The Weekly Geek

The Weekly Filmschool #3: Animation #2, The Story Thus far

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:40:05 -0800

It's been about two months since I declared my intentions to make a fully digital animation in Toon Boom Studio. So how's that going? Well, it's roughly 75% done. However now that summer has rolled around my initiative has been somewhat sapped. Not to mention work and trying to get this Filmmaking Club started at the University.

But just as an interesting side, I figured I'd post all of the backgrounds I did. You can find them all here on my Fickr Gallery.

Under the cut I'll show you the basic process I went through to make them.

The first thing I did was take a piece of paper and scribble the basic rough sketch of the background. Then import it into Adobe Illustrator as a template.

I like nice, clean lines with little variability. So Illustrator is perfect for me. Most of the inking process is done with just simple mouse clicks with the Pen Tool, but occasionally I also used my Wacom pen tablet to make short work of complex lines.

Once the inking process was done, I imported everything into Photoshop.

Coloring cartoons or comics in Photoshop is super easy. You set the line art layer to multiply and have a layer underneath for color. You then use the Magic Wand and other select tools to fill in the colors.

I used the default color pallet I made for the houses. Meaning I colored the houses, yards, and street with no regard for any lighting effects later on. The sky is on a separate layer due to some effects that'll be added later in AfterEffects.

Now With the sky in place (the major light source) I can start shading. Obviously I going for a hot day so red will dominate.

Once again the select tools are used. The polygonal lasso tool is very hand for making shadows.

Finally, I made a red shape on a separate layer that only covers the foreground and set it to color burn. This gave everything a red tint. Then used a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer to make everything really bright and vivid.

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:04:51 -0800

Boom. by pbm

Lively Scene from "Ponyo on the Cliff by the sea" by jasohill

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here. (Oh god please no more Perler bead creations unless they are COMPLETELY AWESOME)

Practical Alchemy: Tools of the Trade

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:25:05 -0800

While traditional alchemy relied on the alembic, vials, and lead, my alchemy relies on a different set of tools to perform the arcane culinary arts. While the end results of cooking are much more related to the ingredients used and the skill of the chef, the process of cooking is affected significantly by the equipment at hand. Like any mad scientist, I'm into the geeky gadgets that make my job easier, be that job dominating the world or just the taste buds of my guests.

Almost any chef will tell you that virtually any preparation can be made with a simple pan, a single knife, and a wooden spoon. In the spirit of Alton Brown I'm not a fan of uni-tasking kitchen gadgets, but having a few additional versatile tools in addition to those three will certainly make the alchemical arts easier. Click through the jump to see some of my favorites.

A good knife
While I already mentioned a knife as one of the three basic things required to cook, I wanted to emphasize how great a good knife can be. When I started cooking I had one of those knife block kits you can get on Amazon for $30 and it certainly fit the bill of letting me cut things. Now that I've gotten myself a really nice knife, however, my prep work in the kitchen has changed dramatically. A good, sharp knife makes slicing, dicing, and mincing a breeze. It cuts more cleanly through tough and soft vegetables alike. Finally, a sharp knife is much less likely to catch on something and slip - studies have shown people injure themselves with sharp knives much less frequently than with dull ones.

High-quality knives will last a lifetime, are easier to sharpen, and hold their sharpness longer. A good knife will also be comfortable to hold in your hand. Before purchasing an expensive knife, it's recommended to try it out either at a friends place or in a store to make sure the handle is comfortable in your hands. If only buying a single knife, I've found Santoku-style knives to be very versatile - long enough to make cutting vegetables of any size possible, and with a wide blade to make flipping cut food around quickly.

If you put out the cash for a nice knife or two, it's also worth noting that a nice cutting board is a great tool to have around. A solid heavy wood one is ideal because wood won't dull knives and a heavy one won't move around on the counter when in use. Wood isn't ideal for cutting meat on due to microbial concerns, but it's the best surface, hands down, for anything else. I solved this problem by getting a small plastic board that I can lay down over my wood board when I need to trim chicken or beef. Editor's note: it's ok to cut meat on a wooden cutting board, as long as you sanitize it with a squirt of water/bleach solution. Use about a teaspoon of bleach in a small squirt bottle, and your board will be clean and free of germs. - Chris

Kitchen scale
Nary a meal goes by that I don't use my scale to make in some way. Weighing ingredients makes measuring things out quick and accurate. Particularly when dealing with powders or other compressible ingredients, a scale helps take the guess work out of the equation. When baking the amount of flour in a 'cup of flour' can vary by as much as 50% depending on how compressed the flour is in your measuring unit, but humidity aside 10oz of flour is pretty much always the same amount.

Scales also allow for easy modifications of recipes to adjust the quantity. Once you have figured out the ratio of ingredients in relation to one another, by weight, making a single serving or making 10 is just as easy. Place a bowl on the scale, toss in the ingredients one at a time, and tare the scale after each one is added. A good scale will allow enough weight that even a heavy metal bowl from a stand mixer (discussed below) can be used as the container things are being weighed into making for nearly instant measuring when baking bread, cakes, or other ratio-based foodstuffs.

Stand mixer
Admittedly there is nothing a stand mixer can do that you can't do by hand with enough elbow grease, but boy do they make a lot of things easier. Particularly for baking, being able to quickly and effortlessly combine ingredients while working on other tasks in the kitchen is a joy. From fluffing eggs into meringue to kneading bread dough, a sturdy mixer frees the cook from the most laborious tasks in the kitchen. Another great example of how a scale and stand mixer can shine is cookies - tossing the mixing bowl on a scale and throwing ingredients in followed by a quick blitz in the mixer can have cookies ready to go into the oven in 5 minutes flat.

While I'm sure any stand mixer will do I personally selected Kitchenaid based on their reputation. Both my mother and grandmother had Kitchenaid stand mixers their entire adult lives, and neither of those wore out. When my grandma died, her 40+ year old Kitchenaid passed on to my cousin and still churns out baked goods on a daily basis. The extra money is worth it for a tool that will serve for a lifetime.

Silpat
Finally I want to wax poetic about the Silpat. A Silpat is a non-stick baking mat that is pure magic. With a fiberglass interior to evenly distribute heat, and a silicone exterior that nothing sticks to the Silpat is perfect for everything from cookies to bread. Even when working with sticky doughs and oils, the Silpat simply wipes clean after use. Offering more benefits than parchment paper, my Silpat will pay for itself over the course of its life by being reusable unlike the parchment paper it replaces.

--Sparky

Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him - CNN.com
interesting run down of how the internet imploded.
This Wednesday: Worms 2: Armageddon, King of Fighters '98 Ultimate Match attack XBLA
Yay more worms!

Podcast for 06.29.09 | Satisfaction

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:41:12 -0800

At what point does a game stop being fun and start being work? This week, Ross Rosenberg, Jinny, Ryan G Biv and I focus on the theme of satisfaction. What makes us continue playing a game even if it kicks our ass all over the room? Why do we persevere in the face of ridiculous difficulty and unfair game mechanics? We also touch on game and movie news, from the new Heavy Metal movie, to a Facebook movie, Miyazaki's new movie, a rumored PS3 operating system refresh, Nintendo's new auto-play help system, Michael Jackson's death (and how it affected the internets), along with some great iPhone games to download. And then we answer some questions from the mailbag.

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Show Notes:

Links for 2009-06-26 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Rumour: PS3 to offer “Completely New System” in Firmware 3.0 | The Blu-Ray Blog
A whole new system? NEAT

The (somewhat) Weekly Filmschool #2: Chroma Key

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:15:55 -0800

Chroma Key (or Green Screen) is one of the most popularly known compositing techniques in our film-literate society. The concept is simple: put a pure-color in places where you want to be transparent later on. It sounds simple in theory, but can be very complex in practice. Fear not though, for it is not out of reach of the average geek! I'll show you how it's done.

Chroma key is really simple and really affordable (which is why it's so overused.) All you need are:

A vivid green or blue background.
Multiple lights for lighting the background and your subject. Large fluorescent lights work best for the background. Ideally you don't want to cast any shadows or see any detail in the background.
A DV camera, or film camera and access to a telecine machine.
A pretty beefy computer with at least 2GB of RAM, and Adobe AfterEffects.

You can use any color for the chroma key, but you don't want common colors that may make isolating your subject difficult (such as red.) Hence the use of day-glow green and pure blue. You could also use pure black or white ( a "luma" key.) Deciding on what color to use depends on what exactly you're compositing. For instance, on the first Spiderman movie, they shot Spiderman on a green screen because his costume contained a lot of blue. Then they shot the Green Goblin in front of a blue screen because, well, yeah.

You can find fabrics or paint that can make good green screens at a hardware store or any fabric shop for cheap (fuzzy fabrics like velvet work great.) Heck, even construction paper will do the job!

Now you're going to need a program to do the chroma key for you. The sky's the limit in terms of price, especially if you want to do something real-time like what TV meteorologists use. If you have slightly less money than God, I'd suggest Adobe AfterEffects. It's a good, consumer-level program that has other very useful tools. The downside is AfterEffects is one of those programs that requires a rather steep learning curve, because it's not very intuitive to somebody who's never used a post production suite before. But at its core, AfterEffects is simply Photoshop for motion pictures.

The biggest hurdle I think is truly understanding how AE handles your footage. You import video same as any other program, but you do not usually work directly on it. You nest your footage into compositions, which are like canvases. You can have compositions within compositions within compositions to make very complex animations or composited footage.

Ok, now that that's out of the way, let's make some movie magic. I took a picture of a crecent wrench on a green piece of fleece, just for demo purposes.

Open AfterEffects and ignore all the startup prompts. You want a totally blank slate. Import your footage by hitting CRTL+I or CMD+I on the Mac. Or you can left click in the Project window and select Import → Footage.

Hit Ctrl+N or CMD+N to create a new composition. Set it to whatever format you're using. I'm using a still image, but most likely you'll be using NTSC DV (United States) or PAL DV (Everywhere else). You'll also want to set the background color to black under Composition → Composition Settings.

In AfterEffects CS4, you have two tools with which to create a chroma key. You have your basic color key effect , and you also have the Keylight 1.2 plugin. Keylight allows you to do much more than just the basic effect from Adobe, but we'll just stay simple for now.

So double click on Color Key in the Effects & Presets panel on the right. You can go to Keying → Color key, or you can just search for "color key" in the search bar and it'll just pop right up.

In the effects panel, under key Color, use the eyedropper tool to select the color you wish to cut out. At first not much will happen, you have to move the color tolerance up to around 70 to get most of the color out, but not so much that it starts cutting out the subject as well.

Well, that's a fairly decent key. Aside from a hint of green around the edges, it looks pretty much isolated. However, if this was video, it would look like crap. That hint of green, and jaggy edge, would look really cheesy and ruin the effect. No chroma key is ever perfect. 90% of the work is hiding the flaws.

We need to apply another filter. It's the Spill Suppressor effect under the Keying menu. Use the eyedropper tool to carefully pick the color that is spilling onto the subject. Do not pick the background color itself, that will mess up everything. Pick the color that is being cast on the edge.

Now to get rid of the jaggies. Under the Color Key effects controls, there's the Edge Feather slider. Move it until it looks good (but not too fuzzy.)

You might have other stuff in the scene that the keying filters can't cut out. Such as, say, a boom operator or set rigging. The edges of the green screen might not be lit properly. For this, we need a garbage matte (or junk mask.)

It's super easy. In the upper left hand corner is the tool pallet. Select the Pen Tool, and on the subject layer, click to make little points, and make a shape that fits the subject as tightly as possible. This gets tricky with a moving subject, but I won't get into that now.

Finally, import your background put it beneath your subject layer.

Well there you have it. A super fast Chroma Key. It certainly won't get you any jobs, but for the average video jockey, it'll be an indispensable tool for his or her internet videos.

Links for 2009-06-25 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Text utilities

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:24:04 -0800

Epic Fail by Oh Yeeeeah drink Kool Aid

Castle Crashers by SnotRockt2

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

On Failure, Obsession, Inspiration

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:06:42 -0800

For your approval, a steam engine of enthusiasm in black, defining light source replaced with twin beaming orbs framed in plastic. I give you mine own Muse, Adam Savage.

A while back the nefarious Ross linked Mr. Savage's talk on Obsession, in which our hero reveals not one but two rainy-day craft projects gone awry that exemplify his own power of focus and palpable will of force. He proceeds to make something out of nothing.

It's times as these, sinking in a pool of writer's block and isolated at a timeless swamp, that I listen to Savage talk and find inspiration. In the above clip he speaks on Failure, an odd topic in light of his own widely recognized success in model production, special effects, and, of course, television.

Still Savage's relation of professional failure, often in the grip of a crushing deadline, only makes me like him more. If he has failed, and persevered, then maybe so can I.

Both talks bear watching. If not now then perhaps later when you need a lift, a middle-aged fiery-haired catalyst to jump start your creative doings. Save this on your iPod, a virtual defibrillator to be applied in case of emergency.

Links for 2009-06-24 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Gamasutra - News - Analysis: Can Nintendo Take 'Accessibility' Too Far?
Interesting write up on Nintendo's purported auto-play help system.
Apple - Trailers - Ponyo
omg new miyazaki movie

Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

The Wizards of Ur: Heavy Metal Movie: 2011
The new Heavy Metal movie has a TON of big names attached to it. Wow.
The 15 Games You Need For Your New iPhone (pg. 01) | Offworld
Some really really great games here.

Practical Alchemy: of Internet inspiration

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:30:00 -0800

While the Practical Alchemy archives consist of a scant six entries, it's understandable that you'd feel as though it's not your end-all be-all resource when it comes to making a meal. I've got a couple other great Sparky-approved™ websites that I browse through for recipes, pairing ideas, or just general inspiration to give my creativity the jump start it need sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean always.

Click through to see a listing of some of my favorite online cooking resources, and then share your own in the comments!

Foodpairing.be - My ultimate inspiration source for when I have a new or fresh ingredient I want to build a menu around. Enter any food and it will give you a web of food pairings showing what flavors it mixes well with. I could spend hours in a well stocked pantry playing with Foodpairing and mixing small bites of multi-flavor glory.

Michael Ruhlman's blog - Michael's writings have been a both an inspiration and a guide for me in learning how to cook. Both Ratio and The Elements of Cooking were instrumental in getting my alchemical juices flowing. His blog is a random smattering of divine photos of food by his wife and delicious ideas which makes it a must-subscribe.

Friendfeed Foods Group - Friendfeed is a great online community offering a way to share and discuss your online activities. The foods group is an eclectic mix of recipe ideas, kitchen gadgets, and random questions about food and cooking.

All Recipes - A sometimes hit or miss resource given its user generated nature but always a great browse. Like Friendfeed, All Recipes, a community based around food, allows members to post recipes and keep their own food blogs. Often when I just want to figure out the ratio of ingredients for a particular sauce or preparation, I'll look at the top few results on All Recipes and average their ratios as a starting point.

Slashfood - Slashdot's culinary little sibling, without the scathing comment culture of its more famous sibling, Slashfood is another random smattering of food-related content that's great for inspiration when you want to figure out what to make for dinner.

Cookthink - Cookthink is a new-to-me resource I uncovered while researching for this article. Like Foodpairing, it offers culinary inspiration based on the input of a user. Unlike Foodpairing, Cookthink offers full recipes and techniques rather than solely flavor pairings and substitutions.

And there you have my five favorite foodie sites on the internet with a bonus link that is sure to be a favorite soon. Leave your favorite online food resource in the comments to share with fellow Weekly Geekers.

--Sparky

Links for 2009-06-22 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Pixar grants girl’s dying wish with home viewing of 'Up'
Lord of the Rings Trilogy on Blu-ray in November | The Blu-Ray Blog
It's not the extended edition, which is completely ridiculous. Hopefully they release them side by side. New Line has a habit of selling LOTR fans the same movie over and over again though.
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/06/17/5-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-iphone-3g-s/
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/20/steamboats-and-body-parts-in-new-point-lookout-screens/
Point Lookout releases this week for Fallout 3
Gundam Statue Completed | Boing Boing Gadgets
I for one blah blah blah
First Photos from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway - Film Junk

Podcast for 06.22.09 | Go Ask Alice

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:50:24 -0800

Bringing you the week in geekery, it's Jinny, me and the super famous Ross Rosenberg. We talk about the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland remake, Fallout 3's new Point Lookout DLC, the iPhone 3GS and Ngmoco's new Plus+ network, a life-sized Gundam statue finally finished in Japan (and set to become our new overlord), Lord of the Rings coming to Blu-Ray, 1vs100 and how dirty Bob Saget is as a stand-up comedian, Pixar granting a dying girl's last wish... look, if I tell you that this podcast is epic you have to believe it. It. Is. Epic. How can you possibly distill all this information on your own? I say, you cannot! That is why we are here, to bring you all of these good things in the span of an hour and ten minutes or so.

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Links for 2009-06-18 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

A Quick Look At iPhone's Answer to Xbox Live and PSN
Ngmoco is pushing a new game network integration service with Star Defense, and it's looking pretty sweet. They seem to be the innovators of this realm, for sure.

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:56:24 -0800

Gotcha! - JSMc

Straight Reppin' - Rocco Anthony

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Practical Alchemy: Cobbling Together a Cobbler

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:00:00 -0800

Fruit cobblers are a sweet and easy way to finish a meal. A fresh, hot dumpling of dough and fruit — straight out of the oven — ready to be topped with vanilla ice cream or another sweet creamy sauce of your choice. Cobblers are great dessert recipes for any cook's arsenal, given both how quickly they can be thrown together and how many endless variations can be created on the theme.

Cobblers consist of 2 or 3 main parts: the biscuit-like cobbler dough, fresh fruit, and an optional sweet syrup to mix with the fruit. Since the dough takes 5-8 minutes to toss together and dicing fresh fruit is as easy as introducing your favorite fruits to your collection of knives, a cobbler can be in the oven in as little as 10 minutes flat &emdash; tossed in just before a meal begins and ready to eat when the main course has been consumed.

Click through to learn how to cobble together a cobbler.

Cobblers are defined by their biscuit-like dough which rises during the baking process to intermingle with the fruit. To start, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and get a baking pan ready. I usually use a 9"x9"x2" glass dish or a loaf pan depending on the ratio of fruit to dough I prefer. The square pans allow for more fruit to be added, while the loaf pan allows for a more dumpling-like end result.

Before mixing the dough, I first prep the fruit and sauce. The fruit preparation itself is drop-dead simple: dice larger fruit into bite-sized pieces and put them in the pan. If using small fruit like berries, they can be put into the pan whole. I usually add approximately 2 inches of loosely packed fruit in the bottom of the pan.

For bitter or dry fruit, adding some type of simple sugar syrup is a good idea, but it's not necessary for sweeter or juicier fruits. The syrup (actually called "simple syrup") is easy to make and consists of equal parts sugar and water boiled together on the stove and then cooled. For a standard 9"x9" recipe, 1/2 cup each of water and sugar works well, a little less for loaf pans. The syrup can also be a great vessel of flavor. For example, sometimes I'll break down another fruit, like rhubarb, into the syrup or add extra liquid, like white wine and citrus, and boil it down. If I feel like I want to be a bit more indulgent, I often make a little extra syrup and save a bit of it to combine with cream to pour over the top of the cobbler once it's baked.

The cobbler dough I used is borrowed from the Joy of Cooking. To start the dough combine 1 1/3 cups flour, 2 tbsp sugar, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt in a large bowl and mix it well. Take 5 tablespoons of cold unsalted butter and dice it into small cubes then mash this into the powdered mix. Mashing it in can be done most easily with a pastry blender. A fork, however, can be used almost as easily in a pinch. Mixing in cold butter ensures that the dough will have a light and fluffy texture when baked. As the dough rises from the baking powder, the butter will melt and leave behind pockets of air.

Once the mixture has the consistency of bread crumbs, gently fold in 1/2 cup milk or cream. Cream will give the richest finish to the dessert, but packs a lot of calories. I've tried it with fat-free milk and still ended up with decent results, so don't feel that the extra fat is a necessity. It's important to be gentle with the dough at this stage and handle the dough as little as possible to avoid forming gluten chains in the flour, which would give our light flaky biscuit dough a chewy, bread-like consistency.

After the dough is ready, arrange bits of it over the prepared fruit pan. The dough likely won't cover the whole surface and that's to be expected. As the dough rises, it will sink down into the fruit a little and expand to cover the top nicely. Once the dough is properly arranged, drizzle a few tablespoons of melted butter over the top for a richer dessert or skip that step to be a bit more health conscious. Pop the cobbler into the oven for 45-50 minutes and kick back and relax. The cobbler is done when the top has golden brown peaks and the fruit and syrup are bubbling up around the edges. It will be extremely hot after taking out of the oven, so 5-10 minutes of cooling prior to serving are recommended for those lacking metallic mouths.

As I stated earlier, one of my favorite things about cobblers is their versatility. It's a basic dessert form that can take on any number of flavors depending on what you put in it. A few of my favorite combinations so far:

Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler - use diced strawberries as your fruit, and add diced rhubarb to the syrup while it boils. The rhubarb will break down in the boiling water, and after a quick blitz in the blender will be a thick chunky syrup ready to pour over the strawberries.

Nectarine Black Tea Cobbler - sliced nectarines pair well with a syrup made of strong black tea. When boiling down the sugar and water add several tablespoons of loose black tea (or a few teabags), and then strain it after 10 minutes of steeping. Warning this makes for a caffeinated dessert so plan accordingly.

Apple-Pear bliss Cobbler - The syrup here is made from pureed pears reduced down to a sludge with white wine, cinnamon, and sugar. This decadent sauce is then poured over sliced apples. Usually, I let the chunks be a little larger on apples to give them a more recognizable form. And there you have it-- three variations on a simple theme with wildly different results. Play around with this Cobbler blueprint and share your favorite flavor combinations in the comments. --Sparky

Podcast for 06.15.09 | ProtoFAMOUS

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:18:10 -0800

If you were on a deserted island and the only game you can bring with you is either Prototype or InFAMOUS, which would you bring? Why not let The Weekly Geek help you decide? In this week's podcast, we talk about the two very similar sandbox games and the pros and cons of each. We talk a bit about the Ghostbusters game coming out this week, more Metroid Other M details (or lack of details), Scribblenauts and its crazy database of functional imaginary objects, the devs of Darwinia+ opening all their documents and bug reports to the public, EverQuest's legacy, and how to properly season meat. We also touch on the current craziness in Iran, and how Twitter is helping get the word out. All the weird stuff that is currently impacting our world. Just a normal Monday.

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How Did I Get Here?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:40:50 -0800

It's a new month, which means a brand-new batch of crazy search terms people actually used to get to this site! Raise your hand if one of these is yours. Don't be shy, own up to your freakishness. Freaks. Truth be told, I'm probably messing with some pretty dark forces by posting these search terms. I may be creating an infinite search loop within the space-time continuum. Given our generation's love for all things post-apocalyptic, this shouldn't be too much of a burden for you.

how did orville redenbacher invented popcorn
geeks by the pool
question mark suit free stuff
how do you pronounce lior
gay and geeky retarded cartoon characters
video clips funny video hidden camera positions and very embarrassing for adults only
fiction stories about mutant chocolate bar causes controversy in local grocery store

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:13:12 -0800

Statue Mario Loves The Weekly Geek - JSMc

Decemberists Palladium Sign - Kurt McAllister

Me holding a fluorescent tube - Sitnalta

How you gonna live today? - Tabs McGee

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Practical Alchemy: Olive Oil Citrus Cake

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 09:00:27 -0800

Olive oil is a great base ingredient for so many types of food--flavorful, savory, and rich. When I found a recipe for a sweet cake based on olive oil, I was a little suspicious. But, hey, what did I have to lose other than 10 minutes of my time and a few dollars worth of ingredients? The gamble paid off and now I have a drop-dead simple cake in my recipe box ready to go for impromptu entertaining.

The greatest thing about this cake is how simple it is--in less than 10 minutes it can be in the oven, and an hour later its cooled and ready to serve. Click through the jump for details on how to make your own delicious olive oil citrus cake.

This dessert is adapted from Cook The Book's entry which adapted the recipe from the Rustic Fruit Desserts book. This is the second alchemical recipe I've found online from the book and given how fantastically they both came out I've got a copy on order - you should buy it too!

To get things rolling, preheat the oven to 350 and prepare a 9-inch springform pan by wiping it down with an olive-oil-infused paper towel and then dusting it lightly with granulated sugar.

Next up collect the zest of a large lemon, orange, and grapefruit. You can use a cheese grater's small grating side or a microplane to zest the citrus fruits. Once this citrus-y bounty has been collected toss it in a stand mixer with three eggs and 3/4 cup (5.5oz) of sugar and mix on high with a whisk for 5 minutes, until the mixture is pale and has gained a little bit of volume. It will take a little longer if you don't have a stand mixer, but can still be done quite easily.

While the egg-citrus mixture is whisking, measure out 1 1/4 cups (5oz) flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Use a fork to mix these together well and ensure that any clumps are broken up.

Once the dry ingredients and the egg mixture are both ready, it's time to add the key ingredient: olive oil. Reduce the speed on the mixer to medium and slowly drizzle in 1 cup of extra virgin olive oil into the egg mixture. Once this is added, splash in some vanilla extract (the recipe calls for 1 1/2 teaspoons, but I always like to go a little overboard).

Finally, reduce the mixing speed to low and slowly fold in the flour mixture. Once it's combined, pour this into the prepared cake pan and pop it into the oven. The cake will be ready in 25-30 minutes once it has turned a delicious golden brown and is slightly domed in the center.

Once the cake is cooled, the springform pan can be removed and can be served as-is or you can whip up a quick grapefruit glaze for an extra special treat. To make the glaze, hand whisk 3/4 cup (3 1/4 oz) powdered confectioners sugar and 2 tablespoons of freshly-squeezed juice from the grapefruit that was previously denuded. I intentionally added a little bit of the grapefruit pulp to the mix as well to give it a little body and texture. Once it's whipped together, simply drizzle this over the cake and serve to a table full of hungry friends.

Podcast for 06.08.09 | E3 2009 Wrap Up

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:34:29 -0800

It's been a looooong week full of news in the geeky realm, mostly coming out of the gaping maw of hell that is Los Angeles and E3. In this week's podcast we attempt to wrangle the rest of the E3 news we care about, most likely missing a massive amount of information in the meantime. There's just too much to fit into one podcast! Nintendo and Sony's press conferences are the focus, but we also talk about the glut of sequels (and why that may actually be a good thing), the WWDC Apple keynote and the new iPhone 3g S, what we've been playing this week and we dip into a heaping helping of mailbag. A meaty helping, sure to nourish and enrich for hours after ingestion.

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Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:16:35 -0800

Kaplah! - vlukyniuk

P5290282 - malpertuis

Craphead goes after the smallest - voidmunashii

Ramps on the grill - sparktography

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Practical alchemy: the perfect steak

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:47:00 -0800

Since primitive man first cooked his meat over an open fire, the tradition of grilling meats has been evolving. Thick cuts of beef served with rich accompaniments enhancing the flavors of the meat - no meat eater could resist the call of such a scrumptious treat.

Luckily, the perfect steak is easy to make. All you need is a few basic ingredients and less than an hour to make a meal that any high-end steakhouse would be proud to serve. Click through to find out how to serve tender steaks topped with sautéed mushrooms and a buttery béarnaise.

There are endless variations on how to serve steak and as such only a single (delicious) variation will be covered in this particular article. Every time I prepare steak, I try a little something new and usually am delighted with the results. If readers have other great preparations chime in with comments and share your secret mojo with the rest of the Weekly Geek audience.

The three components below combine into something truly greater than the sum of the individual parts. Usually when I'm making this I try to start work on all three at the same time. The meat is salted at the start and then while the grill is heating I work on the béarnaise and mushrooms.

The Steak
To find the basis of a good steak meal, one has to look no further than the name itself: steak. Selecting a good cut of beef is essential to the finished product. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the filet mignon, but other cuts can easily be used as well. So far I've also had some good experiences with porterhouse, sirloin, and T-bones.

A good, tender cut of meat will have a minimum amount of tendons and other connective tissues in it-- giving the finished steak a melt-in-your-mouth texture and a softness that can all but be cut with a butter knife. Less-than-perfect cuts can be improved by vicious beatings (tenderizing to the common man) or aging to help break down this tough tissue. Many steak houses age their beef for 20+ days in a chilled environment to let these connective tissues degrade so don't be afraid to purchase your steaks a little early and let them rest in the fridge.

The preparation of the steak itself is simple - an hour or so before grilling take them out of the fridge and dust them with salt and pepper. The flavors of the salt and pepper will absorb into the outer layer of the steak giving a nicely seasoned result. While salt and pepper are being absorbed by the steaks, let them come to room temperature. Not doing this will mean the cool center of the steak does not cook evenly on the grill.

The grill itself can be any heat source. Many will argue the merits of charcoal grills and the subtle flavors they can add, but for my money propane or even electric works so long as your chosen grilling surface is as hot as possible. Charcoals end product might be fractionally better, but dealing with charcoal is a mess and can take away from the spontanious cooking a gas grill or cast iron pan with a lid on the stove.

To my palate, the perfect steak is a nice medium rare and needs a high temperature to sear the outside while not overcooking the tender middle. Once the steaks are situated on the grill, I've found the best approach is to touch them as little as possible. Approximately halfway through the grilling process I flip them and leave them alone until they are ready to be taken off the grill. How long you should grill your steaks is highly subjective and something that takes experience and finesse to get right. Thicker steaks will need to cook longer, at slightly lower temperatures, as fatty meat is a surprisingly good insulator.

My biggest cue thus far has been texture. Raw meat is very soft and it gets progressively more firm as it cooks. You can check the "done-ness" factor by gently prodding the middle of a steak and feeling how much resistance is offered. Alternatively a grill thermometer can be used to measure the temperature of the center of the steak, aiming for 130-150 degrees depending on if you want your steak more on the rare or well done side. As a final effort you can always slice into one of the steaks for a quick peek at the center.

Once the steaks are done be sure to let them rest for a few minutes off the grill prior to serving. This lets the juices and temperatures equalize throughout the steak and gives Le Chef a few moments to delicately plate them with mushrooms and sauces.

Mushrooms
While being of a fairly delicate flavor mushrooms themselves are a favorite of mine to pair with steak. The texture and flavor of sweet-sauteed mushrooms enhances the rich salty flavor of meat perfectly. Mushrooms stand well alone and I usually favor a fairly simple preparation. Baby portabellos are my favorite, but any type of mushroom will work beautifully so go forth and experiment.

After rinsing the mushrooms I slice them vertically (stems and all) and then saute them with a little minced garlic (or in the most recent go shallots instead). Once the garlic starts to caramelize I toss in a small extra bit of oil,vinegar, brown sugar, a pinch salt and pepper and let that simmer while the steaks grill.

Mushrooms prepared like this make an excellent side on their own, or with a little onion and bacon thrown in early on can make for a tantalizing main course.

Béarnaise
The final point of the perfect steak trifecta is béarnaise sauce, a rich emulsion of egg and butter with tantalizing flavors of tarragon. A traditional béarnaise starts with a reduction of red wine vinegar and tarragon, but I personally like to slightly bastardize that and start my reduction with red wine and tarragon rather than vinegar.

The reduction itself is easy - simply put the ingredients together in a pot and let it boil down over a medium heat until a sludge of pure flavor remains. Add a stick of butter to this and let it melt in to form the béarnaise base.

In a glass bowl separate out two egg yolks and add a splash of acid (lemon juice or vinegar) and a pinch of salt to prepare for the emulsion. Whisk this together and then get the tarragon/butter mixture into a pourable container (Pyrex measuring cups work really well for this). Add a few drops of the butter to the egg yolk mixture and whisk well. When done properly, the egg mixture will change slightly in consistency to become slightly thicker and paler. Once this has happened, add a few more drops and re-whisk. Do this two or three more times until the emulsion has definitely started and the mixture has an even consistency. The butter should not be separated at all.

Once the emulsion is going strong start to pour a small but steady steam of the butter into the yolk mixture while whipping furiously. This step takes a little finesse and I actually failed the first few times I tried egg emulsions. Just go slow and don't be afraid to start over if it goes wrong. As long as the butter mixture is added slowly the mixture should continue to emulsify and get thicker as you go. As the butter is warm and liquid it will never become the gelatinous texture of mayonnaise (an emulsion of oil and egg yolk), but instead end up a thick creamy sauce ready to slather on steak.

And there you have it - three simple components ready to combine into the perfect steak. Pair this with mashed potatoes or grilled vegetables and enjoy with good friends. Chime in with a comment if you have another favorite steak preparation for Weekly Geek audience to try on for size.

--Sparky

Podcast for 06.01.09 | So It Begins

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:50:28 -0800

It's like geek Christmas. E3 is where all the good little gamer girls and boys get to learn about the games they're going to be dropping their hard earned cash on when the real Christmas comes along. Today marks the beginning of the biggest video game convention of the year, with the Microsoft press conference. They set the bar pretty high, and this week's podcast is devoted to all the crazy-ass stuff Microsoft showed off. We talk about Left 4 Dead 2, Crackdown 2, Metal Gear, the new motion controller thing and the creepy little kid simulator thing. We also discuss why we want the ability to have two Netflix accounts on one box, the death of curiosity and new Monkey Island games. Deep, deep issues for sure.

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My Weekly Geek stickers. Let me show you them.

Fri, 29 May 2009 10:12:10 -0800

I've been getting requests for this for some time, and they're finally here! We've got a whole batch of Weekly Geek stickers fresh from the printers, ready for your waiting hands. Stick 'em on your computer, on your car, your cat, whatever! Put them all over the place, but be sure to take a photo of where you stuck your sticker and submit said photo to the flickr pool.

How do you get one of these awesome, hand-cut stickers? Just make a donation via Paypal for at least a dollar (to cover postage) and I'll ship a couple out to you. An easy and fun way to support the show, for sure.

The Mind Boggleth: I hope she gets a pre-nup.

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:55:59 -0800

Once upon a time, a year prior to a certain bombing of a certain harbor named after the June birthstone and Roosevelt still ruled over our fair republic with an iron fist, a clumsy teenager named Archie Andrews was crapped out on the comics stage as the retarded brainchild of a man with the rather dubious name of "Bob Montana". For over 60 years, the badly written, poorly illustrated and cheaply printed Archie Comics is still churned out monthly. Like buttermilk, nobody knows who consumes it, but somebody's got to, because they sell it.

Well, actually, I take that back. That's my churlish Internets persona talking, the spawn of a 21st century irony, a childhood where Archie's Riverdale was a hopelessly backwards neverland of malt shops, Model T jalopy races and that weird crown-hat-beanie thing that Jughead wears. Truth be told, I have something of a fondness for the absolute brainless mush of Archie and Pals, and I'm known to occasionally pick up a digest. That they're called "digests" is somewhat bizarre, since "digest" implies that somewhere there are individual copies bought and sold on a regular basis.

Still, there's an art to reading Archie Comics. First off, you must know the rules of this strange little continuity:

- Archie as a teenager in school exists concurrently with Little Archie, Paranormal Investigator Archie, and whatever the hell happens over in the "New Dynamic Look" Archie. Time is always subjective, but usually at least 15 years behind the current fads. You know something is no longer cool the second Betty adopts it: they're just now getting in-line skates.

- Archie and friends are basically commedia dell'arte interchangeable characters. In one story, Archie can simultaneously be the most popular kid in school and an utter graceless buffoon. Do not try to rationalize characterization. You will fail.

- Archie exists in a permanent purgatory, which he can never escape, no matter how hard he tries. Jughead is the omniscient overlord of this universe. Betty and Veronica are his tormenting demon-harpies, ripping his flesh off and his heart out daily. Like Phantasm, Archie thinks it will all be over when he dies, but in truth he reincarnates as a hideous troll being named Little Archie and the process starts over again. Actually, the Phantasm motif is pretty constant throughout, only Veronica's father is Angus Scrimm.

- Archie has met The Punisher. And it was played straight without the slightest ounce of irony. Even weirder, Riverdale was The Punisher's first stop on the way to Gotham City. Figure that out.

This month, however, it has been announced that Archie will finally choose between Betty and Veronica, and he has chosen Veronica. This has happened before, although not with rings, with one of the greatest cop-outs in history: Cheryl Blossom. While I won't go into the details of the inane Cheryl Blossom's dunderheaded existence, just suffice it to say that it was bad. 61 years in perpetual adolescence and finally the eternally chaste Archie is going to get some.

I can't help but think he's making an enormous mistake. I guess it's not my Hell to live. Unlike Gilligan, who had the Skipper to fall back on when forced to choose between the down-to-Earth Mary Ann and the sultry (but utterly unlikeable) Ginger, Archie has not only Betty and Veronica to choose, but also had to weed out such non-runners as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats.

However, in these woeful economic times, maybe Archie is making a good choice. Veronica is wealthy and clearly capable of keeping him in chocolate malts and sweater vests for the rest of his unholy and miserable existence. Archie's life is almost Miltonian in agony. Any small bit of comfort he can get is probably more than enough to keep him from staring into the brutal realization that Jughead is the unflinching demi-lich Acererak in his own personal Tomb of Horrors.

I think I have sufficiently pumped more nerd in this opine than has ever been delved. Feel free to print it out and shellac it to a chair for future generations to behold.

Ultimately, I suppose that I have a soft shell for Archie because no matter how hard it tried, it still never changed. It was a solid rock of stasis in a steady stream of cultural devolution. I'm not sure I feel comfortable with Archie Andrews having a sex life (although I suppose... no... premarital sex has clearly never been an option for the poor guy, although I'm sure there are plenty of pics on /y/ about it). I don't think the world is ready for the the sex-howl that shook Riverdale.

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 28 May 2009 13:49:01 -0800

Over 9000 by James2432

Lightsaber Battle by JSMc 2082

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Practical alchemy: bread

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:45:00 -0800

Fresh warm bread is one of the treasured exquisite experiences baking has to offer - the melt-in-your-mouth freshness is hard to beat! Luckily baking bread is a simple (yet deep) process that anyone can do. Made simply of flour, water, and a pinch of yeast; bread is an excellent example of a cooking process which produces something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Click through for the rise on baking bread.

Before diving in to actually making the bread dough - a word on yeast. Yeast is the first live ingredient I've used upon my path to understanding the culinary arts. While most ingredients are based in life, yeast is unique in that it's used in a dormant form and its utility comes entirely from its life cycle. Like most carbon-based life on Earth, yeast consumes sugars and oxygen to live and reproduce; excreting carbon dioxide and alcohols as waste.

Much like pasta detailed in last week's Practical Alchemy, bread owes much of its greatness to gluten. The long protein chains give bread dough the elasticity it needs to contain the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast that grows within it. These bubbles of gas trapped within the gluten network expand when the bread is baked giving bread it's light, fluffy consistency. Magic!

Baking bread is simple, yet deep: now 15 or so batches in and I still learn something every time I make bread. As follows is the recipe and technique I'm currently evolving.

The process starts with the water and yeast. To activate the yeast I start with warm water. I mix 12oz (fluid measure or by weight - the same for water) of water with a teaspoon of dried yeast stored in the freezer. After mixing this thoroughly and letting it rest for a few minutes I add a tablespoon of brown sugar to help feed the yeast. You can do without the sugar as flour has some natural sugar in it, however I've found that this little extra bit of sugar helps jump start the process and gives an airier finished product.

Once the yeast is thriving in its sweet slurry the flour can be added. I add 20oz of flour (by weight) to the water and mix it by hand until a sticky dough is formed. At this point the dough is ready for kneading. Unlike the egg pasta covered last week, water is a great buffer for gluten so over-kneading isn't as much of a risk. The dough can be kneaded by hand or by machine. Personally I've found that my stand mixer does a fine job of kneading the dough in about 10 minutes on a low setting with a kneading hook. Regardless, if using a stand mixer or kneading the dough by hand it's ready when it's no longer sticky and has become elastic enough to stretch into semi-transparent panels by hand. Once it has reached this state the dough is ready for proofing.

Proofing is when the dough gets to rest and the yeast starts its process of eating the sugars and producing the carbon dioxide gas. I cover the dough with plastic wrap while it proofs to prevent water from evaporating and drying out the dough.

Usually I divide the dough into two equal parts and bake them on separate days to have more readily available fresh bread. Prior to proving the dough the half that is not being baked that day is placed in a zippered freezer bag and plopped in the freezer to halt the growth of yeast.

When baking a half recipe of dough I froze earlier I move the dough from the freezer to the fridge the night before baking, and then let the dough prove itself for 2-3 hours on the counter prior to continuing with the process below.

After an hour of proofing, I gently knead the dough to press out any extra gas and even out the now relaxed gluten network. I shape it with my hands into an oval on a Silpat-clad cookie sheet and then cover it with a damp cloth; again to keep moisture from escaping. I let the bread rise for a little over an hour before baking it.

While the dough is rising, I get the oven ready. I put one of the racks in the middle of the oven onto which the bread will go, and the other rack as low as possible over the heading element. I then put an oven-safe pan on the lower rack and just prior to putting the bread in I add 1/2 cup of hot water to make the initial baking environment have 100%+ humidity. This humidity does two things: it prevents the bread from losing moisture prior to it's crust forming, as well as actually helping form that crust. Steam provides a far more rapid heat transfer than dry air would.

Once the oven is arranged I pre-heat it to 450 degrees and let it rest for a bit. Because of the diffusing effect of the pan in the bottom of the oven pre-heating will take longer than normal, potentially as long as 20 minutes.

Just prior to placing the cookie sheet bearing our precious dough into the oven, I quickly make a vertical slice through the top of the bread to give it a natural growth point for its quick expansion in the oven, and then brush olive oil onto the surface and sprinkle a little sea salt onto the olive oil. This will help the crust be firm yet soft, and the salt adds a splash of flavor.

Once the loaf and the 1/2 cup of water are in the oven, I turn the temperature down to 375 and let the bread bake. The baking time is very dependent on the size of the loaf. If I had not separated the loaf into halves the baking process will take nearly 40 minutes. By halving the size to make more manageable loafs the baking time is nearly halved, reduced down to 22 minutes.

A final tip for once the bread has emerged from the oven: I like to take the damp cloth that had covered the rising dough and wrap the loaf in it while it goes through it's cooling process. This helps keep moisture in and lets the loaf cool more slowly so the inside can continue to slowly bake for a few precious more minutes.

And there you have it - fresh delicious bread with surprisingly little effort. Most of the time spent has been waiting for the proofing or raising, leaving me - the baker - to do other geeky things like wander the wastelands of Fallout 3 with visions of doughy nirvana flitting through my mind.

--Sparky

Podcast for 05.25.09 | Sriracha

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:49:58 -0800

Beating the heat this week, Ryan, Jinny and Ross join me to talk about this week's news in the geek world. The Metroid Prime series gets ported to the Wii, Monkey Island is getting ported to the Xbox 360, V is getting remade for ABC and we rant a bit about the need to remake and repackage all of this media, just to sell it back to us in the end. There's a bit of food talk, a bit of movie talk and a lot of video game talk. You know. It's an episode of The Weekly Geek. Enjoy.

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Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 21 May 2009 11:10:25 -0800

PETS!! by SnotRock2

Scavengers by nanoplasia

my muse is a fickle bitch by big andy fae perth

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Always Bet On Duke

Thu, 21 May 2009 06:35:23 -0800

To be sure, Duke Nukem Forever has been in the news more lately than it has been in many, many years. With the shuttering -- or not, depending on who is doing the talking -- of 3D Realms there has been a flood of art and game-play footage release as well as a nifty lawsuit.

Certainly there are those that doubt the sway that 3D Realms's long suffering game holds over the masses, our fearless Editor-in-Chief being one of them, but for those naysayers I offer up this. If this does not prove the power of Duke Nukem Forever, I'm not sure what else will. Birthed from the fetid mind of a true acolyte, this is a glimpse into the abyss; the churning mass of insanity that festers in the depths of the pit. Whether it is a warning or prophecy I am unable to say but I would advise against repeat viewings lest your will be crushed, your irises split in twain, your mind be taken as well; the only sound reaching your ears as you unleash a soundless scream being these terrible words:

"Duke Nukem Forever is coming. Mortal men may not craft him, gods might not live long enough to play him, the very universe itself may fold under his might, but he will come and there will not be a toilet big enough to park his bricks in."

[cxiam veti sur duke]

Ask Dr. Helmig #29: "Spectre of a Gun"

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:26:05 -0800

What? an early comic? Yup, I'm heading out to California and I don't know when I'll be back, or if I'll have reliable internet. But you can take the next couple of weeks to come up with some questions for Dr. Helmig! (Seriously, though. Do that.)

Don't forget to send your qvestions to helmig@weeklygeekshow.com

Teh Mind Booglereth: I WAS ONCCCCE A MAAAAAAAAN

Tue, 19 May 2009 13:48:30 -0800

Internet success: it shouldn't happen.

Being a success on the internet should be like the equivalent of waking up one morning as Quasimodo: people should be throwing rotten cabbages at you as you are wheeled down the streets, you should be chased into cathedrals with pitchforks and torches, you should be found dead in a Parisian catacomb, clutching the dessicated corpse of your beloved Gypsy woman of choice.

You should never want internet success. This is why the internet sucks, and blogging sucks, and Twitter sucks, and everything sucks and you suck and I suck. Sucky sucky suckaroo Magoo.

First off, the lack of journalistic ethics is somewhat dumbfounding in the blogging community. Do they still call it "blogging" now? It seems like that would be one of those terms that would be outdated 5 days after it's coined, like "Surfing the Information Superhighway" was circa 1994. Blogging requires absolutely no training, no statement of sources, and relies almost solely on gossip and hearsay. If you're a conservative blogger, 99% of your "articles" will be thinly cribbed Free Republic rants. If you're a liberal blogger, 98% of your "articles will be thinly cribbed Huffington Post rants. Yes, you're 1% better than conservatives, libbies. If you're like me, and you are an e/n opine writer, a full 100% of everything you say or do has already been covered by Seanbaby and Matt Carracappa in 1998, or if you're very clever maybe you can slide in some Charlie Brooker and hope nobody notices your source, and you dread the inevitable when Brooker finds your blog and mercilessly reams you on Screenburn.

The agonizingly annoying thing about blogging, from the perspective of reading, is that so many bloggers actively push the idea that they somehow found these sources themselves. Everybody in the show really does think they're that interesting. Even worse, bloggers have a tendency to supply each other with ego boosts. The highest goal of your average low-on-the-totem-pole blogger (sup?) is to get linked on Kotaku or Wonkette or whatever your favorite blog happens to be, which fill their daily crap quotient linking to other blogs. It's a vicious circle, inescapable except by just not caring.

Second, just not caring.

You're not allowed to be seen caring what other people read on your blog, all the while actually caring what everybody thinks about it. There's the tendency toward the Geocities Site Hit Paradox. If you mention you want site hits, they never come. Nobody wants to read the opinions of a shameless hit gigolo. It's sort of a subtle undercurrent of etiquette that sort of reminds me of the various unstated court politics of the Gormenghast novels. We're all a bunch of toadying fops, standing around waving lacy handkerchiefs and hoping, praying that somebody will notice how much we don't care if they notice us.

Third, people who write blogs are generally the least informed people I know (sup?). This is because blogs have to cater to a very specific niche. If a blog tries to expand away from soundtracks to 1980s Italian giallo flicks, the difference between the Sega Genesis and the Dreamcast, or the gross national product of Sweden as a representation of delusional persecution disorders, it suddenly starts to step on the toes of another, better, blog, likely with more readers. Suddenly, the envy creeps in. The instant obsession to constantly check up on your competition becomes the number one priority. You start to actually become one of those insufferable asswipes who are insiders. You start dropping names, you start posting pictures of yourself at Comic Con with Thomas Lennon, you start laying out your insipid theories about comedy and horror in comparison to Krod Mandoon.

Soon, you start grasping for more. You start to wonder why you're not on VH1 yakking about how much you love the 90s. You notice Michelle Malkin (THAT CUNT!) on Fox News. You smell the sour stench of Bruce Vilanche's yeasty skin flaps. You start thinking to yourself, "I wish I too was a flavor-of-two-minutes-ago pundit!"

Then, you are. And suddenly you're one of them: the bloggers who betrayed their roots and no longer speak for the little guy. The little guys now loathe you for it (secretly envious of your late night chats with Shepard Smith), the big guys no longer care about you because you're generally too little too late on your chosen area of expertise, and worse still, you're tied for life to being "that one crazy". You're concretely solidified within whatever opinions you offered, and you can never, ever, ever deviate from it, lest you expose yourself as the shamelessly pandering fraud that you actually are.

You become a cartoon.

And not an amusing cartoon about a cartoon mouse constantly outwitting a cartoon cat.

Oh, and something about Twitter. Er, Twitter sucks. Twitter is where the internet goes to piss on the neighbor's couch after a night out.

Practical alchemy: pasta

Tue, 19 May 2009 01:23:45 -0800

Food at its finest is simple yet satisfying and few foods can meet these criteria better than Pasta. With more than 4,000 years of refinement and experimentation under it's belt it's no surprise that noodles are a staple for much of the world. The best part about it is how quick and easy fresh egg pasta is to make.

The dried pasta you can buy from grocery stores are simply flour mixed with water. As easy as dumping dried pasta into boiling water is fresh pasta is easy too, taking only a few extra minutes to mix and knead the dough. Since I started cooking I've discovered the true joy that fresh egg based noodles bring, packing more flavor and a richer texture into your meal.

Much of my fascination with pasta stems from its versatility: once pasta dough has been mixed and kneaded, it can be formed into sheets and then cut into spaghetti, linguini, ravioli, or virtually any other form. From there the base pasta can be cooked and served as is with a light drizzle of olive oil or presented with any number of sauces or other accompaniments.

Click through for the noodley details on how to make fresh pasta yourself.

Pasta is a perfect example of practical alchemy in that it is made of only two very basic ingredients, and yet produces delicious food. Simply combining flour and eggs results in a basic pasta dough. Michael Ruhlmans' Ratio suggests 5 parts flour to 3 parts egg by weight, although acknowledges that this is a very vague guideline and pretty much any combination of eggs and flour will work.

The 5:3 weight ratio works out to about 1/2 cup flour for each large egg. Personally I've found myself gravitating to putting in a little bit more flour and making it more of a 2:1 ratio. This works out to a generous 1/2 cup of flour (say 2/3 cup perhaps) per egg and produces a denser, chewier noodle. Each egg used in this ratio makes for roughly a single serving of pasta. By scaling this up it's just as easy to make pasta for a single person as for 10, just plop an egg per person in the bowl and measure out the appropriate amount of flour before mixing.

Once the flour and eggs are in the bowl mixing is very straightforward.The first few times I tried it using my fingers to mix things and everything got quite messy. A food processor was suggested as an alternative and while the food processor does indeed mix the dough together well it is a pain to clean up. So far I've had the most success with mixing the flour and the eggs with a fork in the bowl prior to plopping on the counter for kneading.

Kneading the dough is the most important step of the overall process. Kneading allows the gluten in the flour to form into long chains of gluten and protein which make the dough stretchy and elastic. Prior to kneading, the dough is goopy and wouldn't stick together during the rolling and shaping process. It took me a few tries to get the hang of kneading, but now that I've got it there is a bit of a zen like quality to it.

The first trick with kneading is that the surface you are kneading on must be well floured to prevent the dough from sticking to it. My first attempts didn't use nearly enough flour and thus the dough stuck to everything and made rolling and the cleanup after I was done far more difficult than it needed to be. With each subsequent batch I increased the amount of flour laid down and things worked better and better. It's important to note that the flour laid down gets incorporated into the dough so even though I like to start with a 2:1 flour to egg ratio I likely end up with dough that's 7:3 by the time the kneading is done.

The best technique I've come up with is to fold the dough over itself lengthwise, and then press it together with the heel of my hand before rotating and repeating. Five to ten minutes of this and the dough will progress from gooey to the consistency of chewing gum that's lost its flavor. Then it's ready. The more kneading you do the more elastic the dough will be and thus the more chewy the end result will be. I've read that too much kneading will break down the dough, but thankfully I haven't hit that threshold yet myself.

Once the dough is ready form it into a ball and wrap it in some plastic wrap to sit for at least 10 minutes. This lets the gluten chains that were created by the kneading relax into each other. This plastic-wrapped dough ball can be rolled and cut after the 10 minutes, or will last up to a day in the fridge if you want to prepare the dough ahead of your meal.

Once you are ready to prepare the meal itself re-flour a large surface and plop the dough ball onto it for rolling out into a sheet. If you are making more than a single serving of pasta it may be easiest to cut the dough into several 1-2 portion sized lumps and roll each one independently. Rolling itself is very straightforward, but something that took a few tries for me to get down pat. So far my most successful technique came from watching Chris and Jinny make Ravioli: roll the dough in one direction a few times, pick it up and flip it over turning 90 degrees at the same time and roll out in that same direction again. By rolling and flipping like this, the dough stays well floured from the counter top (and thus does not stick to the rolling pin) and is easier to get very flat.

Once the dough is rolled into sheets, it can be cut into any desired shape using either a knife, or a rolling pizza cutter. Pretty much any shape will work and the process is wide open to creativity. Personally, I'm a fan of both 1" square shaped pieces of pasta and of flat fettucini. The easiest way to get perfect straight lines when cutting long pasta like fettucini is to roll the flat piece of well floured dough into a log and cut the log into slices leaving you with perfect spirals of dough.

Now that the pasta is cut and ready you can toss it in some boiling water and you are ready to go. The water should be seasoned with salt to both increase it's boiling temperature as well as to add a little salty flavor to the pasta. The Weekly Geek's, Chris, suggests heavily salted water "tasting of the sea", although I've had success with less salty water as well - individual preference changes everything so experimentation is encouraged.

While dried pasta takes some time (9-15 minutes) to cook, fresh pasta takes much less time. Particularly if you rolled the dough very thin, the cooking time may be as little as 3-4 minutes. To see if it's done, extract a piece with a spoon and take a bite after blowing it cool.

Once it's done, simply drain the pasta in a colander, toss with a tiny bit of olive oil to prevent the pasta from sticking to itself and you are ready to serve. Fresh pasta is delicious by itself with just the olive oil and perhaps a little salt, but can be a phenomenal base for any number tasty sauces and other accompaniments.

And there you have it - in a few short minutes alchemy has occurred- simple flour and eggs have been transformed into delicious, ready-to-eat pasta! Shout out in the comments if you like the article, or have additional variations or techniques to suggest that myself and the readers can try out!

--Sparky

Podcast for 05.18.09 | Wherefore art thou geek?

Mon, 18 May 2009 18:12:02 -0800

What makes a geek truly a geek? Does the distinction between true and supposedly false geeks even matter? On this week's podcast we focus on geek culture and geek pride - delving into topics such as Star Trek canon (and if canon is even as important as geeks make it out to be), internet celebrities who call themselves geeks but probably aren't, and a small smattering of game news. Then it's on to what we're playing and mailbag as always, but this podcast has a lot of discussion about what makes us geeks at the very core. I think it's a pretty interesting topic, I hope you do too. Here it is. A podcast. For you. Enjoy.

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On the relevancy of Star Trek canon (and canon in general)

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:25:37 -0800

There will be no spoilers in this article. It's the very core of geekery. It's the glue that holds our universe together. It's canon, and it is quite an important part of the myriad mythos we love and cherish. The way a mythos' timeline fits together, the relationships between characters, the locations they are able to explore, everything that makes a world feel fleshed-out and real lies in canon. It's also one of the things that drives us geeks mad, especially when an "official" source seems to get it wrong. But should canon really even matter to you?

For writers on a series or a movie based on a beloved franchise like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, the franchise bible is quite important. It facilitates the writing process, helping you remain in the world you set out to tell a story in. For the end-user (reader, viewer, listener, whatever) it is what makes the world feel real. While all fiction requires you suspend disbelief to some extent, canon is the thing we can always go back to and point a finger to when something doesn't seem to make sense. If a story breaks its own rules, it feels disingenuine - like the author maybe isn't taking it as seriously as you want them to.

But then... what about Star Trek canon? The new movie is a reboot of the franchise. All new actors playing old characters meant to refresh the canon. Yet, it's also the first time in Star Trek history where I haven't heard much discussion about where this new bit fits into the canon. Perhaps that's not all bad. This weekend I was checking out the wiki page dealing with Star Trek canon and found this little nugget:

See, people can easily catch us, and say "well, wait a minute, in 'Balance of Terror', they knew that the Romulans had a cloaking device, and then in 'The Enterprise Incident', they don't know anything about cloaking devices, but they're gonna steal this one because it's obviously just been developed, so how the hell do you explain that?" We can't. There are some things we just can't explain, especially when it comes from the third season. So, yes, third season is canon up to the point of contradiction, or where it's just so bad... you know, we kind of cringe when people ask us, "well, what happened in 'Plato's Stepchildren', and 'And the Children Shall Lead', and 'Spock's Brain', and so on -- it's like, please, he wasn't even producing it at that point. But, generally, [canon is] the original series, not really the animated, the first movie to a certain extent, the rest of the films in certain aspects but not in all... I know that it's very difficult to understand. It literally is point by point. I sometimes do not know how he's going to answer a question when I go into his office, I really do not always know, and -- and I know it better probably than anybody, what it is that Gene likes and doesn't like.-- Richard Arnold, 1991
Another thing that makes canon a little confusing. Gene R. himself had a habit of decanonizing things. He didn't like the way the animated series turned out, so he proclaimed that it was not canon. He also didn't like a lot of the movies. So he didn't much consider them canon either. And - okay, I'm really going to scare you with this one - after he got TNG going, he... well... he sort of decided that some of The Original Series wasn't canon either. I had a discussion with him once, where I cited a couple things that were very clearly canon in The Original Series, and he told me he didn't think that way anymore, and that he now thought of TNG as canon wherever there was conflict between the two. He admitted it was revisionist thinking, but so be it.-- Paula Block, 2005

Star Trek's revisionist history dates back to the creator himself, who repeatedly threw things out, brought new things back in, and denounced his own creations as "non-canon". So what's the big deal? Are you annoyed when a series breaks its own canon? Or do you just suspend your disbelief a little while longer?

header image from kwindu on DeviantArt

How Did I Get Here?

Fri, 15 May 2009 09:58:45 -0800

It's been a few weeks, but I'm back with a brand new slew of completely ridiculous actual search terms people have used to get to our website. It's a constant exercise in "you're doing it wrong" and it's just too good not to share with you fine, fine people. I like to imagine the desperation it takes for someone to enter these words into a search engine, hoping beyond hope that what they're looking for will come up in the results.

i've known a couple of jerks from the local anime club who tried to keep getting a convention off the ground and kept trying to find ways to squeeze extra cash out of people let's just say that convention still hasn't happened
graffiti art of spongebob smoking crack
a game that has you be hot nude females
what can you use to hold corndogs
a fantasy tater tot
racist postcard
buttfly
picture of a fruit
fiction stories about mutant chocolate bar causes controversy in local grocery store

The Threat is Real

Fri, 15 May 2009 09:32:31 -0800

The Pirate Lobby will not be ignored.

[via The Official WhiteHouse Photostream]

Krod Mandoon is the least funny show ever.

Fri, 15 May 2009 09:15:53 -0800

It's always amazed me how similar horror is to comedy. For example, attempting to present horror on television is an incredibly difficult thing to pass by the network Standards and Practices, since horror is based on shocks, exploiting existing social mores, and imagery that some might consider to be offensive. Horror makes us uncomfortable, because horror shows us what it is we DON'T like. To work successfully, horror needs to be a reaction to what the majority of society rejects.

Vampires, for instance, have ceased to be horrifying to us. Originally, Dracula was a horrifyng example of what people in the 1890s West found scary: backwards and corrupt aristocracy, the liberated woman, the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, and the breakdown of the established post-Enlightenment social order. Dracula was scary because he was all the things the 1890s gentleman might find repellent. Frankenstein's monster, similarly, was a manifestation of early 19th century's worries about the amorality of the inevitable extensions of the Age of Reason's search for progress, and there is a very good reason why it took the wife of the second most prominent British Romantic to write it. The monster represents authority gone wrong, authority that translates into fear, because we have to deal with it.

Like monsters, comedy requires a working knowledge of what it is the majority of the audience finds valuable. Comedians and monsters both rely upon the knowledge of communal truths to operate successfully. The comedian is a living monster, only one we want to know, instead of one we don't. We invite the comedian to make us laugh by pointing out the things we know to be true. Jon Stewart and the kids from South Park are characters that ask questions and speak to authority, questioning it. In the circus, clowns are divided into White Face and Auguste (Red Nose), the two primary characters of the circus clown system. White Face represents the character who makes us laugh because he's smarter than the system, Auguste represents the character who rebels against that system. White Face usually takes the pie to the face, and Auguste usually throws it.

The interesting interplay between Batman and his nemesis, The Joker, reflects this weird dichotomy. Batman is a force of authority outside of the control of mundane confines, and The Joker is a reaction in the opposite extreme, the ultimate avatar of chaos. Horror and comedy meet, and because they are so thinly delineated, they become compelling. The 1960s Batman show was an example of taming the horror... the 1960s culture was no longer afraid of authority, and so Batman became a source of comedy. It wasn't until the Reaganite/Thatcher era that authority became something to be scared of again, and Batman took on new relevance, and The Joker returned to his psychotic roots.

The worst thing in the world is when attempts at comedy don't even try to question authority. Circus clowns have ceased to be funny because they are now a cultural institution, completely unresponsive to the desires of the audience, and have mutated into a common childhood phobia. Whereas generations ago, the clown might have been a visual grotesque, it has now become an uncomfortable form of stasis. The clown hasn't had innovation in nearly a century, and ceases to be amusing.

Comedy Central's Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire is a bit like the circus clown. It's a painfully enormous, overwrought and too desperate exercise in nerd-fan-wankery, of the kind that usually happens in bad sprite comics. I can only assume that Comedy Central assumed they were going to get a Blackadder-esque romp through High Fantasy, but what they got was... something else entirely.

The concept is that Krod Mandoon is the Mary Sue of somebody, and the story is about his team of D&D adventurers of various offensive cultural stereotypes trying to take down the evil and cackling Chancellor Dongolor, played by Matt Lucas, the tedious half-star of Little Britain. Yes, "Krod" is "dork" spelled backwards, and "Dongolor" is a name that basically represents the high-water level of comedy you're going to expect here. Like every good D&D party, there's the dumbfoundingly black wizard, the teenage sex fantasy rogue, a wacky half-human sidekick and, yes, the gay cleric.

Little Britain, by the way, is basically an exercise in which two Oxbridge graduates mock those who need the least mockery: the poor, the gay, and the mentally challenged. The show is utterly puerile trash of the highest order, and yet Krod Mandoon seems to top it. It's really quite amazing if examined from a purely humorless, ironic level. It's basically the Hoover Dam of Unfunny, a gigantic structure built solely to restrain funny from bursting forth.

The whole of Krod Mandoon consists in playing up various high fantasy/D&D tropes, while not doing any of them very well. Krod Mandoon, played by Sean Maguire, is a very well acted source of physical buffoonery, but because Sean Maguire is so damningly attractive, the comedy is short lived. Half the first episode consists of Krod, shirtless to expose the admittedly splendid torso of Mr. Maguire, berating his astoundingly attractive girlfriend for wearing a skimpy costume. If Krod was a little less attractive, and his girlfriend a little less sexy, the conceit would work. Instead, we get an episode of The OC in the middle of what is essentially a parody of Xena:Warrior Princess.

The villain, Dongolor, sits in his palace most of the show and much of his "comedy" revolves around him killing various henchmen non-chalantly as he explains, ad nauseum, how he was more popular than Krod in school. Dongolor would be an interesting character if he wasn't so fucking annoying and plagiaristic. He's basically a word-for-word rip-off of Mike Myers' Doctor Evil, and Matt Lucas' horrendously unlikable sort of comic whinginess is so stupidly painful to watch that it just comes off as agonizing.

The whole show is like this... we're supposed to identify with Krod, who is clearly the Mary Sue character of a fairly interesting, yet unseen, 17 year old nerd. His friends are the characters that a particularly unimaginative group of tabletop gamers would roll up in 20 minutes, and the villains are so ridiculously ugly and sociopathic (yet played for laughs) that they're just as, if not more so, unfunny.

The offensiveness of the supporting cast is at a level unseen. For example, the black wizard is so urban that every word he says is in a Chris Rock impression. The gay character, named Bruce (of fucking course), is mincing and limp-wristed, and so annoying that it becomes even worse when Krod displays obvious homophobic behavior around him. Even Reno 911, which thrives on the consistent mincing behavior of the outrageously funny Lieutenant Dangle, justifies this transgressive comedy by making Dangle the most intelligent and relatable character in the cast. Not so here. Krod seems utterly broken that Bruce is the prison boyfriend of his beloved mentor, and makes repeated pointed remarks about not wanting him around. If these are the characters of unseen D&D players, they're all very young, very shielded, and likely living in Orem, Utah.

The crux of this litany is this: comedy, in the case of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, has been flipped on its ass and has turned into horror. Authority isn't questioned in this show. The whole show sneers down, as if through the monocle of a 17th century fop, at those who society has mocked for so long and so hard. Racism, homophobia and sexism isn't questioned, it's encouraged by the character of Krod, who has no problem whatsoever engaging in all three at once while the writers try to cast him as a sensitive character. For a network that has some of the most progressive and thought-provoking shows in current rotation, this is just unbelievably painful, not even hitting the level of transgression that it thinks it's aiming for. Staring at this brutally and unrelentingly anti-comedy "comedy" is an instance in staring straight into the face of Hannibal Lector, who is juggling and telling knock-knock jokes, or possibly a jaw-droppingly bizarre re-edit of the Masters of the Universe movie.

Ask Dr. Helmig #28: "Immunity Syndrome"

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:01:00 -0800

Witness the triumphant return of Ask Dr. Helmig! My animation is going to need some more work to be presentable, so stay tuned on that. I'll still do Weekly Film Schools here and there as I come up with worthwhile ideas.

Don't forget to send your qvestions to helmig@weeklygeekshow.com

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 14 May 2009 11:01:12 -0800

Pikmin 8-bit Retroactive - NES style - Collectable Card by Arcade Art

Green Nerd Glasses by MagnetGames

Robbie the Rabbit by TheVideoGameGirl

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

Create a GUI Interface using Visual Basic VS Generation Kill

Wed, 13 May 2009 19:11:39 -0800

Last week we received an interesting mailbag from WANTED outlining a particular flavor of displeasure I completely relate to. While the origin of my own ire varies, the frothy foam that flies from my gaping maw like so much volcanic ash as I vent primal anger is very likely the same.

That scene in Swordfish with the (wine/dancing!?) coding cube, the magic image enhancement flaunted in so many episodes of CSI, and easily half the shit pulled in Hackers (alright, the rollerblades were super hot). Why does this bother us geeks so much? Lightsabers, photon torpedoes, and time travel are gravy but damn the production that allows our hero's clip to magically hold 500 rounds.

Examples of such deviancy permeate every genre, doubly so if an area you happen to have as a profession is the topic abused. For WANTED it was the impossible image enhancement, for me its just about any military film of late. Hell, seeing characters in BSG with their uniforms all open and disorderly was enough to make me cringe. And they were in the future. Fighting robots. In space.

Just as gross exaggeration fuels frustration, a square hit on a niche topic lends incalculable credibility. One such example is the 7-part HBO mini series Generation Kill.

Adapted from the experiences of Evan Wright, a reporter embedded with the US Marine Corps' 1st Recon Battalion in 2003, the series got right everything that Jarhead and several other USMC-centric films got wrong. Being character driven, as the better mil-flicks tend to be, we get front rows seats for what is essentially a road trip to Baghdad. While I can't claim any ties to the Recon specific aspects of tomfoolery there were dozens of references that were superbly accurate, from a superstitious loathing of Charms to how race kind of sort of doesn't really exist in the Marines.

Inside jokes and uberniche references aside, Generation Kill performs on a level all of its own portraying equal parts pumping adrenaline and mind-numbing boredom, both of which are synonymous with a modern day deployment to Iraq. I was surprised at how enjoyable getting to know these characters was as they went through nearly unbelievable circumstances over and over only to come out at the end more themselves than when they started.

If you like mil-flicks at all be sure to pick this one up.

Sure, some parts are a bit exaggerated but they only enhance the experience. It's a fine line that, when balanced, yields the ultimate in entertainment. Gritty details act as salt in the saccharine rich fantasy fluff, like the dual pistol reload in Equilibrium or just about all the fights in the recent Batman movies. Yes, the protagonist is a superhero. Yes, his shiz breaks and he nurses bruises the next day.

Details make or break the story; perhaps that's why gross negligence can become unforgivable in a series like CSI. I still watch LOST despite near cosmic season-to-season changes but for me a balance is struck between fantastic and mundane.

So what does it take for you to stop watching a show? What exactly pushes your tolerance beyond that of acceptance to pure rage despite the fact that the setting is as far from reality as possible?

Weekly Geek Exclusive Interview: Nester's Long and Winding Road

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:01:34 -0800

It actually took me the better part of six months to track down Nester, the mascot for Nintendo Power magazine between 1989 and 1993. The first attempt to contact him, via his agent, ended in disaster when it turned out that the address given me was actually a slaughterhouse in Arizona. After hiring a private detective (at Chris' personal expense no less... whatta guy), we finally tracked down the man that for four years stood as the gateway between the obfuscated world of Nintendo's products and the common man.

Facing Nester is an exercise in suspension of expectation. He is a broad, bespectacled man in his early 30s, the only remnant of his child-star presence being the roundish head that made him famous. I catch up with him at an undisclosed location in Tacoma, Washington.

SECKSCAB: It's been twenty years since you premiered in Nintendo Power, as a sidekick to Howard Philips in the "Howard and Nester" comic. Do you still keep in contact with Howard?

NESTER: Sadly no. I haven't seen him since he left Nintendo in 1991. I heard he was working for Lucasarts.

SECKSCAB: Apparently. Wikipedia agrees.

NESTER: I never got to say goodbye. One day he was polishing the gigantic brass Shigeru Miyamoto statue, and the next day he was gone. His desk was completely atomized, after blinking three times.

SECKSCAB: That's... odd.

NESTER: It was like he never existed. Or if he had, it was like he was killed with the Silver Arrows.

SECKSCAB: Were there any other strange occurrences at Nintendo that you can recall?

NESTER: I don't really want to talk about what they did to Donkey Kong.

Awkward silence.

SECKSCAB: So, you left Nintendo in 1993. What have you been doing since then?

NESTER: Just trying to keep afloat, I guess. We try to keep things turning here in Nester Headquarters. I did return on a consultancy basis in 1996 for Nester's Funky Bowling on the Virtual Boy.

SECKSCAB: I'm sorry, I was not aware...

NESTER: Not many are, sadly. Michael Jackson was the only one who pre-ordered it.

SECKSCAB: Really? Did he send you a note or anything?

NESTER: I think he was dismayed at the "Virtual Boy" not exactly turning out to be what his imagination assumed it to be.

Nester sips the cup of coffee that I purchased him, and looks somewhat saddened.

SECKSCAB: What was the high point of your stardom?

NESTER: Referring to my genitals as "The Rumble Pak".

SECKSCAB: Nice.

NESTER: Feel free to use that. Hasn't worked for me in fifteen years.

SECKSCAB: Do you still play video games?

NESTER: I do, yes. I have a Death Knight on Ethelon named "AwesomeKillz", if anyone wants to hit me up. We have a Tabard now. Now accepting all classes and levels, seeking serious players with no drama.

SECKSCAB: So you like World of Warcraft?

NESTER: Keeps me busy, ever since my wife left me. It's just me and the WoW and the Social Security Administration these days.

SECKSCAB: I'm sorry, I was not aware you were married.

NESTER: Twice. I have a son now, Lester.

SECKSCAB: How old is he?

NESTER: He's four years old, (Amy Schultz; localization editor for HAL) is keeping him hostage for the time being. Apparently I'm a "deadbeat dad". So the judge says.

SECKSCAB: That's... er... what was your favorite game you ever reviewed?

NESTER: What the hell does it matter, man? It's all blown to Hell. It's all over. Nester the man is a broken shell and a failure. A heartbroken supertanker full of misery and regret. My spirit has been crushed, every day is a roaring success if I can find the gin.

SECKSCAB: I had no idea.

NESTER: I'm kind of bleak these days.

SECKSCAB: Obviously.

NESTER: No need to be snarky, man. I know the score. I know the motherfucking score. There's something fishy going on in Maniac Mansion. Grab the remote control on the third floor to summon Robo-Duck. It's a bad night for a curse. Dodongo dislikes smoke.

Nester is nodding back and forth oddly, as if his whole equilibrium is off.

SECKSCAB: So then, do you have any projects for the future? Anything that the fans of Nester would like to hear about?

NESTER: I am going to lay a gigantic dook in about an hour. Inform the press. I will accept the laudatory praise of the universe with all due humility.

With his fifteen minutes up, Nester returns to the Suncoast Video where I found him lurking.

Podcast for 05.11.09 | 9000 Reasons To Love Star Trek

Mon, 11 May 2009 16:46:45 -0800

This week sees the end of Jinny and Ryan's race to 9000 gamerpoints, and they are both exhausted. We talk about how E3 is fast approaching and what games we're looking forward to seeing more about, the new Star Trek reboot and how the movie is awesome, Fallout 3's Broken Steel DLC, a new Weekly Geek editor is introduced, and Jinny and I talk about our recent trip to Disneyland and California Adventure, and the craziness of the new Toy Story ride. Oh yeah, Ross is here too. Fully enjoyable, robust and deep in flavor, this is a podcast you will enjoy.

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Practical alchemy: cookies

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:28:07 -0800

To some food comes easily, whipping together raw ingredients akin to alchemy, producing culinary gold. For others this combination of pre-food constitutes a mysterious process, wrought with danger and difficulty. Practical Alchemy hopes to help chronicle my personal journey from a terrified food neophyte scared to handle raw chicken to what may someday be an alchemical wizard, bending food to my very whim.

A scant 3 months ago I insisted upon wearing latex gloves to handle raw meat. 3 months ago I moved out of a condo which had an oven I literally hadn't turned on in the 6 years I had lived there. 3 months ago I was challenged by the idea of making even Kraft blue box Mac'n'Cheese. Luckily a stray neutrino hit my brain after the move and activated my magical Betty Crocker gene.

Having 20-plus-plus years of food eating experience under my belt, but for all practical reasons no food cooking experience to rely on has made a crash course into cooking an interesting experience for me. I've seen others perform this mystical art my entire life and have a great basis of what end results and effects I enjoy, however putting the process together from start to finish is proving to be an interesting journey.

Click through for a first (long) peek into that journey with my most favorite of creations so far: cookies.

Cookies are an excellent example of the practical capabilities of alchemy - a few simple ingredients combining to create something far greater than the sum of their individual parts. At their most simple cookies combine sugar, fat, and flour and then apply heat to solidify their form. The fat holds the flour together, and the sugar adds both sweetness and a chewy quality normally associated with cookies.

Michael Ruhlman's Ratio (a great book which I promise to write more about in a future column) lays out the basic blueprint for a dizzying array of cookies: 1 part sugar, 2 parts fat (usually butter), 3 parts flour - all combined by weight. Mix well and then bake at 350 for ~15 minutes and presto: cookies.

Now this little bit of kitchen magic has taken sugar, butter, and flour and turned them into delicious although rather plain cookies. Where the alchemical ingredients to gold really gets interesting is in the fine tuned variations. In the last few months I've made 20 some odd small batches of these cookies, each with little additions, little garnishes trying to get my head around the subtle differences that varied ingredients or techniques produce.

Initially I thought the biggest impact on the end product would be the garnish, be it chocolate chips, oatmeal, or bits of fruit. This misconception was quickly resolved realizing that the details of how the ingredients were combined had more of an effect on the end product than what additional ingredients are added. The most important one of these details turned out to be the handling and preparation of the butter.

Initially I tried melting the butter to make combining it with the sugar and flour a little easier. While this did make the mixing process a breeze it made the dough very runny. While in the oven the cookies spread out more than I wanted resulting in a thin, crispy cookie.

An overcompensation for this was to try forcing a hard stick of butter directly out of the fridge into the mix. While this did produce the thick cookies I wanted as an end result the mixing process was difficult, even when using a giant stand mixer. Taking a more moderate stance I then tried letting the butter stand for an hour or so outside of the fridge prior to using it so as to have a soft (but not melted) room temperature fat to work with.

A deeper fascination with technique came from the suggestion to whip the butter and sugar prior to combining the flour. A few minutes of whipping these two basic ingredients together in a stand mixer makes a surprisingly large impact on the end result. The fluffier butter-sugar mixture traps some air and makes for a fluffier, crumble-on-the-tongue cookie.

Another big impact on the texture and richness of the cookies that I came across was the addition of some egg. Adding a single egg per stick of butter produces a richer cookie with a moister, thicker feel. A few experiments later determine that the best way to add the egg was after the flour had been added to the fluffy butter-sugar mixture. Adding it prior to the flour made for a not-so-fluffy sludge that resulted in a thick cookie almost akin to a sweet bread.

Once this basic dough is ready you can form it into cookies and bake immediately for a plain yet delicious sugar cookie, or you can treat this dough as a foundation for the nearly limitless addition of flavors, garnishes, and other culinary twists. Gently folding in flavor extracts, dried fruits, or other tasty bits can produce a dizzying array of end results.

Before getting to the details of a few great variations I've come to love a quick summation of a few pages of my notes for readers own experimentation: adding dry ingredients such as oatmeal dries out the cookies due to the moisture the ingredients soak up. Conversely overly wet ingredients such as fresh or canned fruits add a lot of moisture and can both increase the baking time required as well as make the dough harder to form into cookie shapes. Taking both of these into account allows the alchemist to balance the dough using both dry and wet garnishes to achieve both the desired taste and consistency.

Basic cookie dough (makes 8-12 cookies):
Combine one stick (4 oz) of room temperature unsalted butter with 2oz of white sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla extract and beat until fluffy.

Gradually mix in 6oz of flour at a medium speed to produce a basic dough.

Mix in a single whole egg.

Mould the dough into 1 inch balls and place on a cookie sheet that has either been lightly greased, or has a Silpat on it. What's a Silpat I hear you ask? A Silpat is the ultimate non-stick baking accessory. It provides even cooking and falls-off-the-sheet non-stick capabilities. Silpat is so awesome I wrote poetry about it. Twice.

Finally flatten each ball into a rough cookie shape and stick them in an oven pre-heated to 350 for ~15 minutes or so. When the bottom edges of the cookies start to turn a slightly darker shade of brown and there is no apparent moisture pool on the top of the cookies they are done.

Coconut almond cookies:
A personal favorite variation on the above basic cookies includes flavors of almonds and coconut for a light cookie that dares you to eat a single one. To the above cookie dough recipe I mix in ½ teaspoon of almond extract, 1oz of crushed almonds, and 1oz of shredded baking coconut.

Tropical rum cookies:
For a fun fruity dessert you can also add fruits to the cookies. I've had the best luck working with dried fruits and rehydrating them myself shortly before baking to avoid extra moisture. This variation is best omitting the egg from the basic cookie dough to compliment the light airy texture tropical fruits bring to mind.

Prior to making the dough I finely chopped 1oz each of dried cranberries and dried pineapple chunks. These and the zest from a lime are soaked in enough dark rum to cover them, and the juice from the now-denuded lime. An hour or so of soaking and the fruits plump up beautifully and are ready to strain and add to the egg-free cookie dough for baking. The now-fruity rum makes for some fantastic drinks should you be so inclined.

And there you have it - from someone who never thought they would bake cookies, let alone write page after page about how awesome baking cookies. Try them out, let me know what you think? Since I'm obviously fresh and new to the wild world of culinary alchemy post a comment to let me and the rest of the weekly geek readership know what comments or suggestions you have that could make a more sublime cookie.

--Sparky

Introducing: Sparky

Mon, 11 May 2009 08:11:37 -0800

Sparky turned in enough box tops to get his very own author account (but boxes of what?) He's been teaching himself how to cook and not only will he document this experience for you, but he's going to cover whatever other subjects he's currently geeking out about. We'd like to welcome official #3 Weekly Geek fan Sparky to the site.

Good morning internet, It's Sparky! I'm the newest contributor to the Weekly Geek site and our fearless leader Chris has asked me to write a quick introduction to formally introduce myself to the geeky masses. Introductions always do seem a little awkward, so I thought I'd dive in headfirst and present myself in faux-interview style.

What makes you a geek?
If I had to pin it down to something it would be my mildly obsessive compulsive personality. Once I get into something I geek out on it nearly endlessly.

What thinks do you geek out on?
I love technology, photography, video games, cooking, baking, iPhone apps, and (unfortunately) self-created internet memes. Combining these in different permutations can result is greatness and great tragedy. For instance combining photos and baking results in mouth-watering food photography, while combining baking and video games results in ruined game discs and acrid smoke.

Click through to keep reading more information than you really require about Sparky

What are you top three video games of all time?
Chrono Trigger, Super Mario Brothers 3, and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

If you were trapped on a desert island and could only take one thing with you what would it be?
I'd be immediately tempted to pick the ultimate swiss-army gadget; the iPhone; however given the lack of AC adapters on your average desert island and the short-lived battery ensconced within my iDevice I'll have to go with an old school film camera and a bunch of film. That way if I ever get rescued I'll have a pile of creative photos chronicling my experiences ready and waiting to develop.

How did you meet the Weekly Geek crew?
Last year I was walking home from PAX when I came across Chris, Jinny, and Flynn from gaygamer.net walking back down to the Washington Convention Center for a last panel. I recognized Flynn and ended up joining the crew for a panel, dinner, and some drinks. This began my now year-long obsession with the Weekly Geek and safety gnomes.

Really?
Yes, unfortunately.

How do you feel about Antarticans?
About the same way as the Upright Citizens Brigade feels about Astronauts. Look it up.

Where do you live?
In (sometimes) beautiful Seattle, WA.

How can we get more of Sparky?
Are you sure you want that?

Yes.
Check me out on Twitter, on Friendfeed, or via my Xbox 360 Gamertag: Sparktography.

--Sparky

The Mind Boggleth: I don't like to play World of Warcraft.

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:24:39 -0800

It's true. I don't like to play World of Warcraft. I know it's been available for something like 5 years now, but I just finally downloaded the free trial last week, and I played my 10 days, and now I'm done.

Maybe someday I'll come back, but I was somewhat disenchanted early on. I started as an Undead Warlock, which maybe wasn't the best choice. As I kept playing, I quickly discovered that I had to press about 18 buttons all in exact casting order, tell my minion what to do, and make sure that the dude I'm killing dies when I throw off a certain spell so I can make "Soul Shards".

It was sort of bizarre. The most annoying thing is that I spent about fifteen hours traversing Brill and the skeleton infested hills of Doomy Swampy Scary Land, carrying the bassist from Oingo Boingo's skull around, desperately trying to bury it. I had tried every grave I saw, and nobody told me there was a graveyard behind the chapel. By the time I finally buried the fucking skull, I was about Level 8.

I also didn't die until I hit Level 10. I felt that was somewhat odd.

So, growing bored of my Zombie Warlock, I tried an Orc, which was really fucking dull as hell. I was in a neon orange valley that looked like Duckburg 200 years after the nuke dropped.

Eventually, I discovered the only quest I was interested in, which was the seasonal easter egg hunt. Bear in mind that I had already done the exact same thing in Animal Crossing a week earlier, and I did it splendidly. I got a full set of the Easter Egg furniture.

It then became obvious that building a WoW character is a lot like Animal Crossing, in that you're supposed to do a lot of things: killing 20 centaurs, finding a walrus a red snapper, killing 20 gnolls, planting flowers and trying to breed a blue rose, sending a party of 40 characters to kill a dragon, sending a party of 40 characters to kill Krazy Redd. They're very similar games, really.

I think the deal-sealer was that Nintendo sent me an in-game couch for my in-game house, shaped like a Nintendo DSi. The week previous, I got a red Pikmin hat, and before that was a green St. Patricks hat.

You see, I happen to like that Animal Crossing has no levels or ways to kill characters or anything like that. World of Warcraft does appeal to my desire to collect absolutely everything in the game to see what they do, but the problem is that I have to kill 4,000,000 zombies to do it.

If you want to see the future, Winston, it's Tom Nook's foot, smashing into your face, over and over and over again.

It's not that Animal Crossing doesn't have flaws. The Wii version is the same damn game as all the others, with a few annoying tics to make a learning curve inherent. For example, players and animals build trails based on where they walk most. It took me a few weeks until I realized that my entire village was beginning to look like Planet Arrakis. I now have been spending every last Bell on flowers, the only way to reseed your village's brown.

So, despite Animal Crossing being a flawed game, it's still way more fun than World of Warcraft. Of course, I'm deeply disturbed, and Animal Crossing is the video game equivalent of a padded looney bin cell, where absolutely nothing can possibly be a stressor, so it might, just might, not be for you.

Weekly Geek Flickr Pool Finds

Thu, 07 May 2009 09:18:00 -0800

Lemmings tattoo - darlaa sproklett

Resident Evil Perler Bead Project - Gamer Grrlz

My Mario Plant Garden - Faith9990

A New Challenge - JSMc

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

The Weekly Geek on Twitter

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:10:01 -0800

I just started an official Weekly Geek Twitter account, which you can follow to keep up to date with the podcast and the blog - as well as read tweets from the entire Weekly Geek crew. We'll update multiple times a day with interesting links and commentary about what we're playing/cooking/reading in REAL TIME. Crazy!

In addition, everyone in the WG crew has their own personal Twitter account (listed on the sidebar) in case you want to follow someone (or everyone!) individually.

Click here to follow The Weekly Geek on Twitter!

Podcast for 05.04.09 | Calm Before the Storm

Mon, 04 May 2009 19:05:48 -0800

Can you feel that tingle in the air? The excitement turns palpable as Jinny and Ryan's race to 9000 comes to a head - they're both at 8000+ and one of them is going to hit 9000 soon, but who? The super-famous Ross Rosenberg also joins us to talk about some video game news, Myst and Peggle on the iphone, PixelJunk Monsters on the PSP and a super nerdy (and possibly awesome) Lord of the Rings fan movie that definitely bears mentioning. Also this week we have a super special bonus, Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer joins us for the last bits of the podcast to discuss Mint's new Financial Fitness feature - turning personal finance into a race for arbitrary points, just like achievements! FINALLY, A REASON TO SAVE MONEY.

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Weekly Geek Community Flickr Pool Photo Of the Week

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:43:31 -0800

[Doppelganger - JSMC]

[Mini Dirt Cupcakes - Madame L.]

[Readymade for disaster - sparktography]

Submit your photos to the Weekly Geek Flickr Pool and get your cool or otherwise geeky photo featured on the site. Prizes are involved. Click here.

24 Kobolds

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:41:33 -0800

Custom Shy Guy Mini Munny

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:27:51 -0800

I made another custom Mini Munny this week, this time around it's Shy Guy from Super Mario Brothers. His mask isn't formed to fit his head like most depictions, I wanted to make him look a bit more like the slimmer, more agile Shy Guys from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Click the pictures to zoom (goes to my flickr).

I think he turned out pretty badass.

Podcast for 04.27.09 | World of Pegglecraft

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:53:34 -0800

What makes a hardcore gamer hardcore? Why does the hardcore gamer have a beef with the casual? Join me, Jinny and Ross this week as we tackle this debate of hardcore vs. casual, and the elitists therein. We also discuss how Peggle inside World of Warcraft is potentially a society-crashing invention, how LEGO Rock Band isn't solely a cash-in game, and much much more.

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Share your photos with the Weekly Geek Flickr pool

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:03:43 -0800

We've set up a Weekly Geek community Flickr pool and we need you lovely community members to fill it up with your photos. Did you try making home made corn dogs? Add a photo to the pool! Did you make your own Settlers of Catan board out of cupcakes? Add a photo to the pool! Add any photos you find especially geeky to our new Flickr pool and have your photo featured here every week. I'll pick one exceptionally geeky (or otherwise awesome) photo a week and send the lucky winner a prize. We've got a ton of stuff to liquidate here, including some Halo shirts, posters, Nintendo Power pins, mini prints, and even some Weekly Geek pinback buttons. All you gotta do is submit photos to the pool, which is not only super easy to do, it's free!

Click here to join now!

dust off the wii, bit.trip beat is worth your five dollars

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:14:42 -0800

With all of the incredible shit that you can download directly to your consoles these days, there's almost no reason anymore to get off your ass and head to the store. Unfortunately there's a bunch of stuff out there in the cloud, and not a lot of games rise to the surface to separate the great from the crap - just look at all of the horribleness that's on the XNA community games list. The WiiWare lineup is just the same, it's mostly cash-in half-assed crap that's not even worth your time. Heck, I hadn't even turned my Wii on in months were it not for this game. This amazing, beautiful game. This wonderful, glorious, deliciously difficult game. This game is bit.trip beat.

Disclaimer: bit.trip beat is the kind of game that feels catered just for me. I only want to play bit.trip beat for the rest of my life ever. The upshot is that it's PongRez. Or RezPong. RezPongGuitarHeroRockBand. In space. With Atari graphics. From the future.

Basically bit.trip beat is one of those games that seems like some form of therapy made specifically for autistic children. It requires so much concentration as it progresses, my brain started to hurt in ways it hasn't hurt since Braid. Much like Flower, bit.trip beat is smattered with those moments that make you grin a cheshire cat smile. A sort of "I see what you did there" respect for the developer. The best example of this is the death mechanic. As you miss (and you'll miss a lot in the beginning) your life meter goes down until finally you enter the "nether".

When you enter the Nether, the graphics become pure black and white. The music and beats become monotone - and they play only out of the Wii remote speaker. The small, tinny beats are so effective in motivating you to win back your life, it makes me wonder why more games haven't included something like this. It's perfect.

Even the motion controls don't bother me. Normally I'd scoff when a game tells me to control something using only the tilting back and forth mechanism of the Wii remote, but the controls don't feel tacked on like in other games. The controls feel perfectly suited to the gameplay, and vice versa. I can't imagine playing the game any other way.

bit.trip beat is only 500 Wii moon moneys, which translates into about five of your American dollars. It is worth twice that. It has replay value up the wazoo and rewards multiple play-throughs. You'll love whipping it out at parties to show everyone the incredibleness.

Did I mention it also has 4 player local co-op? If you don't have any friends, now's the time to kidnap some.

Show Your Enthusiasm in Style

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:54:28 -0800

Did you know we have official Weekly Geek t-shirts? It's true! Not only can you support your favorite podcast (subscribe!) but you can show your love for the best exclamation ever uttered by mankind. These Huzzah! shirts are super high quality from the lovely gents at SplitReason, printed on American Apparel tees and shipped straight to your door. How kind.

Pick one up today!

YPS: Pet Shop Boys - Love, Etc

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:31:40 -0800

I went through a New Wave phase in High School, after listening to nothing but Portishead for about a year I needed a major pick-me-up. One of my friends introduced me to Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys, and it was all over. I went through each of their respective back catalogs and didn't listen to anything but New Wave until rainbows shot out of my eye sockets. The Pet Shop Boys, like any band who was once popular and then faded into obscurity, continue to release albums that frankly just aren't very good. Enter the recently released Yes, a fresh take on the Pet Shop Boys sound. Here's the first track (and first single) off of the album. It's bright and catchy and displays all the attributes that make the Pet Shop Boys great.

The rest of the album feels like returning home. It's the same PSB sound, but renewed. It's familiar yet unfamiliar and interesting at the same time. Even more incentive to check out this new wave of New Wave? Owen Pallett does the orchestral arrangements. Aww yeah.

Check Yes out on Amazon. It's worth your attention.

How Did I Get Here?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:30:05 -0800

Every week when I compile this list of actual search terms people have used to get to this site a little bit of blood starts dripping out of my ears. It's not much, but cumulatively I think I have probably lost about 3 liters of blood from my brain in the time since I started this feature. It's a real problem. This week I'm focusing on some of the... more strange terms. Because of the... strangeness, I'm skipping the requisite Google Image Search link.

hobo show.com
snake hibernaculum
awkward boners
tasty earwax confections
precious moments clip art
real turds in a toilet
please rub my man parts ryan g biv
how moms can fix ps2
why won't chris furniss return my phone calls?
can i get an std from a potato?
self actualization through coffee enemas
alton brown gets a brazilian

No Billy, I don't think you can get an STD from a potato. But be sure to wear a condom just to be safe. Join us next week when I *collapses into a massive seizure*

Podcast for 04.20.09 | Tangent

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:14:52 -0800

This week's podcast is full of tangents with me, Ross, Ryan and Qais talking about the new Fallout game (and subsequent TV show/movie?), zombie board games and Bioshock 2. Jinny then joins us to talk about Fat Princess, Starcraft II and Drop7. We then give you an update on the race to NINE THOUSAND and crack open the mailbag to continue the fight for the right to be called The Weekly Geek's #1 fan.

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Video: Emerald City Comicon 2009

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:24:32 -0800

It wasn't too long ago that Chris, Ryan, Ross and I were ranting about douchebag comic artists, swooning over Derek Kirk Kim (Ok, I was doing most of the swooning), and gushing excitedly about purchasing amazing, new art. Yes folks, we dedicated an entire podcast to Emerald City Comicon. If you felt the podcast lacked a certain visual element, you're in luck. Friend of the site, Andrea, put together this awesome video of the event. If you like it, head over to her YouTube site and check out the rest of her stuff. I particularly like the BrickCon 2008 videos.

The Weekly Geek - Swagger Like Us

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:49:25 -0800

As a recent transplant to the greater Seattle area fortune quickly dropped me at the doorstep of The Weekly Geek Headquarters. With vision blurred from the incessant bass rhythm pulsing out the door and nostrils stinging from an indescribably foreign yet appetizing odor I gulped a few calming breaths and prayed they wouldn't be my last.

The door opened, reality spliced.

While there are actual people behind the voices you know and love their physical bodies have been duplicated in a hellish mockery of synthetic bone and flesh. They send these mechanical doppelgangers to their day jobs, out to the market, or downstairs to accept shipments of oddly soiled wooden crates and tiny, paper wrapped bundles of hard to find meats.

It's genius really, and appears to be wildly successful as no one has yet uncovered their cosmic ruse.

The real Chris, Jinny, and Qais were sitting on opulent thrones of Persian pillows, each calmly snacking on a a variety of unsavory morsels piled at their feet. Standing behind them, as silent sentries, were their robotic doubles; twin animatronic likenesses staring blankly as if awaiting instruction.

"Play for us, RYAN G. BIV" they cried in unison, "Play for us FOREVER."

Before I could scramble for the door the robots had thrust a Rockband guitar in my hands and computed the password to my gamertag. Terrified, I plucked for the first time the notes that would ensnare a part of me long devoid of Sheer Enjoyment.

Join me in the video above as I play for my life, powerless to resist the sheer force that is The Weekly Geek and their twisted, evil Rockband Bots.

Podcast for 04.13.09 | I'm Your #1 Fan

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:43:53 -0800

Have you ever had the feeling someone's watching you? Hm... this week's podcast takes an interesting turn as the fight for the Weekly Geek's #1 fan comes to a head. LIOR LAYS THE SMACK DOWN. I'm telling you, it's epic. Join me, Jinny and Ryan this week as we discuss Will Wright leaving EA, Shadow of The Colossus being turned into a Major Motion Picture&trade, Bioshock 2's first footage, ecstasy pills found in a used copy of GTAIV, and the NEOGAF thread with the Criterion covers of video games. We also eat our words regarding Resident Evil 5 and read some absolutely amazingly epic mailbag letters.

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How Did I Get Here?

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:01:09 -0800

A brand-new month means a brand-new set of crazy things people have typed into search engines to get to this site. Yes, they are real. Yes, they are insane. Be sure to click through to the Google Image Search results! Here we gooooooooo

He sure does. Speaking of weirdness, would you guys be interested in an "I'm too porno for my wimple" t-shirt?

Forget the Freezer Aisle, Make Corn Dogs At Home!

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:37:33 -0800

Jinny is known for her random outbursts. Every once in a while, she'll just be sitting there on the couch and say something like: "I want waffles!" or "TEATIME!" And I feel obliged to sate her snack-lust. It's like a challenge for me. The weirder her request, the more excited and inspired I get. A few days ago, while gorging herself on Sour Punch Straws and playing Civilization Revolution on the 360 in a sugar-induced daze she exclaimed "I WANT CORN DOGS!"

Well we didn't have any corn dogs. But how hard is a corn dog to make, really? Turns out it's not hard at all. In fact, I'd say making your own corn dogs at home is one of the most fulfilling things you can do in your life. Screw publishing a great novel or seeing your kids go off to college, corn dog alchemy is the bestest. So, how is it done?

The Upshot:

Take a thicker version of a basic corn bread recipe and dip skewered hot dogs into it and deep fry. Make a huge batch and freeze to microwave later.

The Hardware:

A Deep Fryer (or a deep pan, oil, and a frying thermometer)
Wooden sticks for stickin' (thin bamboo skewers work great)
A baking sheet with a wire cooling rack for drainage (paper towels also work fine)
A tall drinking glass
A mixing bowl
A spoon for mixin'

The Ingredients:

The best, tastiest hot dogs you can find. I prefer either Hebrew National 100% beef, or Kirkland Signature Costco dogs (cut in half).
A basic corn bread recipe (seen below)

Basic Corn Bread Recipe (adapted from The Kitchn)

1 1/4 cups yellow cornmeal
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon sugar (or honey)
1 teaspoon coarse salt
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk (or regular milk)

The Process:

Heat your frying oil to 350-375
Mix your corn bread batter in your bowl and adjust for thickness by adding more flour if it's too thin, more milk if it's too thick. You want something as thick as pancake batter.
Pour your batter into a tall drinking glass. Don't drink it! It is not delicious yet!
Stick your sticks through your hot dogs until about half way up the dog, so you have a little handle on one end.
Dip the dog into the batter, swirling it around in the glass to coat. Gently pull it out and let the batter drip off a bit. You want a nice even coat all around the dog.
If your oil is at temp, quickly dip your battered dog into the oil. As it cooks, shake the basket or rotate it with some tongs so it cooks consistently all around. Depending on the size of your fryer, you can probably fit 2 or 3 corn dogs in one batch.
Once the corn dog looks like it's *almost* golden brown (see picture), take it out and put it on your wire rack. This should take about 4 or 5 minutes.
Repeat with the remaining hot dogs, adding more batter to the glass from the bowl as needed.

Keep in mind that with any fry job, the first couple things you fry may look a little wonky. Your fryer will also perform better if the oil has been seasoned from multiple uses. Don't worry about cleaning your fryer so much. Honestly, the oil won't go bad easily. If it smells off, throw it out. If it smells delicious then yay. Once the corn dogs have cooled (and if you haven't eaten them all by then) you can throw them into freezer bags and save them for later. Pop em in the microwave for a minute or so. They hold up surprisingly well. See how easy it is to make corn dogs at home? There is literally no reason to buy the crap they sell in the freezer section at the grocery store.

Feel free to experiment with batter additives (a dash of garlic powder, or some minced jalapenos would be nice), hot dog brands and dipping sauces. I like to dip 'em in mustard. Ketchup is for children and people with poor taste in things. Enjoy!

Podcast for 04.06.09 | Comics!

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:06:08 -0800

Jinny, Ryan and I visited the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle this weekend and walked away with some pretty amazing art from some incredible artists. This week's podcast is all about that, with Ross in tow to chat about the good, the bad, and the completely awesome. We tell you about some of the cool stuff we saw at the con, and discuss con etiquette. There's some video game talk at the end, so if that's your thing, we won't blame you. It's there. For you. Enjoy.

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The Weekly Filmschool: Animation Numero Dos

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:30:43 -0800

As the end of the semester looms like a freshly detonated whale carcass on a nudist beach, I have decided to do an equally ambitious animation as my previous cel project. This time, however, in digital.

I have a bit of a personality flaw. It forces me to try and be better than everybody else. Not in a constructive way where I simply want to excel, I just don't want others to outshine me. So when it came time to decide what to do for a final project for my Digital Animation class, the choice was simple: do a 12-minute narrative of equal quality to something you'd see on TV. It's perfect in that nothing like this has ever been done at this college, and it cheeses off the beatnick, avant garde, latte-swillers that make of 98% of the film school.

So how does one create such a thing? Is it even possible to do in less than a month? We'll see on both counts. I'll be posting updates of my progress over the next month, and then post the final product on April 30th.

In the meantime, here's some material to better know the characters I'll be using:

Synopsis:
Lars gets fed up with constant power outages during a heatwave, so he builds his own nuclear reactor. But with increasing numbers of horrifying birth defects and frequent meltdowns, the neighborhood seems to be getting more and more hostile everyday.

The main software program I'll be using is Toon Boom Studio. It's a vector-based animation program. Vector-based means artwork is created by mathematical equations rather than pixels. Adobe Flash and Illustrator are also vector-based.

I'll go into greater detail in the coming weeks as to why Toon Boom is so great, but I'm sure some of you right now are wondering "why not just use Flash?" Flash, while pretty powerful in it own right, was never designed with animation in mind. Its interface can be extraordinarily frustrating when trying to do complex animations. Such as, for instance, Flash does not have a camera. Which makes pans, zooms, and tilts unnecessarily complicated.

Flash's main selling point is it's cheap, and if you're doing simple animations, it's generally good enough. But if you want to do a lot with as little effort as possible, it's Toon Boom all the way.

How Did I Get Here?

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:41:06 -0800

Before we get to a brand new set of completely insane How Did I Get Here entries for April, let's wrap up March! I scoured the whole set of March search terms and picked out the best of the rest. Let it be known that these are real search terms people used to get to this site. They are not fake. I can't make this stuff up. They are genuinely crazy. Remember to click through to the Google Image Search results for extra crazy.

Strangely, the first entry seems to pull up a ton of images from this site. Magical!

No more ghosts!

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:03:22 -0800

Thanks to everybody who sent in a request for Ghosts-by-Mail, and the response was stupidly enormous! NO MORE REQUESTS, PLEASE!

I'll reopen the request window once the blog is set up. The first batch of 10 will go out shortly, and then I'll move on with the rest of you.

Thanks for the excitement, everybody! The ghosts thank you!

Podcast for 03.30.09 | Max and the Island of Misfit Baseball Mascots

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:56:14 -0800

Ross, Ryan, Jinny and Chris come together this week to talk about all the junk they've been geeking out about. We've got GDC news and announcements, news about new Katamari games, Fable DLC and the return of The Phantom, Modern Warfare 2's trailer's effect on the developers versus the commenters, the ridiculous bullshit of OnLive Where the Wild Things Are's stunning trailer (no matter what Ross says), how to make home made corn dogs and mailbag. Yep. That's right. Corn dogs. Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes!

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Music by Tettix

I forgot to mention something vital to the corn dog recipe! You'll need two eggs to go in your batter. I'll do a write-up and link it here this week.

The Ghost-By-Mail Project

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:42:03 -0800

Seckscab here!

Believe it or not, I AM ZEE GREAT ARTIST.

I'm introducing a strange new idea.

I am willing to paint you a ghost, in watercolor, and mail it to you. WHAT IS THE CATCH? You must immediately email afterwards and tell me HOW, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY this ghost died, and provide me with an EXTRA SPOOKY NAME for said horror. Image and description will then be published on a forthcoming blog!

Email me your snail mail address to adorablepuppies@gmail.com. Privacy ensured!

The Weekly Filmschool #1: Cel Animation

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:22:37 -0800

These days the concept of a "hand-drawn" animation is quite alien. Even shows that still animate on paper eventually send everything into a computer program to be inked, colored, or composited. But there was a time when cartoons were inked, colored and composited painstakingly by hand.

First of all I should mention that cel is a horrible, HORRIBLE medium. It's frustrating, tedious, and expensive. However, there isn't an animation or graphics program out there that doesn't base some part of itself on what cel used to do, so it is an important thing to understand. Cel is short for celluloid, which is what animators used a long time ago, but nowadays the sheets are made out of cellulose acetate, a plastic.

So here's how I made this animation.

First off, I made storyboards (which I don't have anymore) to get the basic gist of the layout of all the scenes, and the character's actions.

Then I went onto the computer and made rather large backgrounds. 12 inches by 10 1/2 @ 600 DPI. I was fortunate in that I had access to a plotter that could print everything all at once on one large sheet of glossy paper... for free! The college also has an Acme hole punch. After this I could make the characters interact with the environment.

Every action was painstakingly drawn on animation paper. I used "12-field" size because I wanted these to look good if I decided to make this HD, or even a higher resolution like 4K. Animating was aided with a "field guide"- A plastic grid laid beneath the paper.

After all the action was dawn, I laid a sheet of cel over the paper and traced using a quill pen. It was a bit janky because I used the vinyl paint which clogs the pen tips within a matter of minutes, so I had to work fast. I also had a small fan to help expedite the drying of the lines.

Next came the color! After drying, the cels were flipped over and paint is applied very thick to the back. I mean VERY thick. The rule of thumb is to make pools of paint so it'll look even.

Each cel (and there are hundreds of them) took about a half an hour to complete, and another hour to dry. I had to buy a wire frame shelf unit so air could flow around the cels.

Now that all the cels were painted, it was time to shoot it all onto film. My college has a way of getting a hold of excellent film equipment nobody ever uses. This little treasure is an Oxberry 35mm motion controlled camera stand. It can pan, zoom, or rotate. As well as have two layers of cel move independently of each other. This stand has a lot of history behind it. It shot pretty much every cereal commercial character up until the late 90's, and Matt and Trey used it to animate their South Park pilot episode.

Operating the machine involved tinkering with a very difficult to use computer program. You have to program in every move with a set of wheels, as well as set the parameters for acelleration/decelleration between keyframes (or "easing.") After all that, you shoot a frame by stepping on a foot peddle.

Developing 35mm film is very expensive. I could've just bought a work print of my film (a "positive") but since I couldn't think of a time when I'd be projecting this on an actual 35mm projector, I opted to just get the negative and transfer it to video in a preocess called "telecine" (tell-a-siny.)

The telecine machine is basically just an digital SLR camera mounted on an old photo printer. A photo printer is normally a projector and a film camera pointed at each other, but on this one they removed the film camera so they could build a video to film transfer machine in another room. The telecine machine can take one picture every 10 seconds and deposit it into a folder on a computer as discrete images. These images not only have to be combined into video, but processed quite a bit in Adobe AfterEffects.

Now, film negatives aren't just negatives. They're what are what is called an "orange mask." The exact reason as to why they're orange is complicated, but that's just the reality. It can be very difficult to get the image to look right if you don't know what you're doing.

This can either be done in AfterEffects or a batch process in Photoshop. What you basically have to do is after the colors are inversed, you get out the levels adjustment (or filter in AE) and find an area that is 100% black, and another area that is 100% white with the eyedropper tools. The colors will magically right themselves afterward.

Well, that's basically it. This took over two months of hard work. Once the video was good, I imported it all into Adobe Premier and added sound effects.

Let's say you wanted to create a cel animation. Well you're going to have to buy supplies, dummy! Cartoon Colour is the internet go-to place to get any supplies you need. For just basic stuff, you will need:

1 x Acme Peg bar. This is important! You can't animate by hand without some way of aligning the drawings over one another.
1 x Light table. You will need to be able to see the previous 3 or 4 drawings. This is called "onion skinning" in digital media.
1 x Set of cartooning quill pens. To draw your lines.
1 x set of Vinyl water-based paint. To add color.
Several pairs of white cotton gloves. To make sure you don't smudge or contaminate the cel.
A pack of cel and animation paper (pre-punched.) Pretty obvious this one.

In adition to the above, you will need:

LOTS of free time
No friends
A humidifier. Cel builds up a static charge and will attract whatever garbage is around.
A series of wire-mesh shelves. To allow the freshly painted cel to air dry.
Access to a massive robotic motion control camera (if you want pans or zooms.)

Now, if you're interested in animation, I wouldn't recommend this right off the bat. An Acme peg bar and a pack of pre-punched paper are fairly cheap. A stop-motion program like iStopMotion or Monkey Jam coupled with a cheap camera can go a long way to making your pencil drawings come alive. You could even import those frames into Toon Boom Studio, or Flash and digitally ink and paint them.

Music Review: The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:40:02 -0800

Sometimes a concept can be bigger than the people who convey it. Since signing to major label Capitol, The Decemberists have brought two fanciful (and highly conceptual) folk tales to life.

Frontman Colin Meloy - much maligned for purveying "thesaurus rock" and much beloved for making it tastefully palatable - could care less about the classifications, petty or otherwise. He's only concerned with the story. On The Hazards of Love, Colin and his swarthy, seasoned shipmates have recklessly run ashore, found some friends, and are colonizing the forests.

Much akin to their past works, but drastically cross-hatched, Hazards incorporates elements of "California One/Youth & Beauty Brigade", the pastiche prog themes from The Tain, and the solemnity of preceding Crane Wife. It's unmistakably Decemberists, and undeniably new. With this record, unlike past Meloy-led expeditions - which upon repeated listening leaves a campy residue - is a maturation of sorts; a culmination.

Opening number "Prelude" bleeds with organs into a crisp, revealing "Hazards of Love 1" where Colin's character shape-shifts from a fawn into a suitor for the angelic Margaret (voiced by Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark). Their courtship is contested by the searing Forest Queen (played by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden). Eventually, as in all their morbid tales, the couple succumbs; they're held captive by the angry river and they drown with a kiss. ("We Both Go Down Together" ring a bell?)

But the real glory is the insular drama of the centerpiece tracks in Hazards. Worden's Forest Queen reigns supreme with vocal strength such that her wrath is well remembered long after (see "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid" and "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing"). A bitter widower kills his children to become a bachelor and the youngsters come back to haunt him in "Hazards of Love 3", recalling their own deaths like something out of an Edward Gorey illustration.

But the oak in the center of Hazard's woods is Margaret's "Won't Want for Love". It's the perfect example of what The Decemberists have become - Meloy and Chris Funk riffing like they're being measured against late-era Zeppelin, John Moen keeping an effectual, but even-tempered beat resembling Mick Fleetwood, and Jen Conlee hammering keys with a Pink Floyd-like precision.

It's ironic that with such a devoted fan base and such an unalienable, literary-obsessed style, that The Decemberists has arrived at what might be their career's magnum opus by loosening the resolutely-gripped reins on their sound and allowing guest performers to shape their destiny along with them.

Stark's recurring chorus "I may swoon from all this swaying/but I won't want for love" is the revelation here; you can't help but adore the strange path that The Decemberists have carved. And if Hazards of Love is but a landmark in their journey, the end point will be unimaginably grand.

Podcast for 03.23.09 | Drop It Like It's Hot

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:34:52 -0800

The usual cast gets their geek on this week, talkin' bout Battlestar Galactica (no spoilers, we swear!) and what we really expect from a series finale. It's also GDC time, so we discuss a little gaming news and declare the iPhone a viable gaming platform. Why, you ask? Well you'll just have to listen to the show! We also discuss the existential weirdness that is Instant Action, and how PC gaming may just rise from the ashes. Ross also introduces us to a very intriguing PC game called The Path, and then we all gush about a little iPhone game called Drop 7. Lots of mailbag, too. Remember to subscribe in iTunes by going to weeklygeekitunes.com!

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How Did I Get Here? Negativity Edition!

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:21:27 -0800

As I scroll down the list of completely ridiculous terms people actually type into search engines in order to end up at The Weekly Geek, often times I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something. This week I'm showcasing the month's most negative and insulting search terms. Be sure to click through to the Google Image Search result for added angst!

I hope you're happy, Internet. I hope you're happy. *Runs away sobbing*

Dr. Helmig is dead. Long Live Dr. Helmig!

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:33:00 -0800

Ok, folks. Here's the deal.

As you may or may not know, I am a film student. Film is a very time-consuming, very difficult process. Even major studios take years and hire hundreds of people to make a simple two-hour movie everybody hates. Learning about it is even more daunting, and Dr. Helmig is competing for freetime I just don't have anymore.

But I'm not ending it. No! Instead I'm expanding what I do here at the Weekly Geek. The comic will update basically whenever the heck I feel like it and in between those sparse comic updates will be demos, showcases, and how-to's on video production, animation, and photography. Basically a dumping ground for all the things I learn and/or produce in film school. One week I'll show you how to animate on cell, the next I might show you how to do good green screen compositing, or I might just show you a funny video I made.

This all starts next week. Until then, I'll show you a little animation I did about a year ago. This was actually painted on cell, and shot underneath a 35mm camera.

Next Thursday, I'll show you how I made it.

Away We Go

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:36:22 -0800

While this movie smacks loudly of the often over-used Wes Anderson/twee/emo/Little Miss Sunshine brand of filmmaking, I am starting to really appreciate the fact that our generation has these kinds of romantic comedies instead of the shitty You've Got Mail style of the 90's. Here's Away We Go, featuring a cast made up entirely of awesome people.

Disclaimer: I am completely gay for these kinds of movies.

[link via The Slog]

Podcast for 03.16.09 | Embarrassing

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:26:26 -0800

After listening to this week's podcast, you're going to seriously re-think the way you view the world. It is that mind-blowing. What kind of podcast deserves this much hyperbole? Why, one with me, Jinny and Ross, of course! Join us this week as we discuss the most recent Bioshock 2 rumor quashing, pointing fingers at who started it and who propagated it. After the actual details are revealed, we ponder if sequels actually tarnish their source material in any way. Professor Layton is seeing a new trilogy in Japan, but will we see it in the states? Then, I recommend a podcast for the first time ever, and we berate the SciFi channel for their ridiculous re-branding. I also talk about tater tots. Then we open the mailbag. These are exciting times, my friend. Exciting times that call for an exciting podcast. Won't you listen?

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All music by Tettix! DOWNLOAD HIS MUSIC! He is amazing!

How Did I Get Here?

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:44:47 -0800

It's Friday! You know what that means? More batshit crazy search terms from The Weekly Geek's raw server logs. Each one of these terms are actual phrases someone typed into a search engine in order to get here. Each week is just another layer in the onion of insanity. And if you read them all together, it kind of sounds like a beat poem! Like always, click the phrase to get the Google Image Search result. Onward!

You really can't make this shit up.

Get a mask of your own face. Fool your friends, scare the cat!

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:28:51 -0800

The Internet truly is a treasure trove of weirdness. Enter That's My Face, a site where you can upload a few photos of your face and blammo you get a mask, action figure, 3d crystal (!) or any number of other forms of terrifying simulacra.

The Internet never ceases to amaze/horrify me. I want a mask of my own face to wear to costume parties. Best. Costume. Evar.

[link via @archiemcphee]