#the nineties

[sunbookie]

Purpose...

Beautiful.

[madameshogunassassin]

Jennifer Aniston for US Weekly, October 1998

[mutenostrilagony]

[dollsahoy]

Simply handmade : 365 easy gifts & decorations you can make : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

216 p. : 26 cm

The library where I lived in 1998 got this, and I checked it out then multiple times because the projects were Just So Modern. I acquired the book from a thrift store a few years ago, and the projects are indeed Very Late 90s, and also very...ah...beginner friendly. Sometimes I think of getting rid of the book, but it's still highly amusing, and it occurred to me that others may enjoy The Incredible 1998ness of it

I don't think I've actually ever made anything out of it

[vifetoile]

Photography from The Art of William Morris in Cross Stitch, by Barbara Hammet (1996)

Styling by Zöe Hill, photography by Tim Hill

[gijoe-forever]

[eaterofdust]

...would you try redesigning the mist twister from the nine realms?

Your wish is my command!

I thought it'd be fun to swap the twin and varch dynamic; while the twins want to be seen as seperate but are forced to have a single(?) dragon, Wu- er, Nessy- and Wei- sorry, Quezzy- have to deal with each other in order to have a single human.

Female Misttwisters take after their more tidal class relatives, swallowing water and evaporating it in order to float on the top of the underwater lakes, fairly unconcerned with most things. Their claws are only ever really used to hold food or eggs.

Nessy specifically is an outlier, being quite aggressive; when she finds the humans, she is not pleased and immediately begins doing her best to stalk after them (which isnt particularly practical when youre effectively a car-sized seal). Thankfully, having been in the middle of the ocean means that the hidden world is quite wet, and everywhere has water- save for the fire cave.

For a while it's Jun and Nessy (named because Jun is fairly certain that this type of dragon is what inspired the Loch Ness Monster), but a male Misttwister begins to follow the two. Males often ride on their mates, flying off to catch her food and caring for hatchlings later on (best I can describe their dynamic is penguins, at this point). While Nessy wasnt originally fond of company, Quezzy (named after Quetzalcoatl, unwillingly- it was a joke by Alex, of which the dragon took to) is more curious than anything of the gang, bringing food and offerings to the weird pink-fleshy hatchlings that had clearly been abandoned for some reason.

He and Nessy quickly became rivals, both protective and possessive over Jun and quite unwilling to share, though they can put their difference aside for Jun's sake; it's safer for both to stay together anyway.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fu-Schnickens

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

I can't remember where I first heard dancehall reggae, but I do remember where I bought most of my dancehall cassettes: at Play De Record, a great hip hop/reggae DJ store on Yonge Street in Toronto whose bins were all killer, no filler. I'd go into the store every couple weeks and more or less pick three albums at random and love every one of 'em. I just discovered that PDR is still in business, which makes me extremely happy:

https://www.playderecord.com/

Look, I know that mostly I use this blog to talk about tech politics, monopoly, impending fascism and the climate emergency, with the odd science fiction review. But all that other stuff (modulo the sf novels) are weighing on my heavily this week, and I feel like posting something a little more lighthearted. So I consulted my editor (me), who called a special meeting of the editorial board (also me), who kicked it up to the publisher (still me), and they all agreed that I could write a post about a weird hip-hop album that's been earworming me in the best way imaginable since 1992.

I'm pretty sure I bought Fu-Schnickens' debut album "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" at Play De Record. Certainly, I have a memory of stopping on the sidewalk outside of the store to wrestle the cellophane off the cassette and pop it into my walkman. I definitely remember my first walk through the city with the music in my ears. I laughed aloud. Several times. I might have even danced a little:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw–ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas

At the time, I knew nothing about Fu-Shnickens. In the years since, I have listened to F.U. Don't Take It Personal approximately one heptillion times and somehow managed not to learn anything about Fu-Schnickens. Today, I read their all-too-short Wikipedia article and learned that the group was together between 1988 and 1995, that their second album (which I remember not being as impressed with) had a top-40 novelty track with vocals by Shaquille O'Neal, who said the Schnickens were his favorite hiphop group:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Schnickens

I get it, Shaq. They're great. First of all, they're incredibly silly. Long before Wu-Tang Clan, they were doing this weird kung-fu movie schtick in their songs (which, admittedly, walks an uncomfortable line between "parodies of racist depictions of Chinese people in the movies" to "racist parodies of Chinese people in the style of those movies"). Their songs are jammed with pop culture references in a way that puts, say, Paul's Boutique to shame. You can get a sense of this by looking at the lyrics transcribed over at Genius (where they are criminally under-annotated):

https://genius.com/artists/Fu-schnickens

Take "La Schmoove," a song that references "The Jeffersons," "Leave It To Beaver," "Superfly," Honey-Nut Cheerios, Popeye, Elmer's Glue, Elmer Fudd, Pippi Longstockings, "Married With Children," "Three's Company," "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," "Do-Wah-Diddy," the board game Battleship, and Pepe Le Pew. It features rhymes like "we in there like swimwear," "Adios muchachos dorme vous unbuckle my Fu-Schnick shoe," and "Yo zilch kaput me nada none son." It's legit bonkers.

But also: they're really good. The frontman, Chip Fu (Roderick Roachford) raps really fast, has amazing flow, and periodically just starts rapping backwards, like literally saying the same syllables he just said, but backwards, with that same amazing flow. They are steeped in old dancehall, and it shines through (they more-or-less single-handedly revived Tenor Saw's now-familiar "Ring the Alarm").

Many of their songs feature a kind of hiphopified Phil Spector wall of sound, a kind of melodic drone that underlays the beats and lyrics. As soon as I hear that drone, I start smiling, because I know what's coming.

I have been earwormed by these tracks for this entire century and much of the past century. It's always really hard to explain why you like something, but I think that Fu-Schnickens' pop culture stream of consciousness and nonsense syllables are a kind of rhythmic version of my own internal monologue, which is a kind of endless babble of fragments of books, music, movies and TV; dumb jokes; words repeated until they lose all meaning and become meaningless phonemes, all kind of splinters of ideas and words floating around, bumping into each other.

There's lots of dancehall and dancehall-adjacent stuff that's arguably better than this album, like "The Good The Bad The Ugly & The Crazy," the amazing and underappreciated collaboration between Necka Demus, Junior Demus and Super Cat:

https://www.discogs.com/master/158493-Super-Cat-2-Junior-Cat-Junior-Demus-Nicodemus-The-GoodBadUgly-The-Crazy

And I could listen to Shaggy's cover of "Oh Carolina" all day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLqmWt2h2g

Or Apache Indian's "Boom Shack-A-Lak":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZzBd41NuZw

Or even better, "Ragamuffin Girl":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGhrpajNtKk

But none of music is on continuous shuffle-play in the back of my brain the way "F.U. Don't Take It Personal" is and has been since the Clinton administration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2wD7FbIzGI&list=PLJw–ySHyZNwsmLcxfW3NWTyxQX7mARas

What's more, this is one of the very few (non-Talking Heads, non-David Byrne) albums that my daughter and I like listening to together in the car. It's so perfectly silly, virtuosic, funny, and danceable. Still as good as it was when I was young and had the hips I was born with. I've owned it on cassette and CD and as MP3s. I somehow own the vinyl (though I have no turntable).

I'm grateful to the management of this publication for the opportunity to share it with you.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/17/holy-batfu-its-an-apple/#ba-schnicker-bah-snchnucker