Accelerants in Life

I wasn't sure what I was going to write for today --all I knew is that I wanted to write something to get out of the funk I've found myself in writing fiction-- when this video dropped from Bookborn:

Now, to be fair, I've found Bookborn's videos engaging, and I don't agree with all of her takes on things, but I found that her videos do make me think, which is a good thing. This one is about fandoms, and how fandoms have gotten more strident and whatnot in the past several years with the rise of the algorithm controlling what is on your feed in social media.

As an example, she mentioned that she's a Taylor Swift fan, and with the new album release she went ahead and listened to it by herself first before she got online. When she got there, she discovered that all hell had broken out about the album. This is but one example she had about how toxic fandoms had become these days.

To my mind, my first comment would have been

Since I've referenced it once, you bet I'm gonna
bring it out from time to time.

It's not as if the Internet created Gatekeepers and assholes and purists in fandoms. Like any item of technology, it is an accelerant. I'm not going to say that we were all one big happy family in Ye Olde Days of SF&F (and music and whatever) fandom, because everybody had opinions and frequently there were assholes you had to deal with. Typically, however, the reach of said assholes wasn't very far, typically the local area you lived in. It was only with the advent of the Internet and various forms of social media did people become louder and more obnoxious over a much more distant area. 

Just remember, kids, that whenever you're seeing someone espousing something on the internet that's just one person's opinion. Go and form your own. And remember, when someone says "EVERYONE BELIEVES THIS", don't believe them. Just don't. That could be the social media algorithm's fault that you're not seeing the other opinions. Examine sources, and trust but verify.

What the F is Filk?

If you're not familiar with the term "filk", it's a specific subgenre of music that references SF&F media, placing the SF&F topic into a musical framework. We're not talking about a soundtrack, or even something like Toss a Coin to Your Witcher...

...but typically a replacement of lyrics of an already existing piece of music.* Like oh, say, replacing the lyrics in the Beatles' song Penny Lane with an ode to Middle-earth:

From my copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook,
Page 144. Apparently a lot of people
on Goodreads don't understand that
The Tolkien Scrapbook's origins
are long before Tolkien himself was
ever taken seriously by academia,
much less the Peter Jackson films.

Filk appeared with the rise of the SF&F convention scene, and I suppose you could argue that the bastardization of the words "folk music" is where "filk" got it's name. My guess is that we're talking about, oh, the 1960s or so given the rise of folk music in the popular consciousness at the time. 

Despite it's age, some people have issues wrapping their heads around filk; even if they are inclined to accept cosplay there tend to be raised eyebrows at filk songs and performers. My suspicion is that because cosplay is primarily a visual medium --and let's be honest, there are a lot of attractive cosplayers out there-- it's easier to accept cosplay than filk. 

You get the idea.
From BlizzardTerrak
via Pinterest.

Now, if you like your football/soccer, you're probably familiar with the replacement --or insertion-- of lyrics specific to your team, such as that found with such creative editing of Classical Music or Hymns, so the basic concept isn't completely unfamiliar to people. This isn't the adoption of an existing song as your club's theme song, such as Cincinnati Bengals' Welcome to the Jungle, Liverpool FC's You'll Never Walk Alone, or Crystal Palace's Glad all Over by The Dave Clark Five,

but something like a full version of this sort of thing, taking the melody from Land of Hope and Glory to tell Nottingham Forest (among others) to go piss off:

***

You're probably wondering where the hell this post came from, and I'll be honest this wasn't what I had in mind when I sat down to write on Tuesday. (That post will come later.) In this case, I pulled up YouTube to listen to something --I was originally thinking of something mellow to get through my morning workload, such as French Impressionistic pieces, but instead this old chestnut appeared on my feed:

And so I went down that rabbit hole for the next half hour, listening to piece after piece, because when you start YouTube just starts throwing everything vaguely similar at you.

A lot of those pieces are listed as "WoW Parody" or "[insert franchise here] Parody", which I guess filk could fall under,

but I also would argue that the term parody makes light of what is clearly a labor of love. It's fine for the music to be self-aware and not take itself seriously, but I typically think of a parody as something that can be easily dismissed when people want to discuss "real music". Sometimes, however, the "real music" gets overshadowed by the parody to the point where the parody is more well known than the original piece it was based on, such as Weird Al's I Lost on Jeopardy eclipsing The Greg Kihn Band's (Our Love's in) Jeopardy. 

This isn't a plea for filk to be taken seriously --after all, it already has its own website at Bowling Green State University in northwest Ohio-- but more a celebration of the form. Or raising some visibility to it.

Locally we have a true community radio station, WAIF-FM 88.3 MHz. There are only a handful of community radio stations in the US these days where you can donate money, become a member, and actually get air time for your show/program. These are distinctly different than public radio stations, which are far more organized and tend to be affiliated with colleges/universities or other non-profit organizations. Community radio stations are just that; they take their mission very seriously, even if the programs themselves can skew very oddball at times. (I personally recommend listening to the Rockin' and Surfin' Show on Saturday nights; if you like your surf music, you'll love that show.)

From WAIF-FM.

And when I said anybody could put on a program, I meant anybody. Back when I first started working in IT in the mid-late 90s, I knew a guy from work who had a radio show on WAIF that was strictly filk music. You might think that a once a week hour long show might run out of filk music to play after a short time, but he was able to come up with new filk pieces on a regular basis. I've no idea when he stopped producing the show as it's no longer on their lineup, but it's still a nice reminder that there have been people out there, raising filk music's visibility.

So have a couple of pieces of filk music for your day...

It wouldn't be Christmas without

HP Lovecraft, I suppose...

For those Honor Harrington fans...

And it wouldn't be a filk session

without a Star Trek song, by way

of Kermit the Frog...

*That's not to say that some people don't expand the definition of "filk" to cover new pieces of music based on SF&F topics. Or RPG topics. Or video game topics. I mean, there is the band Harry and the Potters, after all.

Just a Pinch of Thyme

I wanted to put aside some of my foibles in The Burning Crusade Classic for the moment and talk about something near and dear to my heart.

Food.

You know, this stuff.
From masterclass.com, but apparently
it's an Adobe stock photo.

 

If you've ever gamed with friends --whether it's playing D&D or Settlers of Catan around a table, playing Smash Bros around a television, or kicking a soccer ball around in the yard-- you know that food and drink makes a good gathering great. It never has to be fancy, but it does have to leave you full. 

Food is also a window into a culture. The various cuisines around the world pay homage to the immense cultural variety out there, and you could spend a lifetime exploring various cultures through cuisine. The late chef Anthony Bourdain strove to put that exploration into his television show, Parts Unknown. I remember distinctly his episode in Libya, not too long after the revolution there; you could feel the danger Anthony put himself in just to explore the cuisine that few Americans have ever experienced. 

***

As much as food is a window into a culture, it is also a window into our fictional worlds. 

I am a big Tolkien fan*, and I used to scour the bookstores and library for books about Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. Books by J.E.A. Tyler and Robert Foster found their way onto my bookshelf, as did a book that I discovered when perusing the shelves and the Downtown branch of my local library:

The library's version was in hardcover.

It was a book made for fans by fans. Yes, there were articles by some scholarly critics and a short biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, but what fascinated me were the fan related sections. There was a map of Middle Earth as it looked in the First Age, as a fan noted the Blue Mountains were in both maps and simply combined the maps of LOTR and The Silmarillion. Another article that fired my imagination (and no doubt planted the seed of my blogging career) was about the LOTR fanzines that sprang up all over the world in the wake of Tolkien fandom. There were also fan-made scholarly articles, poems, filk songs**, and even a listing of the more popular fan clubs and fanzines (and their addresses) in the back.

Alas, those fan club addresses were out of date. And yes, as a middle schooler I did try them, which is how I know.

But there were also recipes.

I may try to take another pic, but I didn't want
to damage the book.

These were fan inspired versions of foods found in Lord of the Rings, or as in the case of Scotch Eggs Strider, a Scotch Eggs recipe with Aragorn's Bree nickname attached to it.

While I remained fascinated by the recipe section, I knew my parents were less than thrilled by my Tolkien obsession already without me turning the kitchen into Tolkien fan food zone. 

So my interest in these recipes slumbered, until they were revived by another book:

I slightly tweaked the coloring to make
the bottom left corner more legible.

I'd somehow managed to "sneak" the original Dragonlance Chronicles past my parents, despite their being published by TSR, the publishers of the "Satanic" Dungeons and Dragons. So when a cousin of The Tolkien Scrapbook for the world of Krynn appeared, it was a no brainer that I'd grab a copy. 

And yes, among all of the other articles, there was a recipe section:

Again, not the greatest of photos, but it'll do.
Also, actor and lifelong D&D fan Joe Manganiello
referenced this book in a review for, well, you'll see.

Being just out of high school by the time Leaves was published, I kept those recipes in the back of my head for a time when I could try some out. That came later, after college, in my then girlfriend's (now wife's) apartment. Considering my cooking skills needed a lot of work, she tolerated my interest if it meant cookies were going to be made (and they were). 

Still, I never really had the time to follow through on this interest to the extent I wanted, so Leaves went back on the shelf.

***

Ages came and went, and the world changed.

First came the rise of the "themed party". No longer chained to birthdays, variously themed parties became popular in the 90s and have stayed with us until today. Just go look at the magazine aisle at any craft store and you'll see what I mean.

Second was the 800 pound gorilla that was Harry Potter.

Harry Potter became such a phenomenon --which continues to this day-- that Harry Potter themed parties are a cottage industry all to themselves.

Some parties are more elaborate than others.
From stuffmumslike.com.

So with an environment like this, food from Leaves or The Tolkien Scrapbook fit right in. And believe me, as I was to discover, themed foods from other SF franchises are very much a thing.

***

My kids gave me this as a gift this past Christmas:

Yeah, this is the book Joe reviewed.

The inside of Heroes' Feast is gorgeous.

It looks like a modern cookbook, complete
with the luscious food pics.

And I have to admit that I didn't see this coming.

I mean, I expected that there'd be Harry Potter cookbooks out there, and I've even seen one for a Star Wars themed party. But something like this, where the authors tried to imagine what the food in a D&D setting would taste like and interpret that like this? And that they'd convince a publisher to actually, you know, publish it? THAT I wasn't expecting.

With this in mind, I started poking around the internet, because surely D&D was not a harbinger of the fandom cookbook revolution. 

And... Wow. 

There's a ton of cookbooks out there for all sorts of gaming and literary fandoms, such as The Elder Scrolls, Lord of the Rings (naturally), Fallout (really?), and A Game of Thrones. Oh, and there was another cookbook that caught my eye. I collected some of my birthday money*** and picked up this:

In a world of $200 18" statues, this
cookbook gift set was a bargain.

"You didn't!" --Cardwyn

"Oh yes I did." --Me

"You could have just asked me! My sister could have written half of this!" --Cardwyn

"You do realize you're a figment of my imagination, right?" --Me

"..." --Cardwyn

And yes, your eyes do not deceive you, it comes with a 2-sided apron: Alliance on one side, 

Everybody ignore that 80s era
door behind the apron.

 

Horde on the other.

I have to admit that the Horde
side does look better.

And the interior is just as beautiful as Heroes' Feast is:

Yeah, I could go for some chops right now.

Okay, I want to try these recipes. ALL OF THEM. But at the same time, I realize that I've got responsibilities, things to do, and so I can't commit to doing all the recipes at once. So I'm going to have to pace myself, picking and choosing what makes the most sense for the moment.

I have kind of a hard and fast rule about cookbooks: if I can find about a half dozen recipes that work their way into my regular rotation, it's definitely worth picking up. If I can then find about another 6-10 recipes that I'll occasionally go to, then I've got a real keeper. So these two cookbooks have a tall order to fill, but I think that they're up to the challenge.

And if nothing else, there's the drink section to keep yourself lubricated, right?

 

*Not nearly as big as Stephen Colbert is, but when I was much younger I could have possibly claimed that level of obsession.

**Filk are fan made songs with a particular SF, Fantasy, or Horror theme, and frequently utilize the music from a popular song for their lyrics. In that way, it's a cousin to the spoof genre, as popularized by Weird Al Yankovik and Doctor Demento. Just like Weird Al used the Greg Kihn Band's "(Our Love's In) Jeopardy" music to create "I Lost on Jeopardy", filkers took The Beatles' "Penny Lane" to create "Middle-earth". Or converting Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Puff The Magic Dragon" to "Smaug the Magic Dragon."

***Most of the time I get gift cards to hardware stores, because there's always something around the house that needs repairing. But this year, I just got cash, which was fine with me.

Friday Musings

Yeah, it's a gloomy kind of day today --both outside, where it's rainy, and inside at work-- so my mind has turned to more whimsical musings.

• Do Elves ever get seasonal allergies? When I see the Night Elf pic below, all I can think of is that in September and October, I'd be miserable.

From walldevil.com, based on a Blizzard artwork.

• Unlike their common counterparts in fiction, the dwarves in Terry Brooks' Shannara series are scared as hell of being underground. (It was mentioned heavily in the very first book about how the Dwarves had to deal with all sorts of things underground during the years that they "became" Dwarves that it left a scar on their collective psyche.) Why don't you see that sort of thing more often in Fantasy fiction?
• The Star Trek Next Generation Federation jumpsuit is one of those outfits that flatters most forms, so why did Cryptic Studios feel the need to sex up their loading screens and whatnot? There's absolutely no need, and I can tell you from having been to Star Trek conventions before that a well done ST:TNG jumpsuit does VERY well all by itself without having to unzip or sexy up anything. To quote George Takei: "Oh mmyyy....."

I'm not posting the pic from A New Dawn, as it likely shows
someone from the alternate ST "Imperial" universe. (From reddit.com)

• I realize that for the sake of continuity that Governor Saresh had to disappear from Taris' questlines on SWTOR, but I still miss her. Even though my Smuggler was unable to successfully flirt with her. (Hey, it fit that the Old Man would find an older woman like Saresh attractive.)
  

  

  Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard that one before, Saresh.
  From Reddit.com

  
  
• Yesterday I pulled out my old copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook (now called A Tolkien Treasury) and perused the articles inside. The article The Evolution of Tolkien Fandom by Philip Helms reminded me how I really really wanted to run my own fanzine back in the day, using mimeograph to put everything together. But I never a) had the money for a mimeograph machine, and b) never really had the oomph to start and keep running a fanzine all by myself.
  
  And now the Tolkien fanzines at least are either mostly gone or have evolved into real scholarly works, and I'm not that into the History of Middle Earth series. Blogging is about as much of a "fanzine" mentality as I can handle.

A copy of Orcrist #3, circa 1969/1970, published
by the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society.
From tolkienguide.com

• I've been tossing around the idea of splurging on a used Xbox 360 so I (and the mini-Reds) could play the Mass Effect trilogy (among other titles) without having to buy multiple copies of the game for the PC. I'd consider a 360 over the current gen consoles because the multiple disk games (such as ME2 and 3) aren't quite ready for backwards compatibility with the XBone, and the PS4 is now going to release yet another version of the PS4, and I don't want to get on that treadmill. Besides, I'm more likely to find a used 360 (or even a PS3) at garage sales than the current gen consoles, anyway.

As if I don't have enough things to do.
From masseffect.bioware.com

• The Boss has the day off, and is over watching Muhammad Ali's funeral procession on television (thank you, Chromecast). And the news just broke a short time ago that another sports legend, Canada's Gordie Howe, passed away. The fact that it is raining outside is somehow appropriate.

EtA: Fixed some grammatical issues.