Smokelit Flashback II

"In a Half-Lit World"

[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.]

As I mentioned last time, the first two volumes of Smokelit Flashback were developed simultaneously.¹  So in this volume we see lots more entries from the same 5 albums: Portishead, the two Lemon Jelly EPs, and the two Naomi albums.  However, we’re also already starting to see some important branching out.

First and foremost, we have two tracks from Falling You.  When some people say “darkwave,” they just mean “gothic.” But I use the term in a very different way: oh, darkwave is very much gothic-derived, no doubt, but it’s also quite distinct in my eyes.  Siouxsie is gothic.  The Cure is gothic, as are Sisters of Mercy and the Swans and the Mission.  Gothic reaches its peak in bands like Mary My Hope and Fields of the Nephilim, who are so close to what would eventually become goth-metal that you could be forgiven for thinking they were just collections of the mellower songs from bands like Type O Negative and White Zombie.  But darkwave goes off in a different direction: through dream pop and flirting with trip-hop, before finally settling somewhere in a DIY æsthetic with strong electronica tendencies.  The first time I heard darkwave, it was Black Tape for a Blue Girl, and it was on Hearts of Space.²  Now I mentioned before that I was greatly influenced by HoS’s excellent mixes, but I also picked up a fondness for many new musical styles from that show, and darkwave was one.  Because, you see, Black Tape for a Blue Girl leads one to Sam Rosenthal³ and Sam Rosenthal leads one to Projekt.

Sometimes a particular label will come to focus on a genre or style to the point where it nearly defines that type of music.  Sun was rockabilly.  Sub Pop was grunge.  Blue Note was jazz.  Well, Projekt is darkwave.  It seems like any darkwave artist of any note ends up on Projekt sooner or later.  So perusing their stable of artists is a good way to discover the best of darkwave.  The funny thing is, despite the fact that Black Tape for a Blue Girl got me into darkwave, I don’t really like that band all that much.  There are a few BTfaBG tracks I like, of course, and one good album,⁴ but it was the bands I discovered through them that really excited me.  Lycia, and Love Spirals Downwards,⁵ and Autumn’s Grey Solace, and Unto Ashes.  And Falling You.

Falling You isn’t technically a Projekt artist, but the band has strong connections to the label.⁶  Like Black Tape for a Blue Girl, it’s essentially a one-man show, although John Michael Zorko doesn’t do any of his own singing.  He employs a number of very talented women with haunting, ethereal voices for that, and he provides the gothic wash of sound with the strong backbeat.  Falling You is, in my opinion, the best of the darkwave bands, and they are now appearing on a number of my mixes (including at least one track on every volume of Smokelit Flashback from here on out).

Just as Projekt is the darkwave label, so 4AD is the dream pop label.  The two biggest names in that field—the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance—had their home here, and I chose a track from each one for this volume.  Dream pop, with its glorious backwashes of swirling guitars and keyboards and its soaring, often celestial, occasionally eerie vocals, is a great match for this mix.

The Cocteau Twins—who, like the Thompson Twins, do not consist of two people—have an interesting history.  Like darkwave, they started in gothic (their first album, Garlands, is as dark as anything by Siouxsie or the Cure) and then transformed, but they stopped when they hit dream pop.  In fact, some would say they invented it.⁷  Certainly they define it in some way, just as Nirvana would forever define grunge, despite their not having invented it.⁸  If I need to explain to anyone what dream pop is, I just put on some Cocteau Twins.  They’ll get it.

I discovered Victorialand in 1986, shortly after it came out (although I didn’t know that at the time).  My record-collector father had a friend who ran a small record store in Chesapeake, Virginia, near my hometown.  Once while he was at the house visiting Dad, he told me I should drop by.  I told him I wasn’t into the 50’s and 60’s proto-rock that he and my dad were into.  He smiled and promised me he’d have music that would interest me.  He wasn’t kidding.  The small shop was called Unicorn Records, and it was there that I first heard Pleased to Meet Me by the Replacements, and Phantasmagoria by the Damned ... and Victorialand.  I had to buy an import because there was no American release yet—it may well be the highest price I’ve ever paid for an album that I bought myself.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  It was dreamy, and sonic, and only barely decipherable as English.⁹  It was too melodic to be ambient and too edgy to be new age and too dense to be electronica (also, electronica hadn’t been invented yet).  The best I could come up with to describe it was “angels singing in a pink fog,” which is what I told people for years when desperately trying to put the music into words.  Now, you may say, “how could you tell the fog was pink just from listening to it?” To which I can only respond: “you obviously haven’t heard Victorialand.” Ordinary white fog it ain’t.

Dead Can Dance is a slightly different story.  They’re still dream pop, definitely, but with a healthy dose of world, and an injection of Renn Faire to boot.  I’d heard the name kicked around, but I hadn’t heard any of their music when I fell in love with It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil.  TMC was a group with a rotating membership, composed nearly exclusively of 4AD bands.  I knew the Cocteau Twins, of course, and I knew Martin McCarrick from his work with Siouxsie, but the other musicians were from bands I’d mostly never heard of: Cindytalk, Colourbox, Xmal Deutschland, Wolfgang Press.¹⁰  And Dead Can Dance, which of course I had heard of.  I figured I liked the Cocteaus, and I liked This Mortal Coil, so I better pick up some of these other bands.  And I figured I should start with the one name I recognized.

The album I eventually bought was Aion, and it too would become one of my favorite albums (possibly even eclipsing the other two).  This trilogy (Victorialand, It’ll End in Tears, and Aion) comprise the perfect music to relax to, to fall asleep to, to mediate to, to just lose yourself in.  Aion differs from the others in having a strong medieval bent.  As such, a lot of the tunes (such as “Saltarello” or “Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book”) don’t really work for Smokelit Flashback.  But then you have “Black Sun,” which I’ve always thought is one of Brendan Perry’s strongest vocal performances.  There’s no doubt that Lisa Gerrard is the vocal powerhouse of the duo, but when Brendan is on, he’s on, and “Black Sun” is the perfect closer for this volume.

The volume title is a line from “Mourning Air” by Portishead.  The sense of mystery it conveys is perfect for this mix.

Smokelit Flashback II
[ In a Half-Lit World ]

“Cowboys” by Portishead, off Portishead
“She Hangs Brightly” by Mazzy Star, off She Hangs Brightly
“Mercy” by Falling You, off Mercy
“The Thinner the Air” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“Mourning Air” by Portishead, off Portishead
“White” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“Experiment Number Six” by Lemon Jelly, off Lost Horizons
“Sumeria” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
“Syndicate” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“Humming” by Portishead, off Portishead
“the art of possession (no escape)” by Falling You, off Touch
“Ana” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
“Black Sun” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion

Total:  13 tracks,  63:16

As I mentioned back in volume I, the other bridge off Transglobal Underground’s International Times (“Sumeria”) is here, as is “Ana,” a song which simmers but somehow never boils.

Rounding out the set is a single track off Mazzy Star‘s debut, She Hangs Brightly.  Mazzy Star is often described as dream pop as well, but I find it to be something a bit to the left of that.  Not harsh enough to be shoegaze yet too harsh to be proper psychedelia, with just a hint of country twang, it exists in a bizarre world mostly to itself, with only Tashaki Miyaki and a few of the mellower Sonic Youth cuts for company.¹¹  Much of the Mazzy Star ouevre isn’t quite right for Smokelit Flashback, although it’s all tantalizingly close.  But “She Hangs Brightly” is just an eerie, haunting tune that fits in perfectly here.

For our next installment, we’ll leave Smokelit Flashback for some more upbeat pastures.

⇐ Smokelit Flashback I

Smokelit Flashback III ⇒

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1 This is actually quite common.  Often when I decide I have enough tracks for a full volume, I end up having enough for two.

2 Specifically, program 250: “Liquid Desires.”

3 BTfaBG essentially consists of Rosenthal and whoever else he feels like, much like Nine Inch Nails is Trent Reznor and The The is Matt Johnson.

4 Specifically, The Scavenger Bride.

5 We’ll see them on Smokelit Flashback V, if we get that far.

6 For instance, perennial Falling You vocalists Suzanne Perry and Dru Allen are the regular singers for Projekt artists Love Spirals Downwards and This Ascension, respectively.

7 While others might say that honour should go to labelmates Dif Juz.

8 Nirvana formed in 1987, which puts them 4 years behind fellow Seattle natives the Melvins, and 3 behind seminal Boston grunge band Dinosaur Jr.

9 And I’m being generous when I say “barely.” Many people listen to the Cocteau Twins for years before figuring out that it actually is English.  I know I did.

10 I would eventually procure Devils and Funky Little Demons as well.  Still have never picked up any Cindytalk or Colourbox though.

11 Well, I say “only,” but that only goes to show you that you should never use words like that when it comes to music.  I’ve recently discovered Beach House and Widowspeak, and both are very similar to Mazzy Star, especially the latter.  In fact, I suspect that you’ll be hearing from one or both bands in future volumes of this mix.

Smokelit Flashback I

"Fortune Teller Eyes"

[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.]

Smokelit Flashback is the first of the “modern mixes,” by which I mean the first one that I really developed as a digital playlist, as I described when I first told you about my mixes.  I have older mixes, true, but they’re all recreations of old mix tapes I made (mostly in college).  But this was the first time I heard a song and said, “whoa ... I need to make a mix based on this.”

The mix starter in this case was “Seven Months” by Portishead off of Portishead, and it was the culmination of my discovery of chill and trip-hop.  I had recently started a new job, and part of that for me is always exploring the musical tastes of my co-workers and figuring out what they know that I don’t.  I had already discovered Modest Mouse, Pinback, Mogwai, and Cat Power from one person there, but it was to be my fellow programmer, a fellow with tastes as eclectic as mine (only in different directions), who would lend me his Lemon Jelly EPs and two albums he’d found on iTunes by an obscure German band called Naomi.¹  This was the first time I’d been exposed to proper chill, also sometimes called downtempo.  I knew techno, of course, and I liked a bit of it (e.g. “Something Good” by Utah Saints), and I knew electronica and liked a bit more of that (e.g. Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, etc), but I’d never really heard anything like these four albums.²  And, in trying to find more like this, I stumbled onto Portishead.

Now, trip-hop is not the same as chill, but they share certain characteristics.  And the second I heard “Seven Months” (really from the opening bars of “Cowboys,” which would become the opener for Smokelit Flashback II), I knew that this was something which was just totally outside my experience in music.  See, I’d heard some music which pushed the boundaries of what constituted “music” altogether, and I’d heard some music which might be difficult to distinguish between music and comedy, and I’d heard plenty of music that tried to be a story in musical form, but among those things which were undeniably music, there were 3 pretty hard delineations in my head: there was classical, and there was popular, and there was cinematic.  Oh, sure, prog rock (among other forms) uses classical ideas, but it was still popular music in my mind.  And movies often use popular songs, or even classical songs, but that doesn’t make them cinematic.  Cinematic music is music composed for soundtracks, and it isn’t classical, and it isn’t popular, although it generally leans more towards the former than the latter.³  But here I was listening to something I could have sworn sounded like it fell out of a Sean Connery James Bond movie, kissing cousin to Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”.  And yet ... not.  Undeniably popular music, yet so strongly cinematic you could almost see the movie playing behind your mind’s eye as you listened.  To my mind, Portishead presaged those artists who would produce exclusively cinematic music that just lacked a movie to go with it, such as Chris Joss.  But Portishead was true trip-hop, of cinematic nature but fused with something unquestionably popular as well, with the strong hip-hop-influenced beat and the electronica-derived swirling melodies, and the washes of sound that owed something to dream pop.  It was the production more than anything that gave it its cinematic flair.

I felt like was I in a black-and-white film noir movie, listening to a jazz singer in a smoky club, with the only color provided by the raging acid trip that I was on.  Thus: Smokelit Flashback.

At the time, I hadn’t formulated my concept of mixes yet.⁴  I basically just wanted to take the best songs from these 5 great new albums I’d found and put them in some interesting order and listen to them whenever I was in that sort of mood.  You know: the sort of mood when you’d like to feel like you’re having an acid flashback in a smoky bar in a black-and-white spy movie.  I rapidly realized that I had enough songs here for two full albums’ worth of listening, although it needed a bit more to flesh it out.  So I started traipsing through my collection.  The first track that jumped out at me was from Norah Jones’ excellent Come Away with Me.  Her music is often more jazzy and upbeat than is required for this mix, but she can do smoky bar with the best of ’em, and “I’ve Got to See You Again” is the best of those.  I was also listening to Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World a lot back in those days, which is as close to country music as I ever get.  “Kings of the Highway” feels like something that would be playing in the background of the scene where the film noir detective walks along the deserted desert highway, trying to get back to the city in time to save the dame.  And so forth, with a handful of others that stood out from their surrounding albums as having just the right quality to fit in here.

Being that it started out focusing on just 5 albums by 3 artists, this volume (and the following one) has much less variety than nearly all my other mixes.  After these first two were in the bag, I started trying to adhere to my rule for mix tapes back when I was making those: a given artist should only appear in a mix volume twice at most, and those two appearances should be spaced out as much as possible.  I haven’t always adhered to that guideline of course, but I’ve never broken it quite as badly as I’ve done here. 

Smokelit Flashback I
[ Fortune Teller Eyes ]

“Seven Months” by Portishead, off Portishead
“Kneel Before Your God” by Lemon Jelly, off Lemonjelly.ky [EP Compilation]
“Paravent” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
“I've Got to See You Again” by Norah Jones, off Come Away with Me
“Kings of the Highway” by Chris Isaak, off Heart Shaped World
“Freshly Squeezed” by Angelo Badalamenti, off Twin Peaks [Soundtrack]
“(—-) [5]” by Swans, off Love of Life
“Pity” by the Creatures, off Boomerang
“Curious” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
“Keep the Change” by Banyan, off Anytime at All
“Over” by Portishead, off Portishead
“Chaldea” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
“(—-) [2]” by Swans, off Love of Life
“Homage to Patagonia” by Lemon Jelly, off Lemonjelly.ky [EP Compilation]

Total:  14 tracks,  58:13

Two of the three bridges come from the Swans’ excellent Love of Life, which is more gothic than trip-hop, but suitably weird for inclusion here.  This album contains six distinct tracks named ”(---),” which can be quite confusing when you’re trying to reference them in, say, a mix list.  Here I’ve chosen to just add a bracketed number which represents which instance we’re talking about.  So ”(---) [5]” is the fifth such track (track 12 on the album) and ”(---) [2]” is the second (track 4).

The third bridge is “Chaldea” from the world/electronica/trip-hop-influenced International Times, by Transglobal Underground.⁵  The other bridge from that album, “Sumeria,” will show up on Smokelit Flashback II.

The volume title is a line from “Keep the Change” from Banyan.  Although Anytime at All is a jazzy, almost prog-rock-like album, which normally wouldn’t catch my attention too much, I had checked it out because it was the side project of Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, and I sort of fell in love with it.

The collection is rounded out by a track off Angelo Badalamenti’s amazing soundtrack for Twin Peaks, and a vaguely eerie track from Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie’s side project, the Creatures.

So that’s my first modern mix, although it really was made simultaneously with Smokelit Flashback II.  But that’s another post.  In the meantime, feel free to make your own copy of this one.  Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.

Smokelit Flashback II ⇒

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1 Any time I mention a band that I can’t find a decent AllMusic page to link to, and the Wikipedia article for them is essentially a one-liner, you can be sure I consider that an obscure band.

2 Specifically, they were: LemonJelly.KY, Lost Horizons, Everyone Loves You, and Pappelallee.

3 Presumably due to the habit of using a full orchestra for cinematic music, although one sometimes supplemented with popular instrumentation such as electric guitars.

4 In fact, my experience making Smokelit Flashaback I & II is how that concept came to be.  Which is why I wanted to start with this one.

5 Another album introduced to me by that same fellow programmer, as it happens.

Re-exploring the Whedonverse

I just watched one of the best ever episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Now, if for any reason you just turned up your nose, or perhaps snorked milk through it, I will assume you’ve found it difficult to appreciate Buffy for what it is.  Let’s start with its pedigree: there are essentially three television show creators for whom I will watch basically anything they create:¹ Alan Ball, Aaron Sorkin, and Joss Whedon.  At this point, I’ve watched almost everything those three gentlemen have ever done,² although sometimes I have to go fill in gaps.  A couple of years ago I had to sit down and watch/rewatch the entire 7-year run of West Wing.  And, currently, I’m embarked on the same mission for Buffy.

Now, as it happens, I saw most of the Buffy episodes when they went into re-runs the first time, which I believe would have been before its original run was even complete.  But that was 15 years (and three children) ago, and I certainly don’t remember all the ones I watched, and I never watched them all.  Plus I never watched a single episode of Angel, which means I totally missed out on all the crossover fun.³  And, somewhere in my various and sundry pokings around the Internet, I discovered the excellent Watcher’s Council viewing guide, which tells you exactly what order to watch every episode in, and, as it mentioned, the entire run of both series is available streaming on Netflix, so it doesn’t even cost me anything.⁴

Buffy is an interesting story in Whedonosophy.  First there was the movie, which Whedon wrote but then didn’t have much else to do with.  I had seen it: I thought it was an interesting enough piece of fluff entertainment ... nothing to write home about, perhaps, but a not unenjoyable way to kill an hour and a half.  If nothing else, it’s always fun to see Pee-Wee Herman playing a vampire.

Reportedly, Whedon said he didn’t like the studio’s treatment of the Buffy movie because they had made it too campy.⁵  Which is kind of funny, because there is no way to take Buffy completely seriously.  The trick is to understand that you don’t have to take it completely seriously to have fun with it, come to love and empathize with its characters, and appreciate the genius of its creator.  When I first saw my roommates gathered around the television, excitedly watching a show based on a movie about a cheerleader who chased down vampires, I thought, man, that’s silly ... how can you really get into something like that?  But the more they watched, the more dialogue I heard just passing through the room, and the more I got sucked in.

See, dialogue is Whedon’s true talent.  Very like Sorkin, and to a lesser extent like Ball, Whedon writes sharp, clever, engaging dialogue.  Oh, it’s completely unrealistic: listening to a conversation between two Whedon characters is like listening to two people re-enacting a conversation they had yesterday, only now they’ve had time to think of all the witty comebacks they couldn’t come up with at the time.  No one really talks like that, but it’s oh so entertaining to listen to.  Just as Sorkin sucked me into Sports Night even though I hate sports, the words that Whedon put into the mouths of his characters easily overcame my reservations about the subject matter.

Now, this was Whedon’s first show, and you can tell.  It’s great, but it does take a little time to get there.  The first two seasons are good, definitely, but you have to stick with it until season 3 for the greatness to kick in.  Once it does, though, it becomes a bit of a thrill ride, and it’s difficult not to binge watch it.

While the snappy dialogue is the most often cited evidence of Whedon’s genius, it’s certainly not the only one.  Another thing his shows have is organic relationships amongst the characters.  His shows tend to have large casts of central characters (Buffy season 3 has 7, for instance), not to mention many more recurring characters.⁶  And yet all these people have particular relationships with each other that somehow never seem forced.  The best example is when he needs to introduce a new character.  In most shows, character A disappears at the end of season X, and character B magically appears in season X + 1, and everyone just accepts them with minimal adjustment.  One of the most egregious examples of this would be Criminal Minds (another show with a large cast), where Mandy Patinkin’s Gideon never really returns after season 2 and Joe Mantegna’s Rossi shows up out of nowhere in season 3 to replace him, and the team dynamic changes not a whit.  The writers attempted to explain this by giving Rossi the backstory of being Gideon’s old partner—the cofounder of the whole unit, in fact—so he was well-known to all the existing characters on the show.  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is easy to overdo: Rossi was apparently so well-known that, in nearly 50 hour-long episodes, no one ever thought to mention him before Joe Mantegna showed up on set.  The truth is, this is just the shit that happens when one actor leaves the show and is replaced by another.  We in the viewing audience just accept it.  What’s the alternative?

Well, Whedon has an alternative.  He doesn’t always have time to build a logical story arc around an actor’s exit,⁷ but a character’s entrance is always under his control. Let’s take Seth Green’s Oz.  Oz first appears in season 2, episode 4, for about 30 seconds.  He then shows up again in episodes 6, 9, and 10 for equally brief amounts of screentime, before becoming a pretty regular guest star in episode 13 and finally a series regular in season 3.  So, by the time you need to accept him as a full-fledged member of the group, you’re already used to having him around.  He didn’t just show up one day and become an integral part of the story.  He’s that guy we kept bumping into and then he struck up a relationship with one member of the group and then he started having plots revolve primarily around his character and he just naturally became part of the gang.  It’s all very organic and feels very real, which, if you think about it, is pretty bizarre for a show with highly stylized, unrealistic dialogue about high school kids fighting supernatural monsters.  But the reality of characters is something you just can’t fuck with.  You can have outlandish situations, and you can have over-the-top dialogue, but the people on the show must feel very real, even when they’re vampires.  If the audience doesn’t identify with your characters—doesn’t see in them people they know and love, or even themselves—then you’re done.  No amount of cleverness and ingenuity can save that show.

So the characters are the main thing I praise Buffy⁸ for, but not the only thing.  Being that it is a show about high school kids fighting supernatural monsters, it could either be a cool high school show, or a cool monster show.  But, with Whedon at the helm, it’s somehow both.  Sometimes it takes turns going from one to the other and sometimes it really does pull off doing both at once.⁹  It’s also a fun action-thriller show at the same time it’s a clever (not broad) comedy.  When it’s doing action, it’s blood-pumping, edge-of-your-seat thrilling.  And when it’s doing comedy, it’s tickle-your-funnybone funny.  And, again: he can even do both at once, sometimes. 

One thing it’s generally not, though, is scary.  With a premise like “high school cheerleader takes on vampires”¹⁰ you can do funny pretty easily, and you can do thrilling if you work at it, but scary requires taking the show way too seriously.  I said up at the top that you can’t take Buffy seriously and you don’t need to, and that’s true.  It’s also true that Whedon doesn’t try to take the show too seriously (just seriously enough to make it awesome), and for the most part that’s the right choice.  When creators try to take their stories too seriously, that’s when they become silly.  So with the writer not being entirely serious and the audience just in it for the fun (and the awesome), actual scary is a pretty unlikely outcome.

And yet, the episode I watched recently, that inspired me to write this post, is actually totally creepy.  It’s not going to give me nightmares or anything, but damn if the monsters in this particular episode creep me right the fuck out and give me a serious case of the shivers.  The episode is called “Hush”, and, while following that link will show you a picture of the monsters in question, it’s not just their appearance that made them so damn freaky.  It was also the way they moved, and their expressions—one of the main monsters is played by Doug Jones, and, if you don’t know who that is, go back and watch Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies again.  So we’re talking actors who are gifted at expressing emotion without talking, which is handy, because the gimmick of these monsters is that they steal everyone’s voices.  After the first 15 minutes or so of the episode, no one gets to talk any more.  And that just makes the whole thing even creepier.

Which is not to say that Whedon shorts us on the funny, though.  The Buffyverse wiki article linked above says that one of Whedon’s inspirations for writing this episode was constantly hearing that his scripts hinged on the dialogue.  Well, if his intention was to show that an episode of his could succeed without the clever dialogue, he failed abysmally.  The scene where Giles explains the nature of the danger and how to defeat it (using visual aids since he can’t talk), is one of the funniest Buffy scenes in the series, in my opinion, and it’s all because of the painstakingly crafted¹¹ pictures, gestures, facial expressions, phrases hastily scrawled on signs, and artfully placed silent mouthings of words, few enough that you can read their lips without any issues.  All Whedon managed to prove is that he can even write clever dialogue without using a single spoken word.

And on top of the creepy and the funny, there are still plenty of great character moments, including an unexpectedly sweet gesture between two characters just starting a romantic relationship, and the first appearance of a character who I happen to know will become a crucial part of the show in later seasons.  I’d missed this episdoe the first time around, and, now that I’ve had the opportunity to see it, my faith in the genius of Whedon is only reinforced.

So, if you’ve never thought to give Buffy a try, but perhaps you appreciate some of the other Whedon properties, such as Firefly or The Avengers, let me encourage you to fire up your Netflix and take it out for a spin.  For a show about high school kids fighting vampires and demons, it’s surprisingly enjoyable for adults and kids alike.

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1 Barring premature cancellation.  Television network executives being as moronic as they are, I often have to wait a season or so to make sure they’re not going to cancel the show out from under me before I get too invested.

2 Except for the premature cancellations (see previous footnote).  Specifically, Oh, Grow Up, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and Dollhouse, respectively.  I don’t count Firefly because of Serenity (natch).

3 Not to mention I never understood where Cordelia went.  Now I get it.

4 Well, above and beyond what I’m already paying Netflix every month.  Which is a bargain, really.

5 Specifically what he said, according to Wikipedia, was: “I had written this scary film about an empowered woman, and they turned it into a broad comedy.  It was crushing.”

6 This is another characteristic he shares with Sorkin and Ball, actually.

7 Although sometimes he does.  The character who leaves in season 4 (no spoilers!) was a real blow, but I thought the exit was handled gracefully.  Less so the first actor to depart Angel, but, as I say: sometimes things are just out of your control.

8 And Angel.  From now on, let’s just pretend they’re a single entity, and every time I say “Buffy,” you translate that as “Buffy and Angel.”

9 See?  Balance and paradox.  No wonder I love this show.

10 Although, to be fair, Buffy was only really a cheerleader in the movie version.  By the time she hit the series, she realized her life was never going to allow her to do something as normal as cheerleading.

11 Obviously I don’t know that for sure, but as an aspirational fellow writer, I’d put money on that assessment.

Too much/not enough

I don’t think I’m going to do a proper post again this week.  Oddly, my problem today is not having nothing to say, but rather having too much.  I’ve had several ideas for posts this week, but couldn’t settle on any one of them, with the result that I’ve got 3 or 4 half-finished^* ideas and no hope of actually completing any of them.  I’ve been worrying at a technical post for my Other Blog for a couple of weeks now.  I’m also due for a follow up on my first full-length Heroscapers post.  I’m deep into my rewatch of the original Whedon brilliance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer intertwined with Angel, and it’s inspired at least two post ideas in my brain.  Plus I now have twice as much experience with the Iron Druid books as I did when I last wrote about them, so I feel an update there is warranted.  I’ve been pondering a much longer series-version of my salad post.  And several other less developed neotonous thoughtlets.

Of course, one of my richest source of blog posts is questions people ask me.^**  Someone will ask me a question, then I give them the answer that springs to mind, and then I get to thinking about it, and pondering, and mulling it over, and worrying at it with my little mental teeth, and suddenly blammo! I’ve got a new blog post.  This weekend’s question was from my eldest, who I introduced to roleplaying games like Pathfinder and Darwin’s World at a fairly young age.  Now he’s a teenager and handling the GM duties for his own circle of friends.  Although in many ways he’s a typical teen, which means he spends all day in his room in front of his computer avoiding talking to icky parents and annoying little siblings, every once in a while he comes out for air and actually engages with me on some topic or other.  Yesterday, he asked me: which D&D/Pathfinder race did you think was the most exciting when you read it?  Quickly followed by, which class?  These are some weighty questions, and they could easily balloon into a whole series of posts, but I think I’d like to give them time to germinate a bit before I just leap into them.  Also, I want to finally get off my ass and put some of my homebrew classes up on the web somewhere so that I can reference them in these posts.

Anyways, that’s a long rambling way of saying that I’m fiddling around and not actually going to give you a full post this week.  Hopefully you’ll recover from the crushing disappointment.

* This is me being generous to myself.  They’re all less than half finished.  None of them are really a quarter finished, most likely.

** Most recently seen in my post on craftmanship.

All Mixed Up

I’ve been working on my mixes today.

By “mixes,” I mean music.  Sort of like making mix tapes, back in the day, except these days we don’t actually use tape any more.  Everything’s digital: digital playlists of digital music, bought digitally, or digitized from CD.  More and more the music we listen to was even created digitally, especially if you’re into electronic, or chill, or ambient, or new age, or any of several dozen other genres and subgenres.  So it’s all manipulating files on disc, which, as a programmer, I’m not that bad at.

Of course, most digital music these days is inside programs like iTunes, or up in the cloud in services like Pandora or Rhapsody.  So few people have actual .mp3’s (or other file formats, if you’re more of an audio snob than I am).  I would love it if I didn’t have to keep lugging around my digital files, which my handy dandy space checker script tells me now total 81 gigabytes.  But there’s still too many things I have that the cloud doesn’t know about (or care about, in the case of some of my older and/or local band music).  So it’s a challenge keeping everything backed up and whatnot.  Of course, these days, you can get 128Gb thumb drives.  So it’s not as painful as it used to be.

I started making mixes back when they really were mix tapes, of course.  The art of the mix tape is somewhat lost these days, I fear.  It’s mostly replaced by music discovery services like Pandora, which has algorithms for choosing music you want to listen to (even when it’s music you never heard before).  And Pandora is great, don’t get me wrong: I’ve discovered some fantastic music by listening to Pandora.  It’s just that I then want to buy my own copies of that music and mix it up in my own ways.  That’s what “music discovery” should be: I discover some music, explore it further (e.g., was it just one great track, or is there a whole great album lurking underneath? or maybe an entire great new artist?), then I buy it, if the exploration proves fruitful.  Using music disovery as a personal playlist doesn’t really appeal to me, although I know it works well for some.  I’m a little more comfortable with curated Internet radio stations, like Radio Paradise, but I still like to take away what I learn there and mesh with other stuff I already have.

Mix tapes have played important roles in literature and movies, like Hi Fidelity or Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, although in most of those (as in those specific examples), it’s all about making a mix tape for someone.  Which is fine.  For me, though, I make mixes for myself.  Or occasionally for parties, or other special occasions.  For instance, I made a mix for our recent week-long vacation in Las Vegas.  ‘Cause, I mean, we’re driving to Las Vegas for my eldest’s birthday, and I’ve just discovered the Weepies and their excellent song “Vegas Baby”, and how can you pass up an opportunity like that?  It’s practically begging for a mix.

But those are the minority.  Most mixes I do, as I say, are just for me.  I build mixes around a theme.  Generally, the themes are lyrical (all the songs have similar subject matter) or musical (all the songs have a common instrumentation or musical structure) or emotional (all the songs invoke a certain mood).  So then, when I feel like listening to a certain type of music, I just break out the appropriate mix.

How it usually works is, I’m listening to an album, and a certain song jumps out at me.  I think, hey ... that song reminds me of this other song, which is also like these three or four others.  That first song, that provides the inspiration, is what I call the “mix starter.”  It’s generally emblematic of the whole mix, for obvious reasons.  When I’m just starting out, I don’t even make a playlist yet: I just jot down the starting tracks in a text file.  As I stumble across other songs that might fit, I add them too, until the list is long enough to start working on in earnest.

Now, back in the days of actual mix tapes, mixes were about an hour long, and that was it.  Nowadays of course a mix is a playlist, and playlists can be infinitely long.  I have some mixes that are six or seven hours long, and still growing.  As I’m continually discovering new music (both new and old), I’m continually find more tracks that fit the existing themes, in addition to finding new themes.  So a mix can fairly quickly grow unwieldy—way too long to listen to the whole thing in a sitting.  So I divvy each mix up into “volumes”: about 60 to 80 minutes of music, which is, not coincidentally, exactly what can fit on a recordable CD.  I do sometimes burn volumes of mixes onto actual CDs, but usually not until the list has settled down a bit.

See, at the beginning of the life of a mix (or a new volume in an existing mix), I just throw songs at the list, constantly rearranging them according to rules (more like guidelines, really) that mostly only make sense to me.  Songs that sound alike go together, but not if they sound too much alike.  If I have multiple songs from the same artist (quite common, since some artists really embody certain themes in all their work), they have to be spaced out so that the mix doesn’t devolve into a greatest hits compilation.  It’s all about variety.  Likewise, not too many slow or fast songs in a row; in fact, I generally like to amp up gradually to a fast song, then back through a few mid-tempo tracks until I get to a slow song, then start over.  And one track needs to “flow” into the next.  Sometimes you get really lucky with this, like being able to butt “No One Knows” up against “Underneath It All”: if you use the album versions and you can manage gapless playback, you won’t be able to tell where the Queens of the Stone Age end and No Doubt begins.  Mostly you don’t get that lucky, but in this area I’m deeply influenced by Hearts of Space.  The first time I heard that show on NPR, I was blown away by how seamless the transitions were, and it’s been the goal I’ve striven for ever since.

Thus, I constantly fiddle with the ordering.  I keep little notes to myself in my text file about which tracks go together so perfectly they can’t be separated, which transitions are not bad but are still open to finding a better one, and which are mostly just wishful thinking.  As a result, none of my mixes are ever really “finished.”  But some I’m so happy with that it seems unlikely that I’ll change them.  For instance, 3 years ago, I presented volume I of my Christmas mix, entitled Yuletidal Pools.  That one’s pretty unlikely to see any changes.

Which brings me to the topic of mix naming.  All my mixes have pretty abstract names.  In fact, “Yuletidal Pools” is one of the more comprehensible ones.  The names are mostly two word titles, often with transposed syllables or other linguistic tricks, and they’re meant to evoke a vague feeling which might give you some hint about the theme of the mix.  So for instance, my mix which has songs which are not necessarily sad but a bit wistful-sounding is named Wisty Mysteria, which manages to wrap up “wistful,” “mysterious,” “misty,” and “wisteria,” with its associations with gothic architecture.  Or there’s my mix of songs whose lyrics are all a bit abstract and weird: that one’s called Bleeding Salvador, which is meant to make you think of Salvador Dalí, and perhaps picture some of his melting clocks dripping blood, for added effect.  Pretty much all my mixes have names like that.

On the other hand, the volumes within the mixes have names which are generally drawn from a line in one of the songs on that volume.  Typically not a line from a chorus—not a line that’s repeated over and over.  Just a single line, something that struck me while listening to the volume: a pretty turn of phrase that also seems to relate to the theme of the mix somehow.  For example, volume I of Rose-Coloured Brainpan (my mix that puts me in a nostalgic mood) is subtitled “Billion Year-Old Carbon,” which is of course a line from “Woodstock” that I always felt had a nice ring to it.  Sometimes I deviate from this general principle; the subtitle of Yuletidal Pools I is “featuring Michael Bublé,” which obviously isn’t a line from a song, but refers to “Elf’s Lament.”

So these are the things that I fiddle with when I fiddle with my music.  I like playing around with my mixes, and a lot of the time when I’m listening to music, I’m planning which mix to add the current track to, and what position to put it in.  Perhaps I’ll share a few more of my mixes here, from time to time.  I like talking about music.  And you, dear reader, apparently have nothing better to do.

All work and no play is pretty much the same as all play

I’m doing some work this weekend, so I’m not doing a normal blog post.  Let me stress that this is not like a Lumbergh type situation.  In fact, this job has been quite courteous of my weekends, especially compared to $last_job.  So when something comes up and I know that people would be inconvenienced if I didn’t work on it over the wekend (which happens pretty rarely), I actually want to put in the extra work.  Plus I love what I do, so then is it really work?  As Confucius (supposedly) said:

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Of course, saying “I love what I do” is not the same thing as saying “I love my job,” but, as it happens, I do that as well.  I don’t know that I could describe it as a perfect job, but I also don’t know what any of my bosses could give me that they haven’t already, so perhaps that’s as close to perfection as makes no never mind.  In my blog post about what employees want, I said that the most important things are respect, trust, and freedom, and I have those in spades.  So it pleases me to do nice things for those I work for, and it’s fun, so sometime I do a little extra, if the mood strikes me.  Which, this weekend, it has.

So I’m going to go immerse myself in some Perl code and try to accomplish a few things to make my coworkers’ lives easier.  Perhaps next week I’ll be inspired to write a more complete post.

Heroscapers post #1

Remember how, just after Thanksgiving, I said I was going to post something on my Heroscape forum about the big game the boys I played?  Well, I never did.  But today I finally decided to put some time into that, and produced this post.  Check it out, if you’re so inclined.  It might not make a huge amount of sense to those not steeped in the game, but it might be mildly entertaining nonetheless.

Perl blog post #38

I didn’t actually miss a post last week.  I just forgot to post a pointer here to my Other Blog.  So here’s a belated such pointer.

And, due to the magic of computers, it even looks like I posted it last week, when I really should have!  But I didn’t.  Because I’m lame.  Sorry.

A Lament for a Lost Post

Well, I missed another blog post last week: only the seventh one since I started this blog almost five years ago.  So, more than one a year, but not so many as two per.  (The exact statistic is 7 out of 250 weeks, or 2.8%, for those with a more pedantic turn of mind.)  I suppose that’s not so bad.

The reason, such as it was, was simply the holidays ... last Sunday fell 3 days after Christmas, which of course is 3 days before New Year’s Eve.  There was still a lot going on, and I’m guessing I was playing Little Big Planet, in its latest incarnation with my boys.  That’s quite a common post-holiday pasttime currently.

I thought it might be interesting to go back and review those 7 occasions when I missed posts.  Here they are:

• On 6/27/10, I was in the middle of a two-week vacation and apparently just spaced.
• On 11/28/10, I was in the midst of moving into our new (current) house, and everything was in flux.  I can probably be forgiven for that one.
• On 6/26/11, 6/2/13, and 6/22/14, I was traveling to or from a YAPC.  For some reason, I have a tendency to miss a week around my yearly Perl conferences.  Less excusable, but not entirely feeble, hopefully.
• On 7/24/11, I missed a post for no reason that I can determine. 
• And 12/28/14 was last week.

Of course, all this virtual hand-wringing over missed blog posts presumes that anyone cares, and, as I am constantly reminding you, you, dear reader, should not.  Because you should not even be reading this blog.  Nonetheless, I’ve tried to maintain a consistent schedule, and, when I miss a week, I upset that schedule.  And it tends to bother me.  Perhaps it might be appropriate at this juncture to ponder exactly what my goals are for the blog itself.

The blog was originally a suggestion from The Mother.  She pointed out that I was an aspiring writer who never wrote anything, as well as a technogeek, for whom theoretically at least the creation of a blog would be much easier than it would for most of the rest of the populace.  I had no excuse, she pointed out, for not creating a blog and writing a post a week.  I resisted this at first, of course, given my staunch opinion on blogs in general.  But eventually I gave in and agreed to make the commitment.

And the commitment, once given, should be honored.

Of course, there’s still no particular penalty for missing a week.  But, the thing is, now that I’ve gotten into a rhythm, it’s an excellent way to keep me on track producing work.  Without the commitment, I’d probably just spit out a few thousand words every 9 months or so, instead of a moderately steady 1500 words a week.  Oh, sure, even when I don’t skip a week, I often produce an anemic, underfed post (such as this one), which I mark as “interstitial,” and which doesn’t come close to the 1500-word mark.  But, even so, I’m still writing something ... and I find that’s often sufficient.

So I’ll apologize for another missed week, even as I tell you that you really shouldn’t care.  And I’ll tell you once again to tune in next week for another blog post that you really shouldn’t read.  Because it’s become something of a habit.  A good habit, I think.

Merry Yule

Today is Yule.  This is the darkest night of the year, the night when the Great Mother will give birth to the new Sun King.  I hope you all are lighting your yule logs tonight and gathering around them with your loved ones to wait out the dark night of our souls and welcome the spark of thew new year.  The Lord of Light shine on you, and the Goddess bless your ways.

Tonight we’ll light our yule log and a few candles, say a few words, and eat some soup, and perhaps watch a holiday movie.  (There aren’t any good Yule movies that I’m aware of, but I’m sure we can come up with something appropriately festive.)  Hopefully this is the start of some peaceful times which can last us into next year.

Today I’ve mostly been wrestling with CD burning software, and mostly losing.  For some reason, I’ve had horrible luck with GUI programs such as K3b or Brasero.  Either they don’t have all the features I want, or they can’t easily deal with my playlists, or they just don’t burn properly (which admittedly could be more of a hardware thing).  So I’ve moved on to fiddling with the command-line burners, primarily cdrdao.  Now I’ve discovered that they hate me as well.  I’ve been fighting with cdrdao for two days now, and I finally managed to produce a CD with it, but I didn’t get the CD-Text, which was one of my primary goals.  Still, I’m starting to think I need to be happy with what I’ve got.  Perhaps I can gradually improve my functionality over time, as I get a little more familiar with how all this stuff fits together.

The CD I managed to burn, by the way, was a copy of my Yuletidal Pools mix, which I developed 3 years ago and which (unlike most of my mixes) hasn’t been changed since.  I’ve been very happy with it over the years.  And while, in that introductory post, I claimed that “only 3 of the songs could even remotely be considered serious,” I find that, over time, I can get just as choked up over “Christmas Wrapping” as other people can get over “O Holy Night” or “The Little Drummer Boy.”  I mean, come on: that is a 5-minute nugget of Christmas miracle going on right there.  How can you not be inspired by that?  And while Run-D.M.C. does advise us to “give up the dough on Christmas, yo,” they also give us “one you won’t believe: it’s better to give than to receive.”  Truly, can’st thou gainsay such instruction?  And, as for “Oi to the World”, it practically makes me tear up these days.  If the punks and the skins can get along, then surely there’s hope for the rest of us.  Go back and listen to it again, and really listen to the words.  Then you too can rappel down the roof with the rest of your turban and go back to the pub and buy each other bourbon.  ‘Cause that’s what the holidays are all about.

Wishing you and yours safe and happy.

Obstreperousness as a Virtue

I am sometimes a giant pain in the ass at work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not always a giant pain in the ass.  Often I’m quite pleasant.  Sometimes I’m even agreeable.  But occasionally I lock into stubborn mode and I won’t let go of a point of view, even when I’m hopelessly outnumbered.  When one is younger, one can look upon one’s obstinacy as persistence, can see refusal to compromise as being a bastion of integrity.  Of course, as one gets older, one realizes that they’re really both the same thing.  And, once you realize that every good quality you have is also a bad quality, sticking to them no matter what because they’re “the right thing to do” doesn’t fly any more.  You need better justifications than that.

Thus I keep examining my own motives in an attempt to figure what makes me tick, even though I know that’s doomed to failure.  In fact, on this very topic I’ve already waxed authorial not just once, but twice.  I’m not saying either of those posts are wrong now ... just that I continue to look for something more, even more to help explain my behavior.

The first time I concluded that I hate seeing people make what I think is a mistake, and that’s a part of it.  Maybe a smaller part than that post made it out to be, but it wasn’t a completely useless observation.

The second time I talked about my number one source of frustration in the corporate world.  That’s still relevant too; in fact, at work this week I trotted out that very same story to tell my coworkers.^*  But I still think there’s more to be teased out here.

After quite a bit of reflection, I’ve come up with this:  I figure if you’re going to hire someone like me—by which I mean someone with this much gray in their beard who is this much of a pain in the ass—then you do it for two reasons: you want my experience, and you want me to be vocal about it.  If you didn’t want my experience, you could hire someone younger.  And if you didn’t want me to be vocal about it, you could definitely hire someone who was a lot easier to put up with.

Hiring someone for their experience means hiring them for their mistakes.  As a popular quote tells us:

Learn from the mistakes of others.  You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.^**

So, if you’ve hired me, and you’ve kept me around for a while, and you genuinely seem to value me, then I assume that you want the benefits of my mistakes, and you want me to let you know in no uncertain terms when you’re about to repeat one of them.  And to keep on letting you know if you continue to keep on trying to make that mistake.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying you always have to agree with me.  In fact, I think it’d be pretty disastrous if everyone always agreed with me, or always agreed with anyone.  Difference of opinion, as I am fond of saying, is what makes the world go ‘round.  Which is to say, the world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed on everything.  And how would we ever learn anything without other people challenging our assumptions?  No, if I’m saying that me disagreeing with you is a good thing (which is what I seem to be saying, if I’m saying that my pointing out that a plan of yours may be a mistake is valuable), then I have to accept that you disagreeing with me must be an equally good thing.  In the big picture, I mean.  On any given point, I’d really prefer you stop disagreeing with me and just do as I advise.  But, overall, I can accept that, some percentage of the time, you’re going to disagree with me, and, some percentage of the time, I’m going to lose that fight, and, overall, that’s good.  But I think there are different ways to disagree.

For instance, if I say “if you do this, things could go wrong” and you (“you” in this scenario are my boss, remember) say “yeah, they could, but the rewards outweigh the risks” ... well, that’s a tough argument to beat.  Maybe we can debate the value of the rewards a bit, or the seriousness of the risks, but in general if you know the dangers and you’re willing to risk them for whatever the upsides are, I can’t argue with that.  Business requires risk.  Opportunities have costs, and sometimes you just have to pay them.  You roll the dice, pray the worst never comes, but, if it does, you just deal with it.  Because it was worth it.  If you don’t take risks in business, you get left behind.  Rapidly.

On the other hand, if I say “if you do this, things could go wrong” and you say “nah, I don’t think they could,” or perhaps “well, they could—after all, anything could happen—but the chances are so low it’s not worth worrying about” ... if you say that, then I may just have to dig in.  Because what I’m telling you is, here’s a mistake I’ve already made.  I’m not talking about some theoretical consequence here: I know it can happen because it already happened to me.  I’ve lived through this, at least once (and, the older I get, the more likely it was more than once), and the resulting unpleasantness is burned into my memory, and I’d really prefer not to suffer through it again, thankyouverymuch.  This is why I also tend not to accept an answer of “yes, that could happen, but that’s okay; we’ll just deal with it.”^***  ‘Cause, trust me: if it was no big deal to “just deal with it,” I would not be doing my giant-pain-in-the-ass impression.

Now, let me stress that I’m not unhappy with the way the these sorts of debates are unfolding at my current job.  In fact, curiously, the fact that the discussions have been so reasonable has been the impetus for my meditation on why I get so stubborn.  In past jobs, the pain of beating my head against a brick wall has somewhat dulled my capacity for self-reflection.  In this job, I have some confidence that the folks who hired me can and will take my obstreperousness in the spirit in which it is intended.  Still, I think it’s worth exploring why I feel so passionate about some of these positions, and examining which circumstances trigger my response and why.  Even it’s only for myself.  Because I think that understanding ourselves is one of the hardest things to get right, but one of the most worthwhile endeavors we can undertake.

__________

* If they would just have the good grace to read this blog I keep telling people not to read, I wouldn’t have had to retell the story.  But one can’t have it all, I suppose.

** Like many quotes floating about the Internet, this is attributed to a bewildering multitude of people, including Martin Vanbee, Sam Levenson, Hyman Rickover, John Luther, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Groucho Marx.  Most of whom I have no idea who they are.

*** This was the favorite tactic of my previous boss.

Perl blog post #37

Today I’ve done a technical post on my Other Blog.  Check it out if you’re into Perl.  Elsewise, check back in next week.  Or don’t.  That’s your perogative.

Thanksgiving fallout

Well, Thanksgiving was lovely.  We had plenty of deviled eggs and cornbread stuffing with cranberry sausage and we sat around and told each other what we were thankful for.  The 2-year-old happily proclaimed she was thankful for “DINNER!!”  The rest of the holiday weekend has been predictably lazy.

While I haven’t done the writing necessary for a full blog post, I have managed to eke out a few bits and bobs.  I replied to a comment on one of my old Perl blogs, and, if the Time Gods are willing, I’ll yet have a chance to post on my Heroscape forum about the marthon game my kids and I just finished up yesterday.

If you are visiting my page from the US, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving.  If you’re from a different country, I hope you had a lovely ... Thursday.  And Friday.  And whatnot.

Taking a week off

This week I have a sick child, a new puppy, and a lot of work to catch up on.  So I’m taking a week off of blog posting.  This is different from when I normally post an excuse about how I ran out of time, in that I pretty much knew from the get-go that I wasn’t going to be able to make a post this week.  Of course, either way you get nothing to read, so I suppose that’s not particularly different from your perspective.  But I feel better about it.

This is the part in a post like this where I tell you to tune in next week and I’ll have an actual post for you.  Of course, next week is Thanksgiving.  So it occurs to me I’d better not make any promises I can’t keep.  In my mind, I think that I’ll have two extra days off, so surely that means I’ll have even more time than usual to compose a post ... right?  Unfortunately, what happens in my mind and what happens in reality rarely coincide.  So we’ll just have to see how it falls out.

Perl blog post #36

Today I returned to Perl blogging with some actual code this time.  Even less useful for those of you not technically inclined.  But fun for those of you who are.  I hope.

Check it out.

An excuse and a pondering ...

As I mentioned two weeks ago, this is my birthday weekend.  You were lucky to get a real post last week, if you think about it.  It was Halloween-on-a-Friday, a moderately rare occurrence, and we did lots of Halloween activities and collected boatloads of candy (although less than I’d expected).  But I still found time to write my roughly 1,500 words for your perusing pleasure.  What an awesome fellow I am.

And now this awesome fellow is another year older (yawn) and he am celebrating by ordering his family around and totally letting the power go to his head.  Also eating terribly.  Also also I forced my children to help build a rather large Heroscape map.  And watch silly movies with me.  And there’s more to come today.

So I’m much too busy to spew forth a chiliad and a half of lexemes for your oblectation.^*  But next week you may score, so tune back in and try again.  After all, birthdays are fleeting, as are all measurements of our span on this earth.  So let me wallow in my sorrow over the inevitable passage of time for just a bit longer; I’ll get back on track next week.

* Look ’em up.

Between the Lightning Bug and the Lightning

There is a German word that I’m quite fond of: Weltanschauung.  It means, roughly, “worldview,” although it’s both a little more specific and a little more general than that.  More specific in that, technically speaking, it is a term used in German philosophy with a very particular meaning.  But also more general in that we’ve somehow watered down the meaning of the word in English.  That is, “worldview” is a calque of Weltanschauung, so it really ought to mean the same thing.  But, after we borrowed the phrase, we started interpreting it literally (in English, that is), so that nowadays “worldview” often means (or is taken to mean) the way a person views the world.  But that’s actually too specific for what Weltanschauung means (or can mean, when used outside of its technical philosophical sense).  Weltanschauung, according to Wikipedia, “refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it.”  That is, not just how you (one person) views the world (the physical planet you live on).  But how any person, or even an organization, or a nation, sees and interprets not only their physical surroundings, but also the social and emotional context in which they are living.

This is related to what I learned of as “the fishbowl effect.”  Nowadays, Google will tell you that the fishbowl effect is a feeling of constant scrutiny, experienced mainly by astronauts and reality TV stars.  Which does make a certain amount of sense, particularly if all you know about keeping tropical fish is those little bowls with goldfish in them that you win at the county fair.¹  Slightly less sense if you understand that keeping fish in a small enclosed area with no cover terrifies them so badly that it cuts their life expectancy by an order of magnitude.  But, anyway, my point is this: when I learned about “the fishbowl effect,” it meant something else entirely.  It was the idea that the fish in the fishbowl has no concept of what a “fishbowl” is.  To him, it’s just the world.  You need to be outside the fishbowl in order to comprehend that it is a bowl at all.  For me, “Weltanschauung” encompasses all the connotations of that: that your worldview not only frames your entire outlook, but also limits it in certain ways.

Similar to how it’s difficult for people to understand a concept that their native tongue lacks a word for.  Like how English doesn’t really have a word for “Weltanschauung.”

German has a few words that we don’t have in English, so we just stole them.  “Weltanschauung” is my favorite, but ”Zeitgeist” is also good, as is ”Schadenfreude.”²  These are great words, and remarkably useful.

The other day I came across an online article outlining ten more German words that there really ought to be English equivalents for.  Sort of like the German version of sniglets.  I find very many sniglets to be remarkably useful: I have a friend who’s afflicted with bovilexia, and how can you tell the story of the guy who invented bumperglints getting 10¢ for each one and therefore becoming a millionaire without the word “bumperglint”?³  And the number of times I’ve committed the act of carperpetuation at this point in my life is pretty ridiculous.  So I’m perfectly fine with coming up with new words to paper over cracks in our vocabulary.⁴  So much the better if they happen to already be real words, just in a different language ... right?

So this list of ten German words was pretty entertaining, in my view at least.  None of the ten are are as great as the big three I mentioned up at the top of this post, of course, but there were some keepers there: who hasn’t wanted a word to express the excess weight you’ve put on from emotional overeating (“Kummerspeck”), or, possibly even more useful, a word to describe the feeling of depression you get when you contemplate the world as it is compared to the world as it might be (“Weltschmerz”)?  Two of the words in particular stand out as pretty damned useful.

The first is “Fremdschämen,” which is defined herein as “the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are.”  This words rings a rather large bell with me.  For years now I’ve been experiencing this exact feeling without knowing what to call it.  Because of Fremdschämen, I can’t watch reality TV, or shows like Springer.  And there are entire avenues of comedy that are closed off to me: I can’t listen to the Jerky Boys or their ilk, I didn’t make it through even a single episode of The Office, I regularly have to fast-forward through Stephen Colbert’s “Better Know a District” series ... hell, I couldn’t even properly enjoy a recent rewatching of Fawlty Towers on Netflix because of constantly feeling embarrassed for Basil.  Also, fully half the comic ouevre of Ben Stiller.  Have you ever noticed that Ben Stiller comedies fall into two groups?  On the one hand, he does some great movies where he plays a wacky character, like Zoolander, or Tropic Thunder, or Mystery Men.  Then there’s the other half of his movies—such as There’s Something about Mary, Meet the Parents, and Along Came Polly—where the entire movie is about him doing stupid, embarrassing things, and we’re supposed to laugh at his misfortune.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t find amusement in the pain of others.⁵  So sue me.

The other great word here is “Torschlusspanik,” which the article defines as “the fear, usually as one gets older, that time is running out and important opportunities are slipping away.”  I live in an almost-constant state of Torschlusspanik.  There are many reasons for this.  Probably the biggest one is something I’ve alluded to before: as you get older, your ability to judge the passage time slows down, resulting in time appearing to go faster.⁶  And I’m pretty much right at that point in life where most men my age have already snapped and gone out and bought a motorcycle or a Porsche, or quit their job to pursue their lifelong dream of being a rock-n-roll drummer or performance artist.

But there are other reasons as well.  I’ve never been a very organized person.  My mother’s side of the family is populated with people who overplan everything, and I find it annoying.  Going on vacation with my grandparents on that side of the family was a nightmare of schedules, itineraries, and lists.  Aren’t vacations supposed to be relaxing?  How are you supposed to relax with all that rushing around trying to make your schedule?  So I never subscribed to all that organizational crap.  Which wasn’t a huge burden when I was younger, although I find that the older I get the more I regret never having put much stock in it.  I’ve tried various techniques for keeping track of my todo list(s), but so far I’m pretty terrible at it.  Which only exacerbates my feelings of Torschlusspanik.

There are lots of things I want to do.  Of course I have a family, including 3 lovely children, and I want to spend time with them.  I want to do my writing: not only my ongoing novel, but this blog of course, and my Other Blog.  I have a few CPAN modules that I’m responsible for, and other programming projects that I want to work on.  Then there’s my hobby, and my other hobby.  And my job takes up some time, which of course I don’t mind at all because I love my job, and there are holidays and birthdays and things to do around the house or things to fix on the car and all the ordinary little things we have to do just to keep on functioning in life.  So sometimes I feel like I’m being pulled in many different directions, all of them desireable, surely, but one still can’t do everything at once.  Sometimes I sit down at night, knowing I probably ought to be working on something, but unable to properly fixate on which something I ought to do first.

So I do my best to spread out my activities.  Being someone who puts so much faith in balance and paradox, I believe one should try to do as many different things as possible, and also sieze any opportunity to do several things at once (like playing Heroscape with my kids, or working on one of my CPAN modules for work).  And I try to fight through my feelings of Torschlusspanik so that I can still enjoy things like finding German words for concepts we don’t have in English.  Or deep philosophical ponderings.  Like wondering if euneeblics are really just trying to overcome their Weltschmerz.

1 Although, technically, goldfish aren’t tropical fish.  Probably you don’t care about that distinction.  But I mention it so that I can prove I know the difference in case I’m verbally attacked by aquarium nerds.

2 German nouns are always capitalized, in German.  There is some debate as to whether German loanwords should be capitalized in English.  You can see which side of the debate I come down on.

3 Fair warning: I’m pretty sure that story is an urban legend.  But still a good story.

4 Remember: “sniglet” itself is defined as “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.”

5 Hey, look: Schadenfreude!

6 I really ought to write a whole blog post on this.  I keep referring to it, but a longer exploration of this interesting scientific theory is probably in order.