The Sin of Popularity

... and then that’s not even accounting for the people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular.  I’ve known people like that, and I’ve never understood that: that it’s like, this is the #1 movie in the world, and that is why I will not watch it.  And I’m like, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

Thus sayeth B. Dave Walters, the great sage and teacher.  And, while normally I tend to agree with what B. Dave says (I’ve quoted him several times, in fact), this time I felt a little called out.  After all, I have (very puposefully!) never seen Titanic, nor Forrest Gump, nor Rocky, nor The Godfather, nor The Sound of Music ... in fact, on some random Internet survey of winners of Best Picture Oscars ranked according to how much people actually like them, I’ve only actually seen 7 of their list of 22 (and only 3 of the top 10), and if I consider which movies I’ve just never gotten around to watching, I can only generously come up with a further two.  That means that, on this list of Academy-Award-winning films that people actually enjoy (as opposed to the pretentious twaddle that usually wins), I’ve actively avoided watching 13 of them.  Honestly, to have lived this long managing to avoid seeing Titanic is becoming somewhat of an accomplishment in and of itself these days.

But it’s also instructive to look at the films on that list that I have seen: Rain Man, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs ... I didn’t go see any of those films because they were popular, or because they had won awards: I saw them because they looked good, and they interested me.  Hell, I rushed to see Silence: it was one of the few films on the list that I was really excited to see.  As was the film that inspired the article: Everything Everywhere All at Once is surely an anomoly—an utterly non-pretentious, nerdy movie inspired by The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and various Japanese anime (and none of those have ever won Best Picture awards), and yet it swept the Oscars.  Of course I’ve watched it.  It’s the most “my kind of movie” in this whole post.  But several of the others make perfect sense for me: “Braveheart” and “Dances with Wolves” are both historical action films with cool sword and/or gun fighting (as is Gladiator).  I’m not sure I can explain Rain Man and Kramer vs Kramer other than to say “Dustin Hoffman,” and I will admit that I’ve only seen Casablanca beause a friend convinced me that I simply couldn’t go through life without having watched it, but, in general, the ones I’ve seen make sense, for me.

And, likewise, the ones that I haven’t seen make sense ... for me.  Let me get this straight: you want to pitch me a love story (not a fan) that’s a period piece (not a fan) in a historical context that involves zero swords or guns (not enticing) about an event that I already know quite a bit about, including how it ends?  Oh, and it’s over three hours long?  No thank you.  Why would I ever watch such a thing?  Well, you reply, because it’s one of the highest-grossing films in the world (and the first ever to reach $1 billion), it won 11 Academy Awards (tied for the record with Ben Hur and Return of the King), it won a bunch of other awards, critics loved it, it’s appeared at the top of many lists of the best movies ever, the music won Grammys, and so on and so on.  But does any of that change what it’s about?  It’s still an overwrought love story with a very predictable shipwreck that goes on for three hours ... right?  Why on earth would I watch something that is so antithetical to everything I know I enjoy in a film?  And did I mention the three-hour time investment?  I mean, for a 20 minute short, I might be willing to give it a chance, but three friggin’ hours ... why would I torture myself in that manner?  Just because it’s popular?

Because here’s the correction to what B. Dave was saying.  Speaking as one of those people who pride myself on not doing many things just because they’re popular, I have to take objection to his characterization.  The poularity is not why I won’t watch the movie (or read the book, or eat the food, or listen to the music, or whatever).  But the popularity sure ain’t gonna change my mind.  Look, I’ve already gone over my stance on Cynical Romanticism, and I covered my experience working at Burger King where I first began to understand that people, collectively, are herd animals.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the opinions of any given individual, of course.  But, as Mark Twain once said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” I mean, if you’re watching movies that you don’t think you’re going to like just because a bunch of other people are telling you to ... isn’t that just peer pressure?  Bad for sex and drugs but okay for movies, I guess?  I’m just not seeing it.

Look, I’m not saying I’ve never been wrong about whether I’d like something or not before.  I’ve spoken before about liking John Grisham even though I typically hate lawyer stories.  When Grisham first started getting popular, I assumed I wouldn’t like it, and I was wrong.  But what I am saying is, I’ve never discovered something great by following the crowd.  I didn’t read my first Grisham novel because everyone told me to.  I read it because it was the least bad choice of novel in some beach cabin we’d rented one year, and I was bored stiff.  I may have also mentioned in passing that I dig Tom Clancy too, even though I’m not into spy novels.  So did I pick up The Hunt for Red October because it was a national bestseller, or because it got made into a high-profile film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin?  Nope.  I got it because a friend—one friend—advised me that they thought I’d like it.  Not that they liked it, mind you (though of course they did), but that they thought I would.  And I respected this person enough to know that, if they thought that, they were probably right, so it was worth giving it a shot.  But, not once that I can recall, throughout my entire life, have I ever thought, “well, that sounds terrible, but the public seems to love it, so I guess I’ll love it too.” Never can I remember trying a very popular thing that I didn’t think I would like and being proven wrong.  It just has never happened.  Maybe it will one day.  Except probably not, because I doubt I’m going to suddenly start jumping on bandwagons at this age.  But I won’t say never, for sure.

What’s really funny to me is that I totally misheard what B. Dave was saying at the beginning of the quote.  When he started talking about “people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular,” I assumed he meant people that will be disagreeable because it’s popular to be disagreeable.  In other words, disliking something just because it’s popular to do so.  Like, how everyone knows that Nickelback is the worst band.  Except, you know, they’re not.  I’m not saying they’re amazing or anything, but, c’mon: you can’t tell me you can listen to “How You Remind Me” and not think “damn, that song kicks ass.” Ignore the cheesy video: just listen.  And I find this particular example especially intriguing, because that song was super popular.  In the US, it was #1 on the Hot 100 (which is the “main” US chart), plus #1 on the alternative, rock & metal, and mainstream rock charts (a truly dizzying bevy of contradictory genres).  It was #1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, and Turkey, and top five in a dozen other countries.  Wikipedia further tells us that it was “the number-one most played song on US radio of the 2000s decade” according to Nielsen, with 1.2 million spins, and Billboard ranked it #4 of the decade.  On the other hand, hating Nickelback has become an Internet meme, and Wikipedia will also tell you that Rolling Stone readers voted them the second worst band of the 90s (behind Creed), and that some music dating site’s users voted them the number one “musical turnoff.” So, if we think we’re supposed to be going along with popular opinion ... exactly which popular opinion are we supposed to be going along with?  ‘Cause I gotta tell you: if I was ever on a musical dating site, my number one turnoff would be pretentious twats who dump on bands like Nickelback and Smashmouth just because it’s popular, and anyone who puts Nickelback in the same breath as friggin’ Creed is obviously looking around at all their friends and saying “just as bad, am I right? guys? I’m right ... right?” and definitely not listening to “How You Remind Me,” which, you may recall from the beginning of this paragraph, kicks some serious fucking ass.

So I won’t watch Titanic just because everyone else in the world has, and I won’t refuse to watch a Keanu Reeves movie just because the Internet tries to convince me he’s a bad actor.  Because, sure: Parenthood and Point Break didn’t demand much of his talent, and every once in a while you hit a true stinker, like Much Ado about Nothing, but I also know that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is an amazingly fun watch, and The Matrix is one of the best movies of all time, and, if you really need to prove to yourself that the guy can actually act, you can go watch The Devil’s Advocate or My Own Private Idaho or River’s Edge or A Scanner Darkly.  But some people just wanna diss Keanu and Nickelback because “everyone” knows they suck.  I mean, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

Apparently, time flies whether you're having fun or not

Whew!  It’s been a crazy week.  Family stuff, work stuff ... hopefully it’s all settling down soon.  But luckily this was a short post week anyway, so it all works out.  Let’s see how next week comes out.

The Fox May Grow Grey, but Never Good

Many moons ago, I would often tell people that I didn’t think that Rush Limbaugh believed the things he said.  “This guy,” I would tell anyone who asked, “is just performing for the audience.  Oh, he might believe something he’s saying every once in a while, but it’s almost accidental: believing or not believing is completely irrelevant for him.  He makes a lot of money with this act, and he will literally say anything for the money.”

Now, Rush’s popularity faded, and eventually he died, and younger folks today might not even remember who he was.  But the sad thing is that there was always someone coming along behind him, trotting out the same old act—some even priding themselves on taking it further—saying the same old bullshit, and making the same old bank.  First Bill O’Reilly, who has himself come and gone by this point, then Glen Beck (gone but trying to stage a comeback, I’ve heard), Alex Jones (fading fast), Sean Hannity (still around), and current star pupil Tucker Carlson.  Not to imply that right-wing douchebaggery is only a man’s game, of course—folks like Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro are fighting to break that glass ceiling, for some reason—but it’s mostly been the men, hogging the spotlight, as men are wont to do.  But the point is, there’s always been someone, and usually several someones.  And, for every single one of them, I’ve said, repeatedly, I think it’s all an act.  I don’t believe for one second that any of those motherfuckers believed a single word of the shit they were spewing, except maybe by accident.  Many of them are very well educated, and it’s quite simply not logical to believe they’re that stupid.  ‘Cause, you know, they’ve said some stupid shit.  Limbaugh once said that “firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does” (he, of course, died of lung cancer).  Jones once said “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.” Megyn Kelly (who is not Laura Ingraham, but is a credible imitation) once said “Santa just is white.” Not only do I not believe that any of these people believe what they’re saying, I think they’re engaged in a competition to see who can say the most ridiculous bullshit and make it sound credible.  I imagine a Victorian-style English gentlemen’s club where Hannity, wearing a long walrus moustahce, is slapping Kelly on the back and saying, “oh, good one Megyn! ‘Santa just is white’ ... bally good show, eh wot wot?”

And, for all the decades that I’ve been saying this, people have been telling me I’m full of shit.

Not just conservatives, mind you.  Most liberals also seem convinced that these folks are true believers, which of course is more dangerous.  Though ... is it?  Would it be more dangerous if someone truly believed the hate they were shoveling, or if they were cynically manipulating people into a hate they couldn’t be bothered to feel?  Perhaps an academic question.  Point being, I’ve been ridiculed for having this view just about every time, by just about everybody, from just about every point on the political spectrum.  I’d like to say that I kept saying, “just wait: one day you’ll see.” But, the truth is, I didn’t actually hold out much hope of this.

Oh, I’ve had some glimmers of hope along the way.  In 2017, Alex Jones was involved in a vicious custody battle; his wife, unsurprisingly, said she didn’t want her kids being raised by someone who routinely made homophobic comments and indulged in outlandish conspiracy theories.  Jones’ lawyer claimed: “He’s playing a character.  He is a performance artist.” Kinda sounds like what I’ve been saying for years, right?  But of course people said he was just saying those things to get out of legal trouble (which was probably true).  In late 2016, Glenn Beck did an interview with Samantha Bee of Full Frontal wherein he said: “As a guy who has done damage, I don’t want to do any more damage. I know what I did. I helped divide.” Sure sounds like he not only wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, but had rather come to regret ever selling the stuff.  Still, people said that Sam Bee and her people had edited the interview to show the narrative they wanted to show (which, also, was probably true).

But now, my friends, I have achieved total vindication, thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, and their more than one billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News.  See, because what we’re learning now is not what Fox News people are saying in court; no, what we’re learing now is things they said, to each other, in private, which is now evidence in court.  And I don’t think anyone believes that the court is editing the information to fit a narrative ... in fact, if anything, Fox is the one doing the editing.  Just this week, the judge in the case sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence.  Plus, as law professor RonNell Andersen Jones pointed out in an interview with Jon Stewart, there’s still a lot of information that is redacted in the court filings.  The stuff that we know about is the stuff that “either they thought that they could let it go or ... they lost in an effort to redact it.”

So what do the texts and other messages say?  By now you’ve likely heard the worst of them.  Tucker Carlson describing Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer” and writing of the ex-president’s lawyer “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her”; Ingraham replying “Sidney is a complete nut”; Hannity saying of Giuliani “Rudy is acting like an insane person” and calling Powell a “fucking lunatic.” Not only do the messages show that the on-air personalities didn’t buy the bullshit they were peddling; they also tell us exactly why: it’s all about the money.  When the New York Post asked Trump to stop claiming the election was stolen, they started losing readers; Rupert Murdoch (owner of both the Post and Fox News) messaged the Post’s chief executive “Getting creamed by CNN!” When a Fox reporter tweeted that “there is no evidence” of voter machine defect or fraud, Carlson texted Hannity “Please get her fired.  Seriously what the fuck?  Actually shocked.  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.  It’s measurably hurting the company.  The stock price is down.” None of this is controversial.  None of this disputed.  None of this is paraphrased or edited in any way.  All of it has been reported multiple times by reputable outlets (the links I’ve included above range from ABC News to the Guardian in the UK to Rolling Stone magazine), and they’re direct quotes from court evidence.  And this, as Andersen Jones points out, is what they couldn’t get suppressed.  There’s like a lot worse out there waiting to be unredacted.

But, hey: this is sufficient for me.  This, I think, proves my point to a T.  These idiots don’t believe what they’re saying.  What’s worse, they don’t care how much damage it does, as long as they keep making money.  At the end of the day, that’s really all it’s about.  So is it more dangerous that they might all be true believers?  I’m not sure.  I think the truth might be even more dangerous than that: that they are all cynical, performative, money-grubbing assholes who care more about lining their pockets than they do about the state of our democracy.  They are, in many ways, the ultimate expression of late-stage capitalism: fuck ’em all, let the world burn, as long as I get my nut.  That’s plenty scary enough for me.

[A side note on today’s title.  Wiktionary refers to it merely as a “proverb,” and says it basically means the same as “a leopard cannot change its spots.” Now, if you ask the Internet, it will gleefully tell you that this saying derives from Benjamin Franklin, and one source (which I refuse to link to) even has the balls to source it as being from Poor Richard Improved.  But, see, here’s the thing: the entire works of Mr. Franklin are available on Project Gutenberg, including Franklin’s Way to Wealth; or, “Poor Richard Improved", and the only thing it says about foxes is that “the sleeping fox catches no poultry.” In fact, after some diligent searching, I have concluded with a decent degree of confidence that Franklin never said any such thing.  So, you know ... don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.  If you want more musings on quotes, I got you covered.]

Gothic Gaming

This weekend we’re going to try finish up the many-times-postponed birthday game of D&D that my eldest prepared for my middle child.  And, yes, it’s nearly a month late, but ... well, shit happens.  After getting postponed due to sickness, unpreparedness, and all around general grumpiness, I ended up having to postpone due to fallout from my big work project, which I finally pushed to production on Monday.  So we started on Friday, but we started late, and now we’re finishing today, so, TL;DR: you get no proper post again this week.

But, in order to have something to put up, I thought perhaps I’d tell you about some of characters for this game.  We’re doing a sort of Gothic horror game, though it seems so far like it’s less Ravenloft and more Castle Amber (if you speak D&D, you’ll get what I mean).  My middle child opted for a flesh golem moster hunter barbarian—think Frankenstein’s monster, one of the intelligent but reticent versions, weilding a combination sword-shotgun (I, Frankenstein might work, or any number of videogame characters).  I can’t give you too many more details than that, because I wasn’t responsible for helping build that character.

My youngest, on the other hand, came to play with a creepy-as-fuck concept.  Silvin is a young man with no eyes (he wears bandages over where they should be) who wears dark, baggy, nondescript clothes ... including gloves, which cover the fact that he has eyeballs in his palms.  So he has to take his gloves off if he wants to see, but on the other hand he can move through the world just fine as a blind person.  He can’t speak, but he can communicate telepathically.  He is a bard of the college of whispers, which gives him access to powers like Psychic Blades, Words of Terror, and Mantle of Whispers.  As if that weren’t enough, he’s a feat machine, having taken Telepathic, Telekinetic, Shadow-Touched, and Gift of the Gem Dragon, which latter is just more ways to push people around with your mind.  Aside from Words of Terror, he can cast cause fear, fear, danse macabre, dissonant whispers, phantasmal force, and phantasmal killer, which is a hell of a lot of ways to be a scary dude; when it comes to “look into my eyes” type shit, there’s the aforementioned Mantle of Whispers, plus even more spells: enthrall, confusion, unearthly chorus, Tasha’s hideous laughter, mental prison, crown of stars, and synaptic static.  And I haven’t even listed all the spells he knows ... did I mention we’re 14th level for this one-shot?  It’s crazy.

For myself, I resurrected an old character of mine that I had for a previous one-shot (also Gothic horror, and possible also for a birhday game).  She was only 7th level, but it was easy enough to bring her up to 14th.  She’s a rogue inquisitive and also a warlock of the Raven Queen (pact of the blade).  I built her to be a mystery-solver who can also hold her own in a fight.  She’s a lavender-skinned tiefling; I found this image on the Internet drawn by Bright Bird Art:

So she looks pretty much like that, except that her staff is actually illusory, so she can stab you with it (she summons her pact weapon, a scimitar, so that it’s inside the illusion of the staff), and she has a raven on her shoulder which doesn’t look quite real.  In terms of feats, she is Perceptive and Mobile; in terms of eldritch invocations, she wears her Armor of Shadows, and can summon a Cloak of Flies when she needs to be really scary; in terms of spells, she can also mess with your mind too: via puppet, ego whip, or Raulothim’s psychic lance.  Her expertises are in acrobatics, stealth, investigation, and perception; in battle she likes to cast spiritual weapon in the form of a person-sized raven and then either eldritch blast from afar, or get into the mix using Mobile, her improved pact weapon, and sneak attack.  In social situations, she’s pretty darn good at persuasion and deception, but she’s not afraid to break out that cloak of flies, which can do poison damage if you stand too close, and, if you don’t, there’s always infestation to send those little buggers out up to 30 feet away.

So that’s our primary party (my eldest’s partner is playing a helpful druid, but he’s really closer to an NPC), and we’re exploring a vampire’s castle and seeking out and destroying various loose, undead organs.  We got the stomach and the liver so far, but I’ve a feeling there’s a lot more to go.  Wish us luck!

Infinite Birthday Season

This weekend, my youngest is having her birthday weekend.  She almost made it to the end before the curse of the Holiday Sickness came for her as well.  So we may very well be doing more make-up time next weekend, just as we had to do for the middle child—this is starting to turn into the never-ending month of birthday celebrations, and it’s already next month.  But we shall see if everyone recovers and is satisfied with their birthday experiences.  Hopefully it’ll all work out.

Whither the beef?

When I was a kid, the only thing I liked to eat was hamburgers.

For my own children, it was more about the chicken nuggets (at least for the first two).  But, for me, it was hamburgers.  At home, my parents would cook hamburger helper a lot, but that’s still hamburger, right?  I didn’t eat chicken, period.  Wouldn’t touch pork (well, unless it was disguised as bacon, of course).  And seafood?  Don’t get me started.  My grandparents on my mom’s side loved seafood.  They would often go out to eat at very nice seafood restaurants, and sometimes they’d take me.  And there was literally nothing on the menu I would eat.  Oh, sure: nowadays, almost every restaurant will offer a hamburger or some chicken nuggets on a kid’s menu, regardless of the actual cuisine.  But not in my day.  In my day, if you didn’t like the type of food they had, you were just supposed to suck it up and eat it anyway.  But I was a stubborn child.  I would eat nothing rather than eat seafood.  I spent many a meal eating Captain’s Wafers sandwiches with butter in the middle that my grandmother would make me, and that was literally all I’d get.  Once when I was perhaps 8 years old my grandfather gave me a few dollars and told me that, if I wanted a hamburger so bad, there was a McDonald’s next door: I could go get it myself.  I was a painfully shy kid, and the thought of going somewhere (even directly next door to a restaurant where my grandparents could easily see me from their table by the window) and actually interacting with adults was horrifying, and, in retrospect, I think my grandfather knew this and the whole thing was sort of a challenge.  But I ate a hamburger and fries that night.

I was committed to the beef, is what I’m saying.

Besides the fast food hamburgers and the hamburger helper, there was “hamburger steak,” a dish (and I’m being very generous in calling it a “dish”) that my father made by serving a hamburger patty in onions and gravy rather than on a bun, bologna sandwiches (always beef bologna, of course), spaghetti and meatballs (meatballs composed either solely or primarily of, you guessed it: beef), beef stew, the occasional beef pot roast at my grandmother’s house which then turned into something she called “beef hash” the next day, and probably a few more ways to dress up cow meat that I’m not even remembering right now.  The only thing I can really remember eating as a child that wasn’t beef was hot dogs (we didn’t really do beef hot dogs back in those days).  And the occasional meal of chicken chow mein (my foodie grandfather again) that was served in that particular way that they used to make it on the East Coast before they decided that it should be full of bean sprouts (bleaaugh).  It was a whoooole lotta beef.

Of course, most of it wasn’t very good beef.  I didn’t care for steak (too chewy), and my parents and grandparents were just as happy not to have to pay for one for me anyhow.  I didn’t do prime rib either, on those super rare occasions when the parents or grandparents would spring for it.  So the vast majority of the beef I ate didn’t taste much like beef: the hamburgers tasted of mustard and ketchup; my dad’s “hamburger steak” tasted of gravy; most of those meatballs tasted like my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce; hamburger helped tasted mostly like MSG.  And, you know, back in those days, that might have been for the best.  Beef was pricey (chicken was the “cheap” meat back then), so most of what I was eating was right down at the lower end of the quality spectrum.  Which is fine: I was a dumb kid.  Don’t waste the good stuff on me.

Of course, as I got older, I did get a little more discerning.  I never really developed a taste for seafood, but I started liking various forms of chicken, and even started appreciating pork chops, not to mention all the really delightful disguises that pork can assume, like pepperoni, salami, capicola (for Italian subs), andouille sausage (for red beans and rice), country sausage (for biscuits and gravy), country ham (for ham rolls on Christmas morning), etc etc etc.  I even started liking the finer forms of beef ... somewhat.  I’ve always been the sort of person who appreciates a good filet mignon but otherwise can take or leave a steak, and as far as I’m concerned the attraction of prime rib lies almost entirely in the au jus.  Even what is probably my all-time favorite beef dish, steak au poivre, is, again, all about the sauce.  Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, in recent years, even the once-lowly hamburger is getting new appreciation from the culinary world.  First they told us to stop using so much damn ketchup (or mayo, or thousand islands dressing, or whatever your slathering of choice may be) so we could actually taste the meat.  Then, once we decided that was a terrible idea, they started telling us to seek out a better class of meat.  Organic, pasture raised, grass-fed: all that stuff became all the rage.  Even kobe, if you want to get really pricey.  And, as the much better qualities of beef have gradually become more and more commonplace, and we’ve all become more and more able to actually taste the meat, and I’ve become more and more discerning, I’ve discovered a very curious thing about myself.

I don’t actually like the taste of beef.

When I look back on my life at the quantity of beef I’ve packed away, this is practically shocking.  I mean, how can I not like beef?  Everyone likes beef.  It was the most consumed meat in my country of origin for the first twenty-five years of my life, and #2 for the last thirty.  In 2020, the U.S. consumed 20 billion pounds of beef, which is roughly 90 pounds of beef for every man, woman, and child in the country.  And for 50 or so years, I was perfectly happy with beef.  Until I could actually taste it.  Now ... not so much.  Now, I would have to rate it as “meh” at best.  Quite often, in a beef dish made with particularly high-quality grass-fed beef, I actually dislike it altogether.  Sometimes, when someone in my house is cooking beef (especially in combination with garlic), it can actually make me a bit queasy, even though I know I’m going to enjoy the taste once it’s done.

And of course the silly thing is, it’s not particularly good for me.  I know there’s some debate about whether beef is healthy or not, but I think a lot depends on the individual.  For me, I can tell you definitively that there are only a few things I know for a fact help me lose weight, and one of them is to cut out red meat.  So what occurs to me is, why should I bother continuing to eat a meat that makes me fat and I don’t even like the taste all that much?

Oh, I don’t propose to cut out beef altogether.  I still like a nice filet every now and again, but for me “every now and again” means about once a year.  When it comes to meatballs or hamburger-helper-style meals or tacos—at least when we’re cooking it ourselves—I find that ground turkey is perfectly lovely.  And for the ever-popular hamburger itself ... well, I’ve started eating Impossible burgers.

I tried it on a whim, really.  Just to see if it could really live up to the hype.  So, can I tell it isn’t beef?  Of course.  Then again, that’s sort of a plus from my perspective.  The more important question is, can I tell it isn’t meat?  And the answer is, no, not really.  It sort of tastes like an exotic meat you might get at a fancy chain, like an ostrich burger from Fuddrucker’s (and, yes: I’ve had one of those before).  Like a turkey burger, but different enough that you probably wouldn’t think it actually was turkey.  Point being, it’s a perfectly acceptable meat substitute.  And they say that plant substitutes such as Impossible are better for the planet, so that’s a win-win in my book.  It does contain soy, so I try not to eat it as a regular thing (soy has its own set of pros and cons), but, as a sometime food, it’s probably better (and better for me) than actual beef.

So that’s where I’ve landed on the topic of America’s #2 favorite (formerly #1) processed animal protein.  I think I just don’t need it any more.  And I think that’s going to be good for me in the long run.  No need to go full-on vegetarian, I don’t think, but getting a bit closer has got to be a good thing.

The tide is high, but I'm holdin' on

I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without posting a proper, long post.  But everyone in my house has been sick for nearly two weeks, and it’s finally come for me.  So this is about as much as I can manage in between cough drops and shots of Cēpacol.  At this point it seems foolish to try and promise anything, but please believe that I will do everything in my power to end this dry streak next week.

The joint is out of time

You know, when I said I should be able to get back to a normal schedule this week, I didn’t consider that it was the beginning of the March birthday season.  Even still, I might have been able to slap something together, except that another stomach virus—which germs seem to be attracted to birthdays and other holidays in our house—descended upon us and kept me home from work a few days whilst taking care of sick kids.  In point of fact, our middle child, whose birthday weekend this was supposed to be, eventually had to give up and take a rain check.  So there’s a distinct possibility that I might fail at making a blog post next week too.  But I’ll do my best to put something together ahead of time for a change.

Frenetic tumultuous chaotic confused ... it's been a bit hectic, is what I'm sayin'

This should have been a long post this week, but, due to some family matters and other things going on, I simply ran out of time.  I should be able to get back on schedule next week though.

I wanted to be with you alone ...

This week, we got both hail and snow in Southern California.  I’ve written about this whole climate change thing before ... about six years ago, now that I look back on it.  For my first ten years in California, it rained about twice a year—granted, it rained for a week solid every time, but still: pretty much twice in a given year, every year.  And, as near as I could tell, everyone else in SoCal considered this perfectly normal.  Then, about six years ago, the rain began coming more often and lasting longer.  And now suddenly L.A. county has gotten its first blizzard warning in 34 years.  Only for the mountains, true, but ... I mean, multiple co-workers posted pictures on our Slack this week of hail.  Hail!  When was the last time it hailed in L.A.?  Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw hail when I lived on the East Coast.

Typically, I use these types of opportunities to make fun of the climate change deniers.  But, honestly, I’m not even sure who’s still on that train: with more massive wildfires burning in increasingly unlikely places, so many hurricanes in a season that the National Weather Service now routinely has to start over at the beginning of the alphabet, so much flooding that it’s carrying away cars ... is there anyone who claims climate change is a hoax for anything other than performative reasons?  While I was marveling at the reports of snow and hail, one of my old friends from the East Coast was telling me that the temperature hit 80° for them: a new record for February.  I’m pretty sure everyone knows that it’s real at this point, primarily from personal experience.

The only question is, much like with the pandemic: are all these changes permanent? is this just the new normal now?  I don’t know ... I’d like to say I don’t believe it, or at the very least that I hope it’s not so.  But hope is a precious resource these days.  So I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

Getting Chatty

I’m probably not the first person to tell you this, but there’s a new AI wunderkind taking the Internet by storm, and it’s called ChatGPT.  Everyone’s buzzing about it, and Microsoft is pumping money into it like crazy, and even boring old news outlets are starting to pick it up—heck, I just heard them mention it on this week’s episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.  If you’re late to the party, perhaps I can give you some insight into what’s going on, and, if you’ve been hearing all about it but not really knowing what “it” is, then perhaps I can provide some insight.^*

AI has been undergoing a bit of a Renaissance here lately.  For a long time, AI development was focussed on “state machines,” which are like really fancy flow charts.  You’ve probably seen one of these on the Internet at some point: you know those web pages that try to guess what animal you’re thinking of (or whatever), and, if they can’t guess it, then they ask you to teach it a question that will distinguish your animal from the last animal it guessed, and then it adds that to its little database ... those amusing little things?  Well, those are very simple state machines.  If the answer is “yes,” it goes down one path, and if the answer is “no,” it goes down a different one, until it eventually hits a dead end.  State machines, as it turns out, are very useful in computer science ... but they don’t make good AI.  That’s just not the way humans think (unless you’re playing a game of 20 Questions, and even then a lot of people don’t approach it that logically).  So eventually computer scientists tried something else.

One way you can make a better AI than a state machine is doing something called “machine learning.” With this, you take a bunch of data, and you feed it into an algorithm.  The algorithm is designed to analyze the data’s inputs and outputs: that is, if humans started with thing A (the input), then they might conclude thing B (the output).  If you have a decent enough algorithm, you can make a program that will conclude basically the same things that a human will, most of the time.  Of course, not all humans will come up with the same outputs given the same inputs, so your algorithm better be able to handle contradictions.  And naturally the data you feed into it (its “training data”) will determine entirely how good it gets.  If you accidentally (or deliberately) give it data that’s skewed towards one way of thinking, your machine learning AI will be likewise skewed.  But these are surmountable issues.

Another thing you could do is to create a “language model.” This also uses training data, but instead of examining the data for inputs and outputs, the algorithm examines the words that comprise the data, looking for patterns and learning syntax.  Now, “chatbots” (or computer programs designed to simulate a person’s speech patterns) have been around a long time; Eliza, a faux therapist, is actually a bit older than I am (and, trust me: that’s old).  But the thing about Eliza is, it’s not very good.  It only takes about 5 or so exchanges before you start to butt up against its limitations; if you didn’t know it was an AI when you first started, you’d probably figure it out in under a minute.  Of course, many people would say that Eliza and similar chatbots aren’t even AIs at all.  There’s no actual “intelligence” there, they’d point out.  It’s just making a more-or-less convincing attempt at conversation.

Still, the ability to hold a conversation does require some intelligence, and it’s difficult to converse with a thing without mentally assessing it as either smart, or dumb, or somewhere in between.  Think of Siri and other similar “personal assistants”: they’re not really AI, because they don’t really “know” anything.  They’re just capable of analyzing what you said and turning it into a search that Apple or Google or Amazon can use to return some (hopefully) useful results.  But everyone who’s interacted with Siri or her peers will tell you how dumb she is.  Because she often misunderstands what you’re saying: sometimes because she doesn’t hear the correct words, and sometimes because her algorithm got the words right but failed to tease out a reasonable meaning from them.  So, no, not a “real” AI ... but still something that we can think of as either intelligent or not.

Language models are sort of a step up from Siri et al.  Many folks are still going to claim they’re not AI, but the ability they have to figure out what you meant from what you said and respond like an actual human certainly makes them sound smart.  And they’re typically built like machine learning models: you take a big ol’ set of training data, feed it in, and let it learn how to talk.

Of course the best AI of all would be a combination of both ...

And now we arrive at ChatGPT.  A company called OpenAI created a combined machine learning and language model program which they referred to a “generative pre-trained transfomer,” or GPT.  They’ve made 3 of these so far, so the newest one is called “GPT-3.” And then they glued a chatbot-style language model on top of that, and there you have ChatGPT.  GPT-3 is actually rather amazing at answering questions, if they’re specific enough.  What ChatGPT adds is primarily context: when you’re talking to GPT-3, if it gives you an answer that isn’t helpful or doesn’t really get at the meaning, you have to start over and type your whole question in again, tweaking it slightly to hopefully get a better shot at conveying your meaning.  But, with ChatGPT, you can just say something like “no, I didn’t mean X; please try again using Y.” And it’ll do that, because it keeps track of what the general topic is, and it knows which tangents you’ve drifted down, and it’s even pretty damn good at guess what “it” means in a given sentence if you start slinging pronouns at it.

Now, many news outlets have picked up on the fact that Microsoft is trying to integrate ChatGPT (or something based off of it) into their search engine Bing, and people are speculating that this could be the first serious contender to Google.  I think that’s both wrong and right: while I personally have started to use ChatGPT to answer questions that Google really sucks at answering, so I know it’s better in many situations, that doesn’t mean that Microsoft has the brains to be able to monetize it sufficiently to be a threat to Google’s near-monopoly.  If you want to watch a really good breakdown of this aspect of ChatGPT, there’s a really good YouTube video which will explain it in just over 8 minutes.

But, the thing is, whether or not Microsoft succesfully integrates a ChatGPT-adjacent AI into Bing, this level of useful AI is likely going to change the Internet as we know it.  ChatGPT is smarter than Eliza, or Siri, or Alexa, or “Hey Google.” It’s more friendly and polite, too.  It can not only regurgitate facts, but also offer opinions, advice, and it’s even got a little bit of creativity.  Don’t get me wrong: ChatGPT is not perfect by any means.  It will quite confidently tell you things that are completely wrong, and, when you point out its mistake, completely reverse direction and claim that it was wrong, it was always wrong, and it has no idea why it said that.  It will give you answers that aren’t wrong but are incomplete.  If asked, it will produce arguments that may sound convincing, but are based on faulty premises, or are supported by faulty evidence.  It’s not something you can rely on for 100% accuracy.

But, here’s the thing: if you’ve spent any time searching the Internet, you already know you can’t rely on everything you read.  Half of the shit is made up, and the other half may not mean what you think it means.  Finding information is a process, and you have to throw out as much as you keep, and at the end of it all you hope you got close to the truth ... if we can even really believe in “truth” any more at all.  So, having an assistant to help you out on that journey is not really a bad thing.  I find ChatGPT to be helpful when writing code, for instance: not to write code for me, but to suggest ideas and algorithms when I can then refine on my own.  Here’s the thing: ChatGPT is not a very good programmer, but it is a very knowledgeable one, and it might know a technique (or a whole language) that I never learned.  I would never use ChatGPT code as is ... but I sure do use it as a jumping-off point quite a bit.

And that’s just me being a programmer.  I’m also a D&D nerd, and ChatGPT can help me come up with character concepts or lay out what I need to do to build one.  If I can’t figure out how to do something on my Android phone, I just ask ChatGPT, and it (probably) knows how to do it.  Networking problem? ChatGPT.  Need to understand the difference between filtering water and distilling it? ChatGPT.  Need help choosing a brand of USB hub? ChatGPT.  Want to know what 1/112th the diameter of Mercury is? ChatGPT (it’s 43.39km, by the way, which is 26.97 miles).

But you needn’t take my word for it.  The Atlantic has already published an article called “The College Essay Is Dead” (because, you know, students in the future will just get an AI to write their essays for them).  A Stanford professor gave an interview about how it will “change the way we think and work.” YouTuber Tom Scott (normally quite a sober fellow) posted a video entitled “I tried using AI. It scared me.” The technical term for what these folks are describing is “inflection point.” Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the concept of sitting down of an evening with a book was unheard of.  Before Eli Whitney built a musket out of interchangeable parts, the concept of mass production was ludicrous.  Before Charles Birdseye figured out how to flash-freeze peas, supermarkets weren’t even possible.  And there is an inevitable series of points, from the invention of the telphone to the earliest implementation of ARPANET to the first smartphone, that fairly boggles the mind when you try to imagine life before it.  My youngest child will not be able to conceive of life without a phone in her pocket; my eldest can’t comprehend life before the Internet; and even I cannot really fancy a time when you couldn’t just pick up the phone and call a person, even if they might not be home at the time.  Will my children’s children not be able to envision life before chatty AIs?  Perhaps not.  I can’t say that all those friendly, helpful robots that we’re so familiar with from sci-fi books and shows are definitely in our future ... but I’m no longer willing to say they definitely won’t be, either.

The future will be ... interesting.

__________

* Note: This is not designed to be a fully, technically correct explanation, but rather a deliberate oversimplification for lay people.  Please bear that in mind before you submit corrections.

King Missile is cool ...

I have a friend in from out of town at the moment, so no blog post for you this week.  Still, all is not lost ... no, all is not lost: not yet.

By which I mean you’ll get another shot at it next week.  See ya then.

Blah blah blah

You know, at this point, even I’m bored of hearing me complain about my computer woes.  So let’s just say that today was a bit of a lost cause and leave it at that.

Next week, I sincerely hope that there will be something more exciting here.  I can hardly wait to find out!

80s My Way III

"On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2)"

[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 series introduction for general background; you may also want to check out the mix introduction for more detailed 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.]

Last time we had arrived in 1982, and, despite enjoying nearly 78 minutes of classic 80s goodness, there was still more to cover.  So let’s finish that up, shall we?

As I noted, 1982 is the beginning of the end of the transitional years.  While there were still some tracks that tried to have it both ways—both straight-ahead rock and this new, “alternative” sound—trends like post-punk, new wave, and, most cruicially synthpop, were here to stay and truly starting to take over the scene.  And, most significantly, a lot of the non-quite-alt from last volume was, unlike volume I, from artists who were truly reinventing themselves.  The members of Asia certainly qualify, but the major success story from last time was Hall & Oates, who were perhaps the most successful at this feat.¹  But there are two other artists who were one thing in the 70s and an entirely different thing in the 80s, with both sides of that changeover still being pretty decent.  I’ve picked one of those to be our closer here:² it’s Golden Earring.  Now, if you’re a typical American, there are exactly two songs by this Dutch band that you’ve ever heard.  The first is “Radar Love,” which is in that 70s proto-hard-rock style epitomized by the Who and Led Zeppelin.  (Weirdly, Golden Earring actually originated in the 60s, where they sounded more like the Beatles or the Zombies.)  But, by the 80s, they were ready to remake themselves again, and so the second of their songs you’ve likely heard is “Twilight Zone,” which sounds nothing like “Radar Love” ... but still amazing: strong rock guitars, but a very complex bassline, overlapping vocals in very different styles, solid, scifi-adjacent synth work.  In 1982, I had a paper route, and I usually rode with headphones on and my Walkman cranking, playing mix tapes I’d made myself.³  “Twilight Zone” was definitely was of the songs on those tapes, as was “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby.  Forget “injections” of synth: this song was almost nothing but synths, and samples, and weird, nonsensical vocals.  Everyone was rushing to put synths in their music, because it was new and hip and different.  Utterly unsurprsing from Dolby, whose stage name after all came from his “always messing around with keyboards and tapes.”⁴  But from reggae/dancehall virtuoso Eddy Grant?  “Electric Avenue” was something special, something most of us had never heard before ... primarily because it almost certainly never been done before.  The synths in this otherwise Caribbean-flavored track made it irresistable to butt up against Dolby’s classic.

There are a few other people here who started in the 70s and reinvented themselves for this exciting new time.  For instance, being (musically speaking, at any rate) a child of the 80s, Genesis was an entirely different band to me than it was for the afficianados of prog-rock.⁵  The transition in Genesis came when its lead singer, Peter Gabriel, left.  Now, Genesis is certainly an important part of my 80s, and “Abacab” and “No Reply at All” were likely on those Walkman paper-route mixes, but we’ll have to wait for 1984 to get a proper entry from them.  But Gabriel, on the other hand ... as part of Genesis, he was known for outrageous costumes set to meandering prog-rock:⁶ sort of like what you might get if you could have David Bowie fronting Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  But somehow, as a solo artist, his music morphed into a sort of alt-pop: strong hooks and interesting synth work made songs like “Sledgehammer” and “Games Without Frontiers” 80s staples, not to mention the all-time most iconic 80s ballad, “In Your Eyes.” But the first Gabriel song I ever heard was “Shock the Monkey,” and that’s the one I’ve included here.  A screed against animal testing, there’s something primal about the song, with its electronic perscussion and dreamy synth washes which play against the power chords.

But the real story of the time were the new bands, and few were bigger or more emblematic of the new style than Duran Duran.  Formed in 1978 and named after a character in Barbarella, Duran Duran scored a hit in their native UK in 1981 with “Girls on Film,” but it was barely heard in the US.  But they burst into 1982 with Rio and “Hungry Like the Wolf,” which played over and over and over on the radio stations of the time.  But somehow it wasn’t annoying: it just got better and better.  Spurred on by a great video on the then-nascent MTV and an appearance on SNL, “Hungry Like the Wolf” was #1 in Canada, #3 in the US, #4 in Finland and New Zealand, and #5 in the UK and Australia.  It sold over a million copies in the US alone; it’s been streamed in the UK over 40 million times; its video won the very first Grammy for best video.  VH1 says it was the third best song of the 80s, and Rolling Stone included it on their list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.  While “Rio” was a better song in many ways, and their material of Seven and the Ragged Tiger (such as “Union of the Snake”⁷) was more interesting, there can be no doubt that “Hungry” was fundamentally important: it shook up the scene, and showed that synthy, poppy alt rock could not only be sonically impressive, but cool and sexy and could make money.  I would love to believe that the explosion in alt rock was more about artistic integrity and exploring new musical fusions and all that, but let’s face it: the fact that Duran Duran became mega superstars (and presumably multimillionaires) certainly didn’t hurt.

And so the music starts to diverge more significantly.  Adam and the Ants had always been a bit out there,⁸ and for his first solo effort the former punk turned new wave actually moved just closer enough to mainstream that it would catch on.  Still, “Goody Two Shoes” was pretty distinct from most of the standard offerings.  And what were we to think of one-hit-wonders Men Without Hats and their “Safety Dance”?  My small town couldn’t get cable yet, so I had no MTV: I was reduced to watching Friday Night Videos on NBC.  And I distinctly remember the first time I saw the video for this song;⁹ the “what the fuck is this??” factor was pretty strong for this one.  This was new wave at its weirdest, and that’s saying something, considering new wave is the genre that gave us Devo.  And as for Wall of Voodoo, who were, according to lead singer Stan Ridgway, “on a wavelength far from home,”¹⁰ there was definitely nothing else like “Mexican Radio.”¹¹

This was also the time when I was regularly raiding my father’s reject box, which is primarily what I used to make those Walkman mix tapes.  That may have been where I found “She Blinded Me with Science” (certainly I can’t imagine why else my dad would have had the single); it was absolutely where I found “Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox, fronted by Midge Ure, who had formerly toured brifely with Thin Lizzy,¹² and would go on in future years to co-write the first of those charity supergroup songs, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” “Reap” was #12 in the UK and #10 in Ireland, but peaked at a paltry #71 here in the US, so most of us yanks have never heard it; despite that, it’s a classic new wave tune that deserves wider recognition.

But the most fateful record I plucked out of the reject box was undoubtedly “The One Thing” by INXS.  It wasn’t their pinnacle—“Don’t Change” was more classic, and that album overall was just a prelude to the superb Listen Like Thieves, which would give us the nearly perfect “What You Need”—but “The One Thing” was the first time I heard the band that would go on to define a huge part of my 80s.  INXS is to me one of the four musical corners of the decade, in fact,¹³ and the first one to truly penetrate my consciousness.  From the plaintive wail of Hutchence’s voice to the even more plaintive wail of Pengilly’s sax, INXS is 80s perfection in some fundamental way that is difficult for me to describe.  It’s not really new age, and it’s certainly not synthpop, but it’s amazing, and different, and I’m not sure we ever heard its like again.

For proper Australian new wave, we need to look to Icehouse.  Their excellent Primitive Man was contemporaneous with INXS’ Shabooh Shoobah, but I don’t believe I was aware of them until a few years later, when I started getting serious about filling out my collection.  “Great Southern Land” most likely came to my attention in 1989 when the compilation album of the same name was realeased in the US.  With its individuated synth notes and echoey vocals, it’s a great example of the subgenre.  As is Missing Persons’ “Walking in L.A.”, with Dale Bozzio’s quirky vocals, like Martha Davis (of the Motels¹⁴) cranked up to 11 and twisted slightly out of true.  Of course, “Walking” is a much more jagged version of new wave than “Southern” or “Reap”; for an almost folksy contrast, we go to the Nails, known as one-hit wonders for their “88 Lines About 44 Women,” which, musically isn’t much more than a preprogrammed Casio rhythm track and some harmonized humming, but lyrically was quite adventurous: the “women” in question included Eloise, who “sang songs about whales and cocks,” and Tanya (Turkish), who “liked to fuck while wearing leather biker boots.” And, if you want the Britpop version of new wave, there’s “Love Plus One,” by Haircut One Hundred.  I never really loved this song the way some did, but it was definitely an important milestone for the subgenre, and I have some fond memories of it.

But of course the ultimate new wave classic (for this volume, at any rate¹⁵) is “I Melt with You,” a song so insanely good that it transcends having the stupidest breakdown in musical history (seriously? a humming solo?).  “Melt” is an anthem about making love while the bomb is dropping, and it’s utterly wonderful.  I can’t quite consider Modern English one-hit wonders, even though it’s true that “Melt” was their only top 40 hit in the US (they did much better in their native UK), mainly because I think of a one-hit wonder as having one great song, period.  The rest of the album that that song comes from has to be mediocre at best, at least in my head: a band with even one really great album just doesn’t seem to hit the one-hit mold for me, despite technically fitting the definition.  But After the Snow is brilliant: opener “Someone’s Calling” is a solid offering; “Life in the Gladhouse” is dark and brooding; “Face of Wood” is pretty and melodic; the title track is martial and just slightly off.  But there’s no doubt that “I Melt with You” deserves its spot on just about everyone’s 80s retrospective.  Including mine.

80's My Way III
[ On a Wavelength Far From Home (1982 Pt 2) ]

“The One Thing” by INXS, off Shabooh Shoobah
“Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, off Combat Rock
“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant, off Friend or Foe
“Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran, off Rio
“She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby [Single]¹⁶
“Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant [Single]¹⁷
“Shock the Monkey” by Peter Gabriel [Single]
“White Wedding, Part 1” by Billy Idol, off Billy Idol
“Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo [Single]
“Steppin' Out” by Joe Jackson, off Night and Day
“88 Lines about 44 Women” by the Nails [Single]
“Save It for Later” by the English Beat [Single]
“Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners [Single]
“The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats, off Rhythm of Youth
“Reap the Wild Wind” by Ultravox [Single]
“Great Southern Land” by Icehouse, off Primitive Man
“Love Plus One” by Haircut One Hundred [Single]
“I Melt with You” by Modern English, off After the Snow
“Walking in L.A.” by Missing Persons, off Spring Session M
“Twilight Zone [single version]” by Golden Earring [Single]¹⁸

Total:  20 tracks,  82:09

There are two tracks which come close to straight-ahead rock (even more so than “Twilight Zone,” in my opinion): the first is “Shoud I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash, and the second is the crowning achievement of one William Idol, “White Wedding.” The Clash were theoretically a post-punk band, but, honestly: they were still punk.  Especially for ‘82’s Combat Rock, which include both this classic and “Rock the Casbah.” Mick Jones’ surly lyrics and Joe Strummer’s simple but powerful guitar licks make this a song to rival anything the Sex Pistols or the Ramones came out with.  And what can you say about Billy Idol’s magnum opus?  In many ways, I was more enamored of “Dancing with Myself” at the time, but, man does “White Wedding” really stand up all these years alter.  Also coming out of the British punk scene, Idol and his guitarist Steve Stevens constructed a song that starts with a riff often described as “ominous,” breathy vocals, and background vocalizations, eventually building to that trademark Idol scream at just shy of the 2-minute mark.  Still capable of giving me the shivers decades later.

For further stretching the boundaries of what “alternative” can connote, the English Beat (of course known in Britain as simply “the Beat”) were one of the foremost purveyors of two-tone.  While Madness and the Specials were doing more or less straightforward ska, the Beat were doing songs like “Save It for Later” (which I’ve used here), and the earlier “Mirror in the Bathroom,” which infused some new wave sensibilities into the ska rhythms.  Turning instead to alternative jazz, Joe Jackson has had a tendency to reinvent himself on just about every album.  Whereas Look Sharp! was more poppy, and Jumpin’ Jive was swing and jump blues,¹⁹ his entry for 1982, Night and Day, was in many ways a modern inflection on old jazz standards (AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine compares it several times to Cole Porter).  “Steppin’ Out” is cool, breezy, jazzy, and, as the name implies, nocturnal.  There is a bit of new wave flair in it, but it’s a light touch.  I thought it was a nifty song at the time; it was only some years later, when I heard the entire album, that I truly began to appreciate Jackson’s genius.

And that only leaves us with what must surely be the most improbable success of the year, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners.  Dexys struggled with finding its image and tone for several years before settling on the coveralls that became their trademark style.  Their instrumentation was all over the place: a strong contingent of Celtic/country (banjo, mandolin, accordian, and two or more fiddles) but also a touch of brass (saxophone, flute, and trombone).  The album that spawned “Eileen” credits 11 musicians, not even counting backing vocals.  Speaking as someone who owns the dubiously named Very Best of Dexys Midnight Runners, I can tell you that it contains 19 tracks, and two of them are great—the second being their cover of Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said”—and 17 of them are absolute shit.  How this eclectic mess managed to stumble into a #1 hit in 8 countries, best selling single of the year in the UK, declared later by VH1 as the third greatest one-hit wonder of all time, and the sixth favorite 1980s #1 hit by ITV poll ... how this band did all that is anyone’s guess.  It’s a complex song, with key changes and tempo changes, rapid-fire lyrics, blazing fast fiddling, brass fills, and piano glissandoes.  It’s both unlike all the other music extant at the time and quintessentially 80s.  Almost everyone who was alive at the time will sing along when it comes on, despite the fact that very few of us know more than a few words.  It’s just that catchy.  That was just the state of music in 1982.

Next time, we’ll return to dreamland.

⇐ 80s My Way II

80s My Way IV ⇒

__________

1 One might argue that Heart did it better.  But, as Heart blossomed more into stadium rock than the synth-infused alt-rock that Hall & Oates was so successful at, we won’t feature them on this mix.

2 The other will have to wait for us to reach 1985.

3 Remember, my father was a record collector, so making mix tapes was a skill I learned at a fairly young age.  They weren’t very good mix tapes, of course, but everyone has to start somewhere.

4 According to Wikipedia.

5 As was Fleetwood Mac, I suppose.

6 Here’s a typical example.

7 But not “The Reflex”; that song is just annoying.

8 In fact, I almost threw in “Stand and Deliver” as my choice for Ant.  But in the end I decided to wait for this one.

9 Which was, apparently, some time after it came out, since FNV didn’t start till ‘83.

10 Title drop.

11 Fun fact: I used to have a friend who fantasized about an imaginary 80s song which was a duet between Stan Ridgway and Fred Schneider of the B-52’s.  Try imagining “Mexican Radio” with Schneider interjecting “Mexican radio, baby!” in between lines of the chorus.  It’s fun.

12 And sang for Rich Kids, the band Glen Matlock formed after he left the Sex Pistols.  Ghosts of Princes in Towers is damnably hard to find, but well worth it in my opinion.  Its title track was a little too early to land on this mix, but it was defnitely an early harbinger.

13 We’ll see the other three corners when we get to 1984 and 1986.

14 Who we heard from last volume.

15 I’m going to make a strong case for Icicle Works’ “Whisper to a Scream” being the ultimatest new wave song of all time when we get to 1984.

16 The single is probably sufficient, though The Golden Age of Wireless is not a bad pick-up either.

17 Unlike Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” even the single of this song is not easy to find.  However, Killer on the Rampage is pretty nifty, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort (second best track: “I Don’t Wanna Dance”).  Or, as always, just go to YouTube.

18 Make sure to get the “single version” of this track.  The album version is nearly twice as long, and that’s not to its credit.

19 You may recall hearing a lot of the latter album on Salsatic Vibrato.

Character noodling

It’s been a busy weekend, and I did a long post last week, so I think I’ll leave you with little other than the promise of something more substantial next week.

But, just for fun, my youngest and I have been working on a new D&D character: he’s a young (~13 years old) dinosaur person related to the Jurassic-Park-style dilophosaurus.  We decided his name should be Oxý Sálio (Οξύ Σάλιο).  (You’ll have to use Google Translate to work out what that’s based on, but it’ll be obvious in retrospect.)  We’ve still got more work to do, but it seems like a cool basic concept.  We’ll see what develops.

OGL Doomscrolling

I’ve never been particularly susceptible to doomscrolling.  I didn’t do it during the height of the pandemic, nor on January 6th, nor even during the run up to (and aftermath of) Trump’s election.  I didn’t do it during the most intense times of the Black Lives Matter protests, nor during the most heinous parts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The closest I ever really got was an obsession with TV news shortly after 9/11, but that was technically before doomscrolling was a thing (although really it was the same impulse).  But, overall, I was starting to think I was immune to the syndrome.

And then Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast (or WotC)—the company that makes D&D—started fucking with my game.

Now, on the one hand I suppose it makes sense that this thing, which is more likely to affect me personally than any of that other stuff (maybe even more so than COVID), was the thing that finally caught me in its web.  But that’s sort of a shallow assessment, and I would at least hope that there’s a better explanation than that.  After some introspection, I think I’ve put my finger on it: none of that other stuff really surprised me.  Anyone who was surprised that Putin would invade a country just hasn’t been paying attention, and anyone who was surprised that cops were killing black people is beyond clueless.  The US government wasn’t prepared to deal with a major health crisis? yeah, some “breaking news” there.  Corporations are using the pandemic to gouge us for more money? well, duh: it’s what they do.  As for Trump, I can’t say which is less surprising: that a politician would be a compulsive liar, or that a rich white guy would be self-absorbed and unscrupulous.

But this ... this actually caught me off guard.  I never thought that this could happen.

And that’s primarily because it already happened once before. See, what Hasbro is doing is trying to screw with the Open Gaming License (OGL), which was invented for the third edition of the game (3e), and tries to do for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) what open source licenses did for the software industry.  Both 3e and 5e use the OGL, but 4e did not.  What happened?  Well, presumably, some dick executives at Hasbro decided that it sucked that other people were making money off D&D and decided to create a new version that wouldn’t use the OGL (I actually cover this is some detail in my discussion of what Pathfinder is).  And it bombed.  See, 3e made D&D the biggest TTRPG in the market—by a huge factor.  Other TTRPGs were, in those days, like browsers other than Chrome: sure, they exist, but the only people you know who use them are hardcore nerds.  4e killed all that, and other TTRPGs began to equal—or even overtake—D&D.  And it’s obviously an oversimplification to claim that moving away from the OGL was responsible for that ... but it’s hard to ignore it as a factor as well.

Especially when you factor in that 5e brought it back.  Basically, WotC said, “hey, guys, we know we screwed up, but now there’s a new version of the game, and it will use the OGL again ... please come back to us.” And it worked.  Oh, sure: once again it’s too neat and tidy to lay the massive success of D&D in recent years at the feet of re-embracing the OGL.  But, also once again, it’s hard to ignore that factor.  So it seems like the company learned their lesson, and now everything is good ... right?

Except corporate executives come and go, and often institutional memories are amnesiac.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, warns George Santayana, and that’s exactly what’s happened now.  Thus, doomscrolling.

Well, today is my last allotted day to obsessively hit the refresh button to get the latest news on this topic, so perhaps I can declare it not a complete waste of effort by giving you, dear reader, a few links which can hopefully tell the story in a cogent, coherent manner.  I tried to focus on shorter articles and videos to make it quicker to get through, but there’s no getting around that this is a big topic, so don’t dive in unless you’re willing to spend some time on it.  But, for all that, I think it’s a really fascinating topic, with business aspects, legal aspects, issues of creative vs capitalist, and feats of journalism.  If you do have the time, it might just be worth it to take a look at this particular controversy.  And, even if you’re not into TTRPGs, considering the fact that the blockbuster D&D movie is scheduled for March, and a new D&D TV show was just announced, it’s possible that the fallout could impact a lot more folks than that, if only tangentially.

For each link below, I’ve indicated what format the media is in, and what expertise the author is bringing to the table.  I’ve tried to arrange things into an order that makes the story easier to follow (which is decidedly not chronological order of these things being published), and add a brief bit of commentary as to what I think the value of each is.  This list is highly curated, based on my own opinions; I tried to save you from going through a lot of the dreck that I did during my doomscrolling spree, but that inherently means that my bias about what to include and what to omit is on full display, so take with as many grains of salt as you feel appropriate.  Some of these I’ve marked “informative,” if they’re primarily to get raw data; some I’ve marked “entertaining,” if the authors have added a bit of flair to make the new go down more easily; and some I’ve marked “emotional,” if the authors are letting their feelings show as to how much this is impacting their lives and livelihoods.

I’ve explained most of the acronyms above; “3PP” means third-party publisher (i.e. someone who is not WotC or the consumer who is publishing D&D-related material).  The fate of the 3PPs are the main thing that’s in doubt with this move from Hasbro / WotC.  It’s also fair to note (as some of the folks below do) that, when we demonize the “company,” we need to be careful to disinguish the sleazy executives from the rank-and-file employees of WotC (and its subsidiaries, like D&D Beyond), who are really just trying to get along, and many of whom don’t agree with the policies of the “company” at all (and several of whom are, apparently, responsible for many of the leaks that are fueling the fire, precisely because they can’t stand idly by).

What the hell is all this about anyway?

• Best overall summary: (video) Mark “Sherlock” Hulmes (D&D streamer); emotional.  The first 13 minutes here are the best breakdown of almost every salient event that I’ve heard so far.

• Best summary of the situation pre-leak: (video) Profesor Dungeon Master (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); informative.  The first 4 minutes here are a very concise window on the situation up to the point where the leak happened (the leak was just a rumour at this point; it became official upon publication of the Gizmodo article—see below).  After that, the Prof goes on to make some fairly cogent commentary and predictions, but a lot of it was invalidated by later events.

Was the original OGL useful?

• Negative: (text) Cory Doctorow (author); informative.  Some people say the original OGL was useless or even harmful.
• Positive: (video) Roll of Law (lawyer); informative.  Others counter that this is too simplistic a view.

The business issues driving this

• Early predictions: Flute’s Loot (D&D streamer); informative.  Really, Flute is just collecting words of wisdom here from Matt Colville (founder of MCDM), but, since he’s done us the kindness of picking out just the good bits, we may as well take advantage.  (And he does add some useful commentary.)

• Assessment of the factors leading up to this situation: (video) Ryan Dancey (former VP at WotC and co-author of the original OGL); informative.  Nice short clip from a much longer discussion with the Roll for Combat folks (who were one of the third-party publishers involved in the leak) which explains very cogently the business side of things from someone with inside knowledge.

• What WotC should have done to address “undermonetization”: (video) Tulok the Barbarian (D&D streamer); entertaining.  This is probably about as pro-Hasbro as it gets (spoiler: still not very pro-Hasbro).  While this came out before the ORC license annoucement (below) and way before WotC’s response (even further below), it is still the absolute best (and funniest) assessment of what WotC / Hasbro could have done—still could do, for that matter—to address their concerns that D&D is “undermonetized” without pissing off their customer base.

What’s bad about the (proposed) new license?

• The original leak: (text) Linda Codega for Gizmodo (journalist); informative.  This is what kicked off the controversy.

• Why it’s legally bad: (video) The Rules Lawyer (lawyer and D&D streamer); informative.  A good summary of the issues from a legal standpoint.

• Why fans are outraged: (video) DnD Shorts (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); entertaining.  Anti-Hasbro biased, obviously, but really encapsulates why people are freaking out.

Reactions from the community

• A typical 3PP reaction: (video) The Dungeon Coach (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); emotional.  I could list literally dozens of videos just like this one, but I think DC is honest and raw and lays it out straight.

• The #OpenDND movement: (video) The ArchCast (D&D streamer); informative.  A decent summary of the situation post-OpenDND but pre Paizo.

• The ORC license: (text) Charlie Hall for Polygon (journalist); informative.  Paizo are the makers of Pathfinder, you may recall, and are severely impacted by all this since Pathfinder (or at least the first version of it) is completely dependent on the original OGL.  This article is a nice summary of Paizo’s annoucement of the new Open RPG Creative (or “ORC”) license, and it includes a link to the full announcement if you want to read that.

• Community reaction to the ORC license: (video) No Nat 1s (D&D streamer); entertaining.  I don’t love this guy in general, but his joy at the Paizo annoucement (just above) is kind of infectious.

The campaign to send WotC a financial message

• A typical plea on Twitter: (tweet) Ginny Di (D&D stremer); interesting.  Ginny Di is a major influencer in the D&D space.  Note that she’s retweeting something from DnD Shorts (see above), but most people feel it was her signing on that really made this go viral.

• A typical plea on YouTube: (video) Indestructoboy (third-party publisher); interesting.  Reasoned and rational.

• The end result: (video) Tenkar’s Tavern (D&D streamer); informative.  Not necessarly the best on this topic, but probably the most compact.

WotC’s response

• What it is and why it’s bad: (video) DnD Shorts (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); entertaining.  The only person I’m linking to more than once, Will from DnD Shorts is definitely very anti-Hasbro, but he’s just so damned articulate and simultaneously so damned entertaining that I can’t not point you at his videos.  This video contains the entire text of WotC’s response.

• Why people find it offensive: (video) Dungeons & Discourse (UK legal professional^* and wargaming streamer); entertaining.  Originally an anti-corporate voice in the wargaming hobby space,^** this creator originally published videos under Discourse Miniatures.  She actually just started this new channel focussing on TTRPGs specifically because of this OGL debacle.  She’s informed, articulate, funny, and I adore her accent.^***  (I actually just signed up for her Patreon.)

So that’s it; pretty much the whole story.  There are more details out there, but don’t get sucked in like I did.  It’s not worth it.

And maybe now I’ve learned that even something this massively stupid shouldn’t surprise me.  Hopefully that’s armor against the next crazy-ass thing that might tempt me into wasting my life reading about shit that’s just going to depress me anyway.  One can always hope.

__________

* The UK has a few different professions which are licensed to practice law, and I don’t know exactly which one she is.

** Remember that D&D actually grew out of wargaming, so it’s definitely related.

*** Northern Ireland, perhaps?