Some Music You Might Enjoy...

Sorry for not posting in over a week, but I've been really busy with work and writing.

While I've been writing, I've been listening to music.  Mostly from my iTunes collection, but often from music videos on YouTube.  One music-video I listen to is entitled "Blood for the Blood God" and consists of clips from various Warhammer 40K video games strung together in such a way that it sounds like a rock anthem to the Chaos God Khorne.

(And darn it's awesome.)

And YouTube supplies suggested videos on the right side of the screen.  I've found some songs this way that I'd never considered before.

The first was the instrumental piece "Preliator" by the band Globus, which puts out stirring orchestral music.  It was used as the background for a slideshow of Warhammer 40K images, mostly pertaining to Khorne and the Chaos Space Marines that follow him like Kharn the Betrayer.  Here it is if you want to see it.

Then I discovered the Swedish metal band Sabaton.  The first song I viewed, "Masters of the World," was kind of a standard metal song with a lot of Nietzschean self-assertion going on.

Then came "40:1," which is about the Battle of Wizna in Poland during World War II.  That battle is known as Poland's Thermopylae--720 Polish soldiers held 40,000 Germans for three days.  They lost, but they inflicted many more casualties than they suffered.  This is appropriate because I was writing a portion of Battle for the Wastelands taking place in one of the refugee camps where the remnants of the Merrill army look after civilian refugees from Flesh-Eater cruelty and periodically raid enemy territory.  The Merrills are outnumbered by their Flesh-Eater enemies and even more so when facing the combined armies of the tyrant Grendel, ruler of the entire Northlands.  However, the ones who survived the conquest of their homeland are the hardest of the hard-cores and they won't go down without a fight.

The last song I've purchased as a result of listening to it on YouTube so far is "Ghost Division," which is about Rommel's division and its role in the German invasion of France during WWII.  Even though Sabaton is no friend of Nazism, one can honor martial prowess and sheer cojones and that's what the Germans showed during the Battle of France.

(Although they conquered France in six weeks, it was by no means a walkover like the France-bashers like to say.  They outmanuevered French armies that were larger and in some cases better-equipped.  Read about the Manstein Plan, the collapse of the Meuse Front, and the Channel Dash in the Wikipedia article for the cojones part.)

I might buy other songs based on the YouTube videos.  Although it may seem odd to buy songs when I could simply listen to the music online, there's not much incentive to produce content when you don't get compensated for it (intangibles like fame and the joy of exercising one's creativity are nice, but they don't pay the bills).  I view it as stealing, although not everyone agrees.  It's also a lot easier to save an iTunes file onto my iPod than extract the music from the video, save it to my computer and then transfer it.