Harry Connolly's Blog, page 9

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

On May 19th, this will be available:

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Yep, the folks at Tantor Media have signed on to make audiobooks of some of my work, starting with this one.

Then, in June through September, they’ll be releasing the four core Twenty Palaces novels:

June: Twenty Palaces

July: Child of Fire

August: Game of Cages

September: Circle of Enemies

And once The Iron Gate and The Flood Circle are finished, they’ll be coming out, too, with “The Twisted Path” piggy-backed onto Iron Gate.

So, that’s a lot of my words to put into the auditory centers of your brain. And… that’s it. That’s what I have to say. Audiobooks incoming. I hope you are keeping safe and comfortable.

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:

https://sketchybunnies.tumblr.com/

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, but then 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.

First, your musical interlude, which is Leon Redbone’s cover of Seduced:

RIP, dude.

It’s been longer than I planned since my previous QP post, mainly because I sat down for another binge watch of Stranger Things. I’d been joking about it on social media, but I find the show soothing and I have a prescription for watching endless hours of TV to ease my anxiety. No really, I have the prescription around here somewhere it was right on that table I swear.

Then I came across this Vox mini-documentary about the origins of the 80’s aesthetic that shows tries to replicate. Maybe 75% of this video looks like one of the outfits Millie Bobby Brown wore after her character visited the mall.

But the interesting thing about this is that a person (or group of people, in this case) can be so influential yet remain unrecognized. Until now, obviously.

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.