Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
If anybody knows how to make these crazy things? Let me me know. I saw them on a Japanese review site, thanks to someone on Twitter, but it was a review site and not a recipe site. This is crazy and I must have.
eta: AAAAA THEY DO IT ON A GRILL HOW DO YOU EVEN
I got too distracted by work and semi-work to write up the second picspam post today, so instead, have this week’s flower picture a day early.
I enjoy this kind of macrophotography. The bud was about… 5mm tall, I think, from memory? Something like that, anyway.
It’s another picspam post! Yay! As always, much larger versions are over on my Flickr feed – the panoramas in particular are good to view larger.
It’s been a couple of years since I had any dates in Oregon, so I jumped on the chance to play with Leannan Sidhe again. Shanti’s good about letting people play a couple of their songs, which means you can sell some CDs, and all around it tends to be fun. As it was!
We met up at King Street Station and took the train south. This is the first time I’ve been in the new higher-capacity Cascadia Rail cars. They’re nice enough – the chairs are a new thinner type, which lets them add a new row without sacrificing person space – but they’re now a 50/50 orientation split, and I don’t like that.
The new dining car style itself is fine, but the serving car has lost its booth, and I miss it. On the other hand, they have speed trackers in the cars, and the outlets are easier to reach, and there are other nice parts as well.
Vancouver the South has a train station too! It’s smaller than Vancouver of the North’s, but tidy and attractive.
Shanti’s mom picked us up there, to take us down to Newport. They’d been wanting to get together for Mother’s Day anyway, so that worked out well. I’m afraid I don’t have a good picture, which makes me feel bad. But here, welcome to rural Oregon:
We kept stopping to take countryside pictures, since the next show wasn’t until 12:30 the next day. I’d brought both my phone and my old Canon G9; it’s kind of telling how far digital technology has progressed that most of these are from the phone. Still, there’s some thing the phone can’t do that the G9 can.
Once we reached 101, the Coast Highway, the cameras really started coming out, in between cloudbursts, which we kept seeing. As it turned out, we were probably wise to get a hotel the first night – tho’ we could’ve camped the second, as the weather turned fair.
The light was all over the place as the clouds whipped around – bright sun, dark clouds, changing at little or no notice. This makes for excellent photography if you can keep your kit dry. This one really needs to be seen on Flickr tho’.
We stopped at a couple of particularly rocky beach areas for sunset. All of these photos come from those stops. I have video of the waves in the bay, but I don’t really have a good place to put them. I really should make an account at the appropriate services, I suppose, but who has time?
Once the sun went down, we made pretty good time, snacked in the hotel room and headed pretty straight to unpacking and bed. But I took a picture to tweet successful arrival, so here that is:
Tomorrow, some pictures from the fair!
Sakura season is pretty much over here. Anybody still have blossoms?
A couple of months ago, I bought one of these little ASUS atom-based all-SSD microcomputers that are basically the size of a network hub. It’s now our media server and house file server and we have those again, which we haven’t had for a while and I’m really glad to have back.
There is a story here, of course.
A long time ago we had… a… geez… this is a while ago… a 20/8mhz 286-based computer that came from the surplus store at Microsoft. It even had a TURBO button, which we of course always left on, because TURBO. It ran DOS, and was our voicemail server, which we so hugely did not need because c’mon, seriously, what. But it was cool, because it was the 90s and nobody had digital voicemail at home yet. It looked something something like this, because they all looked something like this:
Then we upgraded it to a 386 of some sort – I think, could’ve been a 486sx – when we got our first CD burner, and started running on Windows 95 instead, naming it \strongbow, from Elfquest. Once again, this was the 90s, so kind of cool, even if the CD-R burner was an external box the size of a peculiarly thick laptop. You could’ve killed a dog with that thing, I’m just saying.
But the software that came with the burner wasn’t smart enough then to notice you were trying to burn too much to a CD. It would just fail, then tell you, after coastering your $3 CD-R. THANKS, HP! (Pro tip: never buy software from HP.)
So I set up a tiny partition called stagingarea that was exactly the size of a CD-R to get around this problem; you couldn’t overfill it. And I shared it out (\strongbowstagingarea) so it could be loaded over the LAN for CD burning.
Over time, hard drives wore out, like they do. The replacements were, of course, larger, so I added a media share for downloaded audio and video. By this time, we were using stagingarea for passing files around within the house instead of burning CD-Rs – even our laptops could do that.
Eventually, that got upgraded to a Celeron-ish refurb Compaq, as strongbow-the-286-box’s power supply blew out and old-format AT power supplies were really expensive. But for a while the new box was running off the last \strongbow drive, so it’s still a direct descendant.
From a 286. But we aren’t finished.
A couple of years after that upgrade, I started recording. And I needed a digital audio workstation, so I upgraded the Compaq’s motherboard/processor/drive and started dual-booting it to Linux for my DAW, making the server – now \kimo, also from Elfquest – unavailable when I was working.
And then \kimo was in DAW mode a lot, and I’d forget to reboot into Windows. So media and stagingarea were usually not up, and fell out of use; we started shuffling around files via flash drives and email. But \kimo’s shares were still around – just hibernating.
About six weeks ago or so, I upgraded the Windows partition on my DAW to Windows 8, which involved wiping that part of the drive. But, of course, I pulled off all the data first, including all that old \strongbowmedia data.
At roughly the same time, someone online was talking about a tiny ASUS they’d bought for like $140 that was all-SSD and not super-high-powered but who cares, right? Turned out that was a special refurb deal no longer available, but I got a similar one for $200, because we’d actually been trying to get to that media stuff again, and with the upgrade, it was on our minds.
So now we have all that data back up and running on this box, \kimo. media and stagingarea shares are both up, and with some really old files on stagingarea, I mean wow. It uses the TV as a monitor, draws hardly any power, and works like a champ – well, after spending a day inspiring me to come up with new ways to kill all the humans, like y’do.
Now, if I could only find some way to hook that old 286’s 5.25″ drive up to the new server…
I think this is some sort of plum? I’m not sure. It doesn’t make actual plums, tho’, which really is too bad. I’d like some plums.
George does not like space rock. I put on Cybotron, and:
Playing lots of catch-up today with office things, so have a picture of some flowers that I took a couple of days ago. I don’t even know what these are called, but they’re pretty common garden trees here. ^_^
Now, where were we? Oh yes, on Saturday, where I finally got to go to a panel I wasn’t actually on – a Japanese SF panel hosted pretty much by Haikasoru. I’ve known Nick Mamatas online for years and years and years, and now we’ve finally met in person! Along with Toh EnJoe! Who signed his book for me, since he was right there. How often does that happen in North America? Approximately never. And yet:
So that’s extremely cool. But Saturday was also the day for me to start doing panels, most notably the two-hour Cascadia’s Got Talent! event I kept talking about beforehand.
Being out of exile really showed. I estimate we doubled our usual attendance, setting a clear record. We had eight entrants – another record – counting…
Okay, so, this takes a lot of explanation to get all of it. But. The original Star Trek had episode called The Naked Time. It involved this infection that made people act out in various ways: Sulu became a French fencer, things like that. In this episode, Ensign Riley decided he was Captain, took over engineering, and sang – repeatedly, and very badly – “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” over shipwide intercom.
While looking for prizes for our little show, I came across a Mitch Miller album (“PARTY!” edition). Almost none of you will remember Mitch Miller, or Sing Along with Mitch!, which was a TV show featuring simple chorus-driven arrangements of songs, to which people would song along.
On this album were several songs, including, yes… “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” I’m not sure what a maudlin dirge like “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen” is doing on a “PARTY!” album of any sort whatsoever, because if this is what you’re singing at your party, you’re not only doing party wrong, your party is outright broken.
But it was there, and the result (in mp3 form) is perhaps predictable. My grand plan was to get Starfleet-uniformed fans to come up on stage and start the same song over and over again, getting gonged off sooner each time. I only got one volunteer, but he played it really well. After he was driven from the stage, he stormed it again later in the show for another go, which was hilarious.
Amazingly and confusingly, the eighth contestant, Paul Not My Housemate Paul, came up and did a lovely hammer dulcimer performance, thus demonstrating that apparently what our silly comedy based more or less on drunkenness and the moral equivalent of fart jokes really needed was a moment of quiet beauty… and unironically walked off with the trophy.
I don’t even know how to process that. But the show was a riot all around, except for the people who were trying to be good, and they actually were. And that in and of itself was plenty entertaining.
Aside from the trophy, we gave away a couple of LPs: The Singing Legislator, which was filled with some old-time church-organ pain warbled to by a one-term special-election California state representative, and Wayne Newton Sings Hit Songs from 1964 which must’ve been recorded when he was, I don’t know, twelve? Because his performance made the Bee Gees sound like The Three Tenors. When I put on the first track, Minion Paul thought I had the turntable set to the wrong speed, and I thought it was a Peggy Lee duet. But no, that’s just Wayne. Plus, we gave away our traditional terrible, terrible all-expenses-paid trip to Kenmore (consisting of two Metro bus passes), and a polka CD with a spectacularly hideous cover.
Really, everyone wins. Or loses. Depending on your point of view.
“Find Your Instrument” followed immediately; it ran pretty much the same as last year, only with less cacophony, because we had a bigger room. I think it was the only panel that didn’t feel more crowded than the previous year despite being in a room three times larger – but we all kept busy, that’s for certain. I gave Irish Bouzouki demonstrations to probably a dozen people, and got about six or seven of them to actually try playing.
Then time for concerts! We didn’t do Electric Night lighting for Death*Star, not because we don’t care, but because I was already too damn busy and it was a lot of work for a single act.
Funny thing; C0splay told me they have two entirely different fandoms at Norwescon, the group that comes to their official show, and then the group that comes to their room party. They’re pretty widely different in age and demographics, and there’s very little overlap. I need to get these people mixing a bit, somehow or other. Like everyone else, they had a very good crowd, but their party audience not showing for their official show (and vice-versa) actually explains a few things.
Jen and I were working the Twitter feed pretty hard. I started doing 20-minutes-before tweets, with photos like this:
Then start-of-show and 10-minutes-in tweets (“The Doubleclicks RIGHT NOW! Evergreen 1&2!”) and each wave seemed to catch a few more people. I’d use live shots for the promos:
At the start of the show, The Doubleclicks weren’t quite to standing-room-only. But after the second tweet, a bunch more people came in, and they went SRO:
We were also promoting the livestream a lot. A bunch of us had sent out mail to all our fan lists and subscribers and followers, and we got audiences in the mid-60s – enough to say “dozens,” I think – online, in addition to the people in the room.
Energy in the room just kept ramping up. I’m not a bad MC (in the sense of being a presenter, not in the sense of nerdcore/rap) and I had a lot of fun whipping up the crowd more every opportunity I could. I don’t have any photos of myself, of course, but I wore the supervillain stagewear that I use for my own shows, MCing as Solarbird, the Lightbringer. I found a tiny picture on a snippet of video, but it’s pretty tiny.
The Doubleclicks were followed by Molly Lewis, of course. She did a smashing job, as usual, with Vixy & Tony again as her Completely Different Band backup band.
Molly was another case where I got to show off MCing – when I told that crowd to blow the roof off for Molly Lewis, they damn well did. Goddamn that was loud, and awesome.
I also took the time to take some Ambush Selfies. I should take more of these. It’s kind of like, “I’mma gonna photobomb my own selfies and so are you and you can’t stop either of us.” That might be a little high concept, but that’s how I roll.
There would’ve been another one but I had the wrong camera active on my phone somehow. I have a hilarious picture of Startled Kaede Tinney that I will not post because rude, but yeah. XD
Saturday night after the shows, I did my usual party swing. Sadly, I couldn’t find Torrey, and she coudln’t find me, so we failed to hook up and be Norwescon Drinking Buddies this year! Sadness. But there’s always next year, I suppose. She actually kind of missed an extra good time, because … okay, I’m gonna brag here, because it was that kind of year.
Everybody kept buying me drinks in response to nwcMUSIC this year. Everybody. I kept a lid on it and didn’t get too blasted, but people were buying the supervillain more alcohol everywhere I went.
These people are brave. XD
Sunday! Sunday. I scheduled myself for three panels in a row on Sunday. This was … actually, I was pretty okay. I’d drank a lot, but I’d also spaced it and drank a lot of water. Home Recording I and II stayed pretty well on track, and we had pretty decent turnout for both. Vixy & Tony both had things to say – particularly Tony, it’s basically “Tony’s Panel I and II.” But Lex Lingo had some really nice thoughts to drop in, and I’ve had some contact from people at the panel post-convention asking follow-up questions, which I’m happy to answer. The handout I distributed at the first panel is here, and I have a whole series of posts on building your own home studio here.
Shubzilla took a photo from the audience:
Between parts I and II, though, I’d scheduled this year’s one experimental panel: Cypher vs. Housefilk: FIGHT!. Basically, I threw some nerdcore and chiptunes and filk people all on a panel – with me in the middle) to talk about their home music get-togethers. I didn’t honestly know what would happen, but it turns out Jonny Nero is a really good panel moderator. We had a really relevant discussion on similarities and differences between the two. There was a lot of note-taking to transplant ideas, too, which is great.
Then in the Q&A period, someone asked Shubzilla if she would demonstrate some freestyle, and she of course totally did since she’s awesome that way. And afterwards, Jonny Nero asked our filker on the panel if she’d do something from filk, but she wasn’t actually a performer, so I jumped in and said I could do the one filk song I do in my shows sometimes. (It’s my version of Frank Hayes’s The S-100 Bus, with his lyrics and my music. You can download my version for free.)
But going into the bridge, where I usually make a joke about the solo I haven’t written yet, I start the chords, look at Shub, and say “take it.”
And she did. Out of nowhere, we got one of those moments of pure awesomeness that cannot be predicted but will just happen. Jonny Nero grabbed his phone and started shooting video, I shifted my already-not-filky-really rhythm just a little bit more to match her rap pattern and we do like, I don’t even know. 12 bars? 16 bars? It felt like a lot. And then I took it back and stuck the finish and it was amazing.
I still can’t believe that panel actually worked. Over on the Facebook Norwescon page, one person listed it as their favourite moment of the entire convention. If I could make this alchemy happen at will, I really would rule the world, and everyone would love it.
Then it was time for teardown and loadout. I missed the first part of Onions and Roses, but apparently several people made very nice comments about nwcMUSIC this year, which is always incredibly gratifying. One of the groups doing so tracked me down later and gave me what they called a Challenge Coin. They described it as a military tradition; Wikipedia seems to know about it. I am, of course, honoured:
As far as most of the concom was concerned, Norwescon ended then, at 6pm. But nwcMUSIC had other ideas. K had decided to restream all the shows starting at noon on Sunday, and he also streamed a new interview with Molly that didn’t even start until 10pm. We saw a whole new crop of viewers on the fansupported.tv channel; the peak viewership I saw there was mid-60s, but I wasn’t watching it the whole time.
Basically, the whole damn thing was so over the top this year we just didn’t want to stop, so Norwescon wasn’t over until nwcMUSIC said it was over.
Which in this case meant 10:30 Sunday night. n/
So, yeah! I don’t know how we top this. I really don’t, at least, not yet. I had a bunch of things in my five-year plan, like livestreaming and full-event CD sales. As of now, year four, we’ve hit all of them.
I guess it’s time for stretch goals. I have some ideas. And it’s not that everything is perfect, either. One of the nuts I haven’t been able to crack is open filk. We don’t have very big ones. I’d like to fix that. Norwescon has managed large ones in the past, so it’s doable – tho’ that was before Conflikt was in town. Angi Long and I are talking about this in comments on yesterday’s post, if you’re curious. There are many constraints I have to work with here, but drop in and add your thoughts.
PS: If you like any of the pictures, most have higher resolution versions available on my Flickr photostream. Enjoy.
nwcMUSIC videographer K is rebroadcasting/restreaming ALL THE CONCERTS today! All of them! If you had trouble with any element of the feeds before, now is your second chance to see it all. And it was a hell of a show, too, you have no idea. Here’s K:
Let your friends, fans, and folk know that we’re re-streaming the Norwescon concerts at http://fansupported.tv/ today.
You can watch all the shows in HD, and if you watch it on the youtube
channel, you’ll be able to use the comment / chat system to interact
with fans and the other musicians as they watch the concerts.Here’s the schedule:
Noon: 9k1 (nerdcore)
1pm: Jonny Nero Action Hero (electronica/chiptunes)
2pm: Klopfenpop (nerdcore)
3pm: The Heather Dale Band (Arthurian celtic)
4pm: Hello, the Future! (geekfolk)
4:45pm: Vixy & Tony (filk)
5:59pm: Seanan McGuire (filk)
7:05pm: Death*Star (nerdcore)
8pm: The Doubleclicks (geekfolk)
9pm: Molly Lewis (geekfolk)
10pm: Molly Lewis interview (sponsored by Tony Fabris)
THE NEW SINGLE
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