Lots of songs
I could talk about real life. Real life is being really crazy just now - and please send fiddledragon more hugs - but I don't want to talk about real life. Or study database systems, apparently. I want to post songs. Lots of songs.
Some of these songs are new, some were sitting around nearly-written for a while but were only recently finished, and some are rather old but I only got around to posting them now. They run the gamut from epic quests to furry animals to religious devotion (to, would you believe, all three at once?), plus machine learning and rubber-band-powered airplanes. As usual, everything is linked from my songs page. The layout over there is a bit rough just now.
With "Divine Monkey" (mp3), I add another religion to my songbook - Judaism, Wicca... Hinduism? I got the idea for this song when I noticed how many songs Jonathan Coulton has written about monkeys and relationships. This immediately got me thinking about Hindu mythology's favorite monkey, the heroic monkey-god Hanuman, who acts as a go-between for Rama and Sita in the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana. The idea, presented in the song, of the devoted servant who brings together the masculine and feminine faces of the Divine, is remarkably parallel to Jewish mysticism. If you want to cover this song, but you just want an epic story about a monkey, it's okay to omit the fourth verse as long as you don't pass around an abridged copy of the lyrics.
"El-ahrairah" (mp3) is another song about a furry animal from an epic - the legendary rabbit-ancestor El-ahrairah from Watership Down. Many tales have been told of El-ahrairah, but the one retold in this song is the beginning of them all. The scansion is a bit strange.
I started writing "Solitary World" when Episode II came out, and just finished it. The exiled prophet-child of Dave Carter's "Ordinary Town" reminded me a lot of Anakin Skywalker - his destiny seems to call him away, but he can never really leave Tatooine. (Didn't I already write a Dave Carter filk about this?)
"The Messenger" (mp3) was an attempt to write another song in the vein of "John Barleycorn" and Old King Coal" - what else among the resources upon which our civilization depends can we, metaphorically, ritually torture and exploit? Listen and you'll find out.
"Toy Planes and Rubber Bands" (mp3) introduces an original alternate-history setting I like to call "rubber-band-punk". It's set during a war, and the tech level is somewhat like that of the Napoleonic wars, with a few major differences: industrial technology (including engines) is less advanced, electronics are more advanced, and one side has access to a natural-rubber formulation which allows aircraft of this general design to be built at full size.
Especially for gfish and vixyish: "Free Spirit" (mp3), inspired by these posts on Slashdot, is a response to "The Collars" (story, song). Remember, kids, this is science fiction - I'm sure that, by the time our colony of robots on Mars achieves sentience, the key players will be quite different.
"Galapagos (Mendel's Escape)" (mp3) is based on a obscure computer game of the same name. The game was basically a platform-puzzle game, except that the little bug-like protagonist who had to crawl from platform to platform and not die was not controlled by the player - he was an autonomous AI. The player could only click on objects in the environment to activate/deactivate them. It was cute, if frustrating (I've been writing a walkthrough), and it had a ridiculously over-the-top frame story, which is now available to you in song form.
I wrote "Tit for Tat" (mp3) a long time ago, but held off on posting in because I wasn't sure I was 100% happy with how the song's message came out. Tit-for-tat is one of the ecologically optimal strategies for the iterated prisoner's dilemma, which can be thought of as a primitive model of social cooperation. The success of tit-for-tat seems to suggest that cooperation on a societal scale can emerge from the naked self-interest of individuals - and that's true, but it doesn't mean that widespread selfishness is good for society. Rather, it means that cooperating is in our best interest. So let's cooperate.
"Tzur Hashlishi" (Third Rock) (mp3) was recently posted here and linked on israfilk. It's a reverent mash-up of "Hope Eyrie" with Psalm 92. Fascinatingly, the Apollo 11 landing took place on Tisha B'Av, the date on which the Temple was destroyed (twice!), but also the date on which, according to legend, Moshiach will be born. The sages wrote that the Temple was destroyed because of groundless hatred. It seems to me that on of the best cures for groundless hatred is to realize that we're all in the same boat, and nothing brings that home like the image of the Earth as seen from space. My rock.
"Ma'ariv Aravim" (mp3) and "Yotzer Or" (mp3) are prayers from the Hebrew liturgy - specifically, the prayers honoring G!d as Creator in the evening and morning respectively. Of the central prayers of the service, they're the ones most associated with nature, which appeals to me, and, oddly enough, neither of them appears to have picked up a tune (at least, not a generally-known one). I decided to fix this.
The Niggun of Zelda (mp3) is, like most niggunim, a wordless tune hummed slowly and contemplatively in a minor mode. It may also sound hauntingly familiar to some of you... yep. I especially enjoy starting this at a Jewish gathering at an appropriate-time-for-a-niggun and seeing the looks on the faces of the people who recognize it.
In addition, I've posted MP3s of the much-requested "Jurassic Park Sunset and "Not All Who Wander Are Lost in Space".
Some of these songs are new, some were sitting around nearly-written for a while but were only recently finished, and some are rather old but I only got around to posting them now. They run the gamut from epic quests to furry animals to religious devotion (to, would you believe, all three at once?), plus machine learning and rubber-band-powered airplanes. As usual, everything is linked from my songs page. The layout over there is a bit rough just now.
With "Divine Monkey" (mp3), I add another religion to my songbook - Judaism, Wicca... Hinduism? I got the idea for this song when I noticed how many songs Jonathan Coulton has written about monkeys and relationships. This immediately got me thinking about Hindu mythology's favorite monkey, the heroic monkey-god Hanuman, who acts as a go-between for Rama and Sita in the great Hindu epic, the Ramayana. The idea, presented in the song, of the devoted servant who brings together the masculine and feminine faces of the Divine, is remarkably parallel to Jewish mysticism. If you want to cover this song, but you just want an epic story about a monkey, it's okay to omit the fourth verse as long as you don't pass around an abridged copy of the lyrics.
"El-ahrairah" (mp3) is another song about a furry animal from an epic - the legendary rabbit-ancestor El-ahrairah from Watership Down. Many tales have been told of El-ahrairah, but the one retold in this song is the beginning of them all. The scansion is a bit strange.
I started writing "Solitary World" when Episode II came out, and just finished it. The exiled prophet-child of Dave Carter's "Ordinary Town" reminded me a lot of Anakin Skywalker - his destiny seems to call him away, but he can never really leave Tatooine. (Didn't I already write a Dave Carter filk about this?)
"The Messenger" (mp3) was an attempt to write another song in the vein of "John Barleycorn" and Old King Coal" - what else among the resources upon which our civilization depends can we, metaphorically, ritually torture and exploit? Listen and you'll find out.
"Toy Planes and Rubber Bands" (mp3) introduces an original alternate-history setting I like to call "rubber-band-punk". It's set during a war, and the tech level is somewhat like that of the Napoleonic wars, with a few major differences: industrial technology (including engines) is less advanced, electronics are more advanced, and one side has access to a natural-rubber formulation which allows aircraft of this general design to be built at full size.
Especially for gfish and vixyish: "Free Spirit" (mp3), inspired by these posts on Slashdot, is a response to "The Collars" (story, song). Remember, kids, this is science fiction - I'm sure that, by the time our colony of robots on Mars achieves sentience, the key players will be quite different.
"Galapagos (Mendel's Escape)" (mp3) is based on a obscure computer game of the same name. The game was basically a platform-puzzle game, except that the little bug-like protagonist who had to crawl from platform to platform and not die was not controlled by the player - he was an autonomous AI. The player could only click on objects in the environment to activate/deactivate them. It was cute, if frustrating (I've been writing a walkthrough), and it had a ridiculously over-the-top frame story, which is now available to you in song form.
I wrote "Tit for Tat" (mp3) a long time ago, but held off on posting in because I wasn't sure I was 100% happy with how the song's message came out. Tit-for-tat is one of the ecologically optimal strategies for the iterated prisoner's dilemma, which can be thought of as a primitive model of social cooperation. The success of tit-for-tat seems to suggest that cooperation on a societal scale can emerge from the naked self-interest of individuals - and that's true, but it doesn't mean that widespread selfishness is good for society. Rather, it means that cooperating is in our best interest. So let's cooperate.
"Tzur Hashlishi" (Third Rock) (mp3) was recently posted here and linked on israfilk. It's a reverent mash-up of "Hope Eyrie" with Psalm 92. Fascinatingly, the Apollo 11 landing took place on Tisha B'Av, the date on which the Temple was destroyed (twice!), but also the date on which, according to legend, Moshiach will be born. The sages wrote that the Temple was destroyed because of groundless hatred. It seems to me that on of the best cures for groundless hatred is to realize that we're all in the same boat, and nothing brings that home like the image of the Earth as seen from space. My rock.
"Ma'ariv Aravim" (mp3) and "Yotzer Or" (mp3) are prayers from the Hebrew liturgy - specifically, the prayers honoring G!d as Creator in the evening and morning respectively. Of the central prayers of the service, they're the ones most associated with nature, which appeals to me, and, oddly enough, neither of them appears to have picked up a tune (at least, not a generally-known one). I decided to fix this.
The Niggun of Zelda (mp3) is, like most niggunim, a wordless tune hummed slowly and contemplatively in a minor mode. It may also sound hauntingly familiar to some of you... yep. I especially enjoy starting this at a Jewish gathering at an appropriate-time-for-a-niggun and seeing the looks on the faces of the people who recognize it.
In addition, I've posted MP3s of the much-requested "Jurassic Park Sunset and "Not All Who Wander Are Lost in Space".