Lots of artists (including a few I follow) livestream their drawing sometimes, usually showing their desktops so you can see what they’re working on. A fair number of them do this on Picarto, which is pretty visual arts focused, but says it’s for creators in general.

So I decided hey, maybe music? And they even have a category for it. Yay! And I’ve set up an account here on Picarto, and will stream sometimes, probably announcing on Tumblr and Facebook on the band page.

I’ve only tested it once and it was a little weird but I think it worked most of the time? The wifi in the part of the studio where I have to put the laptop is a little wonky tho’, and it cut out at least once. If people come by I’ll work on fixing that.

It’ll mostly be rehearsals/practice but might occasionally be me mixing something or writing something. I dunno! I’ll probably turn it on later today, I completely upended my planned VCON set and I’ll want to try that out this afternoon. And I’ll check the chat window every so often, too.

Here, you need to watch this.

(h/t Tony of Vixy & Tony)

The show at VCON is on Sunday afternoon! They’ve stacked like five of us up, and we each have mini-sets.

Anybody reading this going to be there? If so – got a request? It’ll just be me, as far as I know, so no whole-band songs, I’m afraid. Unless they’re USSR or Kaiju Meat, I’m willing to do those with backing tracks. XD

Also, I’m still a little “woah” that I’m on a panel with Kevin Anderson, Gerry and Sylvia’s son, who does modern CGI and(!) ultramarionation Anderson Entertainment shows. And a bunch of Doctor Who work with Big Finish, too. Awesoooooome.

But yeah, if you’re going to be there and want to hear something I can do solo, let me know. ^_^

C. Martin Croker died. What the hell, 2016?

Who is C. Martin Croker? He’s done a lot of animated comedy, he might be most famous for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but for me, he’s the one, the only Zorak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Adult Swim before there was Adult Swim, the musical evil villain and resentful second banana we needed and Space Ghost deserved.

He was 54. Godsdammit 2016. Stop.

Green is the colour of my true love’s exoskeleton
she only has
a thousand eyes
for me

Know what? You start talking about “shooting n*****s right in the dome” on Overwatch in-game chat, I will call you on it, and I will drop out, and yes, including competitive, just like I did last night.

Yeah, I know it hurts my competitive ranking. Particularly last night. I was on a solid streak and looking okay and now I’ve got a mid-match voluntary dropout on my record. I know that, and I will absolutely fucking take that gutshot because FUCK YOU, YOU RACIST SON OF A BITCH.

And I will take your ranking down with me. Hope you like playing five-on-six, dickbag, because you do that shit, it will fucking cost you. Or – I know! – maybe next time I’ll switch to Mei or Symmetra and start griefing you, making damn well sure you know why.

Still so angry. FUCK YOU, OVERWATCH RACISTS. FUCK. YOU. Fuck you, fuck your friends, fuck your rebranded ~~alt-right~~ white nationalism, and just in case you missed it, fuck you.

Fuck you so very, very much.

You know what else I’m sick of? People giving this kind of shit any kind of a pass. Fuck that, too. You let this shit go, you are the problem. Yeah, I said that – you’re not just an accessory, you’re a core part of the problem.

Nobody should fucking play with these shitbags. If you hear that kind of thing go down and you don’t call them on it and don’t drop, I am damned well going to judge you too. There were four other players in that chat who were apparently gonna let that go, and that’s horseshit.

Because these racist fuckers should know: they drop their shit on chat, the game is over. Right then. It should be a fucking guarantee. There’s no neutral ground here, and I am sick of people pretending there is.

RACIST GAMERS FUCK OFF! And racist gamer enablers? Fuck you, too.

I used to be a big X-Men fan – the comics, most of the movies haven’t done it – so when I saw this going around, I of course had to watch it. It’s a fan-made solo (and short) Storm film, and in one of the more severe Mutant Registration/Normalisiation Act AUs.

But it’s also really good and Storm always deserved better than Singer ever gave her in the movies. Plus, it passes the Bechdel test. Content warnings, though, hm – violence, attempted (note: attempted) sexual violence, fascism and all that implies.

Overwatch had a free-play weekend these last couple of days, and so the system was flooded with n00bs. And that’s fine, but somehow, it deeply confused the skill ranking system used to set up matches.

I mean, it’s always been flaky, and find of setting me up as the high-ranked player with five mid-ranked players against teams well above our level, but Sunday? It would be me with my one star and levels plus one person who has two digits of experience pus four literal single-digit n00bs vs. FIVE STARS and a NOBODY.

Because sure, that’s math. I mean, the game has always had issues with its levels matching, but c’mon.

(Crashing on me three times during winning games did not improve my statistics either.)

Is this what I thought about on Sunday night instead of working on the lyric video for “We’re Not Friends“? Yes. Yes, it is. BAD MUSICIAN NO GAMING except of course lots of gaming, at least, when not working on day jobbe, because this is Big Time for Day Jobbe month.

Also I think I’m shipping Phamercy now. Because sure, why not. My section of Tumblr fandom has pretty much decided everyone in Overwatch is queer, and really? I’m good with that.

Yeah, so – how was your weekend?

So this is just kind of neat, right? The previous lair was a building originally built in 1911, with a lot of expansion in 1924, and it has a lot of history. It was even a chocolate factory for a while, in the 1950s, and I’m not even making that up. (Was it an evil chocolate factory? Sadly, this is not known.)

Anyway, we’ve been replacing the roofs in sections, because it’s a large and strange building, and we’re doing the last part now. Also doing some other improvement work as part of the same project, but mostly, it’s a new roof.

There’s a little mostly-decorative overhang on the front porch which is also singled. The big surprise is that this little decorative part had never been stripped off before. It was four layers deep back to the original, which means we now have a complete history of all the roofs this building ever had.

Now, the further down you go, the more damaged the shingles are, because – particularly bad in the day – they’d tar over the old layers, at least in sections. But some parts were still clean. Check this out:

(Bigger)

That’s 1911, 1946 (almost definitely), 1963 (probably), and 1982, left to right. I like that modernist striped blue! That must’ve looked pretty damn swank in ’63. I’d love a photo of the whole roof done up that way – but yeah, good luck finding that.

1982 came out brighter than it was in real life, I don’t know why. It’s a dark grey, with no actual hint of blue in it. But the others are pretty good representations.

I’m gonna save pieces and make a display frame of them, I think, like I want to do with the (huge!) Christmas Chocolates sale sign from the chocolate-factory era. That’ll be neat.

VCON – the Vancouver SF Convention – is coming up, and of course yours truly has a show and some panels and a songwriting workshop! So if you want to see what a songwriting workshop is like when it starts with a brief physics lecture, and also work on some song you’ve got in mind, go sign up right now!

The workshop itself is Saturday, October 1st, at 1:30, in case you don’t when VCON is this year. They’re back in one of the hotels I wrote about in “You Can’t Get a Good Kamikazi In Vancouver,” specifically, the one that’s Really Really Really Really Really Really Really Really <gasp> Really Far Away. But it’s a nice hotel despite that, and VCON is reliably fun.

So – see you there?

So the new iPhone is out, and as predicted, it does away with the standard, unencumbered, unrestricted-by-patent 3.5mm audio connector. You can read about the release on BuzzFeed’s pretty decent writeup if you like. And this matters, even if you have an older phone, or an Android phone, because Apple is the kind of 10,000-pound-gorilla that can shape markets in this area. Even if you’re not an Apple user, this throws expectations around for the future.

There is an adaptor – really, a mini-interface-card disguised as a cable adaptor – to let you use 3.5mm devices with the lightning port. It has to contain a D/A converter and a small amplifier. One will be included with the new phones, and it costs $9 and doesn’t make your cable weird – it’s not some big block like the previous 30-pin to Lighting interface, and it’s not $30.

I have concerns about how good a job a $9-retail D/A converter and amp unit is doing to do at rendering quality audio. It will be very tempting to make it deliver “meh” quality output, and push people to new gear. That’s short-sighted, but let’s not pretend that stops anyone.

Countering that concern is the fact that at least at one point, Apple required a specific D/A converter for the Lightning audio standard: this one. I have no idea whether that’s still a requirement. But if it is, I’m willing to assume a baseline of competence for it – anything else would’ve been suicidal for the spec right out the gate.

I’ve heard a lot of people talking about whether the new interface is built for digital rights management (DRM) as the long goal. I genuinely don’t think so, because it doesn’t really add much capability they don’t already have. Sooner or later, you have to go to analogue, and unless they want to remove the capability to connect to high-end audio equipment – and Bluetooth does not cut it for audiophiles, or necessarily even mid-philes – there has to be a way to hook up to standard, not-Apple gear.

You can’t get around that. Lest people forget, an Apple-provided solution for this already exists in the form of the dock – shown on the iPhone 7 front page, too. It’s not going away. And the reason it won’t go away is that while audiophiles are not a big market, they are exactly the kind of lifestyle market Apple wants and needs in order to support its brand, and more importantly, its markup. That’s not tech; that’s image management. Even without Steve, Apple knows its image.

Similarly, they can’t cut off concert musicians and DJs from plain old analogue output. There are too many audio pros out there using phones now, and while that market isn’t actually large, it’s a market Apple still invokes in image, and it’s too perceived as cool for Apple to throw overboard without throwing another serious wrench into its branding.

And frankly, with the recording industry betting what’s left of the farm on streaming, they don’t really don’t seem to care much about DRM on plain audio anymore. The RIAA destroyed the value of owning music, so from their point of view, who cares? Music is the billboard, not the product. I just really can’t see this as “HDMI for audio.”

So from a consumer standpoint, mostly I see “Apple has made your headphone cable annoying.” Even that’s assuming you’ve got your own headset and aren’t using the one Apple included, which most people do and will continue to do.

Now, this does get more complicated for musicians and DJs. Even if the included little cable adaptor is good – and let’s say it is straight up great – then you can’t trivially run the new devices on power and interface directly to performance gear anymore. That’s a headache. “Oh shit, I forgot to charge my phone” becomes a critical failure. Best case is you get a new device for that – and the dock is not suitable, you need something you can’t knock over or drop – which means one more damn thing to buy and carry around and/or lose.

Let’s also say you’re using some sort of audio software on the phone, and it doesn’t have a way to save files that you can transfer to other devices. (Even the software I have which does this doesn’t do it easily or well, it’s kind of a pain in the ass and I don’t do it. I use the headphone jack.) And a lot of software – like 8-bit emulator sequencers, and like Animoog, which I have actually used on multiple released tracks – just doesn’t do it. So that just got more annoying on newer hardware too. Another dock or another cable or another whatever. It’s one more step.

But, interestingly, not on the iPad. So far, I’ve heard no rumours that the iPad will drop the 3.5mm connector. And the iPad – particularly the iPad Pro – has very un-phonelike things like a keyboard case and special connector, and art stylus/pencil, and so on.

So what I’m thinking – particularly with the Pro – is that Apple is seeing a differentiation opportunity between “phone” and “pad,” and that they’re pushing “iPhone” to “purely consumption device,” paralleling their attempt to push “iPad” towards “creation device.” That’s not the actual usage out there – lots of people use the iPhone to make things – but it’s coherent market segmentation, and marketroids love their market segmentation.

Also, the iPad isn’t nearly as space-constrained as the iPhone. It’s just not comparable. On the iPhone, replacing that jack space with bigger battery and camera means vastly improved camera and about an hour extra battery life. On the iPad, it’s not a big enough percentage of space to care.

If the next generation of iPad keeps the 3.5mm analogue headphone jack – while adding support for the new Apple wireless headphone specs, of course – I’ll take that to be pretty solid supporting evidence. We’ll see.