January 2020 – Page 3 – My Scattered Thoughts

Some Bands

Scrabb Puhtaytozz and the Frabby Bunch — Scrabb rocks hard on his wail guitar while the Frabby Bunch provide backing vocals and twenty-three different percussive mechanical sounds. Check out Scrabb in his velvet jumpsuit! Check out Scrabb in his frantic jodhpurs! Check out Scrabb in his one-strap overalls! Check that moppy hair, the sixteen inch platform shoes, the sneering mechanical moustache! You won’t stop dancing even after the music ends, courtesy of the parasitic earworms provided gratis at every Scrabb Putaytozz and the Frabby Bunch performance!

Nuelis Clav and the Extradimensional Choir — Which one is Nuelis Clav? No one knows. She’s one of the Extradimensional Choir, but no one knows which one, only that her heavenly voice hits highs and lows that will have your brain gasping for more. Trip out to the melodies and harmonies this choir provides. You may be put off by their identical bald heads and shapeless infrared robes, but don’t fret. Once they open their mouths and sing, you’ll be seeing stars.

Bagby Jones — What can we say about Bagby Jones? He’s got an acoustic guitar and a cheap plugin amp. We can’t actually remember anything about his music (nor can anyone we interviewed) but we just know we really have to hear him play again. Really. We’ll pay good money if you know when and where he’s playing again.

Glamera — Glamera’s the diva’s diva. (For real, we spotted Cincy Kidd and Blondette at her last show, fangirling out.) She can belt a tune and dance her ass off. If you don’t have fun at a Glamera show, you are LITERALLY a corpse, and even then… Good luck getting into one of her shows, though. She’s sold out for the next 400 years.

The Endless Car Ride, or, My Hat Looks Better on You

Driving feels like always having been driving
Every car ride more of the endless car ride
Especially when the rain turns sight into a grey muddy mess
Or nighttime with the lights shining sliding away across the glass
And me reflecting or not thinking about anything at all

You’re wearing my hat
But I wouldn’t know it from all the glances spinning your way
It’s a fine hat that went for a ride one day and never came back.
Everyone’s saying so.

A Grab Bag of Links (Go-Round Gorilla Edition)

I’ve had more dreams in the last week than I’ve had in the last couple months probably. Wild! I don’t remember much, apart from going through doors. That’s dreams for you! Anyway, here are some interesting things I found on the internet thingy.

Looks like I’m going to be running this groovy game, Ultraviolet Grasslands by Luka Rejec, for some friends of mine. It’s just the kind of gonzo stuff I’m into. Feeling pretty excited about it! (I listened to a chat with Luka on the Rollin’ Bones podcast and he’s just as interesting as I was thinking he would be.)
The Last Blog has some great music on it. All fascinating and weird in the best way.
I’ve been listening to songs from KEXP’s Song of the Day podcast for years now. A lot of good stuff. Occasionally a song sticks with me and I’ll dig a little deeper into the band, such as In Dreams by Math and Physics Club. I had never heard of them before, even though they’re a Seattle band and I lived there for years. I was deeply charmed by this photo of the band at a Seattle library.
Alan Jacobs honed in on something that stuck with me too from Neal Stephenson’s last novel, Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, namely, what to do about people who have veered off into a completely disconnected reality tunnel and are determined to stay there no matter what.
“Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen. Probably time to start reading some of the old war poets again.

The Walled Garden

Once there was this jungle. It was kind of shady. Also, there were tigers in it. People sort of wandered around and picked fruit and berries and sometimes built treehouses and then swung vines between them. Everyone was having a pretty fun time swinging between the treehouses. Sometimes the vines would break or you would swing to a treehouse that wouldn’t end up being there anymore, but that was mostly ok, because there were a lot of treehouses. Some of them were pretty fancy, with bright flashy lights and spinning signs and sometimes just a lot of construction work that never seemed to end. Even though there were always new people showing up, it always seemed like there was enough room for everybody. Then, one day, this walled garden showed up. People who swung into there tended not to swing out again. I mean, they could leave, there was nothing nefarious there, but they did tend to stick around. There was so much fruit to eat in that walled garden. It was so sweet! But, you know, it didn’t seem very filling. And some of the fruit seemed sweet at first, but then led to some real digestive issues later. Yikes! Still, it seemed like kind of a “friend garden” because it seemed like your friends were already there already. Also, since they were just hanging out there people just kind of started to work in that garden. The work mostly involved moving fruit from one side of the garden to the other. Sometimes someone would try to build a sort of on-the-ground treehouse, but those never seemed to work out. For some reason. One day this monkey just started throwing shit into the garden. And then it seemed like a LOT of monkeys started throwing shit into the garden. People just sort of shrugged and kept on hanging out in the garden. The fruit didn’t taste nearly as good, because it had shit on it. Yuck! Then everyone realized, boy, we shouldn’t be blaming monkeys, it was really just someone in this garden dressed in a monkey suit! Some people had been swinging outside in the jungle (remember that?) this whole time. They were still having a pretty good time, hanging out in treehouses and stuff. Occasionally, they tried to let people in the garden know how fun it was.

Moral: Why work in someone else’s garden, when you can swing through the trees with the greatest of ease?

Lotsa Loose Links (Bilious Baboon Edition)

I’ve been thinking about weblogs a lot lately. Not sure why. I’ve had mine for quite a while now. Originally, blogs or “web logs” were a way to keep notes on things you saw on the web. Just lists of links, I guess. At least that’s my memory of it. In that vein, here’s a bunch of links from my recent aimless wanderings through the internet.

I’ve gotten a lot out of Robin Sloan’s weekly newsletter, The Year of the Meteor, over the last year. (scroll down for links to all 52 of them). Every one had a link or two to something I found fascinating and something to think about. I briefly considered starting an email newsletter, but boy it seems like too much work.
There was a time before tabbed browsing (one window for each web page, egad!) and I remember I first discovered tabs with Mozilla Firefox. (I remember a conversation where I basically tried to sell my friend on tabbed browsing–he was skeptical.) Now, there are just so many tabs. I don’t know why I’m afraid to just close them. Sometimes it’s just not being sure what to do with them, like this IMDB page for the 1978 film, Jubilee, about a time traveling Queen Elizabeth. Or this Wikipedia page on the Peter Ackroyd book, The House of Doctor Dee, which seems long out of print (maybe I’ll interlibrary loan it?). Or this Wikipedia page on an Anthony Burgess book that describes 99 20th century novels he feels are worth reading (I will almost certainly never read this and the WP page handily provides the entire list).
Sometimes they’re things I mean to read later, like this science fiction story, “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Robot Walk Into a Bar” by Andew Dana Hudson. I’ve never heard of the author before, but I liked the story title. Still haven’t read it! For a long time, I was using Instapaper to keep track of things I wanted to read from the web, but once I got to 500+ saved things, I sort of stalled out on it. That’s a pretty daunting queue!
There was about a decade that I wasn’t obsessed with tabletop roleplaying games, but that decade isn’t now. The Principia Apocrypha: Principles of Old School RPGs, or, A New OSR Primer is exactly what it says on the tin. (OSR stands for “Old School Roleplaying” or sometimes “Old School Revival”.) This is a pretty good resources if you want to know what RPGs are all about. (OSR itself is pretty complex and this blog post about what the hell OSR means is pretty comprehensive.)
I just spent an hour trying to remember the name of Dorothy Dunnett’s Game of Kings so it seemed worth writing down. Great book!
Man of Medan seems like a pretty fascinating horror game. (This was the oldest “tab” on my phone.)

The Hacker and/or the Mongoose

Once there was this hacker. She was so good at computer things it was insane. Like, people literally thought they were going insane watching her typing away at a computer, there’d be like these visual artifacts swirling around, vision zooming in and out like an out of control music video director, this feeling that time was fragmenting and sharding out into these teeny weeny pieces, these just throbbing bass notes and wild keytar riffs, and at the end of it, in what felt like seconds, she’d swivel around in her chair, and boom!, it’d already be done. One time Horatio Moonbats watched her “hack” a Gooseberry 7000 Mainframe (in the cloud, obvs (literally in the clouds, even more obvs)) and then when she swiveled around triumphantly, all H.Moonbats saw was a mongoose, looking very self-satisfied to be sure.

Moral: I didn’t say she couldn’t hack reality, too.

Dig these photos of 1970s Tokyo. I’m reminded of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Idoru.

The Cat Sitting on the Blanket on the Couch, Indulgently Permitting Brushing

eyes barely open, purring

Some Very Thick Spectacles

Once upon a time there was an owl who had astigmatism. This made swooping and pouncing on small rodents pretty tough. The owl was pretty sad, because he didn’t like eating toast at all. Not even with marionberry jam. Also he kept flying into tree branches or flinching away from non-existent ones. He put off going to the eye doctor for months. Really, just the longest time. Too proud maybe or perhaps there was a bit of fear there or just an aversion to “eye stuff”. But finally, after the third time pouncing on a dog toy in one night, he went to the eye doctor. It wasn’t fun. Imagine you’re an owl and then you get your eyes dilated. Yeesh! The owl spent a really long time picking out frames. Were the yellow horn rims more him than the indigo rounds or the rectangle wire frames? (Being a horned owl, he thought maybe the horn rims might be a little too much horn?) Finally, he settled on these classy aviator glasses with a rose-colored tint on the lenses. Very stylish! said the mouse as he swallowed it whole.

Moral: Style aside, it’s tough to stay on target when your vision is fucked.

The Moonrise podcast is definitely worth a listen. Luminous and haunted.