"World" Muzzak

Muzzak isn’t universally terrible, but it is generally subpar. It’s the sound quality, I think, the small buzzing that permeates throughout the song. The quiet atonal hum that distracts the mind from the melody. The worst song I’ve ever heard was a poor-quality rendition of My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion used as hold music for some company I can’t remember the name of.

The restaurant I work at has muzzak. I’ve been told it’s some radio station or streaming service that does the occasional updates to their playlist, but outside of the Christmas tunes added at the appropriate time (though I have learned there are some actual garbage covers of Carol of the Bells out there), I’ve yet to hear any song I haven’t heard a thousand times before.

Here are the songs that I like on our muzzak playlist: I Won’t Let You Down by OK Go, Cello Song by Nick Drake, and Booty Swing by Parov Stelar. And even then they’re ruined by either being mixed in with seemingly hundred of songs I dislike or, when they are all together, they’re still corrupted by poor speakers and just a little too soft to understand.

I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination. I buy cheap headphones and when they inevitably break six months later, I buy them again. I just wish that these songs sounded better, or, failing that, better music altogether.

We’ve actually had this discussion before, or at least those of us who are nowhere near influential enough to change anything. We’ve talked about what songs we would add if given the chance. I’m not sure how I would answer. The restaurant presents itself as a gathering together of cultures. “Dishes from all around the world, and one from Wisconsin” adorns one wall, for example. And there is some variety in cultures in the music. Parov Stelar is Austrian, for example.

But we don’t serve Austrian dishes. We don’t play music from Wisconsin. Outside of these rare example, the only memorable songs are some variant of country or hispanic (though we do serve a few spanish dishes such as an Adobo). An entire third of our menu, the Asian dishes, are entirely missing from our track selection.

I get that muzzak is meant to play in the background. That it’s supposed to go unnoticed until it isn’t there. But there has to be something we can do to create the same environment that our food does. Little things like music, I’m sure, go a long way.

-F

Anime Music

Here are a few things I don’t really keep private, even if I haven’t mentioned them yet on this blog: I played soccer in high school, and occasionally I listen to music my parents not-so-affectionately refer to as “Techno-Bluegrass.”

That’s fine, though. That’s the stereotype. Parents aren’t supposed to like their children’s music. And Eurobeat -- the actual name for Techno-Bluegrass -- certainly leans more towards the “acquired taste” side of things. It’s certainly aggressive at times, and, to my mother’s chagrin, occasionally uses the banjo as part of its melody. But through various media, from cartoons to Sonic the Hedgehog, Eurobeat has become its own little niche of “pump-up” music best used for anything from workouts to simply staying awake in the car.

This is why, whenever I got the opportunity to run the booth during Junior Varsity’s pregame warmups, I went straight to it. I didn’t get to too many times, mind you, but I did take the opportunities I got.

This story takes place in senior year of high school. Our previous soccer coach had decided to retire after just having won us our league’s championship, leaving us with high spirits, but maybe more than a little tentative energy meeting our new coach. At one point early in the season, after a particularly disjointed practice, this new coach declared that we needed to write a one-page paper on teamwork. I half-assed it like any senior would.

I apparently made him cry.

We were coming in on the final games of the season, and this was perhaps my third or fourth time in the booth. Dave Simon’s Speed Man had just wrapped up, and I was going to pick another song when the head coach entered the booth.

“Let me play a song,” he said.

He played Jason Aldean’s The Only Way I Know. Which I would be fine with. I’m not the biggest fan of where country music has gone in the past few years (even if typing that sentence makes me the biggest snob on the planet), but its lyrics were relevant to the situation. It’s a song about winning. So yes, I would have been fine with it.

If he hadn’t also said, “Enough of this anime crap.”

I get it. I get how each generation hates every other generation’s music. I’ve had discussions on the merits of a brostep creator versus a symphony. I’ve internally tried to keep track of what my friends are listening to so I can avoid playing anything we disagree on aloud. But I’m not sure what’s accomplished by, when leading a team already falling apart at the seams, already ready to get the season over with, that specific comment needed to be made.

-F

Terraforming (Part Three) -- Great Artists Steal

I still don’t know how Naviim was created (again, in universe. Of course I know how I made it), but I do know how it ends. To be more specific, I stole how it ends. I stole Naviim’s grand apocalypse from someone else.

That shouldn’t be too surprising, right? There are so many archetypal apocalypses that me having one isn’t that big a deal, right? If Naviim fell to the inexorable tide of Zombies, initially spawned in the capital and pushed east by their insatiable lust for blood, that wouldn’t be held against me, right?

Right?

So, I was playing some horror games to celebrate Halloween, and came across a text-based adventure called Hornets by someone who goes by Kitty Horrorshow. I’ve been a fan of hers for a couple years now, and I’ve specifically enjoyed how she manages to do more (in this case, creating the unsettling atmosphere of a city overrun with monstrous hornets) with so little (Twine is a valuable tool for creating interactive text-based stories, though she also uses a personal edition of Unity from time to time). I couldn’t tell you why the idea of Hornets -- that one single act of wrath caused the world to end -- appealed to me. Maybe it’s my latent fascination with purple prose. But I took it, basically wholesale, and inserted it into Naviim.

I couldn’t actually have it end, though. That’s the one thing I changed. Through some luck and a heavy dose of protective magic, a small community developed in the center of the main continent. And who knows? The hornets might die off and the world can develop again. But that would be my own story, and I haven’t gotten that far yet.

-F

Terraforming (Part Two) -- The Video Game That Never Was

This isn’t the origin story for Naviim. Well, technically it is, but it’s not an “In the beginning there was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” type of story. It’s a “here’s how the concept was created” story.

Video games are complicated. That much should be obvious. But a few friends and I thought we had enough free time and enough of a working knowledge of the Unity game engine to try and make some semblance of a medieval tactical game. I was not completely non proficient at programming, but I was far enough behind everyone else that I was designated as head writer and coordinator, while also taking part in the mechanical design process (“Designated” might be the wrong term; I was certainly more interested in these areas of design, but it’s still closer to the truth). So after the initial meeting, I opened a notebook and started crafting the world:

Daniel, on a pilgrimage to the western capital of Camaralin with the intention of pleading with the king to reinforce his hometown of Karkus, hopefully rebuffing the demon scourge that harrases the village, runs afoul of a group of highwaymen who beat him, strip him of all food and valuables, and leave him for dead.

I’ve never been one for town names. They always end up sounding a little too “made up” for me. This is probably because they don’t have as much information surrounding them as “Rivendell” or “Tatooine.” At least not yet. To counter that, I tried to make each character name an actual name (no Aerith and Bob situations for me!). The most obscure name, I think, was Thomasin, which is a name I’ve appreciated since seeing The Witch.

Daniel is saved by an angel named Joan, who is in the middle of waging a revolution against Camaralin. Joan then recites a prophecy which predicts Daniel’s involvement, ascension to the throne, and inevitable downfall (how I treat prophecies themselves is the topic of another essay). From there, the plot would have basically been various excuses for battles to take place. It was all very straightforward.

My biggest problem with this story, looking back now, was how little it used of Naviim. It started smack in the middle of its largest continent, and only really uses points west of that, never travelling along the eastern coast, and only really mentioning other continents in passing. At this point, almost a third of the world was completely blank. I sketched it out later, but I never really went anywhere with it in the text.

Naviim could have died when the project fell through. My friends and I had all been a little too naive, and we had bitten off more of what we could chew. But I still had this notebook full of characters and a third-full world. And I still had time to fill it. If you forgive the pun, I had all the time in the world.

-F