My memories of Breath of Fire are inextricably bound to the most miserable summer of my life: The year I lived alone in Abilene, Texas tending to a friend’s house while he was out of town for several months. Although it eventually turned out to be a pretty decent summer, the first month or so was absolutely wretched: I was isolated in a house on the edge of the city with no money to speak of and nothing to do except play the two or three used games I owned and pore over the modest collection of comic books I had carried along from high school. This was before the Internet was particularly interesting, or in any way accessible outside of universities. About the only good thing I had going for me was being able to live rent-free. When I think of Breath of Fire, I think of being stuck in that house and being intensely depressed.
After a few weeks of that, I found two jobs, started dating, bought a dog, and generally made my life turn into a bundle of awesome. But for that first while, it was just me, the X-Men, and Breath of Fire. And that sense of ennui and emptiness is all this game brings to mind. No wonder I’m not a fan.
On the plus side, the Japanese subtitle of the game is “Ryuu No Senshi.” That is to say, “Dragon Warrior.” Yes.
Last week was a rough one, so by the end of it my family and I (by which I mean wife and parents) needed a little bit of a break. The problem is that Lubbock, Texas is not really a city known for awesome events and destinations, unless you like collegiate sports or rodeos. So, we decided to head a little ways out of town to the Llano Estacado winery.
I’d heard good things about Llano Estacado, and I enjoyed the tour of the facility (the guide explained far more about the winemaking process than any winery I’ve toured here in California; I suppose here they just assume you know). The pleasant surprise was the tasting afterwards, which gave us a sampling of several different kinds of wine, many of which were quite good. Granted, I wouldn’t rank anything I tasted there among the best I’ve ever had, but I’ve certainly had much worse wine via well-regarded vintners up in Napa. I’d call it a win. (“Win” is “wine” without the “e.” Let that be a lesson to you if you were planning to dose up on Ecstasy while quaffing a Chianti.)
We brought home a bottle of Cat’s second-favorite vintage from Llano Estacado. Her favorite — which I also really enjoyed — was Viva Rosso, an unusual blush dessert wine that packed a sort of natural carbonation, making it a bit like a champagne/sparkling wine but with a completely different flavor than you expect from those varietals. Unfortunately that mild natural carbonation makes it ineligible for interstate shipping because apparently it causes the bottles to run the risk of exploding in flight, so we decided it was probably best not to risk it. We went with the Moscato instead.
I’m not much of a fan of white wines, and I generally steer clear of dessert wines, but I have to hand it to Llano Estacado: They make a good one. The problem I have with dessert vintages is that they tend to be heavy, almost syrupy, and entirely too sweet. The Llano Moscato, however, is light and crisp, and the sweetness is just enough to counter the “sour grape juice” sensation that I usually take away from whites, especially something like Chardonnay. Would drink again, which is more than I can say for most wines of this type.
The really nice thing about Llano Estacado is that the pricing of its vintages reflects what the market will bear. Lubbock isn’t really a wine town; it’s more a Michelob and Bud Light kind of town. So where most Napa/Sonoma wineries would probably charge $25-30 for a bottle of this quality, secure in the knowledge that Californians simply expect to pay dearly for a good selection, Llano prices this at $10.
Anyway, if you ever happen to pass through West Texas, stock up! It’s cheap yet good, the elusive perfect combo of wine attributes.
This post encompasses pretty much the extent of my ability to write about wine. Wine for me is like art for Gelett Burgess: I don’t know anything about it, but I know what I like.
When Cat and I were in Lubbock visiting my family, she got into a groove baking lemon desserts. My grandfather has always had a huge sweet tooth, and he’s always had a thing for lemon. I remember taking a road trip with him back in the ’80s, when Jelly Belly jelly beans were first a thing, and he bought a huge bag of lemon jelly beans. He always had a lemon drop handy to suck on. His enthusiasm for eating lemon sweets has only been matched by his love of Burger King Whoppers and Dr Pepper (I inherited his love of sweets and citrus, but the Whopper and Dr Pepper fixations passed me by). So we — by which I mean she — basically spoiled him for a week. Lemon meringue pie, lemon pudding, and an amazing triple-lemon cake with lemon cream cheese frosting and a lemon pudding center. Yum.
Amazingly, upon our return home, she promptly turned around and baked yet another lemon dessert just for us. Normally I’d complain, but, well, I am my grandfather’s grandson, after all.
This time, she made a lemon pudding cake. I have no idea what the science behind this thing is, but it’s kind of crazy. When it bakes, it turns toasty brown on top and mostly becomes a spongy lemon cake. The bottom of the dish turns into a sort of pudding — a bit soupy while warm, but thicker and creamier once cooled. The trickiest part is getting it out of the oven, since you’re supposed to bake it with the pan immersed in two inches of water, which is quite hot when just removed from the oven… but you can’t pour the water out over the sink like you would with a normal pastry dish, because the cake itself is floating on a cushion of custard and will happily spill out along with the water. You can see the complications of our water-extraction efforts on the facing lip of the pan. It all turned out well, though. And by “well” I mean “delicious.” The cake is fairly sweet, while the custard has a sharp tartness that burns your throat a bit, which is always a sign of a true lemon confection. The texture of the cake is airy and wonderful. And you don’t have to worry about it drying out in the fridge, because it stays super moist thanks to the pudding.
If I’m not mistaken, Cat got this recipe from a ’70s edition of the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook. And it’s good. However, we now have a copy of the 1951 edition on order; that’s the one my grandmother used — the one we baked from back in Lubbock — and it had much better recipes. The copy we’ll be receiving won’t have stacks of hand-written recipes inserted into it like hers does, and it won’t be falling apart from 60 years of constant use… but I bet we’ll get there eventually.
I am no longer allowed to write about Super Metroid, because I have used up all my allocated words on the subject. Fortunately our girl Nadia is happy to take up the slack.
I’ve added yet another new category for the blog. I hope we can still be friends.
I first became a music enthusiast (as opposed to a dude who listened to whatever came on the radio and was happy about it) at a weird time of transition for the music industry. CDs hadn’t yet become universal, yet vinyl LPs were fading from sight. Tape cassettes enjoyed a brief day in the sun, and archival releases in that format were universally terrible. I remember buying nearly half a dozen different used copies of Genesis’ Wind and Wuthering over the space of a couple years that all had the worst imaginable tape warble; decades later, I still hear those shuddery defects even when I listen to perfectly remastered CD releases.
Back catalog cassette releases were produced on the cheap, which meant that their inserts were usually only printed on one side. Basic information like names of band members, composition credits, and instrumental roles were missing in action, to say nothing of the elaborate art that had graced those albums’ vinyl sleeves. I was often left wondering about the music I was falling in love with — who made it? What was it about? Fortunately, I was occasionally able to turn to my mother’s vinyl collection and learn about the albums that way.
Close to the Edge was one of the records she owned. But I learned nothing about it. Why? Because it was deliberately enigmatic. The cover was simply a deep green fading to black. The interior didn’t include bios or essays or photos of the band or thoughts on the recording process. Instead, the green sleeve opened to reveal the following mysterious gatefold image:
Intriguing, but meaningless for the young man in search of facts.
The music itself is exactly matched to this packaging. Dense, abstruse, ineffable. Close to the Edge contains three songs: The title track (comprising one entire side of the vinyl) along with “And You and I” and “Siberian Khatru,” each of which is a roughly nine-minute-long exercise in, well, being Yes.
A friend of mine once described Yes as five guys playing solos all at once, and “Close to the Edge” embodies that definition. It begins with a bit of ambient environmental sound — birds and waterfalls — before Steve Howe launches the track into full strength with an expansive guitar phrase that immediately blooms into a solo accompanied by the rest of the band edgily supporting but clearly champing to bust out into solos of their own. They do precisely that about a minute later as the tempo changes and all four instruments begin working kind of together, but kind of not together, and Jon Anderson begins singing.
If you want to call it singing, I mean. It’s vocalizing, definitely, but the lyrics don’t seem to mean anything. “A seasoned witch can call you from the depths of your disgrace/And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace/And achieve it all with music that plays quickly from afar/And taste the fruits of man rewarded losing all against the hour.” What does that mean? (Besides, “Whoa, man, LSD is super trippy”?)
“Close to the Edge” is a song divided into movements, a common practice in the heyday of album-length songs due to the record companies’ practice of paying artists royalties by the track; by “breaking” an 18-minute piece into four passages (denoted by those wide bands on the vinyl), the artist could make four times as much money… or rather, the same amount of money for work equivalent to creating four individual songs. That being said, “Close to the Edge” definitely is divided, with the near-cacophonous introduction eventually melting away to a quiet passage of complementary vocal parts accompanied by Rick Wakeman’s rhythmic cathedral organ. The organ builds to a crescendo before crashing back into the full band’s reprisal of the rock fury opening, which finally dissipates and drifts apart, leaving only the environmental sounds that led into the song.
It’s really good, but definitely offputting for anyone who isn’t accustomed to lengthy, baroque, cathedral rock compositions. The first time I heard it, I felt like I’d just opened the door to a bizarre alternate universe where music wasn’t constrained to shapes even vaguely resembling anything that could ever appear on the radio.
The two songs on the flip side of the album are a little more cohesive. “And You and I” is structured a lot like “Close to the Edge,” but it’s far more approachable. It’s much more gorgeous, too, if no more lyrically coherent:
And finally, “Siberian Khatru,” which runs at full throttle from start to finish and showcases the band’s ability to rock out in concert. It’s not one of my favorite pieces by the band, but it’s still pretty great.
Occasionally I like to go back and listen to Close to the Edge with fresh ears, and I can still feel the sense of wonder and mystery that the album instilled in me. I still recall wondering at the inscrutable album art. I still hear the slight tinniness of my mother’s 33 RPM version of the album as I sat before my hand-me-down record player. This is a pretty great album; a pinnacle of progressive rock. What do you mean, that’s not great? That’s totally great. Get your priorities straight, dude.
Satoru Iwata: “When it comes to the appeal of the Nintendo 3DS, the 3D images have been focused on. I believe, however, the actual users understand that its expanded communication methods like ‘StreetPass’ and ‘SpotPass’ that have a lot of potential.”
Interesting! I said the same thing a year ago. I don’t know why Nintendo doesn’t listen to me. I could save them a lot of trouble.
I really wish Swapnotes were viewable on the web. The world deserves to see my creations. As it is, I promised to add my cousin to my packed-full 3DS friend list, so some poor schlub is going to be culled. If you’re on my list and secretly hate that fact, now is the time to speak up!
Psst, the Final Fantasy II retrospective from GameSpite Journal 10 was secretly posted as a feature over at 1UP. This lets me assuage my guilt for not contributing to 1UP while out on bereavement without actually having to be genuinely productive. My pragmatism disgusts me, sometimes.
My grandmother’s passing was unexpected, and it was heartbreaking in its suddenness; I missed seeing her one last time by a matter of hours. I’m still having trouble believing she’s gone, because she’s been an enormous presence in my life since the beginning: Ever more diminutive in stature as her extreme arthritis ravaged her limbs and caused her to shrink from a height that even in her youth never quite reached five feet, but a towering pillar of charity and love not only to her family but to all around her. The truth is, I had planned this trip with the intention of seeing my grandfather for very likely the last time, assuming my grandmother — ever the fighter — would be around for a while longer even as Alzheimer’s takes its toll on my grandfather. I suppose the one upside to her loss is that all the family activity around Grandma’s memorial has helped him cut through the fog of illness and be himself, something all too rare in recent months. Needless to say, I’m soaking up every minute of my time with him, every snatch of conversation we share.
I take a lot of crap from people who think I’m pretentious for having taken to wearing a hat over the past year or so, but those people are cordially invited to to shove off. They don’t know the reasons behind the change, and frankly they don’t deserve to know. The hat here is the one that started it all; Cat found it as we were walking through Nolita while spending Thanksgiving 2010 in New York. She and her brother encouraged me to try it on, even though I figured I’d look like a complete twit in a hat. I put it on despite my misgivings and they both assured me it worked. I checked a mirror and sure enough, it actually looked OK. Later, I saw a photo of myself and realized why it worked: I looked an awful lot like my grandfather.
Grandpa always cut a dapper figure. It’s something of a generational thing, of course, but even after other men his age had abandoned wearing a proper hat and dressing well, he continued to cover his head when he went out, to wear French cuffs, to don slacks. Even after he retired — and really right up until the past few years, where his health has diminished — he continued to dress in a nice shirt and slacks to do nothing more than sit around the house and nap in his favorite chair. When I see myself in a hat (and, subsequently, in dressier clothes to properly match my headwear, because wearing a hat so nice with a screen-printed T-shirt would make me look like a twit), I see him reflected. I remember always being able to tell if he and my grandmother were at church when I arrived late, because his hat would always be sitting by itself atop the coatrack in the entry vestibule.
I was told that Grandpa recently saw my favorite portrait of Cat and me from our wedding, the one in which I’m standing slightly to the back in a suit and the hat, and asked, “Is that a picture of my father?” I gave it a closer look, and I really do look a lot like my great-grandfather in his younger days there. (No doubt Grandpa was also wondering why his father had posed in a suit with a lovely Vietnamese lady in a beautiful dress.) It’s a resemblance that no one ever noticed until I adopted a different mode of dress. It’s a connection that means the world to me — now more than ever.
Yesterday I had to borrow a tie from my grandfather for the memorial, because the ones I’d packed (unaware that I’d be saying my farewells to my grandmother) seemed inappropriately cheery. Not that Grandma would have minded my wearing a colorful tie in her memory, but sometimes it’s OK to step in line with social mores. I selected the one pictured above.
“Does it look OK?” I asked.
“Turn and let me see,” he replied. He looked for a moment and nodded, then told me to keep it after the memorial. I found myself suddenly choked with emotion and thanked him. It’s a great tie. I’ll be wearing it often with the hat Cat gave me, and not just because they look good together. I don’t know how much longer my grandfather will be with us, especially now that the love of his life is gone, but I will always keep a part of him with me in how I present myself.
Hi, everyone. I probably won’t update here much, if at all, for the next week. I’m out of town on a trip I’ve been planning for months with the bittersweet intention of spending time with my two surviving grandparents very likely for the last time. Unfortunately, it turned out to be too late; as I was boarding the plane, I received word that my grandmother had unexpectedly passed away. I’m pretty devastated to have missed her by a matter of hours, and I’m deeply frustrated that I let work obligations repeatedly delay a trip I intended to take months ago.
I have a lot of things to do over the next few days that seem more important than writing about video games and music and watches. You do, too. You need to tell the people you love how important they are to you. Because you never know when you’re going to just barely miss your last chance.
ANYWAY. Remember that e-ink watch I got for Christmas, the one I was super-stoked about and loved madly? Yeah, well, after about a day of wear I discovered that I am incredibly allergic to the metal (ion-plated nickel, I think?) they used for the face and band. My wrist became red and puffy, and it itched for almost a week after I stopped wearing it. Needless to say, this turn of events was kind of disappointing. I really loved that watch.
I’ve never really worn jewelry until the past year or so, when I began wearing watches and a wedding band (which, being tungsten carbide, is not only indestructible but also irritation-free). So I didn’t realize until the past year or so that I seem to have inherited my mother’s hyper-sensitive skin. She can’t wear gold and several other kinds of metals because she breaks out on contact. It’s OK, because I inherited lots of other things from her — my love of reading, my interest in pretentious rock bands of the ’70s, my artistic streak — so I’ll forgive her the less fortunate inheritances, like skin allergies and a lack of height.
I was able to exchange the disastrous watch for another, so I decided to go all-out and find one that was as far removed from a futuristic, metal-banded, e-ink LCD-screened watch I couldn’t wear. I bought instead… an analog watch made of wood.
“Wood?” you say. “They make watches of wood!?” Yes, apparently they do. I discovered the existence of wood watches at the same time as e-ink watches, and they both fascinated me in equal measure. In fact, I put both on the wish list from which my sister-in-law selected the e-ink one. Now that I have it in hand — or on wrist, as the case may be — I like it just as much as the previous watch, because it really is different.
Rather than sporting a funky, abstract face, it uses a simple, old-fashioned analog dial. Where the other watch was thick and very heavy on the wrist, this one is quite thin and incredibly lightweight. And the aesthetic differences should be obvious.
The thing I find most interesting, though, is that there the other watch seemed destined to look worse as it aged due to nicks and scratches on its jet-black surface, this style of watch is said to improve over time. Weathering and exposure to skin oils supposedly “cures” the wood, giving it a richer and more vibrant tone over time. I hope that’s true! I like the idea of a technological device that actually becomes better as it becomes older. Also, the watch’s primary color is similar to the tone of my skin, so a little weathering might add some welcome contrast.
Oh, and it’s different than the e-ink watch in another way, but perhaps the most important one of all: It’s hypoallergenic. Also, it was just slightly less expensive than the other one… enough that the leftover credit netted me a Marillion album I’ve been meaning to pick up for a few years. Flawless victory? Here’s hoping.
I first became a music enthusiast (as opposed to a dude who listened to whatever came on the radio and was happy about it) at a weird time of transition for the music industry. CDs hadn’t yet become universal, yet vinyl LPs were fading from sight. Tape cassettes enjoyed a brief day in the sun, and archival releases in that format were universally terrible. I remember buying nearly half a dozen different used copies of Genesis’ Wind and Wuthering over the space of a couple years that all had the worst imaginable tape warble; decades later, I still hear those shuddery defects even when I listen to perfectly remastered CD releases.
