This past week has been such a blessing. Hope you’ve enjoyed the holidays too. Thanks everyone who showed up with cardboard for the yard, yummy treats, and good company. Knocked a ton of time off the ongoing gardening project. Looks like we’re down to the shop which looks like the last load of mulch for hugelkultur, German style land regeneration. Nice. No more poison ivy or brambles! If you live in the Southeast, poison ivy is a PEST and it’s so nice to have a real solution for the problem that has plagued our place for a decade. Whoot. There’s plenty of tutorials online for anyone who's interested in learning about this ancient art and if you live in Raleigh with its hilly clay valleys, check it out.
Gardening aside, the US music scene is also been a cool 2025 surprise. Coachella is having a Western short skirt moment which brings back 90s short skirt hot economy moment. Awesome. Maybe Western scifi? Or Western Technosorcery? Has anyone else read the excellent book Hidden Musicans: Music-making in an English Town by Ruth Finnegan? She’s a British author who did an AWESOME study on informal amateur musical networks in a major British city in the 80s including revenue. The 2007 edition includes several decades of before and after as it appears to be the author’s hometown, especially for nonprofits or charities looking to raise money or run successful artist ventures. Her chapter 9 on Western music is pure gold. There’s a huge contrast right now in NC between say Charlotte and Raleigh in terms of the arts bouncing back. Durham is also doing a great job. Wandering around Charlotte for the holidays, there seems to be more organic traffic and events than downtown Raleigh even though we have more NGOs on the books.
This is not a dig on Raleigh, just an observation of money needlessly being left on the table. Based on what fashion trends are putting out, especially Coachella, while the Disney and LA movie industry fumble, it seems like someone in RTP gaming industry could grab that piece of the pie with live Western music events to roll-out gamer tech.
For people who have not read Ruth’s book, which I highly recommend, successful Western live music events often use a stock format in British society of a two-part band show with a gun duel break in the center. Obviously with drone technology coming as far as it has, there’s an opportunity to reimagine this for a new age and make some serious money in the process. Blame years of a brother and family obsessed with duck hunt, Halo, Mass Effects video games, and laser tag for this idea. Mass Effects (and several other futuristic scifi games) feature a ghost or sidekick for game play. In fantasy games, this can often be a pet animal, pixie centaur, etc. Someone with an eye towards laser tag in the 90s, Star Wars, Dune, etc. is going to reimagine the classic dueling with light sabers or blazers via lasers to create a toy or package set in which players in the real world can modify the classic laser tag gun between two people (thanks Nathan Fillion) or group nerf fights with flying drones that can emit lights and interact with players to create their own Ghost assistant. Obviously, this could also be sold for the Christmas holiday market which would be a GOLDMINE for the gaming community. Mass Effects seems the most likely candidate. Halo? What else? How many video games over the past 50 years have featured an adorable flying AI sidekick? Anyways, this Western music trend and short playful skirts seem custom built to make money. Xbox could also integrate the drone play gaming system like guitar hero or other add-ons for super nerds. The marketing campaign would definitely need Western AI scifi/futuristic touch. Given there’s no 2025 scifi movie buzz, LA is down 22% or something crazy for jobs for the year according to Film Threat, it’s the gaming industry’s golden ball to win. Given how close RTP is to DragonCon and the technology industry, Raleigh schools and businesses could cash in on the trend if they were smart and found the touring music groups this summer/fall to roll out the product marketing for the Christmas holidays. The cynical person will say that the military will cash in on Band of Brothers, Mars Edition. But will anyone bother? Just a thought.
If you like the idea. It’s yours. Feel free to run with it. Just consider supporting Ruth Finnegan by buying her book. And NO, this is not a paid sponsorship. Just like her work.