solarbird | Entries tagged with fail

Wow. Just watched last week’s Doctor Who, the one on the moon. This show has descended into utter incoherence so steadily I never even noticed when Aquaman showed up.

Thing is, I didn’t like Superfriends as an animated kids show. I don’t like it any more now that it’s called Doctor Who. I don’t expect hard science, I know it’s science fantasy, but I do expect better than Superfriends Logic. And upon getting to that point, I am done.

Ring me up when Moffat’s gone. If the show survives that long, I might come back. Then again… I dunno. I walked out on this one as the space dragon that the moon turned into laid a replacement moon egg, and wow, do I not have any fucks to give anymore. I can’t even work up being insulted. I’m just done.

eta: Anna stayed through to the end.

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Current Mood: bored

Dashcon, billing itself as the first large convention of Tumblr users, is apparently a major drama emitter today, with hotel contract issues, reports of a request for $17,000 in donations, further reports that got dropped onto the hotel's paypal(?!) and general gnashing of teeth and wailing.

If half these reports are true, I haven't seen a convention meltdown this bad since graduate school, when a first-time con invited Anne McCaffrey but booked a hotel in Kentucky during sportsball playoffs and ended up in de facto a turf war with what later became known as the Clay County Basketball Berserkers after their team lost.

Current Mood: confused

Unsurprising discovery of the week, nr. 1: people really like posts about glowy things. I cannot blame you.

When I mentioned this elsewhere on the net, Fishy replied that eventually the entire world will look like Burning Man at night. I can’t really argue with that, with the possible exception of less fire. Or more fire. Hard to say.

Unsurprising discovery of the day, nr. 2: I should not have been trying to do timing edits while recovering from eye surgery. Past me did not save current-me any time by pressing on while medicated. Sedated me had a… questionable sense of rhythm, apparently.

The biggest fallout from #2 is not realising it was happening until I nailed duplicating the iffy timing on mandolin. I thought it seemed funny at the time, but the mandolin part for this song (Song for a Free Court/Anarchy Now) is actually quite difficult, so I thought it was just me struggling with what I’d written. But no. So I got to fix it twice yesterday.

Not helping matters: apparently when I do this live I… kinda slip in a couple of 5/4 measures and slide the note timing around to make it work. It’s as if I was just slowing down for part, but I land right back on the original beat when I hit the verse, just at a different point in the measure count, so I don’t think that’s it.

Either that or I’m just slowing down and speeding back up very precisely, even when sedated.^*

That’s not going to happen in the studio version, and that’s a little weird to my ear right now. So, twice the work, half the fun, but fortunately, all of the awesome. It sounds really good now.

Whelp, rehearsal time. Catching a train down to Oregon tomorrow for six shows subbing for various members of Leannan Sidhe, and today is final rehearsal. Anybody gonna be in Toledo this weekend?

*: Given my history of successful! hax0ring while anaesthetised, paranoid, and hallucinating, a thing which I am not making up and can in fact prove happened, this does not surprise me.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come check out our music at:
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Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Sparks Nevada, Marshall on MARS! (Opening theme)

Remember all those rounds of Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) racist and sexist pratfail in 2013?

Well, now that SFWA is trying to clean up its act, here comes the pushback, with a petition against “political correctness” and violations of the First Amendment by… applying editorial control to its own publication.

A publication which is, by the way, supposed to be the official house organ of this supposedly professional writer’s organisation, and not the fanzine of a moderately horrible Old Phart Phan.

These things are inevitable, but man, is it still embarrassing. Not because it’s happening – that’s inevitable; old-school holders of racial and gender entitlement will generally push back at any perceived loss of that entitlement. It’s a turf war. That’s only to be expected.

No, it’s embarrassing because of some of the signatories. Many of them are the sorts you’d expect, but some of them aren’t, and in them, I am disappointed, for multiple reasons.

First, the idea. The confusion of “what we want in our trade publication” and the mere idea of editing with censorship, in people who are old enough to know better.

Second, the damn thing leads off with “political correctness.” Anybody who starts with this line has no goddamn facts. To steal a line, “political correctness” is a dog-whistle for resentment about feeling pressured to treat people decently.

Finally, look at this thing. Content aside, this came from a professional writer? This sprawling slurry of rambling resentment apparently formatted by a hyperkinetic hamster who has no comprehension of punctuation and an unsettling attraction to the spacebar?

As someone who has pulled $1.50 a word writing, albeit technical writing, I am appalled on that basis alone.

Honestly, how many faces can one hand palm, anyway?

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Current Mood: annoyed

I got up into the attic above my studio this weekend, because I have this leftover rock wool sound insulation, and wanted to see whether I could further dampen the occasional airplane noise that makes it through everything.

I’ve never lived in a new-construction house before. This thing was built in 1998-2000. (Why such a wide date range? Because this.) I’ve always lived in old buildings. Attics are dark spaces with 2×12 joists and random boards lying about and forgotten storage and knob and tube writing (sometimes just remnants) and hopefully bare-bulb light-fixtures and places where they took out the pull-down staircase and probably spiders and possibly livestock and almost certainly not ghosts.

This attic? Basically, this attic has no goddamn floor at all. Turns out the top floor ceiling is just wallboard held up by 2x4s, which are in turn hidden and drowning in an ocean of blow-in insulation. And while blow-in insulation is awesome – I’m all for insulation – having literally no visible places to step is not awesome. It’s like the end of the world in Skyrim. LOL NO FLOOR ANYMORE HAVE FUN WITH THE OCEAN.

I’m not walking around up there, much less putting in rock wool. And while, okay, 2x4s, they can hold up wallboard, and hopefully me at least briefly, and hopefully all that blow-in insulation but I’m not convinced, I’m mostly in the category of whose idea is this?! Can wallboard ceilings hold up rock wool? I would think so, but I don’t even know! Hell, I’m not even enamoured of it holding up that much blow-in thermal insulation because that is a lot of insulation up there.

Basically what I’m saying is that compared to what I’m used to, this attic “floor” is made up of assurances which are made up of lies. So I’m not remotely surprised I hear airplanes through it.

What do I do here? Continue to live with it? I mean, it’s only occasional, and it’s at -60db when I do hear it at my normal recording levels, so even if it happens during recording it’s not that big a deal. Do I tack up another layer of wallboard to absorb low-frequency airplane noise, maybe on floaters of some kind? Do I make rock wool pillows and hang them from the existing ceiling and try to compensate for the brightness loss by taking out other baffles? Will this all literally come tumbling down on my head if I do any of it?

I’ve no idea. And really, I suppose it’s not that important. But it tasks me. It does, it does.

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Current Mood: frustrated
Current Music: Up Up Up | Fun.

Agents of SHIELD has made its way into the category of “current good” in my band’s mythos, and I am, as they say, disappoint. That sounds contradictory, but it’s not; let me explain.

Core Crime and the Forces of Evil mythos is that we were superheroes who lost a war to our world’s supervillains. In a universe with superheroes, that means villainy triumphant gets to decide what’s right and good; the victorious villains become the new super-heroes.

This isn’t some cosmic event, it’s not even magic; as a rule, humans basically go along with whoever is in charge. Once the supervillains have the power, well, there y’go. And if you don’t go along – well, somebody has to be the new super-villains, don’t they? Good, evil, whatever – we’re just the supervillain enemies of the new order.

SHIELD, now – SHIELD has long been a clandestine secrecy, surveillance, and enforcement organisation that is above the common law. There are laws they follow, apparently, but these, too, are secret. SHIELD threatens and intimidates and disappears people and things that We Aren’t Meant to Know, and are sole and unaccountable deciders of these matters.

At least, if you lack the money and power to prevent it, like, say, Mr. Stark.

And all that’s fine; you have evil and intrinsically corrupt organisations all the time. But the show appears to expect us to be on their side. They are the paradigm. Oh, they get their hands a bit dirty, but who doesn’t?

Why don’t we take a look at that?

With “The Girl in the Flower Dress,” what do we have? (Spoilers, ahoy…)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: something by Lou Reed

I haven’t, for a long while, given much of a rat’s ass about the Olympic Games. But now that the IOC has ordered GBLT athletes to stay silent about Russia’s anti-gay pogrom that extends even to them, and the Americans are telling their team to comply(!) with the Russian anti-LBGT laws, I now do care.

I am now actively against the entire project. Don’t move the Olympics; cancel them.

It won’t happen, of course. The very idea is ludicrous. Despite its redeeming elements, it’s always been deeply corrupt and frankly kind of horrible as soon as you scratch the surface. And god damn, if this is how they’re gonna roll? To hell with the whole project. Burn it down and start over.

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Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: only when you leave | spandau ballet

James Nicoll reports on his blog that Orson Scott Card has declared marriage equality ‘moot’ and asks for ‘tolerance’ from ‘victors’ – oh, and please don’t boycott his movie. Bleeding Cool asks whether it’s enough.

No. It’s not. Honestly, I’m shaking a little with rage. That stinking S.O.B., whose legions and allies both active and advantageous have worked throughout my entire life to make me a non-person, who has advocated that I should be illegal and in jail and worked towards that goal, whose nationally-organised well-funded partners have actively persecuted me my entire life… who’ve harassed me, who’ve sent anonymous rape and death threats, who’ve assaulted me, sent me to hospital… I’ve sidetracked career, I’ve sidelined huge chunks of my life, I’ve spent – as they used to say – blood and treasure in fighting off these bastards… and knowing full well that they’d make me a nonperson again in a heartbeat if they could…

…the most we get out of this duplicitous steaming bile is “moot”ness and a request for “tolerance” (and don’t boycott my movie)?

Seriously?

Fuck you, Orson. Fuck. You.

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