So, yeah, J-List sent this thing:

C’mon, J-list, if you’re gonna anticipate my surprise medical emergencies, at least put the patch on the right eye!

Surgery went well; for a couple of days I felt like I was filming an extraordinarily monotonous documentary on my own feet (Live from Shoetopia?) because I had to keep my head parallel to the floor and eyes down, but now I can look forward even if I still have a bunch of restrictions. (No looking up, no lying on my back or on my left side, no lifting even somewhat heavy objects, no sleeping without the eye guard (above) no strenuous activity, no driving, no altitude changes of substance – I could go to Portland, say, but not to the dry side – weird eye drops 8x daily, it goes on a bit…)

A lot of these get lifted in a week; a bunch, not for a few weeks.

On the plus side, my right eye is now a microscope! No, seriously, it actually is. There’s an air bubble in it – put there by the surgeon to force the torn part of the retina back into place – and the refraction factor between it and eye fluid is like sixty, which is to say, it acts as a lens! Yes, for the moment, I actually did get a super-power out of this. Sadly, it’s one not worth it, but still: moral victory! Or possibly amoral victory, what with the supervillain thing.

I asked the surgeon whether I had X-Ray vision now and he said, “Not yet.” Interesting.

Y’know, when you have an eye that’s a microscope, you can really tell the difference between retina and non-retina pixels. Seriously it’s like lego and duplo.

Also, my eye looks really scary and gross! Check it:

Read more

There’s an Avengers meme where people do pop culture and news magazine covers set in the Avengers world. It’s cool and stuff, but I don’t read those magazines.

I read this, though:

July-August 2010

They’ve changed style since then, but I wanted it after Iron Man 2, or more specifically, right after Tony Stark’s testimony to Congress, so I used their old style.

Fonts aren’t quite right. But they’re the closest I have. I mucked with the kerning to get closer.

I’ve been getting back up to speed in sewing – ramping up for some costume changes, Solarbird the Lightbringer needs a new outfit – and made a Pacific Rim Pan-Pacific Defence Corps purse/bag yesterday afternoon.

First test wearing

Patch detail. Silver highlights added to match better with silver in ribbon.

Ribbon detail

This is the third I’ve made in this style – I made a green one yesterday, and a red one a few weeks ago. This one took about four hours; the previous, a good solid seven hours; the first one, I don’t know, but it was several hours across a few days. I still want to make a blue one, using the Dresden Codak “Cyborg Pride” patch I have from the Kickstarter. But I’m lacking a zipper and a strap.

I think I’m getting back into the swing of this.

Outside the lair right now? Lightning and heavy hail.

This has been a very successful experiment.

I’m writing up a VCON post-con report for tomorrow. This was also a very successful experiment.

VCON asked me to host a songwriter workshop, which is kind of amazing, and I said okay, which is even more amazing. So, Vancouver, if you want to workshop a song with a supervillain? Now is your opportunity. Details below, but move fast, deadlines are kind of now. Or the 30th. One of those.

VCON 38, Song Writers’ Workshop
Instructor: Dara Korra’ti
Date: Saturday, October 5
Start Time: 2 PM
Duration: 2 hr
Max participants: 4

Singer songwriter Dara Korra’ti will meet with workshop participants for a collaborative review of songs-in-progress. The focus will be on general feedback and constructive criticisms for improvement from both her and other participants.

Participants must submit the work-in-progress they wish to have workshopped no later than September 30. To submit, send the lyrics you have written so far and a recording (or a link to a recording) of the song or the music your lyrics are for via email to programming@vcon.ca.

Any quality recording is fine – even a phone recording – though obviously higher quality is better within the constraints of sending a file by email. If your lyrics are written to go with an existing, popular song you can just provide the title name of the artist. If you have written your own music, you may also submit the score but, at Dara’s request, the deadline for a submission with a musical score is a week earlier (September 23) to give her more time to review it.

While not required, participants are encouraged to bring their favourite, portable musical instrument to the workshop.

NOTE: Online registration for VCON hands-on workshops are normally restricted to those who have pre-registered with those who purchase a membership on site only being allowed to register if there are open spaces available the day of the workshop. However, given the nature of this particular workshop (that is, material needs to be pre-submitted), and the fact that pre-registration ended on Sep 15, anyone who would like to participate in this workshop but who has not pre-registered for VCON is invited to contact the VCON Director of Programming atprogramming@vcon.ca to discuss possible options regarding their participation.

I played more with the panorama function on iOS 7 last night. It appeared to assume that you’d stand in place and turn, which is how most people do it, but I wanted to see how it would work if you didn’t do that, but instead scooched along in a straight line, to the side.

It really doesn’t expect you to be doing that. Check these out and click for larger:

Turning in place

The above looks pretty much right. I’m not practiced with it and the light could’ve been brighter, but you get the idea. Items look the correct size and shape, really, and the seaming is handled very well.

Now check it when you don’t do what they expect and slide from left to right:

Scooching left to right

Look how wibbly and bent things get! Particularly the compost bin – that’s the silver cylinder on the countertop. Is that cool or what? I suspect there’s some insight into their algorithmic assumptions here.

So, yeah. Not built for this purpose.

Oh, the stand-in-place version is cropped, because it came out to a higher total vertical resolution for some reason – 2468 pixels high. The slide version used I think the whole width, or close to it, and came out to 8627 horizontal. That’s a pretty high resolution pan. It is kind of noisy, tho’; I’d like to see how it does in good light. I suspect it’s optimised for outdoors.

The new iOS 7 panorama UI is perhaps the best I’ve ever seen, and it works great. You start, you pan slowly right, you tell it when you’re done, and there’s a UI to show you if you’re moving up and down or if you’re going too fast.

But since it works by knitting together new slices of images as you turn/move, you can screw with it by walking around. 😀

iCubism: Musician Traversing a Couch

iDada: iPunch The Cat

Those were taken with Paul’s iPhone 4. My iPad Mini doesn’t support this feature. I may need a new phone now. Goddammit.

Up late comping fiddle and listening to J-Pop of the 1980s, in a two-hour compilation tw:freedrull found on YouTube. (“Category: Science & Technology” Awesome.)

The fiddle is for the Bone Walker/Free Court of Seattle soundtrack album – I played a bit of it in the latest episode of the podcast – and I’m trying to get reasonable comps ready for Friday’s recording session with Ellen Eades on hammer dulcimer.

I made kind of an ad hoc standing configuration for my digital audio workstation. I hate sitting for long periods of time – I’m too antsy for that! But it turns out a music stand makes a fine keyboard shelf:

Turns out I’m more likely to start working if I don’t have to sit down, and can wander away and back to it. So I’ll keep this kind of thing as an option. I’m building a better keyboard shelf that’ll have room for the trackball and also attach to a mic stand, because if you’re going to engineer something, you should totally over-engineer it. (I tried just putting a board on the music stand… it was too wibbly.)

Did I take pictures? lolno. I’ll post about it later anyway, though. It’s an easy build.

A house, but with a second underground lair house you say? Like in that Alicia Silverstone/Brandon Frasier movie, Blast from the Past, you say? Only the 70s, not the 50s, so it looks like Janet’s mom’s house in Shock Treatment, you say? Only entirely actually genuinely real? you say?

holy hell!

And the underground house even has its own guest lair house, you say?

dude.

God damn. I am not evil enough to live in Las Vegas; I’m the wrong kind of supervillain. But were I? I would be all over this shit. I mean it. Go watch the video, or look at more pictures. You can even walk all the way around the underground house, it’s in the middle of its very own Brady Bunch shag carpet lawn.

They also have some pictures of the upper house, but IDGAF. Use it for storage, whatever, nobody cares. This? This is sheer epic awesomeness. This is somebody’s dream lair.

I was over at Peter’s house yesterday. He has a mini-me in dog form. This is Pete:

Mini-Pete

Take a good look because that’s the only time you will see that puppy that idle, or rather, I will, because Pete has decided somehow that I am the most exciting person ever, and this is what he usually does when I’m around:

Spin Cycle

I tried to shoot phone camera video, but he’s not a stationary typhoon; he’s all over the place, so it didn’t really work out.

There’s no story here, really. I just find this kind of hilarious and adorable, and after the last few posts, I figured we all needed a puppy break.