Hopnog Bottling Day

...was yesterday. The Hopnog is now residing in our guest bath, where it will stay undisturbed, dark, and at a consistantly warmish temperature. The alcohol content is a little on the lowish side (I think I measured it at 4.3%), and it got a little bit of sediment in a couple of the bottles when my father-in-law insisted on getting "just a little more" out of the bottling bucket, but I'm excited. The beer should be ready to drink in time for the Twins home opener, so I've got multiple reasons to be pumped for that.

I wasn't a big fan of the "just drop the pellets in a be careful later" method. My FiL mentioned that he generally steeped the hops in a mesh bag instead of of just dropping them in. In any home-brewers happen by this blog, by all means let me know what some good ways of accomplishing this are.

Still, even with a little extra sediment and a lowish ABV number, I made 46 bottles of beer, now I just have to wait.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Punch To a Quick End

Last week went pretty well. This week, the challenge was to write as short a complete story (or at least something that told a complete part of a complete story) as possible. To complicate matters, the story had to fit within two bookending sentences (helpfully provided by the judges).

Better get used to these bars, kid.
Your stunned silence is very reassuring.

It didn't matter which one started the story, and which finished so long as the story was bookended by those two sentences. In addition to the standard "x points out of 5" scale, additional points would be added or taken away based on the length of the piece in comparison to the other entrants. The shortest three (again, assuming the entrant told a self-contained story) would be given extra points. The longest three would lose points.

Was I able to top last week's top notch score and grab an almost impossible '7'? Read on...

My entry:

“Better get used to these bars, kid.”

The words snapped me back to reality as I stood in front of the dessert table at my wedding reception. The man’s voice went on, “after all, you did marry into a Lutheran family. Goes with the territory”. I faked a chuckle.

My new wife approached. “What a whirlwind of a day. Is there anything I can get for you? Have you met my family?”

I wanted to say something but nothing was coming. I couldn’t do anything but stare dumbly at those damned brownies. I guess I had a lifetime of those to look forward to, at least. Lisa gave me a quizzical look before playfully jabbing me with her finger, “Your stunned silence is very reassuring.”

Kelly and Beau's Critiques

K: I do like the sad internal monologues of people in regret. Always interesting stuff. I assume this one will be on the long side, but it’s good. 4

B: Cute. I’m not much into denomination jokes. I am very into brownies. 3

For fun, here's the breakdown of what everyone's "bars" were:

Dessert: 4
Prison or Other Cage: 3
Musical Notation: 2
Drinking Establishment: 2
Handlebars: 1
Generic Metal Bars: 1

So first things first, I guess I completely failed in my intention to pick something others might not. I figured more people would go for either the prison or drinking establishment routes. My first thought was to go a more comedic route, with the bars tasting terrible or something of the like. I'm glad I didn't do that, as a couple of the other entrants went in that direction, and were more successful than I probably would have been.

I'm not entirely certain where I got the idea of a semi-regretful groom staring at a dessert table. I've never actually seen one of the stereotypical Lutheran "Potlucks" at a wedding reception - certainly not mine, though I did marry into a Lutheran family (more on that in a moment). The "Lutheran family" joke was actually meant to lampoon those who DO subscribe to denominational humor (I really dislike humor of that ilk), so I had the speaker of that joke be a nameless, faceless annoyance. It looks like that didn't come across quite the way I wanted for it to.

The "stunned silence" line simply would not fit into the story, no matter what I tried. I still don't like the look of it. It's not a phrase that is very easy to shoehorn into "normal" dialogue. It sounds sarcastic, but stiltedly so. The bride is playfully ribbing the protagonist, and it doesn't quite look right, but I don't it's so bad that it throws everything off.

I didn't even bother with length. I know that length was precisely half the challenge, but I couldn't find a way to tell the story I wanted to tell without having three characters, and it's quite difficult to have three characters and describe them in only a couple throwaway sentences. As it turns out, I think I made the right call on disregarding the length (but only barely so, a couple more sentences and I would've lost points). I think the idea of "short as possible" stories is a good one, and the challenge on whole is solid, but most of the shortest ones read as jumbled and somewhat static (and received low "story" scores as a result), and most of the longest ones ended up being the best. In the end everyone who submitted was within a point and a half of each other. That probably says something about the level playing field almost as much as it does about the challenge, but I digress.

More nonsubs this week, so of course, it only mattered insomuch as it's always fun to read the submissions. Maybe next week we'll get a full quorum and things will get interesting.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Create-a-Challenge Grab Bag

I didn't update this last week because it was the create-a-challenge, and I never have anything very interesting for those. In fact, the one I made this time around is one I would explicitly not want to actually do - it scored appropriately poorly.


This week, though, I was a little more excited. Spooky and Beau chose seven challenges out of those submitted last week (including mine, for reasons that likely involve brevity), and instructed us to pick whichever one struck our fancy.


This was actually the first time during this Survivor that I felt solid inspiration. I ended up choosing Drew's challenge, involving these three seemingly unrelated pictures.









Here's what I came up with:

I suppose I am asleep right now. After all, that is how the Lotus Eater works. The machine keeps you in a kind of lucid sleep limbo as the technicians view static images from your memory on the screen. I am not in control of anything; I am simply a passive observer. I don’t even know what they’re looking for.

They didn’t seem to be interested in the first few images, and passed them by pretty quickly. Soon, they found one that must have at least piqued their curiosity. I’m not sure why. It was a memory from my college days. My brother, his girlfriend, and I were drinking on the roof of my parents’ farmhouse. The image is wrong, though… the ground is covering everything up to the top window. It’s almost as if they zoomed in on what they were interested in, ignoring everything else, or maybe the technology isn’t as perfect as they’d like – it’s hard to say. Either way, they saw what they wanted to see and moved on without much delay.

The second image they stopped on seemed to have caught a bit more of their attention. The company I work for had me take a look at some geological anomalies out by the old fairgrounds. The project seemed routine, so I brought my fiancée and her friend along (I will note that geological phenomena do not capture the interest of the average American woman). I didn’t expect to find anything particularly damning, and I didn’t. I gave my superiors my findings, and they placed a research team on the project. That’s not strange, it happens all the time. What is strange is that this image is wrong, too. The bulge in the ground was nowhere near as pronounced as this one is. Something like this would’ve garnered a lot more attention.

While they might not have had much interest in any of the other images, they’re clearly keen on this last one. They’ve had it up for what feels like hours. I don’t even remember being in a room that looks like this. Knowing how images in this mindspace get altered, I’m trying my best to think of how this one could have been changed. I think I vaguely recognize my fiancée in the middle, and the person on the right could be my brother’s ex-girlfriend, but they never knew each other, and I’ve seen then together. The person on the left is obscured, and doesn’t look familiar, anyway. In fact, the whole memory is so unclear that it doesn’t seem like any information could be gleaned from it at all. I’ve been trying to piece together how these last three images could be connected, and I’ve gotten nothing. Unless…..

Oh, God…

I don’t think that they’re going to be waking me up anytime soon….

And here's what the judges said:

K: What an awesome idea this is. So unexpected, and so clever. It rambles a bit, but that fits the character. 5

B: All right, this is just great storytelling. I so want to know what happens next…no, scratch that. I want to know what happened before. 5

Obviously, I'm pretty pleased with the results this time around. I knew right when I saw the challenge that I wanted to go with the pictures (I'm kind of surprised no one else did, instead opting to go in the rather tired "advice column" direction). The idea of an unnamed narrator being stuck in a sort of limbo of lucid dreaming came right away. The idea of people using a machine to try to extract information from damaged memories came very shortly after. Now the only problem was to write it in a concise manner.

I didn't actually succeed in writing what I had in mind, the middle picture provided me with a problem* - how could I move the story forward without getting overly wordy or even worse, give too much away? This story relied on a vague sense of dread in order to function properly. Revealing too much about the protagonist or what the mysterious people were after - especially before the third act - would undermine everything.

* The second act has always been the hardest to write in any fiction I've ever written. In fact, I'm not actually sure I've ever completed one to my liking.

The third picture was suppose to be the easiest. The picture itself is good, but given the right framing device, could feel ominous. The problem was, how was I going to tie everything together when I didn't even know myself how everything tied together? The answer - don't tell anyone how it ties together - could be viewed as kind of a cop-out. You really don't learn anything about the main character other than the fact that he's just realized something awful and is in very deep trouble by the end of the story. I actually like it better that way. Over analyzing dread removes a lot of the bite to the feeling. A monster in dim light is more frightening than both a monster in full light and a monster in no light.

I actually had a full paragraph opening this as a sort of explanation of what was happening to the narrator, and how the world operated. I excised this and went for the more slimlined version seen in the final version. I like that decision. I've actually thought about writing a full length short story about this scenario, but I'm unsure of whether or not it the feeling that this short piece evoked could possibly be drawn out to that extent. I guess we'll see.

Bottom line, there were nonsubs again this week, so it didn't matter. DARK STORMY KNIGHTS remains triumphant, and Nick Punto is sitting somewhere in St. Louis, eating a plate full of bacon and laughing maniacally.

Spookymilk Survivor VIII: Dewey Defeats Truman

So, after rolling to a better-than-deserved-but-still-kind-of-disappointing third place in last year's Spookymilk Survivor creative writing contest, I'm back for another round with a new team. My team, DARK STORMY KNIGHTS, seems pretty solid, and through the first four weeks, we've yet to lose a member.

For week five, the challenge was "Dewey Defeats Truman". Write a short article based on a real life news item with a drastically different outcome.

This was my submission:

May 7, 1937

The Zeppelin Hindenburg arrived in Lakehurst, New Jersey this morning, carrying 97 passengers. Though the trip itself may be considered a marginal success, the dullness of the trip left most of the patrons wanting.

“The trip itself was an awful bore” stated one of the travelers, “I mean, I know airships are safer than those awful fixed wing aircraft, but I do wish they were a little more exciting.”

The disappointing reviews, in conjunction with the financial failure of the movie Dirigible, seem certain to spell the end of the golden age of airships.

These were the judges' critiques (scores are out of 5)

K: I don’t say this often, but this one isn’t wordy enough. I love this concept – the idea that a story would be written for no other reason than to relate a story of people being bored – but a longer story would have made it just keep getting funnier, I think. 4

B: You know, there’s nothing really funny about this one. But it’s written well. And it’s short, which is a nice touch in itself, what with the Hindenburg now being a back page story. The movie tie-in is pretty sweet, although the fact it was released six years prior hurts the irony of its mention a bit. Still, nice work. 4

Overall Score: 4

First thing, I knew to avoid politics. While I enjoy discussing politics occasionally, I knew that there would be lots of political sketches (though I didn't know how many there really would be). I knew that it would be unwise to go toe-to-toe with some of the writers on a political level. That's fair enough. Besides, while it's fairly easy to write a light-hearted political spoof, it's damned tough to write well-written political satire.

The next thing I found out is that just about anything I could come up with for this challenge would bear resemblance to a certain mock news site already in existence. While I do enjoy the Onion, it tends to be formulaic, and if I wasn't careful, it would be too easy to fall into the standard Onion formula.

Once I started writing, I found that just about everything that was appearing on the screen sucked. I wrote a Grammy write-up in which Katy Perry won best album, causing Russell Brand to rush the stage and start mooning the audience, only for an angry Justin Bieber fan (Usher, as it was) to rush the stage in turn, take the Grammy out of Ms. Perry's hands and bludgeon Mr. Brand to death with it. Not good. Awful, in fact. Everything I was writing was too complicated, or too jokey, too pointlessly edgy, or just flat out DUMB.

Originally the Hindenburg piece that I went with was going to have two more paragraphs (which would have included another eyewitness account and a mini-editorial by the 'reporter'). I cut them out because they didn't make anything any funnier or better, only longer. The fact that Dirigible came out in 1931 was unfortunate, and I’m not sure if it was a financial failure or not, it was just an interesting piece of trivia, and I liked the idea that someone was deciding that airships were screwed because a movie about them did poorly. I liked how my piece - short as it was - was written. It looked like a little blurb that could have been tucked away on the fourth page. It was a little bit of a gamble (my decision to go the short route on the Battle of the Mimes challenge last year very nearly ended with my elimination*), but I decided that it was the best I could up with without sprawling into writing bloat.

* Then again no matter what length, mine would have been the worst entry that week anyway, it was a hell of a challenge, and I'd suggest anyone who hasn't seen it go check it out - very much worth a read.

I guess it didn't matter one way or the other. There were two people who didn't even submit anything, so they'll be on the block (which is disappointing, there's been a lot of great work already this contest, and none of it's meant much of anything because of the nonsubs). I'll keep this up to date, detailing my time in the contest a little better than I did last year. If nothing else, it'll be a nice time-capsule of where my headspace was at when I was writing this.

Top 30 Most Listened of 2010

You thought you were never getting this list...

Starting January 1st, 2005, I decided to pull a little masochistic prank on myself. I decided to pay strict attention to the playcounts of all the different songs in my library. If I listened to a song, it got counted - be it in the car via CD, at a club, or on the radio. Obviously, it can't be 100% perfect (buzzed at a bar laughing with friends isn't exactly the best time to note "hey! this is that one obscure b-side to the Oasis song I like, does anyone have a pen? I'm never going to remember that they played this in 4 hours.), the point is... I get closer than most. Last.fm helps a ton in that regard. So does the fact that I hate the radio stations available to me, and most of the songs I listen to are off of CDs that I own.

Speaking of CDs, this year, my listening habits changed unconsciously from a mostly song-based listening approach to a mostly album-based one. I don't really know what to make of that, and it isn't really reflected here, but I thought it was interesting, at least.

Anyway, for the sixth year in a row, this is the list of the songs that I listened to the most for the entire year. Believe me when I say that this list is pretty damned accurate. Also, I've made comments on each song - what the song meant to me personally, where I found the song, where I listened to it the most, etc.

30. Dessa - Matches to Paper Dolls

The best beat of A Badly Broken Code paired with some of the better introspective lyrics on the album. The sped-up sample certainly didn’t hurt it at all. Still, I’m a little surprised I listened to this song this much.

29. Frightened Rabbit - Keep Yourself Warm

Embarrassingly enough, I have NBC's Chuck to thank for my 2010-long obsession with Frightened Rabbit. I sort of liked "A Modern Leper" in 2008, but for some reason, I never thought to give the rest of The Midnight Organ Fight a try. I heard this song on season two of Chuck, and finally checked it out. Even then, this particular song didn’t strike me the first time I heard it. Given a couple listens, though, and I was hooked. Once the song picks up steam around midway through, there’s no stopping it. If I had heard this one earlier in the year, it would be much further up the list.

28. The National – Sorrow

High Violet was my favorite CD this year – by far. How did it get only one song on this list (and so low on this list, at that)? The simple truth is that it was nearly impossible to listen to just one song off High Violet. Anytime I wanted to hear “Sorrow” (and why wouldn’t you? The “I don’t want to get over you” part gives me shivers every time I hear it), I had to start with “Terrible Love”. If I wanted to hear “Conversation 16” (easily my favorite off the CD), well… “England” was just after that, and that’s a great song, too. Positions 31-60 are littered with other songs off of High Violet.

27. Children 18:3 - Cover Your Eyes

I mostly played this song because it was the lead single to the new album, which I was rabidly anticipating. It’s not really even one of the 2 or 3 best songs on Rain’s a’ Comin’, it just benefited from being new music by a band I love.

26. Yeasayer - Ambling Alp

This is sort of the same situation described above, but I like this song more. I didn’t really care for All Hour Cymbals, so I greeted the news of a new Yeasayer CD with a pretty emphatic “meh”. Once I heard “Ambling Alp” (I actually heard it toward the end of 2009), that changed in a hurry. The lead single for Odd Blood did a great job of setting the stage for one of my favorite CDs of 2010.

25. Crystal Castles - Doe Deer

More advance single action here, with the added benefit that this particular song is a minute and a half long and goes great with just about every violent video game ever.

24. Memoryhouse - Sleep Patterns

I really like this song. It’s that perfect kind of half-awake dreamy sounding song that feels warm and familiar. Earlier in the year, this song was a lot higher on the chart, I just sort of forgot about it as the year went on. With winter bearing down, I’d really like to revisit warm sounding songs like this.

23. Titus Andronicus - A More Perfect Union

This one’s length kind of works against it, as does the fact that The Monitor was a lot like High Violet (albums best experienced all at once). My 20 minute commute didn’t allow me to get much more than 3 songs into the CD before I arrived at my destination.

22. The Hold Steady - Hurricane J

Yet another advance single, but this one is my favorite one of the bunch. At first, something about Craig’s vocals threw me a little. It wasn’t until Linds (my Hold Steady-hating wife) asked me “Is he actually trying to sing?” that I figured it out. Huh. Craig Finn actually (kind of) singing. Cool.

21. The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt

I adore the main riff to this song, as well as the lyrics. There were numerous times where I’m quite certain that I took a chunk out of my hearing range and my car’s speaker life to this song.

20. Children 18:3 - Lost So Long

Everything about Rain’s a’ Comin’ led up to this. It wisely stretches out the “Rain’s comin’!” part at the end, before coming to an abrupt, but perfect ending. The only complaint I have is that they decide to stick a meaningless piano instrumental track after it on the album (I usually excise the track – seriously, it adds nothing, why does it exist?).

19. Yeasayer - O.N.E.

For a while, I thought this was the best song off of Odd Blood. That’s not quite true, but it does have all the qualities that make up a good Yeasayer song: a heavily 80’s-borrowed vibe, a catchy as the plague hook, and a certain bit of weirdness that uniquifies everything. Few songs better nailed those three elements than “O.N.E.” this year.

18. Rosefield - Save a Bullet

Back in 2005, there was a band called Rosefield Rivals. They played a sort of Emo-Pop mixed with Power Pop. Usually I’d dislike such a band, but they wrote such hooky music (plus they played the local club 2 or 3 times, and put on a great live show) that I had no choice but to love them. Then they all got pissed at each other and broke up, as such bands tend to do. Most of the creative force behind Rosefield Rivals made a band called Rosefield, and they took the world by force and….. made a grand total of two songs before breaking up again long before pretty much anyone even recognized what had happened. This is one of those two songs (I don’t have “All That You Got”, though I’d love to remedy that if someone would be willing to help out).

17. Frightened Rabbit - The Twist

It would seem that Frightened Rabbit make music that I wouldn’t be able to identify with. I’m happily married, and just about everything FR does (especially on The Midnight Organ Fight) is centered around being profoundly unhappy with relationships. I don’t know how to explain the appeal, but even so, when Scott Hutchison sings “I need company, I need human heat…” it still resonates with me. Plus that breakdown that happens after the second chorus is just awesome.

16. Frightened Rabbit - Nothing Like You

“There is nothing quite like someone new, and this girl she was nothing like you…” I wish I’d had this song back when I, you know, actually had breakups. Instead, the song was merely a perfect piece of pop-rock music.

15. The Thermals - Here's Your Future

I’m not really sure why this song got played more than “A Pillar of Salt”. I certainly like “Pillar” more. I think the problem lies in the fact that I played “Pillar” pretty heavily right around August of last year, whereas “Here’s Your Future” started getting plays around February. Ah, well. No one ever said this list was perfect.

14. American Fangs - Le Kick

This one is kind of a weird outlier. I don’t generally like American Fangs brand of Hot Topic punk rock anymore, but the band kind of caught me off guard. I reviewed songs for the now (maybe?) defunct website c0nsensus. Basically, you had a lot of people who just wanted someone to hear their music, so you got a LOT of dross, with the occasional diamond (I plan on writing more on this at a later date). “Le Kick” sort of came out of nowhere. It found its way onto several playlists (“Music to Shoot Stuff To” and “Music to Evade The Fuzz To” the primary two). This might have inflated the song’s playcount, but it’s a kind of honest inflation (if that even makes sense). I played the song because even beyond the adrenaline kick (which I did enjoy), I just plain like the song. I finally broke down and bought the CD, which isn’t nearly as good as this one song, but I suppose they deserve a little credit and some spare money for “Le Kick”.

13. P.O.S. - Low Light Low Life

The best song of last year’s best album. Rocks twice as hard when seen live and with the full crew (since it is a full Doomtree crew song, unlike most of P.O.S.’ other solo work).

12. Arcade Fire - Ready to Start

That subtle little downshift at the beginning of the song threw me. I was expecting the chord progression to go in a different direction. The fact that it defied my expectation even in that seemingly tiny way set the mood for this song. I knew The Suburbs would be great after this one.

11. Julian Casblancas - 11th Dimension

The CD this song comes from sucks. I thought this song kind of sucked the first time I heard it… now it’s my ringtone.

10. Crystal Castles – Celestica

I can never understand the lyrics to Crystal Castles songs.

9. Japandroids - Younger Us

8. Washed Out - Feel It All Around

I played this one a ton in the early spring months. I love everything about the sound of this song.

7. The Hold Steady - The Weekenders

This is pretty much the quintessential Hold Steady song. It has all of the trappings – self-reference, an anthemic chorus, a lot of clever one-liners. On the album that sounded the least like a Hold Steady album, we get the song that sounds the most like a Hold Steady song.

6. Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars

I already gave this song quite a few listens when it and “Crown on the Ground” came seemingly out of nowhere toward the end of last year. Then, after Treats turned out to be completely awesome, it got a ton of plays on just about every list that needed an adrenaline boost. As an added bonus, this song’s coda sounded absolutely killer coming out of a good sound system.

5. Fuck Buttons – Olympians

How did I miss this one last year?? I paid so much attention to the obviously-epic “Surf Solar” that I sort of glossed over the best song on the CD. Then one night, after several drinks, I curled up in my recliner, put on my headphones and gave Tarot Sport another listen. I fell asleep pretty quickly, but by some miracle, managed to awaken into some sort of half-drunken trance right when “Olympians” switches things up about 4 or 5 minutes in. Right then, I could have sworn that “Olympians” was the greatest song ever made – I didn’t even know which song it was (I had to scramble to read from the iPod to figure it out). That night remains one of my favorite experiences with music. This song is over ten minutes long, and I still managed to play it more than almost any other song this year.

4. The xx - Intro
(number 8 on this list last year)

There's no particular reason I play this song so much; it's not the most substantive song on this list (in fact, it's probably the least substantive song on this list), it's just so mellow and easy to listen to. There's never a time when I don't want to hear it. It's what got me to give The XX album a second try last year, and I can't imagine that I'll stop listening to it anytime soon.

3. Frightened Rabbit - Swim Until You Can't See Land

I was actually kind of shocked that I had played this song that much… until I thought back. “Swim” is immersive – put in the right mood, it felt as though you were floating in the middle of a limitless sea. Certainly it got plenty of plays in the car, at my PC, etc… but laying back in the dark in my recliner listening to this song… there isn’t anything quite like it.

2. Sleigh Bells - Tell 'Em

One of my favorite parts about “Tell ‘Em” is how after about 20 seconds of it, you know whether you’ll love the artist that plays it, or despise them. Everyone I played this for this year loved it. I’ve heard people complain about the gimmickiness of the “Beyond in-the-red” style mastering, about the general lameness of the lyrics (the band has admitted as much), and any of fifty other supposed problems with Sleigh Bells. My favorite comment goes “I feel like I’m getting beat up when I listen to them”… in this case, that’s a good thing, right?

1. Yeasayer - Madder Red
(6th favorite song of 2010)

I still think this was the catchiest song of 2010. The towering hook, the “oohs” in the beginning, the great fade out at the end… no song this year was as easily replayable as this one. Number two was a long way off.