Independence from blogging, apparently ...

Well, today I’m in the midst of a four-day weekend, because Friday was another “free Friday” that my company is giving us this summer to celebrate surviving the pandemic, and Monday is of course a holiday (even though technically Independence Day is today).  Given all that, and given that, despite my best intentions, I actually did manage to post a (nearly) full post last week, I think I’m taking the week entirely off.  See ya next time.

Short-Form ... Long-Form ... I'm the Content with the Shiny Object

Have you ever been listening to an interview with someone, and they are asked a question, and you think: hey! I have an answer for that.  No?  Maybe it’s just me.

In any event, I was watching an interview with some Twitch streamers, and the interviewer asked why they thought long-form content had become so popular lately.  Many Twitch streams last for hours, and have an audience for the whole time.  You can go to Twitch and watch people play videogames, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, and you can watch them do it for a long time.  Even interviews on Twitch are an hour or two long, compared to the 5 – 10 minutes that you might get on a primetime or late night talk show.  And Twitch is not alone: podcasts can focus on one game or interview for hours, or have limited series that go on for dozens of hours of content.  Turning novels into 2 hour movies is passé: nowadays they are turned into multi-season televsion shows.  Of course, movies themselves are getting longer and longer ... an NPR article puts it like so:

Seven of the year-end top grossers released during the 1980s ran under two hours. But from 1991 to 2000, only three of the top earners were that compact.

Only two year-end box office champs this century have had sub-two-hour run times, and both were animated: Shrek 2 (2004) and Toy Story 3 (2010).

That article decided that movies are getting longer (at least in part) because they’re competing with long streams and television shows, which seems to be begging the question.  More interesting was the answer of the streamers in the interview that prompted this whole meditation: they decided that, in today’s world of being increasingly disconnected from each other, sometimes you just want to experience personal interaction vicariously.  It’s an interesting theory, and probably not entirely wrong.  But I had a different thought.

I’m just old enough to remember movies with intermissions.  They weren’t common even then; a holdover from the intermissions in plays or operas, which could last for 3 – 4 hours.  (Sure, some were shorter, but then some were even longer.)  Long-form content isn’t new, by any means: it’s old.  Like so many things, it’s destined to come around again.  These types of trends tend to be reactionary, in my opinion.

Becuase I’m also old enough to remember, much more clearly, the advent of MTV in the 80s and the growing popularity of quick cuts.  This even has a formal name, apparently: post-classical editing.  It was a stylistic choice, but somehow it became a mandate.  According to Wikipedia, Lawrence Kasdan said in a documentary “that the generation of people who grew up on MTV and 30 second commercials can process information faster, and therefore demand it.” This assumption that the modern audience can’t handle anything long-form without getting bored was so prevalent by the 90s that the brand new “Comedy Channel” (which would eventually become Comedy Central) even anchored its programming with a “show” named “Short Attention Span Theater,” whose title was, so far as I could tell, completely non-ironic.  What it actually was was small snippets of stand-up routines, because obviously no one had the brainpower to sit through a whole stand-up show, right?

Except that I challenge all this conventional wisdom.  Short-form content wasn’t what the audiences demanded.  It was just a reactionary fad, a way for the modern consumer to differentiate themselves from their parents and grandparents, who had sat through Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and even It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Lawrence of Arabia, both of which were 3½ hours or more long and written as recently as the 60s.  We were young and hip and cool, so we wanted more stuff packed into less time ... or at least that sounded cool, because it was different.  But you know what always happens: it’s only cool while it’s new, and once everyone is doing it, then it’s old hat and we want something different again.  The magic of “Short Attention Span Theater” (which I watched a lot of) was that you could experience a bunch of different comics in a short time.  The sheer quantity of people I was exposed to in that decade is completly unrivaled by any other time of my life.  But, the thing is, once I discovered someone I liked, I wanted to watch a whole show with them.  Five minutes of Bill Hicks is great, but two hours of Bill Hicks is fucking amazing.  So I thank SAST for all its contributions—not the least of which is introducing us to Jon Stewart—but it was never the endgame.  Just a vehicle to get us there.

And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.  Now people are just tired of little short snippets, and sound bites, and quick cuts.  We want substance, and nuance, and we’re perfectly willing to devote the time to get it.  So I think that is the truly the reason why long-form content is so popular now ... just as it was back in the “old” days.

Give it another couple of decades and there’ll be a hot new trend for watching everything at 1.5× speed, or watching two things at the same time, or somesuch.  Or maybe it’ll be simpler than that: maybe everything will go to Talk Soup style summary shows of the long-form content that no one wants to invest the time to actually watch themselves any more.  Who knows?  But time is a flat circle—although perhaps we don’t have to interpret that as pessimistically as True Detective’s Rust Cohle meant it—and everything will come ‘round again.  Eventually.

Paternal Indolence

Well, today is Father’s Day, and this past Friday was both a paid holidy (for Juneteenth) and one of the “free Fridays” that our company gave us off for surviving the pandemic, so I was instructed to relax twice as hard.  Sadly (for you), a double day off and Father’s Day in quick succession leaves little time for writing blog posts.  You’ll just have to try again next week.

Smooth as Whispercats II

"Looking So Bereaved and So Bereft"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

You know, I’ve often said that volume II of most of my mixes typically consist of the tracks that wouldn’t fit on volume I.  It continues to be true here.  Two of the tracks were mentioned by name in our last installment, 3 are from artists that we mentioned last time but didn’t feature tracks from, and there are a whopping 6 further returning artists.  I have to say “further” in this case, because the seventh returning artist is also one of the tracks that we talked about last time by name: “Driving,” by Everything But the Girl.  While “Missing”¹ is generally considered EBTG’s biggest hit—#3 in the UK, #2 in the US, #1 in Canada, Germany, and a bunch of other countries—I still say “Driving” is their best.  Peaking at #54 in the UK, #30 in Ireland, and not even cracking the top 100 anywhere else, the public apparently doesn’t agree with my assessment, but I don’t care.  This sublime track is not only the best EBTG tune in my opinion, but quite possibly the best representative of this subgenre of smooth-jazz-inflected alternapop.  From the intro, which appears to be a breathy Tracey Thorn exhalation sampled and turned into a repeated synth note, to the plaintive, evocative vocals, to the sophistipop arrangement (including a great solo from 15-time Grammy winning saxophonist Michael Brecker), to the lyrics which tell her “loverboy, if you call me home, I’ll come driving, fast as wheels can turn” ... this track is nearly pitch-perfect.  If you don’t like the style, I don’t know if this song could convert you, but if you have any interest at all, this track will make you want to close your eyes and make your insides stretch out for something just out of reach.  It’s amazing.

And, of course, the second track mentioned by name last time was “Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits, which is yet another amazing performance by Brecker, not to mention a trumpet intro from his brother Randy.  While a lot of Dire Straits’ output is fairly straight-ahead rock such as “Sultans of Swing” or “Money for Nothing,” they’re no stranger to a softer track, and “Your Latest Trick” is an ode to loneliness that starts out by painting a poignant picture of a big city after the bustle of the day has wound down:

All the late night bargains have been struck
Between the satin beaus and their belles.
Prehistoric garbage trucks
Have the city to themselves.
Echoes and roars of dinosaurs—
They’re all doing the monster mash—
And most of the taxis and most of the whores
Are only taking calls for cash ...

It also provides our volume title.  Definitely a classic.

Of the other returning artists, there’s nothing too surprising: Sting is back with the title track from The Dream of the Blue Turtles, a bouncy little instrumental bridge that takes us into our centerpiece, Boy Meets Girl’s “I Wish You Were Here,” which is slightly more upbeat than last installment’s “Oh Girl” but still very typical of their sound: West Exit brings us another bass heavy, late night tune in “Take a Ride”; Norah Jones swings back around with another breathy torch song, “The Nearness of You”; and Johnny Hates Jazz brings us a much smaller hit than “Shattered Dreams,” but one which is every bit as good: “Turn Back the Clock.”²  And finally we have the inimitable Aztec Camera.  While “Stray” is possibly the best song off of the album of the same name,³ I still maintain that the crowning achievement of Roddy Frame (Aztec Camera is almost entirely Frame, in the same way that Nine Inch Nails is almost entirely Trent Reznor) is his first album, High Land, Hard Rain.  Some of its songs are slightly more upbeat, such as its very minor hit “Oblivious,” but it’s definitely an introspective album, and “We Could Send Letters” epitomizes that, with lyrics such as “you’re free to push me and I’m free to fall” and “I’ve been smothered in the sympathy you bleed.”  This album is one of my favorites, and this was the song I chose to represent it here.

I also mentioned 3 bands last time out without using any of their songs.  In the case of Swing Out Sister, it was primarily because “Breakout” is such an amazing tune that I knew it had to be a volume opener, and that spot was already filled for volume I.⁴  I love this song, partially because, unlike a lot of the other tunes on this mix, it is unabashedly upbeat, powered primarily by some great trumpet work from Johnny Thirkell, whose prolificness is summed up by this statement from Wikipedia: “Through the 1980s and early 1990s he was on at least one album in the UK Charts continuously, without a break, for over 13 years.”⁵  Wow.  He’s a big part of why “Breakout” is awesome, but a lot of props go to the Manchester band themselves: Andy Connell synths with the best of them, and Corinne Drewery’s vocals are just gorgeous.

Speaking of upbeat, I also mentioned Hipsway, whose track “The Honeythief” is almost slinky enough to make it to Slithy Toves.  It’s a bit goofy, and the rest of Hipsway’s œuvre is nothing to write home about, but I always secretly dug this one, and this mix is certainly the right place (the only place, really) to showcase it.  The other band mentioned previously was the Blow Monkeys, who are definitely back on the downbeat side of things.  But “Digging Your Scene” is pretty upbeat for them, so it still fits the theme.  Front man Dr. Robert has that smooth vocal quality that so many of the bands here have, and they even have their own sax player for a change: Neville Henry is not exactly a sax superstar, but his fills are quite lovely, and they work well in the context of the Monkeys’ jazz-adjacent sound.

Of course, every track discussed above save three live in that golden period I talked about last time, from 1985 to 1990, and, if we’re willing to back it up to 1983 to account for a few outliers, we can throw in the Aztec Camera as well.⁶  There are a few more tracks from that period too.  The most obvious (if obscure) is “One Simple Thing” by the Stabilizers.  This is a song I discovered by going through my dad’s record collection rejects,⁷ and I fell in love with it and later picked up the album, Tyranny.⁸  The Stabilizers were, sadly, a one-hit wonder who didn’t even get their one hit: “One Simple Thing” peaked at #93 in the US and #100 in Australia, and that was about it.  Unfairly, in my view: this track epitomizes the poppier side of this subgenre.  Like “Barely Breathing,” it’s both smooth and edgy, both mellow and impassioned, but the Stabilizers were doing it 9 years before Duncan Sheik came along.⁹

I also briefly mentioned ABC as “dabblers” in this style, so let’s hear them dabble.  The tremendous How to be a Zillionaire! is a cornerstone of 80s synthpop, with big hits “Be Near Me” and “How to be a Millionaire.”  But it has its more reflective moments too, and “Between You and Me” is the best of them.  Plus you gotta give mad respect to Martin Fry for not only rhyming “brutal” with “mutual,” but also “hyposcrisy” with “democracy” ... in a love song.  I also also briefly mentioned the Blue Nile, but mainly to say that we’d see them on Moonside by Riverlight before we saw them here.¹⁰  Which is not to say that we can’t ever see them here: the title track from their stunning A Walk Across the Rooftops has a lot going on, giving credence to the (possibly apocryphal) story that this album was used to demonstrate how the fancy new “compact disc” technology could make clear the most subtle of background sounds.  From its nearly inaudible fade-in which swells to its opening notes, from the lonely trumpet to the insistent strings to the poweful staccato bass riff, to Paul Buchanan’s soulful vocals, it’s just a gorgeous tune, with less of the Scottish band’s normal lounge vibe and more of a jazzy feel.  Plus it makes the perfect closer.

Smooth as Whispercats II
[ Girl Can Get Lonely Out Here on the Road ]

“Breakout” by Swing out Sister, off It's Better to Travel
“Driving” by Everything but the Girl, off The Language of Life
“A-kasseblues” by Movits!, off Äppelknyckarjazz
“Take a ride” by the West Exit, off Nocturne
“Your Latest Trick” by Dire Straits, off Brothers in Arms
“Love and you and I” by Lizzi, off Love and you and I
“Here's Looking at You” by Blondie, off Autoamerican
“No Ordinary Love” by Sade, off Love Deluxe
“The Nearness of You” by Norah Jones, off Come Away with Me
“The Dream of the Blue Turtles” by Sting, off The Dream of the Blue Turtles
“I Wish You Were Here” by Boy Meets Girl, off Boy Meets Girl
“One Simple Thing” by Stabilizers, off Tyranny ¹¹
“The Honeythief” by Hipsway, off Hipsway
“We Could Send Letters” by Aztec Camera, off High Land, Hard Rain
“Between You & Me” by ABC, off How to Be a Zillionaire!
“Turn Back the Clock” by Johnny Hates Jazz, off Turn Back the Clock
“Digging Your Scene” by Blow Monkeys, off Animal Magic
“A Walk Across the Rooftops” by the Blue Nile, off A Walk Across the Rooftops

Total:  18 tracks,  77:04

In newer fare, the West Exit is joined by fellow Magnatune artist Lizzi, whose style slots pretty perfectly in here.  “Love and you and I” is fairly layered and electronic compared to the late 80s fare, but it’s no less smooth-jazz-inspired.  For a tune just past the golden period, there can be no better exemplar than Sade.  “No Ordinary Love,” while it didn’t reach the peak of her megahits “Smooth Operator” or “The Sweetest Taboo,” was a pretty solid hit, and I will always maintain that Love Deluxe is a better album than Diamond Life.¹²  It’s another slinky one, with a bit of a loungy overtone, but it’s a solid smooth-jazz-like performance that leads beautifully into Norah Jones.

Which just leaves us with the two very unlikely candidates.  The earliest track on this volume is 1980’s “Here’s Looking at You” by the normally punky Blondie.  Of course, Blondie was famous for a style that ranged solidly across the musical map, from the disco-inflected “Call Me” to the reggae-infused “The Tide Is High” to the rap-adjacent “Rapture.”  Here they do a callback to the torchy jazz standards of the big band era which instantly make you imagine Deborah Harry lounging across a grand piano in front a full horn section, perhaps wrapped in a feather boa.  It’s not a remake, though: Harry and bandmate Chris Stein wrote it, and Jimmy Haskell, noted for the horn arrangement on Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now,” arranged the orchestral components, including the background strings and the foreground trumpets and clarinets.  It’s a gorgeous song that really sounds like it belongs in the 30s or 40s, but also has a surprisingly modern feel.  Plus I’ve always liked the lyric “if I ever had a million dollars (and if I didn’t give it all to you) ...”

Bookending us chronology-wise, the latest track on the volume is the surprisingly low-key “A-kasseblues” by Swedish swing-rappers Movits!.  I’m not entirely sure what the song means, although a Swedish-to-English translation site suggests the following chorus:

A-kasseblues
Who would have thought it would be something for me
Say where to live
Or put my shoe
Can I sleep with you?

Sure.  Why not.  But the point is that it’s a very pretty song, even if you have no clue what Johan (Jivin’) Rensfeldt is babbling about.  And it flows very smoothly into this mix, unlike the majority of their output (which you will find on various volumes of Salsatic Vibrato¹³).

Next time, I think we’ll cast our minds back to a more primitive radiophonic era.

⇐ Smooth as Whispercats

Smooth as Whispercats III ⇒

__________

1 Which we already heard back on volume I.

2 “Shattered Dreams” was #2 in the US and #5 in the UK, while “Turn Back the Clock” hit #12 the UK and failed to chart in the US at all.

3 Although “The Crying Scene” is damned fine as well.

4 By “Captain of Her Heart,” you may recall.

5 Amongst my mixes, you can also hear Thirkell on “Walking on Sunshine” from my Mother’s Day mix, “From Under the Covers” by the Beautiful South on Bleeding Salvador II, and the Swing soundtrack, which is featured heavily in Salsatic Vibrato (volumes II, V, VI, and VII) and occasionally in Smokelit Flashback (volumes III and IV).  He also played for Level 42, but not on the track of theirs we heard on volume I of this mix.

6 The other two tracks outside the golden period are the Norah Jones tune (2002) and the West Exit track (2004).

7 A story which really deserves its own blog post someday.

8 The title track is even better, and we’ll see it eventually on 80s My Way and possibly another mix, although that latter one is still in a very neotonous state.

9 In fact, Sheik would have been a junior or senior in high school at the time of the Stabilizers’ flash in the pan ... I wonder if young Duncan heard them and was inspired?

10 Which we did, on Moonside by Riverlight II.

11 This album is damnably hard to find, but apparently the whole thing is available on YouTube.  Hard to pull individual tracks from that, but I have faith in you.

12 In fact, I’ve already used 2 tracks from it: “Mermaid” on Numeric Driftwood II and “Pearls” on Tenderhearted Nightshade I.

13 Specifically, volumes I, II, and III.

Isolation Report, Week #65

This week we had a new roof put on.  You know, when they tell you that contractors will be arriving at your house at the crack of dawn and making a lot of noise over your head, you say yourself “duh.” Of course there’s going to be a lot of noise.  But knowing it and experiencing it are entirely different things.  For 3 days, everyone in the house was woken up far before they were used to being conscious—even our middle child, who is the only true morning person in our family.  Lack of sleep was just the beginning though: the loud noise and massive amounts of dust coming in his window made our middle child (who was recently confirmed to be on the spectrum) fairly discombobulated,^* the indoor cats hid under the bed for 3 days, and the outdoor was scared to go out but not scared enough to be coerced into using the litterbox like a normal feline being.  We couldn’t let the dogs out in the yard because they think they’re vicious and want to “attack” the workmen.  We couldn’t run the air conditioner, because the roofers covered it in plastic to keep the dust from getting sucked into the vents, but we also couldn’t get in the pool, because stray pieces of shingle and once even a tool were raining down on it.  And the constant doorbell ringing: there are rotten beams, you should probably replace the gutters, we had to add new “fascia boards,”^** can you move your truck out of the driveway so we can park a porta potty there instead?  (It’s still there, by the way.)  It was a lot.

Next week they’re coming to turn the power off for up to 6 hours so they can replace our electrical panels (so that should be a load of fun), then the actual solar panels get installed.  As I say, it’s a lot, but at the end of the day we’ll have enough solar power to never have to pay the power company again, and a battery backup which should last indefinitely the next time said power company turns off our electricity for specious reasons.  Assuming the solar company isn’t full of shit.  We shall see, I suppose.

On the pandemic front, our humans are now 60% vaccinated, which is to say 2 of us have had 2 shots, 2 of us have had 1, and one of us hasn’t had any (but only because she’s too young).  Moving forward to a better future, hopefully.  Again, we shall see.

__________

* The technical term is “emotional dysregulation.”

** No, we didn’t know what that meant either.

5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds

On this blog, I’ve talked about leaving D&D for Pathfinder, and even a bit about leaving Pathfinder for D&D 5e.  The truth is, my feelings on these two actually mirror my feelings on my two favorite programming languages: C++ and Perl.  I learned C++ first, and I loved it.  Mostly.  But then I learned Perl and it was so much better than C++.  Except there were still parts of C++ that I missed.  And then sometimes I would go back to C++ and I would remember all the reasons I loved it ... and all the reasons I left it.  Back and forth, always missing whichever one I wasn’t using, always nostalgic for the other one.

Remember when I talked about game rotation?  Well, as I mentioned, most of our games are 5e (or variants thereof), but occasionally we dabble in other games.  And, recently, we finally decided to play a Pathfinder campaign, spurred by my eldest’s love of the Kingmaker adventure path.  And I was quite excited to get back to Pathfinder, because there were lots of things I missed about it.  Except now that I’m deep in it ...

You see, as I explained a bit when I originally talked about Pathfinder, it made a number of improvements on D&D 3e.  You may also remember from my discussion of multiclassing in 3e that 3e (and even moreso Pathfinder) has my favorite implementation of multiclassing, and that’s just one of the many ways that Pathfinder makes character creation a joy.  You have so many options ... many people would say too many.

But allow me a brief digression: I will always maintain that you can never have too many choices.  Now, people will inevitably respond with “but ... analysis paralysis!” Yes, indeed: analysis paralysis is all too real, and it can be very problematic, especially when people need to make a series of choices in a row.  And that’s all a roleplaying character is, you know—a series of choices.  Some big, most small, but just choice after choice after choice.  So analysis paralysis can really screw you over when you try to build a character.  But here’s my potentially—hell, probably—contentious opinion: analysis paralysis isn’t caused by having too many choices.  It’s caused by having those choices shittily organized.  Think of it this way:  If I asked you pick from a list of 256 options, there’s no way you could do it.  The analysis paralysis would be crippling.  On the other hand, if I asked you pick from a list of 4 options, that would be trivial.  If I asked you to pick from a list of 4 options 4 times ... still pretty easy.  But, see, 4 to the power of 4 is 256.  To make 1 choice from 256 options is next to impossible (without spending an inordinate amount of time, in any event); to make 4 choices from 4 options each still gives you 256 total options, but they’ve been organized in such a fashion that the chioces are pretty easy.

This is important in the context of TTRPG character creation because, as I said above: character building is just choosing a bunch of options.  Now, I’m not saying that Pathfinder is immune to crappy organization which can cause analysis paralysis.  For instance, the number of feats available in the game is ... overwhelming.  But, they’re all tagged with various tags.  For this campaign, I built a witch character.  We started at 4th level, so I needed to choose 2 feats.  There are (quite literally) hundreds of feats to choose from.  Except a lot of them (like, a whole lot of them) are combat feats.  My witch is not going to be doing a lot of melee combat: she’ll be casting spells, and using hexes (which are like special magic tricks only available to witches).  So I don’t need any of those combat-oriented feats.  A bunch more are “teamwork” feats, which are only useful if two or more characters take them, so I eliminated those as well.  “Metamagic” feats can change the way you cast spells; some of them might be useful for a witch character, but they’re far more useful for what’s called a “spontaneous caster” (as opposed to a “prepared caster,” which a witch is).  So I’ll skip those.  And so on, and so forth, until I’ve narrowed down the list of potential feats from hundreds to a dozen or two.  Still more options than I’d like, and Pathfinder could still stand to add a few more layers of organization for their feats, but it was doable.  And I did it.

So, now I’m playing a witch named Wilhemina Osterdale Bexxancourt—but please call her “Bexx,” everbody does—and she’s a custom race, which is another thing Pathfinder makes it very easy to do via its race builder rules, and she has an “archetype,” which is another thing Pathfinder has over 5e (although, to be fair, 5e has started dabbling in this arena lately: they refer to Pathfinder archetypes as “variants” and use “archetypes” to mean subclasses, which is very confusing for those of us who have to go back and forth).  My race and archetype are based on comic characters, actually: the talokka are based on the Legion of Superheroes’ Shadow Lass,¹ who hails from a planet called Talok VIII, and, while I can’t be sure that the creators of the “tatterdemalion” archetype specifically had Ragman in mind when they wrote it, the fact that he’s often referred to as “the Tattered Tatterdemalion” in the comics is surely suggestive.  So I’m a blue-skinned spellcaster who can manipulate shadows and whose clothes can reach out grab people, who talks to the stars, which grant her her powers, and also to her indigo and lavender fox, which is her companion and mentor.  Also, I’m traveling with a clone of Vexx and a little boy whose stuffed toy shaped like a demon can turn into an actual demon.  In Pathfinder, none of this was particularly difficult to build.  In 5e ... well, let’s just say there would have been a lot of reskinning, refluffing, and handwaving, and it still wouldn’t have been as satisfying as what we have currently.  In my humble opinion.

So, you may say to yourself, sounds like you’re happy to be playing Pathfinder then!  Yeah, you’d think that ...

See, the problem is that the character creation is only one part at the beginning at the campaign.  It’s a huge part, don’t get me wrong ... but still only one part, and it’s over before you even start playing.  Then you get to the actual gameplay, and that’s where 5e really shines.  Simple example: as a prepared spellcaster, I know a certain number of spells, and, out of the ones I know, I can “prepare” a certain number of those spells to have on hand on any given day.²  Now, in 5e, I would be able to prepare, let’s say, the spell cure wounds.  Once it was prepared, I could cast it as many times as I liked.  I could also cast it at either 1st level, or at 2nd level³ ... whichever the situation called for (i.e. depending on how bad the wounds I wished to cure actually were).  In Pathfinder, I have to have two entirely different spells: cure light wounds, and cure moderate wounds.  I need to know both of those, and, if I want to cast both of them, I need to prepare them both.  Worse, if I think I may need to cure some moderately severe wounds more than once, I have to prepare cure moderate more than once.  This felt perfectly normal back in the days when I played Pathfinder exclusively and 5e was just a rumour known as “D&D Next.” But, now that I’ve been playing 5e for, at this point, years—maybe even longer than I played Pathfinder, now that I think about it—this seems utterly insane.  And limiting.  And just ... annoying.

Of course, the obvious thing to do is to play some hybrid Frankenstein system where you would build your characters using Pathfinder rules and then play them using 5e rules.  Except that you can’t really do that, because everything is so intertwined.  Take my example of cure wounds above: that works in 5e because they revamped the entire magic system, collapsing similar spells into one, and adding “upcasting” effects for when you cast a lower level spell in a higher level spell slot.  That was a lot of work.  Pathfinder characters are all built on the assumption that you’re using Pathfinder spells; if you suddenly said, no, we’re using 5e spells instead, what would that do to the power levels? the spell slot progressions? the tables of spells known? class spell lists? what about domain spells for clerics and patron spells for witches? some of those are Pathfinder-only spells—what do we do then?

And the magic system is just one place where character creation and character play intersect: what about the alignment system? the skill system? the feat system? the differing methods of increasing ability scores, both as a racial feature and during level progression?  There are just two damn many moving parts here to successfully combine the two into any semblance of something that would actually work.  Well, without putting massive effort into it, and it seems foolish to devote that much time into something that you have no idea what the chance of success is, or how useful it would be even if you do succeed.  So I kind of feel like I’m stuck wishing I was using Pathfinder when I’m building characters for 5e, and wishing I was using 5e when I’m actually playing Pathfinder.  And it’s a bummer.

I don’t know if this tension will ever get resolved.  You may recall my talking about looking forward to Pathfinder 2nd edition (a.k.a. “P2”), but that turned out to be a bust.  They really blew it, in my opinion.  Not only did it devolve into each class being a huge list of powers like D&D 4e tried to do,⁴ but they also completely removed multiclassing (again, like 4e tried to do).  You know, for all the hate that 4e got (and I’m guilty of quite a lot of it myself), 4e did a lot of things right.  But it screwed up in (at least) two fundamental areas; the idea that Paizo (the makers of Pathfinder) would look at 4e and go “let’s only take the parts that really failed!” is just incomprehensible to me.  If I wanted something entirely different from the D&D lineage, I certainly have lots of great choices.  My eldest is particularly fond of the “Powered by the Apocalypse” sytem.⁵  But I don’t want something entirely different.  I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.  I love the D&D system and mythology and even some of its little weirdsies,⁶ like saving throws, or high-level characters being able to survive falls from orbit.⁷  I just want the thing I love to be better, not to abandon it entirely.  I’m not sure if there will ever be an answer here.  P2 didn’t do it, and, while “6e” is mere conjecture at this point, it seems a safe bet that, even if it does arrive one day, the amazing success of 5e taught its creators that “simpler is better.” Of course, I don’t believe that.  But simpler gets more people to try out the game, and (strictly from a business perspective) having a steady stream of new customers is way more important than catering to those few customers who have grown sophisticated enough to want more options.  So a future hypothetical 6e probably won’t address it either.  It may just be an insoluable problem.

And that makes me sad.  Not completely depressed, of course, but just a bit bummed out.  Maybe one day someone will solve this dilemma.  Until then, I’ll keep playing the one and missing the other, and swapping back and forth just to keep myself appreciating whichever one I’m not playing at the moment.  It’s still a lot of fun either way.

__________

1 Shadow Lass was later renamed “Umbra” when the naming convention of “So-and-So Boy” and “Such-and-Such Girl” fell out of style, but that was well after my time reading comics.

2 Yes, I know that, as a witch, I’m not constrained to a limited number of spells known, as a bard or sorcerer would be.  That’s not really relevant to my point here though.

3 For this campaign, our characters are starting at 3rd level, so I have access to 2nd level spells.

4 The fact that “powers” was spelled “feats” did nothing to alleviate that impression.

5 That’s the one that is used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, etc etc etc.

6 To steal a phrase from Judge John Hodgman.

7 For those who didn’t realize that, the issue arises because there’s a maximum amount of falling damage one can take.  The reason there’s a maximum is to represent (sort of) the concept of terminal velocity.  The problem comes in because maximum falling damage is anything but terminal for most characters once they get up around 15th level or so.

Isolation Report, Week #63

No long post this time, but I will point out that this week saw the last episode of round 2 of Narrative Telephone.  You may recall my first talking about it back in week 8, again briefly in week 14, and I even gave it a 5-star rating in my pandemic TV roundup part 2.  Well, that was all about round 1.  Now they’ve done round 2, adding guest stars to help them achieve maximum chaos.  This last one was an amazing story kicked off by Aabria Iyengar, which of course the Crticial Role crew butchered beyond recognition.  But you should watch ’em all.  It’s the closest to joy I’ve gotten out of the past year and a half.

• R2E1: Return of the Matt (Matt Mercer starts; Brian W. Foster guests)
• R2E2: Two Brothers, One Coast (Brian W. Foster starts)
• R2E3: The Night Before Winter’s Crest (Laura Bailey starts, Micah Burton guests)
• R2E4: Two Brothers, One Coast (Micah Burton starts)
• R2E5: Questions and Quackery (Liam O’Brien starts, Dani Carr guests)
• R2E6: Familiar Feywild Fables (Dani Carr starts)
• R2E7: Chutney’s Christmas Vacation (Travis Willingham starts, Aabria Iyengar guests)
• R2E8: Of Heists and Horses (Aabria Iyengar starts)

Again, you don’t have to understand anything about Critical Role—or anything about D&D at all—to appreciate these.  It’s just the delight of watching 8 friends (and guests) struggle to recreate what has gone before, and then watch each other fuck it up completely and give each other shit about it.  It’s fun, and it’s funny, and it’s weirdly sweet.  Take happiness where you can find it, especially these days.

P’raps something more substantial next week.

Smokelit Flashback VI

"Snow-Coated Thought Cage"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

We’re coming up on 5 years since we last visited the noir-infused trip-hop that is Smokelit Flashback, which was, once upon a time, my longest mix.  It’s been eclipsed lately by Salsatic Vibrato (and equalled by Shadowfall Equinox),¹ but there’s still a lot of great music to be discovered here, so let’s dive in.

You know, I talked a bit on Shadowfall Equinox V about how every volume of a mix is just a bit different from the others, even though they share strong connecting tissue.  In that same volume, I also talked about a song that kept getting bumped from one volume to the next because it didn’t quite fit on any of them.  And so it was with the Sneaker Pimps—one of the few trip-hop artists to see some pop success—with their classic “6 Underground,” which just barely failed to break the top 40 in the U.S.² but went all the way to #15 in the U.K.  It’s a great tune, but just a little too upbeat, too ... well, poppy ... for the other volumes of this mix.  So it kept getting pushed along until it found some volumemates to land with.  (And, honestly, opening volume VI with “6 Underground” was just too spot-on to pass up.)

One of the first such volumemates was “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins, which is not really trip-hop at all, but certainly quite poppy.³  These two tunes are both so radio-friendly that, for a long time, I had them butting up against each other as the opening tracks of the volume.  But eventually I had to face the fact that, while the songs might pair nicely, a transition is more about the closing notes of one track and the opening notes of the next, and these two didn’t really gel in that way.  But despite their pop leanings, they both still have ... something ... something noir-ish and trippy and indelibly Smokelit Flashback.

So, somewhat stragely, this is a fairly upbeat volume of this mix.  Perhaps that’s most reflected in the fact that we see so few of our go-to artists here: of those artists with 4 or more tracks on the mix, only Hooverphonic makes it here: there’s no Naomi, no Portishead, and no Falling You.  Those appearing 3 times fare a bit better, with with Devics, Goldfrapp, and hands upon black earth all making their third appearance right here.  Hooverphonic’s “2Wicky” leans into the upbeat vibe, with its assurance that “SH-10151, this is the serial number of our orbital gun.” I wouldn’t call it uptempo, for sure, but the stacatto snare hits and swirling keyboards make it upbeat in my book.  Too, Goldfrapp’s breathy spoken-word vocals on “Utopia” lead to some crescendoes of high-pitched synth notes that make it difficult to classify as downbeat.  It’s a bit more difficult for Devics or hube to be upbeat, but the plaintive, saloon-piano of “Heaven Please” actually served as a pretty nice bridge between “6 Underground” and “Girl Like You.” As for hands upon black earth, “Ovforever” kicks off with the whispered repetition of “no dream is the earth ... just a dream,” but then acquires a driving synth beat that is not particularly upbeat, but not particularly downbeat either.⁴  It’s nearly 7 minutes of that, but somehow it works and doesn’t get repetitive.

Showing up for only the second time are Mono, Baco de Gaia, and Ugress.  Mono’s solid trip-hop bona fides will out, of course; while “The Outsider” is definitely a bit more upbeat than “Life in Mono,”⁵ it still retains the Portishead-like quality that made Siobhan de Maré the amazing front woman of not one but two trip-hop bands.⁶  Ugress, on the other hand, is quite often upbeat, as we’ve seen repeatedly on Paradoxically Sized World (volumes II, III, and IV) and dramatically on Fulminant Cadenza, but he can also be a bit dark, which we saw last volume.  “Queen of Darkness” has some great vocals, some wordless (and no doubt retuned) operatics that sound like the faux theremin of Star Trek, and a chilling sound bite from Christopher Walken’s portrayal of the archangel Gabriel from The Prophecy.⁷  Banco de Gaia’s chill (which is, of course, also called downtempo) is fairly consistent, but they did one club hit (“Obsidian”), and the vocal version of “Glove Puppet” I use here features the same singer, Jennifer Folker (who is also half of Dahlia, whom you may recall from volumes III and IV).  Folker’s soaring vocals sound almost like a plea, which is echoed in the lyrics (e.g. “please remember what I look like”).  Again, not exactly upbeat, but something more immediate than the standard downbeat fare.

In the “not particularly surprising” category, Wax Tailor’s lazy, swirling, exotica-adjacent trip-hop works well here.  It’s the first time we’ve seen the French producer, but almost certainly won’t be the last.  And surely you had to know we’d eventually get to Julee Cruise—the only shocking thing is that it isn’t a track off the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but rather from Graeme Revell’s excellent soundtrack for Until the End of the World, where it has just enough twangy guitar that it makes a perfect follow-on to “A Girl Like You.” And, considering that the last time we saw Kristin Hersh she was hanging out on Smooth as Whispercats, it shouldn’t be too weird to see her show up here.  The Throwing Muses alum has a tendency to sing lyrics that are just a bit ... off, and “Beestung” is no exception: I don’t know what a “snow-coated thought cage” is, but I just had to make it the volume title.  For this tune, the music is also a bit anxiety producing—I suspect it’s in a minor key, but I admit my musical acuity is insufficient to know for sure.  Although I still think “The Key” is the pinnacle of Hersh’s career, I also love “Beestung,” and was thrilled to get a chance to feature it here.

My most favorite find of all, though, would have to be Waldeck.  I originally discovered him because of his almost loungy cover of “Bai Mir Bist du Schön,” but he has so much range, as you may remember from hearing “The Night Garden” on Phantasma Chorale I.  Here, he epitomizes the more upbeat side of this mix with an extremely trip-hop-y tune which includes only a single lyric—the repeated whispered “get up”—backed by tinkling piano, a clarinet lick, some synth noodling, and a “scratchy record” overlay to give it some character.  It’s a sublime track, and it’s really the centerpiece of this volume.

Finally, our closer is a fairly well-known trip-hop tune (assuming you’re into trip-hop, that is), “Golden” by Thunderball.  Thunderball is a DC-based group on the label founded by the guys behind Thievery Corporation.⁸  “Golden” is a mellow instrumental that has a lot of character, which makes it the perfect note for closing out this mix.

Smokelit Flashback VI
[ Snow-Coated Thought Cage ]

“6 Underground” by Sneaker Pimps, off Becoming X
“Heaven Please” by Devics, off My Beautiful Sinking Ship
“A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins, off Gorgeous George
“Summer Kisses, Winter Tears” by Julee Cruise, off Until the End of the World [Soundtrack]
“My Favorite Plum” by Suzanne Vega, off Nine Objects of Desire
“Beestung” by Kristin Hersh, off Strings [EP]
“The Outsider” by Mono, off Formica Blues
“Communion (instrumental)” by Swing out Sister, off It's Better to Travel
“Get Up Carmen” by Waldeck, off Ballroom Stories
“2Wicky” by Hooverphonic, off A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular
“Ovforever” by hands upon black earth, off hands upon black earth
“Mary Ann” by Swingerhead, off She Could Be a Spy
“Glove Puppet [vocal version]” by Banco de Gaia, off Igizeh
“3:51 AM” by oOoOO, off Without Your Love
“Ungodly Fruit” by Wax Tailor, off Tales of the Forgotten Melodies
“Utopia” by Goldfrapp, off Felt Mountain
“Lost” by Emma's Mini, off Beat Generation Mad Trick
“Queen of Darkness” by Ugress, off Resound
“Golden” by Thunderball [Single]

Total:  19 tracks,  78:19

Of the more unusual picks, probably none is moreso than Swingerhead, whose dangerously-close-to-silly “She Might Be a Spy” was featured on Salsatic Vibrato IV.⁹  Well, apparently the “she” who “might be a spy” is the titular “Mary Ann,” because while this tune has an exotica feel that nearly pushed it into Zephyrous Aquamarine territory, it most brings to mind a spy movie soundtrack, thus bringing us full circle to my observation that Portishead sounded like the soundtrack for a very trippy James Bond movie that never was.  Plus it has those same Star-Trek-y theremin-adjacent wordless vocalizations that we heard on the Ugress track, so it just seemed perfect here.¹⁰

There’s only one proper bridge on this volume, which is courtesy of oOoOO (supposedly pronounced “oh” and supposedly designed to represent a hand: the little “o"s are the knuckles of tucked in fingers, and the big “O"s are extended fingers).  The San Franciscan artist is often called the pioneer of witch house (the genre for which Grimes is famous), but he’s also sometimes described as chillwave, and that’s a perfect label for “3:51 AM,” which has just a touch of hip-hop, but is mostly gothic-adjacent downtempo.  It’s the perfect lead-in to the quote from Jack Benny’s strange black comedy about Nazis To Be or Not to Be that is the opening of “Ungodly Fruit.”

That having been said, Swing Out Sister’s other instrumental track from It’s Better to Travel¹¹ serves much the same purpose as a bridge ... just a very long one.  But its jazzy meandering does work well to take us from the much more mellow trip-hop of Mono to the more evocative and upbeat Waldeck.

Suzanne Vega might seem an odd choice at first, but instead of thinking of her folksier fare such as “Luka” or “Tom’s Diner,” try remembering her whimsical side (featured on Bleeding Salvador I), or her slinkier side (from Slithy Toves I).  This is somewhere in between, though definitely leaning more toward the slithery sound of “Caramel” from the latter.  Perhaps it’s the echoey bass twang, or perhaps the Hammond organ sound, but this tune has put me firmly in mind of this mix for quite a while, and I was just waiting for a volume pop-tolerant enough to showcase it.

Last but certainly not least, I’m excited to finally introduce you to emma’s mini, a Seattle duo that Magnatune describes as “glamorously femme electropop.” Discovered via Magnatune, of course,¹² emma’s mini has a lot of great, upbeat music that definitely slots into the electropop genre, but “Lost” is kind of downbeat for them ... which means it’s pretty upbeat for Smokelit Flashback.  I thought it really captured the vibe of trip-hop trapped in an old black-and-white movie, though, so I slotted it for this mix, and this is where it finally bubbled up.  We’ll be hearing from them again on other mixes, I’m sure.¹³

Next time, I think we’ll take a second crack at getting smooth.

⇐ Smokelit Flashback V

Smokelit Flashback VII ⇒

__________

1 And don’t even get me started on 80s My Way, which has ... well, a lot of volumes.  But that one doesn’t really count as a “proper” mix.

2 Peaking at 45, actually.

3 At number #32, it was in the bottom of the top 40 in the U.S., but it was #4 in the U.K. and actually #1 in a few countries, such as Belgium and Iceland.

4 Fun fact: remember back on volume IV when I used hube’s “Dream” to transition into “the canoe and the waterfall” by Falling You?  That worked because “Dream” ends with the words “he turns to me and speaks without words ...” Well, the whispered refrain of “Ovforever” is what that transitions into on the hube album.

5 Which we heard back on volume III.

6 The other being Violet Indiana, which showed up last volume.

7 One of my favorite films; you should check it out.

8 Who we heard from on volume III and volume V.

9 And whose more straight-ahead track “Swing Out” was a late addition to Salsatic Vibrato II.

10 And the possibility that it actually refers to the Gilligan’s Island character can be ignored: I’m living proof.

11 We heard the first on Phantasma Chorale I.

12 As is hands upon black earth.  I suppose artists who don’t like to capitalize their names are just naturally attracted to a virtual record label with a “We’re Not Evil” motto.  See Rose-Coloured Brainpan for a more full discussion of Magnatune.

13 Most likely their next appearance will be on HipHop Bottlerocket II.