Dan Schmidt

Historically writers have not done great with the quotation marks in the David Bowie song "Heroes".

Someday I will write a movement marked Allegro con troppo,

Basically we got them through two distinct paths (not an excuse, just an explanation). -able is the default; there's a finite list of -ible words and they all have Latin roots because that was the route they took to English.

Wow, never heard of him but this looks right up my alley. Too bad we'll never know what W words he'd have gotten to if he needed another hundred.

Frohwalt bin ich!

About twenty contenders, but today it's The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory.

It's also worth noting that we tonicized the heck out of iii just a few measures ago! (I zoomed in on the passage in question and forgot all about how we got there.)

...just to illustrate to myself how we can reasonably be hearing the pull of iii there. (Of course the melody has to change too.)

Oh, I totally misread, you're talking about the v/vi, not the vi (my bad, I got thrown off by i-v-iv-i). Yeah, it totally feels like iv-i in iii for a moment. For fun I just tried iv/iii - iii - V/iii - iii - V7 (last two half a measure each) to tonicize it even more and it's not ridiculous...

I think part of it (for me) is that the melody is going 1-7-2-1 (with a 6 in between, granted) so the original tonic is being emphasized melodically at the same time that vi is tonicized harmonically. Some deceptive-cadence-like vibes but expanded out to four measures.

Pretty! My process:
a) I can't really prevent 2.Ka2.
b) So what will my second move be? Knight checks won't work. I guess it's going to be 2...Ra4#.
c) Fill in the blank for 1..., then verify.

There is more music in the pipe, although it's an open question when and if it ever gets out of the pipe and into the world. Comments like yours are motivational!

Yeah, as a listener I hate feeling like the writer came up with a great first line and then had to tread water for the second (I have totally been guilty of this myself of course). Often I'll rewrite a first line so that it can naturally come second instead.

A songwriting tip I haven't seen elsewhere: in a rhyming couplet, put the more interesting word in the second line. The reaction you want is "Whoa, I didn't see that rhyme coming!", not "Cool word, but will they just use a generic word to complete the rhyme?... yep."

Any DM can tell that Mamdani just cast Charm Person.

This was lovely, thank you. I've enjoyed his work but didn't know anything about the man.

...so I wanted to note for any historians out there that we were actively thinking about just about all of these things (maybe some more obviously than others).

Yes, which I appreciate! I made the comment because often works that are seminal to a genre actually did many of those genre-defining things by accident to some degree, and then succeeding works used those elements more intentionally...

I don't mind you excluding Ultima Underworld, but as a historical data point, I'd say that every one of your bullet points was explicitly on our minds as we made it (maybe not the linear structure but I may be misinterpreting what you mean by it; embodiment/physicality we did what we could).

Barth.

17 years is how long I stayed at Harmonix! I’m glad I moved on eventually and I bet you’ll be too.

It totally depends on the pulse of the surrounding measures, but in the absence of any context, #1.

For what I paid for this Scotch, you'd think they might bother to use more than just a single malt.

Tonight marks the transition from everyone incorrectly writing EST to incorrectly writing EDT.

I can't believe there hasn't been a single mention of Drums and Wires.

YouTube video by Brute Force - Topic Tapeworm Of Love

Did you guys know there's another "Tapeworm of Love"?? Of all the titles to be a duplicate. I swear I had no idea when I wrote mine. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHrF...

If we did I've suppressed the memory.

I think Doug did!

Looking forward to the Schulhoff selection, there are some bangers!

but of course if Clara was actually playing the Db in front of Robert, that’s hard to argue with. Anyway, there’s probably a dissertation on this note somewhere, I’d love to read it!