For today’s upbeat tune, I give you this:
There’s an odd story behind this video, according to my son. The song is from 1978. The video is much more recent, and was created for a completely different song. This YouTuber stripped out the original son, put in this goofy old disco tune, and got way more views than the original.
Silly and fun. I approve.
Next:
This is a simple idea that is satisfying beyond the all expectation: A microphone in a tuba, pointed at a little waterfall, at dusk
This video hit YouTube last October, but it looks like it was designed for self-quarantine. It’s:
a group of friends
having fun
in the beautiful outdoors
with drinks
recipe included
Plus, the song is upbeat and a lot of fun. Perfect for today.
As for today’s pleasant distraction, if you’re a photographer (or you just like looking at pretty pictures) check out this list of Flickr Groups. Personally, I like Less is More and Catchy Colors, but the Portraits group is nice, too.
Have some laid back tunes inspired by Thai Funk. I’m not sure about the guitarist’s wig, but the tunes are great.
If you’re looking for a soothing Youtube channel to watch, I recommend 李子柒 Liziqi. I have no idea how that’s supposed to be pronounced (or what the Asian writing means), but I’ve been calling it “Liz Icky” for about a year. It’s got natural beauty, cooking, hand-crafts, family, cute animals, the whole deal. Staged as hell, with impressive production design, but I appreciate what they’re going for.
Here’s the first episode the wife and I saw so many months ago.
There are lyrics here, but I can’t make heads nor tails of them. Still soothing, though, and the title fits.
For today, we have a special treat:
Again, no music video this time, because I’m posting Cirque du Soleil, and those guys are pretty much all music video.
First, from April 3:
Second, from April 10, which is today:
I’m scheduling this post to go online ten minutes after the second video goes live. Here’s hoping that works.
Is Cirque du Soleil planning to release a new video every week? If so, they’ll be making this series of Quarantine Posts super easy for me.
Not sure why I get so much pleasure from music with samples, esp audio clips from movies, but I do. I really do.
Over the weekend, we finally got the chance to play the second half of our Escape from Dino Island PbtA game. As an emulation of Jurassic Park, it’s pretty great: fast and deadly. As I mentioned on Twitter, before the game started, I suggested we start with two PCs each, since the game looked like it was designed to kill characters pretty quickly. The others poo-poo-ed that, telling me I could just make up someone new if I had to.
Two die rolls later, I was doing exactly that.
One of the mechanics in the game that I really liked was that the basic moves were broken into categories: Peril Moves and Safety Moves. When you make a Safety Move, you’re supposed to tell a story about your character (each playbook has a number of specific prompts, which you cross off as you go through them). At the end, when the story is wrapped up, either because the living PCs have escaped the island or they’ve all died, you roll for the denouement.
Like all PbtA games, you roll two dice, then add something to it. For this roll, you add the number of stories you’ve told.. 10+ gives you a great result, 6+ is a failure, 7-9 is a modest success. So, the more stories you tell about your character, the more sympathetic they are and the more beloved they are by the audience.
My character had made the Finale move, which was a self-sacrifice play to save everyone and wrapping up the plot. So while the other two players got to roll on the “Safe at Last” table, and both got the result “… describe something (an image or memory) you will carry with you from your time on the island.” which is the modest result, I rolled on the “Never to Return” table.
And I’d told four stories over the course of the game, so my roll was +4. And I had sacrificed myself for the group! And I rolled snake eyes.
That was the only roll I could have made and still failed, and I’d done it. The result I got was “… tell the others why you deserved your fate.”
Is life fair? It is not.
But I laughed my ass off, which I really needed. At this point in my life, I don’t get to laugh all that much. Not that I’m unhappy (I’m not) but I don’t find many things funny. Except when I’m playing in a game with terrific players.
Anyway, next up is a longer game (we hope) and the group has picked Liminal, a contemporary fantasy game set in London. (I’m not doing an accent.) It looks great, and I don’t just mean the art. Seriously, that art is amazing.
But for the meat of this post, and the whole reason I am doing these, let me link to a site I found inside the rulebook:
http://www.guerrillaexploring.com
It’s a site about people getting into places where they’re not supposed to be, and the pictures are cool. I really liked the concrete… rooms? tunnels? in the bowels of the Tower Bridge.
Anyway, worth checking out.
Take care of yourselves.
Cirque du Soleil has dropped an hour-long special on YouTube.
No music video today, because this is a music video, sort of.
Sometimes, an artist steps out of their usual role to work for someone else, and their own creative impulses bounce against exterior constraints to create some of their most interesting work.
Graham Coxon, formerly of the band Blur, was tasked with creating a song for the Netflix series I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS. This is the song he wrote and recorded. Then he just kept making music, putting together a whole album for what should have been a fictional band. Check out also Vanilla Skin and Bloody Witch, and the whole rest of the album, too.
One of the problems people are having with the quarantine guidelines is that they’re going stir crazy with the people they’re quarantined with. Over at The Social Distancing Project, people vent their stories of stress, heartbreak, revived romances, and petty grievances for you to… enjoy, I guess? Some are sad. Some aggravating. Many are funny.
It’s a bit like a COVID-19 edition of reddit’s relationships group.
Being cooped up with my wife and son has added very little stress to my life, to be honest. My wife is a kind person and always has been. She’s considerate as a reflex, and is mellow when I’m upset or need space.
I make an effort to be a kind person because I fell for her, and I realized that my old habits–basically, that I wanted to make people laugh and would do anything to get that laugh, even say cruel shit–were poison to her, our relationship, and to me, too. When I realized how much she hated humor based on shock and cutting remarks, I also realized how toxic it was to me.
It’s hard to talk about how much importance I used to put on making people laugh. It felt like a connection, but one where I was both the one in power and the one who was doing a kindness. It was a sort of competition with the world to see who could get the most laughs with cruelty, but without crossing over the line where the laughs stopped coming. And the only way to continue in that wholly made up competition was to pretend I couldn’t see the way peoples’ faces looked when I hurt them. And when I couldn’t pretend anymore, those hurt feelings became part of the game.
Anyway, I’m glad I stopped doing that, even if I miss making people laugh.
Author Mindy Klasky has been writing Coronavirus Diversion posts, highlighting interesting stuff on the internet for people stuck at home who need a pleasant diversion. I think that’s a brilliant idea, and I recommend everyone go ahead and click that link above to check out what she’s sharing.
I don’t want to copy what she’s doing, but I thought I’d try something similar-ish. A little music. A little cooking. Comics or shows or something. Who knows? Something mellow and casual. I can’t promise to post every day, but I’ll try not to let this space go fallow.
To start, today’s song.
My Twitter timeline is full of people talking about baking, and the grocery stores are sold out of flour, so it seems like a lot of folks have stocked up for baking. If that’s you, check out this episode of What’s Eating Dan:
Having made this recipe myself, I can say the results really are amazing. They’re so fluffy and light that they almost feel like they’ve been made by a machine or something. Maybe that doesn’t sound appealing, but it really is.
And now I’m thinking you must be wondering how a tangzhong works in a pizza crust recipe. Not well, it turns out, because of course I tried it. Tangzhong makes a soft interior rather than a chewy one, and that’s okay of the bones at the edge of your pizza are very small, but feels insubstantial if they’re large. I’d only use it (again) if I was planning to make a stuffed crust pizza.
Take care. Keep washing those hands. Don’t forget to check out Mindy Klasky’s posts linked above.
Lots of folks are self-quarantining at the moment, and there’s a lot of tension and anxiety out there. My family feels it the same as anyone else.
There’s not much I can do about that, and I don’t have much to offer folks to make this difficult time easier. However, I can do this:
Until the end of March April, you can use coupon code
HX57G
to get a free Smashwords ebook of A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, which is probably the most upbeat, least harrowing book I’ve ever written. Just go to the link above, click the “Buy” button or the “Give as Gift” button, then add the coupon code in the provided field. After, you can “Update cart” to be sure the price has been set to zero dollar and zero cents.
Key/Egg is a pacifist urban fantasy about Marley Jacobs, a sixty-five-year-old woman who’s a cross between Gandalf and Auntie Mame, and it’s set in modern day Seattle. (Or, at least, “modern” to the time it was finished, about six years ago. In construction-happy Seattle, some of the locations in the novel no longer exist.) There are lots of books out there that feature vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, but I like to kid myself that I’ve created an usual take on them here.
Plus, this is my most upbeat, light-hearted book. I figure folks don’t need another harrowing angsty bloodbath right now.
Finally, there’s no limit on the number of times you can use this coupon, so if you want to pick it up for yourself and make a gift of it, please do. All I ask is that you only send it to people who might like this sort of thing.
And that’s it. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.