Cobb

The Ethiopian Sea Cliff

I just got my latest book from the guy who writes XKCD. The inside dust cover is a map of the world as represented if there was a wormhole from Earth to Mars at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. As you might guess, there isn't much water left.

My biggest project, were I to become president of the US would be to initiate a water project that drains the Great Lakes, maybe a foot or two, and irrigates the desert Southwest. Starting by filling the Great Salt Lake, it would be the coolest thing since the Panama Canal. Sez me.

On the other hand, since there isn't likely to be any wormholes sucking away our oceans, it might be a better project to place some nuclear powerplants on the coastline and desalinate a river of water going back from the ocean into some parched nations that could use it. I just love the idea of a river that starts from the ocean and flows inland - an artificial estuary that begins on a sea cliff.

You see if you're going to build a nuclear power and desalination plant it's going to take a community of hard working, well educated civilians protected by some special arrangement. A sea cliff would be a very nice place to live, walking distance from your job at the plant. 

Just saying. 

The Aha Moment of Destiny

Last night I had an experience with Destiny that has changed the way I look at the game. I think I understand what's going on here. It is an experience that changes it from just another shooter into something far more.  

What I did was die. I died every minute. And unlike the other times when I had died in Destiny I did not automatically respawn after three seconds. Nor did I automatically respawn after thirty seconds. I died and stayed dead, with enemies pounding my dead corpse with energy weapons and swords, until my teammate could revive me. Half the time, when I was revived by my teammate, she died immediately after and so I had to double back and revive her. Your instinct is to run away. You cannot. 

We were participating in the Weekly Heroic Strike at level 26. Two of us were already 26s, I had just barely become a 25. We were two hunters and a warlock, a sunsinger, a bladedancer and myself a gunslinger. We battled the Phogoth in the Summoning Pits. We beat Phogoth before, all of us had battled all of these enemies before, and as the narrator said, we sent their souls screaming back to hell. But during this particular battle, things were different. Immediately we recognized that even the level 6 flunkies at the beginning of the strike were stubbornly difficult to kill. We ignored them and kept plowing through the Hellmouth, but just after we bounded down the stair where the meathooks hang from the ceiling, things got ugly. 

We started to die. This was way too early and these enemies had been familiar to us, why are they able to kill us? Our tactics were not working. The weapons we usually used to dominate seemed puny now. The combination of armor we were wearing, didn't seem to protect us as well. The super power we used to blast through foes now simply didn't. I used my golden gun on a level 26 wizard and the thing didn't go down in two shots. Usually it just takes one. Two, and it was still up! What fresh hell is this? Our go-to powers were gone. 

They say that only a fool keeps doing the same thing and expecting different results. We were being fools, for a long time. We kept saying. "This sucks'", "This is hard", but we kept trying. We got through the second room finally after about 20 minutes. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, we didn't have to restart the whole room. You see what goes on in Destiny at this level is that while your team of three may have infinite respawns individually, if the three of you are killed, the room restarts. You have to begin that part of the adventure all over again. It doesn't matter how close you come to unlocking the next door or how long you have been trying. If you all die, Destiny exacts its toll without remorse. Start over. You're doing it wrong. After a while, 15 minutes or so into this second room and dying many different ways we started realizing a couple things. The first, is that these wizards will 'puppy dog' your dead body. If you are killed by a wizard, it's going to stay there and make it that much harder for you to be revived. The most important thing I realized was that my teammate has Radiance. When she's fully powered up, she can raise herself from the dead.

They say that the noose focuses the mind. In Destiny's Heroic Strikes, you get a lot of focusing. But most of the time, you want to focus on blaming the game for just upping the level of you enemies, and making it so damned difficult. It's not a simple matter of 'if you do this, then that will happen'. There's chance - there are slim chances. The strike will challenge you beyond your ability to remember. It's only after having failed continuously for an hour, at midnight, when you want to quit, quit, quit, but you don't. THEN you start trying something different. Well, what if I use this gun instead? What if I go gunslinger instead of bladedancer. Well that means I'll be able to triple jump onto those platforms. Maybe if we take out the yellow-bar enemies then the ordinary red bar enemies won't come out. What if we concentrate fire on those guys first? What if we try to all hit the Phogoth at once. What if we switch off, two of us against the rats, and one against the boss? What if we all hide? Will that stop enemies from respawning? What did we do to get the Phogoth off the chain so soon? How do we handle all three of those wizards up on that platform? What is the safest part of this area? Should we stay together or split up? What if we get rid of all the rat enemies and then concentrate on the boss? 

It took us about two hours. We had to retry the room at about a dozen times. We lost count. But we kept charging in. We kept saying, damn this is hard. We're never going to forget this. Each of us wanted to quit. But then one of us would run through the door and then start the whole thing over, and the rest of us would follow. We persisted. We changed strategies and tactics. We tried everything. Finally we figured it out. 

Destiny is a no-excuses game of hardball. Nothing you do in it makes sense until you and your team are tested at the level of a heroic strike. Yeah you can get cool gear, you can farm loot, but no matter what you do, you haven't played Destiny at its deeper level until you have faced your own anger and frustration at not being able to kill all the baddies that you used to kill. As they kill you and your team, you have to figure out their behaviors because when everything they do doesn't kill you, you don't pay attention. When suddenly it takes three of you to figure them out, then you must pay attention. Or you quit.

You may not like what I'm going to say next. There's a lot of quitters out there. There's a lot of quitter in all of us, as gamers and as people. I have to say that Destiny actually tests you character. If you want to win at this game, you have to make sense of deadly chaos and face it. What is Destiny's tagline? Be Brave. Yeah. You have to, because the game will kill you. The only way to win at this game is to forget what you think you know, and make something work. And there are millions of choices in Destiny and you are going to die for the consequences of your choices, over and over again, until you rethink and retry. The right combination is persistence, flexibility, humility and courage. And trust your teammate with your life. That a video game brings this out is no accident. The battle mechanics of Destiny are damn near perfect. There are no excuses for you to say you pushed a button and nothing happened. The game executes your will, and the game can be won, but it's hard. That's what makes it great.

So Destiny is a test of your will. I think you can only discover that one way, which is to succeed against the odds. Then and only then will you understand what this game is all about. Until you have pushed yourself to you limit and then beyond, you're just playing around and being cute in your little Guardian suit. There's plenty of that kind of fun in Destiny, and I'll be doing it merrily. But then I'll have to steel myself for some PvP in the Crucible and then warm up for a Strike like this one. One day soon, I'll be ready for the Raid. lt's a frightening prospect. There's something deep going on here, and I know I'm not the only one that feels it.

The Peasant Epicurean Diet

One day two weeks ago I threw out my back. Nothing serious but I'm so stupid that I put heat on it instead of ice and ended up having to go back the the chiropractor twice more than it usually takes. You see, once a year I do this, but this is the first time I've done it during summer beach volleyball season. At 53, I'm the oldest dude on our regular court (but still have the highest vertical), and this might be my final season. I've got a lot of work done in my home office this year and I think all the sitting is catching up to me.

My chiro and I had some good conversations. He's about the same age and he reminds me of the Chinese kid from Oceans Eleven. The 'Grease Man'. He's one of those lightweight small guys that are all sinew and muscle and flexibility. Yeah he does ultra-triatholons. I used to have a very strong 'core' before pilates and big rubber balls came into fashion. That's because my primary sport in highschool was springboard diving. I retain my good posture and I never destroyed anything in particular except my gut.  

He recommended I do 'movement', meaning exercise, and it worked. Simple stuff like squats and bends that made me hurt and pant for a week. Now I can do it without much problem, especially since my back pain is done. He also recommended The Paleo Diet. I whipped out my iPhone and took a picuture of the ISBN number on his copy, told the Spousal Unit and she said just figure it out, you don't need to buy the book. Besides, I already know what I eat that I could do better at. 

For the past six months or so, I've been making a concerted effort to eat better lunches. And so I have moved through the deli section and bought a set of cutting boards. I've developed a taste for soprassetta and pepper jack cheese which are two new additions to my lifelong love of deli. I've also been consuming a lot of gourmet potato chips. I cannot resist Kettle Maple Bacon. Who could? But I turned a corner this summer when I realized that I could make a better ceasar salad.

Just this past weekend, I found myself at a joint called DTLA Cheese in the Grand Central Market. There, with Paleo fundamentals on my mind, I thought it would be cool to eat as I imagined most working class men in the 1920s ate, with some meat, fruit and cheese wrapped up in a handkerchief. So I got myself a chunk of hard sheep cheese called Fiore Sardo and a fat square of fennel salami called Finocchiona. The guy at the counter wrapped it up in special paper and put it in a brown bag for me. 10 bucks, and it lasted longer than lunch. 

Now I'm not a cook. Not at all. My mother's kitchen was strictly a place for me to wash dishes and fix peanut butter and jelly and Nestle's Quik. I never touched the stove except for giant Saturday morning breakfast. So I know my eggs and sausages, but that's about it. Now I am having emerging behaviors about kitchen propriety that may very well stress my marriage. This combination of disciplines around food and movement I am integrating into my life, I thought you might like to come along.

So the first thing you need to know are the broad outlines of what I am calling the Peasant Epicurean Diet. It is designed for an upper middle class snot such as myself with rather paleo attitudes about grooming and housework and all that. I'm a man's man who works at a damnable keyboard all day long. Let my role model be a cross between Rudyard Kipling and a player to be named later. In short, I am going to use expensive ingredients because I dig flavor - that's the epicurean part. But I'm also going to use very simple raw ingredients that need a minimum of preparation, that's the peasant part.

Let me put one more image into your head. Back when I was 19, I worked at a retail store. Teamster Union shop. There was this pale skinny kid from Czechoslovakia who worked there. My friend Clave Marks could speak fractional Russian and Czech, but not much enough to have a conversation. The kid, every day, came up to the lunch room and ate out of a grocery bag. Groceries! Like an onion, an apple, a head of lettuce. Dude could fill up for a dollar. 

--

The first staple of this diet is deli meat. The second staple is cheese. The third is romaine lettuce. The fourth is water. 

Instrumentally, I have a big kitchen knife (Henkels I think - I've had it for 22 years) and a stack of pie tins. That's right. You see the signature meal I've been eating is a Man Lunch. That means I can throw this thing together in about 5 minutes. I don't know about you but when I had no cooking skills and I jump off the keyboard to eat, I want to eat now. I'm thinking the wait at the drive through is a good deal compared to figuring out something in my wife's kitchen. The most frightful apspect of this involves digging through a refrigerator that is (dis)organized according to principles that make no sense whatsoever to me. So I needed my own section of the refrigerator. Meats. Cheeses. Bottled water.

Now since I'm going to continue in this thread for a while as I develop the food and movement discipline, I realize I ought to just use today as a benchmark and sample day. How about that?

Today, my after morning poop weight is 210.6. Today's man lunch was, I think, pure Peasant Epicurean - let's call it PE - as follows.

1 dozen slices of Gallo sliced salami.
2 slices of pepper jack
1 half dozen strawberries
2 dozen or so green seedless grapes.
12 oz bottle of Pelligrino

All except the water goes into a pie tin. I use a hand towel, not napkins. 

--

This morning I had no breakfast, but it's going to go something like this as time goes on.

Tea. Always tea. Simple, pure. Use Dasani bottled water and English Breafast grind Earl Gray loose tea. I get mine from the local Japanese supermarket.  

2 Boiled eggs. 2 Microwave sausage. 

That's it. Boom.