Sometimes I take pictures of flowers, or leaves, and mushrooms are kind of flowers, right? We spotted these on the way to the final Sunday Market of the year down the hill from the Lair.

What’s your autumn look like? Or spring, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, and a couple of you are out there, I know because facts.

Gossimer

Gills

If you’re looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominees, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

The new Prime Minister of Canada is Justin Trudeau. He is the leader of the Liberal Party, part of the Rebel Alliance, and a traitor. TAKE HIM AWAY!

photo via GeeksAreSexy

Also, I’m pretty sure there’s some separated-at-birth action between him and Molly Lewis. I am serious, check out that and her Wikipedia photo:

also force-sensitive? perhaps.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

If you’re looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominees, thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

The jury phase of the Grammy Awards process is over. Reportedly, Long List nomination ballots will be going out to members of the Recording Academy as soon as this weekend.

Everybody who made it past the jury phase – whatever that consists of, I don’t even know, all I know is I needed to make a bunch of CDs for it – is on the Long List.

If you are a member of the Recording Academy, I hope that you will give our music your consideration. If you know a member of the Recording Academy, I hope you will ask them to do so.

Thank you very, very much.

(ROUND 2: FIGHT!)

I’m finding that getting someone to replicate 150 CDs with colour labels costs more than buying A WHOLE NEW PRINTER+EXTRA INK+200 blanks and doing it myself. That’s kind of goofy. Capital expenditures what.

This is relevant to anything at all because Lightscribe (which is how I printed Dick Tracy Must Die, as a DIY project) is very much a legacy technology now, and I can’t get green lightscribe blanks anymore. The closest I can find are what I suspect are remaindered five-colour Memorex multipacks, which makes my per-disc cost $4. Yeah, no.

So yeah, I dunno. I was just going to farm out this mini-run, but now I’m weighing whether just to get a whole new printer just for this. Because then I could use it for other things. Which I likely would. And also, I wouldn’t have to worry about the printing technology going away – at least, not before CDs go away entirely, if they do.

(There are, yes, still some advantages of physical media. Most notably, people like having something you can sign. Also, while less of a problem: no DRM, no subject-to-surprise-licensing-changes. And finally, physical data durability. That’s a pretty decent combination right there.)

Downsides: 1) wtf will I do with this extra device other than this? Nothing? 2) where will I put it? 3) it seems like a waste because wow, a whole printer? (see nr. 1) and 4) um… not sure about four but four sounded better than three for some reason.

I mean, I guess I can say, “my time is worth money” and have it come closer to balancing that way, but the next time I need/want some short-run CDs… yeah.

I dunno. Anybody got opinions?

I had two very interesting meetings yesterday. One is about a new fan-run event; I’m providing advice and information and possibly some other involvement. They’re very ambitions, and I worry that they’re overreaching, but their numbers are sane. It looks promising.

They’re also looking for some people for various positions – webmaster, music track lead, publications lead (they have multiple promotions people), programming co-ordinator (they have most track leads already), stuff like that. Their web presence at the moment is just Facebook, but give it a look.

The other one… the other one… yeah. The other one is more in I-would-be-setting-fires territory. But it’s early days, and I provided a lot of data, and a lot of advice, and I’m throwing some people who need to be together at each other, and hopefully that’ll work. Because I do not want to start that particular riot.

On the way back from that second meeting, this happened. I was not involved with the accident, but nonetheless ended up directing traffic for three hours on a side street after an articulated Sound Transit bus got directed by police down a lane-and-a-half road with oncoming traffic, inadequate guard rails, and hairpin curves. That was… a bad decision. And my reaction was… weird. I guess superhero instincts still kick in sometimes. Ah, well, I guess I’ll get over it.

(Spoiler: I will never get over it.)

Anyway, eventually police came by and I thought they were going to take over – I had asked a previous traffic cop a couple of hours before for somebody to do this because goddamn – but they said “yes, helping, but stop it, liability.” And I was all “really? good samaritan law?” and they were all “NOT FOR YOU” and I went “oh.” So I quit.

I guess the best part of that was the road traffic worker who I helped get through the traffic and offered me his reflective safety vest. He thought I was doing it just fine. But I guess that wasn’t the point, anyway.

Yeah! Weird day. Very weird.

Off today to talk to a couple of convention organisers about music tracks and music programming. Hopefully I won’t talk myself hoarse, and hopefully this will result in more little geek music festivals around Seattle!

See, I may be handing off nwcMUSIC to new people this year – which still feels weird, I feel like I should be going to meetings and planning that show now – but I’m more than willing to talk. I’ll dump off all the data, institutional knowledge, and know-how that I’ve got to anyone planning an event if I can. There’s lots of room for more of these things.

Maybe I should do a series of knowledge-dump blog posts. It’d be nice to have all this online someplace so people could find it.

I’m considering using rafflecopter for a couple of promotional giveaways – not just to give and end-of-the-year boost to Bone Walker, but for the next album, once it’s out.

(Which means once it’s recorded, which means once it’s planned… hey, at least it’s written, right? That counts for something… XD)

Anyway, has anybody used this thing? Is it any good for getting notice? What kind of results have you had, if you’re the one running the raffles?

INBOX. ZERO.

I have no idea the last time this happened, or when it will happen again, but here it is. This is not the same as TODO zero, gods know, but it’s inbox zero, and that’s the closest I’ve come in living memory.

INBOX ZERO! IT CAN BE DONE! o/

I wonder how many seconds minutes it will last?

…well, okay, there are a bunch of problems with it. But one is that you don’t have much to talk about the next Monday, because nobody other than maybe Egon is interested in your mucus and phlegm. But I am feeling much more back to my normal now, and just in time for First Thanksgiving, about which I’m thankful for not being so full of either phlegm or mucus.

The experiments on it, however, are very promising.

Anna and I have been going through the very last of the Thrilling Adventure Hour podcasts, which is sadness, because we aren’t even 100% done because we’ve been rationing them, and I’m already missing that show. One of the strangest things is that I’ve done the Sparks Nevada theme song several times at SF conventions, and only as of VCON last week had anyone heard of it.

How was this not the biggest thing in fandom? Seriously, I don’t understand that. It was so amazing.

All of you were Thrilling Adventure Hour Podcast fans, right? Surely?

So yeah, hey, I went to VCON 40!

It’s a little bit of a blur, mostly thanks to too much fun crammed into too few days followed by unfortunate con crud. All of the panels I was on went really well, and most were heavily attended – the exception being Sunday morning at 10am on self-publishing, that one not so much. None of us were awake, and by “us,” I mean “VCON members” – this is a pretty seriously late-nite con.

I hung out with the hot tub crowd for a bit, and one of the surprisingly large number of fem!Sheps (the two most technically impressive were in the masquerade, see below) kept me in alcohol and unexpected affection. I got to wave papers in the air like a five-cent street-corner Leninist during the Puppies panel and that’s always a good day.

They had a Family/Fannish Feud PM game-show that was not remotely worksafe but our team didn’t make it up on stage, which is a damn shame. They also had super-snazzy technology that my version from some years ago didn’t have and it was pretty sweet – you can see the projector in shots from below.

Captain Canuck picked up Steve Rogers and his punching bag, which was pretty hilarious but didn’t stay posed long enough for me to get a shot. The Turkey Readings – wherein terrible works of fiction are read and acted out by audience members, with the rest of the audience bidding in cash to make them stop – had some new people and some prime material this year.

The Dead Dog almost imploded, because the hotel totally didn’t separate “quiet” and “party” spaces and shut it down, even though I have it on good authority that this was in the contract and there will be repercussions, and everyone including everybody snuck off Elsewhere to By God We Will Have a Dead-Dog and did. When I left just before 4am, it was still going pretty strong – just every so often we had to suddenly All Be Very Quiet, with concordant shushing and sssssssssh and apparently being a party made up entirely of snakes.

Ain’t no party like a Slytherin party, is what I’m saying.

So, yeah! Bought next year’s memberships already, will be there for 41. You should too, it’s great.

Guests of Honour

Fannish Family Feud
The room was actually packed, the empty seats are where the two teams
were sitting before they went up on stage.

Holy Shit It’s Finally October of 2015 And Marty is Here
I kept calling him Calvin.

Masquerade Winners

I found an alchemist and loaded up on void, fire, and frost salts
Time to make some potions!