Lists of things that I have enjoyed in recent years, online or offline, to be updated indefinitely. If I’ve linked to your art/works, identity, etc. improperly, please let me know. Click to expand/collapse.
Cohost user @blaze-casual made this half-set of veney pieces from polymer modeling clay and captured the vibe of the pieces I sketched so well. This post won’t stay up for long, as Cohost is set to be going offline completely at the end of 2024, but hopefully the artist will put them up somewhere else.
High-energy rocks assembled by a longtime veney supporter. These remind me of a type of rock I used to pick out from the gravel around the house where I grew up. I still have one (in a veney set). Mine, I thought was jade? Maybe it’s aquamarine. I’m actually not very good with rocks.
Video talk with GM Jonathan Rowson, interviewed by IM Sagar Shah of ChessBase India. There’s probably too much to say here about Rowson’s chess ideas. I think at one point in this video, he says something about it being a “kind of Taoist” point of view (paraphrasing). I remember feeling a bit confused, because it all sounds extremely Taoist to me, and that’s why I’m into it. Anyway, I put some more Jonathan Rowson interviews in a collapsible partway through my blog post reviewing The Solved Game.
This story is one my favorite things I’ve ever read. For one thing, for a story about people essentially stuck in two different locations, it’s incredibly exciting. It can also be somewhat dark, depending on the perspective you bring to it, with themes of trauma, addiction, unhealthy, fixation in the face of oblivion. Definitely don’t look into this one too much if you’re not in a resilient headspace. But I believe there is an instructive thing within.
The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, 2nd Edition, by David B. Pritchard, Ed. John & Sue Beasley. A definitive and yet not-definitive collection of chess variants, organized usefully by qualities/mechacnics/etc.
Cohost user f.k.a. harphony (who seems to have logged off some time before the shutdown announcement) describes a turn sequence for chess and similar games intended to nullify the first-move advantage. Since I can’t locate the original author, and the post will not survive to 2025, I’m going to copy the text below. I’ve wracked my little brains trying to figure out an elegant way to make some sort of automatic/analog version of this sequence using an intuitive game object. It would probably be easier to make a rudimentary version of it that instead quickly becomes the standard ABABAB... anyway, the text:
“Let A denote a white turn, and B denote a black turn. In order to fully negate the advantage accrued by white by going first, instead of the turns going ABABAB indefinitely, they use the following sequence:
ABBABAABBAABABBA...
in order to generate this sequence, simply at each power-of-two number of turns (1st,2nd,4th,8th,...) write your sequence so far, but with B’s replaced by A’s and A’s replaced by B’s :)
You may put yourself in check on one turn as long as you have another turn and immediately undo it.
en passant is legal even if your opponent took another move directly after it, so long as you immediately play it.”
■ Agadmator’s Ivanchuk breakdowns
YouTube
Vasyl Ivanchuk is my favorite chess player. If you’re not familiar, the short pitch is that he is a frustratingly eccentric strategist even for the best players in the world. He himself was once said to be possibly on his way to becoming world champion, but never made it. He makes some very strange choices and finds things no one would ever see, resulting in titles of chess videos like “Karpov is Helpless against Ivanchuk's Weird Plan”, “Ivanchuk Plays A Weird Move Just to Annoy Kasparov”, and “The Only Man Kasparov Ever Feared”. He is said, affectionately, to live on “Planet Chucky.” I think what’s fun about that joke is the logical continuation of its meaning when paired with the fact that Ivanchuk is known to have an extremely thorough knowledge of opening theory. So, it doesn't really matter how good you are in the opening. He knows his way around. Then he takes you on a trip to Planet Chucky. It’s not just that he lives there. If you want to play him, you have to risk going there.
In all seriousness, I also just find him to be a very charming person. He has fun.
I read this book at exactly the right time in my life for it to hit really hard. The story (and the story of the prior book in the series) is about being a certain kind of mis/valued outsider, trying to be a normal person among people, observing and participating in societies teetering on the edge of tumult, being a gay weirdo and freaking out because nothing makes sense and your dreams are trying to tell you stuff, et cetera. I think anyone who is struggling as a creative person trying to find a job or a place in the world might enjoy this book. The Goodreads reviews for it are... contentious. Is this just how Goodreads is? I have not really engaged with the site much other than this. Anyway, I loved it. I need to re-read it sometime.
I looked away for a few years to be insane, and when I checked in on the author last year, he had started a new epic seemingly written for me and my neuroses. Unknowability. Gleaning. Extremely novel types of kicks.
This is a fairly humongous semi-autobigraphical manga history of Japan in the Showa era of 1926‒1989. It has helped me, so far, to connect with the subject matter a bit; My grandmother was born and grew up in Japan during this time. Some pretty grim stuff in here, some gorgeous and foreboding chapter illustrations, plus commentary from a character named “Rat Man.” Also, there’s a lot of talk of ghosts and folklore, at least in the first volume. Mizuki is better known for making comics and shows about yokai.
A few years back, my partner and I learned that we were living in the same neighborhood as a building where this guy Burr Tillstrom used to live. He made some puppets and had a puppet show on TV with entertainer Fran Allison. Looked it up, and it turns out someone is digitizing the whole archives of the show from the Chicago History Museum. I became obsessed. Kukla is a strange sort of precocious and sensitive boy thing with sort of a Charlie Brown style bald-old-man-child syndrome going on, except he’s beloved by all. He claims to understand quantum physics. Ollie is a cheetah-print(?) dragon with a beautiful mane of hair and one big tooth. He gets a bit ahead of himself, is prideful, dramatic, accidentally eats things. They have some puppet roommates and friends, and then there’s Fran, an adult human woman who seemingly lives with them in an unseen, unknowable puppet home world off-stage.
Watching Fran have thoughtful little conversations with Kukla is often transportative in that surreal puppet way. And for Burr’s part, he shows incredible skill with his characters. They frequently have spontaneous misunderstandings, banter with amazing speed and do/say things that only separate individuals would do. Fran often seems to forget they're characters. In this episode, they all get a bit crazier than usual.
Warning for general 1950’s white American social worldview regarding all things race, women, Japan, the “frontier” mythos and mistreatment of native people, et cetera. There’s nothing really hateful, but, you know, it’s TV and it’s gonna be like that. Lots of product placement for Ford and laundry soap. I think Burr was a good person. Just a gay puppet man.
Okay, I know everyone knows about the PriceMaster at this point, but I had to put it on the list. He’s a funny little guy, and I’m curating something here. The intro text quoting Marshall McLuhan puts it very well: “...Humor as a system of communications, and as a probe of our environment‒of what's really going on‒affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide in changing perceptions.” The date of February 2001 is also amazing to me, and that this was going on in a weird art school town in Texas. I feel like this kind of engagement between art jokers and everyday folks just cannot happen anymore in America today. I hope I’m wrong.
I know I’m not really breaking any niche ground here by sharing links to Japanese 1990s–2000s jazz that we’ve all seen go up on YouTube in the past 5‒10 years. But... this song. I tend to overdo things, and I have to make myself not listen to this too often–I could end every day with it.
Priests was a band that, while they were one and still to this day, gave me such a persistent sense of confusion as to why everyone around me is not obsessed with them. Run around thrashing and crying, exultant, wall-climbing, Kate Bush is mad at you and now you’re both mad together and you’re starting a cult, flipping everything upside down type music.
The amazing OK Glass, ft. Amy Carstensen and Jesse Greenberg. Oh, what a perfect world this world would be if only folks like you would bring your dog to the bar.
We make okonomiyaki a lot. Probably too much. This is the recipe we use for the basic proportions; we use bonito flakes instead of pork, sometimes an extra egg yolk or a little more tofu if the batter seems dry, lots of aonori furikake on top and green onion (not listed in this recipe, for shame), and we just buy okonomi sauce from the store. It’s really nice to have something elaborate and almost excessively delicious that you’ve cooked so many times that you’ve got a process down and a rhythm and can whip it up quick.
Plus, cabbage and tofu is not expensive. The bonito and the furikake last a while. The sauces are a bit pricey, though. I tried making okonomi sauce once, and it was okay. The mayo doesn’t need to be kewpie, and, you know what, we could be simply putting MSG in regular American mayo, saving money and skipping the plastic bladder-bottle waste. It’s all worth it for okonomiyaki night. Getting that stainless steel pan super hot... flipping those pancakes in the air. Man. I love okonomiyaki.
Okay, so about the yam. There’s this yam known as nagaimo in Japan, aka mountain yam. Cutting and grating nagaimo creates a sort of frothy, mucilaginous slime. It’s not particularly flavorful, but what it does is add an amazing bounciness to the batter. I've seen others say that most Japanese people, enjoyers of okonomiyaki, will assert that it’s not right without the grated yam as an ingredient. (The recipe linked above does not mention nagaimo, probably thinking of the American audience.) The thing is, okonomiyaki basically means [grilled] “as you like,” as in, whatever you want in it. Kind of hypocritical. Though I understand that there must be limits on that wide latitude, and the basic substrate of the thing has to work right for it to be the thing at all...
We did try the yam. We found some very expensive South Korean imported nagaimo and bough it as a treat, dehydrated and powderized what we couldn’t use in the first batch. I admit, it was pretty amazing. Totally changed the texture of the batter. I love yams in general, so, I don’t know why I was skeptical. Just really expensive. I would say unless you’re already all-in on trying various authentic recipes with elaborate fidelity, go ahead and try okonomiyaki without it (using tofu or panko bread crumbs for similar volume), and it’ll still be great. If you become as obsessed with it as we are at our house, spring for nagaimo. And if you live already somewhere they grow nagaimo, send me some.
■ Buckwheat
Earth
No link here. Just buckwheat. It’s great, check it out.