Optimally different!

Dreamed I was in the cast of the original Star Trek series, but it was modern-ish times and we were all old and meeting at an airport to fly to some kind of reunion*. James Doohan** was the first one there. We greeted each other warmly like old colleagues, and joked around until DeForest Kelley** and several guys I didn't recognize but pretended I did showed up. Then, in walks William Shatner. For some reason he is removing riding gloves as he approaches. "Mistah Shatnah!" I say, affecting and overly formal tone. He grins, shakes my hand, and says "You know, there's been all kinds of chatter about Akamai lately". I am intrigued. "Oh really? What about?", I say.

And then.

At that moment.

I wake up.

FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUU....

What secrets about my workplace were The Shat about to reveal to me? I must knooooooooow!

I had a really fantastic Arisia this year for a number of reasons. Maybe it's something about the Winter, or maybe it's just what happens when you put almost everyone I know on the east coast in one place for a weekend every year, but every Arisia, good or bad, seems to encompass the milestones of that year for me, and looking back on them shows me how much things change and how much my life has changed each year.

My first Arisia was my first live performance with Second Shift, on a double bill with this other audio theater group of whom I'd never heard, called the Post Meridian Radio Players.

I attended my second Arisia with Sequoia and rigel, both of whom I was involved with at the time. I handled some things badly, and in a way it marked a turning point in both relationships.

I started my third Arisia in an awkward quasi-dating state with juldea, and left it officially dating her.

By my fourth Arisia, juldea and I had broken up, but I wasn't over it yet. It was also the first and only con where I didn't do any performing (which I've found has a huge effect on how much I get out of a con experience), and I got a cold Saturday night to boot. Needless to say, this was not my favorite time 'round, but even then I met both sandrylene (IRL, at least) and fontia, and I'm glad for that.

This year was distinct because not only did I do more performing and paneling than in previous years, but I was also in the most stable place socially/romantically I'd been in for any Arisias past. My romantic situation definitely deserves its own post sometime, but suffice it to say for now that not only am I very happily involved with two lovely people, I even got to perform with both of them over the course of the weekend. This among a number of other factors contributed to just about the perfect way to get 2011 started.

Some highlights:

The Starship of Madness
Friday night I did monster voices for the PMRP Doctor Who/HP Lovecraft crossover show, "The Starship of Madness", which was very well received. I hadn't expected it to be badly received, but people really liked it (apparently we even got a nice writeup in the Boston Phoenix). As preraphaelite and I walked the halls afterward, we each got recognized and complemented several times. This was understandable for her, because she made an awesome sexy villain, but all I did was say things like "get them!" and "flee! flee for healing!" in a funny voice, and yet people still seemed to dig it, so yay! read_alicia will be happy to know there were also inquiries after the author of the script. We referred them to the Mask of Inanna site. :)


Sassafrass/Stranger Ways: Dark, Nerdy, Norse, A Capella, Folk Concert Extravaganza!
On Saturday afternoon Stranger Ways and Sassafrass had a joint concert that was a joy to take part in. I'll let y'all in on a little secret: up until then I didn't really think of Stranger Ways as a band. We were just some friends who played music in my basement and were presumptuous enough to record an album to release at our second show ever. But once we were up there, jazzing off the energy of the people in the audience, and realizing that they were actually into us... it was great. I think some of the live versions of our songs are actually significantly better than the recorded versions, plus we ended up making back everything we spent on producing the album, and between the two groups we were approached by representatives of three other cons who all wanted us to perform there! I remember during one song, a sing-along where this room full of a couple hundred people were all singing with us...I started to get all choked up. It was just beautiful, and my thanks to everyone who helped make it happen.

For those who couldn't make it, we have video of most of the songs by both bands, in concert order, up on a youtube playlist here. Please check it out and share! I'm really pleased with the whole thing, but here are a few of my favorites:

- Our opener, Boys of Bedlam
- Our funniest/cutest song, Week Exchange
- A cover of one of my favorite Tripod songs, I Will Still Play (thanks to rubicantoto for turning me on to them!). Getting to perform this song was huge for me!
- Our big sing-along closer for the first set, Fhear A Bhata
- Sassafrass' song about the runic alphabet, in which I am comically tall, The Futhark Song
- My favorite Sassafrass song Somebody Will. I love the lyrics and sentiment of this song dearly, and didn't get to join in on the sing-along parts because I was too busy crying in the corner. I remember hearing it for the first time at a Sassafrass concert I went to with juldea... and now that's her singing it as a member of the group. Awesome. :)
- Finally, our big joint group closing number, Toys for Big Kids, in which faerieboots gets her mad science on!


Story Improv!
As if that wasn't enough, I then ran a panel, and not just any panel, the Story Improv panel! This is an event where four writers take turns writing a story based on prompts from the audience. I was the emcee, which means I was in charge of coming up with prompts to solicit from the audience and giving those prompts to one writer while interviewing the other three to keep the audience entertained. To be honest, I was really, really nervous because I'd spent so much time prepping for PMRP and Stranger Ways that I really hadn't spent much time getting ready for this, and was madly reviewing a recording of a similar panel to remember how the format went just hours before the event.

It went pretty fantastically. There is a thing about myself that I keep forgetting: if you put me in front of a responsive audience and just tell me to start talking, I can generally do it. Hopefully that lesson will stick one of these days. Anyway, there's a transcript and an mp3 up here. The recording is about an hour long, but I'm really happy with how it turned out, and it's a lot more fun than just reading the story. ;)


2010: Our Hideous Future
I continue to be amazed by the creativity and talent in the community out here. Case in point: have I mentioned that some friends of mine wrote and produced a full-length musical in their spare time? Seriously, how cool is that? It's a really fun show, and the brand new soundtrack is currently on sale super cheap at Amazon.
If you're looking for something to sample, I recommend tracks 7 and 12, which are both good songs for different reasons and both show off Kamela Dolinova's great voice, as well as #21 in which lediva makes an awesome singing, world-dominating computer, and #23, which sums up the show's sense of humor pretty well.


Everything else
There were just too many other things, too many little moments, to list them all. From conversations with people I don't see often, to reminiscing and joking with people about things that had been sources of great tension between us at the time, to a big, Saturday night cuddle-pile that segued straight into the con's big dance party.

All in all, it was a pretty fantastic weekend. I just hope that the rest of 2011 can keep up.

...while I talk about something, like, 5 people are going to care about:

I always tell my students that what makes Linux's learning curve worthwhile, particularly for sysadmins, is how phenomenally lazy it lets you be once you've overcome it. Case in point, I needed to copy a PDF to a system that I could only reach by way of another system. Sure, I could have copied it to systemX, then ssh'd in and from there copied it to systemY, but that's tedious. We hates tedium. How about this instead?

[brad@foo ~]$ cat file.pdf | ssh systemX "cat | ssh systemY 'cat > file.pdf'"

The rabbit hole, it goes deep.

This is my first mostly-day-off in... damn, a really long time. Closing night of EDTM tonight, and hopefully will get some progress made on the workwork project on which I remain behind, but other than that, today has been spent either running low-stress errands (yay sunny day and things within walking distance!!) or sitting in bed with tea and goodfoods, trying to recover from the cast party. MIT's musical theater guild has some... ill-advised traditions, IMO, not least of which being having the cast party the night before closing. There's a rationale for doing it that way, but suffice it to say I am achey, grossly underslept, and, as Henry Rollins once put it, "my body feels like Billy Idol himself". I have no idea what that actually means, and yet it seems to capture what I feel like right now nonetheless. Still, just one more show. If can just baby my voice enough today to pull off one more non-sucky performance this evening, I will go out with a bang and all will be well.

In other news, I owe redfishie big time for introducing me to Raquy and The Cavemen. I can't decide whether listening to them makes me want to pick up my doumbek and play more, or never bother touching it ever again. Seriously, if this track in particular blows my mind. MUST. SEE. THIS. LIVE. I will dance until I break, and then I will die happy.

In other other news, I have officially run out of space for both clothes and costuming in my closet, which raises a serious question: where am I gonna put all my clothes now?

Well, this has indeed been a weekend of Art and Drama (*badum-bum*).

Yesterday a group of us went to MassMOCA to see Tripod Vs The Dragon. Becca, Jason, sandrylene and I went ahead of the rest to check out the museum prior to the show. The extended drive with three people with whom I wasn't too well acquainted proved quite fun, with everyone gelling remarkably well. In fact, partway through we realized that everyone in the car was veggie so, capitalizing upon this was a rare opportunity, immediately got on gmaps trying to find the hippiest, most carnivore-withering eatery in the area. We ended up going to a place called, I kid you not, Tofu A Go-Go, in the charming town of Greenfield, MA. Well, trying to go there, at least. Sadly, the place turned out to be closed, so we ended up at Thai instead. A worthwhile outing nonetheless. Greenfield is a little mountain towns with an old-fashioned ice cream parlour and earthy-crunchy grocery coop across the street from an independent video game store. My kinda place.

Anyway, we went on to the museum and had time to see the whole thing. There were definite high points, but on the whole it didn't do much to change my feelings about modern art. So much of it seems all inspiration and no perspiration... and much of the inspiration didn't seem particularly inspired either. I mean, there was one room full of weird ambient music that was carpeted with artificial grass, scattered with potted plastic plants, against one of which was laid an ordinary electric fan. Hung from the ceiling were a couple of crude shapes that might have been supposed to be animal parts with speakers in them playing slightly different weird ambient music. If it had been set up as a scene in a larp I might have been mildly impressed.

Then again, there were a few things that I really dug. The first piece that really struck me was called "A Little Death", by Sam Taylor Wood. It was a time-lapse video of a rabbit being eaten by maggots; not much technically, but morbidly fascinating aesthetically. It was part curiosity, as I'd never actually seen the entire process, part amazement at the machinery of nature, and part tentative willingness to accept this as as a sort of novel found art. On the table next to the rabbit sits a peach, which the maggots never touch. The peach was a nice touch, making it look like a "still lifedeath" painting, only animated. ...aaaand here it is on youtube. Don't click if you squick over this sort of thing... duh.

The highlight of the visit was a retrospective of the "wall paintings" (that is, painted walls) of Sol LeWitt. I can't find any good images of the ones we saw (edit a ha! the massmoca site has all of them, though the photos don't really do the experience justice), but the examples from his "late period" were almost literally mind-blowing. Imagine a chunk of wall 10ish feet high, and 10-100 feet long. Now imagine that an artist has figured out exactly how much color the brain can process within its field of vision, upped that by about 10%, and applied to to all sorts of weird geometric patterns. It was literally trippy, and a very cool experience.

(edit Yay picture (you just have to imagine it even brighter and filling your field of vision)



His earlier work was a bit more subdued, but led to my favorite part of the trip: there was one long wall that was divided into 20 or so equally-sized quares, each of which was divided into quadrants, which were filled with four smaller squares each. Each smaller square was grey, yellow, red or blue, with no repetitions within the same quadrant, but, at first glance, never in the same order either.

(edit aaaaaand here's a picture)



This grabbed my brain and would. not. let. go. What was the pattern? Was it random, or was there a message here? I quickly got sandrylene, and later Jason's, attention and we geeked out for about 20 minutes, finding duplicates and proposing theories as to where a pattern might lie. It was also a neat object-lesson in how differently different people process information. One of us would try explaining a theory, particularly ones that had to do with describing patterns, like how the color order in quadrant B might proceed from the color order in quadrant A, and it was like we were speaking different languages. For example, I found it easiest to explain by numbering each of the positions and analysing the "path" that each color took, so if you went clockwise around the quadrants of one of the squares, the grey square might go 1, 4, 2, 3 but the red square might go 2, 3, 1, 4. This didn't compute at all for Sandry, who instead talked in terms of "rotational symmetry", which didn't compute for me. It was all really fascinating. In the end, I figured out roughly how I could effectively search for patterns with a python script if I'd had my laptop and that was good enough for me. I'm enough of a developer nowadays that the fun of problem solving isn't so much in the solving as in devising the algorithm that solves it for me anyway. ;)

So, to me, that is art I like. I have a pretty liberal definition of art, specifically "any product of creativity". But then I have a rather stricter definition of "art I like", which all comes down to the quality of the reaction it evokes, whether technical appreciation, emotional impact, or simple provocativeness. The trippy walls had an emotional impact in that they were fun to look at, and the pattern wall was the "best" art I encountered simply because of the great playtime that it provoked, intentionally or not.

...although one more thing has to be said for MassMOCA, I lied when I said that the walls were the highlight of the museum. For me, the museum its self was the highlight. Seriously, the building is just fascinating. It's some kind of converted factory, full of twisty passages (most definitely not all alike) and just fun to wander around in exploring.

I'm going to have to do the rest of my Tales Of Culture in a subsequent post, I guess, as it's now well past my bedtime, and having gotten home late from the MassMOCA/Tripod trip last night, and having been awfully labile lately, I'm thinking it's best not to tempt emo by not taking care of myself.

So, there's this British comedy/music quiz show called Never Mind the Buzzcocks. They recently did a Doctor Who special with a bunch of DW cast plus Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh as the panelists and David Tennant as the host. So far, it is fantastic. At one point, he starts asking the panelists Doctor Who questions instead of music questions.

My question for you, Dear Readers, is this: am I more of a nerd or less of a nerd if when asked "Who created the Daleks?", I blurt out "Terry Nation" long before it occurs to me to answer "Davros"?

...just wonderin'.

Also, Noel Fielding's comment on Davros: "Is he the small one? The one who looks like a prawn?" <3 Boosh.

Because Chuck Norris Facts just weren't geeky enough: Bruce Schneier Facts.

"There are no prime numbers, just numbers Bruce Schneier hasn't bothered to factor yet."
"There is no secure e-commerce. Only stuff Bruce Schneier doesn't want."
"Bruce Schneier's private key is so strong that he doesn't even hide it -- if you saw it, you'd die before you could use it."
"Bruce Schneier is not balding, you just can't see the encrypted portions of his hair."
"Bruce Schneier can log into any computer just by staring down the prompt."
"Bruce Schneier once beat an asymmetric cipher into symmetry."


And then there are the Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret T-shirts.

Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be working today... *sigh*.

Work let me borrow a laptop, thus allowing me to fullfill my lifelong ambition of coding at Denny's.

Plus, the hotel has dsl. sw33t. =:)