Posted: 13 Apr 2020 12:00 AM PDT

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Your Sushi May Serve Up Parasitic Worms | Health News U.S. News & World Report

Posted: 24 Apr 2020 07:02 AM PDT

If you are lucky enough to have some land at your disposal, chances are you have been turning it over in your mind. Stuck at home, deprived of natural light, with grocery shopping less carefree than ever, it's no wonder we start eyeing sections of lawn the way a hungry coyote might look at his pet rabbit.

Sure, it's nice to curl your toes in a little short grass once in a while, or whack around a croquet ball. But perhaps you can spare a sunny corner, or four, for a different mission. Nearly 2% of the lower 48 states is lawn, while garden space is a small fraction of that.

Lawn conversion can be a grueling project. Or it can be as relaxing as a cup of tea. If you don't have any lawn or land to look at longingly, I hope that someday you find some. In the meantime, please stay for some carrot aioli.

Two ways to go
The hard way to convert a lawn is to dig out the thick sod, shaking the dirt from the hefty roots and tossing them into a pile. You then must dispose of all this plant matter, and the wasted potential it represents. The best thing to do would be compost it, but it will take a while to kill all those roots, and proper composting is hardly a passive piece of work. One way or another, that dug sod is going to make you work some more just to deplete the land's fertility. And no matter how hard you try to remove every last root, you will still have grass sprouting in your garden.

The easy way to replace a lawn is to cover the garden-to-be with a sheet of black plastic. You can then attend to other matters while the lawn beneath hosts a temporary worm conference. Two months later, what had been a typical section of sod is now a sea of soil, about half of which is soft worm poop. It's weed-free and ready for planting.
The problem with the easy road is you have to wait for results, but at least there is comfort in knowing that your waiting is productive. The problem with the hard road is the lack of waiting. You have to get to work or nothing happens.

Both paths are therapeutic in their own ways, and fortunately we don't have to choose. We can actively dig one spot, while elsewhere, tucked under plastic, another piece of earth turns itself.

If you get that plastic on soon, you could have a garden spot by early summer. If the plastic goes on in late spring, the soil will be ready in midsummer, which is is perfect for planting a fall garden.

Kale, spinach and carrots can grow through the autumn and even overwinter if you take measures to keep them warm. Beets, radishes, salad turnips and many other short season cool weather crops can also produce well with a summertime start.

You will have to dig and work the new soil into place, which will be laughably easy compared to the labor of digging green lawn. But before you get started on that new piece of earth, put that plastic in its next location: the future garlic patch.

Garlic needs to be planted sometime in the fall, by about Halloween at the latest. That means that if you were to move your plastic in the middle of summer to the future garlic spot, the next piece of lawn would be converted to worm poop right on schedule. When the frost is on the pumpkin and next year's garlic is in the ground, you can fold up that sheet of black plastic after a productive season, and keep it safe for next year's adventures in lawn conversion therapy.

How-to
The hardware store should have black plastic, although it might not be in the garden section. You want at least 6 mil (0.006 inch) in thickness. I bought a 10 foot by 25 foot piece the other week for $30.

When you lay down plastic, first rake and mow the spot, scattering the clippings . After the plastic is in place, set heavy objects like bricks or pieces of wood around the edges of the plastic to keep the wind from getting under it. Random pieces of furniture work, too, depending on the exterior decor you are going for.

After the lawn is fried and before you plant, consider digging a trench around the edge of the new spot and installing some kind of edging to block the grass roots from invading. Pieces of 1×6 or even 2×4, buried with the thin edge at ground level, will slow the invasion of the persistent lawn to a manageable pace.

When you are living off the land, eating seasonally is normal. But early spring is the trickiest time to do so, as there is little new food and last fall's stash is dwindling. Since carrots and garlic are virtually always in season, here is a recipe for carrot aioli that you can pull together any time of year. You can then use it to pull together any meal.

Recipe: Carrot Aioli
In this recipe, steamed carrot takes the place of egg. The thick, orange emulsion is tangy with lemon, and functions as a megaphone for the garlic. It's good on bread, chips, pasta or straight off the spoon.
Makes 4 large servings
1 pound carrots, trimmed and cut to 3-inch lengths
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 teaspoon salt
½ lemon juice and zest
1 cup olive oil
A pinch of thyme or oregano
Steam the carrots until you can easily thrust a fork through, about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, add the garlic, salt, oil, herbs, lemon juice and zest to a blender and make it silky smooth. Add the carrots, still hot so they cook the garlic a little, and blend until smooth again. Add more olive oil if necessary to help the blender achieve a nice vortex.
Serve as a condiment, sauce, dressing or main course. Refrigerate any leftovers.

Tapeworm Interview: Binding of Isaac Creator Talks New Card Game, Art, and Themes - Game Rant

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 05:33 AM PDT

Game Rant recently had the chance to sit down with Edmund McMillen, creator of such classic games as Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, to talk about his newest project. Rather than an update to Binding of Isaac or even the start of another video game, Edmund's latest creation is a tabletop card game called Tapeworm. The Kickstarter campaign for Tapeworm launched just yesterday at the time of writing, but has already reached well over ten times its initial goal for funding.

Tapeworm is played similarly to dominoes, with players connecting segments of different colored worms to deplete their hands. However, additional mechanics such as rewards for completing full rings of worm segments, forcing other players to draw cards, and slicing off entire sections of the game add another layer to the gameplay. It seems like most of the challenge of Tapeworm comes from the interaction with other players, and we can't wait to get our hands on it ourselves.

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Game Rant's interview with Edmund covered a lot of topics, from the need for more developers to make board games to the inspirations for McMillen's signature art style. Our questions focused on the challenges of designing both video games and physical board games, the interplay of artistic themes with gameplay, and the inspirations behind Tapeworm's unique flair. The interview also gave us some interesting tidbits about difficulty in video games and the importance of playtesting for enjoyment, not just bugs.

tapeworm, card game, promo art, cover art

Q: I notice that a lot of the art in all of your games straddles the line between being cute, and being sort of gross or morbid. Is there anything that was an inspiration for you on that?

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A: The easy answer is just that it's what I find aesthetically pleasing.... I love that sort of classic 80s to 90s gross-out humor that went into the Ren and Stimpy era. I tend to go cuter I think. I found out early on that if you go with really cute things you can get away with darker themes. I could talk about more serious things without people thinking it was contrived or pretentious. Because it just looks goofy, even when its dark and weird. It's what I'm comfortable with, it's my wheelhouse.

Q: Was there an intent behind making dark themes more accessible?

A: For me there has to be some element of danger to what I enjoy for me to be able to enjoy it.... The same goes for Tapeworm. I demo'd it multiple times with a bunch of different people, and people were like- 'you know if you just made this trains it would sell really well.' There is no doubt in my mind, but then why would I be making it?... I never want to work on something that doesn't have my voice in it.

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Q: That cutesy-dark aesthetic that you strive for- do you feel like that goal also translates into gameplay?

A: Yeah. For sure. But... There's a big difference between making something thematically inaccessible and mechanically inaccessible.... I can't bring myself to make completely alienating themes mechanically because it seems like it's bad design.... I can do something avant garde and make it very inaccessible for a bunch of people, which is fun, and I've done that in the past, but when I'm making something that's true to what I would enjoy I want something that's well designed and accessible. I honestly don't think that my games are that hard.... Super Meat Boy was not too difficult, I was really pussyfooting around with difficulty and made things easy. They look hard, but they're easy. And it's about perseverance.

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Q: There's always this difficulty debate in games, but it seems like for those games dying and trying again is built into the core ideas, which is interesting.

A: Yeah. And I try to push that. I try my best to not use themes without something tied into a core mechanic behind it. With The Binding of Isaac, the game was literally designed to be played over and over again, which was something that was difficult to explain to people early on. Super Meat Boy was instantly like that, you died right away. It's not always appropriate for every game.... Tapeworm is not like that.

Q: How did you feel about the transition between making things that are a little bit more punishing into making something that's more of a light card game that you can do with your friends or with kids?

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A: For me it's a genre change. I'm mostly known for my platformers, but I've made a lot of games in a lot of different genres. Like, Legend of Bum-Bo is a puzzle game, Binding of Isaac is a top down rogue-like shooter. For me it just felt like switching gears and kind of trying out something new. With Four Souls I kind of jumped into multiplayer- I wanted the social interactive aspect of it to be the core foundation of what you were doing, I wanted a lot of interaction with other players. You know I've been playing board games forever, and there's a few key aspects of that that really get people into the game- like dice rolling. It still blows my mind how you roll a six-sided dice and you get a six and everyone cheers. It's like 'what?' It's such a weird- there's something there to seeing luck happen before your eyes.

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When designing in the real world, in the physical realm, it's totally different than working in video games. I felt like the main difference was the social interaction, so I wanted to focus on that for Tapeworm. Four Souls was a huge success... but accessibility-wise it was very inaccessible because it was very advanced. With Tapeworm it's the opposite. I wanted to make a game that people could sit down and instantly know what they were doing. And then as they play they discover more strategy, you don't need to explain anything right when they sit down.

Q: As a game designer is it more challenging or less challenging to make something so simple?

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A: I feel like it's the same. The gear switch is more like, more focused on broad playtesting instead of niche playtesting.... with this, I'm literally playing with my mom, my nephew, you know, random people at a table next to us while we're eating. I designed the foundation of this like nine years ago, around the same time I designed the original Binding of Isaac. There was a moment in my life when Super Meat Boy was over and I could feel the depression pocket that I would drop right into, so I needed something to do.... so I sat down and just started designing stuff, and I designed about three or four different games, and one of them was Tapeworm, one of them was the Binding of Isaac, one of them was Mew-Genics. I have a family member who has some learning disabilities and his reading comprehension isn't great, so I wanted to make a game that was mostly visually driven, and spatially driven. I hadn't seen many games like that outside of dominoes. So I set out originally to make something as accessible as Uno, but with strategy, and a dynamically driven visual-spatial thing.

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So the way the game kind of plays out... it kind of expands expands expands, and then at certain points in the game you can cut, and sever off a whole segment and then grow out from that. So if you could stop motion it, it looks like this growing organism that's spreading all over the table and then shrinking and spreading again. I really loved how that looked, but that was almost ten years ago.... So I shelved it basically. I put it back, and after Four Souls finished I had a meeting... and they were like 'you got anything else that you're working on that's physical that we could- anything Isaac related?' And I was like well, not anything Isaac related but I have this game called Tapeworm.... they really liked it. Let's see what happens. It's gonna be interesting because it's not Isaac, but… I want to do it. I want to get it out there, I want people to play it.

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Q: As someone who's designing these games, do you feel like there's a huge difference designing a video game as opposed to a physical card game?

A: Oh, it's very different. It's night and day.... There's only so much you can do with it. It's not like you have a thousand moving pieces, this isn't Catan. It's only me, I can do whatever I want, and I can play it and then I can say, 'let's play again but with a different ruleset.' Not only am I getting feedback on gameplay, I'm also just looking at their faces. There's a certain point when you can literally see someone go 'Ah, I'm smart! I've done it! I figured this out." A moment like that will suck a person right into the game.... [and] there's just a really cool political game going on where... they always force the guy or gal with he least cards in hand to draw a card.... So then you go around playing a minimal amount of cards, but making sure the ones you do play fill your hand with insta-win conditions, so you stack your hand into something like a flush from a card game.... Once you know what someone else has in their hand you can lock them off, you can screw somebody out of the game completely.... When we went really deep on this game, we came into situations where people actually were able to strategize ahead enough to finish the game by locking it off so no one could play a card.

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Q: Do you feel like there's some aspect of designing video games that informs designing board games? Or vice-versa, that designing board games would carry over to video games?

A: So far I've learned a lot more about board games that carries over into video games. It's kind of just understanding people more. Understanding what makes people feel smart, what makes people feel upset about things.... In video games you can playtest so much, but a lot of times when people playtest they're just playtesting for bugs, they're playtesting for accessibility and that's it. But to actually sit there and watch expressions, and watch emotion, it's much easier to see when you're in it in the physical realm.

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Q: Do you feel like maybe more developers should experiment with board games?

A: For sure! I honestly think that any designer out there- designers who aren't programmers especially, have a great deal of freedom in this realm. You can do whatever you want and you're not dependent on somebody else, or even yourself, spending countless hours programming something.... You can learn a great deal from it. Of course it's not going to work for all games- I'm most known for reflex-driven games. Card games aren't usually reflex driven.

Q: Well that's pretty much exhausted my prepared questions; my last question is just this: What is your favorite thing about Tapeworm? Either in making it or in the finished product.

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A: I think seeing it come alive from the sketches. I think my favorite part of it is the worms! They were very fun to sketch, and working with the artist on this, who actually illustrated everything.... They just look so cute and weird, and I don't know... people tell me 'if you just did anything else this would do well.' But I really love it! I put worms in a lot of my games and I've always had a fascination with parasite type things, and I just thought it would be really cool to make cute ones.

Q: So do you think the game itself would have ended up being different if it hadn't been worms? If it had actually been trains, do you think it would be as good of a game?

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A: I would have lost all interest in it… *laugh* if it was trains. Maybe if it was poops I could have kept going. It was either poops or worms. I couldn't see anything else outside that.

The Kickstarter campaign for Tapeworm is live now. Check it out here.

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About The Author

I am a recently graduated Anthropology student from UCLA. My work mostly centers on the archaeology of the colonial-era Philippines, while my hobbies center on video games, tabletop games, anime, manga, and movies. I can be reached at robinmeyerlorey@gmail.com.

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