Erik – Page 52 – Co-Geeking

Dining in Middle Earth

January 13, 2016December 15, 2016Erik

“As for the Hobbits of the Shire, with whom these tales are concerned, in the days of their peace and prosperity they were a merry folk… with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them).”

So Tolkien introduces us to his Hobbits, lovers of good food and good company. There is plenty of eating and drinking in The Lord of the Rings, from humble Hobbit fare to Elven delicacies, from the foraged meals of rangers in the wild to the feasts of great kings.

In 2016, we’re taking up a project to eat our way through The Lord of the Rings. Every month, we’ll prepare and present a dinner inspired by foods from the novel, working our way through the story from Bilbo’s 111th birthday party to Frodo’s return to the Shire. Along the way, there are some meals that Tolkien describes in such detail that we can read the menu straight from the page. In other places, he offers only tantalizing hints that require us to engage in gastronomical-literary archaeology to fill a table.

We’re doing our best to stay true to the novel in the project, so where Tolkien gives us a clear idea of what the characters eat, we stick to it. When we have to figure something out on our own, we use clues from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and ideas from historical cookery to guide us.

We’ll share the results of our work with you around the middle of the month. A post introducing the month’s meal and showing the results of our labors will come out on a Wednesday. The following day, we’ll offer a behind-the-scenes view of how we researched the food, decided on a menu, prepared the dishes, and designed the setting, complete with recipes you can try for yourselves. We’ll collect links to all the entries on this post, so you can always come back here to get caught up, or check the dining in Middle Earth tag to find them all.

A note on the behind-the-scenes posts: we’ll be referencing passages from the book and since there are many different editions of the text with different paginations, we’re using the book and chapter divisions given in Tolkien’s table of contents. For example, the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring is identified as Book 1. In that book, chapter 4 is “A Short Cut to Mushrooms,” so we reference that chapter as (1.4); we reference Hobbit chapters with (H).

January: A Long-Expected Party / Making A Long-Expected Party

February: A Farewell Feast in Bag End / Making A Farewell Feast in Bag End

March: Supper at the Prancing Pony / Making Supper at the Prancing Pony

April: Food in the Wild / Making Food in the Wild

May: In the House of Elrond / Making In the House of Elrond

June: Dinner with Durin’s Folk / Making Dinner with Durin’s Folk

July: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit / Making Herbs and Stewed Rabbit

August: Rangers’ Rations / Making Rangers’ Rations

September: The Courtesy of the Golden Hall / Making The Courtesy of the Golden Hall

October: Flotsam and Jetsam / Making Flotsam and Jetsam

November: The Return of the King / Making the Return of the King

December: A Proper 1420 / Making a Proper 1420

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Gift Exchange

January 11, 2016October 15, 2022Erik

Gift exchange is part of festive celebrations for many people in the modern world, including many traditions whose gift-giving season has just passed. In the pre-modern world, though, gift exchange was often a vital part of social, political, and economic life.

The essential principle of gift exchange is reciprocity. Giving someone a gift obliges them to return a gift of equal value. In the modern market economy in which every item can be assigned a monetary value, this is cause for anxiety (and comedy) over gift-giving, but in earlier societies value was measured in other ways. The value of a gift often depended on the prestige of the person giving it. Since gifts were reciprocal, they created a relationship, of which the gift acted as tangible proof. The modern taboo against asking the price of a gift (“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”) attempts to reinforce this kind of value in a monetized world.

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Things I Can Do Without

January 7, 2016March 12, 2016Erik8 Comments

We all have our storytelling pet peeves: the things that make us yell in frustration at the screen or put down a book in disgust. Some things have been done to death already and we want to see something new. Some things play on outdated assumptions and problematic tropes. Some are just lazy writing.

Misery loves company, so let’s share. Here’s a few of mine.

1. Fathers and sons who have a bad relationship.

A father who was never emotionally available to his son and is now disappointed in his son’s failure to live up to his expectations? A son who resents the pressure put on him to be like his father and craves the love and approval his father never gave him?

It’s been done. Really, it has. Everyone from Homer to Shakespeare to George Lucas has done it. That dead horse has been pounded into subatomic particles by now. There is nothing new to be said on the subject. Time to move on.

2. Heroes who have no plan

Or if they do have a plan, it depends on factors that the hero can’t control or predict.

This doesn’t mean that plans have to be perfect or go off without a hitch. You can’t control for everything. Plans have to change in response to unforeseen events. There can be plenty of good drama in the uncertainties of chance, and I’ll even take the occasional deus ex machina if it’s clever enough. But a hero who’s counting on the deus ex machina for victory? That’s right out.

3. Villains who have no goal

A good villain has a goal they are trying to accomplish and a plan for achieving that goal. No matter how fiendishly complicated the plan, if the goal is just to indulge a vaguely sexual obsession with the hero, something has gone wrong in the writing.

“Annoy the hero and force them to play with me” isn’t a goal, it’s a toddler tantrum.
4. Weirdos who can’t tell fantasy from reality

A terrible murder has happened at an SFF convention. When the police show up to question witnesses, the bystanders refuse to speak English and answer all their questions in Klingon. It turns out a vampire cosplayer killed a werewolf LARPer. Why? Because vampires hate werewolves! No other motive required!

This one isn’t just lazy writing, it’s insulting. The usual targets are fandom or kink communities, but anyone who isn’t in the mainstream can be a victim. I’m a history professor. According to popular media, that means I must show up in class wearing a toga and insist that my students address me as “emperor.”

Writers of the world: the inability to distinguish reality and fantasy is a sign of a serious mental illness. It is not how those of us who belong to non-mainstream interest groups go through life.

5. “Gimmick” serial killers

This one is really just the intersection of 3 and 4, but it shows up often enough to merit special mention. These are the characters who kill people as part of some elaborate symbolic game. “My God, the killer is targeting people whose names are anagrams of Alice in Wonderland characters and staging their bodies to look like scenes from Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, and they’re doing them in reverse alphabetical order when translated into Albanian!”

That sound you hear is my suspension of disbelief repeatedly slamming its head into a wall in hopes of inducing a coma.

I could go on, but that’s enough from me for now. Your turn. Got something on your mind that you could do without ever reading or watching again? Share in the comments!

Images: Community via ScreenCrush. Kirk via Memory Beta. Moriarty via Baker Street. CSI Blood Moon via dkompare. Se7en via Crash/Burn

Story Time is an occasional feature all about stories and story-telling. Whether it’s on the page or on the screen, this is about how stories work and what makes us love the ones we love.

History for Writers Compendium: 2015

December 28, 2015December 28, 2015Erik

History for Writers explores world history to offer ideas and observations of interest to those of us who are in the business of inventing new worlds, cultures, and histories of our own. Here’s where we’ve been in 2015:

Thinking about history and writing

Worldbuilding basics

Economics and wealth

Military history

Race and gender in history

Architecture

The Return of the Bread Pudding

December 17, 2015December 16, 2015Erik

For our final Star Wars rewatch, here’s a sweet but simple bread pudding.

Ingredients

Stale bread, any kind, enough to make 4-5 cups loosely packed cubes
4 egss
1 tablespoon rum
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3 cups milk

Cut the bread into chunks and press into a buttered baking dish until well packed in.

Beat the eggs, rum, sugar, and spices together until well mixed. Add the milk and beat well.

Pour the milk mixture over the breadcrumbs. Press down the top with a spatula or spoon to make sure the liquid is well distributed.

Let sit for half an hour, pressing again occasionally, until the liquid is thoroughly absorbed by the bread.

For best results, set the baking dish inside a larger dish of water to make a water bath, ensuring that the level of the water reaches up to the top of the pudding. If this is not practical, you can just bake the pudding in its dish, but be aware that the edges may get crusty.

Bake at 350F / 175 C for 1 and 1/4 hours.

Serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Our Star Wars Rewatch Project: Epsidode VI

December 17, 2015March 12, 2016Erik

Our Star Wars rewatch concludes with Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.

1. Best Fight

Eppu: The space battle above Endor! Epic! (Even if it’s modeled after aerial dogfights, but nostalgia…)

Erik: Ewoks vs. stormtroopers. I know some people think it’s too silly, but I disagree. The rebellion vs. the empire was always a case of guts and inventiveness vs. industry and regimentation. The fact that the empire never even considered that the ewoks could be a threat was their undoing. Besides, there’s nothing like seeing an imperial walker get smushed between two dropping logs.

2. Best Line

Erik: “I don’t know. Fly casual.” Han’s approach to life in five words.

Eppu: “How are we doing?” Luke: “Same as always.” Han: “That bad, huh?”

3. Best Minor Character

Eppu: This may be a little corny, but Admiral Ackbar! (“It’s a trap!”)

Erik: The commander in charge of the Death Star construction. He seems like a well-organized, conscientious leader, just the sort of person you’d want to put in charge of such a huge project. Too bad he works for a genocidal totalitarian dictatorship.

4. Best Reveal

Erik: R2-D2 was carrying Luke’s lightsaber in Jabba’s palace all along. The moment that lightsaber handle pops up out of the droid’s top is the moment when “Luke, you naive idiot!” turns into “Luke, you cunning bastard!”

Eppu: A two-parter: Luke finds out on Dagobah that Leia’s his sister, and Leia tells Han that Luke’s her brother. Mostly the latter because of the expression on Han’s face (click, click, click… you can see the wheels turning).

5. Best Save

Eppu: Chewie and ewoks commandeering a walker on Endor and turning its guns against the Imperial troops. Pew pew!

Erik: Luke Force-floating C-3PO in the ewok village to convince the ewoks to let them go. C-3PO’s mid-air freak-out pushes it just far enough over the top to go from ridiculous to hilarious.

6. Best Visual

Erik: The Millennium Falcon racing the fireball out of the exploding Death Star. It still gets me on the edge of my seat.

Eppu: The rebel fleet coming out of hyperspace to attack the new Death Star.

Extra: Best Guess for an Episode VII Hook

Eppu: Leia’s become a Jedi. Her title has been revealed to be General, which lines up nicely with her holo-message line to Obi-Wan in Episode IV (“General Kenobi. Years ago, you served my father in the Clone Wars…”).

[And a week after writing the above, the world came crashing down: J.J. Abrams revealed in an interview with IGN (as reported by Moviepilot) that Leia chose to lead the rebellion instead of becoming a Jedi. Ohwell.]

Erik: Palpatine has been pulling the rebellion’s strings all along. He’s a master manipulator who can foresee the future. Did he have a contingency plan for Vader’s betrayal and his own (apparent?) death? Are his dead(?) hands still pulling the strings?

Images: Ewok log trap via History Bomb. Han’s bafflement via lennongirl / LG-CRACK on LiveJournal. Millennium Falcon escaping Death Star via Starscream & Hutch

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Star Wars and the Classics, Part II: The Original Trilogy

December 16, 2015March 11, 2016Erik1 Comment

Yesterday we looked at how classical literature offers interesting ways of looking at the Star Wars prequel movies. We continue today with the original movies.

Episode IV: A New Hope – Homer, the Odyssey, Books 14-22

Episode IV can be read, from a certain point of view, as an essay in heroism. In particular, we see three different kinds of heroes: the always-was-a-hero, the becoming-a-hero, and the choosing-to-be-a-hero.

Leia is the always-was. She is a hero from the beginning of the movie straight through to the end. We never see her stop being heroic, even when being rescued. She has been part of the rebellion literally since she was born and even the destruction her homeworld doesn’t stop her.

Luke is the becoming. He starts as just a farmboy who dreams of far-off adventure. When he discovers his true heritage he strives to live up to the legacy of his father Anakin the great Jedi. Much is expected of him and he does his best to be the hero that people like Obi-Wan and Leia need him to be.

Han is the choosing-to-be. He’s a smuggler and scoundrel who isn’t in it for the rebellion. He just wants to do a job and get paid. He could have just flown away from Yavin with his hold full of cash and nobody would have been surprised. Instead, he decides to come back and help Luke blow up the Death Star.

The same three kinds of heroes appear in the Odyssey. In Book 14, Odysseus has just made it safely home to Ithaca but is still in disguise, getting the lay of the land and figuring out how to deal with the suitors who have been gorging themselves in his hall. The next few books follow Odysseus as he gathers allies, makes plans, and finally confronts the suitors in the final battle in Book 22.

Odysseus is here the always-was. He is a veteran of the great war at Troy and a cunning warrior. He begins the epic as a hero and never falters. Nothing stops him in his determination to get home and reclaim his place as king. Books 14-22 show him as a steady, crafty commander, biding his time and waiting for the right moment to strike.

Odysseus’ son Telemachus is the becoming. As the epic begins, he is just entering manhood and starting to take his first tentative steps into his father’s old role. For Telemachus, the Odyssey is all about proving that he is a worthy son to a heroic father that he knows only through stories. In this stretch of the epic he finally meets his father and proves that he can live up to his example.

The choosing-to-be hero of the Odyssey is Eumaeus, swineherd to Odysseus’ house and one of the servants who remains loyal to Odysseus, even when his master has been gone for twenty years. The sensible thing for Eumaeus to do would have been to abandon Odysseus and suck up to the suitors, like many of the other servants do, to secure his place in the household when Penelope eventually marries one of them. Instead, he sticks by his old master and helps him take back his home.

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Star Wars and the Classics, Part I: The Prequels

December 15, 2015March 11, 2016Erik1 Comment

Star Wars takes many of its cues from mythology and classical history. Here’s some recommended reading if you want to see how themes from the classics found their way to a galaxy long ago and far, far away.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace – Homer, the Iliad, Book 1

I can still remember my feeling of anticipation when I first sat in the theatre to watch The Phantom Menace. We’d waited years to get the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace. We were going back in time to a more civilized age, a golden age of Jedi knights and the sophistication of the galactic republic.

The screen went dark. John Williams’s fanfare blasted from the speakers. The opening text began to scroll up from the bottom. This was everything we had been waiting for!

So what’s this crap about taxation of outlying trade routes? Huh? What is this, Accounting Wars?

The story began. We saw Jedi sitting in a conference room waiting for some cowardly bureaucrats to come and talk turkey. My heart sank in disappointment. (And we hadn’t even gotten to Jar-Jar Binks yet.)

It took many more years and several viewings of Episode I for me to appreciate what George Lucas was doing in this movie. There is a point here and it’s an important one: momentous events don’t start out looking momentous. Terrible things happen because no one is paying close enough attention to stop them when they’re small enough to be managed; only when they roll out of control do people realize what’s happening. Of course the fall of the galactic empire started because of a minor trade dispute and a lonely boy from a desert planet in the middle of nowhere. It could have started in any number of ways, but they all would have seemed just as trivial.

(Mind you, this doesn’t actually make Phantom Menace any better as a movie. It’s still plagued by terrible dialogue, wooden acting, and disturbing racial caricatures. But as a storytelling choice, it’s interesting.)

The classic mythic example of small causes leading to momentous and terrible events is the Trojan War. While pieces of the story are told in many different sources, there’s no single work that covers the entire war. Book 1 of the Iliad, however, puts us in the middle of the action to watch the last act of the war unfold. I’ve written about Book 1 of the Iliad here before, but it’s one of those texts that rewards going back to again and again.

As the Iliad opens, the Trojan war has already been going on for ten years. What we witness here is the conflict between two of the Greek captains, Achilles and Agamemnon. It begins when Agamemnon refuses to ransom a captive woman back to her father. By the end of the book, Achilles has withdrawn his forces from the fighting, which will swing the war in the Trojans’ favor, leading to the near defeat of the Greek forces, the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and Achilles slaying the Trojan prince Hector in madness and grief. The death of Hector robbed the Trojans of their best warrior and sealed the fate of Troy. And it all flows from a dispute over the ransoming of a prisoner from an outlying village.

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Travel: Small Groups on Foot

December 14, 2015May 16, 2016Erik1 Comment

Despite what you may have heard from certain Gondorian captains, one does sometimes have to simply walk into Mordor.

In the first installment of the travel series we looked at some basic issues involved in travel in a pre-industrial world. Today we tackle the kind of travel that most people did most of the time in the pre-modern world: overland journeys by foot in small groups (or alone). We have a few basic questions to ask: How far could they go? How fast could they get there? How much stuff could they take with them? And what did it take to make the journey successfully?

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The Empanada Strikes Back

December 10, 2015December 4, 2015Erik

Empanadas are often savory and filled with meat, but for our Star Wars rewatch I made this sweet variety filled with caramel and apple.

Crust

Ingredients

1 cup milk
3/4 cup butter or shortening
1 package dry yeast
3 cups flour
pinch of salt
pinch of cinnamon

Heat the milk in a saucepan until bubbles form on the top.

Add the butter and let stand 10 minutes until butter is melted.

Stir in the yeast and let stand another 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and cinnamon. Make a well in the center and pour in the milk mixture. Stir until it forms a ball.

Turn out onto a floured surface and knead well, adding flour as needed.

Let rise in a warm place for 30 minutes to an hour.

Punch down the dough, turn it out on a floured surface for another quick knead, then divide into sixteen small balls. Flatten these balls out into six-inch circles and place them on parchment paper on baking sheets.

Filling

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons cream
2 medium apples

You will want to fill and bake your empanadas as soon as the filling is ready, so preheat the oven to 425 F / 220 C while you work.

Peel, core, and finely dice the apples.

Place the sugar and water in a shallow saucepan and stir until the sugar is well dissolved.

Put the pan on medium heat. Large bubbles will eventually give way to smaller bubbles. Stir gently as the sugar mixture begins to brown.

When the caramel has reached a golden brown, add the cream and mix well.

Add the apple pieces and stir well.

Place a generous tablespoonfull of filling centered on one half of each dough circle. Fold the dough over and press the edges together with your fingers, then crimp the edge with the tines of a fork.

Bake for 20 minutes or until beginning to brown. You can continue to cook them as they are until golden brown (about five more minutes) or take them out, glaze them with egg, and return them to the oven to finish baking.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!