I was up all yesterday and last night watching votes come in on Brexit, and I’m as surprised as the next supervillain, or, for that matter, the next Briton who has been googling exactly what is the EU, anyway? after the vote.

I posted a bunch on my old LJ/DW account pair, which you can read here if you want, but that’s just tracking financial reaction. I’m really thinking about just the UK, at the moment, and what happens politically now. In that, I’m assuming in this that the EU manages to stay together without the UK, which will certainly be the number one project of everyone over there for the next five years.

Scotland will treat this as an abrogation of promises made in 2014 to entice it to stay in the UK. A big one of those was continued and certain EU membership.

Scotland, of course, voted overwhelmingly – and across all of the country – to stay. Northern Ireland voted soundly to stay as well, but less overwhelmingly, and doesn’t have a recent close referendum on leaving. Both the SNP and Sinn Féin have called for new referenda on separation, and everyone’s treating the Scottish call more seriously – including, I note, the Scots.

But I’m not sure that’s the right analysis. I think it’ll come down to borders.

The biggest question in both cases comes down to free movement. Within the EU, you have free movement; border controls are not really a big issue for Europeans.

But outside the UK, there are, of course, plenty of border controls. If those controls reappear, I think Northern Ireland tells the UK to fuck off. The smart thing for Sinn Féin might be to wait ’till those border controls start showing up.

It won’t be like this, because that’s Africa and the racism is fierce.
But it’ll be controls of some sort, and this is the image to use.

And if those border controls reappearing are part of Scottish independence, I can’t but wonder if that means the Scots will stay.

Scotland and England have had free borders for a very, very long time. In the last vote, that was brought up, but you’d’ve had EU co-membership, making the issue moot. In a new vote… not so much.

So I think they might well have it backwards. Irish reunification, yes; Scottish independence, no.

And, of course, across all of it, ample chances in destabilisation. Supervillains and day-traders, be on alert, opportunity goddamn knocks.

Yeah, yesterday was fun.

Night before last I started having these visual effects in my left eye. Now, I have a history of repeated childhood head trauma, and visual effects are real bad because it turns out when you have that trauma history, your retina can start to disintegrate in adulthood. That’s how I lost most of 2014 to repeated eye surgeries.

So when I started seeing these odd effects in my left eye, some of which were similar to previous effects, I was pretty much freaking out, because Oh Shit Not Again. But they weren’t exactly the same as the previous times, and what I was seeing also matched the description of a strange and rare migraine variation called ocular migraine, where it’s basically a migraine, but entirely confined to your retina and optic nerve.

And that’s there the ophthalmologist went, too. The good news is: no surgery. The other, mostly good news: it’s probably a clean bit of vascular membrane separation. This happens all the time, including to you. If you see floaters in your eye for a while? That just happened to you.

For most people, it’s harmless. In large cases, there’s a small (2-3%) chance of retinal involvement, and that’s not at all good – if your field of vision changes, that’s the sign you need to see someone immediate.

For me, by contrast,, that percentage had so far been 75%, not 2%, because if there is the outer edge of a bell curve to be found, I will goddamn well find it.

Those odds now down to 60%, which is much better. He examined the hell out of my retina and couldn’t find any sign of disturbance. It looks healthy as all hell.

Which is why haven’t actually ruled out ocular migraine either, because what I’m seeing with the neon-like lights business actually fits that better. If I didn’t have a big new floater, that’d probably be the only thing under consideration. Good part of that is: nobody understands it, but it’s confined, and has no symptoms – no headache, even – other than the optical effects, and the prescription is “well, just put up with it, it’ll go away. And then come back, and then go away, but it doesn’t hurt and generally won’t change much.”

The doc doesn’t think anything will happen, I just have to keep an eye on it – EYE on it! HA! – for six weeks to be safe, and I have a follow-up appointment in July. If something retinal were to happen, well… I’d be back on hiatus.

But not today.

I gotta say, I have never been so happy to be working on a drum track all my life. 😀

It’s a common story – lots of women enter the workforce during World War II, doing all the jobs normally restricted only to men, before millions had to go off to fight Fascism. Then the war was won, the soldiers came back, the women were forced back out.

But, at least, it was acknowledged, and, at least, some credit was given.

But not at Gibson Guitar. They officially say that they shipped no instruments during World War II at all – not a one. But that’s simply not true. They did – they made and shipped thousands of instruments, with a wartime workforce of women. Some even went with GIs overseas.

Women instrument makers, Gibson Guitars, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Apparently, management decided that people wouldn’t want instruments made by women, so they erased the Kalamazoo Gals from history. When law professor and music journalist John Thomas got a hint there had actually been wartime production, and found out the story, the acoustic department was initially very interested – and then corporate found out he had been digging, and started threatening him for revealing it. It’s fascinating:

Women guitar makers scratched from Gibson history
By Ryan Grimes

Women are constantly being erased from history, including music history. Sometimes more aggressively – and pointlessly – than others. Never forget that.

You might have seen a bunch of (((this))) going around on Twitter. What’s it about?

It’s basically a target. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists are using it to target Jewish people (specifically) for online harassment, including violent threats and abuse. It’s useful because by default it’s extremely difficult to search for using standard tools – they had to put together a Google Chrome extension, which Google has now pulled – but who knows how many copies were already downloaded and are in use?

So one response is to flood their data streams with bad data, by having everybody put (((and))) around their usernames. I’ve done it, because Nazi punks fuck off is why.

Join me and change your username to add parentheses to defeat the neo-nazi hate mongers https://t.co/IEsDAgQ5qu

— (((Brian Teeman))) (@brianteeman) June 3, 2016

.@CliffStanford @brianteeman If everybody does it it wrecks the Nazi symbol's utility. If all Jews do it, it shows they're outnumbered.

— (((Charlie Stross))) (@cstross) June 3, 2016

(h/t Vixy of the band Vixy & Tony)

For a long time, there was a… conceit, of sorts, in science fiction, of connecting simple large objects in such a way that produced inexplicable complexity. The sort of thing where the characters would put five or six pieces together, and suddenly have a walking, talking robot.

It never made the least bit of sense, either in reality or to me personally, but that latter is changing. As I’ve been playing around with this carbon microphone (here’s a new test recording from yesterday, using the improved circuit) and along the way reading about things like the early telephone system and early radio and most of all the telegraph – I really start to see how they get there.

Particularly early radio, and even more particularly the telegraph.

The telegraph, I mean, damn. They ran one wire. Not a pair of wires: one. They relied on local grounding at each station; the ‘return’ for the power supply was the planet.

So look at this from a not-really-that-naive point of view, right? You’re a farmer out in the middle of Saskatchewan or something, right? It’s weeks to anywhere. You go into town for your mail every couple of weeks, the nearest neighbour is a mile or two or three away, a big gathering in town is monthly market day. You’re not stupid; you deal with complex machinery pretty regularly as a farmer. You know how this works; you know clocks, you know how complex machines have to be to do even simple things well, you know how they work and now to fix them and how to adapt them to new tasks.

Now take this metal rope, attach it to a bit of wound-up metal thread and a lever and a spring, and suddenly you can talk to Vancouver. Sure, you need to learn a code, but that’s easy, and suddenly there’s impossible spooky action at a distance – a really big distance.

Then there’s radio. Even crazier. Take another metal rope, and another bit of wound-up metal thread, and a tiny bit of inexpensive crystal, and this thing you put in your ear that you ordered by post (which is not more than a magnet and some more metal thread and a piece of paper) and suddenly you have news from Toronto in your house.

To the observer at the time, it is intense complexity from small numbers of simple parts. Sure, most of the complexity comes from the humans at the far end of each connection, but it’d take a good bit of sorting out to get that really parsed, and in the meantime, the reaction is more along the lines of:

     What magical fuckery is this?!

Suddenly the whole “small numbers of simple objects producing combinations of intense complexity” makes a lot more sense. They’d seen it multiple times in their lives, so… let’s make a robot with eight vacuum tubes, a motor, and a bunch of metal tubes? SURE, WHO EVEN KNOWS – THAT OTHER SHIT WORKED, WHY NOT THIS? How is an empty metal tube supposed to do anything? I dunno, I didn’t expect this metal rope to do anything either, but now it’s 8pm and dark since 4pm and I’m snowed in on the cold cold plains in January, and before going to bed I’m listening to a jazz band playing right now in the Savoy Hotel in New York City.

Impossible madness, from small numbers of simple parts.

Really, if anything, it’s surprising those decades weren’t even goofier.

Over on Tumblr, monsterquill interviewed me for a project, and I figured hey, let’s post it here too. Particularly since yep, still busy! monsterquill is in bold italic; I’m in regular text. Enjoy.

Why do you do fan music, what do you like about it?

Oh, well, mostly, because it’s fun. I mean, sure, I’m not going to lie; it gets attention, because you have a pre-existing audience to leverage, and all that. But I was coming up with fan music when there wasn’t a receptive audience for that kind of thing, I just wasn’t recording it – just because it’s a way to do fandom.

How did you get into it?

Same way as people get into fan fiction or fan art or anything else fannish (to use an older term) – THIS IS AWESOME I’M GONNA DO A THING! And then I did a thing. I also drew some fairly terrible (and some halfway decent) comic art and wrote fanfic. Music is just another aspect of that.

How are you involved in fan music community, & how would you describe it?

Well, I started nwcMUSIC, a geekmusic festival held as part of Norwescon, and ran that for six years – this immediate past year was the first one they ran after I handed it off, and I think they learned some things, and will continue to improve next year.

Describe it? Jeez, that’s a bit of a question. There are so many different such communities – the chiptunes crowd and the nerdcore crowd definitely overlap, and they talk to each other a lot across geographic regions. There’s an older folk tradition called “filk music” which was the first really organised geek or (”fannish,” in the old language) music community, and they started releasing audiocassettes in the 1980s. (Look up Off Centaur Publications and go from there if you want to dig into that part of the history.)

There are a fair number of differences in specifics, but it’s funny how the patterns repeat. Like, nerdcore people get together in the hiphop tradition and do improvised/freestyle rapping over beats, which tend to come from chiptunes, and it’s at homes and sometimes at events and everybody’s just getting together to do stuff, right? These are called cyphers. But filk started doing almost exactly the same thing a few decades before, but folk-music-y, and called them “housefilks.” Chiptunes people have a name for their improv/workshop/fun playing get togethers too, but I don’t remember what they’re called at the moment.

How do consuming a fannish thing and producing your own work relate for you?

Well… in both cases, I guess, I’m playing to the same audience, which is to say, me. And also people who like the same things as me, at least, within a certain range.

What genres of music do you tend toward, & what subjects, & do those affect each other, & do you use different ones?

There is very little geek metal out there, and while I’m playing acoustic instruments most of the time, what I’m really writing a lot of the time is metal. Early metal, rather than more modern metal, but still – that’s why the most common comparison by far that I hear is to Led Zeppelin. (Occasionally I’m thrown in as folkpunk, and get comparisons to The Pogues. But most of the time, it’s Led Zeppelin.)

My personal background is a mash of Newfoundland folk, metal, and electronica. In released material, I mostly hang out in the folk/metal arena, but I’ll drop a rock track once in a while. Pretty much always, I just go where the song says I need to go.

Like, when I did my first released fannish track – which was really an exercise in how to use a digital audio workstation – it was straight-up rock and roll, because the song required it. There’s a cult classic film called The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and it’s an odd, odd film, and I really like it. Part of the shtick is that Buckaroo Banzai is a brain surgeon, physicist, and! leader of a rock band called The Hong Kong Cavaliers, and successful at all three at the same time. (And also, he’s a pulp adventurer, but I digress.)

Given all that, it bugged me that they never got to do a whole song in the film. They start a couple, but plot happens, and they’re interrupted. Soooooo… a bunch of new lyrics, some additional instruments, and a zillion edits later, I’d scraped off every note out of the film and finished that song.

And it’s called The Diesel-Driven Eight Dimensional Jet Car Blues, and it’s on my fan-music page, http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/free to this day. 😀

What’s your songwriting process like? What inspires you to do a song?

The problem with a day job is that you have a day job. The advantage of a day job – at least, one that doesn’t eat your life, and I note that I didn’t do any music while I was a software developer in the industry – is that you can really pick and choose.

But even without that option – everybody writes for the same reasons, be it writing fiction or drawing artwork or making music. It’s all the same answer. I guess for musicians, it’s “I want to say a thing about a thing, but with a good beat.”

I heard a good analogy the other day – artwork is how we decorate our space, but music is how we decorate our time. I really like that. I also think – while not at all asserting there’s no overlap, because of course there is – that art is how we write down what we see, writing is how we write down what we think, and music is how we write down what we feel. Music is transcription of emotions, and lyrics add thoughts to give specific context.

Or that’s how I look at it, anyway.

Had good fun at the small but enthusiastic Rainbowcon I over the weekend; met a bunch of new people; Annie and Tim Walker and Dave Clement (the GoHs) are all really nice, and I may have recruited Tim into a bit of fan music silliness I started at one point and have been wanting to finish for a while. (He can play horns.)

There were workshops and lots of playing sessions and more workshops and also we did a whole set of songs about dead animals for some reason.

Why are there so many / songs about corpses?
Why did they all have to die?
Was it the bullets? / Or maybe a comet?
What was that thing in the sky?

Rainbowcon II has been confirmed, with GoH announcements on Saturday night: April 28-30, 2017, Seattle; GoHs Alexa Klettner (Germany), and Trickster & King (Ada Palmer and Lauren Schiller, together the band Sassafras). Details here.

Front row, L to R: Dave Clement, Annie Walker, Tim Walker, Rainbowcon I GoHs, in workshop

I had a brief discussion on Twitter yesterday with one of the Rabid Puppies. A lot of it went like you’d expect – Vox is brilliant, they can’t lose, they’ve proven the existence of a “hidden slate” that was already rigging the Hugo awards (despite exactly zero evidence showing this – lack of evidence is apparently confirmation of the conspiracy?) and so on.

But a couple of tweets caught my eye. First, you have pretty much an admission that they know this is Vox’s revenge campaign:

Vox retweeted that, which I’m sure some would say isn’t necessarily an endorsement, but let’s be real, it is. And it’s very popular with his fans.

But more interestingly: I’ve long held out the point that the foundation of the Sad Puppy argument can be summarised as, “we don’t like the winners, therefore nobody can, therefore FRAUD!” – that the entire Puppy crowd can’t even admit that voters not voting in slate actually liked what they were voting for, it was all political and secret-conspiracy. And I got that argument from him, more or less:

Virtue signalling instead of good work.

They still can’t even conceive of the idea that people actually like what they’re voting for, it had to be an invisible covert political slate, so they have to mount an organised and expensive political slate to create the results that “should” have happened. (“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” I guess.)

That’s really insulting, as has been so much of the Puppy effort. But don’t miss this new buzz-phrase, virtue signalling.

Isn’t that neat? I thought maybe it was a one-off, but no, apparently, it’s their replacement for political correctness. They’ve realised that the PC thing doesn’t fly anymore, so they’re trying out a new, substitute phrase.

And the neat thing about that is that you now have “virtue” being used as a negative by the alt-right/reactionary crowd, just as they use “justice” as a negative. Political correctness had at least some degree of neutrality to it, but now, virtue signalling – a.k.a., not being a douchebag – and social justice warrior – a.k.a., opposing injustice? Bad? Apparently. So now we have “virtue” and “justice” both being portrayed as negatives, and undesirable.

Sometimes, my band shtick feels like it just gets more and more appropriate by the day. At least, I guess, whether they realise that or not, they’re laying their cards on the table.

This is a part of a series of posts on the 2015/2016 Hugo Awards capture by a rightist political group whose focus has now shifted to destroying the awards.

So the Hugo finalists are out for the 2016 Worldcon, and, again, the Rabid Puppies put up a slate, and, again, it’s the same as it ever was: one political party vs. no political parties: the party always wins.

The damage, if you’re curious, of Rabid Puppy slate vs. finalist positions:

2/5 Best Novel (40%)
4/5 Best Novella (80%)
4/5 Best Novelette (80%)
5/5 Short Story (100%)
5/5 Related Work (100%)
5/5 Graphic Story (100%)
1/1 Editor Short Form (100%, but four positions were left open)
3/5 Editor Long Form (60%)
2/5 Dramatic Long Form (but both actually very popular: The Martian and Avengers: Age of Ultron) (40%)
3/5 Dramatic Short Form (60%)
5/5 Professional Artist (100%)
4/5 Semiprozine (80%)
5/5 Fanzine (100%)
5/5 Fancast (100%)
4/5 Fan Writer (80%)
3/5 Fan Artist (60%)
4/5 Campbell Award for Best New Writer (Not a Hugo) (80%)

A lot of people were opposing E Pluribus Hugo on the basis that if you just had a lot higher turnout, the one party running as a political slate would be swamped.

We got that huge turnout. We got the biggest turnout in the history of the Hugo awards. From memory, it was roughly twice the size of last year’s record – and Puppy-fuelled – turnout.

And it had fuck and all impact on the party vs. no-party problem. And it never will. And that’s how we have Chuck Tingle’s “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” with a Hugo nomination.

No, really, it is, thanks to the Rabid Puppy slate voters.

e pluribus hugo must pass second reading at the 2016 Business Meeting. I hope people get that now.

Now, as expected, this year, we saw some sabotage nominations, as well as some genuinely-popular nominations in Long Form. The goal, clearly, was to trigger a repeat of last year’s response: NO AWARD all Puppy nominees, with a revised goal of blocking all Hugo Awards from being given. They said that outright last year: if they can’t win, they will destroy all the awards forever.

So for this year, I am proposing a different strategy:

NO AWARD above anyone connected to running this slate. Anyone who supported it, anyone who promoted it, anyone who worked on it: NO AWARD over them. NO AWARD above Vox Day, NO AWARD above Castalia House (and all its works), NO AWARD above all of it.

Everyone else, vote for the best. Last year was a highly effective action showing rejection of all slates. But this year, the targets must be the specific perpetrators directly. It must be the people who are doing this, because while half of their interest is destruction, another half is self-promotion and boosting the visibility of their own works.

And until slates can be stopped via electoral changes, until e pluribus hugo can pass second reading at this year’s Business Meeting, this must be opposed. Because a vulnerability, once exposed, will be exploited. This will not stop, until it is stopped.

Particularly since Vox gets to spend all of daddy’s money on whatever little ragefest his neofascist heart desires.

e pluribus hugo is now the minimum requirement to save the Hugo awards, in anything like their current form. We knew this would take two years to fix, and this is year two; e pluribus hugo must pass second reading in Kansas City. Fandom, if you care at all about the Hugo Awards, do not fail.

eta: Well, this isn’t good. (File 770 is down, hard, with an owner-please-contact-administrator notice.) Anybody know what’s up? Here’s an archive.

eta2: Mike Glyer says on Facebook that it’s not a DDOS, and that his ISP is working on it; they’re migrating to a new server.

eta3: And there’s our first withdrawal: Tom Mays has pulled “The Commuter” from consideration.

This is a part of a series of posts on the 2015/2016 Hugo Awards capture by a rightist political group whose focus has now shifted to destroying the awards.

So here’s video of a cop throwing a lesbian against a wall and out of a washroom for dressing too butch, as the Gender Police start stepping up their game. This has been happening for a while, but the new fundamentalist right Queer Panic is really ramping it back up again. It’s like Saudi Arabia and the goddamn religious police in action, only, you know, it’s not a death penalty situation – yet.

That video pretty much instantly triggered a new Mary Kaye and the Cosmetics song. They’re my all-dyke hardcore punk alt-band who play only Hello Kitty-branded instruments, and they write shit like this and My Boyfriend and Sad Muppet. I’ve worked out the lyrics and most of the chords, of which there are four.

It’s short and very screamy. I’m not sure I have the vocal chops for it but I’m going to try. The lyrics are not worksafe.

Also, this same pack of assholes are going to be ramping up their local to me initiative campaign next week.

See, they may have local activists, but all these trace back to one specific large group of fundamentalist/reconstructionist lawyers who advocate making queer people illegal across the world. This time, it results in putting a $2500 bounty on trans kids in schools. I am not even making that shit up, it’s $2500 per kid per washroom break, because as I’ve said before: these SOBs aren’t happy unless they can make queer kids as miserable and broken as possible. It’s what they live for.

And yet, somehow, we’re the supervillains. jfc.

I think I’m gonna go work more on that song now.