I’m going out with Leannan Sidhe this weekend, which is normally awesome good fun times. But this time, I’m actively worried. There are a bunch of different alarms and alerts up telling people to stay home and stay indoors and the forecast high during the days I’m going to be out is around 43°C, which is right around 110°F.

And laugh all you want to – I’ll destroy you first – but yes, Solarbird the Lightbringer has heat issues. And this isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to blog about, everyone will tell you, you’re supposed to keep it upbeat and confident in a music blog, and I’m actively kind of frightened, because 30C is a bit hot for me, and we’re shooting well past that and past “hi, I’m passing out now” territory and into “why am I doing this” zones.

Plus, we’re camping. There’re no hotel rooms around for less than $600. Well, that’s not technically true, there are, at hotels with reviews that talk about bedbugs, which is to say, there are no goddamn hotel rooms.

Normally, this is all quite fine, I’m fond of a bit of camping. But the lows are, like, 24C, which is, um, like 75F? The outdoor low in the shade is a temperature I find a uncomfortable for sleep.

I’m not kidding when I say I’m really nervous about this. Not in that isn’t-this-exciting way, but in that passing-out-on-stage-is-a-real-possibility way.

Yeah, so, that’s no fun. Here, meet Paper Jam Shatner. I found him while looking for something else completely unrelated and I have no idea why Google showed him to me. Paper Jam Shatner will only make sense at all if you watch a lot of Gravity Falls, but hopefully, that’s you.

kkkkkkgkkkgkgkgkgkkgkgkgkggkkkngnnnnnN!!

C’mon, George, have some goddamn self-respect.

No.

It’s hard to tell, but his tongue is out. He only moved because he heard me get the camera, but for once, I got a picture.

It’s really important for many kinds of instrumentalists to maintain good callouses, particularly zouk, mandolin, and guitar players. There’s a rumour that Stevie Ray Vaughn used to superglue his callouses back on if they fell off.

Somehow my left-hand (fretboard side) callouses have all disappeared. I’ve been playing all week but in the shower yesterday I was like, “wait, my fingertips on my left hand feel really soft, what the hell?” now, well, YEP THEY SURE ARE.

A few hours of playing tonight seems to be bringing them back, but… da hell?

I’ve never seen this before – a puzzle game for capcha on some Livejournal comment pages:

queen to queen’s level 3

Yeah, I had to do a puzzle to leave a comment. Also to edit the comment.

There must be some truly severe spambots out there at this point is all I can say. Damn.

Oh, also, we saw Jurassic World. It’s much better than I was led to believe, on several axises, and easily the best since the original – which is not a high bar, of course, but I don’t mean it as a backhanded compliment. It was genuinely fun.

I didn’t get into it enough to write my own review, but Anna posted one over here. I guess the only thing I’d say about Anna’s reaction is that the shit Claire got for not picking up on her nephews personally the first day there.. I really read that as fallout from her sister’s impending divorce. I’ve seen divorcing parents ramp the “it’s all about me” neediness up to 12 before, and for me, anyway, it felt very much like that.

Sadly, another character also gave her shit for not dropping everything and attending to the kids, too. Just not as much. I’m sorry, did you miss the part where she had a serious job and where events were unfolding?

Regardless; better and less annoying than I was lead to expect, and well done making me be actively on the velociraptors’ side. Team Velociraptor. Go Blue.

I have a Google Voice number that I set up a couple of weeks ago solely to give to PayPal, given their new horrible data-mining and cold-calling-by-anyone terms of service.

I have given this number to quite literally no one outside my lair. (And not even everyone in it!) I even added it to the Do Not Call registry. So guess what I got today that could only have come through one place?

Die in a fire, Paypal.

If you have a PayPal account, get a throwaway number for it, because the spam robocalls are coming.

We finally saw Jupiter Ascending a couple of weekends ago, in the lair, rented rather than in a theatre. I wish I’d got myself out to see it large, but, well, life and all that.

It’s better than it’s given credit for. And I thought I had a long post to write about this, but I keep not writing that post, so I’m going to write a shorter one and see what happens.

Jupiter Ascending is, in large-brush-strokes, David Lynch’s Dune, but with the “Chosen One” trope excised and replaced with “Hidden Princess.” It’s a bold decision to make, because audiences aren’t used to Hidden Princess in live-action anymore, and they’re not used to it in nominally-SF movies at all.

That’s what it is, though. You’ve got all the bits. You have ultra-rare critical-to-galatic-society unique-brutal-production-method High-Protein Liquid MacGuffin. You have old-school Dune-style space-opera politics-as-secret-warfare over the usual space-opera things, with betrayals! Everywhere! You have overflowing decadence, commentaries on exploitive economics, and massive disparities of wealth and power on an intergalactic scale, and set design Lynch would’ve killed to possess. And it’s a whole family of disturbing predilections and obsessions, as in, again, Dune.

You even have Eddie Redmayne channeling Sting’s shouty Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, only with a little more of a lid on it.

But not much of one

Meanwhile, instead of Chosen One tropes and fantasies, you get a huge bundle of Hidden Princess – the lost royal child, the family of commoners who know actual love vs. the royality who doesn’t, all of it.

Plus you get the bundle of heterosexual schoolgirl fantasy stuff that tends to go along with that trope. So… you’re found by a guy who is part wolf and has a tragic backstory you can’t be bothered to explain coherently because it doesn’t really matter because it’s different for you because it’s you (of course) and he has wings and he’s utterly devoted to you and has a great ass – did Tina Belcher write this part?

That’s just one example. And sure, it’s silly, just like a lot of the Chosen One tropes – Harry “Lightning Scar” Potter, I’m looking in your direction. But we take those tropes for granted, and run with them because they’re so common, they’re shorthand, and given meaning depending up on how well they’re done or not done. We don’t even call them “silly,” half the time; we call them “mythic” if we don’t just gloss over them entirely.

And when push comes to shove, that’s what I think did in Jupiter Ascending with critics; familiarity with “Chosen One” tropes, and the expectations thereof, but a lack of current familiarity with “Hidden Princess” in anything like this context.

Many, many people complained that the story made no sense, or was confusing. It’s not. It lacks narrative discipline, sure, but the primary flow is deeply linear – pedantically so at times. It only fails to make linear sense if you either try to force it into the Chosen One paradigm against all the actual storytelling on screen, or if you ignore everything women characters do as unimportant. (Every reviewer who referred to Black Widow as “eye candy not doing anything much” in the first Avengers film, I’m looking in your directions.)

But also explains why it did eventually find an audience. A subset of the viewing audience did pick up on the Hidden Princess tropes, and once you get that, it makes all kinds of sense.

Particularly once you realise it’s Hidden Princess Dune. Then, suddenly, it’s pretty neat.

I should schedule a critical-viewing double-feature at the Lair: Lynch’s Dune and the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. Seeing them in that close a proximity sounds neat to me, as a cinematic exercise. Maybe in the fall, once summer touring season is done.

Guess what finally showed up in the post:

I’m happy with the chrome instead of the black I’d originally wanted – I worried the chrome on the frame wouldn’t match that on the vehicle itself (because I have seen it in different colour temperatures) but yay, that worked out fine. ♥

Rehearsal today. Getting ready to head out for shows again soon. Yay!

So, as predictably as rain is wet, the Puppies have declared a boycott on Tor Books unless they get a swath of demands met, including apologies from Tor for true statements made by people who are not Tor employees. While the most famous of the white supremacists in the Puppy movement didn’t start it – this guy did – the oberpuppyführer has, of course, endorsed it. So has the Internet’s biggest Korrasami hater, and some others, too.

Anyway, the demands are ludicrous, but to summarise:

• Tor must publicly apologize for writings by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, Irene Gallo, and John Scalzi that “demonize, denigrate, slander and lie about the ‘Puppies’ campaigns”
• Tor must “publicly reprimand those individuals for stepping over the line”
• Tor must “publicly indicate that it is putting in place policies to prevent any recurrence of such issues.”

See, this is exactly what you get when you hang one of your own out to dry for making personal comments on their own Facebook page like Tor did. You get escalation. So I’m honestly having a hard time feeling sorry for Tor Books here; it was as predictable a piece of politics as one can imagine. And I’m not just saying that in retrospect; I said so at the time.

Now mind you, this “boycott” is pretty must sad-trumpet amateur hour for several reasons, not the least is probable inability to make visible economic impact. As Vox himself admitted, he hasn’t bought anything from Tor in years, and I doubt all that many of the others who are going to sign on to this thing have either. A few, sure, absolutely – with the hilarious side-effect that means the writers they might be able to hurt are the ones on their side.

But even were it all of them, I have to wonder – how small a pond do they think this is? As I’ve, again, written before, if you want an effective boycott, you need three things: 1) a specific and reachable goal, 2) the ability to have economic effect, and 3) a functional alternative to the thing you’re boycotting.

They don’t have these conditions met. They have maybe half a point on item one: there are stated demands. But the thing is, those demands are mostly stalking horses for greater goals, and the Puppies have already proven they will unilaterally escalate. Therefore, no one sensible should assume those demands will be stable here, either. Meet them, more will arise. It’s like Hydra.

Plus, and this should not be left unsaid, their demands are simply ludicrous. But moving on.

They have more than half a point on item three, the alternative – they have a mishmash of selfpub (which, as we know, is Real Publishing for Real Men Now, apparently) and small-press, particularly the Oberpuppyfurher’s small press. (“Shocked! Shocked to discover there might be economic motive to my political boycott!”) Plus, there are plenty of other publishing houses. So maybe a full point, but so much of their work is Campbell-reject shenanigans that I don’t think it really matters.

And most importantly, they have exactly fuck and all on item two. “Oh look, a few dozen people who hate us and don’t read what we publish are calling a boycott.” “‘K.” The whole “muzzle a whole fleet of people or we’ll ruin you” threat doesn’t have a lot of bite if you can’t pull it off. And their 10%-of-the-vote crowd simply can’t.

Sure, they managed to game the Hugo system with numbers that small, because nobody else was block voting; parties vs. no party always win. But that trick doesn’t work when everybody is throwing dollars around for things they actually want and there’s no shortlist to pack. It’s not the kind of closed environment where these tricks work.

Plus – and this is probably my favourite part of this particular fail – the political movement whose original rallying cry was “Heinlein couldn’t win a Hugo today” is now boycotting Robert Heinlein’s publisher.

I guess keeping him off the Hugo ballot this year just wasn’t enough. Man, they just must hate Heinlein.

So, in conclusion: doomed.

eta: Steven Savile on Facebook claims Puppy leader Torgersen told him this was all about exposure, and wasn’t ever about the Hugo awards, back at a Writers of the Future event. And lj:yamamanama reminds us that one of the boycott organisers threatened to sue them for… boycotting that organiser’s vanity-press publisher. Hilarity!
 

This part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

So here’s what the Second Doctor sonic screwdriver I built and carried around at Anglicon looks like on the inside. It took a few goes to come up with the best way to do things – or should I say, a functional way to do things – since everything had to fit in a 9mm diameter tube.

I took a few approaches, but eventually I went back to just using the original pen light’s switch – a spring which is compressed to close a very simple circuit, which used the metal housing itself as the return power conduit. So all the various elements ended up being shaped like short AA batteries, with power contacts at each end.

This involved occasionally making casts for new parts, to hold the active elements against each other. I made them out of epoxy glue, with forms made of various items, sometimes tape, but whatever was appropriate.

I ended up having to cut that form down a lot, after it was done, because it was too big. And I needed to keep some space from the other side of the speaker, so I built a spacer out of a wooden dowel, and glued it all together, then wrapped in heatshrink.

The rattle/buzzer is similar. Obviously it has to be longer, because the actual driver is an offset motor, the sort of thing used in phones. The big difficulty here was that there’s an actual physically-spinning offset piece, and I needed a way to allow that to be pushed down upon without jamming. The original piece was a bit of plastic on only one side of the spinning element, but that turned out to be inadequate, so I surrounded it with a wooden tube.

Plus of course in both cases the wiring had to be moved so there’d be positive on one end and negative on the other, so all these cast elements had wire grooves in them. Here’s one of those ends, nice and visible.

And so, I ended up with this totally modular thing which will let me swap out modules – even, say live – and have functionality change. I already know my next module, if I can make it work. It’ll be hard, given the tiny size, but it’ll be fun to try.

Here are two videos of the sonic in operation: Noises emphasised, Light effect emphasised. Even though it’s just an LED, I really like how the lighting works.

And stills:

Sonic, Idle

Sonic, Lit

Sonic, Light End

Screen Accurate

So, yeah! Second Doctor Sonic.

Minion Paul, watching a Pink Floyd concert ad on after Doctor Who: One has to wonder whether One Direction will be up there on stage when they’re all 60 years old.

Solarbird: No, there will be two One Directions, which is, of course, hilarious.

Minion Paul: That’s a really good point.

Solarbird: One with Zayn, one with everybody else.

Minion Paul: So I guess he’s the Roger Waters in this situation?

Solarbird: I guess so?