Dinner and a Show

Today was Father’s Day, and we took the whole family out for a teppan yaki lupper.  If you don’t know what “lupper” is, it’s a meal about halfway between lunch and supper, in the same way that “brunch” is halfway between breakfast and lunch.  Of course, according to the terminology I was raised with, “lupper” is still dinner, despite the odd timing, because “dinner” means “the biggest meal of the day, no matter what time you eat it.” But that’s a technicality.

If you don’t know what “teppan yaki” is, it’s the Japanese cuisine where they cook on the table (which is apparently called a “teppan,” although most of us Americans just say “hibachi”).  Where I’m from (the DC-VA-NC East Coast corridor), we typically just called it ”Benihana,” because that was the only such place there was.  Well, at least that’s the way it was when I was growing up, which admittedly was a long time ago.

But, here in Southern California (and/or here in the aftertimes), we had a whole bunch of options, of which Benihana was only one (and not even the best one, apparently).  We went with a place called Musashi, which, going by their website, used to have 3 locations, but is now down to just one (the pandemic was not kind to most restaurants, but for teppanyaki restaurants in particular—where more than half the point is the showmanship of the meal preparation, so take-out isn’t as enticing—I’m guessing it was devastating).  Anyway, Musashi has been around since 1981, which is one of those years that seems ancient to my children but doesn’t seem that long ago to me.  But, it was 42 years ago, which is at least long ago enough that it seems like these folks know what they’re doing.  So, I don’t really want to tell you how much it cost us, but the food was excellent, and the kids seemed to enjoy the show (and, honestly, that was the main reason I wanted to go).  So I call it a success.

Next time, a longer post, assuming all goes well.

Do Androids Dream of IQ Tests?

Recently, I was listening to a podcast—it happened to be Election Profit Makers, with the lovely and talented David Rees.¹  In this particular episode,² David offers this “hot take”:

I also think AI is kinda bullshit.  I’ve been thinking about it; I think there’s some stuff that AI can do, but on the other hand it really is not ... we shouldn’t call it AI.  Someone was making this point, that calling it “artificial intelligence” is kind of propaganda.  It’s not really intelligent yet.  It’s just like a word prediction algorithm, you know?  You give it a topic—it doesn’t know what it’s saying.  It’s ... it’s like an algorithm that predicts what the—given any word or paragraph, it predicts what the next most likely word is, I think.  I don’t think it really thinks ... I don’t think it’s artificial intelligence.

Of course, I put “hot take” in quotes because it’s not particularly hot: as David himself notes, other people have been making this observation for a while now, especially in relation to ChatGPT.  I gave my own opinions of ChatGPT several months ago, and it’s only become more pervasive, and more useful, since then.  Now, David’s assessment is not wrong ... but it’s also not complete, either.  David’s not a tech guy.  But I am.  So I want to share my opinion with you on this topic, but, be forewarned: I’m going to ask a lot of questions and not necessarily provide a lot of answers.  This is one of those topics where there aren’t any clear answers, and asking the questions is really the point of the exercise.

So, first let’s get the one minor detail that David is wrong about out of the way.  What David is referring to here are the LLMs, like ChatGPT.  To be pendantic about it, LLMs are just one form of AI: they just happen to be the one that’s hot right now, because it’s the one that’s shown the most promise.  If you’ve had the opportunity to interact with ChatGPT or any of its imitators, you know what I mean.  If not ... well, just take my word for it.  LLMs are extremely useful and extremely promising, and the closest we’ve come so far to being to talk to a machine like a person.³  But they are not the totality of AI, and I’m sure there will be AI in the future that is not based on this technology, just as there was in the past.

But, forgiving that understandable conflation, what about this notion that an LLM is just a “predictive algorithm,” and it doesn’t actually think, and therefore it’s a misnomer to refer to it as “intelligence”?  David goes on to cite (badly) the “Chinese room” thought experiment; if you’re unfamiliar, I encourage you to read the full Wikipedia article (or at least the first two sections), but the synopsis is, if a computer program could take in questions in Chinese and produce answers in Chinese, and do so sufficiently well to fool a native Chinese speaker, then a person who neither speaks, reads, nor understands Chinese could be operating that program, and taking in the questions, and passing back the answers.  Obviously you would not say that the person could speak Chinese, and so therefore you can’t really say that the program speaks Chinese either.  Analogously, a program which simulates intelligent thought isn’t actually intelligent ... right?

This immediately reminds me of another podcast that I listen to, Let’s Learn Everything.  On their episode “Beaver Reintroductions, Solving Mazes, and ASMR,”⁴ Tom Lum asks the question “How does a slime mold solve a maze?” A slime mold is, after all, one of the lowest forms of life.  It doesn’t even have any neurons, much less a brain.  How could it possibly solve a maze?  Well, it does so by extending its body down all possible pathways until it locates the food.  Once it’s done that, it retracts all its psuedopods back into itself, leaving only the shortest path.

Now, the conclusion that Tom (as well as his cohosts Ella and Caroline) arrived at was that this isn’t really “solving” the maze.  Tom also had some great points on whether using maze-solving as a measure of intelligence makes any sense at all (you should really check out the episode), but let’s set that aside for now.  Presuming that being able to solve a maze does indicate something about the level of intelligence of a creature, isn’t it sort of sour grapes to claim that the slime mold did it the “wrong” way?  We used our big brains to figure out the maze, but when a creature who doesn’t have our advantages figures out a way to do complete the task anyway, we suddenly claim it doesn’t count?

Let’s go a step further.  If I give the maze to a person to solve, and they laboriously try every possible pathway until they find the shortest one, then are they really doing anything differently than the slime mold?  And does that mean that the person is not intelligent, because they didn’t solve the maze the way we thought they should?  I mean, just keeping track of all the possible pathways, and what you’ve tried already ... that requires a certain amount of intelligence, no?  Of course we lack the advantages of the slime mold—being able to stretch our bodies in such a way as to try all the pathways at once—but we figured out a way to use our brains to solve the problem anyhow.  I wonder if the slime mold would snort derisively and say “that doesn’t count!”

Now let’s circle back to the LLMs.  It is 100% true that all they’re doing is just predicting what the next word should be, and the next word after that, and so on.  No one is denying that.  But now we’re suddenly faced with deciding whether or not that counts as “intelligence.” Things that we’ve traditionally used to measure a person’s intelligence, such as SAT scores, are no problem for LLMs, which are now passing LSATs and bar exams in the top 10%.  But that doesn’t “count,” right?  Because it’s not really thinking.  I dunno; kinda feels like we’re moving the goalposts a bit here.

Part of the issue, of course, is that we really don’t have the slightest idea how our brains work.  Oh, sure, we can mumble on about electrical impulses and say that this part of the brain is responsible for this aspect of cognition based on what lights up during a brain scan, but, at the end of the day, we can’t really explain what’s going on in there when you can’t remember something today that you had no trouble with yesterday, or when you have a crazy idea out of nowhere, or when you just know that your friend is lying to you even though you can’t explain how you know.  Imagine some day in the far future where scientists discover, finally, that the way most of our thinking works is that words are converted to symbols in our brains, and we primarily talk by deciding what the next logical symbol should be, given the current context of who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about.  If that were to ever happen, seems like we’d owe these LLMs a bit of an apology.  Or would we instead decide that that aspect of how we think isn’t “really” thinking, and that there must be something deeper?

Look, I’m not saying that ChatGPT (for example) actually is intelligent.  I’m just pointing out that we don’t have a very clear idea, ourselves, what “intelligent” actually means.  It’s like the infamous Supreme Court definition of obscenity: we can’t define intelligence, but we know it when we see it, and this ain’t it.  But what I find to be a more interesting question is this: why does it matter?

An LLM like ChatGPT serves a purpose.  Now, overreliance on it can be foolish—just check out the case of the lawyers who tried to use ChatGPT to write their legal briefs for them.  As the Legal Eagle points out in that video, their idiocy was not so much the use of an LLM in the first place, but rather the fact that they never bothered to double check its work.  So you can’t always rely on it 100% ... but isn’t that true of people as well?  Honestly, if you’re a lawyer and you get a person to do your work, you’re still responsible for their mistakes if you sign your name at the bottom and submit it to a judge.  An incisive quote from the video:

... the media has talked about how this is lawyers using ChatGPT and things going awry.  But what it’s really revealing is that these lawyers just did an all around terrible job and it just happened to tangentially involve ChatGPT.

So you can talk to an LLM as if it were a person, it talks back to you as if it were a person, it can give you information like a person, and oftentimes more information that you can get from most of the persons you know, and you can rely it as exactly as much (or, more to the point, exactly as little) as you can rely on another person.  But it’s not a person, and it’s not really “thinking” (whatever that means), so therefore it’s not “intelligent.” Is that all just semantics?  And, even if it is, is this one of those cases where semantics is important?

I’ve got to say, I’m not sure it is.  I think every person reading this has to decide that for themselves—I’m not here to provide pat answers—but I think it’s worth considering why we’re so invested in things like LLMs not being considered intelligent.  Does it threaten our place up here at the top of the food chain?  (Or perhaps that should be “the top of the brain chain” ...)  Should we seriously worry that, if an AI is intelligent, that it poses a threat to the existence of humanity?  Many of the big tech folks seem to think so.  I personally remain unconvinced.  The Internet was proclaimed to be dangerous to humanity, as were videogames, television, rock-and-roll ... hell, even books were once considered to be evil things that tempted our children into avoiding reality and made them soft by preventing them from playing outside.  Yet, thus far, we’ve survived all these existential threats.  Maybe AI is The One which will turn out to be just as serious as people claim.  But probably not.

And, if it is the case that AI won’t take over the world and enslave or destroy us, then what difference does it really make whether or not it’s “technically” intelligent?  If it’s being useful, and if we can learn how to use it effectively without shooting ourselves in the foot, that’s good enough for me.  Perhaps it can be good enough for you as well.

[For complete transparency, I must say that, while ChatGPT did not write any of the words in this post, it did come up with the title.  Took it six tries, but it finally came up with something I felt was at least moderately clever.  So, if you like it, it’s because I’m very good at prompting LLMs, and, if you hate it, it’s because ChatGPT is not very smart.  This is one of the primary advantages of having an LLM as a contributor: I can hog all the credit and it will never be offended.]

__________

1 If you’re not familiar—and can figure out where to stream it—you should check out his Going Deep series.  It’s excellent.

2 Approximately 40 minutes in, if you want to follow along at home.

3 “LLM” stands for “large language model,” by the way, although knowing that is really unnecesssary to follow along on this topic.

4 Again, if you want to follow along at home, jump to about 44:45.

Puzzle Progress

Well, I finally kicked off my baby girl’s birthday campaign, and I think it started off pretty well.  She (and my eldest’s partner) seemed to enjoy it at any rate.  The other two kids ... well, let’s just say that they more of the “I don’t have patience with anything I can’t kill” school of D&D.  Still, they’re contributing, and I think they may come around.  And, if they don’t ... welll, it isn’t their birthday game.

Longer post next time, most likely.

Music Story #3: Into the Groove

[This is the third post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

This is one I originally published on my work’s Slack channel #tunes.  It’s a shorter post than usual, but I thought it worh sharing nonetheless.]

This sub-series has covered music in various formats.  But they’ve all been about music formats that you buy.  Obviously that’s not the only way we hear music—in fact, one might argue that we hear way more music for free than we ever do paying for it.  And that’s primarily because of one thing: radio.  Or it used to be, anyway, before the Internet came along.  I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with radio.  Here’s a thing which happened to me recently that may help illuminate that.

A week ago today, we packed up the whole family and went to the Renn Faire (I wrote about this last week).  My youngest had never been, and the other two hadn’t been in years (and the eldest’s partner had also never been), so there were six of us.  Obviously we weren’t going to fit in my Prius, so into The Mother‘s SUV we hopped.

Now, The Mother’s SUV is old enough not to have a Bluetooth connection for the sound system; it used to have an “aux” plug that we would just plug our phones into, but the jack got wonky, so we either have to do CD’s, or listen to the actual radio like we’re the Flintstones or something.  For this trip, we decided to do the radio.

Now, when I listen to the radio, I have a very low tolerance for songs I don’t like, and zero tolerance for commericals, so it’s a constant bouncing around of stations.  The Mother has programmed all 12 possible FM stations with something, even if one is country and one is classical, so it’s like we really only had 10 stations.  But it’s an eclectic mix: KROQ, K-Earth (our local oldies station), Jack FM (which there’s one of in every market, I gather), MyFM (current pop music), etc.  We were just as likely to hear Led Zeppelin as Lady Gaga (both of which we did hear on the trip, for the record).

[Brief tangent: I don’t typically like pop, so I would never listen to stations like MyFM in my own car.  Still, there’s almost always one song by every megapop star that I really love.  So I hate Ricky Martin, except for “La Vida Loca,” which is awesome.  Can’t stand Whitney Houston, except for “How Will I Know?” which I adore.  Or, for a more contemporary example, I’m fairly unimpressed by Olivia Rodrigo ... except that “Brutal” is absolutely bangin’.  I’ve never really cottoned to Taylor Swift either, and thus far had also never found her one exception.  But I stumbled across “Anti Hero” on the way to Renn Faire and I was like, shit, that’s Taylor Swift??  It’s great.  (I had a similar reaction to “How Will I Know?” ... for months I was convinced it was the Pointer Sisters and that’s why I loved the song so much.  But I digress.  In my digression.)]

Anyways, there was a fair amount of 80s music, as K-Earth—who originally played like fifties music when i first arrived in Cali—now considers 80s music old.  Bastards.  But, nonetheless, we heard some 80s classics on the ride down, like “Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go-Go’s, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol, and “Into the Groove” by Madonna.

Then we had a lovely day at the Renn Faire (although it was was more vendors and way fewer entertaining bits than I’d remembered), and we got in the truck again to head home.  On the way, we heard “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s, which wasn’t too surprising ... but also “White Wedding” again.  Then, a half an hour later, there was “Into the Groove” again.  Weird.  I probably hadn’t listened to any Madonna in a few decades—Madonna is less of a megapop-star-with-one-good-song-exception to me, and more like a used-to-be-a-cool-alternative-singer-then-turned-megapop-star-and-so-I-stopped-liking-them type thing.  Early Madonna is great: “Lucky Star” is awesome, “Borderline” and “Holiday” are pretty good too.  Then you get to “Material Girl,” which is still pretty good, and “Like a Virgin” is okay, and by the time you hit “Papa Don’t Preach” I’m pretty much checked out.  So “Into the Groove” is right on that borderline (pun inteneded, I suppose) between good-to-mediocre Madonna and bleaugh Madonna.  So I’ve probably listened to Madonna at some point in the past couple of decades, but certainly not that particular song.

Friday I had jury duty.  My county’s courthouse is about an hour’s drive for me, and it was The Mother’s truck again (for family-vehicle-related reasons).  By this time it was all 80s Memorial Day weekend or somesuch on K-Earth and KROQ was doing some sort of “top 500” thing, so I was mainy back and forth between those two.  And I heard “Into the Groove” again.  And I was like, what the fuck is going on???

Yesterday we drove my middle child out to another city about an hour away (though in the opposite direction) for homeschool prom.  We took the youngest with us and went out to dinner to kill time so we didn’t have to drive all the way to Glendale and back twice in one night.  On the way back home, guess what came on the radio again?  Yes, that’s right: “Into the Groove.” By Madonna.  Again.  A song from nearly forty years ago (I looked it up: it was released in 1985) that I haven’t heard in around twenty years and now I’ve heard it four times in a week.  On the radio.  Which I rarely listen to any more.  What the fuck is up with the universe?  I was ranting in the car a bit about how unlikely it was that I heard this stupid song 4 times in a week when i hadn’t heard it once in the past 20 years, and my middle child opined that perhaps the universe wanted me to refamiliarize myself with the song.  I was like, I was plenty refamiliarized by play #2: numbers 3 and 4 were just redundant.

So, anyway, that’s my random weird radio story for the day.  Or week.  Or month—hell, probably for the year.  I hope.

How Doth Fare Thee, M'Lord?

Today we took a trip to the Renn Faire (or the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, as it’s more properly known).  Our youngest had never been, and the pandemic is totally over (right?), and our eldest is back in town (with their partner), so it seemed like a good year to do it.  I have to say, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have in the past.  But perhaps I’m just too old for this shit, as Danny Glover is wont to say.  Here are my observations:

• It’s very dusty, and very hot.  I’m sure this was true in past years as well, but I was definitely in better shape back in those days.
• There are way more vendors.  I wondered if maybe I was just misremembering how many there used to be, but Christy agreed with me that this was far more than last time (which was, to be fair, probably around 10 years ago, if not more).  Essentially, we had to hunt for non-stores in between all the stores—it was crazy.  There were 3 shows, 1 one which was terrible, and the joust, which was so packed we had no hope of getting in.  And a few games (archery, throwing axes, that sort of thing).  Other than that, just rows and rows (and rows) of shops, overpriced food stalls, and sellers of of $7 water bottles.
• Our middle child (that would be the one with the heart condition) really does not handle heat well.  I think they might be done with Renn Faires and amusement parks and that sort of thing.
• I could be wrong, but I swear I walked right past Amy Dallen (late of Geek & Sundry, currently at D&D Beyond).  I would have stopped to say “hey,” but people were moving along so fast, I barely registered it was her before she was out of sight.  Perhaps not a major celebrity sighting, but still worth sharing.
• Other than food and drinks and parking, we bought some fancy honey, and the youngest got a pretty nicely carved wand for only $20.  Other than that, everything was just too pricey for us.
• The youngest claims to have enjoyed herself, so I suppose it was all worthwhile in the end.

So, I’m not sorry we went, but man am I exhausted.  Until next week.

Dreamtime II

"Colourless and Dangerous"

[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.]

As I discussed last time, Dreamtime is one of the mixes (the first, actually) that I developed after the pre-modern mixes but before the “modern” mixes.  (I used to call these “mood” mixes, but it wasn’t a very distinguishing term, which is why I now use “transitional” instead.¹)  None of these were every designed with any thought to burning them on CD, which is why part of the challenge of updating them is finding natural volume groups.  Even after adding a few tracks to what is now Dreamtime I, what I had left over from the original Dreamtime playlist wasn’t really sufficient to make a volume II ... in some ways.  It had just about enough length, but it didn’t have any throughline, and it also had that really long track that I mentioned last time, which meant that pretty much as soon as I started adding tracks to make it a bit more coherent, it became too long.  So, I set aside a few tracks for a potential volume III—including the really long one²—and started filling out the rest.  And now here we are.

There’s a few returning artists.  Of course we need to hear from the inimitable A Produce again, and once again he’s our closer.  A Produce tracks are just really great for that, and “The Far Shore” is no exception.  It’s slow, mellow, and dreamlike in the way that reminds you of the sensation of moving in slow motion, which is something that you’ve only ever done in a dream.  And I wouldn’t want to leave out the darkwave twins, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You.  From the former, we get one of those Sam Rosenthal concoctions which starts out as one song—minimalist, but almost carnival-like (if somewhat creepy)—and then, halfway through, becomes an entirely different song: a folding and intertwining of sinuous background whispers, underpinned by a lonely synth melody.  From the latter, a more classic John Michael Zorko composition which is Jennifer McPeak’s only vocal track on the magnificent Touch,³ though this time Zorko eschews the trip-hop bassline and just does an extended, almost ambient synth noodling, while McPeak abandons words altogether and just provides an almost operatic, swooping vocal track.  At 7 minutes long, it was probably never going to land in any of the usual places I tend to slot Falling You,⁴ but it’s kind of perfect here.  And I wouldn’t want to skip This Mortal Coil, of course, who often provide dreamlike instrumentals thanks to Ivo Watts’ tendency towards synth minimalism.  “The Lacemaker” is a curious little tripartite track that starts out as just that, then becomes a lonely wind behind which you gradually start to pick out a voice on the breeze (speaking our volume title, as it happens), which is then superseded by some adjacent-to-creepy chamber music.  Songs like this (and the BTfaBG track) that sort of don’t know exactly what they want to be are often impossible to slot into typical mixes, but the advantage of having a mix based on feeling like you’re in a dream is that weird transitions actually fit the theme.

And we couldn’t forget Ensemble of the Dreamings, those weird snippets of music I found on the very early Internet that were supposed to go into a dreamlike videogame.  I’ll mine them all eventually; for this volume, here’s two more: “Processional” is about two minutes of vocals that you can’t quite make out with the standard synth backing, while “Angel Knife I” is (naturally) an angelic voice for which you can mostly make out the words, and a slightly more coherent melody, but it’s barely more than a minute before it melts into our other returning soundtrack, Mirrormask.  “Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” is an anticipatory track which climaxes but then keeps going into a very unsettling groove.  Iain Bellamy turns in another great track that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else.

The only new artist to achieve two tracks on this volume is Al Gromer Khan, a German-born sitarist who spent seven years learning the instrument in India, and only added the “Khan” to his name after being accepted into the Khan-I-Gharana tradition.  “The Anahat Syndrome” is something I first heard on a Hearts of Space program (specifically, “The Perfumed Garden”), and I was inspired to pick up the full album (1984’s now impossible-to-find Divan I Khas).  It’s a lovely, dreamy piece of sitar work that’s been on the Dreamtime playlist forever.  Adding “Oiram Qarz” was a much more recent inspiration; I felt that “I No Longer Remember the Feelings” just needed a better lead-in, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fading strains of “Oiram” butted up pretty nicely against “Remember.” “Oiram” is a bit more slow and meandering than “Anahat,” and it works pretty well right after our opener, Angels of Venice’s “Persentio,” especially if you overlap the fade-out and the fade-in just a skosh.  “Persentio” is a fairly typical outing from AoV (who we’ve heard from many times thus far in these mixes⁵), meaning it’s some lovely harp work from Carol Tatum with cello and flute backing from her collaborators du jour, but I always felt this particular piece had a bit more of a feel of the nighttime breeze through the trees.  I think making it the opener of volume II was part of my more recent rejiggering, but honestly it feels so natural at this point that I can’t really remember for sure.

Ambient tracks can be dreamlike too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner back (we’ve seen them twice so far, both on Shadowfall Equinox⁶) with “Inter Astrum”—this sprawling, synthy track makes you feel like you’re traveling between the stars indeed.  And that bleeds nicely into “Anahat,” which in turn bleeds nicely into some Twin Peaks music.  Unlike most of the music from that show that I’ve used, though, this is a more guitar-driven track by Lynch himself, off the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack.  “The Pink Room” is a bit menacing, a bit minimalist, and thoroughly Lynchian.

Dreamtime II
[ Colourless and Dangerous ]

“Persentio” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“Oiram Qarz” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁷
“I No Longer Remember The Feelings” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Basketball Dream” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off II
“Processional” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“... a cry for the broken-hearted” by Falling You, off Touch
“Inter Astrum” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“The Anahat Syndrome” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁸
“The Pink Room” by David Lynch, off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [Soundtrack]
“Party of the First Part” by Bauhaus, off Swing the Heartache [Compilation]
“Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Circus Waltz” by Sweetback, off Stage 2
“Angel Knife I” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“The Lacemaker” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Words of Tranquility” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“The Far Shore” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  18 tracks,  78:53

One of the tracks which has been on this playlist for the longest is Bauhaus’ trippy little song called “Party of the First Part,” which lets the non-Peter-Murphy contingency of the band⁹ do some classic goth noodling in the background of clips of (of all things) The Devil and Daniel Mouse.  This oddity is, so far as I know, only available on the CD reissue of The Sky’s Gone Out, but it’s well worth tracking down in my opinion.  And it was a great excuse to get the goth legends onto this mix.  (Plus, if I’m honest, I’ve always loved this song—possibly due to remembering watching the cartoon that provides the samples in my youth—and where the hell else was I going to put it?)

But what to put after it?  For a long time, it just fed directly into “Angel Knife I,” which was ... okay, I guess.  But I really felt like it needed more there, so I came up (again, fairly recently) with the weird little trilogy that now follows it: “Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, “Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, and “Circus Waltz” by Sweetback.  Now, the first is a creepy synth vibe, perhaps inspired by some of the soundtracks to the John Carpenter classics of the 80s (particularly Halloween, but also The Fog and Prince of Darkness), but then the second (from Midnight Syndicate’s album Carnival Arcane) really starts to lead into the creepy carnival vibe.  Which is what you’d expect from these two purveyors of what I like to call “gaming music” (meaning it’s often used as mood music for TTRPGs), but then the Sweetback track is a bit of a surprise.  Sweetback is the backing band for Sade,¹⁰ and normally I would describe them as “smooth jazz” and just leave it at that.  And, “Circus Waltz” has a bit of smooth jazz in its DNA to be sure ... but there’s also something more here, an auditory glimpse into a carnival that’s just a little off, and I thought it worked perfectly after “Mesonoxian Visitors,” which sounds like the arrival of said creepy carnival on a Depression-era circus train.

Which only leaves us with two more tracks in the “unexpected” category.  I’ve put a lot of Koop on these mixes—on Salsatic Vibrato,¹¹ on Moonside by Riverlight,¹² and of course on Zephyrous Aquamarine—but “Words of Tranquility” is something different from their normal electrojazz.  It’s the first track I’ve used off their debut album Sons of Koop, which is way more electro than jazz, and it’s ... dark.  I don’t know how else to describe it.  The vocals are credited to “K (23),” which is certainly a bit mysterious; whoever she is, she provides the vocals for four of the ten tracks on that album, which is more than any other singer, and more than there are instrumentals as well.  The words are intelligible, which doesn’t mean they make sense: they include lines like “my desires are made of cold” and “I’m a pilot, I’m above, you’re a chauffeur, down below.” It’s definitely very dreamlike, and definitely couldn’t fit anywhere but here.

Finally, perhaps my favorite track here is the very strange “Basketball Dream,” by the Presidents of the United States of America, the closer of their very simply titled II.  This is some basic guitar noodling backing a spoken word description of a dream involving Magic Johnson, as recited by a young boy.  It’s very weird, in that way that makes you believe it was an actual dream, and you can hear one of the band members feeding the lines to the kid, and sometimes the kid just giggles in delight at the preposterousness of it all.  Just a delightful track that epitomizes the dream state.

Next time, more meditative, autumnal fare for getting work done.

⇐ Dreamtime I

Dreamtime III ⇒

__________

1 In this blog series, anyway.  In my tracklists/ directory, they still live in a subdirectory called moods/.

2 It’s just a second shy of 20 minutes long, if you must know.

3 Jennifer provided all the vocals on Falling You’s debut album Mercy, but became a more infrequent collaboration on later albums.

4 The “usual” places in this case being Smokelit Flashback, where we’ve seen them so far on volumes II – V, and Shadowfall Equinox, where they’ve appeared on I, II, V, and VII.  But Falling You is nothing if not versatile, and I’ve also used them on Tumbledown Flatland I, the previous volume of this mix, and slotted them for several other mixes that we will, presumably, come to in the fullness of time.

5 On every volume of Numeric Driftwood so far, on Shadowfall Equinox VI and Darktime I, and, somewhat atypically, on Fulminant Cadenza I and Penumbral Phosphorescence I.

6 Specifically on volumes VI and VII.

7 This album seems to be impossible to locate these days.  The link is to a YouTube video which contains the full album, which is annoying to parse individual songs out of, but it is what it is.

8 Same album as the previous Gromer Khan track.

9 Occasionally known, eventually, as Love and Rockets.

10 In fact, they were recommended to me by a coworker who was a Sade fan and was surprised to hear me play one of her tracks in one of my mixes one late night in the office.

11 Volumes III and V.

12 Twice on volume I and once on volume II.

Puzzle Plotting

This week I’ve been working on a D&D one-shot (that is, an adventure that should ideally only take a single session to complete) for my youngest child’s birthday.  Which has, technically, come and gone, but we’re running a bit behind on such things, not to mention that I didn’t even realize that I was supposed to be doing it for a while there.  But now I know, and I’m trying to put together something that she’ll like.  Which is a tiny bit tricky, because she’s a bit different from my other children: she likes roleplaying more than combat, and she’d rather solve a puzzle or talk to an NPC than go slay a dragon.  So it takes a bit more finesse to make her happy.

In fact, designing puzzles for D&D is notoriously difficult, for two reasons.  The first is that it’s easy to make the puzzle too easy, and your players just blast through it.  It’s also, weirdly, easy to make it too hard, and then it takes forever.  So it can be basically impossible to predict how long it’ll take, which means you can’t necessarily guarantee that your one-shot will get done in one shot.

The second potential problem is that it’s easy to put your players in a situation where they just get stuck.  If they miss a clue, or they just have a mental block and can’t figure out a clue, all of a sudden your game grinds to a halt and there’s not much to do other than just tell the players what to do, which sort of defeats the point.  So it can be tricky to design something that is challenging without being impossible.

I’ve attacked this problem in a few different ways.  (And I’m going to keep it a bit vague just in case my kids actually do read this blog, which I find particularly unlikely, but better safe than sorry.)  First, I’ve designed a set of interlocking puzzles that can be done in any order, and it’s highly randomized.  So, at the first sign of getting stuck, I’m calling for some dice to be rolled, and everything will change.  Secondly, I’ve built in a bunch of “back doors” (basically, hinting structures) that will get revealed over time, so that the game will get easier as it goes on.  If it needs to.  And, if I’ve made it too easy, it won’t.  But then I can also use the randomization to change everything if the players start getting too close too fast.

Now, overall, this is a bit tricky to do in a natural fashion.  But, happily, D&D is a fantasy setting where anything goes, so I can make it work fairly easily—worse come to worst, I can always wave my hands a claim “a wizard did it.” But I’ve also come up with a theme that should make it make sense, even when it doesn’t make sense.  I can’t be more specific than that just yet; maybe I’ll post again once I’ve revealed things to my players.

I’m actually a bit excited for this.  It’s taking me a fair bit of work—inevitably, it takes more time to design a puzzle game than it does to play one—but I think it’s going to work out pretty well, and I’m pretty sure my kids won’t have too much trouble figuring it all out.  We’ll see how it goes.

The Sin of Popularity

... and then that’s not even accounting for the people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular.  I’ve known people like that, and I’ve never understood that: that it’s like, this is the #1 movie in the world, and that is why I will not watch it.  And I’m like, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

Thus sayeth B. Dave Walters, the great sage and teacher.  And, while normally I tend to agree with what B. Dave says (I’ve quoted him several times, in fact), this time I felt a little called out.  After all, I have (very puposefully!) never seen Titanic, nor Forrest Gump, nor Rocky, nor The Godfather, nor The Sound of Music ... in fact, on some random Internet survey of winners of Best Picture Oscars ranked according to how much people actually like them, I’ve only actually seen 7 of their list of 22 (and only 3 of the top 10), and if I consider which movies I’ve just never gotten around to watching, I can only generously come up with a further two.  That means that, on this list of Academy-Award-winning films that people actually enjoy (as opposed to the pretentious twaddle that usually wins), I’ve actively avoided watching 13 of them.  Honestly, to have lived this long managing to avoid seeing Titanic is becoming somewhat of an accomplishment in and of itself these days.

But it’s also instructive to look at the films on that list that I have seen: Rain Man, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs ... I didn’t go see any of those films because they were popular, or because they had won awards: I saw them because they looked good, and they interested me.  Hell, I rushed to see Silence: it was one of the few films on the list that I was really excited to see.  As was the film that inspired the article: Everything Everywhere All at Once is surely an anomoly—an utterly non-pretentious, nerdy movie inspired by The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and various Japanese anime (and none of those have ever won Best Picture awards), and yet it swept the Oscars.  Of course I’ve watched it.  It’s the most “my kind of movie” in this whole post.  But several of the others make perfect sense for me: “Braveheart” and “Dances with Wolves” are both historical action films with cool sword and/or gun fighting (as is Gladiator).  I’m not sure I can explain Rain Man and Kramer vs Kramer other than to say “Dustin Hoffman,” and I will admit that I’ve only seen Casablanca beause a friend convinced me that I simply couldn’t go through life without having watched it, but, in general, the ones I’ve seen make sense, for me.

And, likewise, the ones that I haven’t seen make sense ... for me.  Let me get this straight: you want to pitch me a love story (not a fan) that’s a period piece (not a fan) in a historical context that involves zero swords or guns (not enticing) about an event that I already know quite a bit about, including how it ends?  Oh, and it’s over three hours long?  No thank you.  Why would I ever watch such a thing?  Well, you reply, because it’s one of the highest-grossing films in the world (and the first ever to reach $1 billion), it won 11 Academy Awards (tied for the record with Ben Hur and Return of the King), it won a bunch of other awards, critics loved it, it’s appeared at the top of many lists of the best movies ever, the music won Grammys, and so on and so on.  But does any of that change what it’s about?  It’s still an overwrought love story with a very predictable shipwreck that goes on for three hours ... right?  Why on earth would I watch something that is so antithetical to everything I know I enjoy in a film?  And did I mention the three-hour time investment?  I mean, for a 20 minute short, I might be willing to give it a chance, but three friggin’ hours ... why would I torture myself in that manner?  Just because it’s popular?

Because here’s the correction to what B. Dave was saying.  Speaking as one of those people who pride myself on not doing many things just because they’re popular, I have to take objection to his characterization.  The poularity is not why I won’t watch the movie (or read the book, or eat the food, or listen to the music, or whatever).  But the popularity sure ain’t gonna change my mind.  Look, I’ve already gone over my stance on Cynical Romanticism, and I covered my experience working at Burger King where I first began to understand that people, collectively, are herd animals.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the opinions of any given individual, of course.  But, as Mark Twain once said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” I mean, if you’re watching movies that you don’t think you’re going to like just because a bunch of other people are telling you to ... isn’t that just peer pressure?  Bad for sex and drugs but okay for movies, I guess?  I’m just not seeing it.

Look, I’m not saying I’ve never been wrong about whether I’d like something or not before.  I’ve spoken before about liking John Grisham even though I typically hate lawyer stories.  When Grisham first started getting popular, I assumed I wouldn’t like it, and I was wrong.  But what I am saying is, I’ve never discovered something great by following the crowd.  I didn’t read my first Grisham novel because everyone told me to.  I read it because it was the least bad choice of novel in some beach cabin we’d rented one year, and I was bored stiff.  I may have also mentioned in passing that I dig Tom Clancy too, even though I’m not into spy novels.  So did I pick up The Hunt for Red October because it was a national bestseller, or because it got made into a high-profile film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin?  Nope.  I got it because a friend—one friend—advised me that they thought I’d like it.  Not that they liked it, mind you (though of course they did), but that they thought I would.  And I respected this person enough to know that, if they thought that, they were probably right, so it was worth giving it a shot.  But, not once that I can recall, throughout my entire life, have I ever thought, “well, that sounds terrible, but the public seems to love it, so I guess I’ll love it too.” Never can I remember trying a very popular thing that I didn’t think I would like and being proven wrong.  It just has never happened.  Maybe it will one day.  Except probably not, because I doubt I’m going to suddenly start jumping on bandwagons at this age.  But I won’t say never, for sure.

What’s really funny to me is that I totally misheard what B. Dave was saying at the beginning of the quote.  When he started talking about “people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular,” I assumed he meant people that will be disagreeable because it’s popular to be disagreeable.  In other words, disliking something just because it’s popular to do so.  Like, how everyone knows that Nickelback is the worst band.  Except, you know, they’re not.  I’m not saying they’re amazing or anything, but, c’mon: you can’t tell me you can listen to “How You Remind Me” and not think “damn, that song kicks ass.” Ignore the cheesy video: just listen.  And I find this particular example especially intriguing, because that song was super popular.  In the US, it was #1 on the Hot 100 (which is the “main” US chart), plus #1 on the alternative, rock & metal, and mainstream rock charts (a truly dizzying bevy of contradictory genres).  It was #1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, and Turkey, and top five in a dozen other countries.  Wikipedia further tells us that it was “the number-one most played song on US radio of the 2000s decade” according to Nielsen, with 1.2 million spins, and Billboard ranked it #4 of the decade.  On the other hand, hating Nickelback has become an Internet meme, and Wikipedia will also tell you that Rolling Stone readers voted them the second worst band of the 90s (behind Creed), and that some music dating site’s users voted them the number one “musical turnoff.” So, if we think we’re supposed to be going along with popular opinion ... exactly which popular opinion are we supposed to be going along with?  ‘Cause I gotta tell you: if I was ever on a musical dating site, my number one turnoff would be pretentious twats who dump on bands like Nickelback and Smashmouth just because it’s popular, and anyone who puts Nickelback in the same breath as friggin’ Creed is obviously looking around at all their friends and saying “just as bad, am I right? guys? I’m right ... right?” and definitely not listening to “How You Remind Me,” which, you may recall from the beginning of this paragraph, kicks some serious fucking ass.

So I won’t watch Titanic just because everyone else in the world has, and I won’t refuse to watch a Keanu Reeves movie just because the Internet tries to convince me he’s a bad actor.  Because, sure: Parenthood and Point Break didn’t demand much of his talent, and every once in a while you hit a true stinker, like Much Ado about Nothing, but I also know that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is an amazingly fun watch, and The Matrix is one of the best movies of all time, and, if you really need to prove to yourself that the guy can actually act, you can go watch The Devil’s Advocate or My Own Private Idaho or River’s Edge or A Scanner Darkly.  But some people just wanna diss Keanu and Nickelback because “everyone” knows they suck.  I mean, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

Apparently, time flies whether you're having fun or not

Whew!  It’s been a crazy week.  Family stuff, work stuff ... hopefully it’s all settling down soon.  But luckily this was a short post week anyway, so it all works out.  Let’s see how next week comes out.

The Fox May Grow Grey, but Never Good

Many moons ago, I would often tell people that I didn’t think that Rush Limbaugh believed the things he said.  “This guy,” I would tell anyone who asked, “is just performing for the audience.  Oh, he might believe something he’s saying every once in a while, but it’s almost accidental: believing or not believing is completely irrelevant for him.  He makes a lot of money with this act, and he will literally say anything for the money.”

Now, Rush’s popularity faded, and eventually he died, and younger folks today might not even remember who he was.  But the sad thing is that there was always someone coming along behind him, trotting out the same old act—some even priding themselves on taking it further—saying the same old bullshit, and making the same old bank.  First Bill O’Reilly, who has himself come and gone by this point, then Glen Beck (gone but trying to stage a comeback, I’ve heard), Alex Jones (fading fast), Sean Hannity (still around), and current star pupil Tucker Carlson.  Not to imply that right-wing douchebaggery is only a man’s game, of course—folks like Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro are fighting to break that glass ceiling, for some reason—but it’s mostly been the men, hogging the spotlight, as men are wont to do.  But the point is, there’s always been someone, and usually several someones.  And, for every single one of them, I’ve said, repeatedly, I think it’s all an act.  I don’t believe for one second that any of those motherfuckers believed a single word of the shit they were spewing, except maybe by accident.  Many of them are very well educated, and it’s quite simply not logical to believe they’re that stupid.  ‘Cause, you know, they’ve said some stupid shit.  Limbaugh once said that “firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does” (he, of course, died of lung cancer).  Jones once said “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.” Megyn Kelly (who is not Laura Ingraham, but is a credible imitation) once said “Santa just is white.” Not only do I not believe that any of these people believe what they’re saying, I think they’re engaged in a competition to see who can say the most ridiculous bullshit and make it sound credible.  I imagine a Victorian-style English gentlemen’s club where Hannity, wearing a long walrus moustahce, is slapping Kelly on the back and saying, “oh, good one Megyn! ‘Santa just is white’ ... bally good show, eh wot wot?”

And, for all the decades that I’ve been saying this, people have been telling me I’m full of shit.

Not just conservatives, mind you.  Most liberals also seem convinced that these folks are true believers, which of course is more dangerous.  Though ... is it?  Would it be more dangerous if someone truly believed the hate they were shoveling, or if they were cynically manipulating people into a hate they couldn’t be bothered to feel?  Perhaps an academic question.  Point being, I’ve been ridiculed for having this view just about every time, by just about everybody, from just about every point on the political spectrum.  I’d like to say that I kept saying, “just wait: one day you’ll see.” But, the truth is, I didn’t actually hold out much hope of this.

Oh, I’ve had some glimmers of hope along the way.  In 2017, Alex Jones was involved in a vicious custody battle; his wife, unsurprisingly, said she didn’t want her kids being raised by someone who routinely made homophobic comments and indulged in outlandish conspiracy theories.  Jones’ lawyer claimed: “He’s playing a character.  He is a performance artist.” Kinda sounds like what I’ve been saying for years, right?  But of course people said he was just saying those things to get out of legal trouble (which was probably true).  In late 2016, Glenn Beck did an interview with Samantha Bee of Full Frontal wherein he said: “As a guy who has done damage, I don’t want to do any more damage. I know what I did. I helped divide.” Sure sounds like he not only wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, but had rather come to regret ever selling the stuff.  Still, people said that Sam Bee and her people had edited the interview to show the narrative they wanted to show (which, also, was probably true).

But now, my friends, I have achieved total vindication, thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, and their more than one billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News.  See, because what we’re learning now is not what Fox News people are saying in court; no, what we’re learing now is things they said, to each other, in private, which is now evidence in court.  And I don’t think anyone believes that the court is editing the information to fit a narrative ... in fact, if anything, Fox is the one doing the editing.  Just this week, the judge in the case sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence.  Plus, as law professor RonNell Andersen Jones pointed out in an interview with Jon Stewart, there’s still a lot of information that is redacted in the court filings.  The stuff that we know about is the stuff that “either they thought that they could let it go or ... they lost in an effort to redact it.”

So what do the texts and other messages say?  By now you’ve likely heard the worst of them.  Tucker Carlson describing Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer” and writing of the ex-president’s lawyer “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her”; Ingraham replying “Sidney is a complete nut”; Hannity saying of Giuliani “Rudy is acting like an insane person” and calling Powell a “fucking lunatic.” Not only do the messages show that the on-air personalities didn’t buy the bullshit they were peddling; they also tell us exactly why: it’s all about the money.  When the New York Post asked Trump to stop claiming the election was stolen, they started losing readers; Rupert Murdoch (owner of both the Post and Fox News) messaged the Post’s chief executive “Getting creamed by CNN!” When a Fox reporter tweeted that “there is no evidence” of voter machine defect or fraud, Carlson texted Hannity “Please get her fired.  Seriously what the fuck?  Actually shocked.  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.  It’s measurably hurting the company.  The stock price is down.” None of this is controversial.  None of this disputed.  None of this is paraphrased or edited in any way.  All of it has been reported multiple times by reputable outlets (the links I’ve included above range from ABC News to the Guardian in the UK to Rolling Stone magazine), and they’re direct quotes from court evidence.  And this, as Andersen Jones points out, is what they couldn’t get suppressed.  There’s like a lot worse out there waiting to be unredacted.

But, hey: this is sufficient for me.  This, I think, proves my point to a T.  These idiots don’t believe what they’re saying.  What’s worse, they don’t care how much damage it does, as long as they keep making money.  At the end of the day, that’s really all it’s about.  So is it more dangerous that they might all be true believers?  I’m not sure.  I think the truth might be even more dangerous than that: that they are all cynical, performative, money-grubbing assholes who care more about lining their pockets than they do about the state of our democracy.  They are, in many ways, the ultimate expression of late-stage capitalism: fuck ’em all, let the world burn, as long as I get my nut.  That’s plenty scary enough for me.

[A side note on today’s title.  Wiktionary refers to it merely as a “proverb,” and says it basically means the same as “a leopard cannot change its spots.” Now, if you ask the Internet, it will gleefully tell you that this saying derives from Benjamin Franklin, and one source (which I refuse to link to) even has the balls to source it as being from Poor Richard Improved.  But, see, here’s the thing: the entire works of Mr. Franklin are available on Project Gutenberg, including Franklin’s Way to Wealth; or, “Poor Richard Improved", and the only thing it says about foxes is that “the sleeping fox catches no poultry.” In fact, after some diligent searching, I have concluded with a decent degree of confidence that Franklin never said any such thing.  So, you know ... don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.  If you want more musings on quotes, I got you covered.]

Gothic Gaming

This weekend we’re going to try finish up the many-times-postponed birthday game of D&D that my eldest prepared for my middle child.  And, yes, it’s nearly a month late, but ... well, shit happens.  After getting postponed due to sickness, unpreparedness, and all around general grumpiness, I ended up having to postpone due to fallout from my big work project, which I finally pushed to production on Monday.  So we started on Friday, but we started late, and now we’re finishing today, so, TL;DR: you get no proper post again this week.

But, in order to have something to put up, I thought perhaps I’d tell you about some of characters for this game.  We’re doing a sort of Gothic horror game, though it seems so far like it’s less Ravenloft and more Castle Amber (if you speak D&D, you’ll get what I mean).  My middle child opted for a flesh golem moster hunter barbarian—think Frankenstein’s monster, one of the intelligent but reticent versions, weilding a combination sword-shotgun (I, Frankenstein might work, or any number of videogame characters).  I can’t give you too many more details than that, because I wasn’t responsible for helping build that character.

My youngest, on the other hand, came to play with a creepy-as-fuck concept.  Silvin is a young man with no eyes (he wears bandages over where they should be) who wears dark, baggy, nondescript clothes ... including gloves, which cover the fact that he has eyeballs in his palms.  So he has to take his gloves off if he wants to see, but on the other hand he can move through the world just fine as a blind person.  He can’t speak, but he can communicate telepathically.  He is a bard of the college of whispers, which gives him access to powers like Psychic Blades, Words of Terror, and Mantle of Whispers.  As if that weren’t enough, he’s a feat machine, having taken Telepathic, Telekinetic, Shadow-Touched, and Gift of the Gem Dragon, which latter is just more ways to push people around with your mind.  Aside from Words of Terror, he can cast cause fear, fear, danse macabre, dissonant whispers, phantasmal force, and phantasmal killer, which is a hell of a lot of ways to be a scary dude; when it comes to “look into my eyes” type shit, there’s the aforementioned Mantle of Whispers, plus even more spells: enthrall, confusion, unearthly chorus, Tasha’s hideous laughter, mental prison, crown of stars, and synaptic static.  And I haven’t even listed all the spells he knows ... did I mention we’re 14th level for this one-shot?  It’s crazy.

For myself, I resurrected an old character of mine that I had for a previous one-shot (also Gothic horror, and possible also for a birhday game).  She was only 7th level, but it was easy enough to bring her up to 14th.  She’s a rogue inquisitive and also a warlock of the Raven Queen (pact of the blade).  I built her to be a mystery-solver who can also hold her own in a fight.  She’s a lavender-skinned tiefling; I found this image on the Internet drawn by Bright Bird Art:

So she looks pretty much like that, except that her staff is actually illusory, so she can stab you with it (she summons her pact weapon, a scimitar, so that it’s inside the illusion of the staff), and she has a raven on her shoulder which doesn’t look quite real.  In terms of feats, she is Perceptive and Mobile; in terms of eldritch invocations, she wears her Armor of Shadows, and can summon a Cloak of Flies when she needs to be really scary; in terms of spells, she can also mess with your mind too: via puppet, ego whip, or Raulothim’s psychic lance.  Her expertises are in acrobatics, stealth, investigation, and perception; in battle she likes to cast spiritual weapon in the form of a person-sized raven and then either eldritch blast from afar, or get into the mix using Mobile, her improved pact weapon, and sneak attack.  In social situations, she’s pretty darn good at persuasion and deception, but she’s not afraid to break out that cloak of flies, which can do poison damage if you stand too close, and, if you don’t, there’s always infestation to send those little buggers out up to 30 feet away.

So that’s our primary party (my eldest’s partner is playing a helpful druid, but he’s really closer to an NPC), and we’re exploring a vampire’s castle and seeking out and destroying various loose, undead organs.  We got the stomach and the liver so far, but I’ve a feeling there’s a lot more to go.  Wish us luck!

Infinite Birthday Season

This weekend, my youngest is having her birthday weekend.  She almost made it to the end before the curse of the Holiday Sickness came for her as well.  So we may very well be doing more make-up time next weekend, just as we had to do for the middle child—this is starting to turn into the never-ending month of birthday celebrations, and it’s already next month.  But we shall see if everyone recovers and is satisfied with their birthday experiences.  Hopefully it’ll all work out.

Whither the beef?

When I was a kid, the only thing I liked to eat was hamburgers.

For my own children, it was more about the chicken nuggets (at least for the first two).  But, for me, it was hamburgers.  At home, my parents would cook hamburger helper a lot, but that’s still hamburger, right?  I didn’t eat chicken, period.  Wouldn’t touch pork (well, unless it was disguised as bacon, of course).  And seafood?  Don’t get me started.  My grandparents on my mom’s side loved seafood.  They would often go out to eat at very nice seafood restaurants, and sometimes they’d take me.  And there was literally nothing on the menu I would eat.  Oh, sure: nowadays, almost every restaurant will offer a hamburger or some chicken nuggets on a kid’s menu, regardless of the actual cuisine.  But not in my day.  In my day, if you didn’t like the type of food they had, you were just supposed to suck it up and eat it anyway.  But I was a stubborn child.  I would eat nothing rather than eat seafood.  I spent many a meal eating Captain’s Wafers sandwiches with butter in the middle that my grandmother would make me, and that was literally all I’d get.  Once when I was perhaps 8 years old my grandfather gave me a few dollars and told me that, if I wanted a hamburger so bad, there was a McDonald’s next door: I could go get it myself.  I was a painfully shy kid, and the thought of going somewhere (even directly next door to a restaurant where my grandparents could easily see me from their table by the window) and actually interacting with adults was horrifying, and, in retrospect, I think my grandfather knew this and the whole thing was sort of a challenge.  But I ate a hamburger and fries that night.

I was committed to the beef, is what I’m saying.

Besides the fast food hamburgers and the hamburger helper, there was “hamburger steak,” a dish (and I’m being very generous in calling it a “dish”) that my father made by serving a hamburger patty in onions and gravy rather than on a bun, bologna sandwiches (always beef bologna, of course), spaghetti and meatballs (meatballs composed either solely or primarily of, you guessed it: beef), beef stew, the occasional beef pot roast at my grandmother’s house which then turned into something she called “beef hash” the next day, and probably a few more ways to dress up cow meat that I’m not even remembering right now.  The only thing I can really remember eating as a child that wasn’t beef was hot dogs (we didn’t really do beef hot dogs back in those days).  And the occasional meal of chicken chow mein (my foodie grandfather again) that was served in that particular way that they used to make it on the East Coast before they decided that it should be full of bean sprouts (bleaaugh).  It was a whoooole lotta beef.

Of course, most of it wasn’t very good beef.  I didn’t care for steak (too chewy), and my parents and grandparents were just as happy not to have to pay for one for me anyhow.  I didn’t do prime rib either, on those super rare occasions when the parents or grandparents would spring for it.  So the vast majority of the beef I ate didn’t taste much like beef: the hamburgers tasted of mustard and ketchup; my dad’s “hamburger steak” tasted of gravy; most of those meatballs tasted like my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce; hamburger helped tasted mostly like MSG.  And, you know, back in those days, that might have been for the best.  Beef was pricey (chicken was the “cheap” meat back then), so most of what I was eating was right down at the lower end of the quality spectrum.  Which is fine: I was a dumb kid.  Don’t waste the good stuff on me.

Of course, as I got older, I did get a little more discerning.  I never really developed a taste for seafood, but I started liking various forms of chicken, and even started appreciating pork chops, not to mention all the really delightful disguises that pork can assume, like pepperoni, salami, capicola (for Italian subs), andouille sausage (for red beans and rice), country sausage (for biscuits and gravy), country ham (for ham rolls on Christmas morning), etc etc etc.  I even started liking the finer forms of beef ... somewhat.  I’ve always been the sort of person who appreciates a good filet mignon but otherwise can take or leave a steak, and as far as I’m concerned the attraction of prime rib lies almost entirely in the au jus.  Even what is probably my all-time favorite beef dish, steak au poivre, is, again, all about the sauce.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, in recent years, even the once-lowly hamburger is getting new appreciation from the culinary world.  First they told us to stop using so much damn ketchup (or mayo, or thousand islands dressing, or whatever your slathering of choice may be) so we could actually taste the meat.  Then, once we decided that was a terrible idea, they started telling us to seek out a better class of meat.  Organic, pasture raised, grass-fed: all that stuff became all the rage.  Even kobe, if you want to get really pricey.  And, as the much better qualities of beef have gradually become more and more commonplace, and we’ve all become more and more able to actually taste the meat, and I’ve become more and more discerning, I’ve discovered a very curious thing about myself.

I don’t actually like the taste of beef.

When I look back on my life at the quantity of beef I’ve packed away, this is practically shocking.  I mean, how can I not like beef?  Everyone likes beef.  It was the most consumed meat in my country of origin for the first twenty-five years of my life, and #2 for the last thirty.  In 2020, the U.S. consumed 20 billion pounds of beef, which is roughly 90 pounds of beef for every man, woman, and child in the country.  And for 50 or so years, I was perfectly happy with beef.  Until I could actually taste it.  Now ... not so much.  Now, I would have to rate it as “meh” at best.  Quite often, in a beef dish made with particularly high-quality grass-fed beef, I actually dislike it altogether.  Sometimes, when someone in my house is cooking beef (especially in combination with garlic), it can actually make me a bit queasy, even though I know I’m going to enjoy the taste once it’s done.

And of course the silly thing is, it’s not particularly good for me.  I know there’s some debate about whether beef is healthy or not, but I think a lot depends on the individual.  For me, I can tell you definitively that there are only a few things I know for a fact help me lose weight, and one of them is to cut out red meat.  So what occurs to me is, why should I bother continuing to eat a meat that makes me fat and I don’t even like the taste all that much?

Oh, I don’t propose to cut out beef altogether.  I still like a nice filet every now and again, but for me “every now and again” means about once a year.  When it comes to meatballs or hamburger-helper-style meals or tacos—at least when we’re cooking it ourselves—I find that ground turkey is perfectly lovely.  And for the ever-popular hamburger itself ... well, I’ve started eating Impossible burgers.

I tried it on a whim, really.  Just to see if it could really live up to the hype.  So, can I tell it isn’t beef?  Of course.  Then again, that’s sort of a plus from my perspective.  The more important question is, can I tell it isn’t meat?  And the answer is, no, not really.  It sort of tastes like an exotic meat you might get at a fancy chain, like an ostrich burger from Fuddrucker’s (and, yes: I’ve had one of those before).  Like a turkey burger, but different enough that you probably wouldn’t think it actually was turkey.  Point being, it’s a perfectly acceptable meat substitute.  And they say that plant substitutes such as Impossible are better for the planet, so that’s a win-win in my book.  It does contain soy, so I try not to eat it as a regular thing (soy has its own set of pros and cons), but, as a sometime food, it’s probably better (and better for me) than actual beef.

So that’s where I’ve landed on the topic of America’s #2 favorite (formerly #1) processed animal protein.  I think I just don’t need it any more.  And I think that’s going to be good for me in the long run.  No need to go full-on vegetarian, I don’t think, but getting a bit closer has got to be a good thing.