Well, it’s 2015, and I’m writing this as the fireworks are still going off around me and downtown; I didn’t go, I’ve been too busy working on all the tune parts for the live Bone Walker release party/concert at Conflikt at the end of the month.

It’s hard work, too. I have a little secret that isn’t very secret: I am not a natural tunes player, and, this being the trad album, there’re a lot of tunes in it. They were by far the most difficult part of the album, and they’ll be the most difficult thing to perform live, and even though I’ll be kind of miked down a bit on mandolin, I still need to get it right.

Seriously, though; rhythm parts: 10 minutes to learn. Melody on flute: maybe 20. Sung parts: 10-15 minutes, and I’ll make new parts. Tunes: weeks. No idea why. It’s such an outlier that Anna has incorporated it into the Free Court universe, in the background, as part of the way magic works; traditional Irish tunes and the Sidhe magics don’t get along, and that’s on purpose.

But I’ll manage, I always do.

Perhaps coincidentally, the Space Needle is currently fireworking Newfoundland colours. I’m not even making that up. Newfoundland Liberation Army, represent.

I’ve seen people say that 2014 flew by; not for me. For me it felt kind of endless; 2013 seems so long ago. 2014 certainly had some personal lows; two more rounds of eye surgery, including – hopefully – the last one; way too much hanging out at home (recovering) and studio (recording). But it had highs, too – the most successful nwcMUSIC to date, actually finishing the Bone Walker project (preorder OK!) and y’know what, I’m going to say it again:

Korrasami is canon and nothing hurts.

No, seriously, see… here’s yet another level of it. There’s this longstanding trope of having queer couples who end up dead, or in tragedy. I mean, sure, mostly we don’t exist, but if we do: tragedy or death. Not cake or death; tragedy or death. We get one or the other, and sometimes both. Mercedes Lackey did it, for example; big three-book queer love story; one ends up dead, and gets reincarnated (without memories), so he can fall back in love with the survivor… who then dies. Tragedy and death twice in one trilogy! It’s amazing.

Similarly, as much as I love Revolutionary Girl Utena, it did it too, more or less. Maybe Utena still exists; maybe Anthy will find Utena; we don’t know. (In the manga, she doesn’t, but the anime is different in many ways.) At the time, I was really angry about it, because it hit that same trope after teasing us with better; even though she’s not dead (or so it’s implied), they’re still ending apart, as stories say you must, if you’re queer.

Elfquest, too. Dart’s boyfriend Shushen? Introduced and dead in two issues. Boom.

Basically, as a rule, queers don’t get to go off into the sunset together, in fiction. That’s historically not for us. For us: tragedy and/or separation, often through death.

Until now.

I can’t overstate how much that changes the world. It may not seem like much to people who are used to having it. But in a desert, even a teacup’s worth becomes an ocean of water. And for that, I can forgive a lot about 2014.

We face 2015 with a whole new world. Gear up, everybody – let’s see what it brings.

A science-fiction writer of some notice has taken rather severe exception to the Legend of Korra finale. It’s the sort of vicious vitroil that I would expect out of Concerned Women for America – it’s too crude for the relatively-erudite such as Focus on the Family, and a bit too literate for the cretins at the American Family Association. You don’t have to read it; it’s the usual eliminationist rant.

I found out about it via Jim Hines’s post to his blog, and mostly, I spent time talking about how Korra affected a lot of us. But then Mr. Writer’s minions started showing up with their all-queers-are-child-molesters savagery, and, well, I may have started to have some fun with them last night.

A week ago, I made a now rather popular commentary on poison. These are people who would do and are doing everything they can to keep that poison inside of us – any method, rhetorical or otherwise, apparently will suffice. One of them is currently actively attempting to conflate abuse victims with child molesters. It’s quite repulsive.

I can’t imagine how it must feel, to be that brutal a sadist. Even I’m not that sort of terrible person, and I’m a goddamn supervillain.

Ah, well. I’m just glad the Avatar is on our side. o/

eta: Hooo, I hadn’t noticed the comment section on the original post had grown so much – I’m not sure whether my favourite comment is the one about how the rules of drama require that a strong female character have a stronger male love interest, the complaint about how Katara never learned proper submission to Aang, or the assertion that all anime exists to train child molesters.

It is a very strange universe over there.

eta2: Anna has a post up about the last beehive of 2014, and the idea of exterminating ideas, in the way Mr. Writer demands.

Korra and Asami as a canon romantic couple is CONFIRMED. The completely obvious is categorically and unequivocally confirmed; Korrasami is canon on every level.

The Korra page on Wikipedia – where I had been fighting the erasure battle – has been unlocked, and the edit has already been made. I’d won the argument to at least the point of being in Significant Other with a section talking about the evidence – now we can just skip ahead because 100% creator-confirmed yes that is exactly what we meant and you gotta deal with it.

BOOM.

I am dealing with it by crying my remaining good eye out. I had no idea how much this mattered to me. It mattered to me because of how much I couldn’t let myself believe it was possible, no matter how heavily they were hinting at it all the last couple of series. I just couldn’t let myself buy in, I wanted to, but I couldn’t believe it was possible I was just praying we’d get an ambiguous no-endgame ending, and I was prepared to respect that.

I feel like a huge, missing piece of my emotional childhood has just been filled in. I feel like something very old and very hurt just got healed. I never believed we would actually get this one. I have never been happier to be so wrong.

KORRASAMI IS CANON AND YOU GOTTA DEAL WITH IT! And, at least today, everything is beautiful and nothing – not even Wikipedia – hurts.

Today there will be more lasers in my eyeball! Sadly they will not stay there so I will not be able to laser my enemies with my eyes. However, I should have my UV vision back once all is said and done, which will be nice for tracking my enemies with my eyes.

I was also hoping for telephoto but that hasn’t entirely worked out. It’s okay. Upgrades later.

We had a really productive rehearsal yesterday for the release concert. Learned a lot. There’s lots to do but it was nice to have all the guest villains there, and I think everybody has a good idea of where they are and need to be.

More when I’m back out from the lab, I hope. Until then, go read Anna’s post about Legend of Korra and Korrasami, and if you missed it, my post on queer erasure at Wikipedia as applied to fiction in general and this in particular. I have a lot of Korrasami feels. I really do.

eta: it didn’t go super-well. It didn’t go disastrously, but it didn’t go super-well either. Damage from the previous eye surgeries was the cause. I will definitely not be getting normal vision back in this eye – fully normal was a bit of a long shot, but now it’s really ruled out. 🙁

I really need to get that antimatter generator up and running. We’ve lost power again. Going down; back up when we… can be back up. No ETA yet. http://music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com will continue to work.

Remember yesterday, when Google decided all the mail I was trying to send users – personal mail, one to one correspondence – was actually bulk email spam?

Today it’s decided that I don’t meet IPv6 authentication standards. Except WE DON’T EVEN RUN IPv6.

Does ANYONE know what those clowns are doing over there? I mean seriously, what are they doing?

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.:
DATA
<<< 550-5.7.1 [2601:8:9740:1300:da50:e6ff:fe55:2303] Our system has detected that <<< 550-5.7.1 this message does not meet IPv6 sending guidelines regarding PTR <<< 550-5.7.1 records and authentication. Please review <<< 550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=ipv6_authentication_error for more <<< 550 5.7.1 information. rc8si3266778pdb.83 - gsmtp 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable Reporting-MTA: dns; murkworks.net Received-From-MTA: DNS; murkworks.net Arrival-Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 09:26:44 -0800

eta: That turned out to be a one-off, with Google reverting to the rejected-as-spam error. Until now! When it's rejecting mail as "too much mail being sent." We've sent like 20 MESSAGES ALL MORNING, most of those test messages, all of them bouncing.

<10 MESSAGES AN HOUR IS NOT A MAIL BOMB. JFC GOOGLE WHAT.

421-4.7.0 [173.160.243.46 15] Our system has detected an unusual rate of
421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily
421-4.7.0 rate limited. Please visit
421-4.7.0 http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review our Bulk
421 4.7.0 Email Senders Guidelines. ry9si11359491pbc.147 - gsmtp


eta2: Okay. Between getting Comcast to revert some of their internal network changes (and marking us DO NOT INCLUDE) and figuring out how Google was reacting badly to them, we seem to be able to deliver mail to Google again. Google never did answer or even acknowledge queries tho', and their solution pages were a combination of useless and irrelevant.

Wow, this was not how I wanted to spend all day.

First off: THIS WILL NOT AFFECT THE ALBUM RELEASE OR RELEASE CONCERT EVENT IN JANUARY. It also won’t affect preordering of Bone Walker, which you should of course totally do. ^_^

But. I will be going in for what is hopefully my last round of eye surgery early – this Monday, to be specific. It got moved up some weeks, due to reasons. This is actually good; it moves recovery time to December, which means I can more and better rehearsal time in January for the big event.

However, it also means my next couple of weeks have been tipped over. Things may be a little random. If all goes well, it won’t be a big deal and nobody will notice anything, but I wanted to get it out there now anyway.

Fingers crossed, eh?

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
it might just be me

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
i can’t disagree

this is the kind of crap we’ve all seen before
the kind of hack that we all know I abhor

someone’s gonna wanna swear at me later
might as well be me!

friends don’t let supervillains design+build late at night with alcohol
this is why supervillains have minions instead

Hey everybody, we’re back up! We used the downtime to upgrade the webserver. WITH MY BRAIN. Also with a screwdriver.

Okay, mostly with a screwdriver

The lair was fine, of course. We even kept wifi and connectivity, even if we went dark to keep certain people from finding out too much about our resources… but I’ve said too much, now you’re all gonna die.

One thing we seriously learned this morning, though? I was unsurprised to discover that the switch built into Comcast Business Class internet modems kind of sucks at dealing with a mix of gigabit and 100mb interfaces. The upgrade was to get the last machine not on gigabit up to gigabit, and suddenly the entire uplink is meaningfully faster via the wireless regardless of whether the upgraded machine is even vaguely involved. Like, a third again faster on the 802.11g – the test I just ran was a solid 30% faster than the previous best speed. It’s kind of nuts.

This implies the Comcast Business modem/switch is making some really stupid decisions internally. Make sure to configure your LAN so it doesn’t have to make those decisions and life will be better.

Anyway, back to digging out. Honestly, who bombs with flowers? Are they hoping to hay fever us to death? That must be it.

There’s a windstorm coming in tonight and tomorrow; it’s supposed to get quite windy (95-100kph gusts) by Thursday afternoon, so we may lose power and go offline around that time. There won’t be much warning, necessarily; we have 45 minutes or so of offline power, but we don’t tend to want to use all of it staying online if we know we’ll be down overnight.

And since tomorrow is the day I was planning to remind everybody about the Hey, Creative Followers! Show People your Stuff! post, I’m doing an extra round of that now, just to be safe. Go add your creative output to the list in comments for Monday’s big repost!

Or if you don’t have something to post, go look at the list now, it’s pretty cool. 😀

If we do go down, the Bandcamp site (http://music.crimeandtheforcesofevil.com) will stay up, and we hope you’ll consider pre-ordering Bone Walker just to help us dig out. And pay for the mastering. And all that. Or really just to make us feel better. One or more of those. 😀