Some things I like and don’t like about making gyoza —
Chopping Chinese cabbage is my least favourite part, mainly because my chopping board is a bit too small, as is my knife, so I end up with bits of cabbage all over the kitchen. It seems like I chop for an hour or two without making much progress then suddenly it’s over and I have a large heap of finely chopped cabbage. Nice.
Salting and squeezing the cabbage is probably my favourite part. Basically you take the chopped cabbage, put it in a bowl, stir through a couple of spoonfuls of salt, put that into sieve over a bowl and wait for twenty minuets. The salt will draw water out of the cabbage so there’ll be quite a bit in the bowl. Most of the water will need a bit more encouragement, so you put the cabbage in the middle of a tea towel and wrap it up and squeeze it as much as you can to extract as much water as possible. I don’t know why I find this so satisfying. Maybe its because there’s nothing like this in any other recipe I make. Anyway, it’s fun.
Bonus second favourite part — getting a nice deep dark crust on the underside of the gyoza. Without it, I’d consider my gyoza a failure.
If you haven’t made gyoza and want to give it a try, go for J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe.
think of the big picture
From Elle on Mastodon:
whenever my boss says “think of the big picture, elle” I’m immediately an astronaut floating silently in space tethered to my ship looking down on earth, and nothing he wants seems important or even relevant really so this strategy has backfired on him more than once is what I’m saying
Just Some Buttons
I want to get a new non-phone eReader — although I love my iPhone Mini’s size I’d like to see more than seven words on a page — and the main feature I care about is that it have page-turn buttons. Seems like that’s a high end feature these days. The two choices are the Kobo Libra 2 for $300 or the Kindle Oasis for, ahem, $420. On all the more reasonably priced options you have to tap the screen to turn the page. I know from years reading on a phone and some time with a Kindle Paperwhite that I hate tapping the screen.
So, should I spend $120 more to be able to read my fairly sizeable library of Kindle books? Should I throw my hat into the ring with the non-Amazon crowd? Most likely I’ll end up deciding, as I have in the past, that I could buy a lot of books with even the $300 that the “cheaper” option would cost and that reading on my phone is not really that bad.
Anyway, back to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. A terrible thing has happened to Marx and I hope he pulls through.
Yesterday Is Not Today
From Louie Mantia’s Yesterday Is Not Today:
Everything has to change, every day, forever. That’s how it has to work. If not, we have determined we were smarter yesterday than we are today.
Really Really Light
The New Pornographers is a band I never listened to mainly because their name made me think they were a kind of sleazy Strokes ripoff. Turns out they aren’t. Since getting my AirPods Pro I’ve actually started to listen to music outside of my car and I’ve been really enjoying a lot of the stuff the Apple Music Discover station has been surfacing. I’ll always give more weight to the recommendations of an actual person, but maybe there is a place for algorithms after all.
Anyway, one of the songs that popped up was The New Pornographers’ Really Really Light from their newish album Continue as a Guest. It’s catchy, has those obscure lyrics I can’t resist, and features a wonderful interplay of male and female vocals. Can’t wait to dive deeper into their sound.
Letterboxd Activity Feed
I was halfway through writing a post complaining that Letterboxd has no way of filtering its overly noisy Activity feed when I took the time to check that it wasn’t already one of its pro features. Guess what — it is! Yay!
Of course, because I’m unsatisfiable, it doesn’t work quite as I’d hoped. Basically, you can filter out many of the small actions people take on the site, making it a lot more useful, but it applies the filters to everyone you follow. There is a very small number of people (three actually) whose likes and watchlist additions I do actually want to see, but with the filters on I won’t. It’s not a huge deal. I can check out their watchlists from their profiles now and then, but it would be nice to be able to filter activities on a user-level basis.
While I’m dreaming about features, sometimes I get sick of hearing about certain movies. Right now that would be Poor Things, Saltburn, Oppenheimer. It would be great to be able to mute mentions of certain films entirely, ideally for a length of time of my own choosing, kind of like how Mastodon handles muting now.
Anyway, despite my whingeing, Letterboxd is good and the ability to filter the Activity feed makes it even better. Also, the regular non-subscription experience has a bunch of features that other social networks either make you pay for or don’t allow at all, such as editing, html formatting, and proper links.
Trying Obsidian
I finally got around to trying Obsidian and, with the Things theme installed, it seemed to do everything I wanted. Mainly, I really like the way it displayed checklists and dimmed the text if you checked something was done. And being able to add little icons to the mobile toolbar to move items up and down is also great.
One thing I didn’t love about the theme was that on my iPhone it put a big blue dot in the bottom right hand corner to let me change from one kind of view to another but also got in the way of the words I was trying to write.
After a bit of head scratching I worked out how to turn it off. You have to install a plug-in called Style Settings. Once you’ve installed and enabled it, there will be an option in the general settings to allow you to make the dot disappear along with a bunch of other little tweaks that you can make.
Things seemed great until I tried it out on my Mac using Voice Control, my preferred text input method at the moment. And for some reason, unlike almost every other app on my computer, nothing happened — no text appeared. I’m not sure why, but there is some kind of disconnection between Voice Control and Obsidian. This seems to be something of a known issue with some people reporting that it works about 10 per cent of the time and fails the other 90 per cent.
So, back to Bear it is.
Guardian of Suminodo
MarsEdit media manager issue (and how to fix it)
If you use MarsEdit and its media manager is showing hardly any of your photos, the problem is most likely your setting in the Photos app for iCloud Photos.
You have two choices: “Download Originals to this Mac” or “Optimise Mac Storage”.
If you have it set to download originals, all your pictures will show up. If you have it set to optimise Mac storage, you’ll just see a random smattering of images.
While troubleshooting this with Daniel Jalkut, the author of MarsEdit, he mentioned he was looking at ways to address this including, perhaps, using a newer Apple facility to access the Photos database. As SSD space on Macs remains limited and image resolution on iPhones expands, I hope Apple will make it easier for developers to deliver what users expect.
Like Kings
This is a great point. So much coverage of tech focuses on the wrangling of aristocrats.
This is not a fully formed thought, but I have a visceral reaction to seeing coverage of Altman’s firing treated as a top-left news headline. It feels part of the hagiography of these dudes, that we cover them like kings and we cover their companies like nations, but somehow we don’t cover what their tech is going to do to real people.
New Love Glow
What kind of monster, when meeting their brother’s ex-girlfriend at the pharmacy, would casually mention that he’s got that new love glow?
Gardening in the Rain
I have accidentally left cleaning up the garden to the day before our rent inspection and now it’s raining. Looks like I’ll be living a real life version of that early REM song “Gardening in the Rain”.
Shush
Although Mastodon is the social media thing that feels most like home to me, I’ve been dipping my toe a little into the slightly murky waters of Bluesky and Threads.
One thing that has surprised me is the primitive implementation of the mute feature. I use muting to temporarily make my feed a bit quieter and stop it being dominated by people who are being particularly vociferous. It’s more of a “shush” than a “mute”.
Neither Threads nor Bluesky lets me do that. I can’t just remove someone’s posts for a day and have them start showing up tomorrow, which is pretty much all I want to do. You can mute someone, but you have to manually unmute them to see their posts again. It’s more of a way to quietly unfollow someone without them knowing. Maybe that’s what people want or maybe they’re planning on adding more granular controls.
Oh, and neither has keyword muting yet either. So if you’d like to take a break from hearing about the Cybertruck or whatever, they can’t help you there either.
Thunk
I love the soft thunk you get when you drop the kettlebell on the grass at the end of a set.
Super Spicy
So if you buy your daughter some super spicy chicken wings at the Taiwanese chicken place whose supposedly non-spicy chicken is too spicy for you, it’s a bad idea, when you put the super spicy chicken wings into the oven to heat up, to plunge your hand into the bag, bring out an assemblage of crunchy chicken bits and the super-spicy spice mix and put it in your mouth. You will not be happy. Lesson learned?
TAR
This was great — just so full of great scenes and much less straightforward than I’d expected. After just one watch I don’t really feel I have a handle on what this film is about or trying to say. But I do know I’ll watch it again.
Some things that stood out for me:
- Lydia pretending to find her partner’s blood pressure medications upon returning to Berlin when she actually stole them in the first place. A pretty clear signal that she is not a good person.
- The whole white male cis composer scene — that student’s bimbou yuzuri is off the charts.
- Her threatening a child — “No one will believe you because I’m a grown up.”
- Her gradual increasing sensitivity to sounds — screams in the park, ticking metronome and the like. I need to be more aware of this on the next watch.
- Noémie Merlant just disappears halfway through the film when it’s clear to her that she has fallen from favour — no dramatic confrontations.
Playstation Language Settings
Nine out of ten times when I turn on the Playstation I have to change the interface language from Japanese, my daughters’ preference, to English, which is mine.
Why can’t I set the preferred language at the user profile level rather than it be a global preference? For families like mine it would be a huge benefit and it doesn’t seem like it would be difficult to do. Maybe Sony thinks there just aren’t enough multi-lingual families to make it worthwhile.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Second watch. The first two episodes of this three-part anthology seemed just as off as before — odd casting for the first and too much of a contrived structure for the second.
But the third episode was even more moving than before. Just wonderful performances from the two actresses as they wrestle with regrets and doubts. I love that it is shot in a very flat and uncinematic way. For forty minutes you get to share this wonderful day without anything getting in the way.
There’s so much to love here: the moment the mistaken identity is discovered, the In the Mood for Love-ish role-playing, and calm, but deeply emotional tone.
The Platonic Ideal of KFC
In the last few weeks I’ve made the long drive down to Busselton or Bunbury and back about ten times. Today, on my last drive back to Perth for, I think, a week or so, noticing my eyes were getting that droopy feeling, I stopped at one of the roadside service centres to get a coffee. I decided to pass on the coffee, which I knew would be either too milky or too bitter. A splash of cold water in my face did the trick to snap me out of highway fatigue.
But I was feeling peckish. Against my better judgment I went for one single piece of KFC original recipe chicken. KFC is one of my most reliable disappointments with Australian fast food. I should add that I judge all fast food by Japan standards — a very high bar. It’s either too soggy, too oily or too dry. But I just needed some calories to keep me going.
When I got back to my car (air-conditioning and good music) I opened the little one-piece pack to find the platonic ideal of KFC — crispy, flavourful and perfectly cooked inside. My faith in the fast food gods have been (temporarily, I’m sure) restored.
Dolphins
We decided to swing by the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre on the way back from Busselton so got up early and headed off to get there for eight o’clock.
I am still haunted by our first visit, when I failed to take into account that the dolphins are wild and don’t just hang around the whole time the centre is open. They come and go as they please, which I’d have realised if I’d given it even a moment’s thought. So we turned up late, after they’d been in, and waited for a fair while hoping they’d make a rare second visit. They did not.
So we got there a little after eight this morning and just as soon as we got our stuff out of the car, ready for an indeterminate wait, the bell rang that signalled there was a visitor. We got to spend about twenty minutes as she swam about just in front of us. A very nice anniversary (plus one day) present.
Mendokusai
I lived in Japan for close to 20 years and, after 10 years of living in Australia, there are still many Japanese words that are part of my mental language — you may never hear me say them, but they are the ones my mind goes for to describe certain things.
My favourite is probably mendokusai. Unlike some others, like fuinki or natsukashii, which don’t really have straight English equivalents, it translates pretty easily as What a bother! or It’s a hassle.
But there’s something about mendokusai that I love and that makes me prefer it. I think it’s the hard consonant sounds that do it for me — and that I can draw it out into three distinct parts: men doku sai. That doku means poison also helps add the feeling that something is such a hassle that it is toxic.
A Week In Late September
Started the week feeling stretched in a thousand directions at once. Things evened out after a day or two thanks to the restorative powers of conversations with friends.
Alvvays’ Perth show in December sold out quicker than I expected, leaving me ticketless. Although I signed up to a waitlist, I didn’t think much would come of it. Given their tight tour schedule, it seemed impossible for them to add another show. But something did come of it! They changed to a bigger venue and I managed to hold my procrastination at bay long enough to get a ticket. Looking forward to mucking up the lyrics as I sing along to them just as much as I do in the car.
The Barbie movie was fun. I especially appreciated the Malkmus reference, of course. Sadly, although it was supposed to have Japanese subtitles, they were nowhere to be found. Apple gave us a refund, but I would have far preferred to have got what was — and still is — advertised.
I finally got a Bluesky invitation as, it seems, many others did. Haven’t really used it enough to get a real sense of what it’s like, but I’ve found a few people who I’d like to keep up with. People seem really into using “skeet”. I see it way more than “toot” on Mastodon. The app is surprisingly slow and flaky for something I thought had big VC dollars behind it. I suppose I’m spoiled by Ivory and Mona.
Irma Vep Saves the Day
I gave High Life a go last night and ended up having to bail about halfway through — something I almost never do when watching a film by myself. It was just too bleak and unpleasant — and I usually have a high tolerance for bleakness. Each minute sapped my curiosity about where things would end up further and further until it dried up completely. Maybe it had something to do with having driven for six hours earlier in the day.
It was still early when I pulled the plug, so I reached for another film that had long been on my to-watch list — Irma Vep. What an absolute joy from start to finish! I had expected something more serious about the struggles of creating art — part of the reason it’s been sitting unwatched for so long — and worried I’d have to cringe through some blithe 90s racism. I was wrong on both counts. There’s tonnes of drama and argument behind the scenes, but it’s all so enjoyable to watch, and Maggie Chueng comes across as being totally in control the whole time. All the performances feel so natural and the camera dances about the whole time, adding energy to every conversation. It’s a nice change from the fussy framing and intentionally stilted delivery of so many films today.
What’s In My Ears Right Now?
What to do when you’ve listened to Blue Rev a million times and can’t wait for a new Alvvays album? Simple — go back and listen to their previous one, Antisocialites, which also has tonnes of great songs. Probably works better if you haven’t heard it before. Can’t get enough of In Undertow right now. Has one of those bits that I love where Molly’s voice goes from highish to lowish, taking the song from great to greater.
Speaking of old music that is new to me, Morningside by Fazerdaze is a revelation. It was Lucky Girl that hooked me, but it’s not really representative of the rest of the album. Song after song had me amazed that this was her first album.
Sometime last year I saw a video of Courtney Barnett recommending some albums to Kurt Vile. There may have been more, but the ones I remember were Dick Diver’s Calendar Days and Chastity Belt’s I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone. That album’s opener, Different Now, was the soundtrack to hours and hours of wintery driving in Japan last December. Now Courtney has released a cover of it and, umm, it didn’t do much for me. Maybe the original is too hardwired into my head. I keep waiting for things to happen than don’t. Oh well, it’ll probably turn more people onto Chastity Belt so overall a good thing.
Properly Crispy
Happy to announce that my fear that Recipe Tin Eats’ method of tenderising the pork for sweet and sour pork by marinading it overnight in a sauce containing baking soda either wouldn’t work or would taste strange was unfounded. Super tender, super tasty and super crispy. Total home run!
I can’t speak for the sauce because we used a Japanese one from a packet — that was the flavour we wanted — but I doubt it’d be anything but great.
Gathering Crickets
While playing the main story of Ghost of Tsushima, I tended to ignore all the little collectible things — singing crickets, Mongol artifacts, banners and the like. Basically, anything that didn’t make me a more effective killing machine seemed like a pointless distraction.
Nowadays, things are different. I start each play session by donning the Traveller’s Attire and choosing something to search for. Then I just follow the guiding wind across the countryside, taking out stray bands of mongols and bandits along the way, until I find what I’m looking for. I like that these items don’t appear as icons on the map. There’s no point in using fast travel because you don’t know where you’re heading — just the general direction. It’s very relaxing and peaceful to just walk or ride across the countryside.
The Coffee Dilemma
A note for future me — when at work and faced with the choice between drinking instant coffee or using a couple of paper towels as a make-do coffee filter because you left the filters you bought the day before at home, always always always go for the paper towels even though it takes longer and looks ridiculous. That one cup of instant you had a year ago that you thought was surprisingly good was a one-in-a-million never to be repeated again.
Not Much of a Career
Last night I arrived a little early to pick up my wife from a dinner in Fremantle and parked on the side of the road to wait. While reading on my phone I heard some voices from behind and saw in my rear view mirror someone trying the handle of the car behind me. It took me a little while to realise what was going on and before I knew it my drivers side door was opening. I let out a surprisingly loud and aggressive shout as I pulled it shut and three guys ran off into the night.
I was genuinely surprised at my reaction. I am definitely more a flight than a fight person. I think it was the suddenness with which it happened. There was no time for my brain to get in the way. If they hadn’t run away immediately, I wonder whether I’d have kept up my aggro facade. Happy I didn’t get a chance to find out.
Once my heart had stopped pounding, Billy Bragg’s lines from Welcome to the New Brunette popped into my head.
The people from your church agree
It’s not much of a career
Trying the handles of parked cars
Whoops, there goes another year
Whoops, there goes another pint of beer
Denser Than a Hockey Puck
Will I ever learn? On a whim, I looked up the lyrics for the Malkmus song Old Jerry and the line “Art is denser than a hockey puck” is supposedly “Heart is denser than a hockey puck”. What nonsense! I’m going to continue to sing “Art” as I barrel down the freeway.
Hand in Hand
This was almost certainly unintended, but Shiv’s hand coldly placed on Tom’s as they drove away felt like a negative echo of Mr Darcy touching Ms Bennet’s as he helped her into her carriage.
Skipping Over
I have reached the point with Blue Rev where the songs I used to skip over — Pomeranian Spinster and Tile By Tile among others — are now the ones I skip to.
A bit of a hit around
We’ve been driving past Robertson Park tennis courts for years, thinking we should pop in and give it a go sometime. That feeling gained some impetus when I found out that Steve Malkmus played there when Pavement came to Perth in February. Silly, I know, but still …
Today we finally did it and it was a tonne of fun. It’s been over ten years since I last played tennis, and that was at a house we were staying at down in Yallingup and was very much fuelled and/or hampered by copious amounts of wine, so this was the first sober tennis I’ve played since I was in high school.
It was just $15 an hour and mercifully uncrowded, so our many wayward hits didn’t cause any bother for anyone else. We didn’t actually keep score or anything like that. Our main goal was to keep some kind of a volley going and help each other get the ball over the net. All in all a very good hour.
Just One Cookbook’s Macaroni Gratin
This macaroni gratin is probably the first actually new recipe I’ve made this year. It was a late request on a Sunday, with just enough time to get to the shops.
For ages I’ve shied away from anything vaguely rouxish. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of mixing flour into things properly. But this time was a total success — not even the slightest floury hint.
Net Happiness
It makes me happy to think of the millions of people out there joyously gliding, crafting, cooking, ascending, recalling, fusing, climbing, and all the other things you can do in the new game. If world’s net happiness has been boosted even just a smidge, that’s pretty cool.
Halt
While savouring the Roy kids’ final few bouts of sniping and betrayal, I’ve been dipping into the final season of Halt and Catch Fire. I’m struck by the contrast. It builds so much warmth and love for the characters. You really want them to find happiness and feel there’s a good chance they will.
Succession – Spoiled Yet Unspoiled
Having been late to the Succession season 4 party I went into episode 3 knowing what would happen. While I’m sure I would have enjoyed it just a bit more if I had not, the episode was brilliant. It made me think about what I really like about this show. It’s not the events that matter, it’s the reactions to those events — the side glances, the body language, the moments of realisation and, of course, all that wonderful and nasty dialogue. That said, there are a few media sites, both old and new, that could stand to be a tad kinder in their crafting of headlines and URLs.
Switching iPhone Apps with an External Keyboard
Today I started experimenting with using my iPhone with the external Bluetooth keyboard I bought way back when I got my first-generation iPad. It’s been a while since I used it and the batteries (yes, it’s that old) I left in it had begun to rust. A bit of rust on the outer cap was getting in the way of the new batteries making a connection but a bit of scrubbing got it working again.
All in all it was a good experience. It’s a million times faster to type on a proper keyboard than the usual software one. Some apps, such as Ulysses, Bear, and Safari, have very good keyboard shortcut support. Others are very limited.
The biggest surprise is that there’s no easy way to switch apps without enabling full keyboard support in the accessibility settings. Once you do that you can hit Function+Up Arrow to get the usual app switcher that appears on a swipe up from the bottom of the screen. It’s great that full keyboard support exists as it enables all apps to be fully keyboard controllable. Unfortunately, it makes apps that have taken the trouble to support external keyboards slower and more difficult to use.
At the moment it seems like the easiest way to switch apps without having to tap the screen is to hit Command+Space to bring up the search screen, type in the first few letters of the app you want, then press Return when it shows up as the top hit. It’s clunky, especially when you want to switch back and forth between two apps, but is the best way I’ve been able to work out so far.
Salt & Fat’s 707 Fried Chicken
A while back I wrote a little about Salt & Fat’s Butter Tomato Sauce setting me on the journey to learning how to cook. That sauce was and is great, but it’s the Summer Babe to 707 Fried Chicken’s Gold Soundz. I’ve made this fried chicken hundreds of times over the years and it’s become our go-to dish whenever we have friends over. If you’re new to deep frying, I’d suggest following Neven’s instructions as closely as possible but there are some parts of my current process that differ from the recipe.
Cutting the Fat
Neven recommends cutting extraneous fat off the chicken. These days I generally don’t bother — partly due to laziness but also to enjoy its crunchy goodness.
Drying the chicken
I’ve used countless paper towels dutifully soaking up as much marinade as I can from the chicken, but I’ve recently stopped. Again, a bit of laziness and it doesn’t seem to make much difference spatter-wise once the chicken is properly covered in potato starch.
Potato Starch
The recipe calls for sweet rice flour, but it’s something I was never able to find in Japan. Instead I use potato starch, which is the go-to starch for deep frying chicken in Japan and is now easy to get in Australia (check out the Asian aisle in Woolworths).
Candy Thermometer
Temperature control is really the key to stress-free deep-frying. My initial attempts at this dish were foiled by cooking in over-hot oil. I have memories of my kids gamely struggling through those charred lumps. Getting a thermometer made all the difference. Although I once bought a candy thermometer I found it difficult to use and read. These days I just use a regular meat thermometer and stick the pointy bit in the oil. You have to hold it for a little while for it to read the heat but it’s not too much of a bother.
The best writing about cooking doesn’t tell you how to make just one thing. It gives you a springboard to explore. Although I still mainly use chicken thighs for this, it’s a great way to fry wings as well. And once you have confidence dealing with hot oil the delights of tonkatsu, spring rolls, and tempura await.
Pavement: Echelon Your dreams
Do I have a favourite Pavement song? I don’t think I do. Some I like more than others, but for the most part my favourite at any moment is the one I’m listening to right then.
But, of course, there are a dozen or so that exist on a level above all the rest. Among them, and the one I most hoped they’d play when they came to Perth was Fillmore Jive, which I’ve never heard live.
And play it they did. It was every bit as huge, soaring, swirling and glorious as I’d dreamt.
Hot Spring Amber
While I was dozing off yesterday in a relaxation chair at a hot spring in the Japanese countryside my brain recognised a slight similarity in the bland piano background music to Dick Diver’s very much not bland song Amber and kept trying to match the lyrics to the music. It would get through a couple of lines of lyrics but then the music would veer off in a different direction, but again and again it kept on trying.
Mastodon – Links and Styles
Of the issues with Mastodon raised by Dave Winer, the ones I’m most interested in are links and styles. It’s baffling to me that in 2023 we’re still looking at raw urls and that although I can insert little emoji as much as I like, I can’t make text italic or bold. These limitations kind of made sense in Twitter’s early days but make none for Mastodon.
Fire Ceremony
Osaka from a distance
Roots
If Pressed
He stands by the door, all ready to go — 250 yen in his left pocket, bus fare, and 550 yen in his right, which is for the subway. He knows he should probably get one of those cards that you can just tap through and not have to juggle handfuls of change. If pressed, he’d find it hard to explain why he hasn’t. The bus he had hoped to be on passes.
Tied Fortunes
Calendar Days is Back
I made it through a week or so without having Calendar Days playing on repeat in my head.
It’s back now, especially the verse that goes “There’s a kind of quiet. A fighter jet’s applause. They’re all saw toothed fragments. Scattered in an empty hall.”
The Phone Disguised
Despite the valiant attempt to disguise it, nothing can hide the futuristic technology lurking with this box plonked down randomly in the Sumiyoshi Taisha grounds.
It’s trying to fit in with this, so it’s a kind of high bar.
Early January Photos
House vs Plant
Sumiyoshi Park in the evening
The platonic ideal of a cheeseburger
Sumiyoshi Lantern at dusk
Chiaki waiting at the station
