Bear's Monthly Mayhem - November 2023!
Archived from BearWiseman.com
November has been soggy. So soggy, in fact, that I slipped in the wet grass and hard-crashed into the gravel, puncturing my palm, ripping up my leg… and then, as if by magic, the JBL speaker I was holding FLEW into the air like a rocket into space, only then to plummet vertically back to earth, clocking me in the back of the skull while I was down.
I hope you’ve all been having a better time!
Okay, as fun of a visual of that is aside (I am truly sad that no one witnessed that catastrophe, because there was a physics-breakingly low-odds probability of it going down exactly the way it did), I actually have a whole lot of news this month! There are big changes around here, so I wanted to share all of things that are going on. I’m also trying something out a little different with Monthly Mayhem this time around! Instead of including all of my articles in a big pile at the bottom, I thought—as you can see from that gnarly image above—that I’d start throwing some photos in here to jazz the place up, and then I’ll drop my articles in here as you read about what’s been up going on!
First up, last month’s live report of Merta & Machinae Supremacy @ On the Rocks is online now over at Tuonela Magazine, so be sure to check that out! I was very sorry that I didn’t have a photographer, because I ended up kind of falling in love with Merta. In fact, I ended up writing a whole article about it!
I had a great time at the Love Potion Psych Fest this year, also writing for Tuonela Magazine. I really don’t know the psych scene very well yet, but I like the organizer of this festival, so she and I trade bands every once in a while. It’s fun to see some of them show up at events like this (like Octopie)! Most of the time, there’s maybe one artist that I’ve already heard of, so everything else is a completely new experience, and all of it tends to be something really fun and interesting. I never thought I’d hear classic country rock/blues mixed with psychedelic music, for example. It’s always a grab-bag of wild, unexpected experiences, even if not all of it is the type of music I’d take home, and I’m all about trying new things and having new experiences right now, so this is tickling me nicely. Check out the review of Love Potion Psych Fest’s first day here and read about the festival’s day 2 over here!
This month’s Gathering of Geeks podcast episode was with May Lo, who is a local multifaceted artist who dabbles in modeling, painting, and all sorts of things. I met her last year, when Mikael Salo introduced her to me at a show and I was astounded by both how beautiful she is, both inside and out. After following her for a while, I also picked up on the fact that she’s a geek. This was our first time hanging out IRL and she was over for a good long while. We chatted for hours and there’s only an hour and a half of podcast episode, but that’s because I wanted to cut out a bunch of my awkward babble and save some of the other things we talked about that were a bit more related to mental health and art than geek stuff per se (heh heh… perse), but I’m definitely going to save that material and hopefully release it in smaller bits here and there for some extra content, because we had some really good chats.
Hit up Gathering of Geeks S01E14 ft. May Lo!
A few friends gathered to check out the local Halloweenpolku, since two of them have a toddler and two more have one on the way. Since it was in our town, we congregated to check it out. The event had some food stalls and odd musical assortments. There were decorations, but the Halloween feel was very much in the vein of “what does Tuusula have to make use of for free? Let’s use that!” It’s a shame that the origins of Halloween aren’t included as often anymore (anywhere, really), replaced by hardcore consumerism. This would have been a great place to have candy given out to children (or even children in costumes), for example, but that wasn’t part of it. Also, the haunted things were really odd choices, like a mining site (set up on a grassy riverbank, so the mining site was implied via auditory queues), or a segment that looked more like cosmic psychedelic space than anything haunted. There was almost no one in creepy costumes looming around, and very little that could be interacted with. Even the most rudimentary Halloween pranks for kids, like a covered bowl of peeled grapes to put their hands in, feeling like eyeballs, or spaghetti brains… all of that sort of thing is old news to an ‘80s or ‘90s kid in North America, but I bet it would be really fun for kids here, since it’s not been done before. It’s a shame that it’s mainly the commercial parts of Halloween that seem to have traveled onwards, because that’s definitely the least-fun part of the season.
On the 18th and 19th, Warmen were having a few local shows—the first night at On the Rocks sold out so quickly that they added a second night. I was quite excited to see that Vansidian (whom you might remember from episode IV of Gathering of Geeks!) were taken in as the opening act! I was also rather delighted to be asked if I could take care of their merch that night, which, I admit, sounded like good enough reason to crawl out and see the show. Plus, I was hoping that my friend might be able to make the trip down south for the show, and she did. It was a really fun night of great shows and it was nice to catch up with a friend whom I haven’t seen in right about forever.
And then I already hauled my ass out of my house on the 21st to go see the Musamimmit, which you can read about over here. That was really lovely for me, because… well, I’ve mentioned a few times how much people treat you like furniture in Finland, so having such a kindhearted welcome amongst these artists was so lovely. I felt like I was so full of joy and energy afterwards, which is something I feel extremely rarely lately. In a strange way, I almost feel like there’s a spark of light at the end of this depression tunnel… I just keep having to reach for it. I also wrote up a featured single for Johanna von Hertzen for Tuonela Magazine and I would be loathe to not mention that Helena Haaparanta released an new isklemä [a type of Finnish pop music] song just after this show that you should definitely check out, especially because my cool friend Kathy Criswell did the artwork for it.!
In the general things that I’ve been checking out, I recently played Moonlighter, which was fun for a little while but ran its course quite quickly; I’ll surely next be talking about Sea of Stars though, because I am absolutely loving that game so far. I checked out the latest album by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard called “The Silver Cord,” which I wrote up for Tuonela Magazine—that band’s discography is one hell of a trip! Everwave, who Tuomas Välimaa sings for, also put out a really solid new prog album that you should definitely give a few spins. Of course, my best of 2023 playlist is still linked down below, if you want to see who’s on it!
Now, I mentioned also that I’ve made some big decisions this month. I’ve mentioned online a couple times that my life situation has suddenly erupted and we are in extremely urgent need for a change. One of these changes was attached to an epiphany I had about how not following my own voice has led me to stagnate and that I’ve always done my best when I was just sharing my weird old self with everyone. You can read more about that over here! This was followed the next day by another realization: if I’m going to truly follow my own voice, why in the absolute crap am I not pursuing my own things like NOW? Why am I holding out for an agent and publisher from another country, that I don’t like, who are just going to leech off of my creative work? Word on the creative street is that nowadays, publishers don’t even put that much effort into getting the word out anyways, so if that’s the case, why am I waiting for other people? Maybe it’s time I just do this on my own. So I’m going to start self-publishing my short stories and you can read a little bit more about that over here. In fact, I went so far as to publish a short story already!
And in completely other shenanigans, here’s a little something I wrote for a friendly little lyrics writing competition I had with some Discord friends, and because I’m a big fan of the Lost Book of Herbal Remedies and I follow them on Instagram, a bunch of people started asking me how to make bacon fat ginger snaps, so I wrote up the recipe (no life’s story, I promise, just a short paragraph explaining why I was sharing it). So if you’ve never tried that, bacon fat ginger snaps might convince you to start saving your bacon fat and find ways to use more parts of your animals and live more naturally! I mean, I am a hippy after all. I’ve gotta shout that stuff out.
Well, and that’s about it for news here! Check back next month for more short stories and other shenanigans! Take it easy and stay geeky!
— Bear Wiseman