Voluntary victim…

It’s December.

37 Weeks…

We survived November, but I’ll finally believe there’s a chance things will start to change in a positive direction if we get to January 21st without the festering pile of rotting excrement fucking up everything even more than he already has.

Thanksgiving was just the two of us at home, and while it was nice to not have the three-day post social gathering hangover recovery, it was really weird. I haven’t seen my parents (or any family) since last Christmas. With the path we’re on we won’t be seeing them this Christmas.

So…yeah.

I tried to write an actual post that wasn’t just a lead-in to my monthly Last.fm stats and it just did not happen. It felt like dragging a spoon through oobleck. Not pretty. I tried to write about the story monstrosity I’ve been working on for a full year (!) now, but it just didn’t happen.

Many years ago I wrote a story (and by “wrote” I mean started, beat to death, and never finished) about a band. (Big surprise.) One of the band members was named Dalin Ryan Miller. Everyone called him by his middle name because he hated his first name and he was an absolute train wreck for a multitude of reasons. Fast forward through a lot of years and a lot of started and abandoned stories and that character (in name at least) has persisted. And thanks to a lot of WHATIF-ing from Basil, good-ol DRM ended up in the latest clusterfuck spilling out onto the page. He’s still an absolute train wreck for a multitude of reasons. Different reasons, but a shitton nonetheless. This thing has tested me far more than really anything else I’ve written, but I’m not entirely sure why. It’s really just a Frankenstein-ed disaster of pieces cobbled together from dozens of other stories, so the material is really not new. But it’s sitting at seventy-five thousand some-odd words and it has surpassed in length just about every other story I’ve written. (Or started, beat to death, and never finished.)

Anyroad.

Last summer when I discovered I apparently like Panic! at the Disco, I fell down a rabbit hole of their music, in addition to all of the Post!Panic! projects the multitude of former members have put out. Which led me to the musical stylings of I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, a duo of bass player Dallon Weekes and drummer Ryan Seaman, and then my brain short-circuited much like it did with Stephen Tyler because Dallon and Ryan. I AM EASILY ENTERTAINED. *ahem* Anyway. Their full-length album came out in October and I bought it last month and…the Last.fm stats speak for themselves. There’s a lot of 80’s synth-pop and things that sound like they’re out of a John Hughes movie and now I know why I liked Panic’s Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die album as much as I did, because clearly DW had a very strong influence on the overall sound of that album. (Collar Full might as well have been on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack.)

In other news…

After thirteen (!) years of listening to me whinge about being fucking cold all the time, Bob got me a heated blanket. It’s soft and fuzzy and bigger than your average throw blanket and I don’t even need a hoodie sitting at my desk while wrapped up in this thing. Tiny Pink Bear, the resident blankie aficionado, approves. Getting her to share it is another story.

What.

You heard me.

She’s here to bring you the monthly Last.fm stats.

Top 10 Most Played Artists for November 2020…

1.) I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME 729 plays

2.) The Killers 292 plays

3.) Fall Out Boy 229 plays

4.) Parachute 150 plays

5.) O.A.R. 149 plays

6.) Splender 80 plays

7.) The Young Veins 80 plays

8.) Carbon Leaf 66 plays

9.) The Police 63 plays

10.) Billy Joel 52 plays

Honorable mention: Brandon Flowers, Elton John, The Honeydogs, Evan & Jaron, Sara Bareilles, Darren Criss, The Monkees, 2AM Club, Gin Blossoms, Ryan Ross, Panic! at the Disco, Foo Fighters

Total of 2,276 plays of 703 tracks from 36 albums by 112 artists.

Mad IQs
I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME

Something to say?