…is under attack! For the first time since 2005.

Yes, that’s right, THE POWERPUFF GIRLS RETURN TO TELEVISION JANUARY 20TH. Mark your goddamn calendars because it is about time.

And if you’ve wondering what that has to do with us, the band – well, here’s a refresher course. The 28 second mark is particularly relevant.

The Night of the Doctor, a six-minute mini-episode:

I have to say: five minutes – five minutes of screen time, and I am weeping for the missed opportunity. My gods, it would’ve been great.

I also have to say: Holy hell! That list of names… Doctor Who Big Finish Audio Adventures companions are now screen canon, motherfuckers! O.O n/

Goddammit, Moffit, why you make me gotta hate you less? This is wonderful. Why can’t you’ve been this good the last few years?

So Séan McCann the Shanty Man is done, leaving Great Big Sea at the end of the current tour. And with that, an era is over. Even were the band to carry on in name, that’s half the original lineup gone, and more importantly, a big chunk of the soul of the group.

I can’t say I’m surprised. The last couple of albums have felt more like collections of solo work than Great Big Sea; The Hard and the Easy was the last album to feel like the whole band. Then the hiatus year followed by a notable lack of new material made the GBS XX box set sound mostly like a curtain call. I told Anna at the time: this is a farewell tour, announced as such or not. Bands have lifespans, and Great Big Sea ran in original lineup for one decade, then mostly-original for another; one hell of a run by any standard.

I owe a lot to GBS, musically. They’re why I know what an Irish bouzouki is, much less why I play one. They’re why Anna formed Three Good Measures (later Twelve Good Measures), and dragged me into it as a moderately-resistant flautist, and how she got that mandolin she eventually gave me. People say your first band should be a cover band; we were, largely of Great Big Sea, and it’s in that band where I started hearing music in songs that hadn’t actually been written yet, and started to play it.

I remember the first four bars I wrote, live, just while playing, in practice, and Kathryn, one of our vocalists, spinning around pointing with both hands saying, “THAT! Do THAT!!” and it felt like suddenly I could see through time.

And maybe that would’ve happened eventually in some form somewhere else, with other people, for other reasons – it didn’t really start to unlock for another few years, even as it went – but in the world I have, this is the where, and the when, and the why it did.

It hasn’t all been good; so much of doing music – or, indeed, any art – is about learning to deal with being ignored and rejected. And with my history of abandonment issues, those are particularly difficult lessons. Worse, I’ve never found anyone else who writes the way I do; the elfmetal community of artists consists, let’s be honest, pretty much of just me. CFoE was always supposed to be a band, not a solo act; only now am I occasionally getting to realise any part of that.

But none of it would even have been started – certainly not then, and not for a while – without Great Big Sea showing up, and despite my substantial frustrations, I’m still glad it did. It may’ve been Alexander James Adams who told me, “hey, you really need to be doing this,” but it was Great Big Sea who had me carrying around that flute in my backpack to begin with.

Without them, no N>=3 Good Measures, no Supervillain Studio, no nwcMUSIC geekmusic festival, no Crime and the Forces of Evil, no touring, I wouldn’t know half the people I do today… and, honestly, who knows what else? The knock-on effects scatter both far and wide.

And thus, here we are, at the end of an era. Oh, sure, a sort-of GBS could play on as the Alan Parsons Doyle Project, but that wouldn’t be the same, and besides, Bob has bands to manage and a bar to run. We close one era, while still hoping to see another start.

So thanks, Séan, Bob, Darrell, Alan, and latecomer Murray – guys, it’s been great. No; it’s been amazing. I hope, someday, I can return the favour – or, if not that, pass it on, casting a little magic myself. Maybe someone will catch it, and throw forward a bit of their own. The least I can do, I think, is try.

Big windstorm due in today! Things may be a little goofy around the Lair, since we’re self-hosted, and if the volcano gets blown out – don’t laugh this has happened – we might fall off the net.

Windstoooooooooorm. Wiiiiiiiiindstoooooooooooorm! Oh, hey, that reminds me of an experiment some collogues of mine ran…

Okay, so, I finally saw Chinatown the other day. Roman Polanski, 1974. Colour film noir.

Turns out the ending filmed wasn’t the end scripted. The screenwriter’s ending was rather different. (This is spoilerriffic, but c’mon, it’s a 1974 film.)

So let me get this straight, because this is really icky, and I don’t mean that in a funny way…

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Agents of SHIELD has made its way into the category of “current good” in my band’s mythos, and I am, as they say, disappoint. That sounds contradictory, but it’s not; let me explain.

Core Crime and the Forces of Evil mythos is that we were superheroes who lost a war to our world’s supervillains. In a universe with superheroes, that means villainy triumphant gets to decide what’s right and good; the victorious villains become the new super-heroes.

This isn’t some cosmic event, it’s not even magic; as a rule, humans basically go along with whoever is in charge. Once the supervillains have the power, well, there y’go. And if you don’t go along – well, somebody has to be the new super-villains, don’t they? Good, evil, whatever – we’re just the supervillain enemies of the new order.

SHIELD, now – SHIELD has long been a clandestine secrecy, surveillance, and enforcement organisation that is above the common law. There are laws they follow, apparently, but these, too, are secret. SHIELD threatens and intimidates and disappears people and things that We Aren’t Meant to Know, and are sole and unaccountable deciders of these matters.

At least, if you lack the money and power to prevent it, like, say, Mr. Stark.

And all that’s fine; you have evil and intrinsically corrupt organisations all the time. But the show appears to expect us to be on their side. They are the paradigm. Oh, they get their hands a bit dirty, but who doesn’t?

Why don’t we take a look at that?

With “The Girl in the Flower Dress,” what do we have? (Spoilers, ahoy…)

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It’s new Inspector Spacetime! Yes, yes, thanks to NBC, it’s officially Untitled Web Series About etc nobody cares, it’s Inspector Spacetime. There’s an eight-minute prequel to Series 2 out, there’s a Kickstarter to fund the whole series, it is great. This prequel is everything I wanted in Series 1 but didn’t really entirely get. Don’t get me wrong; I liked Series 1, but it was a bit slow and kind of uneven. Now, though, now they have it going:

Here’s the Kickstarter. Hie thee and go fund!

Black MIDI is a thing. A thing of cacophony and madness, of multi-million note MIDI songs, played on MIDI pianos as visual art and audio maelstrom.

Does anybody going to Norwescon do this? If so, talk to me. If there’s a panel to be had here, I’d like to have it. music at norwescon dot org.

Several people I know spin poi – some of them are really good! A few of them are fire performers, and that shit is epic. I have photos of a bunch of that up on my Flickr account.

But I haven’t seen people spin LED poi before. This is awesome in a different way entirely:

Somebody commenting on it said the spinner is using those bike LEDs. BEST USE EVAR.

I want to see this added to the Main Street Electrical Parade. I love that show. 😀

The Seattle Geekly podcast has long been a big supporter of geekmusics of all flavours. They had to retire from podcasting a couple of years ago due to Fuck You, Cancer reasons, but are ready to come back with a little Kickstarter funding.

They’re less than $400 away from goal, but are down to four days as I type this. Go back this project. I already have. In fact, I just upped my support.

Seriously, go throw ’em a fiver if nothing else. They’ve been big music supporters; get them back above the line.