EtnaAtsume

We'll do this in layers.

I used to worship at the altar of Smashing Pumpkins. Some (though not all) of their stuff holds up pretty good still, I think. They're good at concepts and imagery. Er, were. Teargarden by Kaleidyscope was kinda the last thing of theirs I bothered with, and I'd started to fall off well before that, too. Shame level 3/10 just because I was obsessive about deep-diving every single one of their tracks (from their first few albums anyway).

I was gonna say Linkin Park at first blush, and would have followed through with that, except that just a couple of weeks ago I played through Hybrid Theory and thought "y'know, this isn't my style of music anymore but it's not bad, not bad at all." Still, the supposed emotional resonance I had with them puts this at Shame Level 4/10 because, looking back as an adult, most of them are pretty pandering towards angsty teens.

Felt the same about Weird Al. I mean, okay, I cringe at how UPROARIOUS and CLEVER and SUBVERSIVE I thought he was as a kid, but the music is fine for what it is and I feel it accomplishes what he, as an artist, set out to do. And while corny it's not quite cringy. Shame level 4.5/10

Glenn Miller and other mid-20th-century big-band/swing stuff. Not bad on the face of it, really - still good, in fact, if that's your thing. But as with the others, my reasoning behind liking them is the reasoning for the Shame Level 6/10 - yes, I segued into your typical fedora-tipping "le gentleman" Humphrey Bogart wannabe around 2005-2009. Urgh. At least it was before the REAL BIG WAVE of that swept over the Internet and everyone was doing it. Shudder to think of how I'd be if I'd gotten REAL caught up in that wave. But maybe that'd have been a preferable alternative to what happened...read on, if you dare.

Testament is perhaps my greatest shame since I was desperately trying to become a metalhead but really didn't care for their music all that much? I figured if I listened to it enough times it'd eventually just all click. NOPE. But I kept on with that for several years. Shame level 8/10. Throw Metallica (esp. Death Magnetic, which I slavishly adored) and your other typical Guitar Hero RAWK EDITION tracks that your typical identity-less 00's teen woulda latched onto. You get the picture. (Slight redemption: I did discover Gamma Ray through this phase and, as with Smashing Pumpkins above, I relistened the album Heading for Tomorrow and honestly really appreciate the positive/happy/hopeful messages in songs like Heaven Can Wait. A bright little happy diamond among a genre inundated with DEATH AND PAIN AND SUFFERING IS ALL THERE IS.", and it helped me kinda realize that "hey, you don't gotta be all doom and gloom all the time, man. Light only shines where you let it in." Here's the lyrics if you don't wanna listen to the long song.)

However, they are dragged down by some of their other stuff which is weirdly Christian-leaning (nothing wrong with that, well, at least not on their spin on it, since they aren't really in your face about it. A mention of "God" here and "Satan" there but not, like, Christian rock's repeated mantras of "praise Jesus" over and over as a "refrain". You can tell their religious beliefs but they don't make it front-and-center. Anyway) and anti-government (which I think they did more as a concept for their No World Order! album than anything else, but), which I ran with all the way into the conspiracy-idiot hole for a few years. IT'S THE JEWS MAN. Ugh. A coincidence of unfortunate timing that I watched the "documentary" Zeitgeist at just the right (wrong) time to coincide with my discovering of that album. GREATEST SHAME. 11/10 (but that's on me for how I interpreted and interacted with their artwork, not really the art itself)

DLC: Why did I like I My Me Mine so much? I'd blast it everywhere as a teen because I saw it on the Gaia Online profile of some lolsorandumb e-girl -- not that we had the term then. Probably just to annoy people.

Speaking of pre-e-girls, there was this other online girl whom I was head over heels with who really liked the uh...weirdly soft "let me fill this emotional void of yours" sort of music, from bands like The Spill Canvas and Jason Mraz and Owl City. OUCH but I didn't need to remember that, but I did, and I'm putting it down here at the deepest circle of hell. SHAME LEVEL 12/10

Edit: My adoption and subsequent abandoning of anything approaching consistency on my 1-10 shame scale earns a shame rating of 15/10.

E-Rotic is still worth a listen....right???

Oh NO. I recognized the name even and was like "I know that song...don't I?"

Ugh. Yeah. I do.

My usage pattern too. I did nip on today to post/rant on some calorie counting subs just because I valued a faster answer over a quality one.

And also, are you picking up on what irmoz and I are doing? Take notes!

Huh. I do that all the time. Guess I shouldn't.

Sure. Let me reiterate that you're thrown right in and there's no exposition dump, no explanation of terms or of the world or that kind of thing, to guide you into the opening beats.

I didn't appreciate this at first, but in hindsight it's a clever way of making the reader think like one of the world's denizens. But it's a hard hurdle to cross. Good luck.

Oh, to possibly save you a click or two, first book is called The 5th Season.

Well, I hate to phone it in, but I have tried and failed to write one a few times now. So I've let someone else write one for me. Take as much or as little of this as you think is worthy of "elevator pitch"; any one paragraph will do but the most condensed for your intentions would probably be the third.

The Broken Earth is set on an Earth-like planet that is constantly subjected to large-scale seismic and volcanic events. The people of this land, which is called the Stillness, live in constant fear that an Angry Father Earth will unleash an environmental disaster strong enough to trigger a Fifth Season, a prolonged winter of hardship that can last anywhere from a decade to thousands of years. The Broken Earth is a resonant and cautionary work of climate fiction at a time when hurricanes, floods, and wildfires are pummeling the globe. Disaster preparedness is the organizing principle for people of the Stillness; they build for survival among the technological remains (the “deadciv”) of a long-dead civilization, which includes large mysterious obelisks that hover above them in the sky.

Among the people of the Stillness are orogenes, people born with the ability to harness and control kinetic, thermal, and other forms of energy. They alone can quell the seismic and volcanic events that threaten the Stillness. But orogeny is illegal, and orogenes (referred to as the derogatory term “roggas” by most people in the Stillness) are regarded as less than human. Orogenes are hunted down throughout the Stillness; those that aren’t killed are enslaved by the secret order of Guardians. Even more powerful than orogenes or Guardians are stone-eaters, a humanoid species that resembles stone statues and that rarely interacts with other beings in the Stillness.

Jemisin’s series centers on the story of Essun, a 42-year-old village schoolteacher who has been hiding her identity as an orogene. The Fifth Season begins with the shattering of two worlds: Essun’s husband discovers that their children are orogenes, kills the youngest, and kidnaps their daughter Nassun; the Stillness experiences an earthquake so powerful that it triggers the worst Fifth Season the planet has ever experienced. Jemisin immerses readers in the world of the Stillness: the journey that Essun sets off on to find her daughter propels the narrative, but Jemisin tells the story through multiple points of view and from multiple points in time. It’s an ambitious task to balance complicated world-building, a well-paced plot, and a range of fully distinctive characters, let alone to do so over the course of three novels. Jemisin deftly keeps all the plates spinning.

More varied formalwear than "suit with some superficial variations" (tux, 2- or 3-piece, colors, tie variety). Broader range of styles.

The third and last entry in Jamisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Stone Sky. Good God it's great. Hard to break into the series and I always feel like I'm a step behind the plot, but not so much that I've lost the thread entirely and just want to give up. It's a delicate dance between author and reader that takes such a deft and skilled touch that I'm floored by not just the skill involved but the gall it takes to skate so close to totally alienating your audience. But damn does it pay off.

A quote from it I grabbed to share earlier:

When a [society] builds [a city] atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.

I see. What steps do you think you could take? How can you tell you struggle with it - have people mentioned it?

What colour would you like your dragon?