About 2.5 years ago - centuries in internet-time, really - a "Draw Supergirl" meme went around LJ and elsewhere. I just discovered it, following this NPR story about Supergirl's costume. Which led to this article - http://www.girl-wonder.org/supergirl/pop/costumes1.htm - and ultimately to Dean Trippe's LJ post where he linked to gobs of "Draw Supergirl" fan art.
Much of it is... well... fan art. But there's some really good stuff in there.
But it was this one that particularly caught my eye.
http://odditycollector.livejournal.com/135541.html
I keep going back to look at it. It makes me happy. She's the best Supergirl ever.
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I overslept on Saturday at Nearfest. As a result, I missed this band. They were on first thing in the AM. When I managed to drag myself in, everyone was raving about them. "The program said they were Avant Gard, and I didn't think I'd like them, but they were amazing!"
They had a video of them live playing on their merch table, and I ended up buying their compilation disk...
...and discovered that I needed to see these people.
They played at the North Star Bar in Philly on Monday night, and at Mojo 13 in wilmington tonight, which is where I saw them. They'll be in Washington the next 2 nights, and then in Baltimore on Saturday.
IF YOU CAN GET OUT THERE TO SEE THEM, DO SO! Who knows when they'll next be in the US? This year they went through work-visa hell because of nearfest, but barring a big festival, a US tour is perhaps more difficult than it is worth.
How to describe them? Well, that's the difficult part. Sometimes they sound like latin flavored jazz fusion. Sometimes they are reminiscent of Frippertronics, or mexican folk music, or the Lounge Lizards. And sometimes they throw themselves into heavy, King Crimson-like driving cacophony. They flow between these things effortlessly.
The band is:
Mauricio Sotelo - Chapman Stick, Oud, 12 string guitar, and some sort of weird creation instrument that looks somewhat like the prow of a ship. It's got 3 strings and is made of metal, and is played by bowing, strumming, plucking, tapping on the side (which gets a cool steel drum sort of sound), and banging the snot out of it with a drum stick. The Chapman Stick he played in the standard tapping style, but then also would strum, pluck or slap the thing.
Francisco Sotelo - drums and percussion. Sometimes he'd be playing the drums, the bass line and a keyboard part, all using the drum pads.
Ramses Luna - Saxes and Wind Synth
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So. Nearfest.
Wow.
Gordon and I have been going to a prog festival every year for the past 4 years now. And typically, while I enjoy good prog, and some of my favorite artists of all time are prog bands, I'm not really a prog-head. I can't really tell you which kraut-rock band influenced which Italian symphonic band in which way at what time, or even name more than a half a handful. So generally by the time the middle of the second day comes around, I'm pretty progged out and want nothing more than to put on some B-52s or something like that.
This weekend was something special. It opened with Van der Graaf Generator.
( Read more... )
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Quite frankly, it's terrifying.
My book, The Evil Gazebo, has been accepted for publication.
Now it's all about numbers and details and contracts and such. I'll give you more news as I have it.
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What should Neil have said? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17213-competition-win-a-piece-of-moon-rock.html
Win a piece of the moon by coming up with something better. "Can you hear me now?" comes to mind.
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http://dudeism.com/index.html - The Church of the Latter Day Dude
(Ironically, right about the time ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) westlinwind was posting a link to this on Facebook, I was learning how to make a White Russian.)
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http://www.hiddencityphila.org/home - This is still going on, for folks who have interest.
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http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?pi=1002028360 - This very well may be worth the road trip... journey to the land where Union soldiers got whupped. By dinosaurs.
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http://www.starshipsofa.com/20090402/aural-delights-no-72-nebula-nominee-kij-johnson/ - Kij Johnson's amazing story, 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.
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A while back, when the iphone first came out - a couple years now, I guess - my boss bought a couple of the things and I ended up with one of them. Of course, the caller ID has his name on it - not the company name or anything useful - and I've been unable to get AT&T to change it.
So, maybe a year ago, I cracked the screen. I had been helping my ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend move her out of her and her husband's house - I called it karma. I put packing tape over it, and it held up okay. But my boss had just upgraded to the new improved version, and he gave me his 1st gen phone. But he'd pulled the sim card - and the sim card carrier. I tried swapping over to the new phone, but it wouldn't take. Tried dealing with it online. Fail. Tried calling support. They wouldn't talk to me because I wasn't my boss. Talked to the folks at the AT&T store. That was a useless exercise. I gave up, and stuck to the broken phone.
Time passed. I didn't really mind having a broken phone - the karma story tended to make people blink a couple times.
And then Saturday I managed to leave the phone at the dojo, after the Live Steel grapple-fest. I was too exhausted to think clearly when I was getting all my bits and pieces together. I tried to get back in, but banging on the door just set the dog barking. I made phone calls from the payphone at the corner, and finally went home. It was looking like I'd not be able to get my phone back until Monday night.
So I decided it was time to call this one lost and get the new one working. Having exhausted other avenues already, I set up an appointment with the genius bar at the apple store. They couldn't help me right off - they'd have to order me a sim card carrier. They didn't know how long it would take to come in, but probably sometime next week. Then, I'd need to go to the AT&T store and get a new sim card. Then, presumably, I'd have to call AT&T support and impersonate my boss to get it activated.
Or, I could buy a new 3G iphone for $99 and be done with it.
I consulted with Linda and we decided to go for the new phone. Cool. Went to talk to one of the salespeople. "One of the guys in the light blue shirts," the genius bar (dark blue shirt) said. Yeah, he can help me with the phone, etc etc etc.
There's only one hitch.
When the storms came through that afternoon, they lost power and it toasted the server. No iphone activations until that was fixed.
Yeah, I can tell when the universe is trying to tell me something.
Karma ain't done with me yet.
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| 2009-06-13 21:31 |
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Dave is movin' to California.
He was the founder of Live Steel Fight Academy. At the end of last year, he handed the reins over to Joe, and the mayhem has continued.
Today was Dave's final class. He wanted to do tag-team wrestling. We did tag-team wrestling. 3 hours of grappling. 3 hours of grappling in which the rules preclude chokes that make use of the opponent's clothing, and in which going into a nice guard counts as a pin. Against yourself. Alas, stripped of my best techniques.
I'm limping. I took a couple blows to the jaw and a knee to the chin. It hurts to chew. It was worse earlier.
A bit of sake is called for.
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Today we celebrated my parent's 50th anniversary and my mother's 70th birthday. We held the party in the coffee shop that my brother manages, down in Wilmington - the area that got blown up in Fight Club. An odd collection of folks - neighbors and yugoslavs and academics and dancers and people from church - but an interesting mix.
There were some picture boards set up with bits of their lives, everything from adorable pictures of them as children to embarrassing pictures of my brother and me as kids.
And then there was a picture of two men talking, with a typewritten (in a real typewriter) caption below it. Below that, my father had written:
( This conversation is responsible for our coming to the U.S. )
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Today in class we cut.
Joe brought lots of gallon milk bottles, and some smaller, denser apple juice containment units. He filled them with water as we warmed up and practiced our footwork. Then we went out into the parking lot and he pulled out the real blade.
It was a lot lighter than the hickory swords we've been practicing with. I'd kind of expected it to be heavier. Nope.
We took turns slicing bottles, horizontal cuts, rising cuts from tail guard, or descending cuts. If you cut perfectly along the angle of the blade, you get a smooth cut and you don't even feel it as it goes through; you only know because a piece of the bottle slides off and the water pours out. If your angle is off, it feels like you're hitting it with a springy baseball bat. There's a thump and your target bounces off the sword. If you change the angle of the blade or the direction of the cut partway through the target, you'll see it in the cut - there'll be a jag where you made the change. In the image below, you can see a little jag right in the middle where something changed.
After I got a bit more comfortable, Joe suggested I "chip at it." I took off a few layers like this one, and then, inevitably, flubbed a cut and sent the remainder of the bottle spinning across the parking lot.
 Now... now I'm feeling the need to own a nice, sharp sword of my own. And after that, all I'll need is to figure out what to do with all that milk...
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I am starting to not feel like a total klutz with a sword. I'm just mostly a klutz. This is progress, and I am heartened.
I've been playing with different guards. The one most typically seen in film representations is the middle guard, which seems like it would be a good general purpose guard, but feels to me just a touch overextended for a quick reaction to something coming from an unexpected angle. The other guard that you see a lot is the high guard, where the pommel is held at the shoulder with the blade point facing up. This is a very aggressive looking guard, but it seems to me as limiting one's attacks fairly significantly and being particularly weak against some attacks.
The guard that I've been finding particularly useful has been the hanging guard - the forward facing one on the dominant hand side. This was the most difficult guard for me to grok; it involves a bit of contortionism that twists the arms around awkwardly oddly, and it seems needlessly complex. But it makes for good defense against both low and high attacks, keeps the tip pointed at your opponent's face, and leaves you with a lot of options for attack.
On Saturday I realized that I'm quite fond of the plow guard. Very nice for getting a nice thrust in, or for feinting a thrust and then twisting the sword around their block and getting a nice cut to the ribs. I had always disliked the plow, but I'm now needing to reconsider.
But my new favorite guard is the English high guard held on the non-dominant side. It is the most Lebowski of all the guards, the most slackerly. The pommel is held at solar plexus level, with the blade resting gently against the shoulder, the tip pointing up and back. It is very restful. It's also incredibly fast, doing an overhead strike with the false edge. Did that four times in a row, and succeeded in a one-shot killing strike three times out of four. Sweet. Gives good defense against high attacks, and gives you the ability to strike fast if they try to go low.
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Made it home from Balticon. Good fun, but a lot of work and frazzlement. Let's see if I can manage to say anything coherent.
The latest in publication news, in the wake of Balticon, wherein I got to talk face to face with many a fine person, some of whom I've met online.
~raises his glass in salute~
A pleasure to make your acquaintance, my friends.
So, onward to announcements:
The Path That Few Have Trod - Well, it was supposed to be out in issue #10 of Trail of Indiscretion in time for Balticon. Alas, computers suck, and therefore the issue is running late. I expect it out within the next month. I'll post a note with links when it's actually out.
It Was Just Like Her - Was accepted, and should be out in Cemetery Moon #6 in or around August.
For both of these, if you live in my general area and want me to pick up copies for you, let me know via email (contact info is on my web site if you don't already have it). I can't beat Fortress Publishing's shipping rates, though, so if it needs shipping, it makes more sense to get it from them, unless you are a signature fetishist who is willing to pay a bit more to get one that's been defaced.
I'm pretty sure I've already mentioned that The Collector will be in the anthology Dead Souls, scheduled for release in September. Not Balticon news, but it fits into the time-line right here.
The Levee Song will be in the themed anthology Barbarians at the Jumpgate - stories of conflict between low tech and high tech societies - tentatively scheduled to release in Spring of next year.
Sales of The Evil Gazebo went well enough for The So-So Depression - 10 copies sold, bringing us to 45% of the edition sold since we birthed this thing in October. 57 sold, which means only 69 unique, handbound copies left...
Other developments? Well, we'll see what happens.
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It was, of course, an insane amount of work getting the thing prepped - the story written and proofed, the artwork complete (thanks, thereallinda), the book layout designed and finalized (thanks, Lindsay), and then proofed and proofed and proofed and proofed, and finally printed.
Then, the challenge was to assemble the pages correctly into signatures and ship them off to ladywind, who has the task of sewing and gluing these into the spectacularly original handbound books that they are.
During which time we sit on our hands and twiddle our thumbs (don't ask) until suddenly, a box of books appears on the doorstep.
Then comes the fun bit. The printer wasn't able to accurately trim the images to an 1/8th inch border, and having been a picture framer, I'm fairly persnickety about that. So, I trim the images - 9 of them per book - down from larger sheets. (Fortunately, for the most part I'm still pretty accurate within 1/64th of an inch.) Then I get to tip them into the books with archival glue.
The tipping-in process is (always) done in batches of five. This is done due to a conjunction of two reasons, mainly, that each image needs to be glued and positioned, then the book closed carefully on it (such that it doesn't shift in the process), and then pressed until the glue sets - a few minutes at least.
The other reason is that I picked up 5 volumes of Lands and Peoples: The World in Color, a sort of geographical encyclopedia with glossy color illustrations, published in 1929. These are probably the heaviest books I own.
They are also full of spectacularly awful statements like: Afghan women work very hard, and as a result they lose their good looks at an early age.
Or: In many villages the witch doctor is the real chief and rules his subjects by fear. He is usually a good deal more intelligent than the people whom he deceives with his conjuring tricks, hypnotism and feigned trances. He sells advice and spells to these simple and ignorant folk and rids himself of his enemies by means of subtle poisons.
What a grand history of scholarship we have to be proud of.
Anyway. There are now more copies of The Evil Gazebo, and an appearance at Balticon, for the hawking thereof. Hopefully, in the next day or two there will be pictures of books. And I've been told that I should have yet more books soon, so I can finally fill all the outstanding orders. If you're around, drop in and say hi. Browse. Gawk. Covet. Buy, even, if'n you're in the mood for it.
It's also a good time to pick up Bad-Ass Faerie stuff, and Mike and Dani's new anthology is debuting, and in theory the issue of Trail of Indiscretion containing my story will be available.
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The elusive bridge to the end of the Digger's alt history story has finally manifested itself, after a few weeks of false starts and discarded stupidity. The ending, of course, was well in mind since the beginning.
Until I got to it.
Have I written a bridge to nowhere?
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It's happening today, in Phoenixville, 200 block of Bridge Street, from 10-6.
Live Steel will be there, showing off bits of metal, giving impromptu sword fighting lessons, etc.
Just, y'know. Letting you know.
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David Sanborn, Loudon Wainright, Phillip Glass, Debbie Harry and Pere Ubu all on a stage at the same time?
How did I miss this show when it was on?
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The antidote for twitter is: every time someone starts raving about why twitter is so great, make sure to cut them off at exactly 144 charac
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This brings back memories of what is possibly my favorite comic book of all time: Puma Blues.
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