i think we can all agree standard oven fries are pretty lame. these are better. probably. caveat emptor.

Curry Oven Fries
ingredients:

• up to eight medium/large-sized russet potatoes- either half of a really big white onion or all of a fairly small white onion
• 1/2 can Thai Kitchen whole coconut milk
• 1/2 jar Thai brand red curry paste
• 4 cubes of Dorot frozen garlic
• a good amount of powdered cayenne pepper
• a pretty ok amount of powdered cumin
• half a cup of olive oil

yeah this is how i measure stuff okay. measuring everything out in cups and tablespoons is for cowards.

alright so cut those potatoes up into some fairly consistent french fry-like shapes. now that the worst is over, get a blender out, and chuck that onion/half into it. scoop out half the curry paste and chuck that in there too.

okay so this stuff? unlike some brands they don’t put anything in there to keep it from separating, which probably sucks in most cases but is actually better for what we’re doing here. the juice is usually underneath a layer of the solid cream, so what you want to do is scoop out about half the can’s worth of the cream and get as little of the juice in the blender as possible. the coconut milk makes it taste fattier like real fries, and it also gives you that bit of sweetness without having to resort to using white sugar on a savory dish like some Good Housekeeping arthropod. you’re better than that.

this stuff is awesome. it’s maybe not quite as good as the real deal, but it’s a lot better than the powdered or pre-minced stuff, and it’s so much quicker and easier than trying to peel the skin off a half dozen individual cloves. toss four cubes in the blender. i think the curry paste has a little garlic or some Eastern garlic-ish thing in it already but there’s no such thing as too much garlic.

next add however much cayenne pepper and cumin you deem wise. obviously the more cayenne you add the spicier they’ll be. i like using a bit of cumin in many foods because it imparts a heartier, “meatier” flavor but i know a lot of people don’t care for it at all.

finally put about half a cup of olive oil in there so the mixture will be liquidy enough to blend. that’s everything, right? now blend it all together until it’s homogeneous. put all your fry pieces in the biggest bowl you own, pour the sauce over it, and then mix it all up with your hands so every millimeter of fry surface is covered with the sauce (man i hate this part.) lay them down on cookie sheets, shaking the excess sauce into the bowl first (otherwise the final result might be too greasy) and making sure they have enough breathing room not to stick together though you don’t have to be super OCD about it or anything.

bake them at 430F for about 45 minutes, though this will vary depending on how thick you cut them. you want them to be fairly firm, crisp, and wrinkly on the outside when you take them out. then put a bunch of salt on them and eat them. they should taste pretty good. if anyone actually tries this, let me know.

there are definitely some things wrong with Bayonetta, the latest game from Devil May Cry guy Hideki Kamiya (it’s basically DMC 5: You’re a Chick Now) and Clover Platinum Studios. but one idea it gets just right is “Witch Time,” a purple-tinted slow-motion mode that is triggered whenever the player evades an enemy or obstacle at the last possible moment, allowing them to attack enemies wildly without fear of reprisal for a few precious seconds.

it’s not like the idea of the player slowing down time to take out enemies is anything new in action games. In Max Payne and F.E.A.R., though, slow-motion is a limited resource, like ammo, triggered at the player’s discretion, and in Wet, it happens pretty much whenever you push more than one button within five seconds. (don’t play Wet.) Bayonetta’s slow-mo, as it relates to the rest of the game, has more in common with Bangai-O Spirits’s “EX Attacks,” where the number of projectiles you launch at enemies increases with the number and severity of the projectiles they launch at you:

(i wanted to find a video that clearly and consisely demonstrated the mechanic besides this back-of-the-box-bullet-point trailer, but no luck yet.)

they’re both risk/reward mechanics semi-disguised as balancing mechanics. to the beginning player, these features offer a welcome relief after a near-brush with death; they initially seem to reward “bad” playing more than good. but soon the player internalizes the games’ rhythms enough to exploit them, recklessly pushing themselves to the brink of danger for a longer-term advantage. it’s a notion that perfectly suits Bayonetta’s titular protagonist, who gleefully provokes her enemies in the game’s campy cutscenes. in both games it’s a good example of how auxiliary mechanics can help guide the player toward a certain kind of experience – in this case, a frenetic, knowingly over-the-top experience filled with dramatic reversals of fortune – in a natural and elegant way.

fuck the singularity. i hope someday instead of everyone being mystically connected through robot brains all features of what we currently think of as normal social interaction are compartmentalized and commodified as a matter of course

…

So I’ve resorted to the Pomodoro Technique. It’s actually working well, to my slight disgust. God knows why the urge to stick to an arbitrary short-term schedule is more persuasive than the urge to, you know, make things I want to make, but that’s the way I’m wired. I also find the commercialization of and apparent community behind it sort of asinine, but whatever, I’m not buying their book.

Here’s what ILXION looked like a few days ago:

The level design has been challenging. I have to admit, when I locked the viewpoint downward to make the controls simple enough for the iPhone, I failed to realize how much that limited the player’s ability to grasp their environment and plan ahead. It makes optional time-saving virtuoso jumps of the kind you’d normally see in third-person platformers difficult to justify. Additionally, it’s almost impossible for me to know the implication of every move the player is likely to make or even direct the player in a level as open as the above. My latest idea is to create iconic pixel-esque prefab combinations of blocks that look like spaceships or fish or what have you, and choose the blocks such that each prefab is a small challenge or item of interest in itself, placing them so that only a reasonable amount of attention is needed to figure out the potential interactions between them. I’m pretty happy with it from a design standpoint, but moving all those platforms around brings my iPhone 3G to its knees, and I’m having trouble finding a way to disable physical simulation on platforms far away from the player thanks to two rather infuriating quirks of Unity’s API – colliders can’t be disabled like other components, and there’s seemingly no way to get just the grandchildren objects of an object into an array. Well, I’m sure I’ll figure something out eventually.

let’s get it right this time.