Darktime II

"All the Devils Are Here"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the series introduction for general background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

There were a few tracks left over from the original Darktime mix after I trimmed it down to a proper volume length, but not nearly enough for a second volume.  So I’ve had to spruce it up rather significantly to flesh out this set.  Our top artists are probably Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Jeff Greinke, and Nox Arcana, who each have 3 songs between these first two volumes.  In fact, BTfaBG in particular is significant because they were almost certainly the mix starter.  It was from scouring the Internet’s early, primitive sharing sites that I accumulated the vast majority of my BTfaBG collection, and many of them inspired me to pair them up with other, equally tenebrous tracks, and that’s what eventually turned into Darktime.  You may recall that this is one of my “mood mixes,” which are the small set of mixes between the pre-modern and modern mixes.  And there was a lot of “stuff I found floating around on the Internet” involved in those.

Now that I’m bringing the mood mixes into line with the modern mixes, there’s less of that.  Most of the BTfaBG I own now I bought, because I wanted to have the full albums.  Take “Left, Unsaid”: it’s a meandering, ethereal, but still creepy track, and, when the vocals finally kick in nearly halfway through, they’re murky and provide more atmosphere than lyrics.  It’s a great example of what makes Sam Rosenthal’s personal project so perfect for this mix.  I’ve had a copy of “Left, Unsaid” for æons now, but I only bought This Lush Garden Within, their fifth album (and yet still considered one of the early ones), fairly recently.  Which is how I came across “Into the Garden,” another track off that album, which shares the gothic horns and murky vocals, but gets right into it much more quickly, and then layers on some female vocals for good measure.¹  As for Greinke, I’m returning to Cities in Fog, wherein I drew one of his tracks for last volume, because it really is the album of his that’s best suited for this mix.  “Moving Through Fog” is exactly what it says on the tin, complete with echoes that you can’t quite pin a direction to and muffled industrial sounds that could be machinery or equally could be restless spirits.  Nox Arcana also returns with its same album from last time, Legion of Shadows, which likewise is just too perfect for this mix.  “Spirits of the Past” is, as the name implies, pretty spooky, but also weirdly pretty, with its bell percussion and synthy, Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque melody; “Ancient Flame” is much calmer, giving a slight Middle Eastern vibe, like a night in the Arabian desert.

There are other returning artists as well: Amber Asylum is back with a short, bridge-like tune that begins the transition into the middle third of the volume.  “Ave’ Maria” is what you’d hear if you dared engage the old-time phonograph you found in the haunted house you were exploring.  Nox Arcana’s progenitor Midnight Syndicate² provides the “Epilogue” from their Carnival Arcane, which is here used as a bridge to transition from “Ancient Flame” to the closing triptych of the volume.  The new-age-y Angels of Venice also return with a quite long track, “Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi),” which I almost ditched several times; the first minute and a half is more reminiscent of Incanto Liturgica, but after that it settles into a solid, Halloweeny vibe.  Darkwavers Love Is Colder Than Death are also back, this time with “Tired to Death,” a synthy track with a funereal beat, though it does pick up a bit in the middle, and Susann Heinrich adds some ghostly vocals as well.  And we also return to the soundtrack of the original Dark Shadows for a “Seance” from from composer Robert Cobert, which sounds a bit like what the original Star Trek’s theme would have been if it had been a horror series instead of a scifi one.

This volume also reflects my newfound passion for gaming music.  Jeremy Soule provides “Aquarium of Alkonos,” a spooky, echoey track from the Icewind Dale videogame, and there’s a Jason Hayes track from the World of Warcraft game soundtrack,³ “Duskwood,” which is perfect for exploring creepy woods at night.  The newest addition to this volume—not added until I actually started getting organized for this post, in fact—was “Let Them In,” a track from the Candela Obscura soundtrack, credited to “Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness,” though I suspect McGuinness did most of the work.  We’ve heard from McGuinness before, everywhere from Shadowfall Equinox VIII to every volume of Eldritch Ætherium except the first,⁴ and here he turns his penchant for dramatic, cinematic music to a creepier bent, as befits the Candela Obscura game.  Plus it flows so beautifully off the LICTD entry that I knew it was perfect here.

Like Greinke, Kevin Keller is usually found on Shadowfall Equinox,⁵, but “Chamber Doors” is a lot darker tonally than his usual fare, so I thought it worked well here.  And French soundtrack composer Xcyril closes us out with a weird, synthy track called “Organique.” The foreground gives insects-scattering-in-a-panic vibes, while the background is more howling-wind-on-a-cold-winter’s-night, but the whole thing works well here, and it fades into a muted something-else-entirely in a very satisfying way.

It’s also not that surprising to see hardcore gothic representatives Faith and the Muse here; “And Laugh—but Smile No More” is a creepy little harpsichord bridge that takes us solidly into the center stretch of the volume.  And witchhouse project oOoOO winds down that center stretch with the short “Crossed Wires,” which wouldn’t really be out of place on Cantosphere Eversion, but I thought it was dark enough to work well here.  As for brothers and film composers Mychael and Jeff Danna, they’ve worked together on films such as The Boondock Saints, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and the animated version of The Addams Family, so they know how to do creepy and dramatic, and how to combine the two.  A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre is the soundtrack to an imaginary film⁶ about legendary Irish folk hero Deirdre, protagonist of a tragedy which could put any of the classic Greek ones to shame.  I’m not sure what part of the story “Druid” is supposed to represent, but, as it comes late in the album, it’s probably not a happy one.  This is the perfect song for meeting with a mysterious mage to seal a dark pact, and it flows beautifully into “Left, Unsaid.” Plus its slow boil makes it a great opening track.

Darktime II
[ All the Devils Are Here ]

“Druid” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“Left, Unsaid” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Moving Through Fog” by Jeff Greinke, off Cities in Fog
“Aquarium of Alkonos” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Chamber Doors” by Kevin Keller, off Intermezzo
“Ave' Maria” by Amber Asylum, off Frozen in Amber
“And Laugh—but Smile No More” by Faith and the Muse, off Evidence of Heaven
“... You” by DJ Food, off Kaleidoscope
“Into the Garden” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Spirits of the Past” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Tired to Death” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Let Them In” by Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness, off Candela Obscura [RPG Soundtrack]
“Crossed Wires” by oOoOO, off Without Your Love
“Hell Is Empty” by Emilie Autumn, off Fight Like a Girl
“Psalm” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi)” by Angels of Venice, off Angels of Venice
“Ancient Flame” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Epilogue” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Duskwood” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Seance” by Robert Cobert, off Dark Shadows, Volume 1 [Soundtrack]
“Wandering Heart” by Xcyril, off Organique

Total:  21 tracks,  76:10

What’s unexpected here?  Not too much.  Classically trained violinist Emilie Autumn is usually more suited to Fulminant Cadenza, where we’ve already seen her, and Distaff Attitude, where we haven’t (yet⁷), but “Hell Is Empty” (which also provides our volume title), is a creepy little bridge that I thought perfectly transitioned us from the center to the back stretch.  And that back stretch kicks off with an even more unlikely candidate, Koop.  The electrojazz Swedes are perhaps the last folks you’d think would produce something dark and gothy, but “Psalm,” from their first album (which is the least jazz and the most electro), feels like a song from a black-and-white gothic horror movie—you know the kind: unsettling, but not really scary.

And, finally, DJ Food is Londoner Kevin Foakes, who we’ve heard before on Mystical Memoriam.  He’s an electronica artist who often ranges from upbeat electropop to downtempo chill, but ”... You” is a short, vaguely unsettling track with some muddled female vocals in the middle (and some similarity to “Psalm,” actually).  It was too perfect for this mix for me not to include it here.

Next time, we’ll start trying to achieve inner peace using electronica beats.

⇐ Darktime I

Darktime III ⇒

__________

1 The Internet seems disinclined to identify the female vocalist for me, but I’d guess it’s Susan Jennings, who did the artwork for the album, wrote some of the lyrics, and is credited with vocals on at least one other track.

2 I feel comfortable calling them that, because Joseph Vargo, who basically is Nox Arcana, got his start working with Midnight Syndicate before breaking off to do his own project.  And the MS guys have definitely credited Vargo with a lot of their vibe, such as their themed albums which seem specifically designed to be played during Halloween parties.

3 Which we’ve mostly seen thus far on Eldritch Ætherium, specifically on volumes III and IV.

4 So II, III, and IV.

5 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII.

6 At least that’s how AllMusic described it.

7 Perhaps in the fullness of time.

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account

Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!

What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a user car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”^*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.

Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

• This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)

• Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.

• The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.

• Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).

• That’s a Johnny Carson impression, which is totally wasted on the youth.

Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.

__________

* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?

Actual Play Time, Part 2: Depends on How You Slice It

[This is the second post in a series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time, we talked about my discovery of actual play and my realization that it was a whole new medium.]

You know, for writing about novels there’s the language of literary criticism; for writing about movies, the jargon of movie critiques is also well-established.  But actual play is new enough that the terms haven’t evolved yet.  Which means I get to make up my own.

In examining the burgeoning actual play medium, there are a few different ways to cut it up, but the most useful one, in my opinion, is by length of story arc.  For this purpose, I think of actual plays as falling into one of three categories: short form, medium form, and long form.

Short form content is your typical one-shot.  A “one-shot,” in TTRPG parlance, is a short adventure designed to be played, start to finish, in a single session.  Of course, a session of D&D (or any TTRPG) can last several hours, so even short form actual plays are often 3 – 5 hours long.  And, sometimes, you just can’t fit it all into one session after all, because things always take longer than you think they will, and the “one-shot” ends up becoming more of a two-shot (or even three-shot).  So a short form actual play is typically one episode, but up to 3, and it’s typically anywhere from 2 – 10 total hours of viewing time.  That doesn’t seem particularly short, if you’re comparing it to a sitcom, or your average comic book.  But trust me when I tell you it’s short compared to other actual plays.

Medium form content is usually around 5 – 20 episodes, which can be 50+ hours of viewing time.  These are longer stories, often corresponding to a longer adventure in TTRPG terms.  You can think of it as roughly equivalent to a season of television, just with more hours and more likely to be wrapped up at the end.  For some people, this is such a massive investment that it hardly seems possible, let alone worthwhile.  Yet there are several medium form actual play shows that are well worth the time investment.

Finally, long form content is a full TTRPG campaign.  For regular people playing TTRPGs, this is often a multi-year proposition, and we rarely get the opportunity to wrap them up neatly.  Somehow actual play shows manage to polish them off on a regular basis, with there being far fewer actual plays that peter out mid-storyline than there are TV shows cancelled mid-season.  (There are reasons for that, which we’ll dive into shortly.)  But we’re talking about anywhere from 50 – 150 episodes here, with the total time investment often ranging into the hundreds of hours.  Which means that the shit’s got to be pretty damned good to get people on board for a time expenditure of that size and scope.

But it also begs the question: why are there so many of these, when each one has the potential to produce hundreds of hours of content?  Surely there can’t be that much of an audience ... right?  Well, a number of factors in our entertainment landscape have conspired to change the way we think about these sorts of things.

When I was a kid, right on up to the point where my children were born, the landscape of entertainment, but television in particular, was moderately simple.  There were movies and novels and so forth, but those were seen more as one-off time investments.  You could produce a book, but you had to think about how long it was: readers might be intimidated by an overly large tome, and they might also have a big backlog of reading material, meaning that your longer novel might be less attractive than a short book that could be knocked out with a smaller time investment.  Same for movies: people were willing to sit still for maybe two hours, if you were lucky, but often the major studios shot for an hour and a half, tops, with many stories of crucial cinematic scenes getting “cut for time.” All of that eventually changed, of course: Harry Potter proved that people would gobble up multiple near-thousand-page novels, and Titanic proved that you could make people sit through 3+ hours of a movie if it was popular enough.

But television was a bit different.  We had 3 major networks, because creating a TV network was a gargantuan task that took a huge amount of money, and the existing networks didn’t much care for any more competition.  We had PBS, sure, and the occasional indy TV station, but, in general, 3 networks, and each one had 24 hours in the day, and that was it.  The attention span of the consumer was no longer the limiting factor.  No matter how much content people might want to put out, there simply wasn’t room for any more than 72 hours of it every day.  Where would it go?  As a result, a lot of great ideas never got made, and sometimes you’d even get great ideas that were made and then never saw the light of day.  Television shows were cutthroat, and they lived and died by ratings that purported to tell how many people were watching, and any show that didn’t appear to be garnering a big enough following was swiftly replaced by what they hoped would be the next big thing.  Even after we (finally) got a couple more networks in the 90s, things didn’t change all that much.

But then there was cable, and suddenly there were dozens of channels.  And then along came streaming, and suddenly the number of hours in a day was no longer relevant at all.  The Internet can play as many shows at once as there are users (at least theoretically), and suddenly the race for more content was on.  Of course, the audience was completely fractured as well.  In the “golden” era of television, every show had to appeal to the broadest possible audience to justify its existence.  And it meant that, on the consumer side, you often had to settle.  But now you can demand—and usually find—the exact sort of content you want.  I recall that, 10 years ago, I used to work upstairs from the offices of the Tennis Channel and, every day I would walk past their door on my way to the elevator and think to myself, do we really need a whole channel for tennis?  But then again I am not a tennis fan, so of course I would think that.  Other people who are tennis fans no doubt think the Tennis Channel is a great boon.  So we ended up with channels for just about everything, and streams for even more things, and a huge raft of content.

But of course content takes money to produce, which means that folks are always looking for cheaper and cheaper ways to put out more and more content.  That’s how we got reality TV: with no need for scripts—and therefore no need for script writers, script editors, script supervsiors, etc—and with most performers being non-union, unscripted TV is often significantly cheaper ... and, in an often overlooked aspect, significantly faster to produce.

And actual plays fit this mold.  You can make an actual play with minimal equipment, zero scripting, and whoever wants to be a player at the table.  You can crank out tons of content with only a modicum of effort, and there is apparently a hunger for it.  As with any new medium, more and more people are discovering it, and discovering what it can do.  So they’re willing to watch a wide variety of options.  Now, of course it is the case that the low-effort actual play shows will likely be the least popular, with the really well-established ones having full crews these days: directors, producers, sound engineers, editors, etc.  But you can make it cheaply and quickly, especially when you’re first getting started, and that’s the key.  It’s not really that surprising that a show can put out hundreds and hundreds of hours of content when the cost of doing so is moderate at worst and the appetite of the audience is continuing to be expansive.

Next time, let’s look at some of the big names in the space and see how they got that way.

Bugs in my ears, their eggs in my head

This week, I’m sick.  You’re lucky I’m cogent enough to write this much.

It's Easy to Criticize (But Cut It Out)

Some months ago, I wrote a politics post, which I framed as primarily being about third parties, but I also addressed this idea that that young people might not vote for Biden (primarily because of his stance on Palestine), and the conflicting attitudes that engendered from the “experts.” And I included a long quote from Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who was doing exactly what liberal podcaster David Rees said he wouldn’t do, and what liberal commentator (and former lawyer) Elie Mystal said one shouldn’t do: scolding people (especially young people) for saying they wouldn’t vote for Biden by fuming about how Trump would definitely be worse.

Well, the race is quite different now—what a difference nine months can make!—and yet many things haven’t changed.  I still hear Elias going off on those rants (although I tend to just fast-forward through them nowadays, because I know them by heart, and also they make me a bit queasy).  Look, Elias is a brilliant (and relentless) lawyer, and he’s out there fighting for voting rights in states across the country, and I’m so glad he’s doing it.  I have a great deal of respect for him.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t also criticize him when I think he’s wrong.  And he’s kind of a jerk on this topic.

See how it’s possible to like and appreciate someone and disagree with them?  Kind of like when people say they don’t agree with Biden’s take on the Israel/Palestine conflict (which is now morphing into the Israeal/Palestine/Lebanon conflict).  Instead of responding to that with a knee-jerk “but Trump would be worse!” perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider the closing words of Mystal’s article from The Nation that I quoted last time:

The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse.  They’re saying Biden should be better.

And, while Harris isn’t Biden, she definitely inherits his policies via guilt by association if nothing else.  Of course, if you believe Trump and Vance, those policies have ceased to be Biden’s policies altogether: they’re Harris’ policies now.  This is, of course, somewhat silly ... as Trump also said, the vice-presdient “makes no difference.” Harris was probably in the room when these decisions were made, but to imagine that she had any real control over them is just dumb.  So the truth of the matter is, we don’t actually know whether Harris’ approach to the Middle East would be as controversial as Biden’s.

But that, of course, is the problem.  She’s had plenty of chances to distance herself from the pro-genocide position, but has taken none of them.  At the Democratic convention, they had the opportunity to highlight pro-Palestinian voices, to vet the speeches ahead of time, to show the world that even people who disagree with her administration’s actions would still support her in the election.  Nope.  Not a single Palestinian-American voice was allowed on the stage, being instead consigned to hold protests outside.  And I’ve heard plenty of people say that this is the right move for her: that, by picking a side, she can only make things worse.  Which, maybe, is true.  But of course if you’re taking that attitude, then you just have to accept that some people are going to take the silence as proof of being just as bad as Biden.

And, yes, I use the term “pro-genocide” advisedly.  If you pay any attention to what Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet actually say, you know very well that they are remarkably open about their goals to eliminate the Palestinian people from the Earth, and that’s kind of what “genocide” actually means.  “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group” says Dictionary.com, quite succinctly.  When the deputy speaker of the Knesset says “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”, or when the Heritage Minister says it would be okay to nuke the population because “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” (this presumably includes all the children: nearly half of the Palestinian population is under 18), or when the Defense Minister says “we will eliminate everything”, or when the major general in charge of the military in Gaza says “you wanted hell, you will get hell” ... when those are the things they say out loud, I’m not sure anyone can reasonably accuse me (or anyone else) of using the phrase “genocide” in an inflammatory way.  I consider it quite matter-of-fact, actually.

And the problem with sending a country a shit-ton of bombs and then saying that you had no idea that they were going to be used for whichever atrocity-du-jour they’ve been used for is that that only works if you then stop sending them bombs.  Which, you know, we haven’t.  Saying, “well, we told them that this was unacceptable and then just gave them more bombs” is not taking an anti-genocide stance.  So you can say my language is deliberately inflammatory when I call Biden’s policies “pro-genocide” if you like, but I stand by my statement that it’s more factual than incendiary.  And now they’re bombing even more people with the bombs we’re faithfully continuing to supply them with?  It’s utter insanity, I tell you.

But I digress.  I was reminded of this whole “scolding” thing yesterday while watching Robert Reich.  Now, I really like Reich.  Possibly because, like me, he’s an old liberal—twenty years older than I, even.  Possibly because he’s a short guy, like me (5 inches shorter than I, even).  Mostly because we agree on just about everything, and he can explain things pretty well on YouTube, which is defniitely a skill.  So I was a bit surprised to hear him say this:¹

Why is this not getting through to people: why are there still so many people who are willing to say, well I’m going to go with Trump ... you know, why are they voting against their own self-interest?  ...  I mean, what why are people voting, or willing to vote, against their economic self-interest?  I really don’t quite know, except that, you know, ... for so many years, so many people have been so devastated by the economy ...

— Robert Reich, The Saturday Coffee Klatch, 9/28/24

I suppose that, one of the things I like the most about Robert Reich is that he’s a nearly 80-year-old man who doesn’t sound like a typical old man.  And I suppose that’s why I found this particular quote so disappointing: because here he does sound like the old guy shaking his head about “these kids today.” Note that, in this particular video, his regular co-host Heather Lofthouse² is out sick and he’s talking instead to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, one of their producers who happens to be a member of Gen Z (as Michael puts it earlier in the video, “the oldest of the Gen Z’s, yes”), so maybe that’s partially responsible for his falling into the trap of the rambling-old-man-speak.  Here’s another, perhaps more telling example, after discussing the recent announcement by Chapel Roan that she was not officially endorsing Harris:³

But don’t they, Michael, don’t they understand that Trump would be worse!  That is, if ... you’re making a choice here.  I mean, by not making a choice, you’re making a choice.  By not voting for Harris, you are essentially voting for Trump.  Don’t they understand this, your friends, your generation?

Ummm ... yeah, Robert.  They understand that Trump would be worse.  But, if Harris can’t inspire them to give a shit about politics, if it seems like she’s promising more of the same old horrible crap we’re already living through, they just might not bother.

The weird thing (at least to me) is that these same pundits seem to understand it perfectly when the shoe’s on the other foot.  Listen to any given batch of them talking about how the ridiculosity that is Mark Robinson could discourage Republican turnout:⁴

This is what I think you’re hoping for if you’re Kamala Harris: that there’s some category of people in North Carolina that are just like, “These guys are too crazy, I’m not gonna ... I’m just not gonna bother this year.  I’m taking this year off.”

— Tim Miller, Inside the Right, 9/22/24

This sort of perfectly describes my father, who hates Trump, but almost certainly can’t bring himself to vote for a black woman.⁵  But, when it comes to young people feeling the same about Harris, people just don’t seem to get it.

Don’t get me wrong: I will be voting for Harris, personally.  I actually think she’s been rather energizing in this race, and, far from being someone who didn’t know who she was before becoming vice-president, I’ve actually voted for her before, both when she ran for Attorney General in 2010 and when she ran for Senator in 2016.  Plus she had some great YouTube moments making Trump appointees look dumb in congressional committees.  And, while I think she won’t be as firm with Israel as I’d like, I agree with Cody Johnston (of Some More News) that she at least represents a break from the generation of Israel-is-always-right old white guys, of which Biden is hopefully the last.  So at least there’s a chance that she’ll be better than Biden, and that’s good enough for me.  But, if you’re a younger person (or even an older person) who thinks it isn’t good enough, that she damned well ought to come out and say she’s against murdering Palestinian children no matter how evil Hamas is ... well, I totally respect that position too.

People have various reasons for seemingly voting against their economic interests. In the case of my father, and many others, I’m sure, it’s simple racism.  In the case of many other working class folks, it’s just that they’ve been told all their life that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and from that perspective voting for anyone other than a Republican seems a bit insane.  But these things are changing.  Only the oldest among us truly remember McCarthyism, and even the Cold War is a fading memory.  So the boogeyman of communism doesn’t hold the power it used to, and equating socialism with communism, when we have modern counterexamples like France and Sweden,⁶ is also falling a bit flat these days.  And, while racism is certainly still going strong in our country, it does seem to be going more and more underground.  Today’s younger generations not only have lived with diversity all their lives, but they’ve lived with the pain of late-stage capitalism and seem to instinctively understand that there must be a better way.

And some of what appears to be “voting against one’s own economic interests” is just plain evil marketing campaigns launched by rich people, who desire nothing more than to continue to be rich (and not to collect any more peers).  For decades, rich people convinced poor white people that poor black people would take their jobs, their homes, and their American dreams.  Nowadays they’ve mostly switched to convincing poor people both black and white that it’s the immigrants coming for their bounty, but it’s the same playbook.  And it might be easy to think that people that buy into these messages are dumb, but that’s oversimplifying the issue: people who are struggling will often latch onto any message, especially the ones that are slickly produced, and there’s no point in being naïve about the fact that advertising works.  Getting upset at the victims of these evil marketing campaigns is sort of missing the point.

So I’d love to see less of people railing against young people for not voting against Trump, and railing against working class people for “voting against their interests,” and more people pushing Harris to do more to try and reach these cohorts.  I think she’s doing great in many ways, but could she be doing better? Absolutely.  And the polls are too close for her not to try.

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1 If you want to follow along, here’s the video; jump to around 14:09.

2 Heather is also the president of Inequality Media, who produces those videos.

3 Same video, around 11:20.

4 Again, follow along in the video at about 8:26.

5 You may recall that I said recently that my father claimed he’d vote for anyone the Democrats put up, unless it was Biden.  Well, his sexist, racist ass is kind of eating those words now.

6 Yes, yes: neither France nor Sweden is technically socialist.  But then neither are any of the policies that Republicans label as socialist.  So I think it’s a fair correlation.

You know I never could say anything in 20 words or less

This week, one of my oldest friends from the Heroscape scene (who also happens to have been an actor as a teenager and young adult, though he’s out of that game these days) came over to our house to play Heroscape with me and the two smallies (neither of whom are all that small these days).  It was great fun, and perhaps I’ll write up a more complete report of the day’s festivities next week.  For this week, I’m pretty exhausted, and it’s a short-post week anyhow.  So I think I’ll just leave it there for now.

Engage the Annihilation

Well, we’ve had our new Heroscape sets (called “Age of Annihilation”) for a few weeks now, and my middle child and I have been playing several games.  I think at this point I’ve played, or played against, every figure in the new wave except the dragon.  (Xenithrax, like pretty much all dragons, is tricky to fit into smaller armies due to her cost.)  I thought it might be worthwhile to give my initial impressions on the new units.  (If you’re not a Heroscape player or fan, this may be less interesting for you.  Sorry ‘bout that.)

The Polar Bears

The Frostclaw paladins and their hero, Knight Irene, are some great looking minis.  Anthropomorphic armored polar bears with metal clawgloves?  Just bad-ass.  They also have a fun trade-off during the game: they’re either very slow with decent attack, or have decent speed and crappy attack, and, unlike most squads, you can make that choice on a figure-by-figure basis.  You can play the Frostclaws with Knight Irene, or choose any of 6 other champions to bond with.  You can put them into an army with Sir Dupuis to boost his attack, with Concan to boost the bears, or with Sir Gilbert (who can also be their champion) to get some movement boosts.  Not to mention that Knight Irene is valiant, so she can hang out with the minutemen.  Lots of cool options.

But, of course, most of those units didn’t really need the help (especially the minutemen).  And the Frostclaws introduce a new, weird rule: they’re the first ever common unit with multiple life points.  Apparently, you’re supposed to put the wound marker on the map beside the figure, and then you’re supposed to move the wound marker whenever you move the figure, and also make sure that you don’t mix up wound markers when the figures are adjacent to each other, and it’s just a hot mess.  With the result that most people (e.g. when I’ve watched people using them on the Internet) just put the wound markers on the polar bears’ heads, like a little hat.  In our house we call it “the helmet of shame.” It’s kinda ... dumb.  Sorry.  Also, when I ran them, I ran them with the wizards and familars, so I didn’t get as much out of them as I might have if I’d paired them with any of those exciting Jandar units I mentioned above.  But I don’t really do Jandar units that often (and plus I was trying to use as many new units as possible).  So, I dunno ... I was a bit underwhelmed, overall.

But, they do look cool.  Really ... fucking ... cool.

The Pirates

There have never been pirates in Heroscape before, and it was always considered a major omission.  Now all of a sudden we have 7 different units: an admiral, two captains, two pirate heroes, and two unique pirate squads (4 members each).  This is moderately cool, and I was looking forward to playing them.  I think in general they did not disappoint, although some of the individual units may underwhelm.

First of all, we decided to forgo using Admiral EJ-1M the first time around, and this was definitely a mistake.  On the second play-through, I did take him, and I thought he was pretty damned awesome.  His first power lets you fool your opponent with your order marker placement, which is always fun, but it’s that Boarding Party special attack that really makes the unit.  And the four-armed robot mini makes a pretty imposing figure on the board.

The knaves of the Silver Scimitar are your main pirate squad: they get to pick a captain and then bond with either that captain or any pirate hero,^* disengage for those sneaky guerrilla hit-and-run tactics, and an extra attack die to encourage them to do just that.  It’s a bit too bad that it’s a unique squad—it’d be fun to field multiple squads of these guys—but they’re pretty powerful, so I get it.  The sculpts are pretty fun too: this is the first Heroscape unit where the species is just listed as “various”; the 4 squad members look like they might be 2 orcs (Heroscape orcs are blue, for whatever reason), a mostly human, and ... a four-armed green guy.  No clue what that one is.  But they look cool, so that’s what matters.

The rest of the units are a mixed bag.  Fia Bonny the Void Siren is probably the better captain; Bok-Bur-Na, the Marro captain, looks cool enough, but I found him a bit underwhelming in play.  Fia is ostensibly a human, though I guess she’s wearing some sort of space armor, ’cause she looks way weirder (and cooler) than your standard human.  I suppose Bok-Bur-Na’s powerset is more useful, but he’s also significantly more expensive, so I still say Fia is the better choice.  (And there’s no point in taking both because of the way the Knaves’ bonding power is worded.)  Meanwhile, your other choice for a pirate squad, the exiles of the Sundered Sea are, according to their card, also a pack of mongrels, but their sculpts look way more consistent.  Having some range (even if it’s only 3 times per game) is nice, but Stealthy is not as useful as First Assault in my opinion, and they have no bonding, so I wasn’t as impressed with them as with the Knaves. 

Finally, the two pirate hero options are Dorim the Bulkhead Brawler and Killian Vane III.  Dorim has a cool sculpt, but he has one power that’s literally useless unless you’re bonding with him, and he costs 100 points, so I wasn’t really sure he was worth it at the end of the day.  Killian is more affordable, adds an area-of-effect special attack, and he looks like a proper bad-ass pirate.  Having only a single power is slightly disappointing, but overall I thought he was a decent choice if you want to run a pirate army.

The Revna Heroes

At several points in Heroscape’s history, two (or three) units are designed together, but somehow they end up not getting released together.  With the results that, when the first unit appears, everyone scratches their head and says “hunh?” And then eventually the other units show up and everybody goes “ooooh ... now I see.” And here’s another case that falls in this unfortunate bucket.

The problem with Misaerx is that there are no other Revna warrior heroes.  Which makes one of her powers utterly useless.  The other one, Life Drain, is a tough sell on a figure with only 4 life: in many cases, you’ll never get a chance to use it before you’re wiped out.  At 50 points, she’s almost cheap enough to be considered a filler, but even then there are better options at 50 (Me-Burq-Sa, Tarns, Eldgrim + Marcu, etc).  So I don’t see a lot of utility for her until we have a few more options to fill out this faction.

It’s also worth noting that I also fail to see the value of adding yet another general.  (The “generals” are basically just a way to group units into vaguely coded groups, like “the really good guys,” “the nature guys,” “the really bad guys,” “the military guys,” etc.)  We originally had 5 generals, which seemed like plenty, and then we added another one, which also seemed like plenty, and then we added another one, which was starting to seem like overkill, and now Revna is the newest (and eighth) general.  Did we need this?  I’m trying to keep an open mind, but so far it appears to be yet another flavor of “the bad guys,” which isn’t even adding anything fresh or unusual.  Not a fan so far.

The Evil Kyrie

There are two new Utgar (a.k.a. evil) kyrie: Loviatäk and a new, evil version of Raelin.  These are perfect to combine with an existing unit, the minions of Utgar, which are already beasts.  Minions only have two weaknesses: they’re slow, and they’re expensive.  These two ladies are not helping with the cost, but, if you take both with your minions, they do help with the speed.  Not to mention that Loviatäk makes the minions even more deadly by letting them reroll dice that don’t show skulls (and, remember: every skull from a minion counts as two skulls).  Combine that with Raelin sitting there lowering your defense dice and you’re just screwed.  Before this new wave, your only choice for Utgar kyrie were Taelord (useful but expensive) and Runa (not particularly useful).  Raelin and Loviatäk are not only way more useful, but both are cheaper than either of the previously extant options.  I played against this army, and, let me tell you: it was pretty terrifying.  Once you take out at least one of the red ladies it gets a bit easier, but it’s tough going up until that point.

The Wizards and Familiars

The most awesome thing about this new faction is that all the figures are just crazy awesome looking.  Ewashia is a cool blue squid lady, and Raakchott looks like a plant-based wendigo.  Ewashia’s power to drop water tiles (three times per game) keeps her useful on every map; Raakchott’s powerset is hard to use, but it can be kind of cool.  The two familiars, Kita and Onshu, are cute as hell, but also alien-looking, which is fun.  Neither add a huge amount of power on the battlefield, but they’re cheap, and the Command Familiar power means you’re not wasting an order marker on them (at least until all your wizards are wiped out), so that’s fine.

I really enjoyed playing this faction, and I hope it gets expanded in the future.  There are currently no medium beasts at all in the game, and the only other small beast is a community custom, Otar (which I did use in my army).  There plenty of other wizards in the game, of course, but none of them have the Command Familiar power.  So I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with this faction in future waves.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this new wave of Heroscape.  They didn’t all hit it out of the park, but that’s always the case.  And of course some people will disagree with my assessments, and that’s reasonable.  But I think that, on the whole, if you were a fan of Heroscape back in the day, you should absolutely get these new sets.  And, if you’re new to the game, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the update.

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* Interestingly, this bonding power lacks the typical “After revealing an order marker” language, which means it could eventually end up becoming ‘Scape’s second ever double-bonding chain.

There's just a blind spot in my memory

There’s been some sickness going through our house this week, and I’m just not capable of the mental acuity necessary to put up anything resembling a coherent blog post.  Hopefully next week will be better.

Technicolor pachyderms is really too much for me

This week, our new Heroscape has finally arrived!  We got the prepainted versions of the new master set as well as what they’re calling a “battle box” (which is basically just a mini-master set).  So we slapped all the terrain together into a basic map and my middle child and I have played two games so far with the new figures, trying different configurations and combining with some of the classic figures to fill in gaps.  So far, I haven’t managed to win a game, though it’s been pretty close both times.  They seem to be having a good time kicking my butt, so I’m happy enough to provide the experience.

Our smallest child isn’t interested too much in playing, though she likes to watch and provide a running commentary.  And a fairly snarky one at that.  She also likes the mapbuilding aspect, and the map has been getting slowly larger and more elaborate as the week goes on.

She also displayed some interest in taking a non-Heroscape figure we found while gathering supplies in my office and working up a custom card for it.  In just a couple of hours, she managed to work this up on her art tablet:

I should be clear that, while I did help with the wording a bit, all the graphics and layout is completely her work.

Anyways, that’s how we’ve been spending our week.  Maybe I’ll have a more formal review of the new set next time.

Stumbling Locomotive I

"Keep A-shovelin' That Coal"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One of the earliest of the pre-modern mixes¹ was Stumbling Locomotive.  Like most of the pre-moderns,² this was made to play at parties, and its central conceit was that it would feature songs that started off a bit slow, perhaps staggering around a bit, but then eventually worked up a full head of steam and went rolling and rollicking along.  Such songs are great for parties, in my opinion, because they provide natural breaks: particularly when you’re dancing, as one song fades and the next one begins, if the new song starts off slow, that gives you a little break, a short time to cool off before the song eventually hits its stride and you can get back to your frenetic gyrations.

Now, like all the pre-modern mixes, the original version was both chock full of songs from the period of my second college attendance (roughly 1989 – 1992) and riddled with bad choices.  Not meaning bad songs, of course, just songs that didn’t really fit the theme.  For instance, “Sin” by Nine Inch Nails was originally on this mix.  And that’s a fantastic song, and great to play at parties, but in no way does it fit the description I gave above.³  So this is probably the pre-modern mix that’s been most extensively reworked: less than half the tracks from the original mix survive, and only a third of what remains falls into that college timeframe that tend to dominate the other pre-moderns.⁴  As I started to get the vibe for the mix, it was easy to find songs that fit the theme.

For instance, songs about trains are common, and many of them actually tend to sound like trains.  And that’s sort of the epitome of what this mix is about.  If you can write a song about a train that has the same rhythm as a train rolling down the tracks (and if you can manage to avoid it being a country song), you’ve really got something kinda cool.  “Train” by 4 Non Blondes is perhaps the best example of this; if you’re familiar with that album,⁵ it’s even got a picture of a train right on the cover.  It’s a kind of wacky, cartoon train, sure, but there it is nonetheless.  And, on this album with a train on the cover, there’s a song called “Train” that both sounds like a train and is about a train.⁶  Plus it has a harmonica!  Totally trainy.

Many songs on that album have that train vibe, though none are quite as on the nose.  Still, “Old Mr. Hefffer” gives “Train” a run for its money, so it earned a spot here as well.  But, for powerful female vocals belting out train-inspired lyrics, Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes has a powerful competitor in Liz Phair, whose “Baby Got Going” not only has the harmonica, but also gives us our very trainy volume title.  And we can’t leave out Johnette Napolitano: Concrete Blonde’s “Carry Me Away,” which is the transition song between the “Day Side” and “Night Side” of their amazing album Free actually throws the line “Today I saw a train roll by the river” into its first verse, and the song follows the now familiar pattern of starting off slow and then kicking it into high gear.

Of course, that brings up the question of how Stumbling Locomotive differs from Creeping Rageaholic.  The main thing is, songs on that latter mix tend to burst forth into being; these mostly ramp up gradually.⁷  And these songs have a rolling quality that is reminiscent of riding on a train.  Perhaps the best example of this is to look at Pete Yorn, who has tracks from his musicforthemorningafter featured on both mixes.  “For Nancy” is a song you belt out when you’re in a joyous mood; “Life on a Chain” is one that just carries you along in its wake while you bop your head and carry on with what you were doing.  Heck, some of these tracks actually don’t have the slow start: “Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives has that rhythmic rolling right from the opening notes and it maintains a frenetic pace throughout.  And “Railroad Steel” by the Georgia Satellites—a band which is very good at cozying up to that line that separates Southern rock from country without ever crossing it—keeps a pretty steady pace throughout as well (plus it has lots more train similes).  On the other hand, “Burn Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees really does start out a bit slow in the first half of the first verse, picks up the pace in the second half, and finally hits its strides with the chorus.  No train imagery in this one, but the harmonica is back, and I challenge anyone to listen to this track (which is about a pyromaniac) and not think “train.”

As much as this rework diverges from the original version, there’s one place they’re exactly the same: the opener.  It was always “It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds.  Once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives” by 120 Minutes music critic Dave Kendall, this band from Wales⁸ produced a great Britpop first album (Pop Said), and, while their follow-up Crawdaddy was not quite as impressive, its opening track will always epitomize this vibe for me.  It doesn’t really sound like a train, but it starts out slow and quiet, building gradually, with some breathy vocalizations from Andrea Lewis, and eventually that driving bassline kicks in, and that carries the song (and the listener) along for the rest of the journey.  It’s just brilliant.

In fact, several of the tracks here are less reminiscent of trains so much as they remind me of galloping horses.  One of the first additions to the rework was in fact “Shadow of Love” by the Damned, off the brilliant Phantasmagoria.  With Dave Vanian at his gothiest, the rhythm section of Brynn Merrick and Rat Scabies turned in some of their best work on this track.  The song takes the occasional break from that strong canter, but the sonic reflections of hoofbeats always come back, driving on and on and on.  It was an early choice for second track here.  And another track that showcases that rolling equine gait is “Take Me I’m Yours” by Squeeze.  This was actually their first single, originally released back in 1977, but I never heard it until I picked up what is quite possibly the best greatest hits compilation ever: Singles: 45’s and Under.  Every song on that collection is a winner, and this, the opening track, is a great example of what we’re looking to achieve here.

For another song that gives that riding-on-a-horse vibe, there’s the aptly named “Ride,” also from Liz Phair (she can do trains and horses, on the same album, even).  The titular ride is more of a car ride, granted; here’s my favorite lyric from the song:

I don’t know, but I’ve been told
That the road to heav’n is paved with gold
And, if I die before I wake,
I need a ride ...

The best thing about this bit is that she compresses “heaven” down to a single syllable, which makes it sound remarkably like “hell,” so you’re not quite sure which one she’s singing.  Chef’s kiss.  And I follow that up with KT Tunstall’s “Push That Knot Away,” from her magnum opus Tiger Suit.  As I’ve said before,⁹ Tunstall reminds a lot of Phair, in both style and attitude, but with significant enough differences that pairing them isn’t repetitive.  So I put these two back-to-back in the closing triptych of the volume: “Knot” has a slightly different rolling gait than “Ride,” but it’s quite insistent as well.  But perhaps the best example of this rolling beat outside of “Shadow of Love” is another late-80s-early-90s classic, “Away” by the Feelies.  With two drummers, a great bassist, and some guitar work that somehow manages to sound like lonely train whistles, “Away,” with its Jonathan-Demme-directed video, was my introduction to the Feelies, and still stands as their greatest achievement in my opinion.  It was a natural choice to open up the back third.

Stumbling Locomotive I
[ Keep A-shovelin' That Coal ]

“It Makes No Difference” by the Darling Buds, off Crawdaddy
“Shadow of Love” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“Old Mr. Heffer” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Life on a Chain” by Pete Yorn, off musicforthemorningafter
“Say Amen (Saturday Night)” by Panic! at the Disco, off Pray for the Wicked
“On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, off On the Corner Where You Live
“Take Me I'm Yours” by Squeeze, off Singles: 45's and Under [Compilation]
“Railroad Steel” by Georgia Satellites, off Georgia Satellites
“Baby Got Going” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Burn-Up” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Cakewalk” by House of Freaks, off Cakewalk
“Carry Me Away” by Concrete Blonde, off Free
“Train” by 4 Non Blondes, off Bigger, Better, Faster, More!
“Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“I Wonder Why” by the Heart Throbs, off Cleopatra Grip
“Cecilia Ann” by Pixies, off Bossanova
“Away” by the Feelies, off Only Life
“The Bosses Daughter” by the Lucky Bullets, off Dead Man's Shoes
“Shine On” by the House of Love, off The House of Love [Butterfly Album]
“Add It Up” by Violent Femmes, off Violent Femmes
“Gipsy Threat” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Ride” by Liz Phair, off Whitechocolatespaceegg
“Push That Knot Away” by KT Tunstall, off Tiger Suit
“400 Bucks” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat

Total:  24 tracks,  80:23

There are 3 bridges used here, of which “Cecilia Ann” by the Pixies is easily the one which hews closest to the theme: it’s a hard driving instrumental with impeccable basswork from Kim Deal (as always) and a great beat from Lovering, though it’s (somewhat surprisingly) Black Francis’ rhythm guitar that provides the “chunk-a-chunk” that gives it its impetus.  And of course Joey Santiago’s great Western-sounding ringing guitar chords.  I thought it made a nice lead-in to “Away.” Next, the title track of House of Freaks’ third full-length album Cakewalk has that great Johny Hott percussion and the now familiar rolling beat; it introduces the middle stretch of the volume.  Finally, I felt that the back third needed a little something in the middle to introduce the return of Liz Phair, so I found a bit of electronica from Ratatat¹⁰ which also featured that galloping hoofbeat rhythm that features so heavily here.

There’s not too much surprising going on.  I did want to add a few newer tunes, so I slotted in “Say Amen” by Panic! at the Disco, which is, to be fair, more of a happy trot than a proper canter, but I think it still works here, followed immediately by “On the Corner Where You Live” by the Paper Kites, a lovely Australian band that I discovered through a coworker at my current job.  They’ve been around since 2010, and this album (of which “Corner” is the title track) is from 2018, but I never heard of them until 2020, when this coworker suggested a song from their 2012 EP as our “push song.”¹¹  That song had more of a Simon-and-Garfunkel vibe to raised-by-my-record-collector-father me, but it was intriguing enough to me to send me scurrying to listen to more of their work.  As it turns out, Corner is a fantastic album, and this track is one of those not-quite-downbeat songs with a very steady pace that I thought was quite excellent coming off the much more ebuillient “Amen.” Finally, the Lucky Bullets is a Norwegian rockabilly band (as unlikely as that sounds) that also treads dangerously close to that country line, although they rarely trip over it.  “The Bosses Daughter” [sic] trades the harmonica in for a trumpet, giving it a Western hoofbeat that’s almost enough to earn it a spot on Tumbledown Flatland.  But I thought it worked well here.

For more late-80s-early-90s goodness, “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes is a classic that, again, starts off slow and quiet, then picks up the pace.  As always, Brian Ritchie’s basswork is the stand-out, giving it the requisite rhythm.  Meanwhile, “Shine On” by House of Love hits the pace right out of the gate, then alternates between slowing down (but never too much) and speeding up (but never to a reckless level).  Both are perhaps a slight stretch here, but they match well with “Away,” and using “The Bosses Daughter” to break up the 80s goodness just seemed to work.  Our final track from this period is from the criminally forgotten Heart Throbs, who hail from Reading, home to the lead singer of the Sundays.  And Cleopatra Grip was even released the same year as Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but the latter was a huge hit while the former produced one song that hit #2 on the Modern Rock charts and then they seemed to fade from the spotlight.¹²  And there’s no good reason for it: Cleopatra Grip is a fantastic album with consistently good songs, and “I Wonder Why” has the perfect beat for this mix.

Our volume closer is one of those patented screech fests from the Reverend Horton Heat, “400 Bucks.” The psychobilly auteur is going off this time about some money owed by an ex-girlfriend.  The relentless pace just adds to the desperation in Heat’s voice, and I thought it worked well to wrap up the set.

Next time, it’s time to get dark again.

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1 You can find a definition of that term in the series list.

2 Probably all of them, with the exception of Wisty Mysteria.

3 Which is why now you can find it on an entirely different mix.

4 The worst offender on that score being HipHop Bottlerocket, whose volume I is still 80% composed of tracks from that narrow slice of music history.

5 Yes, “album” singular.  4 Non Blondes only ever had the one, and it was primarily known for containing “What’s Up?” Which, as songs go, was ... fine.  It was fine.  Perfectly lovely.  But, like I said about Natalie Imbruglia: the rest of the album is so much better.

6 I mean, technically the song is about something else, but it uses a bunch of train imagery, which is close enough.

7 To be fair, “Carry Me Away” is a bit of an outlier there, and it might have qualified for Creeping Rageaholic if it weren’t for the obvious train imagery.

8 Perhaps oddly—or perhaps not—the Primitives are from Coventry, which is just a bit to the right of Wales on the map.

9 Specifically, on Sirenexiv Cola.

10 You may recall them from Paradoxically Sized World VI.

11 Specifically, it was “Leopold Street,” off Young North.

12 Technically, they produced two more albums, but I didn’t even know that until doing the research for this blog post.  I may have to track them down.

Feeling so good-natured I could drool

This month, we’re getting new Heroscape for the first time in 14 years, and a new edition of D&D (despite the fact that they refuse to admit it’s a new edition) for the first time in 10.  Exciting times for my two primary gaming passions.  So far all we’ve seen are previews, but I’m cautiously optimistic.  Probably more so for the Heroscape “Renegade wave 1” (really wave 14) than the D&D “Fifth Edition 2024 rules” (really 5.5e, or, as the great Dael Kingsmill has dubbed it: “5e2e”).  But still looking forward to both.  Good times for fantasy gaming fans.

Actual Play Time, Part 1: Discovery of the New World

[This is the first post in a new series.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[If you’re wondering why D&D is such an important part of my life, I encourage you to read my D&D and Me series.  Parts of this post are adapted from part 8 of that series.]

While I am safely on the Gen X side of the Garofalo curve, I have to cop to being on the backside of that arc.  And one of the things I never understood was the fascination with watching other people play games, especially videogames.  My brother (11 years younger than I) and his friends would do it all the time: I specifically remember going out with him and his friends our first Christmas home after his high school graduation.  We went to someone’s house to play videogames; there were about six of us, and two controllers.  And, when people weren’t playing, they were avidly watching.  I was bored.  I don’t specifically remember thinking to myself “I’m too old for this shit,” but I may as well have.  (And, given that the rest of the crowd was only 10 when the R-rated movie which that quote references came out and so likely never got to see it, it would have been oddly appropriate.)

Later, when I had kids, there was a lot of watching other people play videogames, because: YouTube.  Twitch and YouTube have made videos of watching other people play games something of a new artform (often called “Let’s Play” videos).  These are often very long videos—hours and hours, sometimes—and yet our children, with their suppoedly short attention spans, watch them all the time.  Sometimes this is to see if they want to purchase the game (videogames can be quite pricey, so it’s a good way to be smart with your allowance money), and sometimes it’s just background noise while they do other things, but often they just enjoy watching the people play.

And I was always someone to whom this seemed kind of silly.  Why watch other people play? just play yourself!  Or so I would think.  And I always just shook my head in a “kids today” sort of fashion.  I didn’t tell them not to watch, of course—nothing makes your child want to do a thing more than forbidding them from doing it—but I thought it was a dumb thing that hopefully they would grow out of eventually.  Certainly I never imagined that I would ever spend hours watching someone else play a game.

I can no longer remember when this happened—hell, I can’t even remember which kid it was at this point—but it was most likely in 2016 or ‘17 when I happened to wander through the room where one of my kids was watching a Let’s Play video.  No clue what game it was either, but I distinctly remember the joy in the player’s voice, and the lilting Irish accent.  The guy was hilarious.  “Who’s that?” I asked, drawn to watch over my child’s shoulder.  And, the answer, delivered in that “what are you, stupid?” tone that only your children can deliver, was: ”Jacksepticeye.” This was unlike any of the other Let’s Play videos I’d ever seen: Jack wasn’t trying to make me love the game, he wasn’t trying to make fun of the game, he wasn’t trying to do some artsy or clever commentary on the game ... he was just playing the game, and having fun, and being damned entertaining while doing it.  Even though I can’t claim to have become a big Jacksepticeye fan after that—I didn’t go around watching a bunch of his other videos or anything—I have to credit him with changing me in a fundamental way.  Before I discovered Jacksepticeye, I didn’t think watching other people play games could be fun.  Afterwards ... it was like discovering I’d been fundamentally wrong about something my whole life, and, now that I had realized it, I couldn’t go back to the way it was before.  Pretty much exactly like that, in fact.

And I began to understand that my whole attitude (which, from hanging out on the Internet, I already knew was not unique to me) was kind of stupid.  Why watch someone else play a game when you could just play yourself?  By that logic, the entire sports industry becomes meaningless, and yet there’s a multi-billion-dollar business—several, even!—in having people play games so other people will watch them.  But of course this illuminates why it’s tricky: sure, watching an NBA game can be pretty damned exciting, but that doesn’t mean that watching any random game of people playing basketball will be fun.  There are many factors to consider: the talent of the players, the production value of the presentation, the knowledge of the commentators, and so on. 

But, still, Jacksepticeye proves one thing: it is possible to make watching other people play videogames entertaining.  And, if I could enjoy watching someone else play a videogame, when I don’t even like videogames all that much, surely I could enjoy watching someone play D&D, which I absolutely adore.  Because, up until that point, the idea of watching other people play D&D had seemed just as stupid as watching other people play videogames.  How could that possibly be entertaining?  But now I was living in a whole new mental paradigm.  And I knew that there were a lot of these D&D videos out there (what would eventually come to be called “actual play” shows) ... not just videos, but podcasts too.  The field was still fairly young back then, but there was already a bewildering array of choices.  So, cautiously, I decided to try a few.

And, honestly, none of them were that great.  Oh, sure, they had their moments, but they weren’t sucking me in the way good ol’ Jacksepticeye had.  There were a bunch of “CelebriD&D” videos on YouTube, but they were edited to hell and back.  In a way, this makes sense.  Going with the sports analogy, D&D is not basketball.  In terms of pacing, it’s more like baseball ... if not golf.  And, if you don’t have time to watch the 3 or 4 hour baseball game, what do you do?  You watch the highlights, of course.  But the thing is, you can boil a baseball game down to just highlights.  There’s not a whole lot of context required for any given play, and what little there is can be described by a competent color commentator in a few brief sentences.  But D&D is different: there’s an underlying story, and, without that context, the exciting moments are far less exciting.

Eventually I came across Force Grey (this would have been the first season).  Now, I didn’t really know who this Matt Mercer guy was, though I recognized him from a bunch of the other videos (apparently he was quite popular for running D&D actual plays).  And I’m sure I knew Ashley Johnson because I had almost certainly started watching Blindspot by that point.  But mainly I was here for Chris Hardwick and Jonah Ray.  A couple of comedians I knew and liked, playing a game of D&D?  This should be good!  And it was ... okay.  Mercer was competent, and discovering Utkarsh Ambudkar was an unexpected joy, and the story was decent, but it just didn’t grab me.  Some of the players were competent, others were just learning, but it was obvious they were having difficulty gelling as a team.  Once again: you can’t just throw 10 people off the street onto a basketball court and expect magic to happen.  Season 2 would eventually come along and be much better, but season 1 was just ... meh.

And then I heard that a new show was going to come out with Deborah Ann Woll, who I knew (and liked) from True Blood and Daredevil.  And, back then, it was still fairly unusual to see a woman in the DM’s chair, and I thought that might be worth checking out.  Episode 1 was set to feature Matthew Lillard, who most probably think of as Shaggy or “that kid from Hackers,” but I always preferred him in Scream and Thirteen Ghosts, so that seemed promising as well.  As soon as the first episode was out on YouTube, I sat down to watch it.

Relics and Rarities was all I’d hoped for, but also much more.  First off, it was perfectly edited: not just the highlights, like the failed attempts in the “CelebriD&D” videos, but not completely unedited, as seemed to be popular in other, longer videos.  It was still people sitting around a table and actually playing the game—no cheap gimmicks like animation or puppets—but the set dressing was excellent, and there were sound effects.  When Woll described the party as being in a dank castle with a fierce thunderstorm raging outside, a crack of lightning could be seen in the faux window set into the faux stone wall behind the players, and peals of thunder punctutated the table talk.  Just enough, mind you: not so much as to be distracting, but not so little as to make no difference.  Lillard knew what he was doing, obviously; I could tell he was a long-time player, but I could also tell that he was one of those folks for whom D&D is somehow a competitive game, even though it very much is not.  He was the sort of player who competes with his fellow players (and sometimes himself) to always do the optimal thing, always do the coolest thing, and often got frustrated when he couldn’t (or tried to and failed).  But the other four players were very solid: two were obviously actors, and the other two (who I would eventually come to know as two of the best players in the actual play space) were consummate professionals.  Watching Jasmine Bhullar and Xander Jeanneret play was perhaps not like watching Jordan play basketball, but certainly as satisfying as walking into a no-name dive bar and realizing that the rhythm section of the band that just happens to be playing that night is more amazing than three-quarters of the musicians on the albums you own.  And, by the end of the first episode, they had changed Lillard in a fundamental way, teaching him something about the game that he seemed surprised he could still learn.  And Woll herself?  A master storyteller, fond of setting puzzles for her players, always understanding how to motivate the PCs, perhaps a bit more lenient than I personally would be, but always in service of the Rule of Cool.  I was blown away.

Because, you see, I realized that I had been watching this new actual play thing all wrong.  I was treating it like sports: the thrill of watching people at the top of their game perform amazing feats, the empathy of experiencing the highs and lows, the satisfaction of armchair-quarterbacking a game that you yourself play well (or used to).  But, no: actual play is not that.  Or, it sort of can be that, and some of it is nothing but that.  But those aren’t the good ones.  The good ones are the ones that are taking advantage of this entirely new medium of storytelling to tell tales that you can’t really see anywhere else.  Just as a novel can tell stories that a movie can’t (and vice versa), or a comic book series can tell stories that a TV series can’t (and vice versa), actual play can tell stories that nothing else can.  Unlike a novel, it’s collaborative, and far more so than a comic.  Movies and plays and televsion are more collaborative, but still there’s usually one writer (or at most a handful), and the characters in all those other media serve the plot.  If someone forgets something, it’s because they needed to forget that thing for events to be set in motion.  If one character hurts another, it’s because the one character needs to learn from it, or because the other character needs to have something to regret, or because the audience needs to pick a side.  Characters die because an author or screenwriter decided it would have maximum dramatic effect.

But, in actual play (at least when done well), the GM builds a world and sets the PCs loose in it.  Each character has their own arc, and that arc is completely controlled by the “actor” portraying them.  Normally an actor, whether in film, television, or stageplay, has the constraint of playing the character as written on the page, using the words they’re given.  But, in actual play, a player can do anything they want with their character, take them in any direction that feels natural.  And, most importantly, there are dice.  The element of randomness the dice provide adds something that no other medium can compete with.  A good DM harnesses that unpredictability, never letting it derail the story, but letting it add wrinkles and twists and complications.  The resulting tapestry of big swings and near misses, huge triumphs and massive failures, is both complex and beautiful, and unlike any other form of storytelling.

Actual play is a new medium.  The fact that you’re watching people play a game is almost incidental to that fact: it’s a bit fun, especially if you know the game yourself, but it’s totally unnecessary to enjoy the story.  The story is the thing, the thing that makes actual play special.  The stories told via actual play are unique, amazing, engrossing, and transcendent.  And that’s what this series will explore.

Next time we look at some of the different forms actual play can take.