Geek Out New York

Recent Additions to the Teti Ouevre

2009-04-03T06:24:01Z

I wrote a review of Star Ocean: The Last Hope for Crispy Gamer, and it sucked. The game, that is. The review? Why, it was transcendent! I bitched about lazy, misogynistic game making. Bafflingly, Crispy did not post the above screenshot of a 16-year-old catgirl exposing her pubis to the sex-starved teenage gamers who adore her. Me, I’m more taken with the blond guy’s pose, on the right. Exactly what emotion is conveyed by turning your body into a giant “X”?

I also produce the “Internet’s Fastest Game Reviews” videos for Crispy Gamer. I don’t star in these, but I’m starring in a different series on the site soon, so those of you holding out for Teti beefcake will not be denied much longer (but I will not be exposing my pubis, sorry). In the meantime, enjoy these ridiculously quick nuggets of game criticism brought to you by my friend Scott Jones.

My work at The A.V. Club continues unabated, of course. Last week, I went to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference. I coordinated the coverage and put together a write-up of each day in tandem with the estimable Chris Dahlen. Check out the AVC at GDC page to read those write-ups and an interview I conducted with Crayon Physics Deluxe creator Petri Purho.

I also reviewed Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Opera Omnia, and Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. That last one apparently isn’t selling too well, which is a shame. Buy it.

Where Have I Been?

2009-03-31T19:14:45Z

Today is the 9,999th day of my life. Number 10,000 has me excited. I’m even throwing a small party, and I never do birthday parties and the like. (The only trouble is that the 10,000th day of my life falls on April 1, so I have to convince people that this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. It’s not.) According to Wikipedia, nothing interesting happened the day I was born, but on the day after, Luke and Laura got married on General Hospital. So I got here just in time.

The Civilization series of games have always thrilled me. They’re turn-based strategy games, which means that you get a turn to adjust policy and shuffle your people around on the world map, and then your rival(s) get a turn. Et cetera. The games are complex. The history of a civilization can take days of real-world time to finish. I’m always amazed when I come to the end of the game and see that all my conquest, defeat, rising, and falling took place in the course of a few hundred turns. That’s it? How is that possible that I achieved so much in so few turns?

It’s tempting to think the opposite way on this 10,000th-day thing. Ten thousand is a big number. Perhaps the natural thought is, “I should have achieved a lot more by now.” But no, I feel the same way about 10,000 days as I do about Civilization’s 500 turns. On Day 1, I was a dumb, stupid infant who soiled himself regularly. On Day 9,999, I am a smart adult who almost never does. I’ve come a long way, baby.

Around Day 1,400 or so, I used a computer for the first time. On Day 4,947, I lost in the sixth round of the National Spelling Bee after misspelling “antonomasia.” On Day 2,161, Bob Barker walked out on stage with gray hair, so I realized that heroes age. On Day 5,985, I wrote a letter to the first girl I fell in love with, begging her not to forget about me while she was on a months-long camping trip. It didn’t work.

On Day 7,868, my dad hugged me after I received an award, and he spoke of his recently dead father, and I understood why people work all their lives to make their parents proud. On Day 6,369, I saw George Carlin live and could not wipe away the tears of laughter fast enough. On Day 8,689, Jon Stewart slapped my back and said, “Nice job, Teti!” I would not have guessed that on Day 9,167, I would leave The Daily Show without knowing entirely why.

On Day 9,378, my best friend from high school wrote me a note saying, “every time I think about how we’ve grown apart it kills me,” but what really killed us was the knowledge that we could never return to Day 5,203, when we goofed off so much in Spanish class that we were sent to the dean’s office, or Day 6,166, when we went bowling. Somewhere around Day 4,100, my big brother played Super Mario Kart for the first time, beat me, and then declared he would retire undefeated. He never played me again. I learned the art of committing to a bit.

On Day 7,019, an envelope slipped out of a stack of newspapers that a New York CNN staffer named Carolyn was taking to the trash. The envelope contained my résumé. Had Carolyn held the stack of newspapers with her other hand, my next 3,000 days would have been something different.

On Day 7,268, I met a pretty girl in a Belle & Sebastian T-shirt. My first thought was, “She’s out of my league.” On Day 8,419, I asked the girl to marry me. It worked.

Day 10,000 will be a good day.

Bugging Out

2009-02-18T22:40:28Z

I wrote a piece for Crispy Gamer this week about glitches from video-game history that, in my opinion, actually made the games better.

I’ve watched this video of the Super Mario Bros. minus-world bug a number of times now. I find myself anthropomorphizing the game, standing in awe of it, feeling sorry for it. Look at the glitch and its aftermath from the program’s perspective. How does it continue to work after everything goes so FUBAR? I can’t help but admire the fact that it doesn’t simply give up and crash (i.e., off itself—not “Hello, world!” but “Goodbye, cruel world!”). There seems to be a stubborn, resilient intelligence at work. The game’s entire world is thrown out of whack—the rules are thrown out—but it tries to soldier on, fights to make sense of its situation.

This imagined psychodrama has two different endings. In the Japanese version, the game succeeds in working its way out of the crisis. If Mario completes the three glitched minus worlds, you are returned to the title screen and everything is mercifully returned to normal. But in the U.S. version—this is the haunting part—the minus world is an endless underwater stage that loops back on itself. Neither Mario nor the game can escape this glitch-induced purgatory.

Of course, you could say that the only thing at work here is a few shifted memory registers and some abnormal pixels; there’s no underlying meaning to any of it. Careful how far you take that line of thinking, though. You may not like where you end up.

State of the Site

2009-02-15T19:05:02Z

I hate to write about the site on the site because it’s not usually a very good use of anybody’s time. But obviously, things have cooled down a touch around here lately. So here’s what’s up.

The weekend posts are no more. They were fun, but if I can’t do them every week, they don’t make much sense to me. Lately, I have not been able to do them every week.

As for the rest of the site, a funny thing has happened over the past year. People have been asking me to write for them, sometimes for the TV, sometimes for the web, and they’ve been offering to pay me in exchange for my trouble. I’d done this before, in the form of a 9-to-5 job, but never like this. They call me a “freelancer.” I prefer to think of myself as a writing mercenary¹, as mercenaries are more badass and wear cooler clothes. (Don’t believe me? Watch any movie ever to feature mercenaries, then come back and try to tell me they aren’t working it. Go on, I’ll wait.)

Geek Out New York is a labor of love, and it continues because the world always needs more love. At the same time, my pocket always needs more money, so the mercenary duties have to come first sometimes. I know you understand, sweet America.

As always, I recommend you subscribe to the feed. It alerts you when a new post goes up. Handy.

My recent successes are due in no small part to the support I’ve received from GONY readers; thank you. Of course, I also blame you for my recent failures, especially my rejection from So You Think You Can Dance Season 5. So it’s a mixed bag.

Actually, the word “freelance” originally meant “mercenary.” ↑

Why Should I Care About The Internet? c. 1996

2009-02-10T19:28:47Z

Mayowa of My Pleasure, Miss! sent an interesting email in reply to the MacUser May ’96 retrospective. I probably should have noted in the original piece, as Mayowa reminded me, that you can use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to resurrect many of the dead links. That includes treasures like Mark Kantrowitz’s Travel Periodicals, which turns out to be just as boring as you expected.

Another nice tidbit in Mayowa’s email was a link to this 1996 MSN “Welcome to the Internet” tutorial. My favorite part is the third page, “The Big Picture: Why Should I Care?” Yeah! Why should I care about this dumb Internet thing? Leave me alone, computer people! Family Matters is on!

But wait, says MSN, the Internet is actually a magical place. Imagine the possibilities:

Because it is very easy to publish on the web, many individuals have set up personal “home pages,” pages about themselves and their interests, pictures of themselves, and more. Some even have pointers to what they are wearing in the office that day or their pet.

Well, why didn’t you say so? Sign me up!¹

Note: While this imagined exchange is a facetious joke, I realized, after reading it over, that it’s also a fairly accurate account of the Internet’s development over the last decade. ↑

Cloudphobia

2009-02-10T18:52:03Z

I went with an obscure choice at the A.V. Club this week, a throwback shoot-’em-up game from Japan. I’ve been playing some very hard games lately, but I don’t mind it. A lot of modern games are missing that intense challenge because they have too much time and money invested in the entire game to risk players giving up on it. Independent games are well-suited to fill that niche.

Spelunky

2009-02-02T21:10:04Z

Spelunky is a game that’s different every time you play it, because the levels are semi-randomly generated on the fly. Beware, no matter how many times you die—and you will die a lot—you’ll always want to spelunk again. For more, read my review at the A.V. Club.

Do Something This Weekend of Jan. 30, 2009

2009-01-30T22:24:34Z

A selfish item to start out this week’s DSTW: Read my MacUser post. It’s fun (I promise), it was more time-consuming than my usual slothful output, yet right after posting it, I bumped it down from the top slot with two more posts. Humbly, as always, I submit that you might enjoy it.

Geek Out

Racers in Idiotarod 2008. (Photo: Matthew Bradley)

Go cart. With its perilously high hipster quotient, I debated whether to include the Sixth Annual Idiotarod NYC in today’s roundup. But this event gets the GONY seal of approval because A) they admit they are idiots and B) any event that includes a scavenger hunt cannot be bad.¹ If you haven’t encountered the billions of wacky human-interest stories published about the Idiotarod, it’s a shopping-cart race for costumed morons. This year’s race takes place in Astoria, and it will be frigid, so try to design a get-up that strikes the right balance between wacky and warm.

Geek In

GONY’s very first flatulence-related endorsement. There are a few small games I’ve played recently that will eat up your time whether you like it or not. They’re too small to merit their own review, but too much fun to ignore, so here we are.

Achievement Unlocked: So you like Xbox achievements, eh? Well, have ALL THE ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE WORLD!

Puzzle Farter: You’re a farting goldfish. Either you already hate this game, or you love it. Your opinion is unlikely to change by playing it.

Lemonade Stand for iPhone/iPod Touch: I spent many a rainy grade-school recess calculating optimal pricing strategies in this game. And a bunch of sunny ones, too. Go classic graphics mode or go home.

OK, as soon as I wrote that sentence, I was able to thing of some potentially bad scavenger hunts, like the First Annual New York Arsonist Assocation Scavenger Hunt. Damn you, New York Arsonist Association! [Vigorously shaking fist] ↑

Lord of the Rings: Conquest

2009-01-30T22:24:03Z

The atrocious Lord of the Rings: Conquest was the subject of my latest review for the A.V. Club. (The review was posted Monday, but I forgot to throw up a link until now.) What a slapdash game. It was a fun review to write, though.

I realized yesterday that there is a “The” at the beginning of this game’s title—i.e., it’s The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. I left out the “The” in my review. That’s gonna bug me.

MacUser, May 1996: Make the Net Work For You

2009-01-30T06:08:56Z

Over the holidays, I was rooting around in some old storage boxes and came across the May 1996 issue of MacUser, a now-defunct enthusiast magazine (whose target audience is, hopefully, obvious). Flipping through the pages of this magazine evoked an era of my life full of technological experimentation. At the time, it was understood that Windows was the platform of choice for hobbyists, but I always loved the Mac. I tinkered and created and explored on my Macs until I wore them out. By then, my dad was usually ready to upgrade and would graciously let me have his hand-me-downs.

Getting the latest issues of MacUser and its stodgier (and still extant) counterpart, Macworld, were highlights of the month. I liked MacUser a little better: It had a more personal style and a sense of community. I would pore over the pages, starting with the fun stuff like Q&A and Andy Ihnatko, and eventually perusing drier fare like scanner reviews because hey, it was there. At the age of 11, I was so excited to read that my letter to the editor had been published in the latest MacUser that I ran into my parents' bedroom to wake my mom up. She felt the news could have waited until morning. I honestly had no conception of why she was not beside herself with joy at my great success. (And FAME!)

This May ’96 issue is a fascinating picture of technology—and the technology press—in that moment. The Mac platform was undergoing a thorny transition from 680x0 processors to PowerPC. Mac users were parroting "Windows 95 = Macintosh ’89" to pretend we were not afraid of the unstoppable Microsoft juggernaut. And Gil Amelio had just taken the helm at Apple, succeeding Michael Spindler as CEO. It was a seamless transition: Spindler's handprints hadn't even disappeared from Apple's throat before Amelio started strangling the baby again.

Steve Jobs, chief of a boutique software company called NeXT, is not mentioned anywhere in the issue.

My favorite article in this edition, looking back 13 years later, is "Net Success." "MAKE THE NET WORK FOR YOU," blares the front cover, promising dozens of ways to get actual work done on the Internet. I wanted to see whether any of these resources were still around—in other words, how many of MacUser's tips still work in 2009? For each of the article's sections (except the last one about mailing list software, "E-Mail to the Max," because it was so terribly boring), I typed in each ofMacUser's supplied URLs to see what happened. I've outlined the results in convenient tabular format below.

1. Phone Home for Less

The MacUser piece is full of surprises, not least of which is the revelation that VoIP was already attracting interest in 1996. MacUser makes it the first order of business in this article. The three end-user internet telephony applications plugged in this section were all abandoned long ago, but one of the companies mentioned, VocalTec, is still around and doing quite well.

Quote that says it all: "Sound quality and voice delay vary, depending on the speed of your local connection, but even with a standard 14.4- or 28.8 kbps dial-up connection, what you get generally resembles CB-radio sound."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Cornell University's freeware CU-SeeMe	No	Server not found
VocalTec Internet Phone application	Kinda	Corporate "solutions" only
Electric Magic NetPhone application	No	URL goes to eMagic, a mortgage back-end software company

2. Stay Tuned to the News

This section is insane. First, MacUser invites readers to "spend $10 to $30 per month for newspapers such as the San Jose Mercury News." That's funny, sign of the times, etc. But then the next enticing option is The Hotline, an email newsletter available for $3,950 a year. Four grand a year! For an email newsletter! Sweet lord. But here, we do get the first URLs that still work in 2009, with the Mercury News and Yahoo.

Quote that says it all: "Many publications are still experimenting with pricing policies."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
San Jose Mercury News	Yes	Now free of charge
The Hotline newsletter	No	404
Yahoo News	Yes
"The Daily News—Just the Links" news aggregator	No	404

3. Launch a Full-Scale Job Hunt

I expected to see names like Monster and HotJobs on this list, but apparently they weren't around yet.¹ Instead, the article directs readers to sites like JobHunt, which has a Stanford URL (http://rescomp.stanford.edu/jobs). The proliferation of .edu addresses throughout this article is a charming indication that in 1996, the Internet was still largely a product of the academic institutions where it blossomed into a global network. In fact, this article captures a Web that's on the cusp before dot-com became the standard.

Quote that says it all: "You don't always know who you're sending all this personal info to."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
The Internet Mall job agency directory	No	Redirects to domain squatter page
JobHunt	No	404
CareerPath	Yes	Now a subsidiary of CareerBuilder
CareerMosaic	Kinda	Redirects to CareerBuilder

4. Get Your Facts Straight

This is the only section that approached a 100 percent score on the modern-day web. Only InfoSeek gets a yellow square, because it doesn't technically exist anymore. But the URL does redirect to a search engine, so it's pretty close to a win. Speaking of redirects, props to the SEC web team for maintaining theirs 13 years later. I expected a 404 for sure on that one.

An exercise for the reader: Do you notice which search engine is conspicuously missing from the 1996 landscape? Take your time!

Quote that says it all: "For more personalized attention, post to one of the many Usenet groups corresponding to your interest, ask a question, and wait for the tide of responses."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Yahoo	Yes	Duh
Lycos	Yes
InfoSeek	Kinda	Redirects to go.com, which no longer uses InfoSeek search technology (uses Yahoo instead)
Library of Congress	Yes	URL returns a 404 but gets you to the LoC site; I'll call it a win
SEC EDGAR Database of Corporate Information	Yes	Redirect
Quote.com	Yes	Financial info site

5. Spin Your Own Web Page

Remember when puns on the word "web" were in vogue?

Quote that says it all: "Usually your service provider will let you publish a home page at its site at no extra charge, unless you're using the home page to promote a business. … For example, America Online's lowest fee for business owners is $750 per month, which entitles you to 24-hour-a-day server access, an e-mail link, and your own logo or photo."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Jon Wiederspan's Macintosh WWW Resources page	No	Domain squatter
"Guides to Writing HTML Documents"	No	Server not found

6. Take Your Database Public

What a strange section. I have no idea why this would make the top 100 things someone would want to do on the internet, let alone the top ten. I remember hating when the Mac magazines would write articles about FileMaker Pro and whatnot. It seemed like the most boring thing in the world. Because it was.

Quote that says it all: "Once you've started publishing information on the Web, one of the first things you'll want to do is unleash your databases and share that product catalog or Star Trek episode guide with like-minded people."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
XTML Excel to HTML plug-in	No	Redirects to AOL notice that personal homepages have been shut down, complete with enraged comments
WEB FM CGI software	No	404
ROFM AppleScript-based CGI software	Kinda	Developer's personal site still exists; software doesn't

7. Play Games

At this point, MacUser abandons the entire premise of the article, which is that you need to stop dicking around on the internet and get something done. They barely make it through six items—that "UNLEASH your databases!" crap was a squeaker—before they throw up their hands and include a slew of gaming links. I'm surprised they don't go whole-hog and make section #8 all about where to find free pornography. Publishers had standards back then.

The Outland URL is my favorite broken link of them all. It redirects to a page that not only glosses the history of Outland but also tells you what the Outland founders are up to now. Brilliant.

Quote that says it all: "If you've been killing yourself over games such as Marathon or Doom, you can take a shot at other players by logging onto such online gaming services as Sim-Net for Macintosh!"

Runner-up quote that says even more of it all: "Seemingly 'free' games can be expensive when you add up your connection time. It's also harder to cheat."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Sim-Net for Macintosh! gaming network	No	Domain squatter
GameNet gaming network	No	404; domain now hosts lame Flash games
Outland gaming network	No	URL helpfully redirects to "History of Outland" page
The MUD Resource Collection	No	404
Universal Access Blackjack Server	No	404, essentially
Games Domain	Kinda	Redirects to Yahoo Games UK
Happy Puppy Games You Play on the WWW	No	Defunct
The Action Games Menu	No	404

8. Seek Technical Help

I expected all of these URLs to work, but only one did. Really, Microsoft, you can't maintain a redirect for "http://www.microsoft.com/kb"? That's just lazy.

Quote that says it all: "Many companies are still struggling … to iron out the bugs in their tech-support Web pages."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Apple Tech Info Library	No	Server not found
Apple product information	No	404
Microsoft Knowledge Base	No	404
Microsoft support	Yes	Redirect

9. Take a Vacation

It's clear that MacUser shelled out a lot of cash for an old-timey photo library before publishing this piece, as it's absolutely riddled with stock photography of scenes from the 1940s/50s era. They are crammed into every nook and cranny of the page, even when the page layout doesn't accommodate them. I guess the original notion was that they're writing about the Internet, so all the pictures of people from the olden days would look ironic. Thirteen years later, it just looks stupid. The photo that accompanies the travel section is definitely the weirdest:

Photography aside, this eclectic grab-bag of travel links would be disappointing even if all the links worked. The Paris Beer Guide? "Mark Kantrowitz's Travel Periodicals page"? By the way, Kantrowitz's page has the most convoluted URL in an article full of ridiculously bad URLs. It's too long to reproduce here without breaking my page layout, so you'll have to click on the link below to witness its glory.

Quote that says it all: "Until there's more widespread use of the secure transmission features incorporated into new browsers such as Netscape Navigator 2.0, you may be forced to settle the fees via fax or phone."

Site	Still Exists?	Notes
Internet Solutions' rec.travel Library	No	Server not found
The Hotel Anywhere! On-Line Travel Magazines Search Page	No	404
Mark Kantrowitz's Travel Periodicals page	No	404, essentially
The Paris Beer Guide	No	A fine guide to beer in New York, though
Hotel Reservation Center	No	404
Hawaii visitors bureau	Yes	Tourist information
Internet Travel Mall	No	Server not found
Joe Witherspoon's Industrial Strength Travel	No	Joe's ISP apparently not as industrial-strength as his travel page
GNN Whole Internet Catalog Travel Page	No	Server not found

Conclusions

The final tally: Ten links worked, five kinda worked, and a resounding 28 links didn't work at all. Even that exaggerates the success rate. Take out the search engine winners, and only four links worked. I was hoping for a better result, but this isn't a huge surprise. Even in 1996, it was frustratingly clear that the Web's most interesting resources were built on shifting sands—fly-by-night pages furtively posted on university servers, corporate websites set up on a lark by a guy in the accounting department who taught himself HTML, etc.

Still, it was fun to go through this quaint old article. The Web hasn't ceased to amaze—in fact, it seems to have more untapped potential today than it did 13 years ago—but the ’96 vintage awe has the thrill of newness about it. We'll never get that back.

Actually, HotJobs launched shortly before this issue of MacUser was published, but nobody cared yet. ↑

Do Something This Weekend of January 23, 2009

2009-01-23T22:46:35Z

Notice there is no question mark at the end of that headline. I’m not asking you, “Do something?” and twisting my face up like, “Arroo?” No, see, the way this works is that I command you to do something. And then I give you a couple options. I start with one that involves going outside. Then I give you a lazy one. You pick the lazy one 90 percent of the time, I know. But I’ve got to try.

Geek Out

A capital idea. The New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West) is cashing in on this Obama craze that’s sweeping the nation, recently unveiling a new exhibit, “Taking the Oath: The First Presidential Inauguration.” The NYHS’s artifacts tell the story of George Washington’s 1789 swearing-in ceremony, which took place in New York while our fair city was the nation’s capital. That’s right, people used to complain about “those fatcats down in New York” and boast of being “New York outsiders” until 1790, when Washington, D.C., won a pumpkin-seed-spitting contest and earned the right to become capital of the United States.

The priceless mementos on display include Washington’s inaugural chair and the balustrade from Federal Hall, where the inauguration was held. No joke here, that’s just very cool. (“Balustrade” is a funny enough word on its own, anyway.)

Geek In

Play with power. The Instructables people have assembled one of their most inspired features yet: Stuff to make with an old NES. It’s a great idea, not just because of Gen-Y nostalgia, but also because most of those finicky old Nintendo boxes are borderline useless for games by now—no matter how hard you blow on the cartridge. So why not chop up your NES into something practical, like an emulator-playing PC, or something less so, like a lunchbox? Yum.

Three New Cereals, A Three-Act Saga. We Conclude With the Part Where the Saga Gets Dark and Brooding to Boost Its Oscar Chances: Banana Nut Cheerios

2009-01-22T22:59:12Z

Thankfully, I didn’t experience stomach trouble while under the weather recently, but I didn’t want to push it, so I made sure not to eat any Banana Nut Cheerios. My small intestine rebels at the thought. (Don’t even get me started on the large.) I had one bowl of these orangish-tan circles of artificial flavoring back in December, and that will probably be it. I don’t plan to finish the box. Why is Banana Nut Cheerios a failure? Let’s look back at Cheerios history first.

Cheerios was introduced in 1941, and it immediately became the choice of frazzled airport mothers digging into a grubby Zip-Loc bag for a bland snack that will shut up their crying, mucusy infant. General Mills rode the lucrative gross-baby-who-you-know-will-end-up-sitting-next-to-you-on-the-plane market for four decades before the introduction of Honey Nut Cheerios in 1979.

The product ignited a controversy, not for its content but for its mascot, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee. At that time, news reports stoked fears of killer-bee swarms approaching the United States. These swarms were widely rumored to be trained by special-ops divisions of left-wing South American governments, and thus the Honey Nut Cheerios bee was viewed as tacit encouragement of a new world order. “Honey Nut Cheerios?” said West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph on the Senate floor. “More like Honey Nut Cheery Communists, if you ask me!” But this was not a very catchy slogan at all, so the imbroglio quickly subsided.

Petty red-baiting distracted from the fact that General Mills had blessed our nation with one of the greatest cereals of all time. Honey Nut Cheerios is so, so good to this day. It has even survived a formula change: They don’t use full-fledged nuts anymore but rather almond extract. No matter. This is probably the closest you can get to a “sugar cereal” without passing irrevocably into the tooth-rotting zone, and Honey Nut Cheerios is better than a lot of sugar cereals, anyway.

The reason it’s great is because it works with the milk. A lot of cereals make the mistake of trying to be great on their own. They taste fine straight out of the box. But then they hit the milk and it all goes to hell. Maybe they become too soggy, or maybe they taint their medium with colors or granola mush. Honey Nut Cheerios, though, recognizes that it is one part of a team in the land of milk and honey. So while Honey Nut Cheerios tastes fine dry, when you make a bowl, the milk gives the cereal a magical glaze that brings out another layer of nuttiness. It’s awesome.

Banana Nut Cheerios has the glaze effect, but not much else. The cereal industry has been experimenting with fruit lately, specifically by putting freeze-dried fruit bits in the mix (cf. Honey Bunches of Oats with Strawberries). I don’t like these chunks of astronaut food in my bowl, but the fruity bits have proven very popular, so the cereal makers are taking a new look at what they can do with fruit. Hence Banana Nut Cheerios.

“Banana flavoring” probably raises alarm bells for most of us. It’s a tough flavor to describe, and also a tough flavor to replicate in the lab. Banana flavoring evokes awful banana simulations like the yellow pieces in Runts candy, which taste nothing like banana. Yet General Mills boasts that Banana Nut Cheerios is flavored with nothing artificial. Instead, they use “real bananas and natural banana flavors.”

I don’t know what the difference between those two things is, but the fact that they list both tells you that the following conversation took place at General Mills HQ:

General Mills henchman: Here you are, sir, it’s the Banana Nut Cheerios prototype. It’s flavored exclusively with real bananas.
General Mills middle henchmanager: This tastes terrible. Add some of that fakey “natural” banana crap.
General Mills henchman: Yessir!

The result of the process is a cereal that doesn’t taste like the familiar Runts fake-banana flavor, but still doesn’t taste too much like bananas, either. It tastes like stale bread from a recipe that included ingredients which don’t belong in bread. You know, like when your aunt says, “Here, I got this recipe for boysenberry bread from the health-food store! Try it!” And of course, it tastes wrong because health-food stores are always baking inappropriate crap into bread. (Ironically, banana bread is delicious, but that goes to show how irascible the banana is.

So that’s it. Three new cereals. To recap:

Honey Kix: Pretty good!
Cinnamon Chex: Mediocre!
Banana Nut Cheerios: Bad!

As always, there’s no accounting for taste. Your opinions may differ from mine, in which case you are wrong.

Biological Difficulties, Please Stand By

2009-01-15T20:54:47Z

No weekend post or new cereal review this week; I’m ill. See you next week.

Do Something This Weekend of Jan. 9, 2009

2009-01-09T23:19:02Z

You know that problem where the new year comes and you’re still writing the old year on paperwork? I never did that until this year, except instead of “2008,” I started writing “2007.” I think I subconsciously lump all the odd years together, in a bag labeled “strange, unpredictable, maybe a little boring.” Conversely, an even-numbered year seems new and exciting on its face. It’s not a tangible thing, just the way numbers “feel” in the recesses of my brain. Last year, 2008, was an awesome year for me, and it had nothing but even digits in it. For the next 11 years, though, we’re stuck with an odd digit in there somewhere. Try to persevere.

Geek Out

Hurricanes and matchsticks. The central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza) an exhibit of Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, a graphic-novel retelling of six personal stories from Hurricane Katrina. Based in Brooklyn, Neufeld published A.D. on the web in 2007; it’s expected to hit print later this year. Tomorrow is the exhibit’s last day, so get a closer look at the work of a talented independent illustrator while you can.

Scratching an entirely different geek itch at the same library is an exhibit of match memorabilia. That’s all I know; the description on the library’s site reads, in full, “Got a Light? From the collections of Larry Cole and Joe DeGennaro: A collection of matches and match memorabilia dating from the turn of the century right up to the present.” I like to see collections of things most people would never think to collect. I mean, what is “match memorabilia”? Is that a fancy name for matchboxes, or do people commemorate matches?

Geek In

Go w young man. Recently, after reviewing award-winning text adventures Violet and Everybody Dies (pictured above), my A.V. Club colleague said he’d like to create his own interactive-fiction game in 2009. Sounds like a good project to start on a cold, windy weekend. You can download the games that won 2008’s Interactive Fiction Competition from the contest site (which also has info on the interpreters you’ll need to play them). Most of them are a quick play. Then, if you’d like to author your own adventure, Dennis Jerz has a bunch of resources to get you going.

Three New Cereals: The Trilogy. And Now Comes The Middle Cereal, Cinnamon Chex, Disproving the Theory That Trilogies Always Peak in the Middle

2009-01-09T01:46:40Z

Chex has been coasting on this nation’s goodwill for too long. There, I said it. Nobody ever wants to call Chex out because we fear the wrath of General Mills—so named because when you criticize them, in “general,” they will put you through a “mill,” if you know what I mean. (I mean they will murder you by processing your body in one of their many industrial mills.) But it’s truth time. Each member of the vaunted Chex Godhead—Rice Chex, Wheat Chex, and Corn Chex—stinks its own way.

Rice Chex is passable, better than its reprehensible grain-brother Rice Krispies, but it gets soggy too fast. If you try to eat anything more than a small bowl of Rice Chex, the bottom layers turn to mush long before your spoon can reach them. Revolting.

It doesn’t even take a taste, just a glance, to observe that snuff-colored Wheat Chex is not meant to be. Birthed by a mad General Mills cereal scientist who was later indicted for war crimes, Wheat Chex limped into life with those wimpy squares, those tiny pores struggling against milk-induced suffocation—nature abhors this cereal. And so does anybody who eats it, unless you sprinkle a generous layer of sugar on top every minute or two. Then, it’s not half bad.

As for Corn Chex, it tastes less like corn and more like CornNuts®. It is an atrocious breakfast, and I’ll say no more about it. I will say more about CornNuts, though, because I just visited their website. There’s a picture of some cute monsters eating corn nuts, and this caption:

You’ve found the lost tribe of Stun Nroc. A curious bunch with but one obsession: CornNuts.

There’s a lot to take apart in that sentence. First, at some point, the name of Corn Nuts was officially changed to CornNuts. Think about that for a moment. Someone decided that Corn Nuts needed a “branding” edge over its competitors, and the edge was to get rid of that fuddy-duddy space. This means that on a laptop somewhere, there’s a PowerPoint slide charting sales before and after the name change. The slide is captioned “No-Space Initiative = TWO PERCENT GROWTH!”

Second, “Stun Nroc”? I’m guessing that wasn’t the longest brainstorming session in the world. This is the same marketing team that came up with the brilliant get-rid-of-the-space campaign, and they follow that up with “Stun Nroc”? What a bunch of one-hit wonders. Even I could come up with a better tribe name than that. In fact, I just did: StunNroc.

Back to Chex. The only reason we’ve put up with Chex for so long is because of Chex Mix. And what a mix it is. I’m not talking about the pre-packaged stuff, but the original homemade mix that you bake in the oven. Even here, there are problems. General Mills has quietly updated the “original” recipe to match their commercially packaged dreck, adding mixed nuts and bagel chips to the sacred brew. Go with the true original recipe, where butter and worcestershire sauce somehow combine to make three mediocre cereals taste absolutely freaking delicious.

At long last, this brings us to Cinnamon Chex. With a new cinnamon cereal, General Mills is treading on the hallowed ground of their own Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a cereal so potently scrumptious that it should not be sold to minors. Cinnamon Chex wisely does not try to imitate “CTC,” as they call it on the street. Cinnamon Chex is a unique cereal, where some of the rice Chex squares are dusted with cinnamon and sugar, and some are not. This makes it look strange in the bowl, but it’s an admirably restrained approach.

Cinnamon Chex does have more of a real cinnamon flavor than any cereal I’ve had, but I’m not sure that’s a plus. Literally, I’m not sure. This cereal has me on the fence. It has none of the flaws holding back the original Chex line, so you’d think I would love it. Yet it’s still saddled with that essential Chex boringness. Maybe Chex and milk will never be a winning combination. The cinnamon in this incarnation of Chex doesn’t stick to the squares very well, so the milk develops a layer of tiny red cinnamon flakes, like the cereal is rebelling against its liquid medium. Weird.

In the end, Cinnamon Chex is a solid C, like its brethren, and I doubt there will be a tasty snack-mix recipe to save it. If you want to try this cereal, I’d recommend grabbing it while you can. I’ll be surprised if it survives the year.