ACDC Retrospective: Why and June 24, 2014

ACDC Retrospective: Why

(much longer post at my music blog)

Over the past few months I have taken an ACDC record one at a time and given them several listens.

I guess the first question is ask and answer again is "why".

ACDC was very integral to my formative attitude towards things.  It was a constant reminder of what it means to have a little "rock and roll" in your life.  "Highway to Hell" was one of the first records(in actual record form too) that I remember, that and some Muppet Christmas record my mom owned.  I grew up on the essentials, and remember when Razor's Edge was new.  I remember when the videos for "Shook Me All Night Long" were done.

But not just that.

I have finally, REALLY, started on the road of learning guitar in a meaningful and lasting way.  While Angus was not the soul reason that I chose to get a Gibson SG, he's easily 50% of it.  I have all my life wanted to be able to play "Highway to Hell", "Back in Black" and "Shook Me All Night Long".  The guitar of Angus and Malcolm is a pure blues-rock style guitar that I have always enjoyed and thankfully is one of the first genres you can learn competently as a guitarist.  Even Angus' advanced soloing work is fun variations and tricks within the pentatonic and blues scales.

Then there are my black-out areas of which I did not have much listening experience with ACDC.  My Bon Scott era knowledge was larger than I had believed when I started this adventure, but it was still greatly expanded by listening to the era.  My biggest surprises came from listening to early recordings.  The "Fly on the Wall" and "Flick of the Switch" era was another blackout section, and to tell the truth I did not know much about the album before those two, or after those two.  Finally the last black out era was everything after the release of "ACDC Live", other than Harder than a Rock, Stiff Upper Lip and Rock and Roll Train.  That's 3 of around 30 tracks I had never heard.

June 24, 2014

I finished "SORCERY!" on my tablet a few times today.  I had always heard that there were some "single player" Dungeons and Dragons modules, but I never realized there was an entire set of "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books done throughout the 80's and 90's.  They were done by Steve Jackson(of Warhammer fame, not GURPs and Munchkin) and Ian Livingston.  I now want to collect these books, as they never sold extremely well, many are hard to find easily in legal purchasing circles.  The series of books are called "Fighting Fantasy" books, and are classified as "interactive fiction" if you want to search for some on your own.  Be warned, many are multi-book anthologies, like the one they based Sorcery! on, its a 4 parter, just like the "video game" is planned to be.

I worked on some new adventures in my "Tiegel" world today.  Last week I was doing the set up adventure in a "Trilogy of Trilogies" style adventure that I favor doing.  A Trilogy of Trilogies just means that there are 9 parts, each meant to take around 1 session(your times will vary of course).  This one is based around a group of players hired to be gatekeepers for a remote part of "The Wall" that is too far to officially garrison, so its generally manned by mercenaries.  It involves making judgement calls, and a dispute among bitter rivals leading to a race for an ancient artifact.  Today I made several puzzles that I am quite happy with.  Instead of doing the "3 answers" method, I went for a very theatrical "trial and error" system where if the answer is not very obvious, the players can get by with simple trial and error actions.  The puzzles really fit the themes of the areas they appear, and were pretty fun to come up with as well.  Any time I can make beer the focus of a puzzle, I'm happy.

I watched "Silent Running", an early 70's scifi movie starring Bruce Dern(Laura Dern's father and a well respected actor in his own right).  It was directed by the lead special effects maker from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and its quite apparent that more effort was put into the stage and set than the story, but the story is still ok overall, if a little heavy handed.  The COOL part about this movie is realizing just how much it has influenced people.  I pretty much made a list of movies this one reminded me of, and sure enough most of them cited "Silent Running" as big influences.  In particular the wonderful movie "Moon" directed by Duncan Jones, and the TV comedies of "Red Dwarf" and "Mystery Science Theater 3k".  If you enjoyed "Moon" you owe it to movie history to watch "Silent Running", its on Netflix.