Robot Cop

We need some powered armor. These images are from Nightmare Armor (which seems to not exist anymore).

We need a full suit of armor for Dead Residents.

Of course I love the robot with red eyes. I wonder how that neck gasket works.

We would have ordered a suit from Nightmare Armor but we can't get their email address or even communicate with them on Facebook. So we'll have to make our own.

Blognitude

Every once in a while I like to remind that my blognitude is multifurbicated.

blog.pandoramachine.com is the "official" blog of Pandora Machine, the film company.
blog.pleasurefortheempire.com is whatever random thing Andrew Bellware is saying (and making his dad complain about because it causes too much email with posts about, you know, whatever I say on here.)
blog.tyrannosaurusmouse.com is the blog for music and suchly, including the band Diatomaceous Earth

Ed's Message

Are you sure? Are you really sure? You know this can't be undone, right? Do you really want to go through with this? Do you want to think about it first?

Table Dive

So I feel more comfy with my dive shop now that I called them and got the guy who was interested in, you know, helping customers to talk to me about what the open water dive is all about. Because otherwise I was just going to cancel and go through another shop (see comments below).

From what I can tell, the whole thing where I studied how to read dive tables and calculate my pressure group based on how much time I've had in-between dives and such is completely irrelevant to the first level of open water diver. I can't understand why that would be true but apparently it is.

Type Like an Animal

Ed, Todd, Scott, Drew

The single funniest line the entire night was when we got into Scott's Mustang I was laughing too much to say my address into the GPS voice recognition system. Disgustedly Scott took back the GPS and said "I'll just have to type it in like an animal."

Silent Running

I just had the most frustrating customer experience at my local dive shop, PanAqua. I came in to get fitted for and to rent and buy the gear I need for my open water dives. At first I was being helped but then another customer came in so the two people working decided to swap customers.
This meant that the woman helping me decided to take time out to call someone and tell them how incredibly busy she was. You know, rather than actually getting me checked out. So busy. Oh. So busy.

Getting information was like pulling teeth. And it's a real problem when you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, that I realized I didn't know stuff, but I didn't even know in what categories I didn't know stuff. So: the dive computer. Never touched one before. Are we planning dives with this thing? It only has two buttons. The cover is scratched up to the point where it's a tad difficult to read. Is there some sort of manual for it? One I can read? Somewhere? Who knows?
I seriously and fundamentally have no idea what I'm doing next weekend. I mean, is this safe? Should I be looking into another dive shop for my open water dives?

The Ides of August

Now then therefore this is the most recent rehearsal of Diatomaceous Earth. Two basses -- both fretless actually. We had a big problem with the level from Ethan's bass. Now that I think about it, if that bass has normal pickups, it SHOULD have been relatively low-level. You know what? Every other signal we're feeding into the JamHub rehearsal headphone distribution system is line-level. So why shouldn't a bass plugged into it not have to be turned up?

Chocotaurus Mouse

The snare at the rehearsal studio got changed out for a metal Ludwig snare. Lou was not impressed. He's more of a wooden snare guy although his favorite is the stupendously expensive Drum Workshop "Edge" snare which has metal rims and wood center.
The sort of grand experiment that is two bass players has much of interest. Still, Ethan has threatened to bring his stick next time and I suspect that will work awesomely.
Overall my focus tends to be on the wheat we create and not the chaff. Sure, there's a lot of chaff but even a few minutes of wheat is a very good ratio. Thing is though, somebody has to sit down and go through the whole thing and say "Okay that moment between 10:42 and 11:35 is good, but cut out every thing until 22:50" etc. 
I tried to not use a "center" microphone for the drums in this recording. I can't say that blows my mind. I think I will go back to having a center mic. Oh, and I put the overheads at the upper-most setting on the boom (the boom is level horizontally). Which is something which you find extremely important.

Pops

My dad takes a mighty fine picture.

Belt, Biz, Boff

The musician's belt. It's actually both a musician's and a mechanic's belt. The point is that it has no buckle to scratch your guitar (or finish on your car).
I don't know that it's honestly possible to play the blues without scratching the back of your guitar. In fact I think that may be the deal you make with the devil in order to play the blues -- your guitar gets scratched. But, you know, it's interesting.

There is much the noise in the world of musicians about various things about the business of music. Indeed, there's is much the Luddite in (ironically) much of the internet chat regarding the nascent horribleness which is ostensibly Spotify. In any case, here's a critique of the argument that vinyl will "save" the music industry.
Lastwise: aargh. My main computer is being very cranky of late. It may be that it does not like to read off of large ExFat drives. I'm hoping it's that.

The Uninformed Aardvark

Here's a rehearsal album. I'm always surprised at how well these things come out. Nobody, I mean nobody, had any idea what we were going to do until we were doing it.
We have two bassists and two guitar players. We suffer from having too many good ideas and too much fun. Which is a good thing to suffer from. We could sit down and take (say) one rehearsal and work and edit them all down into single coherent songs (you know, with changes and such which are, er, planned).
But so much of what we do is an experiment. I mean who would have thought two bassists would have worked? But it does. This sort of experimentation is fantastically and critically necessary.
For me, I mean I've been in bands where I pretty much wrote everything and had to have all the arrangements down. And being in a band where we can just experiment with the writing process for... hours... is a hugely euphoric and euphonic experience.
That last song there, A Mere Resplendence,  is only divided up into two parts because when we played it it was over an hour long. So I had to split it in half to get it onto bandcamp.
If you have the willpower, see for yourself how many times one of us tried to play Darkstar by the Grateful Dead. It's gotta be 4.
I'm gonna bet that we're going to think of some specific sections to go to at some point in the many hours of rehearsal we're going to do on Wednesday.

Bun Air

The HEED is an emergency air device for helicopter crews.

Scubapro makes a full-face mask for under $600 (without regulator).

Done with the pool

The whole SCUBA process is pretty amazing. They have really made recreational diving about as stupid-proofed as possible. Every part of the gear and the system has been engineered and thought through so that literally a child can do it (PADI minimum age for the basic SCUBA certification is 10 years old.)
I have found a new love in my life. The 2nd-stage regulator. I love the regulator.

I mean, if you don't understand what I'm talking about, let me put it in a way you can understand.
With the regulator you can breathe underwater.
You can breathe. Underwater.
The regulator is simply a brilliant and marvelous invention. But here's the thing. Breathing underwater with a regulator is not actually the weirdest and most whack experience when learning SCUBA. No. Breathing from a free flowing regulator is the most whack thing.
Essentially if your regulator is free-flowing (no longer behaving like a demand regulator but rather just spitting out air like crazy) you can't keep it in your mouth. So you have to drink the air from the regulator. Underwater. Nothing's in your mouth, you're just breathing from a stream of air being cupped in your hand.
That is a counter-intuitive feeling.
You go through a crazy amount of air when you do that. I lost 800lbs of air pressure in my tank from a 30-second free flow. So if you're free-flowing you should be thinking about getting to the surface.
I cannot over-emphasize how good the advice from Joe (below) is. Be the fish God intended you to be.

"Y" Because We Love You

My Mac keyboard died. Specifically what happened is that I spilled water on it and the "y" key just up and died. Typing emails without the letter "y" became interesting. But I got a new keyboard today. Rejoice.

Here is a by-no-means-complete guide to Theatresource folks who have Fringe shows this year. Fact is that so many people have been through or done shows at Theatresource that you'd be hard-pressed to get a final count.
Coinstar. It's a coin depositing thing in supermarkets. Nominally they charge a fee but they don't charge a fee if you get, for instance, an Amazon gift card in the amount of change you put in. And for me that's pretty much just like getting cash.

Theories

Holy cats the sound of that live version of Won't Get Fooled Again off of the movie The Kids Are All Right is even more spectacular than I remembered it watching as an impressionable teenager on late night TV. I remember my dad saying that he didn't think they were so violent. Meaning he didn't like how violent they seemed. I only thought Ha! THIS isn't the Who at their violent!
But looking back, this sound was exuberance. The Who were kings of the power trio. And adding keyboards is something to not be taken lightly. And boy they don't. The sequence (which apparently is just played live on an organ of some sort) freakin ROCKS.
It's funny though. Remember the volume wars? Those volume wars substantially post-date The Who. The Who. I mean those guys had a stage volume that would make dead men wake from their graves.
But on a recording, where you can play back at any volume you desire, they're simply not as loud as a modern bubble-gum pop song. And I'm wondering if the fault lays only partially in multi-band brick wall limiters.

I think the other problem may be how freaking loud we've been mixing drums since sometime in the 1980's.
With The Who you can tell -- yes the drums are loud and being hit hard but they're slightly swamped by the double HiWatt heads driving 4x4 12" cabinets on a guitar with P90's being smashed by a sledgehammer. You can hear the drums, sure, but they're right there next to several hundred watts of guitar amplification that do not mind in the least going into distortion.
Nowadays those drums would be at least 6dB louder in the mix. The snare would smack you in the face every time it came down. And suddenly at that volume it's competing with the vocal (because snare drums have all kinds of sounds which smear right across the vocalist's range -- we can call a snare drum a little band-limited white-noise  generator can't we?)
And once you're fighting with the vocal you're fighting with everything and the answer to making everything loud is to use more compression everywhere. And look! Now we have the ability to use digital multi-band auto-makeup limiters which eliminate pumping and make every part of signal as freaky-deaky loud as we could ever imagine it being.
If we mixed drums quieter this wouldn't be as much an issue. Not that I'm advocating that. I'm just saying. Louder drums = louder everything.
This is just a theory mind you.

Richard Waters, the fellow who invented the Waterphone, passed away on July 4.