And "The Christmas Shoes." As bad as "Wonderful Christmastime" is, I'd rather listen to it on a loop for six hours than listen to "The Christmas Shoes" once.

… AIs have been writing less creepy music than that for decades. So I'm not sure why it's so bad at melody. The lyrics are the cool part, though.

Some great stuff has been created that way, as well as some pretty boring stuff. And it's not a modern phenomenon: my wife likes to point out that Virgil's Aeneid is Trojan War fanfic — and boring and interminable fanfic at that. She counts the Aeneid as an example where remix culture got it wrong, and Batman as a…

Mary Robinette Kowal created a free game based on her SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY fantasy-Jane-Austen world; it's available for download: http://maryrobinettekowal.c…

It's interesting living on the North Shore of Boston and being a Lovecraft fan. My wife works in Ipswich, which is what Innsmouth was based on. Her commute takes us right past the site of the old Danvers Asylum, which is what Arkham Asylum was based on. (It was abandoned half a century ago, and was only torn down…

Some times, places, and tones just somehow feel right together. New England/Prohibition-Jazz Age/Pulp Horror somehow just plain feels right, just as Regency/England/Social-Climbing-Romance feels right. People still write things in the mode of Jane Austen and H P Lovecraft because they somehow just work. And most of…

The only reason roleplaying games will lead to homelessness is that you can start collecting so many books that you'll squeeze out all room for humans to be inside your house. But if you're comfortable throwing a blanket and some pillows on top of a pile of books to sleep on, you'll be fine.

Not everybody is on Facebook. It's kind of old-school.

I presume that you're familiar with http://www.debunking911.com… and https://youtu.be/2dvv-Yib1Xg

Well, yeah. The rest of them got blowed up.

I find your lack of teeth … disturbing.

Not really a part of my subculture — I come from the "open communication/enthusiastic consent" model.
Which is the point, really. The song was written by and for people working by that model you're talking about, but, when you come at it from the model I work from, it gets real creepy.

It can't be emphasized too many times in this comment thread: the literal worst is "Christmas Shoes."

"What's in this drink?"

I'd put "Christmas Shoes" as worse than "Baby It's Cold Outside", because good music can have reprehensible messages, and still be good music. I mean, Li Stadellman's harpsichord music is quite pretty and she wrote it FOR the Nazi party. There's lots of great art and music about the Sabine women and Leda and the…

The Charlie Brown stuff is on my "Christmas Music That Doesn't Suck" playlist, too. While there's a lot to like about the Peanuts specials, I'd argue that the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack is the best part of it. (Then again, I'll also argue that, while there's lots to like in STAR WARS, the John Williams soundtrack is…

I see both of those songs, and raise Billy Idol's YELLIN' AT THE CHRISTMAS TREE. I've got a "Christmas songs I actually like" playlist, and those three are on it. I think there are about twenty songs on it, and those three are probably the best.

It's from "Opportunities" by The Pet Shop Boys.

I'm willing to suspend disbelief for that sort of thing. If you remember the Emma Thompson/Will Ferrell movie STRANGER THAN FICTION, it requires you to believe that Thompson's character's novels are the most important and moving books in modern literature. And whenever we hear an excerpt from them, they're boring…

I think Rowlf has occasionally been done with hands covered by fur, so he can play piano, but you don't SEE them.