Food

Shrimp and Grits in 10 Minutes

At LibertyCon I was told that the restaurant did good Shrimp & Grits. I love both shrimp and grits, so I was on board for that, but it turned out that the hotel had no proper kitchen this year during the remodel. I left the convention shrimp-and-gritsless.

The recipes I’ve seen online appear far more complex than the name “shrimp and grits” would suggest. They involve sausage, bacon, cream, a suite of multi-colored bell peppers, and lots more things I don’t have the patience for. Also, they take an hour to cook. I wanted these for breakfast, and breakfast is not a dish I can afford to spend an hour on. I’m breaking fast, not hosting a dinner party.

Here’s my alternative. It’s simple, and like the name of the dish suggests, it pretty much sticks to the “there is shrimp in these grits” theme.

  • 6 medium-large uncooked shrimp, peeled
  • 1/4c Quaker instant grits
  • 1c water
  • 2tbsp butter
  • 1 chicken bouillon cube
  • Zatarain’s Blackened Seasoning
  • 1 green onion
  1. Prepare the grits in the water w/ 1tbsp butter and the bouillon cube. This takes 5 minutes, tops. While that’s working, multitask the rest.
  2. In a separate pan, saute the peeled shrimp in the other tbsp of butter, w/ Zatarain’s seasoning on them to taste.
  3. Chop the green onion.
  4. When the grits are done, remove them from the heat. Toss the chopped green onion into the pot, and then drop the cooked shrimp into the pot. Stir.
  5. Serve.

This is not a big, fancy dish that says “I had shrimp, so I threw a food party and invited all of the shrimp’s friends.” This is a dish borne of “oh, hey… there’s shrimp in the freezer, and nobody is watching. I’ll be done and cleaned up before anybody is the wiser.”

Journal, Reviews

A Planet Mercenary Play Test

On Saturday, June 27th, we had a Planet Mercenary RPG play test at LibertyCon. Alan Bahr ran the game, and Steve Jackson joined us. Our small band of mercenary officers was cast as follows:

  • The purp doctor: Howard Tayler
  • The tetrisoid attorney: Alijah Ballard
  • The ursumari engineer: Keliana Tayler
  • The mobile-chassis A.I.: David Pascoe
  • The Ob’enn captain: Steve Jackson

The adventure began at MercCon, held in a dilapidated station in orbit around Damaxuri. We roamed the expo hall looking for swag, and while the captain adorned himself with things that blinked and glowed, our one-meter-tall attorney decided to prank random strangers by injecting them with stim samples he lifted from one of the booths. When an angry neophant caught him at it and grabbed him, the doctor whipped out a syringe and said “if you want the antidote, you’ll put my friend down.” It worked, and now that we could see that our attorney player was going to play as a rogue, we adjusted our deployment to keep a better eye on him.

The A.I. went sniffing through the data-streams, and determined that there was money to be made on the surface of Damaxuri, but only if we moved fast, and got there before the news broke to the rest of the mercenaries at the convention. After evaluating several slow, or bad, or slow-and-bad options for getting to the surface, the captain decided we should find a civilian ship with immediate clearance, hijack it, and then remove its transponder to provide OUR ship with clearance.

The following thirty minutes of game play were pretty hilarious, and included safe-cracking, recruiting, remote piloting for maximum “soft” collisions, a false alarm about an outbreak of smuttorhea, and us racing to the surface well ahead of anybody else who may have wanted the job that just posted. The attorney did the safe-cracking with the ursumari’s boomex, and only the fact that the safe contained both currency and blackmail material pacified the ursumari.

I’ll spare you any further spoilers, since the adventure (with some tweaks, of course) will be part of the final product.

The final tableau: while our ursumari roared in frustration, literally bristling with shuriken from her violently defective weapon, the doctor stabilized our target and began counting out pain killers and happy-pills for the angry wall of “friendly” fur. Meanwhile the lawyer and the captain managed the “recruiting” of our target’s hench-folk, and the A.I. rolled through the warehouse evaluating whether or not we could collect the bounty *AND* salvage the inventory of a profitable criminal enterprise.

Steve, Keliana, and I had to bounce out to another event, but everybody (including us!) kept talking about what our characters would do next. The game was over, the players had to leave, but we were all still telling the story.

That’s a pretty successful game.

The “speak first, go first” initiative system worked perfectly, in part because our captain spoke first and began issuing orders. Steve Jackson played that really well, which is no surprise, and the other players rolled with it equally well. Whether or not the captain was right about this plan to blow a hole in the bulkhead, we were going to pour our bullets through it and get the job done.

The mayhem cards also worked well. The doctor’s fire team gained a bonus to all combat actions by virtue of being terrified of him, and our company’s charter lost a couple of points of reputation because despite getting the job done there was an embarrassing video of our ursumari covered in bits of her own weapon. Both of these elements would have played straight into further adventure sessions, informing our role play and the math of combat.

Most auspiciously, the game played *fast.* The fun we had voicing our characters  carried straight into the combat scenes at a pace which felt natural, and which, even though we were all still learning the system, did not bog down.

To paraphrase Steve’s remarks to Alan: “This was fun. I suspect you could run *any* game well, but you’ve got a good thing here.” I don’t remember the exact quote, but that was the spirit of it, and Alan was grinning for the rest of the day.

I had microphone responsibilities at the luncheon which followed, so I wasn’t paying enough attention while Keliana sketched. I caught just enough to realize she was drawing our Planet Mercenary party, but before I could ask to see the finished piece, she’d given it to our play-test guest of honor.

 

Journal, Reviews

Inside Out

Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out is one of those films that I didn’t really enjoy, but which I believe to be incredibly important. It’s certainly clever enough and deep enough to entertain grown-ups, but I believe the target audience for Inside Out is children who need a memorable, functional model for understanding how emotions control their perception of the world.

Disney-Pixar-Inside-Out

In terms of societal value, then, Inside Out may be the most important movie Pixar has ever made. The world is definitely a better place with this movie in it.

In terms of entertainment value, your mileage is going to vary wildly depending on the manner in which you’ve built your own models for understanding your brain, not to mention your awareness of mental health issues. I believe that the film is trying to portray an ordinary emotional crisis for a young person, but as I watched the destruction wrought upon the model of Riley’s mind I was terrified. I stopped seeing the film as a quest to restore happiness, and started seeing a descent into madness whose only possible happy ending began with immediate medical attention.

Since that’s probably not what the movie wanted me to see, it didn’t work as well for me as it did for the audience full of college-aged kids at the Thursday night showing. They laughed and cheered while I white-knuckled.

inside-outI know that this is *my* problem, not the movie’s problem, and in spite of the fact that I’m sure there are others who will white-knuckle during Inside Out, I stand by my earlier statement: this movie is incredibly important. Whether or not they see it in the theater, kids should see it, and then spend some time talking about it. Oh, and it will almost certainly be fun for them, too.

My movie rankings are based on the amount of fun I had in the theater, and on that scale Inside Out enters my 2015 list at #11, and is the first Pixar film I’ve seen since Cars 2 that has failed to crack my Threshold of Awesome. Please don’t let that fool you into thinking Inside Out is not awesome. There are other scales than mine, after all.

Reviews

Spy

I had forgotten how good a proper comedy can be. Spy, starring Melissa McCarthy, did everything right. I laughed hard, and left the theater on that happy high that comes from laughter with, rather than laughter at.

SpyThis isn’t a sit-com kind of movie where we laugh at the absurdity that grows out of an absurd situation. It’s a comedy with character, and the absurd situation is actually kind of terrifying. In order to maintain tension we aren’t allowed to laugh at it very much. That’s fine. There’s plenty of funny elsewhere.

After having seen Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, and now Melissa McCarthy in action roles, I’m afraid Scarjo’s Black Widow finishes in a distant third place. Theron’s Furiosa was amazing, and set a new bar, but I’m putting McCarthy’s Susan Cooper over that bar and in first, because she was the only one of the three to ace the delivery of the stand-up-and-cheer moment.

I could write a 5,000-word treatise going into more detail about how this works for me, but I have comics to make and an RPG to write. I’ll just say that Spy clears my Threshold of Awesome, and leaps to the top of my list. I had so much fun…

UPDATE

One of the reasons this movie worked so well for me is that it treats its genre, the super-spy thriller, in much the same way my own Schlock Mercenary treats science fiction.

This quote from writer director Paul Feig is telling:

I’m a big fan of spy movies, and I wanted to create a broad action comedy in that genre. The comedy comes from the characters. It’s not a spoof or satire. The danger and action are genuine. We wanted it to have the tone of a spy film, but still be as funny as we could make it. I also wanted to create a relatable story in which we could all wonder, ‘If I was recruited as a spy and sent on a mission, how might I react?’ —Paul Feig, cited on IMDB

That’s not the only reason it works, but that’s a big one, and for me that was the biggest surprise. I went in expecting a spoof, and what I got instead is the very thing I most love creating.

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer