blog

Daily December 14

Posted on By Wil

I kinda want to retreat into Fort Kickass and stay there all day, listening to Stabbing Westward and eating cookies.

The first draft of Ravenswood is with a couple of early readers who will give me the feedback I need to polish it up and send it to my editor. I haven’t decided it if will get released as its own thing (it’s just over 10000 words) or if I’ll keep it as part of the collection of short stories I originally intended for it to live.

Now I’m going back to finish the first draft of another short called Devil’s Gate, and then I’ll circle back around to finishing the puke draft of the short story that became a novella that ended up becoming a novel, which is currently called The Childhood I Lost but needs a better title.

I still don’t know if that thing holds together, and I think that part of the reason I haven’t finished it is being afraid of handing it to an early reader who may say, “this doesn’t hold together, dude.”

I’m late to the party, so most of you have probably watched all of Black Mirror, but Anne and I started series three last night and … wow. It’s intense. I highly recommend it, but probably don’t binge, because each episode deserves at least 24 hours in your brains to unpack itself.

Current Affairs

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

Posted on By Wil

We, the Rebel Alliance, do therefore in the name—and by the authority—of the free beings of the Galaxy, solemnly publish and declare our intentions:

To fight and oppose you and your forces, by any and all means at our disposal;
To refuse any Imperial law contrary to the rights of free beings;
To bring about your destruction and the destruction of the Galactic Empire;
To make forever free all beings in the galaxy.

To these ends, we pledge our property, our honor, and our lives.

Until about two months ago, I was really into the Empire in the Star Wars universe. Darth Vader was cool and the bounty hunters were awesome, and the Death Star was bad ass, and Star Destroyers were amazing.

And then America elected (barely and with interference from a hostile foreign power) a Fascist know-nothing who has so much contempt for our country and the people who live in it, he has chosen men and women who have no experience in government and/or aggressively hate the agencies they will be charged with overseeing to lead them. He’s instigated dangerous international diplomatic incidents that threaten the safety of all of us, and he doesn’t seem to care.Though he lost the popular vote by the largest margin in history, though he will take office (unless the Electoral College acts to preserve the Republic — I’m still in Bargaining, it turns out) with the lowest approval rating in this century, though he has never held a public office or cared about anyone other than himself in his life, he and his toadies are acting like he has a mandate to destroy the popular, progressive achievements of the last century, and enact policies that will greatly harm the very people who voted for him.

Neonazis have been welcomed into the mainstream of America, and their leaders have been normalized by our media. An unabashed authoritarian is set to take control of the most powerful office in the world, with the most invasive and unaccountable spying apparatus in history at his tiny orange fingertips.

All of that was going through my mind as I watched Rogue One last weekend, especially during scenes that take place in cities that are under occupation. I realized that I’d sort of known on some level that Star Wars was, at its core, an anti-Fascist story, and I’d understood that the bad guys were, like, bad … but it was all in the fiction for me. Until this weekend, it wasn’t something I’d ever really felt as a commentary on reality. After a lifetime of being entertained by Star Wars, it landed on me in a way that it never had, before. I didn’t want to like the Empire, or admire how cool it was when Vader uses the Force to choke someone. I wanted the Empire to lose, and to lose badly. I wanted the Empire, and the Emperor, and the Sith to be destroyed. Retroactively, Darth Vader’s redemption in Jedi was more powerful than it had ever been, and I haven’t watched Jedi in years.

Suddenly, Stormtroopers weren’t just cool action figures I played when when I was a kid; they were literal stormtroopers. They were the forces of evil and terror. The fun of cheering for Darth Vader when he’s being a badass villain, believing that bounty hunters are awesome, or getting excited when the Death Star is cleared to fire and a Star Destroyer blasts ships into oblivion … it was all gone. The Empire is terrible. The Empire is evil. I realized that Yoda is right about the Dark Side of the Force and those who are seduced by it. I realized that the Republic — our Republic — is worth fighting for, and even though it feels like nothing matters at all right now, everything is terrible, and the forces of evil are going to get away with it because the so-called “leaders” in Congress put their party and their ambitions ahead of their patriotism — maybe because of that — it may soon be time to get off of Tatooine, and join the Rebel Alliance.

May the Force be with us.

Food and Drink

Recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies with Coconut Oil and Cacao Nibs

Posted on By Wil

I don’t have any vices (coffee is a fundamental building block of life, and I will cut you I swear to god), and I’ve never had a sweet tooth. But since I did the life reboot and cut literally everything that was even close to being a vice out of my life, I’ve slowly and steadily developed these weird sugar cravings. I’m sure there are medical and psychological reasons, but that’s not what this is about.

This is about how I made these amazing cookies to satisfy both my desire to make a thing and have something sweet to shove into my face after dinner last night. I cobbled this recipe together from different bits from all over the Internets, didn’t take notes because I didn’t plan to write this post, and am doing this from memory.

Chocolate Chip Cookies With Coconut Oil and Cacao Nibs by Wil

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Coconut Oil and Cocoa Nibs

Coconut oil is healthier than regular vegetable oil, and it gives a delicate sweetness to the foods you make with it. It may be overwhelmed by the other sweeteners in these cookies, but I prefer it to butter. Cacao nibs give this really nice extra crunch and bitter chocolate flavor (because they’re unsweetened) that balances out the sweetness in the rest of the cookies.

This makes about 12 cookies. If you need more, do the math. I believe in you.

I really want to do this all by weight, because that’s how I do my bread baking and coffee roasting/brewing, but I think it would be showing off and making things complicated when they don’t have to be, so I’m going to use standard measurements.

  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup white sugar
  • 1 cup coconut oil
  • 1 egg
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon(ish) of salt
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips
  • 1/4 cup cocoa nibs

In a perfect world, we’d throw all this stuff into a bowl, say, “Boy am I glad Donald Trump isn’t president,” and mix it all up at once. But that’s not how this works, because everything is terrible and we’re making cookies to forget that for a few minutes.

So start out — Oh. Wait. I forgot to tell you to preheat the oven. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Okay. Good job. You’re doing great.

Put the sugar into a bowl and give it a stir with a fork or whatever, just so that it’s kinda mixed up. This isn’t for any reason related to baking or chemistry, it’s just that the two colors of sugar look cool when they swirl together. It reminds me of this toy my parents had when I was a little kid that was blue sand and white sand and they wouldn’t mix together, but they would swirl around in this big oval thing and it looked really cool, like the clouds on Jupiter.

Add the coconut oil (which is probably going to be really firm since it’s winter, but if it’s melty because it’s warm in your kitchen or it’s summer when you’re making this or you live near the equator where it’s warm all the time that’s fine, too) and now stir it all together. If your coconut oil is firm, it’s probably going to separate into hunks (and not the cool fireman calendar kind). If that happens, just use your fork or whatever your stirring thing of choice is to smash the hunks around and get the mixture as smooth as you can. This is called “creaming” the ingredients together. I know it sounds kind of dirty, but I’m going to let you make whatever joke you want.

Now add the egg and the vanilla to the creamed oil and sugar, and stir it all up.

Most recipes tell you to combine the dry ingredients in another bowl. I think this is stupid and a waste of your time, creates a whole other bowl you have to wash, and isn’t something you need to do. So you can be a rebel like me and just start adding the dry ingredients to your bowl, or you can be a fucking lemming and put them in another bowl like The Man wants you to. Hey, if you want to be a puppet of Big Bowl, go nuts. I would say that I’m not judging you, but I’m totally judging you.

So add the salt and then the baking soda to the bowl, and give it a stir or two. Then take your flour, half a cup at a time, and mix it in. It’s going to be clumpy and annoying, but you just keep on adding it in until it’s more or less in one big hunk of dough.

Now, at this point, I stop using my spoon or fork or whatever, and I switch to using my hands. This is a thing I picked up from Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, which is teaching me how to bake bread: for combining stuff like this, actually using your hands gives you a sense of what the dough really feels like, and gets you closer to what you’re making, so you can literally get a better feel for it. You don’t have to do this, of course, but it’s fun, feels kind of like mooshing Play*Doh around, and it’s just satisfying to combine all that stuff together with your fists.

Mix in your chocolate chips a little bit at a time until they’re all in the dough. I used to wonder why I couldn’t just dump them all in at once, which is a legitimate question. The answer has two parts. First, it’s the way we do it, okay? It’s always been this way and if it’s not broken don’t try to fix it. If you’re so goddamn smart with your “dump them all in at once” idea, why does literally every recipe tell you to put them in a little bit at a time? You think you’re smarter than centuries of bakers? I’m so proud of you. You sicken me. Second, it actually does make a difference in the way that the chips are spread around in the dough, so that each individual cookie has a good amount of chips in it.

After you’ve put your chips in, you can put in the cocoa nibs and mix them up, too. The dough is probably getting pretty stiff at this point, so remind it to think unsexy thoughts and keep on mixing until you feel like they’re spread pretty evenly around the whole thing.

Grab a cookie sheet. If you have a Silpat, use it. If you don’t, and your cookie sheet is shiny, you don’t need to do anything, but if your cookie sheet is dark, you probably want to put a tiny bit of coconut oil or nonstick cooking stuff on it so your cookies don’t stick.

Separate the dough into 12 parts and put them on the cookie sheet. I did six at a time, in two batches, but you don’t have to do it that way if you don’t want to.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, take the cookies out of the oven, and let them sit on the cookie sheet for two or three minutes before moving them to a rack to completely cool.

Be careful if you dive into these while they’re still hot, because the super melty chocolate chips can burn the fuck out of your mouth.

These cookies have infinity calories and will last for like fifteen minutes, so you should eat them all before they spoil.

You’re welcome.

 

Film

The last time I loved a Star Wars movie as much as I loved Rogue One, it was 1977.

Posted on By Wil
That's a full-sized TIE Fighter!
That’s a full-sized TIE Fighter!

I wanted to take today off from the blog, but that would be counter to the goals I set out in Daily December, so here I am.

Anne and I went to the world premiere of Rogue One last night, because we apparently live in a world where we get invited to the world premiere of a Star Wars movie, which I still can’t believe actually happened.

I wanted to experience a Star Wars movie the way I did when I was a kid, so I deliberately avoided everything about this movie. All I knew was that it was a stand alone story that involved the plans for the Death Star that were such an important part of Star Wars. I didn’t even know that one of my friends was in the freaking thing!

I’m not going to discuss the film in depth, because that would be cheating, so I’m just going to repeat the title of this post, which is what I said on Twitter last night: The last time I loved a Star Wars movie as much as I loved , it was 1977.

Yes, I know that Empire came out in 1980. I chose my words carefully, and deliberately.

I’ll say a little more on the other side of the jump, so those of you who want to avoid hearing a little more until you’ve seen the movie can do that.

(more…)

blog

Daily December #10

Posted on By Wil

Back in the Before Times, in the Long Long Ago, I’d save up links and stuff over a couple of days, and then post a link dump on my blog. With the advent of platforms that are specifically designed to do quick hits like links and pictures and whatever dumb thing just crossed my mind, it’s kind of pointless to do that today.

But I’m going to do that today, because the whole point of Daily December is to just post something every day, even if it’s a bunch of dumb links.

Let’s start with this really cool thing that @midnight is doing! A weekly Spotify playlist of recordings by the comedians that are on the show.

How cool does Hardwick look in that picture? The answer is all the cool.

I may have bought myself a glowing Enterprise schematic from ThinkGeek because I don’t need a reason.

I did the Arduino version of Hello, World last night.

Hello, World!

A video posted by Wil Wheaton (@itswilwheaton) on

Maybe it’s my eyes getting older, but I struggled more than I expected to put the wires into the right places on the breadboard. I haven’t worked with electronic connections that small and precise in like thirty years, at least, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right. It turns out that I managed to get it right on the first try, so I guess I win a gold star?

My first impression of Arduino vs. Raspberry Pi is that the rPI (or RPI? I don’t know what the cool kids call it, but I know it’s something like that) is more my speed. I like the idea of connecting electronics, but the reality of writing code and getting software to do stuff is more satisfying and comes more easily to me. I had also forgotten how inscrutable C (the language, not the mathematical constant) is to me, and how much easier Python is for me to understand as a programming language. Maybe it’s because I struggled with C a lot when I was trying to learn it in my teens and twenties, while I’ve been learning Python as an adult with access to more resources to help my understanding, or maybe Python is just easier than C for someone whose brain is wired like mine is. Whatever the reason, my heart or my shoes, I’m going to have an easier time writing a Python script to annoy the Whos.

I’ll probably end up copying sketches for Arduino instead of trying to write my own, at least for the foreseeable future, and I’m okay with that. I think the fun and challenge of Arduino is in the actual use of the electronics, anyway, and not the programming.

This picture makes me so happy. I feel like the world is on fire, and I’ve been finding comfort in little things, like pictures from the RPG books I read when I was a kid and it seemed like the world would never be on fire.

I shipped all the coffee orders from the secret store yesterday. The other thing you can order in the secret store has like ten left, and I’m going to ship all of those things on Monday. If you don’t know what the secret store is, or how to get in, don’t feel bad; it’s a secret to everyone.

This is your yearly reminder that Christmas Lounge from SomaFM is the only Christmas music station you need.

I get these stats from Instagram, and they tell me that like 50,000 people on average are looking at the dumb videos I post there. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but it sure feels like a lot. I realized that something has changed in me, because instead of panicking about it, I feel like oh man I gotta make something amusing or stupid or stupidly amusing, because that’s a lot of people who I can entertain.

I got this picture of all the tires in the world from imgur, and used gimp to make it seamless, so if you wanted your desktop to be a bunch of tires for some reason, you can tile it.

Yeah I don’t know why, either, but there it is. At the very least, it can probably be used as a cool texture for some layers or whatever.