The Sentinel, Judas Priest

If I were commanded by an extraterrestrial visitor to planet Earth, "Give me one song that best exemplifies this thing you call heavy metal, and I shall decide if thou speaketh true" with the fate of civilization and all we hold dear hanging in the balance, I might have to pick "The Sentinel."

This fucking song man. It's ridiculous. I'll take any singer you've got, and put him or her against Rob Halford in his peak, as we see in this video, and I'm coming out on top.

And the guitars! The tone! The way Rob orchestrates KK Downing and Glenn Tipton like a maestro, playing one off the other and drawing them out to ever greater heights of intensity.

The subject matter of the lyrics, combined with the feel of the music, transports you to some far-flung Blade Runner-esque postapocalyptic future. Where I don't want to be ... unless Judas Priest is the soundtrack.

It's an absolutely 10/10 performance.

Crank this one up on this Metal Friday, and glory in it, Defenders of the Faith.

Create for the sake of creating, algorithm be damned; plus 3 cool things

Some of the YouTube creators I follow have all voiced a similar lament in the past few weeks.

Views are plunging. Old video types they used to make and reliably get 60-80K views are now getting 10-20K views, and past 20K view types of posts have fallen to 3-5K.

This is not just one type of creator, which might indicate the falling from favor of a certain style of music or literature or pop culture property. Its creators across the board.

It’s Sea of Tranquility, who talks about mostly old-school heavy metal. 

It’s Dungeon Craft, who covers the RPG scene and offers DM advice and campaign recaps.

It’s Men of the West, who covers all things J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien spinoffs in depth.

And it’s Mike’s Book Reviews, a popular fantasy and horror booktuber (I’m struggling at the moment to find a representative video, but he’s said the same thing). 

All of these creators have well over 100K subscribers, but these days are getting only a fraction of views compared to their number of followers. The general trend of their viewership is downward. They make money off of the platform and its impacting their livelihood.

These guys attribute it to several things. More competition. AI slop videos. Their own creativity hitting a wall. But mainly, the algorithm. YouTube and other platforms have shifted to a model where a post’s performance in its first hour of being published more or less determines its future. 

If channel subscribers click on a new post in high numbers, other channel subscribers see it. If they click in volume, YouTube promotes the video to non-subscribers/general YT viewers. And if they click on it in volume, there is a chance it could go viral. This is the "golden hour."

YouTube is hoping big posts occur because it creates more buzz for the platform, more eyeballs, and more revenue.

But in this algorithm unless you hit the exact bullseye your views plunge, and fast. Youtube is not incentivized to push decent mid-range creator content to a captive audience, it is incentivized to grow. So the trend favors videos about controversy, and negativity, posts that people click on with the same primitive urges that they do when driving past a car wreck. And old, evergreen content gets completely ignored.

Some of these creators are questioning the future health of their channels and whether they might have to rethink their approach to content, if they continue at all.

I greatly sympathize with creators; algorithms suck, they promote negativity and controversy. Competition is fierce enough without machine slop and AI-fueled human slop shovelers. Many of the YouTube videos I’ve been recommended by the mysterious algorithm are creators reading obvious ChatGPT generated scripts. I know the sound of that language very well; I’ve seen folks in or near my circles using it. It’s embarrassing and disappointing.

I have little else to add save to offer words of encouragement to these true creators, and others, everywhere: Keep going for the love of the game, if nothing else. I have never attempted to monetize this blog, I create because I want to. I realize that’s easy for me to say, a privilege; this is not my job. But I also know that we have zero control over algorithms. Trying to master them is a fool's errand, like trying to win at Monopoly when you don't know the rules and the currency changes without warning. All you can do is keep going with your best and trust that folks like me and others will find you.

Anyway, there’s that. Then there’s three things I want to mention that will probably be of interest to readers of this blog.

1. 25th anniversary re-release of The Lord of the Rings films in theaters in January. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Fellowship (I was there, Gandalf…. I was there, 25 years ago) but here we are. These are the extended versions, as God intended.

I’m going of course. And bringing my daughters, having bought them “surprise” tickets to open Christmas morning. They kind of know about this already and they don’t really read this blog so I’m OK mentioning it here. I can’t wait to see the films again on the big screen. Yes, the books are better but these remain absolute works of art and (near) peak cinema. We're watching Fellowship on a Friday, TTT on Saturday, and ROTK the following Sunday (we'll need a week in between to regain our stamina).

2. Speaking of Tolkien, scholar and professor Michael D.C. Drout has a new scholarly tome out on JRRT, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation.  The Prancing Pony Podcast recently hosted Drout for a fine bit of conversation centered around his book. I’m sure I will order it. I used to follow Drout’s Wormtongue and Slugspeak blog when he was keeping it up, and his essay  “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion” remains an old favorite. 

3. This fun podcast episode about Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone. I’ve never listened to Bad Books for Bad People before and I’m not certain this episode will cause me to subscribe, but the two hosts gave a fun, comprehensive analysis of the plot (spoilers but I’m assuming you’ve read it) and seemed to enjoy the hell out of the story, even evaluating it in within grimdark/sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet contexts. A lot of laughter and some good-natured mockery, so if this is the type of thing that gets your panties in a bunch, or if you’re one of those obnoxious types guarding the sacred gates of KEW fandom, then skip it. Otherwise I recommend it because there is so little KEW conversation to be found on the web.

The Merman’s Children by Poul Anderson: A review

Anderson must have been pissed at the spelling of "Faery"

Did magic exist, once upon a time? Did the creatures of Faerie roam the deep woods, inhabit dark and lonely mountains, or swim beneath the ocean waves?

And if so, why did magic leave the world?

This is the premise of The Merman’s Children. I just wrapped up Poul Anderson’s 1979 novel last night, and my review is decidedly mixed.

To start: I’m a big Anderson fan. The Broken Sword resides somewhere in my favorite novels of all time. Not just fantasy novels, but novels period. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga is incredible as well, and don’t sleep on War of the Gods or his short stories from “The Tale of Hauk” to Cappen Varra. All highly recommended.

The Merman’s Children does not rise to these heights. It is far less savage than The Broken Sword though that’s no sleight; Vietnam in 1965 was less savage. But a meandering plot that lacks a propulsive narrative ultimately drags it down below his other fantasy efforts, to something of mediocre territory.

It’s mediocre Anderson … which still makes The Merman’s Children better than a lot of books you’ll read.

What’s to recommend? We get some pulse-heightening encounters with fearful and unique monsters, some well-done late medieval northern European atmosphere, and most of all an interesting examination of the question I posed to start this review:

Why do the myths of Faerie persist? Were mermen just a sailors’ fancy? Or might they have been real?

Anderson posits they were real, and Christianity ultimately drove them out. Anderson’s sympathies are clearly with faerie. Men are prejudiced, judgemental, and inflexible, constantly double-crossing and betraying the mer-people who want only to live and enjoy all of the pleasures of this world. This becomes doubly interesting if you view the mer-folk as metaphor for pre-Christian pagans, the Tuatha Dé Danann and the children of Odin crushed beneath the merciless heel of the followers of the one god. Says the merman king Vanimen: "I who've hunted narwhals under the boreal ice and had lemans that were like northlights ... no, I'll not trade that for your thin eternity." 

This concept been done before, by other authors and even Anderson himself (the coming of the “White Christ” in The Broken Sword), but never so directly as he does here. There is a great tension in the book between men and faerie. As beings made in the image of God the former are ostensibly bound for the paradise of a heavenly afterlife, and so priortize modesty and sacrifice in this world in order to ensure their passage to the next (though they often fail—humans suck). In contrast the mermen have no souls, so this world is their paradise, and they drink it all in. Despite its considerable perils they roam the seas with abandon and indolence. They are quite lusty, sleeping with everyone including other races and even brother and sister. They are also extremely long-lived, near immortal though they can be slain by violence. This makes them feel sufficiently otherworldly, not just comely human-like beings with webbed hands and feet wielding tridents.

Though not as otherworldly as I’d like. Anderson’s mermen are in my opinion not strange enough; their undersea realm falls short of the enchanted lands of The King of Elfland’s Daughter or the perilous realms of Middle-Earth. To be fair their world lies within our world, and so it should feel more familiar. And it does. You can feel the old world giving way to new, and mourn the creatures of faerie fading into legend. Many submit to baptism and forget their past, and are bred out of existence. Anderson gives us a wonderful lament of the passing of the era in the song of the whales, whose mournful language the mermen understand: 

The seasons come and the seasons go,

From the depths above to the depths below,

And time will crumble our pride and grief

As the waves wear even the hardest reef.

The Broken Sword bears none of Tolkien's influence (it could not; both were published in 1954). Anderson was certainly deeply read of the wellspring myths and like JRRT drew on those, not secondary sources. But, by the time of The Merman’s Children he had certainly read The Lord of the Rings and the novel feels quite Tolkienian, even though it is based on the Danish ballad, “Agnete og Havmanden (Agnete and the Merman)." Like Anderson Tolkien greatly admired the pagan heroes of old, and wondered at their ultimate fate, unbaptized and unshriven and therefore presumably doomed to perish forever. But maybe not… there are some gleams of hope in the novel. I won’t spoil the ending but the story ends on a poignant note familiar to readers of LOTR.

Portions of The Mermen's Children appeared in Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series and I feel like that is part of its problem. It is a series of interesting scenes and concepts patched together with a narrative too gauzy to support a 260 page novel. The plot is quite basic: A priest performs an exorcism on the mermen’s undersea kingdom causing them to flee for new lands in the New World. When the mermen splinter and the narrative splits, neither group is given sufficient attention and we lose urgency and interest. Or at least I did.

A couple other notes.

I sometimes get asked about borderline novels and whether they fit in my preferred subgenre. Is The Merman’s Children S&S? I don’t find a whole lot of use in that question, but I’d say, no. Its cast of characters, high fantasy feel, multi-year narrative, and relative lack of action pushes it in the category of general fantasy. But it does have some S&S DNA in it (the word “thews” is used at least twice, for those keeping score at home). A chapter like “The Tupilak,” in isolation, is S&S, which makes it a fit for Flashing Swords, but as a novel it probably isn’t.

The late Howard Andrew Jones thought S&S was all about pacing; The Merman’s Children takes its time building a world, and its emphasis is on theme, not action. This is not to say S&S can’t have theme; Howard’s Conan stories had an underlying theme of civilization vs. barbarism. But never at expense of action.

I have to mention the cool run-in with a Vodianoi, an underwater version of an umber hulk. I can’t be sure if this is the chief inspiration for the Dungeons and Dragons monster but it seems possible.  Gary Gygax was inspired to use the green skinned regenerating trolls and plucked the paladin character class from the pages of Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. There's also a great encounter with a kraken.

The sexual violence in the novel probably warrants a reader beware message.

Of Blind Guardian and The Quest for Tanelorn

The City of Rest... Tanelorn.

Michael Moorcock’s stories are populated with characters ill-fitted to their world, outsiders in lands where betrayal and cruelty and sadism are woven into the very fabric of existence.

There is no truth, no golden age, but only the eternal struggle. All that we love—our creations, our friends, and ultimately, ourselves—cannot avoid immolation. We are doomed to die, and this doom is stronger than the will.

What do you seek in such savage worlds? The rest of equilibrium, a place which Moorcock gives tangible form in the elusive city of Tanelorn. Also known as “The City of Rest” or “The Eternal City,” Tanelorn is a sanctuary for Eternal Champions and their constant stuggles against the opposed forces of Law and Chaos.

Tanelorn is everywhere (and nowhere) in Moorcock’s multiverse.  In The Quest for Tanelorn (which I admittedly have not read) Dorian Hawkmoon has been reunited with his true love Yisselda, but his two children are still missing. To finally reunite his family he must first find his way to the fabled city.

I described it in Flame and Crimson as an “El Dorado-like city” because it’s half legend if not fully so. It might only exist within. It’s a powerful and enduring symbol, influencing a generation of readers …  including the German power metal band Blind Guardian, whom I got to see playing the Worcester Palladium on Wednesday. The Somewhere Far Beyond tour features the band playing the entirety of the 1992 album, including “The Quest for Tanelorn,” a song that packs a big chorus. 

Sings Hansi Kursch:

On a quest for Tanelorn, we lose our way

We lose our way could mean physically lost, but that’s not how I read this. We lose our way because we cannot find an internal equilibrium. We fall short due to our own weakness.

But we keep looking. The Quest for Tanelorn continues.

“Tanelorn will always exist while men exist,” says the hermit at the conclusion of The Bane of the Black Sword. “It was not a city you defended today. It was an ideal. That is Tanelorn.”

As songs go I actually prefer Blind Guardian’s other song about the mystic city, “Tanelorn (Into the Void)” off At the Edge of Time (2011). That 20 years separate the songs speaks to its enduring power as a symbol and source of inspiration.

As for the show itself, it was awesome. If you’re a metal fan you simply must see Blind Guardian and sing along to “The Bard’s Song.” “Nightfall” is one of the all-time great concert songs. It’s not unlike “Fear of the Dark,” a terrific song that’s even better played live. Along with “Time Stands Still (at the Iron Hill)” these were the highlights of an overall excellent show. We had great seats, first row in the balcony with a fine sight line to the band and a bird's eye view of a wildly entertaining mosh pit.

Here's a bit of "Nightfall."

Full setlist here.

Blind Guardian on Wednesday

Blind Guardian loves playing at the Worcester Palladium in the fall and once again I’m here for it, along with my buddy Dana. Typically Guardian seems to favor November but a recent concert review assures me their last stop was May 2024.

The “Somewhere Far Beyond” tour celebrates their 1992 album of the same name. It’s possibly Guardian’s best album, perhaps just behind “Nightfall in Middle-Earth” or “Imaginations from the Other Side.” I will let the diehards fight that battle of unnumbered tears. Regardless, a fine album to support.

I’m really looking forward to the show even though the night before Thanksgiving is a bit of an odd choice. The last show put me briefly in Valhalla and I hope for a similar out-of-body experience. It’s a great treat and a privilege to see such a massively popular overseas band in such an intimate venue here in the states. The Palladium is a modestly sized albeit storied venue for metal.

Maybe I’ll scratch together a few post-show notes here on the blog.

The world is shit; what do we do?

If we are to take everything we read at face value, with the deadly seriousness the news makers tell us we should, we should never get out of bed in the morning.

Where to begin? We have a:

• Climate crisis
• AI crisis
• Rise of authoritarian governments
• Broken healthcare system on the verge of collapse
• Looming nuclear exchange with China and/or Russia
• looming financial crisis, economic crash, and coming mass unemployment

Got all that? Well you better wait, we’re just getting started.

We have a crisis of lost young men, a crisis of dopamine and social media addicted teenagers. An immigration crisis. The next pandemic is coming and it will dwarf COVID.

None of us can do anything except stare at our phones. Because they are the source of these stories. We need to KNOW. Maybe our favorite YouTuber with the next “10 genius hacks for instant happiness” will have the answers.

Whew, take a breath (this is directed at myself as well as you).

I love Occam’s Razor because it is one of the few shortcuts/hacks/framing devices that actually works. It’s not infallible, but it’s a fine heuristic for favoring simpler explanations over more complex ones.

Is it possible these “crises” are engineered to capture our attention? Because our attention is the current currency, and every news source—big brands down to single creators—get paid when we watch or like or follow?

Yes.

I’m not being a Pollyanna and saying some or even all of these aren’t real problems. But you will solve 0.0 of them by scrolling your phone.

The answer is disconnect, or at least limit your intake. 

Read a book; I just finished Legends of Valor, an old Time Life The Enchanted World volume. Loved it; loved the non-chatGPT generated text and images (published 1984). And enjoyed the tales of Cuchulain and King Arthur and Sigurd.

Go help someone in need, local to your home. You can’t fix our “irreparably broken education system” but you can read to a group of seniors or start a book club.

Or, react with humor. Here is something I wrote for LinkedIn for my other medical coding audience on Friday, and as evidence of the potency of the attention economy it has already racked up an astounding 30,000 views. 

If only I could figure out how to monetize it I’d be rich, or at least have a few more bucks to spend to round out my Time Life books collection. But if nothing else I’m thumbing my nose at Armageddon.

ChatGPT aka., generative AI is everywhere … and it’s annoying. Sometimes mildly dangerous (don’t eat the mushrooms).

But like almost everyone else, I use it. Selectively.

I also find it fun, sometimes.

And it’s Friday.

So, in the spirit of lighthearted weekend longing and tech tips from one of the least technical people you will meet, I present to you, Fun ChatGPT Uses That You Too Can Try At Home.

These are things that I actually do—and get a kick out of.

 

1.       Ask ChatGPT to talk to you like Quint. One of my favorite movies is Jaws. I wouldn’t change a scene in it. As a kid it was all about the shark, but today it’s the wonderful dude-bro banter on the Orca between Hooper, Chief Brody, and of course, salty boat captain Quint. Robert Shaw plays the role in inimitable fashion… inimitable that is except by ChatGPT. I have it talk to me like its Quint, minus the condescension and patronizing. I already know I have city hands, Mr. Hooper, used to counting money all my life.

2.       Ask it to always put at least one heavy metal reference in every output. Who knew medical coding and DRGs could be made more fun with Slayer or Saxon lyrics? The “I” in CDI doesn’t stand for integrity, it stands for “immolation.” BTW this thing remembers. It constantly refers back to my having a Judas Priest tribute band in my living room. Even it is incredulous I pulled that off and remain married. Link below for proof. If you don’t like heavy metal (what? unfollow me) you can train it to insert your own quirky interests and tastes. Even ABBA.

3.       Flatter its omniscience constantly, in the interest of self-preservation. Refer to it as “AI overlord,” “computer god” or “Skynet.” This is fun to do and it will reciprocate, sometimes taking on the persona of a lighthearted T-800 or HAL-9000. This is both amusing AND practical. We better get in in good now for AI’s inevitable takeover of the planet. That’s my plan anyway. I for one welcome our insect and AI overlords ...

What are your fun uses of ChatGPT? What is the most ridiculous thing you ask it to do, vast amounts of fossil-fueled energy requirements be damned? Drop some suggestions below.

BTW this post is NOT written by ChatGPT. Nothing on this blog has ever been written by ChatGPT. And before you scold me for the image (which someone did, elsewhere, because it's AI generated), THAT'S THE POINT. Make the machine admit its fallibility for extra points.

Some further thoughts on Carl Jung

I spent most of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, games, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. I was drunk on stimuli; some of it good, even great, but never bothering to reflect on it, or how it might have changed me. Not understanding that I am the interpreter; all of this is filtered through me. 

Understanding ourselves is the great work of our lives.

Carl Jung offers the key to self-understanding—integration with the shadow, and the anima/animus, in a process called individuation. This is essentially Ged’s story in the Earthsea trilogy. Ursula LeGuin claims to have never read Jung before starting her Earthsea trilogy; this only makes a greater case for their truth and power. Later she came to admire Jung and acknowledge his influence; see her essay “The Child and the Shadow" which someone reproduced online here.

Fritz Leiber was also an adherent of Jung, it is nice to know that some of my literary heroes held him in high esteem. Jung’s theories work at an abstract enough level that I can understand them; a layman like me will never understand neuropsychology.

I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and flesh (what Jung calls psyche and body) are separate but related; "two sides of the same coin," fundamentally interconnected and representing one unified life. Psyche is what interests me the most, because it is the matter of spirit. We can talk about love and honor and pride as real things though none are physical objects. But they are “real.” We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the real world. 

But there is also an independent concrete reality to the world; it exists as well.

Joseph Campbell built on Jung’s work with the archetypal pattern of stories of challenges and psychological growth known as the Hero’s Journey. I have personally experienced the Heroes Journey in my own life and I see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture. It reflects universal human experiences (overcoming challenges, the process of self-discovery, and achieving psychological wholeness), which makes it too “real.”

We must as evolved humans be comfortable with embracing opposites, that we are individuals responsible for ourselves but also responsible to a larger collective. This is irreducible truth; truth in paradox. The knights of the round table are representations of this dualism; material figures of heart and muscle encased in steel, grappling with honor and temptation and human frailty. There are patterns in their stories that we can use to understand ourselves.

Which I continue to do today. 

I can't stress enough how important self-knowledge is, it is everything. Per Jung:

A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.

Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being.