As promised, The Geekmusic Podcast premieres today! We preview Norwescon, ask Hello, The Future!’s Nicole Disker, Rai Kamishiro, Death*Star, Klopfenpop, and Starlight’s Stephanie Weippert what all this geekmusic stuff is about anyway, play two songs from each, and have a healthy dose of DIY, ’cause that’s just what we do.

Episode One, The Geekmusic Podcast

Here’s the podcast page. It has YouTube embedded, and also direct links there, to Soundcloud, and to a direct Dropbox download link. I’m linking the page instead of those things because Dropbox gives me no statistics, and if people download it directly I! Never! Know! But I can count things here. ^_^ But here’s YouTube.

I really do want to hear what people think works, what people think needs fixed, and who and what people you’d like to hear in future episodes. So, go listen and send me feedback! I’ve never done a podcast – or even any radio segment this long, I always did music and sports. What do I know? XD

A sneak preview for the 15 or so people who might actually see this on Sunday night: I’ve got episode 1 of The Geekmusic Podcast uploaded. YouTube, SoundCloud, direct download from Dropbox. All in one convenient place:

http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/podcast

Give it a go? See what happens? Let me know?

Looks like we get to replace some hardware in the Lair’s MASSIVE ELECTRONIC BRAIN tonight. We were already scheduled to do this sometime this weekend, but, whelp, somebody stuck their little robot head in the data stream, and we’re just lucky they aren’t in control of the reactor.

So we’ll be dropping offline tonight, assuming we make it that long. If a big chunk of the earth’s crust flies into space suddenly tonight? It’s not my fault.

ETA: And we’re back! That was nightmarish but it’s fixed. We’re live!

Meanwhile, have a quick podcast preview:

It’s all! Right! There!

Okay, it’s not actually all right there, because the screen whited out a bit. But all the segments are done, the rest is wrapper and introduction and a little more stitching together. We’ll be out MONDAY with Episode One – not that episode one – even with all this.

Oh, and check this shit out; it’s a real-life 3D-drawing pen. It draws with melty plastic IN AIR. I am NOT EVEN JOKING, it is just that cool.

See you when I see you…

So in awesome news of awesomeness, I’ve been offered and have accepted a spot as musical guest on an upcoming live episode of The Cosmic Ray Show. The official website is here. I’m appearing with people who have actually, you know, done things – Discovery space columnist Amy Shira Teitel, Ryan Kobrick from Yuri’s Night, NASA/JPL engineer Matthew Robinson – so I need to get my shit together! XD

Does this thing have production codes? It should have production codes.

It’ll be livestreamed a few places, most notably YouTube, starting at 8pm Cascadian/Pacific, 11pm Eastern Standard, and a kind of problematic 12:30am Newfoundland (sorry! But that’s live web series for you). I’m in the closing segment.

So, tune in, if you can! And tell people. They already have a pretty good chunk of audience, but I would like to bring in a bit more.

Via John Scalzi: Random House is trying to adopt ALL the wretched, musician-bankrupting models of the record labels, and force them onto writers, all at once.

I DO NOT HAVE STRONG ENOUGH WORDS FOR THIS: DO. NOT. BUY. IN.

John’s post, with all the gruesome details. The imprint is called “Hydra,” but it’s Random House.

DO NOT BUY IN. DO NOT LET FRIENDS BUY IN.

This is EXACTLY the model that labels have used to take ALL the money from the artists – ALL of it, so strings of chart-topping hits never “make money” and send artists into bankruptcy after years of below-minimum-wage returns.

DO NOT BUY IN. RUN from this. Run from it, and STOP OTHERS FROM SIGNING.

Seriously. This new model from Random House is the EXACT model musicians are trying to work around and recover from. IT IS BUILT TO STRIP MINE YOU FOR EVERY PENNY YOU EVER MAKE, AND MORE.

There is no winning here; not just for anyone who signs this agreement, but every other writer trying to sell their work. EVERYBODY loses – except the imprint, of course. And eventually even they even lose.

DO. NOT. BUY. IN. And tell others. This cannot be allowed to fly.

Anna is raffling off two copies of Valor of the Healer over at her author blog today. Get it before Carina Press’s release! She’s asking about your favourite musical characters, so go answer.

Also, I posted a short ECCC roundup here, late yesterday. If you only read things in the morning, there’s your link! And I have a live appearance coming up on … a web series I can’t name yet. But pencil in two weeks from tonight!

This podcast project is going to make me upgrade software. And possibly hardware. It’s not that it’s so insanely complex – it’s most assuredly not – it’s just that it’s so. long. I have about eight hours of source material to edit down into a bit over an hour, and apparently single tracks of two and a half hours make it a little cranky. And crashy. Whup, there went the GUI again. SURPRISE!

I’ve just accepted an invitation to perform live on a web show, in two weeks – save Tuesday, March 19th, 8-9pm Cascadian/Pacific time (11-midnight Eastern) in your planners. More details soon!

ECCC this past weekend; I didn’t take photos, but did see some really awesome cosplay. My favourite was Bizzaro, a really old-school version, because who wears him? Someone who is huge and not conventionally attractive and decides to damned well own it.

Well played, sir. Well played.

I may’ve gone a bit overboard on loot

Also there were a whole fleet of Korras and every single one of them was awesome. I finally got a close-up look at Torrey’s Prince Zuko armour, and my god, the hammer work! Just lovely. She says it took her 14 hours just for the patterning; I’d’ve guessed longer.

Jhonen Vasquez’s standalone panel got scheduled badly, so he couldn’t talk about anything new – all that was embargoed until his publisher’s panel, a few hours later. But turns out he’s hilarious when having to wing it. Wendy and Richard Pini have a whole lot of things coming out in the very near future, only some of which they could quite talk about, but two of those are two new Wendy art books! One’s Art of Elfquest, of course, but the other is a solo non-Elfquest Wendy art book, which has been on a lot of peoples’ wish-lists for just ever.

POSTARRRRRRS

I took a break from ECCC to record the final interview for the podcast pilot! And I’ve been editing like crazy ever since. I’m aiming for MARCH 11TH as the premiere. This will be a difficult date but I’m goin’ for it.

In between taxes and show prep and and and.

Anna has some commentary on Marvel and DC and the superhero sect with which I’m sad to say I generally agree. I have a long goddamn history with comics, and watching the core material for so much awesome stuff end up focusing more and more on being wank material? We are not amused. Fortunately, there’s a lot of other, better work out there, too.

Were you at ECCC? What’d you think?

PLAN 34!

http://www.luth.org/plans/instrument_plans.html#plan34

This is not what I’m actually trying to do, but not completely different either. Swap the guitar stick with a bass stick, move the harp strings below the bass and have them going higher in pitch, not lower. BUT IT COULD BE DONE.

I’ve been talking about this idea I’ve had for an electric instrument; a bass-type fretted set of strings across the top bar – a stick-type bass – and a panel of deep harp strings coming off the bottom of that which could be finger-plucked, all with electric pickups and stuff.

It just struck me as something an elfmetal band should have, and I’m semi-serious about getting a luthier to make one at some point. It’d look like kind of a wedge bass, but with a bunch of extra strings and pickups on it. The top bar could also be fretless, but that’s more a jazz thing than metal.

Somebody beat me to an acoustic version. They have the harp strings on top, and it’s all acoustic (which is NOT THE SAME) but it’s still the same basic idea.

(photo Long & McQuade, Surrey, BC; h/t Pauline McDonald)

I still want my bass electric version. But… yeah.

Oh awesome, the nwcMUSIC preview pages are up! Check all these out:

This is the landing page, kind of an overview of what’s going on and what we’re about. Plus it has this picture of The Screech sitting on Richard Glover’s head:

The Screech is the one on top

Here we have the concerts page, which has playable tracks from most of the people who have stage time. Not all, because some people don’t do that, which is totally cool. But most.

Workshops, events, and more workshops! Did I mention workshops? Also panel programming, we have that too.

Pass these around to anybody who might be coming, or thinking about coming, to Norwescon this year. I’m really pretty happy with where nwcMUSIC is going, and people have a good time once they find out about it, so let them know.