September 28, 2008: Those little habits that get you down

Habits I have picked up:

~*~*~

- I drink a lot of tea. Iced tea, hot tea, anything. If they made frozen tea (I'm sure they do, but it's probably sweetened and sugared into what's basically a highfalutin snowcone) I'd probably eat that too. This summer, I came to the frightening realization that I went through several days drinking only tea. No water. This scared me, so I started to dilute my iced tea. Half water, half iced tea. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was at home this summer, and my mother and sister preferred to put sweeteners in their tea. I weaned myself off sweet tea years ago to the point where it genuinely tastes disgusting to me. Anyway, my reasoning here was that a glass of water is still a glass of water, even though it's currently mixed in with a glass of tea. I don't know how accurate that is. It seems like it should make sense, but not everything does.

Now I'm away from home where I don't have to dilute tea, but I still do it. It tastes pretty much the same. Most places where you'll be serving your own tea don't make it very strong in the first place. I can't tell a difference. I suppose this is somehow better. It probably gets me a few weird looks, but then, so does drinking unsweet tea in the South.

- Whenever I go to a restaurant or a store or any place that my name will be called, I give a false name. Sarah was in the top 10 most common names for my birthday, according to the SSA site. When someone calls my name, three heads usually turn. (Case in point: as I was typing this someone called it. My head turned.) My middle name is Katherine, which is second only to Elizabeth as the most common middle name for it (I don't actually have stats on that, this is anecdotal). It's nice enough, but nothing florid. So I give false names that I really like. I started small, with names people are used to: Laura, Clara. I'll progress as I get more confident (and farther away from any place where I could be recognized.) Some people do this for privacy reasons; I just do it because it makes me happy. It's lying, technically, but it's lower than a white lie. I introduced this habit to my friends. They quite liked it. This probably had something to do with the fact that I used the feminized name of the actor who is the object of their current obsession.)

- When I do anything involving copy-pasting, I immediately copy something like "the" or "and" immediately afterwards to cover my tracks. I don't need to cover my tracks and don't think I ever did. But it's habit.

A medley of Halloween costume groups that I wish would happen

In an ideal world, I would be in groups with people who dressed as:

~*~*~

- American Doll Posse. Do you know how amazing this would be?! I call Clyde. If we're going by hair color/style I look more like Pip but I *am* Clyde.

- The *rest* of the people from The Line, The Cross & The Curve. Come on, I was almost Miranda Richardson's character (and may still be if I can't find that red skirt!) Lindsay Kemp's guy would be fun. It's perfect.

- Pirates of Penzance. My first attempt at this (non-Halloween) was a bit of a miserable failure so I'd like to redeem myself. I have the VHS.

~*~*~

More added as I think of them.

September 23, 2008: Music extravaganza, Halloween, and two short poems

(Three of these are Kate Bush with the costume I will wear. Not shown: The red shoes. One of these is me, with my old Halloween costume.)


It's September. This is close to October, which is close to November, which is close to December (SHADY CIRCLE! but I digress), which is close to the end of the year where everyone, including ecto members, will be putting out their year-end best-of lists.

But I haven't flat-out loved anything this year. I've liked some things, and loved a few, but nothing stands above the rest yet.

Well, that isn't true. I liked every single Kristin Hersh track from Speedbath, and loved most of them, but that isn't technically being released, as an album, until 2009. This is tricky when it comes to dates but since she said the versions were works-in-progress, I'm going to bump that back. Which means that I have my best album of 2009 already. I'd bet money.

ScribbleWiki is down so I can't consult what I bought this year. The fact that I don't really remember isn't promising. I do remember that I bought more from this year than I did last year. You can't really make inferences from a sample size of two, but since I managed to cobble together something resembling a list (even though there wasn't much that *didn't* make the list) last year, I should be able to do it this year. It's not working.

Maybe 2008 isn't such a good year for me. 2003 and 2007 were great. Maybe it's a gap year. I don't know. But I DO know there are several holes this year that I need to fill, and maybe one of them will get onto my best-of list. So here you go. Things I really need to pick up as soon as possible.

~*~*~

Veda Hille - This Riot Life: Has been out since spring. She's one of the Ecto goddesses and I liked what's been streamed on her Myspace. I have no excuse. My only excuse is that it isn't through Amazon (where I get trickling gift certificates) and it's in Canadian dollars (which have shattered my childhood by becoming worth more than the US dollar. Congratulations, economy.) That's hardly an excuse.

Lisa Hannigan - Sea Sew: I have this in the mail, from Ireland. It's above water right now, probably. Unless it got shot down, Missile Command style, in which case it is below water. I hope that didn't happen. "Pistachio" still gets stuck in my head.

Emiliana Torrini - Me & Armini: This one blindsided me. I read a blurb about it somewhere and my first thought was "She's still making music?" I never thought she wasn't, mind you, but I hadn't been following her. I liked parts of _Love in the Time of Science_ a lot. _Fisherman's Woman_ was nice but very innocuous. But nothing in anything she's ever done prepared me for how bracing and amazing "Gun" was. Both because of the music - palpably dangerous, just like the title implies - and because of how unexpected it was. (I know that's circular.)
Camille - Music Hole: I've heard decent things about this, on ecto and elsewhere. I might start with an older album, though.

Thea Gilmore - Liejacker: I've heard EXCELLENT things about this on ecto. From what I can tell it might lie a bit too far into the contemporary placid-folk realm for my tastes, but I'm probably making a too-quick judgment.

~*~*~
The other issue is that Halloween is soon. Last year I was sick in bed and, at the last minute, decided I wasn't really that sick and threw together a stereotypical secret agent costume.

This year I'm planning in advance - a novel concept! The group I'm going with is doing a Mighty Boosh theme - this British sketch comedy show which I'm unfamiliar with. So I decided I'm going as Kate Bush from The Line, The Cross and The Curve,

The thing is that the costume is going to be a bit spendy. I found the perfect shoes but they're actual ballet pointe shoes so they cost a bit. I can't find the top anywhere, and the skirt is somehow even more difficult. I have over a month but still. I need to get this right! Luckily I have a few weeks' more paychecks, and I start a new job soon. So.

~*~*~

Two short poems to make your day. One familiar, one less so (?):

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

- Margaret Atwood

Santa Claus
How would it be
if you gave it to me
all at once for Christmas
Three dark sapphires
all of the same size. Love,

- Marianne Moore

September 14, 2008: Freudian riffs and copyediting and music

I did a lot of procrastinating on that Freud paper. Involving the following comments:

- I want to become a professor, and have my dissertation and area of study be Freud, and teach a class on psychoanalysis or literary criticism or something. Just so I can get a crappy paper by an undergrad and grade it with this: "IDiotic."

- The whole ego, id, and superego thing sounds like a comic premise. By day, mild-mannered Ego is a manager at a generic office. By night, he is SUPEREGO, out to fight crime and socially unacceptable impulses! But if he encounters the uncanny, he becomes ID, villain extraordinaire!

The aforementioned instance of "Freud" on my blog makes two in a row. Hence the shiny new 'freud' tag, which I may or may not ever use again.

~*~*~

Kristin is going to be playing some non-folk songs at Shady Circle! Don't get me wrong. I love folk songs. But I also love her original songs SO MUCH.

I also added a 'kristin hersh' tag, which probably WILL get used again.

~*~*~

Kara DioGuardi is going to be a judge on American Idol, which you probably know if you follow these things. I probably shouldn't like her. She's written for Paris Hilton, among others, and she went to Duke.

But 'among others' is a really, really broad category which includes many songs that I like. I wouldn't call her ecto; a few pop songwriters have gotten into their canon, such as Chantal Kreviazuk, but not many. I still like her, though, and happen to love quite a few songs from her side project Platinum Weird.

The backstory: Kara and Dave Stewart (from the Eurythmics) wanted to collaborate, but they didn't think, for some reason, that being Kara DioGuardi and Dave Stewart would provide enough buzz. So they constructed an elaborate backstory about it being a lost '70s band. I don't quite understand the reasoning here. Whenever people construct elaborate false backstories, the truth gets out (...or does it?) In this case, its main accomplishment is getting a lot of people to compare you unfavorably to Fleetwood Mac or whatever press-release mention they latch onto.

These days, they're best known for the song "Taking Chances," which was covered by Celine Dion. That's generally a punchline. I'm not going to defend that song either, because I don't like it any more than you do. Celine Dion punchlines are perfectly fine with me (even though I liked Sarah Brightman's first cover of her.) There's a whole rest of an album there, though. It's a pop album, decently done, and I happen to like a lot of certain parts of it. Namely, I've got what is possibly infinite patience for relatively fast minor-key pop songs. Witness.

There are several tracks I just don't like. There's one I like part of: "Somebody to Love" (not a Queen cover). It has a decent beginning, which sounds far earlier in the '00s than 2006, when all this was released. Everything about it is good except for the chorus, which is generic and just doesn't fit in any way that I can figure out. This is coming from someone to whom the twists in, say, Throwing Muses songs make perfect sense. This twist doesn't. The next tier comprises "Will You Be Around" and "I Pray," relatively fast and relative slow minor-key songs respectively. I like them pretty well, but don't love them.

So this brings me to my two favorites: "Avalanche" and "Crying at the Disco." The former is raucous, punchy pop-rock, and I love it. The latter, as the title suggests, is electronic, which makes it a bit of an anomaly. The piano bits in the chorus, in particular, owe a lot to "Children" by Robert Miles. There's still plenty of pop-rock in there, and the overall effect is pretty great.

~*~*~

Other songs I've been listening to a lot these days:

"Call Me" and "Green" from TM's first album. I can't get past these two songs because they are respectively so perfect. Also, "Man On The Scene" from the Production Club album, which is an Incredible Moses Leroy track. When I decided I loved this song I went and looked up the rest of his stuff, none of which I was particularly crazy about. Oh well.

September 14, 2008: Dreams!

To commemorate not having to write another paper about Sigmund Freud, I thought I'd post some more excerpts from my dream journal of sorts (I say 'of sorts' because it hasn't been updated since August 5.)

~*~*~

May 21, 2008: "We had to escape because someone was chasing us. We did this by turning into dust specks and floating above the river. First we stopped at a shop where you can change your appearance, Sims-like, but they tracked us down so we had to dust-speck escape. So we did, and got to a town. We walked around but couldn't do much of that because we were afraid people would recognize us. Eventually we got to another river and Satan was there. He got really mad."

May 30, 2008: Unremarkable except for the fact that I coined the phrase "driveway of drama" in this dream.

July 4, 2008: Shootings in the English building! (Except it didn't look like the English building in my dream. It looked more like the music building.

August 5, 2008: "One of the unfortunate 'dreaming about your alarm' dreams. so anyway, I had my clock radio alarm clock, and the alarm wouldn't stop going off no matter what I tried. I unplugged it, I poured water over it, I took it apart, I beat it up with a hammer, etc; none of it works. Eventually I just had to get rid of it, so I took it over to our neighbors' house (in this dream, I still lived at my old house; these were the neighbors over the fence) and dumped it in their Dumpster. This did nothing to muffle the sound. So I get back to our house and close the door. Still nothing. I had to explain to my mother what was going on. And then, of course, I woke up and turned the alarm off the normal way."

September 10, 2008: Apropos of nothing

This entry is not bragging. I re-read it and it came off a bit jackassy. I promise I'm not a jackass, and I'm not arrogant.

~*~*~

I have fooled people into thinking I have perfect pitch, but I don't. Let me explain. If you play a note, I can tell you what it is if you give me a few seconds. If you tell me to sing a note, I can do it if you give me a few seconds. Everyone thinks that's perfect pitch.

But it isn't automatic. It isn't instant. I can only do it because I remember this one phrase from the end of a song we sang in high school chorus. It's been years and I still remember it. I periodically remind myself of it from time to time, and it's always the same.

I didn't even sing it. A male soloist sang it. I've forgotten the soloist's name. Now that I think about it, I've even forgotten what he looks like. His voice isn't all that clear, either. I can call it up but I'd wouldn't recognize it if I encountered him singing somewhere. Part of it is probably that the voice pattern wasn't all that distinctive. Which isn't that surprising; every genre of music has vocal tones associated with it. It's how you can tell death metal from teen pop. Anyway, his voice was pop music male falsetto. Male falsetto has a general sound in pop music. It doesn't deviate.

But I do remember what he sang. The exact ad-libs too. I can reproduce it (although not in falsetto, of course; it's pretty much in the middle of my voice.) None of that matters. More important is the pitch. (How dehumanizing, I know, I know...)

The phrase, the way I remember it, ends on an F sharp. (God knows what the actual piece ended on. Google didn't know. But that's not important, it was a throwaway high school chorus piece. I'll never sing or hear it again.) I want to get from there to C so I can figure stuff out easily. So in my mind, I make the F sharp a fifth, go down to a B, and then go up a half-step to C. All of this is thought out. I don't have to figure out the pattern again, but I still have to go through it. And then when I have the C I can get to wherever I want to go.

As you can tell, that's a horribly inefficient way of going about things. I sing the phrase, then go through the pattern to get to C, then go to whatever note I need. (This makes it quicker for me to sing a note than to recognize it, incidentally.) The thing is that I've never had much music theory. I've had enough to know the basic keys you sight-sing in. But I have no idea what notes are in a F sharp major scale. I can sing it but I don't know what I'm singing. If I memorized them, I could do this faster, and thus fool people better.

(I looked F sharp major up on Wikipedia just now. It has SIX SHARPS in it. This must be a cruel trick. Of all the phrases to get permanently lodged in my psyche, it had to be the one that was ridiculous to memorize.)

On the outside, this resembles perfect pitch, but it isn't. I'm cheating. I have a cheat sheet in my head. Right now it's more of a cheat algorithm, but still. I'm referring to something external that somehow got internalized. I've always wanted to meet a person who can do it legitimately.

I do get all the annoyances people report. If someone's singing and goes sharp or flat, I notice. (This isn't just other people, mind you - if I start going sharp or flat, I notice that too.) If I start to sing a song without listening to it - I do this idly - I'll notice if I started in the wrong spot and I'd have to stop and start over because otherwise it will really irritate me.

Apparently this is genetic. My mother has it too. If I'm at a recital or watching American Idol or something with her, we cringe at the exact same spots. (Oh yes, and a note to the general public: if they say something is "pitchy," they're right, it's not just a filler word.) But I couldn't always do it. It's recent. When I first started taking voice lessons I'd be practicing at home and my mother would tell me I was sharp. She might as well have told me I was purple; I had no sense of it whatsoever.

~*~*~

Why is this important? One of my puzzles involves music and pitches. In order for this to work, I had to rewrite the >SING command to allow you to sing specific pitches: >SING D-SHARP, for instance. (Hyphenated so I didn't have to screw too much with parse_name.) (I didn't actually rewrite it all myself; I'm not proficient enough for that. I used the same topic system for ask/tell.) In order for THAT to make sense, the PC has to have perfect pitch.

This is where people will accuse me of being unrealistic. Oh, sure, they'll say, YOUR PC has to have perfect pitch because she's so much more special than everyone else, how incredibly Mary Sue, etc. I have a decent narrative reason for it, though. Or an excuse. Probably an excuse.

But what I'm wondering is if that will even make sense. I mean, on a certain level, it doesn't have to. I'm working with text, not music. It doesn't matter whether someone can recognize they're in C major if I tell them they are. And then they can imagine it, or play it on a piano, or not bother, at their leisure. Would it be offputting, though?

~*~*~

From Kristin Hersh's Twitter comes the wonderful new word "aufblasenfreude". I really want to use this word all the time, but it'd probably get me arrested. And then the media would start blaming Throwing Muses for all the world's violence.

~*~*~

The original title of this was September 10, 2001. This disturbs me.

Introcomp 2008

(My first formal set of reviews!)

I was underwhelmed this year. While I like the idea of IntroComp - anything that reduces the looming barrier of a full-fledged IF game enough to make people confident is OK with me - the execution left some things to be desired. My number one comment:

- Flesh out your implementation! It's bad enough when full games have sparse implementation, but these are just intros. You're working, presumably, with a lot fewer rooms and objects. You have even less of an excuse. Your job is to hook the player, and when you've got spotty implementation, I am not hooked.

I didn't play Phoenix's Landing or Bloody Guns because they did not work with my current interpreters. The other four I did play, and have thought on. Spoilers ahead. For everything.

It is also worth noting that I have not completed a game of my own.

~*~*~

Bedtime story

I appreciate that a great deal of work has been done making the parser respond to past tense commands. It's still jarring. The first command I type is "ABOUT", and "The prince then about" makes me cringe a bit.

Other than that, it was a good start. The stuff about the boy was sufficiently cute, and the major puzzle was decently done and well-clued. I'd say it's perfect difficulty, actually. Not extremely hard, but you're telling a bedtime story. A few grammatical errors (not counting parser stuff) but nothing big. In fact, re-reading my other reviews, this is the only game that I don't have any major complaints about. So that counts for...quite a bit.

(Side note: I can't read --glaring light... without thinking of Spider and Web. I wonder if this was intentional.)

(Side-side-note: "The prince then abouted" works. This makes me giddy somehow.)

~*~*~

Fiendish Zoo

Decent idea, needs to be fleshed out more. If you mention objects in a room description, there at least needs to be a "You don't need to refer to that." message. If you have cabinets, I should be able to open them. If you have a cat, I'm going to try to pet and hug and kiss the cat because I like cats, and a "Keep your mind on the game." message is rather offputting and creepy. I did like the ashglobe. And the room descriptions, at least, seemed to be plausibly zoolike and demonic. If only the rest was implemented.

The setup is rather odd, too. The game seems...incomplete. Yes, IntroComp, they're all incomplete, but this is incomplete in an empty, fourth-wall-breaking way. Like so:

>nw
There is more of the Fiendish Zoo that way ... but you've reached the end of this intro version....

I have? Well, gee, OK. I was hoping to run into the loose cockatrice and be turned to stone, or figure out where this cat was coming from. Damn. Oh well.

~*~*~

~*~*~

Nine-Tenths of the Law

On my first playthrough, I never got past the polyp stage. I appreciated that the scene was decently implemented and all, but I'm still a sessile polyp on a hill. I can't do much of anything. There is a zombie wearing decaying clothes and chained to the hill. The game is telling me, repeatedly, that I need to infest the zombie. Awesome. I only figured that out half an hour ago. I can't move, or at least not with text adventure commands. Somehow I need to get my miserable self into the zombie brain. Here we go.

>infest zombie
That's not a verb I recognise.

>enter zombie
That's not something you can enter.

>get on clothes
They're not something you can enter.

>get on chain
That's not something you can enter.

>touch zombie
You bend your stalk and wave your fronds towards the shambling zombie. You sense: The zombie's skin is dry and leathery, scaly and flaky in some thick rough patches, puffy and pustulent in other areas.

>enter skin
You can't see any such thing.

>make zombie my host
That's not a verb I recognise.

>go to zombie
You can't see any such thing.

>be zombie
That's not a verb I recognise.

>turn into zombie
You can't see any such thing.

>attack zombie
A lack of appendages severely limits your ability to interact with your surroundings.

The philosophical hints did nothing for me. The practical hints were not very practical. So I said screw it, and gave up.

A second playthrough, spoiled, revealed that the proper command was >POSSESS ZOMBIE.
Why is this a problem? Let me count the ways:

1) It's not part of standard text adventure vocabulary, which wouldn't automatically be a problem but...
2) Parasitism is not generally defined in terms of 'possession'. Parasites infest their host. Possession is horror fiction stuff. And:
3) The game doesn't make it clear that you're not a parasite. There's no intro, you're just thrown into your sessile existence.

Apparently there were two hints: the title, and one of the messages which was something like "You are possessed by a strange urge..." This isn't enough. When somebody knows exactly what they want to do, and the only difference between their idea and your solution is one of a synonym, there are problems.

The rest of the game was decently detailed - I found a few bugs, but nothing too drastic. The inventory limit was annoying - I understand that if I'm missing an arm I won't be able to carry much, but still. I figured out that colors had some sort of role, but at least in my interpreter, they changed haphazardly. The damage/hitpoint system seemed superfluous, especially when applied to, say, the door.

Overall: A promising idea, but the guess-the-verbiness of the beginning kind of spoiled it for me.

~*~*~

Storm Cellar

"This game contain scenes which are violent, sexual and vulgar, and may be considered cruel."

I really hope this is just a modifier problem.

OK, so I'm in a car. I look around. And it crashes, and I die. Great. That's it?

Turns out it isn't. I was supposed to stop. The problem is that the oncoming truck doesn't actually appear unless you examine the scenery. So you could go 100 turns or more without anything happening. (Yes, you can, I tried it.) There are more things problematic about the scene, actually; one message (for "sleep") says you can understand how someone can get into a trance, but not you, you're wide awake, and then at first "z" actually does put you into a trance. It could be irony, I guess, but it seems like an oversight.

I should give it points for implementing responses for a lot of driving-esque verbs, though.

Anyway. Your car breaks down and you lose your keys and you end up in a creepy motel haunted by cliches - oops, sorry, I mean spirits and dead people. To the game's credit, it gets the sketchiness about right. The hotel seemed genuinely like a no-tell place, and the rooms were distinctive, which is good. But some things are just handled strangely. Unlocking something and failing first produces the Spook-of-the Week, but then spits out a generic message on the second try. This just seems weird. Unlocking the doors to the rooms was a major parsing pain in the ass.

They're not ALL cliches, mind you. It's not all bad, either. In fact, a lot of it is quite good. A bit more polishing, though, I think.

~*~*~

This sounds grumpy. I should probably say that none of the games were horrible, or even bad. But nothing was spectacular. I'm curious what will win. If it's something I played my money's on "Nine-Tenths of the Law," guess-the-verb aside, since apparently I'm the only one who had that problem.

September 5, 2008: Miscellany

How to Become an Idiot, in Three Easy Steps!

1) Decide that you suddenly Know the Answer to All Things Music

2) Decide that the world needs to know of your navelly treasures

3) Impose arbitary rules that even the unenlightened have long since discarded

The result:

Idiocy!

I link to the writeup because, for that extra touch of jackass, the site requires registration. Has Bugmenot taught you NOTHING?

On the Kate Bush mailing lists it's a inside joke that if one is confronted by a person who refuses to acknowledge her genius, a large truck should be sent to their residence blaring her music at top volume.

I find this a fine solution, but Kate Bush might not fit Gallagher's loudrocky criterion. So allow me to substitute 50 Foot Wave. "Pneuma." Music with a message!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98sOgOmQdY0

~*~*~

The soundtrack to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was recently released on iTunes. Damn.

I've mentioned how much I dislike iTunes, but none of my arguments work this time. "DRM!" doesn't work because this doesn't have any. "Liner notes!" doesn't work because they're provided on the website. All this leaves me with is a resigned "Um... I like CDs," which is basically materialism in a pseudo-elevated form.

I remember reading - somewhere - that the soundtrack was eventually going to be released as a CD. I cannot wait.

Hey, I wonder if any of the songs will become overdone audition songs! My first reaction was "no, it's not mainstream enough" but there have been enough press articles. Theatre people are always looking for non-overdone songs from the niches of the theatre world! But their criteria usually exclude new songs, and besides, those niches are more "Off-Off-Broadway" and less "Web hit." It would be like that time I sang "Think of Me" at a Rocky Horror audition. Yes. Cringe. I'm doing it too.

But I'll rate the songs on my "Most Likely To Blow Up" meter, devised by someone with less-than-amateur theatre experience. NOTE: This isn't a measure of how good the songs are, because I love them all! Some great songs just aren't tailored to auditions. People usually warn you off Sondheim because the songs are difficult for accompanists and singers - if singing a cappella, this difficulty magnifies. Frank Wildhorn ballads, on the other hand, are big and showy and would work great for auditions if everyone else didn't think so as well. (Plus, they all sound the same.)

SUMMARY DISCLAIMER: Don't take audition advice from me.

I think "Everyone's a Hero" would work great with one caveat - It'd have to be a fairly modern show with a director who won't be offended. Yes, the point is that Captain Hammer is a jackass, but in this point in the musical that is abundantly clear.

"Brand New Day" is my other favorite song, but it's better on stage. I can't picture it with a piano accompaniment. It needs those crashing guitars. It also falls under the 'really difficult' category - Neil Patrick Harris said in an interview that he had about thirty takes. I can't do it yet even without nerves.

~*~*~

September 1, 2008: A melange. Long!

I just reached level 3 in "Askville bonus". If you find my morals, please return them. I wish I could say they're sorely missed. That is all.

~*~*~

One of the rooms in my game is inspired by Kristin Hersh's "Krait". This may not be precisely what she meant when she set up her R/W section on CASH Music. Certainly it's a bit more difficult to link a .z5 (or a .z8, which is where I suspect this is going with my horribly inefficient noobcode). You *could*, but most people wouldn't know what to do with it.

I'm still figuring out how to convey this. If I was writing Zork I'd simply call it the "Krait Room," but descriptions have advanced past that. You have to do - gasp! - more work.

It wouldn't be terribly out of place to have a snake - because a krait is a kind of snake - slithering around in there. Having the snake be a hallucination would probably be plagiarism, rather than homage; besides, in the context of the game, it'd be much creepier to have an actual snake in there. The PC is claustrophobic, but does not hallucinate, to my knowledge.

~*~*~

Now for the meat of the entry. I like teen pop. I've talked about this before, and it'll get a full treatment later, but this entry will focus on Shut Up Stella. Kay Hanley managed them, which is enough of an endorsement for me. I'll edit with reviews of other songs, but...

"Watch Me Rain" resembles nothing on their list of comparisons, nor on any reviews' comparisons. Clearly none of them ever saw Rent, because it's a successor to "Seasons of Love," from the repeating piano motif to the lyrics: a shimmery existential crisis, less angsty than conflictedly pretty. The background vocals after the second chorus are ambivalent, not harmonies so much as afterthoughts, and beautiful in a way that I have not found anywhere outside teen pop. It's swoon-like and near perfect - 'near', because I have to dock it for the timbre of the vocals leading into the chorus. I can't decide whether it's supposed to sound like an Asian stereotype or just sound forced. Either way, it doesn't fit the rest of the song, which floats.

And it doesn't matter whether the song goes past "current mood:" to emotion; it doesn't matter how many executives it took to get it out there, or how much failed marketing happened. It isn't the kind of label you're on, it's what you do with it.

~*~*~

I say "failed marketing" because, of course, Shut Up Stella was dropped before their album came out. Since then, all three have moved on to solo careers. You might think that you could determine what her solo work would be like from the band, but it isn't that simple. It's easy to tell which parts fan_3 is on, of course, but the vocalists, without liner notes to help, are a bit more complicated. The copy doesn't help much either. So you have to actually listen to the stuff. No problem, let's go.

Jessie Malakouti, having quit the band first, would logically have the head start, and that's indeed how it turned out. The copy described her as the "singer-songwriter" of the group - as if there was only one, but of course there's more going on there. The term "singer-songwriter," of course, has connotations tied up with it that, say, "singer-guitarist" does not. The term is coded female; men are marketed as singer-songwriters, but only if their music has a softer quality. If I said "singer-songwriter" you would probably picture a woman. A young woman, too. A Lilith Fair type - which is not a pejorative, either! If I had a nickel for every music review that dismissed albums as reminding them of Lilith Fair, I would have several handy projectiles.

John Conroy, or his ghostwriter, knows about these connotations. If you discount the 'enigmatic bombshell' (great band name, perhaps) reference at the beginning, he's got them all: "introspective...raw emotional honesty." So if you extrapolate from that, you'd expect Jessie's solo work to be something like Alanis Morrisette, perhaps, or Michelle Branch maybe.

It doesn't turn out that way. Your first clue would be her Myspace page, prominently plastered with pictures and telling about the two older guys who are her managers. Her page describes her music as pop/electro/indie-crunk (the last one a misnomer; there's nothing indie about this in any definition. Which isn't a bad thing, but at least label your music right. I'm not talking about people who put, say, "Melodramatic Popular Song" in there either. That's different and you know how.) They're standard-issue photos: tousled hair, enough makeup to paint a small truck. One of them has her wearing a Cheap Trick shirt. This doesn't predict her music either, before you ask.

She has been blessed with atrociously bad copy. Now, I've done ghostwriting (see above note about morals) and I've written my share of bad copy. But come. the fuck. on. This plumbs new depths of suck. Let's dissect it:

"The music world has a new sex kitten!" - Ugh. I vote for this term's excisement from the English language.

"Formally with Shut Up Stella, an American pop, rock/hip hop group" - Good job quoting
Wikipedia. It's "formerly."

"Malakouti is EMI's latest find" - I hate it when press releases describe people as "finds". Hate it.

"Madonna angst" - Madonna is not angsty.

"Step aside Britney, here's something leaner!" - Hoo boy, let's close with a real fucking lowblow, managing to objectify and/or insult both sides of the comparison in one fell swoop. It doesn't even make sense, either. Britney isn't musically relevant at the moment, nullifying any need to "step aside"; 'lean' isn't a slang term the way Copyhack seems to think it is, making the elementary-schoolness of it ("Ha ha! Britney is FAT!") that much more blatantly obvious.

Now then. On to the music. Kay Hanley endorses it. I love you, Kay, but I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you, for the most part. There are a few good songs that I've heard, but they're buried in too much puke-marketing.

The single, "Trash Me," was rumored to be offered to Vanessa Hudgens, which wouldn't really work since her marketing, at least now, is supposed to focus on an innocent image. Apparently the video was self-funded. The song isn't bad, if too vocoder-heavy for my taste. "Check N Out" is decent in an Ace of Base way, and "Crash Bang Baby" is decent pop-trance stuff.

Now for the songs I don't like, which counteract those. "My Viagra." Yeah, enough said. Even if I could turn off the cynical part of me who wonders how much Pfizer paid the lyricists, it's still an incredibly dumb metaphor. I'm not sure it's even possible to play a lyric like "You are my Viagra" as straightforward. It doesn't work here. The less said about "No. 1 Big Booty," the better. Did anyone even miss skits? Especially faux-cutesy anti-intellectual ones?

It irritates me because I'm not sure this is all that she's capable of. It's presumptive of me to assume this, of course, but I refuse to believe there's not at least SOME posturing going on. I don't approach things trying to be negative. I found an interview with some Swedish radio station and watched it to see if it could clear this up. It didn't bode well when at 0:37, I was treated to this gem from the interviewer:

You write...That's really unique that girls can do that.

*headdesks, then smites with her +5 sword of ecto RAGE*

To be honest, I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the interview after that. So I still have no idea. I wish I wasn't so disappointed.

~*~*~

Kristen Wagner was described as the "consummate surfer chick," which tells more about personality than music, I think, Beach Boys aside. One of Shut Up Stella's podcasts had mentioned something about her record collection, so I had a bit more hope here. Also of note: Fan and Kristen collaborate in their songs. Jessie doesn't. I'm not going to read anything into this. It's just a note.

Now this is more like it. "Get Into Heaven" evokes 80's goth and electro in what I can only describe as a joyous nihilism. "Stranger's Eyes" I don't like as much, but there's nothing wrong with it. This sounds more like a progression from SUS,

~*~*~

And then there's fan_3, who now goes by Fannius. Her attitude towards the whole experience is pretty succinctly summed up in "Major Label Blues," a pretty fun listen.

I prefer the single "Girlfriend" though. Apparently it was written for Dinah Shore Weekend, or at least the video was filmed there. There's plenty of controversy about the event - too Girls Gone Wild-y? or is that just the marketing? - but I'll focus on the song, which is breezy, summery, and quite pleasant, silly lyrics aside.

~*~*~