Kicking off the Family Campaign

[This is not exactly a series, but it’s a report about my ongoing D&D campaign with my kids.  This is the first proper report, but there was also a sort of prologue that you could read if you haven’t already.]


So, I previously described how my daughter decided to invent her first D&D characer at age 7, and how that spurred a whole campaign that we finally started to do what I called “flashbackstory” sessions for.  Well, this week was the first official session of the “Family Campaign,” where each of my children’s characters finally met each other for the first time.

Since I’m always a little irked by the standard cliché of “you all meet in a pub,” I went with an entirely different cliché: “you are all summoned by a mysterious benefactor who wishes to call in his favors.”  I mostly justified this by having inserted the initial favor into the flashbackstories, so that, instead of feeling like a tired plot device, it would feel like an organic outgrowth of the story-thus-far.  At least I hope I achieved that.  The kids seemed to enjoy it anyway.

I kicked it off with a short encounter that the benefactor figure, whose name is Hervé and who is sort of the fantasy equivalent of an alien-pretending-to-be-human, engineered as a sort of audition.  I wanted to throw them together fairly quickly and let them work out their group dynamic, plus I knew there was a butt-ton of exposition coming down the pike, and I didn’t want them to get bored by dumping it all on them before anything exciting happened.  I designed this encounter to be just a bit hard, but certainly not deadly, and it turned out to be way too easy, so obviously I’m going to have to up my game on the GM side.^*  They pulled a classic divide-and-conquer technique (which I wasn’t really expecting from a group so unused to working with each other), had a few good rolls, I had a few really bad ones, and at the end of the day those bad guys never really had a chance.  Interestingly, they decided against outright killing them, even applying some emergency first aid to one who seemed like he might slip away from his greivous wounds.

Then we did our long exposition, which I tried to make as entertaining as possible by framing it as a story, and also because I gave their mysterious benefactor an insane accent, which sort of migrates around from French (Monty Python and the Holy Grail style) to Eastern European (Vlad the Impaler style) to Spanish (Puss in Boots style).  I thought it would be an interesting way to emphasize that they couldn’t pin down the accent, and also it means that my accent can never really “slip,” because then I can just say I did it on purpose.  Plus I get to mangle English expressions just for fun (e.g. “Congratulations! You all have passed with the colors that fly!”).  Of course, besides my own desire to have a good time, it’s also designed to keep them entertained while I have to talk for long periods of time, which I think I mostly succeeded at.  I think perhaps my eldest was losing focus a bit by the end, but the younger two seemed to enjoy it pretty well.^**

So, other than that, we did a little journey planning and that was pretty much it.  I’ve never been the type of GM who likes to handwave away travel time (“oh, you’re gonna walk to this place halfway around the world? should take, let’s say, a couple days”) or even travel details (“you guys ready to depart? okay, you travel for three months; now you’re there”).  I mean, imagine if you removed the “travel details” from The Lord of the Rings ... you’d hardly have anything left!  Travel is where a lot of cool adventures happen, and where some of the most important character bonding takes place as well.  It matters to a story what method you travel by, and which route you choose, and how long it takes to get there ... at least, I believe it does.  So I let the kids plan out their route to get to the magic item they’ve been sent to retrieve (or “the MacGuffin,” as my eldest correctly identified it).  Of course, no matter which road they pick, whether they choose to walk or ride horses or swing through the forest like Tarzan (an actual option, given this particular group), something exciting is bound to come of it, so I’m happy to let them work it out for themselves.

Mainly it was a chance for each character to meet the others, and it went far better than I expected.  Let me give you a brief rundown of the characters my children have developed.

My youngest is Corva Ravenstone, who you may recall from last post.  She’s a classic “jungle princess” archetype, raised by a tiger and with a little blue monkey constantly chittering on her shoulder.  She doesn’t care for people, for civilization, for sleeping in beds, and she’s about 16 years old.  But, since she’s been looking out for herself since 5 or so—tigers don’t coddle their children, you know—she’s quite competent.  She’s a half-elf with blue armor, a big honkin’ bow, and the ability to speak to all animals.

My middlest is Zyx, a changeling from the world of Eberron, which is the only place in the D&D multiverse that changelings are found.  A changeling is a creature who can change their form to look like anything they like, within some broad size limitations.  They can’t be giants, and they can’t be halflings, but pretty much anything in between is fair game: human, elf, dwarf, half-orc, any hair color, any eye color, fat, thin, male, female ... anything.  As you can imagine, changelings don’t have the same concepts of gender, and identity in general, that other people do.  They have a tendency to develop certain forms that they favor, and they give each its own name and history.  There’s even a cool racial feature where you choose a particular identity and you are really good at some skill—but only while in that form.  Zyx’s parents moved them to a whole ‘nother world, Ixalan, when they were just a baby, where they also grew up in a jungle, but a very different one: instead of tigers and monkeys, Zyx grew up with merfolk and feathered dinosaurs.  There, they learned to be a druid, and was content enough with that life, until somehow both parents and druid mentor disappeared within a few weeks of each other.  Zyx doesn’t spend much time looking like themself though: he can be Jon Wood, a very non-descript human man in his mid-thirties, or they can be Moon, a fierce shifter with short white hair and yellow eyes, or she can be Xoc,^*** an orange-skinned merfolk teenager who’s really great at alchemy.

My eldest is Isabella, a human who was raised in a creepy cult that turned out be to riddled with lycanthropes.  Her father was the cult leader, who turned out to be a werewolf, and, when she came of age, he bit her, and now she’s a werewolf too.  She soon ran away and has spent the remainder of her life trying to control her condition, and has now reached a point where she can enter a battle rage, changing to her hybrid wolf form, and not rip her allies to shreds.  Mostly.  Interestingly, she’s the oldest (although all Zyx’s forms appear older, Zyx themself is only 15, a year younger than Corva), but also the most sheltered, since she was never on her own until she left home, which she did at a much older age than either of the other two.  She’s capable of handling herself, certainly, but there’s also an innocence about her that contrasts with her bestial nature.

So far, it’s too early to know for sure how the intra-party dynamics will shake out, but we see some early indications.  Isabella seems somewhat disconcerted that a “child” will be accompanying them, even though Corva is no younger than she was when she left home.  But perhaps she sees herself in the younger girl a bit.  Meanwhile no one even knows how old Zyx is, since they’ve only met Jon and Moon so far—for that matter, no one else even knows Zyx’s actual name!  Corva just seems excited to be a part of all this, and no one at all seems concerned that, within the first few hours of meeting, one of their new friends turned into a werewolf.  And they’ve still yet to meet the mysterious fourth member of their party ...

I’m feeling pretty excited about where the story is going.  There will be some secrets revealed, and some dangers faced, and some dangers handily circumvented, and some new abilities discovered.  Hopefully some friends will also be made along the way.

Perhaps I’ll drop in here to report the progress from time to time.  I think it’s a story worth sharing.

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* That means “game master,” if you’re still not a D&D person and you still didn’t read the prologue blog post, which contains a footnote nearly identical to this one.  In this particular case, though, the relevant part of being the GM is that I’m responsible for choosing all the enemies they’ll have to fight.
** Which is a bit backwards from how I thought it would go down, to be honest.  But probably it was because the younger two are more easily amused, while my eldest was looking for more substance.  Hopefully this situation will improve as time goes on.
*** Pronounced “shock,” if you care.  Due to a bit of linguistic nerdery, we decided that “X"s in Ixalan are pronounced as “sh,” meaning that instead of “ICKS-uh-lan,” which is how most people pronounce it, we say “EESH-ah-lahn.”  We’re weird that way.

A (Belated) Happy Leap Day

Yesterday was Leap Day.

Every four years, we get the Olympics,^* and we Americans get a Presidential election, and we get leap year.  I always wondered how we managed to get all these lined up like that: if they’d spread them out a bit, we could have some excitement 3 years out of 4 and it wouldn’t be so draining once every four years.  But it is what it is, I suppose.

We have an extra day, of course, because, astronomically speaking, a solar year is way closer to 365.25 days than to 365 even, so every 4 years we manage to accumulate an extra day.  For more fun details on why there are leap years, plus way more interesting oddities about dates and times, you could check out my talk on dates in Perl from a few years back.  Sure, you may not know Perl, but only the last part of the talk is really about Perl; the rest of it is perfectly comprehensible regardless of your personal level of technogeekery.

Leap Day was often celebrated by “allowing” women to propose to men.  Supposedly, this was a negotiation between Saint Bridget and Saint Patrick in Ireland, back in the olden times (by which we mean the 5th century or so).  Very gracious of St. Patty to begrudge the women of Ireland 1 day out of 1,461 to choose their own spouses.  Hopefully this type of thing is not really required any more, despite the fact that the abysmally received Leap Year is a mere 10 years old.

Other than that, Februrary 29th is also St. Oswald’s Day.  Who, you may ask, is St. Oswald?  Enh.  Some dude.  You didn’t think they were going give leap day to any of the good saints, did you?

Tune in next week for a longer post.

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* Yes, yes, only the Summer Olympics, since 1992.  But, then, prior to 1924, those were the only Olypmics there were.

Paradoxically Sized World V

"If You Can Remember the Tune"

[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.  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.]

Can you believe it’s been just over 3 years since we last saw an installment in my LittleBigPlanet-inspired mix?  Perhaps it’s because I don’t actually listen to this volume as much as the others.  As often happens when one gets to a volume five situation—and, given the typical length of my mixes, that means entering hour six of music with the same general theme—we’re starting to run low on the awesome, stand-out tracks, and we’re just hitting solid, dependable tracks.  Definitely still fun to listen to, but there’s nothing here that leaps out and screams “me! me!” But, nonetheless, I don’t want any of these great tracks to get overlooked, so let’s dive right in.

Who’s back for more?  I see Lullatone is here with their fifth track in the mix so far, which makes sense: due to the nature of Lullatone’s style (which they refer to as “pajama pop,” and which often includes playing an actual toy piano), where else am I gonna put ’em?  KOAN Sound is back for a third appearance, as are both Pantha du Prince and Plaid.  All three—all four, if we include Lullatone—are artists I would never have discovered if it weren’t for LittleBigPlanet, and that’s what this mix really celebrates.

Possibly my favorite run on this volume is the back half of the opening third, starting with Jaga Jazzist’s “One-Armed Bandit,” from the Cloud Caravan level of LBP3, where you first get Swoop (your bird form).  It’s a juicy bit of jazzy electronica that flows right into “Shooby Shooby Do Yah!” from LBP Kart, which is how I discovered Mocean Worker (rhymes with “ocean worker”).  We’ve seen him twice on Salsatic Vibrato (first on V, where I gave a few details on his background, then again on VI), and we’ll see him on other mixes as well, because he’s awesome.  From there, it’s a little tiki-style 60s exotica from Michel Magne, then into the modern, upbeat bossa-nova-inflected “Beach Samba” found in the PSP version of the game.  It’s a perfect lead-in to the middle stretch, which kicks off with the surf-rock-inspired “Crime Scene” from Los Straitjackets, and thence to possibly the least-chill tune Smokey Bandits has yet recorded, “CrackerJack.” The Bandits have appeared in this series many times,^* but it looks like I’ve never told you anything about them.  It’s a side project for two musicians, one from Athens and one from Hamburg, who apparently^** like to argue about Tarantino films, drink champagne, and rewatch Smokey and the Bandit.  Typically, they do a jazzy sort of chill—an upbeat style of downtempo, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron—but this tune, with its embedded poice radio and siren sound effects, is a grittier track that works well after “Crime Scene.”

If there’s a focus for this volume, it’s surely the electronica side of LBP’s musical tastes.  Some of these tunes are right on the ragged edge of how far into electronica I go before backing away slowly: there’s nothing here so repetitive as the stereotypical techno, but a lot of these tunes—including opener “Sosacharo” by Ochre, Plaid’s “Squance,” Squarepusher’s LBP2 track “Planetarium,” and the two PS Vita version tracks: “Snatch Shot” by the Emperor Machine and “High Together” by Siriusmo—are pretty solidly electronic tones backed by electronic rhythms, repeated until just slightly before you were going to get sick of them.  I know that’s damning with faint praise, and many of the tracks are pretty cool, despite my snark, but I do have to be in the right mood for them.  In the same mold but showing a slightly more experimental bent, KOAN Sound once again takes that formula and infuses it with a bit of east Asian influence, while Amon Tobin both slows it down and metals it up with a slight industrial touch.  Meanwhile, Pantha du Prince wakes it up, by substituting bells for (most of) the electronic tones, and dispensing with the rhythm altogether.  And our closer by Ratatat takes electronica to an almost minimalist pop that winds us down nicely.

As always, I’ve added a note for each track used in a LittleBigPlanet game: either 1, 2, 3, PSP, PSV, or Kart.  If a track doesn’t have a note, it isn’t from an LBP game (that I know of).

Paradoxically Sized World V
[ If You Can Remember the Tune ]

“Sosacharo” by Ochre, off Lemodie
“Wave” by Pantha du Prince, off Elements of Light
“Snatch Shot” by the Emperor Machine [Single]

PSV

“Squance” by Plaid, off Double Figure
“One-Armed Bandit” by Jaga Jazzist [Single]

3

“Shooby Shooby Do Yah!” by Mocean Worker, off Candygram for Mowo!

Kart

“Come Closer to Me” by Michel Magne & his Orchestra, off The Exotic Sounds of Tiki Tribe [Compilation]
“Bossa na praia (Beach Samba)” by Astrud Gilberto [Single]

PSP

“Crime Scene” by Los Straitjackets, off Jet Set

3

“CrackerJack” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“High Together” by Siriusmo [Single]

PSV

“Fantastic Garden” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Dynasty” by KOAN Sound, off Dynasty [EP]
“Planetarium” by Squarepusher [Single]

2

“Driving Home with a Towel on the Seat” by Lullatone, off Summer Songs [EP]
“Marine Machines” by Amon Tobin, off Supermodified
“Panther” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Vision One” by Röyksopp, off Junior

2

“Glokenpop” by Spiderbait [Single]

PSP

“Flynn” by Ratatat, off LP3

Total:  20 tracks,  78:59

In the “unlikely but it kinda fits anyway” category, I essayed my first use of the Coraline soundtrack on an uptempo mix: “Fantastic Garden” imparts a bit of the wonder that its name implies, and I think it works well here.  The worldmusic-inspired downtempo of Monster Rally (who we’ve thus far seen only on Apparently World) makes a nice interlude that takes us into our final tracks.  And, despite the fact that they’re both actually found in LittleBigPlanet games,^*** both Röyksopp’s simultaneously buzzy and smooth “Vision One” and Spiderbait’s absolutely poppy “Glokenpop” do seem somewhat out-of-place.  While I’ve come to love Röyksopp’s downtempo electronica quite a bit, and it was this song which introduced me to them, honestly this is not the side of them that I appreciate most.  This is also the song of Spiderbait’s which introduced me to the Australian trio, and contrariwise I don’t care much for the rest of their œuvre, but this one song is pretty hip.  It’s pure pop glitz (as the name implies), but it’s pretty irresistable in its catchiness.  Besides, as these are the only two songs with any real lyrics in them, “Glokenpop” was the best choice of a song to provide our volume title.

Next time, we’ll expore some more instrumental territory, but in an even more upbeat vein.

⇐ Paradoxically Sized World IV

Paradoxically Sized World VI ⇒

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* Specifically, in Shadowfall Equinox II, Shadowfall Equinox IV, and Salsatic Vibrato VI.

** According to their Facebook page.

*** Specifically, LBP2 and the PSP version, respectively.

Still movin' on into the future ...

This week I achieved a bit of a milepost at $work, so that was nice.  And now I’m in the middle of a 3-day weekend, so that’s pretty nice as well.  Other than that, I’ve got nothing to say this week.  Tune in next time!

Perl blog post #60

This week, unusually, I’ve done another post on my Other Blog—that’s two in a month!  Unheard of.  So, if you have any interest in the topic of hardcoding unit test data (e.g. whether or not you should), head on over there.  If that sounds totally boring to you, then you’ll just have to wait until next week.  (Or, more realistically, wait for two weeks for something substantial.)  See you then.

Nothing going on

Nothing to chat about this week.  I’m working on a new Perl module for $work and also for personal use; maybe that’ll become a nifty blog topic in time.  In the meanwhile, you’ll have to get your blog kicks elsewhere.  See you next week.

Only the Finest Baby Frogs

I would guess that I was somewhere between 8 and 10 when I first saw Monty Python.

I was at my grandmother’s house.  Back in those days, most people had color TVs, but only the “big” TV in the family room.  If there were any other TVs throughout the house (and, in many houses, there weren’t), they were still black-and-white.  They all had real, honest-to-god antennae, because no one had invented cable yet (and wouldn’t for another decade or so).  We had two “bands” on the TV just like we had two on the radio, except instead of FM and AM, it was VHF and UHF.¹  The “normal” channels—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were on VHF and came in crystal clear, barring gale-force weather conditions.  In our small-ish town, we could get 2 channels on UHF, both hopelessly staticy unless the sky was completely cloudless and you managed to tweak the antenna just so.  One played religious programming like The 700 Club during the night, black-and-white comedies like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best during the day, and, weirdly, cool anime cartoons like Star Blazers and G-Force in the afternoons after school.  The other was the local PBS station, and its daytime and afternoons were filled with the typical fare: Sesame Street and The Electric Company and the occasional Romper Room rerun.  At a certain point gool ol’ channel 15² started playing boring crap like news and I would tune it out.  But, for some reason—undoubtedly desperation, meaning there must have been absolute shit on all the other channels—this one night, I decided to see what channel 15 had on at 8 or 9 at night.

And, what it was, was ... well, honestly, I had no idea what it was.  In those days, proper comedies had laugh tracks, so I knew they were funny.  This didn’t have that.  So maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny?  But it certainly wasn’t meant to be taken seriously either.  Most of the sophisticated wordplay was over my head, none of the English class humor was landing, obviously,³ and surrealist comdey wasn’t something I’d ever been exposed to.  For that matter, was there surrealist comedy before Python?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  The point is, I was utterly unprepared to process what I saw that night.  I remember not “getting” it, not particularly liking it, and thinking I would probably never watch that crap again.  But of course I was wrong.

Throughout my life, there have been many comedies that I couldn’t appreciate upon first viewing, but which have since become central to my concept of humor: Beavis and Butthead springs to mind, as does The Mighy Boosh.  Oh, sure, sometimes it clicks right way: South Park, or the Young Ones, or Arrested Development ... all odd, but I felt right at home with them immediately.  But Ren & Stimpy took a few tries before I could fully appreciate it, and The State was certainly more confusing than amusing until I started to feel the rhythm of it.  Monty Python was my first, though, and they say you never forget your first.  It was the first time that my first viewing produced “this is crap” and my second produced “well, there a couple of good parts” and the third was perhaps “you know, it’s not half-bad” and by the time I hit four or five I was finding it utterly hilarious.⁴

The pinnacle, though, was my senior year in high school.  I distinctly remember getting together with my friends in the late summer before the school year: we had a picnic in one of the public parks in my hometown.  I had been an outcast all throughout my school career, until I switched schools in the middle of the 10th grade and had the good fortune to fall in with a fairly hip crowd.  But I still remembered what it was like to be on the other side of the Great High School Divide, and I was bemoaning all the cliques and all that.  “I wish there were parties where just anyone could come, and it didn’t matter who you were or who you hung out with or any of that,” I said.⁵  And someone said, why don’t you just throw a party like that?  And at first this didn’t make any sense to me, because, you know, I was hanging with the cool kids, but I wasn’t necessarily a cool kid myself—certainly not in my own mind, anyway.  So I was thinking, who would want to come to a party at my house, and also why the hell would my parents let me have a party at my house, also how would I pay for party supplies and whatnot ... it didn’t really seem rational.  But we started fleshing out a plan: they would be movie parties, so people would come because they wanted to check out the movies, and we had one of those fancy new “VCR” thingies so we could actually show the movies, and most other people didn’t have one of those so they’d have to come to my house because they couldn’t just sit at home and watch movies themselves, and we’d collect money at the door as contributions and that would pay for soda and popcorn and the actual movie rental and all that, and my parents ... well, honestly I can’t even remember how the hell I talked them into this, but I did.  And we came up with a manifesto, about how everyone was welcome and no one would ever be turned away (unless you didn’t bring your money for the cover charge) and, if you didn’t like it that you might bump into literally anyone from high school there, you just shouldn’t come.  And there were never invitations, just ... word of mouth.  Everyone knew that everyone could come, and most of ’em did, at least once.  We ended up doing this movie party thing maybe 3 times? maybe 4?  I can’t recall.  But I can absolutely tell you, for sure, what the movies were for the absolute first everyone-is-welcome movie-party at my house: we closed with Poltergeist, and we opened with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now, I wish I could take credit for having the idea to show this, Monty Python’s first “proper” movie,⁶ but I honestly think it was my best friend Mackey who suggested it.  If you are not familiar with it, the credits are all at the beginning of the movie—and interspersed with classic goofs in the middle of them, such as “A Møøse once bit my sister” and “The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.”—and, at the end of the movie, there is nothing.  Just a song which repeats ad infinitum over a blank screen.  I mean, it was a videotape, so it couldn’t have literally gone on forever, but I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you how long we let it sit there and play before someone finally said, “shit! the credits were all at the beginning, rememeber!” and we all laughed at ourselves and initiated the bathroom break while we rewound the tape and set up for the next movie.

And that only goes to cover the very beginning and very end of this classic movie, which has since become one of my favorites.  In fact, I’m pretty cagey about picking an absolute favorite out of my top 10 or 20 favorite movies,⁷ but, realistically, Holy Grail is almost certainly at the top of that list.  It is, above all else, inifinitely quotable, and practically every line in it is classic: “I got better ...” and “your father smelt of elderberries!” and “what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” and “strange women lyin’ in ponds is no basis for a system of government” and “three, sir” and “let me go back in there and face the peril” and “I’ll just stay here, then, shall I?” and “brave Sir Robin bravely ran away” and “I think I’ll go for a walk” and “help! help! I’m being repressed!” and “of course it’s a good idea!” and “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” and “go away or I shall taunt you a second time!” and “get on with it!”  This paragraph could easily have been twice as long and I still would not have exhausted all the great lines in this movie.

When my eldest child was young we watched the entirety of the original series, including a couple of episodes I had somehow missed, and we watched Holy Grail often enough that we could recite the Black Knight scene by heart.  We would act it out with toy swords upon occasion: “It’s just a flesh wound”  “You’re a loony.”

Throughout all my life I have hated musicals.  With a great and unabiding passion.  And yet I know all the words to “The Lumberjack Song” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and “Every Sperm is Sacred”:

Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I am a connoisseur of the Ministry of Silly Walks, and Teddy Salad, CIA man, and the music of Johann Gambolputty &c of Ulm, and The Bishop, and the Spanish Inquisition, and pet ants, and how not to be seen, and Norwegian Blue parrots, and argument clinics, and mouse organs, and sharp, pointy sticks, and Confuse-a-Cat Limited, and the Piranha Brothers, and most especially that time of the evening when it’s just gone eight o’clock and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.  I have watched, several times, A Fish Called Wanda and Time Bandits and Brazil and The Fisher King and, at least once, Clockwise and The Rutles and Yellowbeard and Fierce Creatures and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Jabberwocky.  It’s certainly possible that there is a group of six to ten people unrelated to me who have had a bigger influence on my cultural development than the members and contributors of Monty Python, but, if so, I can’t imagine who they are.

Graham Chapman died in late 1989, as I was preparing to make a major move in my life: from the small town where I had lived all but a single year of my life to the environs of my nation’s capital, where I would, after a 3-year absence, finally return to college.  I was too caught up in my own life to notice his passing, I fear, and I only mourned later, but not too much: so many of the members remained.  When Ian MacNaughton, director of all but 4 of the episodes of the Flying Circus and one of the several people to be referred to as “the seventh Python,” died in 2002, it wasn’t major news, sadly, and I never even noticed at all.  But, in the past month, we’ve lost two more: Neil Innes, who sang about brave, brave Sir Robin in Holy Grail and “I Must Be in Love” for the Rutles, and who was perhaps most credited with being the “seventh Python,” died only 3 days shy of seeing in the new decade, and Terry Jones—the Bishop, Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Sir Bedevere, Mr. Creosote (he of the “wafer-thin” mint fame), last surviving undertaker, purveyor of strange stains and mysterious smells, and Cardinal Biggles, poker of innocent women with soft cushions—has, as I write this, been gone for less than a week.  I myself am now at that age where I’m really starting to notice the deaths of my heroes, and even moreso at that age where such deaths start to happen with somewhat depressing regularity.

At 76, Michael Palin is the youngest of the survivors, and the mighty John Cleese is already 80.  Eric Idle is just a few months older than Palin; Terry Gilliam just a year younger than Cleese; Carol Cleveland (wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!) is right in the center of them at 78.  So I suspect that I’ll be receiving 5 more of these little missives of obituarial melancholia, unless one or more of them manages to outlive me, which would not really be better, if I may be so selfish.  Still, I hope I may be forgiven my whinging just a bit.  These are the people who had the profoundest impact on shaping my concept of what “funny” means, who initiated my Anglophilia, thus leading me to Fry & Laurie and the Young Ones and French and Saunders and Blackadder and Red Dwarf and The IT Crowd.  These are the people who, in a small but significant way, made me who I am today.  I’ll miss them one by one as they move on, and I’ll especially miss them once they’re all gone for good.  The Pythons themselves seem prone to making jokes upon the occasion of each other’s deaths—Cleese supposedly said of Jones’ passing “two down and four to go”—and that’s appropriate.  I’m sure that once you’ve spent that many decades trying to make people laugh, you’ve got to be a bit irked if people can’t laugh after you’re gone.  But, still ... my laughter this month is tinged with a patina of sorrow.  These were giants to me ... if nothing else, a giant foot which squashed my boredom and had a policeman’s head on top of it saying “wot’s all this then?”

Or perhaps just ... “Dinsdale!”

__________

1 The highly-underrated “Weird Al” movie of the same name immortalizes those times.
2 The VHF channels went from 2 to 13 (there was no channel 1, although I never really knew why); anything 14 or up was UHF.  Those channels went up to some large-ish number—78, maybe?—but the reception got crappier the higher they went, so mostly the channels would stay at the lower end of the band as much as possible.
3 As I was a stupid American who doesn’t “get” that sort of thing.
4 And perhaps we shouldn’t limit ourselves to television: the aforementioned “Weird Al” Yankovic was an acquired taste for me, as was This Is Spinal Tap.
5 Or, you know, words to that effect.  It was 35 years ago; don’t take “I distinctly remember” as meaning that I’m offering you a verbatim account of that day.
6 Python’s technically first movie is just a glorified clip show of the series, which I always found very disappointing, as by that time I knew all those sketches.
7 I often refer to them as my “Top X Movies,” because the number only ever gets bigger.

Grandiloquence of Otiosity

This week I completed another week of laptop recovery (because the computer gods hate me), and I finally started on the Smaller Animal‘s solo adventure for the family campaign.  It was also my first week back at $work, which went pretty well, I released several CPAN updates for my Perl modules, and the smallies are easing back into their school routine.  Overall not too exciting a week, but I’m fairly happy with the progress.

Tune in next week for a (hopefully) longer post.

Perl blog post #59

After more than a year off, I finally return to my Other Blog for a Perl post.  You’ve certainly heard of the Y2K bug ... perhaps you’ve even heard of the Y2038 bug ... but have you heard of the Y2020 bug?  No, of course you haven’t, because I just made it up.  But go over and check it out, if you’re so inclined.

Another decade bites the dust

Well, the holidays are over, and it’s time to get back to work.  On the one hand, I haven’t been to the office at $work for about 17 days now, so it’ll be nice to get back, and I’m sure my family is just as sick of having me around as I am of being around.  On the other hand, there’s something to the sentiment that The Mother expressed a few days ago: “I want it to be the week between Christmas and New Year’s for the rest of forever.”

From the I’m-Getting-Too-Old-for-This-Shit department:  Today I broke my 5th or 6th dish in the past few months.  It completely exploded (because of course it did)—as Neil once said, it was smashed into 15 million pieces, and every single one of those pieces was smashed into 15 million pieces, and, although at that point I stopped counting, I wouldn’t be surprised if ...  Apparently they make special dishes for old people that are easier to grip, so I reckon I’m going to have buy some of those.  Or at least dishes that don’t shatter on impact.

This year I’m looking forward to more sessions in the Family Campaign, and possibly getting some interesting Perl work done, and hopefully marking a few things off my todo list.  It’s a new decade, after all, and I’m sure many folks look at that as a fresh start.  But, you know, I’m not going to complain about a little more of the same ol’ thing, because, for me, the same ol’ thing is pretty nice.

Sickness behind, hope ahead

Well, another Christmas come and gone.  Mostly I was sick for it.  In fact, I didn’t eat anything at all for over 24 hours: no Christmas cookies, no Christmas chocolate, no ham biscuits.  And, when I did finally eat (right before bed on Christmas night), it was cinnamon toast and turmeric tea.  But enough whining.

The kids seemed to have a lovely day at least.  (They got over their respective bugs well before the big day.)  There was lots of playing with videogames and dolls, and the eldest one and I got to play D&D on Christmas night.^*  So it wasn’t all bad.

Still, hoping New Year’s will be disease-free.  Oh, and that you, dear reader, will have a lovely 2020.

__________

* This was the second of the “flashbackstories” that I mentioned previously.

A season's greeting musical update

Well, it’s nearly Christmas again, and so time to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah.^*  As I apparently only do new Christmas mixes every 5 years, I guess it’s not time for volume III of my excellent collection of holiday classics Yuletidal Pools.  Which is a shame.  But I’ll offer you the next best thing: minor updates to volumes I & II.

One creates one’s mixes with the best of intentions, and the belief that they will last forever.  Alas, every now and again you find that something you were sure you were going to love always is starting to grate on your nerves a bit.  To that end, I’ve found that two of the tracks I picked for Yuletidal Pools (one on each volume, as it happens) aren’t really working for me any more.  So I’ve updated the tracklists with new replacement tunes.

For volume I, I’ve replaced “My First Xmas, as a Woman” with “Merry Christmas I Fucked Your Snowman” by Botson punks the Showcase Showdown.  A bit of a risky move, as, in a few more years, the latter may begin to annoy me as much as the former has begun to.  But it seemed an appropos swap, and it really is a fun little tune, if a bit over-the-top.

For volume II, I found that “Xmas at K-Mart” began to grate on my nerves as much as it always has my family’s.  So I replaced it with the much slicker “Santa’s Lost His Mojo,” by the Lost Fingers.^**  It’s less of a 1-for-1 swap, but I think it still flows pretty nicely in the same spot, and it’s certainly a much nicer tune to listen to.

So there’s a least a couple of new tracks for ya.  And, if you hadn’t yet discovered my Christmas mix, it’s two full sets that you can enjoy as an antidote to the typical holiday pablum that your ears are currently being assaulted with.  You can thank me later.

Wishing everyone the best, and wondering if I’ll actually manage a full post between Christmas and New Year’s ... happy holidays, you guys.  Take care.

__________

* As always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.
** And thanks to new co-worker Max for letting me know about those guys.

No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

__________

1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.

It's the most overstressed time of the year ...

This has been one of our busiest weeks of the year:

• Monday the Smaller Animal was in D&D class.
• Tuesday The Mother took all the kids to Magic Mountain.
• Thursday was Inspire’s Winter Wonderland followed by Dojo Boom.
• Friday was Dave & Buster’s.
• Saturday was our belated National Heroscape Day celebration; I took the kids and The Mother stayed home this time.
• Sunday was a birthday party.

Additionally, there was going to be a vendor fair Wednesday and the annual holiday party for $work on Thursday night, but somethings had to give.  Partially because it’s been raining like crazy here in the desert, which is, needless to say, somewhat uncharacteristic.  So, I wish I had time to write more, but I’m just too tired.  Next time.

Shadowfall Equinox VI

"The Hungry Ghost That Lingers"

[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.  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.]

I really thought that, after narrowly missing being the first mix to achieve a sixth volume, surely Smokelit Flashback would be the second.  But it’s funny how things work out.  See, I listen to a lot of music at work, and, when I’m doing more mindless work that I don’t have to allot that much mental capacity to, upbeat fare rules the day: Salsatic Vibrato is a go-to, but Sirenexiv Cola or Totally Different Head are good choices too.  When I need to actually concentrate on stuff, though, I need something that’s a bit mellower, a bit more background-able.  For many moons Smokelit Flashback fulfilled that need for me.  Lately, though, Shadowfall Equinox has been coming to the fore.

This makes perfect sense, of course.  As I began describing way back with the inaugural entry into this series, and perhaps culminating with my deeper exploration of just what “ambient” means as a musical style in the third installment, SfE is all about ambient, and ambient is all about contemplative thought and creative endeavor.  As Brian Eno put it way back in ‘78, “Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think.” So it’s a crucial part of my work regime, and every once in a while I decide I need some more variety ... something new.  And that invariably leads to a new volume of this mix, my tribute to the Hearts of Space program that really kicked off my mixes as they exist in the modern sense.  So here we are.

Just as with Salsatic Vibrato VI, this mix is falling into a groove, but also showing even more variety as it goes along.  Volume I, you may recall, featured 3 tracks from Jeff Greinke and 2 from Black Tape for a Blue Girl, whereas this mix has only one track from each and no repeated artists at all.  In fact, only 3 other tracks are from artists we’ve seen before in this mix, leaving a whopping 13 tracks from new artists.¹  Sure, that means that several artists we’ve come to expect—such as This Mortal Coil, Falling You, and Stellamara—aren’t here this time out.  But fresh faces are always good: new blood keeps the mix from going stale.

Of course, old blood provides continuity, and we weren’t about to see a Shadowfall installment without hearing from Jeff Greinke, who is the only artist to appear on every volume.  Though we’ve explored a few other albums from this ambient master, we haven’t fully exhausted the album where we started, Wide View.  “Glide” is another track typical of that amazing album: slow and autumnal, with a crispness somehow reminiscent of the brittleness of first frost.  From Black Tape for a Blue Girl,² also a fairly typical piece: “Tear Love from My Mind,” from one of Rosenthal’s early(ish) albums, A Chaos of Desire.  There are muted, muddy vocals in there somewhere, but mainly it’s a swirling, floating, goth-drenched ethereal piece that epitomizes the darkwave sound.  And, while Kevin Keller didn’t show up for our very first volume, he’s been on every volume since, and this one is no exception.  “Peace” is a calm, soothing piece from only about a decade ago, and shows off Keller’s style admirably.  His marriage of ambient and neoclassical is sometimes referred to as “ambient chamber music,”³ and this track embodies that pretty perfectly.

Our other two returning artists are Jade Leary and Jens Gad, both of whom we saw for the first time last volume.  “Salvatrice,” is a fairly typical piece of gothic minimalism from Leary, while “El Momento” harkens pretty strongly back to Gad’s days with Enigma.  It’s tough to beat “The Orbiting Suns” (which is his piece from last volume), but this one is pretty solid too.

The Cocteau Twins are not technically a returning artist, but only because their track from last time (“Sea, Swallow Me”) was a collaboration with Harold Budd.  For this volume, I thought it high time we have a proper, solo⁴ effort from the Cocteaus.  “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” is another beautiful piece off Victorialand⁵ which provides that amazing, dreamy sound that the Cocteaus are so well-deservedly known for, as well as a touch of a dark reminder that they started out as a goth band.  Angels of Venice we’ve not seen before on this mix, but of course we’ve seen them plenty: mainly on Numeric Driftwood—every volume so far, in fact—but also on Penumbral Phosphorescence and even Fulminant Cadenza.  “The Sins of Salome,” from their second album, has a bit of Middle Eastern flair (as the name implies), but mainly its wordless vocals and sombre cello carry us, relaxed and untroubled, into our closing track.  Likewise, Télépopmusik has so far been relegated to Smokelit Flashback—specifically volumes IV and V—where their downtempo trip-hop fits in perfectly.  But “Swamp” is something a bit different: not quite creepy, but not quite not creepy either, the science-fiction background noises and the lonely jazz saxophone backed by strings in the foreground combine to make something more downbeat and ethereal than their usual fare.

Many of the new faces here result from an exploration I did looking for neoclassical bands I had not yet discovered.  Mira Calix, for instance, I was assured (by the Internet) was neoclassical, but I’m not sure I buy it.  South African born, London bred, Calix is mostly electronica of the decidedly weird variety, though she does have a tendency to mix in classical instrumentation.  “Schmyk” is a minimalist piano piece with some concurrent synth noodling and not as much discordancy as she seems to be prone to from my limited experience with her thus far.  Opener “Somnolence” is from Swedish dark neoclassical band Arcana.  They remind me quite a bit of Dark Sanctuary, the French dark neoclassical band we first heard on volume II.⁶  For a while, this volume just opened with “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow,” but eventually I decided it needed a short intro piece, and “Somnolence” is just too awesome to pass up.  I don’t like all of Arcana’s output,⁷ but this track is great: quiet, just slightly menacing, and building up to something.  Here I pay that off with the Cocteaus, which I think is a better choice than whatever Arcana used on their album.  Finally, Ludovico Einaudi is an Italian pianist whose spare “Solo” (from Nightbook) is the perfect closer for this set of late-fall-inspired contemplative tunes.

As for the new ambient artists, the collaboration bewteen Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner is actually one I’ve had for a while now, but I think I must have forgotten about it and only recently rediscovered it.  It’s pretty amazing, if not particularly genre-transcending, and “Vicis Pro Vicis” is one of the most spare and ethereal pieces on an album where spare and ethereal are the words of the day.  Whereas Esther Garcia, who I originally found on Jamendo with one of those sets I like to refer to as “soundtrack portfolios,” is harder to pigeonhole.  Like all such albums, her Incidental Fussion is very eclectic, with no two tracks really sounding alike, but the delicate, airy beauty of “Air Elements” is the one that seemed perfect for this mix.

Like Télépopmusik, Laika is mostly downtempo trip-hop,⁸ but “Dirty Feet and Giggles” is more of a weird interlude on its home album.  Here it makes a bare-bones, echoey, too-long-to-be-a-bridge into the second third of the volume, and specifically into Kid Loco’s amazing remix of Talvin Singh’s “Traveller.” The original is a meandering piece of rave-adjacent electronica from Singh, a Brit known for fusing Indian style into drum&bass.  What French DJ Kid Loco does with it here, on the other hand, is much closer to downtempo/chill.  It’s just a hair away from landing on Smokelit Flashback, but it’s just light and relaxing enough to end up here instead.

When it came to picking a volume title, it was slim pickings indeed this time out.  The line I used is from the Black Tape for a Blue Girl track, supposedly; I sure can’t hear it, but the Internet assures me it’s true.  And it sounded cool in any event.

Shadowfall Equinox VI
[ The Hungry Ghost That Lingers ]

“Somnolence” by Arcana, off As Bright as a Thousand Suns
“How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“El Momento” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Vicis Pro Vicis” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Dirty Feet and Giggles” by Laika, off Sounds of the Satellites
“Traveller [Kid Loco's Once Upon a Time in the East mix]” by Talvin Singh [Single]⁹
“Swamp” by Télépopmusik, off Angel Milk
“Salvatrice” by Jade Leary, off And Come the Sirens
“Tear Love from My Mind” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off A Chaos of Desire
“Sleepwalker” by Colourbox, off Colourbox
“Godnat” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Peace” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Schmyk” by Mira Calix, off One on One
“Glide” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Air Elements” by Esther Garcia, off Incidental Fussion
“Find the Song” by Mary Youngblood, off Dance with the Wind
“The Sins of Salome” by Angels of Venice, off Awake Inside a Dream
“Solo” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook

Total:  18 tracks,  80:19

In the “what the heck are these guys doing here?” category, we have first and foremost Colourbox, the not-really-dreampop alternapop labelmates of the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance.  And, since they were part of the 4AD stable, members of Colourbox appeared in the music collective This Mortal Coil, which is how I discovered them.  Colourbox is known—inasmuch as they’re known at all—for eclectic, upbeat songs, but “Sleepwalker” is something entirely different: another spare piano piece, but (unlike Keller’s “Peace”) with a more lonely sound, almost like the background music in the sad part of the movie, where the protagonist is feeling low before the climactic comeback.  Next up, Analogik, a Danish electrojazz group who came to me via LittleBigPlanet.¹⁰  “Godnat” is uncharactistically slow and meditative; its electronic sounds—reminiscent of an old ship creaking on the waves—are almost hypnotic here.

And, last but not least, I found Mary Youngblood when I went looking for some Native American music ... not the traditional sort, but more modern fare infused with Native American elements and, if possible, performed by Native American artists.  This is how I discovered that there used to be such a thing as a “Best Native American Music Album” Grammy, and that Mary Youngblood had won two of them.  I confess that I don’t properly appreciate all her songs, but her flautism is undeniably beautiful, and “Find the Song” is easily my favorite tune of hers.

Next time, we’ll swing back a bit more upbeat, to our bright-and-shiny videogame-inspired mix.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox V

Shadowfall Equinox VII ⇒

__________

1 Although, to be fair, several of them have been seen before here on different mixes.

2 Who we’ve seen on every volume but one.

3 At least Wikipedia refers to it that way.

4 Well, I suppose “solo” is not the right word to describe a three-person band named after twins, but you know what I mean.

5 Feel free to refer back to my full discussion of how I discovered this amazing album.

6 And, since the two bands started within a couple of years of each other, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole dark neoclassical scene in Europe that I’ve missed out on.

7 Come to think of it, I don’t like all of Dark Sanctuary’s stuff either.

8 Only they’re from the UK instead of France.

9 As always, I hate linking to YouTube.  But this one doesn’t seem to available for purchase anywhere, at least in the US.  Maybe if you’re overseas you’ll have better luck.

10 And, thus, they will eventually start showing up on volumes of Paradoxically Sized World.

Less than nothing to say ... practically a negative amount to say, really

It’s a short week, and I’m a little busy on top of that, so I’m not going to say much this week.  Tune in next week to see if I can muster up a full post.

D&D and Me: Part 6 (The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap out of People)

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

[Last time I talked about more of my D&D characters and what attracted me to each one.  I had just reached the point of buying 3rd edition and thinking I should try out a new class, with my friend Tim DMing.]

Tim, ever my exemplar, had played a monk, named Edax Rarem, for many years, and I’d always admired him.  Many people hate monks in their D&D games, for basically the same reasons that they hate psionics, or dinosaurs, or guns (even very primitive ones): fantasy purism.  Get your chocolate out of my peanut butter, so to speak.  But I like mixing odd things, so I never had any hang-ups about scifi-style psychic powers in my high fantasy, nor about wuxia-style mystical monks in my solidly Eurocentric medieval-based fantasy.  Bring on the weirdness, I say.  And, as it turned out, Jin Shangtzi was probably the character that I ran for the longest amount of time.  He survived an edition upgrade (from 3e to 3.5e), he played with multiclassing into psionic classes, he spoke little and broke things a lot.  To this day, Jin is one of my fondest D&D character memories.

The thing that is awesome about D&D monks is that they are not the greatest offensive fighters, they are not the stealthiest, they have little abiltiy to sling spells and can’t heal for shit, but, when it comes to defense, they are insanely good.  They have the best saving throws in the game, their armor class scales with their level and their nearly-always-astronomical wisdom score, and they’re the fastest characters in the game.  Besides a nearly pathological desire to break things, Jin was focussed on mobility.  I kept his balance and tumble skills maxed out at all times, and his climb and jump and escape artist weren’t far behind.  I used his few psionic abilities to enhance his already impressive strengths: inertial armor boosted his already high armor class, burst briefly upped his already crazy-high speed, and catfall on top of the monk-standard slow fall ability meant that he never really worried about falling off anything.  He wasn’t the character who could take out the enemy in one round, but he didn’t really care about how many rounds it took, because he wasn’t getting hit by anything, and he was running circles around the bad guys while they tried.

A quick story, which may have been one of my favorite Jin moments ever:  We were attempting to rescue some captives who were being experimented on in this big open underground chamber which was overlooked by a large balcony thing—the way Tim described it, it sounded like the observation deck at a sports stadium or something along those lines.  But there were no stairs or ladder or anything; it seemed that you had to get to this balcony from somewhere deeper in the cave system, because there was literally no way to get from where we were up to it.  And, up there, looking down and (figuratively, at least) thumbing his nose at us, was the Big Bad (or at least who we thought was the Big Bad at that time).  So I decided to let the rest of my party handle taking out the mook guards down here and resucing the hostages: I was going go get that fucker.  You can’t reach the balcony, says Tim.  Jin jumps for it, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you’re just hanging off the bottom of the balcony; you still can’t get to the railing, he says.  Jin starts climbing, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you realize that the balcony isn’t just open, there’s a transparent barrier of some kind, he says.  Jin breaks it, I say.  But it’s not glass, Tim says; it’s some sort of crytsal, only fairly thin, so you can see through it, but still pretty strong.  Jin starts punching it, I say.  It might take him a while, but he’ll get through it.  By this point, the bad guy’s sneer is gone, and he’s starting to look a bit worried.  As the first cracks appear in the giant crystal window, he decides to get the hell out of there.  Patient as ever, Jin just keeps right on punching.  No need to worry: he knew he could run twice as fast as the bad guy ...

Jin was ostensibly an Asian character, but I never really borrowed the cultural aspect of that.  It was mainly a physical thing: if you’re going to play a monk character, who doesn’t want to look like Bruce Lee?  Actually, Jin was more of cross between Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but bald.  And no shirt.  In fact, although it wasn’t exactly a vow of poverty, Jin never had any interest in material possessions, and generally travelled around wearing nothing but pants and a rope belt.  He was thin and ropily muscled; not overly strong, but very lithe and wiry.  As a child, he was the youngest of a huge family.  His parents couldn’t really deal with having one more mouth to feed, so, when a group of traveling monks passed by, they agreed to offer their young son in service, in exchange for some food and perhaps a few coins.  Yes, they essentially sold their child; but, on the other hand, he probably ended up getting a better life out of it.  Unlike the standard dark backstory of dead parents, Jin just didn’t ever think much about his family: they never really mattered to him.  The monastery was his family, and there he learned the wonder of breaking things.

See, I had decided that Jin was a monk dedicated to a deity.  This wasn’t strictly necessary, from a game standpoint—if you were a cleric, you definitely had to pick a deity, and if you were a druid or a paladin, you were encouraged to pick a deity, but monks could just be monks.  Not Jin, I decided.  Glancing through the Greyhawk gods,^* there was one clear choice: St. Cuthbert, who was, as Wikipedia puts it, “the combative deity of Wisdom, Dedication, and Zeal.” Could there possibly be a divine figure that more screams “monk!” at you?  I think not.  So I decided that monasteries of St. Cuthbert, while perhaps rare, did exist, and they would typically house two orders of monks: the Gnostics, who believed in study and meditation and concentrating on developing the mind, and the Somatics, who believe in exercise and disciplined movement and concentrating on developing the body.  The Gnostics were the majority in any given monastery, but there were always at least a few Somatics, who were the adventuring monks, the monks of action ... the ones that the D&D class was referring to.  Jin was one of those.  From a mechanical perspective, Cuthbert was lawful neutral (as was Jin), but, while he was not explicitly good, he didn’t allow evil clerics either (Jin certainly leaned more towards good than evil).  Among Cuthbert’s domains are strength and destruction, which is awesome for a monk whose primary mode of dealing with the world is to punch it in the face.

But I decided that Jin was not just a thug who liked beating people up under the guise of religion.  No, Jin (like all the Somatics, in my wholly invented history) believed that the only way to understand the universe was by breaking as much of it down as possible, and by breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, until you could understand the nature of matter by understanding each of its components.  That the best way to break things down was by punching the living shit out of them was just a bonus, as far as Jin was concerned.  With his absolutely abysmal charisma, he was socially awkward, but not in a shy way.  You know how some people just say whatever they think, without regard for social propriety or whether it might hurt anyone’s feelings?  That was Jin.  He never lied, but not because he had anything against it, particularly: he just sucked at it.  If the party engaged in any sort of subterfuge, they quickly learned that they had to tell Jin to just shut up entirely; if they encouraged him to try to play along with the deception, he would happily try ... and fail, every time.  In any event, he never much understood the point of lying, even if he was happy to play along with whatever his friends wanted.  So much easier to just say what you mean, and mean what you say.  He was a deep thinker (middling intelligence and, of course, very high wisdom), and he was well aware of his tendency to say the wrong thing, so he often stayed completely silent, preferring action to words.  He had no interest in gold or jewels, and even magic items only interested him insofar as they could help him break things.  I’m pretty sure his only real magic item, even at the higher levels, was something Tim invented specifically for him: they were bracers, and they increased his damage against creatures a bit, as I recall, but they were especially helpful in destroying objects, which is something Jin really loved to do.  Can’t get the chest open?  Ask Jin to break it for you.  Can’t pick the lock on the door?  Jin will be happy to break it into splinters, I’m sure.  Dangerous artifact needs to be destroyed?  Jin is practically salivating over there to have at it.

Though Jin concentrated on being a monk, I still retained my fascination for D&D’s weird little system of psionics, and when the Psionics Handbook came out, with all new (much simpler) mechanics for 3e, I instantly siezed on the psychic warrior class.  Keeps the base attack and the fortitude save at appropriate levels, while adding cool psionic powers and (oooh!) psionic feats.  I’d already played a psionicist, so I was familiar with what psionics could do.  And, while many people (including my eldest child) don’t see a connection between monks and psionics, I always thought it was a natural fit: they both need discipline, they both concentrate on developing their minds, they both are just slightly to the left of “regular” magic.  So I loved adding a few psychic warrior levels to Jin’s solid monk background.  The last level I took (which I believe brought Jin up to 12th) was a variation of sacred/psionic fist, which I reworked specifically to get access to the destruction domain.  Once a day smite and an inflict light wounds deliverable via touch attack?  Well, Jin’s method of “touching” people was to punch them in the face, so, hell yeah: sign me up for all of that.

Jin was a big part of my D&D experience and, as you do with any of the PCs you carry around for a while, I began to think of him more like a friend than a fictional character.  It was definitely the only time I really enjoyed being a primarily combat-focussed character, but then Jin was always more that just a guy punching people (although he thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of it).  He was a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a mentalist, and a big believer in the orderliness of the universe.  He never wanted to be the ruler of the kingdom, but when his friend Magnus (a sorceror-cum-dragon-disciple played by our friend Marcus) ended up taking the throne (due to a series of weird circumstances kicked off primarily by his emergent draconic nature), he was quite pleased to take over the job of head of the palace guard.  Instill discipline in a bunch of raw recruits while simultaneously keeping all the important people safe?  It was perfect.

Next time: the long break, exploring Pathfinder, and coming back home to 5th edition.

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* Greyhawk was the default setting for 3e, just as the Forgotten Realms is for 5e.