Alfâm Kuduszodikh - A Study on Music Playlists

*alfâm kuduszodikh – "music list" (ahl-faam kuh-duhs-zaw-dike – approximate pronunciation)

~~~

As promised, I bring you a post on music playlists. I would have written "music playlists" or "lists of music" in dwarvish (Khuzdul), but my source (Dwarrow Scholar) didn't have the words for those translations, lol.

Playlists are an easy way to keep track of songs that you like. You can pile all your favourite songs from one genre, or list all the songs that inspire you in your writing (or drawing, or working out, or doing paperwork or house cleaning or –).

You can build playlists almost anywhere – on iTunes, Spotify, Youtube, etc!

For example, here's a playlist from my Spotify (which I just built :P)

{ Fantasy Inspirational }
https://open.spotify.com/user/mikaelaingram/playlist/2q0A3v5f7MdOsKRq175389

The list contains these songs:

Lúthien's Lament by Eurielle
Lost Girls by Lindsey Stirling
Misty Mountains by Peter Hollens
My Dear Frodo by Howard Shore
Viverti by Mattia Cupelli
Victory by Two Steps from Hell/Thomas Bergersen
Forbidden by Eurielle

Creating playlists might just turn out to be extremely addictive.

Here's another playlist:

{ Steampunk Inspirational – incomplete }
Filled With
Euphoria (album) by Revolt Production Music
Cosmos
Breaking Away
Darkness Falls
Contageous
Euphoria
Embrace
Drive
Persecution
Nightmare
Killshot
Beyond the Wall
and
Palladio by Karl Jenkins
The Submarine by James Newton Howard
Starfall by Driftmoon
Die Walkure, Act III: Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner
Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D. 759, 'Unfinished': I. Allegro moderato by Franz Schubert
Time by Hans Zimmerman

Music is a fun platform to mess with. These two playlists are just examples of what I might end up building on Spotify. I encourage you to build your own if you want to - you can get a free account on Spotify, though you'll have to contend with the occasional ad.

iTunes would be the only platform out there, other than Windows Media Player, that wouldn't force you to listen to adds between ever three or four songs, but you'd have to pay for the music before you can put them into playlists.

Spotify is rather easy to manipulate, though, and forces less adds on you than Youtube, which makes you have to sit through an add at the beginning of every video, with most saying your "video will play after add".

All you have to do on Spotify is find your song and click the three dots to the right of it. There, you click "add to playlist", and it will give you the option to choose which playlist. You just need to create the playlists before you go hunting so that it shows up.

Before I end this, though, I would like to give you a word of caution. Spotify doesn't support the artists who make the songs you listen to on it as much as you'd support the artists if you bought their songs on iTunes or on a CD.

I know this might not be such a big deal for artists who are extremely popular and have money rushing in because, no matter what, their fans will buy their stuff and pay to see them live. But many of the artists who have their music hosted by Spotify are more independent than the biggest superstars and rely on the money they receive when people by their songs. The Piano Guys released a message about this at the end of their Youtube music video of "Celloopa", and they have compensated for the pennies they receive for having their songs on Spotify.

So, yeah. Use Spotify to your heart's content, but consider buying the songs as well in order to support your favourite artists. After all, it doesn't hurt to have it on iTunes or on your MP3 player just in case you go camping where you can't get LTE service or you're running low on data and you just have to listen to those particular songs that are on that playlist of yours.

The world's music is at your fingertips, folks!

– Mikaela

Book Review: Dreamlander

Dreamlander. K.M. Weiland. 2012. PenForASword Publishers. Pages: 544. [Source: Bought]

What if it were possible to live two very different lives in two separate worlds? What if the dreams we awaken from are the fading memories of that second life? What if one day we woke up in the wrong world?

~~~

Rating: 

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This book... man, what a treasure! I am so glad I stumbled upon it. I can only thank K.M. Weiland for her leading me to her story, since I've been reading and trying to follow along with her writing advice.

Immediately, I found myself connecting with Chris Redston, the main character of the story. Usually, it takes me two or more chapters to settle down and decide if I like the main character enough to want to follow them through the rest of the story. My connection with Chris was stronger than with any character than I can remember in recent memory. And that thrilled me.

Due to college, the first 25 to 40% were kind of slow, and it took me longer than I liked to get reading. But then I couldn't put it down, and I ended up eating up the rest of the novel like it was the best of Swiss chocolate. Everything was so well-rounded, and you knew what all the main players were doing when you needed to know what they were going. Usually, writers tend to follow the main character and sometimes the deuteragonist, and other important characters would pop up and strike with their plot-twisting purpose before promptly vanishing again. But not in Dreamlander.

You followed Chris, Allara, and Orias Tarn almost evenly throughout this 60-chapter story.

~~~

So his life was careening toward a dead end.

So he was using work as an excuse to run away. 

At least it was safe. At least it was sane. Mostly.

~~~

I loved the genre of this story so much. I went in thinking it was a high fantasy and wondering exactly what the glowing device was in Chris' hand on the cover. But then it quickly occurred to me, when Chris became more and more immersed in the "dream world" - the world Chris would go to when he fell asleep - that it was high fantasy mixed with steampunk. And I love steampunk just as much as fantasy and science fiction.

K.M. Weiland's writing voice was so smooth that it didn't distract me from the story. The dream world and the countries of Lael and Koraud felt so real that I could see myself navigating the streets as if I was following Chris as he went about. I didn't want to leave when Chris left.

I felt fear and connected with the events of the story when I was introduced to the protesters and eventual terrorists/rebels who joined with the bad guys. Nateros (I think that was how it was spelled) echoed with so many things that are happening today, in reality, and it took my breath away, because she was able to make it believable.

This is definitely a book I would like to get in physical format when and if she makes a sequel for it (because I've heard she's been considering it...). And I definitely want to read it again someday. Great job, K.M.!

There was so much I felt when reading this story, but there's no possible way I would be able to put it all down!

The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion. J.R.R. Tolkien. Published posthumously by Tolkien's son, Christopher, in 1977. George Allen & Unwin Publishers Ltd. Pages: 365. [Source: Borrowed from the Library].

"There was Eru, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad."

"Then those of the Ainur who desired it arose and entered into the World at the beginning of Time; and it was their task to achieve it, and by their labours to fulfill the vision which they had seen. Long they laboured in the regions of Eä, which are vast beyond the thought of Elves and Men, until in the time appointed was made Arda, the Kingdom of Earth. Then they put on the raiment of Earth and descended into it, and dwelt therein."

~~~

When I borrowed The Silmarillion from the library, I knew that I would probably struggle through it since Tolkien wrote it like a history textbook more than a story.

And rightfully so - The Silmarillion is basically the history textbook for Middle-Earth, so it doesn't flow like normal fiction at all. There are three more tomes out there that delve even more into the world that's Middle-Earth - but this is a book review for The Silmarillion, so I'm not going to talk about them.

Now, there's a lot about this book that I liked. The only parts I found that I didn't like was the fact that there was bad guys and evil and that it seemed like, whenever something beautiful was made it was destroyed by the evil. But there's always evil where there's good, unfortunately.

Eru Ilúvatar (air-u ill-oo-va-tar) is basically Middle-Earth's/Arda's Aslan/Emperor across the sea (if you compared Arda to Narnia). He's the one who was behind the creation of Middle Earth, though he didn't create it directly. Instead, he bid a group of angelic beings, the Ainur, to sing it into existence. I compare the Ainur to angels because Melkor, an Ainur, eventually turned against Eru, thus becoming Arda's Satan. I compared the events of the story while I was reading it to those of the Bible because Tolkien took a lot of inspiration from and made sure that there was a Christian message woven into his stories.

Reading The Silmarillion was very informative, and I found that it helped me to piece together a lot of events that occurred in The Lord of the Rings. In my opinion, it's a book I would like to own so I could go back and read over the stories when I want to - and I would get a newer edition where the letters were bigger so I didn't end up reading the same sentence more than once. And I'm definitely not reading it all in one go, ever again, lol.

I would give this book a rating of 4/5, since I felt like I was in Middle-Earth, watching from the sidelines, but it's not something I would want to read again for a very long time.