PicoBlog

I can think of a handful of skills any aspiring cook must learn early in their training. Shopping, understanding how to taste and season food, developing proper knife skills, practicing basic food hygiene and making a delicious broth (or stock if you prefer). Learning how to make a good vegetable broth is an invaluable skill to master in vegan cooking; it forms the core flavors of soups, stews and rice dishes.

The search for the origins of free jazz continues…. A couple weeks ago, my former teacher Mr. Bill Goodwin called me to talk about my post on Pete LaRoca and “Minor Apprehension”, a tune LaRoca recorded with Jackie McLean in 1959. LaRoca's drum solo on that tune is, as far as I know, the earliest example of free jazz drumming. Bill appreciated the essay— he knew Pete LaRoca very well, and was glad to see a few words about him.

Tomorrow I am giving a talk to a professional organization I am a member of. I am nervous but excited about my presentation. It’s a friendly crowd and many of my work besties will be there. However, the host asked me to share my professional bio and as I hit sent, I felt like I wanted to die. Who is this person?! And why do I find her so annoying?! Oh, I know why.

Before we get to this week's post... I’m getting excited about the next cohort of my fundraising accelerator program. If you haven’t checked it out– I’d love for you to read about it→ fundraisewithconfidence.com The 5-week program starts Monday, May 22. Applications are due on May 10! …and now on to this week’s fieldnotes A founder asked me the other day “are there any problems with uncapped SAFEs?” The short answer is yes, absolutely.

Among the most successful events created by the Cacophony Society was the “Insane Claus Posse” aka “Santa Rampage” aka “SantaCon” aka “The Thick Red Line” aka “The Red Tide.”  Hundreds of people dressed as Santa Claus and assuming the name Santa Claus would converge on a host city and participate in a weekend of stunts.  From public caroling to crashing the private parties thrown by wealthy people to simply filling the streets with a sea of red velvet coats and pointed hats, the rampage was typical of the group’s events, among those is Burning Man.

In this edition: A cheat code for Three Dirty Dwarves that stayed secret for 28 years A cool development feature for recording auto-demos Cracking the game’s password encoding system Check out the video, and play Superhero mode with this password: GUNHILL Appaloosa Interactive was best known for their Ecco the Dolphin series, but the company developed quite a few games - particularly for Sega systems. One of their Saturn titles was Three Dirty Dwarves, a beat-em-up with a unique aesthetic:

If you are like me, when October comes around your thoughts turn to a festering pile of macabre viscera teeming with writhing eldritch creatures that burst forth from the rot of your mind to gibber their terrifying oaths of the damned! That is, you think about horror. Horror is a genre that fascinates me, in part for its duality. It’s the genre of cheap schlocky gore as well as the home of philosophical debates about how to best guide readers to encounters with the sublime.

“Life is in every breath.” When someone says, “historical epic,” what comes to mind? For many readers here, it will most likely be Gladiator. For others, perhaps Ben-Hur. Numerous examples spring to mind. Why? Because the historical epic, or “swords and sandals,” genre is one of the longest-running genres in Hollywood history…while simultaneously being one of the hardest to keep consistently around (much to this writer’s chagrin). The historical epic was once a mainstay of Hollywood.

The foundation of any behavioral analysis program begins with a deep understanding of what a person is conveying through their nonverbal communication.  Tying the domains Kinesics and Biometrics together allow us to quickly make decisions about a person’s intentions, capabilities and emotions. The six clusters that we use to classify an individual’s behavior (Dominant, Submissiveness, Uncomfortable, Comfortable, Interested, Uninterested) are the science behind our observations.  With all of these clusters, don’t forget about the Combat Rule of 3’s – that we are going to look for three indicators that all lead to the same cluster before we make a decision.