A Quiet Apocalypse — The Long Dark Appreciation Post

Point of view shot from the computer game The Long Dark. The character holds a torch in their right hand. It's night, and snowing.
“I probably shouldn’t be out at night in a snowstorm. Pleasant Valley is a killer.”

I died today. Permanently. While hiking towards safety, hungry, cold, and tired, a wolf attacked me. I ran to the nearest shelter, an abandoned church, chased by a whole pack of wolves. Inside, I realized I had no bandages, nothing to stop the blood loss of my painful bites and scratches. Woozy, fading, I tried to tear up my socks and staunch the bleeding.

I was too late. After 106 days in the northern wilderness, I faded into the long dark.

I laughed and then started a new game.

Death in The Long Dark Survival Mode is permanent. There’s no going back. You can only begin anew, on Day 0. The game, from Hinterland Games, is meditative, methodical, and I find it compelling and immersive.

We Do What We Must

The game is survival. Your character is dropped somewhere on the fictional Great Bear Island, the victim of a plane crash, with only the clothes on your back and a handful of items. If you’re lucky (or on lower difficulty levels), you have matches and a hatchet or knife. If not, you’re nearly naked in the snow and ice, far from any shelter. The only score that matters is how many days you can live, looting abandoned human structures or hunting and killing the abundant and often aggressive wildlife.

There are four needs you have to watch and maintain: rest, warmth, thirst, and hunger. Every one of them responds to the actions you take, as well as the environment in which you find yourself. For instance, warmth goes down slower when you’re bundled against the cold, or when you’re inside a house, it goes down faster if your clothes are soaking wet or if the wind is blowing. The game gives you plenty of options to manage all four needs bars—except they’re scattered across the map and randomly placed, with very few exceptions.

Every tool you can find has a purpose. Can opener? You can get more calories from the cans of soup or peaches you scavenge. Prybar? Great for breaking into car trunks or lockers—or for beating up an attacking wolf. You can use the charcoal from burned-out campfires to map your surroundings. Oh, right: you don’t start with a map. Learning the layout of the various regions is part of the learning process of playing the game.

Some tools can be crafted, but only at workbenches or, for the more critical items, at one of the three forges. When you can’t repair your machine-made clothing, you should have been curing hides and guts that are needed to make animal-skin replacements.

It’s long stretches of silence, just the wind, and your character’s footsteps and breathing, punctuated by bursts of intense action as you stab and try to dissuade a predator from making you a meal. The games’ vistas are beautiful; seeing another sunrise after enduring a long cold night in a blizzard is just as rewarding in the game as it probably is in real life. Many of the elements I enjoy from games like Skyrim and the Fallout series are here distilled down to one compelling narrative and milieu: resource gathering and crafting, exploration, management of opposing needs.

Death Is Always An Option

My first real survival mode playthrough was on the second-easiest difficulty level, called “Voyageur.” I wanted to learn the layout of the various regions in the game and see how far I could get. I expected to die much sooner than 106 days, to be honest, even on that level. And there were several points where I very nearly did.

Once, I was trying to reach one of the aforementioned forges by crossing a frozen lake when I attracted the attention of a wolf. I didn’t have a rifle with me (too heavy for this trip); all I could do was light a flare, hoping the flame would keep the wolf at bay. I didn’t want to turn my back to the creature, so I walked backward, waving the flare, only occasionally turning to make sure I was headed in the right direction.

Except… I hit some thin ice, which cracked and plunged me into the frigid water below. I was instantly at risk for hypothermia (on a greater difficulty, it wouldn’t have been only a risk), but the salt in the wound was that the wolf opportunistically savaged me as soon as I was able to climb back out. That time, however, I survived by running carefully across the remaining ice to reach my goal, the forge barn.

What’s The Story, Morning Glory?

It’s OK to loot all these houses and shops because you’re all alone. It’s just you against the environment. If there’s an answer to why no one is there, it’s found in Story Mode, called Wintermute. In the two episodes that have been released, “Do Not Go Gentle” and “Luminance Fugue,” you play as Will, a bush pilot. You find out your plane crashed due to a massive electromagnetic pulse, accompanied by the strange behavior of electrical items when the Northern Lights are in the sky., and your goal, on top of survival, is finding your passenger, Astrid, your ex. Both characters are voiced by veteran actors Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale (also the voices of male and female Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect trilogy, another series of games I love.)

The third episode, “Crossroads Elegy,” follows Astrid’s adventures after the plane crash, and it will drop in less than two days, on 22 October 2019. I can’t wait to play it. The beauty of the game, the thought, and care that the developers have obviously put into balancing all the interconnected systems, and the talents of the writers and actors will make for compelling storytelling.

It might be difficult to tear myself away from struggling to survive in the sandbox, though. This time I’m playing on a harder mode—but not the hardest. Not yet.

ReNoMeShaMo #1 – Shamsee: A Fistful of Lunars, by Tarwater & Ricker

Cross-posted from my Amazon review of the book, because I felt the best way to start was with something by the instigator of the idea. 

Shamsee is clever, charming, and great at working the problems of being poor, which is to say, he’s been known to steal, or trade sexual services for, the things he needs. But what else can he do? His sister’s the one with an actual job. Shamsee is job-averse; at least the kinds of jobs where they expect you to show up on a regular basis indefinitely and actually get sweaty and dirty.

Because of his job-averse-ness he owes money to Blighter, and Blighter is not amused. Blighter wants to put all this behind him; he knows that Shamsee will never pay him back the money he owes him, and it might just be more fun to watch his dogs, Hands and Faces (named for the things they most like to bite, I think) eat Shamsee. Certain satisfaction in that.

Shamsee is nothing if not charming, though, and manages to buy some time to avoid being dog food. That’s where the story starts.

Tristan Tarwater’s dialogue sparkles and she drops in place names, swears to new gods, and other tidbits that set this story and these characters in a fully realized fictional world, Tarwater’s The Valley of Ten Crescents. The characters’ motivations and personality are built on a solid foundation, and then Adrian Ricker illustrates them with a deft hand and helped by an assist from Michelle Nguyen’s gorgeous colors, expanding the world even further. That world has a subtle tilt to it, one that I found intriguing and left me wanting to learn more.

The comic is a brisk, delightful read, and I was glad to have backed this project on Kickstarter. Both writer and artist are locals in my hometown of Portland, and I could not be happier to support creators of this caliber.

Travis

This is my public apology to Christi. Back in February, she posted about running into some skanky (but in a good way) boys in her apartment complex who were playing and singing songs by a band called Travis.

I’d never heard of Travis before and asked her about them, and she recommended a bunch of songs, including (and I am not making this up) their cover of Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” which, Christi insisted to me, was hawesome (although she might not have used that word). She also compared them to Radiohead, for which statement I berated her because there is no other band like Radiohead, past, present or into the future.

I made a trip to my favorite used music store and found two Travis albums in the used bin (I’m a cheap motherfucker), ripped them to my iPod and listened to them once through.

I bought “The Invisible Band” and “The Man Who”.

I liked them – melodic and synth-heavy and definitely BritPop.

Lately I’ve been shuffling through my library, but once every couple of days I still like to pick out a CD and listen straight through. And in the last couple of weeks, more often than not, I picked one of the two Travis CDs. They have been growing on me. I haven’t really added any new music to my collection in a while, mostly just picking up new releases from bands I already like, and I think my lack of newness has been affecting me – might explain why I’m letting the iPod do all the work of choosing my tunes lately. But Travis satisfies the need for new.

…to be perfectly honest, they’re still not as good as Radiohead. However, they do come close. All they’d need is lyrics that are far more angsty, and to try once in a while for a completely different sound, to stretch out musically. But they’re still good, and better than some of the other BritPop bands I’d tried.

(Like Manic Street Preachers. What the hell was I thinking? Blech.)

At any rate, this post is a public apology to Christi for doubting her and for dismissing the idea that Travis could have any comparison to Radiohead without, y’know, listening to the band first. I should know better.

I still haven’t heard their cover of Britney, however… dammit, iTunes Music Store! Why don’t you have that song? I’ve got all these free credits available for download…

LOST as long-form TV

Note: This post contains no spoilers for “Lost”.

My friend Ken * has been a fan of “Lost” since the beginning. Every Thursday morning after a new episode, he would come to work, sit down, and start out to tell me about the cool things on the show, and then realize that I don’t watch teevee. He would then proceed to pity me and belittle me, because “Lost” was not just some dumb sitcom. It was special.

I resisted watching the show for several reasons. First, probably just because of my contrarian nature – if it was popular, how could the show be any good? I did relent once during the first season, figuring if someone cool like Ken liked it, maybe it had some redeeming qualities. However, the show I ended up watching, while interesting character-heavy drama, didn’t have enough of the “Lost” mythology to project its appeal to me, and I stopped watching. I remember Ken’s disappointment the next day. “Yeah,” he admitted, “that wasn’t the best first episode to watch.”

Then, as Season Two approached, Ken began obsessing even more, joining online forums and discussing the show. I was a bit more intrigued, and when Ken bought the Season One DVD set and offerred to let me borrow it, I relented once again.

So for a couple of weeks I made my way through the DVDs, and I got a little more hooked. The mythology of the show was interesting, but more interesting to me was the characters. Seeing their backgrounds in flashbacks, compared with their current actions on the island, and watching as they developed the characters over the course of a season made me glad to have been there when all this long-form television got started. “Babylon 5”, “The X-Files”, “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”… I’ve done this before. I like the greater depth one gets for characters and situations when they’re not resolved and wrapped up neatly in 60 minutes (42 if you subtract commercials). Ken hadn’t ever gotten into those previous shows (he was off serving his country in the Air Force during most of the 90s) so I saw why “Lost” would feel so new and fresh to him.

And, honestly, the writing on the show was very good. I liked it.

So much so that, weekend after last, when I was done with the Season One DVDs, with the prospect of new episodes being aired, I did something that, until this point, I had never done before: I spent money at the iTunes Music Store. I bought the first two episodes of Season Two for “Lost”. It was the weekend, and I knew that several others I worked with were sufficiently geeky to both watch “Lost” and save it in some digital form, so I could probably find the other episodes for free… but, what the hell, I have a 5th Generation iPod capable of playing video **, so why not?

I bought and watched those two episodes, asked around at work the next Monday, waited another day, didn’t hear back, and that night splurged and bought the rest of the season. Total of 12 episodes so far.

It worked pretty well, although they take up quite a bit of space and I’ll be sure to remove them when I’m done. The screen on my iPod is actually slightly larger than my actual teevee set when I hold it at a comfortable viewing distance. Y’know… visually. So I’m not losing much by watching “Lost” on my device. Plus, it’s good to know that one more capability of my gadget is being actually used.

And using the iTMS is also good. But there was one episode that wouldn’t download. The 7th episode of the season. I kept getting my favorite ironical computer-type-error, the “unknown error”, after the little progress bar crept its way across the screen the entire way. Argh.

And I couldn’t watch these episodes out of order. That’s just not right.

I figured that in this instance, since I’ve been all legal ‘n’ stuff and paid for the privelege of viewing it, that I could justify finding a quasi-legal copy on the internets. And I did, eventually, find one, even one that had already been pre-formatted for my iPod. And it took fourteen hours to download via BitTorrent. Glacially slow. I started it at night, and by the time I had to leave for work in the morning, it hadn’t finished.

While waiting for the quasi-legal copy to download, though, I fired off an angry email to Apple about their failure to satisfy my need for instant gratification. I outlined all the things I’d tried and carefully provided the text of their irritatingly-vague error message and asked them to fix it.

I was losing valuable time – a new episode was coming soon, and I had to catch up. I still had 6 episodes to watch and less and less time to do it. The following day after work, I got home and found that both the legal download worked, and the quasi-legal download had (finally!) finished. Argh. More frustration, but no time for that. I had “Lost” to watch.

Yeah. I’ll admit it. I’ve become hooked on the show. Ken was right. It is the coolest. Ken also likes being the superior one who has already hashed out much speculation and observations about the island and the people on it… but that’s OK.

In the meantime, I got an email from Apple, apologizing for my inconvenience, and explaining that they are crediting me the cost of that download and giving me 5 free downloads at the iTMS. Yay! Now I can enter their “Billionth Song Download” contest without spending any money!

When I win, all my friends get iPods. Just sayin’.

* Yes, I’m linking to his site even though he hasn’t updated since September just because I can and because I’m trying to shame him into updating again.

** I know I haven’t blobbed about upgrading my older one but it’s an embarassing story involving me dropping my old one, the one with the Radiohead lyric on the back, into the toilet so you can understand my reticence. Just go with me, here.

Coldplay’s got RULES

Coldplay’s new CD has rules.

Can’t play it in the car, can’t play it in a Mac, can’t make MP3s out of it, it may or may not hose your Windows PC if you try to play it in there… And you can’t read the rules until you’ve bought the CD and, well, they’re not offering refunds, sorry. You bought into a contract blind, and now you’re stuck.

At least that’s the theory they’re operating under.

Now, is this Coldplay’s fault? Or is this the fault of the corporation that has bought their human “talent” and is selling them for the corporate good?

Either way, it’s just another reason I’m not going to buy any Coldplay music. The first reason being, I think their music sucks. Heh. Like I needed extra reasons beyond that, huh?

Cynical Christmas Mix

And now, on this Day After Christmas Eves’ Eve, I present to you my Cynical Christmas Mix:

  1. Father Christmas – The Kinks
  2. Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas (Sometimes) – Harvey Danger
  3. I’ve Got Some Presents For Santa – Sarah Taylor & Bill Mumy
  4. Fairytale of New York – The Pogues
  5. Santa Baby – Eartha Kitt
  6. Christmas Song – Adam Sandler
  7. Holiday In Cambodia – Dead Kennedys
  8. Another Auld Lang Syne – Dan Fogleberg
  9. Christmas At Ground Zero – Weird Al Yankovic
  10. Punk Rock Christmas – Sex Pistols
  11. Christmas At Ground Zero – Weird Al Yankovic
  12. I Won’t Be Home For Christmas – Blink 182
  13. A Spaceman Came Travelling – Chris De Burgh
  14. Christmas Wrapping – The Waitresses
  15. So This Is Christmas – John Lennon
  16. River – Joni Mitchell
  17. Snowmiser Song – Mr. Snowmiser
  18. Heatmiser Song – Mr. Heatmiser

I’m pretty sure that all of the Seven Deadly Sins are well represented there, along with the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse. It includes a few of the saddest songs I know… Perfect for sitting at home on Christmas Eve, drinking heavily, and wrapping presents for the special ones in your life. Especially the drinking part.

I’d love to comment specifically on some of the songs, but I’ve got to run down to the corner store and pick up more mixers. Luckily I laid in a good stock of Johnny Walker Red (it’s booze in a Christmas color!) for tonight’s wrapping extravaganza…

Dazzle Dogs

There’s a new restaurant near where I work. It serves upscale hot dogs, called “Dazzle Dogs”. I’ve kinda wanted to try it out, see if they’re as good as “Good Dog, Bad Dog”, but just haven’t yet. Hot dogs are normally “bleh” but when they have actual meat in them they’re not so bad.

Today I walked by there on my break, coming back from Rite-Aid to get a Diet Vanilla Coke, and the lights were off and there were signs on the door that read:

“CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS”

That’s, um, a really bad sign to hang on the door of a restaurant. I think a simple “CLOSED” or, if they had to have an explanation, “CLOSED TEMPORARILY” would have sufficed. If they plan on re-opening, they’re probably going to see a drop in business.

The owners must be new to this whole “marketing” thing…

Mmmm… Cake at The Crystal Ballroom

Mmmm… Cake.

Saw Cake at the Crystal Ballroom last night. Cake is one of my all-time favorite bands (I’m a blogger, I can use superlatives like that) and I’ve been waiting to see them live for a long time. Last time they were in Portland, tickets could only be had by calling in to the local “alternative” radio station, so, yeah, I was out of luck. I may have emailed the band and told them that they’d better get their asses back to Portland so that fans who don’t have the spare time to sit around calling a local radio station to snag tickets to see them, could see them.

The opening act was two guys calling themselves The Punk Group (warning: site requires Flash Ugh). Good, local, sounded kinda like Devo. In fact, they had distinctive black t-shirts, black hats, black wristbands and white sunglasses, giving them the near-conformity of look that Devo had. Their lyrics were hilarious.

Cake, on the other hand, don’t have a conformity of anything. They were late to the stage, where a crowded, sweaty house was resorting to chanting “We want Cake! We want Cake!” and even booing after a bit when they still didn’t show. Finally the band took the stage at 10:25. But once they were up on stage, all previous asshattery was forgotten.

Later, after a couple of songs, McCrea said, “Cake isn’t very professional in at least one way…” to which I shouted (but probably wasn’t heard) “Yeah! You were late!” but it turned out that he was referring to their lack of a set list. “It makes us feel like a damned jukebox,” he said, and the crowd started shouting out requests. “Don’t tell us what to do!” he admonished the audience. “We play what we feel like!” To which the fans responded with a cheer. Anyone who likes Cake likes every single song so anything they felt like playing was met with cheers.

The lead singer, John McCrea, struck me with an odd presence on stage. Distracted, distant… the more I think about it, much like the band’s music, which is also ironic and detatched.

I danced. Wow. I didn’t care who saw me. I danced, I pogoed, I sang along, I participated in the audience-participation sections, like the men vs. women singing on “No Phone” from their new album “Pressure Chief”. I had a great time.

Highlight of Cake’s set was John McCrea, lead singer, dedicating the following song to “FEMA, New Orleans, and George W. Bush”, giving a new twist to the lyrics:

You part the waters,
The same ones that I’m drowning in.
You lead your casual slaughters,
And I’m the one who helps you win.

You’ve got your grand piano.
You don’t even play piano.
I’m the one who plays piano.
You don’t even play piano.

You part the waters,
The same ones that I’m thirsty for.
You invite your friends to tea,
But when it’s me you lock the door.
You’ve got your credit cards,
And you thank your lucky stars.
But don’t forget the ones who foot the bill.

You’ve got your grand piano.
And you don’t even play piano.
I’m the one who plays piano.
You don’t even play piano,
But you part the waters.

Mr. McCrea also had a rant about not being able to buy beer on a Sunday in South Bend, Indianapolis, Indiana (yes, he made the mistake of calling the state “Indianapolis”) and turned it into a plea for further separation of church and state, and bemoaned the demise of 3/4 rhythm in popular music, which turned into an introduction to “Mexico”.

If I find a full set list for the show, I’ll post it. Nothing’s shown up yet on the internets (but I’m sure it’s out there).

Harvey Danger at The Crocodile

I shouldn’t have waited so long to blog my Saturday trip to Seattle. I’m sure I’m going to leave out something. As it is, this looks to be a fairly long post.

I did put up all the pictures I took while up there. Yeah, all eight of them. I wanted to take a bunch in the Science Fiction Museum but they didn’t allow cameras. Bummer. Guess y’all will have to go see it yourselves. It’s worth it.

But I’m ahead of myself. The main reason I went was to see Harvey Danger play. They have a third album coming out in a month, “Little by Little”, and have started doing shows to promote it. I saw them last December, but didn’t get to see the whole set due to freakin’ traffic from Hell. This time, I wouldn’t make that same mistake. Although I did end up having a lot of time to kill due to poor reasoning…

I got up fairly early for a Saturday and picked up a FlexCar. I got a Toyota Prius… yeah, the “hybrid” electric/gas-powered car. Turns out it did OK on the highway. A little bit underpowered but cruised along at 75 MPH just fine. I think I took a hybrid last time, too… but the Honda Civic Hybrid.

Oh, yeah, and I ran before leaving this time, too, about 6 miles worth of treadmill and elliptical trainer speedwork. But I stretched well after and there was a couple of hours before I sat down for the 3+ hour drive north… Had breakfast at the Skybox, a sports bar in my neighborhood I’d never tried. I was lured in by the menu item “Cinnamon Bread French Toast”.

Mmmmm. Let me pause for a moment and savor the memory of Cinnamon Bread French Toast. Ah.

The Skybox is run by an older couple, and their banter back and forth made for a very home-y atmosphere. It’s a fun place. I’ll be back.

And once I got Smacky some water and food, and did my best to balance the twin desires of keeping my home secure from intruders and keeping it cool for Smacky and me, I was off. I left town around 1:00 PM. The show started at 9:00 PM. I had plenty of time

Yeah, I was super early. Even earlier, once you consider that the first band went on at 10:00, the second band went on at 11:00… and Harvey Danger, the headliner, didn’t go on until midnight. Oy.

The drive was uneventful. I stopped once to get some water and a snack. No close encounters with road-rage-inflamed drivers. Weather was gorgeous. Car performed normally. Parking, which worried me considering how expensive it is in Portland, was only $3.00 for all-day. I was relieved.

My main plan for killing time was to visit the Science Fiction Museum, a geeks’ paradise. Mainly funded by one of the co-founders of Microsoft, Paul Allen, it houses the most amazing collection of movie props, memorabilia, costumes, and technologically-minded displays I have ever seen. I guess being incredibly rich makes it easy to collect things like the original robot from “Lost in Space” or the model for the Alien Queen from “Aliens” or Darth Vader’s mask from “The Empire Strikes Back” or… or… well, you name a sci-fi movie, any one ever made, and there’s something representing that movie in this museum.

I spent two hours and could have spent more time, and I could go on and on, but let me mention my favorite exhibit. The conceit of the SFM is that it’s a space station, and on one level, the level dealing with science-fictional transportation, there’s a “window” that looks out on the docking ring. It’s really a very crisp monitor that’s easily 8′ across behind a glass window but the effect is impressive. In front of the “window” are touch-screen monitors that list all of the spaceships currently docked at the station. And out the window, in motion, coming and going and avoiding each other, all to the same scale, large and small, are many of the most beloved spaceships of all time. Yes, there’s an Imperial Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon and the starship Enterprise… of course. But there are also ships like the Planet Express from “Futurama” and the alien mothership from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the Red Dwarf from, well, “Red Dwarf”. Very cleverly done, and calling up the information on that ship on one of the displays seemed to send that particular ship into action, landing or taking off or just zipping around or lumbering by, whichever suited that particular ship. I loved that window.

There are other great touches to the museum. For instance, they were constantly playing noises or other throwaway bits from different SF stories over the loudspeakers. I won’t give anything away but it’s practically a trivia contest in itself.

But even though I left the museum shortly before close, I still had hours and hours to go until the show started. I killed some time just walking around the Pacific Science Center. I debated going up in the Space Needle, but they charge for that and I’ve been up there so many times before. Mostly I wandered around the city, and looked for some food. Had Mexican again, just ’cause I got tired of looking for a place and was pretty hungry after all that walking around. Indulged in a lime margarita which could have been a lot bigger but was probably just right.

At one point, walking around, near the venue (the Crocodile Cafe), I saw Sean and Aaron from the band walking by, checking their watches and hurrying. I had a “do I act like a fan?” moment and decided to keep to myself. I had just put away my camera or I might have tried to sneak a picture of Sean’s crazy hair.

Here’s another oddness. Here I was, in a strange city, a tourist, and yet I still get asked for directions from people. What is it? Is it the fact that I’m on foot? Do I just look comfortable or confident? I rarely feel that way, but there’s got to be something going on that attracts so many lost people to me. Go figure.

I missed the opening band, mainly on purpose, but saw most of the middle band’s set. They’re called Razrez, which is pronounced in two syllables, and is just as crappy a name as they are a band. Just sayin’. Imagine the Ramones with lots more confidence and lots less skill or showmanship. Yeah. They could play guitar really fast.

And wandering around the club, I spotted John Roderick from the Long Winters’ out front, regaling a table with a story about something. I almost didn’t recognize him as he had shaved off the beard. He looked about 15 years younger, which means he looked about 15. I was a bit more tempted to shake him and ask when their new album is due out and why do we have to wait so freakin’ long… but sadly the margarita wasn’t big enough for that much courage.

After Razrez’s set ended, there was a 20 minute pause while the members of Harvey Danger got set up. Jeff Lin, the guitarist, came out and was tuning his guitar, very focused on his tasks and ignoring the crowd… until some guy yelled out “We love you, Jeff!” and Jeff blushed but did not look up. Sean Nelson showed up briefly to distribute the set lists and seemed genuinely embarrassed by the cheer from the crowd.

In the crowd, waiting for the show to start, I was standing near a guy who looked exactly like a live-action Steve Dallas, of Bloom County fame. Same greasy dark hair, same sunglasses, same bent cigarette dangling out of his mouth, same unbuttoned shirt. It was uncanny. He looked just like this. He was hilarious and only minorly annoying. He played “Air Guitar” to the songs, and sometimes even “Air Drums” but mostly did this strange not-pointing move with his hands where he would raise his hands in beat with the song but his index finger was pointed down. Hard to describe but it looked like a spastic symphony conductor.

Once the set started, Sean explained that their third album, “Little by Little” was coming out in a month, “so we have a request to make. We would like to play the entire CD, front to back, for you tonight. We have not done that yet.” Of course, the crowd loved that idea. The album, in my opinion, is going to rock. After one hearing, admittedly live, I think that I’m going to like this one as much as their first one, and probably more than their second album. Good stuff. “Little Round Mirrors” is, so far, my favorite.

Before starting the duet “Innuendo”, Sean explained that John Roderick was supposed to come out to do the second part of the song but that he literally had a frog in his throat which needed to be removed. Sean had to do both parts himself, which made for an odd performance. I’m pretty sure Sean was engaging in hyperbole, because Roderick came out to sing harmony vocals on one of the encore songs and there was no sign of any amphibians at all, although Roderick’s voice was a bit the worse for wear so anything’s possible, I suppose.

After going through all the songs from the CD, they then played a bunch of rockin’ tunes from their first two albums, starting with the one song I really really wanted to hear live, “Terminal Annex”. I was pogoing and jumping by that point, mainly because if I jumped up above the crowd I got some fresher, cooler air. The entire set list can be found on the HD message board, including their three-song encore, in this thread (scroll down).

After the show, I snagged one of the posters, and hung around for a bit to see if I could get them to sign it for me, but it was hot, I was tired, and I had a 3+ hour drive ahead of me. Thanks to the power of Diet Rock Star, I made it back home with a minimum of hallucinations and nearly no close scrapes. I dropped the car off at it’s parking spot in the Pearl District, and rode the city bus home, where I promptly collapsed into bed to begin my day-and-a-half recovery period.

It was a great trip.