Waiting on hold to arrange some engineering issues, and George beside me started snoring. So enjoy some video. (Hosted on Tumblr.)

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Philips just instituted DRM restrictions on light bulbs and fixtures.

I am impressed. Not as impressed as I was by Keurig doing it on coffee, but impressed. That’s evil!

eta: Oh, hey, they totally reversed themselves! Hilarious.

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I mean, of course it goes without saying I’m not the only supervillain with computers. One was DDOSing our mail server for about 36 hours Sunday and Monday, which is kind of hilarious since we were down a big chunk of that time already for necessary upgrades/replacements. It was a decent-sized fleet – I blocked 26,000-ish bots before deciding eh, good enough for now.

It all abruptly stopped yesterday at 6:04pm. I apologise if you were downwind. Aheh.

Meanwhile, Kaye on Facebook requested more pictures of George. Here’s one! It’s from a few days ago, he was helping with my nap. He’s such a good kitty.

eta: Oh, they’re back. Around 100,000 machines this time. I wonder why? Ah, well, it’s not like I don’t have firing solutions ready.

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I called the photo “comping zouk” but NO it’s comping OCTAVE MANDOLIN! But octave mandolin like few people have heard it before. I’m not going to say nobody, but not many people, because this is not how this instrument is played. I’m driving this thing so downtuned and so hard that it’s a trial keeping it from slipping out of tune by the end of the song.

Part of that problem is that these strings are at the end of their life and I need to change them out, and I would’ve have already done, but I’m afraid I’ll lose the special sound quality I’ve managed to get the last few sessions.

And partly that slippage, the wearing, that’s also intentional, because the song’s about a coming apart of life, an overdriving of everything when faced with that, a place where all engines are running at 120% rated output and everything’s still firing but at the same time everything is absolutely tearing itself to pieces as a result and there is nothing you can do about it, and it’s necessary, but… you still know.

Because, see, this is a straight-up Doctor Who song, it’s based on a Vixy & Tony song called “Thirteen,” and it’s forthrightly about the Doctor dealing with whelp this is it, this is the last go, after a 12th regeneration, facing mortality right in the face, which was super-current when I wrote it, which meant for about six weeks, THANKS A LOT MOFFAT.

But even if it’s a period piece now, which it is, I still think it’s good, and while I’ve only played it out a couple of times so far, even audiences which know and love Vixy & Tony’s original – and their fans are loyal – have been all, “wow. …that works.” So I’m recording it for Conflikt, and it’ll be on the Conflikt convention CD.

And, pleasantly, it’s proving a good warm-up for getting back into the studio for Din of Thieves. I do often like being in the studio. Sometimes, I forget that.

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I pulled out my ancient copy of Fallout 2 a while ago and found no sign of the manual, but decided, eh, I’ll figure it out. Which is how I got reminded of things like “90s games don’t autosave across levels” and “90s games don’t autosave when you level up.” SO LONG, PROGRESS!

The PDF of the manual was on the Fallout wiki, and that was fine for reading on a tablet. But no, I decided NO I WILL HAVE THE BOOK GODDAMMIT, even if the pages in the PDF are arranged impossibly for proper double-sided-pages book printing.

So I printed out everything, physically cut and reassembled it back into correct signatures, scanned and duplex-printed all those new signatures, recut all of them, and bound it using perfect-binding techniques with carpenter’s glue and fabric. Because I’m just that kind of obsessive.

I thought about trimming the excess glue but realised quickly that no, that’s really kind of thematically appropriate. As would be adding some radioactive material, but I’m only so much into thematic accuracy.

And then I mentioned this online and lj:flashfire demanded gifs or it didn’t happen. So see above, and below.

I’m unironically really pleased with the cloth binding

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Courtesy dw:vatine, here’s Hedningarna, which is not metal, but which is, to quote vatine, “rock, but starting from 15th century Swedish trad music, instead of swing.” Here’s a playlist of their tunes, and here’s one to get you started:

Enjoy!

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Well, the Grammy awards shortlist came out on Monday, and to our… oh, honestly, complete lack of surprise… we did not make the shortlist in either category in which we were nominated. (Bone Walker for folk album; “Kitsune at War” for arrangement, instrumental or a cappella.)

Ah, well, it was tremendous fun while it lasted. But stopping here doesn’t take away that we did get a nod from an Academy member, we did get referred to the jury, we did make it past the jury, and we did become a long-list Grammy nominee.

Twice.

And while the long list was the end of the road for us this year, I’m still pretty damn chuffed about making that.

So thanks to everyone who had any part of any of the process, and hey – I’m finally starting to lay down my first new tracks in a while. Let’s see what happens next year. Because y’know what? We ain’t done here.

(Is there a Grammy Losers party? There should totally be a Grammy Losers party.)

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album. If you’re with the academy, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Remember a while ago I talked about the “bitchin’ metal hurdy-gurdy solo” that Nicolas Boulerice did at a Le Vent du Nord show in Victoria? And I talked to him after the show and found out that he had in fact been in a metal band before going onto Quebecois trad music?

This is called “cutting out the middleman.”

(h/t George P Burdell III on Facebook)

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album. If you’re with the academy, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

We have another High Wind Warning today, so will very likely lose power again, taking most of the site offline. It’s already atypically breezy right now – annoying, but what can you do?

Bandcamp will of course stay up, which means you can still play and/or download music, and the cyber2015 discount code will obviously still work.

On the plus side, at least, we’re making our way through the current series of Doctor Who, and at this point, I’m really glad I gave this series another chance. I’m liking the longer story format, and while the first half of this latest two-parter (The Zygon Invasion) was pretty much rubbish, the second half (The Zygon Inversion) more than made up for it – it made sitting through the terrible first hour worthwhile.

In particular, Jenna Coleman is just knocking it out of the park every episode now. Her performance in Inversion just – wow. I’m actually going to miss her, after this year.

Plus, we haven’t heard a good Doctor Rant like the one we got this episode in quite a while. Sometimes those get pretty tiresome, but this one was built right and in the right kind of context and was all character-revelation-y for a guest character without just being an exposition, and that’s how you should do these. Or, at least, it’s one of the right ways. I’ll take that with some ice cream, Doctor.

Plus I will admit hearing the Brig say “five rounds rapid” made my little fangirl heart squee a bit. XD

So, yeah. If we go out, the Bandcamp site will still be up, as will the LJ/Dreamwidth echoes and all that. And we’ll probably? be back by sometime tomorrow.

Assuming the volcano doesn’t blow. There’s kind of a thing, we kind of have to deal with it today, we kind of need power for that, we do have backup, but only so much, and and and. Such a bother.

Ah, well, best get to it. Geoengineering waits for no one.

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album. If you’re with the academy, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

I grabbed this sign out of an office remodel a while ago – hey, Seattleites, guess where! – and added it to my studio door at the Lair last week:

I may be taking it a little too literally. These are picks after a couple of takes each of “Thirteen” today:

How many of these things am I gonna have to make to record this song?

I may have to upgrade my picks. I may need something a little more ruggedised, maybe something a bit more metal, like these:

Seriously, are those shiny or what? They’re from the GuitarPickCollection Etsy store. I’m not affiliated, the lead dev on Ardour just pointed me at them today and they are very, very pretty. He has a couple and reports they’re really smoothly polished, and are actually playable.

I think they’re kind of amazing. Not something I’d actually want to use; reviews of other metal picks say they’re great for lead work, but I need more flex than these would have. Even so, they’re amazing to look at.

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album. If you’re with the academy, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.