Wednesday, June 25, 2025

This is the sixty-third installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. June is Accordion Awareness Month, so increase your awareness by listening to some of my favorite artists and soundtracks! Find any you’ve missed in this easily navigable index.

A quick housekeeping notice: for every post prior to this one, the URL has been the date in long form; Monday’s was dispatch.zmthomas.com/p/monday-june-23-2025.
Going forward, each West Wind post will be simplified to just the post number. Today’s is dispatch.zmthomas.com/p/westwind-63.
Eventually, every previous post in the archive will conform to this standard. This is only really important if you are one of those old-school folks who keeps bookmarks for your favorite posts, as they won’t work anymore. If you follow an old link, you’ll just be taken to the homepage, so it won’t be that much of an issue.

Mariachi Entertainment System was my favorite mariachi video game cover band, and I use the Wikipedia-style past tense because they are sadly no longer together. No matter, they’ve provided us with lots of great music from across a wide range of games, including the Millenial Fair theme from Chrono Trigger! Watch the video to see the accordionist in action, and if you like this kind of thing you can get the album on Bandcamp.

Recently my daughter read through the City of Ember series, about a society of people living underground to escape The Disaster, but they don’t know they’re underground until the end of the first book (trust me, it makes sense when you read it). That got me thinking of another story of people living underground and not knowing it, and one that I had hoped hadn’t been lost either.

Not The Over and the Under, actually, which I mentioned a few days ago, and which isn’t the final title, probably. No, I’m talking about Wormtooth Nation, a web-series about a group of people trapped underground who are trying to get out, but keep losing their memories. It’s a steampunk Midsummer Night’s Dream, and one of the first productions that convinced me that independent creators can really make it in the world.

When I went to look up the details for this post, I found that the series website, the easy-to-remember theskyisfree.com, no longer existed. Oh no, another story lost to the inevitable decay of the internet?

Fortunately not. Rest assured, you can still watch the whole thing just as it was originally released 17 years (!) ago. That itself was a bit of a shock. We’ve come a long way in the last nearly two decades, and where will we be in another two?