dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Relistening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast's episode on Dracula and the use of the word "draculosity" made me think of the degree of draculosity various Vampire: the Masquerade Clans have.

Like:
  • Tzimisce: 6/10 Draculas. Lords of the night living in crumbling castles in the Transylvanian wilderness and calling wolves on their enemies is pretty strong. On the other hand, there's the whole Necroscope-based body-sculpting powers that warp the entire concept around them. Dracula never turned Renfield into a ten-foot-tall killing machine with bone spikes for hands.

  • Ventrue: 8/10 Draculas. Yes, they don't live in crumbling castles but the whole plot of Dracula was Dracula moving to the modern world! In some kind of theoretical Dracula 2000 that isn't Dracula 2000, Dracula would have a penthouse apartment paid for in Turkish gold. Plus Ventrue can enthrall others and dominate their minds--Renfields galore!

  • Gangrel: 3/10 Draculas. Dracula is much more sophisticated and urbane than the Gangrel are, but the Gangrel are the only Clan I can imagine crawling down the wall of a castle in the middle of the night (a power which actually doesn't exist in V:tM, what's up with that?). Like the Tzimisce, they can also sic wolves on you.

  • Brujah: 1/10 Draculas. Other than being vampires, the Lost Boys don't have a lot in common with Dracula, and neither do the ancient Greek debate guys that the Brujah were later turned into.

  • Followers of Set: 0/10 Draculas. Technically these guys are vampires but they've never felt like it, since they clearly stepped out of the pages of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian with only the most tangential connection to even V:tM's mythic history--"how did Set become a vampire?" is one of those questions that V:tM fans have been asking for decades and never had good answer for it. The answer for that is "it's taken from the secret vampire history in Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned with vampires ruling proto-Egypt, don't think about it too hard" but we're already talking about two books and neither of them are Dracula.

  • Salubri: -1/10 Draculas. Three eyed demon-hunting healers? Come on.
dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Re: the listening entry in my last post, I was listening to their episodes on Dracula and they brought up a point I hadn't thought about, relating to the very beginning of the book. We know that the coachman that comes to pick up Harker is Dracula in disguise, and that Dracula lives alone in his castle except for his vampire brides. He carries in Harker's luggage himself as well. And soon after arriving, he offers Harker dinner:
The light and warmth and the Count’s courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was half famished with hunger; so making a hasty toilet, I went into the other room.

I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful wave of his hand to the table, and said:—

“I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”

[…]

The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had experienced.
-Bram Stoker, Dracula
So, with no servants, who cooked the chicken?



Dracula cooked the chicken.
dorchadas: (Great Old Ones)
No, not the novella by H. P. Lovecraft, though that is legitimately one of my favorite horror stories ever, and is my father's favorite horror story.

A month or so ago I saw a bunch of people posting on Facebook about a BBC Adaptation of the short story, done in the style of a true-crime investigative podcast like Serial and updated to the modern era. That sounded great to me, and I finally worked through it today, finishing the last few episodes all in a rush.

I'm not much of a true crime enthusiast other than the few books we've read for book group (In Cold Blood, etc), but I really liked this adaptation! The original work already has the same structure, with the conspiracy in the past that kills off Joseph Curwen and Dr. Willett working with Charles's father and the mysterious gentleman to kill off Curwen in the present, so making it two people working on a podcast called "Mystery Machine" and the people they rope in to help them fits the structure. Even the fundamental changes to the occult elements work, because it's still about a conspiracy down through the ages to rule the world.

It's only ten episodes and the longest is just over half an hour. I highly recommend it.
dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Link and Zelda together)
I'm trying to tell myself that winter hasn't really begun if I haven't had to button my coat yet, even though it was -6°C when I left the apartment this morning and I had to wash my hair last night so it wouldn't freeze. The weather report says we'll have snow tomorrow. I guess I should be thankful we actually had a Chicago fall instead of going straight from summer to winter like last year.

My favorite zone in old World of Warcraft was Azshara and more than half of it was because it was eternally late fall there. 🍁🍂

You'd think after years of listening to podcasts and playing all the Legend of Zelda games in order I would have combined the two, and before last week you would have been wrong. But after a seeing a tweet from Zelda Universe about their own podcast, I did some searching for Zelda podcasts and subscribed to three: ZU's podcast; Another Zelda Podcast, which has themed episodes like one about forest temples and one about Breath of the Wild's ending; and Tandem Legends, which is two people playing through the whole series except they're doing it in timeline order instead of game release order. I've only listened to a couple episodes of AZP, but I'm halfway through the Skyward Sword part of Tandem Legends and I really enjoy it. Both of them have played the games before, but not all of them and not the same games, so they have differing perspectives and don't just gush about how amazing everything is.

There's also a section in each podcast about the music, which is amazing. Emoji Link smilie

My nightmares seem to have gone away, other than a dream a few days ago about vampires that woke me up an hour before my alarm. That might have been caused by nuVampire's problems, though, since I have vampires on the brain.

[community profile] questionoftheday asks: Is your hair its natural color? Or do you regularly dye it? Is it a naturally occurring color, or a wild one? What's your hair story?

My answer: My hair is naturally already a wild color--it's "copper blonde," according to the marketing copy on drugstore hair dye products. It's also almost waist-long, so I figure it's eye-catching enough. I've dyed my hair only once--black, to cosplay Kaji from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I used temporary dye so it washed out over a few days. I checked a few months ago and sadly there are no pictures.

Alright, back to work.
dorchadas: (Great Old Ones)
Currently listening to H.P. Podcraft's episode about The Street, but the jokes about Lovecraft's xenophobia aren't quite so funny now in 2018...

I'm still coughing, though all my other symptoms have gone away. I'm blaming it on the pneumonia I had as a high school student--my yearly winter cough finally went away after a decade, but I'm still weak against respiratory infections. I bet the weather isn't helping either--as much as I love chill and rainy weather, a warmer summer would probably be better for getting over a cold, now that we know the old wisdom is right and cold weather really does contribute to colds.

Speaking of health, I mentioned my slight back pain to [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans, and how going to ACEN and sleeping on a hotel bed finally confirmed for me that it's probably not just the result of sleeping on a shikifuton, and she suggested that yoga might help. I was sitting the way I often do, legs crossed one on top of the other, feet off to each side, and she mentioned that it was pretty similar to the cow's face pose and some people take years to get to the point that they can do what I do naturally. Maybe I should consider it--I've only done yoga twice ever, and only once with an actual instructor at a Shabbat on the Lake event. I've never had a reason to seek it out, but back pain, even if mild and mostly only right after I wake up, is something I want to head off at the pass.

My father-in-law dealt with back pain for decades, and I think it was a major contributor toward his death. Emoji Oh dear

Yesterday I started reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a book I've heard so much good about but never read. Now that I actually know something about superheroes and the history of comics, I love it. I almost cried at the origin story for the Escapist, the hero dreamt up by the novel's protagonists. Two Jewish kids in New York, with big mouths and bigger dreams, who just need the perfect character in order to break into comics. And thinking of what's happening in Europe, they develop the Escapist, who can break any bonds and enter any prison, and talk about putting Hitler being punched on the cover.

One of my favorite descriptions of G-d is in the Amidah, where he is called מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים matir asurim, "who frees the chained."

That too was wishful thinking, since Josef Kavalier's family went to extraordinary measures to get him out of Prague, but they failed. He had to smuggle himself to Lithuania and then to America through Japan thanks to one of Chiune Sugihara's visas, and he was still only successful thanks to having family in America. Plenty of Jews were not so lucky, and many of them died. I've seen article about how the Golem of Prague was the first superhero--strong, fast, impervious to pain and injury, super-humanly moral, and dedicated to justice--and that echoes really loudly in the book. It's especially nice to read in a time when atrocities are being committed in our names.

"Never again" is now.

...so that's my life. Got more serious than I expected at the end, there, but it's all I could think of on the L as I was reading.
dorchadas: (Kirby Walk)
I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to this weekend, but isn't that always the case? Emoji Link swirly eyes

Friday was Starlight Radio Dreams, so I showed up, sat with [twitter.com profile] meowtima, and ate fish and chips while we watched the show. At intermission, [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans arrived fresh from her other show in time to perform in the second act, and [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny joined us at the table. The others left immediately after the performance ended, but [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans had brought friends visiting from Ohio, so she invited me to stay for a drink and chat with them afterwards. It was lovely, even when I got out after eleven and it was faster to walk four miles home than to wait for the bus. At least it was a lovely night for a walk, and I'm a fast walker.

Once again, I loved the episode of NPC, which this time dealt with a trap-filled maze dungeon. I've dealt with enough of those in the games I've played over the years.

Saturday I lost the whole day to playing Stellaris and was pretty disappointed with myself because of it. That hasn't happened for years and I had so many other things I wanted to accomplish--work more on the next coding challenge, read the first issue of Dill, clean the bathtub, finish up Hibike! Euphonium--and none of it got done. And in the end, I didn't even win! The ReapersContingency showed up as I was in the middle of building a stargate network and one of their Forge-Worlds was in the middle of Ayleid space on a crucial hyperlane chokepoint, so they wiped out my scattered fleets and started advancing on the homeworld. Emoji Commissar I gave up after that.

Sunday I started a new game, this time as a different kind of space elves, and again played longer than I wanted to, but I got presentable and headed out the door in time to make the performance of Prometheus Bound at the City Lit despite a bit of trouble finding the theatre. [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans had warned me that as Greek tragedy, the show would be a bit different than theatre I'm used to and that's not even counting that most of the characters were puppets. A lot of it was characters proclaiming to the audience rather than interacting, even in scenes where they were together on stage, which admittedly my love of kagura had conditioned me to expect. The puppet dancing as the chorus sang was less expected. I thought the person playing Prometheus and [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans (playing Io) did a very good job, especially considering they were the only humans on stage other than ninjas holding the puppets, and [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans said that the director told her that she should be concerned with the gadfly stinging Io and to stop looking at Prometheus. That must make it hard.
Kratos: "No one is absolutely free except for Zeus."
Hephaestus: "That is true."
Kratos: "Then get on with it!"
I had not previously realized that the main character of God of War was named after an actual Greek deity.

Afterwards, [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans invited me out to Ethiopian for dinner with some other people who had come to see the show. When dinner was done, two of the people peeled off to make the trpi back to Hyde Park past the Cubs game, but [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans, one other person, and me went to ice cream. But when we arrived, [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans looked at the time and realized her boyfriend would be in town earlier than she thought, so she excused herself. The other person and I ended up talking for two hours, and when she left to go to the beach she invited me along. We walked north to the terminus of the lakefront trail, then she went off to the beach and I went back to my apartment and stayed up too late reading.

Monday I set a hard limit on Stellaris playing and so actually got a lot done! The whole apartment is clean (except the bathtub...), sheets washed and laundry done, lunches made, food shopped for, and I thought of a way to rewrite part of my weather project so as not to have two separate methods of displaying the temperature depending on whether the page is first loaded or the temperature is toggled between C and F. If only I could have been that productive the whole weekend.

Short week ahead and nothing on the schedule unless that OneTable dinner I signed up for approves me (I have no idea why that one requires approval). Hopefully I can get more done this week, like figuring how to format a fetch() request...
dorchadas: (Not he who tells it)
Haven't had a great week and I'm not sure why. It might just be post-con blues, it might be something else. My therapist pointed out that seeking an immediately-proximate cause for something isn't always helpful, and she's right. It doesn't stop me from trying, though. Emoji embarrassed rub head

After watching the trailer for the Apocalypse expansion for Stellaris--it hit me right in the same place that the Earth Alliance president's speech Babylon 5's Battle of the Line does--I noticed that Stellaris was on sale and I immediately went out and bought it. I found a mod that allows space elves, so the Holy Ayleid Empire is currently expanding across the stars. I've only played for a couple hours so I don't have much of an opinion on it yet, but it seems fun. The people who told me to buy it were right.

I also finished another coding project! It's not super special, but I'm happy because I started breaking all the Javascript out into its own functions rather than trying to stuff everything into a single on-load function, which made it a lot easier to see what was going on. I also used a name-based track and CSS classes to dynamically change the backgrounds based on weather type and time of day with six lines of code and a bunch of CSS classes, rather than a giant switch statement or a massive if/else chain. Next time I'm going to see if I can do the whole thing without any JQuery at all. I should at least know how to write an XMLHttpRequest.

I just finished reading Locke & Key #1, after already reading Nutmeg #1 and Monstress #2 this month. I think the thing that always scared me away from Western comics is that 1) I'm neutral on superheroes as a concept and 2) I don't know where to start. With manga it's easy--start at the beginning. If I wanted to read about the X-men, where is the beginning? How much backstory am I missing? Listening to Jay & Miles X-plain the X-men especially makes me think that there are dozens of issues of backstory I'd need to appreciate what was going on, and that impression is always why I stayed away. But there are plenty of non-manga comics that follow a similar format, just like a lot of Western TV now has the same format as an anime series with a limited, self-contained run instead of just continuing until the money runs out or the creators get bored. I slept on Western comics for a long time, but I was just looking in the wrong places.

Tonight is another episode of Starlight Radio Dreams, so I'm going there later and getting fish and chips while I watch an episode of olde timey radio theatre. Other than that, I have no plans this weekend except maybe going to see Prometheus Bound on Sunday. Emoji Cute shrug Probably just stay in, play games, and study Japanese/coding. Maybe beat Shadowrun: Hong Kong and write about it. We'll see what else comes up.
dorchadas: (Not he who tells it)
Introvert memes no longer apply to me, apparently.

Friday I came home from work, noticed that the clock on the stove wasn't working--this would be important later--and, to pass the time, worked a bit more on my latest coding project, a random quotes page. So far this weekend i've gotten the functionality mostly working, in that it displays random quotes and clicking the bottom calls up a new quote. I haven't yet put in the social media buttons, the fadeout isn't timed right, and it's extremely ugly, so those are the problems to solve next. But it works!

Anyway, after an hour or so I left to catch the bus down to Ms. Murphy and Sons to go to the Starlight Radio Dreams show, the next one after the show I went to in February. I didn't get a picture this time because I was sitting in the back corner of the room, but I did get dinner to go with the performance! Fish and chips and an almond cake for dessert, which I ate while watching the show. The premise this time was that an ordinary suburbanite had won an appearance on the show, much to the surprise and annoyance of the cast, and they had to put up with her while trying to get a show together. Serials this time were NPC, mocking sidequests and NPCs in the town, and one I hadn't seen called Olympic Shore, which was Jersey Shore starring the ​Dodekatheon. I didn't like it as much as NPC, but it did have the person playing the suburbanite as the show's producer who sung a parody of "Part of Your World" about how rich and morally upright she was. That was enough to carry it by itself, honestly.

[twitter.com profile] meowtima was there, as was a friend of his that I hadn't met before who was going through some misfortune. When the show ended we briefly talked about doing something else, but tiredness quickly caught up with everyone and [twitter.com profile] meowtima's friend went home. He did as well after a few minutes of standing and chatting at an intersection where the buses we needed to catch both passed, so when they arrived, we caught our respective buses and went home.

Saturday I woke up early, lay in bed for a couple hours, then coded again until lunch time. That's when disaster struck--when I went make miso soup, the oven burners wouldn't spark. Then I checked the oven lights, and they wouldn't turn on. Apparently the electrical work on Friday had done something very unfortunately to the apartment's wiring, since while I made do and ate a good lunch, when I went to do the washing the washing machine wouldn't turn on either. Emoji Byoo dood

The fridge, the rice cooker, and the dishwasher all still work and the fuses downstairs are all fine. I have enough clothes clean to last the week and there's a laundromat a block away if it comes to that. But, I'm not looking forward to the food costs...

After fiddling with things and getting nowhere, I left to go to the Japanese Cultural Center's kimono exhibition. I arrived at 4 p.m., not long before it closed, so it was basically empty and I was able to freely look at the kimono. They were all pretty small, some of them seemingly sized for a child or a very petite woman, but beautiful:

2018-04-28 - JCC Kimono Exhibitation kimono

That one has 鴛鴦 (oshidori, "mandarin ducks") on it, a symbol of eternal love, but the sleeves are long in the style of an unmarried woman. The accompanying text indicated it might have been for a family event celebrating a relative's anniversary.

The JCC isn't particularly large, so I was only there for a half-hour or so, including the time I spent talking to one of the staff/volunteers/? about the tea ceremony classes they offer. Apparently new ones start in August because the JCC isn't air conditioned and people don't want to sweat sitting in seiza for an hour, which is fair enough. I mentioned that I had been to tea ceremonies before, but only as a participant, not a host, and they suggested the beginner class since it goes into some of the basics. It starts in August, on Saturdays. Maybe I'll take them up on it.

I had put out a call for dinner since I couldn't cook at home and got a response from a friend who was up in Roger's Park with her boyfriend to pick up a board game. So we went to Indie Cafe, ate sushi/poke, and then briefly went back to my apartment to play RoboRally, which I've never heard of but is apparently 24 years old? It involves robots trying to navigate their way around a factory floor filled with obstacles and conveyor belts with all actions needing to be set ahead of time and then playing out sequentially. We didn't have much chaos on our playthrough, since there were three players and we picked an easy board, though there was nearly a situation where someone was shoved off the edge to their doom. After one game taking about an hour, the others were tired and left, and I watched some Hoshi no Kaabi and then went to bed.

This morning I ate a TV dinner for lunch and otherwise have done nothing. Have to go shopping now and maybe go out to dinner, since the oven still doesn't work. Hopefully it's fixed tomorrow and I can make lunches for the rest of the week, otherwise this week will be pretty expensive...
dorchadas: (Dreams are older)
Last night I went home, ate leftovers for dinner, and then went out and caught the bus to go see a show. Pictures were encouraged:

2018-02-23 - Starllight Radio Dreams


[twitter.com profile] lisekatevans offered me a ticket and, after a bit of deliberation, and hearing that [twitter.com profile] meowtima was going to be there too, I decided that I didn't want to just sit at home on a Friday night and went. I had no idea what to expect other than what was on the Starlight Radio Dreams website:
Live comedy show about podcasting. We feature audio drama style serials surrounded by delightful banter from our hosts and short ‘clips’ from a galaxy of hilarious misfit podcasts
I liked it a lot! It was half-scripted and half ad libbed, with the basic structure of a troupe of podcasters auditioning a new member mixed with a few radio-drama-style serials. As it's normally a podcast with live shows every couple months, the humor was almost entirely audio.

None of the serials on that page were featured this week because they're starting new ones. Having played Dragon Quest, my favorite was NPC, all about a village shopkeep whose items are insulted by the wandering hero and, enraged, chases after him to prove the value of his stock. This week was tutorial forest, featuring unskippable cutscenes, slimes, new party members, and learning how crafting works. Emoji Dragon Warrior march The other serial, entitled "Celtica, Enemy of Rome," was nice too, but didn't have the immediate attachment that a video-game-based show did.

Afterward, [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans told me that people were gathering at her house for an afterparty and, after saying goodbye to [twitter.com profile] meowtima, I took her up on her invitation. People ended up being most of Starlight Radio Dreams's cast, so we sat around and they ate nachos and pizza rolls and swapped stories of working at Renn Faires. I expected Faire employees to be underpaid, but I hadn't realized by how much. Emoji Oh dear I didn't talk much, and didn't order any food or drinks at the restaurant, but it was nice to get out and socialize. I even met a tabletop designer who had heard of Delta Green and occasionally drinks beers with Ken Hite!

It was a good night.

And now, I'm off to run Delta Green.

Meeting escape

2017-Dec-13, Wednesday 13:06
dorchadas: (Default)
I just got out of a meeting because it turns out I wasn't supposed to be there at all. Emoji back and forth dance The person handling the invites just picked the first person off the list with my first name, and rather than the guy from the legal team, I got the invite. So now I'm back at my desk and not listening to something I didn't care about at all.

I do have another meeting in forty-five minutes, though, and I had a five-hour-long all-department meeting yesterday, so I haven't entirely won. The upcoming meeting is about another database suite to replace the current one which replaced the previous one, so maybe the problems that I've run into using our current software will be solved. Wouldn't that be nice? Hey, a Democrat won an Alabama senatorial election, so anything is possible.

I did well in my yearly review. We had it a month early because it's due in early January and I'm going to be gone the first week of January to coincide with the [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd's time off between semesters at school. That means that I got it out of the way before my vacation and can go into my two weeks off without anything weighing down on my mind, which is great! But it means that I have to wait another week after this one before my vacation starts, which is less great but still tolerable. We have a half-day this Friday and next Friday off, though, so the shortened weeks will be nice.

Tonight I'm going to a live recording of the final first(?) season episode of [livejournal.com profile] tropicanaomega's podcast She-Ra: Progressive of Power, since [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd is going to be a panelist! I've never been to a live podcast recording despite having listened to a bunch of them, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the sausage is made and maybe learning something along the way.

Alright, back to work.
dorchadas: (Warcraft Face your Nightmares)
No Darker than Black today, since we did our shopping today instead of yesterday. [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd was busy most of yesterday, and also there were torrential rains almost all day. Not good weather for being out at all.

I did go out into it briefly, though. There's no Call of Cthulhu Replay even though game was scheduled because there were two cancellations at the last moment. Since we were all already on the way, [livejournal.com profile] mutantur, [tumblr.com profile] goodbyeomelas, [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd, and I played Eldritch Horror. We fought the King in Yellow and won, barely--he awakened, but we managed to enter the gates and defeat him at the last moment. One more turn and we all would have gone insane and doomed the world. It's like the advice I heard about the perfect RPG experience being that the heroes should win, but barely. It produced that, though we didn't have the time to really get into it and read out all the cards.

No rain today, but we still stayed indoors for most of the day listening to podcasts and I played Stardew Valley. I was planning to play more Trails in the Sky SC, but instead I got almost all the way through summer, year two. I finally picked someone to marry as well. More on that when I finish the game I write my review. Maybe before the end of the year since I want to beat it in single-player before the multiplayer patch comes out. Then [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I will have a farm together. Emoji glomp

Speaking of podcasts, I found a new one to listen to. A genre I really like is in-world history lessons or lore explorations, like the Neo-Anarchist Podcast for Shadowrun or The Signal for Numenera. The one I found is called The Dark Archive, about the World of Darkness. It literally just started, so I don't know how far it's going to go, but since I'm rereading all my old Vampire books it came at the perfect time.

Also because this week was Parashat Bereshit and we had people over for Shabbat dinner. I had a very hard time while I was reading out the parasha before the discussion not thinking of The Book of Nod. Genesis 4:17-22 is basically "That's a vampire, that's a vampire, that's a vampire..."

Alright, let's see if I can get further in Trails in the Sky.
dorchadas: (Death Goth)
While nowadays I listen mostly to synthwave, chiptunes, and video game soundtracks, my playlists used to almost entirely consist of goth music. I picked Philadelphia for university without realizing that it was the headquarters for Dancing Ferret Discs, the record label for a lot of the bands I listened to--and probably named after the Dancing Ferret in the Borderlands series, something I didn't realize until recently--so I spent a good portion of time at places like Dracula's Ball. Then I got older, my tastes changed. It happens.  photo shrug2.gif

However, on the way to work I listen to music-based podcasts because I don't want to try to pay attention to a talk podcast over the noise of the L, and one of the podcasts I listen to is Communion After Dark, which is goth music, of course. A couple weeks ago they had a song that kept making me rewind to listen to it again, and when I got home I looked up the song and found the music video, and it may be the single most profound encapsulation of the goth scene in one video I've ever seen:


It starts off with the band making soulful gestures with profound gazes, on a black background, from the shoulders up. The lyrics are pure "you don't understand us, we are too deep for you":
We're nothing like you
A wall in black
We're nothing like you
And you don't get who we are

We're nothing like you
We dare the flow
We're nothing like you
And you don't know who we are

In a land of seals and sorrow
We kept waiting for the spark
So hail your kings and hail your queens
We're different, we're the children of the dark!
And then when the woman's voice cuts in, it's all people dressed up at concerts, smiling or making silly faces at the camera, and clearly having a great time dressing up and listening to music.

And that's it, isn't it? There is something kind of silly about dressing up in black lace and Victorian coats or strappy leather and vinyl. And who am I to comment? I dress like a mixture of a William Gibson character and a post-apocalyptic citadel denizen. But it's fun. That's why we do it. And sure, the beauty of the night and the emergent mono no aware inherent in decay, but sometimes I just like dressing up like the protagonist of Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines and listening to music like Another World or Deception or Burning Heretic or Ghost Love Score or Night of the Wolf.

I don't demand that everything I do justify itself on some cosmic scale anymore.  photo _thisorthat__or__compare__by_brokenboulevard-d4tole3.gif There are other things I can devote my emotional energy to. Like enjoying ridiculous music.

On digital noise

2016-Oct-05, Wednesday 09:46
dorchadas: (Broken Dream)
Yesterday I came across this article by Andrew Sullivan about the downsides of constant digital connection. A lot of it is the same stuff that keeps popping up in articles everywhere, about how no one pays attention to each other anymore, and maybe we should put our phones down and actually talk to those next to us, and oh no why are people texting instead of calling, and the standard jeremiads about how smartphones are ruining the youths.  photo c9a2ed93dbfb11e324f5b3e281e5e1b2.gif All of that ignores how I can keep in contact with friends from around the world, study Japanese while standing on a packed train, find my way around a foreign country without having to carry paper maps or wander the streets, make restaurant reservations in seconds, tell [livejournal.com profile] softlykarou how long it will be until I can meet her in real time, and...well, if you're reading this, I don't have to keep elaborating because you know.

Multitasking degrades performance and people who read the news are more depressed, and it sounds like that was a lot of Andrew Sullivan's problems right there. But the part of the article that really drew my attention was this:
That Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath — the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity — was a collective imposition of relative silence, a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries — only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past couple of decades. It reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are. But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination.
I don't currently have much silence in my life. Nearly every second of every day, I'm listening to a podcast. Even when I'm reading in bed at night, there's usually a podcast and some music going, since I'm trying to listen to and rate most of my music. And there are definitely times when I realized that I've been listening to a podcast for an hour and can't remember what any of it was.

Is that a problem, that I just want podcast noise in the background sometimes? Would I be better served by just setting Rain Rain on rain-on-roof and thunder sounds while I read? Obviously this doesn't apply in all situations--I remember work before I started listening to music and then podcasts, and it seemed to last a lot longer and was far more boring--but am I doing myself a disservice by eschewing silence elsewhere?

I remember the nights in Chiyoda. Living in the suburbs or the city as I had until that point, I hadn't really understood how quiet and dark the night was. I can just imagine my ancestors in England in winter during the new moon, when everything was deathly silent and pitch black, huddled indoors by the fire. That's why we lit the night (and why we, unlike the Japanese, have central heating). But I do remember going for walks in the hills around Chiyoda, and while it wasn't silent, the only sounds were the wind and the cicadas, the frogs, or the crunch of leaves or snow. Japanese has a word for that: 森林浴 (shinrinyoku, "forest bathing").

Sometimes I look forward to the day when I will have listened to all my podcasts. I wonder if my brain is trying to tell me something?  photo ashamed2.gif

WWII Dream

2016-Jan-14, Thursday 09:46
dorchadas: (Awake in the Night)
I dreamed that my wife and I were in the Allied army during the invasion of Germany during World War II. It was a dream WWII, with pristine fields and a lot of people wearing civilian clothes everywhere, but in that dream way I knew where it was and what was going on.

Everyone was wearing civilian clothes and I don't think anyone had any weaponry, but we were advancing through the bocage in groups. My platoon was lead by...my parents, again in civilian clothes, just strolling around. [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd was with me too, plus a bunch of dream people whose faces didn't stick with me.

About the only indication that it was wartime was when we were securing an abandoned farm and we found a pile of dead animals behind the barn. A few farm animals, but mostly pets, like all the pets in the town had been taken to one place. Just flies buzzing around and the smell of decay in the air, but I haven't actually seen a pile of dead animals so it was more like a video game-style textured static object. It was just a bit unreal.

I kept expecting zombies or something to attack, because me dreaming about zombies is definitely a recurring theme, but no enemies of any kind, Wehrmacht or otherwise, ever showed up. It was just my parents leading the platoon through sunny fields and cutting through hedges while seeing no one and hearing no sounds of battle anywhere. Eventually, we found a farm that was occupied, and it's a good thing my father knew German (he spent his senior year of high school in Germany), because the farmer and his wife invited us in for breakfast. They were cooking eggs and frying up bacon in a surprisingly modern-looking kitchen when my alarm went off and I woke up. I'm positive the bacon was being cooked in a panini-style grill, which I'd bet money that few Germany families used during WWII.

I remember being worried what the family would think when I turned down the bacon, but I woke up before the dream got to that point.

I suspect this was all spurred by finally downloading episodes of the History of World War II podcast to listen to. I've had that on my queue for two years now, but I haven't gotten around to it until now, so maybe my brain thought it was momentous enough for it to show up in my dreams.
dorchadas: (Default)
I'm sure that comes as news to none of you.

I was going to write about this in my New Year's Retrospective, but since I forgot it gets its own post. One of the other changes I made in 2015 is that I started listening to new music again. I only listened to the radio for about two years during the 90s when I was mowing my parents' lawn and needed something to listen to, so that's the sum total of my exposure to pop music. Once I went away to university and found Napster, I developed a taste of goth and industrial spurred by buying a copy of "Music from the Succubus Club," probably after seeing an ad for it in a Vampire: the Masquerade supplement, and that's what I listened to for a while. That fell away over time, though, and by the time I was living in Japan I didn't really listen to any music at all other than the ambient zone music when we'd play World of Warcraft. Even on my two hour each-way commute, I mostly slept.

That changed when I started working at the AMA and learned I could use headphones. Not too long after that, I found 8bit Peoples, an online repository of free chiptunes albums, and that got me into chiptunes. And then I developed a podcast addiction, and a few of the podcasts I added were music ones. I currently listen to:
  • The Irish and Celtic Music Podcast: I used to listen to a lot of Celtic music, but it fell almost completely out of favor in the last decade. This is still probably my least favorite of the music podcasts I listen to, but I've found quite a few gems.

  • This Week in Chiptune: When I found this, I went back over the course of a couple months of commutes and listened to every single back episode. Love those bleeps and boops.

  • Group Therapy with Above and Beyond: I think this showed up in the top podcasts category and I subscribed to it on a whim. There's a lot of stuff that's obvious way better to dance to than to listen to on the L, but I've found some surprisingly (to me) good songs, like this one or this one or this one. I skip past the four-on-the-floor stuff and don't miss it.

  • Space Radio: This updates only irregularly and has a bit of a variable quality, but I like it when it comes out. However, it did inspire me to find:

  • Communion After Dark: This one is amazing, and is probably another one that I'll go through the entire archives of. It's like being back at Dracula's Ball, and this podcast reminded me that bands like Diary of Dreams, Beborn Beton, Neuroticfish, Suicide Commando, et al still exist and are still making music. They have a relatively wide reach, though--this song showed up on the podcast and ended up being launched straight on to my cyberpunk playlist.

  • Steampunk Radio: I have no idea how this is "streampunk" or if it's ever going to continue after the first few episodes, but what I found is pretty neat. Like, this song--how is that "steampunk"? I mean, it's really good, but does it fit the advertising? Not sure about that.
That gives me plenty of weekly new music exposure.

Also, Bandcamp. It's not actually any different than poking around any other digitial music service, but for some reason I've taken to it more. I've found great stuff like Halfont 2 by William Kage (guy composes music using the soundfonts of 16-bit games, so they sound like lost tracks), I Am the Night by Perturbator (another for the cyberpunk playlist), The Spoony Bards by The Spoony Bards (shoutout to [livejournal.com profile] stephen_poon!), Transmission Lost by Sjellos (I have a whole selection of albums that are basically low hums, groaning metal, and space noises set to music), Tome I by Erang (Bandcamp introduced me to Dungeon Synth as a genre)...I could go on. You can see everything I've bought here if you want an example of my modern musical taste.

I've also gotten heavily into Overclocked ReMix (edit:and its podcast) again now that they're posting more. They're a big chunk of what I listen to on my commute if I don't have any podcast updates, and I jumped on their Patreon as soon as they set it up--which also introduces me to new music, since one of the perks is that I get a free album every month from the selection on Overclocked Records, not all of which are video game related. Of what I've gotten, I can recommend the Tale of the Rat King OST by Tom Miller and Quixotica by .mpegasus. I admit, I haven't listened to as many of these as I should, but I just recently sorted them into their own playlist and once I put them on my phone, I can go through them.

This turned out longer than I thought. I guess it's a good thing I gave it its own post?
dorchadas: (Great Old Ones)
So yesterday, [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd, [livejournal.com profile] chronicluscious, and I watched the X-Files, which I have never seen before.


That always catches people by surprise when I tell them about it ([livejournal.com profile] chronicluscious's roommate and [livejournal.com profile] tastee_wheat were both astonished), which I think it's a reasonable reaction. I mean, look at the way I dress. Look at how I love conspiracy theories. Look at the music I listen to and how I have whole albums of what's basically X-Files background spooky music (I recommend Cryobiosis, Sabled Sun, or Atrium Carceri). Look at how I ran a three-year-long game of Delta Green, which I always describe as "X-Files crossed with Call of Cthulhu" even though technically, the very first game of what would become Delta Green ran at a convention in March of 1993, six months before the X-Files pilot aired.

And as it turned out, a good quarter of the backchat was [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd and I throwing Delta Green references back and forth that meant nothing to [livejournal.com profile] chronicluscious.  photo emot-sweatdrop.gif

I've picked up a lot of things about X-Fies over the years just through geek osmosis, like the black oil, the alien bounty hunters, the flukeman, and so on, but I've mostly managed to remain unspoiled about the actual episodes. And then the first episode we watched was Post-Modern Prometheus, which is probably the least representative way to go into the show. But once that was done, we went back to the beginning and started in and...yeah. Why haven't I watched this already?

 photo abkB6ej.gif

Part of the answer to that can probably be found in how I had to make a 'television' tag for this post, because I've apparently never written about it before.  photo emot-v.gif

I can see why there's so much internet love for Scully, though I have some reservations since I know that Mulder's always right and it is always a werewolf or aliens or vampires or witches or mutants or ghosts (are there ghosts? Not actually sure about that one). It's a bit like Kirk and Spock--it's hard to have a proxy debate about reason vs. emotion when one side is always right. But that's me bringing in outside knowledge, and I'm going to try to avoid doing that as much as I can.

In a moment of  photo emot-irony.gif, I just started listening to Kumail Nanjiani's The X-Files Files a couple weeks ago, figuring that I'd probably never make time to actually sit down and watch the show so I might as well pick it up second hand. And, well, it turns out I was wrong and now we're planning to watch the whole run, or at least up to the point where it goes to shit. Wherever that is. I'm sure I'll find out!

Podverload

2015-Jul-23, Thursday 12:52
dorchadas: (Do Not Want)
So obviously on my vacation to Oregon I couldn't listen to many podcasts, though I did occasionally listen while we were driving or at night while I was reading before bed. I listen to a lot of podcasts (134 on my phone at the moment), and I have them pretty well calibrated so that as I spend the vast majority of my waking hours listening to podcasts, I'll listen to them just slightly faster than they come in.

Obviously, two weeks of only occasional listening is going to throw that schedule off, and now my phone is choked full of podcasts to the point where I can't download them all.

I'm pretty sure that this is in the dictionary under the definition of "First World Problems."

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