Underworld

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

February 9, 2025 by Michael Hanscom

So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
- We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
- Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

Just one non-media related blog post this week: a sneak peek at the video backdrop I’ve assembled for my Thursday night dance at Norwescon, along with some details on how I’ve put it together.

📚 Reading

Finished one book, read all of a second, and started a third.
- Finished my fourth of the six Philip K. Dick Award nominated works for this year, Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles.
- Read all of my fifth PKD nominated work, Brenda Peynado’s Time’s Agent.
- Started my sixth and final PKD nominated work, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.
For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

“Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.
Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.

Not a Spotify Wrap-up

January 27, 2025December 2, 2023 by Michael Hanscom

Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.

Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.

That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….

Top Artists

549 total artists

The Orb 137 minutes
Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
Dolly Parton 128 minutes
Orbital 124 minutes
Underworld 89 minutes
Bonobo 71 minutes
Hooverphonic 69 minutes
Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
VNV Nation 50 minutes
Seabound 50 minutes
Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
Rotersand 44 minutes
Icon of Coil 44 minutes

I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!

Top Songs

Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.

So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.

December 17, 2019June 13, 2018 by Michael Hanscom

Book twenty of 2018: Underworld, by Greg Cox. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Barry Manilow listens to Underworld?!?

December 9, 2019February 17, 2004 by Michael Hanscom

I never would have guessed this.

I was poking around on the iTunes Music Store, and started looking at some of the Celebrity Playlists — essentially “mix tapes” (only there’s no tape involved) assembled by famous people. I saw Barry Manilow listed, and had to know.

Two tracks immediately jumped out at me — favorites of mine, and not at all what I expected to see.

First, Underworld’s “Born Slippy/NUXX“. Underworld is one of my favorite modern electronica acts, and while most people know them for “Cowgirl” off of the Hackers soundtrack, they’ve done a lot of other excellent work, including this track (also featured on the Trainspotting soundtrack). Driving rhythms, inscrutable lyrics, and lots of electronic bleeps and bloops — good stuff. ;)

Even better, though, was seeing the Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush collaboration “Don’t Give Up” off of Peter’s album ‘So‘. Where many people would rank “In Your Eyes” (also featured on the Say Anything soundtrack) as their favorite song of his, “Don’t Give Up” has always been my personal pick. Beautiful, haunting, and full of hope for the future, this song is one that often helps me get through some of the rougher times in life. It also has one of the best videos I’ve ever seen — good enough that I remember it clearly, though I only ever saw it once, in a hotel in Italy during one of my trips to Europe. Just Peter and Kate embracing each other against a sunrise, standing on a platform that revolved so that each was facing the camera as they sang their lines. Very simple, and very effective, much like the song itself.

Good to know that Barry’s got better taste in music than I’d expect.

Underworld

December 5, 2019September 29, 2003 by Michael Hanscom

Saw Underworld yesterday. While I won’t go quite as far as to call it a Big. Steaming. Noxious. Pile. of. shite., I will say that I found it very disappointing and frustrating. There was a lot of promise and potential in the film, which unfortunately was entirely wasted. I’d almost prefer that a film be flat-out bad, but when you can see the seeds of a worthwhile effort in the midst of the crap, it makes it just that much harder to deal with.

First off, the good points (and yes, there are some).

The film is extremely pretty. Lots of worthwhile eye candy — cast, sets, costumes — just about everywhere, there’s something worth looking at.

The writers have concocted a new mythology for the creation of both vampires and werewolves, and included an explanation for the enmity between the two species, that I really liked. I’d have to see the movie again (rent, though, not in the theater) to get it down completely, but it involved a disease that one person had an immunity to which was passed to his children. Those two children were bitten by animals — one by a bat, one by a wolf — and the mutation that allowed their father to survive the disease mixed with the animal’s blood to create the beasties. After years of the werewolves acting as the vampire’s daylight guardians, a conflict between the two set off the years of warring between the clans. It’s a definite step away from the traditional storylines, and I liked the new ideas.

Unfortunately…

The writing, the overall story, and the direction were horrid. So much could have been done with the story to make it coherent, and it never happened. Alliances are formed that don’t make any sense, motiviation is never given for much of what happens, and too much of the plot dissolves into an incoherent mess.

The actors are something of an on-again, off-again mix. Kate Beckinsale does decently with what she has, she just wasn’t really given that much to do — her character is essentially either brooding or fighting during the entire movie. Bill Nighy as Viktor, the recently-resurrected elder of the vampire clan did fine by me up until the end, when a suddenly bleated out, “But I loved my daughter!” line completely destroyed all credibility for the character in my eyes. Sure, it was bad writing, but he played the line so badly that it just made it that much worse. Shane Brolly as Kraven, leader of the vampire clan until Viktor’s appearance was fairly ridiculous, to tell the truth. In fact, the only actor — and character — that I really though much of was Lucien, leader of the werewolves, played by Michael Sheen. Not only did he get the only character in the film given any decent amount of personal backstory and motivation, but he was the only actor to really seem like he fit his part.

Special effects wise, the movie was decent for the most part, with a few sudden moments where it got so astoundingly bad that it surprised me (Celine’s sword-slash-and-floating-jump across the pool of water at the end [which can also be seen in the trailer — it’s the sequence that looks like it could be straight out of a video game] stands out in my mind). The soundtrack, both musically and just as effects, drove me nuts. Apparently the sound designers felt that the best way to make sure that something was interesting and intense was to make it loud, and then they decided that everything in the movie counted as interesting and intense.

So that’s Underworld — some definite promise and potential that was completely pissed away during its two hours on screen. A shame, really — in my minds eye, I can see the same elements creating a film that would have been well worth watching, but it just didn’t happen here.