This is epic – it’s a spaceship disaster simulator built into a caravan. Lots more details at the link, but here’s the video:

This would’ve been in this month’s Geekmusic Podcast had it come out in time – Alexander James Adams is releasing a series of singles, once a month, online this summer. The first one is live today, at his bandcamp page. AJA fans, clickie!

For some reason, I feel like talking about photography.

Here’s a shot I took from Butchart Gardens, outside Victoria, weekend before last:

The Inlet

I was going for that kind of 40s or 50s-holiday feel, an older boat, a dock that’s actually pretty new but looks older because of the sepiatone, and all that. I’m pretty happy with it. It has a 1930s feeling that I get from looking at land photos from the era.

But all of that was post-photo, because this was originally a shot with different intent – an intent that didn’t work. At all. Here’s the original:

(Technically speaking, that’s the next shot, but it’s pretty much identical.) I was trying a couple of experiments that failed in the same way, but I didn’t delete the shots from my camera, and ended up with the sepia faux historical.

In terms of mechanics, getting to the above from the below was all in iPhoto, but it works the same in Photoshop. iPhoto has a lovely biased centre-of-brightness tool they call “Shadows,” and another one biased differently called “Highlights.” The first makes shadows brighter, the second brings down highlights, and in both cases, they’ll reveal lots of lost detail if you crank them way the hell up.

The problem with this approach is that no matter what, you’re missing a lot of colour data. You just don’t have it – at least, not in usable resolution. The resulting images often look washed out and/or really grainy. This original, treated thusly, looks really washed out:

“Shadows” and “Highlights” cranked way the hell up

…which is where monochrome comes in. I went with sepia/amber here to invoke a mood, but standard black-and-white would’ve worked about as well. If you merge the colour data to a monochrome palette, you get back to a similar amount of intensity data as you’d’ve had if you’d shot the image in black-and-white to start. It looks natural, within the artifice of photography.

I’ve pulled out a fair number of concert shots this way, and night crowd shots. You get this old-school newspaper/disco kind of look. I’ll even turn up the graininess on purpose, to drive that home. And with that, a shot that looked lost can be made vibrant and interesting again.

C.f. this crowd shot, at Strowler Nights, a few years ago:

That was basically a black rectangle with highlights, on my camera. But play with the levels, edit out a stray arm in the lower left, take out the colour, and: result!

If I’d left it in colour, it would’ve been – at best – a washed-out mess with hints of colour. But taken to monochrome, and kicking up the grain so it looks intentional, and you end up with a textured crowd portrait.

Which I guess really means I didn’t want to talk about photography, I wanted to talk about art, and intent. To wit: a lot of things you think of as flaws or problems can become assets, if you just turn them up to the point where they look intentional, then fine-tune them a bit. Not everything, gods know. But a surprising number.

If you’ve done something like this, post links or descriptions, eh? Share your mistakes-turned-successes. It might be fun. ^_^

Seriously, the last few weeks? Digital audio workstation. Webserver. External storage drive. Backup server. (Well, that’s replaced, not fixed; the old one worked, just really slowly.) CD-burning robot.

This week? I have the replacement transformer for my field-modded-by-somebody SM58 microphone. That should be easy to fix, and then it won’t buzz in the presence of phantom power anymore. Damn, that was annoying.

But mostly, I’m doing a lot of cello recording – final work on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love. And Betsy’s cello, Godiva, gets pretty fierce? And lo, securements come off and my studio reference monitors say WELCOME TO BUZZTOWN!

Yes, Betsy’s cello broke my speakers and made me upgrade them. SONIC ATTACK GRAR!

But that’s fixed now. At least, as fixed as I can make it. These little x77s – if you can even call them that anymore, I’ve modded them so much they’re less than half original – can only take so much bass no matter how much fiddling you do. Right now the biggest source of buzz is at very high volume and from inside the sealed tweeter assembly. I can’t fix it, I’d have to replace it, and ribbon tweeters are kinda spendy.

To wit: maybe I shouldn’t turn them up quite that loud. But it’s tempting, because it’s kind of cool being able to shake the floor with 20cm high bookshelf speakers.

AND NOT BY DROPPING THEM jesus you toons. C’mon.

Anyway, back to music mines. But first! Anna’s new book, Valor of the Healer, is out! She’s got a post up on the official Carina Press site, talking about strong female characters that aren’t physical badasses, and wants to hear about your favorite strong female characters who are strong without the physicality part, because that’s kind of her lead character in this trilogy – strong, despite physical weakness.

Eleanor from The Lion in Winter comes to mind, for me, and if you haven’t seen The Lion in Winter yet, go watch it right the fuck now, seriously.

Anyway, clickie and read and comment. And tell your friends – Anna’s new book is out! 😀

eta: Did I mention there’s a book giveaway involved? No? Damn. Well, there is. Clickie!

Anna’s new book is out! It’s called Valor of the Healer (yes, spellcheck, because Carina Press is an American publisher, leave it) and you can download it right! now! for an eminently reasonable new-release price. And you should! Because I said so. Also because it’s good. And I helped make certain, um, possibly-seen-as-nefarious mechanisations work better.

Yes, that does in fact mean I’m a consulting supervillain. SHOVE OVER, MORIARTY, YOU AREN’T THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. Do you have a heat ray? No? Okay then. SHIFT IT.

Clickie!

I am telling you guys, it is so much more fun being on this side of the spoiler wall. It is. XD

How is it Wednesday? How did that even happen?

I’m working my ass off right now trying to figure out how to update the MBR on a new hard drive in my audio workstation. Basically, my DAW has had two hard drives in it for a while because… oh fukkit there is no good reason. Laziness and It Seemed A Good Idea At The Time. I’m paying for it now, trying to combine them onto a single physical drive.

So here’s a music-acquired roundup from nwcMUSIC 2013/Norwescon 36:

• Experimutations and Counting Sheep from Jonny Nero Action Hero, who has a particularly dynamic live show, double-particularly for a chiptunes artist.
• Geek Girl, Infinity Right Now, and Sidekick and Other Songs from Hello, The Future! Technically Anna bought these but it’s a community property and gay marriage because Fuck Yeah Cascadia, and besides, I already had one of these from Bandcamp
• Temptations of the Fresh, from Klopfenpop, which I downloaded but don’t have the deluxe physical edition yet because he left it at home, and
• The Campaign Mixtape, from Shubzilla, who I actually met there during Jonny Nero’s show. It’s a four-track EP of quality, you should get it.

We had a bunch of out-of-nowhere tech problems including the various components of the sound system – which communicate over IP – all deciding not to talk to any of the other parts on Friday night. Nicole Dieker (Hello, The Future!) had to perform with the emergency backup kit, but fortunately, the emergency backup kit is good kit. And I shot some pretty decent actually video of the second half of her show.

Seriously, it was fucked up. I had to go find a paper clip so John could do some hardcore factory reset action. But that, followed by reprogramming from backup, got it to come back up in time for the Leannan Sidhe show, and it stayed up thereafter.

Cascadia’s Got Talent! got rocky, too – at scheduled start time we had one (1) contestant. Happily we ended up with six, and the Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly of nwcMUSIC (Death*Star) worked really well with Nicole Dieker (who could be our… Ruth Buzzi, perhaps?) and lots of fun was had by most. Scott’s trophy got a great reception, and our terrible vacation tour was to Prohibition boomtown turned suburban hell Kenmore. (“Kenmore! It’s on the way to Bothell. Kenmore! Where the appliances to go die. Kenmore! We used to be interesting; thank god that’s over.”)

The Saturday night concert set – that was pretty epic. We had four for the last-minute open mic, and actually filled the time pretty well. HeyLasFas’s guitarist – whose name I have dropped not in the sense of name-dropping but in the sense of forgetting it right now – did a couple of numbers solo. Then HeyLasFas proper, followed by Alexander James Adams – who packed the room, as always, and incidentally impressed the hell out of Molly Lewis – and then Molly Lewis herself, with Vixy & Tony dropping in as a backup band.

We ran a little late, but that was okay because this time filk was in the same room! And the filkers were all in the audience. I had fun playing with the lateness – walking up to stage carrying the all clock like I was going to be all cranky, holding it up in front of Tony… and setting it back 20 minutes. XD

Molly drew a genuine spontaneous encore. That’s an nwcMUSIC first.

Anyway, time to burn a new live CD and see if I can use it to rebuild the new drive’s MBR. If you know what that means, pop on to chat somewhere and help me, because honestly, WHY CAN’T I JUST EDIT THIS?! I mean damn.

Anna is raffling off two copies of Valor of the Healer over at her author blog today. Get it before Carina Press’s release! She’s asking about your favourite musical characters, so go answer.

Also, I posted a short ECCC roundup here, late yesterday. If you only read things in the morning, there’s your link! And I have a live appearance coming up on … a web series I can’t name yet. But pencil in two weeks from tonight!

This podcast project is going to make me upgrade software. And possibly hardware. It’s not that it’s so insanely complex – it’s most assuredly not – it’s just that it’s so. long. I have about eight hours of source material to edit down into a bit over an hour, and apparently single tracks of two and a half hours make it a little cranky. And crashy. Whup, there went the GUI again. SURPRISE!

I’ve been talking about this idea I’ve had for an electric instrument; a bass-type fretted set of strings across the top bar – a stick-type bass – and a panel of deep harp strings coming off the bottom of that which could be finger-plucked, all with electric pickups and stuff.

It just struck me as something an elfmetal band should have, and I’m semi-serious about getting a luthier to make one at some point. It’d look like kind of a wedge bass, but with a bunch of extra strings and pickups on it. The top bar could also be fretless, but that’s more a jazz thing than metal.

Somebody beat me to an acoustic version. They have the harp strings on top, and it’s all acoustic (which is NOT THE SAME) but it’s still the same basic idea.

(photo Long & McQuade, Surrey, BC; h/t Pauline McDonald)

I still want my bass electric version. But… yeah.

The writer of The Free Court of Seattle series – my partner Anna – has a second fantasy novel series starting up through Carina Press! The first book, Valor of the Healer, is coming out in April, and she’s giving away a copy! It’s a raffle, so go check that out.

Carina started out as a romance imprint. Can you tell?

She’s publishing it under a pen name because there’s simply no way the book databases will not screw up our last name. Which is annoying, but trust me, it’s true. But it’s still her. ^_^

International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield and Barenaked Ladies, live on CBCMUSIC three days ago. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Click through and hit play. Chris’s parts were actually recorded from space, tho’ time syncing would’ve been done later, of course, as is normal.

THE FUTURE!