So I recently finished playing through all four of the old D&D Infinity Engine games, after starting Baldur's Gate something like 15 months ago. Needless to say, they were all fun, or else I wouldn't have put up with dedicating all my game-playing time to games I already invested hundreds of hours into during my childhood while my Steam and GOG queues keep getting longer and longer and longer.
Playing all those Infinity Engine games was so fun, in fact, that immediately after finishing Icewind Dale 2 I started playing goddamn Planescape: Torment. I'd never played it before, it was cheap on GOG, and I'd been getting sick of over a decade of being stared at like I was a leper every time I confessed to a cRPG fan that I'd never played it before.
That said, I'm actually glad I didn't play it until now. It has an amazing story, just like everyone says it does, but it's also a deep and mature story, not just in terms of subject matter, but in terms of symbolism, metaphor, and all that fun English major stuff, and I honestly don't think I would have appreciated it nearly as much at 18 as I did at 31. With the mods recommended on GOG's page installed, the game actually looks better to my eyes that the Baldur's Gate series: the sprites are better animated and the environments are more lovingly crafted. Everything is a bit dull and dark palette-wise, but that suits the story of a guy's quest through the planes of hell to figure out how he can finally die.
So, did I like it? If I was going to sum up my review in three sentences, I'd say this:
1. If you care at all about RPGs or games-as-art, you must play this game at least once in your life.
2. The degree to which your role-playing actually effects the world around you makes me want to play it over again right away, but some of its more "gamey" elements got annoying and I'm not sure I want to deal with them again.
3. How the hell has someone, anyone not made another game like this in the last decade?
But this is a blog, so I'm going to sum up my review in a billion sentences.
It's difficult to talk about this game without comparing it to the other Infinity Engine games, but I'll try my best. First off, rarely have I seen a game that so successfully melds its story and its gameplay such that the combination benefits both rather than hindering them. You begin the game by waking up in a mortuary after being killed, realize you have amnesia, and then progress from there. That your avatar starts at square one, then, in terms of abilities and you as the player start at square one in terms of understanding the ins and outs of the planescape around you makes sense. It's a subtle thing, frequently, how well the gameplay and the story cohere in P:T, but it's not a small thing.
The gameplay itself centers around the usual Infinity Engine (and cRPG) activities: talking, exploring, inventory-managing, and fighting. The emphasis is a lot more on exploring and talking than on fighting, though, than I've ever really experienced playing a cRPG. One friend of mine described it as a "chat simulator," and in some respects that's not too far off the mark. If you winced at that last sentence, this game's not for you. In this game, you read. A LOT.
One of the frequent boasts made about Planescape: Torment is that it has 800,000 words of dialogue. I believe it. On nights when I'm not working or socializing late into the night, I frequently will play a video game until bedtime and then go to bed and read for 30-45 minutes until I fall asleep. Playing P:T long into the night, I found that when I quit playing, I had no interest in continuing to read and just went straight to sleep.
That's a good thing. The game requires you to read through reams and reams of text, but it's all (and I mean all) well-written text. The dialogue and exposition is often of a higher quality than I find in much printed fiction, and on top of that, knowing what's going on around you, paying attention to other characters' reactions, and comprehensively reading your dialogue options is essential to playing the game as the character that you'd like to be. Again, if expressing your role-playing desires by choosing dialogue tree branches for hours sounds boring to you, this might not be your game. I'll say, though, that usually that doesn't sound like my game, but the great writing in P:T and the gravity your choices hold in the gameworld keeps the reading and own-adventure-choosing from becoming a chore. It's an old cliche, and one that I generally try to avoid indulging (because usually it's inaccurate and reductive), but P:T is a bit like an excellently realized, beautifully imagined graphic novel in which you get to make all the choices for the main character.
There's combat, for sure, but it's not nearly as complex as even the Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate series are. I made a point of seeking out companions early, and we generally overwhelmed our enemies in battle with numbers by just clicking like it was Diablo. From a ludic point of view, that's actually one of the downsides of the game; it's so open-ended that the mandatory combat parts can be hideously unbalanced, based on how you play. You always have a few major, overriding quests and the usual spate of smaller, secondary quests to deal with; however, you have to actually go out and collect these quests, and how you do that, when you do that, and even if you do that is mostly up to you. Even BG2 seems linear to me by comparison. In some ways this is great, and accentuates the sense of "being yourself" that the game cultivates so well in other ways.
On the other hand, though, it can lead to imbalance issues which end up unsubtly slapping you upside the head and screaming "YOU'RE PLAYING A GAME!" at really inconvenient times. For example, I spent a lot of time walking around each and every town, talking to each and every townsperson, and following up on each and every quest that they gave me. As talking-quests, debating-quests, and fetch quests are where most of your experience points come from, you'll want to do this. I probably had 50 or so decently long conversations every time I came to a new location. I'd guess maybe 70% of my overall game-time was spent in the dialogue window. There are a lot of NPCs, and a lot of them don't just have canned dialogue, and the only way to find out which ones will want you to do something that will a) shed light on your main quest and b) give you necessary experience points is to talk to them all. I did this, and it took a really long time, and according to the walkthrough I skimmed after I finished the game, I still missed a ton of sidequests. If I replay this game, I'll love having those conversations again and taking a different tack, but I won't love having to walk through each location clicking on everyone like some weird, conversation-based version of level grinding.
It seemed to me that I overplayed this chatty part of the game, that I engaged in more conversations than was absolutely necessary. As a result, I was a bit overleveled for much of the game. I imagine if someone came into playing the game and only talked to the clearly obvious "quest-giving" characters and nobody else (which would still involve a lot of talking), they would likely be unable to defeat a lot of the monsters they have to fight during the ramp-up to the endgame. That doesn't seem right to me. I like the idea that learning something about a major character or yourself through dialogue gets you the same amount of experience as slaying a minotaur does; that's a cool idea. However, when you can't progress through a late-game dungeon and all the minor enemies are slaughtering you because you didn't bother to talk to the stableboy five towns ago and get his 120,000 experience point quest, it just seems silly. When the only way to rectify this "mistake" of not engaging enough with the game's brilliant story is to grind for hours by killing the same enemies over and over again, it's even sillier.
This is why I say I loved the game, but I probably won't replay it. I came out pretty well by playing a high-intelligence, high-wisdom character and had fun talking and dealing my way toward high-level abilities because when do you ever get to do that in a game (as opposed to just slaughtering lots of bad guys)? I saw a lot of opportunities throughout, though, where it became clear that had I played the game a bit differently, the result might have been an experience that was 30% awesome conversation, 70% boring grinding. The content is there, for sure, and its high-quality content, but you've got to be willing to play the game primarily as a chat simulator (for want of a better term) for it to be the brilliant, unique game that everyone keeps telling you it is.
Buoyed by my enjoyment of P:T I started playing the original Fallout for the first time at like 10pm last night. I think I went to bed at...oh, 3am. Fallout's battle system is AMAZING. GOG is going to brutally murder my summer productivity.
Jun 21, 2013
Jun 20, 2013
A Thing I Almost Posted on Facebook
Warning: This is really incoherent, but there might be some neat thoughts in there somewhere.
I was reading an academic piece earlier today, and it was your typical theory-heavy post-structuralist sort of thing, all eyebrow-beetling and theory-over-practice and ivory-tower-as-all-hell (and quite a good essay for all of that), when I flicked back to the top of the essay to check the title and noticed that the piece's epigraph was a lyric from a pop song. This was amusing to me for two reasons.
First, I really, really think that epigraphs should be used to reinforce the point of the piece by using a quote or thought that doesn't really work in context, but stands alone quite well. The epigraph is the one place where you should "quote-drop." This particular epigraph was not that. Instead, it was a very general, nonpartisan statement about the topic of the paper that the author was about to spend twenty pages examining and pontificating on in great detail.
Second, as I was thinking about the incongruity of this, I came to realize that the epigraph of an essay has become the place that us weird, closeted, uncool, anti-social academics have co-opted for desperately proclaiming "Hey! I like rock music!" or "Hey! I watch movies in addition to reading huge tomes of mid-1900s theory!" It doesn't matter if the epigraph fits the paper topic, it seems, as the real point of the epigraph is to prove that we have "real lives" outside of academia, that we do things with our lives other than write essays and push our glasses back up on our noses. This is kind of silly. I say that even though (and maybe because) I've done it too: I almost included a Wilco lyric from "Hell is Chrome" at the beginning of my dissertation, and I've included music lyrics at the top of a few of my essays. Again, not because it's useful in the context of the essay, but because it feels cool to make that shallow link between pop culture and heavy theory...you know, instead of actually building that bridge into your paper and risking getting poo-poo'd because you're talking about Jeff Tweedy instead of Georg Simmel.
Anyway, the end point of my thoughtxcursion was me deciding that I was super-clever and that I obviously had to paste some snarky shit about this epigraph on Facebook. I got about halfway through typing it up before I stopped, realizing, as I said above, that a) I'm also guilty of this particular epigraph-sin and b) that my motive in posting my realization publicly was entirely just to show off by picking on someone else. Sure, I'd do it in a semi-humble way by mentioning that I've done the same thing in the past, but the implication underlying this admission would still be "...but I learned my lesson, and now look at this moron!"
I would never call someone out on something this stupid in "real life," but the one-way anonymity of Facebook made it easy: everyone who saw my post would know who I was and would know how cleverly snarky I was, and they wouldn't know the person that I was picking on, so that made the picking-on okay. A funny observation rather than a direct attack. Right?
No. Not right. Because the spirit of the post would have still be confrontational, and even if it never got back to the person I was writing about (which it absolutely, certainly would not have), I was still doing myself harm in using someone else's (excellent) work as a starting point for a goofy, mocking post made just to make internet people think I was clever. This is a very big thing in other cultures, other belief systems, that we don't really seem to have in our culture: the idea that holding yourself above someone else, defeating someone else, attacking someone else, not only hurts them, but also hurts you. In our culture, it seems, the winner is right (or "Might Makes Right", a dictum we criticized, tore down, and then for some reason replaced with capitalism).
The insidious thing about Facebook (for me, at least), is that it creates a playing field wherein I'm always the winner. Everything I post is, by necessity, my own interpretation of an event, piece of work, etc., and I can post my interpretation in a forum wherein everyone I want to see what I have to say can, and everyone I want to exclude can be excluded. We're already (generally speaking) a pretty intensely ego-centered culture, and Facebook makes it easier, more rewarding, to be that way and never have to face negative consequences (at least not immediately). This is pretty obvious to All Humans in the "Everyone on Facebook is selfish because they think I care about Castle Crashers or their new baby pictures or whatever the fuck!" but I feel like today I discovered a new layer of the site's ability to quietly encourage users to construct a world where they're the center.
From now on, before I post something online, I want to try to make sure that I'm only doing it because it's worth sharing, that it's something that helps build community and strengthen links between people (virtually and maybe even physically). If it's something that criticizes someone, somewhere, or an idea, or a religion, or what-have-you, I want to try to make sure that critique is still in the name of strengthening community bonds and not just in the service of giving me the quick happy-boost one gets from having their opinion validated by lots of clicks on a "Like" button. I will still, for instance, happily post articles about gay-bashing churches being a bunch of assholes because there's certainly a particular kind of community I want to be a part of, and I'm naturally going to want to encourage that other people help build that kind of community (online or off) instead of another kind. I'm only human, after all. And of course I'll fuck up occasionally, again because I'm only human.
But I think that as we continue to rely on services like Facebook for our day-to-day communication, it's important for everyone to think a bit about what you put online and why you do it. Even if you can (and do) "win" an argument or successfully shout over your opposition by posting something online with the intent to win rather than the intent to share, aren't you, in the most Buddhistic way, doing harm to yourself as well as others in the process? When I rarely stop and think about it, like I did today, it sure feels that way.
I was reading an academic piece earlier today, and it was your typical theory-heavy post-structuralist sort of thing, all eyebrow-beetling and theory-over-practice and ivory-tower-as-all-hell (and quite a good essay for all of that), when I flicked back to the top of the essay to check the title and noticed that the piece's epigraph was a lyric from a pop song. This was amusing to me for two reasons.
First, I really, really think that epigraphs should be used to reinforce the point of the piece by using a quote or thought that doesn't really work in context, but stands alone quite well. The epigraph is the one place where you should "quote-drop." This particular epigraph was not that. Instead, it was a very general, nonpartisan statement about the topic of the paper that the author was about to spend twenty pages examining and pontificating on in great detail.
Second, as I was thinking about the incongruity of this, I came to realize that the epigraph of an essay has become the place that us weird, closeted, uncool, anti-social academics have co-opted for desperately proclaiming "Hey! I like rock music!" or "Hey! I watch movies in addition to reading huge tomes of mid-1900s theory!" It doesn't matter if the epigraph fits the paper topic, it seems, as the real point of the epigraph is to prove that we have "real lives" outside of academia, that we do things with our lives other than write essays and push our glasses back up on our noses. This is kind of silly. I say that even though (and maybe because) I've done it too: I almost included a Wilco lyric from "Hell is Chrome" at the beginning of my dissertation, and I've included music lyrics at the top of a few of my essays. Again, not because it's useful in the context of the essay, but because it feels cool to make that shallow link between pop culture and heavy theory...you know, instead of actually building that bridge into your paper and risking getting poo-poo'd because you're talking about Jeff Tweedy instead of Georg Simmel.
Anyway, the end point of my thoughtxcursion was me deciding that I was super-clever and that I obviously had to paste some snarky shit about this epigraph on Facebook. I got about halfway through typing it up before I stopped, realizing, as I said above, that a) I'm also guilty of this particular epigraph-sin and b) that my motive in posting my realization publicly was entirely just to show off by picking on someone else. Sure, I'd do it in a semi-humble way by mentioning that I've done the same thing in the past, but the implication underlying this admission would still be "...but I learned my lesson, and now look at this moron!"
I would never call someone out on something this stupid in "real life," but the one-way anonymity of Facebook made it easy: everyone who saw my post would know who I was and would know how cleverly snarky I was, and they wouldn't know the person that I was picking on, so that made the picking-on okay. A funny observation rather than a direct attack. Right?
No. Not right. Because the spirit of the post would have still be confrontational, and even if it never got back to the person I was writing about (which it absolutely, certainly would not have), I was still doing myself harm in using someone else's (excellent) work as a starting point for a goofy, mocking post made just to make internet people think I was clever. This is a very big thing in other cultures, other belief systems, that we don't really seem to have in our culture: the idea that holding yourself above someone else, defeating someone else, attacking someone else, not only hurts them, but also hurts you. In our culture, it seems, the winner is right (or "Might Makes Right", a dictum we criticized, tore down, and then for some reason replaced with capitalism).
The insidious thing about Facebook (for me, at least), is that it creates a playing field wherein I'm always the winner. Everything I post is, by necessity, my own interpretation of an event, piece of work, etc., and I can post my interpretation in a forum wherein everyone I want to see what I have to say can, and everyone I want to exclude can be excluded. We're already (generally speaking) a pretty intensely ego-centered culture, and Facebook makes it easier, more rewarding, to be that way and never have to face negative consequences (at least not immediately). This is pretty obvious to All Humans in the "Everyone on Facebook is selfish because they think I care about Castle Crashers or their new baby pictures or whatever the fuck!" but I feel like today I discovered a new layer of the site's ability to quietly encourage users to construct a world where they're the center.
From now on, before I post something online, I want to try to make sure that I'm only doing it because it's worth sharing, that it's something that helps build community and strengthen links between people (virtually and maybe even physically). If it's something that criticizes someone, somewhere, or an idea, or a religion, or what-have-you, I want to try to make sure that critique is still in the name of strengthening community bonds and not just in the service of giving me the quick happy-boost one gets from having their opinion validated by lots of clicks on a "Like" button. I will still, for instance, happily post articles about gay-bashing churches being a bunch of assholes because there's certainly a particular kind of community I want to be a part of, and I'm naturally going to want to encourage that other people help build that kind of community (online or off) instead of another kind. I'm only human, after all. And of course I'll fuck up occasionally, again because I'm only human.
But I think that as we continue to rely on services like Facebook for our day-to-day communication, it's important for everyone to think a bit about what you put online and why you do it. Even if you can (and do) "win" an argument or successfully shout over your opposition by posting something online with the intent to win rather than the intent to share, aren't you, in the most Buddhistic way, doing harm to yourself as well as others in the process? When I rarely stop and think about it, like I did today, it sure feels that way.
Jun 19, 2013
There and Bike Again
So, a few weeks ago (quite possibly during the same conversation that resulted in my Palouse Falls trip), my friend Dale brought up the idea of he and I and both of our fair ladies take a bike ride together before Lindsey and I moved away. But not just any bike ride. No, this ride would involve traveling all the way to the city of Troy, ID and back in a day, a journey I'd only ever done in vehicles powered by internal combustion rather than human legs. To put this trip in perspective, the longest I'd ever ridden in a day before was from Pullman to Moscow and back a bunch of times last summer, a distance of about 18 miles, round-trip. Despite being a beautiful ride along the perfectly-maintained Bill Chipman Trail, this ride never got easy for me even after I'd done it 10-15 times in a few months. By the end of last summer, I'd decided that I really liked biking but was pretty sure that ~20 miles a ride was a good upper limit for me. A year or so later, after 12 months of not riding a bike, Dale was suggesting that suddenly I ride not 18 miles in one go, but more like 52 miles.
I was nervous (understandably, I think) about my ability to actually even do a ride that long, let alone my ability to do it and actually enjoy it more than hate it. I mean, I really like riding bikes, but this was almost three times my longest-ever distance. I wasn't at all worried about the rest of our group's ability to complete the ride (Lindsey has done a triathlon and Dale and Jill are both marathoners), just mine. In my mind, the only things that even made it remotely possible in my mind that I would survive such a ride were the facts that we'd be riding a lot slower than I usually ride to Moscow and back and that we'd be stopping much more frequently. Also, the only real consequence of failure would be having to get a ride back to Pullman, and even then I would have gotten to (presumably) ride more bikes than I ever had before.
I've written a bunch of times before (though I can't find any links now) about how much of the joy of backpacking/mountaineering for me is just the knowledge that all you have to do on a day of hiking is walk, eat, and sleep. The experience is stripped down to the bare essentials of life, spread out over an entire day that doesn't involve anything more complicated than survival. Throw in a few friends and it's basically the most fun I can have, at least on this puny human planet called "Earth." I've never ridden a bike long enough or far enough to apply this "hike all day" philosophy to the process. Even my rides to Moscow and back always took two hours or so at most, so they were crammed into the empty part of a "normal" day. The allure of taking another activity that I love (biking) and injecting it into this stripped-down-day experience was, ultimately, too much for me to pass up. Eventually fear of failure gave way to the excitement of getting to do something fucking awesome. And then we did it. And it was awesome.
Unlike a hiking trip report, there's not much to say about the details of the ride. We pedaled a lot, we stopped often enough and stretched that my legs never got too sore, I got incredibly sunburnt because when you're riding it doesn't feel like the sun is burning you like it does when you're standing still, and I learned that there are many excruciating levels of saddle-soreness, but that it can be temporarily alleviated by standing up on your pedals and doesn't need to definitely be a ride-ender like it's been for me in the past. There's much less room for just mind-wandering and sight-seeing when riding instead of walking, especially on a path that, while excellently paved, is (probably for that very reason) filled with other riders and similar obstacles. There's a lot of room for talking, though, which was nice. And holy shit do you apparently burn a lot of calories riding. I had more trouble staying full for the two days after the ride than I ever have even from the most intense and egregious summiting experiences.
We set out from Pullman at about 9am, hooking up with Dale and Jill near the beginning of the Chipman Trail after a nice two mile warm-up ride from our house.
From there, we hooked onto the main trail and rode to Moscow along a route that I was used to, but had never ridden in the morning before. A lot of what I think was larkspur was blooming along the trail, so the morning-lit fields around us had a distinctive purple shade that will probably always remind me of Pullman.
The ride in to Moscow was pretty uneventful, though all the extra cold-morning clothes I'd worn had to come off at around mile five because it was developing into a much hotter, clearer day than I'd expected. We took a short water-and-chatting break around mile seven, and by then Moscow and Moscow Mountain were already in the distance. This leg of the ride seemed to go a lot faster mentally than it usually does when I'm riding alone, but we were definitely riding at a much slower pace, which was great. I was surprised how good I felt riding into Moscow, knowing we'd already covered a fifth of the total distance.
The ride through Moscow (from the Chipman Trail to the Latah Trail) was, surprisingly, one of my favorite parts of the trip. The path was slow and windy, and a little bit too choked with traffic, but instead of forcing us to ride on sidewalks and in streets all throughout town, it took us through some nicely wooded parts of the U of I campus, under some enormous weeping willows, and spat us back out at the east end of town, just in time to link onto the Latah Trail and ride past a huge graveyard, which is always encouraging.
Things were hot and steeply uphill almost immediately outside of Moscow, and here's where, at about the 15 mile mark, I started to feel the distance for the first time. It was the point of exertion at which I would usually stop riding and go home, but over the last few years of running, I've realized that there's a certain kind of exhaustion that you can just push through and keep going because it's not so much exhaustion as it is just breaking through a mental block. Of course, there is a point where you should recognize that you've overworked yourself and stop before you get hurt, but that line is a lot further off in the distance than I thought it was before I started running long distances. I kept pedaling, hoping that the same was true with biking, that I didn't need to stop so much as I just needed to pedal for a bit on level pavement or on a downhill.
Getting up that first big climb was probably the hardest part of the ride for me (mentally, at least), being near-exhausted already and being barely a quarter of the way done with the ride, but once we topped out, there was an extremely sharp drop coupled with a sharp turn and then things leveled out for a few miles before a picnic area appeared on the horizon. We were about 6 miles from Troy at this point (about 18 miles in), and were planning to eat there, but the siren song of the picnic tables pulled us in and we stopped for a snack and a stretch.
Stops like this are what made the trip not only possible but easy(ish) for me because I had both a chance to recover and a chance to feel like we weren't biking every possible second to finish as fast as we could but instead out on a fun adventure to Troy that just happened to involve riding bikes. Oh, and shoveling a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans into my face at this point didn't hurt, either.
The last six miles of the ride into Troy was great after the break. There was a generous but not terrifying loss of altitude for about three straight miles, and we were able to basically ride for about ten minutes without pedaling, just coasting down and down as the trees grew thicker and larger around us. This was easily my favorite part of the ride. Then, suddenly, we came out of the trees, and Troy was right there in front of our faces. We took our time riding through town, and finding a place to eat before chaining our bikes up outside the Little Bear Creek Cafe.
I was nervous (understandably, I think) about my ability to actually even do a ride that long, let alone my ability to do it and actually enjoy it more than hate it. I mean, I really like riding bikes, but this was almost three times my longest-ever distance. I wasn't at all worried about the rest of our group's ability to complete the ride (Lindsey has done a triathlon and Dale and Jill are both marathoners), just mine. In my mind, the only things that even made it remotely possible in my mind that I would survive such a ride were the facts that we'd be riding a lot slower than I usually ride to Moscow and back and that we'd be stopping much more frequently. Also, the only real consequence of failure would be having to get a ride back to Pullman, and even then I would have gotten to (presumably) ride more bikes than I ever had before.
I've written a bunch of times before (though I can't find any links now) about how much of the joy of backpacking/mountaineering for me is just the knowledge that all you have to do on a day of hiking is walk, eat, and sleep. The experience is stripped down to the bare essentials of life, spread out over an entire day that doesn't involve anything more complicated than survival. Throw in a few friends and it's basically the most fun I can have, at least on this puny human planet called "Earth." I've never ridden a bike long enough or far enough to apply this "hike all day" philosophy to the process. Even my rides to Moscow and back always took two hours or so at most, so they were crammed into the empty part of a "normal" day. The allure of taking another activity that I love (biking) and injecting it into this stripped-down-day experience was, ultimately, too much for me to pass up. Eventually fear of failure gave way to the excitement of getting to do something fucking awesome. And then we did it. And it was awesome.
Unlike a hiking trip report, there's not much to say about the details of the ride. We pedaled a lot, we stopped often enough and stretched that my legs never got too sore, I got incredibly sunburnt because when you're riding it doesn't feel like the sun is burning you like it does when you're standing still, and I learned that there are many excruciating levels of saddle-soreness, but that it can be temporarily alleviated by standing up on your pedals and doesn't need to definitely be a ride-ender like it's been for me in the past. There's much less room for just mind-wandering and sight-seeing when riding instead of walking, especially on a path that, while excellently paved, is (probably for that very reason) filled with other riders and similar obstacles. There's a lot of room for talking, though, which was nice. And holy shit do you apparently burn a lot of calories riding. I had more trouble staying full for the two days after the ride than I ever have even from the most intense and egregious summiting experiences.
We set out from Pullman at about 9am, hooking up with Dale and Jill near the beginning of the Chipman Trail after a nice two mile warm-up ride from our house.
 |
| Lindsey at the beginning of the ride. |
 |
| The Bikemoot. |
 |
| You can't really see the larkspur here, but here's the view from my favorite rest stop along the way to Moscow. |
The ride through Moscow (from the Chipman Trail to the Latah Trail) was, surprisingly, one of my favorite parts of the trip. The path was slow and windy, and a little bit too choked with traffic, but instead of forcing us to ride on sidewalks and in streets all throughout town, it took us through some nicely wooded parts of the U of I campus, under some enormous weeping willows, and spat us back out at the east end of town, just in time to link onto the Latah Trail and ride past a huge graveyard, which is always encouraging.
Things were hot and steeply uphill almost immediately outside of Moscow, and here's where, at about the 15 mile mark, I started to feel the distance for the first time. It was the point of exertion at which I would usually stop riding and go home, but over the last few years of running, I've realized that there's a certain kind of exhaustion that you can just push through and keep going because it's not so much exhaustion as it is just breaking through a mental block. Of course, there is a point where you should recognize that you've overworked yourself and stop before you get hurt, but that line is a lot further off in the distance than I thought it was before I started running long distances. I kept pedaling, hoping that the same was true with biking, that I didn't need to stop so much as I just needed to pedal for a bit on level pavement or on a downhill.
Getting up that first big climb was probably the hardest part of the ride for me (mentally, at least), being near-exhausted already and being barely a quarter of the way done with the ride, but once we topped out, there was an extremely sharp drop coupled with a sharp turn and then things leveled out for a few miles before a picnic area appeared on the horizon. We were about 6 miles from Troy at this point (about 18 miles in), and were planning to eat there, but the siren song of the picnic tables pulled us in and we stopped for a snack and a stretch.
The last six miles of the ride into Troy was great after the break. There was a generous but not terrifying loss of altitude for about three straight miles, and we were able to basically ride for about ten minutes without pedaling, just coasting down and down as the trees grew thicker and larger around us. This was easily my favorite part of the ride. Then, suddenly, we came out of the trees, and Troy was right there in front of our faces. We took our time riding through town, and finding a place to eat before chaining our bikes up outside the Little Bear Creek Cafe.
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| Riding into Troy. |
 |
| The Cafe. |
It wouldn't have mattered what the food was at that point, as long as it had calories in it. I ate just enough to keep me going until we could reach the Moscow Alehouse, where there was, I was convinced, a veggie burger with my name on it. We spent a nice, leisurely time eating and then playing at the playground because we're adults.
 |
| Pictured: Adults. |
Headed back out of town, I was dreading pedaling back up that long, drawn-out hill we'd coasted down. I don't know if it was the food or what, though, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd imagined. We took another short break at the top of the grade through before continuing on flatter terrain for the ensuing few miles. During the break, I took a picture of this great tunnel and then climbed up to the road, only to find that the view wasn't that great.
 |
| (Not A Great) View |
We covered all but the last two or so miles to Moscow after that break (~38 miles total) before stopping again, this time just outside of the city. I climbed another big thing to get a picture of everyone stretching in the road.
Then we rode triumphantly back into town, with me feeling much more like I was going to end up in the graveyard than I had when we'd passed it the first time.
 |
| Apparently Lindsey is friends with the Reaper. |
In Moscow, we lived a dream of self-indulgent, calorie-deficient Awesome People, stopping at the Alehouse and eating large amounts of food and alcohol. Because alcohol is a great idea when you've been sweating in the sun all day and have just pedaled 40 miles. Then we all rode to WinCo (en route to Pullman) so Dale and Jill could buy camping supplies for the hike they were going on the next morning and I stumbled around in the aisles trying to metabolize the alcohol in my bloodstream and buying a box of S'mores Pop-Tarts because I wanted to.
Then, massively dehydrated from drinking beer and eating salty food, I followed everyone else groggily for the last leg of our ride back into Pullman.
 |
| The home stretch. |
There was never any doubt in my mind that we'd finish this last leg, but it seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. On the other hand, I'd had more fun during this bike ride than I had in one single day for a long time, so half-drunk, dehydrated, saddle-sore, and with a decent case of sewing-machine-leg, I still didn't really want the ride to end. But, end it eventually did. We parted ways with Dale and Jill at the end of the Chipman Trail and rode the last two miles back home ourselves.
 |
| Me, finishing with my spelunk-biking helmet. |
So yeah, it was super-fun, and as with many of the great things we've done in and around Pullman lately, my only real regret is that we started doing it now instead of years ago. Also, my 80s bike is awesome.
Jun 18, 2013
Palouse Falls Hike
On Dale's recommendation, Lindsey and I took a trip to Palouse Falls Recreation Area two weekends ago. As is often the case in the Pacific Northwest, the near-total lack of information about the site online made it a real surprise compared to what I at least was expecting, but in a good way.
The drive to the falls took us out to Washtucna, which evoked a lot of old memories of making the drive to the Tri-Cities and back that way twice a week for a year when I was teaching at the WSU campus there. A few miles past Washtucna, though, you take a left at a huge, very obvious sign, and then we were on "new road," for us at least. The road into the park was one of those many gorgeous, winding, slow-down-and-enjoy-the-view-or-you'll-crash-in-a-fiery-wreck roads that the Palouse does so well, and that far south we were actually somewhere between the channeled scablands and the loess hills that encircle Pullman, so the landscape was extra-beautiful.
I was vaguely aware of the fact that we were paralleling the Palouse river throughout our drive (you actually follow it for a bit just before and then out of Washtucna on our normal Tri-Cities route) and that it would eventually have to turn from a glorified stream into a falls, which would necessitate a drop in elevation, but I still didn't expect the pleasingly monotonous desert-scrub landscape we were driving through to so suddenly transform into a goddamn canyon. But it did, and then we were in the parking lot, just like that, about eighty or so minutes after leaving Pullman.
There'd been some terror on my part on the way there that I'd left my Discovery Pass ($30/yr for access to lots of pretty outdoor things!) at home like a moron, when in reality it was just hidden in that secret corner of space-time in the glove compartment where all important pieces of documentation go the moment before you really need them. Upon arriving at the Palouse Falls "trailhead," though, we found out that it was National Outdoors Day (or somesuch) and so was one of the three or four days out of the entire year when parking was free. Then I found my Discover Pass.
Anyway, the parking area and its environs were a (literal) oasis in a (literal) desert. There was a small camping area and a nice, tree-shaded lawn whereupon people were grilling and picnicking and such. Of course, we weren't there to freaking eat, we were there to tax our bodies physically and almost fall off of a fucking waterfall.
These experiences were a little harder to come by than we expected, thanks to the site's horrible signage-to-useful-information ratio, which was high even by Washington State Park Services standards. Signs goddamn everywhere, but none of them telling us how to actually hike to the falls. See, there's a phenomenal cliffside observation area right at the parking lot, but we'd heard tales of hiking down to the top of the waterfall itself, and so obviously that's what had to be done.
Unfortunately, there was no clear way down. Using common sense, we started off down one of the many, many crisscrossing footpaths that seemed to have the most tough-looking people walking on it. In this case, our logical deduction paid off in a series of higher and higher viewpoints which made it easier to understand how the site's trail system worked and even hinted at the possibility of being able to get to the base of the waterfall. Challenge accepted.
We followed the trail to the left of the original observation point as it crossed over a few high bluffs and then dropped down a bit onto some (active!) railroad tracks. Fortunately, in true Washingtonian fashion, these tracks were populated with hikers just chilling out and parents skipping rocks with their tiny, train-vincible children.
We walked down the tracks aways and then descended the really obvious path down the railroad grade to the river proper. Along the river were the biggest sage bushes (sage trees?) I've ever seen. Lots of people lined the sides of the river around the lower, more gentle "Upper Falls," and this little river-powered desert oasis would have been a great place to eat a lunch (or camp for a night, if it wasn't illegal). We pushed on after a few minutes, though, following the obvious trail along the base of the cliff on the right side of the river (as it flows downstream).
En route to the top of the falls, we ran across a hugely chubby marmot, and some more great views of the canyon walls, and then there was a disturbingly placid pool that suddenly dropped over 200 feet. Water, fall.
Lindsey jumped around a bit on the rocks just above the cataract while I sat on the ground and tried not to look at her (I'm afraid of heights and of other people falling from them, especially), and then we weighed the pros and cons of continued along a rather slippery-looking trail that circled back the way we'd come from but under the observation deck.
It seemed like this trail dead-ended in a 150-foot gravel-and-scree wash that could only possibly be descended with ropes, but if my mountaineering experience has taught me anything, it's that you've really got to be face-to-face with a descent before you can really see how steep it is. So we followed the almost-goat-trail along the opposite side of the cliff wall until we reached the wash.
At some point in here, we realized that there were actually totally normal-looking people fishing at the foot of the waterfall, so it started to seem like it must be possible to get down there without any special equipment. Turned out that there was a steep but walkable dirt-and-scrabble path that ran down the hill in the opposite direction of the wash. We followed it down, half-walking and half-sliding for the entire 200-foot descent, and then enjoyed a lunch at the foot of the huge waterfall, which was, as I said above, a lot awesomer than we'd been led to believe by our pre-hike research.
Going back up the dusty path to the top of the waterfall required a bit of exertion, especially under the desert sun as we were, but it wasn't nearly as hard as descending had been. From the top of the waterfall, it was a pleasant cool-down hike back to the car. All in all, we probably spent about three hours in the park (at most), and then we took the "long way" home: south out of the park and east through Starbuck, then back up north to Dusty before heading the rest of the way home the usual way. This drive was especially (and unexpectedly beautiful), and included some amazing train bridges and great views of the Snake River.
The drive to the falls took us out to Washtucna, which evoked a lot of old memories of making the drive to the Tri-Cities and back that way twice a week for a year when I was teaching at the WSU campus there. A few miles past Washtucna, though, you take a left at a huge, very obvious sign, and then we were on "new road," for us at least. The road into the park was one of those many gorgeous, winding, slow-down-and-enjoy-the-view-or-you'll-crash-in-a-fiery-wreck roads that the Palouse does so well, and that far south we were actually somewhere between the channeled scablands and the loess hills that encircle Pullman, so the landscape was extra-beautiful.
I was vaguely aware of the fact that we were paralleling the Palouse river throughout our drive (you actually follow it for a bit just before and then out of Washtucna on our normal Tri-Cities route) and that it would eventually have to turn from a glorified stream into a falls, which would necessitate a drop in elevation, but I still didn't expect the pleasingly monotonous desert-scrub landscape we were driving through to so suddenly transform into a goddamn canyon. But it did, and then we were in the parking lot, just like that, about eighty or so minutes after leaving Pullman.
There'd been some terror on my part on the way there that I'd left my Discovery Pass ($30/yr for access to lots of pretty outdoor things!) at home like a moron, when in reality it was just hidden in that secret corner of space-time in the glove compartment where all important pieces of documentation go the moment before you really need them. Upon arriving at the Palouse Falls "trailhead," though, we found out that it was National Outdoors Day (or somesuch) and so was one of the three or four days out of the entire year when parking was free. Then I found my Discover Pass.
Anyway, the parking area and its environs were a (literal) oasis in a (literal) desert. There was a small camping area and a nice, tree-shaded lawn whereupon people were grilling and picnicking and such. Of course, we weren't there to freaking eat, we were there to tax our bodies physically and almost fall off of a fucking waterfall.
These experiences were a little harder to come by than we expected, thanks to the site's horrible signage-to-useful-information ratio, which was high even by Washington State Park Services standards. Signs goddamn everywhere, but none of them telling us how to actually hike to the falls. See, there's a phenomenal cliffside observation area right at the parking lot, but we'd heard tales of hiking down to the top of the waterfall itself, and so obviously that's what had to be done.
At some point in here, we realized that there were actually totally normal-looking people fishing at the foot of the waterfall, so it started to seem like it must be possible to get down there without any special equipment. Turned out that there was a steep but walkable dirt-and-scrabble path that ran down the hill in the opposite direction of the wash. We followed it down, half-walking and half-sliding for the entire 200-foot descent, and then enjoyed a lunch at the foot of the huge waterfall, which was, as I said above, a lot awesomer than we'd been led to believe by our pre-hike research.
May 27, 2013
Blitzen Trapper Blows the Roof Off the Kenworthy, Hundreds Presumed Overjoyed
So, the night before driving the ten hours to Klamath Falls, Oregon for Lindsey's on-campus job interview, we remembered at the last minute that months ago we'd bought tickets for a show that Blitzen Trapper was playing in Moscow that night. We waffled on whether or not we should actually go at first, then decided to check it out, because how often do nationally-recognized bands come to town? By the end of the show, we were really glad that we did.
Blitzen Trapper has been one of those bands that's been hovering at the edge of my brain for a long time. Like Wilco years ago, then Josh Ritter, then Radiohead, and most recently Mike Gordon Band (and even Phish, honestly, at one point in my life), Blitzen Trapper is a band that I'd heard of, and whose songs I'd heard a few of, and whose musical pedigree I knew. I've had a suspicion for awhile that they were a perfect match for my musical tastes, but for some reason I never managed to "get into" them properly. When I get excited about a band, I tend to need to hear all of their albums and get obsessed with the minutiae of every single track for a few months to the near-exclusion of all other music. This detail-oriented approach is really satisfying on one hand, but on the other hand it makes diving into a band a big investment, and I think I need something to really grab me before I'm willing to get really obsessive/excited. Often, this "something" is seeing a band play live.
A band that's good live is usually infinitely more interesting to me than a well-done album (though not always). A band that comes out on stage, plays their hearts out, and are accomplished enough as musicians to not just regurgitate a record back at me in its entirety is way more likely to get me excited about digging into their catalog than anything else. For one thing, I like the idea of musicians who play for the sake of playing, not for the sake of crafting one finely-tuned and "perfect" manifestation of their songs and then leaving it at that and seeing how far they can ride that one moment of creation. This is probably ultimately why I like bands like Phish and Wilco so much: they're clearly playing for the joy of playing, and part of the result of that process is that it is a process. Sure, both bands put out great albums with great songs, but there are also many, many versions and live takes on those songs that have their own quirks and details that are worth digging into. It satisfies the weird, obsessive, collector's mentality I have when it comes to music while also serving as a tacit reassurance that the musicians enjoy what they're doing enough to keep creating and recreating as part of the process of writing and playing together.
Spoiler alert: Blitzen Trapper hit all of these buttons in about the first ten minutes of their show at the Kenworthy. They're clearly really talented, their music runs the gamut across a number of genres that I enjoy, and they weren't at all afraid to just rock the hell out for the sheer joy of it. The show was apparently their first back after a long period of being away from touring, and while some rust definitely showed (missed changes, lots of forgotten lyrics), it was such a small, intimate, and fun show, and the band treated the whole experience so informally that the roughness added to the show rather than subtracting from it.
I only knew a few songs (mostly from their album Furr, which is the only album of theirs that I own), but they played a few of the hits off of it as well as a lot of deeper cuts that were nonetheless immediately accessible and satisfying for anyone inclined toward some Americana/folk/jam/70s-rock/psychedelia mash-up.
One of the things I like best about the band is the lead singer's voice, which is somewhere between Bob Dylan (when he's folking) and Geddy Lee (when he's rocking).
They're also a lot more prog-rock in some respects live than I expected from the album that I'd heard, including a number of new, possibly-on-the-new-album songs that recalled Wilco's more abstract soundscapes to me, and I'm almost more excited now about what they'll put out next rather than what they've already put out. Here's a great video from the show of the new song "Heart Attack" (sorry, no embedding).
My favorite part was probably an especially spirited version of "God & Suicide" from Furr. There was also an amazing impromptu rock/psycho keyboard/harmonica jam at the end of some other song, but I don't know what song it was and there doesn't appear to be any video.
Anyway, it was an amazingly great show, not even considering the fact that it was in the intimate-but-with-great-sound local Kenworthy theater in Moscow, and we didn't have to fight for parking or worry about public transit to get there. The morning after, I also found that Blitzen Trapper has a huge collection of their live shows on Archive.org, and that many of the recordings or SBDs or SBD matrixes.
The takeaway here is that I'm going to be listening to Blitzen Trapper a lot more this summer.
Blitzen Trapper has been one of those bands that's been hovering at the edge of my brain for a long time. Like Wilco years ago, then Josh Ritter, then Radiohead, and most recently Mike Gordon Band (and even Phish, honestly, at one point in my life), Blitzen Trapper is a band that I'd heard of, and whose songs I'd heard a few of, and whose musical pedigree I knew. I've had a suspicion for awhile that they were a perfect match for my musical tastes, but for some reason I never managed to "get into" them properly. When I get excited about a band, I tend to need to hear all of their albums and get obsessed with the minutiae of every single track for a few months to the near-exclusion of all other music. This detail-oriented approach is really satisfying on one hand, but on the other hand it makes diving into a band a big investment, and I think I need something to really grab me before I'm willing to get really obsessive/excited. Often, this "something" is seeing a band play live.
A band that's good live is usually infinitely more interesting to me than a well-done album (though not always). A band that comes out on stage, plays their hearts out, and are accomplished enough as musicians to not just regurgitate a record back at me in its entirety is way more likely to get me excited about digging into their catalog than anything else. For one thing, I like the idea of musicians who play for the sake of playing, not for the sake of crafting one finely-tuned and "perfect" manifestation of their songs and then leaving it at that and seeing how far they can ride that one moment of creation. This is probably ultimately why I like bands like Phish and Wilco so much: they're clearly playing for the joy of playing, and part of the result of that process is that it is a process. Sure, both bands put out great albums with great songs, but there are also many, many versions and live takes on those songs that have their own quirks and details that are worth digging into. It satisfies the weird, obsessive, collector's mentality I have when it comes to music while also serving as a tacit reassurance that the musicians enjoy what they're doing enough to keep creating and recreating as part of the process of writing and playing together.
Spoiler alert: Blitzen Trapper hit all of these buttons in about the first ten minutes of their show at the Kenworthy. They're clearly really talented, their music runs the gamut across a number of genres that I enjoy, and they weren't at all afraid to just rock the hell out for the sheer joy of it. The show was apparently their first back after a long period of being away from touring, and while some rust definitely showed (missed changes, lots of forgotten lyrics), it was such a small, intimate, and fun show, and the band treated the whole experience so informally that the roughness added to the show rather than subtracting from it.
I only knew a few songs (mostly from their album Furr, which is the only album of theirs that I own), but they played a few of the hits off of it as well as a lot of deeper cuts that were nonetheless immediately accessible and satisfying for anyone inclined toward some Americana/folk/jam/70s-rock/psychedelia mash-up.
One of the things I like best about the band is the lead singer's voice, which is somewhere between Bob Dylan (when he's folking) and Geddy Lee (when he's rocking).
My favorite part was probably an especially spirited version of "God & Suicide" from Furr. There was also an amazing impromptu rock/psycho keyboard/harmonica jam at the end of some other song, but I don't know what song it was and there doesn't appear to be any video.
Anyway, it was an amazingly great show, not even considering the fact that it was in the intimate-but-with-great-sound local Kenworthy theater in Moscow, and we didn't have to fight for parking or worry about public transit to get there. The morning after, I also found that Blitzen Trapper has a huge collection of their live shows on Archive.org, and that many of the recordings or SBDs or SBD matrixes.
The takeaway here is that I'm going to be listening to Blitzen Trapper a lot more this summer.
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