Remember Mine to Love, that album I co-engineered last year at Supervillain Studios, and ended up playing on too? Leannan Sidhe’s second album? It’s finally out! It came out today! I didn’t know! SURPRISE!

I’ll post more about it tomorrow, but my favourite song on the album (which I’m not even on) is King of Elfland’s Daughter, which isn’t streamable because of copyright reasons. Just go buy it, it is worth your 99¢, trust me here.

Here’s a player for the entire album other than that track:

Up late until 1am comping mandolin. So it’s PHOTOSPAM DAY!

The primary reason Anna and I went up island was to see Le Vent du Nord – Anna had bought tickets to the symphony show they were doing with the Victoria Symphony almost a year ago, and friends bought tickets to their more typical bar show up in Cumberland which followed.

The symphony show was a little too respectable for my tastes. The group tends to the conservative – lots of Bach in the programme this year I see, oh look, you’ve got a Beethoven show – and I was in the washroom queue before the show listening to the somewhat older regulars saying things like, “Well, it’ll be different” with a small about of disapproval.

No photos allowed during the show

They won the crowd over, in the end, which was a bit of an achievement. And it’s a nice theatre.

Anyway, after that, we headed up island. The Cumberland show was in a local pub in the actual traditional sense – they have a Dominion-era license from the 1840s and it is indeed a public house. Anna brought Jean-Claude, of course – it’s required!

Jean-Claude Mamut stands in rapt attention!

As you can see, we were front row, again. Anna is a huge fangirl and will not be denied; I’m mostly brought along for the ride. XD Camera conditions were difficult, but I got a few nice shots:

You might recognise this stage from a couple of days ago.

Dark is a supervillain’s favourite colour. Also Batman’s. Think about it.

I got this

The microphone was not actually spring-loaded and did not actually thwock Simon in the eye. It merely looks like that’s what happened. I was not involved. No, honestly, I wasn’t.

The only shot of Olivier that came out.

The energy was good in the pub and we had a lot of fun. After this we went hiking before heading home; I’ll post some nature pictures next.

Hey, check out Strah Statham’s post on the women who paved the way for electronic music. She’s added a a Part II, here, as well.

You know about Delia Derbyshire, of course – everyone reading this should – but this post has six others, including Clara Rockmore…

…who worked with Léon Theremin to improve his new musical device (the theremin, go figure) to make it a true musical instrument. Unless you’ve heard her play before – I actually have – then you haven’t heard a theremin sound like this. Check it:

Everybody listen up and pay attention! There are two artistic projects going in to their last days and both are on target to make it, so if you haven’t gone and pitched in already, GO NOW!

First is Heather Dale and Ben Deschamp’s Celtic Avalon album-tour-video project. It’s musical and educational, and they’ve just added SJ Tucker to the project, making it even more awesome than it already was. They’re down to less than a week and are very close, but not quite there. Heather Dale Band fans, SJ Tucker fans, Canadian music fans, you are on deck. If they get over in the next couple of days there will still be time for the only-once-already-successful people to jump in for stretch goals.

eta: They have a fan who will match donations today! Make twice as much support!

Second is the Inspector Spacetime/Doctor Who parody film which has not just Travis Richey and Chase Masterson and Robert Picardo and Mayim Bialik but the actual Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, in it. I talked about this before; they’re a little over halfway through the project period and are about three-quarters of the way to funding. It’d be great to get them over the top this week so all the people who don’t jump in until the project is already funded actually jump in, so they can do extra stuff.

They have the prequel already posted, it’s long, it’s good, you can see it at their IndieGoGo project page. If you’re not already in, go watch that and decide. Sylvester McCoy’s not in that clip – he shows up in the next scene, I’ve already seen the animatronic, it’s good – but Robert Picardo is. G’wan, you wanna.

eta: Woah, made IndieGoGo front page! Awesome. 😀

Okay, enough screwing around online for me. Back to taxes.

Back from Maillardville and Festival du Bois! Here, have a bunch of festival pictures. I saw things exploded and posted about it, but it was over in six hours, making it possibly the shortest-duration F&SF explosifluffle I’ve ever seen.

And how was your weekend?

Vishten. I forgot my real camera so all these are cell phone. You can see what kind of lighting I was up against.

The Puppetmasters do crowd control. Or something like that.

“Do not EVEN post that to Facebook!”

De Temps Antan, with Eric, not to be confused with Le Vent du Nord, with Simon. My Beaudifferentation skills are poor, but Eric is the chatty one.

Famillé Leger

FROGMITTENS
I was doing Frog Mitten Boxing all weekend.

Serene Anna is Serene

It’s’a Shadowbox a’Mario!

ZZZZZZZT
(The forecast was for snow. It turned to rain.)

All PUPPETS, CLOWNS, and COWS to STAGE FRONT, PLEASE!

The Gang at the Rogue

My stupid phone camera wants to turn all spotlit stage performers into columns of light, particularly if there’s a dark background. I could defeat it, but only at the cost of Holga emulation.

Thanks again to Geri and Robert for putting us up, and putting up with us. Next week, Victoria and up the island points north!

I have seen a fair number of Kickstarter burnouts and explosions, but I have never seen one like this.

A few years ago, there was a truly great and hilarious webcomic called Sad Pictures for Children. I always thought – despite reading it during almost all of its run – that it was called Pictures for Sad Children, and I still think that’s a better title, but that’s not important right now.

It gained a following, and, as such things do, eventually wrapped up and the writer/artist launched a Kickstarter project to fund a collected book edition. It kept ramping up, and went way, and I do mean way, over the creator’s head – particularly as stretch goals started piling up, and super-arty features got added, like … okay, the last comic in the book included a joke about a dead wasp. Of course, it was only a drawing…

…originally.

As it snowballed, and costs exploded, and we find out that really, the creator didn’t include any budget for his time and labour in the project, things started to get goofier and goofier.

This is the final update, which just went out.

Yep. That’s a video of him burning a bunch of his own books. And, posted along with the video, you’ll find many pages of anti-materialist philosophy and anger, interspersed with bold text inserts like this:

I called this post “never ever do this,” but not because of the business aspect of this implosion, and not even because of the spectacle of the whole thing. All that’s obvious. I could talk about successful Kickstarters I’ve run, and why things like this shouldn’t put you off the ones I’ve been promoting this week.

I call it that because…

This shit ain’t healthy. I mean, seriously, not. And that’s obvious, isn’t it? But it’s like the (apocryphal) boiling frog, I think.

There’s an old Dilbert cartoon from the 90s, called “When is it time to quit your job?” and, of course, you get a whole series of panels that end up with Wally or Dilbert or one of them hanging themselves and thinking, “Yep… this is better than work,” and everybody laughs.

This artist didn’t get to the last panel, but… yeah.

So. Don’t let anything get there. Don’t let anything here, for that matter. It’s not worth it for anybody. Including you.

ps: I got my book, 18 months or so ago. Just had it down last night. It’s genius.

Back on Monday, I mentioned two artistic projects I thought worth supporting. Heather Dale’s Celtic Avalon came first, and you should go read about that if you didn’t already.

The second is The Inspector Chronicles. It’s basically an Inspector Spacetime movie, feature length, though they can’t call it “Inspector Spacetime” because NBC won’t let them. XD

This time, they have Travis Richey (The Inspector), Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate Atlantis), Chase Masterson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory), and, get this…

Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor, Doctor Who, The Hobbit).

I can’t believe they’ve talked an actual Doctor Who into working this parody project. XD

The first “season” of short episodes they did – Boyish the Extraordinary – was pretty good, and won some awards and stuff, but to be honest, the script was not as tight as I’d hoped.

But the prequel for the movie – already produced, and almost as long as “season one” all combined – is totally great. You can watch it here. This is what I was hoping for, and it looks like they’ve got it together now.

But! Big names aside, it’s still a fannish project, and no money means no show. So to watch the prequel, then go throw your support behind the project, particularly if you think Moffat’s Who needs a bit of parodying. I certainly do, and thus, already have.

Two arty/fannish projects are going that you may want to support. The first is Heather Dale’s Celtic Avalon touring show and DVD; the second is the Inspector Spacetime movie, with Travis Richey (The Inspector), Chase Masterson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory), and, oh my gods, Sylvester McCoy (The Seventh Doctor, The Hobbit). I can’t believe they’ve talked an actual Doctor Who into working this parody project. XD

But that’s later this week. Today, I’m going to talk about Heather Dale’s project, Celtic Avalon.

The Celtic Avalon project is a combination of a new touring stage show, a DVD, and a youth education program, all based on the King Arthur legends.

Heather has been touring and writing for years now; she’s toured across all of North America and parts of Europe; she’s played the geekmusic festival nwcMUSIC that I run at Norwescon; she’s been producing shows with her band for 15 years; and she is, in my experience, one of nicest people I have met in this whole dman business.

The show itself will be about the legends surrounding King Arthur. She has a couple of decades of material to draw on, but knowing her, there’ll probably be new works in there as well. It’ll be accompanied by a professionally-produced concert DVD, which is where the DVD part comes in. That’s all the art side.

The educational programme will apply those legends to modern life. Heather’s more of an optimistic person than I am – of course she is, I’m a supervillain, so that’s not surprising – and draws a lot of inspiration from this whole founding English mythos. She thinks others can, too.

This is the biggest project I’ve seen her attempt. If any of this sounds even vaguely interesting, go read up about it here. She has acres of data and plans available for you to wade through. Or you can just say “Sounds good to me!” and throw in your support.

Oh, and for the record: this is not my project, I’m not involved, I’m not seeing a nickel of this. I just see some people doing some ambitious work and throwing my support their way. Hopefully some of you will, too.

Amongst the news that got somewhat overlooked during the petition-to-SFWA flap of the last two weeks:

• The INSTRUMENT OF MYSTERY! was identified!

• The two-CD-long Destiny came out, with my first voice acting role, and,

• a genuinely nice desert lair went on the market. Any ground- or desert-oriented supervillains looking for a lovely redoubt?

Along the way, I fixed another guitar – I keep repairing instruments I don’t even know how to play XD – and a cool toy appeared! If you have a new enough browser, go play with it, it’s fun.

Finally, this is legitimately hilarious (h/t to Ben Deschamps):

Anna’s new “Boosting the Signal” project features authors’ characters delivering confessionals about their goals in upcoming novels which feature them.

That’s pretty high concept and very meta. I like it.

It’s also partly a response to all the various repeated flaps around SFWA last year, and the petition-to-SFWA this year. That whole thing about starting your own amusement park? Yep.

Anyway, she’s just published the first list of guest appearances. It starts February 28th, with Anna Kashina. She mentioned being already booked through April; should be interesting to follow that as it unfolds.

On a not at all unrelated note, I floated something similar with musicians last year. Maybe I should try that again – I just need a snappy organising concept. Got any ideas?