Although it's been something I've been into for more years than I care to remember, I haven't really looked into werewolfy stuff in any great detail for some time -- with the exception of the RPG Werewolf: The Forsaken, I suppose. However, there's been a few items of related news recently, and I also delved into Amazon for a number of books on the subject, so I figured I'd talk about that here.

On the gaming front, I've got a few more supplements for Forsaken, and it really is an excellent game. I'd be happy to either run or play it at some point, so hopefully I'll get the chance. More to the point, though, I managed to track down a second-hand copy of its old World of Darkness counterpart, Werewolf: The Apocalypse; while I already had the second and revised editions of the game, along with maybe 80% or more of the supplements, I'd wanted a copy of the first edition for a while but never got around to doing anything about it, and now I finally have one - it dates from way back in 1991. (I'd also like the revised live-action rules, the Laws of the Wild, but the newer edition of that is still pretty expensive, even second-hand; I guess it's one of the rarer ones to come by.) As I've mentioned previously, I'm hoping to get hold of some more of the old Werewolf supplements, either through PDF or buying off friends.

The other gaming news that probably everyone has heard by now is that the werewolf-like Worgen as playable characters in World of Warcraft has been confirmed, as posted by everyone in the world ever. I used to play World of Warcraft a long time ago, and I quit just before Burning Crusade came out; apparently there's been a ton of improvements, and with this new expansion it looks to be even better -- so I'm finding myself tempted to try it again, although the outlay for the game and all three expansions will likely be steep. That being said, I mean holy crap you can play a werewolf for god's sake. That's enough of an incentive for me at least. There's also a few nice Worgen pictures in the concept art for Cataclysm, which is well worth checking out - though the Werewolf News post has all the Worgen concept art at a substantially higher resolution than the official site, for whatever reason. No word as of yet when the expansion's going to drop, though. (On the subject of art, check out this piece from Jerad Marantz - Creature Spot is a pretty neat art blog as a whole, too.)

Someone posted a link to this (werewolf cupcake! so cute!), and as a result I ended up searching Flickr for photos tagged "werewolf". In amongst all the Twilight related crap, there were a bunch of shots of this rather tasty fellow (sfw, pretty much) which made wading through all the other stuff almost worth it. For moving pictures, although the release date is slipping constantly, Werewolf News again comes up with the goods in the form of the Official Wolfman Trailer, which looks fucking awesome. I've got a few new werewolf movies to keep me occupied in the meantime, though; the first two, Big Bad Wolf and Wild Country, I got based on recommendations, and War Wolves just looked pretty entertaining for a low price - reviews aren't great, to say the least, but even cheesy werewolf flicks can be fun.

In terms of books, I've ordered quite a range (though I'm still waiting on a couple to arrive). Obviously at first I went for the 'classics': Sabine Baring-Gould's 1865 Book of Werewolves, Elliot O'Donnell's Werwolves from 1912, and Montague Summers' 1933 classic, The Werewolf. As for more recent works, a long time ago an ex-partner got me Brad Steiger's rather unimpressive Werewolf Book; more interesting among modern works are Adam Douglas' The Beast Within (which the aforementioned ex had a copy of, but wouldn't give or sell it to me), Leonard R. N. Ashley's Complete Book of Werewolves, and perhaps most interesting of all is The Curse of the Werewolf by Chantal Bourgault du Coudray.

While all of the above are (broadly speaking) non-fiction, I did come across a couple of novels as well. I got one by Russian author Victor Pelevin (described by the Independent as the "Zen Buddhist Will Self of the former Evil Empire"), with the irresistable title of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and one that I'm sure I had recommended to me but I can't for the life of me think of where I heard about it, Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar. [edit: completely forgot to link to Lycanthrope Library, a kind of werewolf book review service; one recent entry memorably features a "gun-toting, lycanthropic nun".] I've also had some enjoyable graphic novels on the same subject; I picked up the recent miniseries of Werewolf by Night, with the titular character being an anti-hero at best; I must say I preferred The Astounding Wolf-Man, in which the character uses his abilities for good, a rarity in werewolf stories. The artwork's awesome too; Jason Howard posts some of his work over on deviantART.

It's also worth mentioning that I have a couple of books on Real Actual Wolves that I've got hold of via friends; I have Barry Lopez' seminal Of Wolves and Men, along with The Wolf Almanac by Robert H. Busch, apparently one of the best available on the subject. Finally, I -- perhaps unwisely, from my bank account's point of view at least -- searched eBay for 'werewolf', and found all sorts of interesting things. All I bought, though, was something that immediately caught my eye -- a pair of Tibetan silver (were)wolf head charms, as pictured. The price was low, and as I had a spare silver chain lying around, I've decided to give the other charm to torque_tiger as a little gift.

I know a kid who thinks he's hip hop cause he buys it
I know a kid who thinks he's hip hop cause he never buys shit
Underground or mainstream
Some are bound to change schemes.

     -- Sage Francis, Underground For Dummies

So I'm listening to Sub.FM a lot lately -- I first saw it mentioned on Warren Ellis' twitter -- seeing as dubstep and its related spinoffs seem to be the in thing of late, and for once I actually like the genre. (There's also the more obviously-titled Dubstep.FM, but I'm not so keen on that one; DubTerrain is pretty neat though.) The quality of the stream's not brilliant, but in a conversation elsewhere there was some talk of audio enhancers. Normally I'm skeptical of these, but mikosquirrel pointed me in the direction of the DFX Audio Enhancer, which (on certain types of music at least) works really well; with dubstep, you can crank the bass to obscene, bone-shuddering levels, as it should be.

( In which I ramble a bit about music and other cultural stuff. )

Finally a couple of arty type things that I rather like: Multicolr Search Lab lets you pick up to 10 colours and use them to navigate a selection from "10 million of the most 'interesting' Creative Commons images on Flickr". It's a nice idea. Also, New Math is all kinds of awesome; reminds me a bit of one of my favourite artists, Jenny Holzer.

Two new pictures and two new tracks:

	Schrödinger's Dog - Night Drive (Extended Mix) Some rather funky tech house to begin with. For once I wrote a short-ish track, as I often do, and then realised a way I could go back to it and make it longer. Hopefully it's not too obvious where it originally ended, though maybe now it's a bit too long. Can't win 'em all I guess, but I'm reasonably happy with how it's turned out.
	Schrödinger's Dog - Shine and Emptiness I largely blame miyabisan and last week's Hard Drive for this. I have a hard time classifying stuff lately, but I figure this is minimal techno; I'm pretty pleased with it overall, though I wish I'd been able to make it longer as I did with Night Drive. It's just a little bit Trentemøller.

( Plus a few little things about how my life's going. )

Things haven't been terrible or anything lately, it's just that I've either not had the inclination to write (Twitter nonwithstanding) or something like a lack of time has got in the way. It's been about 2 weeks since my last 'life' post, so I'll write again in the reasonably near future, I suppose. In the meantime, as ever, I hope people like the music and pictures.

So, I've been listening to a lot of Lustmord and Stars of the Lid recently, and I thought I'd dig around in the archives to see if I had anything with that kind of vibe. Picked up some stuff from about 6 years ago and rehashed it into an EP. There's some sort of weird problem where the mp3's aren't reporting their length properly, but I can't do anything about that as the original .wav files are lost. (Unless I burn it to CD then re-rip it, which would probably lose fidelity.) I was up all last night (re)making this; hope some folks enjoy. Darkly ambient electronica throughout.

1. Intermission I


2. Intermission II


3. Intermission III


4. Intermission IV


5. Point Zero


6. Untitled

Physical copies of the EP will be made available on request, probably at cost, on the remote chance someone actually wants one. I might even try to sell some, if I can find somewhere locally to carry a few copies.

[edit: By request, the music and medium-rez artwork are now available in a .zip file: download here]

I'll make a regular stuff-about-my-life post soon, and I have some completely new music to post (not just old stuff rehashed). In the meantime, tonight I'm missing not only a psytrance event I've not been to in ages, but also seeing an ex who I get on well with, primarily because I'm stupid with money and don't have enough left to go out. Also, thanks to someone posting it on something completely unrelated, I can't get this song (lyrics here) out of my head. Seems appropriate somehow.

"Procession"

Schrödinger's Dog - The Fireworks Between [3:04, 130bpm, 4.8mb] A little hard to classify, but inspired variously by Darwinia and Crystal Castles -- and if using a Jane's Addiction-esque guitar riff combined with 8-bit bleeps is wrong, then I don't want to be right. May upload this to SheezyArt, but I need to check their policy documents first. Image on the left is designed to accompany the track; click for the full version on dA.

As a quick note, I'll continue posting images and music to this journal as usual, but dA and Sheezy will probably see more updates. I tend to prefer to put a bit more content here than just a picture if I can, so the other sites are more suitable for that. Still, I'm happy that I've got back into producing visual art again, and I've got loads of unused photos that I could do something with, let alone anything new I may take.

Also, this generator is useful for coming up with band/song/album names. Also also, SheezyArt is still being awful and broken for me, so I'll try again in a couple of days. Or just stick with dA and find somewhere else to put my music.

Happiiy, there's more good stuff to talk about today. I've been pretty busy since I last wrote, but (mostly) in a good way.

First up, I've put some of my new art online; after looking for a place to host images and music, as I already have a place for ordinary photographs. I returned to DeviantArt (as electricdog) after a six year absence -- my old account, straywulf, has some very old artwork, but I may repost some of that on the new one, which currently has 5 pieces not posted elsewhere, three of them brand new.

I also got an account on SheezyArt, which -- unlike DeviantArt -- accepts music as well as images, but there were issues with the site yesterday so I've not yet uploaded anything there.

Talking of music, I wish I'd seen this Penny Arcade strip before I named my 'band' -- Schrödinger's Wolfman would be an awesome name.

Finally on the subject I've added a few bits to my Miscellany gallery, all or less of which may be amusing.

( There is yet more. )

I've not been neglecting my spiritual side either. I managed to get Natural Radiance by Lama Surya Das, a book and CD set of teachings on Dzogchen, something which I've been wanting to practice ever since I heard about it. I've found the set to be incredibly useful and effective, and I'm not even halfway through yet. Also, I got an email telling me about the Foundation Course now available on the Free Buddhist Audio site; along with the downloadable talks, it's proving to be a valuable resource.

There's a little bit of a downside though. Despite getting all this creative stuff done and potential courses coming up, I've sacrificed a holiday to Amsterdam in order to study. And, although I'm getting a lot of enjoyment out of my games, books, and so on lately, and as much as I prefer to be solitary, I'm still getting pretty lonely. Hopefully that'll pass in time, and I'll have classes to keep me occupied.

• Schrödinger's Dog - Digital Headache [1:58, 130bpm, 3mb]

  
  
  A icy little minimal techno arrangement I put together on Thursday night after the Hard Drive, having been listening to too many wipE'out" soundtracks (thanks huskion) on my mp3 player of late. I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, though I think I probably could have extended the idea into a longer track. If I was better at animation, I'd make some kind of video to go with it. Click the image for the bigger version.

Quite a bit's been going on these last few days since I got back, and I haven't really had time to process it all yet. I want to write and get things down, but there's a lot of stuff I have to sort through first and I haven't had the time. At least I've had chance to do something creative, though. Hope folks like.

[edit: at huskion's suggestion, I modified the track slightly to make it sound a bit less harsh:

• Schrödinger's Dog - Digital Headache (Alternative Mix)

The highs are softened and the whole thing is a little deeper and more atmospheric; even though I'm listing this as an 'alternative' mix, I think it's probably the better version.]

It's a while away yet, but I've been thinking a little about getting hold of some creative tools in the new year, as I usually get a fair sum of money from my grandparents at Xmas -- not that I really celebrate it, being a Buddhist and all, but it's nice to see family. That, and assuming he hasn't sold the house and moved by then, my dad makes a pretty good Xmas dinner.

( Anyway... )

There's a few bits of creative stuff done by others that I wanted to mention too. First of all, abiku linked me to James Jean's artwork for one of the Fables TPB's, which is just gorgeous. It has wolves. (To sneak in another quick animal-related link, this is the best page on the internet, if cuteness is any kind of measure. Baby big cats!)

Over on Vox some time back, I made a post about The Fountain, and someone responded saying I might like these micro films from the movie. I figured I may as well share that here.

Back to photography for a moment, and the BBC has a story and pictures about Cathal McNaughton, winner of the Fujifilm Photographer of the Year award.

Finally, I've been liking Michael Whelan's artwork; I'd not heard of him before, but he beautifully illustrated the covers to Tad Williams' Otherland series, and I got interested that way. I'm thinking to get a print of the cover of City of Golden Shadow and frame it.

[edit: I forgot to mention that shirosirius has asked to use some of my music for a university project, and as my work's released under a Creative Commons license, I agreed (though it was nice of him to ask first). He wants to use Icecast, an old piece from 2005, and make a mock-up advert for it, as if it was being released as a single. Seems pretty neat, and he's said he'll send me the video when it's done, so I'll be posting that here.]