Steampunk Fonts: Volume II

The second in my series of Steampunk fonts culled from Acidfonts.com

Gearbox Butterfly Preview

Here's one of the videos I made during the creation of a steampunk tin which I call the gearbox butterfly. I will post more details and more videos later but here's a preview to whet your proverbial whistle.

The First Steampunk Piece

This is my first attempt at Steampunkery. It's the lid of a little tin I got at the craft store for a dollar. I used the template I found here just as it was, printed with a laser printer on glossy photo paper and then transferred to the tin lid.
I'm going to make a tutorial video as soon as I have a tried and true method to my mad science.

Bargain CD Friday: Emotional Joystick

Emotional Joystick
Bellicose Pacific
(myspace link only, sad panda)
It was impossible for me not to pick up a CD with this cover. And only $1! It's fairly peppy bit-music, which is to say, I like it. Samples and beeps mostly in lovely melodic arrangements. Reminds me a bit of Little Cat (Incomprehensible web site here, CDBaby Link here.) Some time I will do a whole post about Little Cat, an artist I discovered because Amazon told me I would like them, and by jove they were correct.

More bands should use visualizers in their music videos. Some music videos I've seen have little correlation whatsoever to the music they accompany.
Here are a couple of the tracks from this albums I most enjoyed, hope you do too.

Steampunk Fonts: Volume I

I was looking around the internet, or the "aether" as some folks have it, for Steampunkish fonts to use for a copper etching project. Finding none, I decided to collect some of my own. I found these on Acidfonts.com, which is a great site for free fonts but leaves something to be desired in the way of categorisation.

Thus far I have done some sifting, as you can see I have no fonts later than letter G. Hence, Volume I.

I hope you find these useful:

Check out Volume II

If I owned a record store

The other day I was at the store browsing through the music selection, as I am wont to do, trying to find something new and different or old and very different and a thought occurred to me. Every other item in the store was obliged to describe itself somewhere on its packaging. This is how they sell books, they get important people to write blurbs on the inside covers, publishing companies have whole gangs of lackeys coming up with new synonyms for "fun-filled romp" and "tour-de-force", all in an effort to engage the consumer and turn him or her into a reader.

The same goes for movies, though you have less access to the actual content than you have with books you still get cover art which is, ideally, indicative of the style of the movie. You know who's in it and you have a working knowledge of what kind of movies they act in or what kind the director tends to make. You have a blurb on the back which someone was paid to write (and frankly paid too much). All of these data inform your buying decision, if you're deliberating, you have relative merits to compare, it's a pleasurable shopping experience.

Not so with music.

With CDs you get a small square of shrink-wrapped plastic with some art on the front and a track listing on the back. That's it. Very frequently you don't even get a proper track listing and the artwork is some maddeningly obscure bit of non-art. In order for you to learn more about this product, which you just bought, you have to open the plastic seal, thus committing yourself to that purchase. Call me crazy but the time when I like to make purchasing decisions is before I have shackled myself eternally to that purchase. So now you've opened the CD packaging and you have access to the album art, CD booklet. Lucky you.
It looks something like this

Guitars - Bob Indiepants Guitars/Vocals - Tightshirt Vegandorfer Bass - Cap'n Phil Drums - Saddy Von Emonerd Produced by Phlondark Bob would like to thank his pet hamster Jeebus.

If you're really lucky, you get lyrics. If you're not, no lyrics for you, but don't go looking them up on the internet, that's intellectual property violation.

I will attempt to descend from my lofty soapbox at this point.

As you can see, with these kind of restrictions it is no wonder people download music, at least then if you don't like it you haven't wasted $12 on a shiny piece of plastic that looks very pretty when microwaved.

The problem with music stores is, unless their staff are very, very knowledgeable, there is no facility to point you in the direction of new music you might like. The product itself is no help at all.

Since I, proverbial fledgling record store owner, cannot depend on the artists to describe themselves, I have to find some other way to categorize and label my music. Instead of simply kludging everything together alphabetically in the ignominious ghetto of Rock/Pop, it is time to take matters into my own hands.

Here is the list I give to my employees:

1. Look through the store and find the music you like.
2. If it doesn't have a tab divider with the artists name, make one.
3. Type up a description of this artist in 50 words or less
4. Also type up two other bands that you like in a similar vein
5. Paste this onto the tab divider

And when they're done with that:

1. Start with A.
2. For each CD that we stock more than 2 of, look up the artist on Pandora or last.fm
   
3. Listen to a few tracks
4. Write down the description of the music found online as well as the similar artists
   

In this way, I educate my employees about the product, pay them for listening to and talking about music, something they already love to do, and I convert more customers because they can browse the store and find something that they will like.

Was that so painful?

Bargain CD Day: Friday the 13th

I've decided that every Friday will be bargain CD day, in which I will highlight one of the CDs I've picked up in thrift stores and the bargain section of Half Price Books.
I will put up one or two signature tracks from these albums which will hopefully encourage you to rediscover a wrongfully forgotten album.

The inaugural CD is: The Frogs of Summer!
A little backstory first:
I like looking through the bargain bin for nature recordings, I have a collection of a fair number of different soundscapes from the Northwoods to Australia to recordings of both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean. I've always enjoyed field recording and I love getting the feel of nature. It's lovely to relax to.

This is the reason why I picked up this CD in the first place, as if the cover art wasn't enough of an enticement. Upon deeper examination though, I discovered that it was something altogether more fun.

This is a CD of popular songs re-recorded with frogs.

That is, Mr Bob Joyce went into the field and got recordings of various frogs, sampled them, and then used those samples for the melodies of these songs.
I've posted the three I like best, you can listen to the whole CD here, though it's RealPlayer and the page uses more than one <blink> tag, *shudder*
Enjoy!
MP3 Download here
MP3 Download here
MP3 Download here

On rainy day music and the dying of cars

I was mentally composing a post about the nuances of selecting music for a rainy day when that same precipitation which I have been so enjoying caused my car to become inoperable.
For some reason, whenever my car gets Very Wet it stops working. Putt putt splutter putt croak kind of malfunction. This is not so fun. So I'm writing this on my AS2K waiting for one of my family members to come and pick me up so I can get to work.
My outlook is positive, at least I know what the problem is. I don't think I'll have to spend a ton of money to fix it, just wait for the engine block to dry off and try it again. I wonder if I can drape a towel over it...

This just in, got my car started and off the freeway. Huzzah! Don't quite trust it to get all the way to work.

Rainy Day Music.
The only radio station I've ever heard change their programming according to the weather is my local classical station, MPR 99.5. They never fail to have lovely music in tune with particularly rainy days. I think it is ridiculous that the so-called disc jockeys of corporately owned radio stations don't actually decide anything about the music, but that is a rant for quite another day.
Since I wasn't in a classical mood I made my own rainy day playlist on my iPod.

Below are the reasons why I chose the music, you can listen to the whole thing via the wonder of muxtape!
Listen here then make your own and send it to me!

Sweet Lullaby - Deep Forest
Lovely world music lovingly mixed up.
Gymnopédies: Lent Et Douloureux - Eric Satie
Sweet and sad and beautiful
Inara's Suite - Greg Edmonson (Firefly Soundtrack)
Just listen to it.
The Only Answer - Mike Doughty
This is a perfect wet streets after the rain song, I imagine driving hearing the remaining rain splash against the car in the dark while the stoplights reflect off the mirror of the road.
Axis of Ignorance - TJ Rehmi
This is yet another $1 album from Half Price Books. It's called The Warm Chill, and it's very good.
My Wife with Champagne Shoulders - Mark Isham
PS - Vangelis (From the album Voices)
Vangelis is always amazing mood music. Do yourself a favor and buy the soundtrack for 1492 Conquest of Paradise
Head Swirlin' - Owltree
Found these guys through freealbums, which is awesome. They're like a mellower Alpha Conspiracy
Hilli - Amiina
I have yet to find Icelandic music that I do not like, this is wonderful
Fingers - Yoko Kanno
From the Cowboy Bebop Movie Soundtrack

How my memory works (as far as I recall)

I was thinking recently about memory and how it works and fails to work. All of these are true events.

The initial phase of short term memory is less like memory and more like an extended perception of the present, there is as yet no distinction between what is happening and what has happened. I will call it nanomemory. 

For instance, this morning when I was looking for socks I found one, placed it on top of the dresser and commenced to look for another sock. Less than a second later I looked on the top of the dresser and the first thought to cross my mind was “a ha, another sock!” and then of course memory kicked in to compare the present with the now-faded past causing me to smack myself in the head.  I am a computer nerd so the those are analogies I find most apt. Perhaps it will work the opposite way for people who understand memory better than computers. This “extended present” is like the cache on a CPU. It stores things that are being worked on right now, in this very nanosecond. A lot of things are written to this particular sector in very quick succession, time is passing, I’m experiencing new things and all the while these data are being stored so to my nanomemory so my brain can work on them.

Next in our timeline is what I will call micromemory. This is the period within two or three minutes of the bit of data in question. My micromemory, at least in the aural spectrum, has gotten very good since it has been constantly stretched working as a barista. The need to have total recall for anything spoken in the preceding 30 seconds has honed this particular area a great deal.. The odd thing is, it doesn’t feel like I’m accessing memory, it feels as if I am playing back a recording. There is, as far as I can tell, no comprehension taking place. This is a good thing because I certainly don’t need a lot of grande lattes floating around in my head taking up space, heaven knows there’s enough useless information up there already.

The next segment is the short term memory, this is an area of immense fallibility for me personally. I imagine this bit of my mental landscape looking something like a game of layrinth, only with no walls, just a tilting plane with a lot of holes in it and memories are the marbles attempting to pass through. It doesn’t seem to matter how important a piece of information might be, in fact it seems that the great weight of a given bit of data makes for a heavier "marble" which is even more likely to fall through the holes. I’ve tried many ways of patching up these holes. I’ve tried to remember things by repeating them to myself out loud, writing them down on my hand, even making myself do mental checks every time I pass through any door just to make sure I haen’t forgotten anything. To No Avail. The curious thing, though, is that when bits of information fall through the holes of my short term memory they don’t just vanish, they plummet onto the vast plane below, which is my long term memory.

Here I will return to my geek analogies (for anyone who would like a good metaphor for a bad short term memory the closest I can think up is a corrupt page file, but that one breaks down). Anyway, my long term memory is like my hard drive. Coincidentally, my computer hard drives are one of the few things I like to keep organized. My music is impeccably sorted, my files are categorized and shuffled into neat well-named folders. This is also true of my long term memory. It’s pretty good. I can usually recall things stored there with only a little bit of searching. There is no conscious process for organizing my long term memory. Perhaps it is simply that when I have time between me and the memories then the linearity becomes more apparent thus providing a ready made filing system for the data of my mind. If you ask me who sings a particular song or who was in a paticular movie I should be able to recall it if the information has ever been presented to me. I wish I could get the same kind of organization for the rest of my memory.

More on memory will certainly follow.

Sleeping in

Bit of a late start today.
Even if I don't have anything planned for the morning I always feel like I have to do something important with the rest of the day when I sleep in.
But then again it is lovely, having those snooze-fueled dreams. The problem with those is that while you might remember the attributes of the dream, it was lucid, seemed to last a day, and was vaguely redish, you never remember the events themselves.
It seems as if we inhabit some other plane in these dreams and our relations to ourselves reminds us of where we have been but the anchor of gravity and reality hold us here, only able to remember out of the corner of our minds eye.
Curious.