Paradoxically Sized World VI

"I Can Dream the Rest Away"

[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.]

My opening line for the the last installment of this mix was this:

Can you believe it’s been just over 3 years since we last saw an installment in my LittleBigPlanet-inspired mix?

And that was, ironically ... almost three years ago.  So I guess we can believe it, eh?  Look for PSW VII sometime in early 2026, I suppose.

This is just one of those mixes that started strong and has slowly petered out.  My middle child, for whom this was always their favorite of my mixes, has moved on to other music, and, honestly, my tastes in mostly wordless electronica run way more towards downtempo: basically, this music, entirely designed to make you feel like you’re in a happy little videogame like its inspiration LittleBigPlanet, is often just way too upbeat for me.

Still, there’s a time and place (and mood) for nearly all types of music, and I still reach for this mix every now and again.  You might think I’d be running out of actual music from LBP to seed the volumes with by this point, but the truth is that there’s 3 main games, plus the two portable versions (PSP and PS Vita), and, the one that I lean most heaviy on this time around, LBP Kart.  Kart gives us a whopping 4 tracks this time out, so let’s start there.

LBP Kart is exactly what you think it is: the LBP version of Mario Kart.  It’s a driving/racing game, so it’s quite different from the cute little platformers that comprise all the other installments in the franchise.  And the music is different as well—could Fishbone’s “Skankin’ to the Beat,” for instance, ever have made it into a “normal” LBP game?  Doesn’t seem that likely.  Actually, even “Fresh” by Devo is (unusually for them) a bit frenetic and punky.  Driving games require a whole ’nother vibe when it comes to music: you want fast-paced music that inspires speed and those daring feats of roadwork that are best left to videogames because you’d die in a fiery crash if you tried them in real life.  Crashes in driving games are more funny than scary, so that frenzied beat that you find in the punky reggae of Fishbone or the punky synthpop of Devo is perfect.  You know what else has that crazy energy?  Dubstep.  In this case, “Odessa Dubstep,” by Liverpool house/D&B group Apollo 440.  All 3 of these tracks have a beat which is driving (pun only half intended) and intense; the game itself uses instrumental versions, but I’ve gone with the original vocal version in all cases (as I typically do in this mix).  All these factors combine to mean that this is perhaps the most head bangin’, almost danceable, volume of this mix so far.  Its character diverges sharply from previous installments, at the same time that it’s still noticeably upbeat videogame-inspired electronica.

One of the consequences of that is it’s given me a chance to include a few tracks that I had had slotted for this mix but just never seemed to work on any of the other volumes.  Probably the best example of that is Finland’s Nightwish, whose metal tune “Whoever Brings the Night” was used in LBP2.  As boss battle music, it was okay for it to be a bit more intense than the other tracks in that game, but it meant that it really stood out in my other volumes (which, you know, don’t really have boss battles embedded in them).  Now, Nightwish is often described as “symphonic metal”—and I think that pretty well describes “Whoever Brings the Night,” with its operatic-adjacent choral background vocals, barely noticeable woodwinds, and interesting orchestral percussion.  Add back in Anette Olzon’s excellent vocals and it becomes a heavy metal anthem which still fits right in with the rest of the mix, amazingly.

Another track which fit nicely here was “Toccata” by Canadian electronica artist OVERWERK (the stage name for Edmond Huszar).  OVERWERK was introduced to me by another coworker, who is more into the EDM and techno side of electronica.  A lot of OVERWERK’s stuff isn’t my bag, but this take on Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is pretty awesome.  As is “Best Fish Tacos in Ensenada,” another track from LBP Kart, this time by British DJ Freeland.  It’s a hard driving EDM tune that makes a nice lead-in to “Odessa Dubstep.” Finally, Chicago’s Tortoise is usually described as “post-rock,” but to me it mostly sounds like a 2000’s update of prog rock—“Prepare Your Coffin” (used in LBP PSV), for instance, sounds like it’d be right at home alongside early Yes, or perhaps Emerson Lake & Palmer.  Hard to fit that vibe into other volumes, but it seemed perfectly comfortable here.

There’s also a fair amount of music from other LBP bands that we’ve seen on this mix before.  You may remember Ochre from their track “Sosacharo,” which was the opener for volume V; well, I actually discovered them after hearing their song used in LBP2, “Infotain Me,” which I planted right in the opening third this time ‘round.  I followed that up with Ratatat, a band who I now can’t remember how I discovered, but it surely must have somehow been related to LBP, because their music is so perfect for this mix.  We heard “Flynn” last volume; this volume’s track is “Dura,” which starts out with a sort of synth harpsichord riff, then explodes into happy electronic tones.  Likewise, we’ve seen Plaid twice before on this mix,¹ but the first time I ever heard them was LBP2’s use of “New Family,” a mellow yet still upbeat piece of electronica that I felt worked nicely into our closing third.  Röyksopp I also discovered via LBP;² “In Space” is a very mellow, almost spacey, track which leads us nicely into our closer.  Ugress is appearing here for the fourth time; after discovering the Norweigian wonder via his track for the PSV,³ I’ve sort of fallen in love with him.  “Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” is exactly the sort of non-bridge bridge track that he’s so good at: with a slow build for a nearly a minute, it then bursts into a percussion-heavy thrash-adjacent groove that’s the perfect lead-in to Nightwish.

As for other artists who don’t derive specifically from LBP but that we’ve seen on this mix before, probably the most obvious is Bonobo.  I honestly can’t believe this brilliant British DJ and purveryor of amazing downtempo has never been featured in an LBP game: so much of his music seems perfectly suited for it that I’ve already used him twice so far,⁴ and here he takes the honor of closer.  “Nothing Owed” is a sax-driven, meditative but not sad, mellow track, puncutated by an acoustic guitar riff which is just a perfect way to close out this volume.  And the only other band to appear on this mix 3 or more times (including this one) without ever appearing in an actual LBP game is Combustible Edison, the lounge-exotica-electronica band who we’ve heard multiple times on other mixes⁵ as well as twice before here.⁶  “Solid State” (like much of CE’s output) sounds like it’s from a 50s sci-fi show.  It makes a nice transition from the center stretch of more intense songs into the gentler closing third.

For artists just appearing for the second time, you may recall my speaking of Monster Rally before; I discovered them via my old cable company’s “Zen” music channel, and had had “Panther” down for this mix forever before I finally managed to work it in last volume.⁷  This volume’s pick is a short but happy little bridge called “Paradise”: it makes a nice lead-in to the Ochre/Ratatat pairing.  And finally Smokey Bandits have appeared all over these mixes⁸ before they finally showed up last volume.  I squeezed “Revolucion Valiente” in between Apollo 440 and Fishbone because its strong, brassy, spaghetti Western feel could take it.

Paradoxically Sized World VI
[ I Can Dream the Rest Away ]

“Carefree” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Egg Nog” by Luna [Single]⁹
“Neopolitan Dreams” by Lisa Mitchell, off Wonder

PSV

“Paradise” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Infotain Me” by Ochre, off Lemodie

2

“Dura” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Fresh” by DEVO [Single]

Kart

“Toccata” by OVERWERK [Single]
“Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” by Ugress, off Reminiscience
“Whoever Brings the Night” by Nightwish [Single]

2

“Main Title” by Xcyril, off StarGate Odyssea
“Best Fish Tacos in Ensenda” by Freeland [Single]

Kart

“Odessa Dubstep” by Apollo 440 [Single]

Kart

“Revolucion Valiente” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“Skankin' to the Beat” by Fishbone [Single]

Kart

“Solid State” by Combustible Edison, off Schizophonic!
“New Family” by Plaid, off Double Figure

2

“Prepare Your Coffin” by Tortoise [Single]

PSV

“In Space” by Röyksopp, off Melody A.M.
“Nothing Owed” by Bonobo, off Dial 'M' for Monkey

Total:  20 tracks,  77:23

I wouldn’t want to imply that there’s anything too surprising here, but I will note that hearing Australian Idol contestant Lisa Mitchell show up in an LBP game was surprising to me; I mean, generally speaking, her music is more suited to, say, Sirenexiv Cola.¹⁰  But “Neopolitan Dreams” is a jaunty 3 minutes that, once stripped of vocals, you could imagine popping up behind Sackboy’s adventures (which it did, in the PSP version).  The use of a celesta (or similar toy-piano-adjacent instrument) just gives it that extra layer that makes it fit in so well here.  (Plus it handily provides our volume title.)

And I decided that the Mitchell tune should be the culmination of a very happy opening triad, sort of the bridge to past volumes.  I absolutely had to start with “Carefree” by Kevn MacLeod; because of MacLeod’s habit of releasing his music royalty-free, it gets used in an amazingly large number of YouTube videos, and “Carefree” is so close in sound to Lullatone’s iconic “Race Against the Sunset” (which was used in LBP3 and was the opener for volume IV), “Carefree” is used in a metric shit-ton of fan videos about LBP, because creators know they won’t get demonetized for using LBP’s actual (copyrighted) music.  So it’s an obvious choice for opener here.  That flows nicely into “Egg Nog,” by Luna, also known as “what the founder of Galaxie 500 got up to in the 90s.” “Egg Nog” is theoretically a Christmas tune, but it’s not overtly seasonal (aside from starting with the shaking of some sleigh bells), and is probably not particularly typical of Luna’s output.  But it’s a happy little tune that slots beautifully between “Carefree” and “Neapolitan Dreams.”

And that just leaves us with Xcyril, a French composer who does the occasional soundtrack and otherwise releases neoclassical works that feel like they ought to be soundtracks to something.  So far we’ve only heard from him on Phantasma Chorale, but his “Main Title” for what appears to be a Stargate fan-film series is short, sweet, and very videogame-y.  I’m not entirely sure why I thought it would fit between the Finnish goth-metal and the British EDM, but I actually think it works.

Next time, let’s dip our toes back into that pool that is the 80s.

⇐ Paradoxically Sized World V

Paradoxically Sized World VII ⇒

__________

1 Once on volume II and once last volume.

2 “Vision One,” their track from last volume, was used in LBP2.

3 “Ghost Von Frost,” which we heard on volume IV.

4 Once on volume I and once on volume II.

5 So far: Salsatic Vibrato V, Phantasma Chorale I (twice), Phantasma Chorale II, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

6 Specifically, volumes III and IV.

7 Besides “Panther,” Monster Rally has also showed up so far on Gramophonic Skullduggery I and Apparently World I.

8 Specifically, Salsatic Vibrato VI, Shadowfall Equinox II and IV, Gramophonic Skullduggery I, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

9 As usual, I hate to link only to YouTube, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to get this track.

10 In point of fact, “Clean White Love” does appear there.

Prolly not all it's cracked up to be

Welcome to 2023.  Please keep your hands and arms inside the new year at all times.  Side effects may include drowsiness and upset stomach.  Not recommended for children under 5 years old.  Risk of electrical shock: only qualified personnel should service this year.  Max load capacity 300 pounds.  If ingested, do not induce vomiting.  Read and understand operator’s manual and all safety instructions before using this year.  Authorized personnel only beyond this point.  Avoid direct exposure to year.  In case of damage or leakage, please notify the CDC.  Please mind the gap, and supervise children at all times.  Not intended for highway use.  Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your stay here in 2023.

Season's Greetings

After over a decade of researching the various holidays that exist at this time of year, I feel uniquely qualified to offer you the most diverse set of season’s greetings you’re likely to receive this year.  Here they are, in roughly chronological order of the establishment of the holiday.  Please believe that I sincerely extend unto you each sentiment, as serious or silly as each might be.  To you and yours, I wish you all:

Merry meet! (more about Solstice)

Shalom Aleichem! (more about Hanukkah)

Yazdaan Panaah Baad (more about Zartosht No-Diso)

Merry Christmas! (more about Christmas)

Greetings on Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (more about Sol Invictus)

Habari gani? (more about Kwanzaa)

Enjoy the Mystery Days

Jai Ganapati! (more about Pancha Ganapati)

Happy Festivus! (more on Festivus)

Merry Christmahannukwanzaakah!

Happy Candlenights! (more about Candlenights)

May you all know joy in all that comes your way.

Impending Merriment

Beginning that long slide into the holiday season, so somewhat consumed with family matters this week.  And next week it’ll be Christmas Day, so you might not get anything substantial then either.  But we’ll just have to wait and see.

Only He Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post about quotes.  I sort of imagined it would end up being a thing I’d come back to again and again over the years, but, suprisingly (at least to me), that post is now over 12 years past.  Oh, sure, I’ve used quotes in many posts since then, but only a few have been really solid “quote posts”: there’s one on individuality, and two focussed on particular human quote generators—one on MLK, and one on H. L. Mencken.

If you didn’t already click on all those, let me just sum up by reminding you that I have a “quote file,” which I curate with any interesting quotes I find, and my computers spit them back out at me randomly.  Recently, I got this quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

And I immediately got excited about the possibility of bringing in several other quotes which talk about contradictory thoughts, such as one by Whitman, one by Emerson, and one by Stephen Fry ... and then I realized that I’d already written that post.  Which was a bit deflating.  Reminds me of another quote:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

— Mark Twain

Of course, I was somewhat heartened by the fact that the quote that provided the inspiration was not, in fact, used in that post.  Why not, I wonder?  Well, that post was from a while back as well—over 8 years now—so maybe I just hadn’t found the quote yet at the time I scoured my quote file for that topic.

So, were I to rewrite the post without sufficient research, not realizing that I’d already written it, it wouldn’t be the same.  It would have different quotes (at least one more, and probably one or two less as well), but, more interestingly, it would have a completely different point.  That post was about consistency and self-contradiction; the one I was going to write today was going to use the cognitive dissonance of apparent self-contradiction as a back door into the topic of paradox, which is one of my favorite concepts to write about, but which I haven’t done in a while, so it would be a refreshing return to form.  Reminds me of this quote:

You can not step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.

— Heraclitus

Because the quote file is continuously evolving, you see ... as are my thoughts on the meanings of the quotes, and my outlook on life, and all manner of things.  The universe is in constant flux, as this quote reminds us:

With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules—and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

— Ransom K. Ferm (an imaginary person invented by Kurt Vonnegut)
opening epigram of The Sirens of Titan (1959)

So I not only get older and therefore more likely to repeat myself, but also I, and the entirety of the world around me, are constantly changing and evolving, meaning that, even when I repeat myself, I’m unlikely to say the same things in the same way.  It puts me in mind of this song:

I remember when the world was a little girl,
Every corner turned leading back to her,
Flowing like a stream on a rolling stone,
Certain there was nothing changing ...

— Alison Moyet, “Changeling” (The Minutes, 2013)

That one’s a bit more abstract, but I think it captures both concepts, and the inherent paradox, quite nicely.

This quote business can become a bit recursive, actually.  How about this one?

If you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is favorable.

Here I’m quoting B. Dave Walters, from episode 50 of Writing about Dragons and Shit, from July 6th of this very year.  But, then again, B. Dave is actually quoting Seneca the Younger’s “Letter LXXI: On the supreme good,” from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, and what he actually wrote was:

errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo derigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est.

which translates more directly as “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim; when a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind” (at least according to Wikiquote).  And that of course put me in mind of another of my favorite quotes:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.

Probably just the similarity in nautical themes.  But I can’t take those two and build a blog post around them either: I’ve already written a post centered around the whole ship in a harbor thing too.  Which I of course had also forgotten, that one being about 10 years ago ... I would lament that “I’m getting too old for this shit,” but apparently I already wrote that post too—including another quote, even.  Did I start out this post by saying I hadn’t really written a lot of quote posts?  Man, I really am getting old ...

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Then again, I haven’t really stopped playing.  But perhaps Shaw wasn’t really talking about growing old so much as “growing up,” which is truly a fate worse than death.  If you’ll allow me the indulgence of a self-quote:

”... but then I grew up.” — The good face one puts on when confronted with the tragedy of having irretrievably lost some essential facet of one’s childhood.

Of course, others have put it better.  Here’s one from one of the special features on the Finding Neverland DVD:

Don’t grow up.  Never be a grown-up.  Be an adult; be mature ... but don’t be a grown-up.

— Dustin Hoffman

Finding Neverland, of course, being a movie about J.M. Barrie, who, as the author of Peter Pan, had quite a few interesting ideas himself about “growing up.” Here’s one of my faves:

If I were younger, I’d know more.

— James Barrie

But life goes on, and things keep changing.

The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

One has to adapt to change.  Adaption is a learned skill; it only comes with age.  Sadly, age can also make it more difficult to be malleable in one’s thinking.  Youth has its advantages:

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

— Lyman Bryson

So I suppose age has its advantages as well.  Age nearly always brings experience; experience hopefully brings maturity; maturity typically brings wisdom.  The key, I think, is to keep on learning.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

— Confucius, Analects 2:15

Of course, the learning has a tendency to lead to paradoxical thinking (so there’s our backreference to paradoxes).

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell

And doubt is ... troubling.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

— Voltaire

Voltaire, of course, was a famous philosopher, who is quite often quoted to help us understand our world.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

— Karl Marx

There’s that “change” word again.  This post is a bit circular, I suppose.  Ah, well, as another philospher once said:

You win a few, you lose a few.  Some get rained out.  But you got to dress for all of them.

— Satchel Paige

So, at the end of the day, when I wonder why I keep writing this blog, when I can barely remember what I’ve done already and what I haven’t, I come to the conclusion that I keep doing it because I love writing.  And, as the man who will soon be Maryland’s first black governor once said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

— Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

Pursuing your bliss is something I’ve striven to do, and striven to instill in my children.  When it comes to children, I’ve always been a bit inspired by Frank Zappa.  His youngest once said:

We were free to say whatever we wanted—there were no “bad words,” except if you used them intentionally to hurt somebody.  We could go to bed whenever we liked, and I would play in the rain for hours in my underwear—it didn’t matter, and it was fun.

— Diva Zappa, to The Guardian
on the occasion of her father’s 70th birthday

And I’ve tried to live by that.

Well, this post about quotes has rambled far and wide, and definitely didn’t end up where it started.  I don’t know if it has a particular message, but it does hit a lot of the important aspects of quotes I’ve touched on before: that they are distillations of wise words, regardless of who originally spoke them; that there are often multiple quotes that say the same thing, or come at the same topic from multiple angles; that they are repeated and transmogrified and requoted.  They come from disparate sources: in this post, I’ve quoted books, songs, interviews (both written and spoken), movies, podcasts, textbooks, and myself.  They often have uncertain attributions—the Vonnegut quote is to this day still often attributed to the entirely fictitious Ransom K. Ferm, while the title of this very post is often attributed to M.C. Escher (for obvious reasons), and occasionally to Einstein (for slightly more obscure motivations), but is actually Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (at least according to the ever-excellent Quote Investigator).  And I’m quite proud of the fact that, even though I once joked that “all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is,” this post quotes all three of the great luminaries of the quotiverse, and I’m fairly certain that all three are actually attributed correctly.

Still, the lack of an overall message sort of bugs me.  Perhaps I can fall back on a line I heard in an episode of a Japanese anime that I watched once with my eldest child when they were probably around 7 or 8.  One does not expect to find deep meaning when essentially watching cartoons with your kid, but occasionally serendipity and epiphany align.  So, if there is a message here, perhaps it’s this:

We’re all alive for a reason.  Find out why.

— Gojyo (Saiyuki: The Journey Begins, “Where the Gods Are”)

Progeny Rebound

This weekend, my eldest child has come back home to live with us again, along with their partner.  As you can imagine, it’s been a hectic week with all the preparations.  So there’s not much to say here.  Hopefully more interestingness next week.

GM Philosophy: A Deeper Dive on Death

[This post contains minor spoilers for Critical Role and another show that I don’t even name explicitly, so you’re probably okay to read it even so.  But, still: you have been warned.  This is a post about characters dying in D&D games, with historical examples for context.  I try to avoid being too obvious, and the vast majority of what I discuss has been beaten to death on the Internet, but I can’t guarantee you won’t see something you can’t unsee.  Caveat emptor.]

I’ve already written once before about character death in D&D.  But recently there was an arc on Critical Role that some described as “breaking the Internet” by killing not one, but three player characters (although, to be fair, two of them didn’t stay dead very long).  This spawned yet another round of arguments about whether character death in D&D should be on the table (pun intended).  I’ve already stated my position: I don’t kill characters.  Whereas a lot of D&D luminaries are firmly in the opposite camp.  Perennial DM B. Dave Walters is quite fond of saying that he’s a monster and he will kill your characters (he even said this about the cast of Stranger Things, for whom he DMed a game after season 4).  As for Critical Role’s superstar DM Matt Mer Mercer, he once said about character death:

For me it’s hard to have high stakes in a game like Dungeons & Dragons if the threat isn’t there.

Not to mention doing a whole video giving advice on how to do it.

And yet, when all was said and done with the latest furor, I started to wonder if we really were on opposite sides.

Because my pledge not to kill your character (when you play D&D with me) is a little more nuanced than just “I don’t kill characters.” Specifically, I promise that I will not

• permanently
• kill
• a character that you created
• without your permission.

Each one of those qualifications is important.  So, will I temporarily kill your character?  Absolutely.  Will I give them permament consequences other than death?  In a heartbeat.  Will I kill a character you’ve grown fond of that it just so happens was created by me instead of you, such as a family member or mentor or henchman?  You betcha.  Will I obliterate your character if you ask me to, perhaps because you’re ready to move on to a new character and want your old one to go out in a blaze of glory?  Oh, yes: with wild abandon and sheer delight.

So I’m very clear that only permanent, non-consensual death is off the table: everything else is fair game.  And how about those staunch defenders of the right to kill characters?  Well, across 296 episodes of Critical Role—over a thousand hours of gameplay as of this writing¹—as near as I can tell Mercer has only ever permanently killed a character twice, and in both cases the players are on record as saying they were on board with the death.²  As for Walters, he always says he’s going to kill the characters, but as far as I know he’s only ever permanently done so once, and, considering the death in question took hours to play out on the screen, I can’t help but feel that the player was complicit.

So are we really saying things so differently?

What I’m saying is, if a character dies, I ask the player: What do you want to do?  Do you want to try another character? or figure out how to bring this one back?  And, whatever they choose, I will find a way to make it work.  And I actually know for a fact that Matt Mercer would agree with these words.  How can I possibly know that?  Because they’re almost exactly his words: I was just paraphrasing a Twitter thread that he posted after this most recent episode of killing a character.  Which, I might add, wasn’t, in the end, permanent.  Because the player (Marisha Ray) said she wasn’t ready to let that character go.  So now she’s back.  Which is exactly how I would have done it too.³

I’m actually starting to think we’re all saying the same thing.  It’s just a matter of where we place the emphasis.  Mercer and Walters and oh so many others put the emphasis on the death, and the possibility that it might not be permanent is an afterthought.  Whereas I feel more comfortable placing the emphasis on you as a player feeling safe, and the possibility for temporary death (or permanent maiming) is in the fine print.

Now, you might not agree with my point of view here, but at least you have to grant me that it’s an interesting perspective to consider.  And, granting that, why the difference in how the two positions (which are, possibly, really the same position) are stated?  Well, “stakes” is the magic word that most proponents of character death as a possibility bring up (you see it right in the Mercer quote at the very beginning of this piece).  Your game has to have stakes ... and how can there be stakes without death?  But, as my last foray into this topic shows, or as many other articles on the Internet attest, there are plenty of ways to provide stakes that aren’t irreversible death without consent.

And more importantly, from the perspective that roleplaying is storytelling, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with unilaterally killing off someone else’s character with no hope of reversal.  I found that Adventure Zone’s non-GM⁴ Justin McElroy said it best (talking about his brother Griffin, who was the GM at the time):

This is a distinction between playing an RPG with your friends, and playing an RPG as a method of storytelling ...  Griffin ... is not going to unilaterally decide to kill one of our other creations. We are telling this story collaboratively, right?  ...  But, if Griffin ... is gonna take a player off the table, it is going to, like, be a discussion beforehand.

When I heard this, I realized that Justin (ever the practical McElroy) had put into words exactly what I was thinking but couldn’t quite formulate.  The only part I disagree with is that I don’t think this is something that should be different from using D&D for a show like The Adventure Zone or Critical Role.  Even when you’re just playing with your friends, you should treat their characters like their intellectual property, and you don’t really have the right to just decide to kill them off.  Unless you have a damn good idea how to bring them back, if that’s what they want.  At the end of the day, it’s their character, and you have to respect how they want to see that character’s story told.  You can influence it—that’s what the “collaborative” part of collaborative storytelling means, after all—but you can’t just single-handedly decide for them.

So I no longer believe that all those famous GMs and I are on opposite sides of this conundrum.  Rather, I think that we’re just looking at two sides of the same coin: heads, you die, but you can live again later; tails, you live, but only after you die first.  It’s all in how you look at it.

__________

1 Thank you, CritRoleStats.

2 And, honestly, even one of those didn’t stick, in the end.

3 Well, to be fair, I would have never made a player completely leave the table for as long as Matt made Marisha do so.  I would have either brought about the resurrection faster, or come up with some other thing for the player to do at the table in the meantime.  But Marisha seemed okay with the way Matt—who is, you know, her husband—handled it, so I consider that more of a nitpick than a true disagreement in philosophy.

4 At least at the time he said this; he’s since taken up the mantle.

Dearth of a Blog Post

Still trying to get caught up on everything while dealing with The Mother’s broken foot, so I’m going to skip one more week.  Hopefully next week gets us back to a more normal schedule.

Ossiferous Anomaly

Well, my “long post/short post” schedule has gotten a bit screwed up lately, what with the medium-sized “short” post on All Hallow’s Eve Eve followed by the complete skip “long” post on my birth-Boxing-day.  So technically this should be a short post week even though last week was a very short post, but mainly I’m making excuses because there’s just no way I could manage a long post this week.

But, to compensate, I shall expend a few words explaining why I can’t make that happen, which could be of interest if you happen to know me personally (say, you were redirected here from a social media post), or if you just dig medical anomalies.  This is not a story about me, but rather about The Mother (who, recall, is not my mother, but rather the mother of my children).

So The Mother was out in our back yard, cleaning up dog poop, and she twisted her foot a bit.  At first thinking nothing of it, she kept on walking for a bit, but she quickly realized it was more serious than she’d thought at first.  So she came in and woke me up (I have a tendency to sleep late on days that end in “Y”) and had me examine it.  Now, I am not a medical professional by any stretch.  However, my mother is a nurse (she was a nurse in our local hospital for many years, and then did in-home care after that), and I’ve had a CPR certification since my teen years, and even briefly held an EMT cert.  So I know just enough to be dangerous—but, more seriously, usually enough to know whether wait-and-see is a reasonable option, or if, no, you really need to get your ass to urgent care.  So I palpated her foot to look for swelling and perhaps detect signs of crepitus (that’s the “noise”—more typically felt as a vibration—of bones grinding together, which can indicate a fracture).  When you do this, you always paplate both sides at once.  Remember: everybody’s body is different, so feeling something that feels unusual because it doesn’t feel like that on you means nothing.  However, most people’s bodies are at least symmetrical, so feeling something on one foot (or hand, or hip, or what-have-you) that isn’t on the other can mean something’s up.  Not always, but it’s often enough to say “okay, this is beyond me: time to talk to a real medical person.”

So I immediatley hit a very obvious protrusion on her lateral metatarsal (i.e. the outside-most foot bone).  She tells me, “no, tha’s nothing; just a bone spur.  Ignore that.” I raised an eyebrow, but said okay.  But there was obvious swelling below that, and I could faintly detect some disturbing sensations: maybe not quite crepitus, but enough for me to say, “nope, I think this is serious, we should try to get you into urgent care ... not the ER, but let’s not wait for a doctor’s appointment either.” I did ask her for more info about the bone spur (which, for whatever reason, I’d never heard about before), and she said that, two or three doctors ago, she’d asked about it, and was told “oh, that’s most likely a bone spur, and there’s nothing you can really do about it other than some pretty serious surgery, so, as long as it’s not immediately bothering you, don’t worry about it.” Since then, each successive doctor would say “oh, what’s this?” and she would pass on the bone spur explanation, and they would all nod and say, “yep, that sounds about right.”

So we set about trying to find an urgent care place.  We’ve changed insurance companies about 4 times in the past several years, so this was trickier than we first expected.  But we eventually found an orthopedic urgent care place fairly close by—lucky!—and, at 5pm (the earliest time they were accepting walk-ins), I drove her out to it.

And, of course, they actually X-rayed the thing.  And then they came back and did more X-rays (never a great sign).  And then they came and told her that that bump she’d had forever what not a bone spur at all.  It was actually a piece of her heel. It had broken off at some point, and apparently not hurt badly enough for her to get medical attention at the time, and the stray piece of bone just floated around inside her foot for a while, and eventually it settled into that position, on the proximal end of the lateral metatarsal, just below her ankle, and just fused with the metatarsal.  And there it stayed until this past Wednesday, when she twisted her foot just so, and it snapped off.

If you didn’t at least wince at that last part, you may want to get your empathy meter checked.

So you can imagine how painful that is, and how unpleasant just the thought of it is, and how it might make it difficult to get around.  The doc said that they’re going to immobilize it (primarily via the use of an orthopedic boot) and see if it will re-stabilize.  If so, perhaps we can get by without any further intervention ... although that seems pretty unlikely.  Worst case scenario, she’ll need surgery to have the stray bone removed.  But, honestly, the urgent care doc (orthopedic specialist though she was), admitted that she had never seen anything like this before, so I think the main reason for waiting a week is to get some availability with the podiatry specialist.  But we’ll see what that fellow has to say on Thursday.

So, I can’t really complain but so much—I mean, my foot isn’t hurting all the time, and I’m not the one wearing a giant boot that you have to pump up when you put it on and then you bump it into everything you try to walk past—but at the same time, it’s a little exhausting being father and mother.  In the past five days, I’ve probably left the house more than in the past five months: two urgent care runs, two doctor’s appointments for the smallies, a “teen drop-off” (and subsequent pick-up), and a trip to Costco.  Hopefully this will get better going forward, but, realistically, it may well get worse if surgery ends up being necessary.  We’ll have to wait and see.

Date of birth, 56th of its name

Well, it’s my birthday weekend this weekend, and I gave you rather a long “short” post last week.  So I think I’ll just leave you here and see you next week.  Till then.

Push Poetry (an addendum)

Some time back, in the beforetimes prior to the pandemic, I wrote about my ”push poetry.” You should review that post to see what it is and how it came to be.  As that was over 3 years ago now, you can imagine that I’ve pushed a few more times since then, and generated a bit more “poetry.” I thought I’d just take this opportunity to share a few more bits and bobs I’ve slapped together in the meantime.

Last time, I shared my most prized example, this cento:

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

(For a full provenance, see the original post.)

Here are some others that I’ve put together in the past few years, and where they come from.

the sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air.  there was a rushing of many wings, a great chattering and laughing, and the sun came out of the dark sky to show a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders.  then, with a great deal of chattering and noise, the winged monkeys flew to the place where the push machine and its tender bots were working.

some of the monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the machine and wound many coils about its chassis and control panel and caterpillar treads, until it was unable to roll or rotate or move in any way.

others of the monkeys caught the machine, and with their long fingers pulled all of the wires and hoses out of its logic circuits. they made its valve caps and control dials and gauges into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

the remaining monkeys seized the machine and carried it through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks.  here they dropped the poor push machine, which fell a great distance to the rocks, where it lay so battered and dented that it could neither extend its control arms nor generate any steam.

then all the winged monkeys, with much laughing and chattering and noise, flew into the air and were soon out of sight.

Obviously, this one is from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, not the movie).

the figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face.  it is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. the eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. 

with a sudden rush that could not be foreseen—with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in the breast of every tender bot, the figure seized the exposed tubes and wires of the push machine, and twining them round his bony hands he held it to the riverbank. electronic whine followed the scream of grinding metal in rapid succession. the glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that mettalic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. with a plunge he seizes the primary coolant hose in his fang-like teeth—a gush of fluid, and a hideous sucking noise follows. the push machine has fallen still, and the attacker is at his hideous repast!

I loved researching this one.  This is from Varney the Vampire, often considered to be the first modern vampire story (preceding Dracula by nearly fifty years).

life is short
and pleasures few
and holed the ship
and drowned the crew
but o! but o!
how very blue
the sea is.

i dreamt a limitless machine, a machine unbound,
its gears scattered in fantastic abundance,
on every tooth there was a new horizon drawn.
new heavens supposed;
new states, new souls.

i dreamed i spoke in the push’s language,
i dreamed i lived in the push’s skin;
i dreamed i was my own tender bot,
i dreamed i was a tiger’s kin.

here is a list of terrible things:
the jaws of sharks, a vultures wings,
the rabid bite of the bots of war,
the voice of one who went before,
but most of all the push’s gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.

o push machine,
my little one,
come with me,
your life is done.

forget the future,
forget the past.
life is over:
belch out your last.

a machine lies in wait in me,
a stew of wounds and misery,
but fiercer still in life and limb,
the push that lies in wait for him.

life is short
and labor steep
rusted the bots
and ruined the keep
but o! but o!
how very deep
the river is.

This one comes from gluing together some of Clive Barker’s poetry.  Though Barker is of course known for writing excellent horror stories (and is in fact one of my pentagram of literary idols), he does occasionally dabble in poetry, and he’s not too shoddy at it.  I believe all of these are from the Abarat series, though from different poems, probably in different volumes.

forward, the push machine!
and every tender bot unseen.
not though they all knew
someone had blundered.
theirs not to make reply,
theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do and die.
into the valley of death
went the push machine unencumbered.

then from the bank it seem’d there came, but faint
as from beyond the limit of the world,
like the last echo born of a great cry,
sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
around a machine returning from its labours.

twilight and evening bell,
and after that the dark.
and may there be no sadness of farewell,
when the push machine embarks.

cannon to right of it,
cannon to left of it,
cannon in front of it
volleyed and thundered;
stormed at with shot and shell,
boldly it rolled, but fell
into the jaws of death,
into the mouth of hell
went the push machine, now encumbered.

thereat once more through the mud clomb the tender bots,
ev’n to the highest they could reach, and saw,
straining their sensors beneath the rolling door,
or thought they saw, the speck that bore the machine
down that long river opening on the deep
somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
from less to less and vanish into light.
and the sun set, bringing on the night.

These are all Tennyson poems.  The first and fourth stanzas are from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; the second and fifth (final) stanzas are from “Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur”; and the centerpiece is from the classic “Crossing the Bar.”

twas a dark and stormy night
and the torrents fell like rain;
you may get there by candle-light:
the place where the push machine was slain.

no less liquid than their shadows
at night, the ice weasels come.
obsequious as darkness, under the gallows,
they came; consumed; now are gone.

as hollow and empty, in the bleak december,
as the spaces between the stars.
the ghost of each separate dying ember
illuminates the scars.

now the rain (like tears) is perfunctory;
i can assure you, there was exquisite pain—
fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory—
on the night the push machine was slain.

And here’s another cento; I really love writing these.

Stanza 1

• Lines 1 & 2: The classic opening line of the bad novel Paul Clifford, which inspired the awesome Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
• Line 3: I’ve reused line 4 from my original cento; it’s a traditional nursery rhyme, though I first became aware of it courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 2

• Line 1, line 3 (first half): “Cats,” by A.S.J. Tessimond, contains one of my all time favorite opening couplets, and I often reach for it in cento writing.
• Line 2: This is from a quote from Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell.  Fun fact: I wove this exact line into a wedding speech I gave once.
• Line 3 (second half), line 4: I can’t quite remember where these came from, but at least some of it is original, I’m pretty sure.

Stanza 3

• Line 1 (first half), line 2: This is a line from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
• Line 1 (second half), line 3: From “The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
• Line 4: Original.

Stanza 4

• Line 2: A classic line from “The Forbidden,” Clive Barker’s short story that was the basis for Candyman (just slightly rearranged).
• Line 3 (first half): This is part of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Dune.
• Line 3 (second half): The penultimate line from my favorite speech of Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
• Line 1, line 4: Original.

That’s all I got for ya this week.  Tune in next time for a more substantial post.

Shadowfall Equinox VII

"The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark"

[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.]

In the race to the most volumes in a mix, Salsatic Vibrato has definitely been leading the pack.  However, Shadowfall Equinox is catching up.  Probably this is because, for the past few years, I’ve been involved in an intense project at my work that’s required more thinking than mindless doing.  And, as I talked about last volume, this is the perfect mix for music that lets me concentrate.  This time out, things seem to have taken a strong neoclassical bent, though we do have many returning artists: in fact, all of the top 5 most featured artists for the mix¹ are here, plus a couple more.  But the neoclassical thing probably shouldn’t be ignored.

Neoclassical music (not to be confused with neoclassicism) is definitely not classical, but only in the same way that retro-swing is not really swing.  It’s music composed in the classical style, but produced with modern sensibilities.  We’ve dabbled in neoclassical before, with dark neoclassical such as Dark Sanctuary² and Arcana,³ ambient chamber music such as Kevin Keller⁴ and Amber Asylum,⁵ or folks who like to combine electronic with classical leanings, such as Tim Story⁶ and Mira Calix.⁷  Of those folks, only Keller is back this time—technically, credited to the Kevin Keller Ensemble—with a bit of ambient chamber music called “Reflection.” It’s a piece with Keller’s characteristic spare piano, accompanied only by a string trio at first, then a light woodwind instrument (according to the Bandcamp page, it’s an English horn) comes in; true to its name, it’s a calm, reflective piece.  And speaking of spare piano pieces, Ruben Garcia isn’t too far from neoclassical himself.  “Eyes Wander” is a dark, not quite menacing (but verging) solo piano track that’s right at home here.  “Danse Morialta,” on the other hand, appears to be a piano duet, and is very light and fluffy.  It’s the first appearance in these mixes by prolific modern composer Kevin MacLeod, whose policy of creating royalty-free tunes “has led to his music being used in thousands of films, millions of videos on YouTube, and in video games such as Kerbal Space Program.”⁸  A lot of his music is more electronic, and more suited to an entirely different mix (we just haven’t gotten that far yet), but this one is very neoclassical in its formulation.  But perhaps the neoclassicalest neoclassical entry here is Eklipse, a proper string quartet of goth-appareled German women who like to take modern songs and neoclassical them up.  In this case, the original version of “Where the Wild Roses Grow” (by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue) was already chamber-music-adjacent, so it didn’t take much.  Eklipse’s instrumental version somehow retains all the haunting beauty of the original, despite losing the lyrics about murdered lovers and all that.

Still, I think the biggest find here is A Winged Victory for the Sullen, who was suggested to me by a coworker, one of the few I’ve had who also likes ambient.  For the most part, his taste runs to bands like Sigur Rós, who I’m not the hugest fan of,⁹ but we still find common ground.  I turned him on to Greinke, and he turned me on to AWVftS.  Now, this duo (Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran) were (individually) mostly known for flim and television composing and sound engineering, until a chance meeting in Italy led to AWVftS; originally planned as a one-off project, it’s now produced 4 full-length albums, 2 soundtracks, and an EP.  Personally, I find their output a bit uneven: some tracks are nothing special, but a few, including the opener to their third album The Undivided Five, “Our Lord Debussy,” are simply sublime.  This track takes nearly 5 minutes to reach its peak, then settles into a 2-minute long crescendo, then takes another 3 minutes of denouement before it fades into silence.  It seemed like the perfect opener for this volume.

And just as any discussion of neoclassical must inevitably drift into the cinematic—A Winged Victory for the Sullen themselves produced a number of soundtracks—“Our Lord Debussy” doesn’t actually fade into silence, but rather into “Rain,” a piece from the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack by Hans Zimmer (whose excellent soundtrack for Inception was featured on Classical Plasma) and Benjamin Wallfisch.  “Our Lord Debussy” plays with silence so much that it’s really hard to notice where one track ends and the next begins, despite the very gradual fade-in of “Rain.” But the two have a very similar vibe, with a lot of slow notes and building minor chords.  It’s one of my best transitions, I think, and therefore makes the perfect bridge to talk about my use of cinematic music as an offshoot of neoclassical (although probably it’s really the other way around).  There are a whopping five soundtracks represented here, which is a lot outside of mixes such as Classical Plasma or Phantasma Chorale.  Blade Runner 2049 is the only film; there’s a short piece from television’s Grimm called “Juliette Wakes Up.” Like pretty much all music from that show,¹⁰ composer Richard Marvin starts out slow and pretty, but quickly builds to something much more menacing.  The other three soundtracks are from videogames: “Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule is a short, mildly spooky bridge from Icewind Dale; “Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig is a darker, exploratory bridge from Baldur’s Gate II; and “After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski is bridge-length, but more self-contained—it’s a light, reflective piece from Witcher 3.  All three are fantasy videogames, and I was mainly mining them for Eldritch Ætherium, but they also had a few pieces which fit in nicely here.  And cinematic music is by its very nature closely aligned with neoclassical.

For the volume title, I was suffering another dearth of lyrics to draw from, so I fell back on the naming scheme I’ve used for Classical Plasma and Eldritch Ætherium: I just cherry-picked a few phrases from 3 of the track titles and strung them together into an interesting title.

Shadowfall Equinox VII
[ The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark ]

“Our Lord Debussy” by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, off The Undivided Five
“Rain” by Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch, off Blade Runner 2049 [Soundtrack]
“Danse Morialta” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Reflection” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“The Kiss: Juliette Wakes Up” by Richard Marvin, off Grimm: Seasons 1 & 2 [Soundtrack]
“Where the Wild Roses Grow” by Eklipse, off Electric Air [Covers]
“After the Storm” by Mikolai Stroinski, off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Eyes Wander” by Ruben Garcia, off Lakeland
“Entr'acte (The Garden Awaits Us)” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off As One Aflame Laid Bare by Desire
“reading the leaves (by moonlight)” by Falling You, off Touch
“Gunga Din” by Dr. Didg, off Dust Devils
“Galean Bayle Sailing” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Turning Dark” by Jeff Greinke, off Ride
“Illuminata” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Vale of Shadows” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Element of Hope” by Carmen Rizzo, off Looking Through Leaves
“The Big Sleep” by A Produce, off Smile on the Void

Total:  17 tracks,  78:12

Of course, we can’t have all neoclassical tunes, now, can we?  I wouldn’t let a volume of SfE go by without at least a touch of darkwave, which here is provided by the usual suspects: Black Tape for a Blue Girl¹¹ and Falling You.¹²  “Entr’acte” is a quiet, flute-driven bridge, but of course retaining that ominous, grumbling undertone that almost every BTfaBG tune has.  It leads nicely into “reading the leaves (by moonlight),” which is another excellent, ethereal outing from Falling You, only more or less instrumental—there are some gorgeous, swooping vocals from Aimee Page,¹³ but they’re completely wordless.  What really makes this track, though, is the heartbeat-like thump of the bassline, which will forever be the defining characteristic of Falling You for me.

When it comes to the “proper” ambient, we can’t of course skip over Jeff Greinke.  As I’ve noted previously, every album of his is a little different; Ride is strangely jazzy, occasionally even funky, so there are few tracks on it that will work here, of which the aptly named “Turning Dark” is easily the best.  It’s slow and meandering, with a lot of synth notes reminiscent of bells, and a subtle but almost groovy bassline.  I thought it was pretty perfect here.  And it flows nicely into the soaring, angelic but somehow also tribal “Illuminata.” This is from Deborah Martin’s collaboration with J. Arif Verner Anno Domini, which we first heard from last volume.  In this one, there’s some mumbled vocals in the background that provide yet another layer of mystery.  And of course you can’t get more ambient than A Produce, who describes himself as “exploring the vast realm of trance-oriented musical expression.” Which is why it’s a bit surprising that we haven’t seen him here before.¹⁴  “The Big Sleep” is fairly typical of his output, although perhaps a bit mellower than such outings as “Insect Justice” or “The Dreaming Room.” But I often find that A Produce provides the best closers, and the nearly 9 hypnotic minutes of “The Big Sleep” is the perfect end for this particular volume.

There’s nothing really unexpected here, but I did decide to take things a bit farther afield by adding a couple of touches of worldmusic.  This is our first time hearing Dr. Didg proper, although its founder and primary member is Graham Wiggins, who of course provided what must surely be the only other didgeridoo track we’ve heard on these mixes: “Aziz Aziz,” from Apparently World.  After Outback split up, Wiggins went on to form the band based on his old college nickame and gave us 3 albums across a 7-year stretch.  “Gunga Din” is from the most recent one, and pairs the drone of the didgeridoo with some interesting woodwinds which go back and forth between sounding like bird calls and snake charmers.  Overall it’s a very interesting pairing.  And I couldn’t forget about my all-time favorite worldmusic-meets-downtempo artist, Carmen Rizzo, who I’ve featured a number of times on a number of other mixes,¹⁵ and once previously on this one.¹⁶  “Element of Hope” dispenses with the breathy female vocals many of his songs feature and opts instead for really interesting mixes of synth washes, digitized beats, and the occasional brassy electronic break in this mostly upbeat tune.  It’s the closer for his second solo effort Looking Through Leaves, but I thought it made for a good penultimate track here, sliding into the long wind-down of “The Big Sleep.”

Next time, we’ll go a bit lighter as we return to that happy-making music that makes you feel like you’re in a videogame.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox VI

Shadowfall Equinox VIII ⇒

__________

1 As of time of writing, naturally.

2 On volume II.

3 On volume VI.

4 Every volume except the first.

5 Volumes I and II.

6 Volumes II and IV.

7 Also on volume VI.

8 According to Wikipedia, of course.  They also add: “One of his compositions, ‘Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,’ is among the most-played on TikTok; from January through June 2021 it was played 31,612,975,915 times.” Whoa.

9 Don’t get me wrong: they’re perfectly fine.  I’m just not the fanboy that many ambient afficionados are.

10 Which we’ve heard before, on Eldritch Ætherium II.

11 Seen on every volume so far.

12 Seen on volumes I, II, and V.

13 Who’s done all the vocals on Falling You tracks for this mix so far, except for “Varenka” on volume V (that was Erica Mulkey).

14 We did see him on other mixes though: once on Smokelit Flashback V and twice on Dreamtime I.

15 Specifically: Smokelit Flashback IV, Moonside by Riverlight II, Rose-Coloured Brainpan II, and Dreamsea Lucidity I.

16 Volume IV.

That's a big pile of ...

To say that the computer gods have shat on me would only be an accurate assessment if the pile of shit you’re imagining is the one from Jurassic Park.  There was a point last night when I was pretty sure my $work computer was complete toast and would have be reinstalled from scratch.  But I managed to find some advice on the Internet that helped me figure out how to fix it.

So now I’m mostly back to normal, but there’s still several lingering issues that I’m going to have to deal with over the next few days.  On the plus side, I jumped my operating system forward not one, but two fulll versions.  Which should eliminate several of the problems I’ve been experiencing lately (and, to be fair, will definitely introduce a few more).  It remains to be seen if, on balance, I come out ahead.  Given my history, it seems unlikely, but I remain ever optimistic.  Foolishly.

Perl blog post #62

About a week and half ago, I ran into a bug at work that I thought was pretty interesting, so I decided to write that up and post it to my Other Blog, which I did.  If you’re a fellow Perl geek, check it out.

(If not, try back in a couple of weeks.)

The light at the end of the tunnel (which is hopefully not an oncoming train)

This weekend I’ve been taking advantage of the lack of a long post and being mostly caught up on $work to finally make some headway on that computer issue I was bitching about ever so long ago.  I really don’t seem to be able to actually fix it, apparently, so I’ve been reduced to coming up with a workaround.  And even that is somewhat sticky, but I’ve been making progress, actually, which is more than I’ve been able to say over the past few months.  So that’s nice.  I’m not out of the woods yet, mind you, but moving forward is better than standing still, I think.  Progress, not perfection, as they say!

So I think I shall get back to my computer work and leave you, dear reader, until next week, when there will most likely be a much longer post than this meager fare.  Till then.

Eldritch Ætherium III

"To Moon and Stars: Heart of the Lord of the Undermountain of Gilead & Ashkeeper"

[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.]

Oftentimes volume II of a mix is just a continuation of volume I, and so volume III tends to go off in new directions.  However, you may recall that, with this mix, last volume was the departure, and so in many ways volume III is closely following the model of volume II.  Last time, I noted that

... many things are the same: Midnight Syndicate and the Shards of Eberron album are back, as are zero-project and Nox Arcana, and there’s a Renn-Faire-sounding bridge from Dead Can Dance.  Still nothing with any real vocals to speak of, so we’ve got another volume title cobbled together out of song titles, and once again I’ve tried to arrange the tracks so as to suggest an adventurous journey.  But there are differences as well: we stray from Midnight Syndicate’s Dungeons & Dragons album for the firs time, for instance, and Shards and zero-project give us one fewer track each.  And no V Shane this time around: oh, I’m sure we’ll see him again eventually, but there were just many better options this time around.

Sooo ... we have the same number of Midnight Syndicate, Nox Arcana, and zero-project tracks, not to mention tracks from Shards of Eberron; V Shane is back, and there’s a return to the Dungeons & Dragons album for MS; and I’ve doubled down on the Dead Can Dance: not only a Renn-Faire-sounding bridge-esque track, but also a longer one that’s ... well, also a bit Renn-Faire-sounding, if I’m honest.  Not to mention all the things that weren’t on volume I but are repeated here: another slow Colm McGuinness track for the back third, another track that Ian Fisher Peter rebranded to tie into Critical Role, more tracks from Loreena McKennitt, Faith and the Muse, Epic Soul Factory, and the Game of Thrones soundtrack ... and, yet ... and yet I still feel there’s enough new stuff going on to make it worth your while.  So strap in and let’s see what we’ve got.

First, let’s talk about why it took me so long to get around to Jeremy Soule.  Soule is rapidly emerging as the pre-eminent composer for fantasy videogaming: he’s done the last 3 Elder Scrolls games (including the big one: Skyrim), Guild Wars, and many D&D games such as Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and one of the Baldur’s Gate games.  I’m not entirely sure why it took me so long to get there, although I still think that Skyrim, which he appears to be best known for, is not really the pinnacle of his work.  For his first appearance on this mix, we’ll be sticking to Neverwinter Nights, with just a touch of Icewind Dale, and we’ll get our Baldur’s Gate infusion from composer Michael Hoenig (late of Tangerine Dream) and his score for Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn.  Of course the other favorite gaming soundtrack of fantasy music YouTubers everywhere is the Witcher 3 soundtrack, composed by a variety of mostly Polish musicians; we’re going to just barely dip our toe into that with one my favorite of its mellower tracks.  The other videogame source I’m drawing from is the World of Warcraft soundtrack, with two tracks from composer Jason Hayes.  This soundtrack has a few stand-out songs on it, and I thought these two (especially our opener “Legends of Azeroth”) were among the best.

I also mentioned that composing music specifically for roleplaying games is getting to be much more popular: we’ve come a long way since David P. Davidson and V Shane, and I wanted to put some of the newer fare up against the old classics.  So, yes, there’s a track from Shards of Eberron, and a particularly meandering electronic piece from V Shane, but we also look at the soundtrack for 13th Age, a TTRPG by the designers of D&D’s 3rd and 4th editions.  Coming just 2 years after the release of the game itself, a soundtrack for a TTRPG was still considered somewhat unusual, and this was in 2015 (just seven years ago as I write this).  Nowadays, while I doubt anyone would consider it common, I’m sure no one would be particularly surprised by it either.  The soundtrack for 13th Age brings together 5 different composers, of which I feature 2 here: a short bridge from Tristan Noon, and a longer piece by Marie-Anne Fischer.

And, yes, once again there’s a long, silly title cobbled together from bits of the track names.  Who are Gilead & Ashkeeper, and why do they have an undermountain?  And why aren’t either of them the lord of it?  Yeah, I got nothin’.  Sounds cool though.

This time our journey bursts into a darker tone; the “Legends of Azeroth” are a bit creepier and tenser than last volume’s opener, so they plunge us into immediate danger.  From there, we journey “To Vaes Dothrak,” a quiet but exotic trip which brings us to the “Sun, Moon and Stars” of another Balkan/Bedouin/Gaelic campfire, though this one is bit mellower than last outing’s.  Which flows nicely into the “Radharc” (Irish for “vision”), itself containing some Middle Eastern strains, which of course leads naturally to “Waukeen’s Promenade,” which seems like it would be right at home in a Moroccan bazaar.

Then we slow it down to ponder our “Journey’s Thoughts,” meditate a bit on the “Harai” (a Shinto religious ceremony), and finally come to “The Heart of the Forest,” where it seems that fairies and other mystical creatures abound.  This wood is apparently “Elwynn Forest,” a contemplative place which is perhaps located on the island of “Spikeroog” (also a place for meditation and thought).  But that’s just a brief stopover, because the anticipation of the “Startup Screen” is leading us to an “Escalation,” which pays off in the lovely medieval-style ballad “As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins.” But it’s a brief respite, as we’re soon off on a “Ride to Destiny” where we’ll “Clash with the Lord of Blades,” a dark and suspenseful chapter of our journey indeed.  After that, it’s more “Exploration,” where danger seems to be around every corner, and that’s where we meet the “Knights of the Darkness,” with their awesome military might.  Then, after a tense trek across “The Wastes of Xhorhas,” we arrive at the “Secret Chamber,” where magic seems imminent, but perhaps not the good kind.  We’re soon lost in the “Tunnels of the Undermountain,” which leaves us “Exploring Xen’drik” and hoping nothing too scary jumps out and tries to eat us.

Bad news though: at the “Black Spires,” something is definitely looking to consume us, which just leads to “Unrest in the East Wing” and a flight for our lives.  In “Upper Dorn’s Deep Interior,” all seems lost; indeed, “The Fall of Gilead” is inevitable, as dramatic as it may be.  Which is why there must be “Battle & Aftermath,” leaving only the “Ashkeeper” to take us back to our homeland, where perhaps a bit of wistful “Romance” can provide some closure.

Eldritch Ætherium III
[ To Moon and Stars: Heart of the Lord of the Undermountain of Gilead & Ashkeeper ]

“Legends of Azeroth” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“To Vaes Dothrak” by Ramin Djawadi, off Game of Thrones: Music from the HBO Series [Soundtrack]
“Sun, Moon and Stars” by Loreena McKennitt, off Lost Souls
“Radharc” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Waukeen's Promenade” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Journey's Thoughts” by V Shane [Single]
“Harai” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“Heart of the Forest” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Elwynn Forest” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Spikeroog” by Mikolai Stroinski, off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Startup Screen” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Escalation 1” by Tristan Noon, off The 13th Age Suite [RPG Soundtrack]
“As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins” by Dead Can Dance, off Aion
“Ride to Destiny” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Clash with the Lord of Blades” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Exploration” by Marie-Anne Fischer, off The 13th Age Suite [RPG Soundtrack]
“Knights of the Darkness” by zero-project, off Fairytale
“The Wastes of Xhorhas” by Ian Peter Fisher [Single]
“Secret Chamber” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [RPG Soundtrack]
“Tunnels of the Undermountain” by Jeremy Soule, off Neverwinter Nights [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Exploring Xen'drik” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [RPG Soundtrack]
“Black Spires” by Nox Arcana, off Grimm Tales
“Unrest in the East Wing” by Midnight Syndicate, off Gates of Delirium
“Upper Dorn's Deep Interior” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“The Fall of Gilead” by Epic Soul Factory, off Volume One
“Battle & Aftermath” by Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch, off Lux Vivens
“Ashkeeper” by Colm McGuinness [Single]
“Romance I” by Michael Hoenig, off Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn [Videogame Soundtrack]

Total:  28 tracks,  80:17

(Just like last time, there a number of links to YouTube videos; still a number of tracks here where that’s the only place you can find them.)

In the unexpected category, I suppose we shouldn’t consider Loreena McKennitt too unexpected—I did after all say last time that we’d likely see a tune of hers on every volume from here on out—but I’m still pleased at how well an artist that Wikipedia describes as worldmusic, folk, and even new age(!) can slot so beautifully into a fantasy-gaming-inspired mix.  Faith and the Muse deliver us another great meditative bridge that is pretty far off their normal gothic fare, backed by birdsong and the subtle sounds of a stream flowing by.  And Dead Can Dance are still here, pulling two tracks this time, still both from Aion, which I’ve always felt had a particularly D&D-adjacent feel to it.

The really new kids on the block this time out are Jocelyn Montgomery (one of the founding members of Miranda Sex Garden) with David Lynch producing an album of songs by Hildegard of Bingen, a.k.a. Saint Hildegard, who Wikipedia describes as “a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages,” as well as “one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history.” Lux Vivens is a very interesting album, and this track doesn’t necessarily showcase it very well, but it sure fits in with the theme of this mix.  “Battle & Aftermath” is just what it says on the tin.

Next time, we return to the ambient autumnal mix, possibly just in time for fall.

⇐ Eldritch Ætherium II

Eldritch Ætherium IV ⇒

Down with the Sickness II: The Resickening

Well, I did actually start on a full-size blog post, but some sort of sickness has reared up and slapped me down.  (But not COVID, if my government-supplied test can be trusted.)  Still, I’ve essentially had to count this weekend as sick days, and I’ve done way more sleeping than accomplishing.  So, you’ll just have to wait till next week to get a real post.  Sorry ‘bout that.

Short week

Well, this week saw the last of our “Summer Fridays”, and of course it was Labor Day as well, so I had a very truncated week at $work.  And, due to that, I didn’t get quite as much accomplished as I wanted to, but I feel good about next week.  Really.  I think.

Anyhow, not a lot going on in this post, obviously, so you may want to check back next week and see if it gets any more exciting.  You never know.