New EP Out Now: “Difficult Time”
Posted on February 21, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 4 Comments
Surprise! I have another EP of electronic music ready for you. This one is called Difficult Time, after one of the tracks on the album, and also because [gestures at the world]. The five tracks here allude to the mess of the world, either by running toward the mess, or away from it. It clocks in at 28 minutes, which makes it a nice, compact collection (and also, now I have figured out how some streaming services decide whether something is an EP or album: If it’s less than 30 minutes, it’s an EP, and if it’s longer, it’s an album. Well, okay). Three of the tracks I’ve posted here before; two of them, including the title track, are previously unreleased.
As I type this, Difficult Time is available on YouTube and YouTube Music, and also on Amazon Music. As always, the other streaming services will have it presently, it just takes a day or two to jump through the various approval processes. I do intend to make this EP and other music of mine available on Bandcamp eventually, whenever I can manage to get around to it. In the meantime, I’ve posted the individual tracks below (via YouTube) for your listening enjoyment. They are:
Ascenders — So named because I think it feels like the music is in the process of taking off towards the sky.
Study of Decay I — A very noisy, very grindy sort of track. Perfect for watching the world fall apart.
Difficult Time — Not just an observation on the state of the world at the moment, but a notation that this track is in 7/8 time, and that makes it a bit… jittery.
Study of Decay II — Starts off coherent, becomes less so as it goes along. Sometimes, that happens.
The Stars Are Brightly Shining — An interpretation and interpolation of the traditional Christmas song “O Holy Night.” I like to think it ends the EP on a hopeful note.
As an aside, I mentioned to Athena I was putting out a new EP of music, and she said “You know your music is kind of… out there.” And, well. Yes. Yes, I did know that. I hope it’s enjoyable to folks anyway.
— JS
The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow
Posted on February 21, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 8 Comments
Even if you don’t know what the word “Bezzle” means — yet — you know what it is, because it’s almost a certainty that someone you know, and perhaps even you, have found yourself in that state at one time or another. Cory Doctorow is here now to explain to you what The Bezzle is, and why he found it such a compelling topic for his tale.
CORY DOCTOROW:
Bezzle, n: The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
My Martin Hench novels chronicle the adventures of a two-fisted, hard-bitten forensic accountant who spent 40 years doing spreadsheet-to-spreadsheet combat with technology’s most inventive scammers.
I introduced Hench with last year’s Red Team Blues, which is – paradoxically – Hench’s last adventure, told in the manner of the final volume of a beloved, long-running series. I thought it was a cute conceit and then my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, loved it so much that he bought two more and I had a brainwave: what if I told the stories in reverse? Sure, the reader will always know that Hench survives, but that’s more-or-less true of every long-running series, right? No one really ever bought a new Conan novel thinking that Howard was gonna give the mighty-thewed Cimmerian the axe.
There’s lots to love about this setup. Given that Marty’s career spans 40 years of Silicon Valley history, I can parachute him into any scam in tech history. He’s the Zelig of tech-finance fraud.
Patrick bought three of these: Red Team Blues (Marty’s last adventure, a ripped-from-the-headlines cryptocurrency fraud novel that came out just as FTC was imploding) (though, honestly, I coulda published that one in any month between 2020 and 2024 and there would have been a ghastly crypto scandal to hook it to); Picks and Shovels (Marty’s first adventure, in the heroic era of the PC, set in an early 1980s San Francisco where AIDS is scourging the city, Jello Biafra is running for mayor, and every grifter has invented a new personal computer), and – published today – The Bezzle,
The Bezzle tells the tale of an escalating series of scams spanning the golden age of the scam, starting with Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 buying spree that saw every great, useful tech company bought up with Saudi royal money (funneled through Yahoo! via Softbank) and then torn to shreds by Yahoo!’s warring, venal princelings that pioneered the enshittification playbook.
From there, the book ascends a gradient of ever-more-destructive scams: the real-estate financial engineering that incubated the Great Financial Crisis; the pigs-at-the-trough bailouts that followed; and then, the rise and rise of prison-tech grifters, who filled America’s heavenly overcrowded prisons with cheap Chinese tablets that replaced libraries, continuing education, phone calls, video visits and commissary accounts, with vendors extracting huge sums from prisoners and their families (this scam continues to this day).
I’ve studied scams and scammers for a long time, and despite that, I’ve fallen prey to scams. Repeatedly. This has given me many opportunities to consider the stories that scammers and their marks tell themselves about why scams work.
For the scammer, the principal narrative is the self-serving notion that “you can’t cheat an honest man.” Many of the classic cons involve tricking the mark into thinking that they are committing some kind of scam, and the con-artist smugly pockets their winnings, telling themselves that if the mark had only been honest, they’d have kept their dough.
But not every con involves tricking the mark into thinking that they’re getting one over. The most successful and durable cons rely on the mark simply not wanting to know that they’ve been conned.
This is where Galbraith’s “bezzle” comes in – that “magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” As Galbraith pointed out, the bezzle is an enchanted moment where everyone feels better off: the mark thinks they’re richer, and the con artist knows they are. This was the case during the 2008 housing crisis, when bankers, insurers, and borrowers colluded with regulators and analysts to prolong the bezzle for as long as they could. So long as no one looked too closely at those collateralized debt obligations and other exotic financial instruments, everyone could pretend that the whole world was richer and the line would go up forever.
Same goes for STONKS, cryptos, NFTs and every other vibe-based asset class of end-stage capitalism. So long as no one looks too hard at these pigs-in-pokes, the bezzle can continue and with it, the good feelings it brings.
But the longer the bezzle goes on, the more scam-debt the victim accumulates. Prolonging the bezzle is like going from the bar to a series of speakeasies to avoid your hangover. You’ll have to take ever-more-heroic measures to stave off the inevitable, and the payback, when it arrives, will be a million times worse.
The bezzle is how the con artist enlists the victim to prolong the con, participate in their own victimization and deepen the wound.
It’s damned hard to convince people that they’re being scammed, but not because “you can’t con an honest man.” It’s because we all flinch away from pain and try to keep the party going for as long as we can. It’s because it’s easy to understand how you’re winning, and understanding how you’ll lose is both a lot of dull detail, and a serious downer.
The anti-scam forces have invented many tactics to make it easier to shut the bezzle down. David Maurer, a linguist, turned his glossary of con-artist slang into a gripping anthropological study of con artists (it was adapted for film under the title The Sting). When Adam McKay adapted The Big Short, he had Margot Robbie deliver all the most technical explanations while partially submerged in a bubble-bath. And of course, John Oliver and the Last Week Tonight crew use stunts and comedy monologues to transform even the most tedious scams into rage inducing, laugh-aloud TV gold.
This work is unbezzling. Transforming a scam’s mechanics into entertainment is a way of fashioning a long, sharp pin that can prick the magic bubble of denial that turns a moment’s lapse in judgment into a life-destroying victimization.
This is what makes the Hench books so satisfying to write (and, I hope, to read). Just as my Little Brother books turned the bone-dry business of understanding surveillance and information security into tight technothrillers that inspired a generation of technologists to pursue security and privacy, the Hench books are designed to be a highly entertaining vaccination that inoculates the reader against the raging pandemic of scams that passes for our economy.
The Bezzle: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
The Big Idea: Jennifer Estep
Posted on February 20, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
We all know about protagonists, the characters who drive the story, and the secondary characters, the ones who do… other things while the protagonists drive the story. What happens when one of those other characters want to take a turn at the wheel? Author Jennifer Estep knows, and in this Big Idea for Only Hard Problems, is here to give you the low down.
JENNIFER ESTEP:
If there is one universal truth I’ve discovered as an author, it’s this:
Secondary characters are awesome.
C’mon. Admit it. Some of your favorite book, movie, and TV characters aren’t the main characters of the story—it’s the secondary characters you can’t stop reading about and watching. As an author, I love to write about secondary characters, and I often have more fun with their stories than I do with the regular books in a series.
In my mind, all my secondary characters have their own adventures, hobbies, goals, pet peeves, and more. I just don’t always get the chance to show those things on the page. But sometimes, a secondary character will plant themselves in front of me, shake their fist, stomp their foot, and demand their own story. That’s what happened with Zane Zimmer in Only Hard Problems, book #3 in my Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series.
Zane Zimmer is a powerful psion with telekinesis, telepathy, telempathy, and other abilities. He’s also a wealthy Regal lord and an elite warrior known as an Arrow. Zane is delightfully snarky, supremely confident, and exceedingly ruthless, and he usually gets all the best/funniest lines. Here’s one of my favorite Zane lines from Only Hard Problems:
“That sounds rather sketchy, even for space magic.”
So far in my Galactic Bonds series, Zane Zimmer has been an antagonist to Vesper Quill and Kyrion Caldaren, the two main point-of-view characters. Zane has insulted Vesper and Kyrion, chased them down, thwarted their escape attempts, turned them over to the big bad villains, and more.
Zane hasn’t been a hero or even a remotely good person, but he’s been interesting—so interesting that I decided to write a short book from Zane’s point of view and delve even deeper into his character. Why does Zane want to be the leader of the Arrows? Why is family so important to him? How will he react to a major secret that was revealed in a previous book? I tackled all those questions and more in Only Hard Problems.
And here’s a question I had to answer for myself: Why do I like reading and writing about secondary characters so much?
To me, it’s all about the distance and the mystery. A secondary character like Zane Zimmer can strut onto the page and do all sorts of dastardly things, and the reader is never quite sure of the character’s motives and goals, unless the character announces their intentions in the dialogue (or something similar). A secondary character can just be a little bit extra—extra funny, extra dangerous, extra villainous, extra cool—without the character being over the top (unless that’s what you are going for as an author).
But writing about a secondary character is also a risk. What if readers don’t like learning more about a particular character? What if readers only want to read about the main point-of-view characters?
I’ve had those worries with Only Hard Problems, along with other books/novellas I’ve written from a secondary character’s point of view, but I’m going to keep writing those kinds of stories. Why? Because to me, secondary character stories are like bonus material that give the reader a different look at and another glimpse into a beloved book world/series.
Extra is always better, at least when it comes to secondary characters.
I hope everyone enjoys Zane Zimmer’s story. Happy reading!
Only Hard Problems: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Google Play|Kobo
New Music: Creep
Posted on February 19, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 6 Comments
Yes, it’s the Radiohead song. I fiddled with it some over the weekend. I was trying to make it more clanky. I think I may have gone a little too far over into the noisy end of things. Too many bouncing parts is a hazard when you have a lot of reverb at your command. But! I mostly nailed the falsetto bit. So I have that going for me, which is nice. If you’re curious to hear how I wrecked this one, here you go.
— JS
Probably Because There is Snow All Over the Ground, This Song Has Been Earworming Me
Posted on February 18, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 8 Comments
Now here it is for you. It’s a fabulous song. I wouldn’t mind if the Sundays came back with some more new music sometime.
— JS
New Books and ARCs, 2/16/24
Posted on February 16, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
Smack dab in the middle of the month, a set of new books and ARCs that have arrived at the Scalzi Compound. What here looks good to take with you into the weekend? Share in the comments!
— JS
The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here
Posted on February 15, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 218 Comments
There’s an investigative report out on the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards, by Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford, and make no mistake about it, it is grim. The short version is that eligible people and works were kept off the Hugo ballot, not because the Chinese government or the Chinese principals of the Chengdu Worldcon overtly demanded it, but because American and Canadian Hugo administrators made the censorship decisions themselves, often on grounds that were (to put it politely) misinformed. People and works who should have been finalists were denied their rightful place on the ballot. A fraud was perpetrated by the Hugo administrators: on the Hugo Award voters, on the Chengdu Worldcon membership, and on the science fiction and fantasy community at large.
And as a final kick in the teeth, that fraud? Really fucking badly done. It’s a farce, as well as a fraud.
I would like to believe that this is a one-off failure of administration brought on by the circumstances of this year’s Worldcon location, but inasmuch as Dave McCarty, the principal mover of this fraud (and, for the record, someone who I’d considered a friend for more than a decade) was involved in Hugo administration for several other Worldcons, we at least have to check in again on those results. The good news here is that prior to the 2023 Worldcon, the data and stats for the nominations and voting on the awards were made immediately available after the award ceremony, and any discrepancies would have been found and hopefully addressed. We have the power of community examination and vetting for all of those results, and for correcting any problems while that year’s Worldcon was still in operation.
We didn’t have that in 2023. The data and stats were released as late as possible, far after the closure of the Chengdu Worldcon, which meant, due to the highly idiosyncratic nature of the Worldcon structure, there would have been no substantial way to address these discrepancies after the fact. It’s pretty clear to me now that this strategy of delay was intentional, not to address any difficulty in compiling the data, but to evade responsibility for censorship and for perpetrating a fraud. And that, also, is an act of fraud. Who was responsible for releasing the Hugo voting and nomination stats and data? Again: Dave McCarty.
It’s not only on Dave McCarty, to be clear. Everyone involved in the removal of legitimate finalists from their place on the ballot is implicated, and, at the very least, they should have nothing to do with the administration of the Hugo Awards moving forward. Their actions regarding this year’s Hugo Award administration are appalling, embarrassing and shameful. They abdicated their duty as administrators. So they should not be administrators ever again.
There should be apologies: To the people who were wrongfully removed from the ballot, and to the people who were winners and finalists in 2023. The former did not have their deserved and rightful opportunity to be finalists and to compete for the Hugo award; the latter effectively now have asterisks on their achievements. None of them bear any blame for this, of course, and none of their works were not deserving of a spotlight or an eventual award. They are all injured parties to a greater or lesser extent. But we all know what we know now. It’s difficult to feel good about winning, or being a finalist, in a year when you now know a fix was in. Hugo voters should be apologized to as well; they were obliged to vote on a compromised ballot.
That said: Who will give the apologies? The Chengdu Worldcon no longer functionally exists; the Glasgow Worldcon is a legally separate entity that bears no responsibility for the actions undertaken by the 2023 Hugo administrators. Dave McCarty has apologized for being a jerk for those who questioned his administration of the awards but not, importantly, for how he administered the awards themselves. By his words and actions, he apparently believes that he did nothing wrong here. It’s doubtful any apology is coming out of that quarter. Others involved have apologized, which is good. But again, at this point in time, it’s too late to do much about the 2023 Hugo Awards. They’re in the books.
The 2023 Hugo Awards were fraudulent. Now it’s the responsibility of World Science Fiction Society, who owns the trademarks on the Hugos and Worldcon, and all future Worldcons, starting with Glasgow this year and Seattle in 2025, to make sure that this fraud never happens again. WSFS in particular needs to grow the hell up and get some teeth, and become an organization with the actual ability to enforce a standard of accountability with regard to how their trademarks are used and administered on a yearly basis. Part of that must be a contractual agreement on the part of any potential Worldcon for transparency and openness when it comes to the Hugo Award nominations and voting — and a guarantee that any discrepancies, accidental or intentional, are addressed before the close of the Worldcon, if the current relationship between WSFS and the annual Worldcon continues, or by some other mechanism, if changes are made.
Given the actions of the 2023 Hugo administrators, there should also be a ban on the administrators censoring work for political reasons. If the government of wherever the Worldcon is that year demands censorship of the Hugo finalists, then make that government fucking do it. (And then resign in protest.) The administrators should not be willing accomplices in the act of censorship. It goes against everything the Hugos, and any serious literary award, should be about.
To the credit of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, it has already committed to openness with regard to this year’s Hugo nomination process, and will share, when the finalist slate is announced, the information about what works might have been deemed ineligible and why (Update: It has also accepted the resignation of Kat Jones as Hugo administrator). I can’t imagine that the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle will do any different. These are good steps and the right steps to take, but they cannot be the only steps. Real and substantive structural change has to happen. This report shows why: Because if it is not made, then any other future Hugo administrators can do what these administrators here have done. We make rules in the aftermath of violation. To not do so invites future violation.
I’ll end on a personal note here. I made my first Hugo finalist list in 2006. It had a huge impact in my visibility in the science fiction and fantasy world and on the course of my career. The first time I won a Hugo Award, in 2008, I was delighted, but more importantly I felt the community of science fiction fans sharing my joy at holding that trophy. In 2012, I was the emcee for the Hugo Awards, and as gratifying as it is to win one, it is equally gratifying to give them away to writers and artists and editors and fans. My Hugos mean something to me. They mean something to lives and careers of the people who win them. The Hugos mean something to the community.
People are always in a rush to declare the Hugos “over” or irrelevant, especially when people go out of their way to damage them or their reputation. We’ve seen it before in just the last decade, when bad actors tried to destroy the value of the award from the outside, out of petulance and spite; we’re seeing it now, when bad actors have diminished the value of the award from the inside, out of arrogance and incompetence. What keeps the Hugos relevant is the choice of people who love and value science fiction and fantasy to make it so. And that means making sure the Hugos are robust and resilient, and up to the times. Not just in who and what gets nominated and becomes a finalist, but in how they are administered, and how they move through the culture of science fiction and the world.
We’ve hit a very bad moment with the Hugos. What happens next decides whether this is a one-time event, or something that continues to diminish the Hugos as we move forward. I’m optimistic; this community has risen to the challenge before and met it. I think it’ll do so again. Not only because it has to — because it fucking well has to — but because it wants to. And when it does, the Hugo Awards will be better for it, and so will the community and genres it celebrates.
— JS
Happy Valentine’s Day, Here’s kd lang With a Hugely Romantic Song
Posted on February 14, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
You’re welcome.
— JS
Today In Awards I Didn’t Even Know I Was Up For
Posted on February 13, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
Please meet the Summit Award, which is an award Amazon Original Stories gives to, apparently, stories they publish that have gotten 250,000 readers. And it turns out the stories of the Far Reaches collection, which includes my story “Slow Time Between the Stars” has crossed that readership threshold — and thus, a very handsome Lucite prism commemorating the event is now taking up space on my award shelf. I can only presume my fellow Far Reaches authors are in the process of being surprised by their own Lucite blocks. Good for all of us. We rock.
(Excuse the dust on the award, it’s fresh out of the box and still has packaging clinging to it.)
More seriously, I am actually very happy that my story has been read by so many people. I don’t write much short fiction and when I do it’s usually very short — 2,000 words or less — so writing an 8,000-word novelette is an unusual thing for me. Likewise, the tone and subject of “Slow Time” is a little different from what I usually write, and I was curious as to how it would be received. Now I know. I’m pleased. I’m pretty sure this now qualifies as my most-read standalone short story (I’m not counting the stories of The Human Division or The End Of All Things because they were eventually bundled up into sort-of novels, and the stories adapted for Love Death + Robots were viewed, not read). That’s pretty neat.
Also, if you’re considering works for award consideration — Hugos, Nebulas, etc — give “Slow Time”, and the other stories in the Far Reaches collection, a whirl. They’re all very good.
Thank you to editor John Joseph Adams for corralling me into writing something for this collection, as well as thanks to everyone at Amazon Original Stories. And of course, congratulations to Ann, Nnedi, Rebecca, Veronica and both parts of James S.A. Corey. It’s a thrill to be read alongside each of you.
— JS
The Big Idea: Gwenda Bond
Posted on February 13, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 5 Comments
In today’s Big Idea, author Gwenda Bond wants to pull off a heist — both in her latest novel The Frame-Up, and in the course of the post itself. Ready to be in on it?
GWENDA BOND:
Can I steal a moment of your time?
There, gotcha. If you like a heist as much as I do, hopefully you won’t mind too much.
My new magic heist book, The Frame-Up, started with an idea of an art heist (my favorite) centered on a painting with a complicated history. I knew the main character would be someone who had run from her past, and being recruited to steal this work of art would make her go back and confront it all. Quickly, Dani Poissant presented herself, the daughter who betrayed her infamous art thief mother and landed her in prison when she was a teenager. A prodigal returning to try to put the gang back together to do an impossible job…
Heist novels are almost as difficult to pull off as actual heists. I knew that from listening to friends who’ve written them tear their hair out for years. While I was thinking about my characters and following research threads about the history of women in painting academies and many other things, I also immersed myself in the genre, watching dozens of movies, reading all the classic examples I hadn’t.
I wanted to go into writing this book knowing exactly what works for me in heist stories and what doesn’t. Structurally, they always have three parts: setting up the heist, the heist, and the aftermath. The variations mainly involve on how long those parts are, which ones have the most weight, and the details where the devil lives. The best heists start with a lure, something the characters desperately want. Even better is when it’s something they desperately need. There’s also the question of, well, vibes. How does the story feel? Is it dire or breezy, sinister or stylish? Or a mix?
I also knew I wanted my thieves to have magic, and the central mystery to involve magic. But I also wanted to play by the real world rules. Why make it any easier on myself than on my thieves? So there’s the magic stakes, involving the world hidden inside our own, and outer threats, like the FBI, police, and art owners. I did my best to play fair within each. But the heart of the story is the emotional stakes for Dani — can she atone for what she did in the past? Should she? Can she get a future out of this or is it all another mistake?
I tried to infuse all the elements I resonated most with in other heist narratives into the story. It’s difficult to say too much about the specifics without spoiling the fun. What I learned is that I prefer the clever to the gratuitously violent, the nesting of characters arcs and payoffs within the mystery, the unconventional underworld characters to gritty ones. I went for chiaroscuro, a balance and contrast of light and dark. And I love a great dog — any animal, really — in fiction, so Dani’s muscle, her border collie, Sunflower, is based on my own Sally.
An aside: In an RPG I briefly played with some friends, I had a companion animal named Baby and we would name every installment around her. Some of the ones I recall are “Baby loves a buffet” and “Baby loves a cape.” The climax of the campaign was called “Baby loves a heist.”
If I were running an actual heist, that little paragraph would have been a distraction, a misdirect, while I was over there, doing something else. You see what a treat these structural gambits can be? I tried to embed that sense of play in the book too.
Go forth, read, and have fun, if you, like Baby, love a heist.
The Frame-Up: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Another Airport, Another Town
Posted on February 12, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
Well, here I am again at the airport, heading back after another convention. This Boskone was quite nice and it was lovely to see old friends and meet some new ones, but one of the best things about going out into the world is going back to your own home after you’re done. I’ll be in transit for most of the day, but it will be worth it. Have a fabulous Monday in the meantime.
— JS
Meet the Skylark Award
Posted on February 10, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 16 Comments
The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, more informally known as the “Skylark Award,” is awarded by the New England Science Fiction Association to those “Who, in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late ‘Doc’ Smith well-loved by those who knew him.” This year, that was Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, who were on hand here at Boskone to receive their award and to give lovely reminiscences about their time in Boston. But last year’s Skylark Award was given to me, and I was on hand this year to pick up my award as well.
What happened that I was awarded last year’s Skylark Award this year? Simply, when NESFA informed me last year that they wanted to give me the award at that year’s Boskone convention, I had to tell them I was unfortunately counterscheduled that weekend. To which they said, more or less, that’s fine, we’ll just give it to you next year instead. I made sure to block out that weekend on my schedule, and, now, literally, here I am, with a lovely award in hand, along with Ellen and Delia.
The trophy for the Skylark Award features a magnifying lens as part of its design, and a number of years ago fellow recipient Jane Yolen once caught a coat on fire when the award focused sunlight through a window onto the coat. Since then the annual recipients have traditionally been warned by Jane about the dangers of the award, and are solemnly advised to “stick the award where the sun don’t shine.” I, Delia and Ellen were indeed duly warned by Jane, and fortunately all of us have secure places for our Skylarks.
It is an honor and a delight to receive the Skylark, and I am reminded yet again how welcoming science fiction fandom has been to me over the years. As I said when receiving the award, it is something I appreciate more than my ability to express. I’m glad to be part of this community. I hope to be part of it for years to come.
— JS
View From a Hotel Window 2/9/24: Boston
Posted on February 9, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 12 Comments
I’m in town for the Boskone science fiction convention, where I will be doing panels, a reading, and a dance. I love that I somehow developed this side gig as a DJ. It’s strange yet wonderful. If you’re at the convention this weekend, be sure to say hello. I will not be difficult to find.
— JS
“Starter Villain” in Development at Paramount and Maximum Effort
Posted on February 8, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 65 Comments
As noted in this Deadline article, which just dropped. Maximum Effort, for those who do not keep up with such things, is the production company owned by Ryan Reynolds. They’re lovely folks and I am of course delighted to be in business with them and with Paramount on this. I think it’s a good fit all around. Jesse Andrews is working on the script, and I’m a fan of his other work, which includes Pixar’s Luca, and the movie adaptation of his own novel, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. I have high hopes.
What else can I tell you at this point? Not much! As always, these things get announced and then everything goes quiet for a while because scripts have to be written, decisions have to be made, and even successful development processes take time. Please have patience, and if you can’t be patient, that’s fine, but it won’t matter for how things proceed, I’m afraid. All I will say, and pretty much all I can say at this point, is that I am optimistic. And that it’s nice to be able to tell folks about this, finally.
More news when there is more news to tell! And in the meantime: Yay! I’m happy.
— JS
The Big Idea: David Hamilton Golland
Posted on February 7, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
The very first album I ever bought with my own money was Escape by Journey, so it’s safe to say I had a fondness for the band and its music, both when I was younger and even today. But even for a fan, the journey (small “j”) of the band in American and musical culture, from proggy Santana spinoff to oft-derided AOR stalwarts to beloved-by-generations members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has been remarkable to watch. Historian and fan David Hamilton Golland thought so, too, which is why he wrote a book about it: Livin’ Just to Find Emotion: Journey and the Story of American Rock. Take this trip with him and learn why Golland saw more to the band than just the hits.
DAVID HAMILTON GOLLAND:
I never made it a secret that I’m a Journey fan. A big Journey fan. I went to their concerts, got a vanity license plate that read “JRNYDV” (for “Journey Dave”), and even built a fan website in tribute to the group (journey-zone.com). But as I built an accomplished career as a professional (read: academic) historian, when I finally sat down to write the history of Journey, I figured it would simply be a fun side project. I had a nagging feeling that since someone needs to write their story, it might as well be me. Perhaps I could get it out of my system.
All true, but every book should have an argument, right? A history, even a popular history, should build a case for an idea of some sort. Or was that just my training getting the better of me?
For many years I had kept my love of Journey on the side, treating it as alien to my real work: researching and writing and teaching the history of civil rights and affirmative action. In other words, I kept my identity as a Journey fan separate from my identity as a historian, even as I built a successful career as a professor, and more recently an academic administrator—the kind who authorizes late course withdrawals and adjudicates grade appeals and raises money for student programs.
Still, there had been earlier signs that these two identities were not so far apart after all. When I was in grad school I scored an interview with Gregg Rolie, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member who was the original lead singer for Santana and Journey. Sure enough, I soon found myself deconstructing and interrogating his words and sentences—exactly what I was taught to do with interviews of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
When singer Steve Perry left Journey for good in 1998, I was shocked—just like every other Journey fan. But when the band went on with a replacement lead singer, I was less shocked than many—because I knew the group’s history, and I knew that Steve Perry was not the band’s first—nor even second—lead singer.
Thanks to my training, I had learned to seek a level of objectivity when evaluating the actions of historical figures, even those for whom I would spend exorbitant amounts to see perform—in other words, even those of whom I was a fan. I learned to separate my feelings for the music from my feelings for the person.
Decades later, at the height of the pandemic, I finally decided to apply my skills as a historian—as a researcher and as a writer—to a Journey book project. Still, I felt certain that the book would lack a thesis, other than “Journey made great music, and here’s how they did it.” As one of my old grad school professors would have asked, “so what?”
Except the more I read, the more I uncovered, and, frankly, the more I wrote, the more it became clear that I had a thesis after all. A thesis that would surprise pretty much anyone who had ever heard “Don’t Stop Believin.’” A thesis that would surprise nearly everyone who actually worked in or with Journey. A thesis that, frankly, surprised me. A thesis that the story of Journey—once voted America’s most popular band, according to a Gallup Poll—was the story of the re-segregation of popular music.
The thesis shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, I knew full well that rock & roll had integrated popular music. Rock & roll took seed in a time of national optimism following victory in World War II, and flowered during the social revolution of the 1960s, a revolution that also integrated buses, public schools, lunch counters, and “Star Trek.” But with the War in Vietnam, the urban crisis, and stagflation, society sought familiarity in old patterns. The nation saw a backlash against the achievements of the civil rights era. As the hippies, peace signs, and patchouli receded, rock & roll re-segregated, with white fans and musicians gravitating to rock, while Black listeners increasingly rediscovered soul.
The 1970s saw the rise of progressive rock, glam, and punk, all of which were decidedly coded for the white teenage audience. Disco was an integrated genre, but it was a short-lived phenomenon, immolating famously in a race riot at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. By 1980, white teenagers again yearned for Black music—as they always had, incidentally. But unlike in the 1960s, when they listened to both Black and white artists, now they wanted their music performed by white musicians, macho guitar gods and metal drummers. The difference was that this form of minstrelsy contained no blackface (although it sometimes involved lots of makeup, as with David Bowie, Kiss, and Alice Cooper).
Journey was founded in 1973, at the height of the re-segregation, by two white members of the original Santana band—an interracial group that had stolen the stage at Woodstock and then nabbed the top of the charts with “Black Magic Woman.” In 1978 Journey added Steve Perry—the white second coming of Black soul singer Sam Cooke—and in 1980, pianist Jonathan Cain—a songwriter in the mold of Bruce Springsteen, but with even less awareness of the African-American origins of his style. With those additions, Journey had all the necessary ingredients for success in this era of modern minstrelsy. And you don’t even need to listen hard to find it, for what is the lyric “that midnight train going anywhere” from their most enduring hit if not a modern twist on Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia?”
As I continued in my quest to tell the history of this band—to apply the tools of my trade, as I put it, to a genre mostly populated by journalists and memoirists, who usually lack a historian’s perspective—I found more and more evidence to support the thesis.
There was, for instance, the episode of the King Biscuit Flour Hour where Journey performed a variety of Motown and blues classics with African American singers Annie Sampson and Jo Baker, and the integrated Tower of Power horn section. The episode sadly went unaired; someone—probably manager Herbie Herbert—decided that it might cut into Journey’s almost exclusively white fanbase. But they delivered Sam & Dave’s “Hold On I’m Coming” with almost the same soulful verve as the original.
Then there was the concert they filmed at a local blues club for Soundstage, a series on Chicago’s PBS affiliate WTTW, immediately after opening for the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field. They invited as their special guests blues legends Albert King, Luther Allison, and Pinetop Perkins, who had learned the blues—the original blues—while growing up in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta. The African American musicians were trotted out on that Journey stage not because Journey had suddenly decided to become an interracial blues band, but because the artists lent credibility to Journey’s claim to the evolution of the blues—an evolution available only to white artists. Appropriately reverential, the members of Journey gave them their turn on stage. But when their turn was over, it was back to rock—a rock which was more Black-influenced than most in the audience imagined.
By the way, this is exactly the way a thesis is supposed to emerge. Historians read and research and then draw a conclusion—not the other way around. We listen to the sources.
And in this case, it was actual listening, as many of the sources were aural. When Steve Perry performed the Journey blues number “Walks Like a Lady” live in concert, he referenced an African-American schoolyard chant “put your hand on your hip, let your backbone slip.” It’s not in the official lyrics. And the hard rocker “Line of Fire,” aimed at Journey’s nearly all-white audience, slyly repurposed the love triangle of “Frankie and Johnnie,” a Sam Cooke hit that told a story that traced back to “Negro Folk” music.
But one can only take a thesis so far. There are, in fact, several long stretches of the story that don’t seem to have much to do with race, even to my admittedly attuned ears. Sometimes, after all, a cigar is just a cigar. But that’s okay, too. Historians also write as if we’re playing accordions. We expand and contract our storytelling—we speed it up and slow it down—to focus on the portions that matter most. A thesis is not a narrative, but rather a thread that pulls the writer, and the reader, through the story. But it doesn’t substitute for the story itself.
I think the most important lesson here is not that popular music re-segregated and that popular culture is suffused with America’s troubled history with race. Nor, for that matter, is the most important lesson that every historian should write about a favorite musical act and let the thesis come later.
No, for me the most important lesson is that if you have an idea for a story you’d like to share, don’t get bogged down trying to fit your writing into formulas you’ve used in the past, and don’t be captured by your own identity. Just start writing—researching, thinking, and writing—and see how it develops.
The results may surprise you.
Livin’ Just To Find Emotion: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Bluesky Out of Beta + Various Social Media Thoughts, February 2024
Posted on February 6, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
Bluesky, the microblogging service that I joined last April, is finally out of beta and is no longer invite-only, so anyone who has an interest in joining is now free to do so. Here’s a link to the site; just follow the directions from there. Once you join (if you join), I am pretty easy to find; feel free to follow me there if you like.
Do I suggest you join Bluesky? Well, sure. I left the former Twitter about four months ago now and while I’ve been using Threads and Mastodon quite a bit, Bluesky has been my primary social media hang for most of that time. It’s a generally friendly and fun place to hang out, and while no social media site is perfect, or perfect for everyone, the overall vibe of Bluesky is one I like a lot. It helps that the ethos there when trolls and bots show up is “Don’t Engage, Just Block”; no snarking, no dunking, no pointing out their errors in logic, etc, just immediately blocking them and robbing them of the engagement they crave. The block function on Bluesky eradicates them and their comments entirely from your timeline, which makes it extra powerful. It makes for a much more congenial experience, less prone to obnoxiousness. I like it.
(This will be the cue for some folks to have a handwringing moment about whether blocking is the right thing to do, discourse, echo chambers, blah blah blah, so I want to be very clear about this: I don’t give a shit. You can spend your time online with bots and/or shitty people if you think it’s important and you’re striking a blow for intellectual freedom by doing so. I wish you joy in that endeavor. I’ll be spending my time online with people I actually enjoy.)
Although I do at this point spend a lot of my social media time on Bluesky, I am on both Threads and Mastodon frequently as well, and I find that each scratches a slightly different social media itch. Bluesky is the hangout, Threads is where I talk about politics and social stuff, and Mastodon is where I engage in general nerdery. These divisions are not strict, and I do a little bit of everything on each site (and each get pet pictures and commentary on the writing life), but in general this is how it susses out. When I l first started ramping down my presence on the former Twitter and then stopped posting on it entirely, I assumed that I would end up choosing a single site to take over the role it played in my social media diet. Several months on, I don’t feel like that any more. I’m perfectly content to use three sites for slightly different things, and with slightly different audiences. Is this going to work for everyone? Maybe not, but I’m not everyone, I’m me, and for me, it’s working quite well.
Speaking of the former Twitter, a few months on it surprises me how little I miss it. One part of that is that most of the people I followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky/Mastodon/Threads, so I don’t feel their lack. I didn’t rely on Twitter for news and followed hardly any celebrities there, and those I did have Instagram accounts anyway, so done and done. The other part of it is that the amount of shitty people one has to wade through is much lower away from the former Twitter. I’ve spoken about Bluesky in this regard, but both Threads and Mastodon are better in this matter too. It may not stay this way forever, mind you — Threads had a substantial jump in bots when Europe came online (hello, Russian bot factories!), and I imagine now that Bluesky is opening up, we’ll see more there too. But they at least feel more manageable, not the least because the “Don’t Engage, Just Block” ethos exists on those sites as well.
As a creative person needing to tell people what I’m doing, I did have concerns about how (ugh) marketing my personal brand would be affected. Several months on, I needn’t have worried. I had more followers on the former Twitter than I have on Bluesky/Threads/Mastodon combined… for now, and by not as much as you might think: 194k on the former Twitter vs. about 130k on B/T/M combined. It seems to me that more of the accounts on the newer services actually have a real person behind them, who is signing in and using the service. Engagement feels good on all my post-Twitter services. Also, it took 15 years to peak at 200k followers on Twitter; all the followers on Bluesky and Threads, and about a third of them on Mastodon, have arrived since last April. There’s momentum there. The former Twitter feels eminently replaceable for career purposes.
I don’t ever plan to go back to the former Twitter; for my purposes the only thing it’s useful for now is as a honeypot for existing and aspiring fascists. Easier for the FBI, and the rest of us, if they all stay there. I don’t hold it against the non-fascists who stay on the former Twitter, because they still have their communities there and moving everything is a real pain in the ass. That said, now that Bluesky is out of beta, Threads has 130 million users, and Mastodon has been Mastodonning for eight years now, there really has never been a better time to leave the former Twitter. Make the leap if you want to. Wherever you land, people will be there.
And wherever else you go — see you there.
— JS
The Big Idea: Jordan A. Werner
Posted on February 6, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 6 Comments
As a former professional movie critic, I find a lot to like in Jordan A. Werner’s Big Idea post for The Witch and the Ostrich. I must confess, however, to having no experience with very large birds. One cannot be into everything, I suppose.
JORDAN A. WERNER:
From my senior year of high school to my entire college career, I wrote (mediocre-at-best) movie reviews for school newspapers. Then once I got out of school and found myself working a pair of journalism jobs, I wrote theatre reviews for my local newspaper.
I wanted to draw on that experience and write a story about someone with magical abilities who goes and reviews stuff. And I figured it had to be something along the lines of gladiator combat, for two reasons:
- It’s ancient enough to seem strange to modern sensibilities, so it could fit into a fantasy—the one genre I have comfortably and consistently written since 2016…
- And the idea skewed close enough to being Pythonesque.
I grew up watching a decent amount of British humor—Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, and of course, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Which is what the big idea for this book really boils down to: taking absurd situations and getting a decent chuckle out of peoples’ reactions to them. I wouldn’t call the book a straight comedy, but I did want it to be (deliberately) amusing.
I guess I just really liked the idea of someone sitting down at a typewriter and gleefully clacking out, “Only two decapitations and the fried rat sucked. Not worth the five silver pieces.”
The Witch and the Ostrich is sometimes about Quin Schumacher, a witch armed with a notepad and a magical musket who reviews gladiator combat for the Daily Stardust newspaper. It’s not exactly the kind of job she wants to be doing, but she’s got bills to pay. Omigod, so relatable!
In earlier drafts of the book, that was basically the whole driving force of the plot, which still flew wildly, violently off the rails. But my beta readers said it needed a stronger hook.
After all, you can only get so far on a wild and wacky premise. “Jesus and Buddha are roommates in Japan” got me to pick up Hikaru Nakamura’s Saint Young Men, but it didn’t get me to read past the first couple chapters. A burger with a cone-shaped bun still has to be a scrumptious and satisfying meal. Hence the additions the whole conspiracy/political prisoner angle.
Because everyone just wants to read more about politics nowadays, amirite? Hur-dee-dur.
But witch-reviews-bloody-violence wasn’t batshit enough by itself. So we come to the other half of the equation: Fergus, necromancer tyrant and ostrich.
Why an ostrich? Because it appealed to the portion of my brain that considers Beavis and Butt-Head to be the height of comedic expression. Also, because this has lived rent-free in my head for the past four years.
Witches and talking animals; a common pairing. Though in this case, despite occasional moments of levity between them, deep down, Quin and Fergus hate each other’s guts for understandable reasons on both ends. Fergus resents Quin for turning him into an ostrich and needles her for it, which probably isn’t doing anything for his chances to turn back to normal. And Quin loathes Fergus because he’s an asshole.
Darth Vader, Severus Snape, any of the central case from either version of What We Do in the Shadows. Appealing on the surface, butwhen you stop for a second and really think about what they’ve done, you realize they’re well overdue for a trip to The Hague.
But someone like that isn’t going to dwell on their own actions. I think we’ve all been exposed to enough fascist-wannabe twerps over the past decade or so to know they’re usually vainglorious, narcissistic and profoundly sexist, which is Fergus to a tee.
Oh Christ, I need to make some kind of point here. Um. Reality is what makes the absurd funny? Yeah, let’s go with that. I mean, how else do you explain the ostrich?
The Witch and the Ostrich: Amazon
An Adorable Impediment to Writing
Posted on February 5, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 17 Comments
Spice is a lovely kitty, but my keyboard is also one of her favorite places to hang out. I don’t know how much time you spend typing around a cat, but I can tell you, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
That’s all I have for you at the moment. Spice is currently napping in the cat tree. I have to make up for a little bit of lost time on the novel.
— JS
An Interview With Me on Nashville Public Television
Posted on February 4, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
From when I was in town for the Southern Book Festival. We talk about Starter Villain and the writer’s life in general. It’s twelve minutes, so not too long. I hope you like it.
— JS
My Music Production Setup, 2024
Posted on February 4, 2024 Posted by John Scalzi 19 Comments
Yesterday I posted a picture of my current music composition setup here and on Bluesky, which prompted requests by music nerds to go into detail about the hardware and software I’m currently using. All right, then, fellow obsessives, strap in, we’re gonna geek out for a bit. If you’re not one of these obsessives, then here is a picture of a cat, and you are otherwise excused:
For everyone remaining, here we go:
Computer: It’s the new MacBook Pro M3 Max I bought a few weeks ago, which I talk about extensively here, so I won’t go into any great detail about it now. If you won’t click over to the other piece, suffice to say it has all the bells and whistles and is generally ridiculously overspecced for what I’m currently using it for, which is fine, because that means I won’t have to get another computer for several years (knock on silicon).
When the M3 is in my basement studio, it’s paired up with a 27-inch LG LED 4K monitor that was upper-middle specced when I got it three or so years ago. I knew I was going to be using it primarily for music stuff, which does not generally need high refresh rates or awesome color fidelity, so it’s pretty unremarkable. I got it mostly to have enough real estate to do stuff in the DAW. Speaking of which:
Digital Audio Workstation: That’s the program you use to make the music, whether by playing it into the program live, programming it in or by using samples. There are several different types of DAWs out there in the world, and I have tried several, including Ableton Live, Reason, Bitwig, Reaper and Studio One. The one I end up using as the “daily driver” for my music production, however, is Logic Pro, from Apple.
There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that, while most DAW makers offer an inexpensive cut-down version of their software for people to try out (Apple’s Garageband software, which comes free with its computers and portable hardware, is their version), the fully-featured versions of the software can cost hundreds of dollars, either upfront or through a subscription. Logic Pro on the Mac is, for now, anyway, a one-time purchase of $200, which undercuts most (but not all) of the other DAWs.
The second reason is that it is in fact very well-featured, especially for someone like me for whom music-making is a hobby, not a profession. There are other programs that do certain things better (Ableton Live, for example, is the preferred DAW for live performances, while Pro Tools and Cubase, as I understand it, are the industry standards for professional music production in the studio), but as a jack-of-all-trades program, it’s very solid. It’s (reasonably) easy to get started in and just use, but if you want to dive deeper there’s a lot more there too.
A third reason is that, as Apple’s own product, it’s supported very well across Apple’s hardware. For example, you can use a program on the iPad to help control Logic Pro on your Mac; the iPad can also be used as a MIDI controller, which I find helpful when I’m away from my desk. Additionally, Apple has released a version of Logic Pro specifically for the iPad (this one is a subscription: $5 a month, I think), and you can work on a project on one and then port it to the other to continue working on it, with some limitations.
Finally, Logic Pro comes with its own extensive set of instruments, effects, samples, MIDI loops and other goodies, so that even if you never buy third-party plugins or samples, you will still have a hefty amount of fair-to-excellent synths and sounds to work with. Logic Pro is not alone in this — nearly every DAW ships with its own set of plugins, instruments, et al — but again, for a one-time $200 buy-in, that’s a better-than-decent value.
While Logic Pro is my daily driver with DAWs, I do use other ones from time to time, notably Ableton Live and Studio One, which are available on PC as well as Mac, so I have them on my Windows box for when I want to sketch something out in my office. Ableton also has arguably the best controller on the market, the Push, which I have been coveting, so that is also a reason I keep Live around; the Push is designed specifically to integrate with it. I also have Reason, but I mostly have it for the Reason Rack, a set of plugins I can use in Logic. If you are a PC-only person, you can’t get Logic Pro in any event, so Live, Studio One, Bitwig or some of the other DAWs are going to be your play.
Input Devices: If you’re using MIDI instruments, and you want to get your live performance into your DAW, you need something to play in order get it down. When I’m in the basement, I primarily use two controllers for this: the Novation Launchpad X, and the Theoryboard from Irijule. In both cases, you tell the controller what key you want to play in, and then the controller sets itself up so that it’s near-impossible to hit any bum notes. The Theoryboard also sets you up with a few dozen chords in the key which you can access with a single button press.
This is awesome, so long as you stay in one key and/or are doing a song with no key changes or chords that are not strictly speaking in the general key of the song. When that happens there are workarounds, but not simple ones. The Launchpad X can also serve to launch loops and do other editing/processing stuff, both in Logic Pro and in Ableton Live, which is cool but also something I almost never use. The problem here is me, clearly.
I also have a couple of other input devices with more traditional keyboards: Two Roli LUMI keyboards (they are small and connect with magnets to become one larger keyboard), and an Akai MPK Mini Plus. These mostly live upstairs in my office, where I use them with the PC if I don’t want to walk to the basement.
Live Instruments: But what if I want to connect an actual live instrument into my DAW and play it into whatever I am recording? I do this less often than you might think, but it does happen from time to time. For that, I have a Universal Audio Volt 2 Audio Interface, which is pretty basic and also does the job perfectly well for my own needs. It has two inputs, one of which is dedicated to my microphone (a RØDE NT-1), and the other for any instrument I need to plug in, including guitar, bass or ukulele. Detailing the stringed instruments I have is a whole other post, so I’ll skip that for now, but I will say that at the moment most of the live guitar I port into my recordings comes out of my Acoustasonic Telecaster, because it’s versatile, and because I have it on hand. I don’t typically run the guitar through an amp or effects pedals; I have enough virtual versions at this point to do the job well enough.
For listening to my stuff I have a pair of perfectly adequate Presonus Eris studio monitors, which are small because I’m sitting literally a foot and a half from them and they don’t need to be any bigger, or louder. I have 54-year-old ears, I don’t need to give myself a scorching case of tinnitus.
Plugins and Software Instruments/Effects: If you’re not happy with the virtual instruments and effects that ship with your DAW, you can buy more, either as one-off purchases or as part of a subscription. Be warned that a) you can buy a whole bunch without stopping to realize what you’ve done, b) that adds up to a whole lot of money, quickly. When Logic Pro boots up it tells me I currently have about 1100 plugins at my disposal, not counting the ones native in the software. This is a ridiculous amount and more than almost anyone would need, ever, including me. Please don’t do what I have done. Also, please note that Logic Pro (and Ableton Live, Studio One, Reason, etc) come with some really excellent instruments and effects; please exhaust their possibilities before picking up a bunch of other plugins.
That said, a lot of the plugins I have come as part of a larger bundle or subscription, where for one (not small) price and/or continuing subscription, you get a whole bunch of instruments, effects and (depending) loops and samples. Because I apparently have more money than sense at the moment, I have several of these — again, far more than I need, don’t be me.
Of these several bundles/subscriptions, the one I regularly get the most value from is from Arturia; specifically whatever is the most recent iteration of their V Collection of instruments and/or FX Collection of effects and sound shapers. These collections are the opposite of cheap! And also, I use the instruments and effects they offer nearly every time I make something, so I’m getting some real use out of them. If you can’t splurge on these collections, consider Arturia’s Pigments synth, which is a whole lot of great-sounding presets and super-nerdy customization options for $99.
I also have Native Instruments’ most recent Komplete bundle, which ranges in price from “expensive” to “are you kidding me right now,” depending on which you get (guess which one I got), and which I am of two minds about. On one hand, there are some genuinely amazing instruments, sounds and effects in there. On the other hand, NI’s “Kontakt” platform, which most of its virtual instruments runs through, undeniably sucks: It’s difficult to navigate, hard to control, and is as likely to crash my Logic Pro project as it is to work in it. I’d be more of a fan if Kontakt wasn’t such a pain in the ass.
Subscription plug-in bundles I have include ones from Waves, Plugin Alliance and iZotope (the latter two owned by Native Instruments, but not part of its Kontakt platform), as well as Antares (better known as the Auto-Tune company), Minimal and Reason. They’re all good! Although most people would probably be fine with just one as a subscription. That’s because most offer a bunch of plugins whose purpose overlaps with plugins in other packages, but each have a few that I use regularly that makes it worth it for me. iZotope, for example, has some excellent mastering plugins, while Minimal’s Current instrument (that’s its name) is a synth, effects box and samples service all in one. I also have an account with Splice, which offers literally millions of loops, samples and MIDI presets to play with. This is not an exhaustive list, merely what’s coming to me off the top of my head.
Once again, I am overspending on plugin bundles and subscriptions, and I do not recommend you be me. The world is full of excellent free and really-cheap plugins if you hunt for them, and again, whatever DAW you decide on very likely comes with a complete suite of instruments, effects and samples/loops that will keep you busy for a while. If you can splurge, but only a little, I recommend the Arturia bundles. They will keep you happily occupied. If I were going to suggest a plugin subscription bundle, I would probably lean toward Waves, as it has the widest range of plugins, or Minimal’s Current, since it puts everything into one virtual box. But this is where looking around and doing your own comparison shopping for what you need and can afford will pay off.
Oh, and, two one-off plugins I really like and use a lot at the moment: CUBE, a “morphing” synth from Lunacy Audio, which has some extremely cool sounds, and Transit, from Baby Audio, which is a stealth effects box posing as a very specific type of plugin (I also really like Baby Audio’s BA-1 synth, whose cute interface belies its capabilities).
And that’s where I am with music production here in February of 2024. If you have any additional questions, chuck ’em into the comments and I will try to get to them.
— JS
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying