D&D 5e: The Starting Level Dilemma

I briefly alluded to several things last week specifically related to the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (or D&D 5e for short).  I will attempt to expand on those in a few blog posts, of which this is the first.  These posts will mostly assume that you know (or at least care) about the rules of D&D, so you may want to give this week a pass if that’s not your thing (although I’ll try to make it understandable even if you’re a newbie).  As always, refer to the masthead for some really swell advice.

The thing that I’m interested in today is the question of what level to use for starting characters.  Now, even if you’re not much of a pen-and-paper (PnP) roleplayer, you’ll probably recognize the basic concepts of level and class from many RPG video games:¹ when you build your character, you pick a class (fighter, wizard, etc), then you start at level 1.  As you play, you gain more and more levels in your chosen class.

Well, assuming a single-class system, of course, which is how most video game RPGs work.  That is, once you pick your class, you’re stuck with that class forever.  Or until you change to a different character, at least.  In the first versions of D&D, that was how it worked as well.  Then they added something they called multiclassing (but that was an awfully generous term for it), and something called dual-classing, which was even less so.  Neither one was much use if your goal was to be able to trade power and specialization for versatility and generalization.

By the time D&D hit third edition, someone on the design team had cottoned on to the idea that making multiclassing stupidly difficult was annoying everybody.  Unfortunately, their solution was to make it stupidly easy instead.  You would think this wouldn’t be a bad thing.  And, indeed: when I first read the multiclassing rules in 3e, I was over the moon.  I thought that was amazing: very simple mechanically, very flexible, and it radically increased your chances of being able to build the character you wanted, no matter how wacky a combinaton it was.  But the problem is, when you make things too easy, they’re easy to abuse.  And the ease of multiclassing in 3e led to a practice called “single-dipping” (or, occasionally, “double-dipping”), where you build a character who has one (or two) levels in a bunch of different classes, just to get the cool features that those classes get at lower levels.  This became a favorite technique of “min-maxers,” or, as we like to call them, “munchkins.”²  Which in turn gave multiclassing a bad name, which in turn led to a lot of backlash.

Take 4e.³  In 4e, it was actually impossible to multiclass at all.  Oh, sure: you could simulate it somewhat, vaguely and crappily.  But not really.  This was one of the big reasons—probably the biggest, honestly—that I never actually played 4e.  It was such a massive step backwards to the bad-old-days that I wasn’t even interested in trying it.  You see, for me, D&D has always been about building interesting characters.  I like the weird classes, the unusual classes.  Thus, I’ve played many a bard, many a druid, and one monk, who was probably the longest-running character in my decades-long RPG career.  I’ve only ever played a fighter twice, and hated it both times, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never played a wizard at all.  I like options, the wackier the better, and I like creating convoluted backstories, and I like making characters who leave an impression.  For years, the mechanics of D&D frustrated me when I was trying to push the boundaries of character creation, and finally 3e came along and fixed it, and then everyone decided that multiclassing was for munchkins only and I got screwed.  Many GMs in online forums will tell you they don’t allow multiclassing in their games at all, and while of course I would never play with anyone so close-minded, here comes 4e and the option has been removed completely.  No wonder I went over so enthusiastically to Pathfinder.

Pathfinder’s “answer” to multiclassing, by the way, was to stop trying to discourage people from mulitclassing with penalties and whatnot, and start trying to encourage people to single-class, using bonuses and a “capstone” feature at 20th level.  (For the uninitiated, 20th level is—usually—the highest level a D&D character can achieve.  So, if you multiclass at all, you can never get to 20th level in any class, because your 20th level muticlassed character has, by definition, more than one class.  The problem with this technique as a carrot is that it’s beyond rare for most people to play one character long enough to hit 20th level.  Unless you don’t start at level 1, which gives you a tiny peek at how the topic of multiclassing relates to the starting level dilemma.)  I like this better, obviously, but it doesn’t really do anything to alleviate the concerns with multiclassing: it’s still a tool that can be easily abused by powergamers.

So now we get to the meat of how the whole multiclassing debate has influenced the starting level level for characters in new games I run.  Because I’m running 5e now, and 5e has taken yet another approach to multiclassing.  It’s a two-pronged approach, and the first prong consists of finally figuring out a middle ground for multiclassing.  Here’s the basic problems with 3e-style multiclassing and how they’re addressed in 5e:

• Classes often get very cool/useful features at early levels.  This is called “front-loading” a class’ features, or sometimes just a “front-loaded” class.  Front-loading seriously encourages single- or double-dipping, because you can take one or two levels and get “the good stuff” and then move on to a different class.  This is the most obvious problem with multiclassing—so obvious that D&D began addressing it in 3.5e,⁴ and Pathfinder had already made major strides toward correcting it as well.  5e just took it even further.
• Saving throws get out of control very quickly.  In 3e, there weren’t but 3 saving throws in the first place (down from 5 in 2e), and nearly every class got 1 “good” save and 2 “bad” saves.  So you only had to multiclass twice (at most) to get all 3 good saves, and the fact that everyone’s saves at first level were a bit high to start off (in order to keep you from dying instantaneously the first time you had to make a save), taking 1 level in every class meant you’d end up with ridiculous saves.  5e fixed this by expanding yet simplifying the whole saving throw system: there are now 6 saves, but they correspond exactly to the 6 ability scores, and, instead of having a bonus that goes up every level (and is different for different classes), you’re either proficient in the save or you’re not.  How this impacts multiclassing is that you only get saving throw proficiciencies as a 1st-level character.  If you take the first level of a different class at some later level, you just don’t get any additional saving throw proficiencies.  And, because you’re either proficient or not, you don’t have to worry about stacking anyway.
• Spellcasters get hosed by multiclassing.  In 3e multiclassing, you keep your spells from different classes entirely separate.  So while an 8th-level wizard is casting 4th-level spells, an 8th-level character with 4 levels of wizard and 4 levels of cleric⁵ can only cast 2nd-level wizard spells, and 2nd-level cleric spells.  That’s a huge disadvantage to multiclassing as a spellcaster.  5e fixes this by allowing spell progression to “stack” between classes, sort of.  So if you’re a wizard 4/cleric 4 in 5e, you only know 2nd-level wizard spells and 2nd-level cleric spells, but you can cast them as 4th-level spells, which increases their power so you’re not quite as useless as you would be in 3e.
• The argument against multiclassing is too weak (or so ridiculous/complex that no one will enforce it).  In 2e, only certain races could multiclass (or dual-class, for that matter).  That was so silly that most people ignored it.  In 3e, you get a complicated reduction in XP⁶ for every extra class you take.  That one is so math-intensive that most people ignored it.  In Pathfinder, they’ve replaced the stick with the carrot, but the every-level bonuses (1 extra hit point or skill rank for sticking to your original class) are trivial enough to ignore, and the capstone, as I said, is mostly a theoretical carrot, as opposed to something you could actually eat.  In 5e, they fixed this by tying ability score increases (and feats, if you use them) to your class level instead of your character level.  Which means that multiclassing forces you to delay your ability score increases, which can be a serious but simple to enforce downside.⁷
• The argument for multiclassing is too strong.  Basically, there just isn’t enough variation in the existing classes to allow many character concepts to be built.  So multiclassing is often the only way to play that sneaky, semi-mystical shadowcaster,⁸ or that ever-elusive “gish” (the prototypical fighter/mage).  Multiclassing often wasn’t perfect for these characters either, but it was a damn sight better than the alternative, which was nothing.  Strangely enough, 3e also led to the explosion of “non-core” classes (both official and third-party, not to mention homebrew), so multiclassing obviously wasn’t the best way in many people’s eyes.  But, in the core rules, it was what you had, so you dealt with it.  Pathfiner eventually introduced “hybrid” classes (still non-core) in an attempt to alleviate this somewhat.⁹  5e deals with this issue using their second prong—subclasses—which we’ll delve into in more detail in just a moment.

So multiclassing in 5e is better, for the most part.  But it is harder, which means that it can be more difficult to make that perfect character.  I’ve said (a few times, to a few different people now) that, while I’d much rather play 5e, I’d still much rather build a character in Pathfinder.  I’m not a munchkin, nor a powergamer, nor a min-maxer.  I just love having loads of options.  Anything that increases my options gets a thumbs-up, and of course anything that decreases them gets the thumbs-down.

But let’s talk about that second prong for a bit.  “Subclasses” (also called archetypes, paths, or any number of different terms) are actually quite a brilliant concept.  There’s always been a bit of a chance for specialization in certain classes: many versions of the wizard could choose to specialize in a “school of magic” (such as illusion or divination), and many versions of the cleric had to choose a “domain” (or two) representing the particular areas of interest of their chosen god.  But Pathfinder took that to a whole new level, letting barbarians choose different rage powers, allowing wizards to either have a familiar, or a special wizards’ staff, giving rogues a set of “talents” that they could choose from at various levels, etc.  Suddenly every class had lots of little choices to make, and the end result was that it was now much more unlikely that two characters of the same class would end up being just copies of one another, making at least one redundant.  5e doubled down on this, giving the character one big choice instead of lots of smaller ones.  That choice is the subclass.  So, no longer are you “just” a fighter: you’re either a champion, or a battle master, or an eldritch knight.  The three subclasses play quite differently, yet they all use the basic chassis of a fighter.  This makes adding new “classes” much easier, and much easier to balance.  You merely add a new subclass instead, giving you a much smaller set of features to delineate, and the majority of the class features are already balanced by virtue of being core, thoroughly playtested classes.  From the perspective of multiclassing, it simply removes a lot of the need.  The eldritch knight neatly fills that desire for a gish, and my shadowcaster can either be a rogue archetype (for which there already is one: the arcane trickster), or a wizard tradition (such as a school of shadow; there’s no official version of this, but a quick Internet search will turn up several potential options¹⁰).

The solution isn’t perfect though.  If we imagine that 5e’s eldritch knight is analogous to Pathfinder’s magus, and perhaps that the battle master is a bit like 4e’s warlord (and, yes, I know: neither analogy is without its problems), then you could imagine, at least if the magus and warlock were in the same system, that, with multiclassing, you could play a sort of warmage that was a combination of the two classes.  Maybe two levels of magus followed by a level of warlord, then repeat as needed.  But you can’t do that sort of thing in 5e, even with its disadvantageous multiclassing, because they’re both fighters, and you can’t multiclass with one class.  This is not the real problem though.

The real problem is that you don’t actually choose your fighter subclass until 3rd level.  Now, not all classes are like this: two (cleric and sorcerer) have you choose at 1st level, two (druid and wizard) have you choose at 2nd level, and one (warlock) is totally weird and has you choose one thing at 1st and another at 3rd.  But the majority (7 out of 12¹¹) don’t have you make a very significant choice about what sort of role your character is going to fulfill—in some cases, even down to whether you can use magic or not¹²—until 3rd level.  That’s very late, in my eyes.  That means that, for 10 out of 12 classes, a first level character of that class isn’t yet who they will be, eventually.  They haven’t yet fleshed out their concept.  And I understand why 5e does this—it helps eliminate dipping by de-front-loading the classes—and I’m not even saying I think it’s a bad idea ... but it has a pretty big downside.

And, because of that, I’ve decided that it makes a lot of sense to start 5e characters at 3rd level.  Looking back on it, I sort of hated playing 1st-level characters anyway.  Nearly everything you try to do you nearly kills you (and often actually kills you), so it’s just a stressful survival slog to 2nd or 3rd anyway.  I think most of us just started at 1st level because that’s what you were “supposed to” do.¹³  But it’s not required.  And maybe it’s even a good thing.  I’ve only had the opportunity to carry out this plan once so far—my current game with my two boys—but I really like how it worked out.  The characters didn’t have the chance to play through those early levels, true, but now they’re coming into the story with a richer history and more options.  It feels pretty right so far.

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1 Who in turn derived said concepts from PnP RPGs in the first place.

2 Wikipedia has more info on what constitutes munchkinism, as well as a few guesses at to the origin of the term.  But, again: if you’re already a PnP RPGer, you know the term, and, even if you’ve only played video RPGs, you’ve likely run across it before.

3 Please.

4 The “minor” update to third edition that was released between 3e and 4e, if you’re not familiar.

5 This combo is usually called a “mystic theurge,” and 3e offers a “prestige class” which helps address part of this problem.  But it doesn’t fix it completely.

6 Experience points.

7 Alternately, you can just only multiclass in groups of 4 levels per class.  But that has its own issues.

8 Attempting to combine wizard and thief/rogue was the focus for many of my homebrew classes, as well as two of my major PCs (both using the 2e Skills and Powers rules, which many call “2.5e”).

9 I’m not even going to mention 3e’s “gestalt” classes, which were so over-the-top as to be difficult to take seriously.

10 Although, honestly, I think I might be better off trying to realize this concept via warlock instead.  A warlock with any of the three core patrons—depending on what sort of flavor you’re going for—and maybe a homebrew pact boon (I just don’t feel like blade, chain, or tome works here ... not sure what the right answer is though) would probably end up feeling more right than anything I could do with either arcane trickster or a school of shadow.  But that’s starting to drift pretty far afield of the original topic.

11 Eight out of 12 if you include warlock, but that’s a tough call.  Your patron (1st-level choice) gives you more features to differentiate, numerically, but your pact (3rd-level choice) probably makes the most difference in your playstyle.  So it’s a bit of a toss-up.

12 If you’re a particularly big D&D nerd, you will be tempted to bring up 3e’s (and Pathfinder’s, for that matter) “half-casters,” the paladin and ranger, here.  But I’m ignoring those, for a very good reason: they’re stupid.  The prototypical ranger is Aragorn, and the prototypical paladin is Lancelot; did either of them cast spells?  No, of course not.  I say adding spellcasting—especially delayed spellcasting—to paladins and rangers was lazy design, plain and simple, and I’ll stand by that statement.

13 Unless you were playing Dark Sun.  Theoretically, everyone’s Dark Sun character started at 2nd level because it was just too damn hard for 1st level characters.  But I’ve often wondered if the Dark Sun designers were just tired of killing off fragile first level characters, mostly by accident.

Why I Play D&D

Although most of my gaming posts have been about Heroscape, I have mentioned my love of roleplaying: primarily when I talked about playing post-apocalyptic RPGs and my extended discussion of the evolution of Pathfinder.  I even went into a bit of details of why I like teaching my kids to play them.¹  But I never actually talked much about why I enjoy playing such games.

You know, every copy of D&D rulebooks I’ve ever owned started with a “what is a roleplaying game?” section.  This is because roleplaying games are quite different from other games.  Games are competitive, almost by definition—the word “competitive” is right there in meaning #3 in the Dictionary.com defintion, which I think is the meaning most people have in mind when they say “let’s play a game.”  The “object” of a game is how you win the game—what would even be the point of a game that you couldn’t win?  Yet that’s exactly what D&D—or any PnP RPG—is: a game where no one ever wins.  So what then is the object?

As it turns out, the answer to that is different for different people, and it can be quite disconcerting (and occasionally disruptive) to be playing a game where some or all of the players are aiming at different targets.  For some people, it’s simple escapism: everyone should be having fun stepping outside their own lives for a bit.  For others, each adventure or campaign has a stated goal—collect the most loot, kill the most monsters, outmaneuver the tyrannical despot, defeat the evil necromancer, save the kingdom, what-have-you—and the object is simply to achieve that goal.  Some people can’t help but inject the element of competition into it, and the game becomes a showdown between players and GM: the latter is trying to kill everyone, while the former are trying to survive whatever is thrown at them.  Or some players will try to compete with each other: my character has the best numbers on her sheet, can do the most amount of damange in one round, has the most powerful magic items.  For still others, it’s all about performance: D&D is theater, albeit to a very small audience, and the goal is similar to that of community dinner theater—impress your friends with your acting skills.

I take a different approach from all these.  Perhaps it’s my aspirations to be a writer, but, for me, a PnP RPG is a collaborative story.  A bunch of us are getting together and we’re going to concoct an awesome piece of fiction, which, if it could be written down and sold to the masses, would undoubtedly be a best-seller.  It’s just like we were all getting together to make a movie.  We all provide different skills, but we all pitch in and help each other out and what we produce at the end is sheer entertainment.  It’s going to have sympathetic characters and an amazing setting and a brilliant plot.  And, just like when you go to see a classic movie and then you come home afterwards and want to tell your friends all about it, so a well-played game of D&D gives you stories that you are just bursting to share with other people.  Now, generally speaking, only your other friends who also do tabletop gaming are actually going to appreciate those stories, but it’s still magical to me.  You can meet anyone, from any walk of life, from any country, regardless of race, religion, gender, or anything else, and if you happen to find out that that person roleplays as well, you will be telling each other your favorite gaming stories within about 15 minutes flat.  And you will each be impressed at the other’s ingenuity and marvel at their luck (good or bad) and be jealous of the experiences they’ve had.  Remember the scene in Jaws where Quint and Hooper trade stories about their scars?²  This is just like that: you get a backlog of war stories you can trade with everyone you meet, without ever having to do anything dangerous to earn them.  It’s not much compared to those folks who’ve actually been to war, granted, but then some of those folks enjoy swapping stories about their RPG characters too.

Now, given my feelings about roleplaying, it should be no surprise that my major focus as a GM³ is character.  If I have an overriding philosophy as a GM, it’s a two-part one:  As a player, I demand that you provide me an interesting, fully-fleshed character, complete with motivations, backstory, flaws ... the whole package.  And, as your GM, I promise I won’t kill your character without your permission.⁴  Now, both of those things come with loads of caveats which could probably fill its own blog post, but for now I think that gives you enough background on my style to appreciate the story I really want to tell you.

See, my eldest child came to me and asked me to GM for him again.  Which is so rare as to be unheard of these days: he’s a teenager with his own friends now, and typically he’s the GM for them.⁵  So we haven’t really roleplayed in a long time.  But he wanted to try the latest edition of D&D⁶ and he knew I did as well.  And we felt it was time to get my middle child into the game.

The boy that I’ve often referred to here as the Smaller Animal is currently 10 years old.  Two years ago,⁷ we tried a game of Dungeon World, which is sort of like D&D Lite™.⁸  We did all right, but it was obvious that, at 8, he wasn’t quite ready.  But my eldest figured now was the perfect time to get him hooked.

So we went to him and asked him what sort of character he might enjoy playing.  It’s a fantasy game, we explained, and he knew perfectly well what that meant.  Anything you want: wizard, knight ... what would you want to be?  He said he wanted to be a character who turned into animals.  My eldest and I looked at each other and said almost simultaneously: “Druid.”

Now, the gold standard for beast transformation in fantasy fiction is generally held to be the wizards’ battle in The Sword in the Stone.⁹  And, indeed, D&D wizards can be quite good at transforming into animals ... at higher levels.  But, if you want to start turning into cool things pretty early on, you really want a druid.  In first and second edition, shapeshifting was a thing druids could do.  In 3e, it was the main thing they could do.  In 5e, you have a choice between two types of druids: you can be more of a magicky treehugger sort of druid, or you can be a full-on, constantly-being-an-animal sort of druid.  So obviously that’s what my kid was looking for.  Almost as an afterthought, he tossed out one last idea: “Can I turn into a dinosaur?”

You know, some folks don’t like to mix dinosaurs into their high fantasy.  But D&D has a long tradition of doing weird genre-blender things such as that.¹⁰  We were going to play a pre-made adventure set in the Forgotten Realms, which is not my favorite setting, but it does have certain advantages.  For instance, by virtue of having been around nearly as long as I’ve been alive, it has accumulated nearly everything imaginable—it’s a true kitchen sink fantasy setting.  It took me about 10 seconds of searching the Forgotten Realms Wiki to find a jungle with dinosaurs in it where my son’s druid might hail from.  So logical sense was not a barrier.  Would the rules really allow him to turn into an actual dinosaur though?  Well, in a word: yes.  A druid can turn into any “beast,” which not only includes all actual animals,¹¹ but also dinosaurs, and even a few fantastic (but non-magical) animals such as the axe beak or the stirge.¹²  In 3e, you were limited by the size of the animal; in 5e, all you care about is how tough it is (its “challenge rating,” or CR, to use the technical term).  Now, the 5e Monster Manual only lists a few dinosaurs, and none of them are eligible for druids to turn into until 6th level or so.  But there are plenty of smaller dinosaurs that are less tough than an allosaurus: a velociraptor, for example.  By which I mean less an actual velociraptor and more a Jurasic-Park-style velociraptor, which is probably closer to a deinonychus.  Lots of people online have suggested that the stats for a velociraptor would be identical to that of a lion, so why not just use those stats and call it a velociraptor?  (This is called “reskinning” in RPG parlance, and we desperate GMs do it quite a lot).

So I said, sure, why not?  You can turn into a CR 1 beast at level 2, we’re starting our characters at level 3,¹³ a velociraptor is a lion is a CR 1 beast which can neither fly nor swim, you are a druid from a jungle where dinosaurs roam freely and you are very familiar with them, so, absolutely: you can turn into a velociraptor.  In about 20 minutes’ worth of conversation (and a bit of research on the Forgotten Realms wiki), we fleshed out a fairly complex backstory for him: Elmond Xilofeyr (his last name means “fairypetal,” which is a type of flower native to his homeland) is a wood elf from the Wealdath (which is elvish for “unspoiled woods”) who became obsessed with animal transformation, so he apprenticed himself to a dragonborn arcane scholar (part wizard, part druid, part who-knows-what) who lived in the Starspire Mountains, just south of where Elmond grew up, originally thinking he would become a wizard, until he figured out that druidry was the real way forward for an aspiring shapeshifter; after becoming an official druid, he traveled south, searching for the best place to settle, until a short ship ride from Calimport brought him to the Jungles of Chult, where he became fascinated with the local fauna and lived for several years, until one day he decided to take a journey to visit his old teacher and share whatever knowledge they’d both accumulated in the interim, only to find his master’s mountain hideaway in ruins, apparently the work of evil dragons, but, with no body apparent, it was possible that the scholar had escaped, or been captured, so Elmond traveled north, looking for signs of his mentor until, after traveling up through Amn all the way to Nashkel, a clue brought him down the Uldoon Trail as part of a merchant’s caravan that also included two other mysterious characters ...

And that’s how my ten-year-old developed a backstory with as much depth as any 20-year-old I’ve ever played with.  Cool character concept, we wrestled the rules into submission to make it work, used the Internet to add a little flavor and specificity, then just brainstormed until we had some cool ideas that your friendly neighborhood GM can use to help shape the campaign: for instance, I’ve no doubt that we’ll run into Arjhan Kerrhylon, Elmond’s lost teacher, at some point in the future.

But I mainly gave you all this background so I could tell you this story.

Even for third level characters, first level adventures can be deadly.¹⁴  And of course this is the Smaller Animal’s first time playing proper D&D, so he can be forgiven for not playing his character in a strictly optimized fashion.  So this is the story of how I managed to kill my kid’s character in the first hour of play.

Well, he was only dead for a little while.  You know those stories of people that wake up in the hospital and are like, what happened? and then their friends tell them that they were actually dead for 4 minutes or whatever?  Like that, only not even a whole minute.  As I said above, I don’t actually kill characters.  And, anyhow: with modern-day D&D it takes a while for your character to die really dead: you make death saving throws over and over until you either make 3 or fail 3, and he never even had time to make one of those.¹⁵  But he was at zero hit points, sure enough.  Here’s how it went down.

We’re fighting a bunch of kobolds.  Now, if you don’t know what kobolds are, they’re little lizardy-looking things, smaller than a hafling, even, but vicious.  We’ve been fighting them all night, and for the most part kicking their reptilian asses.  They’re not much of a threat for 3rd-level characters such as us, but of course they have numbers on their side, and we’re not getting a lot of time in between skirmishes for resting up.  In this particular battle, we run up against a group of two humans and eight kobolds: the biggest group we’ve faced thus far.  My elder son’s shadow warrior and my dragon sorcerer/avenger¹⁶ jumped in and took out the two humans first, figuring they were the most dangerous, while Elmond hung back and picked off kobolds with his longbow.  Finally deciding it was time to stride in, my son made the mistake of attacking first, then charging into the melee.  He took down another kobold, but ended his turn right in the thick of the battle.  With the inevitable result that, on their next turn, three kobolds decided it was time to jump on him and take him down.  So he strides up, ready for serious battle, and immediately 3 scaly little buggers leap on him, stabbing him with their wicked knives.  And, due to some unfortunate rolling on my part, they all wounded him, and he went down hard.  “How many hit points do I have left?” he asked.  “Let’s not worry about that right now,” I said diplomatically, looking at the dice.  “Let’s just say you’re too wounded to be able to attack this round.”

Next round my character strides over, jams his arm into the pile of squirming kobolds, and jolts 6 hit points into Elmond’s unconcious body.  Then it’s Elmond’s turn.  And suddenly a velociraptor bursts up out of the pile, and kobolds go flying.

Now, honestly, he missed all his attacks as a velociraptor, but that’s not even the point.  That imagery was so iconic and dramatic that it was easily the highlight of the night.  Our characters were taken aback at seeing their new companion arise from near-death as a terrifying (if no bigger than man-sized) dinosaur, and the kobolds were shitting their pants in fear.  They were quickly dispatched, some of them while attempting to flee, and our characters became a little more comfortable with their now-reptilian compatriot.  My eldest, playing a young dwarven maiden, wondered if the size ratio was right, and, once again, I saw no reason to rain on anyone’s parade.  So she lept on the back of the velociraptor, who let out a blood-curdling roar, and we charged off into the night, looking for more foes to slay.

This is a story which I, my middle child, and probably his big brother too, will all tell with great joy and enthusiasm for years and years to come.  Anyone who’s played D&D, or any fantasy RPG, will hear this story and practically wet their pants over how cool it is.  This is, hands down and without question, a great story.  And that’s why I play D&D.  Because there just isn’t any other way for my ten-year-old to turn into a dinosaur and burst up out of a pile of small lizardlings and have everyone around him go “oooohh!”  And I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.

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1 To review: they’re educational, particularly in a mathy sense.

2 Happily, in the Internet age, you needn’t actually remember it: you can just go watch it online.

3 For the uninitiated, that’s “Game Master”—i.e., the person who is in charge of moving the plot along and deciding how the world reacts to the players’ characters.

4 You might imagine that no one would ever give their permission for you to kill their character.  But, you know: in a good story, it’s sometimes dramatically appropriate for a main character to die, and if your goal is to tell the best story ...  Believe it or not, I’ve actually seen people offer to sacrifice their characters just to make the story better.

5 I’d like to think that’s because he has the most experience as a player, since I started him so young, but I may just be flattering myself.

6 5e, that is—my coming back to D&D from Pathfinder is another topic that could fill its own blog post.  Perhaps I’ll essay that topic at some future date.

7 Nearly exactly: it began during our Vegas trip.

8 Although, to be fair, the latest version of D&D has borrowed liberally from Dungeon World and its work-alikes, including the very cool concept of “bonds.”

9 Again, if you haven’t seen it, the Internet is your friend.

10 Such as having wuxia-style monks as a class, and sci-fi-type psionic powers.  And don’t even get me started on the giant space hamsters.

11 In 5e.  Note that, in 3e, certain animals, like rats, centipedes, spiders, and so forth are technically “vermin,” and druids can’t turn into them.  Which is a bit weird, but then D&D rules can often be a bit weird.

12 Yes, that page I linked you to says the stirge is a magical beast.  But that’s just because it hasn’t been updated to 5e yet.

13 The main reason for this has to do with one of the few things I dislike about 5e, which perhaps I’ll go into in another post.  But this one is getting too long as it is.

14 Yet another reason I like to give my characters a bit of leg-up when starting fresh.  Also, adventures are typically designed for a party of four, and we are only a party of three.  So a couple of extra levels can really make a difference.

15 Well, technically speaking, he should have had to make one.  But I didn’t want to freak him out by telling him he had to make a “death save.”

16 By which I mean I started out as a sorcerer with the draconic bloodline, then switched to a paladin aiming for the oath of vengeance.  In case you happen to be versed in 5e and wanted more details about that.

Smokelit Flashback V

"In My Dream I'll Catch You"

[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’ve mentioned a couple of times¹ that Smokelit Flashback is my longest mix.²  Volume VI is perhaps half done, and there’s a very rough roadmap for a volume VII, which is definitely more volumes than any other mix.  It was the first,³ so it makes sense that it’s collected the most tracks.  And downtempo, darkwave, and trip-hop continue to be interests of mine, and I find it great music to have in the background while I work.  So, given all that, it’s perhaps no surprise that I’m ready to present you with a mind-blowing fifth volume of this unusual mix, before I’ve ever even presented a fourth volume of any other mix.⁴

And, given what we’ve heard from the previous four volumes, there will be a lot of head-nodding and mumbles of “oh sure.” Falling You is back, as is Hooverphonic.  Thievery Corporation, who we first heard on Smokelit Flashback III, is here, and gives us our volume title this time around (as well as providing our centerpiece: “Heaven’s Gonna Burn Your Eyes” is a pretty stunning track).  Mazzy Star returns from Smokelit Flashback II, with perhaps the best song off Among My Swan, “Umbilical,” which also provides our required “creepy” factor.⁵  While in general I don’t care for Among My Swan, this track’s pervasive organ, coupled with Hope Sandoval’s mumbled lyrics, are something you wouldn’t want to have missed.  Devics, who we first⁶ heard from last volume, is also back with a pretty tune off their amazing album My Beautiful Sinking Ship.

Also back from volume III is Goldfrapp, who once again embodies a smokey bar lounge singer transported from a sixty’s Bond movie better than anyone since Portishead.  Back from last volume is Beth Quist, giving us a vocal track this time out: “Blue Planet” is a bit more deliberate than what we’ve heard from her so far,⁷ and it’s just a wee bit haunting, which makes it fit perfectly here.  And, finally from the returning artist crew, French downtempo trio Télépopmusik, who provided the closer from last volume, give us another track off Genetic World, “Love Can Damage Your Health.” (In fact, there’s a bit of a “Breathe” reprise at the end of this song.)  I wasn’t entirely sure where I first heard Télépopmusik, but Wikipedia just informed me that “Breathe” was used in a season 2 episode Six Feet Under,⁸ so I guess that was probably it.  Although I wasn’t inspired to go out and find them right then and there.  But I suppose that’s why it sounded vaguely familiar when I finally did discover it.

Also unsurprising to find here is the stuff I already warned you was coming.  Back in Smokelit Flashback II, I mentioned Love Spirals Downwards, an excellent darkwave band on Projekt Records, and hailing from my hometown of LA.  I told you we’d hear them on volume V right in footnote 5, and here they are, providing our volume opener.  “Illusory Me” is a wonderful tune which puts us right back in the mood that this mix epitomizes.  I was a bit more vague when referring to Widowspeak, a band very reminiscent of Mazzy Star: I said we’d probably hear them at some point, but I wasn’t sure when.  Well, now I am: “In the Pines” provides the perfect lead-in to Devics’ “Gold in the Girl.” It’s vaguely unsettling and trippy and just perfect for this mix.

We also have a few imports this time around, all from Paradoxically Sized World.  Ugress (from PSW volume II and volume III) shows a bit of his darker side with “The Beauty Never Lasts,” the last vocal track on this volume.  Trentemøller, who we first actually heard on Darkling Embrace (his track on PSW hasn’t come around yet), was also discovered via LittleBigPlanet, although they have have plenty of range, as they demonstrate here with ”... Even Though You’re with Another Girl.” It’s the perfect bit of menace to lead into the dark hallucinatory entrails of Widowspeak thence to Devics.  And lastly we have Bonobo, who, while never directly used in LBP,⁹ has appeared on both PSW volume I and volume II.  “Noctuary” is a bit darker than those other tracks, so it works well here.

Perhaps the major discovery, though, is Violet Indiana.  Remember Mono, from volume III?  Imagine if you could take the female vocalist from that band (Siobhan de Maré) and throw her in a studio with the guitarist and cofounder of Cocteau Twins (Robin Guthrie) and cut an album.  Well, you just invented Violet Indiana.  And, while the resulting trip-hop is not as perfect as it probably sounds, there are quite a few stand-out tracks, of which “Rage Days” is the absolute best.  Coming off the mellow instrumental downtempo of “Noctuary” and leading into the more frenetic classical-with-a-backbeat trip-hop of “Battersea,” it’s the perfect intro into our center stretch.

Smokelit Flashback V
[ In My Dream I'll Catch You ]

“Illusory Me” by Love Spirals Downwards, off Idylls [Reissue]
“Given” by Falling You, off Faith
“Umbilical” by Mazzy Star, off Among My Swan
“Human” by Goldfrapp, off Felt Mountain
“Blue Planet” by Beth Quist, off Silver
“Love Can Damage Your Health” by Télépopmusik, off Genetic World
“Noctuary” by Bonobo, off Dial 'M' for Monkey
“Rage Days” by Violet Indiana, off Roulette
“Battersea” by Hooverphonic, off Blue Wonder Power Milk
“Heaven's Gonna Burn Your Eyes” by Thievery Corporation, off The Richest Man in Babylon
“Farewell Ferengistan” by Banco de Gaia, off Farewell Ferengistan
“... Even Though You're with Another Girl” by Trentemøller, off Into the Great Wide Yonder
“In the Pines” by Widowspeak, off Widowspeak
“Gold in the Girl” by Devics, off My Beautiful Sinking Ship
“Empty” by Amanda Ghost [Single]
“The Beauty Never Lasts” by Ugress, off Cinematronics
“Lost River” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  17 tracks,  78:57

That just leaves us with 3 tracks.  Two of those come from two sources of previous inspiration: my cable provider’s “Zen” music channel introduced me to Banco de Gaia, and Hearts of Space was the first place I heard A Produce.  In the former case, “Farewell Ferengistan” is a little bit world, mostly instrumental, with a splash of dreampop vocals, so it works nicely here.  In the latter, “Lost River” is our closer; almost a bridge, it’s a short bit of downtempo trance from A Produce’s stellar (if somewhat hard to find) Land of a Thousand Trances, which winds us down to the end quite beautifully.

Which just leaves us with Amanda Ghost.  British born, with ancestry tracing back to India via the Caribbean, she would eventually become the president of Epic records after writing songs for Beyoncé and Jordin Sparks.  But, at 26, she released a single album called Ghost Stories.  For the most part, it lay in that strange middle ground between pop and folk that had been mined so thoroughly 5 years prior by Poe, Jewel, and Joan Osborne, with some eclectic touches of techno and subtler electronica.  Overall, not my bag.  But “Empty” is a whole different animal: torchy trip-hop that allows Ghost to show off her pipes in ways that I don’t think the rest of her debut did.  I can’t remember where I found her, but I do remember flicking through the samples off that album and thinking, “man, this is a waste of my time” until I got to track 8 (out of 10), and then just being blown away.  Which goes to show you that you should never stop listening to an album after the first 3 or 4 tracks, even if you sort of hate it.  ‘Cause you never know what hidden gem you might be missing out on.

Next time, we’ll sit around a virtual campfire and listen to some stories.

⇐ Smokelit Flashback IV

Smokelit Flashback VI ⇒

__________

1 Specifically, in Salsatic Vibrato I and Smokelit Flashback III.

2 Well, these days Salsatic Vibrato has more total tracks.  But Smokelit Flashback still has more volumes.

3 Of the modern mixes, at least.  Refer to the series list for definitions.

4 Honestly, I only have two other mixes which even have a volume IV: Salsatic Vibrato, and Paradoxically Sized World.

5 You may recall me discussing the creepy angle in Smokelit Flashback IV.

6 Well, first in terms of Smokelit Flashback.  I first first mentioned Devics in conjunction with Darkling Embrace.

7 Not only on volume IV of this mix, but also on Sirenexiv Cola.

8 Who I also credit for inspiring Rose-Coloured Brainpan by reintroducing me to “Woodstock.”

9 At least to my knowledge.

Something to Say

(although not necessarily anything good)

In my informal “nothing to say” series, I have typically taken advantage of having nothing that I really wanted to write about to do a retrospective on how many words this blog has spewed forth.  But last time I had nothing to say, I said something instead.  Which means it wasn’t really a post with nothing to say.  This is a post in the “nothing to say” series, but it actually has something to say, so it’s the opposite of a “nothing to say” post just like the other one was, but in the other direction.  It’s a good thing I believe in balance and paradox, elsewise all this saying something while having nothing to say would really scramble my brains.

So, where do we stand?  Well, as I mused in that previously mentioned non-post, I’ve gone ahead and recategorized many of my “interstitial” posts as “partial” plus some other label.  For instance, if I wrote about not having time for a full post because of various goings-on in my life like birthdays or house-hunting or what-have-you, I labeled that as “partial” plus “family.”  Or if I went into some detail about a problem I was dealing with at work, that would be “partial” plus “technology” (or perhaps “partial” plus “business” if it was less of a technical problem and more of a corporate or workplace issue).  Whereas, if I just said, “I’ve got no time to post this week; sorry” then that I left as a true “interstitial.”

With this new system, about 62% of the former “interstitial” posts are now “partial” instead, making “Perl” now the top category, followed by “partial” (which almost doesn’t count any more, since there aren’t any posts which are only labeled “partial”), followed by “family,” then “fiction” (meaning my ongoing novel), and then “music.”  Not too shoddy.

There are now 333 posts altogether.  If we look at it from an estimation viewpoint, we should not count the “interstitial"s at all, and we should count the “partial"s as perhaps ⅓ of the word count of a regular post.  So that would give us just over 400,000 words.  Doing an actual count of my source files yields closer to 340,000, but that doesn’t include my novel.  (It does, however, eliminate some of the problems that I reported with previous word counts of files: I’ve now separated out what’s actually published from my working drafts for future posts, and I’m now using my more sophisticated script which discounts words in block quotes, URLs, footnotes, and so forth.  So this is far more accurate than ever before.)  Adding in the novel bumps us up another 60,000 words, roughly, which puts us right at that 400,000 figure again.  (In fact, even if I stop rounding, there’s less than 2,000 words difference in the two methods.)  So that seems a rational number to go with: 251 full posts and 51 partial ones for a total of about 400k in terms of words.

Which is overall not a terrible output for roughly six and a half years’ work.  It’s about 1200 words a week, on average.  Sure, Stephen King is pumping out more, but he doesn’t have a full-time job on the side.  (Well, I guess pumping out words is his full-time job, to look at it another way.  But you get where I’m coming from.)  It’s respectable, is what I’m saying.  Nothing to be ashamed of.

Now, whether that sort of pace can continue for another 6½ years or not, I can’t say.  Part of me feels like it’s not sustainable.  But part of me wants to try it and see.  So—for now at least—that’s the part of me I’m listening to.

Hope you’ll stick around to find out as well.

Why the MCU Is Cool: The Heroes I Like

[This is the second 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.]


So perhaps one of the reasons I like the MCU is just plain that I like superheroes.  Which, in some sense, I do.  But I’ve never liked all superheroes equally: I don’t believe anyone does.  Some you like, and some you like a lot, and some you don’t care much for at all, and some you really despise.  It’s like anything: Shakespeare plays, Beatles albums, Stephen King novels ... anything that has sufficient variety, you’re going to like some, dislike some, and be distinctly “meh” on quite a few others.

I used to find it hard to describe what sort of superheroes I like, until I realized what the pattern was: even when it comes to comic nerddom, I’m still a non-conformist.  I like the lesser-known heroes: the more obscure, the better.  With a few exceptions, when it comes to the big names, I’m not that big a fan.

On the DC side, that means I hate Superman, and most of the others I can take or leave: Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash.  The only big name I even sort of liked was Batman, and honestly the best thing about Batman was that, without him, you couldn’t have The Brave and the Bold, and that’s where a lot of the really obscure guys showed up: Creeper, Deadman, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, etc.  On the Marvel side, I thought Spider-Man was okay, but Captain America was nearly as bad as Superman, Hulk was practically cliché, Thor was boring, the Fantastic Four were annoying, and Iron Man was utterly useless: a knock-off Batman with better armor.  The only really big name I really liked was Wolverine, and I’m nearly positive that that’s just because I liked him before he got super-popular.  I can distinctly remember buying Giant-Size X-Men #1, which wasn’t the first appearance of Wolverine ... but it was the second.¹  It’s emblematic of my comic buying habits: I saw a cover with a bunch of heroes I didn’t recognize at all, so of course I had to have it.  New superheroes!  Is there anything cooler?  New people with new powers, new costumes, new personalities ... I’m one of those schmucks who is easily seduced by the new, the different, the revamped, the reinvented ... gimme something fresh and I’m a sucker for it.

So, when it came to Marvel, my favorites were always the more obscure folks: I liked Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Warlock, Son of Satan, Hellcat, Moondragon, Power Man and Iron Fist, Tigra, Cloak and Dagger, and a billion other guys, most of whom you will have never heard of (unless you’re as big a comic book nerd as I am).  Probably the biggest (Marvel) name I can say I really liked was Doctor Strange, and that was mainly because Doctor Strange gives us the Defenders, which had a membership so fluid that there was practically someone new every issue.²  And, as much as I liked the Defenders, I also liked the Avengers.

Okay, now it’s time for a brief diversion on comic book publishing philosophy.  Let me stress that I don’t have any inside info: this is all based on things I’ve read, things I’ve heard, and a lot of observation.  The first interesting thing about comic book publishing philosophy involves a story about a lawsuit.  I’ve never been able to find out if this is actually a true story or not,³ but I read about it in some book about the comic industry, and it certainly seems true, in that it neatly explains a universal principle.  The story goes that, decades ago, when there were a lot more than 2 comic companies, company A had a hero, but they retired him.⁴  Some years later, company B made a new hero that resembled company A’s hero in some way: same name, similar costume, identical powers ... I don’t remember exactly how they were alike, but that’s not that important to the story anyway.  So company A decides to sue company B—again, I can’t remember if this was a claim of copyright infringement, trademark dispute, or what.  But, again: not that important.  The point of the story is, the court ended up ruling that, sure, the heroes were similar, but company A wasn’t using the hero any more, so therefore the similarity of company B’s hero wasn’t costing them any loss of revenue.  Therefore, no damages.

And, supposedly, this is why every comic company ever regularly trots out their old heroes, no matter how stupid (and let’s face it, some of those older heroes are pretty damn stupid⁵), even if they really don’t want to: because they’re trying to make sure their rights don’t lapse.  Titles like The Brave and the Bold were excellent for this sort of thing, because you had a big hero (in this case, Batman) to sell the issue to the masses, and you’d have a minor, or resurrected, or maybe even a long-forgotten, hero who’s just appearing to stay in circulation.  If the minor character happens to achieve some reflected popularity, that’s just bonus.  Mainly, you keep the guys in there, in the public eye.

This concept of using the big guys to sell the little guys crops up again and again, and especially in the “supergroups.”  In music terminology, a “supergroup” is when a bunch of successful musicians from other bands all get together and form a new band.⁶  In comic terms, all groups of superheroes are in one sense a “supergroup.”  But to use the term in the musical sense, there are two basic supergroups: one for each company.  DC’s is of course the Justice League of America, and Marvel’s is, naturally, the Avengers.⁷  Oh, sure: there are many, many groups of superheroes.  But most of them, such as my favorites the X-Men and the Legion of Superheroes, were created as a complete unit: in other words, X-Men members Cyclops, Angel, the Beast, Iceman, and Marvel Girl (a.k.a. Jean Grey) didn’t exist before the X-Men existed.  They were created specifically for that group.  But a true supergroup gathers heroes who were previously appearing in their own solo titles, as separate, pre-existing heroes.

The original Justice League, for instance, was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter.  If we were playing “one of these things is not like the others,” I think you’d see the odd man out here.  But let’s look at the original Avengers: Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, and Ant-Man and the Wasp.  (That’s right: Captain America is not an original Avenger, although he did come along just 3 issues later.)  See the pattern here?  They always throw in a minor character or two, because that way the big guys help sell the little guys.

This pattern is generally taken to an extreme in the supergroups: the minor character(s) end up being crucial to the team, because otherwise the audience can’t figure out why the writers keep them around.  So, in many incarnations of the Justice League, J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, is the guy who stays on the satellite and coordinates the missions for all the other members.  On the Avengers side, Hank Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, a.k.a. Giant-Man, a.k.a. Goliath, a.k.a. Yellowjacket, is pretty crucial to the history of the Avengers.  This creates a rather serious dilemma for the architects of the MCU, as on the one hand you need Ant-Man, and, on the other hand, Ant-Man is pretty stupid.  I mean, he shrinks and talks to ants.  Not exactly exciting as superheroes go.  You can get more action of Aquaman, with a decent writer.  But let’s explore that in a future installment.

The point here is that the Avengers, like the Justice League, always appealed to me for exactly the opposite reason that they appealed to most people.  I never cared about the fact that the greatest heroes of the Marvel universe were all there: Iron Man and Hulk and Thor and Captain America.  Because I never particularly cared for those guys.  I loved the Avengers because of the little guys: Ant-Man may be stupid, but Hank Pym is actually very interesting, and Wasp is very cool.  Then there’s Scarlet Witch and Vision and Beast and Hawkeye and Black Panther and Black Widow and Tigra and Jocasta and Hellcat and Wonder Man.  The Justice League seemed to follow a strict formula of one or two A-listers and then fill out the mission roster with the lesser-known guys, but the Avengers would often do entire storylines where the “Big Four” would never show up at all.  So, while I was in general more of a DC man than a Marvel one, it’s definitely true that I liked the Avengers more than the JLA.⁸

But that’s difficult to translate into the MCU.  The whole function of the MCU is to sell movies (and TV series).  To do that, they need to push the big names: the Big Four, of course, and Daredevil to a lesser extent (because he’s a lesser known name, if still bigger than most of the folks I liked), and they’ve finally managed to bring Spider-Man home, who’s probably the biggest name of all.  But those are not the guys I care about.  So what’s really interesting to me is how successful the MCU has been at integrating the smaller names.  We’ve only had two Avengers movies, and already I’ve gotten to see Black Widow, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Vision.  Now, with the advent of Civil War, they’ve added Black Panther.  Over on the Netflix side, Power Man was introduced in Jessica Jones, and he’ll be getting his own series in just a little over a month, plus Iron Fist is also in the works.  And, speaking of Jessica Jones, that opened the door for Hellcat, of all people, who is one of the most interesting comic stories of all time, and another one of my favorites.  Hell, they even managed to devote an entire movie to freaking Ant-Man, which I swore was impossible—or, if possible, could not possibly be any good.  But it was all right.  (They had to go the Scott Lang route and relegate Hank Pym to a side role, but, again: we’ll look at that angle in a bit more detail in an upcoming installment.)  Point being: the MCU has really done pretty well—surprisingly well, even—with bringing out the lesser known heroes.  And those were always the ones I loved.

So there’s one reason I’m so enamored of the MCU.  But there others.

⇐ What “MCU” Means, and What It Means to Me

Bringing the Funny ⇒

__________

1 Unless you count the teaser panel of the issue before his first proper appearance.  Which I don’t.

2 Although, to be fair, I also had a great affinity for the mystical superheroes, who were fulfilling my comic book requirements and my fantasy requirements simultaneously.  And Doctor Strange is pretty crucial to the mystical storylines, at least on the Marvel side.  Back on the DC side, it would be Dr. Fate and Phantom Stranger, along with some other lesser known guys (Spectre, Demon, Deadman, Ragman, Zatanna, Blue Devil, etc).

3 And I did some extra research while writing this post, only to come up completely blank.

4 Or her, but let’s face it: that far back, it was probably a “him.”

5 Exhibit A: B’wana Beast.

6 Being a child of the eighties, my go-to example of a supergroup is Asia, composed of former members of Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and the Buggles.

7 We could discuss other supergroups: the Justice Society of National Comics (the predecessor to DC), the Invaders—originally known by the unimpressive moniker “the All-Winners Squad”—of Timely Comics (the predecessor to Marvel), the Crime Crusaders Club (another terrible name) of Fawcett, even the Mighty Crusaders of Archie Comics (yes, Archie had superheroes too).  But the big two are the only two left, for all intents and purposes.

8 Don’t get me wrong: the JLA had Firestorm and Zatanna and Red Tornado and Black Canary and Phantom Stranger.  So they had fun times too.  Just not as many.

And now for something not nearly as completely different as it was last time ...

Well, I have to bail on another post this week, unfortunately.  I just (as in hours ago) finished a long project for $work,^* and there’s just no time to work in a proper post before the weekend is out.

So, let’s play another little game of “Last Two,” which I invented about two years ago when I also didn’t have time to do a proper post.

Last two movies I watched:  We (meaning the whole family) just watched The Little Prince on Netflix, which we all thought was pretty good.  Even our eldest, jaded teen that they are, managed to keep their earbuds out of their ears long enough to get to the end.  Higher praise I cannot imagine.  Before that ... I think it was The Last Witch Hunter, which is sort of brainless entertainment, except it had XXX, Frodo, and Ygritte, which is not a bad cast for brainless sword fighting and car chases and nonsensical explosions (considering it’s a movie about witches).  But I’m not particularly hard on movies.

Last two audiobooks I listened to:  Well, I just finished Bitten, which is the first in the Women of the Otherworld series.  I wanted to try it out because I’d heard good things about, but I found it distinctly “meh.”  I’ll try at least one more to see if it improves, but it was a little too Harlequin-romance-y for my tastes.  Not bad ... just not great.  Before that I blew through Around the World in 80 Days, as a palate cleanser after coming off of The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi (which is the one I would really recommend: it was a bit slow for the first 2 or 3 chapters, then it took off like a bat out of hell and was amazing straight through to the end, plus I’ve already talked about what an awesome reader Wil Wheaton is).  80 Days is one of the few Verne books I never read when I was younger, and I picked it up at one of those buy-1-get-1-free-but-only-certain-titles sales at Audiobook.  One is always a little surprised by the casual racism when one reads a book published in, say, 1873, but it was actually the casual classism that irked me more.  ‘Cause, you know, Phileas Fogg is an English gentleman, and Passepartout is just a servant.  And here’s a fun fact that you might not know if you haven’t read the book: Fogg hired Passepartout the day they left on the journey.  So they go off and have all these adventures and Passepartout trusts Fogg implicitly depsite barely knowing him ... because he’s a gentleman.  It’s sort of ... disturbing, really.  But a sort of fun book nonetheless.  Just a bit anachronistically jarring when you’re reading it 150 years later.

Last two real books I read:  Dude, I hardly ever read real books any more.  But, weirdly, I’m right in the middle of one right now: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.  I wasn’t going to even start it until next week, but I made the mistake of reading the first several pages to see if the play format was going to work for me, and I got sucked in.  It’s not as good as sometihng actually written by Rowling, but it’s her story, so it’s still interesting enough to make you not want to put it down.  Before that ... I honestly can’t remember.

Last two bands I discovered:  Well, I just (as in minutes ago) discovered Pomplamoose.  Not sure how I never heard of them before, as they’re apparently a bit of a big deal on the Internet.  Everyone else in my house had heard of them, apparently (The Mother is the one who pointed me at them, actually).  I’m just a bit slow, I guess.  Prior to that, I guess I would say Aurora, who I was bit taken with after her appearance on Colbert.  I don’t think it was the song she played on The Late Show, but “Conqueror” is pretty amazing.

Last two albums I bought:  All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend by Aurora, obviously, and before that I think Still Night, Still Light by Au Revoir Simone.  Whom I also discoverd thanks to Colbert, because one third of Au Revoir Simone is now one third of Nice as Fuck, who was on Colbert last week (or the week before, maybe ... I forget).

Last two restaurant meals I ate:  Does Jack in the Box count as a restaurant?  I tried their new portabello-mushroom burger thing.  They keep advertising it all over the TV there, and it looks so good on the commercial ... but don’t do it.  It’s a bad, bad idea.  Before that, no family meal since last week (Topper’s pizza last Sunday—and, may I say, if you happen to live in Southern California and haven’t yet eaten at Topper’s, put down your computer right this instant and order; you won’t be sorry).  I suppose I ate out with my coworkers on Tuesday (I was sick the latter part of the week), but damned if I can remember what we ate.  Japanese, maybe?

Last two real animals I saw (excluding family this time):  I rescued a widow spider out of my shower this morning.  It wasn’t a black widow, but I’m not 100% sure if it was a brown widow or a red widow or what.  But it definitely had the characteristic widow shape.  Before that ... hmmm ... yesterday, I think it was, I saw a bright red dragonfly that swooped in and landed on one of The Mother‘s planter hooks.  It was pretty cool.

Last two television shows I watched:  Hmmm ... not counting watching things like Sesame Street with the kids, I would probably say SCTV Network 90 and Whose Line Is It Anyway?.  Last two shows I watched with another adult ... probably the season finales of Preacher and Stranger Things.  You totally have to check out Stranger Things if you haven’t yet, by the way.  It’s insanely good.

Last two podcasts I listened to:  I don’t really listen to podcasts, per se.  Judge John Hodgman sometimes.  But I do listen to streaming versions of NPR shows, so if we can count that, I was just listening to Car Talk in the car today.  They’re on repeats now, of course, since Tom died.  But I still enjoy it.  Before that ... well, I just recently discovered Nerd HQ and I watched a shit-ton of Zachary Levi’s “Conversations for a Cause” panels, which they thoughtfully videoed and put up on YouTube.  Again, not really a podcast, and, again, not sure how I only became aware of this recently, but they’re pretty entertaining to watch (top pick from the 2016 set: Felicia Day), and I find Levi just as entertaining as Hardwick, and maybe even a bit more endearing, somehow.

And that’s about it.  Hopefully that’ll tide you over until next week.  And, honestly, this post is long enough that I don’t even really consider it “interstitial,” so, you know ... be happy.

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* Technically speaking, the project is not done.  But it’s done enough to make my boss happy once again, and I think I can take the remainder of the project at a more reasonable pace.

Slithy Toves I

"Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core"

[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.]

We’ve talked about Cherry Poppin’ Daddies in this series before.  We talked about their ability to crank out retro-swing, lounge, and the as-yet-unnamed hardcore-yet-retro 50’s-early-rock style.  But the first time I heard “Here Comes the Snake,” I knew it was something different.  Ostensibly, it’s a lounge soung, but there’s just something ... slinky about it.  Which of course is entirely appropriate (and I’m sure intentional) given the title and subject matter.  It’s really hard to define—I suppose it’s something in the beat that makes the song just slither along—but I know it when I hear it.  And of course the words to this particular track reinforce the theme:

Yes, I believe, but I’d rather not pray;
What I believe in I’d rather not say, baby.
Did your God show you the door?
Well, I’m here to eat your apple to the core ...

Here comes the snake indeed.  The idea of music that slithers its way into your brain somehow put me in mind of the slithy toves from “Jabberwocky” ... you know, those little creatures¹ who did gyre and gimble in the wabe.  And thus this mix was born.

A long time ago.  Newer mixes have bubbled into existence, struggled along, and even had several volumes completed before I managed to put the finishing touches on volume I of this mix.  The reason is simple: for most of my mixes, I know where to go looking for new songs to add to the collection.  But this particular theme is unusual ... there’s no genre or subgenre of music which is more likely to churn out this type of song than any other.  There are not even too many bands that we can count on going back to again and again: in a certain sense, nearly every track in this particular mix is unexpected.  So, while building the mix, I’ve just had to rely on discovery—just waiting until I happened to stumble on a song which would be perfect rather than being able to go looking for them.  So it’s just grown very slowly, very gradually, and only recently did I feel like I had enough to put things in some semblance of order.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have some immediate ideas.  Our opening track here, “Jane’s Getting Serious” by the lesser-known of the Astleys,² was probably the very first thing to pop into my head when I thought of songs that slink along into your brain.  Very shortly followed by “Smooth” by Santana, featuring Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20.  Supernatural is an uneven album, in my opninon, but “Smooth” is the standout: really amazing guitar work from Santana (as always), and some sexy vocals from Thomas.  Both these songs were no-brainers.

But perhaps the strongest contender for this mix (after the mix-starter itself) is “Why Do We Call It Love,” which is what really caused me to fall in love with the Swing soundtrack in the first place.  We’ve seen Lisa Stansfield’s tracks from that movie show up on Salsatic Vibrato II³ and Georgie Fame’s tracks on Moonside by Riverlight, and those are good tracks.  Nothing wrong with those tracks.  But this song ... this song is just incredible.  Smoky vocals from Stansfield, that slinky beat that drives it to this mix, clever lyrics—“Why Do We Call It Love” has it all, and in spades.

Now, as I said up above, in general bands don’t immediately spring to mind when you’re looking for slinky, slithery songs.  However, if there’s an exception to that, Shriekback must be it.  Primarily centered around the keyboards and vocals of Barry Andrews, keyboardist with XTC for their first two albums, Shriekback can do big, bold party songs, such as most of Oil and Gold and much of Go Bang!, or it can do quieter, reflective songs such as most of Big Night Music and a few scattered other songs.  So throughout this series we’re going to see Shriekback on such vastly different mixes as Funkadelic Bonethumper, Wisty Mysteria, Rose-Coloured Brainpan, Bleeding Salvador, Smokelit Flashback, Moonside by Riverlight, Shadowfall Equinox, and Numeric Driftwood.  They’re versatile, is what I’m saying.  But we’ll probably see them here more than anywhere else, starting with two tracks on this very volume.  “The Reptiles and I” is a slinky but quiet little song of lists from Big Night Music, whereas Shark Walk is one my favorites from Go Bang!, a more upbeat but still quite sinuous tune that focuses more on the selachian than the serpentine.

Other early choices include Joe Jackson’s cover of Louis Jordan’s 1944 hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and Cat Empire’s interesting song about a gypsy woman haunting their dreams, “The Night That Never End.” In the former case, it’s a swing standard—I think Jackson’s version adds a bit more flair and maybe more brass, but the slinky undertones are present even in Jordan’s original.  In the latter case, it’s whatever style you want to accuse of Cat Empire of being—probably something latin-ish—and it carries the sneaky, sinuous theme through into the lyrics, in which a “gypsy lady” sneaks into your sleeping head carrying a bottle of schnapps.  The end of the song, where the trumpet-drenched bridge gets faster and faster until it peaks in a crescendo of frenetic energy, is one of the most amazing pieces of musical craftmanship I’ve ever heard.

I also remembered “Caramel” by Suzanne Vega off Nine Objects of Desire, an album which in general I like less than the magnificent 99.9 F°.  But “Caramel” is probably my favorite off NOoD, and has a perfect sinuous beat to fit in here.  Similarly, relistening to Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, I was instantly struck by how perfectly the feel of “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” slots in here.  The song has an Arabian vibe that’s reminiscent of a snake charmer’s tune which is perfect for this mix.

Less likely (and more of a stretch for theme here, if I’m honest) is “Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith.  Last time we saw Smith was on Sirenexiv Cola, where she had a poppy electronica/orchestral tune from her excellent album The Cricket’s Orchestra.  Here we have another track from that album, which has a bit of the slinky feel we’re going for here, concentrated mainly in what I feel sure is a Hammond organ.  But what it lacks in strict adherence to the theme it makes up for in sheer joy.  It shows that, while Slithy Toves is mostly a collection of slower songs, there can be upbeat tunes that fit the mix as well.

Another thing we talked about last week was my discovery of KT Tunstall, and how I’ve not been as excited about any other artist in the past few decades or so.  I threw out a couple of candidates for next runner-up,⁴ but I should have mentioned Iron & Wine.  His album The Shepherd’s Dog is a revelation: part folk music, part alterna-pop, with a tinge of electronica and surreal lyrics reminiscent of Michael Stipe or Robyn Hitchcock.  Several of his songs slither about with an ambience that makes them well-suited for this mix.  The one I chose for volume I is “Wolves,” which is sort of the title track to The Shepherd’s Dog.⁵  It’s a slinky, slithery track that flows beautifully into “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove.”

Slithy Toves I
[ Here to Eat Your Apple to the Core ]

“Jane's Getting Serious” by Jon Astley [Single]⁶
“Why Do We Call It Love” by Lisa Stansfield, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Take Me Dancing” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby” by Joe Jackson, off Jumpin' Jive
“The Reptiles and I” by Shriekback, off Big Night Music
“The Night That Never End” by the Cat Empire, off Two Shoes
“Borneo” by Firewater, off The Golden Hour
“Smooth” by Santana, off Supernatural
“Here Comes the Snake” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)” by Iron & Wine, off The Shepherd's Dog
“The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” by Dead Can Dance, off Into the Labyrinth
“Shadow” by the Primitives, off Lovely
“Shark Walk” by Shriekback, off Go Bang!
“Caramel” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Ghost Highway” by Mazzy Star, off She Hangs Brightly
“Sarah” by Bat for Lashes, off Fur and Gold
“I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree, off Who's Got Trouble?

Total:  17 tracks,  72:20

The rest of the tunes I more or less stumbled upon by accident.  Firewater’s “Borneo” is, like the Meaghan Smith tune, a bit of a stretch here, but it’s a rollicking fun track that upholds the upbeat portion of the festivities nicely.  Plus it flows into “Smooth” really nicely.  “Shadow” by the Primitives is another Middle-Eastern-sounding song that rolls along coming off the back-end of “Lovegrove,” and provides a nice change-of-pace from their usual alterna-pop.

Which just leaves us with our 3 closing tunes.  “Ghost Highway” is in some ways a typical Mazzy Star song, but in others it’s quite distinctive, including a serpentine beat that underscores the duo’s typical echoing, buzzing style.  That flows into Bat for Lashes’ “Sarah,” a slow, sinuous track that shows off her distinctive voice.  And we polish it all off with “I Close My Eyes” by Shivaree.  We first discussed Shivaree’s eclectic style back on Smokelit Flashback III.  “I Close My Eyes” contains quite a bit of torchy Moonside by Riverlight overtones, but it still retains enough of the undulating quality that we’re looking for here to provide a solid closer.

Next time, we’ll go back to the beginning for another installment of the mix that started it all.

Slithy Toves II ⇒

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1 According to Humpty Dumpty, toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”

2 Weirdly, Jon Astley is not related to Rick Astley, despite them both being Astleys, both being British, and looking remarkably similar to each other.  Shame: I’d never have minded so much getting jonrolled.

3 And we’ll see them again on future volumes of that mix.

4 Specifically, Devics and Firewater, the latter of whom we’ll hear from in just a minute.

5 By which I mean that the title of the album appears in the song’s lyrics, even though it’s not the song title.

6 I try not to link to YouTube for music, and in fact I’ve never had to do so before.  But this track is stupidly hard to get hold of—I don’t believe there’s any place you can purchase it digitally at all.  Since desperate times call for desperate measures, I’ll let you know that it is possible to turn a YouTube video into an MP3 file, using any number of sites that will do the conversion for you.  My current favorite is anything2mp3.com.