Order of the Stick Kickstarter page.

My relationship with the Order of the Stick goes back about three years.  I was a junior in college and I’d just moved into Benton House, the science fiction and fantasy dorm for helpless geeks like me.  Such a helpless geek, in fact, that I’d signed up to help take care of the house library of fantasy books.

Well, there was this funny looking book in the graphic novels section called Start of Darkness.  If I remember right, I read it in one sitting.  Holy moly, it wasn’t merely a comic, it was literature as well.  It was a tragedy.  The title is a pun on Heart of Darkness, guys!  Then I devoured On the Origin of PCs (try saying it aloud).  Then I moved on to the OOTS website and blasted through them through finals week.

Cannon Fodder owes so much to this comic.  And Redcloak is awesome.

And the website they link to at the end has an article about the Twin Cities light rail on it.

But anyway, you’re probably looking for the recipe.

This recipe comes from Lois Braun of the Hampden Park Co-op, and she explains it better than I could myself, so here’s a link to the detailed instructions.  Here’s what you’re going to need:

• Some yogurt that says “live and active cultures” on the package.
• A quart of milk.
• A couple of empty yogurt tubs.
• A great big pot.

First, make sure that all your equipment is clean so you don’t contaminate your yogurt with bacteria you don’t want.

Heat the milk just to the point of boiling on the stove.  Keep an eye on it because milk tends to burn easily.  Meanwhile, fill your great big pot with room-temperature water from the tap.  I used a jumbo crock pot that’s too big for cooking food in, and it worked well because it’s insulated.

The setup, part 1

Once the milk is boiling, pour it into the empty yogurt tubs.  Stick the tubs into the pot full of water and stir them a bit to let the temperature equalize.  The temperature of both the milk and the water bath should be just a bit hotter than body temperature, about 100º F.  Drop a spoonful of yogurt into each tub and stir in.  Then cap the tubs up, put the lid on the pot, and wrap it up in as many towels and blankets as you can.

The setup, part 2

Let it sit around for a few hours.  I tried overnight, and that worked well.

When you open it up, you get – magic! – the whole thing has turned into yogurt.  It has a delicate texture, because it doesn’t have any carageenan to thicken it up, and it is delicious.  And you can put whatever goshdanged sweetener into it you want.

I read a couple draft chapters back in 2009, and if it’s still like the draft, this is not your plain ole vampire story.  Way to go, Rebekah!

• 1/3 of a block of firm tofu (or 1/2 block if you’re really hungry)
• dribble of vegetable oil
• 1/2 tsp hot and sour paste

Cut the tofu up into cubes, blot with a paper towel to get the excess moisture out.  Cook in a frying pan with the oil on high heat until the edges of the cubes brown.  You want a crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside sort of texture.  Add the hot and sour paste and just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan, stir vigorously.  As soon as most of the water has boiled away again, serve and enjoy.  It’s best when it’s very, very hot.

Artemis Fowl is a millionaire, a criminal mastermind, and twelve years old.  His dad has conveniently gone missing after an explosion on a Russian cargo ship and his mother has shut herself up in her room out of grief, so he can run around and do his moneymaking schemes without too much trouble.  His accomplices are Butler and his sister Juliet, the butler and maid of the Fowl estate.  And… and… the awesomeness of these characters… you simply have to read about them for yourself:

The Butlers had been serving the Fowls for centuries.  It had always been that way.  Indeed, there were several linguists of the opinion that this was how the common noun had originated.  The first record of this unusual arrangement was when Virgil Butler had been contracted as servant, bodyguard, and cook to Lord Hugo de Folé for one of the first great Norman crusades.

At the age of ten, Butler children were sent to a private training center in Israel, where they were taught the specialized skills needed to guard the latest in the Fowl line.  These skills included Cordon Bleu cooking, marksmanship, a customized blend of martial arts, emergency medicine, and information technology.  If, at the end of their training, there was not a Fowl to guard, then the Butlers were eagerly snapped up as bodyguards for various royal personages, generally in Monaco or Saudi Arabia.

The whole book reads like this.

Artemis’s latest scheme is to kidnap an officer of LEPrecon, the fairy police, and hold her ransom for quite a lot of money.  Of course, the situation devolves into a standoff in which Colfer has the chance to trot out heist movie tropes and play with them.  There’s a fairy sergeant with a cigar in his mouth, a dwarven convict who’s sent to work in a plea-bargaining deal, and the smartass techie who walks the fairies through Fowl Manor via his headset.  He’s a centaur.  He loves carrots.

There are, unfortunately, parts of the book that induce giggles for the wrong reasons.  Artemis has at his disposal the most cutting-edge of 2001 technology.  Near the beginning of the book, he steals some data from a fairy in Saigon and then e-mails it to himself.  One can only assume he was using a Hotmail account.

But seriously, just read it for the Butlers.  Go read it.

Stealing Death by Janet Lee Carey was published in 2009 and is aimed at the YA market.  It’s got a neat premise: After a fire burns down his home, the Gwali, a sort of grim reaper/boogeyman, steals the souls of Kipp’s parents and puts them in a sack.  Kipp will go to incredible lengths to get that sack back.  It’s also refreshingly different that Carey decided to set this story in an African-like society.  (Although the girl on the front cover is quite clearly a white person with darkened skin.  But I digress.  That was the illustrator’s fault.)

I was disappointed to find that Carey took such a cool idea and made a mediocre story out of it.  There’s nothing at all wrong with this book.  But I got about twenty pages into it and wondered to myself why I didn’t care what happened next.  The answer: It’s only a made-up story.  Kipp isn’t real, so it doesn’t matter what happens to him.  When you’re writing fiction, this is a very bad sign indeed.

Carey tells us, outright, that Kipp is sad that his parents and little brother are dead.  Okay.  And he has a crush on his landlord’s daughter.  Okay, but where is the evidence for this?  Does he do anything to show that he’s sad?  No, he just sort of packs up his stuff and starts on his quest.  He’s okay, but he never makes that jump from “generic YA protagonist” to “person I care about desperately.”

I suppose the writing lesson to take away from this is that crafting a compelling story is hard work.