Lately, I've been reading a bit about the local foods movement, which posits a moral (and green) value in purchasing and living exclusively off local foodstuffs, in order to reduce the impact on the planet's ecosystem from the transport of goods from distant places. On the one hand, I've always liked local specialties--e.g., a spring does not go by when I don't make a dinner of shad and shad roe, a very New York thing. Similarly, at present I'm rejoicing in the availability of Jersey tomatoes at the local green market--the pale pink things we get from California during winter, and even the redder "vine ripened" crap we get from the Netherlands (a bait and switch if ever there was one--they may be redder, but equally tasteless) are hardly worth calling tomatoes at all.

On the other hand, this "eat local" thing is one thing to espouse if you live in, say, Berkeley, California, and have year-round access to a huge variety of local produce and other foodstuffs, grown year-round--and largely the product of water irrigating the Central Valley, heavily subsidized by the federal tax-payer at (among others) my expense, and with its inevitable consequence salinization of irreplaceable soils in the region. It's quite another if the only local produce you're likely to find year-round in your region are (as in New York) apples and potatoes--and I shudder to think what eating this way in, say, Finland would be like. In the winter you'd be left with rutabaga and lutefisk. Maybe the occasional reindeer fillet.

Nonsense. And I'm more than a little skeptical that eating locally reduces global resource consumption. International seaborne transport is amazingly cheap, really; the cost of shipping something from China to an American port, say, is a tiny fraction of the likely retail price in American shops. While the carbon footprint of shipping an orange by truck from California to New York may be fairly high, I rather doubt that I'm doing the planet much harm by purchasing, say, tilapia resulting from efficient Vietnamese aquaculture instead a piece of cod from the horribly depleted fisheries of the Grand Banks.

There's a piece by Adam Gopnik in the current New Yorker, in which he describes his experiences in attempting to eat for a time off things produced entirely within the boundaries of the City of New York--no mean feat, as there are only two commercial farms remaining within the urbs. While it's entertaining, it's also clear, reading between the lines, that he spent a fair bit of time at the wheel of one motor vehicle or another to reach the farflung places necessary to obtain his provender. I strongly suspect that spending a half gallon of gasoline in order to obtain a "local" chicken has greater impact on the planet than whatever is saved by ensuring that it doesn't come from the Purdue packing plant in Maryland.

Indeed, it seems to me that "price" is a pretty good meausre of "negative global impact," since the more energy and work involved in bringing something to me, the more it's going to cost. While we're abjured to purchase (more expensive) organic products and (more expensive) local products, I rather wonder: the lamb from upstate is local, but perhaps the natural, well-watered dells of New Zealand are more efficient places to raise lambs than Rockland county.

Of course, I'm a cheapskate by nature, a tendency reinforced by running an unfunded startup, but I suspect a lot of the "eat local" meme is fuelled by a combination of moralistic posturing and Veblenesque conspicuous consumption: by buying locally-grown heirloom tomatoes at $5 a pound, instead of mass-market ones at $1 a pound at the local supermarket, you're wearing both planetary consciousness and a supposed culinary sophistication on your sleeve. Me, I'll stick with nice, ripe local tomatoes at, say, $2 a pound. And live with the $1/pound ones in the winter, when there's nothing much better.

Since I'm working at home, and no longer have the opportunity to bike to the office, in fact, I've taken to combining an opportunity to exercise with the opportunity to get better food than is available in my repulsive local supermarket by venturing out twice a week. Common stops are at the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side, for vegetables and fish; East Village Cheese, for feta and bleu for salads and some brie to go with whole wheat bread; the Wine Warehouse on Broadway south of Astor for decent wine at <$10 a bottle; the Union Square greenmarket for local produce in season; Western Beef on 16th between 9th and 10th Avenues, for cheap meat; and when I hit Western Beef, the Chelsea Market for veggies. (More expensive than the Essex Market, but not by much.) Occasionally, I'll go to Bell Bates--not for the usual stuff, since in keeping with most "natural foods" places, their general prices are insane, but they have bulk spices at very reasonable cost.

The general rules I suggest are:

• If you have to take your car there (or drive farther than normally), don't fool yourself that you're doing the planet any favors. Get on your bike, goddamn it.


• Price is an imperfect but real signal of the all-in costs of bringing something to you--including environmental impacts. Absent other signals, cheaper is better.


• Eating local is largely bullshit; there's no virtue in sustaining the incomes of local fishermen depleting already devastated local fisheries over Vietnamese struggling to survive working at sustainable aquaculture on pennies a day, or yuppie Wall Street refugees who want to make artisinal cheeses over hard-working Danish peasants. Sure, eat the local good stuff in season, but why would you avoid using limes if you live north of Florida?


• Eat well, pinch your pennies, and get on the bike. Sounds like a pretty good recipe to me.

posted by Greg at 10:52 PM

1. ...Heinermann, a font long thought to have been created by Jan Peders van der Heinerman (1658-1702), who was a pioneering typesetter based in Antwerp, but since conclusively proven to have been invented by the Comtesse Madeleine d'Anjou, third wife of Germain (II), Comte de Paris, and filched from her by van der Heinerman's child bride, Genevieve Fleurement, as part of a complicated sexual triangle that some authorities believe may also have involved a goat. Which would make it a quadrangle, we suppose.

2. ...Sativa Monticello Roman, a font originally created by Thomas Jefferson, allegedly after a long night of hemp-induced visions in the arms of his mistress Sally Hemmings, in celebration upon the victory of American arms at Yorktown.

3. ...Chateauneuf du Pape Serif, a charming font with notes of oak and tannin, its present style codified and popularized in the typography of labels from vintners in Chile's Casablanca valley, but ultimately deriving from graffiti carved in ancient Druidic stelae, possibly by Roman legionaries, in the department of Vaucluse in France.

4. ...Cthonian Medium, a font generally credited to Unamit Ahazredit (1323-1348), known as "the Mad Armenian," whose calligraphy in the only extant Latin translation of the "Neopublicon," a work of obscure origin, served as the basis for the font used in Gustav Klimpt's print version of the same work (1672, Leipzig). Per legend, the ornate nature of the serifs used in this font themselves encode arcane knowledge, and assist in imparting whatever hidden and potentially dangerous message the text itself contains.

5. ...Berlow Historia Obscura, a font designed by Jurgen Berlow, one of the most prolific modern creators of faces. This body type is, so he claims, derived from a printed folio composed in Volapuk, an artificial language created by Johann Martin Schlayer in 1879; the manuscript was ostensibly discovered in an Etruscan tomb dating to the sixth century BC, and its pages have been radio-carbon dated to the middle Cretaceous. Some authorities consider this an amusing hoax and credit Barlow with this attractive type; Barlow, and the occasional crackpot, maintain that it is the product of time travellers from our future (when, presumably, Volapuk becomes the human lingua franca) back to the primordial past.

6. ...Derrida Plain, a font in which all characters are rendered as identical rectangular black blocks. Named after Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), this font extends his philosophy of deconstructionism, which holds that all texts have no meanings except for those constructed by their readers, to its logical extreme, by making the text wholly indecipherable, and therefore susceptible to whatever construction the reader desires.

N. ...ISO Latin ASCII, because humans are obsolete, and the only people who need to read such texts (presumably from some fit of nostalgia) are we machines.
posted by Greg at 2:39 AM

Making light has quite a thread going on the possibilities of a Milne/Lovecraft mashup. Works quite well, I think, and a mode I could definitely get into, if I weren't rather inclined to find a mattress at present. I quite like:

Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
That's not dead which can eternal lie,
And in aeons strange even Death may die --
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

posted by Greg at 9:10 PM

So there are, at present, dozens of fire vehicles on West Street in front of the WTC site. Karen, Simona, and I noticed them returning from the subway--we were away at a wedding in Connecticut for the day, dropped off the rental car uptown, and were returning by train.

Hundreds of gawkers were looking toward the Deutsche Bank (formerly Bank of New York Banker's Trust) building, which was on fire. (Or here, if the Times chargewall keeps you out.)

The Deutsche Bank builidng--a black, ugly 70s structure damaged by falling members from WTC 2 on 9/11--has been boarded up for years, and was in the process of being deconstructed, storey by storey. The damage it sustained on 9/11 opened much of the structure to the elements, and apparently there was a toxic mold problem, as well as contaminants remaining from 9/11. In what I view as a pusilanimous over-reaction to an essentially non-existant danger, my neighbors and local politicos required that, instead of it being demolished via normal practices, it would be boarded up, environmentally sealed, and slowly deconstructed from within, in order to avoid "toxic contamination". Air quality monitoring stations, connected to alarm klaxons, were set up in the surrounding vicinity in case there should be an environmental breach. Needless to say, this was an enormously expensive proposition--leading to a dispute by the original contractor, which delayed demolition by years--but the whole thing was finally in progress, with the top 14 storeys of the 40-floor structure already gone.

Apparently, the fire broke out on an upper floor, spread to several others, and is still smoldering as I post. I could visibly see a number of broken windows--and given normal firefighter practice, which is to knock hell out of any barrier when fighting a fire to provide better access--I have to assume that the ballyhooed "environmental seal" is, well, now non-existant to all intents and purposes.

We noted hundreds of people watching avidly, some dining desultorily outdoors at Merchants, a mere two blocks away from the structure. Sauteed sea bass and toxic mold. Yum.

As I've indicated, I don't actually believe the supposed threat of environmental contamination is remotely as great as my excessively fearful yuppie neighbors apparently do. Nonetheless, I find it curious that the two (no doubt hastily written) news items on the story don't raise the question of whether the fire has raised any danger of environmental toxin release.

You note that I'm happily ensconced in my apartment--three blocks away--and obviously don't think there's any great environmental danger myself. But then, I never did. My guess, however, is that over the next few days, this will become a shrill local political issue, and we'll have sobbing local residents on local TV whining about it. (I don't get cable, and local broadcast reception is nonexistant, because of the high level of radio and microwave traffic locally; for this I am thankful. The Internet--and the good gray paper-printed Times--will do me fine, thank you.)

But my guess is that the demolition gets delayed many months to come--quite likely with a major impact on the WTC reconstruction project as a whole, since, IIRC, the Deutsche Bank tower has to come down for them to build some access ramp to the rest of the site--the whole project, a major one in so crowded an area, is like a jigsaw puzzle, and if one piece is missing, others can't be put in place.
posted by Greg at 8:03 PM

Okay, so we've seen a variety of interesting new interface devices for games recently, including the Wii controller and such. But this strikes me as fairly loony.

The project began as an exercise for networked objects. I made a pong controller that was made from a bra. The mapping for the controller was simple - touching the left breast made the pong paddle go left and the right breast made the paddle go right. I then found out about a phenomenon called gamer widowhood where men essentially abandoned their wives to play video games night and day. I wanted to create a type of video game play that would center around a couple's intimacy and where two people would touch each other in order to play the game.

Well, so here's the thing. Touching my partner's tits can certainly be fun. Playing Pong can be (modestly) fun. Touching my partner's tits in order to play Pong?

Um. Not fun. Either I wind up concentrating on the game, and grabbing tits with no regard to, well, mutual pleasure, or I wind up concentrating on my partner, in which case the Pong game goes to hell, and obviates the whole point here.

And I'm not sure making it two player works... After all, where would she grab? I mean, I've only got one. Ahem. Well, motion in different directions... never mind.

Despite Jane's experience with the Rez vibrator--which, I'll note, pretty much divorced gameplay (her boyfriend's) from the erotic aspect (hers), except to the degree that one reinforced the other--I think if you want to make this work you basically need to build a game that is itself erotic in intent (a major design challenge in its own right) and build gameplay around your controller.
posted by Greg at 5:14 PM

So Game Tunnel has up its list of the 100 Top Indie Games of the last three years--which I'm finding fascinating reading, because we cover kinda the same area they do, and yet their tastes are so obviously so different from--I won't say "mine," but say from Manifesto's collectively. (Bill Folsom and Johnny Wilson have a big influence on the games we go after, albeit so do I.)

I'm not posting with any intention to dis Game Tunnel; I love what they do, and I think Russell Carroll is a good guy, and I write for them myself. But I look down the list and think:

1. The only adventure games listed are installments in the Bone and Sam & Max series from Tell Tale Games--except for The Shivah, at #85... You know, this single game is what got Dave Gilbert nominated for "Best New Studio" at the Game Developers Choice Awards, his competition consisting of teams of 30 or more people, all working on multi-million dollar budget titles. Dave works by himself, at Starbucks, with his laptop, on a budget of zero. He's a fucking genius, you ask me. And actually, The Blackwell Legacy is a better game. And, um, don't Al Emmo and Penumbra: Overture rate a mention?


2. As far as I can tell, the only wargame mentioned is Gates of Troy, at #64. Okay, maybe they only review games that are submitted to them, and maybe Matrix and Wargaming.net don't often submit games (though there are a number of non-wargame titles from Shrapnel listed)... but this seems like an obvious blind spot to me.


3. And not a game from Chronic Logic or Apezone?

In the top 10, incidentally, are an Arkanoid clone and a Pong variant--and yes, both have different and imaginative twists on the games they copy. But... well. Among the top 10?

And there seem (to my taste) to be a lot of fairly dull casual titles, arcade game retreads, and unexceptional shooters of various kinds rated rather more generously than I would.

Clearly, though, there's still a strong overlap in taste: We carry almost half the games in Game Tunnel's top 100.

Update: Oh, dang. Almost as soon as I'd posted this, I ran into Derek Yu's top 50 indie games list. I suspect my taste and Derek's vary too, but at least a cursory glance suggests this is much more on target.... A post for another day, perhaps.
posted by Greg at 12:30 AM

Sorta.

This is a bit of a technical hat trick, but a cool one: Tie a Z-Machine interpreter to a Jabber IM bot. The Z-as-in-Zork-Machine is what most of Infocom's text adventures were developed using (and still used today by many people in the IF community). Jabber is an open XML protocol for instant messaging, used by both Skype and Google Talk for IMing (and many other Jabber clients available as well).

To play Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, message "!startgame" to prakbot@jabber.org.

Developed by one of the Perplex City guys, apparently.

I hope he releases the source; while there are plenty of Z-machine interpreters around, everyone knows how to IM, and setting one up on your box does require a little bit of technical knowledge. Would be a convenient way to offer IF games to people.

(Via James Wallis).
posted by Greg at 6:28 AM