Before I became a musician, I was a glass sculptor. I didn’t melt glass and form it that way; I broke, cut, assembled, built. I’d use metal and plastics and silicon with the glass. I rose through the local neighbourhood show circuit and won some judge’s awards and got into galleries and then into a srs bsns downtown gallery, and sold a bunch of pieces. You can see photographs of many sold and unsold pieces here, but here’s a large one that sold at that last downtown show:

Gods at War

It was shortly after that – reasonably successful – downtown gallery show that when I realised… this just isn’t my art. Not in the sense of evoking passion, anyway. And the ideas just stopped.

Despite that, I kept the studio wondering if that art would turn itself back on. It didn’t. So, I’ve decided enough is enough: I’m not going back to this. I’ve found another glass artist who wants my raw materials; I’m turning the space into a rehearsal studio! This is awesome and exciting.

But there’s a lot of sculpture still sitting out there. CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THESE WORKS. If you’re interested in any of the pieces, make an offer. If you’re local or can get to Seattle, that offer can be a willingness to pick it up – tho’ I’d at least like to get materials cost back. I’d so much rather have them in someone else’s houses than gathering dust in an attic, there just aren’t words.

Remembering Someone Else’s Grandmother

A couple more are finished but not photographed; Water Dragon is the better example. Depending on how this goes, I’ll get around to that.

Many are too big to ship without hiring someone. Some smaller pieces (such as Breech and Remembering Someone Else’s Grandmother) should be fairly simple.

And then, there’s the unfinished All the Moons of Mongo:

All the Moons of Mongo

A huge piece, originally envisioned as a wall hanging; kind of a frieze. That was not a good idea. So in the end, it became a mobile assemblage – each moon (Frigia, Land of the Lion Men, Arboria, City of the Hawkmen, Mingo City/Ming’s Palace) is separate, with a metal grid base of aluminium. Each one is intended to be displayed individually around a large room, and they can be stacked as seen here – tho’ the wood blocks visible here would be replaced by glass brick I never bought.

It’s about 90% complete. I will finish this if someone wants it.

Otherwise, it’ll be disassembled.

This isn’t to say I dislike like the piece – or any of the work. I’m entirely fond of it. Of the ones that didn’t sell back when I was doing this for galleries, there several I’m just going to keep – they’re marked on their individual pages as collection-of-the-artist.

Tegami
(tiny and not available; it hangs in my house)

But of all this – there are just far too many, and they’ve been sitting far too long. It needs to get out and into the world. So if any of it strikes your fancy, make an offer. Even if that offer is just a willingness to pick it up – particularly in the case of All the Moons of Mongo. Yes, you, too, could have a kingdom of Mongo, to rule as your own. I’d much rather you had it in your house, than it be scattered…

…into atoms.

STILL NOT DONE!

I’ve amalgamated links to all the posts in the Studio Buildout article series in one place, here. That’s now also linked off the DIY section of the Videos page.

Most of the questions that I’d like to refer to blog posts involve studio buildout, but are there any other post series you’d like to see have amalgamation pages like this? They’re easy to make.

The Geekmusic Podcast has had its own page for a while, but it’s also finally linked to somewhere – specifically, off the Videos page, in the Podcasts section. It won’t get its own top-level menu entry any time soon, but it’s connected.

And finally, the contact page now also links to a contact form, hosted on the blog, so anybody who is weird about email can use a form that … sends mail to the same place. I’m not sure why that’s important, but apparently it can be, so I added one.

As always, bug reports are appreciated!

A bunch of “Do you support local artists?” people were out in force near Centre House, and the first couple of times I ignored them, but on the way out they have a whole goddamn phalanx of people lined up along that corridor, so it’s like getting past Linebackers for LaRouche or something just to get out and go home. Once we made it through, I realised I really kind of needed to use the washroom before leaving, except that meant going through their artsteroid field of fundraising again, so when the same people came after me a third time I started yelling “I AM THE ARTS!!” and giving them business cards when they tried to press flyers into my hands.

This made them all go, “…whut?” and be confused and crash into each other, and thus we made our successful Kessel run. SCORE! By which I mean access to washroom facilities.

Anna said I should’ve been asking, “Do you support local supervillainy?” She’s right, of course.

So at Folklife there was a guy carrying around a sign, “Kick me in the balls for $20.” And I was going to leave him alone but today it was down to $10 and he had some people aggressively shilling for him so when one of them came over to me while I was walking by, we had this conversation:

Solarbird: So where does the $10 come out?

Shiller: No, you kick him in the nads, $10!

Solarbird: Yeah, I get that, how hard to I have to kick him to make the $10 come out?

Siller: No, you give him $10!

Solarbird: But the sign… <points>

Then the guy shilling got mad and walked away which is really too bad, because I have a whole bunch of questions about this whole procedure, like, how did $10 get in there anyway? And if it was $20 yesterday, were there also $20s in there? And where did they go? And honestly, this sounds like some sort of medical condition, and he really should get it looked at, because while I’m no more fond of the American health care system than anyone else, I really have to say that for once this seems like kind of a self-correcting situation, because if you have a condition that makes your body spit out co-pays, that’s a pretty good start. “Yes, I have insurance.” <BALLKICK!> “Here y’go.”

Then Anna wanted to know whether this is related to the condition where you hit somebody ’till candy comes out, and that made me realise: My gods. It’s the tooth fairy. What is her plan?!

We’re having all kinds of weird and random problems with YouTube and Google-hosted stuff. This mostly isn’t a big deal, just really annoying – I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, so.

But it is a thing. and it’s not just lagginess – if I go to YouTube and try to switch accounts, it says I don’t have multiple accounts, then it lets me try to log into my other one, then that fails with a bad password or no response at all (often the latter), then suddenly I’m logged in to both accounts, except one isn’t available, except when it is, and then I can check analytics… unless it just decides not to load. Then I may and may not be logged into both accounts anymore.

Videos sometimes load perfectly and sometimes just never load at all. It’s across browsers and machines, and I’ve rebooted the hardware router. We can’t detect a pattern yet, other than it’s only on Googleplex sites. Everybody else is fine.

To wit: whut?

eta: oh ho, maybe it’s not just us:

Problem loading Google+

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I was going to write more about Victoria and the trip – I talked about a open mic appearance on Friday already – but my Macbook drive is more fucked up than I feared.

Anybody know how to make Time Machine skip past files with read errors and not just bail out?

See, I currently have no backup because Time Machine last week decided the backup was damaged and that it needed to start over with a new one. It’s done this before over the years so I said sure, go ahead.

It deleted the old backup and refused to make a new one. It gets about 1.7 gig in, then fails due to what it calls probably-transient network errors.

What it’s actually failing on are read errors on the laptop drive. Read errors disk utility can’t find. Read errors fsck can’t find either. Read errors SMART says aren’t happening.

But there are a whole bunch of files that if you try to copy them generate read fails. dd sees them too, and fails, if I try to image the disk. I went through and generated a massive list of bad files – and there are many – by having the system cp -pr them all indiviually while I was in Victoria.

I’ve currently added all of them to the Time Machine exclusion list and am trying to get a backup that way. I rather suspect this, too, will fail, due to a previously-undetected bad file.

Does anyone out there know whether there’s a way to make Time Machine not bomb out on these read errors? Or failing that, have another, good solution? Because I really need a better backup than the results of a big tree of cp -pr.

But at least I now have that. Before I set up that job, I didn’t even have that. Not after Time Machine’s lies.

eta:: With a bunch of exclusions added, I have a time machine backup of most of the drive. But it could be better with fewer exclusions if you know how to make Time Machine skip files with read errors instead of failing out. Can this even be done?

How is it Wednesday? How did that even happen?

I’m working my ass off right now trying to figure out how to update the MBR on a new hard drive in my audio workstation. Basically, my DAW has had two hard drives in it for a while because… oh fukkit there is no good reason. Laziness and It Seemed A Good Idea At The Time. I’m paying for it now, trying to combine them onto a single physical drive.

So here’s a music-acquired roundup from nwcMUSIC 2013/Norwescon 36:

• Experimutations and Counting Sheep from Jonny Nero Action Hero, who has a particularly dynamic live show, double-particularly for a chiptunes artist.
• Geek Girl, Infinity Right Now, and Sidekick and Other Songs from Hello, The Future! Technically Anna bought these but it’s a community property and gay marriage because Fuck Yeah Cascadia, and besides, I already had one of these from Bandcamp
• Temptations of the Fresh, from Klopfenpop, which I downloaded but don’t have the deluxe physical edition yet because he left it at home, and
• The Campaign Mixtape, from Shubzilla, who I actually met there during Jonny Nero’s show. It’s a four-track EP of quality, you should get it.

We had a bunch of out-of-nowhere tech problems including the various components of the sound system – which communicate over IP – all deciding not to talk to any of the other parts on Friday night. Nicole Dieker (Hello, The Future!) had to perform with the emergency backup kit, but fortunately, the emergency backup kit is good kit. And I shot some pretty decent actually video of the second half of her show.

Seriously, it was fucked up. I had to go find a paper clip so John could do some hardcore factory reset action. But that, followed by reprogramming from backup, got it to come back up in time for the Leannan Sidhe show, and it stayed up thereafter.

Cascadia’s Got Talent! got rocky, too – at scheduled start time we had one (1) contestant. Happily we ended up with six, and the Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly of nwcMUSIC (Death*Star) worked really well with Nicole Dieker (who could be our… Ruth Buzzi, perhaps?) and lots of fun was had by most. Scott’s trophy got a great reception, and our terrible vacation tour was to Prohibition boomtown turned suburban hell Kenmore. (“Kenmore! It’s on the way to Bothell. Kenmore! Where the appliances to go die. Kenmore! We used to be interesting; thank god that’s over.”)

The Saturday night concert set – that was pretty epic. We had four for the last-minute open mic, and actually filled the time pretty well. HeyLasFas’s guitarist – whose name I have dropped not in the sense of name-dropping but in the sense of forgetting it right now – did a couple of numbers solo. Then HeyLasFas proper, followed by Alexander James Adams – who packed the room, as always, and incidentally impressed the hell out of Molly Lewis – and then Molly Lewis herself, with Vixy & Tony dropping in as a backup band.

We ran a little late, but that was okay because this time filk was in the same room! And the filkers were all in the audience. I had fun playing with the lateness – walking up to stage carrying the all clock like I was going to be all cranky, holding it up in front of Tony… and setting it back 20 minutes. XD

Molly drew a genuine spontaneous encore. That’s an nwcMUSIC first.

Anyway, time to burn a new live CD and see if I can use it to rebuild the new drive’s MBR. If you know what that means, pop on to chat somewhere and help me, because honestly, WHY CAN’T I JUST EDIT THIS?! I mean damn.

We’ve been having trouble the last few weeks with apache runaways on our webserver. We thought it was related to the dying hard drive – it’d throw a read error, maybe apache would freak out and go crazy, maybe it would pull bad data of the swap partition, we didn’t know; we were guessing.

Now, that drive was dying – hard, we barely made it to our scheduled replacement downtime weekend and getting back online by Sunday took lots of work – so none of that time was wasted. But we went down under similar circumstances almost immediately.

So this time I was on watch, with a bunch of utilities running, when it happened again.

We were under what amounts to a smallish DDOS attack. I don’t have the right kind of counting software, but I estimate it was northward of 10,000 requests per minute, mostly of GETs on random points throughout angelahighland.com and crimeandtheforcesofevil.com that invoked php. It was coming from a range of machines in Israel and Europe.

That all looks pretty standard, except for the part where they all go back to the same ISP. So now I’m wondering whether it’s less DDOS attack type intentional and more DDOS attack type incompetent websweeping software under development.

I’ve sent mail, but they’ve had a business day to respond, and haven’t.

Anyway, we handled it, via blocking and tools. Seeing one of these in progress – there were actually two separate rounds – was kind of exciting. The great part is that we stayed up throughout. They didn’t take us down, and while we were dropping a lot of requests, we never fell off the net. If this is affecting anybody I’d be really surprised, but if it is, let me know.

RIP Gerry Anderson, who died today in Britain at age 83. Gerry, along with co-creator Sylvia Anderson, produced some of the most mad and most epic modernist SF television of the 1960s and 1970s, and continued working separately after he and Sylvia broke up between Series 1 and 2 of Space: 1999.

While not as globally famous as Doctor Who, you know his work. Thunderbirds, the global cult classic. Supercar, which never made any damn sense but was crazy awesome all the same. UFO, their first live-action series. Joe 90. Fireball XL-5. Stingray. Space Precinct. Our two household favourites, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and Space: 1999 (series one, anyway). That’s not even the whole list.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons – and its worthy reboot/successor, Captain Scarlet (2005) – doesn’t get the mention it should, much of the time. The title character dies in the first ten minutes, and yes, he’s really dead. The rest of the series, he’s a Mysteron replicant. The war is started – thanks to a misunderstanding – by Earth; the resulting terror campaign is a conflict of nerves, to destroy Terran civilisation. In some episodes, the Mysterons win. And, shot in 1966, all the combat aircraft are flown by women.

Pilot Ready Room, Cloudbase. Combat pilots Destiny (Juliette Pontoin, French, from Paris), Harmony (Chan Kwan, Chinese, but born in Tokyo), and Melody (Magnolia Jones, African-American, from Atlanta). Take that, Star Trek.

Angels Symphony and Rhapsody are off-duty, so not in this picture.

I only met Gerry Anderson once, very briefly, at a convention. He was warm, friendly, gregarious, and talking to about a zillion fans in a row all at once, so it’s not even really a meeting. I didn’t know him. But I knew his work, and particularly, I knew his and Sylvia’s work. His shows weren’t always good – particularly not after Sylvia left – but sometimes, even often, they were amazing. While I know more than enough not to conflate the work with the artist, I’ll still miss him.

Might be time look up some episodes of Twizzle, and then for a Captain Scarlet (2005) marathon. From the start, to the finish. It was a hell of a run, Gerry. Thanks.