D&D and Me: Part 1 (The Time Beforetimes)

[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.]

[This series is about my discovery of and (occasionally stormy) love affair with D&D.  You may wish to think of it as an alternative to 23andMe, since D&D is embedded far deeper in my DNA than any silly “chromosomes.” Or think of it as a complement to my series on the Other Blog “Perl and Me.” This will probably be a bit shorter than most of my series.  Probably.]

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dungeons & Dragons—or “D&D” for those in the know—for most of my life.  For a long time, I took a detour into Heroscape, and I still love (and play) that game too.  But I’m entering a more “on-again” phase, mainly in that I’ve (finally!) discovered the joy of watching people play online.¹  As I’m always interested to find out more about the people behind the art I enjoy—whether that’s musicians, authors, filmmakers, or what-have-you—I’ve also spent a little bit of time listening to some of these people I’m watching talk about how they got into D&D.  And that made me want to tell someone how I got into D&D.  So here I am, telling you.

Because I never met a tangent I didn’t like, I have to start with the pre-D&D stuff.  There were lots of interests that came before I even heard about D&D, and lots of intersecting interests and interests that grew out of it.  Any story about a thing is always about more than just that thing.  For me, as a very young child, the two most important pieces were no doubt fantasy and horror.  And for that we need to talk about books.

I was an only child for the first 11 years of my life, and, while I loved games, I rarely had anyone to play with.  I didn’t make friends very easily, and I was a very short kid, and quite sensitive about it.  So I spent a lot of time by myself, and most of that time I spent reading books.  In my house, movies were awesome, and we went to see quite a few, and television was awesome, and we watched quite a lot of it, and music was intensely important—I may have mentioned before that my father was a record collector—and we listened to a shit-ton of that, but books were king.  No one ever discouraged me from reading comic books, or watching cartoons, or any of that stuff (my dad, in fact, had been fond of comics himself as a kid, so I think he was secretly a bit happy when I started to get into comics), but it was just always clear that books were the ultimate medium.  Everything else was second tier ... at best.  We had entire walls of our house devoted to books, as well as books in cabinets, books in boxes, bookcases stashed into odd corners ... books everywhere.  I had a bookcase in my room as well, of course, and the very first book I can remember reading, after all the Dr. Suess and P. D. Eastman and Berenstain Bears, was a book on Norse mythology.  It was a book aimed at younger readers, so it was a bit watered down, but I learned a lot about Odin and Thor and Loki before I ever saw them in the pages of a Marvel comic.  From there I gave up on the kids’ versions and starting reading Bulfinch’s and Larousse.  It was a short hop from there to The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Probably around the same time, I started getting into comics.  However, I always had a very weird approach to buying comic books: if the cover featured anyone even remotely recognizable—your Supermans, your Batmans, your Spider-Mans, your Fours of the Fantastic variety—I didn’t care much about them.  I wanted comics with pictures of heroes I had never seen before, never even heard of before.  The first comic I can ever remember buying was Atlas #1: that Jack Kirby artwork is always an eye-catcher, I was of course familiar with the name from my studies in mythology, and I had inherited enough of the collector gene to know that a #1 issue could become a valuable commodity ... even at 8 years old, which is how old I must’ve been, according to Wikipdedia’s publication date.  From then on, I would buy anything that had a superhero or two—or, even better, a whole bunch!—that I had absolutely no idea who they were.  It’s why I bought the “origin” issue of Black Orchid, and Ragman #1, and Moon Knight #1, and absolutely why I got into the Legion of Super-Heroes and the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  Teams of misfits with weird powers appealed to me, and really the only truly popular characters I ever liked were the X-Men, and that was only because they rebooted the group with a a whole new batch of crazy unknown heroes—mostly non-American, even!²  Not my fault they got all popular after that.

It’s worth asking why I was only interested in the weird, unknown heroes, and I’m not entirely sure I have a good answer.  But I have a theory.  See, as a kid, I was a little OCD—had I been born 25 years or so later, I might have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, at least a little.  ADHD at the very least.  But, anyway, one of the ways in which my particular brand of OCD manifested was in my obsession with lists.  My mother would indulge me in this (or maybe she was indulging her own predilection for having children able to recite things back to her, who knows) by teaching me various lists of things.  First she taught me how to count to 10 in Spanish.  Then in French.  Then in German.  Then in Malaysian.³  Then she taught me the Greek alphabet.  Then the books of the Bible.  Then all the US Presidents.  Then she sort of ran out of things to teach me and I started chasing lists on my own.

I always loved animals, so I started reading this set of wildlife encyclopedias we had lying around.  But trying to come up with a list of all the animals in the world isn’t like coming up with a list of all the presidents: we don’t even know all the species of animals at any given time—a fact which was already blowing my young mind—not to mention the fact that the list is constantly changing as new species spring into existence or go extinct.⁴  And when it comes to classification, the classic Linnaean taxonomy (phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) held strong appeal for my orderly brain, but it turns out that people were always fighting over what went where.⁵  The main controversy I recall was that rabbits were put into the “new” order of lagomorpha, although the books made it clear that some taxonomists might still be hanging on to the “outdated” idea that they were rodents.  This pretty much blew my mind, since of course my mother had taught me that rabbits were rodents, and common sense told me they were rodents: I mean, come on, they’re small furry creatures with big buck teeth—of course they’re rodents!  But apparently scientists not only knew otherwise ... they had once believed it and then changed their minds.  Insanity.

I fared no better trying to learn the countries of the world.  Surely this was an area where one could come up with a clear list.  And yet ... was Estonia a country?  They had an embassy in the US, but the UN didn’t recognize them.  What about the Bantustans of South Africa?  The opinion of my brand-spanking-new World Book Encyclopedias was that two of them (Lesotho and Swaziland⁶) were countries, but the remainder (such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei) weren’t.  Plus South Africa had two capital cities: how was that supposed to fit into my nice listing of countries and their capitals?  And it continued to get worse: every year they would send us “year books” with updated and entirely new articles, and they actually came with little sheets of stickers you were supposed to stick in the margins of the main encyclopedias, alerting you to an updated section for this article or a whole new article between these other two articles.  I very diligently applied all these stickers for many years, and I distincly remember when the update for 1979 came in and there was a whole new article for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which was apparently an entirely new country ... one year, no country; next year: country.  Mind.  Blown.

Somehow I didn’t melt down and throw a tantrum when I discovered this.  I just began to chase the lists even harder.  I think I somehow (probably subconsciously) believed I could eventually find all the members and learn all the classification controversies and make my own decisions and then I—alone in the world!—would be the knower of the complete list of X.  Where “X” might be animals, or countries, or perhaps superheroes.  Thus my theory that the lists were responsible for my comic-book-purchasing habits.  No point in buying a “regular” issue of Spider-Man—I already knew who that guy was—but an issue with these new guys Cloak and Dagger ... now there was something adding to my quest to know the complete list of superheroes.

Surely even you, dear reader—used to my tangents are you no doubt by now are—are wondering how on earth this relates to D&D.  For that, we need to look at the other half of my interest: horror.

My parents loved horror.  They enjoyed fantasy, and sci-fi probably even more so, but horror was their true calling.  I started reading Stephen King and Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz⁷ at a very young age, and we would go see horror movies like crazy.  I saw The Exorcist in the theater, at a time when I must have just barely turned 7, and The Legend of Hell House, and Jaws, and Burnt Offerings, and Prophecy, and Grizzly, and Day of the Animals, and It’s Alive (in roughly decreasing order of quality) ... all in the theater.  At home on the small screen, we watched even more: I remember Twilight Zone reruns, and I remember Night Gallery, and most of all I remember Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which a Chicago reporter for a tiny newspaper managed to encounter a different supernatural threat every single week.  His editor (who was properly grumpy and talked primarily out of the side of his mouth, as all good Chicago news editors should) would yell at him about his “cockamamie stories”⁸ and how “ya got no proof!” The problem with a monster-of-the-week show that you’re supposed to be taking seriously, though, is that unless your protagonist is actually some sort of professional monster hunter (see also: Buffy), or perhaps even is one of the monsters themselves (see also: Dark Shadows⁹), it starts to strain credulity after a while.  Of course, as a kid, that was not an issue for me.  The bigger problem was that you eventually start to run out of monsters ... or at least out of monsters anyone’s ever heard of.  Partially they solved this problem by occasionally making up monsters—my favorite was the updated take on the Headless Horseman, who was now a headless motorcycle rider with a big sword, zooming around decapitating people—but also they went scouring the cultures of the world for more obscure monsters.  Manitou, rakshasa, succubus ... all these I first became familiar with as a result of avidly watching The Night Stalker.  It was only on for one season, but it was a pivotal moment in my personal history.

Because now, you see, I had a new list to make: a list of all possible monsters.

Next week, we’ll see how that pretty inexorably leads to my discovery of Dungeons and Dragons.

__________

1 Most likely we’ll get into why it took me so long—I mean, Critical Role has been a thing for 4 years already—in a later entry in the series.

2 I can’t remember whether Thunderbird considered himself American or not, but at most 2 out of 8.  Still nearly 90% male, of course, but it was still the seventies: “progressive” hadn’t yet progressed all that far.

3 My grandfather was stationed in Malaysia during WWII and taught her when she was little.  It’s the only one of the four languages I can’t remember today, as it happens: I don’t remember much, but I do remember that the words for numbers were multisyllabic, and that always seemed really weird to me.

4 Honestly, there were similar problems with some of my other lists—Ancient Greek had some letters that didn’t survive to the modern Greek alphabet, so do we count those letters or not? and don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha—but I was never aware of those at the time.

5 Nowadays, biologists have all but abandoned this amount of orderliness for a much more flexible system: clades.  While it’s a much better system for trying to organize the multiplicity of life, which is by its nature chaotic, it would have been anathema to my OCD mind at that age.  Luckily, while the book that would eventuallyt inspire cladistics had apparently already been written, it didn’t start to gain traction until I was out of college and could no longer be offended by its conceptually infinite branchings.

6 Note that modern-day Wikipedia tells us that these two countries were never Bantustans; perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall the World Book making this fine distinction.

7 A.k.a. the first 3 of what would ultimately become my pentagram of literary idols.

8 Note: not necessarily an actual quote.  My memory does not really extend back that far, although I have rewatched a few episodes for nostalgia’s sake.

9 Which I also remember watching, at least a bit.

The End of an Era

Well, tonight was the final episode of Game of Thrones: after 7 years, 73 episodes, and countless character deaths, it’s all over.  Hopefully next week I can present my summary on the final season, but right now it’s just too fresh ... too raw.  Plus it’s an off week anyway.  So, next week.

By the way, I totally spaced on the post two weeks ago; sorry about that.  It happens rarely, but it happens.  The Mother and the kids were gone for a few days, and I was treating myself to a bit of a staycation, and I guess my laziness just sort of kept right on trucking.  But we’re back on track now.  See you next week.

Push Poetry (a history)

It started with one word.

At my last job, there was this computer process that would go rogue and the team would get an email and someone would have to go manually kill the job.  It was considered good form to reply to the email, letting the other team members know that you’d killed it, and that way none of them had to worry about doing it themselves.  After a while it became a weird competition as to who could kill the job and report back the fastest, so naturally these reply emails were inevitably brief.  Just the single word: “Killed.”

Now, obviously we should have just fixed the damn problem and then no one would have had to do anything manually at all.  But we were not allowed to fix things at that job without having a properly prioritized ticket (which, as you can probably guess, is a big reason I no longer work there), and besides: we were having fun.  It was always a big race to see who could kill it first, and report back.  “Killed.” “Killed.” “Killed.”

Of course, eventually we got bored with just saying “killed” over and over, so some bright soul replied one day with something like “Squashed.” And then someone else went with “Crushed,” and there was “Executed,” and “Exploded,” and so on.  Finally I was interested.  Here was a competition I could really get into.  Here were some of my entries:

Hunted down while shambling along, sloughing off rotten pieces of itself and moaning “Braaaaiinsss!”, and decapitated with a chainsaw.

In the parlor, with a candlestick, by Colonel Mustard.

Shrunk down to bug size by an experiment gone wrong perpetrated by a bespectacled, absent-minded scientist who looks suspiciously like Bob McKenzie, accidentally taken out with the trash and dumped out in the yard, chased by the cat, and finally gruesomely decapitated and eaten by a praying mantis.

Those are just a few I saved.  There were many many others: I remember one where I actually looked up the model number of a sniper rifle so I could write a long paragraph about tracking it down through the woods and putting a bullet through its left eye.  When I wrote this one:

Taken to the vet, told it was too late, loved and petted and comforted while the injection took effect, and ... dammit, I’m going to miss that little guy! <sniff>

a friend of mine told me he actually thought my dog had died for a minute.  Obviously I had to write these ahead of time so that I could manage to be the first to kill-and-reply, so I always had a few in the chamber and ready to fire.  I always thought it was super-fun, and considered it a personal challenge.

So, fast-forward to new (and still current) job, and there was no such weird runaway job to worry about killing, and no chance to write insanely weird missives to my coworkers.  It was a bit of a bummer, but I figured I’d survive.

Not right away, but eventually, I became the person who pushed our code to production, affectionately (I think) called the “pushmaster.” To do this, I utilized a creaky old collection of ancient scripts, command snippets, and glue-and-duct-tape bits, which I began to refer to collectively as “the push machine.” When initiating the push process, it was necessary to let everyone know what was going on by posting in our local tech channel, because there were things you really shouldn’t be doing during our push: probably if the whole process was a bit smoother and/or more idempotent that wouldn’t be an issue, but it ain’t, so it is.  The very first message I can find in the old logs is this one, from November of 2014:

okay, firing up the push machine ...

From there, it gradually got more descriptive, and began to reflect my growing suspicion that our push process needed some serious work that nobody on the team had the time to concentrate on.

push machinery winding down.

the great push machinery is waking back up ...

push machinery shutting down.  sounds of settling mettle and trailing steam.

and the great grey-green grinding gears of the push machine slowly settle into the sludge.

the strain of the mighty push machinery lowers in pitch as the metal grinds back into motion after being held in place by its backstops and giant rubber bands ...

and the push machinery settles down, its plaintive whine gradually decreasing in pitch, until one final burp of steam and electronic squeal puffs into the air.

and, with that, the foul, fetid fog of the push machinery and the choking, charnel chaff charcoal from its charcoal chimneys, located on the banks of the great, grey-green greasy limpopo river, slips sluggishly into slothful slumber once again.

You can see where this is going.  I no longer had the competitive angle, but I was now engaged in an bizarre attempt to one-up myself by getting weirder and more surreal as I went along.  (You may also recognize my theft of some of the imagery from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child.”)  Here’s a few of my favorites plucked at random from the logs:

the push machine stops its ceaseless, frantic dashing around and slowly starts to melt, greasy black smoke and the horrific stench of burning plastic oozing from its slowly disintegrating form.

the push machinery lets off a final blast of its steam whistle.  it’s quitting time, and all its robotic parasites scurry back to their flap-enclosed maintenance bays.

the push machinery carefully folds its aluminum aprons and puts away its tin pots.  some steam still spouts slowly from a few scattered pressure vents, but the humidity is dissipating, and the whining and grinding of cogs and gears is fading in the soft summer breeze.

the push machine gradually slows its motion and begins poking out its sensors aimlessly in random directions for a while, but is soon reduced to accosting various woodland creatures.  they hurry away, avoiding eye contact.

the push machine sits in its rocking chair, looking longingly out over the water in the fading light.  condensing steam forms on its metal flanks, rolling down the sloping planes underneath its dimming visual sensors.

la machina del empujón cerra sus ojos metálicos y piensa de la pérdida.  la noche está tranquila ahora, pero la soledad tiene un filo plañido que casi se escucha.  agotada, la machina gira y roda despaciamente de regreso a su caverna.

the push machine stutters gradually to a halt, its jittering metal pincers still intermittently drumming on the soft banks of the misty river.  the soft susurrus of a large body sliding surreptitiously into the water is barely noticeable amidst the fading whine of gears and pistons winding down.

the push machinery freezes.  for several microseconds that seem to stretch on for eternity, there is absolute stillness.  then it explodes in a burst of sound and fire, sending out a hail of clattering metal fragments which rain down incessantly, making soft plopping noises as they land in the mud.  as the sonic echoes fade away, a small beeping begins, and each tiny piece of metal begins laboriously converging on the blast epicenter.

the push machine walks along the shore of the limpid river for one quiet moment at the end of its labors.  hearing a sudden sound, it freezes, straining to keep its metal limbs from scraping against its rusted chassis and giving away its location.  then, startled by its own reflection in the water, it suddenly bounds off, clanking and squealing, to seek refuge in its muddy den.

the push machine begins to hum and spark.  soon, bright fizzles of light are shooting from its metallic body accompanied by long, sizzling splashes of sound.  with a long, whistling scream, a jet of smoke shoots straight up into the gathering gloom, and, then, with an ear-shattering bang, the twilight is turned back into day as the green fire of an enormous catherine wheel spirals across the sky over the riverbank.

the push machine color-shifts slightly; were there any eyes here to see it, it would seem to be viewed through a broken prism.  slowly its edges grow fuzzier and its center becomes more translucent.  after some amount of time which seems to stretch forever but is probably very brief, punctuated by whistles and hisses which are simultaneously lowering in both tone and volume, it has vanished completely.

the push machine begins to jerk and stutter.  there is a loud whine, sharply ascending in pitch, then a sound of large metal gears grinding against each other in a disturbing fashion.  as its echoes die away, all that remains is the soft hum of a servomotor rhtymically interuppted by the quiet click of the push machine’s many limbs resetting to start positions.  tick ... tick ... tick ...

the push machine aims its ocular sensors at the disappearing visual indication of the nearest plasma spheroid.  a single drop of cooling fluid rolls down its front-facing planar surface.

the push machine slowly begins to crumple, drawing inward upon itself until nothing remains but an ever shrinking metal ball, which gradually becomes a brief, glinting period before winking out of existence entirely.

the push machine suddenly begins belching thick, purple smoke.  an alarm which has the exact pitch and tone of a whooping gibbon begins to sound.  chartreuse lights blink in morse-like patterns, and the intertwined smells of sandalwood and stinkbug slowly drive all the surrounding fauna back into their hidey-holes.

the noises from the push machine start to fade, as if coming in from a distant radio station as the tuner moves farther and farther away from the source.  its metal body gets smaller and smaller, its colors fading out to a grainy sepia tone, until eventually it can neither be seen nor heard at all.

the push machine ends its wash cycle and goes into the spin cycle.  shortly, scraps of metal are being flung in all directions.

the push machine thumbs its olfactory sensor at the overseer unit, which re-emphasizes its electronic call that, while the push machine does not necessarily have to return to its den, it may not remain in its current position.

the flames bursting forth from the push machine are quickly extinguished by the foaming chemicals sprayed by its attentive minders.  clouds of thick, oily smoke roll away on the evening breeze, accompanied by the smell of burning plastic and the popping sounds of cooling metal.

the push machine slowly sinks into the bubbling tar.  lonely electronic beeps and whistles grow fainter as the lights dim and more and more of the rust-flecked surface is consumed by the grasping pitch.

the push machine begins to liquefy, shedding bits of its metal hull in great, shining globular beads of teardrop contour and plasmic consistency.  after a long period of squelching noises and oily black smoke which drifts away on the breeze, there is nothing left but a large puddle of goop in the muddy riverbank.

the push machine shudders, shimmers, then seems to drift slowly out of focus, its disintegrating image seeming to distort as if reflected in a funhose mirror.  with one final blinding flare of color, it winks out of existence.

the push machine slowly topples over onto its back; the motorized treads on its undercarriage rotate feebly, seeking purchase and finding none.  emitting a series of irritated electronic chitters, the maintenance bots surround it and drag it slowly back to its docking bay.

the push machine’s seams are venting steam at an alarming rate.  the fact that it no longer appears to be leaking oil may just mean that all its oil has now leaked out.  the squeal of its internal belts has almost reached a pitch only audible to canines.  it may be trying to stagger back to its maintenance bay, or perhaps it’s just shaking itself to pieces where it stands.

the push machine begins to pitch, then to yaw, then to roll.  its rotations and revolutions blur into a complex möbius strip while its minders look on, motionless, as if pondering what support mechanism allows this particular range of motion.

the treads of the push machine roll slowly through the mud as the drizzling rain continues to come down, and slowly, ever so slowly, it sinks deeper and deeper into the muck, the treads desperately trying and failing to gain purchase in the viscous mire, until, eventually, the highest points—the tips of the radio receiving antennae—are the only parts of the machine still visible.

the push machine fades to monochrome and rotates 90° in all dimensions, causing it to effectively disappear.  its confused maintenance bots scurry hither and fro aimlessly, beeping forlornly in a fruitless attempt to locate it.

the push machine moves so fast that its rust and faded chrome are only a blur.  at some point the oily smoke of its dirty engines and the stinking cloud produced by the friction of its metal parts rubbing together become indistinguishable, and the glow off its body is reminiscent of a rocket on re-entry.

the push machine settles into the sludge as the sun slowly sinks below the great, grey-green greasy horizon line of the limpid limpopo river.  as the flaming fiery sphere fills the darkening twilit sky, a single drop of oil leaks from the ocular sensor of the quiescent quasicontraption, then all is quiet, and quelled.

the push machine freezes for a fraction of a second, then immediately resumes its frantic movement.  this only lasts for a few more seconds, however; then it halts again, quivering slightly, then bursts into motion for perhaps a full minute, only to stall once again.  small scurrying robotic tenders hover on the outskirts, waiting for the frenzied motion to resume once again, but it never does ...

the push machine slowly grinds to a halt with various ear-grating creaks and groans.  various multicolored fungi begin to grow out of the cracks where its metal plates no longer fit together seamlessly.  rust spreads preternaturally quickly across its pitted surface, and what little paint has not already chipped away steadily fades to a sun-bleached gray.  in mere moments the accumulated aging of a hundred years appears complete on its frame.

the oily steam from the push machine begins to coalesce in the cool night air, its surface tension gradually forming a vesicle which surrounds the shuddering metal body.  slowly, ever so slowly, the heat of the atmosphere inside this utricle achieves sufficient differential to cause the whole to lift, and eventually the push machine floats gracefully away on the billowing breeze.

the push machine keels over dead.

Over the past 5 years or so, I’ve pushed to production, by my count of searching through the logs, 168 times.  I’m pretty sure every one of these was accompanied by some sort of message, although many of them of course were simpler than the ones above.  But, as the years went on, it became harder and harder to come up with clever messages.  I started to paraphrase bits and pieces of popular culture:

the push machinery downshifts to idle, and reflects:
from there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

the push machine keels over and clatters into a million tiny little pieces.  and each of those pieces bursts into a million tiny pieces.  and, although at that point i stopped counting, i shouldn’t at all be surprised ...

the push machine runs screaming into the murky woods.  the crying tires, the busting glass, the painful scream ...

the push machine rides slowly off into the sunset, slumped forward in its saddle, ignoring the slowly receding cries of “push machine! push machine! come back!”

here, at the end of all things, the push machine is glad just to be done.

the push machine slides the rounded chunk of metal the final foot, reaching the apex of the incline.  suddenly its forceps limbs slip on the mud-slickened surface, and its visual sensors track the downward progress as the large obstacle rolls back to its origin.  after a short, low blast of steam, it begins to caterpillar down the slope to begin again.

as the push machine becomes motionless and start its soft blinking, its maintenance bots slowly gather round it in a circle, stretching out robotic limbs to connect with each other.  is not the spirit of the holiday within their grasp, so long as they have pseudopods to grasp?

That’s Dr. Suess, The Young Ones, “Last Kiss”, Shane, The Lord of the Rings, Sisyphus, and Dr. Suess again, respectively.

I’ve also experimented with drawing from several sources and combining them in unique ways.  Here’s one that combines references from Colossal Cave Adventure and the Zork series:

the push machine is lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  it’s pitch dark.  the shiny brass lamp is turned on, but flickering fitfully.  eventually, the push machine will be eaten by a grue.

This one begins with The Scarlet Letter and somehow ends up in “Shaft”:

the push machine knows not of what you speak.  do not talk lightly of a learned and pious conveyor of code like the push machine!  shut your mouth.  i’m just talkin bout the push machine.

Many of my coworkers refer to these messages as “push poetry,” although one of them has more correctly pegged it as “purple prose.” Still, there can be a certain poetry in it, and, more recently, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing some actual poetry for these push messages.  Now, as I’ve talked about before, I’m not much of a poet, really, but I dabble.  And I tend to like structured poems.  Here’s an attempt at a haiku:

grey drizzle on riverbank,
the push machine waits there forlornly—
a barren tree in winter

Note that I subscribe to the point of view that haiku is not defined by the number of syllables, but rather by its contrasting images, generally using nature imagery, separated by a full stop of some kind.

Then I tried rewriting existing bits of poems to recast them as push messages.  Here’s a bit of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll:

the push machine engages with snark, every night after dark,
in a dreamy delirious fight;
is served with greens in those shadowy scenes,
and is useful for striking a light.
but after meeting with boojums, by day,
for moments (of this be assured),
it softly and suddenly vanishes away—
and such a notion cannot be endured.

And continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme (he’s one of my favorite authors), here’s a longer piece drawn from several verses of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

the push machine and tender bots
were walking close at hand.
it sweated grease and fluids green
upon the slimy sand.
“fear not, machine!” the bots cried, “your
performance has been grand.”

“if seven suns with seven stars
shone for half a year,
do you suppose,” the tenders asked,
“that all this mist would clear?”
with forlorn beeps, the push machine
shed an oily tear.

“oh, push machine,” bemoaned the bots,
“you’ve had a pleasant run.
shall we be heading home again?”
but answer came there none.
and this was scarcely odd, because
the push machine can’t talk.

Tired of Carroll?  How about some E.E. Cummings?

push machine lived on a pretty how bank
(with up so greasy many miles dank)
mist cloudy rainy mud
it clanked its didn’t it dripped its did.

Maintenance bots(both spat and hissed)
cloudy rainy mud and mist
guided gently and back to den
rust slime grit grim

But here’s my absolute favorite, and the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

This is another combination of disparate sources, and it’s probably the closest to my previous attempt at a cento, although obviously much smaller.  Here’s where the lines come from:

• Line 1: Cheating a bit and reusing the same opening as my previous cento; this is from Peter Straub’s Shadowland (although he was merely codifying a much older meme).
• Line 2: This is paraphrase of a line from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
• Lines 3 and 4: This is a phrase by Clive Barker, describing the dream-sea Quiddity (probably from Everville, but I suppose it might be from The Great and Secret Show).
• Lines 5 and 6: This is a lift from Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman.
• Line 7: From the opening of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft.
• Line 8: This is a fun one.  Pretty much everyone has heard this, and thinks it comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But in fact, it isn’t in the book, and it also isn’t in the movie.  When Arthur C. Clarke did the original screenplay for the movie based on his book, so the story goes, he included this now infamous line (“My God! It’s full of stars!”), but it got cut in later drafts.  But somehow the line survived into popular culture despite never actually appearing in any publicly released medium.

I really loved how this one came out, and I felt it was a bit of a shame to consign it to the fleeting ephemera that is our #tech Slack channel.  So I wanted to move it somewhere more semi-permanent, and I also wanted to share it with you guys.  So now I have.

So there’s a sample of my so-called “work poetry.” Hopefully there will be several more years of push poetry to come, and perhaps I’ll do another post about it once I’ve accumulated some further examples.

Fulminant Cadenza I

"Thunderbolt and Lightning"

[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.]

My eldest child and I have wondered what the music of the post-2000s is.  If psychedelia is the 60s, and disco is the 70s, and new wave and alternative is the 80s, and grunge and emo is the 90s ... what comes next?  I proposed two possible trends.  The first is large, folky/neoclassical bands full of non-traditional (for rock, anyway) instruments: banjos and cellos and trumpets.  Examples would be the Decemberists, the Lumineers, Arcade Fire, and of course Of Monsters and Men.  The second is a tendency towards the melodramatic, the bombastic—the operatic.

Now, I just said in our last installment that I don’t care for opera.  But there’s a difference between opera music and operatic music.  In fact, they don’t sound much alike, really.  What makes a tune operatic is more a sense of style vs the actual melodies or instrumentation.  It’s a chance for the music to swell and burst forth in unexpected ways, for vocalists to show off their emotional range, for the song to attempt to stir the listener—forcibly, if need be.  A “cadenza,” says Wikipedia, is an ornamental passage that often allows virtuosic display.  There’s certainly a lot of that going on here.  Wikipedia further tells us that “fulminant” means something that occurs suddenly and escalates quickly; from the Latin fulmināre: to strike with lightning.  I think you’ll find that an appropos descriptor as well.

Because of my perception of this as a trend for the music of the last two decades or so, only 4 of the 20 tracks here are older than 20 years old (which is fairly unusual for this series).  But of course we could never make a mix like this without including the original operatic rock song, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Released way back in 1975 on A Night at the Opera, Freddie Mercury referred to it as “mock opera” and famously introduced it to his bandmates by playing the opening melody and then stopping and saying “And this is where the opera section comes in!” The faux-Italian nonsense section in the middle (“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” and so forth) only emphasizes the operatic connections, and yet the song is undeniably (and indelibly) a rock classic: #1 in the UK, top 10 in the US, nominated for two Grammys, spawned one of the earliest music videos, re-immortalized in Wayne’s World, and its name was used for last year’s biopic of Mercury.  Our volume title is an obvious lift from its lyrics (“thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening”¹).  And, above and beyond all its importance and relevance to the theme, it’s just an amazing, fantastic song.

It was frankly amazing that I restrained myself from opening the mix with it, really.  But I felt like an even better opener would be the theme from The Shannara Chronicles: “Until We Go Down,” by Ruelle.  Like “You’ve Got Time” from Orange Is the New Black² and “If I Had a Heart” from Vikings,³ the non-abbreviated version from Ruelle’s EP is even better than what you get on TV.  It’s the perfect opening for the first section, and for the second section I use Muse to introduce Queen—which is ironic, since the first time I ever heard Muse on the radio, I immediately thought they reminded me of Queen.  Not in a musical sense, particularly, but in their sense of scope and grandeur, which is why I knew they had to appear here.

Other obvious choices were Kate Bush (almost any of her hits would have worked, but I felt like “Cloudbusting” fit here the best), and Pat Benatar, who actually trained as an opera singer before switching to rock (and here the obvious choice was Benatar’s cover of Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”): that’s 2 more of the 4 selections from the 80s or prior.  Emilie Autumn is another no-brainer; Fight Like a Girl has been called “an operatic feminist treatise set inside an insane asylum,” and, while I don’t think it always works, “If I Burn” is a shining example of her at her best.  My Morning Jacket, who I first heard on Stephen Colbert’s show, are sometimes described as alt-country, but I find their album The Waterfall to be way more operatic than twangy.

Closing out the “no duh” list would be MILCK’s dramatic tune that came to epitomize the Women’s March in 2017, “Quiet,” and “Conqueror,” by Aurora, a Norwegian artist sometimes characterized as baroque pop.  For introduction to the former, I have to thank Samantha Bee; for the second, I have absolutely no recollection of where I first heard it,⁴ but I fell immediately in love and knew it had to land here.  “Conqueror” is one of those songs that just fills you with a sort of joy despite all attempts to resist it.  The early 2000s offers me multiple candidates here, but some of them—such as Evanescence, Rag’n'Bone Man, and Hundred Waters—will just have to wait for volume II.

Of course, not everything here is only about the melodrama.  Several songs are cherry-picked from adjacent subgenres.  For instance, representing the oldest song here post-80s, and representing the tendency of a decade’s music to start slightly before the decade itself,⁵ we have Incubus, with the title track from their amazing 1999 album Make Yourself.  Theoretically, Incubus was nu-metal, in the vein of Linkin Park or Korn.  But they managed to break out of that mold in many ways, primarily with a flair for the dramatic.  “Make Yourself” is not a song for you if you’re bothered by the F-bomb, but, assuming you can get past that, it’s pretty amazing.  I can also draw a straight line (in my mind, anyway) from Incubus to the Struts—a line that has to stretch from Southern California to East Midlands, England, granted—whose lead singer has said he was pretending to be Freddie Mercury and Bon Scott when singing in the mirror as a child, so that pretty much nails the æsthetic in my book.  Plus the similar styles mean they pair very nicely as we move to close down the volume, and “Could Have Been Me,” with its pulsing drum-driven call-and-response, is just a natural fit here.

Another genre with some major similarities is goth.  You may recall that back on Penumbral Phosphorescence I talked about how goth wasn’t technically about death and darkness; its original meaning was more about drama and spectacle.  Which is also the aspects of “operatic” that I’m talking about here.  So I threw in a little goth: first of all and most obviously, “Garden of Delight” by the Mission, who are probably the most operatic of the proper goth bands, and then “Ancient Delirium,” the title track off the odd collaboration between Angels of Venice’s Carol Tatum and Seraphim Shock’s Charles Edward.⁶  Finally “The Woman of the Snow” by goth/industrial/darkwave duo Faith and the Muse is one of those layered, voice-as-instrument affairs that can often be found in works by Beth Quist⁷ or (especially) Julianna Barwick;⁸ here’s it’s a bit of a bridge between the powerful, raw emotion of “Quiet” and the subtler but also soaring vocals of “Home.”

This latter tune, by the way, is from an undeservedly obscure artist called Glasser.  I only discovered her while idly looking up what the members of Human Sexual Response⁹ were up to now and finding that their only female member went on to mother a musician herself.  So I had to check that out, right?  Glasser is hard to pin down: she’s a bit electronica, a bit indie, a bit experimental ... and, yes, a bit operatic.  “Home” is, in my opinion, the most emblematic of that off her excellent Ring.

Which nicely transitions to other female vocals that only occasionally drift in operatic territory.  Iiris is an Estonian singer who has thrice come in the top 5 in the Eurovision Song Contest but is not europop in any meaningful sense; she’s more of an indie voice who’s more likely to show up on Sirenexiv Cola.  But “Curaga” is actually sort of a sister tune to “Conqueror” and flows beautifully from it.  It’s a bit more mellow than the latter, but has its moments of bursting forth (“to wake up is to light up all the nightmares by your side”).  Lucius is a beautiful melding of two female vocalists, and we’ll no doubt also see them eventually on Sirenexiv Cola, but also probably on Smokelit Flashback, which gives you some idea of their range.  “How Loud Your Heart Gets” has many moments of upswelling beauty (“we were children now we’ve grown” and, later, “the things we know we just don’t know”) and also fades out with an interesting discordant section that jumps from left speaker to right and back again.  Definitely a great track.

Fulminant Cadenza I
[ Thunderbolt and Lightning ]

“Until We Go Down” by Ruelle, off Up in Flames [EP]
“Quiet” by MILCK [Single]
“The Woman of the Snow” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“Home” by Glasser, off Ring
“Il Pirata” by Ugress, off Cinematronics
“Resistance” by Muse, off The Resistance
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, off Greatest Hits [Compilation]
“In Its Infancy (The Waterfall)” by My Morning Jacket, off The Waterfall
“Garden of Delight (Hereafter)” by the Mission, off Godʼs Own Medicine
“Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush, off The Whole Story [Compilation]
“Wuthering Heights” by Pat Benatar, off Crimes of Passion
“Conqueror” by AURORA, off All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend
“Curaga” by Iiris, off The Magic Gift Box
“If I Burn” by Emilie Autumn, off Fight Like a Girl
“Ancient Delirium” by Carol Tatum, off Ancient Delirium
“Peel” by Jade Leary, off The Lost Art of Human Kindness
“Make Yourself” by Incubus, off Make Yourself
“Could Have Been Me” by the Struts, off Everybody Wants
“How Loud Your Heart Gets” by Lucius, off Wildewoman
“Ban the Game” by Men Without Hats, off Rhythm of Youth

Total:  20 tracks,  76:49

For bridges, I was first off drawn to a weird little track by Jade Leary: “Peel.” Featuring an airy flute counterpointed by some strings which somehow convey the impression that you’re late for something dark and foreboding, and whispered, distorted vocals, it’s certainly got melodrama in spades.  And the bridge between our all-female opening quartet into the more male-dominated stretch of the next 4 tracks is 48 perfect seconds from Norwegian electronica artist Ugress.¹⁰  “Il Pirata” sounds like an old 78rpm record that would be played as the soundtrack for a silent movie (probably during the scene where the train is about to run over the heroine tied to the tracks), but set to a drum machine beat.  Definitely an attention-getter.

Our closer has similar DNA, but lives at the other end of the spectrum.  “Ban the Game” is a slower, piano-driven track, about as far away from “Safety Dance” as you can get and still be Men Without Hats.  But somehow it still feels like the soundtrack to an old movie, only this scene is the one where the heroine is walking off into the sunset, leaving the hero to wonder how he’s going to live without her.  Which leaves us in precisely the proper mood to say goodbye to a set of tunes that is properly operatic without sounding anything like opera.¹¹

Next time, we’ll mix a little magic into our music.

__________

1 Also quite fulminant.

2 Which is our closer on Sirenexiv Cola I.

3 Which we haven’t seen yet, but we probably will sooner or later.

4 Although I note that she was also on The Late Show, in July of 2016, so that’s a good guess.

5 For instance, one of the most iconic songs of the 80s is “My Sharona” ... released in 1979.

6 More discussion of both those bands and albums can be found in Penumbral Phosphorescence I.

7 We’ve heard from Quist many times: Shadowfall Equinox IV and V, Numeric Driftwood III, Paradoxically Sized World IV, and Sirenexiv Cola I.

8 Who we shall hear from in the fullness of time.

9 I talked a bit about this somewhat odd Boston classic new wave band back on Totally Different Head.

10 Ugress is one my favorite musical discoveries from LittleBigPlanet, as we discussed back in Paradoxically Sized World II.

11 Thank goodness.

Pleasant Ēostre

This weekend has been a double hit for me: yesterday I had some sort of stomach flu—I wasn’t barfing, but I spent all day almost wishing I could—and then today was, of course, Easter.  Not a big religious day for us, but we have our egg hunting traditions to uphold.  Long story short: no proper blog post for you today.  Next week, something more substantial.

Game of Thrones Rewatch: the "Short" Version (Part 3)

Here’s the final two seasons of my Game of Thrones rewatch.  A reminder of the rules of my rewatch commentary:

• THERE ARE METRIC SHIT-TONS OF SPOILERS HERE. One wouldn’t think I would have to point this out, as it’s a rewatch, but people will complain.  If you haven’t already watched all the seasons of GoT up till the last one, DON’T READ THIS. Perhaps you can come back when you’re all caught up.  (To be crystal clear: just because the comment is in season 3 doesn’t mean that it won’t contain spoilers for season 4 ... or season 7.  Obviously there are no spoilers for season 8 yet.)
• (Speaking of “shit-tons” ...)  I curse.  Anyone who’s read any of my other blog posts will already know this, but perhaps you got here via some link or other and don’t know what you’re in for.  Although the previous bullet point should have been a giveaway.
• My opnions are just that: opinions.  I present them here in case you find them interesting, but I’m not trying to convince you to believe as I do.  I ask that you show me the same courtesy should you choose to leave a comment—that is, feel free to share your own opinions, but don’t try to tell me I’m “wrong.”
• Likewise, whatever moments I found worthy of comment are also my opinions.  If I left out one of your favorites, sorry about that.  Feel free to remind me of it in the blog post comments.
• My comments are always super-quick.  If I want to expand on a particular thing, I do it as a pseudo-footnote.  In this case, “pseudo-footnote” means “formatted almost exactly like a footnote, but way more obvious.” These “footnotes” are designed to be less ignorable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ignore them if you want to.  They’re just topics I wanted to explore a bit further.  Sometimes only a sentence or two more, sometimes whole paragraphs.  Read ’em or not: your call.
• There’s not a comment on every episode.  Especially in the early episodes: sometimes there’s just nothing that jumped out at me that hour.
• I am watching the “Inside the Episode” shorts after the shows, for every show.  Occasionally that will inform my commentary (but usually not).
• Once I’m done with the rewatch, I may keep some commentary on the final season.  Or I may not; no promises.

Season 6

• Episode 1: Well, I guess after you’ve jumped off a 50-foot castle wall, walking through a frozen river and wandering around in a blizzard is nothing.
• Aaaand there goes Doran.  And Trystane.
• Aaaand there goes Melisandre’s glamour.
• Episode 2: Finally! the return of Bran.  I mean, it’s only been 12 episodes ...
• I just caught this one too: what Ned says to Benjen in Bran’s flashback is the exact same line Jon says to Olly when he’s training him.^[S5E1]
• I’ll give Tyrion this: he’s got big balls.  Huge, even.
• “Next time I have an idea like that, punch me in the face.” —Tyrion
• Aaaand there goes Roose.  Good riddance to him too.
• And his wife.  And his newborn son.  That part was sad at least.
• Aaaand there goes Balon.  No tears for that one either.
• “I’m not a devout man ... obviously.” —Davos
• Aaaand here comes Jon!  He’s back! [1]
• Episode 3: “Hold off on burning my body for now.” —Jon
• Aaaand there goes Ser Alliser.  And Olly.
• Episode 4: Aaaand there goes Osha.  Totally pointless death. [2]
• Aaaand there goes all the remaining Khals. [3]
• Episode 5: “You freed me from the monsters that murdered my family.  And you gave me to other monsters that murdered my family.” —Sansa (A well-deserved slap in the face for Littlefinger.)
• “Where are my neice and nephew?  Let’s go murder them.” —Euron
• Tormund’s keen interest in Brienne is another thing I’d forgotten.  It’s quite cute.
• Another White Walker goes down to dragonglass.  I guess Meera made some spearheads out of what Sam gave her ... ?^[S3E10]
• Aaaand there goes the remaining Children of the Forest.  And Bran’s wolf.
• And Hodor, of course.  I think his death may be more affecting than even Shireen’s, somehow. [4]
• Episode 6: Finally: the return of Benjen. [5]
• Wow ... Sam’s dad is a real dick.  And, in this show, that’s saying something.
• It takes a massive amount of work to make Joffrey look like the tragic hero.
• And even more to make Cersei look sympathetic.
• I think Tommen thinks he’s growing a pair (finally).  I’m not sure I agree.
• Episode 7: “And you’ve got one hand.  My money’s on the old boy.” —Bronn
• I fucking love Lady Mormont! [6]
• “Fuck justice, then: we’ll get revenge.  Drink.” —Yara
• Aaaand there goes guy-we-just-met.  Don’t worry: by this point, we knew perfectly well not to get too attached.
• Episode 8: “I choose violence.” —Cersei
• I really try not to blame Tommen too much, but this is clearly a case of foolishly underestimating his mother.  He knows perfectly well what she’s capable of.
• Aaaand there goes the Blackfish.  Pisses me off that he wouldn’t go with Brienne.  He was a very cool character who got shafted out of his deserved amount of screentime.
• Aaaand there goes Lady Crane.  Not a huge surprise, but a bit of a bummer.
• Aaaand there goes “the Waif” (that’s how she’s credited).  A.K.A. Arya’s arch-nemesis.  Oh, and: Arya kill #8.
• “A girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell.  And I’m going home.” —Arya (Bam!)
• Episode 9: “Tell your people what happened here.  Tell them you live by the grace of Her Majesty.  When they come forward with notions of retribution or ideas about returning the slave cities to their former glory, remind them what happened when Daenerys Stormborn and her dragons came to Meereen.” —Tyrion [7]
• “No one can protect me.  No one can protect anyone.” —Sansa
• “I never demand, but I’m up for anything, really.” —Yara (I love how Yara is like: sure, I’ll marry you, if that’s what it takes.)
• Aaaand there goes Rickon.  This too was inevitable, from the moment he was delivered to Ramsay.  (As Sansa predicted mere moments ago, actually ...)
• Don’t do what he wants you to do, Jon!
• Idiot. [8]
• Aaaand there goes the last giant on the planet.  That’s quite sad.
• Hey, don’t stop beating the shit out of Ramsay on Sansa’a account! [9]
• Aaaand there goes Ramsay.  That’s quite joyous.
• Episode 10: The whole “trial” business is hard to watch knowing how pointless the whole thing is going to end up being.
• Aaaand there goes Pycelle.  Finally.
• Aaaand there goes Margaery.  And Loras, and Lancel, and Mace, and Kevan.  Oh, and the High Sparrow, of course.  But mainly Margaery. [10]
• Aaaand there goes Tommen.  Inevitable, that.
• Very satisfying for Davos.
• What? Winter’s not coming any more??
• Aaaand there goes Walder.  Arya kills #9, #10, and #11. [11]
• Baby Jon: dragonwolf.  Or wolfdragon.  Or ... something. [12]
• God damn I love Lady Mormont!
• A particularly bloody episode, even not counting the death of Lyanna, who is both not quite an important enough character to count and also has actually been dead for like 20 years so really shouldn’t count anyway. [13]

Season 7

• Episode 1: You know, if I’d remembered this opening scene, I wouldn’t have bothered counting Arya kills up until this point. [14]
• I love how there’s no significant difference in either color or consistency between the bedpan contents and what passes for food in the Citadel.
• “No need to sieze the last word, Lord Baelish.  I’ll assume it was something clever.” —Sansa [15]
• “It’s my fucking luck I end up with a band of fire worshippers.” —the Hound
• 61 episodes to reach this point: Dany sets foot on Westeros.
• Episode 2: “Are you a sheep?  No.  You’re a dragon.  Be a dragon.” —Olenna
• There have been several times in this show that I have been pissed off at the writers.  But this is the worst of them. [16]
• Aaaand there goes Sand Snake #1.  And Sand Snake #2.
• Episode 3: Here’s another line I’d completely forgotten: “I have to die in this strange country.  Just like you.” (That’s Melisandre, to Varys.)
• Aaaand there goes Sand Snake #3.
• “I can never be Lord of Winterfell.  I can never be lord of anything; I’m the three-eyed raven.” —Bran
• Aaaand there goes Olenna.  Fare thee well, Queen of Thorns. [17]
• Episode 4: “You died in that cave ...” —Meera [18]
• And now Arya has Valyrian steel as well.  That’s her, Jon, Jaime, Brienne, and Sam. [19]
• Bronn vs Daenerys.  No clear winner, surprisingly. [20]
• Episode 5: Yeah, Jaime! May as well just jump back in the river!
• Aaaand there goes Sam’s dad, and his brother.  No great loss, and some small loss.  (But pretty small.)
• Is there going to be any discussion of the fact that Dany just fried all the remaining male family members of the guy who is the best friend of the guy standing beside her and who cured the man kneeling in front of her? [21]
• Yay! Gendry’s back.
• “Yep, nobody mind me.  All I’ve ever done is live to a ripe old age.” —Davos
• Gilly just gave Sam a crucial piece of history there and he never even noticed ... [22]
• “I’m tired of reading about the achievements of better men.” —Sam
• Hey, look: everybody hates everybody! [23]
• Episode 6: “Your lips are moving, and you’re complaining about something.  That’s whinging.  This one’s been killed six times; you don’t hear him bitching about it.” —the Hound
• Watching this scene between Sansa and Arya ... how much of that anger is just for show?
• Third White Walker killed.  That should leave just 3 more ... but we see 5 a bit later. [24]
• Aaaand there goes Thoros.
• Aaaand there goes ... one of the only three dragons on the planet!!
• Aaaand there goes Benjen. [25]
• Another scene between Sansa and Arya that doesn’t feel like an actual conversation between real people, given what we know is coming.  Feels more like a cheesy plot device.
• Oh, wait ... dragon’s back.  Shiver.
• Episode 7: Talk about your uncomfortable meetings ... [26]
• Qyburn is like the only person on the planet who sees a dead man running at him at full speed and goes “Cool!”
• I love Tyrion’s sigh of relif when Cersei decides not to kill him: he didn’t really know if it was going to work or not. [27]
• “I respect what you did.  Wish you hadn’t done it, but I respect it.” —Dany
• It is very uncharacteristic of Littlefinger to underestimate people, but he’s vastly underestimating the Starks here.
• I can’t believe that the writers are trying to covince us that having been castrated is actually an advantage for Theon here ...
• Aaaand there goes Littlefinger.  Arya kill #12 + F.
• And Jaime calls Cersei’s bluff!  How far he’s come ...
• Incest: consummated. [28]
• Aaaand there goes the Wall.  Double shiver. [29]

[1] I would just like to say that I called this, even the first time through, even without getting anywhere near this far in the books.  (In fact, I really don’t know if this even happens in the books or not.)  I just extrapolated from knowing that, while George R. R. Martin may piss me off at times, he’s still a competent writer.  Thoros of Myr exists for exactly one reason: to bring Beric Dondarrion back from the dead.  And bringing Beric back from the dead only happens for one reason: to let us know that this is possible, so that when we see a high cleric of the same faith in the same place as someone who is well and truly dead that we know is important to the story, we’ll understand that there’s some possibility that things can be reversed.

Interesting to note that the showrunners seem to be trying to get some extra use of Beric by bringing him back late in S6.  I would actually be somewhat surprised if GRRM does the same in the books.  I feel that, as far as he’s concerned, Beric has now fulfilled his duty and can just fade into obscurity.

[2] I don’t mind a senseless death ... well, I mind it, obviously.  But at least I understand it.  A senseless death still has a point to it (otherwise it would be a pointless death).  Take the death of Shireen, for example.  Senseless and tragic, yes, but not pointless.  It signals the downfall of Stannis, and that’s important for the story.  But the death of Osha is entirely pointless, and that I object to.  What was even the point of bringing her character back for that tiny bit of screen time and then poof! she’s dead?  May as well have killed her offscreen.

[3] This is the third great “fuck yeah!” moment for Dany (of four—so far), and the only one that doesn’t involve dragons.  In that respect, it’s probably my favorite.  This is the moment that Dany proves she can kick ass all on her own.  Dragons?  We don’t need no steenking dragons!

[4] It’s not as tragic, and definitely not senseless.  But the circularity of it all, and realzing how many years he’s been locked into waiting for this exact moment ... it’s certainly one of the most effective moments of the series.

[5] I always said there were 3 characters that had disappeared that I refused to believe were gone forever: Benjen, Nymeria (Arya’s wolf), and Syrio Forel.  I think I may end up being wrong about Syrio, and I was extremely disappointed in the “return” of Nymeria.  But the return of Benjen, at least, was totally worth it.

[6] If you can’t get enough Bella Ramsey from her appearances in Game of Thrones (and who could?), check her out in The Worst Witch on Netflix.  My littlest one and I love that show too.

[7] This of course is the fourth and final (so far) great “fuck yeah!” Dany moment.  It’s not just the dragons which are awesome (although of course they fucking well are), but Grey Worm and Tyrion are both pretty awesome too ... even Missandei gets a bit of a chin lift.  Also, that annoying shit from way back in S3 gets slaughtered, so that’s always a bonus.

[8] At least you can see in his eyes that he knows he fucked up.  Right before shit gets really insane.

[9] During the “Inside the Episode” for this one, the showrunners suggest that Jon stops because he realizes upon seeing Sansa that Ramsay is not his to kill.  I have to say, however, that Kit Harrington’s performance didn’t convey that to me.  What I got was more being embarrassed about knowing his sister sees him reduced to that state of mindless bestiality.  But I suppose I must have misread it.  Or maybe Kit was going for a mix of both, and I only caught the one.

[10] This is probably the largest named-character body count in a single event for the entire series.  Quite a few of those are not a big deal: Mace and Kevan are hardly going to be missed, and the High Sparrow is certainly no great loss.  But Loras is a slight bummer, and Margaery is a huge loss.  Much of the remaining tragedy to come is, in my opinion, a direct result of this “triumph” of Cersei over Margaery.

[11] The advantage of the rewatch is that I actually worked out that Arya is recreating the story of the Rat Cook, which Old Nan told to the Stark children, and which Bran relates to Meera and Jojen while they’re at the Nightfort [S3E10].  At the time, it just seems like a bit of Westeros flavor: their version of a ghost story, which sets the mood nicely for everyone being extremely spooked when they hear Sam and Gilly coming up the ladder.  But now I can see it was to prepare us for a fuller appreciation of the (ultra-well-deserved) fate of Walder Frey.  “It wasn’t for murder the gods cursed the Rat Cook, or for serving the king’s son in a pie.  He killed a guest beneath his roof.  That’s something the gods can’t forgive.”

Fun fact: the showrunners want us to believe this is a worrisome development for Arya’s character.  Fuck that.  I’m not worried that Arya can smile as she slits a man’s throat and watch him bleed out, ’cause I’m smiling right along with her.  Go Team Arya!

[12] You know the implications of this are staggering.  The obvious ones are the ones that get repeated the most often: Dany is Jon’s aunt, which certainly means a bit of incest ... but then again Targaryens commonly wed sisters to brothers (as Cersei is constantly reminding us, and as did our own ancient Egyptians, for that matter), so what’s a little aunt-nephew wedding among royalty?  But let’s dive a bit deeper.  If one considers the Targaryens the rightful rulers of Westeros—and of course we could easily dispute that, noting that they just came along a few centuries ago with their dragons and ate all the really properly rightful rulers—but, assuming we grant that, that means that Aerys, mad or not, was the rightful king, and therefore his eldest son would inherit the throne, which is Rhaegar, who has exactly one (surviving) son, who is Jon.  Therefore, friggin’ Jon is the goddamn rightful king of Westeros ... he has a stronger claim on the throne than Dany does, really, even throwing the question of gender out the window.  And, because he is actually older than any of Ned’s children, he has exactly the same amount of claim to King in the North as Dany does to the Iron Throne—that is, he’s the oldest surviving Stark, and he’s not, in fact, a bastard.

[13] Since the body count from just the explosion at the Sept of Baelor equalled our previous record for an entire episode, this episode easily surpasses that and becomes the new standard to beat: 9 named character deaths, all told.

[14] As Arya is technically responsible for the death of every living Frey (or at least all the male ones), and as Walder was notoriously prolific, I don’t know that we can really assign a number to how many kills she has at this point.  Let’s call the number of post-Walder Freys killed “F,” just for purposes of further counting.

Another interesting point: at the Red Wedding, Walder Frey somewhat ironically plays “The Rains of Castamere.” If you didn’t catch the story behind this song (which Cersei tells to Margaery just before the Red Wedding [S3E8]), it’s this: House Reyne rebelled against Tywin Lannister, who not only defeated them, but slaughtered them all—men, women, and children.  The Reynes of Castamere no longer exist in Westeros.  And, now, no longer do the Freys.  Poetic justice don’t begin to cover it.

[15] This may be my favorite line of Sansa’s.  Granted, that’s not saying much, but still: this is one of the few moments where I actually kinda like her.  Not too many people get to say they had the upper hand in a conversational gambit with Littlefinger ... not even Varys, really.

[16] What I’m talking about here is the “return” of Nymeria, Arya’s wolf.  Been looking forward to it for 61 episodes and this is what I get?  Bullshit.  Too cheap to pay for the CGI, I suppose.

[17] Note that, even in death, Olenna gets her last digs in.  Whereas Cersei is scary in a disturbing, psychotic way, Olenna is disturbing in a way that makes you kinda smile for her.

[18] Meera leaves Bran.  Another thing I hadn’t remembered.

[19] The Game of Thrones wiki says there’s also one in the Vale—specifically, the guy in Littlefinger’s trial who isn’t Lord Royce and isn’t a woman.  Since he was only on-screen for like 20 seconds, I’m not sure if that’s really going to be the case in the show; apparently, it is the case in the books, so the wiki is just extrapolating.

[20] I didn’t include this as one of Dany’s four great “fuck yeah!” moments.  Perhaps I should have, but I felt this was more of a sprawling battle than a personal triumph for Dany.  Drogon’s performance is certainly impressive, and there is a certain sense of personal accomplishment for Dany, because this is the point where she stops listening to everyone else and fights the way she wants to fight.  And that’s good.  But of course there’s a certain amount of sense in what Tyrion (and Varys?) is telling her, and so she actually is playing into Cersei’s hands just a bit by delivering on those “foreign boogymen are coming to get you” tales that Cersei was spouting.  I dunno; I still could be wrong, of course, and it is a great scene, but I still think the previous four sum it up for me.  To recap:

1. Burning that dick in Astapor and freeing Missandei and Grey Worm and the rest of the Unsullied.
2. Burning all those dick Sons of the Harpy at the fighting pit in Meereen.
3. Burning all the dick khals in Vaes Dothrak.
4. Burning all the ships beseiging Meereen and then having Grey Worm just slice up some Good Ol’ Wise Ol’ Masters.  Who were both total dicks.

Interesting that, while they don’t all involve dragons, they do all involve fire.  “Fire and Blood,” indeed.

[21] Nope.

[22] In case you too missed it, she just read him story of the annulment of Rhaegar Targaryen’s marriage to Elia Martell.

[23] I found this quite amusing.  Jon hates the Hound because he served the Lannisters, who murdered quite a chunk of his family.  Gendry hates Beric and Thoros, who sold him to Melisandre.  Tormund hates Jorah, whose father murdered a metric shit-ton of his kinsmen.  Meanwhile, Jorah’s not fond of Thoros, who is a reminder of his time before (remember: Thoros fought in the same tournament that Jorah won, thus attracting his ill-fated wife, whose golddigging is what led him to sell people into slavery, which is why Ned Stark banished him and his father disowned him); the Hound’s not fond of Beric or Thoros (remember: fire worshippers, plus Beric did try to kill him that once); Jorah’s not fond of Tormund (remember: Northman, wildling) ... it’s just a fantastic stew of distrust and buried enmity, which Jon finally puts an end to by pointing out that they’re all on the same side because they’re all breathing.  It’s a great scene.

[24] There are several points where you can count the White Walkers, but it never seems to make much difference.  There’s always more of them in the next shot.  I thought I knew how many there were after the attack on the cave of the Three-Eyed Raven, but now there’s more.  Maybe they’re constantly minting new ones.

[25] This is another scene I’d totally forgotten.  It’s a pretty good death scene.

[26] Lots of fun banter here: Brienne and the Hound, Tyrion and Bronn, the Hound and the Mountain.  Also plenty of just plain dirty looks: Theon and Euron, Cersei and Tyrion.

[27] Another question that occurs: is Cersei actually pregnant?  Obviously she wanted Jaime to know, because she told him outright.  In this scene, Tyrion “figures it out” ... but does he really?  Cersei is sneaky, and subtle, and I’m not sure I"m buying that she doesn’t realize that’s she’s “accidentally” giving away this secret.  She touches her belly, she goes on and on about saving loved ones and all that: I say she knows damned well what message she’s putting out there.  Because Jaime thinks she’s pregnant, he’s willing to do what she wants; because Tyrion thinks she’s pregnant, he’s willing to believe that she’ll make sane choices.  What if the whole thing is a way for Cersei to manipulate her brothers?

[28] I can’t quite figure out if we’re supposed to feel icky about this.  ‘Cause I don’t, really.  Compared to the Cersei-Jaime thing, this is very low on the incest scale.  And they have zero familial connection—just a genealogical one.  A sexual relationship with someone with whom you grew up but had absolutely no blood relation to would feel more incestuous than this.  But maybe I’m supposed to feel disgusted ... maybe the writers are going to have Jon and Dany feel disgusted when they learn about it.  But I would be disappointed by that, somehow.

[29] Technically, Tormund and/or Beric could be dead as of this scene.  But I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Birthdays are done for a while

Another March birthday season is in the books.  The little empress didn’t demand too much: take-out from Panda Express, and eat-in at Chez McDonald’s, avec Play Place.  I was required to cook my world famous potato soup,^* and also to take out a second mortgage to be able to afford heating the pool for the first real swimming of the year.  Happily, we live in Southern California, so the water temp as of the last weekend in March was only 61 ... a mere 20° lift.  I’m sure it was only a several hundred dollar windfall for SoCalGas.  But, hey: when your baby girl says “heat the pool” ... whatchagonnado?

There was also a strawberry cake with strawberry icing and a metric shit-ton of sprinkles—which was way too sweet for me—and birthday donuts, and way too much Barbie spewage.  But she had a lovely weekend, and that’s all that really matters.

As with last year, there was a little bit of “birthday weekend hangover”: at 7 years old, it’s tough to have that amount of power for 2½ days and then lose it all just ’cause you went to bed and woke up again.  But she’s worked through it this past week and I’m pretty sure she’s back to Norman now.  Next year, we do it all again.

__________

* To be fair, it is only world famous because this blog post is visible worldwide, and I just talked about it here.