Collection #2: More Interesting Links from Around the Web
And here we have another collection of interesting websites which may fascinate and intrigue my increasingly small audience. Topics covered? Writing and music, generally, as they are my main interests.
Reviews of classical music by "an everyday guy reacting to something [he] loves." I admit I haven't read much of this yet, it's not quite a website I check daily, but it's an excellent review site - honest, genuine, and well-informed.
Do you enjoy Lovecraft? Does the Cthulhu Mythos fascinate you? What about the "Weird"? Well, you may rather like this website about the writer Clark Ashton Smith, who, alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert R. Howard, defined weird fiction, cosmic horror, and created the Cthulhu Mythos.
Smith himself is rather different from Lovecraft: he thought of himself as a poet before prosewriter, and his work often reads like fleshed-out poetry.
The website is magnificent. All (or most) of his short stories, poetry, and prose poetry, his non-fiction writings, correspondence to and from other writers (including H.P.), translations of his work, readings of them, a bibliography, articles of criticism and biography of CAS, even a tributes section of short stories, poetry, and prose poetry.
An intelligent, if infrequently updated, blog about film music, analyzing the leitmotifs of various films and their usages within those films. He's covered work by John Williams and Alexandre Desplat and others. January this year he returned after a long hiatus but since then there's been nothing.
Hopefully he'll be back soon and hopefully he will do another post series on the Oscar nominees, as he did for the 2013, '14, and '15 Oscars.
A marvelous blog and collection of ruminations and reflections on classical music. There are cultivated lists of classical music by a certain theme, such as "Epic" or "Something Different," series' of posts on particular types of works - string quartets, Finnish symphonies, American symphonies, and tohers - and of course the blog itself.
I highly recommend it for these lists' and series'. They are well worth a read and quite intelligent and informed.
Though hardly thorough, this website is a worthy introduction to the various orchestral VSTs there are out there - strings, brass, winds, yes, even full orchestras. It describes in general terms the rough strengths, weakness, and capabilities of the libraries.
Obviously, the intelligent composer or musician should invest in learning in more detail about their options and listening to demos. This website is not meant as a be-all-end-all but as a bread-and-butter.
If you write poetry, horror, fantasy, or sci-fi, or even literary fiction, this website ought to be in your bookmarks as it regularly posts lists of markets looking for submissions. It's through this website that I've discovered many an anthology I hope to write and submit a story for.
This is, like Game Boy Works, a game-by-game history project about videogaming's past. Unlike Game Boy Works, it covers all of Sega's consoles and further more does so in the form of a review of the game as a blog post. This used to be one of my absolute favorites, but in June last year the main thrust behind the blog, Dylan Cornelius, was told by God to stop using ROMs.
Now, I'm not judging him on this - his beliefs are his business, however befuddling I may find them - but for a good many months posts were sparser and less frequent. In recent months things seem to be getting in the groove of things, but I will admit I prefer Jeremy Parish's polished, informative videos to the eye-ache-inducing grey-on-black blog of Sega Does.
If you read my review of Errol Morris' The Unknown Known you probably will have guessed that I find Donald Rumsfeld to be one of the most interesting figures of the past 50 years. He is at once charming and intelligent and also superficial in that there is nothing below the surface level of what he presents himself as. I imagine it is impossible to form a genuine, deep, meaningful bond with him.
He has, for better or worse, and I have every belief for worse, been one of the most important individuals in the history of the U.S., and I'd say of the world, in shaping the 21st century. Certainly it would not be difficult at all to make a compelling, convincing argument that he probably is a war criminal. (Likewise with Cheney, Dubya.)
Yet, I can not bring myself to think of him as a bad person. Not quite. I approach it frequently. I dance around its edges. Yet I never quite can fully. If you'd seen The Unknown Known, read Known and Unknown, perhaps you might understand. I struggle to fully pin a tag like "evil" on someone. There are very, very few people truly worthy of that label.
Whatever! Not the point.
This website is a collection of .pdfs of many of Rumsfeld's memos. During his time in Congress he developed a habit of dictating memos about his votes and why he voted the way he did. He amassed correspondence, legislative reports, memos, etc. It's a habit that he kept for his entire time in government.
Whatever you or I may think of DHR, this website surely is one of the most valuable historical documents there is, a collection and archive of pure primary sources dating back to the 60s. In that regard I can think - off the top of my head - of no other individual who has, or would be willing, to make such an archive available to the public.
This is a blog about fantasy and sci-fi films, books, television shows, and games, generally provided in the form of news and reviews. But that's not all it has. There are also many articles and even essays. Of particular interest is his History of Epic Fantasy, which - when he finished in 2015 - he said he was rewriting and revising with intent to publish.
Sadly, nothing has come of that, and a shame, too, because it is - to my knowledge - the only work of its kind. There is much on the history of science fiction but comparatively little on the history and evolution of epic fantasy.
A recent discovery, this website is incomparably valuable to the writer, be they a writer of fiction or of fact. It advises you regarding your rights, on the subject of income & expenses, the matter of reprints, yes, even advice on the writing itself, in addition to its business advice. I most highly recommend it to the writers in my audience, assuming there are writers in my audience, assuming I have an audience.
Okay, gents. This posting daily thing can't and won't last forever and I am reaching the tail end of my abilities in that regard so you will be - pleased? - to know that it will very soon be coming to an end. I am focusing more on composing music to prepare a C.V. which I can show off to game developers and film makers, as well as on writing short stories that I can submit to various markets.
However! Long, two-three week absences shouldn't be happening again for a good long time unless something happens to interrupt.
You may continue to expect film and book reviews and - yes! - even the occasional soundtrack review, time-consuming though those are. They will, however, be arriving only a couple times a week, rather than daily. Even so, still an improvement over one post every two weeks, I should think.