History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Video Recommendation: “Hands Up” by Meovv

| June 11, 2025

K-pop has some incredibly surreal and evocative music videos. I’ve written a couple of stories that were inspired by one or more videos, and there are some videos that have a better storyline than some movies! “Hands Up” is a recent track by a new girl group, Meovv (yes, with two Vs instead of a […]

A Day Off After a LONG Weekend

| May 26, 2025

It’s been quite a long weekend for me, having taken most of Thursday and all of Friday off so I could see Rolling Quartz on Thursday night, followed by Stray Kids on Saturday night. I’m spending today recuperating from both shows (which were incredible!), so today’s a day off from posting. Back tomorrow with my […]

“Earworm” in New Moons Under Which to Sleep

| January 11, 2022

“Earworm” was a story I wrote for a very specific anthology call that involved “space opera” in a more literal sense than the genre typically means. So my main character was the alien beatbox for an operatic vocal group. As I’ve talked about before, the inspiration for the story was related to K-pop videos, even […]

Cover Recommendation: Hwasa and Kei sing “Wish You Were Gay”

| October 30, 2019

My current obsession is this specific cover of Billie Eilish’s “Wish You Were Gay,” covered by Hwasa from Mamamoo (in the orange jumpsuit) and Kei from Lovelyz (in the black dress). I like the song best of what I’ve heard of Billie Eilish’s music, but this cover (especially their performance of it) is a delight. […]

My First K-Pop Concert!

| September 18, 2019

Last week was the culmination of my frantic watching everything by Pentagon I could get my eyeballs on in preparation for seeing them live. And it was definitely an experience. Jeremy and I both work downtown–my office is very near the theater they were playing–so we met up after work for dinner and drinks, then […]

Music Recommendation: Pentagon

| June 5, 2019

One of the things I’ve learned since starting to listen to K-pop is that the groups primarily play in ENORMOUS stadiums. A friend of mine saw BTS in New York recently, and the stadium there is VAST. Seattle doesn’t have a stadium or arena of the appropriate size to host these sorts of groups, so […]