Still not running at full thrusters, but my wife and I did go see Rainbow Kitten Surprise at the nearby CCNB Amphitheatre at Simpsonville's Heritage Park. They were good! Sandi's description made me think they'd be more electronic dance music, but actually they reminded me more of prog rock viewed through an indie lens, with surprising influences from both rap and metal - four, sometimes five guitars were on stage at any one time, and the lead singer memorably rocked a day-glo electric guitar for one number. The opening band was also memorable - Michael Marcagi, a good singer whose band was pretty tight.
The best part was the company, of course.
Moments. Seize them when you've got them. Because one day, they'll run out.
Chicken and waffles with a side of bacon at Nose Dive in downtown Greenville. Not healthy or delicious --- but as for that recent research that suggests that increased hunger leads to less healthy food choices, well, I can attest to its validity within the framework of my own personal experience.
One of the things I like about vegan food is that it can be both healthy and delicious. This is a vegetarian burrito from La Parilla - no cheese, no sour cream, extra mushrooms. As far as I know, this was a suffering-free burrito, and the most unhealthy thing about it was the tortilla, which isn't unhealthy per se, but is just one of the foodstuffs that we can easily get too much of in our modern environment.
As for the chips and margarita (not shown)? Well, they're vegan, as far as I know, but healthy, not so much. I'm not sure James Willett would approve, but they are delicious.
So! Earlier I said I wanted to build up a buffer for "Drawing Every Day", but that complicated formula "30(m + 1) + d + 2" - a month and a couple of days ahead, computed by adding 1 to the month, multiplying by 30, adding the days, and adding 2 - neither "felt right" nor left me feeling secure in my "aheadness".
I had planned to work on my backlog from 2024 when additional 2025 drawings would have taken me over the magic number "30(m + 1) + d + 2", but it didn't feel right, and the work I had to do to catch up when I missed a day bothered me.
Then I realized I shouldn't be shooting for a month and a couple days ahead ... it should be more like a week. "30(m +1) + d + 7" (or "+ w") would give me a whole week to catch up. In fact, if I pushed it a bit further - getting a month, a week, and a day ahead - then even if I missed a day, I'd be a week ahead. Even if I missed a WEEK, I'd be a MONTH ahead. And if I missed a month ... I'd still have a week and a day.
If you get behind with that much buffer, it's all on you, baby.
I like this. A month, a week, and a day is easy to remember - and easy to compute, even though "30(m +1) + d + 7 +1" looks just as complicated as it was before, it's cognitively easier to process because it's all broken up into a sequence of simple operations that are easy to remember.
Now, next up ... blogging ahead! Let's start with just +1 ... this one.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Welp, I wanted a picture of my drawing context, but, hey, here's me reading at the great Green Lettuce restaurant, which has a nice high-topped counter and awesome decor, food and staff.
SO! I went "outside my circle" today and did something different, and was about to blog about "if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've always gotten" ... but as I started to write, I had this funny feeling that I'd written about that before, and sure enough, I'd blogged about it almost exactly a year ago.
Now, I was outside of my circle today because of Lent - it's Ash Wednesday, and I decided to drag myself out to an Ash Wednesday service at the church I got married at, Saint Peter's Episcopal (the "rapture-ready" church on Hudson Road, complete with to-go box handle on top). That put me in a different physical location than normal, but it took God sending me a firetruck parked in front of one of the restaurants I would have normally fallen back to before I tried a new place - the Lost Cajun, itself part of a chain I'd been to before, but for some reason I ordered something different than normal, and got the amazing blackened catfish dish above which was far better than the things I'd previously tried there.
And, weirdly, my previous "if you do what you always do" post was also right around the start of Lent. So I wonder if there's something about the spiritual earthquake that Lent is supposed to inspire that also had sent me climbing out of ruts and seeking new experiences a year ago - or, whether that experience left echoes of memory that prompted me to try the same thing again this year.
And it struck me, as a foodie, that while these meals were good, their sum was better than their individual bites. In particular, the hummus-tabbouleh-falafel-pita combo at Nuba was solid all around - definitely good but not the best I've ever had - but the sum of all of them into a meal was extraordinarily satisfying.
This is true even in the case where the food itself is extraordinary. One of my favorite meals is the blackened salmon quesadilla at Aqui's - it's off-menu, so you have to know that you can order it, and how - and while that quesadilla is one of the best food items ever, it's the whole plate - the mango salad, the tropical tea, and the special combination of salsas and pickled jalapenos that I add to it - that takes it over the top.
I mean, in one sense, I knew that - I knew a great meal wasn't just one great dish - but walking out of Nuba today, with a really great, really satisfying Lebanese meal in me - really struck that home.
Blogging every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Three great meals (or drinks) from the archives: a cauliflower steak (which they also have, in another form, at Nuba), a Page One or Cafe Salzburg from Cafe Intermezzo, and the blackened salmon quesadilla at Aqui's (mango salad, with my custom four-flavor salsa combo on the side).
Well, that's a wrap for Silicon Valley Open Studios. After-action report will have to wait - it's late and I'm tired.
This was our celebratory meal from Craft Roots, though - almost identical to the one I failed to take a picture of a few days ago (yes, we went to Craft Roots just three days apart, it's that good).
-the Centaur
Pictured: Sandi's brochures on an unfinished table, and a meal at Craft Roots.
A brief one, as I have Silicon Valley Open Studios AND consulting work to do today, but a comment one of my wife's friends made once was "there's nothing so confused as a vegan at a vegan restaurant" ... because normally they have NO options or ONE option, but now have ALL the options.
I dunno, to me, it seems like a good place to be.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My wife at Craft Roots, a vegan bar and grill in Morgan Hill that we love a lot.
Not pictured: the meal, other than the buffalo cauliflower - I forgot to let my phone eat first.
Also not pictured: the dog which came BARRELLING past us, tied to a clanging metal chair that was chasing it down the street (AAA! AAA! Angry metal thing is following me AND I CAN'T GET AWAY!) I caught her by the leash (just as unleashed a load of pee, how fun) and my wife grabbed her and calmed her down until the owners, panting, ran up - apparently the male owner had tied the dog's leash to his chair, but the chair moved or fell over when he stood up, and the dog, scared, took off, the chair in hot pursuit.
Good doggie, though. Reminded me of my old dog Lady, from back in the days we didn't have portable phones capable of taking frequent pet pictures.
... so here's a sunset dinner from a month or two ago that I thought was beautiful. Enjoy!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the patio of La Parrilla restaurant in Greenville at sunset, along with one of their excellent La Parrilla house margaritas - the best drink on the menu, actually, even though it is the house drink.
Okay, I understand that many restaurants serve tomahawk chops like this because they're not really a meal for one, but actually a for-the-table sharing dish. But, for the love of Julia Child, please, don't do this.
You have here a steak cooled ON its long, frenched bone for its beautiful Fred Flintstone-cut appearance. But your kitchen has proceeded to cut if OFF the bone before the diner ever sees it.
And you have a THICK-CUT steak designed to retain both its juice and heat. Then your kitchen has proceeded to THIN-SLICE it before the diner can even take a bite.
In sum, don't slice your tomahawks.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a doubly ruined steak: first, because they cut it up, and second, because I ill-advisedly tried it blackened. Unfortunately, the already charred nature of a tomahawk doesn't go with blackening, so I cannot recommend this to you. Yes, I threw my body on that grenade for you. You're welcome.
P.S. This was supposed to be my celebration steak for funding our Kickstarter, which funded yesterday, but still has a day to go. I suppose I jumped the gun here and paid the price.
For some reason the shapes of this countertop remind me of a maze - strange little pathways leading towards a drink. I have a fairly strict one-drink-per-day limit (with the sole outstanding exception to that being that you can have a "nightcap" if you drank your one drink much earlier in the day and aren't driving anywhere, but in practice I have only exercised the "nightcap exception" one or two times in my life).
And I have this limit because, at one point in my life, my father started drinking too much. He never got violent or abusive - he actually just got, well, unpleasantly silly. But, for a period of time, my mother and I had to rush to get chores done and dinner ready because my dad loved Canadian Club, and if he had more than one after he got home, he would dissolve into silliness and be unable to talk to over dinner.
That doesn't sound so bad, but that was the worst period of my youth: several years where I essentially didn't have a dad in the evening. And, according to my late Uncle Boo, it sounds like we were lucky; he recounted a story of Dad, drunk, deciding to pick a fight with a man sitting at the third barstool of his favorite bar, just because. (Though I don't know how much to trust this story, as - God bless them - some of the older generation of the family seemed to love to lie to me for some reason, and I have later found out that many of the stories about the family were either exaggerations or straight-up false).
Alcohol seems to affect me differently than Dad. For one, I don't want so much of it: while I love one strong drink, I almost never want more. On the extraordinarily rare occasions (twice?) that I have more than one, or just if the drink is too strong, it gives me a headache, makes me feel nauseous, makes me feel like shit, or all three. And, two, it doesn't seem to make me silly: it makes me, for the lack of a better word, blurry. I have to pick and choose my words with care, and the headache is sitting there, waiting to drop.
But we're different in another way as well: a drink seems to reduce my anger against the world, rather than enhance it. I can't see myself deciding to attack the person who happens to be sitting at the third stool of a bar, just because they're there. In fact, after a good drink, I find myself critically reassessing my internal mental dialogues rattling around in my head about other people - stopping the tape loops, stepping back, and remembering that everyone around me is a person, not a character in my internal narrative.
This may seem odd to some, but one of the persistent elements of my (social) anxiety disorder is stressing out about real and imagined issues with people around me, near and far, past and present. It was an important part of the therapy I took up during the pandemic to deconstruct those narratives, to stop the catastrophizing about potential failure modes, and to learn to move on with my life.
Cognitive behavior therapy helped with this, up to a point. But, I recently noticed, sometimes the narratives tend to stop after a good drink, replaced by a warm, magnanimous feeling. And that can be useful, either when reviewing a situation you've just been in, or fortifying yourself to go into a new situation, so you can build new positive experiences with the people you interact with.
Now, all that being said, I can't recommend drinking. From a scientific perspective, my understanding is that many of the supposed health benefits of alcohol don't really exist, or are outweighed by the negatives of alcohol. The public health recommendation for it is that if you don't drink, don't start.
And my understanding is that alcoholism develops from a combination of predisposition and exposure to alcohol over time - so I really have to dis-recommend drinking alcohol unless you use a structuring tool like my one-drink-per-day limit.
I like to joke that, if you can get drunk on one drink, then, well, it's a really good drink. But, actually, it is possible to get drunk on one drink - and that's too strong. If you have a strict limit of one drink per day that isn't strong enough to get drunk on, I think it would probably be challenging to develop alcoholism.
And so, while I can't recommend alcohol, I can certainly appreciate it as a tool to help chill out about life.
-the Centaur
Pictured: An Ardbeg scotch, I think BizzareBQ, which, despite the gimmicky name, is peaty and rather nice.
Clockwork Alchemy is tomorrow, but my wife and I took the evening off to go to our favorite vegan restaurant (and best restaurant in the Bay Area) Millennium.
It's great, but we hung out there so long we closed the place out almost!
SO! I have no topical image for you, nor a real blogpost either, because I had a "coatastrophe" today. Suffice it to say that I'll be packing the coat I was wearing for a thorough dry cleaning (or two) when I get home, and I will be wearing the new coat my wife and I found on a Macy's clearance rack. But that replacement coat adventure chewed up the time we had this afternoon, turning what was supposed to be a two hour amble into a compressed forty-five minute power walk to make our reservation at Green's restaurant for dinner.
Well worth it, for this great vegetarian restaurant now has many vegan items; but it's late and I'm tired, and I still have to post my drawing for the day before I collapse.
Blogging every dayyszzzzz....
-the Centaur
Pictured: Green's lovely dining room, from two angles.
On the other end of the health food spectrum, we present this lovely tomahawk steak, from Chophouse 47 in Greenville. They don't even normally serve this - it was a special - but it came out extremely well (well as in excellent, not well as in well done; I had it medium rare, as it should be). And it was delicious.
Even though I can't eat them very often, I love tomahawks, as they're visually stunning and generally have the best cooked meat of any steak cut that I know.
Also, you can defend yourself from muggers with the bone.
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, I said it already, a tomahawk steak from Chophouse 47.
Unabashedly, I'm going to beef up the blog buffer by posting something easy, like a picture of this delicious Old Fashioned from Longhorn. They're a nice sipping drink, excellent for kicking back with a good book, which as I recall that night was very likely the book "Rust for Rustaceans."
Now, I talked smack about Rust the other day, but they have some great game libraries worth trying out, and I am not too proud to be proved wrong, nor am I too proud to use a tool with warts (which I will happily complain about) if it can also get my job done (which I will happily crow about).
-the Centaur
Pictured: I said it, yes. And now we're one more day ahead, so I can get on with Neurodiversiverse edits.
One of the striking things about this depressing, all-streaming, post-Covid apocalypse that many of us (including myself) seem to think we're sliding into is the resurgence of Movies, Real Movies. In another sense, neither the depression nor the resurgence were all that surprising. Many movements and media have gone away: disco died, 8 tracks went out, and the goth-industrial club scene of the 90's is mostly dead.
But vinyl, which many people thought would go the way of the 8 track given that CDs are more durable and accurate, is having a resurgence because records are larger, more beautiful, sound more pleasant, and are useful in DJ'ing. In the early 2000's, with the rise of ebooks, a friend told me that he would be so worried if he was a physical publisher or a bookstore owner - but, speaking as a publisher, physical books are now being produced at a higher quality than they have been since the book of fucking Kells, and speaking as a bookstore lover, there is a fricking renaissance of bookstores, which in the 2010s felt like a dying breed.
So maybe it isn't surprising that, with the rise of streaming, 85-inch screens for the home, and the whole zombie apocalypse, that there would be some pessimism about the future of movie theaters. But, speaking as somebody who really loves streaming, I've always preferred media that I can physically own, and I've always preferred seeing movies on the big screen to the small.
Now, some things seem just made for streaming. Marvel movies, for example. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, for another. And Doctor Who. Yet my greatest memories of Doctor Who were seeing "The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang" at Comic-Con, and "Day of the Doctor" in the theater. My greatest memories of Star Trek were watching the re-release of Wrath of Khan for something like its 35th or 40th anniversary. And I must have seen Avengers: Endgame in the theaters like six or seven times (admittedly, one extra time because I got food poisoning in the middle of a showing and had to go back to see it again, and another extra time when they did a special showing to push it past Avatar).
But for the real revival of filmmaking, I credit Christopher Nolan and Tom Cruise. They consistently make movies which are, well, real movies. Movies that look best on the big screen. Movies that show us things we haven't seen before. Movies that push the personal and technology envelope to create experiences that no-one has ever created before.
I really enjoyed Tenet - it's my favorite Christopher Nolan movie - but Oppenheimer takes the spectacle of moviemaking to the next level with an unending, almost seamless wall of sound and imagery, broken only when Nolan chooses to go dark or quiet for effect. Top Gun: Maverick may be a popcorn movie, but, at the same time, I think it is very literally one of the best movies ever made, and if you understand the behind the scenes stories, the effort that Cruise put into making it shows in every frame. And the Mission Impossible series, similarly, continues to excel at showing us stunts which are, well, impossible.
Even beyond Nolan and Cruise, other moviemakers are doing the same. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness or Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania may ... not be the best movies ever made, but they are some of the most visually imaginative. No Time To Die may suffer a bit from the just-so storytelling that afflicts many modern movies and TV shows, but it's truly a spectacular Bond outing. And the quality of acting, directing, and even writing in recent years means we get truly spectacular achievements like Knives Out, which uses little to no obvious special effects to achieve a truly spectacular result just by clever writing, deft directing, and amazing performances orchestrated to a crescendo.
So, hey, go catch a movie in the theater. It's better than it's been since the late seventies / early eighties.
Pictured: Gordon Ramsay's "Finally, some good fucking food," adapted for the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie, which was, at last, a good fucking D&D movie, and which had, at last, a good fucking gelatinous cube. It also apparently had cameos of the kids from the 80's cartoons, though for my money my favorite D&D adaptation is the late-80's-early-90's comic Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, because it has a centaur and it's set in Forgotten Realms. Anyway, this most recent movie was awesome, go see it, so it will make a lot of money, and we get sequels with more of Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith and especially Sophia Lillis doing their adventuring thing.
And, allegedly, that's what Sam Spade ate - lamb chops with baked potato and sliced tomatoes. I'll pass on the coffee and cigarettes, thanks, but it was a perfectly nice little meal. John's Grill is a tight space as viewed from above, but it uses every ounce of available floorspace quite efficiently:
The Falcon itself is on the second floor. Forgive me for not coming up with some pun about "The Last Millenium's Falcon" or some such, it's late and I have a presentation to work on for the AAAI Spring Symposium next week. But just so you don't miss it ... well, you can't miss it:
Ah, San Francisco, and John's Grill. I won't say never change, but some things should stay the same.
