Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up

This video mash-up has been around for a while, dropping Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" into Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", but I only became aware of it recently. Seems to work out far too well. If I ever have the chance to sing "Smells Like Teen Spirit", I just might lapse into "Never Gonna Give You Up", just for laughs...

The Music Project - Most Recent Session, and the Naming Process

We almost had two guitar players for today's session, so we still had one left when one of them went down with an injury. I'm not kidding. My stepnephew was supposed to make his second appearance with us, but did his thumb some serious mischief in an accident while painting a house. He tried to play guitar afterward to test it, and when the bandages kept getting bloodier, it was obvious that this wasn't a good idea.

The new guy, Rob, hadn't yet learned all of the songs, so we primarily focused on the ones he was able to learn for the session. We really only got through four songs with him, though we did each a couple of times, and they were improving on each attempt, so we're going to invite him back and hopefully we'll be able to get more done when he's had the chance to work on more of the songs we've been playing. Unfortunately for me, he doesn't sing, so I'm still on my own in that department unless Bryan or Bob shows up again. And Rob's tastes run heavier than ours, so there are signs that if we let him pick some songs (and it's only right that he should if he'll be sticking around), I'll be putting some serious strain on my voice in the near future.

It was a real joy to stay on bass again and just focus on singing and how the bass worked with the drums for a change. I think Jason and I sounded good together for the most part, if a bit rusty in spots.

After Rob had to leave, I picked up the guitar and Jason and I ran through some new songs we haven't tried before. "Cath" by Death Cab for Cutie probably sounded the best of them. It's definitely not a song I would've chosen myself, but I really like the lyrics.

It seems as though Rob is likely to stick around, and Bryan had shown new interest (at least until he was injured), so Jason raised the issue of naming the group. I'd been thinking we didn't really need a name, since we weren't planning on playing in public apart from the odd party, but it would make some things easier if we called it something. We have a few ideas we like, but nothing finalized yet. If anyone reading this has ideas on the subject, I'm more than willing to listen.

New Toy - Boss ME-50

My wife has been particularly supportive of my musical activities recently and has actually been encouraging me to spend money on it (time remains a trickier issue). We discussed her philosophy behind it, which I won't go into here, but the bottom line is that I don't think this point of view is going anywhere soon. She's been very encouraging regarding my progress on guitar over the last several months. Life is good.

And so I picked up an effects device that I can use for both guitar and bass, spending a couple of hours playing with it this afternoon. Big Fun, and practical in several respects. One of the effects will allow me to play a bass part and a guitar part at the same time, which is especially useful since we have only two players at the moment. At the very least, several of the effects will help fill out the sound, and some of the stranger effects will at least add novelty value for jamming. I've never had a wah pedal before, and had a blast playing bass with it.

My wife actually gave me heck for not coming home on the same trip with a Fender Stratocaster I've had my eye on. I hate to miss such an opportunity, but at the same time, there are more practical things I should probably be putting money into at this point.

May

No, not the month. It's a movie title, and specifically the name of the main character. But on to the point...

This movie is a disturbing little affair I found on Netflix, and wouldn't have taken a chance on pre-Netflix. It focuses on one of my favorite subjects, which is the weirdness behind the person next door. I probably find it so fascinating precisely because it's exactly the sort of thing most people don't like to think about.

May is an attractive, but shy and odd sort of girl (and she has reason to be). In the course of the movie you follow her through a series of attempts to relate to other people, which of course don't work out very well, or it wouldn't be much of a movie. The point is that you really come to feel for her, even as she becomes stranger and stranger. There are no supernatural elements here, and I think they would actually have taken away from the impact. It's a lot more frightening to think that people can do this without some kind of powerful interference than if you had the Irresistible Boogie Man clearly running the show from behind the scenes.

One of the Netflix user reviews described "May" as being more of a character study than a horror film, and I'd say that's exactly correct. There are horrific elements, but they're not the point, really. This one is well worth a rental some time when you're in the mood for something off the beaten path. It's low budget, so don't go in expecting much, but it's quite well done and worth a look. I won't even try to give a numeric rating because your viewpoint on it will depend a lot on what you're looking for in the first place.

The Happiest Man in the World

I wouldn't have expected something like this to be measurable, but apparently some scientists have given it a pretty good try, and the best results were from a Buddhist monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

An organization called the Mind and Life Institute worked with Richard Davidson, the director of the Weisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin. The bottom line result is that people who had spent a lot of time meditating (they compare it to the amount of a time an Olympic athlete puts into training for the Olympics) showed much greater activity in the parts of the brain associated with happiness than the average person, showing as much as 700 to 800 percent more activity. And our boy Yongey was the champion of the bunch, standing out significantly even from the other champion meditators.

The good news for more mainstream folks is that even beginning meditators showed a 10 to 15 percent improvement over average people, so you don't have to devote your life to it to feel results.

So now I'm reading Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche's book, "The Joy of Living". It's interesting stuff, drawing from both Buddhist training and science. His father was a scientist and had a lot of friends who were significant figures in the world scientific community while he was growing up, and they were more than willing to talk with him about science, so he learned everything he could from them. His main point is that the more he learns about science, the more he feels it validates spiritual ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

The most significant application for me has been his detailed descriptions of various meditation techniques, which I've been putting to use. It's far too soon to expect results of any kind, but I don't think I'll ever be bored again. There's too much available to do with a human mind, even in an empty room with nothing in particular to do outwardly. Maybe in a year or two I can honestly claim some of that 10-15% improvement in my mental well being.

Spiky Bits of Ego

A funny realization came to me this morning regarding why I was so especially frustrated about the band reunion not involving any actual playing and the idea of playing music at the picnic falling apart. I'm still correct in saying that I don't need an audience of strangers (though it would be fun to perform once in a while). However, part of me wants to show the old friends I've previously played music with that I've gotten a lot better over the last year or so. On some level, I still see myself as the junior partner I was when I was starting out and still have something to prove to people who know me from that time period. I suppose there's a part of all of us that just never entirely grows up and continues to color our choices in life.

Musical Direction Thoughts

Jason and I haven't been doing much lately (though I have located another guitar player for us to try), but we did get together this past weekend to play. Not much of note to say about it, other than that the main thing we were doing was trying to get musically reacquainted, and I finally got to actually use my new bass amplifier. My guitar playing continues to improve, to the point where I'm considering investing in some better guitar equipment if I'm going to continue to spend this much time playing the instrument.

There was a possibility of some friends getting together to play at a mutual friend's picnic that weekend, but everybody except me seemed to lose enthusiasm and/or confidence as the actual date approached, and it fell through. I had focused most of my practicing for almost a month on the particular songs we'd chosen for that event. Very frustrating, but Jason and I should be able to use two of those songs for our project, so the time wasn't entirely wasted. I'm still far more interested in playing as part of a group than performing by myself, but I can really see why some people end up playing solo when it's so hard to get people on the same page.

I'd hoped to get something musically operational together with people I already knew because the idea was more to play music with people I enjoy as a social event than to form a musically successful band, but since that hasn't worked out I suspect I'm going to have to look further afield for people (thus, the guitar player I found on a message board from a local music store). If he doesn't work out, I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do, but I think a change is necessary. The most likely possibility is that we'll try recording some original material with the two of us and see how much fun we can have doing that. Life has a way of taking you where you need to go (which almost always isn't where you wanted to go), so I'm trying to stay open to possibilities at this point.

That Post-Con Charge

As usual, I came out of DexCon with some inspiration to do new material. I surprised myself by sitting down to put some of the new ideas into a form I could save, and typed out four pages of rough ideas for four different scenarios before I slowed down. Looks like I won't have any trouble getting material together for next year.

I had a little time today and put some more focused effort in on my idea for Paranoia. One of the advantages of writing for this setting is that there's a standard format for adventures, and I still haven't written so much Paranoia that I feel a need to break out of that format yet. There's the mission briefing, the trip to PLC for equipment, the trip to R&D for experimental equipment, and then the actual mission can be relatively brief and simple, since most of the complications come from the character interactions. The climax should be wacky, chaotic, and destructive, then it's back to the briefing room for an epilogue.

Most of the real prep work for this one is going to be in character creation (to make sure we get the complex character interactions during actual play) and a couple of forms that I'll have to generate myself to suit one running joke. I like to have a working title, but one hasn't come to me yet for this one, though there is a particular word I want to include in it.

I've been looking forward to revisiting Paranoia for a while. It's a classic that a lot of convention GMs don't seem to tackle for one reason or another, but players always sign up for it when it's available. The writing of it is already fun.

DexCon - Sunday

After checking out of the hotel, I spent some dealers' room time, picking up copies of Zombies!!! from Twilight Creations and "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen" from Magnum Opus Press. I hesitated about picking up Baron Munchausen because, as much as I enjoy the game myself from my experiences at conventions, I'm not sure that anyone I know locally will be willing to play it. Still, I decided to give them the benefit of a doubt after thinking of a few people who might be willing to at least try it.

My final session of the con was another run of "Clerks 1 1/2", with three players this time. A married couple played Jay and Silent Bob, the third player took Randal Graves, and I NPC'd Dante Hicks when we needed him. It seemed a little strange to have a woman playing Silent Bob, but she nailed it, giving me my biggest single laugh of the session by coming up behind "Jay" in character in a scene best not described in detail but entirely appropriate to the style of a Kevin Smith movie. In the end, Jay and Silent Bob lost pretty much everything they had but reaffirmed their friendship in a big way, while Randal had the best three days of his life in the company of two comely female demons before disappearing entirely from the face of the earth, never to be seen again. Yes, it breaks continuity, but it was funny and made perfect sense for the character. I've had a lot of success with Sorcerer for three years in a row now, and since preparation for it is minimal, it's likely I'll do another one for next year if I can come up with the right idea.

I must say that my last couple of convention experiences have been particularly good, and again I had that special recharge of ideas that keeps me going. I have enough new ideas to keep me going for at least another two years, and enjoyed reconnecting with some people I haven't seen in a while.

DexCon - Saturday

I slept in on Saturday, so no Saturday morning session for me. Saturday afternoon was my GURPS Banestorm session that drew a full house of six players plus four alternates, so needless to say I'll be offering this one again next year. The fantasy material does seem to draw better than my usual preference of horror. Five of my six players were new to me, and the sixth was one I hadn't seen in quite a few years. I really enjoy and appreciate my regulars, but it's also nice to have some new blood to shake things up now and again.

I hadn't been able to schedule a playtest in advance for this story ("Tiger by the Tail"), which involved a lot of the characters being at cross purposes, so I wasn't entirely sure how the dynamic would work out, but it did work out pretty much as planned, with one actual character death and a lot of misunderstandings and manipulations. The tricky part turned out to be having a very young player who was not only new to GURPS, but also didn't quite understand his character's relatively complex role in the situation and was having a hard time taking appropriate action as a result. The other, more minor difficulty was that the bruiser of the group had an aspect to his character that didn't work out as threateningly as I'd hoped. I might need to work on that, and possibly have more for the group to do on the journey. I'd purposely kept that part simple because I wanted the focus to be on the interpersonal situations as opposed to figuring out how to fight a monster, but it might help if there was something slightly more involved to deal with along the way.

Three of the players from that session who were new to me must have enjoyed themselves because they all signed up for my Saturday night GURPS Cabal session ("Lives in the Balance"). I was delighted, because up until that point I'd had no players signed up for that one. And shortly after that group signed up, so did some other people. I ultimately ended up having to turn a player away from that session as well. Quite a difference from having no players at all! Even better, one of the Cabal players was another that I hadn't seen in the last few years, and particularly enjoyed having before. The whole Cabal group was very strong in terms of roleplaying, which left us pressed for time at the end of that session, since the final scene got started a bit later than I'd intended.

There were several really fun bits in this session, too long to detail here. The important things to note are, as usual, the surprises that some of the players brought to the table. For one thing, the new character of the group (a Chinese expert on the manipulation of chi energy) was written in a very straightforward manner, but the player brought a wonderfully wry sense of humor to it (as well as some ambiguity about his real origins) that I'll try to maintain if I ever bring the character back as an NPC, which seems fairly likely. The other major development, which I'll almost certainly keep in the official continuity, was one of the female characters making a startling agreement that I can't include here for risk of spoiling a future session. The player expressed concern that she'd ruined the character by doing so. My reply was "I haven't lost a character; I've gained a storyline". I already have a good idea for the very next Cabal scenario, but now I have another one of the scenario after that! There's a lesson to be learned there. Each time someone thought they'd irreparably damaged a character by making a dramatic decision, they had in fact opened up an exciting new possibility for that character! This is a shining example of the advantage roleplaying has over fiction in my eyes. The interaction with the players often produces Big Fun results that I'd never have written myself.

I finished out Saturday night by participating in the poker tournament and being the very first player eliminated. I tried a more daring strategy than I usually do, and ran into triple queens and triple sixes respectively, concealed by the other player having a pocket pair and flopping the third card in each case. It didn't leave me with many chips, so I went all in with a hand of queen/jack suited, only to have the opposing player pair his king on the flop, and I was done. Granted, I had some bad luck, but have to admit that I made far too many mistakes. I have to do better next year if I play, because you can't be worse than first out!

I took advantage of my early departure to spend some time with Mike Miller and Michelle Mishko in the board game room, then with a fellow Steve Jackson Games rep that I'd only met in passing previously, so it worked out well, all things considered.