Solar systematic reach for celestials

I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.

It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.

(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.

#ATOZCHALLENGE, Day 1: Atmosphere

Artist: AtmosphereA
Best Album: You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having
Best Song: Trying to Find a Balance
This Letter Could Have Been About: Afrika Bambaataa, Arrested Development, Angie Martinez

Why I’m Writing About This Artist: Because if I was a rapper, I’d be Atmosphere.  Or… well, okay, that’s not quite true.  Atmosphere is two guys: Slug, the rapper, and Ant, the DJ.  If I was a rapper, I’d therefore be Slug, who is a white guy in his early 40s from Minneapolis.  This makes him only four years older than me and from basically the same cultural background, and we appear to have had basically the exact same childhood; the line hip-hop and comic books was my genesis appears in one of their songs.  The song below, which was the song that got me to first notice the group, makes some direct references to Boogie Down Productions, which will always cause my ears to perk up when I’m listening to a song.  Atmosphere also founded Rhymesayers Entertainment, and basically everybody on the Rhymesayers label is worth listening to.

They’re still active, so there’s plenty of music out there to go find.  But start with this song, whose hook in the days of kings and queens, I was a jester was the tagline on my first blog for a very, very long time.

Have a video!

Next A to Z Post (will be a dead link until the post appears)

In which I’m back, I guess

imagesI didn’t post yesterday; a combination of being legitimately too busy, having very little to say, and a mild ennui/stress/depression thing that had me not in the mood to interact with the universe.  Plus the boy’s been poorly for the last day or so and yesterday was rather more filled with tears than I wanted it to be.  (Mom: don’t panic.)

Today, on the other hand, is going much better.  New Atmosphere CD, for starters, which is awesome.  I’ve managed to make it two days at work without raising my voice; also super awesome.  And this book thing is thisclose to being done; I’ve got a couple of annoying formatting things in the ebook that I really want to fix– one blank page that I can’t get to go away and some weirdness with my author picture in the back, plus I need to figure out where the copyright notice goes, if I’m gonna bother to put one in.  Niggly stuff, mostly; I’ve got ebooks from professional publishing houses with a bunch of blank pages, so I might be stressing about one a trifle too much.

I think I’ll show my son Frozen this afternoon.  He’s never seen it before.  Neither has my wife.  We’ll see if it can dethrone Lilo and Stitch–which, don’t get me wrong, I love– as greatest movie ever or not.

Or maybe I’ll just go outside.  It’s fuckin’ beautiful out there.

How are you, Internet?