<insert crazy ramblings here>

( Progress Diary ... )

Lessons learned from practice shirt:
Pattern tweaks: Collar needs to be looser, shirt needs to be longer, possibly baseball cut, sleeves shorter.
Pattern shenanigans: Glimpses of inner collar stand and button plackard will be colour inverted, seen similar done on fancy shirts now I know what I'm looking for. Main colar will be unglitched plain plaid. Pocket with strip going other way, or maybe unglitched.
( New mock-up... )

I think I'm going to need 107 x 180 cm of fabric.

I've listened to Jonathan Coulton's new albumn Solid State a few times now, and it's just not clicking for me.

I think it's trying to do two different things, and as result not doing either well.

It's trying to be a fun nerdcore pop album; long on geeky references, with occasional pathos to accent this. But fails as it's a concept album set in a dystopia. For instance the "watching kittens videos" and "don't feed the trolls" songs felt more melancholy and depressing than fun or pathos inspiring.

The other thing it's supposed have is "a bit of a concept behind it," with a "character that you follow throughout his life." But because most of the songs are trying to also be standalone songs, I'm just not finding the story here. But the chorus of the main track (released before the album), makes absolutly no sense to without more detail.

"What if Kurzweil doesn't make it?
What if all the switches get struck on destroy?
When the shuttle goes, we won't take it,
When the final counter-measures are deployed,"

Who is Kurzweil? What shuttle? Etc.

If the album only makes sense with the accompanying comic book, then only making that available as hardcover comic, that won't arrive for weeks after the album comes out is an odd decision.

Having said that, once I stumbled upon the explanation for his last concept album, I did enjoy it a lot more. Giving each track a counterpart track with an opposing mood makes for a disjointed, but interesting, album.

So I hold out hope that when the comic book arrives, the album will be more enjoyable.

Subtitle: Juxtapositions. Or two things make a post.

I've been catching up some old Radiolab podcasts, and I've just finished listening to the episode Words.

This episode concerns four people or groups of people, who at some point have no language, and then later acquire it, and the changes that follow.

I'd read about the formation of creoles and sign languages before in some popular science book or another. The founders tend to have very simple structure, but children raised in that environment later develop a more complex grammar. What the Radiolab episode added was that this places certain limits on the founders' thought process, but if the next generation teach the adults their new structure, the adults can learn new ways of thinking.

Another interesting aspect is that toddlers who are able to speak, but are not yet able to form noun phrases like "on the LEFT of the BLUE WALL", have the same difficulty solving certain spatial puzzles as rats.

Then the episode finished, and the very next podcast was Flowers for Algernon.

Every piece of research in the Radiolab episode happened after Daniel Keyes wrote Flowers for Algernon, yet it fits so well as a response to that episode.

Any steampunk fans? You've got until the end off office hours to a bid on these funky glasses.

Harrumph. Looks like official UK update of HTC Heros from Android 1.5 to 2.1 has been pushed back by two months. Think I'll be rooting my phone soon, and installing a custom ROM.

In the mean time here's dump of all the apps I have on there at the moment. I'll add descriptions reviews a q-codes soon.

( My Andriod Apps )

All of those are free, but I intend to pay for a few of full versions soon.

Apps I'm still think about / trying to find the right one of include:
To Do list. (GTD tie in? Tie in to Gmail tasks / Don't forget the milk, etc).
Replacement for the Call log, as it doesn't show the time of recent calls on the main view.
[ETA]
Locale. Clever App that switches on and off setting and Apps based on locaction, battery level, etc. But costs $10.

... or If I Don't Write Something Now I Never Will.

This was a very different convention for me personally. I was definitely far more a participant than a consumer. Oh, and I actually got about 7 hours sleep, and only drank 3 pints, each night. Unheard of!

To begin with I was on 4 programme items. No wait. 5. Oh and that. 6 then. The 2 on comics went reasonable well I felt. The panellists largely had some overlapping experience, but some things that were new to each of us. And sufficient audience participation to show that they were involved with our discussions. For the two on the future of Eastercons, I largely sat back and listened to what the other people in the discussion were saying. Think I learned a lot, and hope I did manage to get my perspective across when I did speak.

The "Star Wars: A Small Hope" cabaret was great fun to do, and seemed to be well received. It did take a large chunk out of Saturday, as we only managed to start rehearsals a few hours before the show, and needed much repetition to get it tight. Hats off to adelhied for pulling together a top notch script and props collection in the weeks pre-con. fuzz57, frankiemouses you were magnificent. Thanks to j_lj for lending us the lightsabers, one of which was found under the stage after he'd left the con. And to C for pinning me into a Leia dress without complaining :D
{ETA: And big thanks to the mighty tech crew for the Madonna headsets, and to the Cabaret organisers, and to our two sheet holding gophers, and the c ConCom, and everyone else who helped make Odyssey happen!}

The last other programmed item I was on was the Eastercon Bid Session. It was interesting. In short I'm now Head of Programme at Illustiorous, Eastercon 2011. Eep. The other news from that session is that Olympus 2012 will be the subsequent Eastercon.

The rest of the con was largely taken up with: Illustrious work (committee meetings, ticket sales, and programme idea discussions), Programme Ops / unofficial Ops Rover work, occasional gophering, dances, and seeing one or two programme items a day. Distressingly little left over for socialising, so I apologise if we didn't get to chat, or if I left after too little time.

Ooh, apparently the British Science Fiction Association's survey of authors is winging it's way to me. Covering the results of two surveys, twenty years apart, and covering over 120 writers.

Didn't even have to ask for it, it's just a bonus to members :)

Sample survey response here.

I managed to score some tickets to a recording of "Comedy Store" at "The Comedy Store" for "Comedy Central". The site proclaims:

On its grimy stage some of the greatest acts in the business have perfected their act

Which clearly isn't true. They was a two man team with a mist-er and a stiff broom giving it quick scrub when we arrived. Owing to my leaving the office later than intended, we were one of the last groups let in. We wound up with a choice between left wing front row, left wing a few rows back, or right at the back.

We decided to sit at the front. I thought that this meant there was a good chance I'd get picked on. As I mentioned I'd come straight from the office, and was in a suit. I've been at the comedy store before where the stand ups picked on the suits.

As this was a TV recording though, and they generally wanted to try and keep to a tight set, ( I almost got away with it. )

And both [Ultimates comics] are incredibly quick reads. Okay, perhaps that’s what I should have expected, but these comics are $4 / £3 each. And that works out to about £1 a minute or £60 an hour. When the comics are costing about the same as my plumber there’s something horribly wrong. - Richard Bruton

Even jamesb has been talked a little about the cost of comics recently.

I finally remembered to head down to my local library to raid their comic shelves. Seems they don't have any Sandman (although I can order it from other local libraries), but I did pick up:

7) Bleach by Tite Kubo Volume's 1 & 2 (Manga)

This is very popular Anime series at the moment, and I've only seen one episode, so when I saw it on the shelves I snapped it up.

It's about a high school student, who can see ghosts, and accidentally gets recruited to be a sort of combination monster hunter / grim reaper. And frankly he's kind of pissed off with the whole situation.

The first volume is essentially an origin story, giving us a lose background into this world, and a few short battles. The second volume introduces a few more characters (I get the impression no-one in this place is going to be left without some mystical power for long), and a bit more about the way this afterlife thing works.

I can see why it's popular. The battles are fun and all, but there's a wonderful sense of humour throughout.

Guess what's happening in this thumbnail? With all it's dramtic shadowing, and extreme close ups.


He's ( answer here ) Bizarre.

8) Flight Explorer Volume 1 anthology editor Kazu Kibuishi (Graphic Novel)

I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about the Flight anthologies. They've been produced as something quite different for a few years now and are coming to an end soon. Full colour, and luscious art, they are often ... quieter tales than your typical super hero comic.

They're produced "via the internet" in some sense. At least most of the contributes are geographically spread, and are often bloggers.

Flight Explorer is the first (but hopefully not last) in a line pitched at the same market as the DFC, the 8 to teen market that seems to be so neglected in comics today.

The art is cartoony but brilliant for it, and the stories from a moment in the life a little girl and her monster friend's first experience of snow, to an action packed tale of a space mouse crashing beside a tribe who are under threat.

9) Watching the Watchmen by Dave Gibbons

Seeing the thumnails and early sketches for the iconic Watchmen moments is pretty neat, but Dave's tale of how it was produced is what really made this for me. And hats off to him for refusing to get drawn into the drama of what happened next. It's a story that needs hearing, but this celebration of the art of the Watchmen was not it.



Oh, and the library had a clever promotion on. They offer a cheap DVD rental service (with a lot of art house stuff as well as block busters), and to encourage the DVD crowd to read more they had a box of wrapped up mystery books on the counter you could borrow, and get a free DVD coupon.