Ships from Duluth. There was some sort of Big Ship festival going on when we drove through.

No bad pictures can be taken in the Badlands. I’m fairly certain of that.

The Devil’s Tower is pretty awesome. It’s hard to capture the scale on camera.

The Big Horn Mountains were pretty amazing. Again, pictures just can’t do them justice.

Yellowstone was a bit of a disappointment – way too crowded to really enjoy.

Glacier National Park, on the other hand, was so beautiful, I barely recall seeing other people at all.

Except, of course, when a bit of traffic afforded us a convenient excuse for a mid-summer snowball fight.

Eventually, we made it to the Pacific.

It was a pretty good trip, but nearly three weeks in a small car with two other people is enough to make anyone a little stir-crazy. It was a relief to finally reach San Francisco. Once here, my major preoccupation shifted from where I would sleep each night, to how I’d pay for it. But, as Rob more than once suggested, the parachute did open. More on that later.

Once we hit the road, Ontario was actually pretty boring. Lots of nothing. We hit our first stand-still as we approached a lane merge near the border into Michigan. At first, this was an almost welcome break. We were afforded a chance to step out of the car and stretch our legs, get a little fresh air. Before too long, we remembered that fresh air is also hot air. It was a relief to start moving again. Eventually we got past the lane merge. Over the bridge we came to the border checkpoint and another long wait. Eventually, they just made the white van in front of us pull off to be searched and then we were back on American soil.

Michigan was pretty dull until we hit Route 23 which ran along Lake Huron. Our campsite was in the Tawas Bay State Park. Once we got our site set up we found beach. We had some burgers and beers for dinner. Then Rob continued his plot to hook me on baseball, playing the Phillies game on his phone.

The next day we continued up 23 towards the Upper Peninsula. The towns along the way, unlike Flint, were quite pleasant. As we neared Mackinaw Bridge, Rob and I decided we wanted a spear for fishing. Despite looking in store after store in Mackinaw City, neither place could help us. So we crossed the bridge. Here’s a picture Cory took while driving:

After we crossed the bridge we were driving on Route 2 along Lake Michigan. It only took ten minutes or so to find a beach that looked too nice to pass by. So we stopped for a swim. We spent about an hour in the sun before we decided to get back on the road. Once driving again, Cory remembered to check on the weather. Unfortunately, it promised lots of wind and rain. We decided to find a motel instead of risking a soggy night in a tent.

After stopping at four or five places, we discovered the Beachcomber. It had very reasonable rates, cable, internet, and a fridge for beer. Both Rob and Cory were excited about Degrassi Boiling Point, a fascination I still don’t understand. As night fell and the wind picked up, we were relieved to have made the right call. The added expense of the room was certainly justified.

That’s pretty much it for Michigan. Next up is Duluth.

This morning, bright and early, Cory came and picked me up. I was eager to leave. Of course I was eager to live. Er, leave. The last few months have been pretty rough. I was unemployed for a long time, getting no responses from applications. When I did find a job, it was only as a temporary Census worker. The hours were far from ideal and nowhere near regular, regularly leaving me exhausted. To top it all off, I was only just feeling healthy again after some terrible and debilitating (and annoying) disease lingered for two months. So I was ready to leave all this behind.

I said my farewells, perhaps with more haste than my parents would have liked, and jumped in the car. We met our third road-tripper for a final meal at Scotty’s – I had a bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich- and then hit the road. I stuffed myself into the back seat of Cory’s Honda Fit. It was filled to capacity with food and everything we might need to survive. The sole remaining back seat was almost a cave. By mutual agreement Rob, the aforementioned third party, and I determined that we would take turns in the cave. The first day was mine. This is what the back of the car was like:

I think that’s fairly clear, but I’ll still explain. Cory and Rob made sure to see lots of interesting things off to the left, none of which I could see. I’m hoping they were joking around, but I just don’t know. Either way, the trip was fairly boring until we made our first stop at the world famous Salt Museum. There we learned all about the history of the illustrious Lake Onondaga Salt Company, and bought a giant brick of salt which burned holes in our tongues.

Fast Forward. Niagra Falls. Not on the US side. That sucked. The far superior Canadian Side. We went to this  little bar called Edgewater’s, where Rob’s shameless flirting turned a forty-five minute wait into near-instant seating at the best table on the balcony. We spent the first half of the night admiring both the fireworks display and our adorable waitress Sarah. From there we went to Jack’s Restaurant, a local bar suggested to us by Sarah, where we met  some nice Canadians. We discussed the finer points of Degrassi; The Boiling Point and the delicious elixir Mountain Brew Beer Ice from Al-bay-knee.

Then back to the campsite where there was lots of internets and I very diligently posted the day’s activities.  Here’s a pic of the falls:

P.S. Rob Says:

Dave is an asshole. This whole move was my idea, but he gets to present himself here on the internetz as a white knight savior, when it was I who saved his skinny ginjew ass from Upstate Ennui.

Weeks passed since I got Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and I still hadn’t tasted a home made bagel. While he does provide a relatively easy recipe for bagels, I hadn’t attempted it for one main reason. Like many of the other recipes in that book, bagels call for an overnight fermentation. However, the other breads are to be baked for dinner. Dinner which you eat at night. That works well for me, because I’m not a morning person. Bagels would need to be finished much earlier in the day. While I can eat breakfast at any time, the pleasure in baking come largely from sharing with people around me. The rest of my family prefers to eat breakfast before noon. I knew I’d have to make  the bagels on a weekend, when they were home. Unfortunately weekends mornings are, due to weekend evenings, much more painful for me than weekdays. Hence, I was reluctant to do the work the day before, knowing that come morning I may be somewhat passed out. Last weekend I finally decided to make time for bagels.

After all that, I discovered that making bagels was even easier than it seemed on paper. The dough came together fairly easily. Because it was a very firm dough, kneading it until the gluten was sufficiently developed was difficult. It took me about twice as long as it should have, but I’m willing to bet that a few months ago it would have taken me even longer. Or, I just wouldn’t have kneaded long enough at all. So in a brief moment of positivity, I’ll pat myself on the back. After that i think everything went smoothly. My dough rose, I separated it into appropriate sizes and formed the basic bagel shapes. There was a curious test to determine if the bagels were ready for the overnight fermentation. Basically, will it float? Yes? Then into the fridge.

The next morning I took the bagels out, tossed them in water, boiling with a tablespoon of baking soda, for a minute per side.

Right out of the water, when still wet, I sprinkled my toppings on. Of the eleven bagels, I made four sesame, four poppy, and left three plain.  The bagels then went into the oven to bake for ten minutes.

It actually took only about half an hour to complete the bagels in the morning. Not as bad as I’d assumed. Once finished, I enjoyed my first fresh home made bagel. They came out pretty well for a first attempt, and I’m confident now that there will be other attempts.

In part, I am to blame for this failure. I refer to my complete and utter inability to remain comfortable in one position for longer than forty-three seconds. Worse, that’s the upper boundary no matter the locale. From the hardest of rocking chairs to a hundred stacked mattresses – minus the pea – I’m only seconds away from fidgeting in brief moments of distraction. This is devastating. It isn’t just the time spent rearranging my limbs until they live once more and until those more pesky senses no longer interfere with all-important vision. No, losing my spot on the page is hardly a problem on a scale epic enough to climax in “devastation.” But, the inevitable consequence does devastate. Though tucking and re-tucking the extremities is a mindless and mechanical chore in process, when you are once again comfortable you quickly realize that your mind has been completely and totally side-tracked. How can you just pick back up where you’ve left off? It feels like starting in the middle of a sentence: Impossible. Remember, this is the best case scenario, the most comfortable of chairs. Temperature and humidity are perfect. I am neither too cold nor too warm. My eyes won’t become dry or tear up from a strong wind. The lighting is perfect and I need not lean in any one direction. Even then, my comfort is temporary.

You see where I’m going now. When I venture out to read, I do so for the sun warming my face and lighting the page. For the slight breeze to cool my face just before it becomes too hot and bring close the song of birds and the rustle of leaves. Occasionally, but not frequently, I enjoy the laughter and chatter of passers-by. The total experience I dream would allow me to engage fully the text, to elevate it to the same level of life that exists around me. Without four walls imprisoning my literary journey it should be, assuming my math is correct, four times as enjoyable.

This is not so! Without fail, I fail to realize my hopes. If it is a day gorgeous enough to draw me out, and those who know me will confirm that it must be an undeniably exquisite afternoon, it will also draw large crowds. At first I’ll enjoy their presence, but it won’t take long before they aren’t mere background but instead an intrusion upon my personal space. The sun is blistering. Gusts of wind are far too infrequent to alleviate the annoyance. At the same time, if I retreat to the shade of a tree, it is a fact those same gusts become near constant, chilling me far beyond comfort. And worst of all, the ants. It only takes one tiny insect inching along the spine of my book before every little sensation renders me positive I have chosen the largest anthill for miles around as my personal throne. They will stop at nothing to evict me.

I fear I paint a better picture of my complaints than my desires. You might read this and think, well if you hate going out so much, why bother? I’m hard-pressed to provide a great answer. I guess it’s just that hope springs eternal. Even now, writing about the misery of nature’s reality I can’t help but believe that the next time, it’ll be perfect.

Maybe the perfect day is today. And, like every year when it starts to get nice out and the dream is reborn, I have just the right book.

Coming Soon: A Look at Dandelion Wine…

Things went pretty smoothly. I’ve finally started using a scale to measure my ingredients by weight, as opposed to volume. We’ll blame my success yesterday on this development, rather than an increase in ability. The starter was like a very loose pancake batter which actually made it quite easy to work with. Getting the small amount of flour hydrated was no problem at all.

I hit the only rough patch of the day when it came time to mix in the rest of the ingredients for the dough. I still tend to neglect reading the directions fully and completely before I begin. I generally opt for something more along the lines of a cursory skim. Nor do I measure out all my ingredients ahead of time, to be ready when needed. As a result, I had no idea that my butter needed to be a room temperature. I also had no idea that all the butter in the house was in the freezer. Knowing this was an Italian version of brioche, an extremely rich bread, I probably should have guessed there would be butter in it. Maybe next time I’ll remember. Thanks to the modern convenience of the microwave, however, the obstacles were overcome with relative ease.

(One modern convenience I specifically avoided was the electric mixer. Back when I started baking bread a mixer wasn’t available to me. I had no other option for kneading except to use my hands. Now I’ve had the opportunity to try both ways, and while the electric mixer is certainly cleaner, I’m not sure it’s any easier. At least, not for me. The mixer I tried was several decades old, and when I say old, I don’t mean broken down. I mean quality. It was a good machine. Still, it felt odd to leave the kneading to a machine. I had trouble telling when it was done, the mixer got very hot, and I felt uncomfortable when it got up into the higher settings. I suppose my inability to trust and rely on a machine says something about me. For now though, I’ll just knead by hand.)

I’m sorry to say there were no other hiccups. Both the fermentation and proofing steps went ahead as described in the formula. I wasn’t sitting around waiting for an extra three hours, as I’ve come to expect. And when the bread had baked for forty to fifty minutes (probably closer to forty), I actually used a thermometer to check the internal temperature. I didn’t leave much to guesswork. It was a good strategy because my bread even had a full hour to cool before slicing into it at dinner.

In addition to the Andouille sausage, my Casatiello had a combination of mozzarella and Parmesan. The picture doesn’t show much of the meat, but it’s in there, I promise. It was delicious. I bet it would make really good toast. In fact, I’m going to have a slice right now.

Making that decision was far easier than following through on it. You see, I am dealing with an abominable lack of funds at the moment, severely hampering my ability to procure new reading material. I can barely afford a mass market, much less a hardcover. Being a newcomer to the idea of writing reviews, when I go looking for something to read it isn’t with the thought of what I may later write. This applies whether I’m at home or in the bookstore. I simply look for something I’d enjoy. So lacking the necessary funds to get something new, I browsed my already considerable personal collection in search of a good book, not fodder for a review.

I found a lot of good books including things I haven’t had a chance to read in years. A few in particular stood out, for reasons I’ll get to shortly. First, a warning. While my wallet remains light, it’s likely you’ll read a review of Slaughterhouse Five.

Which books stood out, you ask? Well, among the many books I perused over the last couple of weeks, included are the Pern series, the Farseer series, and the Earthsea series. I’ve always known that these are among my favorite books, but haven’t had much opportunity to read them all in quick succession. As I did so, I realized that they were all penned by female authors. This is a more significant realization than you might think. You see, once I find that I enjoy an author, their gender hardly matters to me. It is something I ignore completely. Prior to that point, gender does matter.

I suffer from a deep bias against female authors (within the genre of sci-fi/fantasy). This is actually a fairly normal attitude. In fact, most people I know feel the same way. Strangely enough, the gender-bias is not limited to my gender. A very good friend of mine, who is female, is actually far more opposed to women writing in genre than I. Why is this? Why do people dismiss women so easily? Speaking from my own experience, I can think of two main reasons.

First, it is impossible to ignore the gender bias in the content of fantasy and science-fiction writing. Across the board there is an abundance of male heroes, scientists, doctors, soldiers, pilots, whatever. There are also plenty of women in need of saviors, quick to betray, praised for beauty, but stupid as fuck. Yeah, this is the basic formula many authors employ. It’s a classic. Robin Hood saves Maid Marian. Lancelot fights for Guinevere. How can you go wrong?

ONE: Well, enough books are written like this and feminists take notice.  Where’s the female hero coming to the rescue? Aren’t women as capable as men? And so they go out and write a book. Marian saves herself, King and country. Guinevere divorces Arthur, tells Lancelot to take responsibility for his own actions, and finds the Holy Grail. Those sound like decent books, but they rarely are. They suffer from one giant problem. They get preachy. The characters are aware they are defying the gender norms of the genre. They actively flaunt it. They are offering me some lesson on equality instead of just existing. While it does make sense for a character to note an unjust and unfair prejudice once, I find it hard to believe that it is the constant motivating impulse behind all actions. Proving someone wrong isn’t heroic. It’s spiteful and unattractive. I don’t enjoy reading about women who are strong despite all the naysayers. Strong characters are strong. Period.

TWO: The development of urban fantasy. I’m talking about crap like Twilight². Now, granted, I haven’t read that particular piece of shit. But, I think we all know how terrible it is. It’s a lazy way to write. Almost no effort is put into world-building and any fantastical nature seems to be included merely as a means to escalate the otherwise mundane content. Sure, the vampire shamus seems like a good idea. What private eye doesn’t do his best work at night? But it is extremely rare for urban fantasy to deliver on those ideas. And while the disastrously unrealized potential that is this genre isn’t limited to women, it is dominated by them. So it’s only natural for the association to develop.

Ultimately, it’s the lazy writing of the many¹ that put a stigma on all. Which is terrible. For genuine writers like McCaffery, LeGuin and Hobb to be branded so negatively as a result is a true injustice.

¹Let me clarify that the ratio of talented authors to untalented hacks isn’t much better among men. There is a frightening number of poor writers out there. Hopefully, I’m not inviting any comparisons.

²Ed. Note: I have attempted to read the first book. I got about ten pages in before throwing it down in disgust. -Matt

It occurred to me that there’s a rather large “architecture” RPG built right into the Xbox 360 (and soon the Zune and Windows Phone 7) which we all fail to really think about from that point of view. It certainly has been thought about on it’s own, of course – Owen Good at Kotaku wrote an excellent feature about an achievement whore back in December – but there are other aspects which I have not seen examined before and may be worth considering.

I must disclose at this point that I am guilty of being an achievement whore. Not of the “compulsive can’t not play, number must go this high” type, thankfully, but I am one all the same. I set small, nearby goals, and when I hit them, I pick another one. (In reverse order, my last three goals were: breaking 68% completion percentage, hitting 35k gamerscore, completing my 10th retail game.) I know that this is peanuts to a lot of people out there (just go look at the leaderboards on sites like TrueAchievements, MyGamerCard.Net, and XBoxAmerica) but it seems like a lot to me.

It has affected my friends, too. The other night, a few of them were over for some casual Rock Band rocking out, and we found our agenda determined (almost by default!) by what achievements we could pick off that the majority of us had yet to earn. When we finished, I had to tell them how I felt about this particular fact; I will now tell you exactly how I felt about it too.

I was torn between disgust at infecting my friends with that set of behaviors and a sense of pride that I had passed them along.

That kind of confusion and implied self-imposed guilt is reminiscent of how I felt about MMOs when I still played them. I was [often] deservedly proud of my accomplishments, yet felt ashamed to share them with friends who did not play. There was and is a certain social stigma involved which discouraged it. Which is perhaps why I feel hesitant about my achievement whoring, don’t you think?

There’s another aspect to the “completionist” style of achievement whoring, too. Achievements on 360 are mandatory, so a lot of companies use them as a means to extend the lifespan of their game. If they make difficult or obscure achievements, it’s a prod to the player that they have yet to explore all of the available content – and a lot of us are suckers for that. I know that I find it difficult to leave “paid for value” on the table. Throw downloadable content into the equation? Clearly you can see where I’m going.

If you can, that’s good, because I can’t. You see, there is no end in sight! I consider new game purchases VERY carefully most of the time, and achievement whoring factors into the equation – here’s the progression:

1- Am I interested in the game? How interested in it am I?

2- How are reviews for the game?

3- How does the difficulty range for the game match up with my own skill index; how accessible will the bulk of the content be as a result?

4- Will I be able to finish a percentage of the achievement list which I arbitrarily decide to be “reasonable”?

5- What other games are coming out at the same time which I am interested in, and what is their score on this list?

This leads to very interesting choices in terms of which games I buy or pass on. For instance, although I was VERY curious about Bayonetta, I played the demo and didn’t enjoy it to the level I hoped. I knew that the gameplay would likely be better in the full game, and the reviews were good, but it’s a style of game I’m not typically highly interested in, so I passed on the game entirely. On the other hand, I purchased a number of JRPG games (Last Remnant, Infinite Undiscovery, Star Ocean) which I _knew_ I would spend at least 80-100 hours playing but would leave a huge percentage of the content on the table for because of the propensity for JRPGs to have high-difficulty “grind” content included. Finally, I own games like Too Human and Soul Caliber which I got simply because I wanted them badly enough to ignore the checklist. (Too Human was spectacular and greatly underrated, by the way.)

My typically playtime is remarkably average, too – 3-5 hours a night, 5 nights a week, often less depending on what else has caught my interest and the vagaries of seasons – my playtime PLUMMETS in the summer, for example.

Net result? Behavior like that which has now infected my friends. In order to “measure” how “successful” gamers we are, we actively work to maximize the “gain” from our playtime. We don’t enjoy the games any less, we just play them differently.

Because you have to make sure those numbers keep going up.

The first fact to establish is that this is not my first rodeo. I’ve been an irregular “blogger” since the early days of livejournal and the other sites from it’s generation, and I first had a site with some sort of op/ed newsbox in 1998. And much like this post, not a single one of those efforts was at all coherent. It’s a reflection on my mental state, or at least that is how I’m choosing to represent it.

When I was 13, I was desperately seeking new ideas. It was part of this whole “who am I?” thing brought on by the events of that year – puberty, changing schools, the whole bit. As Gob Bluth notably said, “…the awkwardness…the acne…the erections…” which encapsulates things rather nicely. Somehow – I vaguely recall an older kid from my long bus ride to the new school – I ended up with a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig.

This was a seminal moment in my life. Not because it put me on the right track to success and accomplishment, it sure as hell did not! But more because it introduced certain ideas about the approach to realistic personal narrative that really reverberated within the person I was gradually beginning to coalesce into. The whole concept of a narrator who was reliable yet out of touch with himself and his own past…it worked for me.

There was another seminal moment which had happened only a year prior to that, as well. That summer, I had gone on one of those “Outward Bound” style adventure youth trips – a trip which included a week-long bicycle tour. The thrill of pounding the pedals and moving under my own power was an intense drug, and I was hooked.

Skip forward a decade and a half to today. We’ll ignore all the messy bits in between – they might not matter, or I might tell you about some of them as we go along. My writing is a journey into both who I am and who we all are, or at least it aspires to be that. I will write with shameless bias – my columns are firmly opinion-editorial! – but I want to encourage a dialogue between myself and any of you out there who might read this.

With such a personal focus, it’s inevitable that you’ll find me writing here about bikes. Unlike Pirsig, I am not a motorcyclist. I am a bicyclist, and more specifically, a mountain biker. (I’m even an elected officer of the Saratoga Mountain Bike Association – which still surprises me at times.) I will talk about the activity, review publications and equipment, and make reference to it in the course of other discussion. Here is why I think everyone should ride mountain bikes:

1) It’s fun. Simple and to the point for a reason, but it’s true. There is something for everyone in the simple act of riding a bike, or at least I think so.

2) It’s outside. The great outdoors: DO THEM. There’s just something about being outside, in the woods, never knowing when you can come around a corner and see Real Live Wildlife, that is just incredible. It’s like a completely unexpected gift.

3) There is a tremendous amount of detail in it that you can just plain geek out about. Like every other sport with an engineering aspect, you can Get Technical. We’re a generation of people who are always looking at the next hot gadget or gizmo – mountain biking has them too. (Plus actual gadgets and gizmos, pardon my drool over the ContourHD from VHoldR…)

4) You get to feel alive. How many of us have a job, a job which is full of the boring and mundane, that just makes us feel all lethargic and unenthusiastic? I promise you that is NEVER something which you feel after a mountain bike ride.

5) The people are great. The ratio of ridersnobs to regular joes in mountain biking is miniscule. Everyone  you stop to talk to on the trail is mellow and friendly, with few exceptions. There’s an underlying bond of experience, combined with the laid-back nature of the sport itself, that just makes things work. (But go road biking, and you’re almost certain to meet an alpha dog ridersnob who needs to prove he’s Lance Armstrong to your Joe Sixpack.)

That said, here’s a short list of the blogs and writers I currently regularly peruse on the internet:

-Gawker Network Properties: Kotaku, Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jalopnik

-Penny Arcade

-Tim Rogers: Operates ActionButtonDotNet and also writes for Kotaku

-Pinkbike

With that said, and with the mercury rising, I have the biking months and some good book and video game releases to look forward to. Let the discussion commence!

Inevitably, Dad comes to me saying, “I’m going to visit your grandmother. Think you could make her some bread?” Of course I can. So I look through my book (remember I only have the one), and settle on Portuguese Sweet Bread. It’s described as having a soft crust, the only requirement Dad cited, perfect for teeth a century old. Unlike the majority of breads in the book, this one doesn’t need to ferment overnight. The downside being that it should take eight hours in one day.

So I wake up early. Eight a.m. I get started right away, mix the sponge and head off to the supermarket to grab a few things I’ll need. (A sponge, in case you didn’t know, is a small percentage of the dough mixed ahead of time in order to extend the fermentation time.) Upon my return I finish mixing and kneading the dough, and then settle down with a good book to wait for the dough to rise. I’m on a fairly good schedule. According to the recipe, the first rise should take two hours. At that point, I’d divide and shape the dough into loaves before they rise again, another two to three hours. Each rise should about double the dough in size.

In print, I had plenty of time for the whole process. While the first rise only took about 45 minutes longer than anticipated, the final rise took a whopping five hours. I blame the cold. The colder it is in a room, the slower a dough will rise, and I spend most of my time at home in a sweater. All told, it took eleven hours from the initial mixing to the time the bread came out of the oven.

In the end, I think the effort was worth it. It was tasty bread which I know my grandmother will enjoy.