Cassette Presentism

 I truly love the concept of Cassette Futurism, which is a scifi vibe that focuses on 70s/80s tech carried into the future, along with many of the aesthetics. The movie Alien is maybe the most known version, but it's gone into the present in little ways, with some tabletop roleplaying games I've seen and some other stuff--it was somewhat a trope in Alien: Earth this last year.

And now it's the future of say, when Alien was made (clearly, we're like 47 years later) and I'm buying cassette tapes.

It's a bit silly, because cassettes were always an odd thing. They dominated the market for a couple decades and then basically vanished. Mixtapes were wonderful, and the mix CD never was as good, while the playlist on the streaming service of your choice doesn't even come close. But that advantage aside, there's not much to recommend tapes. The sound quality is uncertain; they get tangled; rewinding is a guessing game and slow to boot.

So why am I going back to cassettes?

First, there was a guy I worked with at Powell's named Ryan who is temporally out of place; he has a dumb phone, he's ridden the rails, and (the key bit) he listens to cassettes. And when I saw him playing them at the counter, I remembered how much I enjoyed them, in the limited way I enjoyed paid music as a youth. When I took a trip to Europe in 1998, I was too alone and missed English and ended up buying a walkman (my first) and a bunch of tapes that I played over and over through the remaining weeks of the trip. Wham and Madonna featured strongly. A boy who maybe loved me and maybe I loved sent me a mixtape from home to meet me at Rome. I really liked that trip and those cassettes.

Second, I read an article about how cassettes require attention. Focus. In a way that streaming services--Spotify in my case--don't. That's...not exactly true to me? Maybe they even require less attention. They also reward patience and make your life better when you just ride along instead of considering "should I skip this song?" Because you can, of course, skip a song on a cassette, but it's a pain. And I want to have less digital in my life, and less skipping of things, less easiness when it comes to just deflecting anything that I don't at the exact moment want to deal with.

So I bought a little not-Walkman, and today I went out to Mississippi Records and bought a few cassettes from their in house line that are just fucking awesome. I know none of the songs--some of the artists, yes, but not the particular songs--but they're all great. There's little artifacts of the tapes being mixtapes, snippets of songs that they didn't mean to record, or moments of empty silence, or the hissing of a weird recording. I listened to two cassettes almost completely and there's a third for me to get excited for tomorrow. I love it.

It's maybe time to complicate your life, in ways that are nostalgic and pleasing. Think about what you might do in that regard. 

Welcome to 2026

 I don't think there's anything in fiction, or anything notable, set in 2026. It's not one of those iconic years. But it has to come along eventually, as all years will do in time. Even if nothing notable happens in 2026 in fiction, it's happening to us now. And I'm aiming to make the best of it.

I've started my reading challenge already, going to be 141 books this year which is the size of my to be read pile by my best current estimate. I'm reading Spear by Nicola Griffith and it's great. I made delicious pizza. I worked on editing my Arthurian novel, inspired by reading Spear. I wrote a little on a short story proposed by my colleagues in the Vicious Lion Writers Club, which in this case is going to be about starvation at the end of the world. I went out with Adam to get coffee at Seven Virtues, which is new to us; we liked it, even if the rain made it less than ideal to walk there. There was also laundry, and playing a sort of fun calendar game which in my case is the Dungeon one; I bought it at Powell's in the last week I worked there when I bought so many things (see: the tbr pile of 141 books.)

Anyway, Happy New Year. 

It's Been 84 Years

Not actually 84 years, but more than 8. I haven't posted to any of the dozens of blogs I've made (well, three, and a Tumblr that at one point I was fond of) in all that time. That's not entirely true. For a little while I had a blog on, I think it was called Ghost? It was fancy, too fancy, and I posted to it perhaps half a dozen times and then gave up on the fuss of it. That was a couple years ago.

So why am I back again to a thing that was never notable and that also is now an artifact of the past (a blog, that is, not *my* blog which is clearly an artifact of the past because I am that, myself.) The reason is, I'm not really part of social media, and there's words I want to share, and this is the place I came back to. There's drop cloths on the furnishings and dust is piled on stuff but that's fixable. The dust on stuff, that's my reduction in my already limited blogging skills. Which I can dust away; that being, uh, practice.

So I'm practicing.

Have I been writing? I have, and I finished writing a novel about Christopher Marlowe last week so that's something. But it's a mess of a novel, and I haven't been writing a whole lot.

What am I reading? SO MUCH. This is a banner year, where I've read about 165 books, and I'm aiming to pick up a couple more in the last 3 days of the year. Right now I'm reading The Hounding, about five troubled girls in the 1700s who might turn into dogs; and also The Hobbit, which I'm reading to Adam at night; and also Embers of the Hand which is a history of the Vikings.

I live in Portland now instead of Seattle, that's a big change. I'm a banker (only very recently.) Still married to Adam, still have two cats (did I ever talk about my cats, Jack and Daphne? They're cats, we have them.) We live in a condo that's big and on the edge of the nice neighborhood that's super walkable and I greatly like it.

And it's almost the end of the year, and the new year will bring new things. Maybe new posts. I don't know. Who can say. 

Better?

I went to see the doctor, and got told it was probably allergies. I lacked a bunch of symptoms: very little sneezing, no runny mucus, no itchy or watery eyes. Just in case, I was told to use Nasacort, and it has been pretty good so far. The worst of the congestion has cleared out of my sinuses, and I feel like I am much improved. So, yay?

The weather, on the other hand, is still really a grind. I was walking through the mall across the street, and there are trees all over. It's a week in April, and half of the trees didn't even have buds. There were some with delicate new leaves, but so many were still hibernating. And it's been raining forever, and there is wind, and clouds all the time. When the sun comes out it's glorious, and the light lingers so late into the evening, but I don't know, it's just a long dragging misery.

I've had a lot of games to look over, some I've talked about and more: Hillfolk with Iron Age personal relationships, Esoterrorists with horrific conspiracies to bring demons into the world opposed by expert agents; Fear Itself, which is Esoterrorists but with normal people instead; Trail of Cthulhu which is Call of Cthulhu but with better investigation rules; Microscope Expanded, the broadening supplement for the brilliant Microscope; Owl Hoot Trail, D&D in the fantasy Wild West. So many games. I'm thrilled with it. This is a good thing.

Saw Logan. It was fine. That's all that needs to be said.

I'm reading what I wrote, 30K words to try to figure out how to fix it. But I'm more interested in reading Catherynne M. Valente's short stories in The Bread We Eat In Dreams, some of which are shatteringly good. The sort of thing that makes one want to give up writing because you won't be that good. I'm tearing through them. It's great stuff, but out of print, so that's bad.

Ugh. Still sick.

Nearly a month of illness by this time. Going to see my doctor in a couple days. Been feeling a little better the last few days, but still...sick.

Falling down on the writing as I reassess the work (terrible idea) and try to figure out how to make it into what I want it to be (good idea) which is a worthwhile way to make it work. I'd like more words and less thinking but so it goes.

Getting warmer. Still not drier.

Yet again sick

Another week, another post about being sick. Well, I still am sick, and there's no point living in denial. It's not very bad anymore. A little more coughing, a little less phlegm. I can do stuff without collapsing when I'm done. I only medicate once or maybe twice a day. All of this is good, and improvement, but I wish to be well.

Yesterday I went to see a play called Tribes at ACT. It was astonishing. The play is about a bitterly funny family of academics and creatives. The younger son is deaf but as raised to be "hearing" in that he had hearing aids that vaguely work, reads lips very well, and can speak. When he meets a woman at a party of mostly deaf people who signs at him, and reveals he can't sign, he enters into a steep learning curve about being Deaf (the culture) because the woman is hearing but raised by deaf parents. She is now, however, going deaf. They meet cute (so cute) and are dating very soon, and the son leaves his family to move in with her, which shatters the family entirely: they can't accept he's going, they can't accept he's becoming Deaf instead of just deaf, they can't accept his anger at how they cut him off from being Deaf all his life. It's brutal and sad and funny and incredibly human. As a person with significant hearing loss, I was deeply touched by the story of Sylvia, the going-deaf woman, who has lost high tones, and then music, and then her own voice. It's too sad for me to think about, really, because I'm half-way there (and fortunately going no further at any time soon, I think.)

I also saw the good but not great Get Out, which failed to hit me as hard as I think it probably should have. The main character is just too horror movie requisite in that he doesn't Get Out when the danger is evident and clear. It's necessary for the plot, but plot stupidity, even if slightly explicable because of circumstance, is still bothersome.

I'm writing and reading a lot, so that's good. Many words on the page, and many pages consumed, though it's pretty much all RPG books now: more of Esoterrorists; and also Red Aegis, Eyes of the Stone Thief, Fear Itself and Trail of Cthulhu in rapid succession. Tearing through the Pelgrane Press oeuvre is pretty much what I'm saying.

Warming up but still so much rain. We had a day of sun. Everyone went mad for a while. It's All Summer In A Day whenever that happens now. Ray Bradbury saw clearly this winter and how it would affect Seattle.

Still sick

Day 9 of my cold. It's less bad now than it was. I spent five days in bed, head so congested I couldn't hardly function. Now, I'm just sort of congested, and cough every so often, and it's a lot better. I wish I was fully well, but it's not the case, not yet.

The one thing that's gone well during this period is that I've been writing. I'm more than forty pages into something, and it's not the first time I've been more than forty pages into this particular something but it's the most successful version, to my thinking, that I've yet managed. So that's great.

Not much reaching has been done either, except on some tabletop game books. I'm digging into Pelgrane Press books; they do Dying Earth which I've owned for years and ran twice, I think, and wish I could have done more. It's based on Jack Vance's stories and novellas about a far future Earth of magic and decadence. They do 13th Age, which is delightful and I've run for a longish campaign, and will run again further. That's a D&D varient that combines the best parts of 3rd and 4th Editions with some new spins on things. And now I have Hillfolk--an Iron Age setting that focuses on interpersonal conflicts and the drama that come from such--and Owl Hoot Trail--a Western version of D&D, sort of?--and The Esoterrorists, which lets you play skilled investigators looking into esoteric demonologists, foiling them at every turn if you can. And I just ordered a couple more that look promising. I think I'm going in for the whole company, pretty much? (Not true, there's some stinkers there, but mostly it's good.)

Weather is warmer and wetter and continuing that way. Daylight Savings Time means that we've got late evenings starting again, but the mornings have gone dark once more.

Maybe next time I write, I'll be well again?