I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FREDRIK-Tiny Desk Concert #57 (May 3, 2010).

Fredrik are a Swedish band.  They were a duo, then a sextet and then a duo again.  In this concert, they are in that duo state–Fredrik Hultin on vocals and guitar and Ola Lindfelt on electronics and percussion.

Their then new release was a dark album called Trilogi and was just the two of them.  They play two songs from that album and one form their debut.

“Ner” is quite dark, with the whispery vocals and the minor chord progression.  The simple thudding drum beat also keeps the song somewhat ominous.  Speaking of the drummer, he is using a microphone (into which he later whistles) as a drumstick (he hits the cymbal with it later).  But his main “drumstick” is a maraca.

“Locked in the Basement” is a bit louder but with the same percussion set up.  It maintains that ominousness (just see the title of song).  Although in the middle it quiets down to just a thumping drums and gentle guitar noises with Ola’s backing oohs.

“Black Fur” is a bit more upbeat (in the blurb Robin says it is a soaring song on their debut).  It is stripped down here and it quite catchy–almost upbeat and positive.  It’s quite different from the other two songs. You can hear their recorded version of it (when they were a sextet) here.

I enjoyed these songs, and wonder if Fredrik has continued as a duo in the last five years.

[READ: September 7, 2015] You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) 

Like most geeky folks, I love Felicia Day.  The Guild was an awesome show and her creativity behind it is really masterful.  And she was in Dr Horrible, which is how I found out that she was one of the slayers in the final seasons of Buffy.

So Felicia has the geek cred.  But I didn’t know anything about her.  And I wasn’t sure that I cared all that much.  I mean, Felicia is the bomb but do I need to know how she got to be that way?  Nevertheless, I was curious to see what she would put into this book.

If you’re looking for salacious stories about working on Buffy, you won’t get them.  Aside from an intro by Joss Whedon, there’s very little information about her time on Buffy.  Rather, she talks about her childhood (which is fascinating) and her Guild making days and her post-Guild success.  And there’s a rather dark turn near the end.

But really, this book is all about empowerment (as the title hints at)–all about embracing your inner loves and following what you want to do.  In the book, which is chock full of pictures, she calls these coffee mug moment sand Photoshops her aphorisms onto mugs for our edification.  There’s also a lot of very funny pictures of herself from throughout her life.

The book begins with “Why I’m Weird” and we learn all about her upbringing, which can be summed up in one word: homeschooled.   Her parents didn’t do it for religious reasons (they lived in the deep south and were not fundamentalist), but more for hippy reasons.  But her parents weren’t really dedicated to the prospect so she and her brother seemed to do things on her own and kind of make things up as they went along.  And yet she became a violin prodigy and a math genius.

She was so good at math and the violin that she was accepted into college at age 14 (and her violin skills were so good that she jumped up to first violin).  But at the same time her homeschooling upbringing made her really socially awkward and she didn’t know what to do to fit in.  Her only real social connections before college were in online video game chat rooms.

By the end of college (which she got a 4.0 in) she had had it.  And thus, she stopped putting violinist and mathematician on her resume and set out for Hollywood.  (There was inspiration from her Aunt who signed her up for every community theater project she could get to).

And so you’ll see Felicia in all kinds of commercials, apparently.  She reveals that if you can get a couple of good commercials a year, you can be a pretty successful actor in Hollywood–they pay pretty well.  But most people don’t want that, they want to be stars.  And while she sort of wanted that, she wasn’t satisfied with the auditioning process (she gives some wonderful details of what it’s like to audition–both from when she was an actress and when she started directing The Guild).  everyone had advice for how she needed  to change.  And she couldn’t really handle that.

And then she talks about her depression.  She suffered from it for a while and she found herself getting really absorbed in World of Warcraft.  She formed a team (a guild) and became online friends with most of them.  Then she began getting really into it, forsaking much of her own life to go deep into the game.  (She had a boyfriend at the time–not sure if he is the same one–and he took it well even though he never really saw her).  It took a group of women to dig her out of her funk and get her to write The Guild, based on her WoW obsession.

She talks about the DIY aesthetic of The Guild (I had no idea she shot it for so little).  And then about the difficultly of promotion and then the difficulty of dealing with the success of the show.

There’s a section about Conventions, and how she is happy to talk to you (and accept your gifts) as long as you’re not a stalker.  But then things get dark.  When she starts talking about GamerGate, a scandal I’d never heard of (I’m not a gamer) which involves gamer trolls bashing women for “ruining” video games or some such nonsense.  Their nastiness was unparalleled, trashing people online and even giving out people’s home addresses (Felicia got outed in this way too).  It’s pretty horrifying and really made her lose faith in the online community that she was more or less raised on.

But fortunately the last chapter springs back somewhat.

It’s a pretty quick read.  And Day’s life has been genuinely quite interesting.  I wonder if she still plays the violin (and still does math problems for fun). But the best part is that she is just as funny in this book as she is in The Guild.  She plays with and uses internet tropes and makes a ton of jokes at her own expense (which may be a self-esteem thing, but it still funny).  It also seems like she has had a ton of Success with Geek & Sundry.   Now, if only she can fix the trolls on the internet, (and somehow I imagine she can) the world will be a better place.