Petition to save St. James / The Rogue

There’s now a petition to help save St. James and The Rogue, a critically important venue in Vancouver. Go sign it:

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/save-st-james-community-square

If you don’t know what this is about, see yesterday’s post, here.

Another hugely important venue about to vanish?

Is The Rogue in Vancouver about to disappear? I just got mail last night from the operators, sent out to everyone on their mailing list, saying that apparently there’s about to be a surprise sale of St. James Community Square. That will be followed by demolition and redevelopment – starting in as little as two months.

This is a hugely important venue for the entire lower mainland/greater Vancouver folk scene, and to a smaller degree, the Seattle and Victoria scenes as well. They even bring in people from the Maritimes and Quebec. If you have any fucks in your fields to give for this, now is the time to give them.

Save Saint James Community Square
Under Threat of Re-Development
Help us purchase it from the United Church

We need your support right now to save this building from the wrecking ball!

Come to the show [yesterday] and sign the petition.

Call St. James Community Square on 604-739-9373 in the morning.

Write letters of support. Pledge donations. Tell your friends. Heck, tell everyone about this!

Email infosjcommunitysquare.org
or roguefolktelus.net

This sale could happen within two months if you / we don’t act NOW.

Anna and I have already pledged support. There’s no online version of the petition that I can find yet, though they have posted an alert to the official blog – basically what I pasted in above.

Hopefully there will be more word and more specifics soon. Until then – send email and sign up to mobilise!

no, gamergate misogyny is not even a little over

You think GamerGate misogyny has gone away? Oh hell to the no. After Brianna Wu cancelled her company exhibit at PAX East over threats of violence and concerns about inadequate security – remember, there have now been actual attempts to kill women over this – she went personally, herself, to appear on a panel about censorship. And this happened:

Of course, the GamerGate response is to launch a Fear, Uncertainty, and… oh, we’ll say Denial (“shitpost”) operation:

eta: Brianna Wu responds:

Tycho, Gabe? The ball’s in your court. This guy needs to be banned from all PAX events, everywhere. Forever.

eta2 on Monday: Brianna appears to be satisfied with how it was handled. Good.

 
 

This is part of a large collection of posts on sexism and racism in geek culture.
An index page for the collection may be found here.

still sick

Still sick. Missing a show today. Sadness!

But on the other hand, Turtle-Duck Date Night happened last night, and it took about five hours before the news coverage, between which time the Korrsami fandom exploded like it was December all over again and everything is happiness and roses.

Also the odds are still real good of winning Bone Walker and the books over at Dark Side of the Glass. This is your last opportunity to enter so you’d best go do it. Entering is really easy and, as I mentioned before, right now, the odds are good.

Y’know this whole “sick” thing reminds me of why I never do this “sick” thing. Note to self: no future sickness. And write it down this time, goddammit.

taking it easy for a couple of days

I’ve got some sort of head cold or something – I’m basically about as sick as I ever get (sore throat, coughing, sleepy, a little headachy) so, yeah. Not so much online at the moment.

But don’t forget to enter the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker giveaway. Entry deadline is midnight, March 8th, so you’ve got a few days still.

So, yeah. Back when I’m feeling a little less blicky.

a busy week for media

Hey, know how Anna and I are on the Seattle Geekly podcast this week? Well, here’s a followup; Dark Side of the Glass went live with their interview with me today. Actually they did it yesterday, but close enough. It’s a media explosion! Or possibly only a media perturbation, but category spicy.

Dark Side of the Glass are the same people running that Faerie Blood and Bone Walker giveaway. This coming week is the end of the entry period, so go get your entry in now – the odds of winning are pretty good at the moment, so it’s worth your while.

Do the thing!

anna and I are on Seattle Geekly

Hey, Anna and I are on the final episode – for now, anyway – of the Seattle Geekly podcast. We talked about Norwescon 2015 and Anna’s books and the new album and making characters lives more complicated and all that fun sort of stuff.

It’s sad that it’s the final episode, but it’s still a good one. And they play bits of Kitsune at War and Anarchy Now! Shannon has read and really liked both of the Free Court of Seattle books, calling them some of her favourite new discoveries in urban fantasy, and she made some very flattering author comparisons.

We actually went over to the Geekery last weekend for this – Anna tweeted about it at the time. They have a nice little studio setup, it was like being back in an actual little radio station. (I worked in professional radio during graduate school, part time. It was fun.) If I ever did a podcast again, I’d totally want a table setup like they have – it sounds really weird to say that you sit on the corners but it works, but it does. And when not in use it all collapses into a (rather large, but still much smaller) cube.

Also, I like their cats.

So, anyway, yeah! Go give it a listen!

it's official: bone walker has already…

Whelp, it’s official: Bone Walker has now outsold all other work combined on Bandcamp.

I was going to post today that we were really close to doing that, that Bone Walker was going to outsell everything else its first month of release, but then I didn’t even have time and it’s already happened! So thanks to all of you who’ve bought it, and if you haven’t, go give it a listen already.

And then last night The Dead Kennedys linked to the band blog from their facebook page (no, really), which is pretty much in my top ten of “things I never anticipated saying.” That was kind of neat by itself, and then I was all, “Wait, this means the Dead Kennedys have heard of me” and wow that is also not a thing I expected to happen. Thanks, whoever did that!

Oh, and last Sunday, Anna and I went out to the Seattle Geekly studios and recorded an interview for their last podcast. That might go up tomorrow, I think. Fun!

Anyway, so, yeah! Exciting week!

seriously though this lenovo/superfish thing is bad

If you’ve missed it: Lenovo have been shipping pre-installed crapware that is basically an insta-rootkit on all their machines for over a year. It’s called Superfish, and it’s partly an image search tool, but it’s really about ad-insertion – it sticks Superfish-placed ads onto other peoples’ webpages.

And hey, guess what? Turns out it also sticks a broken SSL certificate in your machine and the password is publicly known and anyone an p0wn your machine at any time even if you uninstall their crapware. It is literally worse than Sony’s infamous CD rootkits and active exploits are circulating now.

Seriously, this is incredibly bad. Their current removal tool doesn’t even fix the problem, tho’ they’re promising one that does. But given how they’ve behaved so far (best summed by “eh, fukkit, and fuck you, losers”), I don’t expect any new one to work either and most certainly would not trust it.

So if you have a Lenovo machine that shipped with Windows in the last couple of years, you probably need to level it and install another OS – a direct-from-Microsoft copy of Windows would be fine, of course. If you’ve installed Superfish for some reason, well, same notation. It’s that bad, and yes, I really mean it.

Lenovo should go down over this. They won’t, but they should. Superfish needs to be sued out of existence. That might actually happen. It’d be nice, anyway. But they’ll probably just change their name and carry on.

nwcMUSIC Sneak Preview

YES IT IS FINALLY TIME! It’s the 2015 nwcMUSIC Sneak Preview grid!

It’s a little difficult to schedule things this year, and the 10,000lb gorilla in the room is of course George R. R. Martin, and everyone has had to move around a bit. But I think we’ve come out well, on the whole.

Also, the graphic is wide this year, because reasons. Regardless, here we are!


Clicking makes bigger

Possibly the strangest thing we’re dealing with this year is the cojoining of Cascadia’s Got Talent! and the Norwescon Masquerade; Special Events asked us to be their halftime show, and we’ve agreed. And to think just two years ago we were still in exile up in the Salon.

I’m particularly hoping people come out for Kadesh Flow’s show on Saturday. He’s coming all the way out here from St. Louis, so nerdcore crew, MAKE YOUR APPEARANCE! He’s really good, and you should go listen to his stuff.

We also have our first Cypher. We were only able to wodge in an hour for it, which is too bad, but we’re glad to be hosting it, and I hope it comes together. For those who don’t know, a cypher is basically a nerdcore filkcircle, and this one is a demonstration/instructional version, and it’s our experimental effort this year. I hope people like it.

Anyway, that’s your sneak preview. See you at Norwescon? I hope so!

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The Music

THE NEW SINGLE