Thankful for Heroscape (among other things)

This week was Thanksgiving, and I took an extra two days off, so I had sort of a 6-day weekend.  One of those days we ate a lot of food (but not so much turkey this year) and came up with some ideas of what we were thankful for.  (One of the things I was thankful for was that we didn’t have to have any of those uncomfortable conversations so many “news” stories lately have been telling us how to navigate—or trying to tell us, anyway.  With brilliant advice such as “avoid politics”—gee, ya think?—none of the ones I saw were actually particularly useful.  Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about that because our Thanksgiving dinner comprised 4 people who all happen to have compatible political views.  But I digress.)

One of the days was spent having an all day (about 6 hours all told, I’d say) Heroscape battle: 3-way, 2v1, with me holding the heights against two swarm armies (Marro drones and vipers) run by the Smaller Animal (who, again, is way taller than me by this point) and one of his best friends who hasn’t played in a while.  And another day was another 3-way Heroscape battle (1v1v1 this time) with me, the Smaller Animal, and my youngest, who thus far had resisted playing (though they’re fully into the crafting aspects of making custom elements for the game).  But suddenly they found an army that interested them, and demanded we play for a second day in a row.  For the record, I won the 2v1 (primarily because I drafted a long-range army who was able to tear up the mostly-melee attacking armies before they could get close enough to engage), and the Smaller Animal won the 1v1v1 (because they chose a regenerating army that was devilishly difficult to exterminate permanently).

So it’s a been a family-focussed few days, and then it’s back to work tomorrow.  I think the break did me some good, and it should be fun to get back to work again.  Let’s find out.

Doom Report (Week -9: The Overton Window)

This week, the saga of Trump’s cabinet is both better and worse.  Matt Gaetz at least is gone, and he was certainly the worst of the bunch.  But, then, Gaetz is the very epitome of shifting the Overton Window.  If you don’t know what that is (and aren’t willing to click that perfectly good link I just dropped on you, though you really should), I’ll give you a quick precis:  The Overton Window is the set of what’s acceptable to voters.  But it’s constantly shifting over time, usually in small increments.  For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even remotely acceptable in the 50s—you couldn’t even bring it up in conversation.  Now it’s legal (at least temporarily).  Same for smoking pot, although that was still considered verboten as late as the 80s, and isn’t legal everywhere even today.  Those are things that took decades for the window to shift.  But, if you’re clever (and have some sort of authority behind you, like being an intellectual thinktank, or a president-elect), you can shift the Overton Window much more quickly.  All you need to do is, put forward an idea that is so ridiculous, so outlandish, so ... well, to use the official Overton term, unthinkable ... that suddenly the ideas that seemed radical before are now not so crazy.

So Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far.  To the point where everyone was stunned by it—even the Republicans.  Susan Collins, who you may remember from her comment that Trump had “learned” his lesson after the first impeachment (her exact quote was that he would be “much more cautious in the future”), said she was “shocked” by the Gaetz nomination.  (Apparently there’s much money to be made on betting whether Collins will see things coming, like, say, the changing of the seasons.)  Lisa Murkowski and John Thune (the latter set to be the new Senate Majority Leader now that Mitch McConnell is finally being put out to pasture) also expressed doubts.  And now Gaetz is stepping down.  See, the system works, right?

But, the thing is, that was all a distraction from the other insane picks.  Which keep on coming: Linda McMahon (yes, the wrestling executive) to head the Department of Education, and Dr. Oz, the TV quack huckster, to run Medicare and Medicaid.  And let’s not forget the previous insane picks: Pete Hegseth, the Fox “News” host, is in no way qualified to run the two trillion dollar Defense Department, and is also apparently a sexual predator.  Then again, as many have pointed out, that’s apparently a unifying theme for his cabinet: Hegseth, RFK Jr, Musk ... even McMahon has been sued for enabling sexual abuse.  But I suppose that makes sense for the adjudicated rapist who’s hiring them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling over themselves to blame each other for why Kamala lost.  Many, for instance, are saying that her campaign was “too woke.”  Which is completely moronic, because the Kamala campaign flew so far to the center that they were actively pissing off the proper liberals: from trans folk to people opposed to the Palestinian genocide.  Palling around with the Cheneys, for fuck’s sake, is about as far from “woke” as you can get.  But still people want to believe it’s someone else’s fault.  Awfully convenient for the white supremacists that the Dems now apparently want to blame the same “others” that the Republicans do.

As to what is the real reason why Kamala lost, I’ve heard a lot of theories in the past weeks.  But probably the best one came from the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, in a recent Jon Stewart interview:

So yeah, people are hurting.  And if you’re looking at them in the face and saying, “actually, you’re not” ... whether that’s a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of—and that’s very difficult to thread that needle, the task she was handed to propose how we’ll change, but also still be riding with the last administration.  ...  But most people are hurting. And here’s the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying: ... the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly.  In the end, ain’t the Republicans worse?  And while I happen to agree with that, here’s the trick: the Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain.  And politics is an emotional business before it’s a rational one.  And that’s why they win.

— Sarah Smarsh, The Weekly Show, 11/14/24

Partially I like this because it lines up with my own theories that I talked about nearly a year ago, and partially because it’s the more insightful version of what James Carville pegged as the reason.  Carville is a bit of an asshole, but he ain’t stupid, and his assessment was that it all came down to when Kamala was asked (in her interview on The View) what she would do differently from Biden, “and she froze.”  Or at least that’s how Carville put it; I would instead say that she waffled and ducked the question, but the end result is the same.  And while trying to boil down an entire failed campaign to one moment is overly simplistic as well as reductive, it is emblematic of the point that she was trying to toe the party line that everything was going great with the economy while ignoring the real concerns of real people.  And, even more incisive to me personally, it’s exactly what my friend said to me in the conversation I reported on a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a trenchant observation.

Of course, let’s not discount the sexism!  Here’s one of Stewart’s producers on another episode:

It can also be true that there’s some sexism and racism ...  Every election, the person who has spent the most money has won, except in two cases: the women.  Just saying.

— Lauren Walker, The Weekly Show, 11/21/24

Again, haven’t fact-checked this, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m not entirely sure what it says about says about us that we’re finally willing to elect a member of a religious minority that’s around 25% of the population, and a member of a racial minority that’s around 15% of the population, but not a member of the gender that’s not a minority at all.  But not anything good, I don’t think.

Will things get worse before they get better?  No one can say for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s where the smart money is.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Doom Report (Week -10)

This week, I’m watching the news and wondering where all those people my friend was talking about last week are ... you know, the ones that are supposed to stop the idiot we just elected from doing bad things if he goes too far.  And yet, our future president has suggested we put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, a Russian asset as head of national intelligence, a pedophile as the Attorney General, a person who believes in neither vaccination nor pasteurization to run the CDC and the FDA, and a Fox “News” host who thinks that women shouldn’t serve in combat to head up the Department of Defense.  Theoretically, all those people have to be approved by the Senate, but he’s already asked the new Senate majority leader to keep the Senate in “recess” until he appoints whoever he wants to wherever he wants, and it’s not clear whether that request will be rejected or not.  And, even if it is, it’s not clear whether the new Republican-led Senate will just do whatever he wants anyway.  And that’s not even considering that he wants to put a guy with billions in government contracts in charge of the budget by inventing a new government department (which, technically, the president can’t do, but, again: if Congress is just going to give him whatever he wants, that’s not much of an obstacle).

I continue to hope I’m wrong.  I mean, the guy’s not even president yet, so all of this dreck may not come to pass.  And, as I mentioned last week, I’m far more interested in you being able to tell me “I told you so” than the other way around.  But, the fact that the guy’s not even president yet and is still able to cause this much chaos does not bode well for our chances, I fear.

Election Reflections

I was talking to a friend today, and I think he might have voted for Trump.

He wouldn’t come out and say it, and I wouldn’t ask—was too scared to, I suppose—but it seemed pretty clear from all the Trump-defending along with all the dismissing all my worries about the future.  My friend is not (so far as I know) racist or sexist, and I know him pretty well, so I feel pretty certain about that one.  I’m a bit less sure that he’s not homophobic or xenophobic, but I’m pretty confident that I would have picked up on that somewhere in the past 40+ years.  He’s absolutely not uneducated: he in fact holds an advanced degree and works in a pretty prestigious technical field.

So what gives?  Well, we needed a change, and that was the only choice.  Kamala’s refusal to say what she would do differently from Biden was foolish, in my estimation, and it apparently cost her more than I realized.  The last few years have been pretty awful, financially, and she really didn’t do a very good job articulating what she would do differently.  Of course, Trump didn’t do a very good job articulating anything, but he did have the undeniable advantage of being “the other guy.”  And, to be fair, pretty much everyone in charge got kicked out this year: Tommy Vietor (of the Pod Save America guys) said that this is the first year where the leadership of every developed nation in the world was rejected at the same time, regardless of whether they were left, right, or center.  I didn’t fact check him, but certainly the ones I know about (ours, the UK’s, France’s, India’s) conform with that assessment.  This is fairly typical really: when you’re getting hit in the pocketbook, throw the bums out.  I certainly sympathize with that perspective.

But, here’s my issue: I sort of hoped that we, as a country, wouldn’t say “well, we need a change, so let’s elect the rapist.”  Isn’t that going too far?  As I tried to articulate to my friend, if the choice were between whoever’s currently in charge and, say, Charlie Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, we wouldn’t elect the serial killer ... right?  Trump is definitely not Charles Manson, obviously, but my point is this: there is a line.  I have to continue to believe that.  I was just hoping that the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist wouldn’t be on the near side of that line.

In our conversation, there were many defenses of Trump floated about.  Here they are, as best as I can articulate them, and here are my counterpoints:

• All this calling him fascist is over the top rhetoric. Except ... is it really?  The guy quoted Hitler—multiple times, even—and said that he wished his generals were more like Hitler’s.  Sounds kinda fascist to me.  Pointing out that he sure does know a lot about Hitler for someone who’s supposedly not a fascist doesn’t seem over the top to me.  (My friend seemed a bit exasperated about the Hitler quote thing.  “What did he actually say that quoted Hitler?” he asked, clearly expecting that it was a rhetorical question.  Too easy: immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, and we have to fight the enemy within.  The subject was quickly changed.)

• He was President before, and he didn’t do any of that really terrible stuff you’re worried about. True.  Because, last time, a combination of incompetence and being restrained by sane people meant that he had difficulty accomplishing any of the really crazy stuff.  But are we forgetting that he actually tried to do those things?  If the arsonist can’t burn your house down because he can’t figure out to work the flamethrower, that’s good, but you still don’t let him keep the thing, right?

• He doesn’t really mean all that crazy shit he says. For instance, last time he said he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.  Obviously we all knew that he was never going to do that.  Okay, probably a fair assessment, but why do want to pick someone who goes around saying they’ll do things that they really won’t do?  If the only way you can justify choosing a person is by ignoring everything they say, you might be working too hard at it.

• He’s not actually running on the Project 2025 plan, so that part doesn’t matter. Wait, so we’re not supposed to believe him when he says he wants to eliminate the EPA, or to erase transgender people, but we are supposed to believe him when he says that the plan, written by people who used to work for him and commissioned by an organization that he’s openly commended in the past, has nothing to do with him?  Sounds a bit inconsistent.  (A few hours after posting this, I watched Adam Conover’s interview with Jamelle Bouie, who put it like this: ”... he’s a blank slate to people.  The fact that he is—like, he doesn’t make any sense a lot of the times, he’s constantly bullshitting, he’s constantly lying, he’s just saying things off the cuff—I think that what that says to people is that you can’t take anything he says seriously.  And that allows people to then pick and choose what they want to believe about him.”  This was such an accurate description of my conversation that it gave me the shivers.)

• Okay, but if actually tried to do any of those crazy things you just mentioned, people would stop him.  There are checks and balances. What fucking people? Elon Musk? RFK Jr? Herschel Walker? Steve Bannon? LAURA FUCKING LOOMER?  Last time, there were sane people around him (at least a few).  This time, every single one of those absolute lunatics that I just listed are specifically named by Trump’s transition team.  And, checks and balances? really?  Will it be the Republican Senate that will keep him in line? or the Republican House?  Or perhaps it will be the overtly Republican Supreme Court, who has already told him that he can do whatever he likes and never be held criminally liable.  Sure, that’s a recipe for success.

• We have too many government agencies as it is.  Getting rid of some of them would actually be a good thing. That’s one of those things that sounds good in the abstract, but sort of falls apart when you start looking into it.  If we get rid of the EPA, no one stops greedy corporations from just dumping their pollution everywhere.  If we eliminate the Department of Education, no one stops all the public school funding from being diverted to private charters that only serve the wealthy.  If we cut the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, many elderly or low-income people could literally freeze to death in the winters.  If we nuke the Strategic Climate Fund (and the rest of the Global Climate Change Initiative), then the crisis caused by climate change gets significantly worse, which may end up killing a lot more.  All those are things Trump’s team has actually proposed eliminating, by the way.

• If he screws up too badly, then he’ll lose all his support and we’ll vote him out (or, technically speaking, vote out the Republicans) in 4 years. Well, I sincerely hope that we’ll at least partially vote out the Republicans in two years.  But how much damage can be done in that amount of time?  “It’s not like we’re going to have two years of people just going ‘woohoo!’ and dumping pollution everywhere for two years.”  Um ... are you sure?  I honestly can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t.  Not to mention the two years of rounding up “illegal” immigrants, the two years of cruel laws surrounding abortions and transgender rights, the two years of brutal prices caused by tariffs and reversing the decision to disallow junk fees and allowing unchecked corporate mergers.  Yeah, maybe it won’t be as bad as all that ... but why are we risking it?

Here’s a simple example.  Our biggest household expense, outside the mortgage payment, is our grocery bill.  It’s more than double what it was four years ago, and I’m actually feeding two fewer mouths at this point.  But it still keeps going up.  And I’m not even counting what we spend on vitamins or toothpaste or paper towels or laundry soap.  Just food.  And I’m not including eating out either—that’s a whole different budget.  Just the food that we get from the grocery store, and it’s easily more than double what we pay in electricity and natural gas combined.  And I think many people have the same experience, and it’s almost certainly a big part of the reason that Trump won.  But here’s the thing: Trump is not going to make the price of groceries go down.  The biggest contributing factor to that is corporate price gouging.  Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, has been fighting to keep Kroger from merging with Albertson’s for two years now, but she’s out the minute that Trump takes office.  In a year, Trader Joe’s will likely be the only grocery store not owned by the same megacorp, outside more expensive “health food” stores.  And do we really think the guy who promised the oil and gas industry record profits if they helped elect him is going to tell any big corporations that they can’t keep making shit-tons of money off our misery?  Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that one.

So I’m fully expecting my bills to go up, not down, just on that single issue.  And the rest of his economic policies are just as bad:  Tariffs will make prices go up.  Deporting immigrants will reduce the workforce and force companies to pay more for labor, which will make prices go up.  And all those relaxed regulations and hanging unions out to dry will certainly make the billionaires much richer, but if you think the corporations are going to pass their savings onto you, the consumer, you haven’t learned anything from the last 50 years of financial evidence.  If you increase corporate profits, they spend it on stock buybacks and CEO bonuses and you get nothing in return.

If you voted for Trump, perhaps you’re feeling pretty good right now.  I encourage to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible.  I suspect that, in a year or two, you won’t be feeling all that good about it.  And, look: I hope I’m wrong about that.  I would be very pleased for you to be able to tell me “I told you so.”  But past history doesn’t lead me to believe there’s much chance of that.  And, even above and beyond the financial impact, what about the human cost?  If, as I suspect, Trump’s plan to deport about twice as many people as there are illegal immigrants results in more horrific images of children in cages, will that be okay?  I mean, they’ll likely be brown children, so maybe it won’t matter to you.  But I hope you don’t actually think that way.  If I’m right that Trump tries to implement a significant chunk of Project 2025 and that results in minorities and, especially, LGBTQ people, being put at risk of prejudice, violence, and loss of healthcare, will that be okay?  I mean, maybe your church told you all those people are going to hell anyway (despite the fact that Jesus not only told you to love your neighbor, but to even love your enemies), so maybe that won’t matter to you either.  But I hope you don’t really believe that in your inner heart.  If Trump attempts to use the Comstock Act to make abortion care so difficult that it may as well be a federal ban, will that be okay?  If Clarence Thomas makes good on his threat to overturn the right to same sex marriage, will that be okay?  Maybe you think that none of that affects you.  But I’ve got children who could be impacted by nearly all of those things, so I don’t have that luxury.

Again, I want to be wrong about this.  But I can’t help but wonder why you thought voting for a racist was okay if you’re not racist.  Why you thought voting for a big fan of Hitler was okay if you don’t believe in fascism.  Why you thought voting for the man who’s bragged about single-handedly getting rid of Roe v Wade was okay if you believe in equal rights for women.  I understand the pocketbook argument, I really do.  And maybe your finances will be better off in a year or so, though I’ve outlined the reasons why I don’t actually believe they will be.  But, either way, you still voted for the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist, and that makes me wonder if it’ll be worth it in the end.

Time: see what's become of me

Well, another trip around the sun and I’m about to turn another year older.  This year my birthday falls exactly on Election Day here in the U.S. ... lucky me.  Honestly, I would have preferred to have a bit more peace and calm on my birthday, but we takes what we gets.  Perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to get a birthday gift for all of America.  I suppose we’ll know by next week.

Darktime II

"All the Devils Are Here"

[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 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.]

There were a few tracks left over from the original Darktime mix after I trimmed it down to a proper volume length, but not nearly enough for a second volume.  So I’ve had to spruce it up rather significantly to flesh out this set.  Our top artists are probably Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Jeff Greinke, and Nox Arcana, who each have 3 songs between these first two volumes.  In fact, BTfaBG in particular is significant because they were almost certainly the mix starter.  It was from scouring the Internet’s early, primitive sharing sites that I accumulated the vast majority of my BTfaBG collection, and many of them inspired me to pair them up with other, equally tenebrous tracks, and that’s what eventually turned into Darktime.  You may recall that this is one of my “mood mixes,” which are the small set of mixes between the pre-modern and modern mixes.  And there was a lot of “stuff I found floating around on the Internet” involved in those.

Now that I’m bringing the mood mixes into line with the modern mixes, there’s less of that.  Most of the BTfaBG I own now I bought, because I wanted to have the full albums.  Take “Left, Unsaid”: it’s a meandering, ethereal, but still creepy track, and, when the vocals finally kick in nearly halfway through, they’re murky and provide more atmosphere than lyrics.  It’s a great example of what makes Sam Rosenthal’s personal project so perfect for this mix.  I’ve had a copy of “Left, Unsaid” for æons now, but I only bought This Lush Garden Within, their fifth album (and yet still considered one of the early ones), fairly recently.  Which is how I came across “Into the Garden,” another track off that album, which shares the gothic horns and murky vocals, but gets right into it much more quickly, and then layers on some female vocals for good measure.¹  As for Greinke, I’m returning to Cities in Fog, whence I drew one of his tracks for last volume, because it really is the album of his that’s best suited for this mix.  “Moving Through Fog” is exactly what it says on the tin, complete with echoes that you can’t quite pin a direction to and muffled industrial sounds that could be machinery or equally could be restless spirits.  Nox Arcana also returns with its same album from last time, Legion of Shadows, which likewise is just too perfect for this mix.  “Spirits of the Past” is, as the name implies, pretty spooky, but also weirdly pretty, with its bell percussion and synthy, Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque melody; “Ancient Flame” is much calmer, giving a slight Middle Eastern vibe, like a night in the Arabian desert.

There are other returning artists as well: Amber Asylum is back with a short, bridge-like tune that begins the transition into the middle third of the volume.  “Ave’ Maria” is what you’d hear if you dared engage the old-time phonograph you found in the haunted house you were exploring.  Nox Arcana’s progenitor Midnight Syndicate² provides the “Epilogue” from their Carnival Arcane, which is here used as a bridge to transition from “Ancient Flame” to the closing triptych of the volume.  The new-age-y Angels of Venice also return with a quite long track, “Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi),” which I almost ditched several times; the first minute and a half is more reminiscent of Incanto Liturgica, but after that it settles into a solid, Halloweeny vibe.  Darkwavers Love Is Colder Than Death are also back, this time with “Tired to Death,” a synthy track with a funereal beat, though it does pick up a bit in the middle, and Susann Heinrich adds some ghostly vocals as well.  And we also return to the soundtrack of the original Dark Shadows for a “Seance” from from composer Robert Cobert, which sounds a bit like what the original Star Trek’s theme would have been if it had been a horror series instead of a scifi one.

This volume also reflects my newfound passion for gaming music.  Jeremy Soule provides “Aquarium of Alkonos,” a spooky, echoey track from the Icewind Dale videogame, and there’s a Jason Hayes track from the World of Warcraft game soundtrack,³ “Duskwood,” which is perfect for exploring creepy woods at night.  The newest addition to this volume—not added until I actually started getting organized for this post, in fact—was “Let Them In,” a track from the Candela Obscura soundtrack, credited to “Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness,” though I suspect McGuinness did most of the work.  We’ve heard from McGuinness before, everywhere from Shadowfall Equinox VIII to every volume of Eldritch Ætherium except the first,⁴ and here he turns his penchant for dramatic, cinematic music to a creepier bent, as befits the Candela Obscura game.  Plus it flows so beautifully off the LICTD entry that I knew it was perfect here.

Like Greinke, Kevin Keller is usually found on Shadowfall Equinox,⁵, but “Chamber Doors” is a lot darker tonally than his usual fare, so I thought it worked well here.  And French soundtrack composer Xcyril closes us out with a weird, synthy track called “Organique.”  The foreground gives insects-scattering-in-a-panic vibes, while the background is more howling-wind-on-a-cold-winter’s-night, but the whole thing works well here, and it fades into a muted something-else-entirely in a very satisfying way.

It’s also not that surprising to see hardcore gothic representatives Faith and the Muse here; “And Laugh—but Smile No More” is a creepy little harpsichord bridge that takes us solidly into the center stretch of the volume.  And witchhouse project oOoOO winds down that center stretch with the short “Crossed Wires,” which wouldn’t really be out of place on Cantosphere Eversion, but I thought it was dark enough to work well here.  As for brothers and film composers Mychael and Jeff Danna, they’ve worked together on films such as The Boondock Saints, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, and the animated version of The Addams Family, so they know how to do creepy and dramatic, and how to combine the two.  A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre is the soundtrack to an imaginary film⁶ about legendary Irish folk hero Deirdre, protagonist of a tragedy which could put any of the classic Greek ones to shame.  I’m not sure what part of the story “Druid” is supposed to represent, but, as it comes late in the album, it’s probably not a happy one.  This is the perfect song for meeting with a mysterious mage to seal a dark pact, and it flows beautifully into “Left, Unsaid.”  Plus its slow boil makes it a great opening track.

Darktime II
[ All the Devils Are Here ]

“Druid” by Mychael Danna & Jeff Danna, off A Celtic Tale: The Legend of Deirdre
“Left, Unsaid” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Moving Through Fog” by Jeff Greinke, off Cities in Fog
“Aquarium of Alkonos” by Jeremy Soule, off Icewind Dale [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Chamber Doors” by Kevin Keller, off Intermezzo
“Ave' Maria” by Amber Asylum, off Frozen in Amber
“And Laugh—but Smile No More” by Faith and the Muse, off Evidence of Heaven
“... You” by DJ Food, off Kaleidoscope
“Into the Garden” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off This Lush Garden Within
“Spirits of the Past” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Tired to Death” by Love Is Colder Than Death, off Teignmouth
“Let Them In” by Critical Role & Colm R. McGuinness, off Candela Obscura [RPG Soundtrack]
“Crossed Wires” by oOoOO, off Without Your Love
“Hell Is Empty” by Emilie Autumn, off Fight Like a Girl
“Psalm” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“Tears of the World (Lacrimae Mundi)” by Angels of Venice, off Angels of Venice
“Ancient Flame” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Epilogue” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Duskwood” by Jason Hayes, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Seance” by Robert Cobert, off Dark Shadows, Volume 1 [Soundtrack]
“Wandering Heart” by Xcyril, off Organique

Total:  21 tracks,  76:10

What’s unexpected here?  Not too much.  Classically trained violinist Emilie Autumn is usually more suited to Fulminant Cadenza, where we’ve already seen her, and Distaff Attitude, where we haven’t (yet⁷), but “Hell Is Empty” (which also provides our volume title), is a creepy little bridge that I thought perfectly transitioned us from the center to the back stretch.  And that back stretch kicks off with an even more unlikely candidate, Koop.  The electrojazz Swedes are perhaps the last folks you’d think would produce something dark and gothy, but “Psalm,” from their first album (which is the least jazz and the most electro), feels like a song from a black-and-white gothic horror movie—you know the kind: unsettling, but not really scary.

And, finally, DJ Food is Londoner Kevin Foakes, who we’ve heard before on Mystical Memoriam.  He’s an electronica artist who often ranges from upbeat electropop to downtempo chill, but ”... You” is a short, vaguely unsettling track with some muddled female vocals in the middle (and some similarity to “Psalm,” actually).  It was too perfect for this mix for me not to include it here.

Next time, we’ll start trying to achieve inner peace using electronica beats.

⇐ Darktime I

Darktime III ⇒

__________

1 The Internet seems disinclined to identify the female vocalist for me, but I’d guess it’s Susan Jennings, who did the artwork for the album, wrote some of the lyrics, and is credited with vocals on at least one other track.

2 I feel comfortable calling them that, because Joseph Vargo, who basically is Nox Arcana, got his start working with Midnight Syndicate before breaking off to do his own project.  And the MS guys have definitely credited Vargo with a lot of their vibe, such as their themed albums which seem specifically designed to be played during Halloween parties.

3 Which we’ve mostly seen thus far on Eldritch Ætherium, specifically on volumes III and IV.

4 So II, III, and IV.

5 Specifically, volumes II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII.

6 At least that’s how AllMusic described it.

7 Perhaps in the fullness of time.

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account

Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!

What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a used car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”^*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.

Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

• This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)

• Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.

• The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.

• Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).

• That’s a Johnny Carson impression, which is totally wasted on the youth.

Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.

__________

* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?