Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. This Mixtape is a week late because, quite honestly, last Monday I forgot entirely that I had one sitting waiting in the pocket to be released. However, it seems like destiny might have shone upon me because this morning is going to be a bit of a mess as I have a very early medical appointment, and don’t really have time to bang out a proper blog post. I am hoping to return to weekly releases after this one again, because I enjoy making these and honestly… I end up listening to them as much as any of you might. Now, to preface my explainer as to why I make these… I have always loved the craft of placing songs in a specific order to create a unique mix that matches a specific mood or theme. Oftentimes, these end up with an anchor song and then attempt to make something that flows together with that single song. Others, like today, are more just that I have been in a specific mood and chose songs to go with that mood. I’ve explained this theory a bunch of times by now, but I don’t necessarily take for granted that someone has read every blog post, or honestly ANY of the previous Mixtape Mondays posts.
27 – Fear Loathing Flesh
If you have consumed any of my posts to date, you might have gleaned that I am dealing with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. It’s really hard waking up every morning and seemingly hearing about another person who has died from this disease, and it feels really prevalent. I am sure this is just selection bias… for example, I had never noticed a Nissan Quest on the road until my sister-in-law got one, and then I saw them constantly. Brains are great at pattern recognition when you are looking for something specific. I’ve been ina pretty dark place over the last few weeks because I am effectively in a holding pattern with no forward momentum yet… and what feels like a ticking time bomb inside of me. As a result, I have been listening to much darker music lately, and this is a mix that more or less fits that mood. This mix honestly caused me to find a song that was completely new to me, because none of the US streaming options seemed to have Melt by Front 242, so instead I substituted a really interesting cover by Helalyn Flowers. Probably my favorite thing is when one of these Mixtapes turns someone on to a new song or musician that they had never heard of before, and I feel like maybe this one has more chance of that given that it is crossing a few different musical worlds.
The funny thing about this Mix particularly, is that it has what I would consider to be a “phantom anchor”, because this did start off with Down In It by Nine Inch Nails being a sort of thread that I was pulling upon. However, the more songs that fell in place, the less and less that song really felt like it fit anymore. So I removed it and replaced it with Reptile that seemed to fit much more neatly into the emerging theme. I am pretty sure this is not the first time I have attempted to make a mix with that song, but I never actually ended up creating anything that flowed in the way that I wanted it to. Tomorrow is probably going to be an emotional post, because it has been a while since I have done one of my big dumb dumps of feels posts. So be forewarned. I did not sleep super well last night because Gracie has decided that she needs to scream instead of going to sleep, and I know that I did not get proper sleep until after midnight. After wrapping this up, I am going to start getting ready to leave the house and go off to my early morning appointment. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and one way or another, this is going to be a bit of a week of reckoning for me and my “cancer boy” journey.
As always, however, you can find the full list of Mixtapes over on my Archives, and I love it when people listen to them and comment about them. Hopefully, I will have yet another new mix next Monday.
Good Morning Folks! Welcome to the second week in a row of this new series of Mixtapes. For those who have not followed this series, essentially the idea is that each Monday morning, I share a new mix of songs with you. Growing up, mixtapes were very important to my existence. I was blessed with a stereo that had a double cassette deck, and I quickly realized that I could remix my favorite albums into combinations that made sense for me personally. Later on, I would share these mixes with friends, and occasionally love interests… that rarely seemed to appreciate the gravity of what I was giving them. For me, each mix is like a little chunk of my soul that I am carving off to share with you, and everything about them was labored over, from the choice of songs to the order in which they appear. During the pandemic lockdown era I started sharing these takes with you, my readers, and more recently, while dealing with my “cancer boy” era, I have started this back up, and while I am sure I will miss the occasional Monda,y I am hoping to keep this feature of my blog rolling for a while. As of this morning, there are twenty-five different mixtapes available, and you can find all of them on the archives page.
25 – Some Jokes Kill
Oftentimes, one of my mixes starts with a specific song that serves as the anchor. I then built the mix around that song, with it buried somewhere in the middle. This week’s spark of inspiration is Heathens by Twenty One Pilots, and was heard on Edge 104.5 while running some errands. I’ve always liked this song because it was so interesting and largely denied trying to place it in any clean category musically. This made it all the more challenging to build a mix of songs that evokes the same sort of feelings, because it doesn’t neatly fit into a box. This song was used in the soundtrack for Suicide Squad, and while piecing this together, a subtheme of the Joker started creeping in around the edges. While I don’t exactly love the Jared Leto Joker, when I think of the Suicide Squad movie, I think of Joker as a character in general. When I think of The Joker, however, I think of The Killing Joke, which is what ultimately inspired the album cover for this one. At face value, this is a weird mix of tracks, but it flows together far better than it might seem. I’m pretty happy with the end result and proud of this one.
Two weeks in a row, friends… let’s see if I can keep it going for a third week. I’m never terribly great at keeping a feature going for the long haul. At some point, I tend to run out of inspiration, and I know that I will either be dealing with Chemo/Radiation or a Surgery soon… which will probably knock the wind out of my sails a bit. I have the first several songs for the next mix ready to go, because it was inspired by one of my friends. This one took a bit of doing to make it work, so I am hoping since I already have three songs that fit together neatly that the next mix will come together easier. If you are enjoying the return of Mixtape Mondays drop me a line below. If you have listened through all of my Mixtapes, pat yourself on the back for being a true pal… but still drop me a line because I am curious if anyone has done this thing. As always, you can find all of the mixtapes… often times ahead of my Monday morning post over on the archive. I tend to stage things ahead of time so I can share them with friends to help beta test them a bit.
Good Morning Folks! Long time readers of my blog might remember a reoccurring feature called Mixtape Mondays, and in theory I am hoping to bring it back. Essentially growing up the creation of Mixtapes was very important to me. I would painstakingly spend hours going over specific tracks and dubbing them onto a cassette with my stereo until I had crafted the perfect flow of songs that followed a sequence and more or less fit a theme. I would give them to friends… and attempt to bestow them upon lovers, who so rarely appreciated them. However that was not the important part. The important part was crafting what I felt was the perfect sequence of songs that fit into the album format, and more importantly than anything… looped in a way that made sense to be able to listen to it over and over. Over the course of April 19th, 2021 through May 9th, 2022 I released twenty three of these mixtapes, and you can see the entire archive over on the dedicated page. These all sort of represent a piece of my soul, and if you ever want to know anything about me as a person… they are written clearly in these assemblages.
Erasure Shaped Box
I’ve talked a bit about my romantic interest on this blog a few times with the code word of “Erasure”, this is in large part because she really likes that band. I gave her some hopeless homework some time ago, where I asked her to listen through my mixtapes as a way of understanding me a bit better. Unfortunately she is not the sort of person who really listens to disparate assemblages of music, but instead prefers to listen to the same song over and over until it is worn out… before moving on to the next song. So I set out with a rather hopeless mission, of trying to craft a mixtape that I thought she might like. Turns out she did enjoy it mostly, or at least enjoys some of the songs on it. However it was more thought experiment than anything else. Could I craft a mixtape that I also enjoyed centered around a song from Erasure the band, not the person… and make something I would enjoy listening to. I think at least in the later mission I succeeded because I have been listening to this one quite a bit lately. The catalyst was Chains of Love, and then I worked forward and backwards from that song trying to assemble a sequence that makes sense.
Track List
01 – Lips Like Sugar – Echo and the Bunnymen
02 – Space Age Love Song – A Flock of Seagulls
03 – Why Can’t I Be You? – The Cure
04 – World In My Eyes – Depeche Mode
05 – International Bright Young Thing – Jesus Jones
That brings to a close the first of this new batch of Mixtapes. I have no clue how long I will keep this run going, because I have a ton of things going on in my life right now. However there is something about crafting a Mixtape that I find deeply satisfying. I usually start with 30-40 songs and then whittle it down to just the right blend of 13-15 while trying to perfect a sequence in which they flow together nicely. I was driving home yesterday from a trip to Harbor Freight and heard a song on the radio that I have not heard in years, and I think that is probably going to serve as the nugget for the next mix. I would love for this to regularly return to my blog, but I am never certain how much inspiration I will be able to keep going. As always however you can see the entire sequence of all of my mixtapes over on the archive.
Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
