Everything old is new again. It has long been true with modern music and so too is it true with video games, with a reboot of the classic ultraviolent shooter DOOM having been released in recent weeks. Hard to believe it has been 23 years since the original, which I recall playing on my beloved 486 across a coax ARCnet LAN set up in my basement until the sun came up on many occasions.
IDDQD, those of you of a particular vintage may recall, was a code that could be typed in to the 1993 version of DOOM that would enter what was called god mode, whereby the player did not take damage from enemy fire or hazards, and could play the entire game through to the end without dying once. While astounding and immensely rewarding at first, IDDQD had the effect of stripping all of the risk, and therefore all of the fun, out of the game.
Real life is like that too. While there is a little voice in everyone that tries to talk us out of trying things that we might fail at, stripping away the challenge and possibility of failure also strips away the opportunity to truly enjoy a well fought victory. As Brickman et al figured out in the 1970s, winning the lottery is likely to make you miserable, while becoming a paraplegic in many ways makes life surprisingly enjoyable. Life, like DOOM, needs to be hard to be rewarding, even if sometimes we might lose a few men in the process.
Despite the rise of social media, there really is no substitute for face to face engagement with friends and family. As mentioned in a few recent podcast episode writeups, the tyranny of distance is a recurring theme for all of us with our hearts in more than one part of the world. As we are not yet blessed with the clear calendars and fat wallets needed to see our friends and family for more than what seem to be very fleeting moments, when the stars align and friends from far away are in town, little incentive is needed to drop everything else and bring forth a celebration, however brief it may be.
Spring has finally arrived here in Melbourne. In fact, with temperatures forecast to rise above 35C in the coming days you could say that we have bypassed spring entirely and headed straight into summer. With the warmer weather comes the inclination to head out to the beach, and spend less time indoors.
It’s the fading hours of the Labour Day long weekend in Canada as I write this, and while it wasn’t a three day weekend here in Melbourne, I still had plenty of reason to recall the Canadian holiday. As the last long weekend of the northern summer, Labour Day has a lot of special memories – for me and doubtlessly for many of you. Ten years ago I was a new uni graduate working behind the counter in a record store, putting every spare dollar I had towards vinyl. One of my jobs was to take the new shipments each week and record samples of their best bits for uploading on to the store website, and one of the side effects of this job was being tapped into the mainline of quality tunes as they came out each week. Alongside colleagues Marsh, Meg and Jules we spent hours listening, recording, and swapping back and forth.
For three and a half years I lived in Calgary, Canada. Tucked into the foothills of the sunny side of the Rocky Mountains, its a city full of lovely people, and a city with a buzzing dance music scene. Returning for a visit a few weeks ago I was honoured to be given the opportunity to play a two hour set on a Saturday night at my favourite place in town. With an incredible sound system, positive bar staff and a clued up clientele, Habitat Living Sound has for years been a centrepoint of the Western Canadian progressive house scene. It was a real buzz to play a proper set there again, and even better to see so many familiar faces. The evening was rounded out by Pallares and Isis Graham, and despite the jetlag it was a sensational evening.
There is something uniquely interesting about preparing to embark on international travel. The combination of project planning, packing, social arrangements, and general getting-in-order-of-things prior to departure provides a structured timeframe and sense of urgency that is sometimes missing from every day life. We may be OK being late for work now and then, but no one wants to miss a flight.
My good friend Kevin once explained that one of the secrets to success is having smart friends. Along similar lines, the secret to good podcasts is having friends with excellent taste in music. This mix contains more than a few gems that have found their way to me via the collections of others. From suggestions made during social get-togethers and mixes exchanged through to emailed promo links and folders left on my desktop, I am blessed with a pipeline full of amazing music.