Musings from the basement...

I did the music for this award-winning indie animated series

The first episode of Paradise Lost, a new indie animated series by Chicken Dynasty (aka Michael), won Best Animated Film at the GenCon 2022 Film Festival. So that’s awesome. Also awesome is that I created the score and music for the show, including the opening and closing themes. It’s been a fun project and I’m grateful that my odd ambient experiments caught Michael’s ear. I’ve seen the first four episodes so far and am happy to report that he’s building some good drama here. Take a look at the first episode:

Enjoy my video interview on Jason and the Argonauts, the Ray Harryhausen classic

I was pleased to join Dan Schneider not too long ago for his Cosmoetica show to discuss Ray Harryhausen’s best film, and one of the best damned fantasy adventure movies of all time, Jason and the Argonauts. Enjoy! And for some previous thoughts on Harryhausen’s work, check out my thoughts on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  

I may have fallen in love with the Hexplore It board game series

I Need a Solo RPG! I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect solo tabletop RPG for myself. I have a specific itch, but most games can’t scratch it. There are many out there, but with a few exceptions none have seemed quite right. I have no interest in the many journaling-style games out there, which are really just collections of writing prompts with a game built around them. (The conceit of Colostle, for example, looks amazing, but I just have no interest in making up a story as I go for the sake of a game. When I want to do that, I write.) Others are more purely skirmish games, focused on fighting. Not interested. I want exploring and stuff to do outside…
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Broken Staircases, a new post-rock sonic experiment for your listening pleasure

This one has been in gestation for a while, much of it pre-Covid, from the time I was recording Empty Nest. Took a while for it to come into shape in my head, to realize what the record was trying to be, but I think it got there. This is an instrumental post-rock record, largely improvised, with a greater focus on electronic drums than I usually have. It’s meant to be a journey; a series of rises and falls and lulls and crescendos. It’s about looking back for so long, you forget to look forward until it’s too late. Recommended if you like Ride (but instrumental), Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed You Black Emperor, etc., though I don’t claim for a moment it actually sounds…
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BLOGGERS BEWARE: Lovefreund, Benjamin Jorgensen, and the photo credit scam

Back in late 2020, I came across a scam whereby a scammer trying to generate links to their site falsely claimed credit for a photo I used, and asked for the photo credit to be switched to one that pointed to their site. Turns out it was a scam that ran pretty deep on Wikimedia Commons. The story ended up getting picked up by a bunch of tech blogs. Well, it’s happened again. This time the scam originates from a sex toy affiliate site in Germany. I will name them, but won’t link them directly. After all, that’s what they want! It began when I received the below email. I’m posting it in full in case others try to Google the text of emails they’ve…
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