatching. Oh, canon doesn’t explain how that thing works? Here’s my explanation. Oh, canon forgot to include any Imperial worlds where you could grow food? Let’s fix that. So these days, it’s a matter of making things up as needed.

5. How do you name things?

Depends on the thing. With characters, some have real world names found by flipping through name books, while others were named by the highly scientific method of scrambling syllables I find appealing or appropriate until something clicks. (And, occasionally, by use of on-line name generators. Which is kind of automated syllable scrambling.)

Places mostly get named via syllable scrambling or name generators. I have a whole spreadsheet of potential ship names, and words that are appropriate for ship names (based both on real world or fictional ship naming conventions of varying sorts - the ______ Star, [country’s royalty], [thing] [animal], etc.

7. How long do you spend in a single writing session? Do you wish you could spend more time?

That varies. There have been times when writing is going swimmingly and I’d write on my lunch break, then come home, make dinner, and write for several hours. There have also been times when I just stare at a blank document periodically and wish words would come.

I wish I could manage to have productive time more consistently. I have plenty of time for writing, really. It’s just that my brain won’t always cooperate.

9. What do you listen to while writing? (If you require silence or some other kind of atmosphere how do you create it for yourself)

I used to be able to listen to songs while writing, but I don’t seem to be able to do that any more. I just sit there and rock out, which is not nearly as useful. I’m trying to scrounge up enough soundtrack and classical bits to give myself a few mood appropriate playlists, since I have trouble focusing in silence. (I’ve also tried various ambient sounds, but, while that’s better than nothing, it’s not as good as music.)

11. Do you know how your story will end when you start writing? Have you ever started out thinking it will end one way and have it end differently?

That depends on whether I started with a vague outline or just a premise/inciting incident. If I have a vague outline, yes. If I’m entirely winging it, nope. When I do know where I’m going, I seem to be pretty good at getting there.

13. Do you immediately post something when you finish it?

Yes.

15.  How many stories have you started and never finished? Are they abandoned or do you want to get back to them eventually?

I have so many abandoned stories from back when I was going to be a “real” writer. Also lots of beginnings from when I was a teenager and better at beginnings than completion.

In more recent times, I’ve got a few bits floating about that just didn’t really coalesce into anything or that I decided wouldn’t work. Maybe I’ll pillage them for good lines some day.

17. How has your writing process changed between beginner writer you and current writer you?

Oh jeeze. Beginner writer me was a tiny child. Except for the few years between when I got sick and when I started writing fanfic, I basically told stories from the time I could talk, drew them from the time I could hold a pencil, and wrote them from the time I could string words together on paper. Young me was an endless font of scenes and ideas and random bits of dialogue and if you left me alone with a piece of paper, it was going to get drawn or written on.

I hate that I rarely have that kind of enthusiasm now. On the other hand, I’m a lot better at actually completing things. But oh boy do I miss that just shameless story burbling.

19. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received?

Uh…

Oh, wait, I was very stuck on a fic a few years ago because there was a very logical way for things to go, but that very logical way had the potential to end terribly. One of my writer friends suggested I try writing it out anyway as a possible way it might go (or words to that effect), so I did, and lo and behold, it did not end terribly.

21. What kind of story are you writing right now (or planning to write soon)?

I’ve got a couple of adventure fics in the works.

23. Is your story top secret or are you posting updates for it as you go? 

I generally post things chapter by chapter, so when the writing starts flowing again, it will be an update as I go.

25. Free space. Tell me anything you want about writing in general or one of your stories.

Earlier today, I was trying to help a writer friend solve a writing problem they were having and instead we solved a writing problem I was having. And maybe made some progress on their problem, too. \o/

[thedeaditeslayer]

Tom Sullivan - Evil Dead (Retrospective Interview)

Below is a short interview with Tom Sullivan that covers working on The Evil Dead making props, stop motion effects and special make-up effects.

Much has been said about The Evil Dead over the years. An abundance of articles and books have covered the arduous low-budget shoot, and the creativity that came out of long cold nights in the wilderness of Tennessee. The dedicated cast and crew went to extreme lengths whilst making the classic film; including memorable instances like Ellen Sandweiss running through the woods until her feet were in pieces, Campbell having his soon to be famous chin scarred when a deadite hand grabbed him through the floor, and long nights in the cabin with no running water leaving crew to wash blood off their hands in scolding hot coffee. But just as impressive as the aggressive perseverance needed to finish the 16mm low budget opus were the imaginative and gory effects that have been etched into fans retinas for nearly forty years! The blood spewing, head-severing effects were created by Tom Sullivan, who had provided makeup for Raimi’s fund-raising short film Within The Woods. Sullivan signed up for The Evil Dead and created the numerous prosthetics and blood gags essential to dismembering a cabin of teenagers, helping bring to the screen a bloodbath of carnage that Stephen King famously called “The most ferociously original horror film of 1982.”  

 With only three weeks to break down Raimi’s script and create the necessary effects needed - and a further three months to create and film the stop motion blood and pus filled “Deadite Meltdown” at the end of the movie - Sullivan built a legion of makeup appliances, severed limbs, and some of the most iconic props in horror movie history. Sullivan, who tours with his Evil Dead Museum showcasing of many of the props, makeups and ghastly creations used in the Evil Dead movies, spoke with Project Louder about what went into creating such iconic pieces for 1982’s The Evil Dead.  

Project Louder: Let’s start with the most famous of all Evil Dead props, The Book of the Dead. In the script it was described as being made from an animal skin. How did you design the book and what was your process of putting it together?

Tom Sullivan: My book is different than the one Sam Raimi described in his script, “Book of the Dead”. His book had some kind of animal skin with a couple of letters from an ancient alphabet on the cover. As an illustrator that didn’t read like an evil book to me.  So, I proposed a book covered in human skin and a human face would make it more obvious it was human skin as opposed to just leather. I had made face molds of all the actors but Bruce Campbell. So, I coated Hal Delrich’s mold about 8 or 9 layers of mold rubber, let it dry, yanked it of the mold and glued it to a piece of corrugated cardboard. The pages were a stiff card stock that I bound together with grocery bag paper. The Illustrations were not to be seen in the original script but as an artist I had to draw on everything, so I based the drawings on DaVinci’s notebooks on anatomy.  The text is all made up on the spot. I call it Bullscript.

Project Louder: What was the process for makeup design, prep and application in regard to Theresa, Betsy and Ellen?  

Tom Sullivan: Sam gave me the script three weeks before shooting began. As the make up and special effects artist all I could think was, “shoot me now”.  I had time to breakdown the script, figure out what effects and make up designs I needed, how I might do them and what supplies I would need. The original demon concepts were based on the Sumerian background. Not that I knew anything about Sumerians, but I had seen The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, so I just figured maybe the Sumerians were proto ancient Egyptians. I was hoping movie audiences were as ignorant as I was, and I was correct. So, I sculpted some designs for the deadites based on a hawk, a snake, and a dog. Sam thought it was starting to look like Planet of the Apes and I agreed. So instead of stealing from John Chambers let’s steal from Dick Smith. Ellen’s, Cheryl Deadite make up was inspired by Smith’s Exorcist make up of the demon. Betsy’s make up was the first make up I did for the film. It was black veins radiating out of her darkened eyes. That design became Shelly’s make up. Don’t waste good ideas. All of the ladies’ make ups were done in 4 to 6 hours sessions. They were built up from scratch. Only Scotty’s dog make up was a latex appliance. That was left over from the Sumerian Dog design. Don’t waste anything.    

Sam’s concept became the idea that the demons were mocking and revealing their victims. After discovering about the “latex point” during the making of Within the Woods, I was hesitant to use spirit gum on the actors. It tends to harm skin when actors have to wear glued on masks for long days upon days. So, I used latex rubber like contact cement. I’d put a thin layer on the contact surface of the mask and a thin layer on the contact surface of the actor. When the layers were drying but still tacky I would press them together. It’s important to clean the actor’s skin with alcohol to remove oils on their skin for longer adhesion.

Project Louder: The Kandarian dagger is another iconic design. What was the concept and build process?  

Tom Sullivan: The dagger was just a dagger in the script. I wanted to make it more memorable and read as a bizarre and disturbing weapon. I loved Ridley Scott’s Alien so I took a 1 ½”  piece of aluminum stock, ground it down with a sharp point, took a couple of handfuls of a ground paper mache called Celluclay added water, mashed it into a clay like substance and shaped it over the hilt of the dagger in the rough shape of the “chestburster” from Alien. I took the parts of a 12” skeleton model kit and stuck those into the Celluclay. When I ran out of kit parts, I bought a chicken, cooked it, ate it, boiled and dried the bones and stuck those into the hilt and instant horror movie prop. I got the idea for the dagger’s skull puking blood the night before we shot the Shelly Deadite death scene. I figured I could drill a hole from the skull’s mouth to the back of the dagger, stick a small, tube into the hole and have a production assistant blow blood through it for the take. I suggested the close up shot for the film when I showed up at the set. And Sam used it. He has excellent taste.

Project Louder: The Evil Dead never skimped on the blood. Would you care to share the Tom Sullivan blood recipe?  

Tom Sullivan: It’s Sam Raimi’s blood recipe. He taught it to me during Within the Woods. It is one bottle of Corn Syrup, 2 to 3oz of Red Food Coloring. 1 Cup Instant Coffee mixed with water into a paste. Mix well. It stains everything but is safe and non-toxic for your actors. However, I drank so much of this coffee syrup I haven’t had a cup in coffee ever since filming Evil Dead. So be warned!!  

Project Louder: The climactic stop motion sequence is masterful in is gore and execution. How did you approach such a complicated and time-consuming sequence?  

Tom Sullivan:  I love stop motion animation, so I was looking for an opportunity to use it in Sam’s film. Sam’s idea for the finale was for me to make some balloon versions of the Scotty and Cheryl Deadites and have them deflate while smoking. As I had been creating lots of gory effects for the film that seemed a bit lame for finale. I thought it needed an explosion of gore and as the special effects artist I wanted to throw guts into the audience’s lap. I did some storyboards of my concept for the meltdown and using George Pal’s great film, The Time Machine stop motion sequence of the Morlock decomposing via clay animation in that films finale, I sold Sam on the idea. He knew Bart Pierce, a filmmaker and stop motion animator and we met and designed the full sequence and started filming in his basement. I made the almost full-size clay models of the deadites over wooden ball and socket armatures made with large wooden beads. I made heads out of blood red dyed modeling clay sculpted into the muscles and then pressed into a mold of the deadite’s sculpture that had a more flesh colored clay. That was then removed from the mold, painted, wigged and ready to animate. To match the cabin set we used wood from the location and found out Bart’s garage’s ceiling matched the ceiling of the cabin. So, we used it. I am very proud of my work with Bart and I consider it my best artistic collaboration.

[innervoiceartblog]

(via Unraveling – Terry Tempest Williams)

Photo by Rhonda Lashley Lopez

Unraveling by Terry Tempest Williams

Terry Tempest Williams searches for what is revealed when worlds unravel, tracing the entangled nature of undoing and becoming.

Unravel   un·rav·el  |  \ ˌənˈravəl \

verb gerund or present participle: unraveling

1. undo (twisted, knitted, or woven threads)

Similar: untangle, disentangle, straighten out, separate out, unsnarl, unknot, unwind, untwist, undo, untie, unkink, unjumble

2. (of an intricate process, system, or arrangement) disintegrate or be destroyed

Similar: fall apart, come apart (at the seams), fail, collapse, go wrong

3. investigate and solve or explain (something complicated or puzzling)

Similar: solve, resolve, work out, clear up, puzzle out, find an answer to, get to the bottom of, explain, elucidate, fathom, decipher, decode, crack, penetrate, untangle, unfold, settle, reveal, clarify, sort out, make head or tail of, figure out, suss (out)

I am unraveling. I am unraveling like a rattlesnake in the desert tightly coiled, my tail issuing a warning I cannot yet decipher. My mind is unraveling as I move to free my thoughts from being held captive for too long in such a tensely wound space. For months, I have been in a defensive stance visible only to surrounding ghosts. Fear brought me here. Uncertainty brought me here. Two hundred and fifty thousand dead from the coronavirus brought me here. My capacity to strike, from one emotion to the next, frightens me. After isolating myself in a landscape of arid beauty for the past nine months during a global pandemic, why do I find myself in the process of unraveling now? What is waiting and wanting to come forth?

When I don’t know what something means, I do three things: consult a dictionary; ask someone I respect and listen; go for a walk.

The dictionary gave me definitions, but what caught my attention was the word “reveal” in the list of synonyms. To unravel is to reveal what has been hidden. And when I asked my father (now 87 years old and weathering the pandemic at home with his partner and a borrowed dog named Sparky) what he thought it meant to “unravel,” he simply said, “I’m too bored to think about it.”

I understand.

An hour later, Brooke and I went for a walk. We found a small, unexpected pioneer cemetery, adorned with plastic red and blue roses, on a bluff overlooking the Dolores River. We stopped to watch a great blue heron fish the shallows. The long-legged bird was not unraveling; she was paying attention, focused on her task. Within minutes, she speared a trout, most likely a rainbow. We watched her slowly, deliberately walk back to the mudflats, toss her head back, releasing the fish into the air, and on its way down gulp the trout whole. The narrow body of the trout, now a bulge, was moving down her neck in a series of muscular swallows. The heron stood still for some time along the riverbank, then waded back into the depths of her perfect concentration.

What interested me in this particular moment was how the heron could live her life, as her species was meant to live, with an integrity of purpose in place—even as the ecosystem to which she belongs is unraveling around her. Climate change is affecting the flow of the Colorado River, with its incoming tributaries, like the Dolores, waning. We are now in what climate scientists are calling “a megadrought.” Moab’s average annual rainfall is 10 inches. In 2020, we have received 4.9 inches, less than half the norm. Monitoring the health of the Dolores River, the nonprofit group Conservation Colorado gave the Dolores River a grade of D− in terms of its water quality. Why? Dams and reservoirs disrupt the natural flows and displace sediments, deeply altering the character of the river. Abandoned mines and uranium tailings continue to leach into the headwaters, carrying on a toxic history familiar to the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. Increased fossil fuel development, including fracked gas, is affecting water tables and aquifers, all contributing to its failing grade.

Could we read the health of the great blue heron fishing along the Dolores River through this poisonous narrative now alive in her bloodstream? Like us, each species large and small—feathered, furred, or finned—carries the larger story of planetary health in their cells. The difference between our species and other species is that we are responsible for much of the demise of all the others.

As life on the planet is unraveling, in ways seen and unseen, we are also unraveling the natural consequences that these larger narratives of unconscious behavior are inflicting on populations, both human and wild. For example, the heinous, illegal wildlife trafficking infiltrating “wet markets” (where fresh meat, fish, and produce are sold) from Asia to Africa and across the globe is responsible for 75 percent of zoonotic viruses. COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a zoonotic disease. That means it came from an animal or animals. SARS-CoV-2 is not the first novel coronavirus to infect humans—it’s the seventh.

A report from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) found “that the United States imported almost 23 million whole animals, parts, samples and products made from bats, primates and rodents over a recent five-year period. These animals harbor 75% of known zoonotic viruses—pathogens that spread from animals to people.”

Wildlife markets in China—where animals are “kept in cramped cages for purchase and slaughter”—are believed to be the source of the global pandemic we now find ourselves in. The CBD goes on to say that, “…many researchers believe it originated from a bat, a scaly mammal called a pangolin (globally the most heavily trafficked mammal), or potentially both. The virus may have spilled over to humans from an unknown animal. Or it may have evolved after infecting people.”

We are unraveling in inexplicable ways given how tightly and mysteriously the world is woven together. Pull one strand and all the strands are disrupted, threatening the integrity of the overall pattern.

We are Earth unraveling and reforming creation.

Along with dictionaries, scientists, and the land itself, I consult the Dead. I hear my grandmother telling me to focus on “the golden thread” that shows us “the through line” that weaves the world back together again. Where might this golden thread be found now?

In March, early in the novel coronavirus pandemic, a global prayer was held at a designated time on a Sunday morning for the Earth and all its inhabitants. Like so many collective rituals, this reached me on the wind by word of mouth.

I walked outside and faced Round Mountain, an ancient volcano plug in the southern end of the valley where we live. I held my grandmother’s “hand stone”—an egg-shaped, polished amethyst—in my right hand as I had seen her do repeatedly. It was her talisman, which she bequeathed to me in her will. She told me it calmed her heart and opened it. I closed my eyes in prayer—believing in the power and connectivity of people gathered together in the name of health and peace on the planet. My mind was quiet, receptive.

In time, I began to feel a heat rising in me from the ground up. To quell my fears and skepticism, I kept my attention focused on how the warmth was settling in my body. In my mind’s eye, I saw a flame coming toward me from the center of Round Mountain, gaining in heat and size and intensity, until it entered my heart, becoming “a burning core of care”—those were the words that came to me as this force burned with a ferocity of intent that I have never known. My grandmother’s hand stone was hot, almost too hot to hold. Opening my eyes, I opened my hand. The stone was shattered inside, with dozens of fracture lines appearing that had not been there before. It didn’t make sense. My eye focused on a particularly large and complex fracture that occurred at the intersection where the deepest purple merged with the brightest, clearest part of the crystal. Within that broken angle, it appeared brown, burnt. I lifted the crystal up toward the light, and therein, I saw a flame.

I have no explanation for this other than to say that what was burning in me burned through the gemstone in my hand, shattering it. The energy I felt rising from the Earth through the soles of my feet and from Round Mountain itself reached directly into my heart with the radiance of a million prayers circulating around the planet and in that moment created a fire in me of inexhaustible light.

In my desire to understand my own unraveling in this global pandemic, I could not have imagined that it would be my grandmother’s golden thread that would lead me to the source of both my undoing and becoming: isolation and engagement. The golden thread became the gilded sunlight woven into the wings of the great blue heron fishing along the banks of the Dolores River. This same shimmering thread exposed the facts that deciphered the toxic residues from abandoned mines and uranium tailings which are poisoning our rivers, poisoning us, and killing creatures. In a similar way, it cinched the illegal wildlife trade that taunted wet markets with “bush meat,” ripe with tainted blood, a spillover causing a global virus infecting us all, threatening what we have taken for granted: Life.

This golden strand reveals what binds awe and terror together, as it travels through shadow and light—illuminating the loose threads waiting to be picked up by each of us so we can mend, repair, and restore what has come apart. We can reweave the world anew, not from the places of fear and doubt, but from the intimate spaces of belonging we must retrieve for ourselves. We are Earth unraveling and reforming creation. We are meant to engage not isolate. These are difficult days. What causes us to recoil, strike, and retreat is also what allows us to reach out from the anxiety of unknowing and dare to trust what is to come—a reassembling of our humanity.

There is something deeper than hope. Between the hours of darkness and dawn, the voices of our ancestors are amplified in the dreamtime—warning us of our awakening wisdom—a blessing to behold and a burden to enact.

[ericahitshawaii]

From the land

Today I am leaving the ocean and heading to the land.  The Big Island is even more biodiverse than Maui.  It contains 11 of the 14 climate zones in the world.  They even have snow on their tallest peak, Mauna Kea.  Today I am heading south og Kona to explore a Chocolate Farm, a coffee farm and a bee apiary!

Chocolate Farm

The Original Hawaiian Chocolate factory is the only chocolate producer in an industrialized country that processes the chocolate from the plant all the way to the final product.  Most chocolate producers start with the dried cocoa bean.  The beautiful estate grows cacao (the pod that chocolate is made from), macadamia nuts and coffee.  The entire operation is run by only eight staff, including the owner (Bob) and his wife.  (American Ex-pats)

Above are the tree that the cacao pods grow on.  They are about the size of a large eggplant when fully ripe.  Iniside these pods there is a fibrous membrane (like in a squash) that contains seeds.  These seeds have to be fermented and dried to give them the chocolate flavor.  This produces chocolate nibs which are ground to make cocoa powder, which becomes chocolate.  (More or less, you can google it if you want to fact check me on this one.)

Cacao pods growing in the trees.  This variety will will turn a bright yellow when they are ripe. 

Ripe cacao pods.  They grow in a variety of colors.  For example green pods turn yellow when ripe, maroon pods turn candy apple red when ripe.  Other colors include purple, orange and rainbow!

These are the seeds (or cocoa beans) inside of the pod.  They are covered with a bitter coating that will help ferment the seeds.

After they have fermented, they are cleaned off and left outside to dry on these racks.

Cocoa beans on the drying rack.  These will be ground to make the cocoa powder used to make chocolate!  This chocolate farm only makes milk and dark chocolate.

Fun fact:  White chocolate is not actually made from the solid bean, it is made from cocoa butter, which is extracted from the bean.  Since there are no cocoa butter extractors on the island, they are limited to milk and dark chocolate only.

It was really interesting to see this done as a small operation, given the extremely unjust conditions that many cacao growers face in developing countries.  At least one aspect of eating chocolate was guilt-free today! m On to cofee next!

Coffee Farm

There is a oot of coffee grown in Hawaii so I had lots of options for a coffee tour.  No one will be surprised to hear that I chose the Kona Historic Socity’s Living History coffee farm!!  YEA!  The nerdiest of an already nerd activity!

So...the Kona Historical Society has preserved one of the early coffee farms on the island that was run by a Japanese family.  It was purchased by the Ushida family in 1913.  The Ushida’s had immigrated from Japans and decided to take up farming.  However, they had no experience farming coffee when they bought the coffee farm in 1913.  The spent the next few years learning from local farmers how to grow it.  This was the beginning of what we know know as the Kona coffee industry, which was led mostly by Japanese immigrants.  The Ushida’s were one of the first Japanese families to do it and encouraged and inspired many other to take up the trade throughout the 20th century.

Fun fact:  In the 1940s 50% of people living in Hawaii were Japanese.

The Ushida’s tore down the small farmhouse that was on the property when they purchased it and built a traditional Japanese home.  The Ushida’s had 5 children, who all shared a three room house (a iving area, bedroom and kitchen).

The Ushida farmhouse, built circa 1917.

To be totally honest, I had absolutely no idea how coffee grew.  I knew it came from beans, but that was about it.  Well...it grows on trees.  Coffee trees can live and produce coffee for hundreds of years, in fact.  Coffee beans actually form inside of these cmall round berries.  (They sort of look like cranberries.)  They are green when unripe and turn a bright red color when ripe.  Inside each berry is a small amount of flesh (similar to grapes) and in the center is a coffee bean.  In order to make coffee, the berries have to be picked, the skin and flesh need to be removed, the beans need to be dried and then they can be roasted.  Coffee beans are harvested 4 months out the year from September - December.

Coffe tree.  The base of this tree is over 100 years old.  The branches are trimmed every few years, but the base and root systems can remain for hundreds of years.

Coffee berries.  These are small because the are yound.  They are about cranberry sized.  The will grow to be closer to grape size when it is time to harvest next September.

The Ushida’s also grew other plants for subsistence farming and to sell at local markets.  Although the weather in Hawaii is perfect for growing almost anything, it can sometime be difficult to farm because of the lava rock that covers most of the land.  Plants that do very well in Hawaii have extremely strong root systems that can actually break through the rock or grow within cracks a crevasses in the rock.  (Like coffee, cacao and pineapple).

It’s a baby pineapple!  It’s one of the only plants, where if you plant any part of the pineapple it is capable of growing a new one.

This may look like a cucumber, but it is actually a plant that grows bath loofahs.  Yep, for real.

See!?!  I didn’t make this up.

During the 4 month harvesting season, the Ushida men would wake up at 2:30 to start harvesting and finish after sunset.  The women would wake up at 4:30am.  The entire family, including small chilren, would harvest the beans.  The most difficult part of the process was removing the skin and flesh from the beans.  It is only since WWII that most farmers had a mechanized process to do it.  For centuries it was done by stomping on them with your feet.  Like grapes.

Once the beans are removed from the berries, they need to be dried, which can take up to 10 days.  The Ushida’s would leave them out in the sun to dry and bring them into the shed when it rained and at night.  At any given time there would be over 1000 pounds of beans drying.  (On average, an adult could pick 150 lbs. a day).  In the 1940 the Ushida’s developed a brillant idea to create a drying platform on the top of the barn/shed that had a sliding roof, so that they could cover the beans at night or during rain and not have to carry the beans in.  Genius.  This is the original roof and the sliding mechanism still works perfectly!

Kona coffee is still an institution in Hawaii.  Descendants of the Ushida family lived in the original house until 1994.  (They never modernized the house, it still had a wood burning stove and outhouse/outdoor bath house)  The historical society bought it and preserved it.  It is still a working farm today.

Lunch

L&L Barbeque is Hawaiian fast food institution.  I stopped here for lunch and was not disappointed.  Many of the things on the menu reflect the Asian and Japanese heritage of the island.  I ordered the chicken lovers platter, BBQ chicken,  Chicken katsu and...something else delicious.

Chicken Lovers Plate

Bees

My last stop for the day was Big Island Bees.  A bee apiary.

Big Island Bees, Kona

I have always been obsessed with bees (and colony animals in general, like ants) so I was SO EXCITED about this.  I have probably told many of you this, but the U of M refused to let me volunteer at their bee lab and I am still really bitter about it.

Kim, the master Bee keeper, gave us free samples and showed us the hives.  They have several sites across the island that produce different kinds of honey.  There are two ways to get flavored honey.  One is to infuse a flavor into already created honey, like pepper or cinnamon.  The other is to place the hives in a area where they have access to only one or prodominantly one kind of flower.  Their bees make three kinds of honey.  One from Macadamia Nut trees, one from the Wilelaiki blossom on theChristmasberry tree (introduced in Hawaii from Brazil) and the rareist type, the Lahua blossom honey, which comes from the Ohi’a trees.  Ohi’a trees are found only on Hawaii and grow out of lava rock.  The honey is naturally white.  (Apparently you can buy Big Island Honey at costco!)

So I learned a lot of cool stuff about bees.  I could write for hours about it, but I’m just going to give you my favorite fun facts.  If you want to know more, let’s hang out!

Fun fact 1: Queens can live for 1-5 years, where as the rest of the bees in the hive only live 4-8 weeks.

Fun fact2:  All of the worker bees in the hive are female.  The only male bees in the hive are called Drones.  Their only job is to mate with the Queen, so when the food is scarce or the hive is in trouble, the female workers bees evict the Drones by biting off their wings, pushing them out of the hive and leaving them on the ground to die.  Sorry fellas, they don’t have time for freeloaders!  I love bees!

Fun fact 3:The worker bees go through four different jobs in their short lives 1) Take care and feed of the baby bees, which hatch in the cells in the hive, feed and take care of the queen, protect the hive, and forage for pollen.

Fun fact 4: Bees are super ruthless, if the queen is not doing so hot, the hive releases special pharamones (sp?) so that the queen will give birth to her own replacement and then they will kill the queen once she’s born.  Total mutiny.  

Not so fun fact 5: Bees are in trouble because of a small hive mite that has starting taking over the hives, laying eggs in the cells and eventually forcing the bees out of the hive.  Hives have to be checked and treated regularly to keep from being infested by these small invasive beetles from Asia.  Boo!

Beekeeper Lisa

One hive.  It contains both the cells for honey and for making baby bees.  This hive has no drones, because it is a slow honey producer, so they opted to kill all of the drones until they have more honey.

The queen is in here somewhere..

Lastly, bees can make art.  Their so cool and talented.  I am ecited because my goal for this spring and summer is to plant a pollinator friendly yard.  I applied for a grant to do, I will know shortly if I got it.  My eventual goal would be to have a hive in my yard, but it is really hard to overwinter bees in Minnesota, so I might have to work up to this.  Future goals...

Honeycomb sculpture (Real honeycomb that the bees constructed over a metal frame)

That’s it for the day.  Tomorrow: Travel along the southern coast of the island to visit the Place of Refuge National Historic Park and one of only 4 green sand beaches in the world.

[4nime6-blog]

Cool Hip Anime!

Anime

Large sparkling eyes, brightly coloured frizzy hair, obscure nose and high facial expression reminds us connected with only one factor.

Anime

Can you do you know what the item is?

If your response is actually Anime, then STOP, to see an otaku's brain!

Cartoons (pronounced: "Ah-nee-may") will be a form of animation typically from Okazaki, japan. They have got their own style this means you will show that in peculiar and wonderful ways. Cartoons also has its very own sense associated with comedy along with has a unique thought processes. It can get actually strong and serious, as well as it could truly be silliest (like: "Lucky Star", "Kill Me Baby") in addition to craziest (like: "Death Note", "Gintama") thing a person have ever before seen. Many Anime demonstrates are centered on popular mangas (Japanese Comics), just putting any not much more life into these people. Cartoons often covers far more serious issues than normal cartoons. In the united states, cartoons tend to be considered a form regarding enjoyment meant for youngsters. In Okazaki , japan, people involving all ages (no, not necessarily newborn babies! ) see anime. Most shows and flicks are centred for youngsters, teenager or young older people, but you can also get many cartoons that are made with regard to older crowd even business people and housewives!

The phrase "Anime" is the close pronunciation connected with "animation" within Japanese, exactly where this expression references just about all animation. Outside the house Japan, cartoons is applied to refer specifically toon from Japan or Western disseminated animation style usually characterized by colourful visuals, attractive characters and fantastical designs. Japanese animation commenced inside 20th century. Katsudo Shashin is claimed for you to be the first Japan animation. The 1923 Fantastic Kanto earthquake triggered wide-spread destruction including demolition associated with earliest Anime Companies as well as anime works; departing Kouchi's Namakura Gatana because the most well-known surviving animation. The 1st cartoons television series was Otogi Manga Calendar aired by 1961 to 1964.

This introduction to anime ended up being in category four while I watched "City Hunter" in a T. Sixth v. channel, Animax. Though I could see anime (as a make a difference of fact the particular multiple of anime is usually anime) like "Doraemon", "Shinchan", "Avatar-The last airbender", "Summer Days and nights with Coo", "AstroBoy", "Dragon Ball-Z", "Naruto" in the past just before yet I did definitely not recognize the profound perception regarding anime as this was dubbed throughout Hindi (rather I would point out "contaminated" instead of "dubbed" by means of old, ridiculous man noises in Hindi who also would break unnecessary, slap-stick jokes deviating viewers through the plot and also terrain you in a hotch-potch of indianised anime). My very own sister ( three yrs young than me even though I actually refuse to confess she is older when compared with me) took weird curiosity in Japanese anime similar to " Tears to Tiara" and "Stigma of typically the Wind" aired in Animax: that we thought strange from that time while the "patriotic inertia" will stop me from receiving something but Indian products. I got first repelled by often the proven fact that all the words casts have been in Japoneses and to understand history I had to consider difficulty of reading the actual Subtitles in english and had to help correlate the particular speech using the video proven; regarding which great deal involving attention seemed to be required. That was impossible personally in order to do both those exhaustion tasks at the very same time, so I delivered to my old Capital t. V. channels: Cartoon Community, Nickolodeans, Hungama, Pogo, Come back and Jetix.

After some sort of very long hiatus, in type seven, My spouse and i again started out experimenting our skills with understanding anime which often converted out to be a new success, when I 1st delighted in anime including "Hayate the Combat Butler" along with "Fairy Tail". Also! This kind of sweet poison! Following a total hectic day time in school, expenses, floating around classes, art in addition to audio classes, and full various other heck lot of routines; I waited only to be able to settle-back and relax for you to watch these kinds of anime. From that time, nothing was of importance to me; not also my parents, close friends as well as teachers. In that online realms of pleasure My partner and i could equipment my failures and sufferings as effortlessly as I got obtained in successes. Nothing irritated me, except when We were required to attend phone telephone calls or to wide open entrance, if any guests will come when the anime indicates were ongoing. However, cartoons hardly did affect this studies as after seeing two hour long plan, I suffered from PARTS (Post Anime Depression Syndrome) that I suffered typically the sense of guilt of wasting moment that has been more intensified through my very own mother's rebuke (I wish to describe this circumstance as "Kata Ghaye nuun-er Chheta") and this also guilt might propel my family to review harder, concentrate and also perform for longer hours this also occurred as daily schedule in my opinion; so I can easily get the best of most connected with the students be that researching or swimming or even any different work.

Hence to all parents, I actually would like to ask for allowing your kids to help watch anime because it proved helpful out for me (maybe I use strange wirings within my human brain! ). Enjoying anime would help an individual to hone your fictional, vocabulary and analytical expertise. More importantly, it would certainly serve as a enormous source of entertainment, at the very least way beyond the little league of daily Indian soap.

Understanding the culture associated with origins is very crucial to realize the plan, be it Japanese cartoons, Korean language Aeni webtoons, China's Manhua Anime or Us sitcoms (which I endured after i was novice inside observing anime). If anyone have watched virtually any cartoons, you will probably discover that often the characters respond differently along with things throughout general (like properties, vehicles, eating etc. ) are usually bit different from everything you used to. Probably the actual most readily evident distinctions between Japanese computer animation in addition to others is the a muslim everywhere huge eyes (bigger in comparison with nose), brightly girl locks, some well-endowed character types as well as exaggerated emotional movement and also gestures are regular regarding anime. Being hand-drawn, cartoons is separated coming from actuality providing an best path intended for escapism directly into which followers can involve themselves having relative simplicity. The production of cartoons focusses less on the particular cartoon movement and considerably more on the realistic look involving settings like "The Yard of Words".

The particular beginning and credit sequences connected with most anime are combined with Japanese rock or take song which maybe related to the anime series, simply by popular bands. "Nanairo Namida" by Tomato n' Pinus radiata of anime "Beelzebub" along with "Just Awake" of cartoons "Hunter X Hunter" are a few of my favourite anime tunes, which you may try out.

Since there are several sorts of cartoons, one will need to classify these individuals with different genres, some associated with them are generally: Action, Audio, Mecha, Experience, Mystery, Bishounen, Yuri, Yaoi, Akuma, Seinen, Shoujo, Shounen, Kodomo, Piece of Existence and a lot of more. Whether you're the die-hard anime fan (like me generally labelled seeing that "otaku"), a casual watcher, the interested onlooker or perhaps commoner from non-anime website: cartoons genres shall supply you actually with some simple knowledge which help you in order to venture the cartoons planet with ease and joy.

I am going to be able to share some remarkable rates of anime which will etch my heart usually are:

• Motoko Kusanagi regarding "Ghost in the Shell a couple of: Innocence"

"We weep to get blood of a pet although not for the our blood of a species of fish. Endowed are those with any tone. "

• Shinchi Akiyama of "Liar Game"

"People SHOULD be doubted. Many people get me wrong this specific concept. Doubting people is simply a part of getting for you to know them. Just what quite a few people call "trust" is absolutely just giving up about wanting to understand others in addition to that extremely act is definitely far more serious than questioning. It is actually 'apathy'. "

• Hachiman Hikigaya of "My Teen Passionate Comedy SNAFU"

"If simple truth is cruel

Then

Lie needs to be kind

Then

Kindness need to be lie"

You can observe anime with T. /. by opting-in to Animax, Aniplus, AnimeCental, TV Tokyo or online on internet sites like animehaven. to help, kissanime, Funimation. com, Netflix, Crunchyroll. com, hulu, Vimeo and so forth.

ENJOY WATCHING CARTOONS!

[daddy-bean-boy]

Final Evaluation on The TrovPod Audio Project

Firstly with this project we were given the task of creating audio. The audio had to be of our own making and include some kind of sound effects in it that we could represent visually. 

We chose to take the structure of a podcast for our audio. This way we could record us talking and cut it down into bite size entertaining pieces. We had to draw inspiration from places to get ideas of what a podcast is like. This meant we needed to research about them. Luckily I listen to a few podcasts and this meant that I already was familiar with the structure quite well. However a problem with this is that obviously it’s a podcast that I would personally listen to meaning its an empirical idea of what a podcast is like. This meant I needed to think about others. I like a more rambling podcast that has funny improvised conversation. A stark contrast to this was a organised and structured podcast which was a lot less familiar to me. This Is why I thought while recording we could use questions to bring out more organisation to it. Alternatively we could of had scripts that would have been pre-written for us to read out.  This would have meant we would of had a head start knowing what sound effects would be made for the conversation and what we would have to animate. However an issue with this is that you lose out almost all the chemistry of open conversation with each other. Which loses a podcasts charm. I drew a lot of inspiration for the podcast structure from an old podcast called the “YogPod” which was two close internet friends, talking over a call and getting funny quizzes off the internet to do on each other and would often end in funny moments. The animation style I took inspiration from a YouTuber called “Odd1sOut” who has a simple animatic style that he uses to tell stories, which I felt was a good way you could tell the stories in a podcast.

With the planning that we did, there was separate planning methods for either end of the project. For example the podcast recording itself meant we had to book out the sound studio so we could all sit round the microphone. I got an app that had questions on it that we could as each other. For the actual sound effects that were made, when we cut down our 30 seconds of the podcast we decided what parts need sound effects and wrote down on a “dope sheet” what time those sounds were needed and for how long. We then borrowed a marantz recorder and sad in a quiet room while we recorded the sounds that we would later layer and compile together. This worked well as we made all the sounds ourselves and if they didn't sound quite right, we could use some sound effects in premier to alter them. Next production, depending on what we do, I think It would be important that you know exactly where the sound effects are needed. This is because when we recorded we were just having to assume what sound effects would be needed in the conversation and put them in. This sometimes meant when we animated, we would have to animate to make sense of the sound effects rather than the sound effects making sense being there. However I think it works well despite this being my original thoughts. Before animating, we all made quick story boards that would give a good guide line for the timings of the animation and the key scenes that were in them. This meant that you wouldn’t have to make up while animating what you think it might look like. Sometimes it would take a long time to make the story board look like what it does in your head and getting married to an idea can mean you will spend too much time trying to capture it.

 When actually recording the podcast, we had one central microphone that we sat around and spoke into. This seemed like it worked as we were all picking up when we listened on the mac. However when it came to recording for an hour we found that some of us around the microphone were a lot harder to hear. This was because the mic didn’t pick up evenly on all sides as it was only meant for one person to talk into. This meant that me, who was seated behind the microphone wasn't picked up well at all, which we didn't realize would be the case at the time. This meant that when editing the audio I had to mess with volume to make me sound a bit louder. The same went for Travis. If we were to record in a similar fashion another time, we would have to all sit facing the front of the microphone and try to squeeze in front all of us as best we can. The hardest part of actually recording the audio was trying to remember how all the equipment worked. However, getting on and practically doing it, really teaches you how it all works. This means next time we’d be much more prepared to just get in and start recording. The room was very sound proof for the recording studio but unfortunately we recorded our sound effects separately in a open room which left for a lot of resonance with some of the sound effects, meaning they sounded far less crisp that the conversation itself.  The animation itself however was an enjoyable process. I’ve had a fair bit of prior experience using the software “Animate CC” therefore this was the go to software I used. I really wanted to push what I knew with the software. I’ve done simple character facial expressions, syncing and slight movement, however I’ve added a lot more things happening at once, Including background animations of apples. I even added a small transition where Freya says “Jesus” and I feel like it just add’s more to the style the animation was going for. A challenge was staying consistent with the style and making sure all the animation appears as though it were in the same universe. I tried to keep with bold and pastel colours for all the characters for a start. I kept them within a simple style so that when crating new assets it wasn't like drawing a whole new scene. That way I could stay in the time frame. I even did 50 seconds instead of 30 because I felt it was more appropriate and pushing the expectations even if slightly.

Next time I work on a large project like this I need to keep myself organised from the beginning. As I started making more and more assets within the animation I found myself having to organised all the layers into folders and cleaning up random key frames that had been left open. Luckily all of this was great practice to know how next time it will work a lot more effectively. I’m really glad how the end product that we added together was a real display of all our different animation styles, what parts of the podcast we found funny and what we like to see from animation. This means next time we’ll know what we can expect from each other. The most challenging thing in the whole process was dedication to the animation process. Even though we made an animatic it was still a dreadfully long process. Taking 8 hours for 20 seconds of animation.

[2018geareduppup]

How I Manage My Weight Without Working Out

Day 35 - March 18, 2018

There are a lot of trendy diets that lure people into eating one way of another in hopes of losing weight fast, and then there are diets that also teach you how to change the way you eat so you don't gain the weight that you lose.  I've been eating paleo since 1999, since before it was considered a trendy diet, and I couldn't be happier with the way I feel and look.

I'm talking about this today because there are a lot of guys in the LGBT community that are unhappy with the way they look and there's a lot of body shaming.  We wouldn't need the #ThirstTrapChallenge if it weren't for the unhappiness and body shaming. At the same time there's an entire Bear Community who is happy with what they look like.

I chose to switch to the paleo diet because I was gaining weight and I was afraid of the health problems that I saw in my older family as a result of being overweight their entire lives.  

What is the paleo diet? It's based on the idea that humans are not supposed to eat processed food that we can't find in nature.  The basic concept is that you should not eat anything if it will make you sick when eaten raw, and in large quantities. Sick, as in a tummy ache.

Opponents of the paleo diet will tell you that this way of eating is screwed up because humans have continued to evolve and over the last 100,000 years our bodies have changed enough to digest the processed foods.  That's a valid point.  Opponents also claim that the paleo diet causes Vitamin D deficiency.  They might be right about this one because I am Vitamin D deficient and take those supplements daily.  They also argue that there is no scientific study to prove the validity of the paleo lifestyle.  But that's only because no one wants to bother commissioning one.  

Therefore, I'm presenting myself as a one-off subject that's been paleo for 19 years.  

First off, my life insurance company does a more in depth health study of me than my doctor does. For many years they have told me that I always come back with a health rating of someone at least 10 years younger, and they ask why.

Second, I have not been able to maintain a real workout schedule in about 10 years.  I don't have a hyper metabolism that helps keep my weight off, I just eat whatever I want that's on the paleo menu.

Third, I have learned that it's better for me to eat large meals in the morning and smaller meals in the afternoon or evening.  I've also learned how to count calories as well as discover which foods are more filling and have fewer calories.  A full plate of food that knocks me into a food coma might only be 1000 calories. Eating that earlier in the day will sustain me for most of the day (assuming I can make it through the food coma).

Eating normal size portions of paleo doesn't leave me feeling sluggish or result in a sugar crash an hour later like many other foods will.  Ever eat ice cream and then feel tired within an hour?  That's the sugar crash I'm talking about.

One of the claims of the paleo diet is that you can eat as much as you want without gaining weight. Paleo foods are not supposed to trigger fat cell production.  I was never an over-eater, but I did feel this was mostly true.  Although, over the years I noticed that there were times when I would suddenly gain 5 to 7 pounds of weight and then struggle to shed it again. On a small frame like mine that 5 to 7 pounds is easily noticeable.

DNA analysis is another trendy thing to do now.  Want to know your true genetic lineage, get a test and find out.  There's a bit of controversy over privacy and DNA testing, but there's also some pretty cool health reasons to know your origins, and it has to do with why you might also gain 5 to 7 pounds even though you might be eating healthy.

About 3 years ago I learned of another new food study of "reactive foods."  This study looked at many common foods and if they triggered water retention (aka bloating), or fat cell production.  What it discovered was that not everyone reacts the same to different foods, and what's considered a health food for some is a seriously bad food for others.

According to the study, 90% of the people tested would retain water if they ate these things: (1) farm raised fish, (2) deli meats, (3) most sushi, (4) hot dogs, (5) bagels, (6) corn.

Consider how common those items are in an American diet, and now consider how often everyone eats fish as a health food.  I won't pretend to understand what's wrong with farm raised fish, perhaps they are fed corn?  Sushi is also considered healthy, but not when made with the farm raised fish. Additionally, wasabi, ginger, and soy can be reactive for many people.

Turkey, salmon, and pineapples are all considered healthy foods, but every time I ate them I would gain weight.  It turns out that 85% of people are reactive to turkey and salmon while 70% of people are reactive to pineapples.  Cross referencing this reactive food list helped me identify what was causing my sudden spikes in weight gain, but it also opened up more possibilities for me.

By studying the list of foods in the 50% and lower category I found some items that are not on the paleo diet that I might be able to enjoy again, most notably, potatoes.  I went more than 10 years without fries, potato chips, or baked potatoes, but now I will occasionally enjoy them.

So what do reactive foods have to do with DNA?  Well, it turns out that the reaction is an allergic reaction to your body trying to process food it doesn't handle well.  Two things happen when the body can't properly process food, first, it can trigger water retention to help filter the food out, and second, it converts it to fat.

With regard to turkey and salmon, both animals are native to North America.  Therefore, anyone without DNA from Native Americans will probably react badly to eating them.  My DNA is purely from Europe, which explains my reaction to them.  Pineapple is originally a native food of South America, so unless your DNA includes Brazilian and Paraguayan then you might be reacting to the delicious fruit like I am.

I've shared this information today because of the #ThirstTrapChallenge that's happening over the past few weeks.  I'm not a doctor, dietitian, or nutritionist, I'm just a pup who has spent 19 years thinking about everything he eats and how I will feel after I eat it.  Perhaps this information can help someone who isn't happy in their own skin and wants to look differently.

For more information you can do a Google search for "Paleo Diet" and "List of Reactive Foods."

One last meal recommendation... use a dog bowl!

Kabous Pup

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Syndicated strip or graphic novel? Lynn Johnston on doing For Better or For Worse in the internet age

In honor of the Library of American Comics' publication of For Better or For Worse: The Complete Library, Vol. 1 (Volume 2 is out this summer), we are delighted to publish this essay by Lynn Johnston, contemplating the nature of writing a serial for decades and how she might approach her life's work today.

  When I was barely 20 years old, I got married. My husband and I settled into an old apartment in Vancouver, near English Bay. He was working for the CBC as a cameraman and I was an ink and paint artist for Canawest Films. I wanted to be an animator and was learning the industry from the ground up. We did commercials, public service announcements and piece work for Hanna Barbera. I was one of 16 young women hired to hand colour acetate cells. Having signed an agreement to not join a union, we took shifts and worked around the clock for $1.50 an hour. It was hard work, but I learned quickly and I realized that an animator makes other people's drawings, other people's characters, other people's dreams come to life. With no children to occupy my time at home, I decided to try my hand at creating stories and characters of my own. I have always been more at home with realistic scenarios, so I decided to tell short stories about my childhood. Within a few weeks, I had a few tall tales worked out and perhaps, 15 coloured drawings. I wondered if they might even be published some day. It was 1968 and I was creating a graphic novel.    

 If I was starting out today, knowing what I do about the internet vs syndicated comic art, I think I would choose to become a graphic novelist. Having said that, I need to add that the very thought of writing a novel and illustrating it is daunting. Even as a young and fairly driven cartoonist, I was as lazy as anyone else! If I had a really good idea, I was immediately inspired to get it on paper, but a long, focused page-after-page production would have had its serious ups and downs. At the moment, I am working with a friend on a graphic novel of his. I'm his editor and he is doing all the work. Even so, it's such a long process that we have our times of great progress followed by times of exhaustion and self doubt! The project continues, but it's far from an easy task. A graphic novel is serious work. I admire all the artists who stick with it and see the sweet success of publication.

  A syndicated comic strip, though hard work and long hours, can be like a graphic novel, I think. Mine certainly became a chronicle of family life – a story that had a beginning a middle and an end. Since it was produced over 30 years - a day at a time, the process was certainly different. Strict deadlines and censorship played a significant role in the way story lines evolved. Timing was important, too. In a graphic novel, the reader can skip forward or back, read the volume entirely or savour it one piece at a time. A syndicated comic strip has to hit a target every day with a gag or a philosophical point; something to make it worth a reader's time. It takes less than 30 seconds for a reader to suck in your message, which has to be good enough to warrant another review the next day. If the reader misses Monday's strip, the strip he reads on Wednesday has to engage and also continue the story line if there is one. There is a steady dance between funny and poignant, serious and satirical. In order to create something that held MY interest, I kept juggling comedy with reality and serious stuff with every day happenings. There was a kind of science to it. I thought a great deal about how dialogue was written. It had to flow like poetry. I thought long and hard about when to stop a serious story and how to start another. Sunday pages were a refuge in that I could make up something fanciful or goofy or honest without having to fit it into a series running on the daily page. Some of my best work was done on the Sunday pages because I had the space to time the action and to craft the commentary. The name "For Better or for Worse" was an honest title; an appraisal of the work I did for so long.

  Andrews and McMeel published “For Better or for Worse” in an annual collection for many years. As a collection, the strip became easier to digest; easier to remember. You could read a year's work in one sitting. I was proud of these books and even more so when readers began to collect them and then pass them on to their kids. The first collections were incomplete, as I had removed strips I didn't think were my best work. A&M gave me that privilege and I edited my books rather savagely. Now, almost 10 years after I retired, IDW books has begun to publish my syndicated work as it originally ran, warts and all! This is a beautiful product. Large, hard cover books, (9 eventually), will be out there on library shelves and will contain everything I ever did for Universal Press Syndicate. This is an honour and a gift. There will be thousands of drawings in these books, representing many more thousands of hours of thought and scrutiny. These volumes will be in their entirety an enormous graphic novel!

 I do think of “For Better or for Worse” as a huge graphic novel, but ironically, the thought of writing and drawing a graphic novel in the modern sense stops me cold. I think of the story arc, the writing and the drawing, the criticism, the editing, the publishing and marketing and it makes me tired. I look at the aisles of graphic novels in the bookstores and all of the work available on the internet and I marvel at the talent. But I also admire the intense perseverance that goes into completing every one of these books. I might have produced a giant graphic novel, but I did it one day at a time. This is a new age with new ways of doing everything. It's a new world, but hard work is still hard work!  Despite the frustration of making ends meet, despite the time it takes and the competition we face, cartoonists (who are also writers, performers and comedians) will always produce, create and be "out there" because it's something we are driven to do. Graphic novel or comic strip, we open our veins. We keep few secrets. If success happens to come, that's wonderful, but most of us would work for free. With this in mind, comic art continues to be one of the richest of art-forms. It's also one of the oldest. Internet or Gutenburg's Press, we're driven to draw and the reward is in knowing that there will be silent but sincere applause.

https://boingboing.net/2018/03/15/syndicated-strip-or-graphic-no.html

[unqualified-advice-blog]

Cooking Tips (Especially on a time & money budget)

These are things I wish I had known when I started having to cook for myself.

1. Read the recipe completely before beginning to buy ingredients/plan to make it. Often recipes will require strange gadgets that you might not have in your kitchen that won’t be apparent in the ingredients list.

2. Don’t plan on making something unless you know you can find all the ingredients at your local store or can make reasonable substitutions. (I know this sounds like a no-brainer but I have made this mistake multiple times and it has sucked every one of them.)

3. Freeze meals and leftovers. I cannot stress enough how much food I have saved from going bad & saved myself having to order out at the last minute by doing this. Freeze any leftovers you think you might not be able to eat before they go bad. The best way to do this is to buy single serving plastic tupperware so you only need re-heat the amount you need for a meal.

4. Find recipes for one-pot meals that have a) plenty of spices, b) protein, veggies, and grains, and c) can easily be frozen. Soups, chilis, pasta sauces, curries, and casseroles all come to mind here. Having lots of spices helps the recipe be filling and just makes it better in general. Also, feel free to add more spices than the recipe calls for if it doesn’t seem like enough.

5. Find recipes that have cheap, shelf-stable ingredients. Again, soups, chilis, pasta sauces, curries, and casseroles are great for this because their ingredients heavily feature canned goods (tomatoes, beans), frozen vegetables, or dried pasta/rice etc.

6. Beware recipes that aren’t a full meal. A lot of traditionally American cooking relies on multiple dishes: eg, a protein, a grain, and a veggie that are all cooked separately. As such, many recipes are only protein, only grain, or only veggie.

7. If you are just starting out, estimate the amount of time it will take to make the recipe and then multiply it by three. Have a friend on hand or on the phone to be able to answer questions you might have during the cooking process. Try to be patient with yourself - everyone goes through a learning curve with cooking.

8. Get out all ingredients at the beginning so they are ready to hand. Chop any vegetables you need and keep them off to the side for when you need them.

9. Clean as you go - if you are done with an ingredient, put it away. If you are done with a dish, wash it. If this is too much for you, designate a “this is where the stuff I’m done with goes” area where you unceremoniously pile all used ingredients and dishes. This should never be the sink - you should always keep the sink clear when cooking.

10. Don’t force yourself to finish cleaning right after you’ve eaten if you can at all help it. Give yourself about a half an hour to digest and enjoy having finished cooking & eating.

VEGETARIAN COOKING

11. If you have any anxiety about bacteria or find it difficult to maintain a clean kitchen, COOK VEGETARIAN. It is an additional learning curve, but there are plenty of reasonably priced meat substitutes available on the market that are pretty good. As with everything, there are pluses and minuses to vegetarian vs meat cooking, but the big plus here is that you don’t have to manage what has come in contact with raw meat when cooking vegetarian. That being said...

12. When cooking vegetarian, double or triple the amount of fat the recipe calls for. Most vegetarian recipes (in the US) are written by meat eaters who classify this as a “diet” recipe and therefore don’t list enough fat and salt to make the recipe actually taste good. Vegetarian proteins don’t have the natural fat that animal proteins do, so especially if you are cooking with a ground beef substitute, you will need to add more oil as the ground beef substitute will absorb a large amount of it.

13. When searching for vegetarian recipes, it’s good to start out with recipes in Asian cuisine. These often will be one-pot recipes over rice and might not be as easy to freeze, but they often have the benefit of originating as vegetarian recipes instead of being adapted from a meat-based recipe. However, many ingredients and tools in these recipes might not be easily available to Americans, so be extra careful here.

14. Vegetarian cooking has the downside that it might not give you the same long-lasting energy that a meat-based diet does. You can address this by a) swapping vegetarian meals with meat-based ones depending on when during the day you might need the energy or b) keeping protein-rich snacks to hand like nuts or protein bars.

15. However, vegetarian proteins often have the upside of being extremely shelf-stable. They are either vacuum sealed in packages that will last months, dried, or frozen. This makes them much easier to keep stocked than animal proteins, which often expire within a week.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE

16. Once you have explored cooking for a while, try to find/choose three recipes that you can memorize and keep a majority of the ingredients for stocked in your pantry or freezer for when you haven’t been able to plan ahead.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Financially disadvantaged millennials and gen zs often don’t have the luxury of enjoying the process of cooking and eating food. Many of our parents did not teach us how to cook, and there is a paucity of resources geared toward helping beginner adults understand how to cook. I was lucky that my mom did teach me how to chop vegetables, what things go together, etc., and it was genuinely surprising to me to watch one of my friends who did not have this advantage greatly struggle with cooking. He has been cooking actively for almost three years now and still becomes extremely anxious whenever he has to do so.

The cooking culture that has developed over the past 70(?) years is almost universally useless to us. Food has been marketed to within an inch of our lives as diet products, expensive indulgences, or status symbols. Most mainstream food culture is aggressively white and upperclass - see the cottagecore aesthetic. On the other hand, areas with majority minority population are way more likely to be food deserts (not have easily accessible grocery stores) and have attempts at community gardens bleached and destroyed by “law” enforcement. I fall sort of in the middle of these extremes: I am lucky enough to live in a nice area with an many easily accessible high quality and bargain grocery stores. Even with these advantages (and being trained from an early age), I find cooking extremely annoying, time consuming, and anxiety inducing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the fatphobia in many cooking spaces as well. Food is marketed as a diet product, which is ridiculous. See this post for a better take down of this than I could come up with. Food is something your body needs to survive, and it is ALWAYS BETTER TO EAT SOMETHING THAN TO EAT NOTHING, NO MATTER WHAT THAT SOMETHING IS. If your breakfast is a donut, that’s better than not eating breakfast. Try to eat a balanced diet with veggies, protein, and carbs (the one-pot meals help with this), but if you ever encounter ANYTHING in the world that is shaming you for what you put in your body, walk the other way, they are lying and trying to sell you something.

In general, the theory I agree with the most is the set point theory of weight: your body has a natural “resting weight” that fluctuates as you age and your body changes. Deviating significantly from this “resting weight” is extremely difficult and oven very very unhealthy. Your “resting weight” is largely determined by genetic factors and has nothing to do with your behavior. The “obesity epidemic” is a myth that has been perpetuated by drug companies and diet companies for profit and has done an extreme amount of harm to the livelihoods of fat people who often do not see their medical needs met properly because the doctor simply diagnoses them as “fat” and investigates no further.

All of this is a bit more big-picture and outside of the scope of your control, but I bring it up to contextualize that your struggles with cooking are in many ways not a personal failing but caused by broader social failings. Also, a lot of people are literally trained by our culture to be anxious around food, so if this is how you feel, again, it is not your fault and while it is common, it is not “normal” or “good” to feel this way. Anxiety around food is something you should work to overcome, not encourage in yourself. That said, the mental and physical practices you must undertake to get as good at cooking as you need to will take a lot of time to develop. Try to be patient with yourself and hang on to the moments of progress: you’ll get there eventually <3.

[peterstestkitchen]

Circus Peanut Peanut Butter

Rating: 5/5 ~ 16 votes

Time: 5 minutes (omnivore, unhealthy version), 7 minutes (vegan, unhealthy version), 1 hour (vegan, healthy version)

Every Thursday when I was a kid, my mom would plop me and my brother down at the local library for children’s storytime. When it was over and the head librarian had dismissed us, I would roam the library in order to gaze upon my favorite library things: the model ships, the strange YA cartoon books, and the aisle where every book had a blue sticker of a man smoking a pipe. When mom showed up again and it was time to go, a video cassette—the Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” usually—was clasped between my grubby paws. In my brother’s, the latest installment in the Hank the Cowdog children’s book series. Ahh… just thinking about the VHS section and I can smell the polypropylene-imbued air sure to be found when in close proximity to the clamshell case palisade!

Come spring, a box of circus tickets would appear on the library counter suspiciously close to the checkout machine. The circus was coming to town! ...And our parents would never let us go. ...Until the day they did.

In truth, I don’t remember much from the circus. It wasn’t in a tent, it was in the town’s hockey arena—and poodles took the place of elephants. In fact, I didn’t even eat circus peanuts while there! Get this, my dad bought a box of Cracker Jacks—for himself! However, this was the genesis of my love affair with the circus. Sorry, honey. There’s someone else… and his name is Barry Lubin! (Barry Lubin is a famous clown.)

Fast forward to the near present and after getting the quarantine spring jibblies, I finally snapped and declared, “If I can’t go to the circus, well, in fact, I’ll bring the circus to me!” (Side note: still to this very day I have only been to the circus once. It’s more about having the feeling that I could go to a circus if I wanted to, rather than the feeling of being barred from a yearly ritual. After all, circuses are generally banal and raise many animal treatment issues. Again, it’s the romanticized circus I like. The Idea of Circus.) So I decided to acquire some circus peanuts, having never actually tried them before.

“So, from where did circus peanuts first appear, even?” you ask. Well, it appears no one knows. They are believed to have come onto the confectionary colosseum sometime in the 1800s, making them one of the oldest continuously produced candies. Well, I shouldn’t say continuously produced, as they originally were a seasonal treat before better packaging techniques were invented! Thank you, science! :) My best guess is that they originated as an ersatz peanut product, similar to how the hazelnut was used as a filler with which to cut chocolate products during a cocoa scarcity in Italy during WWII. (More talk about hazelnut spreads below!) Whatever the case, this homemade recipe is on scale! :) Okay, so back to business.

Acquiring circus peanuts in quarantine was a bit harder than expected. Every store I visited was sold out: Fleet Farm, Walgreens, Kwik Trip—all out! Alas, toilet paper wasn’t the only thing people were snatching up! Curse you, omnivores! (Side note: lest we forget this pandemic would have never happened had the world been vegan. I don’t think it’s wrong of me to suggest that everyone who consumes animal products from factory farms should have to pay the unemployed vegans an extra $600 a month. Why should I, a humble plant eater, pay for the mess of the omnivores yet again? Stop eating meat, y’all! Factually stated, 41% of all land in the United States is used for livestock! What a fuckin’ waste! And excusez mon français!)

So instead of continuing on a wild goose chase to find these golden eggs, I decided to take a radical approach and make my own circus peanuts. (Plus, I found out after Googling around that circus peanuts aren’t even vegan! For shame!) This is where things start to get a little tricky. You see, I’m a bit of a health nut. Well, maybe a little more than a bit of one... I may be a full-on health peanut! Peanuts like me would never eat something so processed anyway... But who’s to say I can’t have a taste of the circus in a healthy, vegan way? Why not make homemade circus peanut peanut butter? And better yet, why not use duckweed as a base instead of circus peanuts? You get all the goodness of the circus but in a spreadable way with all the health benefits of the most nutrient dense plant known to humanity. For yumzeez! :)

World’s healthiest food

For those who only know duckweed from smelly retention ponds, duckweed (also known as water lentils) is actually a great food for humans. It has more protein than soy, has many antioxidants, and is a natural source of B12. Get this, the bacteria that make B12 grow in a symbiotic relationship with the plant! Question: How neat is that? Answer: That’s pretty neat! And by the way, omnis, B12 comes from bacteria in the dirt that vegan animals eat. Given that most cows and chickens eat feed that’s been washed, these animals too have to be given vitamins—the meat you eat is trash :) 

So I finnicked for a long time to get the duckweed circus peanut peanut butter spread consistency right (we’ll save that process for a different post!), bought some peanut-shaped molds from eBay, found some food coloring in the back of the cabinet, and I was off to the races! Err, Circus! I had done it! I had made circus peanut peanut butter! Granted, it tasted more like an artificially flavored banana salad than candy, but it’s the thought that counts!

So… days go by and I get tested and find out I don’t have the coronavirus. Yipee! Time to see my folks! ...But I couldn’t serve that to my family. They’d think I’d lost my marbles! So instead, I came up with a more palatable, albeit less healthy, option. Instead of duckweed, I would use Trader Joe’s brand vegan marshmallows, dye them to the proper color, and mold them in shape. Then I could serve my folks organic, gluten free, non-GMO circus peanuts, or I could blend them to make totally delicious circus peanut peanut butter. Then maybe make a circus-y themed fluffernutter? Mmmmm!

And there’s even an option for the omnis among us: get real circus peanuts and follow the same procedure. (Just know if you do that, the gelatin you’ll be consuming will be from the bones, skin, and hooves of dozens of different cows or pigs.) For simplicity’s sake and also because I am collaborating with an omni for this post, we ended up going with regular circus peanuts. She had already purchased the circus peanuts before I could alert her that it had to be vegan. My bad! :^O “’Tis better to use the food you have than to let it go to waste.” Plus, they were Spangler brand, the classic choice for circus peanuts!

Aforementioned, I called in the big guns: food stylist, chef, event planner, and artist, Kendal Kulley. Check her out on Instagram! She assisted me as we made her favorite sandwich with the addition of my favorite ingredient: the Circus Peanut Peanut Butter and Pudding and Chocolate Peanut Butter Sandwich! First, take lightly toasted Whole Wheat bread (100% whole wheat works best). Then, slather a thick layer of homemade circus peanut peanut butter followed by a smathering of lemon pudding (Snack pack brand is my favorite, lemon is her favorite flavor (within the Snack pack brand family)). Next, add a sprinkling of hemp hearts for a bit of protein and roughage—not to mention polyunsaturated fats!

After that, Kendal likes to add a squidge of chocolate flavored peanut butter or hazelnut spread to thicken the whole thing up. Please note that I do not condone the use of most flavored peanut butters or products like Nutella as they often contain palm oil, a cash crop leading to rainforest deforestation. The same goes for cocoa. Instead, I propose we continue to advocate that the UN apportion monies to residents of poorer rainforested countries so they can live comfortably and keep our biggest source of oxygen intact. I’m happy pitching in a handful of dollars every year if it means I can keep breathing clean air :)

Then, simply close it up and enjoy! Buuuuuuut, if you’re feeling really ambitious like we are, you can make… wait for it… a TRIPLE DECKER! Just repeat the process over again with a third slice and add it on top! YUM. Cut it in half and there you have it! A perfect guilt-free (provided you followed the vegan duckweed version and omitted the peanut butter and used a more hearty bread) lunch item! Bon appétit!

I hope you enjoy this recipe and let me know in the comments how it turned out! It shouldn’t take any more than five minutes if doing the omni method (grrrr!) and about one hour for the healthy vegan method. It makes one jar worth and will last three to five days in the refrigerator—but it never lasts that long! Oh, and if you do end up having sandwich leftovers, it works great for a morning hash! But again, I, for one, almost never have leftovers! :)

Peace!

Peter 

Omnivore version (unhealthy):

Ingredients:

1 package Spangler brand circus peanuts

4 tbsp water

If making chunky, set aside one circus peanut to mince in a food processor or with a knife. In a large bowl, add the circus peanuts and water. Microwave for two minutes on high or until the circus peanuts have expanded to twice their size. Serve immediately or add to an airtight container.

Vegan version (unhealthy):

Ingredients:

1 package Trader Joe’s brand vegan marshmallows

4 tbsp water

2 drops natural banana flavor

4 drops orange food coloring

In a large bowl, add the marshmallows and water. Microwave for two minutes on high or until the marshmallows have expanded and softened. Mix in the food coloring and natural flavor and microwave for another minute. Add to mold and set sit until at room temperature. When fully set, add to Vitamix and blend until desired peanut butter consistency is achieved. Serve immediately or add to an airtight container.

Vegan version (healthy):

Ingredients:

6 cups fresh duckweed

4 tbsp flaxseed meal.

4 drops natural banana flavor

12-18 drops orange food coloring

If making homemade duckweed, follow these instructions and skip the next step. If collecting from a pond, read on. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. In an Instant Pot or lesser pressure cooker, steam the duckweed for one minute on high pressure with the valve set to sealing. Do five minutes of natural pressure release. Blend in the Vitamix with food coloring, flaxseed meal, and banana flavor until it becomes a fine mush. Put in peanut mold. Place in the oven for 10 minutes, or until the peanuts have mostly dried out. Put back in the Vitamix and blend until you have the desired level of consistency. Serve immediately or add to an airtight container. 

Captions:

Oh look! An ant wanted to join us! Hello, little ant!

Comments:

Feel free to email me your comments and I will add them below :)

OMG this looks so goooood!

Thanks for the post, Peter! I just wanna say that I too used to go to the circus with my family every year and loved it! I will try this recipe ASAP.