Made a jambalaya-esque risotto last night, with these giant freakin’ shrimp. Ei-Nyung grilled some asparagus and steamed some squash to go along, and we fed six people with it. Tasty, and fun. It was odd – for some reason, I really wanted to plate all the food nicely, and so I used a can as a ring mold for the risotto, put the grilled shrimp on top, laid the asparagus up against it, and drizzled the whole thing with chili oil.

The risotto was a little too tomato-y – I’d definitely drain the tomatoes first the next time I were to make something similar, but overall, it wasn’t bad.

Also made some quick lasagna Saturday morning, which will be lunch or dinner for the rest of the week. Tonight, Ei-Nyung’s making the butterflied chicken from America’s Test Kitchen, which should be excellent.

So police apparently stopped a “suicide pact” that was supposed to have taken place on Valentine’s Day, and involved something like 30 people. Am I being callous in saying that that seems odd to me, and that there might be a better use of the police’s time? If someone wants to kill themselves, who cares? Shouldn’t a person have the right to decide to end their own life? Even if you stop a “pact” like this, what’s to stop them from just killing themselves next week?

It strikes me that this “Jeff Gannon” issue isn’t getting a lot of play in the media. I wonder if part of it is that it takes a staggering sort of incompetance within the media for this to have gone on for so long, given how obviously this guy was propagandizing. But more than incompetance, if we start evaluating some sort of quantitative difference between propaganda and actual news, that raises pretty critical questions about organizations like Fox News, and whether they should even be considered “news,” at all.

So maybe their hope is if they ignore “Jeff Gannon,” who is, in case you haven’t been keeping up, a White House Press Corps member – a reporter for a GOPUSA-affiliated “news” organization called “Talon News,” who used a fake name (real name JD Guckert), and is potentially affiliated with a male prostitution organization, yet still had White House Press access, and was regularly called on by Scott McClellan at briefings, it’ll all go away. If it goes away, they don’t have to actually answer questions about what is news, and what isn’t.

But “Jeff Gannon,” particularly after Armstrong Williams and that other woman being discovered to be on the White House’s payroll without disclosure… well, there’s a pattern, here. The notion of a “free and independent” media, as Bush says, is critical to the proper functioning of a democracy. Though most Americans may be too cow-eyed to bother questioning why something like this is important, it’s *critically* important that we figure out why a guy like “Jeff Gannon,” gets the access that he does.

And that’s even ignoring the hypocrisy of this guy, who writes articles defending the FMA, yet appears to be gay. Oh, and how did he have access to info about Valerie Plame, exactly?

It’s not a small issue. Not by a long shot.

From CNN.com:

“U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today that Iran must live up to its international obligations to halt its nuclear program or the next steps are in the offing. “And I think everybody understands what the ‘next steps’ mean,” Rice told reporters after a meeting with NATO foreign ministers and European Union officials. In his state of the union address, President Bush singled out Iran as “the world’s primary state sponsor of terror — pursuing nuclear weapons.””

Now I’m not saying, if there’s a legitimate threat in the world, that one shouldn’t confront that threat. But did these assholes learn ANYTHING from Iraq? Diplomacy schmiplomacy, it would seem. “Hey Iran! Fuck the Europeans who are trying to negotiate with you, and achieve some sort of settlement without war – if you don’t stop right now, we’ll fuck you up! and I think everybody understands what “fuck you up” means. Bitches! Hoo-ah!” Christ, you fucking morons, what the fuck is wrong with you assholes? Not a working brain cell in your head.

Huh. So today actually went pretty well. Of course, it’s unlikely to get truly impartial feedback from someone in test, but Rob, the guy that got sent over, did a great job of putting the prototypes through their paces, and giving me the kind of feedback I needed. Some problems popped up (some of which have already been fixed), and he gave me some more subjective feedback that I’ll be trying to incorporate over the next week or so. Documentation’s supposed to be done by the end of next week, and I think I’ll be good to go. Got a fistful of stuff to write up, but I think it’s well on its way.

I’m psyched, actually, because the more subjective feedback was good, and watching him play, it was clear to me that the potential I see in this system isn’t just in my head. It’s not Aura fun, but in part, because it’s not anywhere near complete. It’d be like if I made Aura in a text file with no sound, and then asked someone to play it, and see if they liked it or not. Not quite, I suppose, but it’s close to that – while the guts are there, a lot of the bells and whistles that’ll make the experience complete are simply missing, just because of the state the game’s currently in.

So, I’ve got proper feedback from a working prototype, a week and a half before the deadline, on a system that’s probably close to the most complete new system in the game, period, and something that I got working at the end of last week that could be really pretty cool when it’s done. Verification that the “fun” isn’t just in my head, by someone who’s actually had to spend more than four hours just playing with a woefully incomplete prototype.

How this all fits into the “big picture” is still a little amorphous, but it’s getting nailed down pretty quick. I’ve gotta say, I’m enjoying the process.

Fun fun. I’ve been working on some more design-oriented stuff for work. Tomorrow’s sort of the first “test” of it all – literally, as I’ve got a tester at my disposal to hammer on the prototypes I’ve made. It’s a bit daunting, actually – tomorrow I get my first independant feedback, I actually “manage” a person for a day, and now, it’s not just my time I’m wasting if I screw up.

So, it’s sort of strange – I was asking for some design-related responsibility, and I’ve got it – which is *awesome*. It’s also pretty intimidating, as the feature I’m responsible for appears to have become one of the relatively major selling points of the game, at least internally. It’s really one of those situations where if I kick ass, I think it’s a real opportunity to get more responsibility, at the same time, the converse is true, where if I really screw this up, it is almost entirely all on my head.

The strange thing, of course, is that I have almost no real “experience” in this regard. Sure, Aura was a great project in the sense that we all gave design related input, and getting sort of “nuts & bolts” experience on something *else* was really helpful. And last year’s game was a real learning experience, as my position really required understanding almost every aspect of its production. But, fundamentally, we’re dealing with a pretty huge project- even bigger than the quarter million dollar reactor I made at my last job pretty much by my lonesome. With this, at this point, I’m still just wasting just my time if I screw up (and one more person, potentially, tomorrow). But once we get into production, there’s gonna be a pretty large number of people that this design impacts, and any mistakes that get missed now increased tenfold to fix at every step.

whoo.

So, yeah – no progress without risk, I suppose. But what’s the alternative? The status quo? No thanks. I think, so far, that things have turned out pretty well. Tomorrow, I’ll get feedback, and for good or ill, the result will be progress.

 

The chicken, as a followup to the last post, was phenomenal. And the risotto turned out pretty good, too. The chocolate strawberries, even better than before, ’cause we ended up with a much darker chocolate this time. Whee fun. I really like cooking, and moreover, I really like eating great food. 😀

Food:

Sausage and mushroom risotto, which we ate none of straight out of the pan – all went into small containers for food during the week. Ei-Nyung made a roast chicken with “stuffing” from a Cook’s Illustrated recipe, which should be done soon, and I made some more chocolate dipped strawberries, which look to be pretty swell.

And we had cocktail shrimp for a during-cooking appetizer. Talk about weird. Weird and delicious!

So I saw an image on CNN.com where Bush was standing in front of a huge banner reading “Strenthening Social Security for the 21st Century” – and it occurred to me, I didn’t recall ever seeing Clinton give speeches in front of giant Cliff’s Notes banners.

So I did a quick Google search, and no, none of the pictures came up with either giant banners, or lots of repeated patterns of words – both of which are almost “standard” backgrounds for Bush speeches.

I wonder how effective it is, having your little “point” summarized so that everyone who sees the picture gets the message, even if they don’t hear the speech…

I suppose pretty effective for most of the red state morons.

I haven’t heard any of the SOTU speech, and I don’t think it’s done yet – my guess is 32 “Freedom,” and at least 20 “Liberty.”