Hey kids, I was up until 3am last night working on the Faerie Blood/Bone Walker soundtrack, and this drum track sounds pretty damn cool, but Iiiiiiii’m pretty sleepy. The plan was to sleep in today and then head down to Conflikt, but you know how once in a while you just get one of those

PANG! AWAKE!

mornings? And you’re still tired, but sleep has taken a holiday? Yeah.

Pretty much me

So, enjoy this article about deleting skyscrapers from the top down, and yes, there is video, and yes, it’s kind of freaky but awesome. And here’s an article talking how the ground actually moves during an earthquake. There’s an animation and it’s SCIENCE! Not bullshit.

Anybody gonna be at Conflikt? Any of you there already?

Thanks to weird network events today, today’s post is potpourri. We’re going to have to schedule some server downtime at The Murkworks soon; I’m just hoping we can limp through January and do it in February, due to reasons. There’ll hopefully be an announcement before the downtime, and not after.

First, as some of you know, my partner Anna has medical news again. So to break out of that resulting mood, she’s put Faerie Blood on sale, both print and epub editions. And in better news, Carina Press has released the cover for her next book, Valor of the Healer. Check those out.

Most commentary and discussion that happens on this blog is over on the Livejournal and/or Dreamwidth echos, of all places. A little on tumblr. But I get comments here, too, so I check the spam folder for false positives. That’s where I found this:

Is there an echo in here?

…which is the first time I can recall seeing my own blog mined for response fodder for my own blog.

The spambots seem to be devolving. Goddammit, we were so close!

Also, some of you need this very badly. You’ll know who you are:

And this Earth Science Picture of the Day is lovely. I wish I’d taken it:

click to embiggen

That’s all for now. As I hope you can appreciate, I’m a little distracted. This is round five, if you count the two years of thyroid surgery, and between those two years and the newer issues – that’s the year I got hit by the car while out biking, and spent nine days unconscious in the ICU.

So things have been a bit… disturbed… for a while now. Hopefully Monday – the next appointment – will go well and all will be okay after all. That would be refreshing.

Honestly, why would you want to?

It’s all Day Jobbe crap today, so little time to talk about anything. But I have experimental evidence now: medium-distance micing and overhead micing both can work in this room. Rawk. I also got some drum work in on the soundtrack album, and started working up some mandolin as well. This weekend: Angry Birds Handegg, more recording with Leannan Sidhe, plus other things I won’t talk about, because…

…of this short animated video. It comes from and includes a key point from a Derek Sivers TED talk. (Full talk here.) He talks about yet another bit of primate psychology that backfires and stops you from getting things done; being aware helps.

Also for your enjoyment: a Raspberry PI supercomputer in a Lego cabinet, and some distinctly weird Death Ghosts of Europe.

Finally, I learned something this week:

Looks like the vast lonesome shapes are seeping down from dark stars;
better set up more baffles

The last one is totally real. It’s called “rifle.” As in, get a, and use it on anybody wanting to set up a shotgun mic.

All for now; have fun this weekend. Ja ne!

I don’t know who “she” is, but I like her.

Minion Paul: That’s a neat fabric. What is it?
Solarbird: It’s kind of a fleece.
Minion Paul: Oh, muppet skin. Do you know how many muppets died to make that shirt?
Solarbird: Do you know how many muppets I had to kill to get two good ones?
Minion Paul: How do you hunt muppets, anyway?
Minion Anna: I sure wish someone could teach me how to count to four!

The first day of the year certainly was gorgeous, wasn’t it? At least it was in this part of Cascadia. The Snohomish River valley late in the day in particular, around sunset, turned into this ocean of ground clouds with islands made of hill and the Cascade mountains standing out in particularly brilliant sharp relief from the setting sun – people were stopping on I-5 to pull over and take pictures standing on the guard rails. I am not even making that up.

I was not one of these people, but I thought about it.

Driving across the Hewitt Avenue Trestle took you right into the clouds, too, so the world just disappeared entirely from around you. Given that it was part of a shrine visit, it seemed particularly fitting. And fantastically gorgeous.

And tonight the evening moonrise? Brilliant and also wreathed in distant mist. Fantastic.

There are far worse ways to start a new year.

Last call for 2012! I should do some sort of big end-of-the-year recap post, and probably will on Monday, even though I’d actually rather talk about the 48fps 3D The Hobbit. There’s a lot to say, and some similarities to the arrival of colour in the black-and-white era. But that’ll have to wait until Wednesday, if I want that wrap-up post.

Or not. I may get ambitious. Hey, anything’s possible, don’t laugh. Just because I’ve been putting in 12 to 16 hour days in the Lair’s studio working on the next Leannan Sidhe album and a little on the Bone Walker soundtrack, that doesn’t mean I’m too wrung out to get anything done.

This party can’t be over, there’s still Scotch!

Or maybe it does, I dunno. XD

Talking of, Leannan Sidhe have gone home, to take a break for a few days and warm up for the next round in a week. Henchies are busy working on resetting the guest dormitory. The fairies are pretty neat, but the orcs, well, their ability to party is well known and well deserved.

Sunday readers, I wanted to throw out a last call for discounted physical CDs of Dick Tracy Must Die and Cracksman Betty. Free shipping in North America, even. But only until the first, so move fast. End of year sale and all that, eh? Just for you.

Finally, does your browser support the new WebAudio API? Check out this awesome shit. It’s a reimplementation of some BBC Radiophonic Workshop tools in WebAudio, from the BBC itself. Somebody test this and tell me how it works, I don’t want to install Chrome. But it sure looks cool.

It’s really weird when you’re done with your holidays but the big mass-culture one hasn’t quite happened yet because it’s on a kinda dumb calendar so everyone else is still in ramp-up mode and all the ads are going liek woah.

Except for Rite-Aid, which seems to be filling shelves with Valentine’s Day candy. Who knew?

Next week will be a huge recording week – I’ve been booked from the 26th through the 30th, by Leannan Sidhe, with backup time going to Bards of a Feather as available. I actually find I get a lot of things done that week, partly because nobody else is doing anything and therefore gets in your way. <3

Anyway, faithful minions who are reading these even now, have some fun links:

• Everybody knows that Kíli is really the prettiest, but nonetheless, do enjoy Thorin Dreamboatshield: An Unexpected Hotness of Dwarves.
• I kind of like these somewhat hipster vinyl-record-emulating placemats.
• Here’s Part I of a really quite good fan effort to re-imagine the lost Doctor Who serial, Power of the Daleks
• This isn’t new, but is nonetheless a really effective video (and yes, I figured it out from watching it): Finnish underwater ice-fishing.
• This is some fairly epic data centre hax0ring: 160 Mac Minis in a single rack. I love it.

Have fun, everybody, and if I don’t say it before the first – happy new year!

Google+ has opened up communities. There aren’t any supervillain guilds. I kinda want to start one – but I don’t have a name yet.

I don’t want to reuse The Guild of Calamitous Intent – that’s an epic tag, but let’s have something new. (Plus, I want to keep my Guild membership.) And it can’t be generic.

But ‘Guild’? I like Guild. That’s a nice word. So I’ve been playing with that. Guild of Strategic Interventionists isn’t bad, but isn’t right yet. Infelicitous Action Guild is a little too Silver Age DC if you keep the “Guild” part – even morseo if you swap out “Guild” for “League.”

Society of Superpowered (not superhuman, thanks) Instigators isn’t terrible, but isn’t there. Fellowship of Felons sounds like a bunch of hobbits and says nothing about lulz, mad, or science. Supervillainy United has plusses, except for sounding a bit much like a football team; Fiends Unlimited is a little too 1990s Marvel; Confederated Criminality just sounds like the mob, with pretensions. (Still, it’s better than – lol – “Intergang.”)

You can see the difficulty here.

Infelicitous Action, though. It’s kind of hanging out in my head. Infelicitous Action…

…Alliance?

Internally contradictory, as all such organisations tend to be so let’s get that right out there. Implies subversion – always fun – and has the word “action” which expresses dynamism. Kind of keeps the spirit of the Guild. Leaves room for non-superpowered non-mad-scientist actors such as agents of SPECTRE.

Most of all, does not exclude lulz.

hmmmmmmm.

I have to think on this some more. But… hmm.

PS: This is what a link from The Old New Thing does to your stats:

No, those weren’t all zeroes before. It was quite bumpy.

…makes them utterly useless. Yay! HI NEW PEOPLE! 😀

It’s Friday! I have people coming over to record stuff. Enjoy three pieces of art by other people; one written, two video.

This first item isn’t what you’re going to think it is. I’m going to tell you what it is, and you’re going to go, ‘what? unlikely’ and not even read it, even though you should.

It’s part crackfic, it’s part hard-SF singularity story, it’s kind of creepy, it’s kind of epic, and it’s also quite funny at parts, particularly if the term “paperclip AI” means anything to you. It’s one of the most amazing fanfic efforts I’ve read, and I’m not even in the fandom. Please enjoy:

My Little Pony:

Friendship is Optimal
Caution: self-modifying code.

And if that’s a little too out there for you, please instead (or in addition) please enjoy two mashups.

From an art standpoint, I’m just really impressed by how well this actually just works as music. It’s the kind of mashup that kind of makes sense from the start – it may be R&B separated by time and great distance, but it’s still a collision of two R&B-oriented artists. Please enjoy FAROFF’s PSY vs. Ray Parker, Jr., in Gangnambusters:

This last one’s pretty silly, two rather opposite 1980s pop acts slammed against each other. If you know anything about Billy Idol’s punk era and George Michael’s solo pop career, seeing the high-makeup punk crowd headbanging to George Michel’s high-accellerated crooning is both hysterical and somehow appropriate. It’s not bad musically, either; it sounds too fast at first, but there are reasons – they had to speed up both tracks just to get enough energy into Michel’s singing.

Please enjoy Wax Audio’s Bill Idol vs. George Michael, Careless Rebel:

We’re finally going to see Wreck-it Ralph (a.k.a. Sugar Rush) this weekend. What’re your plans?