Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
Continue readingMusic
Violin Concerto in the Quay of Baldur’s Gate
Notes for the reader:
This is a piece of fiction I wrote almost two and a half years ago for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was playing in. This is about the same character that I’ve mentioned several times in past blog posts and even wrote another short story for. This is Lewis, my favorite TTRPG character I’ve ever made and the only one I still miss playing, even after about a year away from the game. What this piece is, more specifically, is me expressing my enthusiasm for this character to my fellow players and GM by writing about a specific night my character endured while waiting for his companions to return.
As a bit of background, this scene follows my character, Lewis, taking out a collection of local thugs and bounty hunters who belonged to an organization called the Zhentarim. He pretended to know where their target (one of his party members and another player’s character) could be found, lured them out of their base in smaller groups, and then ruthlessly murdered them all in the street while remaining entirely undetected until the last survivors hid in their base where he then killed the remainder.
It was not a fight that should have worked out as well as it did (it resulted in the DM nerfing one of the magic items I used in this series of murders) and it was the one time I made myself feel awful for actions my character chose. It was a turning point in the character’s journey as he realized he’d become what he hated: a powerful person hurting people because he could and he knew he wouldn’t be punished for it. Sure, he had a decent enough motive, but not everyone who died that day was a vile criminal. One was a petty criminal who still had a chance to turn his life around until Lewis ended it. That’s where the scene picks up, actually. Right after he left the bar where he’d offered weregild to someone who cared about the young man he’d killed.
As for the rest of what this piece is… Well, this format was one my friends and I used a lot while we were in high school, as we wrote stories or drew comics about our self-insert characters in the slightly fictionalized version of reality we collectively made up. This is as close to fanfiction as I’ve ever written and only isn’t fanfiction because I don’t think, by its very definition, that you can write fan fiction about your own characters…
Anyway. See this video for the vibe I’m going for (dude walking around playing music) with most of Lewis’ performances. Andrew Bird also did a pretty good Tiny Desk Concert that can give you a sense of his energy and the way he uses a violin, which is my mental image for Lewis making music. To show you the looping thing I mention a few times, and the way I see it, see this TEDTalk Andrew Bird did a while ago (the first song shows it off, you don’t need to watch the whole thing).
This information and the music is mostly about setting a tone and a vibe, sharing some stuff I use as a touchstone for the way I view this character in these moments and the music he creates. In the text below, any time there’s a link, just load the video attached and listen to it as you read (there won’t be any songs with lyrics unless the lyrics are incorporated into the writing somehow). If you get to a new song before you’ve finished the old one, you can pause and listen to the rest or move one. Just don’t, you know, overlap the songs.
Continue readingUsing Kirby Music As An Antidepressant
My latest musical obsession (when I’m not subjecting myself to the 10-hour version of the “He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah” song), is a pair of videos by a music compilation channel on YouTube. The first one, appropriately titled “30 minutes of kirby music to make you feel better” is a collection of bright and cheerful tracks from a variety of Kirby games, classic and current (though it leaves out some of the latest games to avoid the litigious arm of Nintendo), that absolutely lives up to its name. The second one is the sequel to that first, wonderful video, titled “45 minutes of kirby music to make you feel even better” which also absolutely lives up to its name. There’s a lot of familiar tracks in this second one, showcasing songs by the same name that had been updated or changed for newer games, along with a collection of new ones as well. The channel can get away with these videos because it is not monetized and exists solely to create these compilations of video game music according to a central theme. There are a lot of channels out there like this one, but this one takes it all a little step further. Rather than just posting a static image, there’s a little animation of Kirby wearing headphones and bopping along to the music on the first one and, on the second one, fifteen minutes of bright and happy comments from the first video showcasing just how warmly this collection of music was received. The bright and cheerful music the compiler chose for these videos is enhanced by the cheerful and friendly nature of the comments they selected for this video and, for the most part (more so than any other video I’ve ever seen on YouTube), further enhanced by the bright and cheerful comments below the video.
Continue readingYou Can Accomplish A Lot In 10 Hours If You Can Focus
Today, after a few days of slowly circling the drain that is worsening burnout, I realized I had to find a way to stay focused despite how tired I’m getting and decided to skip straight to pulling out the big guns. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, since I don’t always enjoy the experience, but there’s no arguing with how effective it is when it comes to keeping me on task and at least marginally focused on fairly straight-foward work. So, rather than deal with the various thoughts swirling around my head about my job, my work hours, how I feel about doing this work, and literally anything else that might normally occupy my mind, I blasted them all away by subjecting myself to the ten-hour version of the He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah video (officially titled “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” but no one I know calls it that). I started the video shortly after I started work and have left it running all day, taking my headphones off when I need to be capable of complex thought and leaving them on while conducting rote tasks, doing simpler thought work (like writing this blog), and running the hours and hours of tests I need to do today. So far, I’ve kept my sanity and managed to be more productive than any other day this week, despite being four days into this parade of mounting exhaustion.
Continue readingMood Music For Themes And Villains I Might Never Use
When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.
Continue readingThis Moment And Place In My Life
This morning, as I prepared to take my post-workout shower, my morning playlist cycled over to a song that’s been on there for a while. I added “Wherever We Are Now” (from the game “Cassette Beasts” and the EP Same Old Story (from “Cassette Beasts” Original Soundtrack) to my daily preparation playlist this summer, during July, when I finally had the time to make some decent progress in the game. I then promptly stopped playing it on the weekends where I could be bothered to turn my PC on because I developed a crippling addiction to Baldur’s Gate 3, which took over my life for quite a while. Still, I’ve really enjoyed the soundtrack for the game and plan to get back to it eventually, if only because I’m limiting myself to songs from the soundtrack that I’ve already heard in-game and I really want to listen to the rest of it.
Continue readingReflecting On Bug Hunter’s Discography
About two months ago, I wrote about a new album by an artist I’d first heard of long ago and then somehow lost track of for years (twice, even, thanks to the weird way the internet works). This past weekend, while I was cleaning in preparation for having guests over, I finally turned away from the new album and worked my way through the band’s entire discography. I played all but one of them on heavy repeat for two whole days. I listened to so many Bug Hunter songs that the band skyrocketed to the top of my “most listened to” on Tidal and I wound up even downloading the albums so I could listen to them on the app while running my errands and without spending my entire month’s budget of cell data. A lot of the songs resonated with me, some of them catching my attention even more than the latest album did (which joined the rotation on my second day of cleaning) because of the vivid imagery. As a result of all this heavy listening and spending so much time doing manual labor that did not require much mental effort, I’ve got a lot of thoughts to share about all of Bug Hunter’s music.
Continue readingHappy Thanksgiving!
I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looking to escape today. If you can only read stuff, I suggest checking out The Order of the Stick for some D&D themed fun and Erfworld (which has mostly shuttered for the time being, but the full comic is still up for viewing, which is where the link SHOULD take you) for some fantasy-themed fun that quickly turns into incredibly complex story telling with a great deal of heart and (intermittently, due to the main artist needing to focus on her family’s health rather than work) beautiful art. If you’ve got video and audio access, check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube! Every video is excellent! If you need to chew up more time, check out Drawfee for some friends making art together! Sort by popular or just scroll until one of them sounds interesting! You really can’t go wrong if you like seeing artists work (though, personally, I’d definitely recommend the Drawtectives series, my absolute favorite thing they’ve done). If you’ve only got audio, I suggest checking out Andrew Bird’s music for something cerebral and chill or Bug Hunter for something upbeat, fun, and sometimes emotionally difficult but still beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget, all colonialism is bad and genocide is even worse even though they’re almost always found walking hand-in-hand! Work to fight against their influence even today as we in the US celebrate a story we made up to attempt to make it seem like our entire country isn’t built on murder, pillaging, and the destruction of other cultures!
A New Favorite Artist Six Years In The Making
Years ago, (no more than six according to what I’ve been able to find, despite it feeling like much longer ago), I heard this strange song about a person on a plane watching someone beside them write an email while they waited for the plane to fill up and taxi away from the gate. It was interesting, since it was fairly long for such a light song and it felt like such an incredibly human experience to immortalize in song. It somehow walked the line between fantastical and entirely real in a way that left me wondering if the performer was drawing on a lived experience or if they’d made the whole thing up. I didn’t really keep track of the song and it faded from my consciousness until a couple years later when I found a video circulating around Imgur that was someone’s senior project, an animated music video of a cover of the song that changed the gender of some of the characters in the story. It was a lovely video and it reminded me of the song I’d first heard a couple years prior. This time I looked up the artist for the original song and learned that the song, Dear McCracken by Bug Hunter, was just one part of a larger collection of music, available via YouTube videos and various music platforms. I am pretty sure I made a note to myself to listen to more of his music, but this was the summer I separated from my family and I lost track of a lot of things that summer, this artist included.
Continue readingSea Of Stars Was Worth The Wait
The very first thing I did after finishing Baldur’s Gate 3 was start playing Armored Core 6. The second thing I did was stop playing Armored Core 6 and start playing Sea of Stars. Armored Core was fun, but it was more intense that I was up for in the first full week of September since it had been just over twenty-four hours since I learned my grandmother was fading and I just did not have a grindy, punishing game in me. I’ve since learned that AC6 is a lot easier to play if you do it super aggresively, with a heavy emphasis on melee combat, so I think I’ll have a better time when I go back to it, but I needed something calming and Sea of Stars seemed like a better bet. Plus, since I bought it on my Switch, I’d be able to take it with me anywhere I needed to go. This turned out to be the right decision, though I suspect my sleep schedule would be in better shape if I was playing AC6 since I doubt I’d want to stay up super late playing that. Sea of Stars had been described online (mostly by people posting on forums and not at all by any advertisement coming from the game’s creators) as being similar to Chained Echoes and while I think the comparison was useful since it got my attention, I think it really does both games a disservice. Sea of Stars is wonderful and a joy to play in its own ways that have absolutely nothing to do with what makes Chained Echoes one of my top recent games.
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