収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

PAX, DragonCon, Burning Man, Bumbershoot, Fan Expo, Faerieworlds, I don’t even know what else. And, of course, a bunch of people stayed home. Where were you?

I, of course, was at PAX, riding a dragon.

I also released a single. It’s one that’s super-personal for a lot of reasons, and I wrote a big post about it here which you should read because I think it’s the kind of thing that will mean a lot to a bunch of other people as well.

And, of course, you can go right on and play it right here, which you should do. It’s on Bandcamp and also on Soundcloud.

But PAX – wow, yeah. I didn’t intend to do all four days, but I did, and I’m glad I didn’t sell the extra passes. Totally worth it.

First, in a lot of ways, I figured out why it’s felt different the last few years, but still good. PAX got too big to be the “instantiate the internet” event it started out being years go, and, having now spread out over several blocks (all the way to the Westin!), it’s become a gaming-oriented theme park overlay for the city.

That’s a very different experience. But the thing is? I like theme parks. I had a great time. For example – I don’t give two figs about Magic: The Gathering but I loved tooling around the insanely-decorated Paramount. I liked that there was a VR-events hotel. I liked the teeming hoards of geeks up all night downtown, the sidewalks like party wing hotel corridors only not so cramped. I liked finding said afterparties, as well. It was epic.

And, the old parts are still there. I spent a fair amount of time in the handheld lounge and having people want to know where the hell this weird-ass handheld I was playing came from and how they could get one. POCKETCHIP YOU OWE ME. (I was mostly playing Celeste on it, which is kinda brutal. I’m 1km in so far. Hard game is hard.)

From a coming-games standpoint, VIVE did what Oculus Rift did not do, which is convince me that goggle VR has a place in computer gaming in the very near term. It’s kind of like – okay, things like the Virtual Boy and predecessors (which existed!) weren’t quite yet up to Pong. Kinect was maybe Advanced Pong. Oculus Rift made a big jump forward, and is kind of an, oh, maybe an Atari 2600 experience – fun to play with, but not fun to play.

Vive, though – yeah. Vive reaches the level of being actual fun. Look, here I am shootin’ a bazooka and throwing grenades at Nazis! Because fuck Nazis. Really, I wish they’d been doing the greenscreen for another game called Raw Data, because that was the most fun, because it was 100% I AM TRACER ONLY FOR REAL WITHIN VR. That was great.

And sure, it’s probably about the Commodore 64 / Atari 800 level of VR device, particularly since there are still controllers with buttons – even if they’re a lot less intrusive than, say a gamepad. But as we all know from history, Commodore 64 is Good Enough. Game ON.

Oh, what else. The Overwatch cosplay was thick, I shot every Overwatch cosplayer I could grab (which was not all I saw) and put a bunch of photos on Flickr.

I entered a lot of hardware raffles (like usual) but did not win (like usual). I played a hilariously stupid game called Gang Beasts which is technically a fighting game, but all of the characters are floppy plushies. I won one round by deciding I’d just go jogging around the outskirts of the arena instead of fighting and the other players all accidentally threw themselves off the edge of the world. VICTORY THROUGH JOGGING! And I scouted out a lot of hardware, like y’do, for when there’s money again and I can think about building a VR gaming PC.

Like y’want to, at least. 😀

Where were you, and was it fun? Play the new song while you’re telling me about it. It’s the kind of thing I think a lot of us are going to need heading into the rest of this year, and for now, hopefully, we’re all coming off a good long weekend. Time to get back to work.

we’re not friends, we’re not lovers, we’re not people you know
different clans, different colours, and a whole different flow
but i know that when i see you that it’s true even so
that the future has a place for me
and the future has a place for you
and the future has a place for both of us now

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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So, yeah! Back at the lair, back directly from Clallam Bay Comicon! The Party on the Peninsula, Donna’s Weird Little Comic Show, Clallam Fun Days Adjunct and excuse to go relax on the coast for a weekend. Call it what you will, we even made the sign this year:

In a small town, that’s a big deal

Leanne Franson, this year’s GoH in from Montreal, does not stop. She’s the only person I’ve met who can match Donna Barr one-on-one. I bought a bunch of her books. I also finally picked up the Stinz collections – both volumes – and Volume 2 of Winging It, which I’d somehow never read back in the day.

Aside from the usual stuff, CBCC is where I will run little experiments, in front of tiny audiences who are just kind of surprised you’re there at all, so extremely tolerant. TO WIT:

Experiment number one! Remember “USSR,” that YMCA-based Soviet Disco song I wrote in response to a challenge on Tumblr? Well, here’s me doing it live, karaoke-style. I’d embed, but I had to put it on Tumblr because YouTube doesn’t like you uploading Karaoke performances, even if you wrote your own lyrics.

The crowd at the show was quite good, as you can maybe hear in the camera microphone, until about halfway through the show when the sky – which had been threatening all day – really opened up and the rain got serious, at which point an outdoor concert is not the most fun thing ever invented and a lot of people ran off. (Hey, I was sheltered…)

Still, a good day for me – as was, honestly, the whole weekend. You don’t go to CBCC to make money, but damned if I didn’t. Not sure what to make of that.

Experiment number two! I’d gone with the intent of running a panel on building old-technology microphones, but I realised as I was packing that I could haul along enough gear for people to hear their own voices, and make recordings I could hand them via Dropbox.

So I set up at our table, with the carbon mic hooked up to my laptop, and let people go at it all weekend. This was surprisingly popular. Several people made recordings – even when not in use, the microphone remained an attention magnet. Here’s Donna Barr singing an old Ukranian (I think) folk song, trying specifically to sound like a performer from the 1910s or so.

Interestingly, everyone wanted to use the carbon mic, and not the crystal, though they were curious about how both worked.

Experiment number three! I can’t tell you about experiment number three, so instead, have a picture of this other bay that’s on the way there, but I’ve never stopped to visit until now. Very nice.

The Other Bay

Experiment number four! Very similar to experiment number one, except for being “Kaiju Meat” instead of “USSR” and being able to properly mic up for a Godzilla footwear bridge solo. YOU WANT SOME GIANT LIZARD PODORYTHMIE I HAVE SOME GIANT LIZARD PODORYTHMIE

From a technical standpoint, this worked far better than it had any right to. As a performance experience… I think I’ll hold it for when I have an actual live band behind me. Doing it solo… with “USSR,” it felt like the Karaokeness added to the silliness in good ways. In “Kaiju Meat,” the combination didn’t feel like it worked as well.

But the Godzilla Footware Solo is definitely staying in.

Experiment number five! Field recording, using the new windscreen I’d bought, the kind that looks like a tribble got stuck on the end of your microphone. Result: SMASHING SUCCESS. Despite a constant ocean breeze, I got very clean recordings of waves on the shore, and of birds in the foliage nearby. Best investment is best!

Not as many photos this time, but I did take a few. As always, larger at the Flickr feed.

Clallam Bay

The Makah are building a canoe fleet

I realised I haven’t taken many or any pictures of the actual Clallam River heading into the bay. So I fixed that.

Fisher Who?

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I was wrong – Rainbowcon does have a web page! And here it is. ^_^

My schedule today:

Kitting Out Cheap: How to build a home recording studio for as few moneys as possible. 3pm, Rainbow Room, I think? It’s easy to find us it’s a tiny con. 😀

Main Stage: Critiqued One-Shots. 5:30pm, Main Stage.

Decadent Dave Clement concert, Rainbowcon 1

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I went to ECCC as Shadowcat – Kitty Pryde of the early 1990s, when she was with the superhero group Excalibur – because I felt like being retro and also because reasons – and of course the first thing that happened is Lockheed stole one of my goddamn gloves, about which I was tweeting in character all day. I even had period money!

This era of Kitty Pryde is so old (and short-lived, really) that I wasn’t getting recognised until I started fistbumping other mutants. My favourite of that was running into Beast, I was all “yo, Hank!” and he reflexively returned the fistbump, and then was all, “…Kitty? KITTY PRYDE?! OH MY GOD” and it was awesome. XD

I also have like 750 photos that I collectively refer to as Shit Got Arty which were all taken when I accidentally phased a little into my phone. Phone doesn’t like that. At least I didn’t short the thing out completely. XD

Anyway, here are a few samples that I liked. There are lots more photos – including a bunch of group shots from the Marvel fan meet up on Saturday – On Flickr. Plus, of course, they’re larger. Enjoy!

Goddammit Lockheed!

Shadowcat, phasing. Wearing the glove Lockheed didn’t steal.

ALWAYS LOVE THE KYOSHI WARRIORS

This is what I’m going to do to that damn dragon if he doesn’t bring my glove back

Bill Cipher, interpreted, Gravity Falls

Shit Got Arty (538)

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Loading up for Norwescon – see you there in a few hours! First item on the agenda: “The Tumblr Effect” – 4-5pm, Cascade 9. HI TUMBLR!

The rest of my schedule is here.

Raptor 312 – launch!

eta: If you’re new here and into fan music, enjoy some of our free downloads, including two new 2016 tracks: The Blue Morpho and Thirteen.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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We took off north for Maillardville and Festival du Bois, having missed it last year, partly because Anna loves Quebec traditional music, partly because I just like festivals, and partly just to blow this joint.

Let’s be honest: when the supervillain thinks the crazy is getting a bit thick? The crazy is getting a bit thick.

On the way, thanks to the Elfquest fandom revival as of late, I finally got Anna to take a picture of this street sign near the festival that I’ve been meaning to shoot every time I’ve been by it:

If this means nothing to you, that’s okay, the Elfquest fans will like it

We didn’t really have goals – there were bands Anna wanted to see, but mostly I just like the show, by which I mean the festival. I like festivals, particularly ones that are in that little sweet spot of busy and energetic without being swarmed by too many people for the space.

We did play for several hours on Saturday – a few during the day as sessioneers, then another couple at the afterparty in the musician hotel.

2016 Session Musician Pin, Festival du Bois, Maillardville, Coquitlam

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a French traditional music player, I don’t know any of it, and I’m mostly there on Anna’s coattails. But I’d had the sense to bring along my mandolin – which in this environment is very quiet – so I could fake it about half the time, only getting loud when I’d figured out what I should be doing. Plus I was surprised to discover that in fact I did know one or two of these, so that was a nice discovery.

That didn’t stop me from hiding under the table during the evening jam. I was playin’! I was just playing very quietly as I tried to pick these things up. 😀

I think of the performances we saw, MAZ – an EDM-traditional fusion band with some jazz influence – was the most surprising. I like how they are reinterpreting this music. Réveillons was fun too – Richard Forest showed up a lot at the sessions, as did Lisa Ornstein. And I met a really nice new fiddler there too – Jocelyn Pettit. She’s got an album! And, of course, Anna’s large session crowd.

We also brought up a bunch of East-Coast Girl Scout Cookies that our friend Angela had bought, making us her COOKIE MULES.

Then on the way back, this happened:

What Could Lay Behind This Innocent-Looking Cookie Box?

NO ONE WOULD EVER SUSPECT

If this was 1923 and Victory Boulevard was still the only improved road north from Seattle we would be on this shit. COOKIES NORTH! CIDER SOUTH!

(fructose and ethanol)

I need a smuggler accent. I keep trying to go into pirate. That really doesn’t work.

Anyway, that was fun, and if you’re in BC, or close enough, you should go to Festival du Bois next year. It’s small but everybody’s relaxed and happy and they have maple ice candy, which is fantastic.

Which reminds me, actually, that was one of the little fun highlights, because there’s part of making that candy which involves smacking beds of crushed ice with a paddle, and that’s loud, and we were right next to them, so they would work in time with our playing, just like they would’ve and should’ve, since some of these were also work songs. It was one of those yes this this is right moments where small things fall together to make a moment of nice.

And that’s really what I kind of needed.

eta: Anna has a bunch of photos on her writeup over here.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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First, a surprise: the new single! I did it for this con, and it’s a cover of sorts that I turned into a Doctor Who song.

So, yesterday I talked about film. I have my answer, and the experiment with the fisheye lens film camera did not work out so well. 1600-speed film pushed two stops and, well, you’ll see below how dark and grainy the best of them were. I’ll give it one more try (pushing this film as far as it’ll go) and we’ll see. Fingers crossed.

Friday: Not as Fishy As Hoped

Anna and I got to Conflikt pretty early – we had a lot to haul, and the band had final run-through rehearsal at 2pm, a space for which the concom was kind enough to let us reserve in advance.

That went pretty well, so we also had time to get together with GoHs TJ and Mitchell Burnside-Clapp to do a runthrough of our very muppety opening ceremonies skit, which included one of those random semi-nonsensical songs of the sort they used to do on The Muppet Show back in Ye Daye. (It’s called “Magnetic Penguins.”)

So that was a revival of an older form. We knew very few people would get was that Mitchell Clapp here was reviving a character from a Long Fucking Time Ago in the spoken-skit parts of it, but our small test audiences laughed without knowing that, so we figured that’d be fine anyway. And TJ does a good Gonzo, so we knew people would read that part for sure.

Opening ceremonies had a few technical difficulties, which would presage the greater technical difficulties during the show. Still, I’m pretty good at stretching to fill time when needed, and people seemed to like Jeri Lynn’s and Shanti’s improv puppetry in front of the ice-cube background during the “Magnetic Penguins” song.

Then Betsy Tinney had her show, which was great as always, and I played an awfully-nwcMUSIC-like MC, followed by our concert!

Here’s a shot from the stage while I was walking on. This is the kind of thing I want to do with this dumb fisheye lens camera – but honestly, I’m pretty doubtful it’s going to work indoors. Which is a shame, it’s fun to play with, but wow, yeah, film. Film is terrible once you have better.

So Dark and Grainy

The tech issues from opening ceremonies got a lot worse during our show. (Screaming bursts of noise, some of which may’ve been related to RF interference in their gear; no vocals and missing instruments in the monitors, little or no electric guitar in the house mix apparently – really everything that could fall apart did.)

Still, we struggled through, and a lot of people made a point of coming to me and saying that despite the tech issues, our performance was good, and we sounded good in the room. (We didn’t sound so great on the livestream, though, which seemed to be mostly missing CD’s electric guitar, and had a lot of sync issues – I’m hoping to get the raw stems and remix them into a salvageable video.)

People told me they particularly liked “Supervillain For I Love You,” “Thirteen,” and “We’re Not Friends,” all of which are new, which is great.

“We’re Not Friends,” in particular…

I haven’t been talking about that one. I came up with the chorus months ago and had a few failed runs at writing it – those are lyrics which will never see the light of day – but it fell together over the last few weeks. So I took it to my band two weeks before the show and said, “This is brand new. We’re doing it. We are in fact closing with it.” Then I kept making changes to it as we went, because if you’re going to swing for the fences, you should just do that, right?

And the good news is, that worked. We got the crowd to sing along with a song they’d never heard, which was pretty neat to watch and hear, and a few people talked about it affecting them afterwards – ’cause, the thing is, this song is really important and personal to me, but, for a change, in ways other people really get. I’m not going to talk about why here, because it’s long, but – it resonated.

Saturday

Judging the songwriting contest with TJ and Mitchell and Jackie Mitchell (the Interfilk guest; no relation) got the day off to a good start. All the entries were pretty strong, though three did elevate themselves a level up from the rest. And while we did have a consensus on the winner – a song about the “evil” twins in “good/evil” sibling pairs explaining they do things that need to be done – it was close. It came down, really, to the winning song being the one most transportable outside the stated theme of the contest.

After that – running the “Twofers” open mic, running The Dara Show version of Kitting Out Cheap, etc – it was kind of like being back running nwcMUSIC, only with less anxiety. MCing that was always one of the best parts, for me, so more of that? Can do, sport!

I met and talked for a while with a guy named Sean who came to the studio-building panel. He works at Microsoft and has access to one of those ultra-quiet rooms. I asked him if he could get me a tour! I don’t think it’ll happen, but I can hope.

Then, lots more concerts. This actually is the best of the concert photos – everything else came out even lower-contrast:

Later, I also ran into Murray Porath, which was very odd, and was another person I know of through other people rather than knowing directly, until now.

Apparently he’s moved out here, I guess we’ll be seeing more of him! I didn’t get a chance to find out entirely what that was about, but he has a bunch of funny lawyer stories, including a Kentucky county denying some sort of fortune-teller a business license on the basis that they decided she was a witch and casting spells on people. Yes, a fundamentalist revival preacher was involved.

Conflikt’s concert hall also has a big area in the back with tables and craft supplies, so I took a picture of that from overhead. Other than the window, it’s probably the best shot I actually got:

Open Filk ran quite late each night – I don’t know how late on Friday and Saturday, since I had duties the following mornings so didn’t burn too much oil. Sunday night’s smoked salmon ran until around 2am, and given that it’s usually the earliest of the lot to close down, we can probably assume the others ran later.

Sunday

I never go to convention banquets, because the cliche about rubber chicken… well, frankly, it’s true. They’re cash-cows for hotels and that’s why hotels like cons to have them. But this time it was part of my job, so I did!

Sadly the best shot I got with Mitchell

It’s not just a lunch, in this case – you’re also writing a song, collaborating with your table, and using two words or concepts handed around at random. Ours were “awesomesauce” and “perspective,” and our table came up with two songs – one I just wrote, another that I helped with. That was a lot of fun.

Here’s mine, it’s very vaudeville – I was by the gods going to stay in theme throughout, if I could:

The Awesome Sauce Song

Apparently I also bellow like a drill sergeant, because my call for people to get their acts (literally) together for the Band Scramble got the attention of the whole crowd without a PA, because YEAH I CAN YELL PRETTY GOOD IF I WANT.

Oh, and the Sunday afternoon jam – I had an idea where I’d bring a whiteboard and a giant wet-erase marker to write out chords, so people could actually join in on an actual jam more easily, as opposed to it just being another filk circle. It seemed to help, we had really good participation – better than I’ve usually seen, I think.

So – yeah! I guess that’s pretty much it! Thanks to Jen and Beth and Jeri Lynn and Jeffrey and everybody on the concom who invited me. I hope everybody had a good time, and don’t forget the new single!

ps: And also, thanks go out to Tom of the Lundervillains – we traded certain device components on Saturday, and frankly, he was doing me a favour. Muah ha ha. 😀

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I have a couple of possible people, but I’m looking for more (and people who are sure):

If you’re going to be at Conflikt on Friday evening, and are coming to my Toastmuppet concert, and want to be involved in something that is part of the show but does not require getting up on stage – talk to me.

I’m also looking for someone who can deliver one to two lines from off-stage during opening ceremonies.

The Muppet Show and/or Legend of Korra fandom helps, but is not required.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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It’d been so long since I’d been to Orycon that it was basically my first Orycon kind of all over again. And a con other than VCON that I wasn’t working! How strange!

They were in a new old hotel, and we were in a very strange room down past what appeared to be the end of the hallway, down a second, very narrow hallway that did not look like it was supposed to go anywhere. (Seriously, it was some single-file-only narrow.) Our room started then with a very narrow rectangle, one long side of which became the hypotenuse for three sequentially larger and overlapping right triangles. This sounds terrible, but it actually wasn’t; it was kind of neat and certainly more visually interesting than most hotel rooms.

But nobody’s here for architecture. So, oh, what happened that I didn’t talk about in the weekend post? Well, I got into a band scramble with Callie from Echo’s Children, Chris Waffle from Going Viral (who had a great set on Sunday morning that not enough people attended – your loss, folks) and Andrew Ross, a well-liked solo performer in filk. The PDX Broadsides also put on a killer show – really, I didn’t see a bad performance out of anybody, everyone seemed pretty on point.

The party scene at Orycon isn’t bad at all – they have a nice balance of sizes. The Westercon party’s entry stamp was the largest I’ve ever seen, a minotaur that was over 10cm long and looked like it was taking over half my forearm. Fortunately, the Radcon party had a choice of stamps, including a top hat, so I had them give my arm minotaur a dapper chapeau. I’m almost disappointed the ink was water-soluable; I didn’t think to photograph it before it got damaged.

I also found high ground at the NIWA party – which at the time, I found unreasonably entertaining – all while staying on what architecturally my brain decided was all part of an excessively extended patio. (Because until I started heading upwards at the end, it was all on more or less the same level, connected by skybridges, so therefore: same patio. Two different buildings across three different blocks, whatever: same patio.)

Sniper Bitch Instincts: Engaged

Sunday continued to be pretty loopy and we ended up in some long conversations with people we’d never met personally before, including one of Anna’s favourite writers (and both Orycon and this coming Norwescon’s Writer GoH) Tanya Huff, talking about substantially about music festivals of Quebec and Atlantic Canada and guitar strings. I ratted out Anna’s elevator squee to her, of course.

It’s not 10pm post-dead-dog arguments in a hallway about FM broadcast standards in television signals, but it’s pretty close.

Anna and Tanya Huff, trying to keep each other vertical

Anyway, all in all, a successful and fun convention. Played a bunch, sold stuff, had a good time. Next up here is Second Thanksgiving, on Thursday, so posting will probably get a little sparse. It can take a little while to remind all the Henchies about being thankful they are still alive, but eventually, even they get it.

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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I haven’t been posting much about nwcMUSIC’s need for new personnel this year, and that’s because they had people! And they still have some people, but the Concerts Director had to step away due to work and oncoming new child.

So they need a new one, and they need them now! As I’ve said before, I will help you. I will meet with you, I will infodump like a madwoman on you, I will introduce you around.

It fun and it’s also kind of a glamour position in that you get to work with all the bands and even be MC if you want to, which is awesome, or you can pick an MC to do it for you and just sit back and watch them work.

Please, if you’ve given this any thought, this upheaval has left them short, and they really need someone to step in. Here’s the news post about it – and if it’s not for you, please, please pass it along!

Looking for the Grammy Awards Long List nominee post? Thank you for listening, and for your consideration.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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