Meme time!

[flamingsword]

Writer Ask Game from quill_of_thoth :

Rare writer ask game: name three pieces of media that are not novels / short stories or movies / tv that were formative for you, and tag three people.

• The song “We Built This City” by Starship.
• V fir Vendetta (bc comics count)
• Shel Silverstein’s books, especially the ABZ’s
• Bullfinch’s Mythology was formative, though I’m not sure if it falls under the “no short stories” metric.
• The poem Not The Moon by Margaret Atwood
• The Uncanny X-Men #303. The one where Jubilee reads The Little Matchstick Girl to Ilyana Rasputin while she’s dying of the Legacy Virus. It pulled my teenage heartstrings.

As always, if you would find doing this interesting, consider yourself tagged.

I am too sleepy to continue this but maybe tomorrow.

Comments

Three Inspirations

[nyyki]

1. Broadcast radio
2. Nonfiction books about music, science, and the creative process
3. Role-playing Games

Not tagging anyone, because I don't perpetuate meme spread. They get too fat if fed too much and tend to overbalance the discourse.

[minoanmiss]

I think Bullfinch's Mythology is allowable. And I LOVE V for Vendetta and "We Built This City".

Ah Uncle Shelby.

Re: Three Inspirations

[flamingsword]

Yeah, but which broadcast radio shows? Which games and nonfiction? What out-of-the-way media were formative for you?

[flamingsword]

Uncle Shelby’s ABZ’s were something I read when I was, I think, 17? And I laughed so hard and so much that my stomach hurt later. My face was sore and tired from grinning, since it wasn’t a common expression of mine.

I used to write pen-pal letters to the Greek gods, especially Artemis and Apollo. Tiny baby!Heidi was going to re-invent the wheel on paganism. 😸

Re: Three Inspirations

[nyyki]

It wasn't something specific. Abba's song "SOS" taught me how effective a pair of chords stepping up to the root chord of a tune can be. An NPR show called "The Black Cat's Jump" taught me so much about great music from the first half of the last century. I listened to a lot of radio, vast quantities, as in, it was on so much. I had records, cassettes, 8-track tapes, and so much broadcast stuff. I caught radio drama like the CBS Mystery Theater and CBS Adventure Theater, listened to radio talk shows, and pestered the nighttime jazz DJ at KERA to get him to play songs I loved. The early days of my second life had me listening to classic radio dramas like Fibber McGee and Molly, The Jack Benny Show, Suspense, The Great Gildersleeve, and other shows like Joe Bevaqua's Cartoon Carnival and Steve Cumming's Golden ?Age of Top 40 Radio (I have almost all of those, and they're super-useful when writing, because it's a source not often tapped for info.

James Riordan's book "Making it in the New Music Business" was a huge hit to my concept of the music industry. Dan Hearle's great book "The Jazz Language" was also powerful. To say I was a voracious reader was an understatement -- by third grade I was going through a full novel in a single day, and that accelerated from there. I read things about all kinds of stuff -- I remember a series of books about crafts kids could do, so I read the one about making puppets and another one of them about performance ventriloquism, though my brother was so much more into that. At Band camp (no, nothing stereotypical happened either time) it was common to find copies of Shirmer's Pocket Dictionary of Music. I'd pick up a stray copy and start reading it. At my step-grandparents' house they had the set of the Encyclopedia Americana that had both the Book of Knowledge and the Science set, and I scoured the science set for stuff on chemistry. UNESCO published a book about science and what could be done in less developed countries, and I dug through that several times -- this was one of the books I checked out more often. I used the stuff in it to make boiling flasks out of dead lightbulbs, for example. Marble crushed up and covered with sulfuric acid releases hydrogen, so I had that as a science fair project one year. And yes, sometimes I'd sit and read through an encyclopedia, following the precursors to hyperlinks.

Of course I was an AD&D freak, because that was the monolithic option for so many of us back then. I fell in love with Gamelords Ltd's game Thieves Guild, and their use of an urban environment was great for my interests. I played Traveller too, and I read The Dragon every time I got my hands on it. A friend of mine and I wrote three different role-playing game systems in high school, and I read stuff so the games made sense. I was also a semi-early adopter of the game Car Wars.

My step Monster liked grounding us off TV, so I stopped following shows and started reading a whole lot. I was good at undercutting her attempts at manipulation.

I guess someone might say I was a bit eclectic.

Re: Three Inspirations

[flamingsword]

That sounds so awesome, and also a bit lonely, much like my childhood of substituting reading for human companionship. I wish I’d known that KERA had a jazz hour, though, that would have been so useful in the 90’s.

I used to read etymological dictionaries at the library, and when I was little, Mom bought us the New Book of Knowledge encyclopedias bc she had a tax return come in right before someone we knew was trying to get into selling books door to door. I used to read those when it was too dark or cold or grounded to play outside. And after Larry died, I vaguely remember I read them cover to cover because Mom kept saying she would take me to the library later and then not doing it bc she was sleepwalking through life. Not that I blame her for that.

I read through all of the books in my elementary and junior high school’s libraries that I found to be even a bit interesting. So lots of fiction and about a quarter of the nonfiction I guess? Mostly the sciences and books on art and cultures. Less on practical subjects, which I had to fix later.

Funny how stuff comes back to you.

Re: Three Inspirations

[nyyki]

I don't think Don Matken was doing the late night jazz thing by the 90's. Here's the cool part -- I was calling so often we got into a good conversation on a regular basis, and then my freshman year of high school I asked him if he played any local jazz groups. He said he would if he had any to play, so I got him and the assistant band director, who conducted the stage band, talking, and four of the songs from the stage band's spring concert got broadcast. I remember fellow students who couldn't grok how I made that happen.

I didn't think of it as lonely. The UNESCO book was a recommendation from a friend of mine who was big into biology, so we talked about it some I was blazing through books -- in seventh grade I was home sick one day and my step monster handed me a book to read, Judy Blume's "Forever". So of course I read it, and I was left with nothing to read after about 2pm. Reading at the clip I did meant I could have social time too, which was important to me. Let's see... in the early 90's it would be KZPS's nighttime jazz stuff, which made the jump to The Oasis when that station came on the air. And there was also 99.1, KJZY "Jazzy, which was around for a bit, and that was a huge playlist covering over eighty years. Also, KNTU at 88.1 played jazz all the time too. The latter two were the stations that could drop in something from the ODJB (Original Dixieland Jazz Band) from their 1914 recording session, the first one for any popular artists, followed by something from the swing era or bebop or cool jazz or something from Spyro Gyra or Children of Forever or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, so it was true eclectic playlists.

Re: Three Inspirations

[flamingsword]

That sounds so cool. I wish my terrible little radio had gotten more stations coming in clearly, maybe I would have found more music that I liked than just 101.1 classical, the oldies station, and the one hip hop station that came in clear enough to listen to for a year or two.

My existence was lonely as a kid, even though I would not have been able to name it such. I mostly didn't have friends of my own, which was why I read so much and played games that you could by yourself. I grew up and learned how to emulate neurotypicality and things got better, and then I found people whose brains worked like mine and things got LOTS better. I'm mostly not lonely anymore, but my childhood was kind of not great. Then again, whose was?