A short ukulele + live birds song for your Friday.

I had plans to record a different video but I remembered just in time that I needed to record this one today. It's a part of someone's birthday present. 😹

#Music

Keeping with the theme of the last update, I've gone a bit off the rails. This week, I released my next YouTube short, What if corn was advertised like cars.

The Lonely Worlds

On the 27th of January, I began a project currently called The Lonely Worlds. I don't want to say too much about it yet. It's intended to be a serial. It's a setting I've been noodling with for fifteen years or so and I recently worked out enough characters to have a good chance at it. I currently have four chapters written on it with a good start on a fifth.

The typewriter

Last time, I discussed the low-powered computer I put Alpine Linux on for writing purposes. Due in part to the workflow enabled by the typewriter, I managed to write about 47K in January without really trying.

I still don't recommend doing Alpine Linux yourself but if you want to use some of the tools I mentioned in that post, I've adjusted my micro settings files since last time.

settings.json:

{
	"softwrap": true,
	"wordwrap": true,
	"autosave": 60,
	"cursorline": true
}

bindings.json:

{
    "Alt-/": "lua:comment.comment",
    "CtrlUnderscore": "lua:comment.comment",
    "F5": "lua:wc.wordCount",
    "Insert": "lua:wc.wordCount"
}

Next week's goals

I have a few high priority tasks I have to take care of this next week that don't involve writing directly. So, my writing / creativity goal is ... to do some of that. 😹

#ProgressUpdate

This year, I find myself in an unusual circumstance. I don't necessarily have that holiday spirit but I've got ... something. I might even put up a tree this year.

As a consequence of my uncharacteristic mood, please enjoy this holiday stroll through old favorites and new ones too.

Those jingle bells

Image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay

I've never been so much of a Grinch but I'm not really into Christmas. I've only got so much patience for holiday music. Music gets stuck in my head easily and getting Little Drummer Boy stuck in my head even once is intolerable. It might be surprising to hear that I'm kind of grooving to the Worst Christmas playlist by the Effin Birds creator. Some of the songs in it are old favorites. Some are cynical cash grabs. Some are well-intentioned but flawed attempts. I'm not going to say which I think Christopher Lee's heavy metal Christmas album. After a few hearty laughs, I still enjoyed his rendition of Silent Night.

Some of the best holiday music written in the past century has close ties to Holiday Specials. Somehow, Christmas doesn't seem like Christmas without Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas or the music from How The Grinch Stole Christmas! While Boris Karloff's You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch is a crowd-pleaser, I think Welcome Christmas is the real musical star of the original Grinch special.

Tis the season

I don't usually say so unprompted but my favorite Christmas movie is Gremlins. It really is a Christmas movie. It's not quite cynical but it's also not really the kind of thing a major Christmas enjoyer would recognize as a Christmas movie.

It's A Wonderful Life is my runner up. A movie that's not really so much about Christmas as it is about working class communities supporting each other in the face of the real villain of the Holidays: obscenely wealthy guys.

Over the past few years, I've watched some new Christmas movies and some that aren't quite new but are new to me.

A Christmas Story and Silent Night, Deadly Night are two of the latter. I've heard a lot about A Christmas Story over the years. The reality wasn't anything like what I'd imagined. I try to go into movies knowing as little as possible. Basically everything I had heard was about the protagonist being told he would shoot his eye out if he got a BB gun for Christmas. That was a part of the story but it was really more a series of vignettes based on stories written by Jean Shepherd about his own life. It's not a bad movie but, kind of like my experience with The Goonies, I had to have been there (at the time the movie was in its heyday or at a similar time in my own life). I really wasn't so it's not for me.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is a horror movie. More particularly, it's a slasher horror movie. It's thematically a Christmas movie in that it takes place around Christmas and the slasher is dressed up in a Santa Costume. There were a curious number of lies told about the movie when it first came out. Santa is, for sure, not murdering people in that movie. Some very respected reviewers gave it nonsensically bad reviews. Is it high art? No. It doesn't need to be, though.

Three movies that are actually pretty new and Christmas related are: Anne and the Apocalypse, 8-Bit Christmas, and Happiest Season.

Anne and the Apocalypse is a zombie Christmas musical. The songs were great. The stories were great. The way they were combined ... someone needed to have seen a few more musicals before taking a pass at this. The leads give really understated performances in the songs themselves which is ... distracting if you've seen more than one musical. Still, it's a great zombie movie, a pretty good musical, and it's got some Christmas in it too. If that sounds fun to you, give it a shot.

8-Bit Christmas is a 80s nostalgia piece that's kind of cashing in on the 80s nostalgia we see in places like Stranger Things. It also tells a very Goonies like story of a group of kids in the 80s getting up to an adventure around Christmas. While it is banking on a certain type of nostalgia, it never gets distracted from the point: telling a good story. How cheesy and underwhelming the NES would be today is absolutely an element of the enjoyment of the movie. It's a great way of reminding us adults that the stuff we were obsessed with was pretty cringey too when were that age. It won't join my yearly roundup but I think it's worth a watch.

Happiest Season is something I've been after for a long time: A cheesy budget holiday movie for queer folks instead of specifically for people who are telling themselves they are impossibly straight. Clea DuVall directs and co-wrote the screenplay. Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis play partners who are this close to getting married but one of them is in the closet. Daniel Levy plays a familiar role for him but his character has a much healthier perspective than in Schitt's Creek. The story beats are familiar but it's a fresh take and not just because many of the characters are queer. Saying more would be a spoiler. This was exactly what I wanted it to be and some times that's the exact right thing.

Wrapping this up

I've got guesses about what has me in a holiday mood. That's more a topic for me and my diary, though. At least for once, I can be a little less of a bah humbug about the whole thing. If you've stuck it out this far, thanks for joining me. Merry Christmas, you old savings and loan!

Oh, and hey, I did end up putting up that tree.

Speaking of the season, I have a guest blog about another point of winter nostalgia which will go live on Long and Short Reviews on Boxing Day.

Support the author

I've got two books out in the Vay Ideal series. It's a science fiction adventure series built around an eclectic assortment of travelers who find themselves running an independent ship. I'd love it if you'd check them out. While you can buy them on Amazon, the cover links will take you to a landing page which will let you choose any one of several other stores also.

#Christmas #Nostalgia #movie #music

This week's goals were:

1. Finish audio production and get most of the visual elements done for the super-secret project
2. Create audiobook account and finish production on audiobook for Death In Transit

Unfortunately, I didn't complete either. The super-secret project is still manageable but I may have to scale down some elements. There's two things impacting the audio production. The first part is that I can't produce the audio on my main computer because Audacity is having constant issues. The second part is personal stuff I couldn't have anticipated. Nothing truly bad, just a hectic week at the Barret household.

I've managed to squeeze a little writing time in this week and that makes me feel like a writer again. 😹

Next week's goals

Big thing is the super-secret project.

#ProgressUpdate