vampyrichamster

This month saw two titles drop that we'd been anticipating. The first is Graveyard Keeper 2, the sequel to a beloved slow-life sim that's been around on Steam (where the first game is free). We played the first game a couple of years ago because it is also included on Playstation Plus. The second game is a direct follow-up of the first, following our hapless protagonist transported to another world mired in dark-humoured, Eastern European medieval fantasy chic. It's like Harvest Moon for weirdos. Or...uh, if I have to use a games millenials might recognise, Stardew Valley, but your job is burying people.

You: How the fuck is that remotely like Stardew Valley?
Me: If you set aside the talking skull, witch burnings, cannibalism, necromancy, irreverence for organised religion and rude treatment of corpses...
You: <dead eyes>
Me: There's farming! And fishing! And crafting!
You: Oh, yeah? What do you craft? Gravestones and iron maidens?
Me: <furtive glancing about> What? No, no. Perfectly normal hammers and nails. And bookshelves. And zombies.
You: <dead eyes>
Me: There's also cooking! You can brew your own beer!

Seriously though, it's the kind of game you pull up at the end of the work day when your brain is frazzled and you just want to grow some carrots and slowly chisel (perfectly non-deadly) weeping angels. It's a weirdly pleasant and soothing, even wholesome. Just ignore for a second my idea of wholesome could be completely broken. 

The other game we've been playing is something we anticipated, saw the trailer for, played the demo for, and lost about 60% of our motivation about, yet got anyway because we really want them to keep making this game. That would be Brigandine: Abyss. Back during COVID, the previous instalment, Brigandine: Runersia, fell out of the sky one day and blew us away with its lovingly-crafted, epic grid strategising. It felt very much like a homage to classic grid-based tactical RPGs. We bought it after being blown away by the beautiful painted cover art and seeing it was an SRPG, which was facing a series of lean years at the time. Then we were blown away by the amount of detail in the game's world-building and the strategy gameplay itself.

We, or at least I, spent the first week of playing Brigandine: Abyss while talking smack about it. The major reason was the art. Runersia's art looked like painted character illustrations ready for their own fantasy collectible card collection. Sure, the way chests were drawn on men and women was distracting, but in the realm of slightly pervy fantasy art, they were still well-drawn distractions. Abyss's art is generically anime-style. We're talking so lo-fi, it reminded me of the bland illustrations you'd find in an early 2010s Compile Heart game, back when they were putting out RPGs every minute. 50 or so hours of playtime later, I've adjusted with lingering bitterness.

Brigandine games usually revolve around controlling one of a handful of factions to conquer a continent. The real meat of the titles is the unique storyline of each playable faction, and in particular, the vast array of recruitable NPCs you can gain as leaders for your army of monsters. These NPCs are often quirky characters in themselves. Each comes with a unique biography you can read, and many of them are interconnected with each other, encouraging you to find and collect their counterparts if you can. In Runersia, the game actively encouraged you to do this by making it an in-game achievement, rewarding you with hidden cutscenes locked to hitting events or playing specific factions, as well as personal conversations if you got two connected characters together on the battlefield. Abyss hard-locks these interactions only with characters from within the same factional storyline, saving none for "independent" NPCs any faction can recruit or even NPCs from other storylines. The loss of interactivity was a big bummer because collecting those stories became kind of a side-obsession between us when we tag-teamed Runersia. Implied character connectivity is still there in the NPC biographies, and I still take the time to read them, but there's a lot of missed potential. Runersia had only six factions but over 100 recruitable NPCs. Abyss has 24 factions and also about 100 NPCs, with five playable factions in story mode. We joked that they made the five most boring factions the ones with main storylines. I'm going to say this upfront, I wouldn't play Brigandine: Runersia or Abyss for the writing quality. However, each of Runersia's factions had some kind of dark or weird twist to them that was worth finding out. And after each playthrough, I honestly cared for the guys I was helping take over the world. The first faction I played in Abyss, the Pandemyuon, started out promising as the faction run by a mad scientist and his experimental hybrid warriors, only to immediately become a hackneyed plot about a runaway experiment finding redemption with a saintess. I grimaced through the bad web novel dialogue just hoping something better would happen and it did. The story has many cheesy flaws, but it still put up a plausibly interesting tale of freaks getting redemption and justice. There is a twist, an actually great one. However, the way that twist was resolved still leaves me wishing the ideas they were throwing into the hat would sometimes be less predictable. It does give me tentative hope for the other factions though.

Now, I spent the first week of Brigandine: Abyss talking smack about it while we tried to eke even part of the cost back in playtime by starting a playthrough for every single playable faction. We spent the first week talking smack about this game, and still played it consistently on our non-MMO off time since it came out, which might tell you...this thing is an addictive horror of one-more-turns.  We play Brigadine: Abyss more than Star Wars Zero Company, which came out the same day, is made by the people who rebooted X-COM and is basically X-COM in shiny Star Wars skins. Do we regret buying Abyss at present? No.

We started out on Normal difficulty and found it actually rather challenging. Each faction has genuine strengths and weaknesses starting out, and they're not built to be balanced or ever powerful at the beginning. Some factions are definitely more unfortunate than others. I mean, for my second playthrough, I decided to pick up the faction where your starting hero NPCs are literally two fairies and a little girl. Unlike the vast majority of power-fantasy light novels out there, a little girl punching a ninja with her wee balls of light is not great at Level 2. I started my second playthrough on Hard difficulty because I'm difficult. It is noticeably harder. I can't tell you if the hit rate is necessarily worse with the higher difficulty setting because the hit rate at the start of the game is just that bad in general. Enemy units do seem harder to hurt and they do hurt you a lot harder in turn. My experience with Runersia and Abyss's enemy AI is that they're always set to absolutely not attack you until you are within attack range. It is hard, but not impossible, to bait them. Abyss's AI has this weird thing going where enemy casters will stand behind other units and meteor your side to bits like you'd expect, then the healer will just walk up and slap you. At full MP. The dev has apparently said they intend to provide support for their international release, so I'm hoping stuff like this gets patched. It's a great exploit in a hard fight, but man, it's cheap.

So yes, lots of flaws and still a pretty darned fun, addictive distraction. It probably is easier to come into this game if you haven't played Runersia, since that will spare you the jarring difference in art quality. Read the damn NPC bios, the little stories they tell can be more meaningful than the main characters in the factions. Collect your mercs!

It had been a long time since we were able to have a cute spousal date. I feel like about half of that is my fault. Since both of us are foodies and I've had to watch my carbs, this naturally meant we had to cut back on quite a few of things we liked. Like the lovely Italian place on 24th St. I want to survive even though it opened in a lot where the owners (and shop cuisine) changes eerily frequently. Note to self, I should drag Seth back there at some point. We don't want nice food nearby to suddenly be cursed. I would eat anything on special at that place that was not calamari. I'm sure they do excellent calamari. It's really not my protein.

I found out in May that the Legion of Honor was hosting a momentous exhibit on the Etruscans, an otherwise obscure historical subject that Seth happens to have a big interest in. I actually learned about the Etruscans from Seth when I first moved to San Francisco. He told me about this little-known civilisation who scandalised the contemporaneous Greeks and Romans because their women participated as equals with the men at banquets. Greek and Roman women, by comparison, were kind of the prototype for the obedient, unseen woman hidden in the shadowed back rooms of the home. They wove a whole damn lot. To be fair, women of ancient civilisations (including the Etruscans) wove a whole damn lot in general because without machines to make cloth, the process really took up everyone's time. Incidentally. both genders contributed variously to spinning thread, because if cloth took time to make, it would take even longer if the people who didn't weave were not busy making the base material with idle hands. But, Etruscan women could own property. At least until they were conquered by the Romans, Etruscan women even kept and used solely their family names after marriage--and even under Roman influence, they suffixed the husband's surname to their for a while. While comparatively empowered in the social sense, Etruscan genders still did not have equal roles. Men still did the warring and most of the ruling, and women's sphere of influence was primarily the home. The Etruscans were apparently pretty keen on marital harmony too, with depictions in statuary and art showing couples lying together on couches in strong monogamous relationships. Again, not the most patriarchal and strictly functional reltionships common for their neighbours. (I mean, their neighbours thought male homosexual bonding was the height of nobility for crying out loud. Heterosexual sex was for making children.)

More importantly, even though the corpus of knowledge is growing, there's really still not much known about the Etruscans. Their culture was subsumed by the Romans, who took over their city-states. As the Legion of Honor exhibit notes, the Romans absorbed Etruscan knowledge on aquaducts and their numeral system. But over two centuries of conquest, it was the Etruscans who became Roman and lost their culture. We only really know about Etruscan literature from other civilisations mentioning their significant works. Their physical written works, which did in fact exist, were largely destroyed during conquest. Roughly 13,000 pieces of Etruscan writing still exist, most of which are rather short inscriptions scraped together from recovered artifacts and tombs. Because Etruscans were highly religious, their primary ruins still standing are necropolises and temples. You know a written language is in trouble when the longest extant piece of literature we have is 1,400 words found on linen wrappings around an Egyptian mummy some 17th century Czech guy bought as a souvenir in Alexandria. (Just a note, but the Czech guy's treatment of his souvenir is peak we do not do that anymore to historical artifacts. The female mummy was unwrapped and stood up for display with nails.) Historians can roughly read Etruscan text because they use a form of the Greek alphabet, but what the text means has largely only been inferred. The Etruscan language was from an isolate group, that is, unrelated to other known language groups. We don't have many bilingual texts to compare meanings. There is no Rosetta Stone. This is unbelievably as bad as the quipu. The quipu is an Andean method of recording done by knotting string, primarily as numerical notation but historians strongly suspect also for narratives. It was most famously used by the Inca. Spanish conquistadors found these piles of string heretical and burned most of them, thus we have about 1,400 quipu left in collections around the world. A majority of quipu still cannot be read due to lost technique. Even taking into account that not all quipu are whole records, they are records. This still sounds more numerous to me than 13,000 pieces of writing, most primarily a handful of words or less of a name on a statue or grave. 

Having said all this, The Etruscans was a marvelous exhibit. So many rare things I've only ever seen online or read about were on loan. There was the Liber Linteus--the aforementioned mummy wrappings, which actually document a religious calendar. My favourites were a statuette of a couple that is popularly cited as an example of the Etruscan emphasis on marital harmony and a bronze model of a sheep's liver used as a learning tool for hepatomancy (divining by animal entrails). The statuette is a tongue-in-cheek bronze sculpture of a man with one arm around his wife and the other hand groping her breast. The couple are actually gazing fondly at each other and the persons depicted looked to me at least in their forties. When I'd seen photos of the statuette before, I'd assumed it was fairly large, at least the size of a ceramic Madonna statuette, maybe one foot tall. This was because it was so detailed. As I said, you could clearly see the expressions on the couple's faces. In person, the statuette was tiny, probably shorter than my hand. The last time I felt so awed at seeing an artifact in person was probably when we visited the Catherine the Great exhibit in Melbourne and viewed real Old Masters paintings. The sheep liver model, the Liver of Piacenza, is another important example of Etruscan writing, but really, is mostly just super cool. I've read about people divining with animal entrails before and never thought once how you might teach that to apprentices. Turns out, you use detailed liver models with clearly marked zones attributed to your gods. That is legit awesome. The Etruscans sort of led the field of hepatomancy, as their Roman rulers were still sponsoring training for Etruscan diviners long after subjugation. There were examples of Etruscan metalworking in gold, pieces of jewelry but also things like vessels. The Etruscans specialised in granulation, which is basically soldering images on a metal surface using wee dots of molten metal. Very wee dots, some only slightly larger than the full stop at the end of this sentence.  I remember scanning over a goblet on display thinking, "Oh, another engraving," before realising the whole thing was really composed of thousands of tiny golden dots. An ancient artisan must have spent weeks if not months outlining every palm tree on that hand-sized goblet. A set of those and you could very well imagine them doing harm to their maker's eyesight. I basically dragged Seth over once I realised what this was to womansplain that to him. Once we noticed the granulation once, we couldn't un-see it. Like another bracelet on display where the granulated images of people with decorative border was done including on the inner side of the wrist. These were things made in 600 B.C. by hand. Even the bucchero (clay fired black and polished) pieces were amazing. The clay pieces were so well buffed they looked like wrought iron or black metal. Seth pointed out a cheeky black-on-red figure urn whose reverse side depicted a naked man gleefully reaching for a woman at a water basin, She looked back at the man and seemd quite horrified. Probably...these guys weren't married.

As I was about to leave for the gift shop, I caught sight of a small sign posted behind the entrance sayiing there was a complimentary audio tour to accompany all the exhibits, with instructions on how to connect to the museum's network and then scan QR codes on the placards. That nearly made me turn around and start touring the entire exhibit again. Yes, I had noticed people were looking at their phones and some were even holding it to their ears for narration. But the Legion of Honor's basement has no signal, so I assumed at the time these people were accessing a paid audio tour service. Also, I didn't bring headphones. Suitably aghast, I vowed not to make the same mistake when we come for the new exhibit on the Pharoahs in August. We are coming back in August. Seth and I fell prey to one of our greatest weaknesses--little old museum shopkeepers--and bought a discounted membership valid for one person and a guest. It almost immediately went into discounting our purchase of a book on the Etruscans. Pretty sure I'll also come home with some random book next time I'm there too. I don't usually do museum tchotchkes, though I might cave if some pretty glass scarab turns up. I'd be in trouble if they had nice faience tiles or beads.

Once, a long time ago, I was told that when a Muslim child reaches the age of seven, Muhammad was claimed to have said their parents are permitted to beat them if they don't pray. I think I heard it in a religious class. For a good Muslim, praying five times a day is an obligation, so it makes sense a parent would want their child to develop it as a habit, like brushing their teeth. Would a parent beat their child for not brushing their teeth? I suppose most probably won't, but I can imagine the kind who would. A particularly devout Muslim parent might beat their a child for not praying. If we thought about it like maybe disrespecting a god (or a ruler, lord or master). It's a logical, if feudal, reason. 

For the record, my parents never beat me over prayer. I lucked out on the liberal parent lottery for my social context. The reason Muslim prayer came to mind is actually because of research I did for a private reading in San Francisco friends arranged for my latest book, The Society of Vegetarian Cannibals. It was a real honour to be invited. Because I was super chuffed at the chance, I decided I would make the most of it and intersperse my reading with a talk on the status of trans rights in Malaysia. TSoVC, with its interconnection between food, found family and being weird, is also at its heart a story about accepting the fluidity of gender. In the US as in Malaysia, puritanical strands of religion have hijacked politics, relying on crafted narratives about identities to carve their votes. What has always struck me as weird though is how in the US, the trans and by extension LGBTQ+ community fought for their current rights and greater acceptance from a much harder place before, whereas in Malaysia, at least on turning the other cheek towards trans women, the rights and acceptance have eroded to the toxic environment it is today. This was the dichotomy I wanted to convey to my audience.

I know that even as recently as the 1980s, trans people held paegants (though I don't think these were open to the public). My mom remembers that at least one paegant was opened by a local government representative, private event or no. A monograph I have interviews an elderly trans woman who notes that in the 1950s, she openly lived with foreign boyfriends she met in clubs. I'm not saying these things were necessarily by the letter of the law, or that everyone was groovy, but the sum of these allowances already require unimaginably more social tolerance. Factually, until a 1983 fatwa banned sex reassignment surgery (SRS) for Muslim transsexuals, trans people (irrespective of preferred gender/race/religion) could get SRS in public hospitals. The ban on SRS for Muslims impacted access to SRS for everyone else. Though theoretically possible, medical institutions in Malaysia no longer perform SRS. Those seeking it typically go to foreign countries, notably neighbouring Thailand.

I spent a month before my reading researching how the past four decades have changed for trans rights in my country for the worse. I took pages of notes I eventually memorised so well I didn't have to open my notebook at the reading. I read excerpts about a guy hearing firsthand from the coroner that his cousin's body was denied a formal funeral for being 'altered' and a ten-course funerary feast memorialising the deceased by gourmetizing their remains. I was really fucking nervous. I hope they had fun. I was happy to see all the people who turned up, at least one friend I had not seen in a decade and who looked amazing. I still hope they had fun. I promise you I had fun too.

Afterwards, I realised my researching zeal kind of did me in. I thought I was cynical enough to withstand reading about how bad it's gotten. I'm not. The realisation was a necessary humbling experience. 

What ultimately kept me from even talking about my reading until now was a small, silly reason. It was a footnote in an article about how schools separate trans kids for (religious-based) counselling. There was a mention that girls were checked to see if they were actually menstruating if they were skipping the Muslim afternoon prayer (Zohor prayer). Briefly, when I attended high school for a year on Peninsular Malaysia's east coast, our conservative Quranic belt if you will, two well-meaning classmates made it their job at lunch to escort me to Zohor prayer, walk me through the ablutions and the prayer itself. They did this with the supervision of a female religious teacher who would watch me at the prayer room. I only escaped this each month when I menstruated. There was a point where I remember I gave up keeping track of my cycle so it might spring on me while I was at school and visually stain my uniform's skirt. That way, everyone could tell I was not going to pray that day. 

At the time, I found the daily experience stressful but honestly was too busy just getting through it. All of this was just at the level of social pressure. I was the stranger in these people's home ground, so I had to respect their rules. Reading that girls in the present time are physically checked for menstruation was triggering as well as infuriating. This is sexual abuse. Even if it was hand-waved with only female teachers doing the checking, or no privates were actually shown, it's incredibly intrusive and shaming. Compared to my experience, what these girls went through is orders of magnitude more horrible, but it still depressed me long enough to not write. That's it, really. My small, silly reason.

This year, I decided to make Jamaican fruit cake for Christmas instead of my usual kind. I got fascinated with the stuff after the local Grocery Outlet brought in a pile of German ready-made loaves. The German ones were really more of a chocolate cake with orange and rum notes. Great flavour for a cake, but not a fruit cake. It turns out the key difference between Jamaican fruit cake and the English kind is that Jamaican fruit cake blends its fruit into the batter. The Jamaican version also makes liberal use of rum and fortified wine, which makes immense historical sense in the Carribbean. Incidentally, this cake is called Jamaican black cake in its native locale, where it is used as the standard at weddings and other life celebrations. This also makes historical sense because the traditional English wedding cake is a fruit cake, and fruit cake celebrates the wealth of families with its rich preserved fruits and sugar. The cake is in fact black, as the batter is coloured with a liberal dose of basic caramel syrup, a lot like Malay beehive cake. 

The recipe I tried results in a cake with a density resembling an English boiled pudding. It's intensely moist from the fruit puree and gets even heavier after aging, again with rum and fortified wine, preferably. The taste is somewhere between a very traditional fruit cake and a red wine-flavoured fruit leather. Next time I make this I might try to harmonise it with the German version by adding substantial cocoa powder to balance out the red wine/red fruit. This is one of those weird cases where the mulled wine spices that go into the cake somehow got swallowed up by the rum. My idea is to use the chocolate to bring out the inherent spiciness in the rum (if you know me, I don't skimp on spices in cake, I double them; imagine a fruit cake flavour so overwhelming it cancels that out). In more acts of heresy, I might even only blend half the fruits so there's more textural variety.

On a late night with crackers and a warm cat, I decided to re-watch Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes, which I think I first saw a couple of years ago and thought was good. Dennis Nilsen was a British (more accurately Scottish, even if he killed in London) serial killer from the early eighties, who famously got found out when his neighbour reported a clogged pipe and they found bits of flesh in the sewage. He targeted young, at-risk men, many of whom were homeless or drifters. As the documentary's name suggests, it has actual snippets of Nilsen discussing his biography while in prison. Hearing his voice again, I realised I was listening to what my late cat Dorian would have sounded like if he were human being. Nilsen has a droll, actually rather polite personality on tape. He tries to come off as a sort of tragic gentleman outcast with a black sense of humour. Very matter-of-fact about killing. Not quite trying to be an edge lord, really, more like a sort of imitation literary man, perhaps the type prone to consumption? At one point, he critiques the prison curry, which he tries to better with "West Indian sauce". He comments on how the local cooks probably don't know what they're doing and how the meat is textured soy protein, eventually conceding the curry is "not bad, actually", probably due to the West Indian sauce. There was a while where we were under-feeding Dorian when we first got him without realising it. The poor boy would eat anything in sight, even breaking into bowls of instant ramen while we were out. He developed a taste for people food, which he kept all his life. For about thirteen years, he taste-tested all my curries. Well, he taste-tested virtually everything I ate. You couldn't convince me he wasn't testing it for quality. I'd eat a kimchi katsu sando and he'd be on the other side nibbling it with me--and no, not because I allowed him to! That Food Inspector Cat would very much comment on prison curry if he could, passing judgment on the kitchen and hot sauce while he was at it.

If Dorian were to describe himself, I could see him describing himself as a sort of dark gentleman gourmand, possibly prone to a little thuggery. He would narrate his tales with a grandiose air if pressed, very politely, while going out later for a bit of night air and backstabbing. Before he was caught, Nielsen hid bodies under his floorboards at his first flat prior to burning them in his backyard. Police would later sift bits of bone out of the garden soil as they struggled to identify his victims. Out of potentially fifteen victims, only eight were ever identified. Dorian initially brought hom these terrified, catatonic little mice I would calmly pick up and set free out of sight. Eventually, he concluded rather than have his hard-earned prey released, he'd bring then to us dead. During his hungry phase--which was utterly our fault and I'll never stop feeling guilty about it--he ate a fairly large rat I walked in on. I wouldn't at all be surprised if he ate his kills relatively often. During the winter possibly a year or two after we adopted him, I found a couple of stiff rats tucked under fallen leaves in the backyard. While he was around, the gardener who came to rake our yard would frequently complain about finding dead rodents. We will never know Dorian's true kill count nor where all the bodies are buried. Dorian was a quiet and discreet murderer. 

Watching the Nilsen documentary wasn't all random reminiscing about my dear, sweet cat. The reason Nilsen could kill as indiscriminately as he did for some five years in London without anyone noticing was the same reason quite a lot of serial killers got away with it during their golden age--he targeted people the cops and public were more likely to ignore. In Nilsen's specific case, his victims consisted of down-and-out youth left behind by a poor economy. He deliberately went after men who had problems or knowingly engaged in risky behaviour to survive. The documentary is clear that his victims were in their circumstances hardly of their own will. Specifically in Nilsen's case, he also took advantage of the fact being gay in late seventies and early eighties England was primarily a closeted affair. People at the time clearly would rather not see or talk about the fact gay people lived among them. Victims, commensurately, were ignored by police when they survived and reported something was wrong. It's one of those things I appreciate in balanced documentaries. Not the salaciousness, rather, the social environment of the place and time that enabled a killer to go unnoticed. We say serial killers are rarer these days because awareness of basic safety has improved, people are more suspicious of strangers and surveillance tech is everywhere, but this is not universally true. Even armed with the knowledge of a modern city dweller, the fact remains people who fall under the radar are still being targeted by people with the mind and means to do so. For example, Bruce McArthur was active between 2010 and 2018. He targeted mostly South and West Asian men in Toronto's gay village--men who were migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, quite a few of who were closeted at risk of ostracism to their conservative Muslim communities. Toronto police at the time faced criticism in being slow to notice a serial killer in the gay community and slow to connect a string of disappearances involving brown-skinned men. At least, the Toronto police were subject to several internal and external reviews and eventually formed a dedicated missing persons unit.

The world we live in now is kind of oddly swivelling itself back towards darker times that many of us were hoping had finally improved since we were children. I am honestly rather weary of how people who until recently were easy targets for discrimination are once more being called out to distract us from the important problems happening around us. It seems like whenever a whiff of something serious comes up; a widening poverty gap; a bad job market; inflation; extralegal military action on foreign targets; some hired goon in the wings has to shout, "Look out! It's the gays!" or "Men are wearing skirts and women are wearing trousers!" or "Baby killers!" to draw away attention. It's an effective distraction. It's absolutely lame if you thought about it. But well, if we thought about it. In the meanwhile, the "people over there" who get pointed out are effectively re-traumatised in the public spotlight for no wrong they did. This is the problem. We need to be constantly aware that this is a distraction. It's a tactic. It's not the real issue. That's how you get rage from stuff you read on social media while you were trying to tell the news from the alarmists.

It seems I am fated to be a celery farmer. Mumm-ra I and II (the Ever-living), my celery plants spawned from a dying stump my husband saved one winter, are now clearly joined by Mumm-ra III and IV (probably Ever-living), and if I am not mistaken, Mumm-ra V and VI may also be sprouting in a couple of previously "empty" pots. This is all well and good, if my relationship with celery as a vegetable wasn't quite so tenuous. When I was little, my mum had a soup she cheerfully called ABC soup--celery, carrot and tomato in clear stock--that often showed up for dinner. I don't know why, but my tastebuds registered the boiled tomatoes and celery together as a weird clash. To this day, I can't look at a minestrone straight. My dad, when he tried hard to cook for his kids, often made stir-fried celery. It's a little better than minestrone, but again, something about celery stir-fried in soy sauce wasn't working for me. Stir-fried celery shows up a lot in Asian-American stir-fries too, probably because it's an abundantly cheap vegetable. Any stir-fried celery I encounter in my take-out goes to my spouse. And here I am, growing these ever-living bushels of celery.

But wait, you say. I like Cajun food. The base of Cajun food is the Holy Trinity, their mirepoix of onions, peppers and celery. Mirepoix is where the vast majority of the celery we grow ends up. I can tolerate any amount of mirepoix from whatever cuisine. The celery works with the other ingredients to create a specific flavour profile in a mirepoix. If mirepoix tasted mainly like celery, that's not a mirepoix. I use celery stalks and leaves in my cooking, as the leaves are a fairly common garnish in Malaysia. It's used to bring out the aroma of soups, especially for noodles, everything from simple clear broths to fairly spicy curries. It garnishes chicken soto, one of my favourite clear broths (which is taken with either or both noodles and rice). Also, it's worth noting that while clear broth with tomatoes and celery in it is still repellent, celery as part of a tomato sauce, like a marinara, is just fine. So again, as mirepoix, flavourant or garnish, finely-chopped celery shows up in a good number of our meals.

I do not, by the way, kill any of the plants that decide to survive my garden. Even the celeries I take decent precautions against to prevent spawning. That's honestly what being a local-vore is all about. The core of eating local is eating what grows seasonally where you live, the closer to you the better. (Thereby reducing the carbon footprint of your food.) I think it's also a lot about being creative with the things that will grow locally during the season where you live. Put more bluntly, you're also forced to make do with the plants that will grow for you. Before eating local was trendy, there was a time when most of the world didn't have the immense variety of produce in local markets--or for that matter many markets--than it does today. I'm not even talking about the ancient world yet. This was true even in the 1980s, when I was a child. Malaysia was one of the luckier countries, I think, because the majority of our cuisine combined Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines in whole or part. That meant basic ingredients of those cuisines were easier to access for a large number of people. I can't, for example, imagine pandan, spring onions and black pepper being out of reach unless you lived very, very off the map. In fact, some of these things might very well have been growing in one's home garden. 

I still remember when fresh button mushrooms first started being a common sight in KL (they were tinned for a chunk of my childhood). Even the tinned mushrooms were kind of a treat, as they still had to be imported. My surprise was finding out the mushrooms were originally white. I knew about straw mushrooms as white mushrooms, but who knew these uniformly brown things in tins were white? An American friend told me that when yellow bell peppers were introduced in American supermarkets, they were considered odd in the 1980s. It turns out these varieties were originally Dutch and exported from Holland. Button mushrooms are grown in Malaysia these days (though also substantially imported), the same way candy-coloured bell peppers are grown in the US. The heirloom vegetable revival brought a pile of zany new colours, flavours and shapes to market out in San Francisco, albeit at an heirloom-esque price. California is particularly lucky for local-vores because the state grows the vast majority of America's fresh produce. Farmer's markets in SF, loci for local-vores, have impressive piles of things I'd say we're lucky to get locally. Bok choy and mangoes were not things I thought I'd find in an open-air market in the US. Personally, I wished the variety of kales would expand a little away from the European types (note: tough and bitter). Bok choy is a great start, but explaining to my spouse that kale is from the same family as the delicious, tender green vegetable I got at the Vietnamese market as the intimidating yet clearly built-to-last purple feather-duster I forgot to remove from our produce box isn't convincing. They're all mustard greens! (Also note: Blanching and seasoning with vinegar can make even the latter taste edible to someone whose childhood wasn't an endurance test of mustard greens.)

Here lies the crux of my present ramble: without the influx of tasty produce varietals, eating local would be...a more difficult creative process. We can think big, like how without the Columbine exchange or our ancestors exchanging seeds with neighbours everywhere they moved, we'd be growing a lot less types of food where we are. Just without the Columbine exchange, there'd be no potatoes, squashes, capsicums, tomatoes or corn. Trying to think of my food without garlic (domesticated probably 4000 BCE in Central Asia) or ginger (5000 BCE, Southeast Asia) makes my blood curdle. Don't get me started on chicken eggs (domesticated 8,000 years ago in Thailand). Even for a brain that likes to imagine recipes with historical subtractions and menus proper for the cradles of civilisation, there are possibilities too apocalyptic to consider. 

If we think small, the lack of agricultural innovation with the plants people had in place would still be pretty bad, honestly. Remember kale? The reason I somehow managed to still like mustard greens as an adult is because ancestral Asians decided they needed to expand their repertoire of Brassica juncea as far as they could stretch it. In Asia, mustard green flavours go from mild, almost spinach-like varieties to peppery and even somewhat astringent types. There are types for soft leaves, firm leaves, tender stems and crisp stems--or combinations thereof. Some varieties are actually grown primarily for the stems alone. As an adult, I'm fascinated by the varieties of mustard greens I didn't know other parts of Asia had. So in spite of the hillocks of greens I was made to eat as a child (greens were cheap, my mother's a health nut and she's Chinese--which somehow combines to maximise stuffing small children with vegetables), I was able to remember in some corner of my lizard brain that mustard greens taste nice.  

There's a great cookbook I have that tries to recreate from an archaeological perspective what ancient Vikings ate. This was primarily cereals and legumes, mostly porridges. Although they had bread, it was pointed out grinding flour takes significant effort for a small amount without large-scale facilities. Women were the primary millers. Female skeletons have been found with torn joints commensurate to the ones used to work a hand quern. It gave me a new respect for liquified cereals, whether porridged or fermented, as a source of nutrition. The book's primary emphasis is imagining how the different regions of Scandinavia ate with the seasons, making do with the last bit of cheese and dried meat in the pantry before harvest season, and flavouring the sameness of everyday staples to stretch what you had. While our ancestors' tolerance for sameness was forced primarily by circumstance, even back then, cooks were clearly faced with the same dilemmas we have in squeezing satisfaction from our meals. People then and now do still eat to fill our bellies, yes, but I can't imagine that, if given the choice, anyone would continuously just fill their bellies. This is as baffling as saying poverty is a choice. Incidentally, the other takeaway from that cookbook was yet again that meat in virtually every culture was once a celebratory food item. Particularly important for anyone trying to eat local is understanding the impact the Green Revolution had in feeding people who once otherwise struggled to obtain a nutritiously balanced diet. One of its offshoots was the increased availability of cheap meat protein, which requires the most intensive inputs to create. Cooked cereals/legumes flavoured with vegetables and occasionally with (usually preserved) animal protein, whether land animal or aquatic, was the daily staple everywhere before the advent of cheap chicken. I guess what I'm trying to say here is the ideal local-vore diet is probably a reflection of that. Before anyone starts yelling at me about nitrates, I do want to point out there are other methods of preservation to stretch our local proteins, outside of eating less meat in general. Which reminds me, it's been a while since I had stockfish. (It's ancient! It's a seriously ancient food!)

 The season has turned, darkness now comes early. This city might have trouble differentiating spring and summer, but it's great at suddenly turning autumn.

Our cat has lost six collars in six months. The last one lasted five days. We walked to the pet store on Sunday, put the collar on Monday and by Friday he returned a little moist and collar-free. He was then banned until my order of six collars arrived by mail, shaving chunks of our sanity in the process because we're boring people and our cat is easily bored. There are two theories as to where these missing collars wound up. The first says there's a small mound of cat collars waiting up on some errant roof or tree branch in a two-house radius (the cat's approximate range) just out of our sight. I've given up trying to put name tags on the collars, so we might never get them back. Also, because someone loves giant, fluffy cats, Moggie needs special ordered XL collars to fit his precious, just-over-standard-size neck. The second theory, mostly mine, hinges on my cat's most doggie-like trait, that is his enthusiastic approach to life using his entire body. When he gets from Point A to Point B, he ignores everything in front of him and anything else that falls to the side. Pill bottles? Don't care. Letters? Don't care. Random boxes of food? Eh. It's not really any better when he comes to a stop. I've saved my tea from his tail more times than I can count. It doesn't bother him one bit if his tail gets wet. I've seen him deliberately sit in standing water. His people exist for him to dead fall upon at his convenience. Frankly, if it's neither sturdy enough nor large enough, it doesn't matter in his space. Watching him amble about helps me understand the world a bit from Seth's perspective. 

And so, I reckon his collars are actually caught on branches inside the monstrous jasmine wall that grows between my porch and the house next door, which features a cat tunnel (made over generations by neighbourhood cats) on the bottom and which my cat traverses over every day to torment someone else's cat. I keep staring at the monstrosity of gravity-defying jasmine and weedy ivy hoping to spot a bell or metal hardware to poke out. When I first moved in, I tried to pull out that ivy, but it's taken over the yard. There's a wooden trellis under the greenery, which when last visible was splintered and in dire shape, repaired in patches and seriously standing only because vines have grown so thickly it's become its own scaffolding. I continue to be impressed by its will to live. I suppose one of these days, I'll drag over a ladder and poke in more detail. 

As always, my enemy to productivity is my decadent cat-based lifestyle. Very well-loved and decadent, the creature in question is curled in a curlicue of cat against me while I type, absorbing stress and motivation from my person like a sponge. We finished story-mode Final Fantasy Tactics. Now basically grinding the "learned every skill" achievement and odd monster drops I have yet to see in end-game. I do recommend the FF Tactics remake, which was literally remade because they lost the source code. It has amazing voice acting in the new incarnation, the story is great, very heretical, and though relatively short compared to Tactics Ogre, it's compact and complete on its own. Tactics Ogre could make almost any game look short though, so take that as you may.

A book that falls from the sky. I know this feels a lot like that. 

Not long ago, I mentioned I was working on a big writing project. I can finally say what it is. Out now from Absinthe Books is my latest novella, The Society of Vegetarian Cannibals. Mm-hmm. Like the people who eat people. Or as it says on the back cover:

"Welcome to the Downlands, the last safe haven in a dying world. Even as the outside world remains poisoned and the population stagnates, purity runs deep here. Every person is born whole and complete. Every bite of food, manufactured from its base chemicals, is a perfect recreation of flavours from better times. And every one who dies becomes the perfect meat, raised on the perfect diet. At the funeral, the deceased's companions feast on this perfectly raised meal, absorbing the dead's memories and thus preserving their existence in historical record.

When Fritzel accidentally discovers his beloved cousin Bern is dead, and worse, has been refused a funeral, everything he thought he knew is shattered. No one in his family will tell him how Bern died or even what happened to the body. Desperate to salvage his cousin's memory, Fritzel begins a journey to discover how they lived. As he does so, he finds others who knew and loved Bern. Together, they find a way to save the memories they hold dear and savour the taste of a life that was worth living."

It's a hardcover! Super fancy. There are also 100 signed limited editions available. This is like, the fanciest treatment my writing has ever gotten in my life. Any more than this and I might start glowing in the dark.

It's been a long time since I've thought of The Mighty Boosh. My favourite episode is undoubtedly "Nanageddon", that is to say, the goth episode with hairspray "made from Robert Smith's tears"--though really I think the entire second TV series is worth the watch. At the end of "Nanageddon", Noel Fielding does Lovecats as spoken word. I didn't know that until I watched it with Seth, who would of course, recognise that immediately. 

Okay, but why did I even think of, "Oriental prince in the land of soup"? It came about quite naturally while deciding I would try making my own miso paste. I like lacto-fermenting things. I'm not terribly fond of vinegard pickles, but I do like lacto-fermented ones. Pickles are great to have around. You can salvage half-dead veggies and the pickles can go into marinades, salads, sauces, fillers, stir-fries and stews. I use them or the brine as seasoning and salt replacements. The same goes for miso paste. I've had the pleasure of tasting a variety of fascinating miso pastes over the years. They've actually grown in variety as more local producers join the usually imported from Japan types. I think the real surprise for me was when I discovered non-soybean miso pastes, but it logically made sense. People do have soy allergies, so alternatives would exist. It's like non-soybean tofu. I remember being pleasantly surprised when I first tried Burmese chickpea tofu. While figuring out how to make that at home, I stumbled into the fact virtually anything could be made into tofu. In fact, the guys at local station KQED have even made hemp tofu. Their post helpfully points out the local hippie co-op sells nigari should I want to attempt my own.

If lacto-fermentation is pickling for lazy people, making miso paste is pickling for even lazier people. Yes, there's not even starch solution to mix. You more or less boil the base material, mix it with salt and koji starter, and abandon it for at least four months. I'd earlier on tried making a shio koji-esque marinade by using rice wine yeast and glutinous rice, then koji pickles embedded in rice, koji starter and salt. I was incredibly excited when Aedan's fermentation outfit opened up in my neighbourhood and I could buy real koji starter just a few blocks away. Aedan also makes fresh miso paste, koji pickling mixes and soy sauce on-site, if you're ever there, along with healthy bento boxes. (I recommend the amazake if it's available.)

The biggest reason I thought about making miso paste though was because we'd kind of stockpiled these beans and lentils during COVID, and now we had many old beans and lentils that were lying around getting crunchier by the year. I don't mind some crunchy old beans in my stew, but the spouse is sensitive to that texture. I can mitigate some of it with blending, but we had a lot of disappointing dried beans to go through. So I thought, what if I fermented them? I thought about sweet white bean paste, which I really like--and find way more palatable than the mung bean paste that forms the base of Chinese pastry stuffings. Surely, white bean miso must be quite tasty? (And not crunchy.) There were also these dried brown lentils that refused to be anything appetising no matter what I did but didn't want to throw out. I cannot abide wasting food. I can't even watch food-based pranks, which utterly confound and horrify me. But lentil miso might actually be fun. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought cooking brown lentils could be fun. Seriously though, if you must get a lentil, the yellow and orange ones are great. Beluga black lentils are incredible. We need to move past these peasant browns and greens, yes, yes.

Incidentally, my greatest concern about making miso paste was that every recipe required a pickling stone or some weight on the fermenting substrate. People were making do with soup cans and filled small jars in bigger ones. Guys, I'm so lazy I have thought about but somehow managed not to buy pie weights for about 15 years. My pies still come out fine. Occasionally I get bubbly crusts when I'm too lazy, but they're still edible pies. I figured if I occasionally flattened down the substrate with clean fingers, much like resubmerging and squeezing out the bubbles in brine pickles, we'd probably still be fine. I was right. Three months into fermentation, I have a bright, sweet brown lentil miso and a mild white bean miso gently aging away. The brown lentils really mellowed. I was genuinely amazed they turned sweet with no added sugar. It reminded me a little of Aedan's Kyoto-style miso paste, which is my favourite of their line. Both pastes smell amazing, like alcoholic mash. At first, I thought if by the end of this I wound up with just strange hooch it would be hilarious, albeit not any contribution to culinary science. But, no, I am going to get miso paste out of this. I tried using some of the brown lentil stuff on grilled trout for dinner tonight. It really came through.

My next random fermentation experimentation shall be sourdough. The starter I have is currently in what I believe is known as the smelly sock stage. Honestly, I think it smells more like a durian died. In my defense, where I come from, people consider salted, fermented durian paste a sort of exotic, prized condiment, so go ahead and imagine how skunked this must be to smell like a durian actually died. My mom was waxing lyrical about how properly fermented sourdough bread (for anywhere from 48 to 72 hours in the fridge, apparently) dramatically reduced the carbs and was better for diabetics. Personally, I think the science doesn't quite work that way, but hey, I am currently trying out a glucose monitor and I can empirically test this, so I will bake for science. I admit something in my brain also snapped while listening to her because sourdough is my adopted city's bread. I've baked several kinds of breads over the years but never sourdough. The reason for this is that I've never had to. Boudin is the brand that made the stuff famous in SF, but practically every neighbourhood has some bakery churning out their own version, including some truly artisanal, we-kept-the-starter-going-since-we-got-married types. I suppose I could accidentally insult someone if I asked how long they proofed their dough for though. And hey, if I find something that won't spike my glucose like a volcano that allows me to have egg salad sandwiches, that's a plus. Note: French-style honey dinner rolls are hilarious from a glucose monitor's perspective. It was as bad as my experimental two-onigiri lunch--which I knew going in was also going to be hilarious as Japanese rice is the starchiest kind precisely to fuel a cuisine built around rolling white rice into balls and other bite-sized shapes. Perhaps, I should try experimenting with maki rolls next.

For all intents and purposes, yesterday I turned 43. I don't mentally feel all that much different from I was a decade ago. But I could also argue I was already much mentally slower than I was when I was 20 before I hit 30. I suspect anyone who knows me would point out I still think in weird tangents same as I have my entire adult life. As a birthday treat this year, Seth booked us for an overnight stay in Japantown on my birthday. Being in Japantown on my birthday will always be special for me, since that was the date he proposed to me at Peace Plaza. Peace Plaza is currently closed off for renovations, making entry into both sides of the mall there kind of hairy. The omakase sushi place we went to for dinner is still around, albeit closed on my birthday Sunday this year. The claustrophobic Asian ceramic store where we bought two bowls—of which only one remains—closed down years ago. When we visited there in the morning, we were the first customers of the day, which at least in Chinese culture means that first customer must buy something or it's considered a bad omen for the rest of the day's business. Thus, the two little old ladies that used to run the place served us tea to make sure we knew we were welcomed. We bought two bowls and possibly a tea set, I don't quite remember. I think the tea set was a later gift from Seth at some point, but I could be wrong. 

Incidentally, there is still an Asian ceramic store there today. It's a modern Japanese one with a focus on imported artisanal tableware and has pretty cool stuff. It is also run by two elderly Asian ladies. We got a couple of chic serving plates and deep noodle bowls earlier in the year that are real keepers. I'm not an "everything must match" person, and I'd rather we collect the things in our house slowly over time. I guess the exception to that is books. We have enough books we never get around to donate to keep us warm for at least one post-apocalyptic winter in the basement.

I asked Seth's opinion out of four potential restaurants for my birthday dinner: a handmade-there udon shop, a ramen place I've wanted to try for months, an intriguing katsu calorie bomb specialist and the nice little Japanese-style Western food place on the mall's bridge. Seth isn't an udon person and I suspect he finds my fascination with springy, handmade noodles a weird Asian thing. Although this was my chance to eat something I wanted—even chicken rice—I wasn't going to torment my poor date. He gave me back two options, the katsu place or the yoshoku place. On the Bridge is frankly somewhere I've wanted to go for a while (hadn't been there since before the pandemic), so yoshoku it was. This was a great idea. First, the restaurant has an amazing selection of drinks, including our favourite Japanese brewery that was introduced to us by Nombe back in the day: Coedo. This is not a brand we've seen in a Japanese restaurant since Nombe closed down. I forgot which variety out of the five OtB served had the elderflower aftertaste. I thought it might be their pale ale, Shiro, but it wasn't. The Shiro is still a very light, refreshing wheaty beer with no hoppiness afterwards. My dinner choice was between the light mentaiko spaghetti Japanese-style or the "European-style" cream mentaiko spaghetti. I was not wise, I chose the cream version. It was amazingly delicious with mentaiko throughout the sauce and also really, really rich. The cream quotient here would have been enough to make this two servings of pasta. I was more or less a dumpling afterwards. Seth, clearly still with katsu on the brain, ordered the breaded hamburger steak curry rice. Much compliments to the chef, their home-blended curry mix is really good, tastes and looks like it was made fresh there. Like real curry, rather than flour or starch, the sauce was thickened by the spice paste. All dinner, I kept trying to figure out what the finely shredded something that formed the majority of it comprised. It wasn't shredded coconut, like in Malay curry, or lemongrass. It wasn't meat or soy protein floss. The best I could come up with was that it was a mix of ground gingers, boiled sufficiently long the flavour from the individual fibres was all in the sauce. Also, breaded hamburger steak: great taste, you only need to eat it once in your life to remember it raised your risk for heart disease. Verdict: dinner defeated us and we would gladly go again and order less hearty creatures.

Every time we are in Japantown, it is a must for us to visit Kinokuniya and the game store downstairs. It's not necessary that we come home with boo—yeah, we always come home with books. There are a lot of manga in the world I do not have shelf space for. There are a lot of gaming books he does not have the shelf space for. There are a lot of non-fiction books neither of us has space left for. Does it stop us? Did we ever claim to be reasonable people? I veeeery carefully put back that study about sex selective artificial insemination because its chapter on cross-border transactions was too limited and the study on whether Japanese millenials were really introverted shoe gazers. I did! Then I only bought one manga book. Seth recommended and got me (with my choice) the book about Rome's hidden historical women, i.e. they are not the occasional mother of someone important sequestered away in the back of a Roman villa weaving their whole lives. Unfortunately, whether the non-weaving (seriously, everyone in the ancient world spent their spare moments spinning thread), actively participating women of the historical world were anomalies or more common that we think remains to be found. Far as I can tell, we've found more of them over time, but equal participation in society is, again unfortunately, still a mostly modern concept. Suggest books with titles if I am wrong, please. 

This is the first time I've been Japantown and not had a craving for crepe. Guys, I love my Japanese-style crepe. This includes the non-crepe yet still mostly crepe mille crepe cake. It's my birthday, you'd think I would coerce my spouse into cake. Well, you see, the Friday before my birthday, my spouse bought me a lovely handmade bourbon (maple) pecan pie. This is my favourite type of pie. I like it as much as meat and mushroom pie. My love of pies is apparently both American and British. On my birthday morning, I got a slice of pie with a candle in it. The pie was everything I loved about pecan pie except it was American-level sweet, which I forgot could be a thing. It was so sweet, for two days, I was in Japantown and couldn't countenance any Japantown sweets. Note: this usually means a stop at the Andersen bakery or some kind of mochi/taiyaki/cake. I don't do layered, multi-coloured, flavoured tea drinks (this is a travesty against tea) and I find the concept of the taiyaki soft serve (matcha soft serve with a red bean paste or nutella core) frankly terrifying. Does no one except fast food chains do a normal soft serve anymore? I could countenance Niji-ya's peanut butter mochi by day two, but I think they don't make and sell those now. 

We stayed the night at Hotel Enso. Seth found this amazing room with a soaking tub. What we didn't know was that it also had two curtained-off window-seat reading nooks. The views of the square across the street from Peace Plaza were great. Suffice to say we read a lot and soaked our poor combination gamer/office worker backs until we were raisins. Day Two I requested breakfast at Hinodeya, the ramen place, for breakfast. The house ramen claimed to have scallop bouillon and no way in hell was I not trying that. Breakfast noodles remind me of my childhood, when I would go have a big bowl of soup and handmade beef balls with my mom and usually my maternal grandfather in Kota Kinabalu. Hinodeya has an amazingly inclusive and tasty menu. Yes, I am aware I am using "amazing" a bit too much. Honestly, if I wasn't so determined to try the scallop-infused broth, I would have gone for one of the vegan bowls as they were clearly meant to be as tasty as the meat varieties. Most ramen stores are tonkotsu broth-based, right? This was the first time I've seen a store that has options with pork, non-pork, non-meat, non-egg/seafood and intriguing choices of spiciness including some god-level choice with many question marks. Ingredients and potential reactions were meticulously labeled. Even on the fried garlic mix at every table. House scallop bouillon broth was a delight, you can really taste the scallop. A bit on the salty side, but that's practically every ramen broth in existence. They were very generous with the menma. We who are used to getting maybe two planks of bamboo shoots if we are lucky were surprised to find an actual handful of very tasty stuff. They use thick ramen here, nice and springy and perfectly cut to go into the mouth in one slurp. I took my first bite and thought, someone even thought this far ahead for the eater's convenience? Store owners and staff were super friendly and nice. Their karaage with matcha salt on the side is a big serving. The chicken was coated in a light, fluffy batter and it is delicious. I'm going to venture that if you are not too hungry or less than three people, maybe choose one of the lighter appetizers. About halfway through our meal, me and Seth kind of remembered ramen is very filling. Keeping in mind this was our breakfast, we didn't really need food for the rest of the day. It gave us a thin coating of fullness with which to walk into Niji-ya and shop prudently!

An amusing aside: the day Seth proposed, we were both walking through the square opposite Peace Plaza when this tiny old lady looked up at us and exclaimed happily how we were a great couple because of our sizes. She was super sweet and I will never forget her. This time, in the lift down from our room, two little old ladies exclaimed we were a match made in heaven after hearing our respective sizes, i.e. tall pale Swedish vampire and his hamster spouse. The best thing about my birthday continues to be the best decision I ever made as an adult.